Part 4

In a strange fanatical vision, Nietzsche shows how he became an eternity-preacher, an eternity-sculptor. The vision is more novel than that of the Ascension which biblical legends narrate. The disciples of Jesus gaze upon their Master mounting heavenward into the clouds, and they hear strange words of the Christ coming down from heaven again to abide with them all the days till the end of the world. Nietzsche does not speak of the second advent of the Christ, of a recurrence of a single item of being, but of an eternal recurrence of all things, of all men, all moments and happenings of all life! Eternal return--to live life so that we would live each and all of it over again--to live it all so that it would be worth being not once but once again forever and forever--to be joint creator of a cosmos in which what is shall be fit--to be once yet again everlastingly--that is our, and Being's, final flawless test, passing which, no Great White Throne may fill us with dismay! There is the heart's harrowing cry: Could I but begin and live it--all over again, how different I would do! Would we like to do all that we have done over again? do them again eternally? Would we like to say and hear all the senseless prattle over again forever? Horrible thought! It were well to live and speak so that our existence can stand the fiery test of a Nietzschean eternity--live now in a way that it would be worth while to live again. It were indeed well to fill each fleeting moment of time with what is worthy to be the content of eternity. Eternity the criterion of time--that is really a great thought. To be sure, there is no eternal recurrence, and it is not clear that Nietzsche meant to say that there was. Faith in the eternal recurrence of all things, Nietzsche means this,--so at all events it seems to me,--to be a mirror in which we may recognize the true full worth of our life, a life in which there is nothing to be forgotten, nothing to be regretted, nothing done to be undone, because all is freed from the limitations of space and time and from external contingencies, and stands there in its great eternal necessity, because eternal, good, and godly even, in this necessity itself. Then we would not only live our life over again precisely as we lived it, we would live it in the light of the eternity again, ever again. No error, and folly would we then wish out of our life, because in this love of eternity it is precisely from error and folly that the truth grows which lights our faith. No weakness, no stumbling and falling, would we wish out of our life, because in the eternal illumination, power grows from all these experiences which enables us to mount above them, and gives us the victory in every bitter battle of life. No, our life is not lived from the right point of view, until we can sing it out in the song whose name is--Recurrence! We do not know the worth of the honor until we can dedicate to it that song whose meaning is: "_In alle Ewigkeit!_"

Ye say that a good cause will even sanctify war! I tell you, it is the good war that sanctifies every cause!--_Nietzsche._

The Restaurant Violin

GEORGE SOULE

(_Another picture of our violinist_)

A brook Which murmured me to high afternoon fields, Where came a shower, And after that, the long, straight call of the low sun To the green-gold and winking purple of every leaf And the long shadows between the hills. And every leaf was glad And the earth was comforted, Breathing up freshly, And the hills were full of joy, And the clouds remained in the west In ecstasy of color because of the sun. Out of hidden trees A wood-thrush sang.

And then I heard the restaurant-- Crashing of spoons on trays, The dip, dip, dip, of the big rotary fans, The chink of the cash-register, the clatter of money into the tray, And people talking loudly, with mirthless laughter, And munching, munching, munching.

Over it mocked the violin-- The rain fell and the sun called, And there returned unto the violin, And entered with glory into the violin Final loneliness. Then the pianist selected something from a musical comedy.

Editorials

_Our Third New Poet_

Maxwell Bodenheim was born in Natchez, Mississippi, twenty-two years ago, was educated in the Memphis, Tennessee, schools, served three years in the U. S. regular army, and is at present studying law and art in Chicago. He has written poetry for six years without having had a single poem accepted--in fact, he has had exactly three hundred and seventeen rejection slips from the astute editors of American magazines. He addresses to them the following poem:

_The Poet Speaks To Those Who Scorn Him_

I have taken tons of carbon in my hand, Shriveled them, with a thought, to a small diamond: And tried to sell it to men who call it glass. It was glass in a sense-- Glass which with terrible exactness, Showed them big, hideous souls Dwarfed by the splendor of its immense clarity, Like forests pressed to specks by the height of a mountain.

His first acceptance came from Miss Harriet Monroe, who prints five of his poems in the August issue of _Poetry_. "My creed," says Mr. Bodenheim "(if I can be said to have one), is this: Most of the things which men call beautiful are ugly to me, and some of the things they call ugly are beautiful. Men and deeds are subjects for prose, not poetry. I am not concerned with life, but with that which lies behind life. I am an intense admirer of Ezra Pound's," he always adds; "I worship him."

