THE LITTLE REVIEW


                       Literature Drama Music Art

                          MARGARET C. ANDERSON
                                 EDITOR

                             NOVEMBER, 1915

        “Life Itself”                                 The Editor
        The Zeppelins Over London              Richard Aldington
        Portrait of Theodore Dreiser        Arthur Davison Ficke
        Theodore Dreiser                       John Cowper Powys
        “So We Grew Together”                  Edgar Lee Masters
        Choleric Comments                      Alexander S. Kaun
        The Scavenger’s Swan Song
        Dregs:                                         Ben Hecht
          Life
          Depths
          Gratitude
        Editorials
        John Cowper Powys on War                  Margery Currey
        The Washington Square Players               Saxe Commins
        Rupert Brooke’s “Lithuania” at the Little Theater
        Book Discussion:
          An Inspired Publisher
          Gogol’s “Taras Bulba”
          Gorky’s “Chelkash, and Other Stories”
          Andreyev’s “The Little Angel”
          Chekhov’s “Russian Silhouettes”
          Artzibashef’s “The Breaking Point”

                           Published Monthly

                            15 cents a copy

                    MARGARET C. ANDERSON, Publisher
                           Fine Arts Building
                                CHICAGO

                              $1.50 a year

         Entered as second-class matter at Postoffice, Chicago




                           THE LITTLE REVIEW


                                Vol. II

                             NOVEMBER, 1915

                                 No. 8

                Copyright, 1915, by Margaret C. Anderson




                             “Life Itself”


                          MARGARET C. ANDERSON


                                   I.

   “But you don’t know Life,” they are always saying.
   I wonder what it is they mean?

   They mean humanity and the urge of it:
   In the beginning and in the end the soul’s longing to be known, to know
      itself, and to know others;
   And that means, in the beginning and in the end, the quest for love;
   It is the ideal of love and the finding of it;
   And the magic of it and the drain of disillusionment;
   And the luxury of sorrow and the voluptuousness of suffering;
   And the vacuum that is beyond death;
   And the conviction that ideals are better than reality;
   And the decision to live for “art”;
   And the pull to new love ...
   And the discovery that love is enslavement;
   And the breaking from it;
   And the courage to contain life;
   And the emancipation _from_ something;
   And the complacency of first freedom;
   And the emptiness of it;
   And the pull to new love ...
   And the discovery that rapture is not relived;
   And the conviction that passion is not love;
   And the dedication to “the spiritual”;
   And the pull to new love ...
   And the deepest agony, which is unrequited love;
   And the realization of people;
   And the discovery that the world is wrong;
   And the glory of rebellion;
   And the emancipation _for_ something;
   And the pull to new love ...
   And the birth of cynicism;
   And the conviction that rebellion is futile;
   And the discovery of one’s self;
   And the dedication to one’s self;
   And the discovery that one’s self is not big enough;
   And the pull to new love ...
   And the knowledge that love includes passion;
   And the sense of rich growing;
   And the hope of sharing growth;
   And the longing to be known;
   And the relinquishing of that longing;
   And the discovery that perfection does not last;
   And the sufficiency of self-direction;
   And the completeness of freedom;
   And the longing to know the human soul;
   And the pull to new love ...
   And the relinquishing of that longing;
   And the discovery of the peace that is in nature;
   And the realization of the unimportance of man;
   And the knowledge that only great moments are attainable;
   And the hatred of consummations;
   And the realization of truths too late to act upon them;
   And the acceptance of substitutes;
   And the pull to new love ...

   And every human being knows these things.


                                  II.

   “But you don’t know life itself,” I am always saying.
   I wonder what it is I mean.

   I think it is something wonderful like color and sound, and
      something mystical like fragrance and flowers.
   And something incredible like air and wind,
   And something of grey magic like rain;
   It is faded deserts and the unceasing sea;
   It is the moving stars;
   It is the orange sun stepping through blue curtains of sky,
   And the rose sun dropping through black trees;
   It is green storms running across greenness,
   And gold rose petals spilled by the moon on dark water;
   It is snow and mist and clouds of color,
   It is tree gardens and painted birds;
   It is leaves of autumn and grasses of spring;
   It is flower forests and the petals of stars;
   It is morning—yellow mornings, green mornings, red mornings, gold
      mornings, silver mornings, sun mornings, mist mornings, mornings
      of dew;
   It is night—white nights, green nights, grey nights, purple nights,
      blue nights, moon nights, rain nights, nights that burn;
   It is waking in the first of the morning,
   It is the deep adventure of sleep;
   It is lights on rivers and lights on pavements;
   It is boulevards bordered with flowers of stone;
   It is poetry and Japanese prints and the actor on a stage;
   It is music;
   It is dreams that could not happen;
   It is emotion for the sake of emotion;
   It is life for the sake of living;
   It is silence;
   It is the unknowable;
   It is eternity;
   It is death.

   And only artists know these things.




                       The Zeppelins Over London


                           RICHARD ALDINGTON

... The war saps all one’s energy. It seems impossible to do any
creative work in the midst of all this turmoil and carnage. Of course
you know that we had the Zeppelins over London? Let me give you my
version of the affair.

It was just after eleven. We were sitting in our little flat, which is
on the top floor of a building on the slope of Hampstead Hill. We were
reading—I was savouring, like a true decadent, that over-sweet honied
Latin of the early Renaissance in an edition of 1513! Could anything be
more peaceful? Our window was shut—so the silence was absolute. Suddenly
there was a Bang! and a shrill wail. “That was pretty close,” said I.
Bang—whizz! Bang—whizz! Shrapnel from the anti-aircraft guns which are
not five hundred yards from our house! (Of course, like boobies, we
thought they were bombs.) I jumped up and got my coat, and grabbed the
door-key. It took hours to put out the light! (All the time Bang—whizz!)
It seemed interminable, that descent of those four flights of stairs,
all the time with the knowledge that any second might see the whole damn
place blown to hell. We could see the flashes of the guns and the
searchlights as we passed the windows—_they were pointed straight at
us_! That meant that the Zeppelin was either right overhead or coming
there! Some excitement, I tell you. I shiver with excitement when I
think of it. We stood at the porch for a few seconds—very long
seconds—wondering what to do. You are supposed to get into the cellars,
but we haven’t got cellars; and it’s very risky in the streets from the
flying shrapnel. We could see the long searchlights pointing to a spot
almost overhead and the little red pinpricks of bursting shells. A man
came down from one of the flats—very calm, with field glasses, to have a
look at the animal! Suddenly we saw it, clear over head, with shells
from three or four guns making little rose-coloured punctures in the air
underneath it. One shell went near, very near, the Zeppelin swerved,
tilted—“They’ve got it! It’s coming down!” we all exclaimed. In the
distance we could hear faint cheering. But the Zeppelin righted itself,
waggled a little, and scenting danger made for the nearest cloud!
Apparently a piece of shell had hit the pilot, for there was no apparent
damage to be seen through the glasses. There were a few more bangs from
the guns, followed by the cat squeals of the shells and the little
explosions in the air. Then silence as the Zeppelin got into a cloud;
the searchlights looked wildly for it, for ten minutes. Then they all
went out and in the resulting darkness we could see the glow of the
fires in London.

What rather detracts from our heroism is the fact that the Zeppelin had
already dropped all its bombs in the middle of London, but we didn’t
know it till afterwards.

I deduce these reflections. 1. That as an engine of frightfulness the
Zeppelin is over-rated. And the damage it does is comparatively
unimportant. 2. That it is uncultured of the Germans to risk murdering
the English Imagists and ruining the only poetic movement in England,
for the sake of getting their names into the papers. 3. That I notice I
never go to bed now earlier than twelve, and frequently go for a walk
about eleven o’clock.

I can’t of course tell you where the bombs fell, as it is strictly
forbidden. Still I can say this: that no public building of any kind was
touched; that it looks jolly well as if our Teutonic friends made a dead
set at St. Paul’s and the British Museum; that, without exception, the
bombs fell on the houses of the poor and the very poor—except for a
warehouse or so and some offices; that one bomb fell near a block of
hospitals, containing paralytics and other cripples and diseased
persons, smashed all the hospital windows, and terrified the unhappy
patients into hysterics; that, lastly, it is a damned lie to say there
are guns on St. Paul’s and the British Museum—the buildings are too old
to stand the shock of the recoil. Voilà!

... Remy de Gourmont is dead.... Camille de Saint-Croix also. It is hard
to write of friends recently dead....


   The experienced artist knows that inspiration is rare and that
   intelligence is left to complete the work of intuition; he puts
   his ideas under the press and squeezes out of them the last drop
   of the divine juices that are in them—(and if need be sometimes
   he does not shrink from diluting them with clear water).—_Romain
   Rolland._




                      Portrait of Theodore Dreiser


                          ARTHUR DAVISON FICKE

       There were gilded Chinese dragons
   And tinkling danglers of glass
   And dirty marble-topped tables
   Around us, that late night-hour.
   You ate steadily and silently
   From a huge bowl of chop-suey
   Of repellant aspect;
   While I,—I, and another,—
   Told you that you had the style neither of William Morris
   Nor of Walter Pater.

       And it was perfectly true ....
   But you continued to occupy yourself
   With your quarts of chop-suey.
   And somehow you reminded me
   Of nothing so much as of the knitting women
   Who implacably counted stitches while the pride of France
   Went up to death.

       Tonight I am alone,
   A long way from that Chinese restaurant,
   A long way from wherever you are.
   And I find it difficult to recall to my memory
   The image of your large laboring inexpressive face.
   For I have just turned the last page
   Of a book of yours—
   A book large and superficially inexpressive,—like yourself.
   It has not, any more than the old ones,
   The style of Pater.
   But now there are passing before me
   Interminable figures in tangled procession—
   Proud or cringing, starved with desire or icy,
   Hastening toward a dream of triumph or fleeing from a dream of doom,—
   Passing—passing—passing
   Through a world of shadows,
   Through a chaotic and meaningless anarchy,
   Under heavy clouds of terrific gloom
   Or through ravishing flashes of knife-edged sunlight—
   Passing—passing—passing—
   Their heads haloed with immortal illusion,—
   The terrible and beautiful, cruel and wonder-laden illusion of life.




                            Theodore Dreiser


                           JOHN COWPER POWYS

In estimating the intrinsic value of a book like _The “Genius”_
and—generally—of a writer like Theodore Dreiser, it is advisable to
indulge in a little gentle introspection.

Criticism need not always impose itself as an art; but it must at least
conform to some of the principles that govern that form of human
activity. The worthlessness of so much energetic modern criticism is
that it proceeds—like scum—from the mere surface of the writer’s
intelligence. It is true that all criticism resolves itself ultimately
into a matter of taste;—but one has to discover what one’s taste really
is; and that is not always easy.

Taste is a living thing, an organic thing. It submits to the laws of
growth; and its growth is fostered or retarded by many extraneous
influences. In regard to the appreciation of new and original works of
art, it belongs to the inherent nature of taste that it should be
enlarged, transmuted, and undergo the birth-pangs of a species of
re-creation. In the presence of a work of art that is really unusual, in
an attempt to appreciate a literary effect that has never appeared
before, one’s taste necessarily suffers a certain embarrassment and
uneasiness. It suffers indeed sometimes a quite extreme discomfort. This
is inevitable. This is right. This means that the creative energy in the
new thing is getting to work upon us, unloosening our prejudices and
enlarging our scope. Such a process is attended by exquisite
intellectual excitement. It is also attended by a certain rending and
tearing of personal vanity.

One is too apt to confuse the existing synthesis of one’s aesthetic
instincts with the totality of one’s being; and this is a fatal blunder;
for who can fathom the reach of _that_ circumference? And it is of the
nature of all syntheses to change and grow.

Yet, on the other hand, nothing is more ridiculous and ineffective than
the kind of hand-to-mouth criticism which attempts to eliminate its own
past, and to snatch at the glow and glamour of a work of art, as it were
“_de vacuo_,” and out of misty clouds. If one wishes to catch the secret
of true criticism; if one’s criticism is to be something more than a
mere howl of senseless condemnation or yawp of still more senseless
praise; one must attempt to do what Goethe and Saint-Beuve and Brandes
and Pater were always doing: that is to say, to make every use of every
tradition, _our own_, as well as that of classical authority;—and then
carry all this a little, just a little, _further_; giving it the shudder
and the thrilling interest of the process of organic growth.

Without tradition, the tradition of our own determined taste and the
tradition of classical taste, there can be no growth. Oracles uttered in
neglect of these, are oracles “_in vacuo_,” without meaning or
substance; without roots in human experience. Whether we are pleased to
acknowledge it or not, our own gradually-evolved taste is linked at a
thousand points with the classical taste of the ages. In criticizing new
work we can no more afford to neglect such tradition than, in expressing
our thoughts, we can afford to neglect language.

Tradition _is_ the language of criticism. It can be carried further:
every original work of art, by producing a new reaction upon it,
necessarily carries it further. But it cannot be swept aside; or we are
reduced to dumbness; to such vague growls and gestures as animals might
indulge in. Criticism, to carry any intelligible meaning at all, must
use the language provided by the centuries. There is no other language
to use; and in default of language we are reduced, as I have said, to
inarticulate noises.

The unfortunate thing is, that much of the so-called “criticism” of our
day is nothing better than such _physiological gesticulation_. In
criticism, as in life, a certain degree of _continuity_ is necessary, or
we become no more than arbitrary puffs of wind, who may shriek one day
down the chimney, and another day through a crack in the door, but in
neither case with any intelligible meaning for human ears.

