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                           THE LITTLE REVIEW


                       Literature Drama Music Art

                          MARGARET C. ANDERSON
                                 EDITOR

                               MAY, 1914

   On Behalf of Literature                                 DeWitt C. Wing
   The Challenge of Emma Goldman                     Margaret C. Anderson
   Chloroform                               Mary Aldis and Arthur Davison
                                                                    Ficke
   "True to Life"                                             Edith Wyatt
   Impression                                                George Soule
   Art and Life                                      George Burman Foster
   Patriots                                                  Parke Forley
   "Change" at the Fine Arts Theatre
   Correspondence:
     The Vision of Wells
     Another View of "The Dark Flower"
     Dr. Foster's Articles on Nietzsche
   Lawton Parker                                          Eunice Tietjens
   New York Letter                                           George Soule
   Union vs. Union Privileges                         Henry Blackman Sell
   Book Discussion:
     Mr. Chesterton's Prejudices
     Dr. Flexner on Prostitution
   The Critics' Critic                                           M. H. P.
   Sentence Reviews
   Letters to The Little Review
   The Best Sellers

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                           THE LITTLE REVIEW


                                 Vol. I

                               MAY, 1914

                                 No. 3

                Copyright 1914, by Margaret C. Anderson.




                        On Behalf of Literature


                             DEWITT C. WING

It is well-nigh incredible that Edwin Björkman, of his own free will,
should have written the "open letter to President Wilson on behalf of
American literature" which appeared in the April Century. Whenever a man
of promise and power shows the white feather those who admire him suffer
a keen, personal pain. And yet Mr. Björkman is by no means the last man
whom I should expect to make a plea for an official recognition, through
honors, prizes, and subsidies, of an American literature. A conventional
literary man could have done it, but a great man never.

Mr. Björkman, after remarking the President's ability to appreciate the
importance of what he purposes to lay before him, asks, "Will this
nation, as a nation, never do anything for the encouragement or reward
of its poets and men of letters?" He thinks it ought to do something
because "the soul of a nation is in its literature," and because "we
shall never raise our poetry to the level of our other achievements
until we, as a nation, try to find some method of providing money for
the poet's purse and laurels for his brow."

No specific proposal is made to the President. Mr. Björkman outlines the
general question, instances England, France, Sweden, and Norway as
bestowing honors and rewards upon their writers, and says that he has
"learned by bitter experience what it means to strive for sincere
artistic expression in a field where brass is commonly valued above
gold," and "should like to see the road made a little less hard, and the
goal a little more attractive, lest too many of those that come after
lose their courage and let themselves be tempted by the incessant
clangor of metal in the marketplace." Wherefore "on behalf of men and
women who are striving against tremendous odds to give this nation a
poetry equaling in worth and glory that of any other nation in the
world" he appeals to the Chief Executive to take the lead.

A literature worthy of national fostering does not require it.

When President Wilson read Mr. Björkman's letter--we may assume that he
has somehow found time to do so--my little wager is that he smiled
sadly, and perhaps recalled a sentence that he wrote nearly twenty years
ago, when the spirit of youth gave a sort of instinctive inerrancy to
his judgments. In an essay on An Author's Company he said:

   Literatures are renewed, as they are originated, by uncontrived
   impulses of nature, as if the sap moved unbidden in the mind.

In the same essay occurs this wide-worldly phrase:

   There is a greater thing than the spirit of the age, and that is
   the spirit of the ages.

A man capable of the deep, wide thought which these excerpts contain is
not the man seriously to consider Mr. Björkman's appeal. Literature is
not a response to a monetary or other invitation; it is as inevitable as
the sunrise, and opportunity neither originates nor develops it. The
conditions that govern the rise of sap and its transformations into
beauty cannot be set up by legislation nor made easier by Nobel prizes.
An artist of original power, born pregnant with a poem, a picture, or a
symphony, will inevitably give it birth. His necessity is not to receive
but to give. He is independent of the caprice of chance. He has no
thought of a chance "for sincere artistic expression." He is not
interested in the control of circumstance; he is the instrument of
something that controls him. Opportunity never knocks at his door; his
door cannot be opened from without; it is pushed open by an indwelling,
outgrowing guest. The process is as uncontrived as the unfolding of an
acorn into an oak.

I fear that Mr. Björkman's definition of art, if he have one, needs
expansion. The so-called art which he wishes to have encouraged as
something geographically local is an imitation which probably would
suffice in a petty world of orthodox socialism, where writing was a kind
of sociological business. Since unmistakable art is born, not
manufactured or induced, it were folly to try to nurture it. Unborn art
is nurtured by an inner sap; it cannot be fed on sedative pap. It always
has been and always will be born of suffering, in unexpected, unprepared
places, like all its wild and wonderful kin. Eugenics cannot be applied
to its unfathomable heredity.

The soul of a nation is not in its literature but in its contemporary
life. Literatures haven't souls, even if, haply, they have considerable
vitality or permanence. Literatures are intricate autobiographies, vague
symbols of personal feeling, lifted by a modicum of consciousness into
mystic articulation. The great literatures that are on the way will be
more and more psychological. What people call love in the world of
realism will play a sublimer part in the world of consciousness. Prose
and poetry in which our conscious life is more intimately portrayed will
challenge and in a million years increase consciousness, so that through
emphasis and use this later acquisition of the race will transmute
information into perfect organic knowledge. A larger consciousness will
break up the chaos of unnumbered antagonisms in human relationships. The
literature of description and the blind play of instinct has served its
purpose and had its day. The literature of the future must deal with a
vaster world than that in which animals prey upon one another. Such a
literature will not bear the name of a man, a state, a nation, or an
age.

We are opposed to the whole idea of nationalism; we even object to
worldliness in literature; we want something still bigger: a literature
with a sense of the planets in it. In this new day it is too late to
fuss about nations, geographical literatures, and races. We are called
toward the universe and mankind. In this land of blended nationalities
our hope is to evolve a literature vitalized by the blood of
multitudinous races and linked in pedigree with the infinite ages of the
past. Walt Whitman's poetry was cosmic; the new poetry will extend to
the planets. The summit of Parnassus now rests in the gloom of the
valley, and the poet of the future will look down from the higher
eminence to which science has called him. Man today soars in flying
machines in the old realm of his young imagination. Poets must outreach
mere science.

What little patriots call a nation is a huge dogma that must be
overcome. In poetry there must be an increasingly larger sense of the
universe instead of nations as man's habitation. National literatures
are exclusive of and alien to one another; they should be interrelated
and fundamentally combinable. There can be no local literature if the
thought of the world is embodied in it, and any other quality of
literature must lack integrity. Wild dreamers insist upon a literature
that shall be superior to political boundaries. The idea of nationalism
involves the setting up of barriers and the fossilizing of life. It is a
small idea that belongs to the dark ages. If we are ever to expand in
feeling, thought, and achievement we must rise above nations into the
starry spaces. We shall at least be citizens of the world, and, if
citizens of the world, then truth-seekers beyond the reach of land and
sea.

The little question put to President Wilson by Mr. Björkman cannot
escape a negative answer, unless through petty exclusions and barbaric
insularities we continue trying to organize, cement, and perpetuate a
nation--that smug dream of our forefathers who reeked with selfishness
and reveled in a freedom that at the core was slavery. Statehood must
give way to a universal brotherhood. And if this were achieved it would
still be idle twaddle to talk about "providing money for the poet's
purse and laurels for his brow"; for a poet--I am not thinking of facile
versifiers, who are capable of intoxicating emotional persons with
philological colors and sensuous music--is rewarded not by money but by
understanding, and he fashions his own laurel, even as the sea pink
crowns itself with its ample glory. The kind of poet whose measure is
taken by Mr. Björkman's pale solicitude is already generously provided
for by an unpoetic public, and there awaits his moist brow a laurel of
uncritical, national homage.

Whitman, chanter of the earth's major note, and Blake, exquisite singer
of its subtlest minors, are clearly recognizable mutations. Apart from
the work of four or five men English verse falls into infinite grades of
imitative excellence and mediocrity. The best of it is highly finished
manufactured or in part reproduced art, obedient to a commercial age, in
which little men with renowned names gossip about nations, and worship
the god of utility.

Poetry of the highest quality--great enough to burst a language--is the
outflow of the unconfinable passion of exceedingly rare individualities
that can be neither encouraged nor discouraged by any external
condition. They are vagrant leaps of life, wild with the creative power
of projecting variety. They come off the common stock as new forms
having many characteristics common to their ancestors but expressing
their unlikeness in mental or physiological development. Real poets are
genuine "sports" or mutations; near-poets are made by cultivation. As a
nation grows old and the impact of its culture upon all classes of
people increases, the greater its production of so-called classical art;
but this has nothing to do with what I mean by poetry.

What is popularly termed poetry may represent sincere work; it may
answer to all the technical requirements of versification; it may
possess a sheen of word-music; it may contain deep, subtle thought, and
yet, despite all these customary earmarks, it is not real poetry. To be
sure, thousands of critics will acclaim it as authentic, and lecturers
will quote it as beautiful wisdom, but it is soon lost to eye and
memory. And in a large sense this must be true of the greatest poetry.

One reason why we haven't more and better contemporary poetry and prose
is that we are under the tyranny of so-called masters. It is foolishly
assumed that masterpieces are finalities in their fields. By talking,
writing, and teaching this absurdity we set up popular prejudices
against vital work of our own time, so that even literary artists, with
an alleged sharp eye for genius, cannot identify an outstanding genius
when it appears before them. Only that poetry or prose which is a
reminder of or is almost as good as a celebrity's work is accepted as
art. We thus evolve "forms of appraisal" or standards with which we try
to hammer rebels and geniuses into line. The artist who, confident,
fearless, ample, and resolute, can go through this acid test without
compromise (fighting, even dying, for his vision) is the hope of men. He
does not ask for anything; he is a god; the gods merely command--not
always posthumously--and all the world is theirs.

It is quite possible to encourage the profession of writing verse and
prose by making the road easier and the goal more attractive for the
weaklings who whine for nationalized alms, to enable them to pursue a
craft; but literature in the big sense is created by all sorts of men
and women who cannot withhold it, let the world approve, condemn, or
ignore. Hence literature is incapable of encouragement.

In his Gleams, which are the most intimately personal things that he has
published, Mr. Björkman reiterates the conviction that artists ought to
have a better chance than they now enjoy to express themselves. For
instance, he says:

   He who is to minister to men's souls should have time and chance
   to acquire one for himself.

And this:

   The children will build up the New Kingdom as soon as they are
   given a chance.

These extracts from his Gleams taken in connection with our concluding
quotation from his Century article indicate if they do not prove that
Mr. Björkman regards artists as meticulous persons who must be coaxed,
humored, coddled, and rewarded in order to incite them to creative
activity. Obviously he means craftsmen when he uses the word artists. An
artist is impelled to do his work, which is his pain, joy, and passion.
If life is made easy for him the chances are that he will lose his
independence and power, and descend to a popular success. Stevenson
could not endure prosperity; once a man, accustomed to a hard, uphill
road--he did his noblest work then--a sentimental public made it so easy
for him that he eventually grew fairly Tennysonian in his output of
pretty trifles.

A literature worthy of the name might address itself, in Whitman's
words, to authors who would be themselves in life and art:

   I do not offer the old smooth prizes, but offer rough new prizes;

   You shall not heap up what is call'd riches,

   You shall scatter with lavish hand all that you earn or achieve,

   You but arrive at the city to which you were destin'd--you hardly
   settle yourself to satisfaction, before you are call'd by an
   irresistible call to depart.




                     The Challenge of Emma Goldman


                          MARGARET C. ANDERSON

Emma Goldman has been lecturing in Chicago, and various kinds of people
have been going to hear her. I have heard her twice--once before the
audience of well-dressed women who flock to her drama lectures and don't
know quite what to think of her, and once at the International Labor
Hall before a crowd of anarchists and syndicalists and socialists, most
of whom were collarless but who knew very emphatically what they thought
of her and of her ideas. I came away with a series of impressions, every
one of which resolved somehow into a single conviction: that here was a
great woman.

The drama audience might have been dolls, for all they appeared to
understand what was going on. One of them went up to Miss Goldman
afterward and tried, almost petulantly, to explain why she believed in
property and wealth. She was utterly serious. No one could have
convinced her that there was any humor in the situation; that she might
as well try to work up a fervor of war enthusiasm in Carnegie as to
expect Emma Goldman to sympathize in the sanctity of property. The
second audience, after listening to a talk on anti-Christianity, got to
its feet and asked intelligent questions. Men with the faces of fanatics
and martyrs waved their arms in their excitement pro and con; some one
tried to prove that Nietzsche had an unscientific mind; a suave lawyer
stated that Miss Goldman was profoundly intellectual, but that her talk
was destructive--to which she replied that it would require another
lawyer to unravel his inconsistency; and then some one established
forcibly that the only real problem in the universe was that of three
meals a day.

Most people who read and think have become enlightened about anarchism.
They know that anarchists are usually timid, thoughtful, unviolent
people; that dynamite is a part of their intellectual, not their
physical, equipment; and that the goal for which they are
striving--namely, individual human freedom--is one for which we might
all strive with credit. But for the benefit of those who regard Emma
Goldman as a public menace, and for those who simply don't know what to
make of her--like that fashionable feminine audience--it may be
interesting to look at her in a new way.

To begin with, why not take her quite simply? She's a simple person.
She's natural. In any civilization it requires genius to be really
simple and natural. It's one of the most subtle, baffling, and agonizing
struggles we go through--this trying to attain the quality that ought to
be easiest of all attainment because we were given it to start with.
What a commentary on civilization!--that one can regain his original
simplicity only through colossal effort. Nietzsche calls it the three
metamorphoses of the spirit: "how the spirit becometh a camel, the camel
a lion, and the lion at last a child."

And Emma Goldman has struggled through these stages. She has taken her
"heavy load-bearing spirit" into the wilderness, like the camel; become
lord of that wilderness, captured freedom for new creating, like the
lion; and then created new values, said her Yea to life, like the child.
Somehow Zarathustra kept running through my mind as I listened to her
that afternoon.

Emma Goldman preaches and practises the philosophy of freedom; she
pushes through the network of a complicated society as if it were a
cobweb instead of a steel structure; she brushes the cobwebs from her
eyes and hair and calls back to the less daring ones that the air is
more pure up there and "sunrise sometimes visible." Someone has put it
this way: "Repudiating as she does practically every tenet of what the
modern state holds good, she stands for some of the noblest traits in
human nature." And no one who listens to her thoughtfully, whatever his
opinion of her creed, will deny that she has nobility. Such qualities as
courage--dauntless to the point of heartbreak; as sincerity, reverence,
high-mindedness, self-reliance, helpfulness, generosity, strength, a
capacity for love and work and life--all these are noble qualities, and
Emma Goldman has them in the nth power. She has no pale traits like
tact, gentleness, humility, meekness, compromise. She has "a hard, kind
heart" instead of "a soft, cruel one." And she's such a splendid
fighter!

What is she fighting for? For the same things, concretely, that
Nietzsche and Max Stirner fought for abstractly. She has nothing to say
that they have not already said, perhaps; but the fact that she says it
instead of putting it into books, that she hurls it from the platform
straight into the minds and hearts of the eager, bewildered, or
unfriendly people who listen to her, gives her personality and her
message a unique value. She says it with the same unflinching violence
to an audience of capitalists as to her friends the workers. And the
substance of her gospel--I speak merely from the impressions of those
two lectures and the very little reading I've done of her published
work--is something of this sort:

Radical changes in society, releasement from present injustices and
miseries, can come about not through reform but through change; not
through a patching up of the old order, but through a tearing down and a
rebuilding. This process involves the repudiation of such "spooks" as
Christianity, conventional morality, immortality, and all other "myths"
that stand as obstacles to progress, freedom, health, truth, and beauty.
One thus achieves that position beyond good and evil for which Nietzsche
pleaded. But it is more fair to use Miss Goldman's own words. In writing
of the failure of Christianity, for instance, she says:

   I believe that Christianity is most admirably adapted to the
   training of slaves, to the perpetuation of a slave society; in
   short, to the very conditions confronting us today. Indeed, never
   could society have degenerated to its present appalling stage if
   not for the assistance of Christianity.... No doubt I will be
   told that, though religion is a poison and institutionalized
   Christianity the greatest enemy of progress and freedom, there is
   some good in Christianity itself. What about the teachings of
   Christ and early Christianity, I may be asked; do they not stand
   for the spirit of humanity, for right, and justice?

   It is precisely this oft-repeated contention that induced me to
   choose this subject, to enable me to demonstrate that the abuses
   of Christianity, like the abuses of government, are conditioned
   in the thing itself, and are not to be charged to the
   representatives of the creed. Christ and his teachings are the
   embodiment of inertia, of the denial of life; hence responsible
   for the things done in their name.

   I am not interested in the theological Christ. Brilliant minds
   like Bauer, Strauss, Renan, Thomas Paine, and others refuted that
   myth long ago. I am even ready to admit that the theological
   Christ is not half so dangerous as the ethical and social Christ.
   In proportion as science takes the place of blind faith, theology
   loses its hold. But the ethical and poetical Christ-myth has so
   thoroughly saturated our lives, that even some of the most
   advanced minds find it difficult to emancipate themselves from
   its yoke. They have rid themselves of the letter, but have
   retained the spirit; yet it is the spirit which is back of all
   the crimes and horrors committed by orthodox Christianity. The
   Fathers of the Church can well afford to preach the gospel of
   Christ. It contains nothing dangerous to the régime of authority
   and wealth; it stands for self-denial and self-abnegation, for
   penance and regret, and is absolutely inert in the face of every
   indignity, every outrage imposed upon mankind.... Many otherwise
   earnest haters of slavery and injustice confuse, in a most
   distressing manner, the teachings of Christ with the great
   struggles for social and economic emancipation. The two are
   irrevocably and forever opposed to each other. The one
   necessitates courage, daring, defiance, and strength. The other
   preaches the gospel of non-resistance, of slavish acquiescence in
   the will of others; it is the complete disregard of character and
   self-reliance, and, therefore, destructive of liberty and
   well-being....

   The public career of Christ begins with the edict, "Repent, for
   the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand."

   Why repent, why regret, in the face of something that was
   supposed to bring deliverance? Had not the people suffered and
   endured enough; had they not earned their right to deliverance by
   their suffering? Take the Sermon on the Mount, for instance; what
   is it but a eulogy on submission to fate, to the inevitability of
   things?

   "Blessed are the poor in spirit...."

   Heaven must be an awfully dull place if the poor in spirit live
   there. How can anything creative, anything vital, useful, and
   beautiful, come from the poor in spirit? The idea conveyed in the
   Sermon on the Mount is the greatest indictment against the
   teachings of Christ, because it sees in the poverty of mind and
   body a virtue, and because it seeks to maintain this virtue by
   reward and punishment. Every intelligent being realizes that our
   worst curse is the poverty of the spirit; that it is productive
   of all evil and misery, of all the injustice and crimes in the
   world.

   "Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth."

   What a preposterous notion! What incentive to slavery,
   inactivity, and parasitism. Besides, it is not true that the meek
   can inherit anything.

   "Blessed are ye when men shall revile you ... for great is your
   reward in heaven."

   The reward in heaven is the perpetual bait, a bait that has
   caught man in an iron net, a strait-jacket which does not let him
   expand or grow. All pioneers of truth have been, and still are,
   reviled. But did they ask humanity to pay the price? Did they
   seek to bribe mankind to accept their ideas?... Redemption
   through the Cross is worse than damnation, because of the
   terrible burden it imposes upon humanity, because of the effect
   it has on the human soul, fettering and paralyzing it with the
   weight of the burden exacted through the death of Christ....

