THE LITTLE REVIEW


                       Literature Drama Music Art

                          MARGARET C. ANDERSON
                                 EDITOR

                         JANUARY-FEBRUARY, 1916

        Poems:                                             H. D.
          Late Spring
          Night
        A Deeper Music                      Margaret C. Anderson
        Blue-Prints:                                Harriet Dean
          Debutante
          The Pillar
        The Pathos of Proximity                Alexander S. Kaun
        Solitude                                    David O’Neil
        The Novelist                           Sherwood Anderson
        Asperities:                              Mitchell Dawson
          Threat
          In Passing
          Teresa
        Amy Lowell’s Book                            F. S. Flint
        The Picnic                              Marjory Seiffert
        Editorials and Announcements
        “American Art”                              “The Critic”
        Photography                                     C. A. Z.
        Book Discussion
        The Reader Critic

                           Published Monthly

                            15 cents a copy

                    MARGARET C. ANDERSON, Publisher
                           Fine Arts Building
                                CHICAGO

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         Entered as second-class matter at Postoffice, Chicago




                           THE LITTLE REVIEW


                                Vol. II

                         JANUARY-FEBRUARY, 1916

                                 No. 10

                Copyright, 1916, by Margaret C. Anderson




                                 Poems


                                 H. D.


                              Late Spring

   We can not weather all this gold
   Nor stand under the gold from elm-trees
   And the re-coated sallows.
   We can not hold our heads erect
   Under this golden dust.

   We can not stand
   Where enclosures for the fruit
   Drop hot—radiant—slight petals
   From each branch.

   We can not see:
   The dog-wood breaks—white—
   The pear-tree has caught—
   The apple is a red blaze—
   The peach has already withered its own leaves—
   The wild plum-tree is alight.


                                 Night

   The night has cut each from each
   And curled the petals back from the stalk
   And under it in crisp rows:

   Under at an unfaltering pace,
   Under till the rinds break,
   Back till each bent leaf
   Is parted from its stalk:

   Under at a grave pace,
   Under till the leaves are bent
   Back till they drop upon the earth,
   Back till they are all broken.

   O night,
   You take the petals of the roses in your hand,
   But leave the stark core of the rose
   To perish on the branch.




                             A Deeper Music


                          MARGARET C. ANDERSON

A piano, alone on a stage; shadowed light around and above it; ivory and
ebony moving out of the shadow; and the silence that hangs there before
the musician plays. There is nothing like it in the world,—nothing more
wonderful....

                   *       *       *       *       *

There are “revolutions” going on in all the arts. The revolution in
poetry is coming in for a lot of discussion, so that even the layman is
conscious of it. His feeling about it is that some effeminate beings
called Imagists are trying to emasculate the noble art of poetry. But
the thing is happening right under his nose and he is careful to keep
posted, in order to be able to defend his favorite theory. As for the
stage, he knows that Gordon Craig and Rhinehart have been using screens
instead of marble pillars painted against red velvet curtains. In
painting he knows all about the cubists and futurists; he even knows
that the donkey’s tail story was something of a joke. In sculpture he
has heard of an unreasonable reaction from Rodin, and he has probably
seen Brzeska’s head of Ezra Pound. In the ballet he has a rather clear
idea of why the old classical form wouldn’t serve; perhaps because the
Russians have demonstrated so clearly what it was they could do with the
new form. In opera he thinks very little is happening. He is right.

But the slowest revolution of all—and the most interesting—is that which
is just beginning in the art of the piano. It is the slowest because it
is not the public alone that is bound to the old form. The masters
themselves have not visioned toward a need that would make a new form
inevitable. The need is—a deeper music. And it is the most interesting
because the convention that has bound the piano,—virtuosity,—is a more
worthy convention than that which has restricted any of the other arts.