_Sade Iverson, Unknown_

We wish the mysterious poet who sent us _The Milliner_--which we liked profoundly and printed in our last issue--would come in to see us. The poem arrived one day in April with a modest little note: "Something about your magazine--perhaps the essential actuality of it--has moved me to make 'the simple confession' which I enclose. Print it if it is good enough; throw it in the waste basket if it is not." But though we have tried various investigations we have not been able to find out who this remarkable Sade Iverson is. She was the first person to send us a congratulatory letter about THE LITTLE REVIEW. In it she warned us that restraint is better than expression; but _The Milliner_ will stand as a stronger refutation of that advice than anything we can say. We want very much to know Sade Iverson. After reading her poem Mr. Bodenheim wrote the following:

_To Sade Iverson_

I wonder if you scooped out your entire melted soul With shaking hands, and spilled it into this Slim-necked but bulging-bodied flagon-- So slim-necked that my sticking lips Must fight for wonderful drops.

"_Blast_"

The typical gamin, the street-urchin with his tongue in his cheek, crying in an infinitely wise childish treble that the world is an exciting place after all, and that even if you are so burned out that you can't taste your gin straight any more you can still put pepper in it,--this street-urchin has at last invaded the quarterlies. We have known him already in the dailies, the weeklies, the monthlies, the bound volume; but up to now the quarterlies have seemed dignified and safe. But the last bulwark of conservatism has fallen; the march of progress is unchecked!

_Blast_ is the name of the new magazine, published in London by John Lane. Let us take it as it comes. The cover--after you have seen the cover you know all--is of a peculiar brilliancy, something between magenta and lavender, about the color of an acute sick-headache. Running slantingly across both the front and the back is the single word BLAST in solid black-faced type three inches high. That is all, but it is enough.

Inside there is much food for thought. At least one feels sure there must be much food for thought, if only one could come near enough to understanding it to think about it.

First there are twelve pages of what seem to be the rare-bit dream of a type-setter, but which on closer inspection prove to be a table of curses, much like the old table which has now been cut from the Anglican prayer-book. "BLAST" they say "CURSE! DAMN"--"England, France, Humor, Sport, years 1837 to 1900, Rotten Menagerie, castor-oil." "CURSE" also "those who will hang over this manifesto with SILLY CANINES exposed." After these twelve pages come half the number of blessings, again from the prayer-book. "BLESS" they say "England, all ports, the Hairdresser, Humor, France, and castor-oil."

Then comes the Manifesto. No woman of the olden times found without a shift could be more shamed than a new cult today found without a Manifesto. This one begins: "Beyond action and reaction we would establish ourselves." It proceeds with jaunty violence to settle the artistic problems of the world. Nonetheless there is much wisdom in the Manifesto. But you must read it for yourselves to understand it. This announcement is signed with eleven names, of which the best-known in this country are probably Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis (the editor), Richard Aldington, and Gaudier Brzeska.

A group of poems by Ezra Pound follows. After the mental indigestion of the first few pages we cannot be too grateful to Mr. Pound for putting English words together in such a manner that they at least make sentences. More than that, they make in places excellent satire. Then follows a long prose play (at least we should guess it to be prose) by Wyndham Lewis, called _The Enemy of the Stars_. Seven-tenths of it consists of stage directions. Here is a sample:

Fungi of sullen violet thoughts, investing primitive vegetation. Groping hands strummed Byzantine organ of his mind, producing monotonous black fugue.

The plot unfortunately escaped our perusal, hiding itself in verbiage. But undoubtedly there is one.

The number also contains the beginning of a serial story by Richard Aldington, a remarkably vivid short story by Rebecca West called _The Indissolubility of Matrimony_, and _Vortices_ by the editor. The whole is copiously sown with Cubist drawings which must be seen to be appreciated.

So the quarterly street-urchin makes his bow on the literary stage. How much of his singular make-up will prove to be juvenile spleen and how much genuine integrity only time can tell. In the meanwhile his tongue is in his cheek.--E. T.

