Part 1

THE LITTLE REVIEW

Literature Drama Music Art

MARGARET C. ANDERSON EDITOR

MARCH, 1917

On a Certain Critic Amy Lowell Photograph of Mary Garden Mary Garden jh. Prose Poems: Richard Aldington Thanatos Hermes-of-the-Dead Harold Bauer’s Music Margaret C. Anderson And— jh. The War, Madmen! “Daybreak” A Blow! James Joyce The Price of Empire Harold Bauer’s Hands Zuloaga The Reader Critic To Subscribers

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MARY GARDEN

THE LITTLE REVIEW

VOL. III.

MARCH 1917

NO. 9

Copyright, 1917, by Margaret C. Anderson.

On A Certain Critic

Amy Lowell

Well, John Keats, I know how you felt when you swung out of the inn And started up Box Hill after the moon. Lord! How she twinkled in and out of the box bushes Where they arched over the path. How she peeked at you and tempted you, And how you longed for the “naked waist” of her You had put into your second canto. You felt her silver running all over you, And the shine of her flashed in your eyes, So that you stumbled over roots and things. Ah! How beautiful! How beautiful! Lying out on the open hill With her white radiance touching you Lightly, Flecking over you. “My Lady of the Moon, I flow out to your whiteness. Brightness. My hands cup themselves About your disk of pearl and fire; Lie upon my face, Burn me with the cold of your hot white flame. Diana, High, distant Goddess, I kiss the needles of this furze bush Because your feet have trodden it. Moon! Moon! I am prone before you. Pity me, And drench me in loveliness. I have written you a poem; I have made a girdle for you of words; Like a shawl my words will cover you, So that men may read of you and not be burnt as I have been Sere my heart until it is a crinkled leaf, I have held you in it for a moment, And exchanged my love with yours On a high hill at midnight. Was that your tear or mine, Bright Moon? It was round and full of moonlight. Don’t go! My God! Don’t go! You escape from me, You slide through my hands. Great Immortal Goddess, Dearly Beloved, Don’t leave me. My hands clutch at moon-beams, And catch each other. My Dear! My Dear! My beautiful far-shining lady! Oh! God! I am tortured with this anguish of unbearable beauty.” Then you stumbled down the hill, John Keats. Perhaps you fell once or twice; It is a rough path, And you weren’t thinking of that. Then you wrote By a wavering candle, And the moon frosted your window till it looked like a sheet of blue ice. And as you tumbled into bed, you said: “It’s a piece of luck I thought of coming out to Box Hill.”

Now comes a sprig little gentleman, And turns over your manuscript with his mincing fingers, And tabulates places and dates. He says your moon was a copy-book maxim, And talks about the spirit of solitude, And the salvation of genius through the social order. I wish you were here to damn him With a good, round, agreeable oath, John Keats. But just snap your fingers; You and the moon will still love When he and his papers have slithered away In the bodies of innumerable worms.

[Illustration: Photograph of Mary Garden]

Mary Garden

jh.

What did the critics mean when they used to say that never again in our generation would there come another Bernhardt? They didn’t mean that there would be no other great actresses because they were writing of actresses, all the time, whom they considered great. In an argument they would talk largely of Bernhardt’s personality. Let them call it personality if they are using the better Oriental meaning of the word: Individuality. But I fear they mean only to limit something unknown so that it may be understood. The more external nullities they bring to prove it personality the more its unknown nature is emphasized. The more talk there is of arresting qualities of person, acts, and dress, of frankness and ferocity, tears and terror—the more talk there is of all its eccentric sanities, the more it recedes and becomes definitely itself, aloof and unnamed.

Arthur Symons tried to express it when he wrote of Bernhardt: “Two magics met and united, in the artist and in the woman.” But after all it is only that through the woman you feel the imminence of something as great and impersonal as the sweep of sea and the growth of flowers. In all the arts, whenever the magic of the artist has been united with this other magic the possessor has been of the first great. Michael Angelo and the dark troubled magic of him....

I wonder why, even in those people to whom has come some appreciation of the magic of the artist, there is still so often such strong resentment and distrust of this other magic. Because of their adventures in the great emotions, those who have it loosen new forces of life; they recreate the great passions; _they add something to Fate_.