In dealing with a creative quality as unusual and striking as that of
Theodore Dreiser, it is of absolutely no critical value to content
ourselves with a crude physical disturbance on the surface of our minds,
whether such disturbance is favourable or unfavourable to the writer. It
is, for instance, quite irrelevant to hurl condemnation upon a work like
_The “Genius”_ because it is largely preoccupied with sex. It is quite
equally irrelevant to lavish enthusiastic laudations upon it because of
this preoccupation. A work of art is not good because it speaks daringly
and openly about things that shock certain minds. It is not bad because
it avoids all mention of such things. An artist has a right to introduce
into his work what he pleases and to exclude from his work what he
pleases. The question for the critic is, not what subject has he
selected, but how has he treated that subject;—has he made out of it an
imaginative, suggestive, and convincing work of art, or has he not!
There is no other issue before the critic than this; and if he supposes
there is,—if he supposes he has the smallest authority to dictate to a
writer what his subject shall be;—he is simply making a fool of himself.

There is an absurd tendency among some of us to suppose that a writer is
necessarily a great writer because he is daring in his treatment of sex.
This is quite as grotesque an illusion as the opposite one, that a great
writer must be idealistic and uplifting. There is not the remotest
reason why he should concern himself with sex; if he prefers—as did
Charles Dickens for instance—to deal with other aspects of life. On the
other hand there is not the least reason why he should be “uplifting.”
Let him be an artist—an artist—that is the important matter! All these
questions concerning “subjects” are tedious and utterly trifling.

In _The “Genius”_ Theodore Dreiser has achieved a very curious and a
very original work. In doing it he has once more made it clear how much
more interesting the quality of his own genius is than that of any other
American novelist of the present age.

_The “Genius”_ is an epic work. It has the epic rather than the dramatic
quality; it has the epic rather than the mystic, or symbolic, quality.
And strictly speaking, Dreiser’s novels, especially the later ones, are
the only novels in America, are the only novels, as a matter of fact, in
England or America, which possess this quality. It is quite properly in
accordance with the epic attitude of mind, with the epic quality in art,
this reduction of the more purely human episodes to a proportionate
insignificance compared with the general surge and volume of the
life-stream. It is completely in keeping with the epic quality that
there should be no far-fetched psychology, no quivering suspensions on
the verge of the unknown.

Dreiser is concerned with the mass and weight of the stupendous
life-tide; the life-tide as it flows forward, through vast panoramic
stretches of cosmic scenery. Both in respect to human beings, and in
respect to his treatment of inanimate objects, this is always what most
dominatingly interests him. You will not find in Dreiser’s books those
fascinating arrests of the onward-sweeping tide, those delicate pauses
and expectancies, in back-waters and enclosed gardens, where persons,
with diverting twists in their brains, murmur and meander at their ease,
protected from the great stream. Nobody in the Dreiser-world is so
protected; nobody is so privileged. The great stream sweeps them all
forward, sweeps them all away; and not they, but _It_, must be regarded
as the hero of the tale.

It is precisely this quality, this subordination of the individual to
the deep waters that carry him, which makes Dreiser so peculiarly the
American writer. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why he has had a
more profoundly appreciative hearing in England than in the United
States. It was so with Walt Whitman in his earlier days. To get the
adequate perspective for a work so entirely epical it seems necessary to
have the Atlantic as a modifying foreground. Americans—so entirely _in
it_ themselves—are naturally, unless they possess the Protean faculty of
the editor of Reedy’s _Mirror_, unable to see the thing in this cosmic
light. They are misled by certain outstanding details—the sexual scenes,
for instance; or the financial scenes,—and are prevented by these, as by
the famous “Catalogues” in Whitman, from getting the proportionate
vision.

The true literary descendants of the author of the _Leaves of Grass_ are
undoubtedly Theodore Dreiser and Edgar Masters. These two, and these two
alone, though in completely different ways, possess that singular
“beyond-good-and-evil” touch which the epic form of art requires. It was
just the same with Homer and Vergil, who were as naturally the epic
children of aristocratic ages, as these are of a democratic one.

Achilles is not really a very attractive figure—take him all in all; and
we remember how scandalously Æneas behaved to Dido. The ancient epic
writers, writing for an aristocracy, caught the world-stream from a
poetic angle. The modern epic writers, writing for a democracy, catch it
from a realistic one. But it is the same world-stream; and in accordance
with the epic vision there is the same subordination of the individual
to the cosmic tide. This is essentially a dramatic, rather than an epic
epoch, and that is why so many of us are bewildered and confused by the
Dreiser method.

_The “Genius”_ is a long book. But it might have been three times as
long. It might begin anywhere and stop anywhere. It is the Prose-Iliad
of the American Scene; and, like that other, it has a right to cut out
its segment of the shifting panorama at almost any point.

And so with the style of the thing. It is a ridiculous mis-statement for
critics to say that Dreiser has no style. It is a charming irony, on his
own part, to belittle his style. He has, as a matter of fact, a very
definite and a very effective style. It is a style that lends itself to
the huge indifferent piling up of indiscriminate materials, quite as
admirably as that gracious poetical one of the old epic-makers lent
itself to their haughtier and more aristocratic purpose. One would
recognize a page of Dreiser’s writings as infallibly as one would
recognize a page of Hardy’s. The former _relaxes_ his medium to the
extreme limit and the latter _tightens_ his; but they both have their
“manner.” A paragraph written by Dreiser would never be mistaken for
anyone else’s. If for no other peculiarity Dreiser’s style is remarkable
for the shamelessness with which it adapts itself to the drivel of
ordinary conversation. In the Dreiser books—especially in the later
ones, where in my humble opinion he is feeling more firmly after his
true way,—people are permitted to say those things which they actually
do say in real life—things that make you blush and howl, so soaked in
banality and ineptitude are they. In the true epic manner Dreiser
gravely puts down all these fatuous observations, until you feel
inclined to cry aloud for the maddest, the most fantastic, the most
affected Osconian wit, to serve as an antidote.

But one knows very well he is right. People don’t in ordinary
life—certainly not in ordinary democratic life—talk like Oscar Wilde, or
utter deep ironic sayings in the style of Matthew Arnold. They don’t
really—let this be well understood—concentrate their feelings in bitter
pungent spasmodic outbursts, as those Rabelaisean persons in Guy de
Maupassant. They just gabble and gibber and drivel; at least that is
what they do in England and America. The extraordinary language which
the lovers in Dreiser—we use the term “lovers” in large sense—use to one
another might well make an aesthetic-minded person howl with nervous
rage. But then,—and who does not know it?—the obsession of the
sex-illusion is above everything else a thing that makes idiots of
people; a thing that makes them talk like Simple Simons. In real life
lovers don’t utter those wonderful pregnant sayings which leap to their
lips in our subtle symbolic dramas. They just burble and blather and
blurt forth whatever drivelling nonsense comes into their heads. Dreiser
is the true master of the modern American Prose-Epic just because he is
not afraid of the weariness, the staleness, the flatness, and
unprofitableness of actual human conversation. In reading the great
ancient poetic epics one is amazed at the “naivete” with which these
haughty persons—these gods and demi-gods express their emotional
reactions. It is “carried off,” of course, there, by the sublime
heightening of the style; but it produces just the same final
impression,—of the insignificance of the individual, whether mortal or
immortal, compared with the torrent of Fate which sweeps them all along.

And the same thing applies to Dreiser’s attitude towards “good and evil”
and towards the problem of the “supernatural.” All other modern writers
array themselves on this side or that. They either defend traditional
morality or they attack it. They are anxious, at all costs, to give
their work dramatic intensity; they struggle to make it ironical,
symbolical, mystical—God knows what! But Dreiser neither attacks
morality nor defends immorality. In the true Epic manner he puts himself
aside, and permits the great mad Hurly-Burly to rush pell-mell past him
and write its own whirligig runes at its own careless pleasure. Even
Zola himself was not such a realist. Zola had a purpose;—the purpose of
showing what a Beast the human animal is! Dreiser’s people are not
beasts; and they shock our aesthetic sensibilities quite as often by
their human sentiment as they do by their lapses into lechery.

To a European mind there is something incredibly absurd in the notion
that these Dreiser books are immoral.

Unlike the majority of French and Russian writers Dreiser is not
interested in the pathology of vice. He is too deeply imbued with the
great naive epic spirit to stop and linger in these curious bye-paths.
He holds Nature—in her normal moods—to be sufficiently remarkable.

It is the same with his attitude towards the “supernatural.” The
American Prose-Epic were obviously false to reality if the presence of
the supernatural were not felt. It is felt and felt very powerfully; but
it is kept in its place. Like Walt Whitman’s stellar constellations, it
suffices for those who belong to it, it is right enough where it is—we
do not want it any nearer!

Because the much-tossed wanderer, Eugene Witla, draws a certain
consolation, at the last, from Christian Science, only a very literal
person would accuse the author of _The “Genius”_ of being a convert to
the faith. To omit Christian Science from any prose-epic of American
life would be to falsify the picture out of personal prejudice. Dreiser
has no prejudices except the prejudice of finding the normal man and the
normal woman, shuffled to and fro by the normal forces of life, an
interesting and arresting spectacle. To some among us such a spectacle
is not interesting. We must have the excitement of the unusual, the
shock of the abnormal. Well! There are plenty of European writers ready
to gratify this taste. Dreiser is not a European writer. He is an
American writer. The life that interests him, and interests him
passionately, is the life of America. It remains to be seen whether the
life of America interests Americans!

It is really quite important to get the correct point of view with
regard to Dreiser’s “style.” The _negative_ qualities in this style of
his are indeed as important as the positive ones. He is so epical, so
objective, so concrete and indifferent, that he is quite content when
the great blocked-out masses of his work lift themselves from the
obscure womb of being and take shape before him. When they have done
this,—when these piled-up materials and portentous groups of people have
limned themselves against the grey background,—he himself stands aside,
like some dim demiurgic forger in the cosmic blast-furnace, and mutters
queer commentaries upon what he sees. He utters these commentaries
through the lips of his characters—Cowperwood, say, or Witla—or even
some of the less important ones;—and broken and incoherent enough they
are!

But what matter! The huge epic canvas is stretched out there before us.
The vast cyclopean edifice lifts its shadowy bulk towards the grey sky.
The thing has been achieved. The creative spirit has breathed upon the
waters. Resting from his titanic labor, what matter if this Demiurge
drowses, and with an immense humorous indifference permits his
characters to nod too, and utter strange words in their dreams!

The carelessness of Dreiser’s style, its large indolence, its contempt
for epigrammatic point, its relaxed strength, is not really a defect at
all when you regard his work from the epic view-point.

There must be something in a great cosmic picture to take the place of
the sand and silt and rubbish and rubble which we know so well in life,
under the grey sky! And these stammered incoherences, these broken
mutterings, fill in this gap. They give the picture that drab patience,
that monotonous spaciousness which is required. Symbolic drama or
psychological fiction can dispense with these blank surfaces. The
prose-epic of America cannot afford to do without them. They suggest
that curious sadness—the sadness of large, flat, featureless scenery,
which visitors from Europe find so depressing.

Well! Thus it remains. If one is interested in the “urge—urge—urge,” as
Whitman calls it, of the normal life-stream as it goes upon its way, in
these American States, one reads Dreiser with a strange pleasure. He is
no more moral than the normal life-stream is moral; and he is no more
immoral. It is true the normal life-stream does not cover _quite_ the
whole field. There _are_ back-waters and there _are_ enclosed gardens.

There was a Europe once. But the American prose-epic is the American
prose-epic.




                        “So We Grew Together”[1]


                           EDGAR LEE MASTERS

                   Reading over your letters I find you wrote me
   “My dear boy,” or at times “dear boy,” and the envelope
   Said “master”—all as I had been your very son,
   And not the orphan whom you adopted.
   Well, you were father to me! And I can recall
   The things you did for me or gave me:
   One time we rode in a box-car to Springfield
   To see the greatest show on earth;
   And one time you gave me red-top boots,
   And one time a watch, and one time a gun.
   Well, I grew to gawkiness with a voice
   Like a rooster trying to crow in August
   Hatched in April, we’ll say.
   And you went about wrapped up in silence
   With eyes aflame, and I heard little rumors
   Of what they were doing to you, and how
   They wronged you—and we were poor—so poor!
   And I could not understand why you failed,
   And why if you did good things for the people
   The people did not sustain you.
   And why you loved another woman than Aunt Susan,
   So it was whispered at school, and what could be baser,
   Or so little to be forgiven?.....

                   They crowded you hard in those days.
   But you fought like a wounded lion
   For yourself I know, but for us, for me.
   At last you fell ill, and for months you tottered
   Around the streets as thin as death,
   Trying to earn our bread, your great eyes glowing
   And the silence around you like a shawl!
   But something in you kept you up.
   You grew well again and rosy with cheeks
   Like an Indian peach almost, and eyes
   Full of moonlight and sunlight, and a voice
   That sang, and a humor that warded
   The arrows off. But still between us
   There was reticence; you kept me away
   With a glittering hardness; perhaps you thought
   I kept you away—for I was moving
   In spheres you knew not, living through
   Beliefs you believed in no more, and ideals
   That were just mirrors of unrealities.
   As a boy can be I was critical of you.
   And reasons for your failures began to arise
   In my mind—I saw specific facts here and there
   With no philosophy at hand to weld them
   And synthesize them into one truth—
   And a rush of the strength of youth
   Deluded me into thinking the world
   Was something so easily understood and managed
   While I knew it not at all in truth.
   And an adolescent egotism
   Made me feel you did not know me
   Or comprehend the all that I was.
   All this you divined.......