_The Stigma of Knowing It All_

One of the most exasperating things that can happen to a thinking person is to be told this: "You would be much more forceful if you weren't so sure you knew it all." How much time we all waste in vague, unthoughtful generalizations of this sort! The only person who really thinks he "knows it all" is that misguided soul who is always asking for advice, always giving advice, and eternally ignoring both that which he gives and which he receives. He is as muddled as a clear pool that has been stirred up with a stick; but the ripples convince him that the stirring-up has touched many shores. The person to whom the stigma of "knowing it all" is most often attached is he who believes that he knows something about himself and very little about anybody else. He is that person who takes care of his own problems with a certain ardor, with a sense of keen clearness, like the shining of a star through his deep, unmuddled pool. He has realized Arnold's _Self-Dependence_. But the muddled ones can never forgive him for that joy with which the stars perform their shining; nor can they ever understand the stupor of helplessness which descends upon him when he is asked to direct some one else's shining. Therefore, they argue, he is self-sufficient; and the adjective is a curse. Some one has said, quite untruly, that people never know the important things about themselves. But the only thing in the world a man can _really_ know is himself; and it is his chief business to push self-knowledge beyond its obvious boundaries to those reaches where even change becomes a comprehended element. The gist of the whole matter is this: People who know themselves are the only ones with whom we are wholly protected from that stupid and offensive practice of dictatorship; also, they are the only ones capable of receiving counsel with intelligence.

My Middle Name

My middle name rhymes not with satchel, So please do not pronounce it "Vatchel." My middle name rhymes not with rock hell, So please do not pronounce it "Vock Hell." My middle name rhymes not with hash hell, So please do not pronounce it "Vasch Hell." My middle name rhymes not with bottle, So please do not pronounce it "Vottle," My name is just the same as Rachel, With V for R; Please call me Vachel.

_Nicholas Vachel Lindsay._

"Baboosya"

Catherine Breshkovskaya is a legendary woman even for Russia. She is now seventy-three years old; about half of her life has been spent in prison and exile; in 1910 she was once more arrested on the ground of her revolutionary activity, but thanks to the intercession of prominent European and American liberals, the verdict was mild:--Siberia, but without hard labor. Last year the ever-young Babooshka ("little grandmother," her pet name among the revolutionists) attempted to escape, failed, and was subsequently transferred to the terrible Yakutsk region, where she is now slowly dwindling away. The _Russkoye Bogatstwo_ prints two letters--two human documents--miraculously smuggled through the rigid net of the Siberian police system. One is a letter written by Breshkovskaya to a friend; it reveals a great woman--great even in little things. She speaks at length on the miserable life of the exiles; on her plans to mitigate their sufferings by planting vegetables to be used for food and also to be sold on the market; and on other apparently little matters--little when we consider the grandiose activity of the gray revolutionist in the recent past. Her letter is full of love and anxiety for her comrades, but she refers very little to herself. The only plaintive note is heard in these lines:

My wanderings around the little island have come to a stop. I seldom see mountains, water, and woods, and on the streets there is either dust or mud--which I have no desire to look upon. Soon the steamers will discontinue their course. The mail comes only once a week.

This is all she says about her own existence in the dead land, but we hear more about it from the second letter, written by a young exile:

... Her flight was discovered, she was recaptured, and she is imprisoned now in Irkutsk. She holds herself bravely, but I know this bravery. I fear that this flight will kill the Baboosya; she has been ill so often and has had to suffer for herself and for others.... Yakutsk will completely ruin her health.

Most of the exiles feel bereaved. Despite the sharply-defined individuality of each of them, the Babooshka appeared as a spiritual mother to them all, able to encourage, to lift up, to console. The weak asked her for strength; the strong--for counsel. How much endurance and patience she must have had to assist each and every one, to appeal for money, for clothes, etc. Her heart went out to the hapless exiles, oppressed, moneyless, bootless, under the grim Siberian conditions. And how great was her joy at the receipt of a package from some good friends! She spread out the things, looked at them, and sang "Oy, how full, how full is the coffer" (a popular folk-song), with tears of joy in her eyes. Then she proceeded to distribute the bounty: to one a warm shirt, to the other woolen stockings, or a fur-hat. To the children she sent milk....

What a simple tale, friends.

I recall a few lines from a clumsy poem written by an American woman after the trial of Breshkovskaya. Upton Sinclair considered it one of the twenty-five greatest!

In all the world this day there is no soul Freer than you, Breshkovskaya.... For you are free of self and free of fear....

... You are too great for pity. After you We send not sobs but songs; and all our days We shall walk bravelier knowing where you are.

Obituary of a Poet

FLOYD DELL

Adonais is dead--dead in the flush of youth, with all of life before him.

Yes, but perhaps that is not such a bad thing.

"He had so much of promise!" That's the trouble. When the promise petered out--as it usually does--what then?

As it is, he will never have to see his great hopes dwindle. He will never have to bolster himself against disillusion.

