Chapter III (1)

On November first, 1915, at Springfield, Illinois, Vachel Lindsay signed a book on _The Art of the Moving Picture_. The last chapter was called “The Acceptable Year of the Lord.” From having seen forecastings in photoplay hieroglyphics the children in times-to-come can rise and say: “This day is the scripture fulfilled in your ears”:

Scenario writers, producers, photoplay actors, endowers of
exquisite films, sects using special motion pictures for a
predetermined end, all you who are taking the work as a sacred
trust, I bid you God-speed. Consider what it will do to your
souls, if you are true to your trust.... The record of your
ripeness will be found in your craftsmanship. You will be God’s
thoroughbreds.

It has come then, this new weapon of men, and the face of the
whole earth changes. In after centuries its beginning will be
indeed remembered.

It has come, this new weapon of men, and by faith and a study of
the signs we proclaim that it will go on and on in immemorial
wonder.

This, then, is the prophecy, and thus has he proclaimed it: “By my hypothesis, Action Pictures are sculpture-in-motion, Intimate Pictures are paintings-in-motion, Splendour Pictures are architecture-in-motion.... The rest of the work is a series of after thoughts and speculations not brought forward so dogmatically.”

Now, the Arts are complete in themselves; they contain all. The moving picture has come to be a parasite on them.

Sculpture has become a vital thing to this age because of August Rodin. Meunier has moved us too. Also Monolo and Fagi. Now comes Lindsay: “I desire for the moving picture not the stillness but the majesty of sculpture.... Not the mood of Venus de Milo, but let us turn to that sister of hers—the great Victory of Samothrace”.

... I have seen much of Lindsay’s advice followed word for word since this book of his was published. Tyrone Power in _The Dream of Eugene Aram_. Power’s face and figure were more majestic on the stage than in this picture. There was a “sculpture-group,” as you would call it, in this picture—a farmer and two squires on a hilltop. It was in silhouette, a _sketch_ and not sculpture. The nearest I have seen to the majesty and immobility of sculpture, marble or otherwise, was the head of William S. Hart in _The Aryan_. The picture was shadowed so as to center on his poetic face, the fascination of which none but Forbes Robertson’s has. Hart’s face on the screen, his eyes looking into the eyes of you, at his throat a handkerchief of white—a bust by an artist indeed! But the shadows parted, and the hieroglyphic-crowded background came into view. Hart’s head moved, became part of a _moving picture_ and sculpture was no more. The moment was worth it—but it _moved_.... “Moving pictures are pictures and not sculpture”, says Lorado Taft in a public statement, objecting to Lindsay’s phrase. “To a sculptor the one thing cherished as most essential to his art is its static quality, its look of absolute quiescence. It is the hint of eternity which marks and makes all monumental art”.... Has Lindsay no feeling for sculpture?

Frank Lloyd Wright has models in plaster of some of his buildings—“modern” skyscrapers, hotels, and homes, growing, rising upward, white and beautiful. It was these works of architecture which called forth the phrase “flowers in stone”. He alone, it seems, has made art of architecture in our day. He objects to Lindsay saying his art can be that of moving pictures; its very literalness, its actualness being the very negation of the soul and constitution of art. In _The Dumb Girl of Portici_ the Smalleys, as inspired as any of the producers, used the entire Field Museum in Jackson Park, Chicago, as a background for a pageant of Italian royalty, of the middle ages. Insisting on architecture can spoil pictures. It did this one.

Painting-in-motion—rhythm. Rhythm seems alien to the application of the theory of jerky fade-away close-ups. “Intimate Dutch interior” scenes fading into the close-up and then back into the entire scene again. Intimate, friendly, and moving, but lacking in rhythm and the flow of naturalness. Some think that “moving lines”, made an art in themselves, will be an achievement of the moving film. Have you ever been struck dumb by the lines made by a dancer across the stage, the moving of life across life? I have seen it in the moving-picture only in the flight of gulls (unconscious actors) or in pictures of rivers and trees and the sea; in short—nature. But nature is nature. The painter’s art! Botticelli’s _Spring_, or _The Birth of Venus_—pictures containing the essence of rhythmic natural movement. Never yet have the movies given us this. If Lindsay must prophesy and “take the masses back to art” there _are_ artists living today—who are for today. Lindsay seems to know nothing of them. His knowledge of painting seems to have stopped with his art school days. The later work of Jerome Blum, for example, has this movement, this rhythm, not only in composition and line but in the _color_ as well. Reds and greens and blues that vibrate, paintings that live.

The rest of this might be entitled: “An open letter to Vachel Lindsay”, for it is “not so dogmatically set forth” and is mere man-to-man talk.

I have seen most of your suggestions swallowed whole by moving-picture makers.... Your hieroglyphics idea—well, James Oppenheim was an accomplice in that. “On Coming Forth by Day” or your suggestion to use the Book of the Dead—a Chicago woman, the patient, too-patient, beautifully reverent Lou Wall Moore has been working for years on an adaptation of one of the books which, when it does appear on the stage, will have more rhythm and terrible swiftness than ever your moving picture could, the splendor of color, space, height, distance, and most magical of all, the voice:

Priest: Men pass away since the time of Ra
And the youths come in their stead.
As Ra reappears every morning
And Tum sets in the west,
Men are begetting and women conceiving;
Each nostril inhales once the breeze of the dawn;
But all born of women go down to their places.

