Part 1

THE LITTLE REVIEW

_Literature_ _Drama_ _Music_ _Art_

MARGARET C. ANDERSON EDITOR

APRIL, 1915

Etchings (Not to Be Read Aloud) William Saphier Mr. Comstock and the Resourceful Police Margaret C. Anderson Wild Songs Skipwith Cannéll The Poetry of Paul Fort Richard Aldington The Subman Alexander S. Kaun Hunger George Franklin Poems David O’Neil Musik or Music? James Whittaker The Critics’ Catastrophe Herman Schuchert A Shorn Strindberg Marguerite Swawite Vers Libre and Advertisements John Gould Fletcher Extreme Unction Mary Aldis The Schoolmaster George Burman Foster My Friend, the Incurable Ibn Gabirol Gabrilowitsch and the New Standard M. C. A. Bauer and Casals Herman Schuchert Book Discussion John Cowper Powys on Henry James The Reader Critic

Published Monthly

15 cents a copy

MARGARET C. ANDERSON, Publisher Fine Arts Building CHICAGO

$1.50 a year

Entered as second-class matter at Postoffice, Chicago

THE LITTLE REVIEW

Vol. II

APRIL, 1915

No. 2

Copyright, 1915, by Margaret C. Anderson

Etchings Not to Be Read Aloud

WILLIAM SAPHIER

LIGHTS IN FOG

Weak sparkling assertions In an opal, opaque atmosphere Sharp suffering and Kindly whispering eyes In a wan, olive grey face.

You mean all to a few And nothing to the rest.

THE OLD PRIZE FIGHTER

A rosy, I-dare-you nose On a twisted steel-trellice face, Just some knotty lumber Without a hint of flower or fruit.

You tingled many a passion, But never a single soul.

Mr. Comstock and the Resourceful Police

MARGARET C. ANDERSON

I want to write about so many things this time that I don’t know where to begin. At first I had planned to do five or six pages on the crime of musical criticism in this country—particularly as focused in the critics’ antics with Scriabin’s beautiful _Prometheus_ recently played by the Chicago Symphony. Truly that was an opportunity for the American music critic! He could be as righteously bourgeois as he wished and his readers would credit him with “sanity” and a clear vision; or he could be as ignorantly facetious as he wished and increase his reputation for wit. It didn’t occur to him that there might be something wrong with his imagination rather than with Scriabin’s art. How exciting it would be to find a music critic whose auditory nerves were as sensitive as his visual or gustatory nerves! Surely it’s not asking too much of people engaged in the business of sound that they be able not only to listen but to hear. Well ... there were many other matters I wanted to write of: For instance, the absurdity of our music schools; the pest of writers who begin their sentences “But, however,”; the so-far unnoticed strength of _Sanin_; the fault with George Middleton’s _Criminals_; the antics of the Drama League; the stunning things in _The Egoist_; exaggeration as a possible basis of art; the supremacy of Form; the undefinable standard of those of us who hate standardizations, etc., etc. But for the moment I have found something more important to talk about: Mr. Anthony Comstock.

