Chapter IV: (Walter Villerant to Mrs. Bland Burn)

Ezra Pound

My dear Lydia:

Your rather irascible husband asks for “Aunt Sallys”[5]; with the Pyrenees before me and at this late date, it is difficult to provide them. I agree with at least half he says. I am, with qualifications, Malthusian. I should consent to breed under pressure, if I were convinced in any way of the reasonableness of reproducing the species. But my nerves and the nerves of any woman I could live with three months, would produce only a victim—beautiful perhaps, but a victim: expiring of aromatic pain from the jasmine, lacking in impulse, a mere bundle of discriminations. If I were wealthy I might subsidize a stud of young peasants, or a tribal group in Tahiti. At present “_valga mas estar soltero_”, I will not take Miss J., nor her income, nor the female disciple of John.

There is no truce between art and the public. The public celebrates its eucharists with dead bodies. Its writers aspire to equal the oyster: to get themselves swallowed alive. They encompass it.

Art that sells on production is bad art, essentially. It is art that is made to demand. It suits the public. The taste of the public is bad. The taste of the public is always bad. It is bad because it is not an individual expression, but merely a mania for assent, a mania to be “in on it”.

Even the botches of a good artist have some quality, some distinction, which prevents their pleasing mass-palates.

Good art weathers the ages because once in so often a man of intelligence commands the mass to adore it. His contemporaries call him a nuisance, their children follow his instructions, include him in the curricula. I am not lifting my voice in protest; I am merely defining a process. I do not protest against the leaves falling in autumn.

The arts are kept up by a very few people; they always have been kept up, when kept up at all, by a very few people. A great art patron is a man who keeps up great artists. A good art patron is a man who keeps up good artists. His reputation is coterminous with the work he has patronized. He can not be an imbecile.

There are a few more people capable of knowing good art when they see it. Half of them are indifferent, three fourths of them are inactive, the exceeding few side with the artist; about all they can do is to feed him. Others, hating his art, may from family or humanitarian motives, feed and clothe him in spite of his art ... and attempt to divorce him from it.

These statements are simple, dull. One should write them in electric lights and hang them above Coney Island, and beside the Sarsaparilla sign on Broadway! The Biblical Text Society should embellish them upon busses.

Unfortunately the turmoil of yidds, letts, finns, esthonians, cravats, niberians, nubians, algerians, sweeping along Eighth Avenue in the splendour of their vigorous unwashed animality will not help us. They are the America of tomorrow....

(The good Burn believes in America; the naive English, mad over apiculture, horticulture, arboriculture, herbiculture, agriculture, asparagriculture etc., always believe in America ... until they have seen it.)

The turmoil of Yidds, Letts, etc., is “full of promise”, full of vitality. They are the sap of the nation, our heritors, the heritors of our ancient acquisitions. But our job is to turn out good art, that is to produce it, to make a tradition.

“My field must be ploughed up, but the country has need of quiet” (La Famille Cardinal). “I admire Epicurus. He was not the dupe of analogies”. Need I give references for all my quotations?

This nonsense about art for the many, for the majority. J’en ai soupé. It may be fitting that men should enjoy equal “civic and political rights”, these things are a matter of man’s exterior acts, of exterior contacts. (Macchiavelli believed in democracy: it lay beyond his experience). The arts have nothing to do with this. They are man’s life within himself. The king’s writ does not run there. The voice of the majority is powerless to make me enjoy, or disenjoy, the lines of Catullus. I dispense with a vote without inconvenience; Villon I would not dispense with.

Bales are written on the false assumption that you can treat the arts as if they were governed by civic analogies. The two things are not alike, and there is an end to the matter.

It is rubbish to say “art for the people lies behind us”. The populace was paid to attend greek drama. It would have gone to cinemas instead, had cinemas then existed. Art begins with the artist. It goes first to the very few; and, next, to the few very idle. Even journalism and advertising can not reverse this law. I have scribbled a very long letter, and not answered half the good William’s diatribe. My regards to Mrs Amelia.

Yours,
WALTER VILLERANT.

----------

[5] “Imaginary Letters”, by Wyndham Lewis. _The Little Review_
for May.

The Children and Judas

Robert Alden Sanborn

It was dawn upon the fields of Heaven,
The dew upon the fence-rail twinkled,
And there were seven
Stars upon the sky that beamed;
And in the grass the cow-bells tinkled,
And daisies dreamed,
And sweet smells streamed
Over the tasselled corn.