Everyone feels that he has a right to a share in that which the millions are working together in uproar to add to existence. Many long for a share in that which the artists are making in silence for the soul. But who is there except the artist who is willing to feel in this thing the imminence of something beyond life and personality? Who else in the world except the lonely insane, because of their adventures in illusions and hallucinations, ever add anything to Fate? How easy to say that genius is akin to madness. All great antitheses are akin: all unknown things are mysteriously akin, as all known things are naturally akin. But how poignantly akin are the known and unknown! Why does anyone exclude himself from any connection with the infinite?

When I was a little child I lived in a great asylum for the insane. It was a world outside of the world, where realities had to be imagined and where, even through those excursions in illusions and hallucinations, there ran a strange loneliness. The world can never be as lonely in those places where the mind has never come as in a place where the mind has gone. There were no books to read in this place except the great volumes in the Patients’ Library; and I had read them all. There was no one to ask about anything. There was no way to make a connection with “life.” Out there in the world they were working and thinking; here we were still. Very early I had given up every one except the Insane. The others knew nothing about anything, or knew only uninteresting facts. From the Insane I could get everything. They knew everything about nothing, and were my authority; but beyond that there was a silence. Who had made the pictures, the books and the music in the world? And how had they made them? And how could you tell the makers from just people? Did they have a light around their heads? Were there any of them in the world now? And would I ever see one? One day a name came to me suddenly. Some one was talking of a “wicked French actress” who was touring America:—“Sarah Bernhardt.” Even when _they_ said it the name had a light around it! She would come as far as St. Louis. I would go at once. But I was too little. I had no money.... I would run away. I would walk the whole distance to her. But she would be gone before I could get there.... Some day I would go to Paris. Other people had got that far. I would go on living for that.

And then she came again! I was there, the first night, sitting in the balcony with some other art students. We had sold our futures to sit so close. I was burning with hot excitement and shaking with cold fear until the moment—it was _Camille_—when the long french doors opened and she came languidly and as if from a great distance; hands extended as if balancing her exquisitely upon an enchanted atmosphere, her suave voluptuous tawny head bent slightly down. I threw myself mind and soul into the waves of that caressing fiery magic which swept out to us.

After this came a new agony: the critics had said there would never be another. There was Duse, whom I have never seen; but she has always filled me with a restless trouble. What artist has ever so dared to offend Art? Never in all her life as an actress did she choose a play in which her great art could come into its own. It always seems that there is more laid upon the artist than a willingness to serve; it is almost a command to serve. Did Duse deny the command and by so doing add the martyrdom of Art to a great personal tragedy? Or was it because she tried to create an art out of nature itself that Art revenged itself upon her through nature? As an actress she had “no resources outside simple human nature.” As a woman she had no resource in Art.

Then a new name came across the world, with a new radiance. Not with the glow of Duse’s halo, nor with the threat of Bernhardt’s heat-lightning, but with the radiance of the Northern Lights it shone above the horizon.... _Mary Garden!_ Her magics have this kind of splendor. She has brought a new temper into the drama—something not Latin, not English. Duse could never be unnatural; Bernhardt can never be unsophisticated, un-French; English actresses can seldom be unconventional. But Mary Garden.... She brings a sharp new ecstasy of life, an inexorable sadness of love; she brings an energy that is grace and a calm that is energy; she brings a frankness that is mystery. There is something Norsk about Mary Garden. In her the pure metal of the mind seems to have been annealed by an Oriental fire, adding to it a passion without vehemence. There is something unconquered about her, as if she came from that land where the sun shines at midnight; from that race which never made for itself a beneficent God.

I don’t know where to begin to write about Mary Garden’s art. There is art within art within art, and then there is Mary Garden.

First of all, she seems to be the only singer who knows that all the arts come from the same source and follow the same laws. Critics love to say that pure song and pure music do not express human emotion, although drama, poetry, painting and sculpture do. What logic! Pure music and pure song express exactly what drama, poetry, painting and sculpture express. But none of them expresses human emotion; they express the _source_ of human emotion. To express the emotions of life is to live; to express the life of emotions is to make art.