                   So it went. And when I left you and passed
   To the world, the city—still I see you
   With eyes averted, and feel your hand
   Limp with sorrow—you could not speak.
   You thought of what I might be, and where
   Life would take me, and how it would end—
   There was longer silence. A year or two
   Brought me closer to you. I saw the play now
   And the game somewhat and understood your fights
   And enmities, and hardnesses and silences,
   And wild humor that had kept you whole—
   For your soul had made it as an antitoxin
   To the world’s infections. And you swung to me
   Closer than before—and a chumship began
   Between us......

                   What vital power was yours!
   You never tired, or needed sleep, or had a pain,
   Or refused a delight. I loved the things now
   You had always loved, a winning horse,
   A roulette wheel, a contest of skill
   In games or sports ... long talks on the corner
   With men who have lived and tell you
   Things with a rich flavor of old wisdom or humor;
   A woman, a glass of whisky at a table
   Where the fatigue of life falls, and our reserves
   That wait for happiness come up in smiles,
   Laughter, gentle confidences. Here you were
   A man with youth, and I a youth was a man,
   Exulting in your braveries and delight in life.
   How you knocked that scamp over at Harry Varnell’s
   When he tried to take your chips! And how I,
   Who had thought the devil in cards as a boy,
   Loved to play with you now and watch you play;
   And watch the subtle mathematics of your mind
   Prophecy, divine the plays. Who was it
   In your ancestry that you harked back to
   And reproduced with such various gifts
   Of flesh and spirit, Anglo-Saxon, Celt?—
   You with such rapid wit and powerful skill
   For catching illogic and whipping Error’s
   Fangéd head from the body?.....

                   I was really ahead of you
   At this stage, with more self-consciousness
   Of what man is, and what life is at last,
   And how the spirit works, and by what laws,
   With what inevitable force. But still I was
   Behind you in that strength which in our youth,
   If ever we have it, squeezes all the nectar
   From the grapes. It seemed you’d never lose
   This power and sense of joy, but yet at times
   I saw another phase of you......

                   There was the day
   We rode together north of the old town,
   Past the old farm houses that I knew—
   Past maple groves, and fields of corn in the shock,
   And fields of wheat with the fall green.
   It was October, but the clouds were summer’s,
   Lazily floating in a sky of June;
   And a few crows flying here and there,
   And a quail’s call, and around us a great silence
   That held at its core old memories
   Of pioneers, and dead days, forgotten things!
   I’ll never forget how you looked that day. Your hair
   Was turning silver now, but still your eyes
   Burned as of old, and the rich olive glow
   In your cheeks shone, with not a line or wrinkle!—
   You seemed to me perfection—a youth, a man!
   And now you talked of the world with the old wit,
   And now of the soul—how such a man went down
   Through folly or wrong done by him, and how
   Man’s death cannot end all,
   There must be life hereafter!.....

   As you were that day, as you looked and spoke,
   As the earth was, I hear as the soul of it all
   Godard’s _Dawn_, Dvorák’s _Humoresque_,
   The Morris Dances, Mendelssohn’s _Barcarole_,
   And old Scotch songs, _When the Kye Come Hame_,
   And _The Moon Had Climbed the Highest Hill_,
   The Musetta Waltz and Rudolph’s Narrative;
   Your great brow seemed Beethoven’s
   And the lust of life in your face Cellini’s,
   And your riotous fancy like Dumas.
   I was nearer you now than ever before
   And finding each other thus I see to-day
   How the human soul seeks the human soul
   And finds the one it seeks at last.
   For you know you can open a window
   That looks upon embowered darkness,
   When the flowers sleep and the trees are still
   At Midnight, and no light burns in the room;
   And you can hide your butterfly
   Somewhere in the room, but soon you will see
   A host of butterfly mates
   Fluttering through the window to join
   Your butterfly hid in the room.
   It is somehow thus with souls......

                   This day then I understood it all:
   Your vital democracy and love of men
   And tolerance of life; and how the excess of these
   Had wrought your sorrows in the days
   When we were so poor, and the small of mind
   Spoke of your sins and your connivance
   With sinful men. You had lived it down,
   Had triumphed over them, and you had grown
   Prosperous in the world and had passed
   Into an easy mastery of life and beyond the thought
   Of further conquests for things.
   As the Brahmins say no more you worshipped matter,
   Or scarcely ghosts, or even the gods
   With singleness of heart.
   This day you worshipped Eternal Peace
   Or Eternal Flame, with scarce a laugh or jest
   To hide your worship; and I understood,
   Seeing so many facets to you, why it was
   Blind Condon always smiled to hear your voice,
   And why it was in a green-room years ago
   Booth turned to you, marking your face
   From all the rest, and said “There is a man
   Who might play Hamlet—better still Othello”;
   And why it was the women loved you; and the priest
   Could feed his body and soul together drinking
   A glass of beer and visiting with you......

                   Then something happened:
   Your face grew smaller, your brow more narrow,
   Dull fires burned in your eyes,
   Your body shriveled, you walked with a cynical shuffle,
   Your hands mixed the keys of life,
   You had become a discord.
   A monstrous hatred consumed you—
   You had suffered the greatest wrong of all,
   I knew and granted the wrong.
   You had mounted up to sixty years, now breathing hard,
   And just at the time that honor belonged to you
   You were dishonored at the hands of a friend.
   I wept for you, and still I wondered
   If all I had grown to see in you and find in you
   And love in you was just a fond illusion—
   If after all I had not seen you aright as a boy:
   Barbaric, hard, suspicious, cruel, redeemed
   Alone by bubbling animal spirits—
   Even these gone now, all of you smoke
   Laden with stinging gas and lethal vapor......
   Then you came forth again like the sun after storm—
   The deadly uric acid driven out at last
   Which had poisoned you and dwarfed your soul—
   So much for soul!

   The last time I saw you
   Your face was full of golden light,
   Something between flame and the richness of flesh.
   You were yourself again, wholly yourself.
   And oh, to find you again and resume
   Our understanding we had worked so long to reach—
   You calm and luminant and rich in thought!
   This time it seemed we said but “yes” or “no”—
   That was enough; we smoked together
   And drank a glass of wine and watched
   The leaves fall sitting on the porch.....
   Then life whirled me away like a leaf,
   And I went about the crowded ways of New York.

   And one night Alberta and I took dinner
   At a place near Fourteenth Street where the music
   Was like the sun on a breeze-swept lake
   When every wave is a patine of fire,
   And I thought of you not at all
   Looking at Alberta and watching her white teeth
   Bite off bits of Italian bread,
   And watching her smile and the wide pupils
   Of her eyes, electrified by wine
   And music and the touch of our hands
   Now and then across the table.
   We went to her house at last.
   And through a languorous evening.
   Where no light was but a single candle,
   We circled about and about a pending theme
   Till at last we solved it suddenly in rapture
   Almost by chance; and when I left
   She followed me to the hall and leaned above
   The railing about the stair for the farewell kiss—
   And I went into the open air ecstatically,
   With the stars in the spaces of sky between
   The towering buildings, and the rush
   Of wheels and clang of bells,
   Still with the fragrance of her lips and cheeks
   And glinting hair about me, delicate
   And keen in spite of the open air.
   And just as I entered the brilliant car
   Something said to me you are dead—
   I had not thought of you, was not thinking of you.
   But I knew it was true, as it was
   For the telegram waited me at my room.....
                   I didn’t come back.
   I could not bear to see the breathless breath
   Over your brow—nor look at your face—
   However you fared or where
   To what victories soever—
   Vanquished or seemingly vanquished!

   [1] Copyright, 1915, by Edgar Lee Masters.




                           Choleric Comments


                           ALEXANDER S. KAUN

          Faithful are the wounds of a friend.—Proverbs, 27:6.

We were looking at oriental rugs one day, that enfant terrible, the
Scavenger, and I. There were rugs that tempted me to transgress the
tenth commandment, and there were rugs that jarred me as if I were
listening to Carpenter’s _Perambulator_ stunts. My fellow-flâneur became
impatient with my critical remarks.

“You don’t love rugs.” His Svidrigailovian face grinned. “If you did,
you would just love them, you would not quibble. Academician!”

The last epithet is used by THE LITTLE REVIEW priests and prophets as a
means to close all arguments. So it did on that occasion. But it left me
pondering over the words of a New York critic who accused our magazine
of being somewhat indiscriminate in its enthusiasm for the sake of
enthusiasm, in its emotionalism for the sake of emotion. I recalled
blushingly the confession of our chief Neo-Hellenist, who is moved
aesthetically by any sort of music, whether it emanates from Kreisler’s
Stradivarius or from the pianola at Henrici’s.

I confess I am a fastidious lover. The dearer a person or a thing are to
me the more I demand from them, the more painfully I am hurt by their
flaws. Hence the number of my dislikes exceeds that of my likes. Hence I
grit my teeth at the sight of Maria Gay in _Carmen_. Because the music
of that opera is so full of eternal symbols to me, because when
listening to it I understand why Nietzsche preferred Bizet to Wagner,—I
am scalded by its vulgar cabaretization. Had I not been stirred by Mr.
Powys’ remarkable liturgy of St. Oscar Wilde, I would not have been so
keenly pricked by his subsequent remark in his Verlaine lecture that
Rimbaud was a ruffian. It is because I cannot live without music that I
am compelled to suffer weekly indigestion from the sauerkraut menus
furnished by Mr. Stock’s bâton. Will Mr. Scavenger of the rug-philosophy
expect me not to swear and damn at the prospect of being doomed to a
long season of Meistersingers, Perambulators, Goldmarckian fudge,
Brahmsian Academics, Stockian Jubilee-Confetti, and similar insults? Let
me touch another sore:—the Little Theatre, the Temple of Living Art, to
which I have looked up with reverence and hope; the only theatrical
organization in the city that seemed to have other considerations
outside of box-receipts. I was present at the opening night of this
season, and left the little “catacomb” with an aching heart. What
reason, what artistic reason, is there to stage Andreyev’s _Sabine
Women_ anywhere outside of Russia? The play was written as a biting
satire against the Russian liberals who fought against the government
with Tolstoyan Non-Resistance instead of joining the revolutionary
proletariat. In Andreyev’s land he is perfectly, painfully understood;
but here, on Michigan Avenue, the satire degenerated into a boring
burlesque! Even Raymond Johnson’s suggestive, graceful horizons fail to
save the situation. As to _Lithuania_—what is the matter with the Little
Theatre males? They move and speak like hermaphrodites, they drink vodka
and swear in squeaking falsettoes, they appear so feeble and effeminate
in comparison with the virile, gruesome Ellen Van Volkenburg and Miriam
Kipper. Then, how realistic—shades of Zola! Maurice Browne vomits so
much more realistically than Charlie Chaplin in _Shanghaied_....

Finding myself in the Fine Arts Building, I am in dangerous proximity of
another “Temple” that invites my friendly hostility. But I vision the
brandishment of the Editor’s fatal pencil—silenzia! Yet, if I must
refrain from, or at least postpone, my general attack on THE LITTLE
REVIEW, let me be allowed, pray, to whip one of my confreres, the
Scavenger. Whether a sound thrashing will do him good or not is
doubtful; but he certainly deserves flagellation. As a denier, as a
depreciator, as an anti, he is as convincing as a bulldog; but when he
loves, when he lauds and affirms, his voice thins to that of a sick
puppy. He should be administered cure from his mania of showering
superlatives upon false gods and counterfeit prophets. I dislike the
rôle of a Good Samaritan, but our Scavenger is so young, so
impressionable; perhaps he will repent. Besides, I sympathize with him.
He is one of those promising Americans who suffocate in their native
atmosphere, or lack of atmosphere, and are easily lured and led astray
by will-o’-the wisps. In his yearning for wings he is apt to proclaim a
domestic rooster as an eagle; in his craving for sun, for light, he
often mistakes a cardboard butaforial sun for Phœbus Apollo. Hence his
admiration for that Arch-Borrower, Huneker. “He is one of the two or
three American critics that are above Puritanic provincialism, that are
broad, European!” exclaims Scavenger. It is true; but this truth serves
only as a testimonia pauperitatis for the intellectual state of this
country, where glittering counterfeit coins are less odious than
Simon-pure Americanism. The Huneker-cult is one of the American
tragedies of which I have spoken on other occasions, the tragedy of
surrogates. The young generation, seething with longing for the great
and the beautiful in life and art, is forced to feed on substitutes in
the absence of real quantities. They want to read a living word about
Verlaine, about Huysmans, about Matisse, about those winged titans who
make Trans-Atlantic life so rich and pulsating, and they turn to
Huneker, the great concocter of newspaper clippings and boulevard
gossip. When Scavenger read for me Huneker’s admirable essay on Huysmans
I was not yet aware that whatever was admirable in the essay had been
borrowed almost in toto from Havelock Ellis’s _Affirmations_.[2] Why use
the second or third-hand patched up cloak of Boulevardier-Huneker, when
you may drink from the very source, from Arthur Symons, from Havelock
Ellis, from—oh, well, who can recount them? Ah, the tragedy of
substitutes!