   The teachings of Christ and of his followers have failed because
   they lacked the vitality to lift the burdens from the shoulders
   of the race; they have failed because the very essence of that
   doctrine is contrary to the spirit of life, opposed to the
   manifestation of nature, to the strength and beauty of passion.

And so on. In her dissolution of other "myths"--such as that of
morality, for instance,--she has even more direct things to say. I quote
from a lecture on Victims of Morality:

   It is Morality which condemns woman to the position of a
   celibate, a prostitute, or a reckless, incessant breeder of
   children.

   First as to the celibate, the famished and withered human plant.
   When still a young, beautiful flower, she falls in love with a
   respectable young man. But Morality decrees that unless he can
   marry the girl, she must never know the raptures of love, the
   ecstasy of passion. The respectable young man is willing to
   marry, but the Property Morality, the Family and Social
   Moralities decree that he must first make his pile, must save up
   enough to establish a home and be able to provide for a family.
   The young people must wait, often many long, weary years.... And
   the young flower, with every fiber aglow with the love of life?
   She develops headaches, insomnia, hysteria; grows embittered,
   quarrelsome, and soon becomes a faded, withered, joyless being, a
   nuisance to herself and every one else.... Hedged in her narrow
   confines with family and social tradition, guarded by a thousand
   eyes, afraid of her own shadow--the yearning of her inmost being
   for the man or the child, she must turn to cats, dogs, canary
   birds, or the Bible class.

   Now as to the prostitute. In spite of laws, ordinances,
   persecution, and prisons; in spite of segregation, registration,
   vice crusades, and other similar devices, the prostitute is the
   real specter of our age.... What has made her? Whence does she
   come? Morality, the morality which is merciless in its attitude
   to women. Once she dares to be herself, to be true to her nature,
   to life, there is no return; the woman is thrust out from the
   pale and protection of society. The prostitute becomes the victim
   of Morality, even as the withered old maid is its victim. But the
   prostitute is victimized by still other forces, foremost among
   them the Property Morality, which compels woman to sell herself
   as a sex commodity or in the sacred fold of matrimony. The latter
   is no doubt safer, more respected, more recognized, but of the
   two forms of prostitution the girl of the street is the least
   hypocritical, the least debased, since her trade lacks the pious
   mask of hypocrisy, and yet she is hounded, fleeced, outraged, and
   shunned by the very powers that have made her: the financier, the
   priest, the moralist, the judge, the jailer, and the detective,
   not to forget her sheltered, respectably virtuous sister, who is
   the most relentless and brutal in her persecution of the
   prostitute.

   Morality and its victim, the mother--what a terrible picture! Is
   there, indeed, anything more terrible, more criminal, than our
   glorified sacred function of motherhood? The woman, physically
   and mentally unfit to be a mother, yet condemned to breed; the
   woman, economically taxed to the very last spark of energy, yet
   forced to breed; the woman, tied to a man she loathes, yet made
   to breed; the woman, worn and used-up from the process of
   procreation, yet coerced to breed, more, ever more. What a
   hideous thing, this much-lauded motherhood!

   With the economic war raging all around her, with strife, misery,
   crime, disease, and insanity staring her in the face, with
   numberless little children ground into gold dust, how can the
   self and race-conscious woman become a mother? Morality cannot
   answer this question. It can only dictate, coerce, or
   condemn--and how many women are strong enough to face this
   condemnation, to defy the moral dicta? Few indeed. Hence they
   fill the factories, the reformatories, the homes for
   feeble-minded, the prisons.... Oh, Motherhood, what crimes are
   committed in thy name! What hosts are laid at your feet.
   Morality, destroyer of life!

   Fortunately, the Dawn is emerging from the chaos and darkness....
   Through her re-born consciousness as a unit, a personality, a
   race builder, woman will become a mother only if she desires the
   child, and if she can give to the child, even before its birth,
   all that her nature and intellect can yield ... above all,
   understanding, reverence, and love, which is the only fertile
   soil for new life, a new being.

I have talked lately with a man who thinks Emma Goldman ought to have
been hanged long ago. She's directly or indirectly "responsible" for so
many crimes. "Do you know what she's trying to do?" I asked him.

"She's trying to break up our government," he responded heatedly.

"Have you ever read any of her ideas?"

"No."

"Have you ever heard her lecture?"

"No! I should say not."

In a play, that line would get a laugh. (It did in Man and Superman.)
But in life it fares better. It gets serious consideration; it even has
a certain prestige as a rather righteous thing to say.

Another man threw himself into the argument. "I know very little about
Emma Goldman," he said, "but it has always struck me that she's simply
trying to inflame people--particularly to do things that she'd never
think of doing herself." That charge can be answered best by a study of
her life, which will show that she has spent her time doing things that
almost no one else would dare to do.

In his Women as World Builders Floyd Dell said this: "Emma Goldman has
become simply an advocate of freedom of every sort. She does not
advocate violence any more than Ralph Waldo Emerson advocated violence.
It is, in fact, as an essayist and speaker of the kind, if not the
quality, of Emerson, Thoreau, and George Francis Train, that she is to
be considered." I think, rather, that she is to be considered
fundamentally as something more definite than that:--as a practical
Nietzschean.

I am incapable of listening, unaroused, to the person who believes
something intensely, and who does intensely what she believes. What more
simple--or more difficult? Most of us don't know what we believe, or, if
we do, we have the most extraordinary time trying to live it. Emma
Goldman is so bravely consistent--which to many people is a confession
of limitations. But if one is going to criticise her there are more
subtle grounds to do it on. One of her frequent assertions is that she
has no use for religion. That is like saying that one has no use for
poetry: religion isn't merely a matter of Christianity or Catholicism or
Buddhism or any other classifiable quantity. Also, if it is true that
the person to be distrusted is the one who has found an answer to the
riddle, then Emma Goldman is to be discounted. Her convictions are
presented with a sense of definite finality. But there's something
splendidly uncautious, something irresistibly stirring, about such an
attitude. And whatever one believes, of one thing I'm certain: whoever
means to face the world and its problems intelligently must know
something about Emma Goldman. Whether her philosophy will change the
face of the earth isn't the supreme issue. As the enemy of all smug
contentment, of all blind acquiescence in things as they are, and as the
prophet who dares to preach that our failures are not in wrong
applications of values but in the values themselves, Emma Goldman is the
most challenging spirit in America.

   No sooner is a thing brought to sight than it is swept by and
   another takes its place, and this, too, will be swept away....
   Observe always that everything is the result of a change, ... get
   used to thinking that there is nothing Nature loves so well as to
   change existing forms and to make new ones like them.--Marcus
   Aurelius.




                               Chloroform


                  MARY ALDIS AND ARTHUR DAVISON FICKE

       A sickening odour, treacherously sweet,
   Steals through my sense heavily.
   Above me leans an ominous shape,
   Fearful, white-robed, hooded and masked in white.
   The pits of his eyes
   Peer like the port-holes of an armoured ship,
   Merciless, keen, inhuman, dark.
   The hands alone are of my kindred;
   Their slender strength, that soon shall press the knife
   Silver and red, now lingers slowly above me,
   The last links with my human world ...

       ... The living daylight
   Clouds and thickens.
   Flashes of sudden clearness stream before me,--and then
   A menacing wave of darkness
   Swallows the glow with floods of vast and indeterminate grey.
   But in the flashes
   I see the white form towering,
   Dim, ominous,
   Like some apostate monk whose will unholy
   Has renounced God; and now
   In this most awful secret laboratory
   Would wring from matter
   Its stark and appalling answer.
   At the gates of a bitter hell he stands, to wrest with eager fierceness
   More of that dark forbidden knowledge
   Wherefrom his soul draws fervor to deny.

       The clouds have grown thicker; they sway around me
   Dizzying, terrible, gigantic, pressing in upon me
   Like a thousand monsters of the deep with formless arms.
   I cannot push them back, I cannot!
   From far, far off, a voice I knew long ago
   Sounds faintly thin and clear.
   Suddenly in a desperate rebellion I strive to answer,--
   I strive to call aloud.--
   But darkness chokes and overcomes me:
   None may hear my soundless cry.
   A depth abysmal opens
   And receives, enfolds, engulfs me,--
   Wherein to sink at last seems blissful
   Even though to deeper pain....

       O respite and peace of deliverance!
   The silence
   Lies over me like a benediction.
   As in the earth's first pale creation-morn
   Among winds and waters holy
   I am borne as I longed to be borne.
   I am adrift in the depths of an ocean grey
   Like seaweed, desiring solely
   To drift with the winds and waters; I sway
   Into their vast slow movements; all the shores
   Of being are laved by my tides.
   I am drawn out toward spaces wonderful and holy
   Where peace abides,
   And into golden aeons far away.

       But over me
   Where I swing slowly
   Bodiless in the bodiless sea,
   Very far,
   Oh very far away,
   Glimmeringly
   Hangs a ghostly star
   Toward whose pure beam I must flow resistlessly.
   Well do I know its ray!
   It is the light beyond the worlds of space,
   By groping sorrowing man yet never known--
   The goal where all men's blind and yearning desire
   Has vainly longed to go
   And has not gone:--
   Where Eternity has its blue-walled dwelling-place,
   And the crystal ether opens endlessly
   To all the recessed corners of the world,
   Like liquid fire
   Pouring a flood through the dimness revealingly;
   Where my soul shall behold, and in lightness of wonder rise higher
   Out of the shadow that long ago
   Around me with mortality was furled.

       I rise where have winds
   Of the night never flown;
   Shaken with rapture
   Is the vault of desire.
   The weakness that binds
   Like a shadow is gone.
   The bonds of my capture
   Are sundered with fire!

       This is the hour
   When the wonders open!
   The lightning-winged spaces
   Through which I fly
   Accept me, a power
   Whose prisons are broken--

                   *       *       *       *       *

       ... But the wonder wavers--
   The light goes out.
   I am in the void no more; changes are imminent.
   Time with a million beating wings
   Deafens the air in migratory flight
   Like the roar of seas--and is gone ...
   And a silence
   Lasts deafeningly.
   In darkness and perfect silence
   I wander groping in my agony,
   Far from the light lost in the upper ether--
   Unknown, unknowable, so nearly mine.
   And the ages pass by me,
   Thousands each instant, yet I feel them all
   To the last second of their dragging time.
   Thus have I striven always
   Since the world began.
   And when it dies I still must struggle ...

                   *       *       *       *       *

       The voice I knew so long ago, like a muffled echo under the sea
   Is coming nearer.
   Strong hands
   Grip mine.
   And words whose tones are warm with some forgotten consolation,
   Some unintelligible hope,
   Drag me upward in horrible mercy;
   And the cold once-familiar daylight glares into my eyes.

       He stands there,
   The white apostate monk,
   Speaking low lying words to soothe me.
   And I lift my voice out of its vales of agony
   And laugh in his face,
   Mocking him with astonishment of wonder.
   For he has denied;
   And I have come so near, so near to knowing ...

       Then as his hand touches me gently, I am drawn up from the
          lonely abysses,
   And suffer him to lead me back into the green valleys of the living.




                             "True to Life"


                              EDITH WYATT

A recent sincere and beautiful greeting from Mr. John Galsworthy to THE
LITTLE REVIEW suggests that the creative artist and the creative critic
in America may wisely heed a saying of de Maupassant about a writer
"sitting down before an object until he has seen it in the way that he
alone can see it, seen it with the part of him which makes him This man
and not That."

Mr. Galsworthy adds: "And I did seem to notice in America that there was
a good deal of space and not much time; and that without too much danger
of becoming 'Yogis,' people might perhaps sit down a little longer in
front of things than they seemed to do."

What native observer of American writing will not welcome the justice of
this comment? Surely the contemporary American poems, novels, tales, and
critiques which express an individual and attentively-considered
impression of any subject from our own life here are few: and these not,
it would appear, greatly in vogue. Why? Everyone will have his own
answer.

In replying to the first part of the question--why closely-considered
individual impressions of our life are few--I think it should be said
that the habit of respect for close attention of any kind is not among
the American virtues. The visitor of our political conventions, the
reader of our "literary criticism" must have noted a prevailing,
shuffling, and perfunctory mood of casual disregard for the matter in
hand. Many American people are indeed reared to suppose that if they
appear to bestow an interested attention on the matter before them, some
misunderstanding will ensue as to their own social importance. Nearly
everyone must have noted with a sinking of the heart this attitude
towards the public among library attendants, hotel-clerks, and plumbers.
This abstraction is not, however, confined to the pursuers of any
occupation, but to some degree affects us all. In the consciousness of
our nation there appears to exist a mysterious though deep-seated awe
for the prestige of the casual and the off-hand.

Especially we think it an unworthiness in an author that he should, as
the phrase is, "take himself seriously." We consider the attitude we
have described as characterizing library attendants and hotel-clerks as
the only correct one for writers--the attitude of a person doing
something as it were unconsciously, a matter he pooh-poohs and scarcely
cares to expend his energy and time upon in the grand course of his
personal existence. You may hear plenty of American authors talk of "not
taking themselves seriously" who, if they spoke with accuracy, should
say that they regarded themselves as too important and precious to
exhaust themselves by doing their work with conscience.

This dull self-importance insidiously saps in our country the respect
for thoroughness and application characteristic of Germany; insidiously
blunts in American penetrative powers the English faculty of being
"keen" on a subject, recently presented to us with such grace in the
young hero's eager pursuits in Compton Mackenzie's Sinister Street; and
disparages lightly but often completely the growth of the fresh and
varied spirit of production described in the passage of de Maupassant to
which Mr. Galsworthy refers. This passage expresses the clear fire of
attention our American habits lack, with a sympathy it is a pleasure to
quote here in its entirety. De Maupassant says in the preface of Pierre
et Jean:

   For seven years I wrote verses, I wrote stories, I wrote novels.
   I even wrote a detestable play. Of these nothing survives. The
   master (Flaubert) read them all, and on the following Sunday at
   luncheon he would give me his criticism, and inculcate little by
   little two or three principles that sum up his long and patient
   lesson. "If one has any originality, the first thing requisite is
   to bring it out: if one has none, the first thing to be done is
   to acquire it."

   Talent is long patience. Everything which one desires to express
   must be considered with sufficient attention and during a
   sufficiently long time to discover in it some aspect which no one
   has yet seen or described. In everything there is still some spot
   unexplored, because we are accustomed to look at things only with
   the recollection of what others before us have thought of the
   subject we are contemplating. The smallest object contains
   something unknown. Let us find it. In order to describe a fire
   that flames and a tree on the plain, we must keep looking at that
   flame and that tree until to our eyes they no longer resemble any
   other tree, or any other fire.

   This is the way to become original.

   Having besides laid down this truth that there are not in the
   whole world two grains of sand, two specks, two hands, or two
   noses alike, Flaubert compelled me to describe in a few phrases a
   being or an object in such a manner as to clearly particularize
   it, and distinguish it from all the other beings or all the other
   objects of the same race, or the same species. "When you pass,"
   he would say, "a grocer seated at his shop door, a janitor
   smoking his pipe, a stand of hackney coaches, show me that grocer
   and that janitor, their attitude, their whole physical
   appearance, including also by a skilful description their whole
   moral nature so that I cannot confound them with any other grocer
   or any other janitor: make me see, in one word, that a certain
   cab-horse does not resemble the fifty others that follow or
   precede it."

One underlying reason why American writers so seldom pursue such studies
and methods as these is the prevailing disesteem for clearly-focussed
attention we have described. Another reason is that the American writer
of fiction who loves the pursuit of precise expression will indubitably
have to face a number of difficulties which may perhaps not be readily
apparent to the writers of other countries.

Naturally enough, in his more newly-settled, or rather his settling,
nation, made up of many nationalities, the American writer who desires
to "particularize" a subject from his country's contemporary history,
and "to distinguish this from all the other beings and all the other
objects of the same race," will have many more heretofore unexpressed
conditions and basic circumstances to evoke in his reader's mind than
the German or French or English writer must summon.

For instance, the young French writer of de Maupassant's narrative who
was to call up out of the deep of European life the individuality of one
single French grocer, would himself have and would address an audience
who had--whether for better or worse (to my way of thinking, as it
chances, for worse)--a fairly fixed social conception of the class of
this retail merchant. The American writer who knows very well that
General Grant once kept an unsuccessful shoe store, and that some of the
most distinguished paintings the country possesses have been selected by
the admirably-educated taste and knowledge of one or two public-spirited
retail dry-goods merchants; and who also has seen gaunt and
poverty-stricken Russian store-keepers standing among stalls of rotten
strawberries in Jefferson Street market, in Chicago--that writer will
neither speak from nor address this definite social conception according
to mere character of occupation which I have indicated as a part of the
French author's means of exactitude in expression.

Nothing in our own random civilization, as it seems to me, is quite so
fixed as that French grocer seated in his doorway, that de Maupassant
and Flaubert mention with such charm. Nothing here is so neat as that.
To convey social truth, the American writer interested in giving his own
impression of a grocer in America, whether rich or poor or moderately
prospering, will have to individualize him and all his surrounding
condition more, and to classify him and all his surrounding condition
less, than de Maupassant does, to convey the social truth his own
inimitable sketches impart.

Again, ours is a very changing population. Its movement of life through
one of our cities is attended with various and choppy and many-toned
sounds communicating a varied rhythm of its own. To return to our figure
of the retail tradesman--if this tradesman be in Chicago, for instance,
he may neither be expressed clearly by typical classifications, nor
shown without a genuine error in historical perspective against a static
street background and trade life. This background must have change and
motion, unless the writer is to copy into his own picture some foreign
author's rendition of a totally different place and state of human
existence. The tune of the story's text, too, should repeat for the
reader's inward ear the special experience of truth the author has
perceived, the special ragged sound and rhythm of the motion of life he
has heard telling the tale of that special place.

May one add what is only too obvious, and said because I think it may
serve to explain in some degree why individual impressions of American
life are not greatly encouraged in this country? It will be quite plain
that such a limpid, clear-spaced, reverent style and stilled background
as speaks in one of Mr. Galsworthy's stories the tragedy of a London
shoe-maker's commercial ruin, would be false to all these values. It
will be quite plain that such a bright, hard, definite manner as that
which states with perfection the life of the circles of the petty
government-official and his wife in The Necklace would be powerless to
convey some of the elements we have selected as characterizing the
American subject we have tried to suggest.

But many American reviewers and professional readers and publishers, who
suppose themselves to be devoted to "realism" and to writing of
"radical" tendency, believe not at all that the realistic writer should
adopt de Maupassant's method and incarnate for us his own American
vision of the life he sees here, but simply that he should imitate the
manner of de Maupassant. Many such American reviewers and professional
readers and publishers believe not at all that the radical writer should
find and represent for us some unseen branching root of certain American
social phenomena which he himself has detected, but simply that he
should copy some excellent drawing of English roots by Mr. Galsworthy,
or of Russian roots by Gorky.

The craze for imitation in American writing is almost unbelievably
pervasive. The author here, who is devoted to the attempt to speak his
own truth--and the more devoted he is the more reverently, I believe,
will he regard all other authors' truth as theirs and derived exactly
from their own point of view--will find opposed to him not only the
great body of conventional romanticists and conservatives who will think
he ought to stereotype and conventionalize his work into a poor, dulled
contemporary imitation of the delightful narratives of Sir Walter Scott.
He will also find opposed to him the great body of conventional
"realists" and "radicals" who will think he ought to stereotype and
conventionalize his work into a poor, blurred imitation of the keen
narratives of Mr. H. G. Wells.