God lay dimmed in slumber,
And Jesus’ warm hair was pillowed on His Father’s breast;
Seven disciples like seven points of a star
Were rayed about the sleeping Majesties,
And Judas was brighter than the rest,
Because his spirit had a fiercer sin to burn.
His ruddy hair was rimmed with dew,
And what he was to me he is to you.

There was no sound
But the lyric murmur of a Mary, singing
Low upon the ground,
Where a brook ran upon a secret errand
Like a silver hound
Slipping beneath the unbound hair of trees;
Mary was singing to the least of these,
Some Children.

All listened,
For the breath of her caressed the silence
With curves of melody;
And hence the very corn awoke to hear,
And to inhale the healing psalmody.
So because the grass, the daisies, stirred
Pleasantly, and light wings whirred
As birds arose from nests,
And quests of dew and honey went upon,
The Children, one by one, moved about,
And some would run up the hill,
And back again; another seemed to pout,
But changed and blew a glad shrill whistle out
That pleased the sailing stars.

Then Mary ceased her song,
And silence fell like shadow on them all.

Now amongst the ones who slept
Judas raised his head;
Sleep never touched his eyes with cool forgetfulness,
Instead his soul was fed with sin
That never flickered out within.

He yawned and bent his knees,
And the tongue of a silver bell
Shivered above the sleeping Majesties
Within the ring of seven,
Because there were but six
When Judas vaulted the fence-rail
Out of the fields of Heaven.

And now you could hear Jesus breathe,
And God murmur peace upon the wakeful corn.

“God!”
A spire of frail sound rose from a boyish will,
“See God, He’s walking down the hill,
See, Mary!”

And Mary looked up
And saw Judas coming toward them,
The sweet hand of a Child in the cup of either hand.

“Shall I tell them the truth, Judas,
That you are far from God,” said she,
“Or will you burn them with your sin,
You who are no kin to such as these,
And drive them back to me,
Crying bitterly?”

A smile struggled with his twisted face,
But could not give it grace,
And the two Children, wary
Of the lurid tumult in his breast,
Wrested their twined fingers from the gnarled hold of him,
And their eyes dim with tears,
Ran back to Mary.

Judas, the silent shadow of a man,
His will as heavy as a fallen tree in a wood,
Stood upon the hill,
And watched the Children as they ran,
Saw them nestle into Mary’s arms,
Seeking in the cloudy charms
Of her loosened hair,
The peace they knew was there.

Words crowded in his throat,
And he sat upon the hillside
With his face between his knees.

Now when his face was hidden
From the least of these,
One, bidden by the helplessness
Of the man on the side of the hill,
Came from the shelter of Mary’s hair,
And minding not her warning touch,
Nor her sounding of his name,
Knowing he was not chidden much,
Went winding an idle way
Up the hill, and around and away
From the still bowed man.

And first he picked a flower
Which he threw higher toward the fence-rail.

God smiled in His sleep,
And Jesus opened His eyes,
Put forth a hand for the plucked flower,
And hid it in His breast,
Yet did not rise nor cease His rest.

The Child,
Keeping a moody soft eye upon the grey humped figure,
Betrayed his mischief in a smile
That waxed bigger, bubble-like, and broke into a laugh,
And like a thief in the night
Crept up the hill to the fence-rail,
And peeked.

The fence-rail creaked
As Jesus turned His face to him:
“Poor man, dear boy,” he whispered silverly,
“Until he learns to play,
To dress his dusty head
With ribbons of the rosy day,
Never can he share
Your early morning passion,
Flecked with foamy curls of hair.
Would you give him back again
To my bosom, cleansed of pain,
Spill your living ways of laughing
In his muffled ears;
At him, and beset him! Splash him, little dears,
In your fun,” Jesus bade the boy.
“Run!”

And the Child winked, Yes,
Turned about and ran,
Put his flying hands upon the shoulders of the man,
And while a star blinked
At what he saw,
The Child broke the law of sin
As he leaped over Judas in the old, old game;
Ran screaming down to Mary’s covering hair,
But did not linger there;
Sped back and bounded over once again,
And others captured by the first one’s joy
Were startled into rapture
And followed, girl and boy,
In the glamour of the game,
Until the sunken man became
Bathed and spattered,
Shaken, shattered and half-hidden,
In the breaking foam of Children.

There came a pause
When the Little Ones, breathing
Hard about Judas, saw him raise his head,
Saw a smile like theirs, wreathing
His face, washed with sleep,
As though he waked in his bed
From the keep of angels.