I wish I could tell beautifully what a great creative artist Mary Garden is. It is one thing for the artist to create a character within the outlines definitely or indefinitely drawn by the composer; to put himself in the place of the character and act as he would act. But the creative artist _takes the character to himself_ and then creates from his imagination in his own image—the image of his soul. The more universal the artist, the greater his power to reveal his soul in different images. What an infinite thing Mary Garden has shown her soul to be: Thaïs, the Jongleur, Monna Vanna, Carmen, Grisélidis, Tosca, Mélisande, Salome!

And so when she creates a character she recreates the opera. Mary Garden is the only singer in opera to whom song is speech. Because in opera song and music have been fused with drama, the voice must become a medium for creating character, thought and emotion, together with the hands, face and body of the actor-singer. There is no need to discuss here what has or what has not been accomplished toward the creation of a new art by this fusion of the arts. You have but to hear and see Mary Garden in _Pelléas and Mélisande_ to find poetry, music, singing and acting united so that the essence of each art comes to us with a rarer flavor than when free. No perfect thing can lose by being united with another perfect thing. However, it is no small task to do this in those older compositions in which music has been written to melodrama, to be sung by elaborate musical instruments. When the music carries beyond the true emotion of the drama, or when it does not reach to the limits of the drama, it is only an artist with flawless intelligence who can break over the barrier of the score and hold the music to the emotion with a backward line of the voice or carry it on by sheer genius to its full task.

And what a voice! You can’t quite stand it when Mary Garden sings words like “amour,” “pitié,” “éternel.” It breaks your heart in a strange way, because she makes you feel more precisely our brief longing, our frail tenderness and our deceiving hope. Many people don’t like it—the same ones who don’t like modern painting, the Imagists, Scriabine, and the rest. They have no idea that it is a new kind of instrument, to which they must bring new ears. They say: Why does she sing at all? Why doesn’t she go into straight drama?—never realizing for a moment that she has a longer reach than Bernhardt, a stronger grasp than Duse. There is not enough resistance for her in pure drama. She must paint the canvas full.

Once before I called Mary Garden a great decorative actress. I am using decoration in the sense in which it is used in painting, where elimination and not elaboration is used to emphasize the intention of line and color. She carries this same idea into her costumes: she can give you the whole spirit and atmosphere of an historical costume by a mere silhouette of its lines. And she can draw in the whole psychology of a scene with one line of her body—the line of her walk. If she is to dominate a situation with her intellect or her beauty she walks from the center of her intelligence, which is the head, giving a length of line that makes the slightest step a stride; if it is a matter of the soul she walks from the center of her presence, which is the top plane of the chest, moving like a Presence—not like a being; when it is love she walks straight from her heart, with a line that repeats a pain; when it is passion she sinks the line to a point lower than the hip, and prowls destructively. In _Thaïs_, when she is trying to enthrall the monk, she winds about the stage and him, bending slightly in hip and knee. Later, in a scene of contest with him, she lifts the line to her consciousness and stands to the height of her belief in her own beauty and power. When she goes over to the nuns, she moves away with that beautiful unconsciousness of action which is never so mysteriously perfect a thing as in Mélisande.

There is nothing so thrilling in life to me as to watch this living painting which moves in rhythm like a frieze. How I should love to see her working out her designs against a background that has carried out the line of intention of a poem. Imagine Mary Garden in the _Tristan_ Liebestod, coming in upon a scene in which the short lines of a truncated castle rise from the endless planes of a black and purple sea; a fleet of violins in the orchestra singing the Love Death and Mary challenging all this dark negation with the one word “Tristan,” in a voice which is a singing pain. But most of all I wish some one would make operas for her of those exotic things that lie outside of common experience, but which have their place in life: nature too heavily laden or too fantastically free or too weirdly true; bright precious hidden things, corroded jewels, heavy-hanging flowers of sleep—moon-flowers of the day. How passionately and reverently she performed that ritual of dark heat and sex savagery which is _Salome_.

The electric abundance of life in Mary Garden and the splendor of her body are dazzling at first. But it is a stillness of soul, an exaltation of passion which really stamp her. There is something inviolate about her. Other actresses may be soulful, grave, or innocent; but Mary Garden has authentic purity.

But what talk of all these things? I only want to say, “Ah, Conchobar, have you ever seen her, with her high laughing turbulent head thrown backward?”—this Aphrodite of the North, this bacchante from the sea, this viking of the soul. There is no other who has all beauty. She is the white sincerest pledge of deity.