Sometimes these counsellors, not content with commending a copied
manner, seriously urge--one might think at the risk of advising
plagiarism--that the American author simply transplant the social ideas
of some admirable foreign artist to one of our own local scenes. Thus, a
year or two ago, in one of our critical journals, I saw the writer of a
novel about Indiana state politicians severely blamed for not making the
same observations on the subject that Mr. Wells had made about English
national parliamentary life in The New Machiavelli. Not long since
another American reviewer of "radical" tendency harshly censured the
author of a novel about American under-graduate life in a New York
college, because the daughter of the college president uttered views of
sex and marriage unlike those expressed in Ann Veronica.

This sort of criticism--equally unflattering and obtuse, it appears to
me, in its perception of the special characterizations of Mr. Wells's
thoughtful pages, and in its counsel to the artist depicting an
alien topic to insert extraneous and unrelated views in his
landscape--proceeds from a certain strange and ridiculous conception of
truth peculiar to many persons engaged in the great fields of our
literary criticism and of our publishing and political activities.

This is a conception of truth not at all as something capable of
irradiating any scene on the globe, like light; but as some very
definite and limited force, driving a band-wagon. People who possess
this conception of truth seem to argue very reasonably that if Mr. Wells
is "in" it, so to speak, with truth, and is saying "the thing" to say
about sex or about the liberal party, then the intelligent author
anywhere who desires to be "in" it with truth will surely get into this
band-wagon of Mr. Wells's and stand on the very planks he has placed in
the platform of its particular wagonbed. It is an ironical, if tragic,
comment on the intelligence of American reading that the driver I have
chanced to see most frequently urged for authors here should be Mr. H.
G. Wells, who has done probably more than any other living writer of
English to encourage varied specialistic and non-partisan expression.

We have said that to tell his own truth the American writer will have to
sit longer before his subject and will have more to do to express it,
than if he chose it from a country of more ancient practices in art, and
of longer ancestral sojourns. We have said that he will be urged not to
tell his own truth considerably more than an English or German or French
writer would be. These authors are at least not advised to imitate
American expression, and they live in countries where the habit of
copying the work of other artists is much less widely regarded as an
evidence of sophistication than it is here.

The American writer must also face a marked historical peculiarity of
our national letters. The publishing centres of England and of Germany
and of France are in the midst of these nations. Outside the daily
press, the greater part of the publishing business of our own country is
in New York--situated in the northeast corner, nearly a continent away
from many of our national interests and from many millions of our
population. By an odd coincidence, outside the daily press, the field of
our national letters in magazine and book publication seems to be
occupied not at all with individual impressions of truth from over the
whole country, but with what may be called the New York truth.

The young American author in the Klondike or in San Francisco who
desires to sit long before his subject and to reveal its hitherto
unrecorded aspect must do so with the clear knowledge that the field of
publication for him in the East is already filled by our old friend the
New York Klondike, scarcely changed by the disappearance of one dog or
sweater from the early days of the gold discoveries; and that no
earthquake has shaken the New York San Francisco.

Of course we know, because she almost annually reassures the country on
these points, that New York instantly welcomes all original and fresh
writing arising from the remotest borders of the nation; and that in all
these matters she is not and never possibly could be dull. Yet one can
understand how the Klondike author, interested, as Mr. Galsworthy
advises, in seeing an object in "the way that he alone can see it" and
"with the part of him which makes him This man and not That," might feel
a trifle dashed by New York's way of showing her love of originality in
spending nearly all the money and energy her publishers and reviewers
have in advertising and in praising authors as the sixteenth Kipling of
the Klondike or the thirtieth O. Henry, of California. This is apt to be
bewildering, too, for the readers of Mr. Kipling and O. Henry, who have
enjoyed in the tales of each of these men the truth told "with the part
of him which makes him This man and not That." It is possible to
understand, too, how the young author in San Francisco may feel that
since New York's consciousness of his city has remained virtually
untouched for eight years by the greatest cataclysm of nature on our
continent, perhaps she overrates the extreme swiftness and sensitiveness
of her reaction to novel impression from without; and might conceivably
not hear a story of heretofore unexpressed aspects of San Francisco told
by the truthful voice of one young writer.

These are some of my own guesses as to why individual impressions of our
national life are few and why they are not greatly in vogue in America.
Whether they be poor or good guesses they represent one Middle Western
reader's observation of some of the actual difficulties that will have
to be faced in America by the writer who by temperament desires to
follow that golden and beautiful way of Flaubert's, which Mr. Galsworthy
has mentioned.

This writer will doubtless get from these difficulties far more fun than
he ever could have had without them. They are suggested here in the
pages of THE LITTLE REVIEW, not at all with the idea of discouraging a
single traveler from setting out on that splendid road, but rather as a
step towards the beginning of that true and long comradeship with effort
that is worth befriending which our felicitous English well-wisher hopes
may be THE LITTLE REVIEW'S abiding purpose.

"Henceforth I ask not Good Fortune: I, myself, am Good Fortune."




                               Impression


                              GEORGE SOULE

   Her life was late a new-built house--
   Empty, with shining window panes,
   Where neither sorrow nor carouse
   Had left red stains.

   A passing vagrant, least of men,
   Entered and used; her hearth-fire shone.
   She mellowed, he grew restless then--
   Left her alone.

   Now she is vacant as before,
   Desolate through the weary whiles;
   Yet play about the darkened door
   Shadows of smiles.




                              Art and Life


                          GEORGE BURMAN FOSTER

Odium theologicum--it is a deadly thing. But the ridicule and obloquy,
formerly characteristic of credal fanaticism, seem to have passed over
in recent years into the camp of art connoisseurs. No denying it, it was
a Homeric warfare that reverberated up and down the earth from land to
land, and from century to century, between what was ever the "old" faith
and the "new." In this year of grace, however, it is the disciples of
"classic" art--aureoled with the sanctity of some antiquity or
idealism--and "modern" art--in whatever nuance or novelty of most
disapproved and screaming modernity--who hereticize each other, who even
deny each other right of domicile, save, perhaps, in the unvisited
solitudes of interstellar spaces. To be sure, those august and frozen
solitudes of the everlasting nothing may be conceivably preferable to
the theological Inferno, though probably this question has not yet
received the attention from critics and philanthropists that its
importance would seem to merit.

At the outset it seemed as if the religious warfare had a certain
advantage over the esthetic--it agitated more people, and seized men in
their idiomatic and innermost interests, while, on the other side, but
small and select circles participated in partisan questions and
controversies respecting art. But it looks now as if it would soon be
the other way around. The people face religious problems with less and
less sympathy and understanding. But art, art of some kind and some
degree, they are keenly alive as to that, and quick to appraise or to
argue. The churches are ever emptier; the theatres, concert halls,
museums, "movies," ever fuller. A religious book--short of
epoch-making--finds, at best, only a reluctant and panicky publisher; a
new play, a new novel, see how many editions it passes through, how hard
it is to draw at the libraries, even after the staff and all their
friends and sweethearts have courteously had first chance at it!

Now, it is of no use to quarrel with this turn matters have taken. And
we miss the mark if we say that it is all bad. Off moments come to the
best of us when we grow a bit tired of being "uplifted" and "reformed."
Humanity has turned to art and, in doing so, has, on some side of its
life, moved forward apace, mounted to higher modes of existence, and,
whether the church knows it or not, along the steeps of Parnassus and in
the home of the muses has heard some music and caught some glimpses of
the not too distant fatherland of the divine and the eternal.

First-rate spirits of light and leading have pointed the way to a new
esthetic culture--prophetic spirits who in blackest night when deep
sleep had fallen upon most men saw the rosy-fingered dawn of our new
day. It was to be a day when beauty should be bidden to lead the dance
at the ball of life. There were serious philosophers--there was Kant,
who contemplated art as the keystone in the sublime structure which
modern knowledge and moral will should be summoned to erect in life.
There was Schopenhauer, to whom art was the unveiling of the riddle of
the world, the most intimate revelation of the divine mystery of life.
There was the hero of Baireuth, who, in his artistic creations, summed
up all the spiritual and moral forces of humanity, and made them
fruitful for the rebirth and fruition of our modern day.

Among these prophets of a new esthetic culture, Friedrich Nietzsche
occupies a quite special place, and influences the course of coming
events. As a most enthusiastic apostle of the gospel of a
world-redeeming art he first flung his fire-brand into the land, but
only to scorn and blaspheme soon thereafter the very gods he had
formerly so passionately worshipped; now degrading them to idols. His
faith in art, not this art or that, but in all art, in art as such,
pathetically wavered. Still the artist in him himself did not die; its
eye was undimmed and its bow abode in strength. And though he later
confronted every work of art with a malevolent and exasperating
interrogation, all this was only his pure and pellucid soul wrestling
for better and surer values, for new and nobler revelations, of the
artistic genius. Indeed, it was precisely in these interrogations that
he was at once our liberator and our leader--our liberator from the
frenzy into which the overfoaming enthusiasm as regards art had
transported men; our leader to a livelier, loftier beauty summoned to
the creation of the humanest, divinest robes for the adornment of
humanity as a whole.

The great movement and seething in the artistic life of our age
signifies at the same time a turning point in our entire cultural life.
This turning point discloses new perspective into vast illimitable
distances where new victories are to be achieved by new struggles. The
great diremption in our present world, making men sick and weak, calling
for relaxation and convalescence, appears at a definite stage as the
opposition between life and art. Life is serious, art is gay--so were we
taught. Seriousness and gaiety--it was the fatality of our time that
these could not be combined. So art and life were torn asunder. Art was
no serious matter, no vital matter, satisfying a true and necessary
human requirement. Art was a luxury, a sport, and since but few men were
in a position to avail themselves of such luxury, art came to be the
prerogative of a few rich people. Down at the bottom, in homes of want
and misery, life's tragedies were real and fearful; life was real,
indeed, life was earnest, indeed; at the top, however, pleasures claimed
the senses and thoughts of men; so much so, that even tragedies served
but to amuse; tragedies were an illusion of the senses, not realities of
life and pain. What God had joined together man had put asunder--and
there was art without life, life without art, and both art and life
suffering from ailments which neither understood.

There was a time when men worked, too, but it was a beautiful halcyon
time, when pleasure and joy throbbed in the very heart of the work
itself; when a sunny serenity suffused life's profoundest seriousness.
Art pervaded all life, active in all man's activities, present in every
nook and corner whither his vagrant feet wandered. Indeed, art was the
very life of man, revealing his strength, his freedom, his creativeness,
with which he fashioned things after his own image and according to his
own likeness. Every craftsman was an artist, every peasant a poet. Man
put his soul into all that he said and did, all that he lived; his work
was a work of art, his speech a song, his life beauty. No man lived by
bread alone; everyone heard and had a word that was the True Bread. His
cathedrals--domes of many-colored glass--preached it to him; his actors
sang it to him; even his priests were artists. With a sort of divine
humor, man thus subjected to himself all the anxiety and need of life.

Then, later, man came to think that he could live by bread alone. Even
the True Bread came to be mere bread--public influence; political power.
And then man's poor soul hungered. And when he longed for a Living Word
that was not mere bread, he was given printer's ink and the "sacred
letter" of the Bible. But this--ah, this was no soul's food. So the soul
lost its soul. Then, as man had no soul to work with, he had to work
with his head, his arms, his feet. Man ceased to be an artist who
breathes his living soul into his life, an artist who illumined all the
seriousness of life with the sunshine of his living love. Would he art,
he could not make it, he had to buy it. Could he not buy it, he had to
do without it. Thus, life became as jejune and rational as a Protestant
service, where, to be sure, there was no priest more, but also no
artist, only scribe and theologian--where religion became dogmatics,
faith a sum in arithmetic, Christianity a documentarily deposited
judicial process between God and man. To be sure, under certain
circumstances, decoration and color, even pomp and magnificence, may be
found in this church, but no living connection between the outward
appearance of these churches and their inner and peculiar service. Thus,
too, our private dwellings have lost living union between their
appointments and their inmates. What all are curious to know about these
houses is whether the men who dwell in them are rich or poor, not
whether they have souls, and what lives in their souls, should they have
any.

And because art had no soul of its own more, it became patronizing and
mendicant--coquetting for the favors of the rich and powerful, sitting
at their tables, perhaps even picking up the crumbs that fall beneath
the tables. Art, ah, art sought bread--mere bread--and adopted the sorry
principle that to get bread was the sacredest of all duties.

Art without life, life without art! Then came that mighty movement of
spirits to bring art and life together again, to reconquer and recreate
and reestablish a view of life in which man should learn to see and
achieve beauty once yet again. Of that movement, Friedrich Nietzsche was
the purest and intensest herald. Bold, fiery spirit, with words that
burn, he uttered what had been for a long time a soul-burden of all
deeper spirits. This burden of souls was that an art creation should go
on in every human life as its highest and holiest calling; that, without
the living effectuation of the artistic power of the human soul, all
human culture would serve but beastliness and barbarity.

To this end our poet-philosopher returns to the Urgrund, the abyss of
nature's life, from whose mysterious deep all tempestuous, wild impulses
tumble forth and struggle for form and expression in man. It is life
which seeks death in order to renew itself in the painful pleasure of
its destruction, perceived but then by man in the thrill of delight
which prepares the way for his most original eternal revelation. To
breed pleasure from pain; to suck forces of life from the most shocking
tragedies; to eavesdrop on the brink of the abysmal so as to fashion
sweet phantoms in the divine intoxication of the soul,--this is music,
this is art, in this, man struggles beyond and above his whole
contradictory nature, transfigures death, creates forms and figures in
which he celebrates his self-redemption from seriousness, from the curse
of existence. Here, at last, art is no sport, no fiddle-faddle, but at
once highest and gayest seriousness. It returns from the service of
death which it has performed, to its life, which it receives from "every
word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God." Herein lies the
over-powering, the prophetic, in this Nietzschean preaching of art. It
tells us that we are very far from comprehending life when we have but
measured its length and breadth with yardstick and square; that nature
is far different from what scholars have figured it out to be, or from
what investigators have seen of it with telescope and microscope. It
teaches us to listen to the old eternal murmurs of the spirit, whose
sigh we hear indeed, but whence it comes and whither it goes we never
know--murmurs and sighs which bring forth the elementary forces,
instincts, passions, and friendships in man, which men fashion and
shape, regulate and direct indeed, but whose coming and going, whose
ebbing and flowing, is not within their power. Inspiration, divine
in-breathing--a dead concept as applied by theologians to their
Bible--comes into its own again in human nature as a whole, it is the
true element in man's life, by virtue of which the soul feels within
itself a creative life--its own proof that its dependence is no
slave-service, but freedom; that its deepest suffering of pain is itself
creative life, creative pleasure.

Is it, now, the tragic fatality of a sick soul, is it the demoniac play
of a spirit of negation when precisely the very preacher of this
grandiose art-prophecy goes astray in his own preaching, when he finally
thrusts it from him, with shrill laughter? The poet-philosopher begins
to think concerning his preaching! Art makes the thinker's heart heavy!
Art ever speaks a language which thought cannot express. Art strikes
chords in the human heart, and there are at once intimations of a Beyond
of all thought. And the thinker of today has bidden good-bye to every
Beyond of his thought. Nothing unthinkable was to be left for the
feelings. So the thinker felt a stab in every art for his thinker's
heart, a doubt whether he should hold fast to the incomprehensible or
sell himself to the devil of the universally comprehensible. And this
doubt becomes an open confession of sin in the Zarathustra poesy:
poets--and Zarathustra himself was a poet--lie too much! It is
adulterated wine which they set before the thirsty. They muddy all their
streams so that they shall appear deep. Into the kingdom of clouds they
go, and build their air-castles on all too airy foundations. Thus,
Zarathustra, poet, grows weary of their lies; he is a bit tired even of
himself. And so, now, this doubt-respecting art slips into the soul of
even its most enthusiastic prophets--nor are they the worst artists at
whose souls these doubts gnaw! To create a beautiful culture in which
man shall receive a higher revelation of life, and mount to a higher
stage of his development, to this, art which receives its consecration
in dizziness and dream, is not yet called. In fact, these artists do lie
too much! They seek life indeed, they hunger for life; but, because life
is too living to them, too natural, they create an artificial glow in
whose heat they think they first have life. Thus, the second deception
becomes worse than the first. The devil of matter-of-fact prose is
driven out by the beelzebub of over-stimulated nerves, and men flee from
the monotony of every-day life to the refinement of sensibility, which
art shall superinduce. Poets do lie too much, not because they tell us
fairy tales--fairy tales could be the beautifulest, holiest truths! But
because they simulate feelings they do not have--feelings which arise in
them not naturally but narcotically! Sculptors, painters, do lie too
much, not because they create forms and colors which no man's eyes have
ever seen, but because they create their own selves unfaithfully--an
alien life which they have somewhere inoculated themselves with and
given out as their own. Even architects lie too much, because they
compel their works to speak a foreign language, as if stone should be
ashamed to speak as stone, wood as wood, iron as iron!

The Nietzschean doubt respecting art--today this has become a demand for
truth in art and for truthfulness in the artist! And from these a
third--the demand for simplicity! And all this is of a piece with the
purpose to live a simple life.

Man does not live by bread alone. It is a living question for the sake
of future humanity that our art shall give the True Bread to the heart
of man, so that we may form a life in us and around us, a life whereon
shall not repose the dead weight of a culture artificially burdened with
a thousand anxieties and cares, but a life wherein man shall breathe
freer, because he breathes the fresh free air of life itself. Beautiful
life, artistic culture; this means the opposite of what many mean by it
today--it means, not upholstered chairs, not more cushions and carpets,
not motlier pictures on the walls, and not a pleroma of all varieties of
ornaments overloading stands and tables, but it means a life full of
soul, warm with the sunshine of love, it means that all man does, all
that environs him, shall find through eye and ear the mystic pathway to
the heart, to bear witness there of a joy and an ardor, of a freedom and
a truth, inspiring men to cry: It is good to be here, let us build
tabernacles! For such beautiful life, so little is required, yet so
much! So little sumptuousness, so much soul! So little money, so much
man!




                                Patriots


                             ON THE "7:50"

                              PARKE FARLEY

   As you go in and out upon the train,
   You're always reading poetry?

   ... Yes.
   At first it slightly did embarrass me
   To have the people stare,
   Like you, over my shoulder,
   Catching, as it were, a sudden flashing thigh,
   Or gleam of sunlight on a truth laid bare,
   Then sizing me up from the tail of the eye.
   I used to shield the books, and myself, too,
   But now I have grown bolder--I don't care ...
   They say this morning train from Lake Forest to Chicago
   Carries more money, more living money
   Than any train of its length and size in the world.
   There's the Club car, for Bridge, and then the Smoker,
   And four or five other coaches.
   It makes one feel rich merely to ride upon it ...

   No, it's not Keats or Shelley--yes, well enough,
   But these are living.
   I like them young and strenuous,
   And when I find one that has done with lies,
   I send a word ...




                   "Change" at the Fine Arts Theatre


                             DEWITT C. WING

Your enthusiastic welcome of Change, published in the April number of
THE LITTLE REVIEW, compelled me to see the play, and I hasten to report
a memorable evening. Have you ever heard the hard, sharp, battering,
hammering of an electric riveter used on a steel bridge? Change has a
punch like that, and every punch is a puncture. No kind of orthodoxy can
resist it.

I have never spent a dozy moment in the Fine Arts Theatre. I shall never
forget Candida, Hindle Wakes, Miles Dixon, Prunella, Change, and other
dramas and tragedies that I have witnessed there. I shall not even
forget Cowards. Chicago some day will reproduce and expand the truth
which a dozen plays have driven into the souls of people who have sat in
that beautiful little room. Whatever the commercial outcome of an
attempt to present beauty and truth as expressions of life, the
management has already achieved a noble success. Hundreds of men and
women will always remember the Fine Arts Theatre as an inner shrine of
authentic art, where the furthermost reaches of the human spirit in the
fiction of plays have touched and quickened the heart of reality.