Adonais has known the sweet of life--he has known the glory of youth, and the gay companionship of men, and the taste of good liquor in the mouth. He has known the joy of hard work, and the joy of roaming the streets, idle and curious, feeling the beauty of the world; he has known the joy of love.

Fortunate Adonais!

He did not know that it was possible for the love of women to become to him a cheap article, to be appraised with practiced eye and perhaps tossed carelessly aside; he was a lover--

And now he will never be cruel or careless about love, an exploiter and parasite of women. He will never have to emerge, with false hope and courage, from the humiliation of the Keeley cure. He will never parade the streets with a dyed moustache--a broken-down boulevardier.

He will never read with secret malignant envy the enthusiastic words of reviewers about the writings of younger men. He will never foregather with other has-beens in the charitable precincts of a club, to exchange compliments and listen hungrily to the accents of praise. He will never be a perambulating tombstone to a forgotten poet.

He is dead in the flush of youth--

Lucky Adonais!

Humbugging the Public

HENRY BLACKMAN SELL

In the palmy days of the sideshow P. T. Barnum let fall a pat little phrase which might be called the Great American Excuse: "the public likes to be humbugged." The showman referred directly to the amusement-seeking public, and applied his half truth to that rural pageant, the circus; but it was an easy phrase, it suited the purpose of men who were anxious to deceive and to mountebank, and it was snapped up. Today, when a man is caught with a shameful misrepresentation he laughs sheepishly and repeats that the public likes to be humbugged.

But does it?

We are The Public, you are The Public, and none of us likes to be humbugged!

Then how is it that this proverbialism has gained such credence in this country?

We are a new people. Our country is a great international whirlpool of ideas. New music, old music, new theories, old theories, new pictures, old pictures, new standards, old standards meet here and are spun about us with hysteria-like speed.

We do not want to appear ignorant of the newest thought or the oldest convention. We strive for an impossible universalism, and we accept many a mountebank at his face value because we are unable to settle his true worth, immediately, and because we feel that we must give a decision immediately.

Our credulity is stretched almost to the breaking point every hour of every day of the year, for wonders seem never to cease and the quality of the genuine has given rise to the quantity of the false.

We are gullible because we as a nation are alive to the possibility of the impossible.

We have gained a reputation for loving to be cheated because we have the almost national virtue of being able to lose, smile, and again strive, BUT we do not love it. And in the end the only one who really loses is the charlatan who sooner or later awakens to a realization of the bare hollowness of his false and petty philosophy, "the public likes to be humbugged."

The New York Letter

GEORGE SOULE

The future of _The Century_ is the engrossing topic among the writers and publishers in New York. No startling change in editorial policy is contemplated. Possibly the perception of the modern and future world which the magazine has begun to show under the guidance of Mr. Yard will be more apparent. The principal topic for speculation, however, is whether a "high-class" illustrated magazine selling for thirty-five cents can be a financial success, or even self-supporting. It is an open secret that none of them has been making money for some time. With this question readers who are interested in the contents of _The Century_ have no concern except the single rather important one that if present conditions continue long enough the magazine will cease to exist, at least in its present form.

Here, as in every other literary field, the strengthening of the machinery of commerce has enabled the product of transient popularity to interfere seriously with the thing that is done for its own sake. The "lowbrow" rules. An illustrated magazine is made possible by its advertising, and the advertisers want large circulation. Some of them do, it is true, look also for "quality" of circulation, but their standard of quality has nothing to do with taste, literary or otherwise; it measures merely "spending power." And the aristocracy of intellect has only a shadowy identity with the aristocracy of wealth. There are thousands of "automobile owners" who would never think of wading through even an _Atlantic Monthly_ article.

Are there enough people in the United States who will buy an ably edited "high-class" magazine to attract a profitable number of advertisers? That is the question which remains to be answered. A probable answer is that there may be enough, but that it will be a herculean task to get them all buying the same magazine. The people who will pay thirty-five cents for the privilege of reading literature of real thought and ideals are now pretty well divided into parties, ranging all the way from old-line republicans to anarchists. Twenty years ago we had a much more homogeneous culture:--people who had any consciousness of their minds were allied in their fundamental ideals. If an intelligent magazine prints anything vital now, it is bound to offend a large portion of its public. Quite possibly in ten more years there will be only two kinds of general magazines left--those which are frankly "lowbrow," and those which do not care for large profits, depend on uncommercial writers, and are manufactured so cheaply that they do not need much advertising in order to exist. Mr. Yard has a strong belief in the success of his attempt to prove the contrary. It will indeed be a glorious victory if without compromise _The Century_ can weld together a large, intelligent public.