As for your “too ruthless a theory” of having silence in the theatre, or rather just the hum of conversation, let me tell you of the “midnight-movies” in our town: Can you imagine a crowd of people standing in line outside a theatre at one or a quarter after in the morning? And inside an audience—or optience?!—which for interest and variety can equal any of the moving-pictures shown or yet to be shown. I wish you could hear the ludicrous, cutting, knowing remarks made by these people about your pictures, when, after twelve-thirty the piano stops, and the oppressive silence outweighs the interest of the picture. (The piano formerly stopped at eleven, but the management decided that the only way to maintain order was to keep the piano going.) Well, the silence never lasts: snoring, wheezing, roaring, shouting and laughing and calls for “Silence”, “Wake up, the rest of us wanna sleep”, “You’re off key”, or “What time shall I call, sir?” These people are here: business men; newsboys, hobos, drunks, who sleep here all night; salesmen; night clerks; telegraphers; bell-boys; hotel and restaurant maids; scrub-women; actors; vaudevillians; cabaret singers; pressmen; newspapermen; chauffeurs, teamsters; traveling men; gentlemen of leisure; painted youths and scented women. They “get” the psychology of the pictures. Helen’s hazards call forth telegraph tappings to each other; close-ups showing jealousy, rage, or overdone emotion get “woof-woofs” and howls and hoots; the murder prevented “just in time” gets its sarcasms; and “immoral situations” their due appreciation. But—this, which seemed on the way to become our most individual phase of night-life, is passing. The jolly manager, who passed up and down the aisle like a hen among her brood, keeping us awake until one o’clock, has been replaced by a uniformed policeman; the council has legislated women out after two o’clock; and a “ride in the wagon” or ejection faces the one who would “get gay”. Now, as a place of interest, it is passing in this day of short-lived gayety and censored originality. The Law, Lindsay, will not allow your plan to work. In the neighborhoods?—the audiences themselves do not know why they are there. Why disturb them?

Your educational film also I have seen applied. _Saved From the Flames_ worked out in co-operation with the New York Fire department. It teaches a lesson. So does _The Human Cauldron_—your own phrase, I believe, taken from the first line of page forty-two, your book. This picture was done with the aid of the New York Police department. Both were stupid, inane in story and treatment, and on the whole a bore. Even Walthall couldn’t save _The Raven_ from cardboard clouds and angels and “visions”.

Your scenario, the “second cousin to the dream that will one day come forth”, seems quite symbolic of your prophecies. Pallas Athena, Jeanne D’Arc, and Our Lady Springfield; a treeless hill top in Washington Park: this then is the rank of the Goddesses. Springfield is to have secular priests and her patriots are irresolute! “Without prophecy there can be no fulfillment. Without Isaiah there can be no Christ”.—A truly Christian interpretation of the Hebrew’s great Isaiah, to whom Christ was but a disciple! But so you will have it.... We need Isaiahs and John the Baptists, but they were prophets and fore-runners of a Christ, a personality—not a Utopia, World State or International Brotherhood. If you appear before us as an Isaiah we demand to hear of your Christ. You recognize the demand of Confucius for rectification of names. Do you realize Nietzsche’s transvaluations for our day? Faith as opposed to affirmation! Zarathustra has spoken! There is now the mountain peak—and you are still rhyming about a hill top.

Announcements

“_The Weavers_”

Gerhardt Hauptmann’s Weavers is coming to Chicago! It begins a limited engagement at the Princess Theatre Sunday night, April 2. If you don’t go—well, we will pray for you.

It is to be the same production with which Emanuel Reicher stirred New York this winter. Mr. Reicher is no longer with the company, having finally given up the struggle of trying to make a financial success of art and truth. His stage director, Augustin Duncan, who is a man of vision and ability, has formed the actors into a co-operative company, and they have been struggling through various cities where their efforts have been intensely though not largely appreciated. This is to be expected; but surely in Chicago they ought to find an audience.

P. S.—Since I wrote the above _The Weavers_ has opened, and I have heard how the first-night audience laughed where it should have applauded and guffawed when it should have recognized something fine.

_Margaret Sanger in Chicago_

There is an announcement on the cover page of two of Margaret Sanger’s lectures in Chicago, and others may be arranged after she gets here. We have got into the habit of looking upon birth control as a thing in which everybody believes, and which almost everybody practices whether they believe in it or not. It seems quite superfluous to keep on talking about it. But then you remember that Emma Goldman has been arrested for talking about it, and that when her trial comes up—some time this month or in May—it is quite within the possibilities that she may spend a year in prison for her crime. That is something none of us could face without a kind of insanity. So please don’t be content with merely abusing the government: send your protests to the District Attorney and it may help a great deal.

Any one who wishes to arrange for further lectures by Mrs. Sanger may write to Fania Mindell, care THE LITTLE REVIEW.

_The Rupert Brooke Memorial_

It has been decided to set up in Rugby Chapel, England, a memorial of Rupert Brooke in the form of a portrait-medallion in marble. The medallion will be the work of Professor J. Havard Thomas, and is to be based on the portrait by Schell. Contributions not exceeding five dollars may be sent to Maurice Browne, Chicago Treasurer, Rupert Brooke Memorial Fund, 434 Fine Arts Building, Michigan Avenue, and will be sent to England without deduction. Money left over after the completion of the medallion will be given to the Royal Literary Fund. Mr. Browne adds that the nickels and dimes of those who wish to make their offering, but cannot afford the larger sum, will be welcomed in the spirit of their giving; also that he believes there are many admirers of Rupert Brooke and his work in Chicago who will welcome the opportunity to pay in some measure their debt to the poet, particularly remembering that this city stimulated and interested him more than any other in America.

