Part 2

I have expressed myself on this subject many times. Mr. George Haven Putnam has been fighting against the evil for years. It is one ground on which all intelligent Americans, whatever their disagreements as to literary canon may be, can come together.

I am too much buried in work to write you an article at present. There are hundreds of young men with more time than I have, to whom this is a matter not of mere general interest, but of vital and personal importance.

The simple fact is that it is very, _very_ difficult to get foreign books in the United States. There is _no_ facilitation of their sale. The 25% tariff serves as an excuse for an exorbitant elevation of the price of all foreign books, whether imported in sheets, or bound.

Result: Editors of sodden and moribund “better” magazines talking about De Regnier and De Gourmont as “these young men”, in 1914.

Result: provincialism, isolation, lack of standards of comparison, and consequent inability to recognize good work when it appears. When it gets praise it is praised in company with rubbish.

American writers handicapped in competition with men living in civilized countries. Export of best, and even of moderately good, artists instead of export of art.

I can’t go into the whole question of free trade. It has worked in England. It has, more than anything else, made the “Empire.” I do not see why it should ruin the Republic.

_But_ that is not my business. I mean, Free Trade in the widest sense is not my present affair. The prohibitive tariff on books is very much everybody’s affair if they care a hang for the intellectual state of the country.

The state of the copyright laws is barbarous, but it is perhaps more the affair of the maltreated authors than of the country at large. It is evil only as other obstructory measures are evil. _But_ this matter of excluding foreign books in the interest of a few artizans (who are better paid than authors and who seek nothing above immediate gain, and whose loss in the event of reform would be negligible) is immediate and vital.

The whole question of censorship, as to Dreiser, as to Hokusai prints destroyed by customs officials, etc., are all really minor issues, largely dependent on this matter of the exclusion of the words thought and knowledge.

If among the young writers gathered about _The Little Review_ you can not find two or three to take up this question, to study it, to marshal the data (vide Putnam’s “Books and Their Makers” to start with, re. the causes of the rise of Paris as the world’s intellectual capital),—if you can not find such young authors, then your young literati are a set of rotters and the Great West is more of a mud-hole than I should have thought it.

Form, in the narrow sense, is nothing but the separating line between surfaces of color. That is its outer meaning. But it has also an inner meaning, of varying intensity, and, properly speaking, form is the outward expression of this inner meaning.... The artist is the hand which, by playing on this or that key, i.e., form, affects the human soul in this or that way. So it is evident that form-harmony must rest only on a corresponding vibration of the human soul. The more abstract is form, the more clear and direct is its appeal.—_Kandinsky._

Prison Sketches

STEFAN BRAZIER

Yen Shee

Languorously, In my bunk within my cell I lie. About me circles the reek of excrement And the more putrid inanities Of my fellows....

However, Sentiently, No awareness comes to me. About me clings a gaseous vapor, Impenetrable! O warm black armor, O fragrant yen-shee cloud....

Thank you, unscrupulous jailer!

Dreams

When wakedness Surged over me like a sea And derelict dreams Drowned themselves In that deep pool of mind Whence only bubbles come again— At that moment A voice crashed inhumanly, Unlike the cadenced rhythm Of the speech I know....

A large tin cup Was thrust at me: Coffee....

But dreams would not drown. The voice said “Here’s your Java!”...

Java!...

Visions in the word, And palms, And coral strands, And copper bodies leaping in the surf.... And anything but jails!

Memory

Today, Walking the corridor, Glimpsing the sky, And champing at the leash of life, I saw the lake.... And the green-fringed park That borders it.... Do you remember, Distant One, The green-fringed park, And the night, And the coming of Love?

How long shall it be Before we shall lie again, Lip-kissing, limb-kissing, There on the green grass Of the park That borders the lake?

Fear

Big, And brutal, And hateful.... I shivered in his grasp. Hair bristled on his great paws, Oaths stammered to his lips, Rage clouded his huge red face, And I was afraid....

Fear is a hell of a thing For a man to feel....

But when I looked And saw his eyes, Dropping before my steady gaze, And marked his mouth agape, Inarticulate, I laughed.... Fear is a hell of a thing For a man to feel Toward an ox.

Hate

I shall destroy my prisons. Not because I hate them For from them has come to me A brighter shaft From Freedom’s pharos-tower.

But yet I shall destroy my prisons Because they are false idols Worshipped by lovers of hate.... To these My scorn shall be a scourge, My most tender thought a scorpion. And the fire of my hate Shall consume their concepts.

