Part 2
He looms before us on the screen, menacing, grandiose, Byronic. But he is great only from the scaling of values. His contact is incessantly with weaker types who bend or break before him. Grushnitski is a modish idealist; Bela, a captive maid who acknowledges his right to do as he wills; Vera, a hysterical sentimentalist of that spirituelle type to whom the intense physical traits of Pechorin make a ready appeal. She quiets her scruples with the sacred notion that she is sacrificing herself, soul and body to one whose life would otherwise be incomplete. Princess Mary is a typical Byronese victim, a devotee at the shrine of heroism, who for nothing in the world would give herself to a man who has not some mystery or who has not been the victim of some crushing sorrow. Contrast her with the vital, passionate Natalya in Turgene’s _Rudin_.... Pechorin hunts easy game. He acknowledges that he has never loved women of spirit: “Once only I loved a woman with a firm will that I was unable to vanquish. We parted enemies.” What would these erotic, parasitic Byrons subsist upon nowadays? Woman is no more the mere giver; she asks and receives in return.
Pechorin wins from us not honest hatred but contempt. One searches the book for an honorable impulse upon his part. He is a washed-out Byron; a pale Don Juan. He loves many women for the excitement of mere change. “We live out of curiosity. We expect something new. How absurd, and yet how vexatious!” Women fall at his feet and he asks derisively: “Can it be that wickedness is so attractive?” He knows the ways of his victim by heart, he anticipates her every move, and calls her accomplishment tiresome. Passion has shriveled until it is an inglorious segment of his life. It is a thing of curiosity rather than of sympathy. Love is an annoyance, yet he persists in it: “I feel within me an insatiate hunger that devours everything it meets upon the way. I look upon joy and suffering only in their relation to myself, regarding them as nutriment that sustains my spiritual forces.... To none has my love ever brought happiness because I have never sacrificed anything for the sake of those I loved. I have only tried to satisfy the strange cravings of my heart, greedily draining their feelings, their tenderness, their joy, their suffering—and I have never been able to sate myself.”
It occurs to Pechorin that such aimlessness cannot but be a misinterpretation of the mystic handwriting of life. “It cannot be that I came purposeless into the world. A purpose there must have been, and surely mine was an exalted destiny because I feel within my soul powers immeasurable. But I was unable to discover that destiny. I allowed myself to be carried away by the allurements of passions innane and ignoble. From that crucible I issued hard and cold as iron.”... “My chief pleasure is to make everything around me subject to my will. To be the cause of suffering or joy to another without having a definite right to be—is it not the sweetest food for our pride?”
Lermontov is honest. He makes no attempt to vindicate a type. He must have smiled at his hater, his incipient superman, shattered by fate casting himself on the bare steppe after killing his horse in a mad ride, and clasping his body to the earth. Did he think to merge himself with the great “I am”?
“Alas! there cometh a time when man shall no longer give birth to a star. Alas! there cometh the time of the most contemptible man who can no longer despise himself!”
* * * * *
Thus spake Zarathustra!
Not submission, self-abnegation, Tolstoyanism, but wholesome self-hatred, acknowledging in one’s self but a bridge to beyond-man. Pechorin saw life as an end in itself. He was a creature of the surface, he feared to plunge into the blue depths.
One smiles at his childlike attempt to be self-efficient, isolated, damnable. But one is impatiently sorry that his splendid vitality was turned from healthful pioneering to the puny triumphs of the ballroom, and the conquest of hysterical ladies. Young Russia despises life except as a means. It will hurl revolutions into the world’s face, it will build empires. Life will be a hot flame of action and not a hectic afterglow of spent passion.
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[3] _A Hero of Our Time, by A. Lermontov. New York, Alfred A. Knopf._
The Tree
HELEN HOYT
On the way to the factory, In the block as you leave the car, Growing from cinders Is a tree. And it has leaves .... Green .... All around are the factory walls And small sooty houses with bleak steps And babies crawling among flies .... In summer I have felt the pavements Pouring out heat like ovens.
O tree, how can you be so patient!
Editorials and Announcements
_A Real Orchestra in San Francisco_
It’s a quite amazing phenomenon: here in this town encased in philistinism there is a symphony orchestra, conducted by a radical young man who knows his business, playing a series of modern music programs during the summer!
The first day I went out to inspect San Francisco I was struck dumb before a poster in a music store announcing Sunday afternoon concerts by a People’s Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by N. Sokoloff, with Debussy’s “_Faun_” and those lovely _Caucasian Sketches_ of Ippolitow-Ivanow on the program, and Tina Lerner as soloist, etc., etc.—all for a price ranging between twenty-five and seventy-five cents.