_Jerome Blum’s New Work_

Beginning April 15 Mr. Blum will have a two-weeks’ exhibit of paintings done on a recent trip through China and Japan, at O’Brien’s Art Galleries, 334 South Michigan Avenue. At the same time Mrs. Blum will exhibit some Chinese and Japanese figures—and there is one especially that we prophesy will be talked of. It is of a weary-eyed Chinese philosopher, the art of which has been put into words by a painter: “He has seen everything, so he doesn’t look any more; he has done everything—so he folds his hands.”

_The Vers Libre Prize Contest_

Two of the judges for our contest have been chosen. They will be Helen Hoyt and Zoë Akins. The third will be announced in the next issue, and the contest will be continued until August 15, as it seems wiser not to close it before it has been fully heralded. All details will be found on page 40.

“_A Lost Tune_”

Between April 25 and May 7 Mr. Stanislaw Saukalski will give our soft teeth a chance to crack a hard nut at the Art Institute. The “Lost Tune” will lead the flaming lava of this young volcano. Will the readers of THE LITTLE REVIEW send in their impressions of this sculptor’s work? We may print some of them.—_L. de B._

_When You Buy Books_—

Won’t readers remember to order their books through the Gotham Book Society? You can get any book you want from them, whether it is listed in their advertisement or not, and THE LITTLE REVIEW makes a percentage on the sales. Our margin of profit per book is small, but it all helps very much and the continuation of the magazine depends upon just such co-operation. We have two thousand subscribers. If each one of them would order one dollar’s worth of books a month we should make about two hundred dollars out of it,—which would pay for two issues of the magazine and enable us to eat regularly besides. Will you please remember?

_The Russian Literature Group_

Alexander Kaun’s next lecture on Russian Literature will be on Dostoevsky, and will be given April 16, at 8:30 P. M., in 612 Fine Arts Building. Mr. Kaun is becoming more interesting with each lecture—by which I mean that he is revealing more of Kaun the artist, and less of Kaun the professor.

_Independent Society of Artists_

The first international exhibition of this new organization will be held on April 4 in the Ohio Building, Wabash Avenue and Congress Street, from three to seven P. M.

“_Because of the War_”—

Paper is going up. We can’t help looking ugly this month.

The Beautiful and the Terrible. Which is which will never be put
into words. But I am free to tell myself; and let me but preserve
the senses—my eyes, my ears, my touch, and all shall be well—all
shall seem far more beautiful than terrible—_Gordon Craig._

Only fanaticism is possible for phlegmatic natures.—_Nietzsche._

Flamingo Dreams

LUPO DE BRAILA

A burst of passion in a pagan god’s eye was the sunrise as I saw it from the top of Mount Rose one morning last summer. Trembling and with squinting eyes I looked at the grand spectacle, fearing to go blind if I opened my eyes.

The sun stretched its arms and with flaming fingers lifted the bluish-grey blanket from the Nevada hills and the Truckee Valley. Feeling that the beauty of this moment could not be surpassed, I turned my face toward California and ran down the western side of Mount Rose.

One day last week when the massive shoulders of Jerome Blum stepped in between me and a canvas that had transformed his studio into a strange land for me, I wanted to hold his hands for fear the next canvas would take the joy produced by the one in front of me. He came back from an eight-months’ trip through Japan and China recently, and he brought with him over twenty paintings with pulsating nature and unrestrained joy in every one of them. The rhythmic lines dance through the curling roofs and weird trees—and all of them are bathed in sunshine. At the same time they are a close study of this strange land, its people and their habits, by a forceful and unusual artist—a man who says “yes” to nature in no uncertain terms. His bold colors are handled in a most sensitive manner, and when I wanted to place him among the Chicago artists I found that he belongs to an entirely different class and could not even be compared to some of the vacillating and doubtful men who paint in this town.

He has a portrait of a Chinese girl in a green gown, and some scenes along a canal and in a Chinese garden, that have tempted my usually honest mind to some queer contemplations. I have found myself wandering to the windows and other unusual entrances to his studio, figuring out how one might find access to that place without a key and at a certain dark hour. I have only one hope left now of owning one in a figurative way, and it is that the trustees of the Art Institute may see the light and....

I hope Jerome Blum will not be compelled, like some of the best men this country has produced, to go to other shores to gain the recognition due a man of his ability. A few weeks ago I saw one of the older trustees spend considerable time before a canvas by a Boston painter that lacked all that goes to make a work of art,—a canvas on which the artist, with the aid of a pointed stick, had tried to prod his dead and colorless paint into some kind of motion. In spite of this I still believe that they will rise to the high intellectual and artistic understanding that they are supposed to possess, but which they have failed to display up to the present, as far as modern art is concerned.

It is impossible for me to describe any of Blum’s canvases except to say that they tear you away from the dirty grey and ill-smelling Chicago, to a country you have seen in your dreams as a child. We will have a chance to see this artist’s work, beginning April fifteenth, at O’Brien’s, on Michigan Boulevard.

Lucille Swan Blum will exhibit at the same time and place some very graceful Japanese dancers, Chinese children, Corean, Chinese, and Japanese mothers with their babies and other far-eastern types. Best of all is a Chinese philosopher, reduced almost to design to emphasize the idea of the age and wisdom of this people—folded hands, an emotionless face, all seeing eyes....

In the end one experienceth nothing but himself.—_Nietzsche._

New York Letter

(_A scattering of words anent Washington Square, “Henry VIII”,
Yvette Guilbert, “The Merry Wives of Windsor”, and sundry other
things and people, as far as space and time allow._)

ALLAN ROSS MACDOUGALL

From my garret window I look out on Washington Square. Snow and ice still lie there, and the trees are black and mean.