To Our Readers

Will you make _The Little Review_ a Christmas present by renewing your subscription if it has run out? We will value it more than having our stocking filled with gold. It will make the December issue possible for us and will insure your having the magazine during the year when it is to become really good.

We couldn’t have an October issue, owing to our usual embarrassment about funds; so this will have to serve as a sort of October-November, though I can’t put that on the cover because they tell me it would violate some new law.

We are back in Chicago where we shall stay for a month before moving to New York. Word comes from every part of the country that young magazines are dying, and that even _The Masses_ may have to succumb before the increasing cost of paper, etc. That _must_ not be! _The Masses_ is too valuable to lose and everybody must do something about it. As for _The Little Review_, we may have to come out on tissue paper pretty soon, but we shall _keep on coming out_! Nothing can stop us now.

I feel as though we have an entirely new lease on life and were just starting with what we have to say.

The Reader Critic

For So Much Imagination, Our Thanks

[The following letter was written in the thirteen blank pages of the September issue. If the understanding in it were divided among two or three million people the ways of editors would not be so difficult in a prosaic and literal world.]

_Roy George, San Francisco_:

I said you couldn’t be as valiant as you looked, but you are. Nobody thought you’d do it. And then my blood screams through that “must say it” stuff. It’s violent and it’s dear. Did you call for art or artillery?

“jh.” may wreck your ship. I don’t doubt the sincerity of the people who feel her rocking the boat right blithely, but she’ll save your soul and this issue she certainly has saved. Her page! No one out of San Francisco can get the rest of it and no one in San Francisco can get this that she’s pulled down right out of the stars; but it’s just the touch to put you in Abraham’s bosom at the last. Imagine it now in the grins of your friends, and around the hearthstones of your enemies—your worst enemies. The Breakfast! The Sheriff! “Tearing her hair for humanity” will save “her” when she’s arrested for her seductive, seditious, and sudoriparous diatribe against—is it “against”? It’s not a diatribe, it’s an exposé; it’s an exposure, an indecent exposure of the crying disloyalty of humanity to humans, stripped stark. Families? And oh, there are some such nice families. But maybe they never thought about this. The great process _is_ “on.” But who’d have known the earth was beginning to whirl on a new axis poking out through the crust in Mill Valley? Oh I think you said a lot in a little, flaming Angel. With discernment, too.

You were right. Why should the pages be filled until by something that simply will not be denied? Your analysis is sound, if it _is_ in a footnote, and there’s a mighty sane protest in the blank pages against the general welter. It’s only the beginning. It _is_ the beginning. It shows that even an editor may claim a little the inner sense of the dignity of life, that the prosy demands of a paid-up constituency for fodder—paid up, hell!—may be deliberately set aside if one needs a sweep for one’s vision or room to swing an axe or a chance to breathe, or if he sees a chance to save his soul by suddenly taking a firm hold on that fundamental of individualism that says “I will not do what I really don’t want to do” and by holding on until he’s chinned himself three times whatever chinning the rest may do over it. Look like the end? How can it! How can a man like F. L. W.?—but maybe he’s right: maybe he means the other end; maybe he could see what a beginning it was; but to most people it takes the actual sight of the blank pages to get a sense of what’s written so clearly on them. You saw it. You felt it. And aside from the effect it will have on the world,—for it can never again be said that “they have to print it because they can’t get anything better”; and it will be said many and many a time in defense of Modern Letters or a Summary of the Best of Contemporary Thought that an editor did one time assert her belief in herself, did blue pencil an entire issue and did contribute twelve consecutive pages to contemporary thought, the best thought at least that her subscribers are capable of, for they’re left to do their thinking for themselves, and if the thought’s not as consecutive as the pages it’s not the first time that that little matter has come to light when readers have been brought to book; and when you’ve said something so directly that “it can never again be said” it will have its effect, and when you’ve made a contribution to pure thought it’s bound to have its effect for it’s the confusion of tongues that keeps even the other kind (not impure but unpure thought) from having its effect somewhere in an ineffectual world—aside from the effect it will have on the world look at the impetus it gives you. Here are you with twelve pages that you can tuck under your arm any time, day or the black night between days, and march straight up to heaven’s gate and demand a reckoning on. The end? when you’ve here said twelve times over, for the first time, absolutely that it’s ever been perfectly said: “No compromise”!