   [2] _Affirmations, by Havelock Ellis. Boston: Houghton Mifflin._

   The first edition of the book was issued about twenty years ago,
   yet one reads it now with keen joy. With the exception of the
   essay on Nietzsche, which is somewhat obsolete, the essays on
   Zola, Huysmans, Casanova, and St. Francis have stood the test of
   time. One feels the breeze of cleanness, freshness, sincerity,
   and profundity. I may have an opportunity of discussing the book
   some other time.

The other evening, at a gathering of “The Questioners,” I accused Miss
Harriet Monroe and Miss Margaret C. Anderson of being too lenient
editors, in not trying to mould the taste of their contributors. What
conscientious editor would allow a writer of Scavenger’s caliber to
descend to the irritating rhetoric of “The Dionysian Dreiser”? To print
this loud exaggeration immediately after Ben Hecht’s _Songs and
Sketches_ is to profess the rug-philosophy.

The Scavenger, as most of his colleagues, is a reformed Puritan. He
finds boyish delight in reading an author who is a professional
fence-wrecker and convention-smasher. To him immoralizing is a virtue
_per se_. He hails Dreiser as the greatest, for things that he has not
done. Dreiser is a genius because he has not followed the conventional
novelist who makes his villain repent or perish. I admit this; but such
a negative virtue, significant as it may appear in given conditions,
does not qualify an artist. _The “Genius”_ is not art. It is
instructive, it is of great value for the study of contemporary America,
as Mr. Masters pointed out. I can imagine that in the twenty-first
century _The “Genius”_ will be used as a textbook for the history of the
United States in the end of the nineteenth century, for the author has
minutely depicted our customs and morals, has gone into detailed
description of country and city life, of farmers’ menues, of
stomach-aches and their cure, of Christian Science wonders, of salaries
and prices, of all the infinitesimal particles that compose the mosaique
of mediocre life. Instructive—yes; but art—by no means. Let me quote
Havelock Ellis’s _Affirmations_:

   Three strokes with the brush of Frans Hals are worth a thousand
   of Denner’s. Rich and minute detail may impress us, but it
   irritates and wearies in the end.... When we are living deeply,
   the facts of our external life do not present themselves to us in
   elaborate detail; a very few points are—as it has been
   termed—focal in consciousness, while the rest are marginal in
   subconsciousness. A few things stand out vividly at each moment
   of life; the rest are dim. The supreme artist is shown by the
   insight and boldness with which he seizes and illuminates these
   bright points at each stage, leaving the marginal elements in due
   subordination.

Truisms, aren’t these? I wish Dreiser, “the greatest,” and his hailers
would ponder over them before they apply the term art to 736 pages
devoted to rumination of what Ellis calls “marginal elements” of life.
And what a life! In what respect does the life of Witla, the “genius,”
deserve so much elaboration and painstaking analysis? The hero’s only
distinction is his sexual looseness. But he is not a Sanin who gratifies
his animalistic instincts with contempt for motivation or justification.
Witla, and Dreiser, and Scavenger, are reformed Puritans. When Witla
falls in “love” with the round arm of a laundress, or with the golden
hair of a country girl, or with the black eyes of an art-model, or with
the perfect form of a gambler’s wife, or with the innocence of a mama’s
girl; when in each case the lover swears and damns and lyricizes in bad
English and strives to win and possess the object d’art, Mr. Dreiser
appears from behind the sinner, pats him on the shoulder, and flings
defiantly into the faces of the terrified philistines: “Witla is
all-right. He is an artist. He loves beautiful things. See, God damn
you?!” Is he? Throughout the long book we are told time and again that
he is an _artist_. Unless we take the author’s word for it we are
inclined to doubt it very much. True, an artist loves beauty; but does
he necessarily desire to possess the object of his admiration? Does not
the contemplation of a beautiful arm or sunset or flower or vase or rug
bring the artist complete satisfaction and possession? I do not condemn
Witla; although I dislike him, for he is a loud mediocrity. There is a
Witla in every one of us men; but we take our Witla as our animalistic
self, not as the artistic.

Ah, dear Scavenger, I do love rugs. But there are rugs and rugs.




                       The Scavenger’s Swan Song


What a remarkable fellow my friend the Incurable is! I talk to him about
rugs, quite casually, as we wait for a car, and what does this devil of
a psychologist do but walk deep into my soul on one of them. I read him
a Huneker article on Huysmans which he remarks is excellent at the time,
only to find (almost too late) that I should have read Havelock
Ellis....

How I envy him this distinction of having read Havelock Ellis instead of
James Huneker, of being subtle enough to prefer the deep, metaphysical
didactics concerning Life (with a capital L, Miss Editor) to the
contemplation of that most seductive of literary signposts—Huneker. But
it is so foolish to quibble about books.... If I had anything else to do
I wouldn’t read them....

Puritan, indeed! That is too much. I suspect it is only a withering
retort, a ferocious counter to the “academic charges.” But what of
Dreiser—poor, little, smug, banal, and illiterate Dreiser? You should
have spared him. You remember on the elevated going home one night how I
pleaded with you to spare him, how I argued, defended, fought? Ah, I am
shamed. I feel somehow responsible for this annihilation of a man, aye a
good writer, who was fast becoming one of the great men of America....

When you speak of music everything becomes clear to me. Here am I who
like music well enough to have studied it for ten years, who can
improvise as well on the violin as on the typewriter, but who
nevertheless have been denied the capacity for experiencing the critical
disorganization of the soul at the sound of bad music, and nervous
exaltations at the sound of good. I suffer and gloat—but subjectively.
To me music is a background.... It is not my natural form of
self-expression. Neither are rugs.

And I haven’t time to be a connoisseur. Later—perhaps. But now I reduce
all such differences of attitude as yours and mine to the everlasting
wrangle between the connoisseur and the improviser. Yes?

Puritan! That is nothing. Later you will call me charlatan because I
sometimes compose paradoxes and even epigrams. Culture abhors an
epigram.

Ho! ho! the devil take you and all critics. We ride the crests—Miss
Editor and I. Once my friend the Incurable rode the crests and they
washed him up on a foreign shore, and now he calls the crests “foam” or
“emotion for emotion’s sake” or a lot of other rather true things. To
ride on the crests as long as you can—that’s the life (a small “l,” Miss
Editor); to think one thing today and another tomorrow, to have lots of
fun, to yell while you’re young, to believe Havelock Ellis a bearded old
lady—in short, “klushnik,” to follow the care-free, tortuous path of
improvisation, self-expression, instead of pursuing the lugubrious
catacombs of criticism and connoisseurship.

As for my article, “The Dionysian Dreiser,” I will not defend that. Your
abuse of that writing coupled with your smug praise of Ben Hecht’s
atrocious poetry (concerning which I agree with my friend “Bubble”
Bodenheim, who told me it was so bad on the whole that he couldn’t get
it out of his mind) is inconsistent.

Ah, friend, may my death and Dreiser’s be forever on your conscience.

                                                      “THE SCAVENGER.”




                                 Dregs


                               BEN HECHT


                                  Life

The sun was shining in the dirty street.

Old women with shapeless bodies waddled along on their way to market.

Bearded old men who looked like the fathers of Jerusalem walked
flatfooted, nodding back and forth.

“The tread of the processional surviving in Halsted street,” thought
Moisse, the young dramatist who was moving with the crowd.

Children sprawled in the refuse-laden alleys. One of them ragged and
clotted with dirt stood half-dressed on the curbing and urinated into
the street.

Wagons rumbled, filled with fruits and iron and rags and vegetables.

Human voices babbled above the noises of the traffic. Moisse watched the
lively scene.

“Every day it’s the same,” he thought; “the same smells, the same noise
and people swarming over the pavements. I am the only one in the street
whose soul is awake. There’s a pretty girl looking at me. She suspects
the condition of my soul. Her fingers are dirty. Why doesn’t she buy
different shoes? She thinks I am lost. In five years she will be fat. In
ten years she will waddle with a shawl over her head.”

The young dramatist smiled.

“Good God,” he thought, “where do they come from. Where are they going?
No place to no place. But always moving, shuffling, waddling, crying
out. The sun shines on them. The rain pours on them. It burns. It
freezes. Today they are bright with color. Tomorrow they are grey with
gloom. But they are always the same, always in motion.”

The young dramatist stopped on the corner and looking around him spied a
figure sitting on the sidewalk, leaning against the wall of a building.

The figure was an old man.

He had a long white beard.

He had his legs tucked under him and an upturned tattered hat rested in
his lap.

His thin face was raised and the sun beat down on it, but his eyes were
closed.

“Asleep,” mused Moisse.

He moved closer to him.

The man’s head was covered with long silky white hair that hung down to
his neck and hid his ears. It was uncombed. His face in the sun looked
like the face of an ascetic, thin, finely veined.

He had a long nose and almost colorless lips and the skin on his cheeks
was white. It was drawn tight over his bones, leaving few wrinkles.

An expression of peace rested over him—peace and detachment. Of the
noise and babble he heard nothing. His eyes were closed to the crowded
frantic street.

He sat, his head back, his face bathed in the sun, smileless and
dreaming.

“A beggar,” thought Moisse, “asleep, oblivious. Dead. All day he sits in
the sun like a saint, immobile. Like one of the old Alexandrian
ascetics, like a delicately carved image. He is awake in himself but
dead to others. The waves cannot touch him. His thoughts, oh to know his
thoughts and his dreams?”

Suddenly the eyes of the young dramatist widened. He was looking at the
beggar’s long hair that hung to his neck.

“It’s moving,” he whispered half aloud. He came closer and stood over
the old man and gazed intently at the top of his head.

The hair was swaying faintly, each separate fiber moving alone....

It shifted, rose imperceptibly and fell. It quivered and glided....

“Lice,” murmured Moisse.

He watched.

Silent and asleep the old man sat with his thin face to the sun and his
hair moved.

Vermin swarmed through it creeping, crawling, tiny and infinitesimal.

Every strand was palpitating, shuddering under their mysterious energy.

At first Moisse could hardly make them out but his eyes gradually grew
accustomed to the sight. And as he watched he saw the hair swell like
waves riding over the water, saw it drop and flutter, coil and uncoil of
its own accord.

Vermin raised it up, pulled it out, streaming up and down tirelessly in
vast armies.

They crawled furiously like dust specks blown thick through the white
beard.

They streamed and shifted and were never still.

They moved in and out, from no place to no place, but always moving,
frantic, and frenzied.

An old woman passed and with a shake of her head dropped two pennies
into the upturned hat. Moisse hardly saw her. He saw only the
palpitating swarms that were now racing, easily visible, through the
grey white hair.

Some ventured down over the white ascetic face, crawling in every
direction, traveling around the lips and over the closed eyes, emerging
suddenly in thick streams from behind the covered ears and losing
themselves under the ever moving beard.

And Moisse, his senses strained, thought he heard a noise—a faint
crunching noise.

He listened.

The noise seemed to grow louder. He began to itch but he remained
bending over the head. He could hear them, like a faraway murmur, a
purring, uncertain sound.

“They’re shouting and groaning, crying out, weeping and laughing,” he
mused. “It is life ... life....”

He looked up and down the crowded burning street with its frantic crowd,
and smiled.

“Life,” he repeated....

He walked away. Before him floated the hair of the beggar moving as if
stirred by a slow wind, and he itched.

“But who was the old man?” he thought.

A young woman, plump and smiling, jostled him. He felt her soft hip
pressing against him for a moment.

A child running barefoot through the street brushed against his legs. He
felt its sticky fingers seize him for an instant and then the child was
gone. On he walked.

Three young men confronted him for a second time. He passed between two
of them, squeezed by their shoulders.

A shapeless old woman bumped him with her back as she shuffled past.

Two children dodged in and out screaming and seized his arm to turn on.

The young dramatist stopped and remained standing still, looking about
him.

Then he laughed.

“Life,” he murmured again; and

“I am the old man,” he added, “I ... I....”


                                 Depths

Crowds began to come out of the buildings.

They came in streams and broad waves, breaking in a black sweep over the
pavements and spreading into a thick long mass that moved forward. The
glassy lights cut the twilight drizzel with their yellow fire. The
tumult grew until up and down the street an unceasing din sounded,
shrieking, roaring, clanging noises.

Moisse, the young dramatist, stood against one of the office buildings
as the throngs spilled past him on their ways home. His eyes were fixed
on the distant gloom of the sky which hung beyond the drizzel and the
fuzzy glare of light like a vast black froth.

“It is so silent,” mused Moisse. “Millions of miles without a sound. Man
and his accomplishments are infinitesimal,” went on the young dramatist
as the swelling throng brushed and buffeted against him, “but his ego is
infinite. Only by thought can he reach the stars.”

He was thoughtless for a moment, holding his position with difficulty as
the crowds pressed past. Then he resumed:

“None of them looks at me. None of them imagines I am thinking of the
stars. How startled these fat evil-smelling men and women would be if
they could see my thought for a moment as they crashed along their tiny
ways. But nevertheless I don’t eat tonight,” he murmured suddenly, as if
awakening. And the idea plunged him into a series of reflections from
which he emerged with a frown and looked about him.

A short thick man with an unshaven face was shuffling past. His skin was
broken under his growth of beard with red and purple sores. His mouth
hung open, his eyes stared ahead of him and his head was bent forward.
Moisse thought of the body concealed by the layers of caked rags which
covered the man, and shuddered.