On the first page of his new book, “_Moby Lane and Thereabouts_”, Neil Lyons says: “Spring has many ushers, and is heralded by divers signs. Some people look for these signs among the hedgerows; others seek them in the sky, or listen for them in the night, whilst other people neither look or listen, but go smelling about, or stand upon hill-tops, tasting.” My sign shall be, I think, the grimy trees of the Square. And sometimes as I sit here looking out on the icy barrenness I wonder if, when Spring’s breath does touch the earth, whether flowers will come up—flowers that I long to see: crocuses, anemones, daffodils. It’s all very well to see them in shop windows, but God! to see them come up out of the earth and unfold! But I fear our Square is too sophisticated. I know a man will come—a common tobacco-chewing man with a stunted soul who belongs to a Union and gets paid so much coin by the hour—and he will arrange squares, and oblongs, and diamond shaped plots of earth. Then will he proceed laboriously and without joy to stick tulips or some other straight official flower into these geometrical, soulless patterns. And throughout the year in the Square, nature will be kept in bounds and orders.

“_Henry VIII_”

It seems scarcely possible that Sir Herbert Tree would have the calm artistic audacity to come to this country and present his production of “Henry VIII” in the moth-eaten scenery and costumes that were used in the London production in the year 1910. Yet he did, and oh! the wearisome drab antiquity of it all! But the “People” liked it and gave the beknighted actor-manager “one of the greatest premieres that New York has witnessed these many years”.

Mention is made in the programme of “the inspiring aerchiological advice” of Percy Macquoid, R. I. The advice may have been quite inspiring. I do not doubt it. But the results of that advice! That medley of costumes! Those photo scenes of Windsor Castle and Blackfriars Hall and Westminster Abbey! They were bad when first conceived and painted, and five years in a London storeroom has not improved them to any degree compatible with their presentation to an audience that has looked upon the work of Bakst, Urban, Jones, Sime, and Rothenstein.

And what can be said of the lighting? There was one comic spotlight that followed Sir Herbert (or ought I to say Wolsey? I hardly know; they were never quite distinct) around the stage like a little motherless puppy. Sometimes it went before, sometimes it frisked after, on the tail of his magnificent scarlet gown. It had a grand time! But it never seemed to be doing the thing it ought to be doing.

But let me not bore you as these things bored me. Pass we now to the acting. In London the honors of the play were carried off by Arthur Bouchier as Henry, and his wife, Violet Vanburgh, as Katherine. A repetition was performed here. Lyn Harding as Henry, and Edith Wynne Matheson as Katherine, carried every one before them. And Tree? Well, he had his moments. There was his superb entrance with the look he flashed at Buckingham: fine too was the acting in the scene of his downfall. Between these two highlights such ordinary acting has seldom been seen in a man of Tree’s reputation. In a cold classic way Miss Matheson was splendid. I liked her much, and but for her some of the scenes in the play would have been colourless. There was the usual mob of supers who got caught in doorways and tripped over furniture, but on the whole they behaved as well as an ordinary stage manager can make such people behave.

_Yvette Guilbert_

Five years ago I saw Yvette Guilbert in London. I loved her all. Her red hair; the skinny arms of her, clothed in long black gloves; and her Gallic body with the low-necked white crinoline that gowned it. And how she sang!! And her acting! For five years I have carried the memory of her around with me, matching other people up with her but never finding her equal. On Sunday, March nineteenth, I saw her again. The black gloves and the white crinoline were gone, and she had grown a little stouter. The red hair was there, and the smile. Her voice had changed a bit and her personality had mellowed. She sang songs that were grave and moving, like Fiona Macleod’s _Prayer of Women_, and others that were gay and jocular, like _The Curé Servant_. But whatever she sang—and I didn’t know a word of what she sang—carried me away completely. Not a mood did I miss—not a suggestion of a mood. Perfect is her art. She has my adoration.

“_The Merry Wives of Windsor_”

The latest addition to the Shakespeare Festival that is being thrust upon the apathetic people of this place is the Hackett-Allen production of _The Merry Wives of Windsor_. Three things can be said without any further comment. Joseph Urban did the stage settings. Richard Ordynski directed the production. Willy Pogany designed the costumes. Gordon Craig says somewhere that any medium is easier to work in than human beings. After seeing the work expended on _The Merry Wives of Windsor_ by three geniuses, and watching the actors in that play, we understand completely.

_Soulless New York_

Witter Bynner, grown somber and blase,—the effect of living in soulless New York, he says—has become a sort of Greek Chorus to me. In various strophes with divers variations, in sundry public and private places, he chants the dismal fact that New York is soulless and that there is a danger of it robbing me of my joy in life. Not while its streets remain as they are will I lose the joy I possess! I cannot remember any city that I have been in where my sense of the comic has been tickled so often by happenings in the streets. So many comedies are enacted by the curbstone, so many quaintly funny things happen every hour on the streets, that it would be impossible for me to forget how jolly life really is. Of course I see tragedies too, but they seem to be there only for the purpose of balance!

For some time to come I’ll Dalcroze down the avenues and numerical by-ways of this “soulless” city. And my smile will always be handy; and my whistle wet, ready to pipe _Gathering Peascods_ or _The Parson’s Farewell_ or anything merry and bright to dance to.