Would to God some judge—(he will; they will,—I was near showing a lack of faith in the power of this thing you’ve done)—some judge _will_ step down from his bench and leave a sentence unpronounced because the law shan’t bind him to injustice. Some preacher _will_ come to his pulpit with his manuscript a blank because he can’t compel his hand to write more platitudes. A thousand artist hands will break the thing they’ve chiseled at, and search their souls with yearning for the thing they are. The end? This will be quoted. I refrain from mentioning the time when all else is pied, including magazine magpies, and when the arch-fiend has gathered disloyal architects and all their works.

This says: “Life is long.” This denies all that the poets have sung, and the prophets have wailed and philosophy has deluded us with. If the poets have gathered rosebuds while they may, this makes no haste to gather thistles. If the Jeremiahs have said Woe! Woe! this says “Whoa” once and compels it; and the philosophy of this thing, instead of dividing art from its essence and proclaiming that art is long and life is short, identifies life and art and says they’re both long—long enough. Life is long enough for art—just. For art proves itself worthy only as the work of the artist proves him able to work true while he lives and proves him great in so far as his record shows him able to live true while he works. Dauber was all wrong, if art is achievement, or he could never have had it in him to do the thing he was to do and yet lose his grip on the yard-arm however the wind blew; but he was right, whether of life or of art, in his dying cry “It will go on.” He knew you.

These pages are a record bearing on life and art and you. They say that life is long—long enough for pauses, long enough that haste is your only real sacrilege and the artist’s great outrage on life. They do not deny that the seasons are short, whether seed time and harvest or the mating of turtle doves and snails, or even the theatrical season or the press date; but they do define an attitude towards one’s work, and it’s the direct expression of the artist mind. Here is a protest against that haste that does what it may instead of refusing to do what it must not. And this is not youth saying I will do as I damn please, but judgment saying I will avoid doing what I please not; not a baby demanding the moon at all,—merely a proper young entity refusing a rotten piece of cheese. And as for its bearing on you, here is a record of existence, a record of a striving toward that happiness that comes through an understanding of life, a grip on life—the grip that Dauber didn’t have.

You have life in your hands. You have everything. Never mind, you _have_. Something for your hands to dig into—a friendly attitude towards life, and an abiding faith. And these are the essentials. They are. Absolutely. They are the three essentials. A piano and a friend and one star—it’s enough. It’s all there is: something congenial for the hands (literally) to do when heart and mind can’t quite, quite get the grip on things; the capacity for friendship; and faith in one’s stuff. And I said no one could be as valiant as you looked!

It’s easy to imagine your young god springing from the ranks of labor, and as for the oppression of family life I’m starting a subscription to establish a perfectly new ocean and build one big springboard for the proper launching of an army of sixteen year old girls that I see heading this way from a thousand typical American homes. God bless us, but your mind is a crystal stream out of the high hills. I can see it,—I who had the one perfect home in all the world, with a mother who was afraid I’d be hanged and a father who was afraid I wouldn’t, with grandfathers who painted all the world for me and a pair of grandmothers who made home better, with a brother to keep me beat up and a sister to mend my bones and bind me with bands of affection,—with all the loveliest ties and with freedom in everything from the first—if _I_ can see it who is there that can’t?

Just to have a race free so they can have a friendly attitude toward life, with eyes for the marvel of it and half an understanding of each other—it’s such a little thing you ask because it’s what everybody really wants. Surely the world won’t have to be told it twice.

Loyalty?—how it crowns the graces and means the thousand things never dreamed of in a marriage vow and the platitudes of family pride. Your loyalty to yourself this time will feed your individualistic marrow in its bones. I glory in your shame.

Wuzzed Thinking

_Anonymous_:

Recall to mind the ultimatum of Max Eastman: “... Our literary intellectuals will have to go to work. (!) Otherwise we shall merely have to enjoy them like a song. They will have to _pass their examinations_. (!) Science holds the power to make all intellectual literature mere dilettantism and nothing but resolute giants of brain with feeling can prevent it.” Reflect the philosophy of the age, and you will have served Art. Do not attempt to rise precipitously and gaze rapturously into the Blessed Isles, floating without our sphere, situated in the fourth dimension. Come to Jesus!

[Reflecting the philosophy of the age has no more to do with Art than holding the mirror up to nature.]

From France

_Muriel Ciolkowska, Bellevue, S. et O._:

... The last number pleased me especially for your satisfying definition of art versus life. It is the most complete and the most epigrammatic I have ever met with.

“My Word!”