Prose Poems

Richard Aldington

Thanatos

Myrrhine, we have often sung of the sharp end of life, often mocked at death in the midst of the fierce ecstasy of our embraces.

We have heard of this savage and mysterious god from the stately words of Homer; and we also have mourned for beautiful Bion.

We have seen death graven in bronze as a drowsy youth scattering poppies from his delicate hands.

And all this seemed very quiet and lovely—a tender farewell to the sweet lips of life.

But when I saw for the first time the pallid shrunken face of a dead girl—and that girl our lover Kleone—my veins shrank with terror and I feared through all my trembling limbs.

Let others sing gaily or yearningly of death and deck this sombre lord with garlands; we are too timid, too frail-in-hope for that.

Others may dream of the gold islands of the happy dead or of the calm spirits among the phantom flowers in the meadows beyond Acheron;

We can only turn aside, holding heart to trembling heart, and number the dividing moments with close kisses, counting all time lost that is not golden with love....

Drink, my beloved; drink from this wide silver cup; drink as the Maenads in the pine-crowned orgy of Iacchus! Drink, drink! And as our bodies meet tear the garland from my brow and the thin veil from my breasts.

Those who are about to die fear only chastity and an empty wine-cup.

Hermes-of-the-Dead

Myrrhine, when I was a girl in white Alexandria, I listened to the talk of poets, and of philosophers who came to my house to buy (as they said) “delicious remorse for five mines.”

From them, had I been another Aspasia, I might have learned wisdom; but from poets I learned only to love and to know beauty, and from the philosophers I learned nothing except that “Death is not to be feared.” And this I learned no better than they, for we are all cowards at the end.

But since I must go from you; since already the winged sandals of Kyllenian Hermes are rustling the Olympian air for me; since in your purse now lies the silver obol I must drop in the grim ferry-man’s hand—listen a little to me.

When I am but a cupful of grey dust in a tall, narrow-throated stone vase; when the mouth that sang you and the lips that kissed you are withered and silent; when the hands that touched you have crumbled in the funeral flames; when the eyes that lighted at your beauty are quenched; when the ears that loved your beautiful voice are vanished; when the frail spirit that leaped and mingled with your spirit, like two flames, is a tenuous phantom which scarcely “is”; when life has left me: then you must live, live for yourself, but for me also.

For my sake Eos in a cloudless sky gliding from the many-isled sea must be more tender and more thrilling; for my sake the scent of ripe apples in the dim-gold autumn must be keener and more odorous; for my sake the music of Pindar and Theocritus must be more stately, more flower-like, more melancholy sweet; for my sake the ecstasy of love must be sharper, wilder; for my sake you must be more beautiful, more alert, more delicate.

I shall be loveless in a scentless land, where there is no change of light. I shall be desolate and alone and the memory of the dear words of poets will fade from me. But if you love and live fully and serve beauty for my sake, then some slight glow will lighten the dead sky and there will be some faint perfume for me in the chill blossoms of asphodel.

Now loose my hand, for Hermes-of-the-Dead clasps the other.

Harold Bauer’s Music

Margaret C. Anderson

The most interesting art in the modern world, to me, is Harold Bauer’s playing of the piano. And one of the strangest phenomenon in the modern world is the fact that people go to hear him and talk about what he does in terms of what other pianists do.

Now there is no connection between Bauer’s playing and that of any other pianist who has so far come to light. The whole root and fibre of it is different. As I have tried to say before, he has more concern with sound than any other pianist. He loves the piano more. He believes quite different things about its potentialities. But you needn’t know what he believes to know that he is doing something different. You can _hear_ that, surely.

But still they babble: he does this as well as Hofmann, and this less well than Paderewski, and this better than so-and-so. Why do they keep on talking of what he does or doesn’t do?—as though it were a matter of technique, this colossal art of conception? How I love to think of all the famous pianists who have gone to the piano to reveal themselves, and then of Harold Bauer who has brought the piano to himself, to reveal it. It’s something like the difference between the artist and the average man: when any one talks to you of how the struggles and agonies of the artist mould his art you can show him that it’s just the other way around: the artist in him is what moulds his struggles and his agonies. And it’s something of this kind that must be said about Bauer’s difference of approach.