To save the theatre, the theatre must be destroyed, the actors
and actresses must all die of the plague. They poison the air,
they make art impossible. It is not drama they play, but pieces
for the theatre. We should return to the Greeks, play in the open
air; the drama dies of stalls and boxes and evening dress, and
people who come to digest their dinner.—_Eleonora Duse._

The Theatre

“Overtones”

Alice Gerstenberg, who dramatized _Alice in Wonderland_, wrote _Overtones_, evidently as an experiment, and had it produced in New York. Now it is crowding vaudeville houses. As an experiment only is it important. Cyril Harcourt intends collaborating with Miss Gerstenberg to produce a three-act play on the same lines: characters being followed by their “real selves”, veiled, with voices confused. A Shaw play might be done this way—it is a method effective for moralizing and bringing home a point. But why would Darling Dora need an overtone or an undertone; or Blanco Posnet or Fanny’s Father? If there is any reason for the dramatic presentation of characters at all it is the drama of themselves—their actions and their thoughts as opposed to those of others.... Imagine Rebecca West being followed through three acts by a “real self”; or Ulric Brendel—“... I am homesick for the mighty nothingness”.

“The New Manner”

(_Vague Questionings_)

It evidently means—this phrase—“that which is _accepted_ as new”.... There are signs of our dangerously settling down to flat brilliant backgrounds, spots of vivid color, and much _mention_ of “important as decoration”. It seems an unhealthy acquiescence.... “Is desire a thing of nothing, that a five-years’ quest can make a parody of it? Your whole life is not too long, and then only at the very end will some small atom of what you have desired come to you.”—Gordon Craig in his _Art of the Theatre_. It looks as if we are due for a period of the old, old, three-walled room with the new, new, “new” color.... I don’t believe we will find the future in Michael Carr’s butterfly proscenium and moving-picture screen shadows; but, surely, it is not _The Man Who Married a Dumb Wife_, or _Androcles and the Lion_, although Barker’s _Midsummer Night’s Dream_ costumes are the most far-reaching originalities yet seen. Nor will it be like _A Pair of Silk Stockings_, _The Sabine Women_, _Overtones_, _The Charity that Began at Home_, _The Taming of the Shrew_, nor Urban and his present enormous New York output of “designs” and “follies”. Our only light seems to come from Gordon Craig’s work in Florence. “In his work is the incalculable element; the element that comes of itself and cannot be coaxed into coming”. Or from Sam Hume’s enthusiasm over the “Dome”; Reinhardt, of course, has almost acquired his permanent “angle of repose”—the newness of the American stage being, in fact, the Reinhardt of yesterday. If I had my way, I’d destroy all books about the theatre excepting those of Gordon Craig, for inspiration, or those of Arthur Symons for appreciation.... Then, perhaps, we should begin to understand the Theatre.

Bernhardt on Reinhardt

Sarah Bernhardt has been playing a patriotic play, _Les Cathedrales_, in London. “It is such a great play I intend taking it into the provinces and then back to London again”, she says. We have said it is a patriotic play; nothing more need be said. Bernhardt plays one of the seven cathedrals, _Strasburg_. In the interview, quoted above, given to the London magazine, _Drawing_, Bernhardt has also this to say: “And now, it seems to me that artists in the Allied Countries, and also authors, painters, composers, and all those concerned in the theatre have to bind themselves into a league for removing all traces of German nature and influence from our plays and theatres.... Now the German showman Reinhardt flooded Paris and London with the Berliner deluge of the spectacular. He claims artistic superiority on the grounds of having introduced several novel trivialities. But to trace the real curve of truth I must say that he did nothing of the kind. He merely revived, in _Sumurun_ and _Oedipus Rex_, certain outworn conventions which existed before his time! But he has not the honesty to acknowledge it.” Later she does say something worth thinking over: “What he has done is to use Eastern methods for Western ideas when he should have used Eastern ideas for Western methods.” Plagiarism is an irrelevant charge to bring against an artist, but acknowledging an artistic right to adaptation means expansion and, despite nationalism, a universal one-ness.

Book Discussion

“And Lesser Things”

_“—— and Other Poets”, by Louis Untermeyer. New York: Henry Holt
and Company._

Very, very clever. The ultimate emptiness of cleverness. These parodies are “not a piece of buffoonery so much as a critical exposition”,—the poet expects them to approach this “elevated and illuminating” standard; but they never reach satire, which is really the thing that is covered by the above quotation from Isaac Disraeli.

Untermeyer’s verse, including _Challenge_ and that so quantitatively published in the magazines,—still speaking comparatively,—has the same relation to poetry as Urban’s scenery for _The Follies_ has to his Boston Opera settings; or of all of Urban’s work to that of the numerous German poster school of five or eight years ago. Untermeyer is lenient in parodying poets of his own ilk—but it is easy to determine which of those he does not respect by his obvious, spiteful absurdities.

For years now newspaper paragraphers, “poets”, and editors have been saying such things as “It is time we are getting ourselves talked about” when mentioning Ezra Pound. Untermeyer stoops to it; he is still the “once born” when being “critical” about Amy Lowell: “A blue herring sings”. What he is really parodying here is his colleague Walt Mason’s prose-printed jingles which are syndicated throughout newspaperdom; he is not giving a “critical exposition” of polyphonic prose. It will need a keener critic or poet than he to do it—or to produce a parody or satire whose art equals that of the thing satired—Masters’s things for example. By ambling through thirty-seven lines Untermeyer imagines that he is being master of the situation as regards Masters. And the last line of the parody on James Oppenheim might very well have been written by Untermeyer himself as one of his own: “Clad in the dazzling splendor of my awakened self”.... No matter what may have been your attitude toward the poets parodied these things leave your feelings unchanged—except that he makes more definite your attitude towards him.

