Part 2

Congratulations! You have the capacity for suddenly turning back and becoming young enough to say “All or nothing.” And subconsciously realizing that you will get mostly nothing, you threaten your readers with blank pages. And all those who thought that _The Little Review_ did publish only artistic writing have had the veil torn from their eyes and their faith in you begins to waver. Perhaps to vanish altogether!

Is all of the _Meistersinger_ one continuous “Preislied”? Is all of Beethoven equal to his “Ninth”? Is all of Pachman as marvelous as his Chopin? All or nothing! You would feast, and have your readers feast, upon the perfection of art and give them none of its strivings?

Your challenge will remain unanswered. If you dare, or through sheer carelessness, allow this to appear in the next issue, I shall suspect you of considering the writing of an artist a work of art—even though he speak not in his own tongue.

Your challenge will remain unanswered! For who are _you_, to expect a staff of ready geniuses to fill your pages? You should be grateful for one pearl you may find among hundreds of near-jewels. And the world is grateful for one _Ave Maria_ (Schubert) among a thousand near-songs. I preach no gospel of meekness to you, for I know you will turn again and leave your youthful—nay, puerile,—cry of “All or nothing.” It is the cry of the mad—of the foolish, impatient ones! You only want the miracle? You are like the child crying for the moon and, like him, you will accept a round cheese instead.

Do come to New York, and I will play more than an hour uninterrupted for you, and perhaps for five minutes (if I am lucky) you will have a miracle. If I am unlucky you will have only a near-miracle, which will be just very good violin playing.

* * * * *

But what did I say about wanting only the perfection of art and none of its strivings? I said—Art. That includes the strivings, doesn’t it? Surely we needn’t go back to definitions. Ezra Pound has a nice analysis somewhere—to this effect: In such measure as an artist expresses himself truthfully, he will be a good artist; in such measure as he himself exists, he will be a great one. I want a record of the process of that “existing” from as many artists as possible. The process of each will include many things that are not perfection, but who ever told you that perfection and Art are synonymous terms? Some one sent me a sketch, in answer to my editorial, with this note: “You said you wanted Beauty. I am sending you something which I think has it.” I thought it had beauty, too; but it had no Art. What do you people think I meant by the “miracle”? I meant simply those _strivings and achievements_ which show that the great process is really “on.” We published Ben Hecht’s _Night Song_. It had much beauty and no perfection, but it had Art quite apart from either of those elements. Amy Lowell’s poems (not _Off the Turnpike_) have an Art that happens to include perfection. The “miracle” was very much present in _Malmaison_, for instance. Flint’s _London My Beautiful_ has it. The principal trouble is that miracles usually have to be explained to be recognized. It’s like the painter who took a friend to hear Powys. The friend went to hear what Powys had to say—“and I told her what he looked like,” said the painter—_M. C. A._

* * * * *

From your letter you sound like a lot of other young things paralyzed by smugness and complacency. You become a one-stringed instrument and you hope to play the violin. If you dared to be an artist, and all that means of madness and impatience and foolishness and crying for the moon, you’d dare promise more than five minutes miracle in an hour. It would be outside of promises.—_jh._

A Word From Real Art

_Frank Lloyd Wright, Chicago_:

The less money _The Little Review_ has the better it _looks_ anyway! Your resolve is interesting—but it looks like the end.... I don’t see where you can find the thing you need.

But miracles do happen—I wish I had a million or a pen.

Freudian

_A Contributor, Chicago_:

_The Little Review_ sickens me. I don’t understand why in the devil you talk imagism and color and beauty and fill your magazine full of that sputtering trash, that colorless-degenerate edgarleemasters junk. Why not leave blank pages? And your article.... Good Lord!... It was like warm candle grease just after the little candle flame has been sniffed out. I see and feel _The Little Review_ as a case of feminine callowism gone mad.