“He never bathes,” mused the young dramatist. “I wonder what a creature
like that does.” And he followed him slowly.

At the corner the man stopped and blew his nose violently with his
fingers. Another block and he stopped again, bending over in the midst
of the crowd and straightening with a cigar butt in his hand. He eyed
the thing critically. It was flattened at the end where feet had passed
over it. The man thrust it between his lips and shuffled on.

In a vestibule he extracted a blackened match from his pocket and with
shaking fingers lighted the butt. When it burned he blew a cloud of
smoke, and taking it out of his mouth regarded it with satisfaction.

Several in the throng noticed him, their eyes resting with disapproval
and sometimes hate upon the figure. Once a crossing policeman spied him
and followed him with his gaze until he was lost to view.

Moisse kept abreast of him and together they turned into an alley that
led behind a hotel. The man’s eyes never wavered, but remained fixed in
the direction he was moving.

The alley was dark. In the court that ran behind the hotel were several
large, battered cans that shone dully against the black wall. Debris
littered the ground. Looking furtively at the closed doors the man made
his way to one of the cans.

He lifted the cover cautiously and thrust his arm into its depths. For
several minutes he remained with his arm lost inside the refuse can.

“He’s found something,” whispered Moisse.

The man straightened. In his hand he held an object on which sparks
seemed to race up and down like blue insects.

He raised his find to his face and then thrust it into his pocket and
resumed his shuffle down the alley.

“To think,” mused Moisse, “of a man eating out of a garbage can. Either
he is inordinately hungry or careless to a point of ... of....”

He searched for a word that refused to appear and he followed slowly
after the man. In the dim light of a side street the man paused and took
out his booty. It was evidently the back of a fowl.

Standing still the man thrust it into his mouth, gnawing and tearing at
its bones. After he had eaten for several minutes he held it up to the
light and started picking at shreds of meat with his fingers. These he
licked off his hand.

The meal was at length finished. The man threw the gleaned bones away,
blew his nose and walked on.

Through the dark tumbled streets Moisse followed. The shuffling figure
fascinated him. He noted the gradually increasing degradation of the
neighborhood, the hovels that seemed like torn, blackened rags, the
broken streets piled with refuse and mud.

In front of a lighted house the man stopped. The curtains which hung
over the two front windows of the house were torn. One of them was half
destroyed and Moisse saw into the room in which a gas jet flickered and
which was empty.

The man walked up the steps and knocked at the door. It was opened.

“A woman,” whispered Moisse.

She vanished, and the man followed her. The two appeared in a moment in
the room with the gas light.

The woman was tall and thin, her hair hung down her back in two scimpy
braids. Her face was coated with paint and great hollows loomed under
her eyes.

The man walked to her, his open mouth widened in a grin.

“They’re talking,” murmured the young dramatist as he watched their
haggard faces move strangely. He noted the woman was dressed in a
wrapper, colorless and streaked.

“I wonder—” he began, but the scene captured his attention. He watched
absorbed. The woman was shaking her head and backing away from the man
who finally halted in the center of the room.

He lifted a foot from the floor and removed its shoe. Standing with the
shoe in his hand his eyes glistened at the woman who watched him with
her neck stretched forward and a sneer on her lips.

The man put his hand in the shoe and brought out a coin.

“A twenty-five cent piece,” muttered Moisse.

The man held it up in his fingers and laughed. His face distorted itself
into strange wrinkles when he laughed. Moisse who could not hear the
laugh saw only an imbecilic grimace. The woman took the coin, and left
the room.

She returned in a moment holding out her arms to the man.

He seized her, crushing her body against him until she was bent
backward. He pressed his face over her, his mouth still open, his eyes
staring.

The woman stared back and laughed, fastening her lips suddenly to his.

Losing his balance, the man staggered and the woman broke from his
grasp. He pounced on her, seizing her hand and jerking her against him.

As she held back he raised his fist and struck her fiercely in the face.
She swayed for an instant and then stood quiet.

Her lips began to smile and move in speech. The man shook his head
rapturously, rubbing his nose with a finger and panting.

Moisse turned away and walked slowly toward the town.

“Good God,” he murmured, “he’ll take his clothes off and she....”

His emotions began to trouble him. An unrest stirred his body.

“I should have gone in there and taken her away from him,” he mused, and
then with a shudder he walked on—smiling.


                               Gratitude

The avenue bubbled brightly under the grey rain.

The afternoon crowd had melted from the sidewalk, washed into hallways
and under awnings by the downpour.

It began to look like evening. A refreshing gloom settled over the
street.

The wind leaped out of alley courts and byways and raced over the
pavement accompanied by spattering arpeggios of rain.

Moisse, the young dramatist, turned into the avenue. His voluminous
black raincoat, reaching from his ears to his shoe tops, flapped in
front of him.

By exercising the most diligent effort, however, he managed rather to
saunter than walk, and he kept his eyes raptly fixed upon the deserted
stretch of shining cement.

As he moved peacefully along he repeated to himself:

“The rain leaps and pirouettes like a chorus of Russian elves. It jumps.
It bounces. It hops, skips, and runs. Flocks of little excited silver
birds are continually alighting around my feet and chattering in a
thousand voices. I should have been a poet.”

Removing his gaze from the ground he looked at the faces which lined the
buildings and floated like pale lamps in the darkened vestibules.

“Everyone is watching me,” he thought, “for in my attitude there is the
careless courage of an unconscious heroism. I stroll along indifferent
to the rain. It splashes down my neck. It takes the crease out of my
trousers. It trickles off the brim of my hat.

“And all this stamps me momentarily in these afflicted minds as an
unusual human.

“That one with the monogomistic side-whiskers is wondering what a queer
fellow I am.

“What can it be that engrosses my attention to the point of making me so
oblivious to the rain?

“And that fat woman with the face like a toy balloon is certain I will
catch my death of cold.

“The little girl with the wide eyes thinks I am in love.

“There is an infinite source of speculation in my simple conduct.”

The water was making headway down the back of his neck, but Moisse
hesitated and then abstained from adjusting his collar more firmly.

“They will notice it,” he thought, “and immediately I will lose the
distinctive aloofness which characterizes me now.”

So moving leisurely down the avenue Moisse, the young dramatist,
progressed, his eyes apparently unconscious of the scene before him, his
soul oblivious to the saturated world, and his mind occupied with
distant and mysterious thoughts.

The downpour began to assume the proportions of a torrent. Moisse
persisted in his tracks.

Someone touched his elbow.

He turned and found a little old man with faded eyes and threadbare,
dripping clothes smiling earnestly at his side.

The little old man was bent in the shoulders. His shirt had no collar.
His brown coat was buttoned to his neck.

His face screwed up by a sensitiveness to the cataract of drops beating
against it, was round and full of wrinkles.

It had the quizzical, goodnatured look of a fuzzy little dog.

His wet eyes that seemed to be swimming in a red moisture peered at
Moisse who was frowning.

“I’m hungry,” began the little old man, “I ain’t had anything to eat—”

“How much do you want?” inquired Moisse.

“Anything,” said the beggar.

The young dramatist felt in his pocket. A single half-dollar encountered
his fingers.

“I’ve only got a half-dollar,” he said, “I’ll get it changed. Come on.”

The two of them walked in silence, Moisse still sauntering, the little
old man bent over and looking as if he wanted to speak but was afraid of
dissipating a dream.

“Wait here,” Moisse said suddenly, “I’ll go in and get change.”

He stepped into the box office of one of the large moving-picture
theaters on the avenue and secured change.

The little old man had followed him inside the building, his eyes
watching him with an eager curiosity.

Moisse turned with the change to find the beggar at his elbow.

He handed him fifteen cents.

“What’s the matter?” he inquired. “Been drinking?”

“No, no,” said the beggar.

“Why haven’t you?” persisted Moisse frowning; “don’t you know there’s
nothing for you but drink. That’s what drink is for. Men like you.”

The faded eyes livened.

“Now you go and get yourself three good shots of booze,” went on Moisse,
“and you’ll be a new man for the rest of the day.”

The beggar had become excited.

His lips moved in a nervous delight but he uttered no sound. With the
fingers of his right hand he picked at the blackened and roughly-bitten
nails of his other. He cleared his throat and then as if suddenly
inspired, removed his drenched hat and raised his eyebrows.

Touched by the sincerity of the little old man’s emotions the young
dramatist reached into his pocket and brought forth another ten cent
piece.

“Here,” he said, “buy two more drinks.”

The little man seemed about to break into a dance. His face became
tinged with the pink of an old woman’s cheek.

The red moisture ran out of his eyes in two white tears. Moisse regarded
him, frowning.

“Once you were young as I am today,” said Moisse aloud, fastening his
eyes upon the top of the little old man’s head which seemed dirty and
bald despite the pale hair, and alive.

“Perhaps you had ambitions and then some commonplace occurred and you
lost them. And now you float around begging nickles. That’s interesting.
A little old man begging nickles in the rain.”

The beggar smiled eagerly and then ventured a slight laugh.

He came closer to Moisse and stood trembling.

“Asking for crumbs,” went on Moisse with a deepening frown, “cursed at
night when alone by memories that will not die. Eh?” He looked suddenly
into the faded eyes and smiled.

The little old man nodded his head vigorously. He caught his breath and
stood looking at Moisse with his mouth open and his cheeks wrinkled as
if he were about to cry.

His breath struck the young dramatist and he averted his nose.

“Strange,” resumed he, “now you have a quarter and I have a quarter and
still we remain so different. Isn’t it strange, old fellow? Yet it is
the inevitable inequality of men that makes us brothers.”

The beggar was about to speak. Moisse paused and looked with interest at
the round face, the quivering nostrils and the lips that were twitching
into speech.

“No one has talked to me like you,” he said, “no one.”

And he caught his breath and stared with a strange expression at his
benefactor.

He bit at a finger nail and lowered his head. He seemed suddenly in the
throes of a great mental struggle for his face had become earnest.

It endured for a moment and then he looked at Moisse.

“You—you want me to come along with you,” he said and he scratched at
the back of his ear.

“I’ll come along if you want me to,” he repeated.

“Come along? Where?” Moisse asked, his eyes awakening.

“Oh, anyplace,” said the little old man. “I ain’t particular, if you
ain’t.”

He was breathing quickly and he reached for the palm of his patron.

A deep light had come into his face. His faded eyes had grown stronger.
Their quizzical look was gone and they were burning in their wet depths.

They looked now with a maternal intensity into the eyes of Moisse and
their smile staggered the sophistication of the young dramatist.

The little old man continued to breathe hard until he began to quiver.

He suddenly assumed command.

“Come,” he said, seizing Moisse by the palm and squeezing it. “I know a
place we can go and get a room cheap and where we won’t be disturbed. It
ain’t so nice a place but come.”

He squeezed the palm he held for the second time.

The deep light that had come into his little dog’s face softened and two
tears rolled again out of his eyes.

He caught his breath in a sob.

“I—I don’t drink,” he said; “I’m hungry—but I can wait ... until we get
through.”

He was beaming coquettishly through his tears and fondling the young
dramatist’s hand.

“I can wait,” he repeated, raising his blue lips toward Moisse, his face
transfigured and glowing pink.

“I see,” said Moisse, withdrawing his hand with an involuntary shudder.
He was about to say something but he turned, again involuntarily, and
hurried away, breaking into a run when he found himself in the rain.

The little old man’s face drooped.

He walked slowly staring after him.

He stood bareheaded while the rain bombarded his drenched figure and he
looked at the young dramatist running.

While he stood gazing after him his face screwed up was suffused with a
strange tenderness and the tears dripped out of his eyes.




                      Editorials and Announcement


                _Emma Goldman at the Fine Arts Theatre_

Beginning Sunday night, November 21, Emma Goldman is to deliver nine new
lectures in the most interesting playhouse in town—the Fine Arts
Theatre, Chicago home of the Irish Players and Miss Horniman’s company
and Miss Barnsdall’s Players’ Producing company, etc. The complete list
of lectures will be found on page 44.

The first, on “Preparedness”—well, if you heard the Powys-Browne debate
last Sunday night and agree with Margery Currey that Mr. Browne struck
the roots of the issue, then I _beg_ you to hear Emma Goldman. Mr.
Browne said something about the real issue being whether people would
rather kill or be killed. I could scarcely believe my ears.... If you
once listen to Emma Goldman talking of fundamentals you can never fall
for sentimentalizations again.


                        _Will Our Readers Help?_

There is a beautiful plan on foot to help THE LITTLE REVIEW live through
its third year. It is this:

If our readers will order their books through the Gotham Book Society we
will receive a certain percentage on all the sales. This arrangement has
been made with the publishers, so that any book you want, whether listed
in our pages or not, may be procured at the same price for which it is
on sale at your local bookseller’s—and sometimes even less than that.
You will find full particulars on page 50 of this issue.

Radical magazines do not become popular, and the problem of meeting the
cost of production every month is really a desperate one. If there is a
good response to this plan we ought to make the bulk of our publishing
cost out of it, and then we can devote our energies to the improvement
of the magazine’s quality. Will you please keep this in mind when
ordering your books? It will mean such a tremendous thing to us!


                     _The Russian Literature Class_

In reply to many inquiries about the group for the study of Russian
literature, we are glad to announce that the idea is in the process of
realization. Early in January the group will meet, and will proceed to
attend the regular lectures. The course will be offered by a Russian,
who is well known to the readers of THE LITTLE REVIEW. Those willing to
join the adventure are asked to send their names and addresses to 834
Fine Arts Building.