There is a universe of the arts in the piano. But it is not a universe
now. It is a stunt. The piano has been used for stunts for years and
years and years. It will go on being used that way for years. Well, I am
the last one to deprecate the art of these stunts. I think they are
beautiful—some of them. I think they have their place. But they have
served it too well. I love them more than I love all the opals and
rubies and sapphires and emeralds and topaz and amethyst and pearl a
jeweller can dip his fingers into and spread out for your dazzled
senses. But I love poetry more than jewels. And I love music more than
poetry. In the music of the piano you get the best illustration that
music is a thing beginning and ending in itself, a thing not of story or
image but of sound, a thing that must be understood quite simply in its
own terms,—as Hiram Kelly Moderwell puts it, a thing that must be heard
and not seen. And in the revolution that is beginning you get this first
pure principle combined with another; that the music of the piano must
reach to the passion of life. This is quite different from saying that
music must be a dramatization of human life. It is merely saying that
ballet dancing could never have produced an Isadora Duncan.

I imagine that Harold Bauer must have said something of this sort to
himself. He has certainly said it on the piano. His attitude toward the
piano has this sort of prophecy in it. It is a matter of the beauty of
sound. The methods of approach of all the “masters” have been the same.
They have imposed something upon the piano. But Bauer has approached the
handling of the piano as Debussy approached composition—or Schönberg.

When Schönberg wrote that “the alleged tones believed to be foreign to
harmony do not exist; they are merely tones foreign to our accepted
harmonic system”, and that “tonality is not a hard and fast compulsion
directing the course of music but a concept which makes it possible for
us to give our ideas the requisite aspect of compactness”, he was saying
practically what Bauer has suggested about the touching of the piano:
that virtuosity is only a means to an end, that the springs of the art
have been drying up, and that until the musician can _hear_ better he is
not worthy of the sounds the piano has to give him. You can’t play César
Franck with the same hands you use for Liszt. You must change your hands
into different “feelers”. The piano will give you the quality of almost
every instrument. It is as though Bauer had said: “They call this an
instrument of percussion. They have laid down its limitation. But I
doubt very much whether it will stay within that limitation. I suspect
it does not stop there but goes on into a realm where sound is of
infinite development.” That is why you hear an organ when he plays César
Franck; that is why you realize how the Imagists have worked when he
plays Debussy; that is why you get a sense of painting in all his music.
Bauer puts on the sound like paint. He knows, as Romain Rolland has
said, that every art tends to become a universe in itself; that music
becomes painting and poetry, that painting becomes music, etc. And Bauer
is not a genius. He has merely suggested what will happen to the piano,
and paved the way for an openness of mind about it. He has made a good
many people gossip of how his scales won’t compare with those of the
other great ones; but he has made a good many more suspect that there
has been something lacking in the ultimatums of the piano athletes. He
has done many simple and dynamic things to bring the piano into its own.

But the full achievement of this will go beyond what has been heard yet
anywhere; and the man who does it will be scorned as the greatest fool
or madman of his time before it is fully understood. It doesn’t matter.
The thing will happen—I hardly know how. I hardly even know words with
which to tell what it will be like. It can only be told on the piano.

In his _Spiritual Adventures_ Arthur Symons has a story of a musician
who says more true things about the piano than I have ever found
anywhere else. One of them is this: “Most modern music is a beggar for
pity. The musician tries to show us how he has suffered and how hopeless
he is. He sets his toothache and his heartache to music, putting those
sufferings into the music without remembering that sounds have their own
agonies which alone they can express in a perfect manner.” This is where
the “lions and panthers of the piano” have failed most: they have not
loved the sounds enough. They have not allowed each sound its full life.
This is the real reason why the piano has stopped short of itself. They
might almost as well have played bells. You can strike bells which will
bring out any number of tunes, loud or soft, with every possible variety
of phrasing. _But your interest will be in the tune rather than in the
sound._ You can’t limit the piano to the tunes that can be played upon
it. You don’t treat a violin that way, nor an organ. And of course you
can register a piano almost as fully as an organ with the “stops” that
are in the ends of your fingers. How fascinating it is, and how
wonderful!