The idea of writing anything about Masters fills me with disgust. Masters doesn’t even inspire me with rage. I regard his work as a pretentious mediocrity. There isn’t a poem in his books that I couldn’t have written myself in twenty minutes on a typewriter. Why write about Masters? He’s only one of the many dub artists overrunning the country. He isn’t to blame, even if he is cocky about his success. In fact, he is to be commended for putting it over. The fault, in my mind, lies with the great tribe of morons who yap over his doggerel—pro or con. I have read three or four things in his first book, and as many in his second book, and I see no occasion for rubbing it in on him any more than on Luke McGluke, the poet laureate of _The Hickville Clarion_. Put him out of your head, why don’t you? Criticism doesn’t concern itself with the feverishly inflated mob banalities of the moment. Selah!

* * * * *

You say _The Little Review_ sickens you? With the above temperature and tongue? I should diagnose the case as autointoxication.—_jh._

Query

_Mitchell Dawson, Chicago_:

I have read the August number, and have read only the poetry—which makes me sad. Does the new cover represent the Western afterglow?

Consoling Us

_Rex Lampman, Portland_:

Don’t you think you’re asking a little too much of yourself and your contributors, that _The Little Review_ be absolute in each number?

No. I don’t mean that. It’s fine to aim at Art, always, but it isn’t failure to miss it most of the time.

As for me, _The Little Review_ has been an inspiration and a delight. A paper that will publish anything so wonderful as John Gould Fletcher’s _Green Symphony_ doesn’t need, so far as I’m concerned, to “do it again” for quite a while, and I’m quite content that you should fill in with such stuff as Ben Hecht’s _The Poet Sings to the World_ until you get something as good, again, as the _Symphony_.

I’m a newspaper man, and I’m supposed to “write something” every day. Of course, it can’t be done; but once in a while, when the powers are kind, I am permitted to write something that delights me and others. That’s the best I can do, so help me, and I am reminded of the Western epitaph, which went something like this:

Here Lies JIM JONES. He Done His Damnedest. Angels Can Do No More.

And so I hope you’ll never get out a _Little Review_ with any of the pages blank.

You are wonderfully honest—one of the honestest persons, I think, that I know, and I shout for joy at your godlike impatience with imperfection. But patience—pardon the platitude—is also a godlike attribute.

More Consolation

_C. A. C., Chicago_:

Bully! Since your outburst of righteous indignation towards yourself and your contributors I have been comparing your magazine with the others I receive. _The Forum_, _Vanity Fair_ (Oh, dear, yes!), _The Masses_, and sometimes I see _The Bang_—a weekly pamphlet of Alexander Harvey’s, which he distributes discriminately. Your wail seems not wholly justified. True, Arthur Symons’s _Spiritual Adventures, Plays, Acting, and Music_, and other essays, are things to be sought after by any editor. His stuff is appearing in America in _Vanity Fair_ and _The Forum_; it seems to lack his first fire, except that he has put a new ring to Cleopatra’s statement of herself:

Kings have cast their crowns Into the dust, and kings that are my foes I can take up into my hand and cast Into the dust for love of me. I am a woman But I have power greater than any man’s.

And his poems—Symons never was much of a poet. Then, again, that Wright person who writes for _The Forum_—any magazine is the better without his squibs on Art.

Max Eastman had an article in a recent number of _Vanity Fair_ on “Magazine Writing.” He claims it is amazingly well done, so well done that there is “not a speck on it”—the main fault being that “it is professional. It is work and not play. And for that reason it is never profoundly serious, or intensely frivolous enough to captivate the soul. It lacks abandon. It is simply well done.” Now, the fact that the very essence of your magazine seems “pure living,” brings it out of Eastman’s indictment. One cannot say that Sherwood Anderson, Hecht, and Kaun, or even yourself, have been guilty of “earning your living” at the expense of play. “In that play alone is the heart altogether gay and inconsiderate.”

And _The Bang_ has been pounding away steadily for a magazine that exists for the fun of it, the joy of it, and is not built upon the circulation manager’s point of view. Does Harvey get your magazine? Does he ever feel, if he sees it, that the “Ideal” he holds for magazinedom is being realized in your magazine?

Summing it up, Miss Editor, you who once declared you had none of the qualifications of an editor, it seems to me you have been doing rather well. We don’t want you to stand still—_you_ can’t do that—or to stop trying. Please, for our sake, keep it up.