Change represents an ever-new voice rising above the rattle of
inevitable dogma and decay. It rings true to life. Even its name is
profoundly appropriate as a label for an inexorable law. If a play
reveals splendid thinking I am almost indifferent to what in that case
becomes largely the incident of acting, for to be engrossed in enforced
thought is to lose that narrow vision of the outward eye which merely
looks on a performance. One is not then an onlooker but a discoverer.
Change was hard, subtle thinking plus admirable interpretative acting.
Like the Irish and English players who have appeared in the Fine Arts
Theatre, the Welsh company who recently gave us this trenchant criticism
of life endowed the word "acting" with a fresh significance. One does
not think of them as players; they impress one as re-livers of the life
that they portray. That is art of a high order. If we Americans are
proud of our wealth and wonders, we must bow in humility when we
consider that the biggest plays that we have seen and the best acting
that we have witnessed are not of domestic authorship. They are
imported, and we have enjoyed them at the Fine Arts Theatre in Chicago.

Change is in four acts, written by J. O. Francis. It was awarded the
prize offered by the Incorporated Stage Society of London for the best
play of the season. The scene is in a cottage on the Twmp, Aberpandy, in
South Wales. The time is the present. A tragic change occurs in a
family, whose head was a collier. It is a kind of drama that might
inspire the private regret that the tragic martyrdom of Christian
fanatics is no longer in vogue, and offers a species of justification of
summarily removing human obstacles. Who among real men wouldn't have an
impulse to take an active hand in ridding life of a suppressive old
barnacle like John Price? He and his conscience and his God stood
against the primal law of change, with blind passion and colossal
selfishness. If his sons John Henry and Lewis had mangled him I should
have admired their passion. Gwen Price, the wife and mother, suffered
more than all because she was capable of suffering; I did not wish a
change on her account; she was a woman. Her suffering and weakness were
her triumph and strength. Besides, she was not at war with life as she
saw it in her sons. Her love was great and wise enough to confer tragic
beauty and adorn a soul; that kind of love is the supreme religion.

What John Price felt and expressed as religion was a contemptible mental
narrowness and spiritual poverty; a counterfeit religion based upon fear
and hardened by ceremonial practice. Its one virtue was that it offered
the most formidable opposition to the unfolding of manhood in two young
men. Youth is ever pushing its entangled feet down against the hard
substrata of anterior generations. Too often it is stuck and gradually
smothered in the upper mud, which solidifies as insidiously as it forms.
A man who can be held by dying or dead impedimenta is himself dead. A
man who struggles out and stands triumphant upon it, with the antennae
of his being reaching up and out for the widest and finest contacts,
fulfills destiny by adding a golden grain of solid value on which a
succeeding aspirant for a larger life may stand that much higher on the
old foundation. The man who conforms, remains in and a part of the
common level, plastically flattens out like dough under a rolling pin,
merely fulfills the law of the indestructibility of matter and the
conservation of mass. Whereas youth's great dream is symbolized by the
over-topping king of the forest, standing stiff-spined and straight upon
the old earth, its head in rare aloofness, the ease-lover functions as a
lowly parasite.

With wild winged thoughts of which these remarks are vague memories I
took Change in my consciousness from the theatre. No thoughtful person
could have returned unchanged from the playhouse. The transitoriness of
religions, institutions, customs, and all other so-called fixtures which
constitute modern civilization is the tremendous fact that makes Change
a powerful supplement to social forces. Of course to the modern mind the
idea is already old, but to the primitive majority it is a prophecy.

The author tempered his mild radicalism with the hard-headed sagacity of
Sam Thatcher, a one-armed pointsman, who, while unintellectually aware
of the changelessness of change, "figured it out" that life is cyclic;
that as experience broadens the attitudes of men they lose their little
individualities in a common resignation, defeat, and decay, which to him
meant contentment. "I've been round the world some--round and round.
That's how things go--round and round--I know, round and round." Sam
thus epitomized an old theory which has so many supporters that it must
be wrong. But if we do not go "round and round" in what direction do we
go? Nobody knows. If our movement is circular there is the desperate
possibility of sufficient momentum to gain new territory by virtue of
centrifugal force. We can at least make the circle larger. Races have
bloomed, fruited, and passed; planets have shone for an abbreviated
eternity and disappeared; baffling facts about life-forms upon the earth
have come to light. Our conscious life is young, densely ignorant, and
full of pain; our instinctive life is ageless, has perfected its
knowledge and can endure, as it has endured, the aeons of change. We
shall some day get the idea of change into our consciousness.

Unthinkingly one might regret that Sam was clever enough to sway back
toward dogma those wavering minds which might otherwise have yielded to
the drama's punches. But his pathetically amusing romance should have
made it clear to respectable auditors flirting with new ideas that he
was not a competent critic of their particular class-slice of life. What
he said was reassuring, assuaging, brilliantly trite, and an untroubled
mind would take it and reject the austere, burning truth of the
essential message of the play.

"Naught may endure but mutability": Shelley thus expressed what every
educated man knows. Change is the unvarying order, and yet we are
constitutionally averse to it. Comfortable people dislike it. "All great
natures love stability." Why do we make John Prices of ourselves? (I
think that H. G. Wells, more than any other literary man, has lived in
consonance with the law of change.) An expanding knowledge precludes
constancy. All John Prices are obscurantists. Convictions and blind
faith based upon glorified ignorance have for thousands of years
encysted, cramped, and twisted personal life, but somehow it has burst
through the fetters and arrayed itself for successive struggles.
Analyzing what we see and know, and confessing what we think we feel, we
have the ancient riddle before us. We applaud a play like Change, but
seek security and stability in every relationship. Eventually every man
must feel what Rousseau wrote: "Everything in this world is a tangled
yarn; we taste nothing in its purity, we do not remain two moments in
the same state. Our affections, as well as bodies, are in perpetual
flux." Maybe Sam Thatcher was wise, but if we knew that our life were
cyclic the joy of it to us would cease. The wiser man does not know so
much as Sam professed, but his endless endeavor is to try to know more.
The law of change, which he sees enforced everywhere, increases his
insatiability.

It is ultimate questions to which Change gives rise, and to such
questions there are no satisfactory answers. The social value of the
play lies in the graphic clearness with which it illustrates the slow
but epochal shifts that are always under way in thinking individuals,
families, and nations.

There is no Rock of Ages in the land of courageous knowledge. Nothing
endures but mutability. The purpose of a play like Change is to open the
inner mind to this glorious truth, so that with a fortitude born of
understanding we may accept misfortune, calamity, and death as the
effects of unalterable law, and not as donated penalties or inscrutable
accidents. Poise, power, and personality are the fruits of this attitude
toward change, and whoever achieves these has climbed out of the
"reddest hell"

      Armoured and militant,
      New-pithed, new-souled, new-visioned, up the steeps
      To those great altitudes whereat the weak
      Live not.




                             Correspondence


                          The Vision of Wells

I should like to set "M. M.'s" mind at rest about H. G. Wells, but I
can't quite understand what her objection to him really is. She seems to
be in what the charming little old Victorian lady would have called "a
state of mind." Something about Wells annoys her; she hasn't thought it
out clearly, but she raps Wells wherever she can get at him, as a sort
of personal revenge for her discomfort.

Suppose, for the sake of argument, that the passage she quotes from the
hero really represents Wells's feeling about the relations between the
sexes. He believes that "under existing conditions" there is always
danger of love between men and women unless the man has one sole woman
intimate, and lets "a superficial friendship toward all other women veil
impassable abysses of separation." "M. M." wisely admits the truth of
that--in fact, it's the most obvious of truisms. Then the hero--or
Wells--goes on to say that this, to him, is an intolerable state of
affairs. For this "M. M." calls him "wicked," and "Mr. M. M." accuses
him of not being busy enough, and of not working for a living.

I wonder if "M. M." stopped to think exactly why the hero considers this
an intolerable state of affairs. The statement means nothing more than
that the man would like to have intimate friendships with more than one
woman. He doesn't say he wants to love more than one woman. Well, it is
easily conceivable that a man of active mind and companionability would
like to have some degree of intimacy with various women. There doesn't
seem to be anything wicked about that, and it's possible that he should
feel so even if he was "working for a living." If we confine ourselves
to one intimacy, we're likely to lose the full relish of it before many
years. The thought of that is certainly intolerable. A man who is close
to a good many people is usually better fitted to appreciate his best
friend. A woman novelist who has a conspicuously successful marriage put
it well the other day. "If you go into a room where there is a bunch of
violets," she said, "you are charmed by the odor. If you stay in the
room all the time, you forget about the odor--or it bores you. But if
you are continually going out and coming in again, it greets you every
time, and you learn to appreciate its subtleties." Perhaps "M. M."
thinks that reason is begging the question. Well, take the other side.
Any human being who is expanding has an insatiable desire for new
experience, new knowledge. That is the healthiest instinct in mankind.
Such a person would naturally fret at the inability to be intimate with
a new acquaintance who interests him. That feeling would not be wicked;
it would be right, by any sane standard.

Forgive the blatant obviousness of all this. But I'm bent on carrying
through the discussion to the end. Granted, then, that our hero's
feeling is not intrinsically wicked--what then? He faces a dilemma.
Either he must run the risk of a new love affair, or--and this, I think,
escaped "M. M."--present conditions must be changed. If he has a new
love affair, he is at the least violating the Victorian lady's
conventional morality, which says that every man must love not more than
one woman as long as that woman lives. We come then to an extremely
vital problem. On the one hand, is conventional morality desirable? On
the other, can present conditions be so changed as to eliminate the
danger? The solution of that problem is of great importance to anyone
interested in human beings. If it can't be solved, it means that the man
or woman must quench a right and healthy instinct along whichever line
he or she chooses. And that's a bit of pessimism which a warm-hearted
man like H. G. Wells doesn't want to accept without further
investigation. That's the reason he wrote The Passionate Friends. He is
engaged in the noble endeavor to do something at least toward freeing
the great spirit of mankind from the network in which it is enmeshed.
The history of that struggle is the history of human progress.

Perhaps it isn't necessary further to defend Mr. Wells for the sort of
novels he writes. But I'd like to offer an illustration of the
difference between Wells and the old-fashioned novelist. The old writer
started with the conviction that certain laws and fundamental conditions
were forever fixed, and must limit the destinies of his characters. He
then works out his little story according to rules, and gets his effect
by arousing in us pity for the misfortunes, hatred for the sins, and joy
for the virtuous triumphs of his people. The tendency of the whole was
to show us once more what the eternal verities were--and the result was
highly "moral." Every character was an object lesson. Wells, on the
other hand, is not a preacher, but a scientist. He starts with the
conviction that, through lack of impartial investigation, we don't
really know what the eternal verities are, or what power can be derived
from them. His attitude is as far from the old writers' as is Mme.
Curie's from the alchemists'. He attempts to free his mind from every
prejudice. Then he begins his experiment, puts his characters in their
retort under "controlled conditions," and watches what happens. What his
characters do corresponds to fact as well as his trained mind can make
it. The result may be negative or positive--but at least it is true,
and, like all truth, it is really valuable.

"M. M." prejudges the case when she talks about denial, and building up
character, and loyalty, and unselfishness. These things may demand her
conclusion, and again they may not. At best they are means to an end.
She may be right. But Wells is going ahead to find out. He isn't arguing
for anything. We may be denying something we ought to have; we may be
building the wrong kind of character; we may be loyal to a false
principle; we may be unselfish with evil result. But if we cease to
becloud the issue, and watch carefully the experiment of Mr. Wells and
his followers, we shall know more about it than we do.

And, for a general toning of her mind, I should like to ask "M. M." to
read The Death of Eve, by William Vaughn Moody, to pay particular
attention to the majestic song of Eve in the garden, and after she has
felt the tremendous impulse of that line--

      Whoso denyeth aught, let him depart from here

to turn back to her words about denial, and see whether she still thinks
denial is always synonymous with strength.

                                                         GEORGE SOULE.


                   Another View of "The Dark Flower"

It is with no desire to be carping that I offer this criticism of The
Dark Flower, for I, too, am a devoted disciple who hangs on the master's
lips; but being a skeptical modern woman withal, I am not abject.
Perhaps we should be satisfied with what Galsworthy has given us--this
searching vision into the soul of a rarely sensitive man. The writing of
it--what we term style--is beyond doubt Galsworthy's most distinguished
performance, far more poetical than any of his verse. Its material is
invaluable for its sheer honesty as well as its sheer beauty. Its
reality and intimacy are grippingly poignant. And yet how account for
the pain of futility which sweeps over you as you close the book,
drowning for the time the ecstasy of high joy in all its beauty? It is
as if the heavy aroma of autumn's decay had invaded a garden in early
spring.

Yes, there is something essentially futile about The Dark Flower. It
lies so hidden in the warp and woof of the whole fabric that the casual
reader passes it over unseen. I can best explain by referring to the
novel itself. Each of the three episodes deals with Mark Lennan's
passion for a woman: in his youth for an older woman, in his maturity
for a woman his own age, in his approaching autumn for a young girl. And
in all three passion--the great primal force--is made an illicit
emotion. In the first two episodes the women are married; in the last,
Lennan is. It is scarcely by chance that Lennan's loves were unlawful;
on the contrary, a symbolic significance seems to be intended, that
passion is natural, free, coming and going by tides unbound by man's
will or law. But if that was Galsworthy's aim, he has run an unnecessary
stretch beyond his goal. By his over-emphasis, passion becomes
purposefully illicit, voluntarily seeking out the forbidden object and
the secret passage. And instead of being the priceless inheritance from
a free God, passion becomes an ailment laid upon us by some designing
fate.

And now glance at the dénouement of each episode. In the first it is the
woman who closes the little drama; Mark merely watches her go. In the
second the woman's husband kills her, and Mark is left dazed. In the
last his wife steps in and turns the current of events. Always an
extraneous force makes the decision for him. He is never permitted to
grapple with the situation created. Galsworthy forever extricates him.
Not once is his passion allowed to run its course. Each experience is
abortive. If I had been Mark Lennan I should have been tempted to curse
the meddling fate that insisted upon rescuing me just before I jumped.

No, a woman would not have had her perfect moment with Mark Lennan, but
only the promise of it.

Mark is a futile person; his love life a procession of futile
experiences. But in spite of its futility it is an exquisite record for
which I whole-heartedly give thanks.

                                                   MARGUERITE SWAWITE.


                   Dr. Foster's Articles on Nietzsche

M. H. P.'s remarks in "The Critics' Critic" of the April number of THE
LITTLE REVIEW on Dr. George Burman Foster's paper entitled "The Prophet
of a New Culture" in the March issue induced me to give that notable
article a third reading. M. H. P. says "... there's ... too much
enthusiasm to be borne out by what he actually says," and then asks the
author, "Won't you forget a little of this sound and fury and tell us as
simply as you can just what it is that you want us to do?" This
obviously tired and disturbed "critic" continues: "... I have a feeling
that pure enthusiasm, wasting itself in little geysers, is intrinsically
ridiculous. Enthusiasm should grow trees and put magic in violets--and
that can't be done with undue quickness, or in any but the most simple
way. Nobody cares about the sap except for what it does."

This irrelevant criticism is an intellectually lazy protest of a
sensuous, self-styled "healthy" person blundering through an
interpretative analysis of hard, serious thought, expecting to find a
program or a plan, cut and dried, ready for the seekers of a new
culture. Dr. Foster properly avoided making any definite proposals based
upon his study of Nietzsche. With a contagious enthusiasm he wrote his
own response to Nietzsche's attitude toward the universe. To condemn his
animation is barbaric stupidity. He probably was not conscious when he
wrote the paper that anybody wanted him to outline in desiccated phrases
a scheme to crystallize the Nietzschean philosophy into personal or
social action. He was fired by his subject, and his function--I do not
say his purpose--was to spread the flame. The depths of feeling must be
reached before action can be more than an abortion of the mind. Dr.
Foster's serious, almost sad, enthusiasm, makes the spirit of Nietzsche
arouse feeling, and feeling underlies every organic social action. It is
not what he "actually says" but what Nietzsche says to him that explains
and justifies Dr. Foster's enthusiasm.

An incoherent generalization like "pure enthusiasm wasting itself in
little geysers is intrinsically ridiculous" is a part of the typical
literary method of veneering ignorance or prejudices. For a critic who
asks "what is it that you want us to do?" which is the desperate voice
of an imitationist, and then talks glibly of "pure enthusiasm," which is
gaseous rhetoric, I have neither respect nor compassion. What is "pure
enthusiasm"?

M. H. P.'s objection to "sound and fury," which he associates with
"political speeches" "for a major prophet," clearly is attributable to a
temperamental inability to understand Nietzsche or emotionally to
respond to his dynamic appeal to intelligence. A "healthy" critic--was
there ever one?--is a myth, or a morbidly self-conscious person whose
striving after "healthy" attitudes is an infallible sign of disease at
the top. Such a person is pathologically interesting, but in the realm
of philosophical criticism he is incompetent. I should expect him to
demand that "enthusiasm should grow trees and put magic in
violets"--which is a ridiculous horticulture. To limit enthusiasm to so
definite a purpose as this is to affect a poetic attitude whose labored
simplicity has nothing in common with the magic of violets.

Your critic, who has a mania for "the most simple way," is aware of his
own amorphous complexity, and demands that thinkers and writers be
specific, calm, easy, leisurely, "healthy," and lucid, thereby
economizing his unhealthy distress. For him, Nietzsche has no message,
and upon him Dr. Foster's enthusiasm is wasted. To him "sound and fury"
exist where to Nietzsche's "preordained readers" there is the new music
of truth. It is that deep harmony which ran in legitimate fury through
the remarkable article contributed by Dr. Foster. "Nietzsche was a
Knight of the Future." This sentence from the article bears
interestingly upon M. H. P.'s allegation of "undue quickness" in what
the author expects from the adoption of the Nietzschean view of life. As
for nobody caring about the sap, I should say that if he have an
enthusiasm for growing trees and putting magic in violets he will,
perforce, have that care for the sap which conditions the strength of
the tree and the magic of the violet. Nietzsche's superman is not to be
achieved in a society that cares nothing about the sap.

Whoever reads Nietzsche and Whitman "slowly, profoundly, attentively,
prudently, with inner thoughts, with mental doors ajar, with delicate
fingers and eyes," will be better qualified than M. H. P. to serve as a
critic of articles like Dr. Foster's. Why not call it "the critics'
gossip"?

                                                       DEWITT C. WING.




                    H. G. Wells's Man of the Future


   In a little while he will reach out to the other planets, and
   take the greater fire, the sun, into his service. He will bring
   his solvent intelligence to bear upon the riddles of his
   individual interaction, transmute jealousy and every passion,
   control his own increase, select and breed for his embodiment a
   continually finer and stronger and wiser race. What none of us
   can think or will, save in a disconnected partiality, he will
   think and will collectively. Already some of us feel our merger
   with that greater life. There come moments when the thing shines
   out upon our thoughts. Sometimes in the dark, sleepless solitudes
   of night one ceases to be so-and-so, one ceases to bear a proper
   name, forgets one's quarrels and vanities, forgives and
   understands one's enemies and oneself, as one forgives and
   understands the quarrels of little children, knowing oneself
   indeed to be a being greater than one's personal accidents,
   knowing oneself for Man on his planet, flying swiftly to
   unmeasured destinies through the starry stillnesses of space.--H.
   G. Wells in Social Forces in England and America.