Impartial and Otherwise

_The Making of Germany, by Ferdinand Schevill. Chicago: A. C.
McClurg and Company._

_Great Russia, by Charles Sarolea. New York: Alfred A. Knopf._

_Imperial Germany and the Industrial Revolution, by Thorstein
Veblen. New York: Macmillan._

These books are not war-literature—a compliment not often deserved in these days of ink-war demoralization. The lay, unbiased reader, who is inclined to learn facts rather than to find interpretations substantiating his prejudices, will enjoy the three books as a rare treat. They are very much unlike. Mr. Schevill is a historian par excellence, and lends a broad perspective to the related facts. He also lends a rich romantic flavor to his narrative, an emotional undercurrent—so unfrequent a feature with academic writers. His point of view may not be universally acceptable; even in history there are events and phenomena which belong to the autonomous region of taste and opinion. The scene of the triumphant Prussians solemnizing their victory in Versailles, for example, may arouse differing emotions and reflections. Mr. Schevill bows in reverence before the three heroic figures of Emperor William (“not unlike the legendary Barbarossa”), Bismarck, and Moltke. We may likewise not share his enthusiasm for the German idea of State, as superior to Anglo-Saxon individualism. But we cannot help admiring the general brilliancy of the treatment of the gigantic subject, and if we are capable of getting instructed, our reading of the book will amply reward us.

M. Sarolea is a Belgian, hence pro-Ally and anti-German, hence unreservedly Russophil, hence not wholly impartial. It is a poor service to Russia, the unqualified praise of all her institutions and traits on the part of her friends. Exaggerated eulogy is apt to arouse suspicion. If M. Sarolea had interchanged his Mercurian sprightliness for Professor Veblen’s solidity, both would have gained considerably. Mr. Veblen takes us as far back as the pre-historic Baltic tribes in order to prove his point of the peculiar aptitude of the Prussians for borrowing. He certainly succeeds in his attempt, but at the expense of the reader’s patience and eye-sight which is subjected to the perusal of endless pages of miniature type. His scientific style is surcharged with profound sarcasm, and if you are fond of delicate subtleties the book will afford you “great sport.” Schevill, historian; Sarolea, publicist; Veblen, economist—the common feature of the three, particularly of the first and of the last, is respect for the reader who is treated with facts and not with phantoms for the sake of argument.

K.

The Reader Critic

“SPIRITUAL ADVENTURES”

_Anonymous_:

At your suggestion I have begun to read Arthur Symons’s “Spiritual Adventures.”

“Christian Trevelga” strikes me, as you predicted, most strongly so far. Symons is one of the subtlest of minds; everything he writes is worth reading. This is of his best certainly. What is one to make of him? I don’t know. I don’t know whether his kind of subtlety is of any earthly value, or whether it is as valuable as Shelley’s. I can never give up faith in the human race quite as completely as he does, nor adopt his attitude of autocratic detachment; yet I never seem to have any real faith, either.—_Vae victis!_

He is removed from all sense of human values, and lost, always, in abstract patterns. This particular story is an extraordinary expression of him—of the prizes and peril of such a state. Oh, hell! what an insult is put upon us when we are invited to live, and to make such a choice.

Perhaps one makes it: then he is not happy until he has lost himself in an art that is “something more than an audible dramatization of human life.” Perhaps he is right. But—

But—but—

Sometimes I _know_ that for the greatest artist there would be no chasm between what the heart desires and what the mind constructs. Tell me how to do that in poetry and I’ll give you a dollar. Perhaps it can be done in music—I don’t know. But in poetry the human heart and the mathematical soul are always fighting—and so far as I know they have not yet come to an agreement—not in English poetry, at least. The artist and the human being never get to be bedfellows. It’s either sickening humanitarianism or stark designing—the second is the less painful.

Well!—I loathe the world, including Symons and all the arts.

_Ezra Pound, London_:

Thanks for the January-February issue. Your magazine seems to be looking up. A touch of light in Dawson and Seiffert—though THE LITTLE REVIEW seems to me rather scrappy and unselective. I thought you started out to prove Ficke’s belief that the sonnet is “Gawd’s own city.” However, he seems to have abandoned that church. I still don’t know whether you send me the magazine in order to encourage me in believing that my camp stool by Helicon is to be left free from tacks, or whether the paper is sent to convert me from error.

I am glad to see in it some mention of Eliot, who is really of interest.

_The Egoist_ is about to publish Joyce’s “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” in volume form (since no grab-the-cash firm will take it) and do Lewis’s “Tarr” as a serial. I think you will be interested in the two novels, and I hope you will draw attention to them, and to the sporting endeavor of _The Egoist_ to do in this dark isle what the _Mercure_ has so long done in France, i. e., publish books as well as a magazine.

Incidentally, Chicago should not depend on New York for its books.

_Anonymous_:

Will you ask that Lollipop Vender man, in the March issue, what happened to his little dirigible? He was sailing along dropping bombs, hitting the mark every time, when something seemed to happen and he came limply wobbling down to—nothing.

I hope the last half of that article was not meant to be satire or wit or anything like that. He speaks with too much authority to have much sense of humor, and—ye gods!—the situation is far too desperate for wit—of that kind. Now there’s Bartlett—read what he says of Bartlett! Haven’t we answered all attacks for years with “There’s Bartlett”? It was only intuition and self-preservation on our part at first, perhaps—but now hasn’t Bartlett proved that he is a “real artist”? He is off to New York to live.

How he does wobble when he comes to his list of “able and honest”.

Poor Parker! that he should have to go into the list of best men, too—that list! The man _can_ paint—technic seems to be only a superstition now but it once had a place in Art. Parker has that at least. Wendt, Buehr, Ravlin, and Davis should be rescued from the “able and honest” before your critic collapses completely in referring to Clarkson and Oliver Dennet Grover as some of “their best men.” Ask him anyway—what happened?