In his eyes remembrance shone
Of when he was a boy
And looked upon the face of God everywhere;
Of when he was himself a toy,
A plaything of a God who dreamed
Everywhere and everything.

And when the Children saw
Upon his face the broken law
Of sin dissolve like shadows
In a ruined wood;
When they saw the sun come up
Within him, fill his face as the cup
Of the world is filled,
They spilled their bubbling laughter on the air,
And cuddled to his knees
As though he, too, were of the least of these.

His greedy arms inarticulately stuffed
With bloomy charms,
His roughed voice sweet
With honey of his joy, he began:

“Now when I was a boy
I had as little as you to give me joy,
And made as much of it,
Made a world of many mansions
Each great enough for God to dwell in;
Yes, mansions of my little joy,
Even as do you.”

“Do we?” asked one thoughtfully,
And, “What is mansion?” said another.
“And who put the shadows in your face?”
“And who took them away again?”

“A great light put the shadows in my face.”
Said he;
“Because I hoarded it within,
And boarded it up with sin
Of my importance;
Because I would not dance with joy of it
Like a brook prancing to the sea,
But in a deep dark well
Sealed the living spirit up;
What grace of it I could not keep
I would not give away
In play, like you.”

“Do we?” asked one closer than the rest.
“And who is Grace?” from another troubled breast.
“And what is sin?”

“Sin is a stone,”
Dreamed Judas, his chin on a silky head,
“Which when a seed is blown
Upon it, harbors not
The desire of a flower in the seed,
But must be broken by the shower,
And a deal of shining,
And the bold clutch of cold;
Grace is the flower
Of desire in the seed,
And sin is the stone that will not feed the flower.”

“Here is a flower,”
Said a Child with a daffodil.
“And here is a stone,
Will you show us how
The stone won’t feed the flower?”
“Yes, will you _now_?” chattered all.

Judas took the stone in one hand,
And in the other raised a black leather bag
That sagged from the girdle at his waist.
“There is little grace in either,
As much in one as in the other,”
Murmured Judas, hefting the leather bag.

“Oh, I hear something jingle,” said a little blond brother.
“Are they sins?” said his sister.

“NO!” spoke a voice like the beat of a great wing
On the air behind Judas.

Then a white light shone upon him,
Through him spread the light
So that no shadow of him fell
Like night around the Children.
And Judas looked up,
And saw Jesus standing there.

“See, Children!” cried Jesus, with many smiles,
“What the good Judas has brought you all these years;
See, my dears, what he has saved all the stony hilly miles,
For you!”

And Jesus opened the black leather bag,
And brought forth hands full of sweet bread
Which he fed to the Children.

Then Judas, his hands sticky
With crumby kisses of the Little Ones,
Went up the hill with the great Lover,
Under the cover of His arm,
All harm gone from him.

The Reader Critic

Yeats’s “Upon a Dying Lady”

J., New York:

I wonder how many of your readers know that the Seven Poems by William Butler Yeats in the August number of _The Little Review_ were inspired by and written about Miss Mabel Beardsley, the sister of Aubrey Beardsley? I remember when Yeats was writing them. She was dying of a lingering illness. She was a Catholic, and it is of course well known that Aubrey Beardsley became a Catholic before he died. Artists, poets and writers like Charles Shannon and Charles Ricketts, W. B. Yeats, and other old friends of her brother and herself, used to take turns in visiting her. Some of them made points of collecting their best and in some cases most improper stories for her. I hope that she kept a diary and entered some of the stories in it. W. B. Yeats was tremendously moved by her fine spirit and gaiety. The Seven Poems were the result.

The story is one that Meredith would have loved. And she was a joyous creature that Meredith would have loved had he known her. There was no wearing of black there, no making a luxury of her grief, no flaunting it in the faces of others, even though they might sympathize with or share her feelings. It was all quite French, what a spirited French woman would do. She would have enjoyed the story published in the Letters of Meredith that an old Cornish woman told him:

“A hunting Squire in her neighborhood had a very handsome wife, whom he valued less than the fox’s tail. One of the Vivians eyed her, admired, condoled, desired and carried her off. Some days after, she was taken with compunction or compassion, and about midnight the forsaken squire, sitting in his library, heard three knocks at the window. ‘That’s Bess,’ he said, and let her in. She was for weeping and protesting repentance, but he kissed her, taking the blame on himself, rightly, and the house was quiet. Old Lady Vivian, like many old ladies, had outgrown her notions of masculine sentiment in these matters; she said to my friend: ‘What are the man’s family making such a fuss about! My son only had her a fortnight!’”

