Part 4

If only he could touch someone’s hand now—anyone’s hand—the hand of a human being! To be all alone with the cruel, flickering stars up above, that was no way to die—snuffed out into the darkness. That was no way for any man to go, even though he _were_ just a peasant. But Anton knew himself important now, almost as important as a general. He knew himself important, with a strange, tremendous importance. He was as important as almost anyone in the world, and he was dying alone in the darkness.

Then he remembered that there must be other men in the cornfield. He had thought of that before, and afterwards he had forgotten. If there were other men here—even one other man, an enemy—he would find that comrade and they would die together.

Slowly, painfully, inch by inch he dragged himself. The stalks were like an impenetrable thicket. They entangled him as snares or a forest of swords set about him. He dragged himself on his palms, inch by inch, butting away the cornstalks.

An Austrian was lying on his back, gazing upward. He was dead now, but Anton did not know it. There was a wound in his neck, and the flies had begun to gather.

Anton gave a sob as he saw the Austrian. One more effort and he would be near enough to touch him. Perhaps the Austrian would grip his hand—hard—as Sasha had gripped it.

The hand of the Austrian did not grip hard when Anton touched it. It fluttered a little, however—Anton was sure of that. So Anton covered the hand with his own, and with his own hand gripped hard, as Sasha had gripped the hand of Anton.

And so died Anton Tarasovitch, looking up at the stars.

Art as it appears without the artist, i. e., as a body, an organization (the Prussian Officers’ Corps, the Order of the Jesuits). To what extent is the artist merely a preliminary stage? The world regarded as a self-generating work of art.—_Nietzsche._

Rupert Brooke

(_A Memory_)

ARTHUR DAVISON FICKE

One night—the last we were to have of you— High up above the city’s giant roar We sat around you on the generous floor— Since chairs were lame or stony or too few— And as you read, and the low music grew In exquisite tendrils twining the heart’s core, All the conjecture we had felt before Flashed into torch-flame, and at last we knew.

And Maurice, who in silence long has hidden A voice like yours, became a wreck of joy To inarticulate ecstasies beguiled. And you, as from some secret world now bidden To make return, stared up, and like a boy Blushed suddenly, and looked at us, and smiled.

To a West Indian Alligator

(_Estimated age, 1957 years_)[2]

EUNICE TIETJENS

Greetings, my brother, strange and uncouth beast, Flat-bellied, wrinkled, broad of nose! You are not beautiful—and yet at least Contentment spreads your scaley toes.

The keeper thwacks you and you grunt at me, Two hundred pounds of sleepy spleen. He tells me that your cranial cavity Will just contain a lima bean.

How seems it, brother, you who are so old, To lie and squint with curtained eye At these ephemera, born in the cold, These human things so soon to die?

You were scarce grown, a paltry eighty years, Too young to think of breeding yet, When Christ the Nazarene loosed the salt tears Which on man’s cheeks today are wet.

Mohammed rose and died—you churned the mud And watched your female laying eggs. Columbus passed you—with an oozy thud You scrambled sunward on your legs.

So now you doze at ease for all to view And bat a sleepy lid at me, You eat a little every year or two And count time in eternity.

So, brother, which is wiser of us twain When words are said and meals are past? I think, and pass—you sleep, yet you remain, And where shall be the end at last?

[2] _I cannot vouch for the science of this. It is “Alligator Joe’s” estimate._

Villon’s Epitaph[3]

WITTER BYNNER

I who have lived and have not thought But gone with nature as I ought, Letting good things occur, And now amazed and cannot see Why death should care so much for me. I never cared for her.

Scarron’s Epitaph[3]

WITTER BYNNER

He who now lies here asleep None would envy, few would weep: A man whom death had mortified A thousand times before he died.

Peaceful be the step you take, You who pass him—lest he wake. For his first good night is due. Let poor Scarron sleep it through.

[3] From the French of François Villon.

Editorials and Announcements

_Our Credo_

I have lost patience: people are still asking “What does THE LITTLE REVIEW stand for?” Since we have been so obscure—or is it that people have been so dull?—I shall try to answer all these plaintive queries in a sentence. May it be sufficient: I cannot “explain” every day why the sunrise seems worth while or, as Mr. Hecht would say, why the brook rises from the rocks.

THE LITTLE REVIEW is a magazine that believes in Life for Art’s sake, in the Individual rather than in Incomplete people, in an age of Imagination rather than of Reasonableness; a magazine that believes in Ideas even if they are not Ultimate Conclusions, and values its Ideals so greatly as to live them; a magazine interested in Past, Present, and Future, but particularly in the New Hellenism; a magazine written for Intelligent people who can Feel; whose philosophy is Applied Anarchism, whose policy is a Will to Splendor of Life, and whose function is—to express itself.