_Alice Groff, Philadelphia_:

Why did not Sherwood Anderson write up “Vibrant Life” clean and true? Why did he not have the courage to paint every one of those emotions in clear color—to outline every one of those actions in the beauty of naturalness? Why does he artificialize everything? Is he afraid of the crouching tigers of conventional morality?

Why should not vibrant life assert itself after its kind, even in the presence of death? What desecration was there in this man and woman coming together in such presence, drawn by the invincible magnetism of sex? What of falsity to life was there in the lawyer’s giving and answering the call of life as to this woman, even though he had a wife whom he loved?

Why conjure up an atmosphere of guilt that neither man nor woman felt? Why suggest such hair-bristling horror as to the accidental overturning of a dead man’s body, any more than over the accidental upsetting of a vase, or a statue, in the course of a dance? Why such strained effort to make that specialized expression of vibrant life which is the very pivotal centre of all life appear as the degradation of degradation, degrading everything else, even death?

Will you answer that there is an eternal and universal sense of the fitness of things with which every soul may be lightened that cometh into the world? Shall I not reply to you that this is a lie against life—that life is sacrificed every day to this lie? Shall I not say to you that vibrant life must not allow itself to be sacrificed to such lies—that vibrant life must create anew continually a sense of the fitness of things for itself and for its every new expression—that it must do this with authority, shaking itself bravely free from the clutch of the dead hand, whether as to traditions, standards, customs, morals, ideals or love even? Shall I not say to you that Life must assert its right to Live? Shall we not organize life on such basis?

REVIEWING “THE LITTLE REVIEW”

_Virginia York in “The Richmond Evening Journal”_:

As we said a couple of months ago, THE LITTLE REVIEW, published in windy Chicago, is claimed by its editors and readers to be the very, very last word in prose and poetry. Also, it is the organ, the mouth organ, perhaps, of that unsustained tune known as “vers libre.” In a criticism of some of the Review’s lurid, foolish contents we poked a good deal of fun at the publication in general and one piece of loose, or free, verse in particular. This gem, entitled, “Cafe Sketches,” by Arthur Davison Ficke, said, in part:

Presently persons will come out
And shake legs.
I do not want legs shaken.
I want immortal souls shaken unreasonably.
I want to see dawn spilled across the blackness
Like a scrambled egg on a skillet;
I want miracles, wonders.
Tidings out of deeps I do not know, ...
But I have a horrible suspicion
That neither you
Nor your esteemed consort
Nor I myself
Can ever provide these simple things
For which I am so patiently waiting
Base people.
How I dislike you!

As we said a couple of months ago, “Maybe you think this is funny, but certainly it is not intended to be. Seriousness, thick, black, dense seriousness is the keynote of THE LITTLE REVIEW.” However, the current issue of said magazine carries our editorial remarks in full, and with our hand on our heart we make a deep courtesy for the honor conferred upon us. Though we distinctly deplore the fact that absolutely no comment is made upon our criticism of THE LITTLE REVIEW and Mr. Ficke’s remarkable “pome.” It is as if we were taken by the editorial legs and shaken. And we do not want legs shaken. We are a lady. We would far rather have our immortal editorial soul shaken unreasonably and spilled across the literary blackness and blankness “like a scrambled egg on the skillet.” Yet, we have a horrible idea “that neither you,” nor our esteemed contemporary, “nor I myself,” know what it is all about; but we do wish that Margaret Anderson and the other editors of “Le Revue Petite” had made a few caustic remarks on our feeble attempts to be funny. “Base people! How I dislike you!”

But to show that we can be generous and heap coals of fire upon the heads of our enemies, we propose to reproduce two short, sweet poems from this month’s (beg pardon, the January-February issue, lately out, “on account of having no funds during January,” as the Review editors admit) issue of THE LITTLE REVIEW. The first selection on our program, ladies and gentlemen, is by Harriet Dean and is called “The Pillar,” though much more effectively it might have been headed “The Pillow” or “The Hitching-Post.” Here goes:

When your house grows too close for you,
When the ceilings lower themselves, crushing you,
There on the porch I shall wait,
Outside your house.
You shall lean against my straightness,
And let night surge over you.

Now if it were only a nice slim lamp-post of a man giving such an invitation we should pray that the ceilings would descend, and should hasten to the porch—strangely enough on the outside of the house—and we should love to lean, and lean, and lean, surge what may.

The second, an “Asperity,” by Mitchell Dawson, is labeled “Teresa,” and madly singeth as follows:

“Do you remember Antonio—
Swift-winged, green in the sun?
Into the snap-dragon throat of desire
Flew Antonio.
Snap!...
The skeleton of Antonio has made
A good husband, a good provider.”

La, la, la! At first we thought “Antonio” was a green dragon fly, but, finally, by exercising a bit of common sense, we know that Tony is a locust and left his “skeleton,” or “shell,” behind; and that Mrs. Tony must have subsisted on the “leavings.”

Oh, this nut sundae, chocolate fudge, marshmallow whip vers libre poetry! Isn’t it just too lovely? Snap! “Into the snap-dragon throat of desire, Flew Antonio.” Honestly now, Tony, don’t you wish the lady had kept her mouth shut?

We should like to comment upon these remarks, but surely they are too good to spoil.

_A Boy, Chicago_:

I am a boy sixteen years old, and one could not expect me to know much about poetry—especially free verse. But I have heard of your magazine as a magazine that was ready to print what all kinds of people thought. So I have written a little verse—it is not a poem—telling you something about what is going on inside my mind, for these matters trouble every boy’s mind, although you may think that we are light-minded at my age.