Of course there is nothing new to say about him—and nothing awful enough. The best thing I’ve heard lately is this: “Anthony Comstock not only doesn’t know anything, but he doesn’t suspect anything.” Francis Hackett can write about Billy Sunday and resist the temptation of invective. Perhaps he’s too much an artist to feel the temptation. I wonder if he could do the same about Anthony Comstock. Certainly I can’t. Even the thought of Billy Sunday’s mammoth sentimentalizations and the 35,135 people who, according to the last reports, had been soothed thereby, fills me with shudders of hopelessness for the eventual education of men. And the thought of Anthony Comstock is ten times more horrible. His latest outrage is well-known by this time—his arrest of William Sanger for giving to a Comstock detective a copy of Mrs. Sanger’s pamphlet, _Family Limitation_. The charge was “circulating obscene literature.” I have seen that pamphlet, read it carefully, and given it to all the people I know well enough to be sure they are not Comstock detectives. There is not an obscene word in it, naturally. Margaret Sanger couldn’t be obscene—she’s a gentle, serious, well-informed woman writing in a way that any high-minded physician might. I have also seen her pamphlet called _English Methods of Birth Control_, which practically duplicates the leaflet (_Hygienic Methods of Family Limitation_) adopted by the Malthusian League of England and is sent “to all persons married or about to be married, who apply for it, in all countries of the world, except to applicants from the United States of America, where the Postal Laws will not allow of its delivery.” These pamphlets tell in simple language all the known methods for the prevention of conception—methods practised everywhere by the educated and the rich and unknown only to the poor and the ignorant who need such knowledge most. Mrs. Sanger says in her preface: “Today, in nearly all countries of the world, most educated people practise some method of limiting their offspring. Educated people are usually able to discuss at leisure the question of contraceptives with the professional men and women of their class, and benefit by the knowledge which science has advanced. The information which this class obtains is usually clean and harmless. In these same countries, however, there is a larger number of people who are kept in ignorance of this knowledge: it is said by physicians who work among these people that as soon as a woman rises out of the lowest stages of ignorance and poverty, her first step is to seek information of some practical means to limit her family. Everywhere the woman of this class seeks for knowledge on this subject. Seldom can she find it, because the medical profession refuses to give it, and because she comes in daily contact with those only who are as ignorant as herself of the subject. The consequence is, she must accept the stray bits of information given by neighbors, relatives, and friends, gathered from sources wholly unreliable and uninformed. She is forced to try everything and take anything, with the result that quackery thrives on her innocence and ignorance is perpetuated.”

The result of this propaganda was Margaret Sanger’s arrest last fall. I’ve forgotten the various steps by which “that blind, heavy, stupid thing we call government” came to its lumbering decision that she ought to spend ten or fifteen years in jail for her efforts to spread this knowledge. But Mrs. Sanger left the country—thank heaven! However, I understand that when she has finished her work of making these pamphlets known she means to come back and face the imprisonment. I pray she doesn’t mean anything of the kind. Why should she go to jail for ten years because we haven’t suppressed Anthony Comstock? Last year his literary supervision was given its first serious jolt when Mitchel Kennerley won the _Hagar Revelly_ suit. But that was not nearly so important as the present issue, because _Hagar Revelly_ was rather negative literature and birth control is one of the milestones by which civilization will measure its progress. The science of eugenics has always seemed to me fundamentally a sentimentalization—something that a man might have conceived in the frame of mind Stevenson was in when he wrote _Olalla_. Because there is no such thing, really, as the scientific restriction of love and passion. These things don’t belong in the realm of science any more than one’s reactions to a sunrise do. But the restriction of the birth-rate does belong there, and science should make this one of its big battles. Many people who used to believe that love was only a means to an end, that procreation was the only justification for cohabitation, now realize that if there is any force in the world that doesn’t _need justification_ it is love. And these people are the ones who refuse to bring children into the world unless they can be born free of disease and stand a chance of being fed and educated and loved. Havelock Ellis sums it up well: “In order to do away with the need for abortion, and to counteract the propaganda in its favor, our main reliance must be placed, on the one hand, on increased foresight in the determination of conception and increased knowledge of the means for preventing conception; and on the other hand, on a better provision by the State for the care of pregnant women, married and unmarried alike, and a practical recognition of the qualified mother’s claim on society. There can be no doubt that in many a charge of criminal abortion the real offence lies at the door of those who failed to exercise their social and professional duty of making known the more natural and harmless methods for preventing conception, or else by their social attitude have made the pregnant woman’s position intolerable.”

But the immediate concern is William Sanger and his trial, which is to take place some time in April, I believe. His friends are trying to raise $500 for legal expenses, and contributions may be sent to Leonard D. Abbott, President of the Free Speech League, 241 East 201st Street, New York City; to the Sanger Fund, _The Masses_ Publishing Company, 87 Greenwich Avenue, New York City; to _Mother Earth_, 20 East 125th Street, New York City, or to _The Little Review_.