                        John Cowper Powys on War


                             MARGERY CURREY

It was a quite, quite dreadful jolt that shook the John Cowper Powys
cult on the night of the debate between the master and Maurice Browne of
the Little Theatre. The great one, appearing robed in black, through his
Delphic, released, blinding vapor clouds of infallible utterance, was to
devastate the suggestion that war is evil, avoidable, and should not be
prepared for by military methods. Maurice Browne was to defend the
suggestion.

Scarce half a moon before had the first murmuring of discontent arisen
among the worshipers of the temple, when their idol, beautiful, mordant,
flaming, strode forth in flapping black garments and proclaimed that in
this great war of many nations “the gall and vitriol and wormwood and
uncleanness of mankind are burned, purged from the purified flesh of
humanity; that then humanity is transformed, until the passion of hate
is hardly distinguishable from the passion of love.”

The master himself was the glorious vulture of war. Looming there on the
stage of the Little Theatre, black, huge, alone under a vast orange sky
heavily streaked with black, a violet light from somewhere touching the
crimson of his face—and beside him in that great lonely cosmos an
iridescent emerald bowl upon a high ivory pedestal. That little, little
iridescent bowl, the ivory, the vast peace of a universe, no coagulating
clots hanging from the shreds of bodies torn and entangled in the barbed
wire meshes of the trenches, no cries—only one huge black moving thing
there.

“War a great evil and an unmitigated wrong? I cannot see it. A pacifist
struggle for existence is only a meaner struggle. They are fools who
think it advisable or possible to stamp out war; they are knaves if,
thinking this possible or advisable, they still go on a pacifist
crusade.”

Followed then the picture of a well-managed nation during war, a regime
of exalted socialism—the pooling of all moneys, the raising of the
income tax, the rich paying for the needs of the poor; she who was once
thought a bedraggled hussy of London’s east end now become a savior of
her country, in her potential gift of a son to the recruiting office of
her country; the high price now set on flesh and blood, even that of the
most humble.

Well, all this heroic joy and thin-ice socialism—it was announced at the
end of the evening that the week after the subject would be Walt
Whitman. Thank heaven! Let his people listen to John Cowper Powys on
Walt Whitman. Of these he should speak—of Walt Whitman, of Oscar Wilde,
of Huysmans and Richepin and Milton and Ficke and Baudelaire and Goethe
and Shakespeare. On these he speaks divinely. Peace and war indeed!

And the debate? There stood Maurice Browne in valiant opposition, really
“the idealist and fanatic” as his opponent called him, not adding “the
clear thinker,” the rejector of temptations to revel in obvious and
facile romanticisms on the sweet decorum of dying for one’s country,
with all the talk of defending one’s beloved from the hand of the
ravager. There were even those who understood Mr. Browne when his
bravery and his prophetic sight let him dare to say such things as “It
is better to be killed than to kill. To refrain from a combat of
violence when the victims might be your dearest ones is not to put a
finger in the cogs of God’s orderly universe. It is a question of
looking the God that is within you in the face.” As for the merits of
the debate, the matter of war and its avoidableness was not touched on
in its practical aspects, except by one who presided over the meeting
and in three intelligent moments discussed the economic and the proved
sides of war. THE LITTLE REVIEW is no tract, and we may pass that by as
understood.

And after it all, out of an audience of two hundred and twenty—when they
overflowed the Little Theatre they trooped to the Fine Arts Assembly
Room—eighty-four stood up to announce their conviction that war is not
evil, not avoidable, and should be prepared for by military methods, and
some sixty others stood up to indicate their opposite conviction! The
vote was on the merits of the question.




                              The Theatre


                     THE WASHINGTON SQUARE PLAYERS

                              SAXE COMMINS

Were I a self-appointed apologist for the Washington Square Players I
might be able to say with gracious fairness that “their works are not
worth as much as their endeavors but their endeavors are heroic.” But I
am not inclined to pardon these enthusiasts whose enthusiasm has become
cautious, whose ideals are inoffensive, whose outlines are blurred by an
undiscerning dilettantism, who in the absence of a dominant individual
characteristic flounder helplessly through an unbalanced, inartistic
program, that is only relieved, fortunately, by Mr. Phil Moeller’s
delicious satire _Helena’s Husband_.

“It is not from what you emancipate yourself, it is for what.”—Let us
see whether the Washington Square Players have really liberated
themselves from the Broadway tradition of “getting it over,” from the
sacrifice of the artistic for the opportune, and from the fear of
offending the generous critics of the New York Press and incidentally a
gullible public. “What have they done that has an element of daring,
invigorating thought,” was asked of one of the members of the producing
staff. “_My Lady’s Honor_, one of last year’s plays,” was his answer. To
those who were unfortunate enough to have seen this pseudo-feminist
tract—George Broadhurst supplanting Ibsen in a free theatre—I need not
tell what resentment that remark aroused. Nor could those who saw
_Moondown_ on the same bill be more antagonized than I was when I heard
so fatuous a statement as “If we had more plays like _Moondown_ we would
establish the equivalent in America to the Celtic renaissance.” Is this
“for what” the Washington Square Players have emancipated themselves?
Even if _Moondown_ had any value in itself would they deserve any credit
for an aspiration that is only a conditional imitation? I take these
casual expressions of members of the organization critically because
there is a most noticeable absence of persistent, highly individualized
effort, because there is a majority rule, the odorlessness of an insipid
mixture prevalent in the atmosphere about the Band Box. They are
successful—unfortunately.

Consider the present bill. Has the play-reading committee shown any
distinction that differentiates it from those Broadway theatrical
agencies that supply syndicated thrills on demand? Have they not
arranged their programme without any regard for balance, to the
vaudeville formula in this manner: One curtain-raiser on a current
topic—of course the war; one play cut and measured for the star, a
misfit, to prepare you for the middle piece, in this instance an
amazingly clever satire by Phil Moeller; and then the end-up—(Yes, they
have outgrown Broadway; they don’t wave a big American flag as a grand
finale number)—in this spirit: “wouldn’t a fancifully pagan thing be
very nice to show that we have a conception of the beautiful?” Voilà—the
whole is the sum of its parts, mathematically accurate, yes; but “who
knows whether two and two don’t make five” in the science of Esthetics,
if there is such a thing.

Where, I cannot understand, is their proclaimed aspiration of finding
plays which fulfill the artistic merit that they would lead us to
believe the New York theatre-goer demands? If there is such a public, do
they think and choose for them secure in the belief that the patient
supporters of these sterile Little Theatre movements will abide such
exploitation? Is their complacency so complete that they can disregard
every requirement that a “New Theatre” movement imposes and yet get away
with it? When I use the term “New Theatre” I mean it in the
Strindbergian sense, a new and thoroughly iconoclastic theatre that
panders to no opinion, whose merit lies solely in an individual and
artistic distinction, a theatre that has something of the “continual
slight novelty.”

_Fire and Water_, the opening play of the bill by Hervey White, is a
sacrifice of art to the god of timeliness, an inane argument, an
undramatic episode, a virtuous plea against War that permits its author
to air some abstractions on brotherhood and equality with utter
disregard for the tenseness or the dramatic possibilities of the
situation. Broadway knows better. They, at least, are both opportune and
spectacular and do not pour forth so much of what Nietzsche calls
“moralic acid.”

_Night of Snow_, by Roberto Bracco, seems chosen ostensibly to allow Mr.
Ralph Roeder to cover as great an area of the stage as is possible in
forty-five minutes of monotonous gesture to the melodious obligato of a
voice ranting second-rate Hamlet self-lacerations. It tells the story of
a person half gentleman, half derelict, who likes to cry about it while
his mistress and mother indulge themselves to satiation with sickly
sweet sacrifice. “I am his Mo-ho-ther” etcetera. What a relief was
Moeller’s play—a play that could not even be contaminated by its
environment. I think Anatole France would be glad to have written it.
_Helena’s Husband_ is much more than an historical interpretation of a
phase of the Trojan wars. It is the truth! Moeller is more than clever.
He knows as well as France that “history is a pack of lies.”

_The Antick_, by Percy Mackaye, is a devitalized Pagan attempt which in
spite of charming Lupokova was extremely tedious. I heard little of it,
so poor was the enunciation of the actors, and for my concentrated
attention I was rewarded with an incoherent effort to transplant Pan to
barren, colorless New England. I wonder whether Mr. Mackaye ever read
Pater’s _Denys L’Auxerrois_?

At least the Washington Square Players presume to desire, even though it
be in a misdirected manner. Will they overcome the affable praise that
they get so generously from uncritical critics? Will they mature
sufficiently to recognize the mistakes of their infancy? There is still
hope that they can be saved from success. Where is the strong, perhaps
tyrannical, individual who can do it?


                              “Lithuania”

Whoever hasn’t seen the Little Theatre’s production of Rupert Brooke’s
_Lithuania_ has missed an excellent although unimportant dramatic treat.
It is the most “effective” thing of its kind I ever have seen executed
in Chicago. It is one prolonged and unrelieved shudder from start to
finish.

Rupert Brooke is the hero of the occasion. His play is the thing. The
theme is that of the guest who stops over in an outlying peasant hut and
is murdered in his chamber while he sleeps. Brooke added a flourish in
making the guest a returned son of the house who vanished when he was
thirteen. Taking this hackneyed idea Brooke moulded it with consummate
skill. And the result is a study in horror and pathology, vivid,
artistic and for its effect upon the audience to be compared only to the
witnessing of a child birth. Three of its actors rose to its demands.
Mrs. Browne as the lame daughter contributed practically all the human
atmosphere there was. Miriam Kiper abetted her. Allan MacDougall, in the
part of a half-witted son of a tavern keeper, added a few excellent
moments. The other men were, however, entirely unsuccessful in their
efforts. Maurice Browne, as the peasant father, failed with the rest of
them to give the impression the play demanded, sullen, grim, virile,
despondency. But it was there, despite them.


                              An Objection

Why is it people have such stupid reactions to the plays put on by the
Chicago Little Theatre? I do not know. It is easy to explain why they
talk in subdued tones while entering; why they almost walk on tip-toe;
why they ask for the programs almost with awe; and why, sometimes, they
stop their chatter as the lights are slowly dimmed. The causes of these
actions and their explanation are obvious. And yet—after the play! What
inane, half-witted remarks about the bill! This “notice” printed above
about the opening bill of their fourth season—what is it worth as a
piece of criticism, as a review, or even as an account of the
proceedings it so tritely and knowingly pretends to explain? “Mrs.
Browne as the lame daughter.... Miriam Kiper abetted her. MacDougall ...
added a few excellent moments.... Maurice Browne ... failed with the
rest of them.” What rot! In watching Brooke’s play you are not aware
that you are watching “Mrs. Browne as the lame daughter” or Miriam Kiper
as the mother, MacDougall as the son of an inn-keeper, or Mr. Browne as
the father. You do not find time to bother about that part of your
reaction. Your subjection to play and players is too strong and tense.
It is the usual thing to bother after the play, questioning members—who
played this role?—who played that role? And then, after hours or days of
weighing and shallow balancing, write a “review.” Again I question: Why
do people react so stupidly to the plays at this theatre? This is not
the adequate or honest way to view a play like Brooke’s or acting like
the Little Theatre company’s. In this play even as in _The Trojan Women_
they have closely approached that losing themselves in the “impersonal
ideal” or “one tradition” of which Mr. Powys spoke so white-heatedly in
a former article in THE LITTLE REVIEW. Except for MacDougall and for
Moseman, who are _always_ MacDougall and Moseman, we were watching a
play—and forgot to gather the ingredients and essentials of the
inevitable review.




                            Book Discussion


                         An Inspired Publisher

To paraphrase the biblical adage: Samson is upon ye, Philistines! That
quaint giant, Russian literature, is storming the Anglo-Saxon world; and
no longer in apothecary doses, in solitary books, but in avalanches. A
practical dreamer, Alfred A. Knopf, is determined to deluge this country
with the best and nearly best that has been written in Russia, and he is
doing it on a big scale, in torrents and showers. Such a dizzying list
of publications: Gogol, Goncharov, Lermontov, Gorky, Andreyev, Garshin,
Kropotkin; and he is going to give us Sologub, Kuzmin, Ropshin! And he
has given us Przybyszewski’s _Homo Sapiens_, the book about which I have
been drumming the ears of my American friends for years, the book that
has stirred me more than any other work of art,—I mean it literally. Mr.
Knopf has introduced another novel feature on the book-market: he
selects translators from among those who know three things—Russian,
English, and how to write,—so that the reader will be spared the torture
of wading through a badly-done translation from the French version of a
German translation from the Russian (examples? Recall _Sanine_!).

A literature is like a people; if you want to know it, you must learn
not only its Cromwells and Napoleons, but also its Asquiths and
Vivianis; not only its Shakespeares and Goethes, but its Wellses and
Sudermanns as well. Turgenyev, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, do not exhaust
Russian literature of the nineteenth century, though they are the
greatest novelists of their epoch. There are many interesting sides of
Russian life which are not reflected on the canvasses of the great Trio,
but have been painted by perhaps minor artists, whom we cannot afford to
miss if we intend to gain a clear vista of that peculiar life and its
peculiar literature.