Gargoyles

An Old Reader:

I have never been a real subscriber. The only copy of _The Little Review_ I ever bought was the memorable March issue with Galsworthy’s letter in it. For a long time after that _The Little Review_ was my religion; it converted me to a faith in New America, it inspired me to dreams and creative work. It was my first American sweetheart, and as long as it remained such it aroused in me the whole gamut of love emotions, from passionate admiration to passionate hatred. It would pain me to become just a subscriber, to manifest my attitude through a dollar and a half. Better leave the ashes undisturbed by profane poking.

Of late I have thought a good deal about the magazine. I have been camping near the ocean, and have spent some time in your various haunts of last summer where the natives still gossip about the _Little Review_ crowd. Plunging at night into the phosphorous surf and other delightful sins, mingled with communion with some _Little Review_ worshippers, has disturbed my academic calm and provoked my reveries. One night I was awakened and perceived an apparition moving from the roaring sea toward my gigantic fire. I heard a voice, a wail: “Help! Margaret Anderson is murdering me!” Was it the spirit of _The Little Review_?

For surely the spirit of the old _Little Review_ is dead. You seem to be proud of your evolution, of the graves of your old gods that loom in your eyes like stepping-stones to those heights where you bask in the wisdom of the Ezras. I hope your new faith is as sleeve-deep as your former acquired creeds. For the beauty of the old _Little Review_, the secret of its magnetism and appeal to Young America, lay in its youthfulness, its spontaneity, in its puerility, if you wish. For puerility mates with originality. The Ezras know too much. Their minds are black, scarcely smouldering logs. They are yogis; you remember how Galsworthy hoped that you would escape the danger of becoming yogis?

An Ezraized _Little Review_ will have no appeal to Young America. Shall I tell you that in my summer class I had students from various western states to the University of California because they saw my name in the catalogue, and they associated my name with the old _Little Review_? These worshippers are cold to the recent issues. And I sympathize with them. The new _Little Review_ is gargoylitic, monotonously so. We can still enjoy a passage in Wyndham Lewis, although Remy de Gourmont has said the same things more beautifully and less flippantly. We are still grateful for such a jewel as Maxwell Bodenheim’s “Poet’s Heart”: Bodenheim is the greatest of all the Others, for he does not suffer from self-consciousness, from too-much-knowing. But it is Ezra who sprawls all over _The Little Review_ and bedecks it with gargoyles. Mr. Pound is digestible only in the early miniatures:

“Oh fan of white silk, clear as frost on the grass-blade”....

I hope that you will soon tire of your over-sophisticated associates and drive them out of the sanctuary. After all you are a rock ... you are still persisting at the impossible and the miraculous. I am looking forward to the next stage in your evolution. And I send you my hearty greeting, over the gargoylitic heads of your miseacres, for the next fresh, spontaneous _Little Review_.

[This letter I think will find an echo in the minds of many of our first subscribers. I have several faults to find with its point of view, but one especially: I cannot see why personal qualities such as freshness, spontaneity, enthusiasm, etc., are in any way a guarantee for an interesting or important magazine. Being temperamentally spontaneous, my actions will always be characterized by impulsiveness, etc. But I know that spontaneity will never help me to write an immortal poem. You must keep things in their proper correspondences.

I very spontaneously accept the cooperation of a group of writers who can really write. Literature is their medium. Playing the piano is mine. When I play the piano very beautifully to the original _Little Review_ “worshippers” they will know it is not because I am young and fresh and enthusiastic but because I know a great deal about how the piano should be played. I can’t do such things to words. Wyndham Lewis does it in this issue in a passage—“Leonardo’s beauty consisted in a red rain on the shadowed side of heads”.... That is a matter of great prose. And the only reason for a magazine of the Arts to be published is that it shall produce great prose, great poetry, great reproductions of sculpture, painting, and music. We are going to have the latter as soon as possible.—_M. C. A._]

Phases of Crazes

H. L. C., Chicago:

I have just read your circular letter in which you state your aims and set forth your plans for the future. It is the best-written letter of the kind I have ever read.

But I don’t like your promises, so I am going to risk your Reader Critic (that at least is always interesting: no one ever seems to be safe from you) and tell you why.

I wish you didn’t have such a craze for foreigners and self-exiled Americans. I think you have missed your chance right here in your own country. I am sure there are writers if you would go after them who, if they couldn’t write so well, would on the other hand be writing in a familiar manner about subjects known to us and in so doing be creating a literary tradition of our own.