* * * * *

Another thing that must not be forgotten is the “dramatic” attempt to blow up St. Patrick’s Cathedral last month, and all the deep plots to destroy the rich men of that city—what was it the headlines said? Everybody of normal intelligence who read those headlines suspected a police frame-up—which it proved to be. The psychology of the police is something I don’t understand, let alone being able to write about it so that any one else will understand. So I will quote the story of this quite unbelievable crime—police crime, I mean—as it appeared in _The Masses_. (_The Masses_, by the way, is one of the magazines indispensable to the living of an intelligent life). The story is called “Putting One over on Woods”:

When Commissioner Woods took office as head of the New York police force a year ago, he brought with him some enlightened ideas about the relation of the police to the public. A week before a meeting had been held at Union Square which by police interference had been turned into a bloody riot. A week later another Union Square meeting took place, with the police under orders to “let them talk.” The meeting passed off peaceably.

Thus the enlightened views of the new commissioner of police were vindicated. The right of free speech, and of free opinion, was conceded as not being a menace to civilization.

But a police force which is enabled to exist and enjoy its peculiar privileges by virtue of protecting the public against imaginary dangers, could not see its position undermined in this way. It was necessary to persuade the public that Socialists, Anarchists, and I. W. W.’s were plotting murder and destruction. The public was prone to accept this melodramatic view, but Commissioner Woods, being an intelligent man, was inclined to be cynical. So it became necessary to “put one over on Woods.”

They framed it up in the regular police fashion. A clever young Italian detective named Pulignano, it appears from the evidence, was promised a raise of salary and a medal if he would engineer a bomb-plot. Pulignano got hold of two Italian boys—not anarchists or socialists, but religious fanatics—and urged them on to blow up St. Patrick’s Cathedral. He planned the deed, bought the materials of destruction for them, and shamed them when they wanted to pull out of the plot the night before. The next morning, at great risk to an innocent public, the bomb was carried into the cathedral, _lighted_, and then the dozens of policemen and detectives, disguised as scrubwomen, etc., rushed in to save civilization.

And Woods fell for it. He swallowed the whole sensational business. They have got him. He is their dupe, and henceforth their faithful tool.

Reaction is in the saddle. “All radicals to be expelled from the city,” says a headline. A card catalogue of I. W. W. sympathizers. Socialism under the official ban. Free speech doomed.

So they hope. At the least it means that the fight has for the lovers of liberty begun again. But one wonders a little about Arthur Woods. He is on their side now—the apologist of as infamous and criminal an _agent provocateur_ as ever sent a foolish boy to the gallows. But will Woods fail to see how he has been used by the police in this latest attempt to crush freedom in the interest of a privileged group? Is he as much a fool as they think?

Giovannitti’s Italian magazine, _Il Fuoco_, states that the bomb was made of caps and gravel—the kind of thing children use on the fourth of July. I know that _Mother Earth_ has started a fund to prevent the two boys from being railroaded. Will there never be an end of these ghastly things?...

As too much light may blind the vision, so too much intellect may hinder the understanding.

—_Romain Rolland._

Wild Songs

(_From “Monoliths”_)

SKIPWITH CANNELL

IN THE FOREST

I am not alone, for there are eyes Stealthy and curious, And they turn to me. I will shout loudly to the forest, I will shout and with a sob Griping my throat I will cower Quickly Beneath my cloak.

For the old gods stand silently Behind the silent trees, And when I shout they step forth And I dare not Look upon their faces.

THE FLOOD TIDE

The red in me Lives too near my throat. My heart is choked with blood, And a rage drives it upward As the moon drags the flood tide Raging Across the marshes.

I will dance Somberly, In a ritual Terrible and soothing; I will dance that I may not Tear out his throat In murder.

THE DANCE

With wide flung arms, With feet clinging to the earth I will dance. My breath sobs in my belly For an old sorrow that has put out the sun, An old, furious sorrow ...