Hence Goncharov and his _Precipice_. In Russia he is ranked next to
Turgenyev. Without the latter’s delicate lyricism Goncharov presents the
objective artist, if this is possible, in depicting the life of the
gentry, the class that has been either ignored or caricatured by the
writers with a _Tendenz_. In _Precipice_ we face Rayski, Vyera, the
grandmother, the passing types of the romantic nobility, whose passions
and tragedies are as stirring and as human as those of the more
democratic elements of society.

Garshin is another writer heretofore unknown to the English world. His
_Signal and other Stories_ are achingly Russian. Garshin is a product of
the Eighties, the epoch of “petty deeds,” when the heavy boot of
Alexander III. drove into the underground all that was idealistic in his
country. The soil-less _Intelligentzia_ had the alternative of turning
retrogrades or going insane. Garshin’s lot was with the latter category.
His few stories ache with the black melancholy which finally hurled him
down a flight of stone steps,—his last flight. His war impressions are
gripping with the resigned Russian sadness; they are all-human,
universal; but _Attalea Princeps_, the symbolical tale of an exotic
plant chafing in a hot-house—who but a compatriot of mad Garshin will
fathom its profound tragicness!

The republication of Kropotkin’s _Ideals and Realities in Russian
Literature_ will be of service to the critical student of Russian
literature. I say critical, for although the book is rich in material
the personal views of the author and his valuations of the writers are
considerably obsolete and tainted with the liberalistic tendency of
“problem”-friends.

Below are more reviews of Mr. Knopf’s publications. The most important
one is Przybyszewski’s _Homo Sapiens_. It deserves a special article.
See the next issue!


                            Homo Monstrosus

      _Taras Bulba, by Nicolai Gogol. New York: Alfred A. Knopf._

They burned him at the stake, bound to a great tree in iron chains. The
flames lapped at his feet, glowing into his old face that was scarred
and leathered with battle, brightening the silver of his fierce
mustache....

Out of the reddened shadows that fell over him like a mantle his lips
could be seen curling in a smile, contemptuous and arrogant, and he
turned his eyes toward the Dnyeper where the boats of his brothers were
pulling away under a rain of lead.

“Farewell, comrades,” he shouted to them; “remember me, and come hither
again next spring to make merry!”

And then he turned to the Lyakhs against whom he had waged war and who
knew him as the raven of the steppe.

The fire had risen above the faggots and the great tree was burning. Out
of the flames came the voice of the hero....

“A Tzar shall arise from the Russian soil and there shall not be a Power
in the world which shall not submit to him.”

Thus died Taras Bulba, kazak.

In this day when a man’s skin is his most greedily guarded possession
and the lisping of pale, pretty words his greatest glory, Taras Bulba
comes charging into America, a figure in need. On his black horse he
comes, his scalp lock flying in the wind, his sword waving in great
circles above his head, his body leaning over the shining neck of his
steed and his voice ringing with the battle whoop of the kazak.

He is the eternal warrior, the plundering hero, the lusty knight of
battle, a devil of a man with boiling blood in his veins and the savage
joy of life in his heart.

Taras and his two sons, Andrii and Ostap, go thundering up and down the
Russian steppe with the savage avalanche of the Zaporozhe. They fight
and carouse and their deeds are mighty—mightier than the deeds of which
Homer sang and the performances which Walter Scott sketched. Beside
Taras Ivanhoe pales into tin puppet, Ulysses into a lady’s man.

What a book!

If you know Gogol through his _Dead Souls_, the “humorous” classic of
Russia, you will read in amazement his _Taras Bulba_. It is Rabelais
with a sword. Through its pages ring the shouts of battle and Gargantuan
manhood—Homo Monstrosus....

Once or twice the pale face of a woman peeps out of them and Gogol kicks
it back into place with his kazak boot.

“Do you want fire, Ostap? Do you want mad blood in your heart? Come ride
with me over the steppe to the tents of the Zaporozhe....”

When I closed the book with its red shouts still ringing in my ears—with
old Taras still burning against the great tree and the magic steppe
stretching before me—I thought of the baby-ribbon bards and the
querulous quibblers of American letters—and smiled....

Come on, Bulba, there is still blood in America that has not dried,
there are still hearts that have not been transformed into pink doilies.

Welcome! You can’t shout too loud for me, you can’t swagger too much.
The soul of you that left your burning body laughed and roared its way
into heaven....


                      Gorky at His Best and Worst

   _Chelkash, and Other Stories, by Maxim Gorky. New York: Alfred A.
                                 Knopf_

Maxim Gorky is the poorest and most uneven of the Russian writers. He
is—or was—a pioneer. He came wailing from lonely roads where the vagrom
man sleeps beneath the stars and wonders what there is to life. And his
dull, bitter plaints with ferocity as their leit motif soon sounded over
the world. When the majority of Russian genius was struggling to “go to
the people” Gorky had the advantage of coming from the people.

Alfred Knopf’s collection of Gorky tales under the title of _Chelkash_
is Gorky at his best and worst. I find in it some of his best tales
abominably written, studded with crass “gems” of philosophy, broken up
with unnecessary moralizings. For instance, his _Twenty-Six of Us and
One Other_. In this Gorky writes of his immortal bakeshop. As a youth
Gorky spent his days in a bakeshop. Time and again he has painted it, in
other stories better than in this one. But in this instance the bakeshop
is only a background; usually it is the main theme. Tanya, a little
girl, stops every morning to say “Hello” to the twenty-six bakers. They
give her little cakes. She is the only “ray of sweetness” in their
lives. They look upon her as a daughter, a shrine. And Tanya it is who
alone awakens in them for a few moments each day something approaching
fineness. Along comes a terrible dandy, a ladies’ man. He seduces every
lady he sets his cap for; it is his boast. The bakers like him: he is a
“gentleman” and very democratic. But one day when he is boasting the
head baker grows excited and mentions “Tanya.” The dandy boasts he will
seduce her. An argument follows. After a month the dandy succeeds. The
bakers witness the girl’s “undoing.” When she comes out of the dandy’s
room, smiling, happy, they gather around her, spit at her, revile and
abuse her. No names they can think of are bad enough. They fall into a
frenzy of vituperation. But they do not strike her. Realizing dully that
a “god” has died, they go back to work.

_Chelkash_, the first tale in the book, is Gorky on his “home
ground”—the vagrom man, the pirate, the road thief. He paints him with a
careful brush and a sureness of his subject. In _The Steppe_ he does the
same. _A Rolling Stone_, and _Chums_, the last the best story in the
volume, are also variations of the vagrom man theme—the underdog. But it
is in stories like _One Autumn Night_, _Comrades_, _The Green Kitten_,
and _Her Lover_ that Gorky reveals his greatest genius and his greatest
weakness. He can feel them, imagine them, see them, but for some reason
he cannot write them. _One Autumn Night_ might have been one of the
world’s strongest classics.

All the tales in the volume are the work of the “first” Gorky—the bitter
one, the melodramatic, outraged Gorky. They are on a whole not as good
as the collection of stories written during that same period and
translated in a volume called _Orloff and His Wife_. Gorky still lives
and he has learned how to write. His later tales, composed in Italy by
the “second” Gorky, the consumptive, contemplative, clear-seeing Gorky,
are mature, almost mellow. But they are no longer distinctive. Anyone
could have written them, anyone with a bit of genius and a great deal of
time on his hands. But the _Chelkash_ tales and the tales in _Orloff and
His Wife_—these no one but Gorky has written, and although they are
inferior in workmanship to the products of Chekhov and Andreyev the
American reader will find them perhaps more interesting.


                    Two Masters and a Petty Monster

       _The Little Angel, by Leonid Andreyev. New York: Alfred A.
                                Knopf._

       _Russian Silhouettes, by Anton Chekhov. New York: Charles
                           Scribner’s Sons._

      _The Breaking Point, by Michael Artzibashef. New York: B. W.
                               Huebsch._

“Charming fellows, those Russians,” said my friend. “When it comes to
delineating the processes, mental and physical, of rape, suicide,
incest, arson, butchery, and disease, they are without peers....” I
therefore take this occasion to hurl two newly translated Russian books
at my friend, hoping they land on his thick head.

The first book which I hurl at my friend is Andreyev’s _The Little
Angel_. It is a collection of short stories. There are fifteen stories
in the new volume brought out by Mr. Alfred Knopf, and all of them are
little masterpieces. There is one story about a dog, _Snapper_. Only
Anatole France has equaled it. There is another story, _The
Marseillaise_. It is a perfect story. It is Kipling at his very best
plus a flavor, a note, a something serious and deep that the Russians
alone know how to command, that Kipling never reached. There is one
story, _In the Basement_. I hope my friend chokes on this story. It
would serve him right.

But _The Little Angel_ stands out from the fifteen. It is about a little
boy, a bitter, lonely-hearted fellow whose mother drinks and beats him,
whose father is dying of consumption, and who in turn snarls and bullies
his playmates and weeps at night because his heart is so empty and
heavy. In this story Andreyev attains a poignant delicacy of touch and a
grim beauty which even his one-time contemporary Chekhov never
surpassed.

_The Little Angel_ is the most beautiful short story I ever have read.

Chekhov has also been translated again. A collection of fragments,
vibrating episodes, moods, and exquisite children stories called
_Russian Silhouettes_ has been issued by Scribners’.

A better artist than Andreyev, keener, more reserved, more subtle,
Chekhov to my notion nevertheless lacks the vibrancy which the author of
_The Seven Who Were Hanged_ flings into his tales. Andreyev wields the
pen of Dostoevsky with a little thinner ink. Chekhov is Turgenev
fragmentized. He has left behind him a series of little canvases so
finely done, so skilfully passionate ... well, I hurl him at my friend
without further ado....

... It is that consumptive rogue of an Artzibashef who has caused most
of the trouble. The devil take him and his erotic suicides. His latest
translated book brought out by Huebsch is a tasteless joke. It is called
_The Breaking Point_. In it all the characters but one commit suicide,
all the women are “ruined.” Whenever two or more of its genial personae
come together they forthwith fall into an argument concerning the
futility of life, the idiocy of existence and so on and so on. And the
trouble is that Artzibashef can write, beautifully, keenly, and
sometimes gloriously. In _Sanine_, for instance, in _The Millionaire_,
there are passages better than Andreyev, better than Chekhov, better
than any writer has written. But the books are distorted, full of
puerile moralizings, breathing a diseased lust and a sentimentalized
violence—and _The Breaking Point_ is the worst of them to date.
Artzibashef’s work stands in the same relation to the Russian realism
that Paul De Kock’s work stands to the French sensual finesse.




                        AMERICA’S COMING-OF-AGE

                          _by_ VAN WYCK BROOKS

   A study of American ideals and reality: aspirations and
   performance.

   What is it that prevents the maturity of our literature and life?

   In our art, our politics, our letters, the torturous trails of
   the “Highbrow” and of the “Lowbrow” may be traced. They stem from
   Jonathan Edwards and Benjamin Franklin respectively.

                                _At all
                               bookstores
                              $1.00 net._

   Whither do they lead?

   Read the book: it marks a step forward in American criticism.

       _Published by_ B. W. HUEBSCH, _225 Fifth avenue, New York
                                  City_.


                         AMY LOWELL’S NEW BOOK




                            SIX FRENCH POETS

                   Studies in Contemporary Literature

      _Emile Verhaeren_
      _Albert Samain_
      _Remy de Gourmont_
      _Henri de Régnier_
      _Francis Jammes_
      _Paul Fort_

   _By the author of “Sword Blades and Poppy Seed,” “A Dome of
   Many-Coloured Glass,” etc._

   Written by one of the foremost living American poets, this is the
   first book in English containing a careful and minute study, with
   translations, of the famous writers of one of the greatest epochs
   in French poetry.


                                 $2.50

              THE MACMILLAN COMPANY, Publishers, New York




                              EMMA GOLDMAN

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                  NOVEMBER 21ST TO DECEMBER 5TH, 1915

                               SUBJECTS:

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   Thursday,  Nov.  25th,  _The Message of Anarchism_
   Saturday,  Nov.  27th,  _Sex, The Great Element of Creative Art_
   Sunday,    Nov.  28th,  _The Philosophy of Atheism_
   Tuesday,   Nov.  30th,  _Victims of Morality_
   Thursday,  Dec.   2nd,  _Nietzsche and the German Kaiser_
   Saturday,  Dec.   4th,  _Birth Control_
   Sunday,    Dec.   5th,  _Beyond Good and Evil_

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           3.  (a) Romance                         _Schumann_
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                             THE MISCELLANY

   THE MISCELLANY combines illustrated articles of interest to
   booklovers and lovers of literary essays: _belles-lettres_, art,
   and the drama coming within its province as well as occasional
   book-reviews.

   A partial list of topics appearing during 1915 is as follows:

      _The Lost Art of Making Books_
      _The Noh Drama of Japan_
      _The Fortsas Library_
      _The New Loggan Prints, and_
      _Ancient Paper-Making_

   A department in each number acts as official journal for The
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                              ROBERT FROST


                         THE NEW AMERICAN POET




                            NORTH OF BOSTON

   ALICE BROWN:

   “Mr. Frost has done truer work about New England than
   anybody—except Miss Wilkins.”

   CHARLES HANSON TOWNE:

   “Nothing has come out of America since Whitman so splendid, so
   real, so overwhelmingly great.”

   AMY LOWELL in _The New Republic_:

   “A book of unusual power and sincerity. A remarkable
   achievement.”