_Mr. Comstock’s Dismissal_

This great blessing comes sooner than we could have expected, and yet, as _The Chicago Tribune_ remarks, it is belated by about forty years. Mr. Comstock has been Post Office Inspector all that time. I remember a few years ago in New York hearing an interesting woman send a group of people into paroxysms by the passionate childish seriousness with which she said, “I wish Anthony Comstock would die!” Now that the government has accomplished this desideratum, it is almost time for it to be congratulated. I wonder how long it will be before this same government can “see its way clear” to suppressing the agent provocateur and letting his victims go free, or—well, never mind: it is beyond hoping.

“_Succession_”

When one of my friends fails to like Ethel Sidgwick’s _Succession_ I am left in a predicament: on what basis are we henceforth to understand each other? Succession goes so deep into music, into personality, into life that has its foundations in art.... You can explain all the subtleties of your most difficult emotions by referring to how Antoine felt on page so and so. How does one live without Antoine?

_The Strike_

And God said: “Let there be!” And there was.

And when the modern god, the omnipotent Proletariat, says: “Let there not be!” ...

You say the strike of the Chicago car men is of purely local significance. You crack jokes about the pleasure of walking and about the adventure of jitney-rides. You are calm and complacent, you blind and deaf men and women dancing on a dormant volcano.

You are right. Your complacency is justified. Why fear the million-headed mule who has borne his yoke for centuries? He grumbles?—Oh, it’s a trifle: just fill his flesh-pot, and he will take up anew with bestial delight his eternal task of enriching the few at the expense of his blood and marrow.

But fear the eruption of the volcano! For it will not remain dormant forever. Have we not witnessed the spasmodic awakenings of the giant? Recall the achievement of the Russian proletariat in 1905. Did it not wrest concessions from the obstinate Czar by means of a passive revolution? Recall the general strike in Belgium. Did it not cripple its commerce and industry for months?

The strike of the Chicago car men is pregnant with potentialities. It is a symptom of a refreshing storm. Those who produce everything and possess nothing have slept long in ignorance of their power. But they are slowly awakening. And when they become aware of the magic wand in their hand, whose passive motion can stop the wheels of the universe.... Take heed, O merrymakers at Belshazzar’s feast. Behold the MENE, TEKEL, PERES on the wall.

K.

“_The Country Walk_”

A young Englishman by the name of Edward Storer—I am assuming that he is young and that he is English—has protested effectively against the condition which decrees that a piece of writing, a painting, a sculpture has to be judged as a commodity _before_ it can be judged as a work of art by issuing little four-page leaflets containing portions of his work denied publication by the commercialism of the times. The first, which is called _The Country Walk_, has some quite uninspired though rather charming prose poems in it. _The Lark_, for instance:

Out of the young grass and silence you arise, frail bird, spinning upwards to the sky. Faster beat the wings, and shriller is the voice, and soon you are lost in the high blue, so that scarcely can I hear your voice or see the maddened flutterings of your wings.

Then suddenly all is silent, and softly you drop to earth again to rest your aching body against the good brown earth.

_The June-July Issue_

On account of being so late with our May number we have decided to combine the June and July and thus come out promptly again on the first of the month. Subscriptions will be extended accordingly.

_Edgar Lee Masters_

In the August issue there will be a new poem by Edgar Lee Masters, author of _The Spoon River Anthology_, and also a photogravure portrait of the poet which has just been taken by Eugene Hutchinson.

The Submarine

(_Translated from the Italian of Luciano Folgore by Anne Simon_)

It sinks. In the twilight of the water the conquered submarine falls straight to the bottom and seems like a black corpse thrown to the coral below, thrown to the tomb that devours with liquid joy the refuse and remains of the old world. The propellers, devourers of motion, buzz no more, the rudder has ceased turning, the prow no longer points its sharp beak, but the submarine extends itself on the viscid bed, and a multitude of unknown fish, coral and sea-nettles try to enter the closed apertures.

And yet once you leaped in the sun like a sentinel of burnished steel shining in the distance, and then rapidly returned to the green gorge where the sun never reaches, but where you find the tremendous task that is always with you and that whispers courage in the void of your soul. And once with your agile metallic prow you agitated the green water all around your shining body, and you did not feel the torments of the winds nor the black clouds of the hurricane that remained like spiteful women in a corner of the horizon, with hair dishevelled and the eye eager to spy below, from the firmament, the lost, the shipwrecked, the unknown that have no pilot.

Once from your sonorous sides, quietly, but vigilant and mad, the torpedo shot out, making its track in silence, and carrying within its thin body death, and the infinite power of dynamite. As you passed the sharks fled, as you passed the corals suspended their tenacious and clumsy work, and the fish with rapid movement swam away. You seemed like an enormous monster of a fantastic destiny and yet you are only a light submarine, a slender ship that the blow of a beam could sink, that a whirlpool could submerge in the abyss.