I will grin, I will bare my gums and grin Like a grey wolf who has come upon a bear.

The Poetry of Paul Fort

RICHARD ALDINGTON

It is said that there are only three honors in the world really worth accepting. The first is that of Pope of Rome, the second Prime Minister of England and the third Prince des Poètes. Monsieur Paul Fort is Prince des poètes, a sort of unofficial title conferred upon him by the affection and admiration of the young poets of Paris. Paul Verlaine, Stephen Mallarmé and Leon Dierx were M. Fort’s successors, and in the ballot which took place when he was elected M. Henry de Régnier was an excellent second.

Paul Fort is indeed a prince of poets, the essence and the type of the poetic personality, princely in the extraordinary generosity with which he scatters largess of poetry and princely in his disdain for any occupation but that of poet. If I were king of England I believe I would ask Paul Fort to be my Prime Minister, but he would refuse, for he has a better and more interesting kingdom of his own. He should have been Grand Vizier to Haroun-al-Raschid, and when the Sultan went to war or to love, when he was idle or busy, vainglorious or craven, happy or sad, wanton or grave, M. Fort, Grand Vizier, would have made a poem to express or correct the Sultan’s mood.

Critics are fond of making epigrams on Paul Fort. They say he is “genius pure and simple”; that he has a nature continually active and awake. It would be simpler to say he is a poet. Everything he lives, everything he sees, everything he hears or smells or touches or experiences is matter for poetry. Everything from Louis XI. to the “joli crottin d’or” goes into his varied subtle rhythms. He is the only living poet who can gracefully introduce his own name into a poem without appearing ridiculous. He is continually interested in himself and notes with pleasure the interest of others:

“Cinq, six, sept, huit enfants me suivent très curieux du long nez éclairant la cape au noir velours, ‘de ce monsieur tombé de la lune, avec des yeux de merlan frit!’ dit l’un d’entre eux.”

He writes that in the midst of a poem describing a visit to the village of Coucy-le-Chateau. I have no doubt thousands of other people have been to Coucy-le-Chateau, among them many poets, but Paul Fort is the first to make a poem of it:

Les sires d’autrefois portaient: _Fascé de vair et de gueules._ Pour supports: _deux lions d’or_. Au cimier: _un lion issu du même_. — Or voici que, premier, notre gai souverain, missire le soleil, porte un écu vivant! “_Sur champ de vert gazon_, Paul Fort couché près d’une amoureuse Suzon mêle distraitement cent douze violettes à sa barbe, et Suzon rêve sous sa voilette.”

There you have the “familiar style” over which so many gallons of ink have been shed. Observe how perfectly naturally the author speaks of “Paul Fort”; can you hear Tennyson doing it, or Keats or Francis Thompson or the disciples of Brunetière? One might make a pleasant little literary sketch on poets who possess the familiar style to the extent of using their own names in their verse. Thus, that admirable man, Browning:

And Robert Browning, you writer of plays, Here’s a subject made to your hand.

And old Walt:

I, Walt Whitman, a Cosmos, turbulent, fleshly, sensual, Eating, drinking and breeding.

It is, at least, agreeable to find poets who consider themselves as human beings instead of very inflated, somewhat simian demi-gods. Better a thousand times have desperate vulgarity than the New England pose au Longfellow and Emerson, or the still more horrible old England pose au Wordsworth, Tennyson, Shelley. Heaven preserve me from saying M. Fort is vulgar, but if to hate pomposity and moral pretentiousness be vulgar, then let us be vulgar, as M. Fort is. Better be obscene than a ninny.

Those who have not read M. Fort’s work and who suspect from the foregoing quotations that he is really a prose writer impudently palming off his productions as “sweet poesy,” are asked to read the following poem with attention:

LA RONDE

Si toutes les filles du monde voulaient s’ donner la main, tout autour de la mer elles pourraient faire une ronde.

Si tous les gars du monde voulaient bien êtr’ marins, ils f’raient avec leurs barques un joli pont sur l’onde.