   NEW YORK EVENING SUN:

   “The poet had the insight to trust the people with a book of the
   people and the people replied ‘Man, what is your name?’ ... He
   forsakes utterly the claptrap of pastoral song, classical or
   modern.... His is soil stuff, not mock bucolics.”

   BOSTON TRANSCRIPT:

   “The first poet for half a century to express New England life
   completely with a fresh, original and appealing way of his own.”

   BROOKLYN DAILY EAGLE:

   “The more you read the more you are held, and when you return a
   few days later to look up some passage that has followed you
   about, the better you find the meat under the simple
   unpretentious form. _The London Times_ caught that quality when
   it said: ‘Poetry burns up out of it, as when a faint wind
   breathes upon smouldering embers.’ ... That is precisely the
   effect....”

   REEDY’S MIRROR:

   “Genuine poetry, these ‘North of Boston’ tales, they hold one
   with the grip of a vivid novel.... I can only refer my readers to
   ‘North of Boston’ for acquaintance with what seems to me a fine
   achievement; such achievement, indeed, as contributes vitally to
   the greatness of a country’s most national and significant
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            A BOY’S WILL Mr. Frost’s First Volume of Poetry

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                                GENERAL

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                               LITERATURE

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   ENJOYMENT OF POETRY. By Max Eastman. “His book is a masterpiece,”
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   THE PILLAR OF FIRE: A Profane Baccalaureate. By Seymour Deming.
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   IVORY APES AND PEACOCKS. By James Huneker. A collection of essays
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   INTERPRETATIONS OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. By Lafcadio Hearn. Two
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   IDEALS AND REALITIES IN RUSSIAN LITERATURE. By Prince Kropotkin.
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                                FICTION

   THE TURMOIL. By Booth Tarkington. A beautiful story of young love
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   SET OF SIX. By Joseph Conrad. Short stories. Scribner. Send
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   AN ANARCHIST WOMAN. By H. Hapgood. This extraordinary novel
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   THE HARBOR. By Ernest Poole. A novel of remarkable power and
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   MAXIM GORKY. Twenty-six and One and other stories from the
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   SANINE. By Artzibashef. The sensational Russian novel now
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   A FAR COUNTRY. Winston Churchill’s new novel is another realistic
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   BOON—THE MIND OF THE RACE. Was it written by H. G. Wells? He now
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   NEVER TOLD TALES. Presents in the form of fiction, in language
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   PAN’S GARDEN. By Algernon Blackwood. Send $1.60.

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   THE RAT-PIT. By Patrick MacGill. A novel by the navvy-poet who
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   THE AMETHYST RING. By Anatole France. Translated by B. Drillien.
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   CRAINQUEBILLE. By Anatole France. Translated by Winifred Stevens.
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   VIOLETTE OF PERE LACHAISE. By Anna Strunsky Walling. Records the
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   THE “GENIUS.” By Theodore Dreiser. Send $1.60.

   JERUSALEM. By Selma Lagerlof. Translated by Velma Swanston. The
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   BREAKING-POINT. By Michael Artzibashef. A comprehensive picture
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   RUSSIAN SILHOUETTES. By Anton Tchekoff. Translated by Marian
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   THE FREELANDS. By John Galsworthy. Gives a large and vivid
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   FIDELITY. Susan Glaspell’s greatest novel. The author calls it
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   FOMA GORDEYEFF. By Maxim Gorky. Send $1.10.

   THE RAGGED-TROUSERED PHILANTHROPIST. By Robert Tressall. A
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   RED FLEECE. By Will Levington Comfort. A story of the Russian
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   THE STAR ROVER. By Jack London. Frontispiece in colors by Jay
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   THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT. By H. G. Wells. Tells the story of the
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                                SEXOLOGY

   Here is the great sex book of the day: Forel’s THE SEXUAL
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   Degeneracy exposed. Birth control discussed. Should be in the
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   Painful childbirth in this age of scientific progress is
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   FREUD’S THEORIES OF THE NEUROSES. By Dr. E. Hitschmann. A brief
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   PLAIN FACTS ABOUT A GREAT EVIL. By Christobel Pankhurst. One of
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   SEXUAL LIFE OF WOMAN. By Dr. E. Heinrich Kisch (Prague). An
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   KRAFFT-EBING’S PSYCHOPATHIA SEXUALIS. Only authorized English
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   THE SMALL FAMILY SYSTEM: IS IT IMMORAL OR INJURIOUS? By Dr. C. V.
   Drysdale. The question of birth control cannot be intelligently
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   MAN AND WOMAN. By Dr. Havelock Ellis, the foremost authority on
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   WHAT EVERY GIRL SHOULD KNOW. By Margaret Sanger. Send 55 cents.

   WHAT EVERY MOTHER SHOULD KNOW. By Margaret Sanger. Send 30 cents.

   THE THEORY OF PSYCHOANALYSIS. By Dr. C. Jung. A concise statement
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   SELECTED PAPERS ON HYSTERIA AND OTHER PSYCHONEUROSES. By Prof. S.
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   THREE CONTRIBUTIONS TO SEXUAL THEORY. By John C. Van Dyke. Fully
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   THREE CONTRIBUTIONS TO SEXUAL THEORY. By Prof. Sigmund Freud. The
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   FUNCTIONAL PERIODICITY. An experimental study of the mental and
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                                  ART

   MICHAEL ANGELO. By Romain Rolland. Twenty-two full-page
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   INTERIOR DECORATION: ITS PRINCIPLES AND PRACTICE. By Frank Alvah
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   THE BARBIZON PAINTERS. By Arthur Hoeber. One hundred
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   THE BOOK OF MUSICAL KNOWLEDGE. By Arthur Elson. Illustrated.
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   MODERN PAINTING: ITS TENDENCY AND MEANING. By Willard Huntington
   Wright, author of “What Nietzsche Taught,” etc. Four color plates
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   THE ROMANCE OF LEONARDI DA VINCI. By A. J. Anderson. Photogravure
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   THE COLOUR OF PARIS. By Lucien Descaves. Large 8vo. New edition,
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                         SCIENCE AND SOCIOLOGY

   CAUSES AND CURES OF CRIME. A popular study of criminology from
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   THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELAXATION. By G. T. W. Patrick. A notable and
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   PSYCHOLOGY OF THE UNCONSCIOUS. By Dr. C. G. Jung, of the
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   SOCIALIZED GERMANY. By Frederic C. Howe, author of “The Modern
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   SCIENTIFIC INVENTIONS OF TODAY. Illustrated. By T. W. Corbin. The
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   THE HUNTING WASPS. By J. Henri Fabre. 12mo. Bound in uniform
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   SCHOOLS OF TOMORROW. By John Dewey and Evelyn Dewey. Illustrated.
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   THE RHYTHM OF LIFE. By Charles Brodie Patterson. A discussion of
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   THE FAITHFUL. By John Masefield. A three-act tragedy founded on a
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   INCOME. By Scott Nearing. An economic value is created amounting
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   THE STOIC PHILOSOPHY. By Gilbert Murray. An account of the
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   A MESSAGE TO THE MIDDLE CLASS. By Seymour Deming. A clarion call
   so radical that it may well provoke a great tumult of discussion
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   DRIFT AND MASTERY. An attempt to diagnose the current unrest. By
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   FIRST AND LAST THINGS. By H. G. Wells. A confession of Faith and
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   THE SOCIALISTS AND THE WAR. By William English Walling. No
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   DREAMS AND MYTHS. By Dr. Karl Abraham. A lucid presentation of
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   WHAT WOMEN WANT. By Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale. $1.35 net;
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   ARE WOMEN PEOPLE? A collection of clever woman suffrage verses.
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   HOW IT FEELS TO BE THE HUSBAND OF A SUFFRAGETTE. By “Him.”
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   ON DREAMS. By Prof. Sigmund Freud. Authorized English translation
   by Dr. M. D. Eder. Introduction by Prof. W. Leslie Mackenzie.
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   MODERN WOMEN. By Gustav Kobbe. Terse, pithy, highly dramatic
   studies in the overwrought feminism of the day. A clever book.
   Send $1.10.


                          GOTHAM BOOK SOCIETY

     Marlen E. Pew, Gen. Mgr., Dept. K, 142 West 23rd St., New York

                 “You Can Get Any Book on Any Subject”


                NEW BOOKS FOR THE DISCRIMINATING READER

   _“Mr. Dreiser proves himself once more a master realist ... he is
   a great, a very great artist. In a season remarkable for its
   excellent fiction this new book of his immediately takes its
   place in the front rank.”—New York Tribune._




                              The “Genius”

                          By Theodore Dreiser

              Author of “Sister Carrie,” “The Titan,” etc.

                            Cloth, $1.50 Net

   ¶ Eugene Witla is one of those strange personalities which
   occasionally spring up among the humdrum types of common life, an
   exotic flower in a vegetable garden. Brilliant, irregular,
   unstable, he attracts and repels in the book as in life. The
   story deals with his rise as an artist, and later as a business
   man.

   ¶ He is one of those powerful and yet fragile personalities to
   whom great success and great disaster almost inevitably come. His
   weakness lies in the insatiable hunger of his mind and body for
   the charm of feminine youth and beauty. His conquests form a
   series of fascinating episodes, gay with all the colors of love
   and art.

   ¶ Eugene is in search of the “Impossible She.” When he is at
   the height of his success, he finds her. He reaches out his arms
   to grasp her, and at that moment the whole structure of his life
   crumbles beneath him. Abysses open, at the bottom of which lie
   all but insanity. He struggles to save himself. At the end of the
   book—but read it.


                   A STORY OF GENIUS, RESTLESS POWER
                     AND CREATIVE ENERGY SEARCHING
                          FOR LIFE’S SOLUTION

   _“The ‘Genius’ is a work of art to which Dreiser has risen from
   mere works of devoted craft.”—St. Louis Mirror._

   _“Dreiser’s work reminds one at times of Zola, of Balzac and of
   Tolstoy.”—New York Times._

   _“His study of this fine character in fiction (The ‘Genius’)—a
   strictly Twentieth Century product—is full of human interest and
   psychic significance.”—Philadelphia North American._

   _“A separate and colossal effort.... Its people live, its lesson
   is all the more forceful for the author’s consistent refusal to
   pass it. Yes, Mr. Dreiser indubitably is an artist.”—Chicago
   Herald._


                                 POETRY

                          The Collected Poems

                            of Rupert Brooke

        _With a Critical Introduction by George Edward Woodberry
             and a Biographical Note by Margaret Lavington.
             Photogravure Frontispiece. Cloth, $1.25 net._

   “Among all who have been poets and died young it is hard to think
   of one, who both in life and death, has so typified the ideal
   radiance of youth and poetry.”—GILBERT MURRAY _in the Cambridge
   Magazine_.

                                 Poems

                       By Gilbert K. Chesterton,

        _Author of “The Ballad of the White Horse,” etc. Cloth,
                              $1.25 net._

   This new collection of the poems of G. K. Chesterton covers a
   multitude of subjects—Love Poems, Religious Poems, Rhymes for the
   Times, etc., and his verse, no less than his prose, contains
   delicious humor and deep philosophy.


                                  ART

                            Modern Painting
                        Its Tendency and Meaning

                          By Willard H. Wright

        _Author of “What Nietzsche Taught,” etc. With 4 subjects
           in color and 24 reproductions. Cloth, $2.50 net._

   “The first book in English to give a coherent and intelligible
   account of the new ideas that now rage in painting. Its
   appearance lifts art criticism in the United States out of its
   old slough of platitude-mongering and sentimentalizing.”—_Smart
   Set._

                    What Pictures to See in America

                          By Mrs. L. M. Bryant

       _Author of “What Pictures to See in Europe,” etc. Over 200
                   illustrations. Cloth, $2.00 net._

   In order to see art museums rightly in the short time at the
   disposal of the general tourist a careful guide must be had to
   save time and strength. Mrs. Bryant in the present book visits
   the various galleries of America from Boston to San Francisco,
   and points out the masterpieces of famous artists.

                         JOHN LANE CO. NEW YORK




                          Transcriber’s Notes


Advertisements were collected at the end of the text.

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

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

   [p. 4]:
   ... clear over head, with shells from three of four guns making
       little rose-coloured ...
   ... clear over head, with shells from three or four guns making
       little rose-coloured ...

   [p. 16]:
   ... The Musseta Waltz and Rudolph’s Narrative; ...
   ... The Musetta Waltz and Rudolph’s Narrative; ...

   [p. 30]:
   ... “The rain leaps and pirouttes like a chorus of Russian
       elves. It jumps. ...
   ... “The rain leaps and pirouettes like a chorus of Russian
       elves. It jumps. ...

   [p. 32]:
   ... the fingers of his right hand he picked at the blackened and
       roughtly-bitten ...
   ... the fingers of his right hand he picked at the blackened and
       roughly-bitten ...

   [p. 32]:
   ... and stood looking at Moisse with his mouth open and his
       checks wrinkled ...
   ... and stood looking at Moisse with his mouth open and his
       cheeks wrinkled ...

   [p. 39]:
   ... was. Miriam Kipper abetted her. Allan MacDougal, in the part
       of a half-witted ...
   ... was. Miriam Kiper abetted her. Allan MacDougall, in the part
       of a half-witted ...

   [p. 40]:
   ... he has given us Przbyshewski’s Homo Sapiens, the book about
       which I ...
   ... he has given us Przybyszewski’s Homo Sapiens, the book
       about which I ...