I do not know your story, but I will sing your glory that is part of the desire of audacious men. Submarine, Destiny may have willed you to sink silently, and remain lost forever in the viscid bed of the sea-weed, (O submarine, able to challenge the unconsciousness of the seas and the impotence of the lighthouses,) but you are alive and strong; there is no death, but only an appearance of death that remains. Destiny newly moulds you in a long phantom and you are run, submarine, by the courage of men who, in the unfathomable silence of the water, are piloted by the will of the strong.

New brothers will arise and pursue you because your shining back carries a banner, not tri-colored, nor French, but the only color that dazzles; the banner of the battle that amidst disasters combats with this ferocious mystery that is foolishly determined to shut us out from the doors of Nature.

Blaa-Blaa-Blaa

I am sick of words—spoken words—verbal refuse thrown off by the mental hypochondriacs who imagine themselves suffering from thought and afflicted with ideas.

I am sick of the artificial inanities of the drawingroom—the polite poppycock, the meaningless, emotionless enthusiasms. I often have entered a room where male and female husks sat, their faces wreathed in empty grimaces—animated masks discharging automatic phrases—and wished to God I was dumb and could be forgiven for silence. Listening is not so bad because one doesn’t have to listen.

I am sick of the salon-like groups who gather for the purpose of thinking aloud and then forget to think and make up for it in noises. Monotonous varieties, dropping pop-bottle gems from their lips, each individual amusing and delighting himself beyond all understanding with his sterile loquaciousness. Here in the salon groups, the discursive congregations which come together in all manner of odd places and all manner of regular places, garrulity approaches torture. Here the professional discourser flops and waddles about in his own Utopia. He doesn’t crave understanding but attention. As for truth, as for taking the pains to express his innermost reactions to a subject, this is impossible. The discourser doesn’t know what he thinks, doesn’t know what the truth is until he starts discoursing. And then he discourses himself into a state of mind. I have heard him discourse himself into the most startling convictions; into matrimony and out of it into religion and out of it, into and out of every variety of damn-foolishness imaginable.

Persons who use written words instead of spoken words as the parents of their thought suffer from the same hypnosis. But in writing this is commendable. It is commendable for a writer to be insincere if he can be more logical and enlightening as a result. The result may be _De Profundis_ or _Alice in Wonderland_. It is my notion that men are sincere only in their appetites. A man craves food and woman and other stimulants with unquestionable sincerity. But in the realm of thought I have arrived at the conclusion that sincerity is an inspired and not inspiring condition of the mind.

I am sick of the blaa-blaaing hordes, from the smirking “supes” of the let’s-adjourn-to-the-other-room species to the simpering cacophonists of the Schöngeist nobility.

I am sick of the open mouths, the trailing sentences dying from weakness, the painstaking use of wrong words and the painstaking use of correct words; of the stagnated humor of deodorous sallies.

I am sick of the Argumentatives, people with an irritating command of phrases, who balance paradoxes on their noses and talk backwards or upside down with equal lucidity; who must be contradicted or they suffer; who rumble bizarrely from the depths of every philosophical sub-cellar they can ferret out in order to be startling; who shriek and howl and wail and protest and—the Devil take them—tell the truth and make it impossible to believe. Their only reason for talking is to impress. They are as noisy as cannon and as effective as firecrackers.

I am sick of the delicate, searching souls who prick themselves with their own words, who operate on fly specks, who grope and search and struggle for fine and truthful things, who deal in verbal shadings intelligible only to themselves—and then not for what they said but for what they meant to say or desired to say or wouldn’t say for the world.

I am sick of their kinsmen, of the surgical tongues who dissect, who vivisect and auto-sect.

I am sick most of all of my own talk. But I continue to talk. I talk out of boredom and manage only to increase it. I talk out of vanity and spread disillusionment. I talk out of love and have to apologize. A victim of habit, I continue speaking, although I know the spoken word is the true medium of misunderstanding. Words, words, they keep tumbling out of my mouth and blowing away like dust before the wind. A pock on them.

There have been revolutions in literature, authors have changed the size and construction of the novel, publishers have changed the color of their bindings, poets have changed the form of their poetry and the essence of its style, thinkers even have altered slightly the trend of their thought. Music, painting, decorating, carving—everything changes with time except talk, which only increases. What a staggering illustration of the theory that it is only the weak things which survive. For talk is the commonest of weaknesses. Blaa, blaa, blaa—why not a revolution? What ails the radicals? Do they not realize that the time is ripe? They have changed the moral forms, the literary forms, why not the spoken forms? Why not a substitution of expressive grunts and whoops and growls and chuckles and groans and gurgles and whees and wows? Or is this matter one not for the radical but for

“The Scavenger.”