Alors on pourrait faire une ronde autour du monde, si tous les gens du monde voulaient s’ donner la main.

That is said, I don’t know with what truth, to be the most popular of M. Fort’s poems. It certainly was, I am told, in everybody’s mouth in Paris when it was first published—rather as _Dolores_ was in London in the sixties. The cadence of the poem is, of course, obvious and marked, as it should be in a “chanson.” It is rather a good poem to start on, as M. Fort’s way of printing rhymed and accented verse as prose is there forcibly exemplified. M. Fort has not abandoned the Alexandrine; but he is not its slave. Confident in his theory that most poetry is a matter of typography he writes rhymed alexandrines, rhymed vers libres and rhymed and unrhymed prose in exactly the same manner; the effect is curious and charming. It is of course not the very commonplace device of daily newspapers when they want to be funny, but a genuine artistic principle. The effect is very different from that received from a perusal of tedious quatrains written as prose; in the latter case one is disgusted immediately, knowing that no man, not even a paid journalist, is such a fool as to write such stuff in prose; in M. Fort’s case the typographical arrangement prevents the ear becoming fatigued with the stressed rhymes of linear verse and at the same time gives a richness to the apparent prose that no real prose possesses.

For example, this quotation from the Roman de Louis XI., one of Paul Fort’s finest poem-novels.

Comtes, barons, chevaliers, capitaines, tous gentilshommes de grand façon, et le plus fier, le plus grand, le plus beau, Charles de Charolais, qui les dépassait tous, entrèrent un beau matin d’azur pure et de cloches, dans Rouen, la bonne ville, et c’était doux plaisir de voir briller les casques, les cuirasses et les housses; les belles housses, de fin drap d’or étaient, et d’autres de velours, fourrées de pennes d’hermine, et d’autres de damas, fourrées de zibeline, et d’autres, qui coûtaient moult cher, d’orfèvrerie; et c’était doux plaisir de voir courir les pages, les beaux jeunes enfants bien richement vêtus, et le voir danser, devant les personnages, des hommes en sauvages et de belles femmes nues, et sautiller autour des chevaux, en cadence, des nains rouges, roses, verts, et des filles en bergère, et de voir flotter aux toits les étandards bleus, semés de feux d’or, rouges, avec un lion noir, qui se mêlaient avec les bannières toutes blanches, et de voir venir de la cathédrale, sur le parvis, le clergé violet, venir à la rencontre du roi Louis le pâle, que représentait un si beau comte, et le ciel bleu passait dans les clochers à jour, toutes les cloches battaient, de joie ou de douleur, que les crosses luisaient! que les lances étaient belles!... et c’était doux plaisir d’aller voir les fontaines jeter vin, hypocras, dont chacun buvait; et y avait encore trois belles sirènes, nues sur une estrade, comme Ève au paradis, et jouaient d’instruments doux, jolis et graves, qui rendaient de suaves et grandes mélodies; et c’étaient sur le grand pont, sur la Seine, écuyers lâchant oisels peints en bleu, et dans toute la ville c’étaient moult plaisances, dont le tout avait coûté moult finance.

I quote that long passage in full to give a clear notion of M. Fort’s extraordinary fertility and precision in description. It is better than Hugo’s descriptions in _Notre Dame de Paris_, chiefly because it is more natural and familiar.

In this little article I have barely touched the rim of Paul Fort’s work. He is prodigious; he is not one poet, he is twelve, a whole school of poets; he is his own disciples, for none dares to imitate him, just as none dares to imitate Browning. He is the poet who has written everything: Chansons, Romans, Petites Epopées, Lieds, Elégies, Hymnes, Hymnes Héroiques, Eglogues et Idylles, Chants Paniques, Poèmes Marins, Odes et Odelettes, Fantaisies à la Gauloise, Complaintes et Dits, Madrigaux et Romances, Epigrammes à Moi-même. If he has not written plays, he has been a theater director, producing work which delighted literary Paris and annoyed the “boulevardiers”—this at a fabulously early age.