                             Lawton Parker


                            EUNICE TIETJENS

Paris, the iridescent dream of every struggling art student on the round
world; Paris the sophisticated, the most provincial of all cities--as
provincial as Athens of old in the sense that she is complacently
sufficient to herself and all the world else may wag as it will, since
she cares for nothing that does not happen on a few square miles of soil
beside the Seine; Paris the proud, the difficult;--Paris has recently
done the one thing that could be surprising from her. She has laid aside
her prejudices and her pride and has awarded to a foreigner--and that
foreigner an American--the most coveted prize in the whole realm of
painting. She has given to Lawton Parker of Chicago the first medal at
the Old Salon.

Hitherto it has been an unwritten law that the first medal was not to go
out of France. The most ambitious American student, dreaming in his
little atelier high up among the pigeons, over fifty centimes' worth of
roast rabbit from the rôtisserie and a glass of vin ordinaire, never has
dared even to dream of a first medal. A second has been the height of
his wildest hopes. Ten times only since the foundation of the Old Salon
has a second medal, of which more than one is given each year, been
awarded to an American. Sargent had one. Mary Green Blumenschein, H. O.
Tanner, Manuel Barthold, Robert Mac Cameron, Aston Knight, the son of
Ridgeway Knight, and Richard E. Miller are among the others so honored.
Gari Melchers and Frederick MacMonnies have had a third medal.

Now Lawton Parker has carried off the first! Even for a Frenchman this
is an extraordinary honor. It is kept for paintings of most unusual
merit, and often no work of the many thousands submitted is considered
worthy of the honor. At least four Salons have passed without the award
being made at all.

The painting with which Mr. Parker has enchanted Paris is called
Paresse, or Indolence. It is a picture of a nude model resting on a
couch. She lies perfectly relaxed, her body twisted a little and one arm
raised behind her head. The delicate flesh tones are outlined against
pale draperies, mauve, gray, and light yellow. The whole composition is
in a very high key, the red hair of the girl being the strongest note in
the picture.

But it is the lighting which seems most strongly to have impressed the
French critics. More than forty reviews in Europe have contained
favorable accounts of this painting, and they have been unanimous in
their praise of the effects of lighting. Indeed, they have almost
exhausted the vocabulary in their efforts to describe it. It is the
light of a gray day filtered through a Venetian blind, and the picture's
most puissant charm lies in the way Mr. Parker has caught the delicate
and subtle values of this lighting. "Delicate, nebulous, pale, sifted,
intimate, tender, harmonious"--these are some of the adjectives used by
the French reviewers to describe it.

All this is, however, built on a foundation of solid knowledge. Mr.
Parker is an excellent draughtsman and understands thoroughly the
possibilities and limitations of his medium. He has long been known
among the artists in the Quarter as the most scientific of them all. The
chemical composition of the colors, their action and interaction, and
the result of time on their brilliancy--these Mr. Parker has studied
minutely. It is a subject with which the old masters were thoroughly
familiar, but which painters of today too often neglect.

Sanity is one of the chief characteristics of Mr. Parker's work. This is
a day of extravagance, of cutting loose from all ties that bind us to
the past. In Paris the academies are virtually emptied of students, that
the young men may search for individuality in their own little ateliers.
The Cubists and the Futurists are the flowering of the tree of
experimentation that has thrust its roots even into the most academic of
sanctuaries. Many a promising young man has lost his head entirely. But
Lawton Parker has succeeded in keeping his.

He has gone forward with his day, but not blindly. He has carefully
tested each step as he came to it, and has stopped short where sanity
stopped. The old virtues of draughtsmanship, composition, and color he
has kept. But he has added thereto the modern discoveries in the
treatment of light.

He and his colleagues, the little group of painters called the Giverny
school, are already known as Luminists. Frederick C. Frieseke, Richard
E. Miller, and Karl Anderson belong to this group. During the summer
months they paint at the beautiful little village of Giverny. They
experiment with light in all its possible manifestations. Frieseke and
Parker have an open-air studio together, a "water-garden" traversed by a
little brook. Here on warm days they paint beautiful opalescent nudes in
the sunlight, among the shimmering greens of the leaves or beside the
luminous water surfaces. All who have followed the exhibitions in France
or even in America during the last few years are familiar with this
"nymph pasture," as it has been wittily called. It was here that the
prize picture was painted--but not on warm, sunny days. A year ago it
rained all summer, and in desperation Mr. Parker resorted to an indoor
canvas, executed in the house adjoining. It was painted with extreme
care. One comparatively unimportant part of the canvas, a bit of wall
space, he painted over twelve or fifteen times to get just the precise
shade he wanted. This painting is now on exhibition in this country.

Lawton Parker's canvases in his Giverny style are interesting
technically. On a foundation of very careful drawing they are handled
with great freedom of execution. The brush work is loose and vigorous,
the paint being laid on thickly, especially in the background. The flesh
is painted more closely, always with great subtlety in the values. A
nude body in the shade flecked with spots of brilliant sunlight is a
favorite and very difficult subject, in which this subtlety is well
shown. The color is excellent, at times, as in the prize picture, very
delicate and carefully harmonized; at times dealing successfully with
great splashes of autumn leaves or the vivid green of spring foliage.
The composition is pleasing.

Mr. Parker is not by any means limited to this style. Indeed, it is in
another and quite different character that he is best known in this
country. As a portrait painter his work has for a number of years been
gaining steadily in popularity. Many prominent people have sat for him,
including President Harry Pratt Judson, Judge Peter S. Grosscup, Martin
Ryerson, Mrs. Leonard Wood, and Mrs. N. W. Harris.

This portrait style of Mr. Parker's is very different from his Giverny
style. He developed it much earlier in his career, but still uses it on
occasion. The difference is one of psychological viewpoint rather than
of technic. A portrait, he feels, should be a livable presentation of
the subject. It is not a picture to be looked at casually and passed by,
but a work to be lived with intimately for long spaces of time. The
exceptions are, of course, those portraits of well-known men and women
which are to hang in public places. Generally speaking, he paints his
portraits in color schemes that will wear well, in a rather low key,
with neutral backgrounds. These likenesses are solid, dignified, and
simple. To catch the individuality of the sitter is of more importance
to him than to paint a striking canvas. That his portraits are
successful technically is proved by the fact that he has taken a number
of prizes with them, both here and abroad.

Lawton Parker was born at Fairfield, Michigan, in 1868, but spent his
early youth in Kearney, Nebraska. When he took up seriously the study of
painting he moved to Chicago, which has since remained his pied-à-terre
in this country. He studied and taught at the Art Institute there. Later
he went to New York, where, in 1897, he took the "Paris Prize" founded
by John Armstrong Chaloner: a five years' scholarship abroad. In Paris
he studied under Gerome, Whistler, and Jean Paul Laurens. In 1899 he
took the "Prix d'atelier" at the Beaux Arts. In 1900 he received
honorable mention at the Old Salon with a nude; in 1902 a third medal,
on a portrait. Four years ago he missed by three votes a second medal,
which was fortunate for him, since the first cannot be awarded a painter
who has received a second.

He has also received medals from the Chicago Society of Artists, the St.
Louis Exposition, and the International Exhibition in Munich in 1905.

All lovers of art in this country, as well as the painters themselves,
should thank Mr. Parker for having opened the way in Paris for so
unprecedented an honor.

   It is rhythm that makes music, that makes poetry, that makes
   pictures; what we are all after is rhythm, and the whole of the
   young man's life is going to a tune as he walks home, to the same
   tune as the stars are going over his head. All things are singing
   together.--George Moore in Memoirs of My Dead Self.




                            New York Letter


                              GEORGE SOULE

Pavlowa and her Russian dancers have just finished their tour here in a
high tide of enthusiasm,--and financial success, which is worth
mentioning because it means other tours next year. There is a whisper
that we shall see a ballet still more important which hasn't hitherto
been coaxed west of London and Paris. Only a little of the new art-form
now being developed by Fokine, Diaghilev, Bakst, Rimski-Korsakoff, and
the rest of the great Russian romanticists of the stage, has come to us.
But the important fact is that America, as always behind Europe in
seeing new ideas that are not mechanical, is at last waking up to the
dance as an art on equal terms with the greatest.

It is curious, but not comforting, to know that in this case the
original inspiration came from Illinois. My authority is Troy Kinney,
who is, without question, our best-informed critic of dancing outside of
the performers and choregraphers themselves. Mr. Kinney tells me that
after Isadora Duncan failed to arouse much interest in America she went
to Europe, leaving a trail of heated discussion there. When she reached
St. Petersburg the head of the imperial academy, Fokine, saw the vision
of a renaissance of the dance from its classic sterility. He gathered
about him the group of dancers whose names are now known around the
world, and persuaded them to desert the imperial academy, which clung to
the formalism of the old French and Italian ballet. Artists and
musicians were attracted to the movement. This proceeding was quite as
daring as it would have been for the superintendent of the United States
Naval Academy to desert with part of his faculty and the best of the
middies. But Diaghilev espoused their cause and persuaded the government
not to punish them, but to let them work out their ideas and then make
themselves useful politically by showing western Europe that Russia was
not as barbarous as was generally supposed. They are now fully
recognized in St. Petersburg and Fokine is again head of the academy.

On the basis of the old formal steps and positions Fokine built a freer
structure of movement whose chief aim is not virtuosity or pure beauty
of line, but expression. In this new style more modern music was not
only possible, but necessary. Meanwhile, setting and costume of the most
imaginative type--often futuristic--had to be developed. They all set to
work with an ardor possible only to tradition-breakers and are producing
an art which is likely to achieve the supreme place first dreamed of by
the inventors of modern opera.

Here is another keenly interesting relation brought to light by Mr.
Kinney. Everybody knows, of course, that opera was begun during the
Renaissance as an attempt to revive the Greek drama. It now appears that
in our present Renaissance the revived ballet is probably much nearer
the highest form of Greek drama than opera or anything else ever has
been. The early drama of Athens, according to Mme. Nelidoff of Moscow,
consisted largely of pantomime, dance, and chorus. Words were introduced
for the literal-minded. As the size of theatres increased, the actors
came to use megaphones, to conceal which the mask was invented. The
masks were made larger and heavier to add to the height. With this
handicap to dancing, the actor had to depend more on his voice and
stature; and the elaborate dialogue, combined with the high heels of the
cothurnus, gave dancing its final blow. This kind of drama, says Mme.
Nelidoff, appealed largely to the less imaginative and uncultivated, on
account of their desire to know in detail what was going on. The other
kind, however, continued being developed for smaller audiences, and
retained its purer beauty of form in space, sound, and thought. We have
little record of it outside of sculpture simply because there were few
words, and a choregraphic vocabulary had not been invented. We have
almost no record of Greek music, either. It is a bit shocking to think
that Aeschylus and Sophocles were, perhaps, contributors to an inferior
art, but there seem to be grounds for the ingenious theory.

Everyone who has been to a "movie show" knows how effective even crude
pantomime can be. But make your pantomime a portrayal of moods and
emotions rather than of events, give it visual beauty which will
occasionally wring tears from anyone sensitive to line, and accompany it
with music whose most complex rhythm and harmonic color are intensified
by the stage picture, and you have an expression on a plane of the
imagination where the introduction of a spoken word is like the creak of
a piano pedal. If we can't lead the people back from the movies to
"plays," can't we give them the modern ballet?

That is exactly what Kinney proposes. He wants a National Academy for
America, with resources equal to the backing of the Metropolitan Opera
House. Big managers and opera authorities have already admitted that
such an undertaking would, if properly managed, be successful. Compared
with the present interest in good ballet the interest in good music with
which Theodore Thomas started, was nothing. But it is a miracle if
America does a thing like that in the right way. Our princes have, as a
rule, neither good taste nor much public spirit. Our race of
artists--thinkers--mental heroes--is small and largely uncourageous. Our
government accurately represents the most of our people, who still
regard art either as immoral or entertaining and hence not worth the
attention of sensible people.

How bitterly we need missionaries like THE LITTLE REVIEW and the people
who feel the same spirit! But our case is far from hopeless. The good
fighters among us are glad there is a lot still to do. Such visions give
strength to our hewing arms as we cry room for our new images.

   The men who are cursed with the gift of the literal mind are the
   unfortunate ones who are always busy with their nets and neglect
   the fishing.--Rabindranath Tagore in Sadhana.




                       Union vs. Union Privileges


                          HENRY BLACKMAN SELL

"We have granted the miners every union demand," benevolently asserts
the remarkable J. D. R., Jr., "but we will not recognize their
organization"--and here is the hitch. The average lay observer of the
fearful struggle raging in Colorado tosses aside his paper after reading
this, and possibly comments that he can't see what the miners want, if
all the union privileges have been granted.

That was my first thought, but I felt that there must be something
behind the trouble; so I hunted out my old friend Tony Exposito, a
walking delegate for Chicago's pick-and-shovel men, and asked him to
explain.

Now Tony never took a degree, and his English is reminiscent of sunny
Italy, but he knows just what the trouble is in Colorado.

"Eh? You wanta know what ees matta downa there? Eh? Meester Rokefella
say he geeve union preeveleg to all da men? Eh? Meester Rokefella say
begess shara men no wanta strike? Eh? He geeve many thengs to da men?
Sure! Sure! He geeve many thengs! He geeve many preeveleg! Sure! He
geeve! Das justa trubble! Das why da men go strike! No wanta thengs be
geeva to them. Santa Maria! when a man breaka hees back en wear da skeen
off hees hans wet da pick en da shovel, hasn' he gotta right to da money
he gets? Eh? Now, w'at you theenka dat? Eh?"

"Well, Tony," I answered, "I never thought of it that way. It does seem
as though a man might have what he earns without its being handed to him
as if it were a charity."

"Sure! Sure!" cut in the impetuous Tony. "Sure! das da theng--charety!
Meester Rokefella, he say, 'Coma here, leetle slave, nica leetle slave,
coma here;' en he patta on da head en say, 'You donna have to work so
meny hours; I geeve you tena cents more pay!' Eh? en then what? Eh? He
calla all the newsapaper up en tella dem, 'I maka mucha mon; I geeve
some to my workaman.' Then all the peeple say, 'Whata fuss about?' Eh? I
tella you: Workaman want to sell hees labor justa lika Meester Rokefella
buy hees beega machenes. Notheng extra to nobody. Eh?"

"But, Tony," I interrupted, "they say that only a few of the men want
the union recognized. What about that?"

"Sure! Das true! Sure! Das jus da fac. When deesa beeg, granda countree
fighta Eengeland, deed all the men wanta fight? Eh? Tell me! Eh? No, et
was justa few et ferst, dena more, dena more, teel everyone wanta to be
free. Sure! Das da way. Poor nuts, dea don'a know whata rights dea
shoulda have, en dea musta be ah--educate to steek togeater."

And I wondered how many of my highly educated friends realized so well
as Tony Exposito how frightfully devitalizing gratuities are, and what
it means to be able to take a week's pay with the feeling not of
accepting a charity, but of receiving an honest wage for honest work;
what it means to teach mentally stunned and browbeaten laborers that
they have certain definite rights of life and happiness, and that they
must earn them; that when they have earned those rights, it is no favor
given or received.




                            Book Discussion


                      Mr. Chesterton's Prejudices

      The Flying Inn, by G. K. Chesterton. [John Lane Company, New
                                 York.]

G. K. Chesterton really possesses a philosophy, but it is a question
whether he has ever shown a clear intellectual title to it. His method
of asserting ownership is to abuse those who question either his right
to possess it or the desirability of the philosophy itself.

In The Flying Inn Mr. Chesterton does two things. He writes a most
amusing criticism of modern tendencies the while he is defending his
philosophy of Augustinian Christianity.

It may be news to some of Mr. Chesterton's readers that he is a
symbolist with a profound philosophy to expound, and I would never have
guessed from his latest work that he was fighting over again the battle
of St. Augustine against the Pelagians. But this book recently fell into
the hands of a more than usually industrious and erudite critic, Mr.
Israel Solon, and in a recent issue of The Friday Literary Review of The
Chicago Evening Post, Mr. Solon took the trouble to explain some of Mr.
Chesterton's symbolism. The general reader, however,--and what a good
thing it is--does not care a red cent about the triumph of Augustinian
Christianity, while the unbiased student of religion knows that
Pelagianism, a healthy-minded British heresy of about 400 A. D., which
denied original sin, was a more reasonable proposition than the
Christianity which it tried to displace.

The only real interest of Mr. Chesterton's latest book, then, is in his
criticisms of life, and that interest arises from their humor rather
than from their worth.

Mr. Chesterton's theory of criticism is very simple. Poke fun at
everything you do not like. If it is difficult to poke fun at it on
account of its worth or dignity then misrepresent it first.

The present story, for instance, covers the adventures of an Irishman
who left the British navy and became a soldier of fortune, and an
innkeeper whose inn is closed by a fanatical temperance advocate holding
office under a very fussy pseudo-liberal government. This personage, who
is an amateur of religions and wishes to combine Mahomedanism and
Christianity, drives the innkeeper into vagabondage. The Irishman
accompanies him, and they carry the old inn sign and a keg of rum and a
round cheese with them. They buy a donkey and cart, and travel the
neighborhood breaking up meetings in favor of temperance, vegetarianism,
polygamy, and other absurdities advocated by the teetotal aristocrat.

Most of the fooling is excellent, but some of it is very childish. It
shows Mr. Chesterton at his most characteristic. He dislikes all
liberalism, so the efforts of the present British government toward
various forms of amelioration of bonds--ecclesiastical, puritanic, and
economic--are satirized by the implication that the aristocrats of this
story wish to re-establish the Eastern vices of polygamy and abstinence
from wine. He dislikes the Ethical Societies, so he represents them as
meeting in little tin halls and listening to fakers from the East
preaching strange exotic doctrines in return for large fees. He dislikes
the Jews, and so a particularly mean and futile character is painted
very carefully as a Jew who mixes in British politics--a thing which Mr.
Chesterton and his political allies seem to think should be forbidden by
statute.

If we discount all this, however, we shall be able to derive a lot of
enjoyment from Mr. Chesterton. In particular we shall enjoy his songs
against temperance. One of them concerns Noah's views on drinking:

      Old Noah, he had an ostrich farm, and fowls on the greatest
         scale;
      He ate his egg with a ladle in an egg-cup big as a pail,
      And the soup he took was Elephant Soup and the fish he took was
         Whale;
      But they all were small to the cellar he took when he set out to
         sail;
      And Noah, he often said to his wife when he sat down to dine,
      "I don't care where the water goes if it doesn't get into the wine."

      The cataract of the cliff of heaven fell blinding off the
         brink,
      As if it would wash the stars away as suds go down a sink;
      The seven heavens came roaring down for the throats of hell to drink,
      And Noah, he cocked his eye and said: "It looks like rain, I think."
      The water has drowned the Matterhorn as deep as a Mendip mine,
      But I don't care where the water goes if it doesn't get into the
         wine.

And for other drinks than those of orthodox alcoholic content he has
nothing but contempt. Witness the following remarks:

      Tea is like the East he grows in,
        A great yellow Mandarin,
      With urbanity of manner,
        And unconsciousness of sin;
      All the women, like a harem,
        At his pig-tail troop along,
      And, like all the East he grows in,
        He is Poison when he's strong.

      Tea, although an Oriental,
        Is a gentleman at least;
      Cocoa is a cad and coward,
        Cocoa is a vulgar beast,
      Cocoa is a dull, disloyal,
        Lying, crawling, cad and clown
      And may very well be grateful
        To the fool that takes him down.

      As for all the windy waters,
        They were rained like trumpets down,
      When good drink had been dishonored
        By the tipplers of the town.
      When red wine had brought red ruin,
        And the death-dance of our times,
      Heaven sent us Soda Water
        As a torment for our crimes.

To the American cocoa debauchee--if there be any--it should be intimated
that in all probability Mr. Chesterton's turn for symbolism is at work
in the second of the stanzas quoted above. The English cocoa interests
are very powerful and very much interested in the progress of the
present liberal government. In England not cocoa drinkers but certain
liberal politicians will wince with pained appreciation of that
particular stanza.