I went, naturally; not because I expected it to be a very good concert, but because I was starved for music. I knew nothing of Sokoloff, except that he had played the violin in Chicago last winter and I had missed his concert. Perhaps you can imagine the shock and the joy of hearing the “Faun” conducted as I at least have never heard it done before: so that it became really a thing of cool lavender shadows in a forest.... It’s impossible to describe, but it made you weep—it was so beautifully done.
Since then I have heard the story of the unique organization. San Francisco has one orchestra under the leadership of a man who may be called a conservative, I suppose, and backed by numerous wealthy citizens who have the artistic interests of the town at heart without a very definite knowledge of what channels they should follow. But Mrs. J. B. Casserly, a musician, conceived the idea of having better music in San Francisco, and asked Mr. Sokoloff to undertake these concerts. Mr. Sokoloff, who was a violinist rather than a conductor, was fired by the idea, and a skating-rink was hired for the first rehearsal. There was some embarrassment as to who should pay the expenses of the rehearsal, but it was finally decided that if the orchestra men liked the new conductor they would assume the entire cost; if not, it was to be “on” Mrs. Casserly. As I remember, they played the Tchaikovsky _Pathetique_ that afternoon in the sacred halls of the skating-rink, and when it was over the men rose to cheer the conductor. “Well, gentlemen,” said Mrs. Casserly, “who pays?” But there was no hesitation over that trifling matter.
And so the concerts began in a local theatre. It is perfectly simple to realize that San Francisco would not largely appreciate such a blessing, and that Mrs. Casserly and Mr. Sokoloff would be criticised for their “modern” programs; but it is hard to understand the action of the other orchestra people, who locked up their scores so that the “rival” musicians couldn’t use them and were forced to buy new ones. This is the typical history of all struggles in the world to find beauty, so one grows used to it. But the important thing is that the People’s Philharmonic is to go on next year, and their programs (I should have mentioned that they play old music, which is good as well as new music) are exciting to think of. I listened yesterday to their rehearsal of the _Tristan_ Prelude and I know that Mr. Stock in Ravinia Park is not offering his audiences anything so fresh and inspired as Mr. Sokoloff’s reading. May they live long and prosper!
_An Anarchist’s Question_
On the day of the Preparedness Parade in San Francisco some one threw a bomb and killed eight people, who undoubtedly didn’t deserve to die. Since then the city has gone around on tip-toe, as an anarchist I know expressed it. Five people who undoubtedly don’t deserve it have been thrown into jail and tortured. Puzzle: if the object of preparedness parades is achieved, everybody will be killed off anyway; why is one kind of murder so much worse than another?
Julia to Jim
(_After reading Edgar Lee Masters’ “Jim and Arabel’s Sister”_)
SUE GOLDEN
You see, it’s this way, Jim ... You can call me a primrose, if you like, Or the Lover, for that’s a way you have, or men have, Of tying things in bundles, That don’t belong in bundles; For every woman, or man too, I guess, Is a separate complex package With a little bit of everything Out of all the other bundles. You find in us exactly what you look for, As Francis did in Arabella; It wouldn’t have made the least difference What you or I told him, Or what he found out— But about me, Jim? You’ve sat here drinking my coffee, And I’ve made you comfortable and happy, And you’ve told me all about myself, And you haven’t even asked me what I thought about myself. It didn’t occur to you. Do you think Francis Has ever gone deeper Than the curve of Arabel’s cheek, Or what he thought her, or wanted her to be?
You call me the Lover. And try to figure out Why I am not like other women; But I am, Jim— Just an ordinary primrose, For that primrose that changed Started out like all the others; And you wonder why I don’t live like the others, Get married—I was once, have children—my son’s grown— So I’ve been all three, sweetheart and mother and wife, And I am still. Every woman is all three, But not all at the same time; That’s why it is such a bore Being expected to be.
When you have had your coffee, you’ll go down town And forget me. And I’ll forget you, and be comfortable and happy, Not having to remember you. But if I were married to you, You’d want me to keep on remembering you Every minute of the day, And I’d be so tired of it by the time you came home, I’d be sorry to see you. I have nothing against marriage, Except that it’s a bore Trying to live somebody else’s life. You can’t do it. Married people would be happier If they didn’t try to. They ought to live as freely As we do. All these sudden split-ups In the newspapers Are just this: The hysteria of woman is a shriek of boredom. Why, I’d die in a week if I had to keep on Being the particular kind of primrose That you think me. But the hysterical woman, There’s your flower changing, Jim. I’m just the common kind, but I know that I’m never the same, and I don’t want to be. If I’m the mother today, I may be the lover tomorrow, And I don’t want anybody sitting around on me And keeping me from growing. Your primrose probably changed Just to spite the old scientist who kept prying at it.