Casting a Slur Upon What?

_Ruth C. Sweeney, Chicago_:

I simply cannot understand how a person who could write such a beautiful thing as your poem, _Life_, could allow _The Nymph_ to appear in _The Little Review_.

How can you hope to encourage Art when you will print such a thing? I have noticed these free-thinkers, and with the casting aside of “forms that have to be respected” has gone whatever taste they had. They gulp down everything, provided it casts a slur upon something. Does one have to lose all his finer sensibilities because he wishes to be free and open minded?

I have thought of you people when Nietzsche says, “Sensualists are they now become—a trouble and a terror is the hero to them.”

I join with you in your cry of blank pages if _The Nymph_ is the alternative.

* * * * *

Give over reading Nietzsche for a bit; you belong in the primary class. The person who wrote _The Nymph_ has a background of life, if not of Art. And your hero? “A Trouble and a Terror” would make him appear the villain.—_jh._

Why Editors Go Insane

_Alice Groff, Philadelphia_:

I am going to tear to pieces your “A Real Magazine.”

No one ever _reaches_ the “Ideal.” The moment he does, there has ceased to _be_ an “_Ideal_.” Our ideal is an ever-advancing goal. Art is the embodiment of the human ideal—which ideal is the ever-advancing goal of human life.

Art is _not_ the ultimate reason for Life. Life _is_,—for its own sake. Life lives for the ideal—for the ever-advancing goal, which embodies itself in Art—that Life may become ever more and more abundant _life_. Life continually seeks to express its absolute essence in Art, and it will never cease this seeking through all eternity. Such expression will always be compelled by the aspiration to reach the ever-advancing goal—the Ideal which will continually incarnate, and reincarnate, itself in an ever-renewing body—Art.

Art is the incarnation of the Ideal—the shed Chrysalis. The Ideal is the Psyche—continually wending its way toward a new goal and a new Chrysalis (which it continually sheds, leaving with us its mortal part only—Art.)

Facts About the Preparedness Bomb

Out here in the big West, a whooping, yelling mob of “Vigilante” business men is trying to wipe out the last labor union. Hiring an army of bristling gunmen for a spy- and strike-breaker system, they have slowly advanced from conquered Los Angeles to the siege of San Francisco.

The opening fight here was to force Labor, against its will, into a “preparedness” parade. Every organized man refused to move, and the parade for military piracy was cut down to a handful of the unorganized who were bulldozed into line.

Organized Labor, victorious, was satisfied and completely through with the affair before the day of march.

But some individuals, fired by the wild propaganda for military violence, sent hundreds of warnings through the mails, saying that they would blow up the parade with a bomb. Employers and newspapers tried to keep this quiet, but Organized Labor men discovered it and requested their followers to avoid any chance for such a thing to be laid at their door, by abstaining from all activity and treating the parade with silent contempt. This was done.

The ranks of the unorganized marched down Market street behind their employers and society women, unaware of the warnings. A bomb exploded which killed six people outright, three more dying later. A prominent Chamber of Commerce man was heard to remark: “This is a fine chance for the open shop.”

Immediately the Chamber of Commerce, through its tools in public office, swooped down on its most hated enemies in Organized Labor ranks. They took the leader of the recent attempted street car strike, Thomas J. Mooney (as well as his wife, an inoffensive music teacher), ignored his complete alibi and charged him with heading a “conspiracy.” The chief of pickets of the recent Machinists’ strike, Edward D. Nolan, was taken for vengeance’s sake, without evidence, and they announce, in the papers that they “have the hemp stretched around the necks of all.” Israel Weinberg, prominent in the Jitney Bus Operators’ Union, which is troubling the United Railways, was jailed and accused of murder. Warren K. Billings, past president of the Shoe Workers, was charged with the actual dynamiting, and an eye-witness who saw an altogether different man place the supposed suit-case bomb, was assaulted in the office of the prosecutor.

Five conspicuous enemies of the employers were thus caught and apparently doomed. The warnings in advance that had been received through the mails, were thereafter ignored. Direct evidence of eye-witnesses was ignored. The Chamber of Commerce had the men it wanted.