Such is the method of attack with which Mr. Chesterton goes after
liberal Christianity, the Ethical Movement, temperance legislation,
futurist art, and--for some insane reason--the Mechnikoff lactic acid
bacillus treatment. As we have said, it is, except in spots, most
interesting and most amusing, but, except in spots, it is not
significant.

                                                      LLEWELLYN JONES.


                      Dr. Flexner on Prostitution

   Prostitution in Europe, by Abraham Flexner. [The Century Company,
                               New York.]

There can be no doubt whatever in the mind of any student of the
evolution of "civic conscience" that the prominence now being given to
the subject of prostitution is one of the most promising signs of our
day. It is inevitable in the first uncovering of what has been hidden
for many generations that this prominence should be marred by much that
is to be regretted, by much wild hysteria, and much morbid dwelling on
erstwhile forbidden topics. But in the main the knowledge by the people
at large of the cess-pools that lie below our civilization is the only
starting-point from which to set about the draining and cleaning up of
these cess-pools.

As Dr. Flexner points out repeatedly in this volume, it is public
opinion, and in the last analysis, that only, which determines the fate
of prostitution in any given city. Even the most stringent laws are of
comparatively little service when unsupported by an intelligent and
watchful interest on the part of the people at large. And on what can an
intelligent interest be founded except on knowledge? The voices raised
in protest--the voice of Agnes Repplier, for instance--belong surely to
the protected "leisure class"--the class which sees no need for change
since they have never known from personal experience that such problems
exist. Yet it is safe to say that for the great majority of the world's
population the question of prostitution and its attendent train of
disease, misery, and degeneration is and has always been one of the most
vital questions of life.

A single calm, wise, scientific book, like this of Dr. Flexner's, given
into the hands of our boys and girls of eighteen, would do quite as much
good, and for many dispositions infinitely more, than a whole battery of
moral lectures, warning vaguely against the "wickedness of human nature"
and the "allurements of sin." Not that this book was written for boys
and girls. Far from it. It was written for the serious student of the
social evil by Dr. Flexner as representative of the Bureau of Social
Hygiene of New York City. It is an unprejudiced, authoritative statement
of the present condition of prostitution in the various countries of
Europe, and is the result of an impartial and painstaking personal
investigation which required two years of the time of an educational
expert.

Dr. Flexner nowhere raises any question as to how far European
experience is significant for America, but it is inevitable that the
reader should form certain conclusions of his own. Much of the book is
devoted to the relative merits of the two systems of handling
prostitution now prevalent in Europe: regulation and so-called
"abolition." The weight of evidence is overwhelmingly on the side of
abolition. Regulation is left without a leg to stand on. This, however,
is not a burning issue in America. The New York Committee of Fifteen
decided, years ago, that "regulation does not regulate," and such has
been the general opinion in the United States. But the remainder of the
book and much that is brought out in the discussion of regulation can be
of great service.

It is impossible to summarize here a book so rich both in thought and
material. But one thing may be said for the encouragement of future
readers: There is in this volume absolutely no trace of the hysteria so
prevalent today, and on the other hand, no trace of the morbid dwelling
on details from which even some of our official investigations have
unfortunately not been free. There is in the entire book not a detailed
account of an individual case to turn the stomach. Yet the opinion of
every prominent expert in Europe is given, and a calm, scientific
attitude is maintained throughout. We are, as Jane Addams has so aptly
expressed it, "facing an ancient evil with a new conscience," and this
book of Dr. Flexner's is the embodied voice of that conscience. This is
his last word on the subject:

   In so far as prostitution is the outcome of ignorance, laws and
   police are powerless; only knowledge will aid. In so far as
   prostitution is the outcome of mental or moral defect, laws and
   police are powerless; only the intelligent guardianship of the
   state will avail. In so far as prostitution is the outcome of
   natural impulses denied a legitimate expression, only a
   rationalized social life will really forestall it. In so far as
   prostitution is due to alcohol, to illegitimacy, to broken homes,
   to bad homes, to low wages, to wretched industrial conditions--to
   any or all of the particular phenomena respecting which the
   modern conscience is becoming sensitive,--only a transformation
   wrought by education, religion, science, sanitation, enlightened
   and far-reaching statesmanship can effect a cure. Our attitude
   towards prostitution, in so far as these factors are concerned,
   cannot embody itself in a special remedial or repressive policy,
   for in this sense it must be dealt with as a part of the larger
   social problems with which it is inextricably entangled.
   Civilization has stripped for a life-and-death wrestle with
   tuberculosis, alcohol and other plagues. It is on the verge of a
   similar struggle with the crasser forms of commercialized vice.
   Sooner or later it must fling down the gauntlet to the whole
   horrible thing. This will be the real contest,--a contest that
   will tax the courage, the self-denial, the faith, the resources
   of humanity to their uttermost.

                                                      EUNICE TIETJENS.

   The welfare of mankind is as much promoted by the mistakes and
   vanity of fools and knaves as by the virtuous activity of wise
   and good men.--The late Professor Churton Collins in The English
   Review.




                          The Critics' Critic


                   MASCULINE AND FEMININE LITERATURE

Somewhere lately I read a review of Home and the reviewer says that it
was probably written by a woman, giving I forget what reason as to
description of home life, and details of that sort, which "no one but a
woman could have written with such fidelity to truth." But I couldn't
believe it even before the truth came out the other day. Home is
distinctly a man's story, written by a man. The psychology of it is
man-psychology (unconscious of course), and its appeal is more strongly
to masculine than to feminine taste--much as I hate to think they differ
in literature. I have heard several men speak of it as one of the best
stories they ever read, and I, myself, though liking it, could never
become more than mildly enthusiastic. To be sure, it is a great tale of
adventure. But for whom is the great adventure? Alan and Gerry go
blithely about the world in pursuit of it. Alix, Gerry's wife, after
taking a feeble little step in the direction of what was for her a
stirring adventure, returns home, chastened, and is properly punished by
years of waiting for her husband to close up his small affairs. Her
great adventure was sitting at home rearing Gerry's child. Clem's seems
to have been sitting at home waiting for Alan to get through roving and
come back to her. And never a comment to the effect that this should not
have been perfectly soul-satisfying to both of the women, and never a
notion, apparently, but that they were richly rewarded for their waiting
by being allowed to spend the rest of their lives caring for the two
bold adventurers. I couldn't believe a woman living in the twentieth
century could even have imagined such stupidities. I don't mean that
Home isn't interesting, as stories go, but it is the crudest kind of
man-psychology and will be as out-of-date in a few years as Clarissa
Harlowe is now.

I've been wondering a great deal lately whether there is a masculine and
feminine literature after one is grown up. I know there was for me as a
child. When a story like Camp Mates began in Harper's Young People I
regretted that it was not something by Lucy C. Lillie, who wrote of
adorably nice little girls. But possibly if I had ever gone out for long
walks and camped for the day in the open as my own little lad does now,
I too would have read Camp Mates. A man not undistantly related to me by
marriage confessed the other day that he was fondest of stories telling
of castaways on desert islands. "It's a thing I'd like to do
myself--have a try at an island," he said, eagerly. "With your wife?" I
asked, tentatively. He nodded, and gulped his dinner, and then
immediately repented: "With no woman," he said, firmly; "they bring
civilization, and I'd want it wild." Well, I don't blame him. It's
appalling to think of how many men would measure up to a desert island
test--would procure by hook or crook some manner of sustenance. And I
can think of few, very few women (among whom I do not include myself)
whom I should select as companions if I were thus stranded. I mean, of
course, as far as their resourcefulness is concerned. Perhaps that is
why, in stories of adventure, the woman is left behind, inevitably; or,
if she is washed up on the shore by the waves, proves an encumbrance,
delightful or otherwise. And it is all a matter of training--not, as our
novelist would have us believe, a deplorable lack of brains and stamina.


                         THE EDUCATION OF GIRLS

And speaking of training--an interesting thing in March Atlantic about
The Education of the Girl has set me thinking. How am I going to bring
up my daughter? The education of a boy is, compared to that, a simple
matter. Too ridiculous, too, the answers to my query returned to me by
different friends and relatives. "Make her a good girl," says one. But
surely "Be good, fair maid; let those who will be clever," has been
ridiculed to a timely demise. Another said: "I hope I shall be able to
bring up my daughter so that when she is grown she can persuade some
nice man to take care of her, as her mother did." No mention is made, of
course, of what happens if the plan miscarries. It sometimes does. And
it is too funny when one realizes that several decades ago, when
absolutely no question was raised as to woman's sphere (home and the
rearing of children), she received in college a severely classical or
scientific training; and now, when it is by no means admitted without
argument that home is her one vocation, noted educators are recommending
that women's colleges abolish Greek and Latin or treat them and science
as purely secondary and take up domestic science, economics, nursing,
etc., in their place. How can I tell beforehand which of the two my
daughter is going to need? I think of myself, filled to the brim with
Greek, Latin, French, and German, producing in my early married life a
distinctly leathery and most unpleasant pie, or rushing to the doctor
with my baby to have him treat a dreadful sore which turned out to be a
mosquito bite, and my tearful struggles with the sewing machine on my
first shirtwaist which I christened a "Dance on the Lawn," for obvious
reasons ... and I wonder. Never would I willingly give up my classics
and the joy they gave me. But a soupçon of domesticity would surely have
done me no harm. Miss Harkness, in this article, is inclined to think
that it does us all harm. She says:

   Would men ever get anywhere, do you think, if they fussed around
   with as many disconnected things as most women do? And the worst
   of our case is that we are rather inclined to point with pride to
   what is really one of the most vicious habits of our sex.

But in the meantime that daughter of mine! Suppose she prefers to run a
house and be the mother of six children! Some women do, and are
wonderfully fitted for it. Won't she be happier if she knows beforehand
how to do it most efficiently? I hope, of course, she will choose,
besides, a career of her own; but if she doesn't want to? And to give
both does mean a scattering of potentialities! Which brings me back to
the statement that the education of the modern girl is a complex--oh,
but a very complex problem.

You remember Stevenson's poem to his wife. I speak of it in this
connection because it throws light on one facet of the feminist problem
which perhaps is not sufficiently illuminated. He says:

      Trusty, dusky, vivid, true,
      With eyes of gold and bramble-dew;
      Steel-true and blade straight,
      The great artificer made my mate.

"Steel-true" and "blade straight" are epithets more often applied to
men; and indeed Mr. McClure, in speaking of Mrs. Stevenson in his
memoirs, says: "She had many of the fine qualities that are usually
attributed to men rather than women: a fair-mindedness, a large
judgment, a robust, inconsequential philosophy of life."

How then, if in seeking an ideal education for girls, we should dismiss,
or at least diminish, the importance of a purely utilitarian aspect and
look for something that will eventually ensure such qualities?

If, as the feminists urge, they are trying to raise men to a higher
plane, why not apply a little of this passion for uplift to the
education of women into nobler, higher attitudes? Steel-true, and blade
straight! I like the sound of that.

This education of the girl is getting to be an obsession with me.
Everything I read resolves itself into terms of girl-psychology. A
ridiculous tale, not long ago, appeared in The Saturday Evening Post,
called Letting George Do It. George, in charge of the kitchen for a few
weeks or days, immediately revolutionized everything; shortened and
lightened labor, invented all sorts of labor-saving devices, etc., etc.
Immediately all men say, derisively: "Well, that's exactly what a man
would do. You boast that women are as good as men. Why haven't they,
years ago, done all these things for themselves?" It seemed
unanswerable. I have heard housekeepers, bright women, too, speak with
exasperation of the foolish story, while helplessly admitting its truth.
But I really think I've stalked the beast to its lair. Granted it is
true, but have men spent their lives for centuries in a narrow round of
domestic drudgery? Women have, and with very little intellectual
diversion, besides, their society limited to other domestic drudges, and
to their own husbands, who don't try to broaden them unless they are
exceptional men. And if men had lived such lives would they have
blithely introduced these reforms just because their masculinity makes
them so superior to women that they would develop, even under adverse
conditions? They wouldn't stay drudges, they claim. Well, we won't
either, so George is not so smart as he thinks he is!


                     GERMAN-AMERICANS AND AMERICANS

I have been greatly interested in an article in the May Century. It was
by Prof. Edward A. Ross, of the University of Wisconsin, the title being
The Germans in America. You know why, of course. My father was born in
Germany, and came over in 1850. About ten years ago Hugo Münsterberg had
an article in the Atlantic on the same subject, in which he tried to
explain the antagonism existing between native-born Germans and
Americans. His argument summed itself up in the statement that the
German considers the American no gentleman, and the American considers
the German no gentleman. But why? I was willing enough to believe him
because of a curious experience of my childhood. I can remember the
incident perfectly, though it is many years since it happened. I was in
the fifth grade, and the girl who figured prominently therein--her name
was Siddons, by the way, and most appropriately, for she spelled tragedy
to me--had called out on the street to a little boy who was carrying my
books home for me, "Aw, George, do you like the Dutch? George is going
with a Dutchman!"

George was certainly no cavalier, for he dropped my books, mumbled
something, and was off, while I continued on my dazed, bewildered way,
wondering what it was all about. Children learn so quickly to keep their
deepest hurts to themselves that I doubt whether I should ever have
mentioned it at home had it not been for this same bewilderment. My
mother was indignant, not, it seems, because I had had names flung at me
in scorn, but because it was the wrong name! "You are not Dutch. You are
German, and proud of it," she said, holding her head a little higher.
Pressed for an explanation, she revealed that my father had been born in
Germany, "but you must never, never be ashamed of that," she added
earnestly. "Your father was an educated, cultured gentleman." I was then
taken into our little library with its crowded shelves climbing to the
ceiling, and shown volumes of Schiller, Goethe, Lessing in German,
Tauchnitz editions of the great English writers, books of philosophy and
history, and shelves full of Hayden, Beethoven, and Mozart. "He was a
graduate of a German university," said mother, "and you must pay no
attention to these foolish children whose parents never even saw an
American university." All very well, but had my mother been German
herself? No, indeed, so she could hardly realize what it meant to be an
alien and an outcast. Many times during that hard year, while the
detested Siddons crossed my unwilling path would I have bartered an
educated and cultured German forbear for any kind of American, be his
lowly occupation what it might. Later that year a little French girl,
Dunois by name, came into our grade. Joy! Here was another alien who
would be a companion in misery. But to my great surprise she was courted
and flattered by this same Siddons and the two became bosom friends. The
Dunois père kept a small, unsavory restaurant in a side street, but the
glamour of his "Frenchness" was an aureole compared to the stigma of my
"Dutchness." That is still something of a mystery to me, but the article
in the Century explains in part the cause of this attitude among
unthinking Americans. Prof. Ross says:

"Between 1839 and 1845 numerous old Lutherans, resenting the attempt of
their king to unite Lutheran and Reformed faiths, migrated hither....
The political reaction in the German states after the revolution of
1830, and again after the revolution of 1848, brought tens of thousands
of liberty-lovers." And again he says of these political exiles that
they "included many men of unusual attainments and character.... These
university professors, physicians, journalists, and even aristocrats
aroused many of their fellow-countrymen to feel a pride in German
culture, and they left a stamp of political idealism, social radicalism
and religious skepticism which is slow to be effaced."

Possibly one reason for American antagonism to these earlier, superior
settlers was the fact that they did somewhat despise American culture
and hold rather closely to their own German ways of thinking. I remember
in my childhood, in my own home, that although we had Harper's Young
People and St. Nicholas, we also had English Chatterbox--I rather fancy
as a corrective to Americanisms to be found in the other magazines. You
know Germans in their own land today do not wish for American
governesses to teach their children English; it must be Englishwomen.
All our toys were sent for from the beloved Fatherland, and beautiful
toys they were, too. We had a system of Froebel with all his methods
established in our own home, long before the middle western cities
dreamed of a public kindergarten. This deep distrust of American methods
and culture could not help but impress Americans unfavorably; they would
retaliate with the cry of Dutchman, perhaps. Prof. Ross goes on to say:

"Germans brought a language, literature, and social customs of their
own, so that although when scattered they Americanized with great
rapidity wherever they were strong enough to maintain church and schools
in their own tongue they were slow to take the American stamp." So much
for those earlier immigrants. The case is vastly different with the
later tides of immigration. "After 1870," he writes, "the Teutonic
overflow was prompted by economic motives, and such a migration shows
little persistence in flying the flag of its national culture. Numbers
came, little instructed." In the words of a German-American, Knortz,
"nine-tenths of all German immigrants come from humble circumstances and
have had only an indifferent schooling. Whoever, therefore, expects
pride in their German descent from these people who owe everything to
their new country and nothing to their fatherland, simply expects too
much."

Well, then! If they no longer pride themselves on being German, and are
easily assimilated by the second generation, we should expect to see the
slight stigma of being of German descent removed by this time. But is
it? Not long ago I had occasion to attend a Bach revival and the
beautiful passion music was played and sung. One of my friends remarked,
"You have to get used to this music before you can appreciate it," and I
retorted condescendingly, "I don't; I have heard it from childhood. This
is the kind of music we sing in the Lutheran church." This same friend
later, guiding my tottering steps through the mazes and pitfalls of
society in the "most aristocratic suburb of New York," said
hesitatingly, "I don't think I'd mention it, especially to people in
general, that I was a Lutheran, if I were you." Of course I was seized
immediately with a perfectly natural desire to talk of it in season and
out to everyone I met. Why not? Why not be a Lutheran as naturally as an
Episcopalian or a Methodist? "Well, they are mostly Germans, you see."
But I don't see, and I never have seen, although this article,
enlightening and interesting, goes nearer to the reasons for such an
attitude than anything else I have ever read.


                         REJECTIONS BY EDITORS

Never again shall I feel a sense of shame and humiliation on receiving
my rejected MS. and the printed slip. I have always suspected that it
was on account of the editors' lack of taste and discrimination; now I
am sure of it. Indeed, I'm not quite sure but that it argues more to be
rejected than to be accepted. I'm beginning to be proud of it. Read
Henry Sydnor Harrison's article in the April Atlantic--Adventures with
the Editors--and see if you don't feel the same way! Or, perhaps, you've
never been rejected with the added ignominy of the printed slip. If so,
don't read this; it is not for you. But all ye rejected ones take
renewed hope from this statement that an editor, actually an editor
himself, has made:

"I think I can tell you why editors so frequently reject the earlier and
often the best work of writers: it is because any new writer who sends
in first-class work sends in work that is very different from what
editors are used to."

It reminds me of a time when I wrote, maliciously, I admit, to a certain
well-known magazine, to tell its editors a story they had printed by a
renowned author had been cribbed entire (unconsciously, possibly) from
an old classic; and I told them, too, if they would prefer to print
original stories, I had one on hand. I got back such a deliciously
solemn reply regretting the unconscious plagiarism and asking me to send
on any story I had. I did not do so, for the good and sufficient reason
that I had already sent it to them several weeks previously, and had had
it rejected without comment. No doubt it deserved to be rejected; every
one else did the same with it. To be sure, one kindly editor took the
pains to tell me why, personally. "The trouble is," he said, "there
isn't enough story. Your character-drawing is both careful and sincere,
however." So it must have been dull to deserve anything like that. I
wish we could hear a little more of the experiences of those poor
rejected, who never do "get over the wall," as Mr. Harrison terms it. I
imagine it would be both illuminating and ludicrous.

And, oh! the happy moments I had on reading E. S. Martin's comments, in
Life, on Mr. Harrison's article. Mr. Harrison makes the charge that
magazines will print poor stories of well known writers in preference to
good stories of the unknown, and Mr. Martin's response is:

"It does not follow that the editors were wrong because they did not buy
Mr. Harrison's tales before Queed. Maybe they were not more than average
stories. But after Queed they were stories by the author of Queed....
Queed pulled all Mr. Harrison's past tales out of the ruck, and put them
in the running. It was hardly fair to expect the editors to pick them
for winners beforehand."