I am tired of these floods of Russian, French, Scandinavian, Irish and Hindoo stuff that have swept the country. The war will probably reduce the importation of foreign books, and I for one think this will be a good thing....

[I should think there might be room in America for one magazine which will print work just because it is good, no matter where it is produced. All we ask in this is to be allowed a choice of crazes.

To us is seems that there is an indiscriminate craze in the theatre, in books, in magazines, and even in exhibition rooms, for the American product with all its sins upon it. Let your fears for the contamination or stifling from abroad of American letters be at rest. Congress and the established publisher have attended to all that. Ignorance is protected from invasion far better than the country itself.

Each generation in this country is spared the shock of contemporary foreign masterpieces. When a masterpiece reaches America, a generation late, Time has tempered it to the shorn. I happen to know something of Tagore’s experience with this protection. When Tagore was first “discovered” in America—(he had been published in London and had with him only a few personal copies of his work)—he sent to his London publishers for extra copies to meet the requests of his friends. Aside from a terrific tariff, the red tape and the questioning as to the integrity of his purpose in importing his own books proved too wearing an experience: the idea was abandoned. On his recent trip he brought with him a small collection of very gentle Indian water colours, with no other motive than to create if possible an understanding of Indian art in this country. His pictures were held up at the port of Seattle, he was called again and again before inspectors, made to swear all kinds of oaths, and to deposit a fabulous sum (some forty thousand dollars, as I remember) to assure the government that his intentions were all right.

As he was leaving the country some one asked him if he ever intended making another visit,—(there had been some agitation before this about including the Hindoo in the Oriental Immigration laws)—and Tagore replied, “I do not know. You will make a law against the Hindoo coming to your country. You have now a law against books. It may be you will make a law against poets coming too?”

When the western nations have finished making the world safe for democracy, if it wouldn’t be too satirical the Orient might wage a world war to make the world safe for Art.—_jh._]

Bury bloody Bodenheim
Bury bloody Bodenheim
Bury bloody Bodenheim
And Johnny Rodker too.

—_E. J._

To Our Readers

Do you know anything more annoying or more ageing than to have your friends discover for you those cherished things in Art which you should have discovered for yourself?

_The Little Review_ is giving its readers an opportunity to make their own discoveries. There is no magazine in America which has on its staff such an important line-up of known genius and the “yet unknowns”.

If you have any friends who are not entrenched in mediocrity, definitely protecting themselves against good literature, tell them to subscribe to _The Little Review_. Or send us their names and we will mail them sample copies.

_The Little Review_ is doing some intensive growing this autumn. We have great plans for enlarging our format and giving you the best creative work that is being produced here and in Europe, written without an eye on the established publisher, and not garbled in editorial rooms to meet the taste of the average mind.

Send us the names of any people you think will be interested. We will appreciate it.

Mason & Hamlin

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THE LITTLE REVIEW

MARGARET C. ANDERSON, _Editor_
EZRA POUND, _London Editor_

_For October_:

A POEM, by T. S. ELIOT
PO-CHÜ-I, versions by ARTHUR D. WALEY
CANTLEMAN, by WYNDHAM LEWIS
IMAGINARY LETTERS, V., by EZRA POUND
BARBARA ROSCORLA’S CHILD, by ARTHUR SYMONS
AN EDITORIAL ON SOLICITOUS DOUBT

_For November_:

HANRAHAN’S OATH: A PLAY, by LADY GREGORY

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no publishers’ interests, no aged magazines and reviews, nor
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Transcriber’s Notes

Advertisements were collected at the end of the text.

The table of contents on the title page was adjusted in order to reflect correctly the headings in this issue of THE LITTLE REVIEW.

The original spelling was mostly preserved. A few obvious typographical errors were silently corrected. All other changes are shown here (before/after):

[p. 7]:
... there is certain category of spirit that is not quite
anaemic, and ...
... there is a certain category of spirit that is not quite
anaemic, and ...

[p. 7]:
... man’s festival as a Falstaff of unwieldly spume; if he
comes at ...
... man’s festival as a Falstaff of unwieldy spume; if he comes
at ...

[p. 12]:
... Yet saw on “ad.” “To-night, THE HUDSON SAIL”, ...
... Yet saw on “ad.” “To-night, THE HUDSON SAIL, ...

[p. 29]:
... Murmured Judas, helfting the leather bag. ...
... Murmured Judas, hefting the leather bag. ...