Every newspaper blandly declined to print a word without approval of the “Law and Order Committee.” Several newspaper men working on the case came secretly to us to whisper that they knew the men were innocent, but “for God’s sake don’t mention us!” One detective working for the prosecution told a member of the International Workers’ Defense League that the men were to be convicted on fake evidence, now being cooked up, but “not to let on who told you.” Only by keeping the men from having any defense could they be convicted, so the prosecution had the indecency to try to prevent any prominent lawyer from taking the case. A judge forced upon the principal defendant, fighting for his life, a greenhorn lawyer of one year’s experience.

By making it clear to a prominent criminal lawyer that the accused are not guilty, we have gotten him, through a sense of justice, to take the cases for a fee much lower than his usual charge. But we have not even that much money.

Twenty-one Thousand Dollars blood money is in the sight of the horde of ex-Pinkertons and United Railways detectives, and they will not give up their prey without a tough fight. The prisoners are in the hands of men who consider labor unionism in itself a crime. They are now proving this by making peaceful picketing a prison offense.

We have demonstrated to many unions the innocence of the men and gotten them to send delegates to the League.

We are not defending bomb throwers, but innocent men. They will be executed practically without trial if we don’t get the money to defend them.

Send money, and much of it, QUICK, to the International Workers’ Defense League, Robert Minor, treasurer, 210 Russ Building, 235 Montgomery street, San Francisco.

The Vers Libre Contest

The poems published in the Vers Libre Contest are now being considered by the judges. There were two hundred and two poems, thirty-two of which were returned because they were either Shakespearean sonnets or rhymed quatrains or couplets. Manuscripts will be returned as promptly as they are rejected, providing the contestants sent postage.

We hope to announce the results in our October issue, and publish the prize poems.

—The Contest Editor.

IN BOOKS

Anything that’s Radical MAY be found at

McDevitt’s Book Omnorium

1346 Fillmore Street and 2079 Sutter Street San Francisco, California

(He Sells The Little Review, Too)

The Truth From All Sides

“_To understand all is to forgive all._”

In an honest endeavor to present the truth about the great world war now raging, THE OPEN COURT PUBLISHING COMPANY authorized its London agent to obtain for publication in America books by eminent and reliable authors in all the belligerent states.

ROMAIN ROLLAND speaks for France in a wonderful appeal to humanity entitled “_Above the Battle_.” _Cloth, $1.00._

HON. BERTRAND RUSSELL speaks for England and justice to small nations in a veritable classic entitled “_Justice in War Time_.” _Price, cloth $1.00, paper 50 cents._

DR. J. H. LABBERTON speaks for Belgium and the question of Germany’s right to invade Belgium in a book entitled “_Belgium and Germany_.” _Cloth, $1.00._

MARSHALL KELLY, an English radical and labor leader, writes a bitter denunciation of England’s foreign policy during the past twenty years in a book entitled “_Carlyle and the War_.” _Cloth, $1.00._

S. IVOR STEPHEN, an international newspaper writer, denounces the policy of newspapers in general and New York City in particular, for their part in arousing prejudice in war time. His book is entitled “_Neutrality_.” _Cloth $1.00, paper 50 cents._

ROLAND HUGINS, Cornell University, makes an eloquent appeal to the American people for justice and moderation entitled “_Germany Misjudged_.” _Cloth, $1.00._

These books should be read by every intelligent person, no matter what his sympathies may be. It will help to enlighten this world and drive away the hatred and prejudice which a one-sided view is bound to engender.

The Open Court Publishing Co. 122 South Michigan Avenue, Chicago, Ill.

Transcriber’s Notes

Advertisements were collected at the end of the text.

The table of contents on the title page was adjusted in order to reflect correctly the headings in this issue of THE LITTLE REVIEW.

The original spelling was mostly preserved. A few obvious typographical errors were silently corrected. All other changes are shown here (before/after):

[p. 23]: ... play is name The Happy Ending). The curtain rises on a dark forest, ... ... play is named The Happy Ending). The curtain rises on a dark forest, ...