Sex? No, it isn’t sex that these people are writing about, _It’s sentimentality_. They have an ideal, and if the first woman doesn’t answer it They think the second will, or the third. And they call it sex, or beauty, or urge— But it isn’t sex, Jim. I know what sex is.
The reason I like you, Jim, Is because you haven’t any of these silly notions. Sex is honest and healthy. You say they trace morbid ideas to sex, But I tell you it’s the morbid, silly, beautiful ideas About Love and about being able to satisfy the ideal That are at the root of the trouble about sex! I can’t absorb you, and I don’t want to, And I don’t want to be absorbed.
I don’t know whether you get what I mean.
I like you, Jim, Because you leave a person free. After you go, I shall be busy with my own thoughts And my own life, just as if a friend had dropped in. I shall be anything I want to be. I shall change into Just as many primroses as I want to, and you won’t Know anything about it.
You ought to get married, Jim, No, not me. But if you came here every night, I’d a thousand times rather be married to you, For I have never known anybody more tied up Than these “free-love” people.
Am I happy? Well, I’m free. We’d all like to be free _and_ happy. Lots of people could be happy—ought to be happy, If they knew enough to be free..... Perhaps happiness is partly the chance of being unhappy— You and I, Jim, haven’t that.
But what I hate is all this mussing up Of love and sex and the ideal—it isn’t life. One ought to start straight on earth, And take heaven when it comes.
I promise the advent of a tragic age: the highest art in the saying of yea to life, “tragedy,” will be born when mankind has the knowledge of the hardest, but most necessary of wars, behind it, without, however, suffering from that knowledge.—_Nietzsche._
A Vers Libre Prize Contest
Through the generosity of a friend, THE LITTLE REVIEW is enabled to offer an unusual prize for poetry—possibly the first prize extended to free verse. The giver is “interested in all experiments, and has followed the poetry published in THE LITTLE REVIEW with keen appreciation and a growing admiration for the poetic form known as _vers libre_.”
The conditions are as follows:
Contributions must be received by August 15th.
They must not be longer than twenty-five lines.
They must be sent anonymously with stamps for return.
The name and address of the author must be fixed to the manuscript in a sealed envelope.
It should be borne in mind that free verse is wanted—verse having beauty of rhythm, not merely prose separated into lines.
There will be three judges: William Carlos Williams, Zoë Aikens and Helen Hoyt.
There will be two prizes of $25 each. They are offered not as a first and second prize, but for “the two best short poems in free verse form.”
As there will probably be a large number of poems to read, we suggest that contributors adhere closely to the conditions of the contest.
The Reader Critic
The Nymph
(_Edgar Lee, have you missed anything?—Editor._)
I see it all now: I was born with the soul of a nymph, And they expected me to be law-abiding and moral! Why, I was a nymph from the day my mother lashed me For playing kissing games with the boys, out behind the school, To the day I shot my lover in a South State Street cabaret For flirting with another girl and they put me in the penitentiary. Good God! is it a sin to be young?
—_Anonymous._
How Stanilaus Szukalski Expresses Life
_L. C. B._:
There are trees and valleys and mountains—red, blue, orange and purple—all smothered by a phosphorescent green. The trees stretch up gnarled hands, swollen from too much striving. There is no sky. Dull coal mingles with the earth clods. Diamond mines glitter. The ground is misshapen. Flowers give forth a stale odor. A hideous laugh sounds. It comes from the mouth of a hunch-back who, with prods of burning metal, forces people into the quick-sands. Over the sands sucking, demoniacal waters rush. Here and there an eye or a torso floats on the surface. From the trees and valleys and mountains, luridly colored, come human faces. Blood runs from their opened arteries. Their hands are horribly twisted. In the foreground writhes a shape whose fingers bend back to meet his knuckles. Another rears a massive head, the veins of which stand out further than his purple lips. A woman’s arm is extended, too full of blood. A weird figure hovers over an abyss, swathed with the vapors arising from the gases of the underground. All the people are dying. Everyone breathes hard. A whole mound is composed of a soft substance—disintegrated limbs. The jelly-like mass quivers. This is life.
Did you see his exhibition at the Art Institute? At seventeen one is almost wholly in sympathy with him.
Phantasy
_Noncompos Mentis, Napa, California_:
Night! A lambient fog * * * * * Stirs the damp echos of the baleful deep, Cimmerian in its fell intensity. Shrouded in mist, pale wraiths flit hitherward Or yon; lured or impelled * * * * * Peace! Ah! Who shall say?