What then are editors for, if not to "pick winners?" And Mr. Harrison
says himself that Queed was rejected by two publishers. Probably it was
hardly fair to expect the publishers to pick such a winner in advance.
We, the rejected, have always humbly thought that was their
occupation--their raison d'être. And if Mr. Harrison's short stories
were "not more than average stories," doesn't it prove his contention
that average poor stories by the known are more acceptable to editors
than good ones by the unknown?

At least I am going to think so, and some day I shall write an article
on the lofty distinction of being rejected.

                                                              M. H. P.

   The witty mind is the most banal thing that exists.--James
   Stephens in The English Review.




                            Sentence Reviews


The Goldfish: The Confessions of a Successful Man. Anonymous. [The
Century Company, New York.] Proves conclusively, for anyone who may need
such proof, that the "successful" man misses those adventures which
William James ascribed to poverty: "The liberation from material
attachments; the unbribed soul; the manlier indifference; the paying our
way by what we are or do, and not by what we have; the right to fling
away our life at any moment irresponsibly--the more athletic trim, in
short, the fighting shape...."

Walt Whitman: A Critical Study, by Basil De Sélincourt. [Mitchell
Kennerley, New York.] Any biography of Whitman which reveals a large
understanding of his big poems of personality is notable. De Sélincourt
proves in his closing sentence that he knows his subject, for it is the
clearest and best characterization of the poet that has ever been
written: "He rises ... above nationality and becomes a universal figure:
poet of the ever-beckoning future, the ever-expanding, ever-insatiable
spirit of man."

Socialism: Promise or Menace? by Morris Hillquit and Rev. Dr. John A.
Ryan. [The Macmillan Company, New York.] A sophomoric debate between two
dogmatists that ran in Everybody's Magazine. One instinctively feels
that two evils are guised as panaceas and he will have neither of them.
The church, of course, has the last word--in the book.

Penrod, by Booth Tarkington. [Doubleday, Page, and Company, New York.]
At rare intervals we have a book on boys that holds the genuine boy
boyeousness. The Real Diary of a Real Boy captivated us with the story
of big little boys in a village; The Varmit told us of the irresponsible
capers of little big boys in "prep" school; and now we have Penrod, in
which Mr. Tarkington tells us much--well, of just boys.

Joseph Pulitzer: Reminiscences of a Secretary, by Alleyne Ireland.
[Mitchell Kennerley, New York.] An extraordinarily interesting piece of
Boswellizing.

Sadhana: The Realisation of Life, by Rabindranath Tagore. [The Macmillan
Company, New York.] A quiet essay full of the queer charm of conquered
strength memorable for at least one splendid sentence: "... life is
immortal youthfulness, and it hates age that tries to clog its
movements." But Tagore is vying too much with Tango just now among
people who can neither orient nor dance.

The Meaning of Art, by Paul Gaultier. Translation by H. & E. Baldwin.
[J. B. Lippincott Company, Philadelphia.] What is art? This book gives
the best answer that we have read, but when the author is psychological
he is wrong, in most cases. He has a rare faculty of compelling one to
read between his lines, and argue things out with oneself.

The Deaf: Their Position in Society, by Harry Best. [Thomas Y. Crowell
Company, New York.] An astonishing compilation of facts and figures by a
social economist who makes a morbid subject interesting to a healthy
citizen unafraid of truth about life.

Hail and Farewell: Vale, by George Moore. [D. Appleton & Company, New
York.] A completion of the most fascinating autobiography in the English
language.

American Policy: The Western Hemisphere in Its Relation to the Eastern,
by John Bigelow. [Charles Scribner's Sons, New York.] Cautious
discussions that respect diplomatic red tape interest patriotic pedants
but bore personalities who are concerned with bigger things than
national policies.

The Fortunate Youth, by William J. Locke. [John Lane Company, New York.]
Has all the Locke charm--and all the Locke prettinesses. The dish has
been served so often that it has become a bit tasteless. Most accurately
described as the kind of story whose heroine is always called "princess"
and whose hero rises from the slums to make flaming speeches in
parliament and achieve the "Vision Splendid." It will probably run into
ten editions and bring much joy.

The Wonderful Visit, by H. G. Wells. [E. P. Dutton and Company, New
York.] A reprint of a story published in 1895 which shows Mr. Wells in
the very interesting position of groping toward his present altitude.

Sweetapple Cove, by George Van Schaick. [Small, Maynard, and Company,
Boston.] The kind of sweet, gentle love story that a publisher would
rather discover than anything Ethel Sidgwick could write. We searched in
vain for just one page to hold our attention.

Idle Wives, by James Oppenheim. [The Century Company, New York.] Despite
a narrative style that at times fairly suffocates with its emotionality,
Mr. Oppenheim has put up a very strong case for the woman who demands
something of life except having things done for her.

Bedesman 4, by Mary J. H. Shrine. [The Century Company, New York.] The
outline is traditional: an English peasant boy makes his way through
Oxford, becomes a brilliant historian and a "gentleman," and marries a
"lady." But the treatment is fresh and delightful; there is something
real about it.

Over the Hills, by Mary Findlater. [E. P. Dutton and Company, New York.]
There are no new things to say about a Findlater novel. They are always
good.

Sunshine Jane, by Anne Warner. [Little, Brown, and Company, Boston.]
Jane has our own theory that one can get what he wants out of life if he
wants it hard enough. Though we don't advocate some of her "sunshine"
sentimentalities.

The Full of the Moon, by Caroline Lockhart. [J. B. Lippincott Company,
Philadelphia.] As superfluous as The Lady Doc. Those people who are
always asking why such books as The Dark Flower should be written ought
to turn their questioning to things of this type.

The Congresswoman, by Isabel Gordon Curtis. [Browne and Howell Company,
Chicago.] The tale of an Oklahoma woman elected to congress which closes
with a retreat--though not an ignominious one--to a little white house
with a fireside and a conquering male.

The Last Shot, by Frederick Palmer. [Charles Scribner's Sons, New York.]
A war novel without a hero by a man who has experienced many wars.

The Women We Marry, by Arthur Stanwood Pier. [The Century Company, New
York.] One of the most amateurish attempts to meet the modern demand for
sex stories that we have seen.

A Child of the Orient, by Demetra Vaka. [Houghton Mifflin Company, New
York.] A blend of Greek poetry and Turkish conquest and American
progress in autobiographical form, by the Greek woman who wrote
Haremlik.

Anybody but Anne, by Carolyn Wells. [J. B. Lippincott Company,
Philadelphia.] A mystery story of which the most fascinating feature is
the architect's plan of the house in which it takes place.

The Flower-Finder, by George Lincoln Walton; with frontispiece by W. H.
Stedman and photographs by Henry Troth. [J. B. Lippincott Company,
Philadelphia.] Worth owning if merely for the end-papers which literally
lead you into a spring woods. A comprehensive pocket guide to wild
flowers.

Prisons and Prisoners: Personal Experiences of Constance Lytton and Jane
Warton, Spinster. [George H. Doran Company, New York.] As Lady Lytton,
an enthusiastic convert to militant suffrage, the author received
courteous treatment in prison; disguised successfully as a middle-class
old maid she was handled shamefully. Everyone who doubts the martyrdom
or the intrepidity of the suffragettes ought to read this record.

Women as World Builders, by Floyd Dell. [Forbes and Company, Chicago.]
Birdseye views of the feminist movement by a literary aviator whose
cleverly-composed snapshots actually justify his cocksure audacity.

Women and Morality, by a mother, a father, and a woman. [The Laurentian
Publishers, Chicago.] Men and immorality discussed bravely by two women
and a man, without the artistic justification of "getting anywhere."

Karen Borneman and Lynggaard & Co., by Hjalmar Bergström, translated
from the Danish by Edwin Björkman; The Gods of the Mountain, The Golden
Doom, King Argimenes and the Unknown Warrior, The Glittering Gate, and
The Lost Silk Hat, by Lord Dunsany; Peer Gynt, by Henrik Ibsen, with
introduction by R. Ellis Roberts. [Mitchell Kennerley, New York.] New
volumes in The Modern Drama Series.

What Is It All About? A Sketch of the New Movement in the Theatre, by
Henry Blackman Sell. [The Laurentian Publishers, Chicago.] The "art
theatre" is explained illuminatingly for those who are vague about the
movement. Condensed, to the point, and really informing.

The Beginning of Grand Opera in Chicago (1850-1859), by Karleton
Hackett. [The Laurentian Publishers, Chicago.] Mr. Hackett is a man of
ideas and he might have written an interesting book by taking "grand
opera in Chicago" as his theme. Instead, he has done a hack job with its
early history and been given the distinction of tasteful binding and
printing.

Tuberculosis: Its Cause, Cure, and Prevention, by Edward O. Otis, M.D.
[Thomas Y. Crowell Company, New York.] A revised edition of an old,
popular book "for laymen." Abounds in hard, cocksure rules that, if
followed, ought to discourage any germ whose host could outlive it. A
valuable work for persons who must have a definite programme to guide
them in fighting an always individualized disease.

Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases, classified and arranged
so as to facilitate the expression of ideas and assist in literary
composition, edited by C. O. Sylvester Mawson. [Thomas Y. Crowell
Company, New York.] A revised edition in large type on thin paper.

Richard Wagner: The Man and His Work, by Oliver Huckel. [Thomas Y.
Crowell Company, New York.] Between W. J. Henderson's characterization
of Wagner as "the greatest genius that art has produced" and Rupert
Brooke's as an emotionalist with "a fat, wide, hairless face" there
ought to be a man worth biographies ad infinitum. Dr. Huckel's is simply
a clear condensation for the general reader of standard biographical
material, and is worth while.

The Book of the Epic: All the World's Great Epics Told in Story, by H.
A. Guerber; with introduction by J. Berg Esenwein. [J. B. Lippincott
Company, Philadelphia.] The most satisfying compilation in the field
that has ever been offered to the young student or general reader.

The Practical Book of Garden Architecture, by Phebe Westcott Humphreys.
[J. B. Lippincott Company, Philadelphia.] A weighty chronicle of garden
architecture, observations in many lands and under many conditions. "A
pick up and browse" book for the nature lover, with delightful
illustrations and much interesting general data of sunny gardens, cobble
walls, and running streams.

   I am that which unseen comes and sings, sings, sings; which
   babbles in brooks and scoots in showers on the land, which the
   birds know in the woods, mornings and evenings, and the
   shore-sands know, and the hissing wave.--Walt Whitman.




                      Letters to The Little Review


                                                    A. S. K., Chicago:

With your permission I shall try to explain why I am not enthusiastic
about the second issue of your magazine:

The crime of the April issue lies in the fact of its closely following
(chronologically) the issue of March. In the beginning you appeared to
us as a prophet, and we wistfully listened to your unique message; now
you have degenerated into a priest, a dignified station indeed, but
don't you think there are already more priests than worshippers in our
Temple? If you are going to be "one of many" I question the raison
d'être of THE LITTLE REVIEW.

Your debut was a revelation, a new word, a rejuvenating breeze in the
tepid atmosphere of our periodical press. It was a wonderful number, all
fresh and beautiful; even the one or two grotesque pieces that had
smuggled in drowned in the mass of splendor, just as the heavy colors of
the rainbow soften in the powerful symphony of the spectrum.

Now, frankly, would you sign your name under every article of the April
REVIEW? I hope not! You have turned your temple into a parliament of
dissonances; you have admitted Victorian ladies and sentimental
crucifiers of Nietzsche; you have even polluted your pages with an
anti-Bathhouse tirade! Then that cacophony of personal letters: I
blushed at the sight of these tokens of familiarity and tappings over
your shoulder on the part of the benevolent readers. I wished to shout
to the Misses Jones to keep off the altar, lest they besmirch your white
robe with their penny compliments and saccharine effusions.

I could hardly make myself believe that this irritating copy was THE
LITTLE REVIEW.

Pardon this frankness. But I wish you success, not popularity.

                                            Mary W. Ohr, Indianapolis:

Let me tell you how much pleasure you have given me in the second issue
of your magazine. You are certainly to be congratulated upon having the
initiative to start anything so great as this.

I have reserved writing to you until now, for I wished to avoid the
appearance of trying to tear down or discourage an effort that was so
much bigger than anything I could ever achieve. Your article on The Dark
Flower made me feel that possibly intolerance might be your stumbling
block, and that your youth and enthusiasm might lead you into many
pitfalls that might not be for the betterment of your work. But this
number has made me your equal in enthusiasm, and I believe THE LITTLE
REVIEW is here to stay.

                                 Verne DeWitt Rowell, London, Ontario:

THE LITTLE REVIEW is a whirlwind surprise. There is nothing like it in
America. I am glad to see you playing up Nietzsche. Over here in this
little town we have a Nietzschean vogue, and we are all delighted. Truly
the intellectual center of America has shifted westward. To be sure, New
York has The International; but Chicago has THE LITTLE REVIEW, The
Trimmed Lamp, and one or two other magazines of real literature. Then
there is Burns Lee's Bell Cow in Cleveland. Nietzsche is coming into his
own at last. Wishing every success to THE LITTLE REVIEW, which is one of
the two best magazines in America (the other is Current Opinion).

                                                Mollie Levin, Chicago:

The formal bow that THE LITTLE REVIEW made to the public in its first
issue violated tradition beautifully by doing what formal bows never
do--really mean something. It is glorious to be young and enthusiastic,
and still more so to be courageous; and whatever goes into THE LITTLE
REVIEW in that spirit is admirable, regardless of any reader's personal
judgment.

It's good, too, to have used THE LITTLE REVIEW: It makes me think of a
child--beautiful in its present stage and with promise of infinite
fulfillment.

                                      Marie Patridge, Clearfield, Pa.:

I've been tremendously interested in the second issue. It seems to me
your critic is wrong in speaking of juvenility or the restrictive tone
of the magazine. It's exactly that which gives THE LITTLE REVIEW an
excuse for being, that it is not like all other magazines with their
cut-and-dried precision and their "Thus saith the Lord" attitude toward
things.

As time goes on I think it will be wise to enlarge the scope--more of
drama, more of music, more of world politics and science. You will thus
get away from the aesthetic tendency which your critic mentions.

I enjoyed the Wells discussion so much. And yet Miss Trevor doesn't
advance any real arguments. It's very easy to call people muddle-headed
and vaguely sentimental, but an appeal to the upbuilding of character
isn't slushy. I'm inclined to agree with "M. M.," though I'd like to
hear an advanced--not a hysterical--argument on the subject. I'm willing
to be convinced of the other side, but assuredly it would take something
stronger and sterner and more logical than Miss Trevor.

   [The suggestion about enlarging our scope is one we hoped no one
   would make until we had done it, that being the plan closest to
   our hearts. We can only explain our shortcomings in this regard
   by referring to a homely but reasonable saying about not being
   able to do everything at once.--THE EDITOR.]

                                                 Mabel Frush, Chicago:

You have invited frank criticism, and that is my reason for not writing
at first: I could not accept it all. In the first place, regarding
Paderewski. Do you never find him a bit over-powering; do you never feel
that a trifle more restraint might give greater strength? In Grieg, for
instance, does he carry you up into the high places, give you that
impression of unlimited space, rugged strength, and wild beauty? Is he
not too subjective?

I quite agree with you as regards Chopin and Schumann. There he is
satisfying. His interpretations carry a quality that other artists
sometimes treat too lightly; forgetting "a man's reach must exceed his
grasp," and so sacrificing the greater to the lesser in striving for
perfection. Impotency is the price of ultra-civilization.

Your comments on temperament are interesting, but I feel you are not
quite fair in your comparisons. Is not Paderewski's genius largely a
racial gift? To me all Russian (or Polish) art--both creative and
interpretative--possesses the flame of the elemental, that generative
quality which marks the difference between technical perfection and
living, breathing, throbbing art. Appreciating that "all music is what
awakens in you when reminded by the instrument," he strives for but one
thing: an emotional releasement that results in a temperamental orgy
which leaves his hearers dazed, lost in the labyrinth of their own
emotions.

As for Rupert Brooke's poetry, I regard him as decadent--at least too
much so to be really vital. Perhaps my vision is clouded, but I could as
easily conceive of Johnson worshipping at the shrine of Boswell as of
Whitman liking Brooke. Now and then he impresses me as being effete, and
I can never separate him from a cult, though I do delight in some of his
poems.

                                   Mrs. William H. Andrews, Cleveland:

May I put in my little word and wish you all good speed, editor of THE
LITTLE REVIEW?

You evidently live in the clear blue sky where fresh enthusiasms rush on
like white clouds bearing us irresistibly along. Life grows even more
vivid under such stimulating courage and pulsing optimism.

The world is indeed wonderful if we but live it passionately, as did
Jean Christophe and Antoine, leaping forward, breasting the waves, with
music in the soul. My ears are singing with the third movement of
Tschaikowsky's immortal Pathetique, which to me, in larger part, so
belies its name.

Hail to THE LITTLE REVIEW! May it dart "rose-crowned" along its shining
way, emblazoning the path for many of us.

                                        Mary Carolyn Davies, New York:

I have just finished reading THE LITTLE REVIEW from cover to cover, and
much of it twice over.

Thank you for loving the things I love, and thank you for being young
and not being afraid to be young! This is such a good day to be young
in!

With all good wishes for the success of THE LITTLE REVIEW (though it
needs no good wishes, for it cannot help succeeding).

                                                    P. H. W., Chicago:

The article on Mrs. Meynell in your April issue sounded a little curious
in its surroundings, as it was a piece of pure criticism and THE LITTLE
REVIEW is the official organ of exuberance. It is the only one, in fact,
and it is a good thing to have such an organ.




                           The "Best Sellers"


   The following books, arranged in order of popularity, have been the
                "best sellers" in Chicago during April:


                                FICTION

   Diane of the Green Van      Leona Dalrymple           Reilly & Britton
   Pollyanna                   Eleanor H. Porter         L. C. Page
   Inside the Cup              Winston Churchill         Macmillan
   The Fortunate Youth         William J. Locke          Lane
   Overland Red                Anonymous                 Houghton Mifflin
   T. Tembarom                 Frances H. Burnett        Century
   Penrod                      Booth Tarkington          Doubleday, Page
   Laddie                      Gene Stratton-Porter      Doubleday, Page
   Chance                      Joseph Conrad             Doubleday, Page
   Pidgin Island               Harold McGrath            Bobbs-Merrill
   The Devil's Garden          W. B. Maxwell             Bobbs-Merrill
   Quick Action                Robert Chambers           Appleton
   Sunshine Jane               Anne Warner               Little, Brown
   Light of the Western Stars  Zane Grey                 Harper
   Cap'n Dan's Daughter        Joseph Lincoln            Appleton
   The Woman Thou Gavest Me    Hall Caine                Lippincott
   Daddy-Long-Legs             Jean Webster              Century
   World Set Free              H. G. Wells               Dutton
   The After House             Mary R. Rinehart          Houghton Mifflin
   Miss Billy Married          Eleanor H. Porter         L. C. Page
   Flying U Ranch              B. M. Bower               Dillingham
   Ariadne of Allan Water      Sidney McCall             Little, Brown
   Anybody but Ann             Carolyn Wells             Lippincott
   Rocks of Valpre             E. M. Dell                Putnam
   White Linen Nurse           Eleanor Abbott            Century
   When Ghost Meets Ghost      William DeMorgan          Holt
   Dark Hollow                 Anna Katherine Greene     Dodd, Mead
   The Forester's Daughter     Hamlin Garland            Harper
   Peg o' My Heart             Hartley Manners           Dodd, Mead
   Passionate Friends          H. G. Wells               Harper
   Martha by the Day           Julie Lippman             Holt
   Westways                    S. Weir Mitchell          Century
   Gold                        Stewart E. White          Doubleday, Page
   Valley of the Moon          Jack London               Macmillan
   Home                        Anonymous                 Century
   It Happened in Egypt        C. M. & A. M. Williamson  Doubleday, Page
   The Treasure                Kathleen Norris           Macmillan
   Witness for the Defense     A. E. W. Mason            Scribner
   Iron Trail                  Rex Beach                 Harper
   Friendly Road               David Grayson             Doubleday, Page


                              NON-FICTION

        Crowds            Gerald S. Lee        Doubleday, Page
        What Men Live By  Richard C. Cabot     Houghton Mifflin
        Modern Dances     Caroline Walker      Saul
        Gitanjali         Rabindranath Tagore  Macmillan
        Autobiography     Theodore Roosevelt   Macmillan

   The press of my foot to the earth springs a hundred
   affections.--Walt Whitman.