The Nine!—Exhibit!

Sometime in the winter a rumor got about that nine artists of Chicago were to form themselves into a group and hold an independent exhibition.

At once the other artists were divided into two factions, those who jeered and those who applauded, those who said unpleasant things and those who had the enduring hope that at last something better was to be done in our exhibitions.

The Great Nine, as the group began to be called—whether by themselves or by others, it matters not: the phrase is a handicap—consists of Frederic C. Bartlett, William Penhallow Henderson, Lawton Parker, Karl Albert Buehr, Louis Betts, Charles Francis Browne, Ralph Clarkson, Wilson Irvine, and Oliver Dennett Grover. They were too generous in their number. Five, and there would have been no comment; nine, and there was aroused indignation, criticism, and a “show us” spirit which should have put the Nine on their mettle and made them give a stunning and silencing show.

On May thirteenth, after one postponement when expectation was tense, the exhibition opened. What had we? A new setting and old stuff!

One of the East Galleries had been chosen. William P. Henderson designed and executed the room. He made a piece of work having faults but being the best thing about the exhibition, a contribution in itself. The walls with their subtle color, divided into spaces by pilasters of deep wistaria, red, and gold, rising on slender stems and blossoming out above; the screen of red at one end with the Zettler torso against it—they complimented themselves upon using this; the beautiful vases; and the green of the trees made a room too obtrusive for pictures, or one in which pictures are intrusive.

Were the setting less self-sufficient, still there are many things to be said. The sophisticated, almost exotic, color of the walls, emphasizing in the work of some all that is crude and materialistic in execution or interpretation, makes their work appear to less advantage than would the usual bleak gallery. And why so many pictures? Why not one picture in each space and that the best each artist could offer? How much more satisfactory the room would then be. Anyone who follows exhibitions will agree that each exhibitor has shown better work at other times.

Frederic Bartlett’s group is in many ways the best, and holds its own in the room. Surpassingly beautiful in color are Mr. Henderson’s things. The little nude is exquisite, but he should not easily be forgiven his portrait of Florence Bradley, even if it is not meant as a character study. However, he is one of the artists who can do more than put paint on canvas. He can make Art in many ways, as men did in the “high white days” of art.

The artists themselves have seen from this first effort wherein they have failed. This grouping must have been a very arbitrary one. Let us hope that a group founded on mutual endeavor and on equal ability will continue the effort to make our exhibitions comparable in some degree with the best European efforts.

Chicago has now so many artists that it is impossible for them all to be gathered into the old Chicago Society. There should be many societies. Competition and co-operation among them would make the art life here less anemic and super-sensitive and bigoted.

R.

Book Discussion

THE APOTHEOSIS OF PETTINESS

_One Man, by Robert Steele. New York: Mitchell Kennerley._

“There is nothing which reflects the smugness of a people so much as the manner and temperament of its vice. And the temperament of American vice is more distinctly and monotonously bourgeois than any of its virtues”—from Ben Hecht’s “Phosphorescent Gleams” in the May LITTLE REVIEW. I have pondered over this maxim while reading Mr. Steele’s novel which is hailed by the critics as “the essence of America.” The hero is essentially American, horribly so. If the “average” type of any nation is repulsive, the American “Average” is a thousandfold more so. For he is more petty than vicious. The “one man” gives a confession of his life, full of puny deeds, from committing petty larceny to “picking up” a girl in the street and taking her to a “swell” hotel. The nauseating details have the flavor of the adventure stories which you may hear at a gathering of travelling salesmen in a provincial hotel lobby. What makes the boring Odyssey intolerably loathsome is its note of syrupy Christian penitence which the hero expresses after each penny-crime by falling on his knees and praying to his convenient god for forgiveness.

The book has been hailed as a masterpiece. It is as far from a masterpiece as a lewd “photo” is from art. The facts may be true, even autobiographical, as some critics presume; the confessions will furnish good material for Billy Sunday and his lesser brethren. But photography, even if it be pornography, is not art. Let me quote the ever-new Edgar Poe: “Art is the reproduction of what the Senses perceive in Nature through the veil of the soul. The mere imitation, however accurate, of what _is_ in Nature, entitles no man to the sacred name of ‘Artist.’ ... We can, at any time, double the true beauty of an actual landscape by half closing our eyes as we look at it. The naked Senses sometimes see too little—but then _always_ they see too much.” I blush at the necessity of digging up ancient truths, but, my dear friends, read the reviews of Mr. Steele’s novel and you will admit with me the crying need of teaching the American critics the A-B-C of art.

ICY OLYMPUS AND THE BURNING BUSH

_The Need for Art in Life, by I. B. Stoughton Holborn. New York: G. Albert Shaw._

_The Spirit of Japanese Art, by Yone Noguchi. New York: E. P. Dutton and Company._