_Louise Bryant, New York_:

BEAUTY

O foolish ones Who lament Because all the beauty That you discover Or that you create Out of your minds Is not posted On a mountain Before the eyes of the world— Know you, It is no less beautiful Because all do not behold it, It is no less beautiful Because it remains in darkness. Beauty is the same always, It is itself No less and no more.

From Berlin

_Charlotte Teller_

... To my surprise, I found that Marsden Hartley had stayed on in Berlin in spite of the war; and that he was still living in the same place, the garden house, up three flights, at number four Nassauische Strasse. The world was whirling in martial mid-air, and all the planets were out of place. But Hartley had the same rug on the floor, and the same Persian stuff on the brown wall. And the next room was full of canvasses—some forty; a few, done in Paris when he was just beginning to want the Northern Light stronger than France could give; most of them done right here in these rooms.

When the door was closed, the room might have been a magic carpet carrying us out into anywhere, where there are planes cutting into each other, where lightnings zig-zag outlines against black space, where colors refuse to fade, but stay sharp and clean, like good morals.

Marsden Hartley used to be told that he looked like Ralph Waldo Emerson. But since I last saw him he has lost that look of strife with the flesh which gives all Emerson’s portraits a tortured undercurrent. What was before New England philosopher with a touch of the bird of prey is now Indian,—the old, rare, eagle-like Indian whom we have betrayed without counting the loss to the land whose life he knew back to Aztec days. On the card over Hartley’s door-bell some boy has drawn in pencil an Indian. It looks like him. He does not know if it were done to protect him from being taken for an Englishman, or as a portrait. It serves as both.

The portrait I had seen of him when I was in Berlin two years ago was a dream he told me he had had. He had seen a pigeon tied by its feet to a great rock, struggling to get free. He watched it in torment; and saw finally how it flew off, leaving its feet bleeding upon the rock. And he has flown far.

One canvas that he showed me was painted in June, 1914, before there had been the slightest whisper of war. It expresses his feeling of what he calls “ecstasy” on the part of the dragoons at the manoeuvers he had seen. A rising dome, the eternal symbol of endeavor weighted by the desires of the flesh, not able to cut clean like the triangle, the flame-sign of the Persians. And in this dome, and on either side, white horses, mounting, red trappings, white uniforms, and black boots; all of them pouring upward to a high point somewhere far outside of the painting itself. Here is the very spirit of Germany, proud of its display, not yet chastened by the grief of glory.

He has caught Germany and America, and grappled with them in the depths of their own consciousness. Planetary things there are in his work, gracious and balanced, weird and restless—“sensations” he calls them for fear of intellectualizing the emotions he has. But it is all _his_ world. He does not pretend to share it with anyone, although he spreads it before you and listens, or half-listens, to your interpretation of circle and star and streaked skies.

I do not pretend to understand even the theories of these new schools which burst out before the war; and I have no theory about Hartley’s paintings. I feel them, as I might feel a lyric from the Sanscrit if it were read me by one who knows that our modern speech is buried deep in this old language and must inevitably echo forth. When the rhythm swings round and round within the four sides of the frame, I know it as rhythm, although I might not be able to tell what begot it. When the motion set up by color and line goes sweeping out beyond the frame, beyond the walls of the room, beyond Berlin, and Europe, and the age we live in, I get the excitement of it, and I don’t mind the loss of breath.

What Does It Mean?

_Arthur Purdon, Livingston, Montana_:

“A Real Magazine” just arrived, but it isn’t. Art, like music, dies when talked about. The September Want Ad makes me smile. _The Little Review_ is degenerating into the newspaper class, and has become a common beggar. It does not know how to keep its machinery out of sight. I sometimes wish I knew how to make a bomb. If I did I would be tempted to place it under _The Little Review_ and blow its talk about past, present and future straight to hell. I am interested in an infinite present above time and space, that indefinable something expressed in music. There are no such things as Past, Present and Future. They are hollow hallucinations. _The Little Review_ still worships at the altar of time and attempts to concern itself with temporal things.

Music or Art when labelled disappear. The think itself is quite sufficient. Don’t you sometimes get a bit tired of talking so much about Art?

[No; what we get tired of is people like you and Alice Groff who talk out of the air, as though thoughts are made of air as words are made.]

Officer, She’s In Again!

_Alice Groff, Philadelphia_:

You are an insane isolist (ha! ha!)—a mad little self-made God, setting yourself on a pedestal as the _only_ judge of Art (? ! ! !)