   I ... am he who places over you no master, owner, better, God,
   beyond what waits intrinsically in yourself.--Walt Whitman in
   Leaves of Grass.




Where The Little Review Is on Sale


   New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. E. P.
   Dutton & Co. G. P. Putnam's Sons. Brentano's.
   Vaughn & Gomme. M. J. Whaley.
   Wanamaker's.

   Chicago: The Little Theatre. McClurg's.
   Morris's Book Shop. Carson, Pirie, Scott &
   Co. A. Kroch & Co. Chandler's Bookstore,
   Evanston. W. S. Lord, Evanston.

   Boston: Old Corner Bookstore. C. E. Lauriat
   & Co.

   Pittsburg: Davis's Bookshop.

   Springfield, Mass.: Johnson's Bookstore.

   Cleveland: Burrows Brothers. Korner & Ward.

   Detroit: Macauley Bros. Sheehan & Co.

   Minneapolis: Nathaniel McCarthy's.

   Los Angeles: C. C. Parker's.

   Omaha: Henry F. Keiser.

   Columbus, O.: A. H. Smythe's.

   Dayton, O.: Rike-Kummler Co.

   Indianapolis, Ind.: Stewarts' Book Store.
   The New York Store.

   New Haven, Conn.: E. P. Judd Co.

   Portland, Ore.: J. K. Gill Co.

   St. Louis, Mo.: Philip Roeder.

   Seattle, Wash.: Lowman, Hanford & Co.

   Spokane, Wash.: John W. Graham & Co.

   Hartford, Conn.: G.F. Warfield & Co.

   Philadelphia: Geo. W. Jacobs & Co. Leary's
   Old Bookstore. John Wanamaker's.

   Rochester, N. Y.: Clarence Smith.

   Syracuse, N. Y.: Clarence E. Wolcott.

   Buffalo, N. Y.: Otto Ulhrick Co.

   Washington, D. C.: Brentano's.

   St. Paul: St. Paul Book & Stationery Co.

   Cincinnati, O.: Stewart & Kidd.

               My First Years as a Frenchwoman 1876-1879

      BY MARY KING WADDINGTON, author of "Letters of a Diplomat's
          Wife," "Italian Letters of a Diplomat's Wife," etc.

                       $2.50 net; postage extra.

   The years this volume embraces were three of the most critical in
   the life of the French Republic. Their principal events and
   conspicuous characters are vividly described by an expert writer
   who was within the inmost circles of society and diplomacy--she
   was the daughter of President King of Columbia, and had just
   married M. William Waddington, one of the leading French
   diplomats and statesmen of the time.

                       Notes of a Son and Brother

                            BY HENRY JAMES.

              Illustrated. With drawings by WILLIAM JAMES.

                       $2.50 net; postage extra.

   Harvard, as it was in the days when, first William, and then
   Henry, James were undergraduates, is pictured and commented upon
   by these two famous brothers--by William James through a series
   of letters written at the time. The book carries forward the
   early lives of William and Henry, which was begun in "A Small Boy
   and Others," published a year ago. Among the distinguished men
   pictured in its pages are John LaFarge, Hunt, Professor Norton,
   Professor Childs, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, who was a close friend
   of Henry James, Senior.

                     The American Japanese Problem

                          BY SIDNEY L. GULICK.

                 Illustrated. $1.75 net; postage extra.

   The writer believes that "The Yellow Peril may be transformed
   into golden advantage for us, even as the White Peril in the
   Orient is bringing unexpected benefits to those lands." The
   statement of this idea forms a part of a comprehensive and
   authoritative discussion of the entire subject as set forth in
   the title. The author has had a lifetime of intimacy with both
   nations, and is trusted and consulted by the governments of each.

              The Influence of the Bible upon Civilisation

       BY ERNEST VON DOBSCHUTZ, Professor of the New Testament at
        the University of Halle-Wittenberg, and now lecturing at
               Harvard as exchange professor of the year

                       $1.25 net; postage extra.

   This is an attempt to answer by the historical method the great
   question of the day: "How can Christianity and civilisation
   advance in harmony?" The writer simply follows the traces of the
   Bible through the different periods of Christian history--a task
   which, singularly enough, has hardly ever before even been
   attempted, and never before successfully or even thoroughly done.

                    Hebrew and Babylonian Traditions

           BY MORRIS JASTROW, JR., PH.D. Professor of Semitic
              Languages in the University of Pennsylvania

                     8vo $2.50 net; postage extra.

   An important and extraordinarily interesting study of the
   relationship between the Hebrews and the Babylonians, devoted
   primarily to pointing out the differences between Babylonian
   myths, beliefs, and practices, and the final form assumed by
   corresponding Hebrew traditions, despite the fact that both are
   to be traced back to the same source.

                       New Guides to Old Masters

                          BY JOHN C. VAN DYKE

         Professor of the History of Art at Rutgers College and
        author of "The Meaning of Pictures," "What is Art?" etc.

                   12 Volumes Each with frontispiece

   A series of art guides, whose little volumes, unique in
   conception and execution, should be as natural and essential a
   part of every man's traveling equipment as the Baedeker
   guide-books are now.

   They are the only descriptive and critical art guides in
   existence. They are written by the high authority on art, who is
   probably better acquainted than any other writer living with the
   European galleries.

   They are composed of clear, pointed critical notes upon
   individual pictures, written before those pictures by the author.

   These notes deal comprehensively with practically all of the
   European galleries; and therefore discuss and explain practically
   all the important paintings that hang in those galleries.

   The volumes are so manufactured as to be easily carried, and they
   combine perfectly the qualities of beauty and durability.


                              The Volumes
                     I.  LONDON--National Gallery, Wallace
                            Collection. With a General
                            Introduction and Bibliography,
                            for the Series.
                                                   net $1.00
                    II.  PARIS--Louvre
                                                     net .75
                   III.  AMSTERDAM--Rijks Museum
                         THE HAGUE--Royal Gallery
                         HAARLEM--Hals Museum
                                                     net .75
                    IV.  ANTWERP--Royal Museum
                         BRUSSELS--Royal Museum
                                                     net .75
                     V.  MUNICH--Old Pinacothek
                         FRANKFORT--Staedel Institute
                         CASSEL--Royal Gallery
                                                   net $1.00
                    VI.  BERLIN--Kaiser-Friedrich Museum
                         DRESDEN--Royal Gallery
                                                   net $1.00
                   VII.  VIENNA--Imperial Gallery
                         BUDAPEST--Museum of Fine Art
                                                   net $1.00

                                IN PRESS
                  VIII.  ST. PETERSBURG--Hermitage
                    IX.  VENICE--Academy
                         MILAN--Brera, Poldi-Pessoli Museum
                     X.  FLORENCE--Uffizi, Pitti, Academy
                    XI.  ROME--Vatican Borghese Gallery
                   XII.  MADRID--Prado

                        Charles Scribner's Sons
                         Fifth Avenue, New York




                            IMPORTANT BOOKS
                             OF THE SPRING


                           IN THE HIGH HILLS

                       By Maxwell Struthers Burt

   This little book is one that the lover of poetry cannot overlook.
   Mr. Burt has authentic poetic inspiration and a fine command of
   poetic language and his work will be read and treasured.

                       $1.00 net. Postage extra.

                         THE SISTER OF THE WIND

                         By Grace Fallow Norton

   This new collection of Miss Norton's work, the first since the
   "Little Gray Songs from St. Joseph's," shows remarkable poetic
   growth in technical facility, and in range and force of
   imagination.

                       $1.25 net. Postage extra.

                           THE WOLF OF GUBBIO

                      By Josephine Preston Peabody

   "The author has succeeded in transferring to the pages of her
   drama much of the indefinable sweetness and spirituality which we
   associate with the name of St. Francis, and in so doing she has
   enhanced the tender and appealing qualities which distinguish all
   of her work."--San Francisco Chronicle.

                       $1.10 net. Postage extra.

                    THE LITTLE BOOK OF MODERN VERSE

                        By Jessie B. Rittenhouse

   "A delight to all who love poetry.... Surely generations other
   than this will be grateful to the wise gatherer of so much
   loveliness."--N. Y. Times.

                       $1.00 net. Postage extra.

                             THE RIDE HOME

                      By Florence Wilkinson Evans

   "Rich in beauty of thought, feeling and expression.... All the
   songs, whether glad or sorrowful, are human, tender, and
   touching."--Chicago Record-Herald.

                       $1.25 net. Postage extra.

                      THE POEMS OF JOSEPH BEAUMONT

   Poems, most of them hitherto unpublished, of Dr. Joseph Beaumont,
   a seventeenth century divine. The manuscript was loaned by Prof.
   George H. Palmer to Wellesley College, where it was translated
   and equipped with notes and introduction by Eloise Robinson,
   under the direction of Professor Katharine Lee Bates.

        $5.00 net. Postage extra. Limited edition, of which 200
                          copies are for sale.

                        LYRICS FROM THE CHINESE

                            By Helen Waddell

   These free translations of a group of Chinese poems are admirable
   in their faithfulness to the spirit of the originals. They
   breathe the fatalism, wistfulness, homely wisdom, and love of
   beauty so characteristic of all Oriental expression.

                       $1.00 net. Postage extra.

                              LOST DIARIES

                           By Maurice Baring

   The many readers who have found piquant pleasure in Mr. Baring's
   delightful fabrications, "Dead Letters" and "Diminutive Dramas,"
   will find similar but fresh delight in his "Lost Diaries."

                       $1.25 net. Postage extra.

                             PAUL VERLAINE

                           By Wilfred Thorley

   This volume deals in a sane and authoritative fashion with that
   most brilliant of insane geniuses, Paul Verlaine. Verlaine's
   fevered life and his outstanding poetic work are both studied
   with full knowledge and with a fine critical sense.

              With portrait. 75 cents net. Postage extra.

                           A LIFE OF TOLSTOY

                           By Edward Garnett

   Mr. Garnett, who is one of the best known of the younger English
   critics, has made a close study of Tolstoy's life and work. He
   presents it with sympathy, yet with careful detachment, and
   always in harmony with the general relation of life and thought
   of the day.

              With portrait. 75 cents net. Postage extra.

                            IN THE OLD PATHS

                            By Arthur Grant

   "A charming book of sketches that take us into holy
   places--places made sacred by association now dear to the lover
   of books."--Book News Monthly.

                 Illustrated. $1.50 net. Postage extra.

          STORIES AND POEMS AND OTHER UNCOLLECTED WRITINGS OF
                               BRET HARTE

   The material here collected stands comparison in interest and
   value with that in any of Harte's other volumes. Mr. Charles
   Meeker Kozlay, who is widely known as the most successful
   collector of Hartiana, has been able to collect a group of
   stories, essays, and poems from magazine and newspaper sources
   that every reader of Bret Harte will want.

      Illustrated. $6.00 net. Postpaid. Limited to 500 copies for
                                 sale.

                         A CHILD OF THE ORIENT

                            By Demetra Vaka

   A fascinating autobiographical story of the early life of a Greek
   girl in Constantinople. It has the exotic, Arabian Nights flavor
   of the same author's "Haremlik," with an even keener, more
   consecutive narrative interest.

                       $1.25 net. Postage extra.

                             CLARK'S FIELD

                           By Robert Herrick

   One of Mr. Herrick's ablest and strongest novels, showing the
   development of a modern girl involved in the changing conditions
   of American social and business life.

                       $1.40 net. Postage extra.

       4 Park St. 16 E. 40th St. Boston Houghton Mifflin Company
                                New York


                         You Will Want to Read




                         Diane of the Green Van


   IF you choose your reading for the suspense of the Plot

          "A plot far removed from the ordinary."--Pittsburgh
          Chronicle-Telegraph.

          "Full of surprising turns and hedged around with the
          atmosphere of romance which is truly
          enthralling."--Philadelphia Record.

          "A plot remarkably striking--bright and breezy and
          exciting."--Chicago Record-Herald.

                                   or

   If you enjoy the development of whimsical Characters

          "A heroine whose fascination richly merits study."--Boston
          Globe.

          "Everywhere is there subtlety in the delineation of
          character."--Chicago Tribune.

          "Every personage introduced has a distinct
          individuality."--Louisville Courier-Journal.

                                  and

   The wholesomeness of a charming out-of-doors Setting

          "A rare charm in description which brings out the beauty of
          the setting without delaying the story."--Indianapolis News.

          "A land of enchantment--the enthrallment of the
          Everglades."--Book News Monthly.

          "Pictures fraught with poetic beauty."--San Francisco
          Bulletin.

                                  told

   With all the humor and spontaneity of an individual Style

          "Gracefully written, vivid in style and suggestion."--Chicago
          Record-Herald.

          "Lively, thoroughly entertaining."--Philadelphia Public
          Ledger.

          "Unusual dramatic grip; much brilliancy of
          dialogue."--Philadelphia North American.

   You will find all these qualities in

                                 Diane
                                 of the
                               Green Van

                        The $10,000 Prize Novel

                                   By
                            Leona Dalrymple

   If you like a bright, happy, quick-moving love story, spiced with
   individuality, sweetened with clean, wholesome humor, brisked
   with a dash of adventure that will make you sit up, toned with a
   love of nature and the big out-of-doors, refreshingly free from
   "problem," "sex"--99-925/1000 pure story--read "DIANE."

                    At All Dealers--Price $1.35 Net

                  Publishers Reilly & Britton Chicago




                     Mitchell Kennerley's May Books


                            New Men for Old

     By HOWARD VINCENT O'BRIEN. A fine new American novel, serious
      in intent but interestingly told and written with charm and
                              distinction.

                               Net $1.25.

                               Great Days

     By FRANK HARRIS, author of "The Man Shakespeare," "The Bomb,"
                    "Montes the Matador," etc., etc.

                            12mo. $1.35 net.

   There is nothing of the problem-novel about this newest book by
   Frank Harris. It is just a red-blooded gripping yarn, set in the
   time of Napoleon.

                             Forum Stories

     Selected by CHARLES VALE, author of "John Ward, M. D." Uniform
                         with "The Lyric Year."

                            12mo. $2.00 net.

   "Forum Stories" is a representative of American short stories, as
   was "The Lyric Year" of American poetry.

                     The True Adventures of a Play

        By LOUIS SHIPMAN. Illustrated in colors and in black and
                                 white.

                            12mo. $1.50 net.

   Perhaps you remember Henry Miller in "D'Arcy of the Guards." Its
   author, Louis Shipman, has written this unique book about
   "D'Arcy," in which he tells exactly what happened to the play
   from the very first moment the manuscript left his hands.
   Letters, contracts, telegrams, etc., are all given in full, and
   there are many interesting illustrations, both in color and in
   black and white. "The True Adventures of a Play" will prove of
   almost inestimable value to all those who practice or hope to
   practice the art of playwriting.

                     Interpretations and Forecasts

      A STUDY OF SURVIVALS AND TENDENCIES IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIETY

                          By VICTOR BRANFORD.

                            8vo. $2.50 net.

   An important book in which are discussed such timely topics as
   "The Position of Women," "The Renewed Interest in the Drama,"
   etc.

                Intermediate Types Among Primitive Folk

      By EDWARD CARPENTER, author of "Towards Democracy," "Love's
                          Coming of Age," etc.

                            12mo. $2.00 net.

   A new and important book by a man whose writings command the
   attention of the civilized world.

                         At the Sign of the Van

         By MICHAEL MONAHAN, author of "Adventures in Life and
                             Letters," etc.

                            12mo. $2.00 net.

   Michael Monahan, founder of that fascinating little magazine,
   "The Papyrus," has abundant sympathy, insight, critical acumen,
   and above all real flavor. Into this volume he has put much of
   his own life story. And there is a remarkable chapter on "Sex in
   the Playhouse," besides papers on Roosevelt, O. Henry, Carlyle,
   Renan, Tolstoy, and Arthur Brisbane, to mention but a few.

                             Nova Hibernia

     By MICHAEL MONAHAN, author of "Adventures in Life in Letters,"
                                  etc.

                            12mo. $1.50 net.

   A book of delightful and informing essays about Irishmen and
   letters by an Irishman. Some of the chapters are "Yeats and
   Synge," "Thomas Moore," "Sheridan," "Irish Balladry," etc., etc.

           Mitchell Kennerley, 32 West 58th Street, New York


                        The Pre-eminence of the




                             Mason & Hamlin


   During the musical season, just closing, the Mason & Hamlin has
   been heard more frequently in concerts and public recitals of
   note than all other pianos.

   To scan but hurriedly a partial list, is to be reminded of the
   greatest musical events of the past season.

      Tetrazzini-Ruffo Concert
      Melba-Kubelik Concert
      Kneisel Quartet
      Flonzaley Quartet

      Concerts of the Apollo Musical Club
      Sinai Temple Orchestra
      Sunday Evening Club

      MARY ANGELL
      HAROLD BAUER
      SIMON BUCHHALTER
      MME. CLARA BUTT AND KENNERLEY RUMFORD
      CAMPANINI CONCERTS
      LINA CAVALIERI
      VIOLA COLE
      CHARLES W. CLARK
      JULIA CLAUSSEN
      ARMAND CRABBE
      HELEN DESMOND
      MAX DOELLING
      JENNIE DUFAU
      HECTOR DUFRANNE
      MARIE EDWARDS
      CLARENCE EIDAM
      AMY EVANS
      CECIL FANNING
      CARL FLESCH
      ALBERT E. FOX

      HEINRICH GEBHARD
      ARTHUR GRANQUIST
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                             VOL. IV NO. II




                                 Poetry


                          A Magazine of Verse

                        Edited by Harriet Monroe


                               MAY, 1914

     Nishikigi                                     Ernest Fenollosa
       Translation of a Japanese Noh Drama
     The Rainbird                                      Bliss Carman
     Poems                                         Skipwith Cannell
       Ikons--The Blind Man--The Dwarf Speaks--Epilogue to the Crows.
     Poems                                     William Butler Yeats
       To a Friend Whose Work Has Come to Nothing--Paudeen--To a
          Shade--When Helen Lived--Beggar to Beggar Cried--The
          Witch--The Peacock--Running to Paradise--The Player
          Queen--To a Child Dancing in the Wind--The Magi--A Coat.
     Editorial Comments
       The Enemies We Have Made--The Later Yeats--Reviews--Notes.

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                          Transcriber's Notes


Advertisements were collected at the end of the text.

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

   [p. 13]:
   ... makes This man and not That." ...
   ... makes him This man and not That." ...

   [p. 26]:
   ... broadens the attitudes of men lose ...
   ... broadens the attitudes of men they lose ...

   [p. 40]:
   ... "I don't care where the water goes if it doesn't go into the
       wine." ...
   ... "I don't care where the water goes if it doesn't get into the
       wine." ...