Borne on the vagrant breeze she floats; Kelp in her hands; ’twined in her hair The weed from outer seas; writhing yet strangely still. Behold her eyes—shallow, opaque, Yet glaucous with a nascent light, gleaming Its message of appeal to answering soul. * * * * * Ah me! Recall the past; Blot out its infamies; this fiery tumult quell With one tempestuous kiss. My being swoons—my soul is wafted hence, Drowned in its God-like, saccharine ecstasy.[4]
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[4] Here the Muse skidded. Author contemplated another stanza, but warder entered with strait jacket and gag.
Birth Control
_Russell Palmer, Seattle_:
... With particular reference to the matter of Birth Control, which the writer has studied in an amateurish fashion for some time, I want to ask you if there has ever been framed a model statute providing for the dissemination of such information by the State.
If such a model statute exists I will arrange to have it introduced in the Washington State Legislature when that body convenes next January. If nothing of this sort is available I would earnestly recommend that steps be taken immediately to prepare a measure which will bring about the maximum amount of good and yet at the same time have an opportunity of receiving the support of law-makers elected by a semi-civilized and bigoted people.
It should be borne in mind that the Initiative and Referendum are both in effect in the State of Washington, so that there would be a strong probability that such a proposed law would be passed upon directly by the people, either through the failure of the legislature to meet the issue squarely or its over cautious desire to have its action approved by the voters individually.
I believe that such an act would have a fair chance of passage. We look upon our State as not altogether unprogressive, for in addition to the legislative progress indicated by the Initiative and Referendum we enjoy woman suffrage, glory in non-partisan direct primaries, carry but do not wave a Red Light Abatement Act, tolerate Prohibition and threaten Single Tax. So you see there are hopes.
What Is the State?
(An answer to Alan Adair’s “What Is Anarchy?”)
_Alice Groff, Philadelphia_:
Is it not time that thinking people should cease to speak of the social order as “the state”? The very meaning of state is static, and if there be a qualifying word that does _not_ apply to the life of the social order static is that word. The social order is a growing, developing, evolving thing.
Man is a social as well as an individual being. He may be called a political being by virtue of his social activities, and the methods he uses to live best his social life; but the individual man is not a political being—he cannot “flock in a corner all by himself” as Dundreary would say—he is political only in the sense of being an element in a social ego, with a social will toward the desired social end of that ego.
Such social ego is continually being formed anew in the social order. The dominating social ego of any stage is not necessarily the highest ideal which the most advanced and thoughtful minds in that stage can conceive. It is the highest ideal of the largest or most powerful number of individuals that are in unanimity upon that ideal and capable of ruling the rest of the social order with it for the time being. Every form of social dominance that has ever prevailed in the history of the world will come under this head and answer to this description. And who shall say that the prevailing and dominating social ego at any one stage is not the best possible for the social order at that stage?
The individual man with a high philosophic gift and a reasoning mind may say to himself, and to others: “Man is capable of a better social order than this, there are higher and finer ideals than those that prevail”—but he can do absolutely nothing of himself to do away with the prevailing social ego, and to substitute a new one with better ideals, as he thinks, except to teach, to agitate, until he can induce a number of individuals to take up his ideal and to join him in a social ego that shall become powerful enough to drive out the dominating ego and substitute for it the new one. This is all that there is to political activity. This is the whole story of social evolution. And no individual or social ego can possibly decide that the new ideal is better than the old until it is “tried out.” It is of course likely to have better elements than the old in so far as it is born of criticism upon the old which _then_ was being “tried out.” But no dominating social ego can ever hope statically to establish itself in the social order while the world endures; consequently the reasoning mind must say to itself: “The highest social ideal that I can conceive and can induce a social ego to stand for is only the next step in social evolution, which must give place to the next and the next.” Hence, such mind can only smile indulgently upon all static ideals—monarchy, democracy, anarchy, socialism alike; realizing that the only social ideals worthy the name are those based upon demonstrated scientific truth—the collected and collated set of social facts that have been found to work in accordance with natural law in past social evolution; realizing that the personal ideal of the individual man, unless based upon such facts, is socially a child’s soapbubble, whatever it may be in the innermost of his own soul as to the evolution of his own individuality.
The Little Review
Literature, Drama, Music, Art
MARGARET C. ANDERSON, Editor
The monthly that has been called “the most unique journal in existence.”
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 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 Splendour of Life, and whose function is—to express itself.
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The Little Review
OTHERS
A Magazine of the New Verse
Various writers are being invited to edit Others, each for a period of one month.
Williams Carlos Williams will have charge of the July issue, which he announces as A Competitive Number.
Maxwell Bodenheim of the August, which he announces as A Chicago Number.