BLINDNESS

I suppose I must be blind.
People say continually that the world is a wicked place;
I hear them talking about it all the time.
They say our city streets reek
With sin and sorrow
And all manner of misery and filth,
And yet I do not see any of it.
I go up and down these streets every day
And I see that they are ugly and that many people
Are deformed and sick and hungry;
But I close my eyes to it.
I suppose somebody will call me cowardly, but what shall I do?
I have no money to give the poor, and perhaps
That is not getting at their real trouble anyway.
I cannot heal the sick and deformed.
I cannot make the streets cleaner.
So I just think of other things.
Of my books at home, or the tennis courts in the park,
Or my pretty sister or anything.
There is nothing wrong in my own world.
I am happy. I like my school well enough.
I have my boy friends, and they are healthy athletic boys.
All the girls I know are good girls,
With charming and high minds.
And yet it is true that many boys lie and steal,
And girls run away and are dragged into lives of shame.
Why do I not see it? Why do I not do anything?
Why am I so helpless, if I have any duty to others?

FROM “THE INTERSTATE MEDICAL JOURNAL”

A case in point showing how little has been achieved by our medical men who have gone among the people, torch in hand, to lead them to the Promised Land of happiness and content and physical and mental health has been well illustrated in a poem, recently published in THE LITTLE REVIEW (Chicago), wherein the authoress, Mary Aldis, unwittingly indicts the whole medical profession for still allowing the sale of a patent medicine to reduce obesity. The strange title of the poem in homely and unadorned “free verse” is “Ellie: The Tragic Tale of An Obese Girl.”

Mrs. Aldis—thus runs the poem—had a manicurist who was “a great big lummox of a girl—a continent,” with “silly bulging cheeks and puffy forehead,” and who one day said to the poetess, weeping and distraught: “I’m so fat, so awful, awful fat! The boys won’t look at me.” She asked Mrs. Aldis for help and Mrs. Aldis suggested, “A doctor’s vague advice to bant and exercise,” and “Ellie and her woes passed from my mind. Until, as summer dawned again, I heard that she was dead.” Mrs. Aldis went to the funeral and saw Ellie lying in her coffin and was told by Ellie’s mother, “She must a made it [the dress] by herself. It’s queer it fitted perfectly, An’ her all thin like that.” Later in the evening Mrs. Aldis received the following confidences from Ellie’s mother: “’Twas the stuff she took that did it, I never knew till after she was dead. The bottles in the woodshed, hundreds of ’em, All labelled ‘Caldwell’s Great Obesity Cure Warranted Safe and Rapid.’”

To sermonize here, we have Mrs. Aldis, who we know to be a highly intelligent woman and one not only interested in the uplift of the drama but also in the uplift of the common (?) people, merely saying to a girl, who is wretchedly unhappy about her elephantine size: All that I can give you is a doctor’s vague advice to bant and exercise. She might have given her Vance Thompson’s epoch-making book “Eat and Grow Thin,” or read chapters from it to the unhappy girl, thereby convincing her that starvation is unnecessary and also a patent medicine. But with a coldness that is most reprehensive, she gave “a doctor’s vague advice to bant and exercise,” and evidently Ellie would none of this. She might also have consulted the hundred and one doctors in Chicago or elsewhere who specialize in the reduction of fat, and who could have given her for “the continent” a diet chart or perhaps a pill to effect the desired change. But she did not think this necessary; she did not feel it her duty. But if we have only adverse criticism for Mrs. Aldis’ uncharitable act, what direful words of commination should we not visit on the doctor who gave the “vague advice.” In an age when the cult of slimness is uppermost in everybody’s mind, is it possible that the doctor consulted by Mrs. Aldis was so untrue to his mission as a public benefactor that he gave only “vague advice,” or is Mrs. Aldis maligning the whole medical profession and trying to show that by his “vague advice” the doctor was really responsible for Ellie’s death by driving her into taking “the bottles in the woodshed, hundreds of ’em. All labelled ‘Caldwell’s Great Obesity Cure Warranted Safe and Rapid.’”?

The lesson contained in the poetic lines of Mrs. Aldis’ little tragedy is a bitter one for all those medical men who have made strenuous efforts to let the public share their deep and vast knowledge without so much as asking for the slightest compensation. It shows beyond a doubt that not only are the Ellies of this world unwilling to imbibe science in a popular form, but also the Aldises of a much higher intelligence. It shows that the lure of patent medicine is a very strong one and that a doctor’s “vague advice” cannot offset it. Strange, indeed, that a doctor’s “vague advice” should be so inconsequential opposite so patently fraudulent a preparation as “Caldwell’s Great Obesity Cure,” but stranger still is what we are about to record—namely, the failure of our medical propagandists to combat in an intelligent way that most simple of all our metabolic disturbances—obesity!

A Vers Libre Prize Contest

Through the generosity of a friend, THE LITTLE REVIEW is enabled to offer an unusual prize for poetry—possibly the first prize extended to free verse. The giver is “interested in all experiments, and has followed the poetry published in THE LITTLE REVIEW with keen appreciation and a growing admiration for the poetic form known as _vers libre_.”

The conditions are as follows:

Contributions must be received by August 15th.

They must not be longer than twenty-five lines.

They must be sent anonymously with stamps for return.

The name and address of the author must be fixed to the manuscript in a sealed envelope.

It should be borne in mind that free verse is wanted—verse having beauty of rhythm, not merely prose separated into lines.

There will be three judges, the appointing of whom has been left to the editor of THE LITTLE REVIEW. (Their names will be given in the next issue, as we are hurrying this announcement to press without having had time to consult anyone.)

There will be two prizes of $25 each. They are offered not as a first and second prize, but for “the two best short poems in free verse form.”