But most piano recitals are like recitations—or some sort of performance
on a school platform. Their beauty ends with the beauty of style,
phrasing, finish, tone, taste. It is diction rather than music. It is
science. Busoni is not a prophet; he is an orchestra. Hofmann loves
style more than he does sound. Godowsky loves patterns more than sound.
Gabrilowitsch loves delicate sounds intensely, but has no feeling for
the sounds of great chords. Zeisler loves rhythm more than sound. And so
on. Paderewski loves the piano. He is genius, pure and simple—though of
course there is nothing less pure or simple. He may do what he
likes—break sounds into bits, crack them like nuts. It doesn’t matter.
He never fails to communicate a mood to the instrument—the mood of his
personal equation. And that is art. “Przybyszewski playing Chopin”—that
would also be art. What have the excellent piano concerts you hear to do
with art, with inspiration? Piano playing is certainly something to be
surpassed. Music is the thing! And that means ecstasy, madness,
divinity,—the beauty upon which all the ends of the world are come. The
design of sound.... Each sound that comes out of the piano is something
alive....

                   *       *       *       *       *

And now for the interesting part.

When I talk of the “new music”—which will be different from Debussy and
Schönberg and all the rest of them—I am not talking of how far beyond
the limits of known harmony, or the anarchy which disregards any
harmonic system, we shall go. Undoubtedly, as far as all that is
concerned, “some day some one will dig down to the roots and turn up
music as it is before it is tamed to the scale.” This seems to me a
settled fact. But I am much more interested in the piano itself and the
deliverer who is to set it free from the lie which has grown up around
it and make it vibrate to a truer color. It is all in the plane of
vibration, I believe. It will come about in three ways: through the
mechanical development of the piano, through a new type of music, and
chiefly through the new type of pianist.

You will have your Mason and Hamlin—(this is not advertising; it is
merely a conviction)—you will have that great dark-winged-victory
standing alone on a stage; you will care a great deal about the color of
the light around and above it—the tones of the walls within which your
beautiful sounds are to live; you will touch that ivory and ebony—oh,
there are no words! You will _see_ those sounds against the color....

You may write a program for your audience—something like this:

   I believe the right technical approach is simply a different are
   the most beautiful there are anywhere in the world—more beautiful
   than the wind in trees or the moan in the sea or the silence that
   is heard on deserts;

   I believe that these sounds live only by a certain magic of
   invocation. There are no rules for them—unless perhaps you want
   to read Bergson.

   I believe the right technical approach is simply a different kind
   of friendship—or love affair—with each sound.

   I believe that tone goes way beyond the range between pianissimo
   and fortissimo, between legato and staccato, etc. Tone is
   radiance, eagerness, light, darkness, devastation, something that
   melts, something that cries and burns, something that shatters.

   I do not believe in playing “programs”—ending with a blaze of
   Liszt. I couldn’t play the _Campanella_ to save my life, but I
   don’t see that it matters.

   I do not believe in “program” music—beginning with Bach (now that
   the public has learned to applaud him) and ending with Liszt. I
   couldn’t play the _Campenella_ to save my life, but I don’t see
   that it matters.

   I do not believe in nature music—babbling brooks and warbling
   birds. I believe in nature mood, just as I do in the mood of all
   great phenomena.

   The music I have made will be sometimes merely the curve of a
   mood—like the curve of line in Watts’s _Orpheus and Eurydice_; or
   merely the design of a color or a scent. But always it will keep
   close to two fundamentals: that “hard gemlike flame” and the
   rhythm of sex.

All this will come under the classification of those things which are so
worth knowing that they can never be taught. It will belong to that
individual who can say the new word—his own word. It will make the piano
something we have scarcely dreamed of. It will make up an art that has
nothing to do with the four walls of a room. It could not be set to
“Questions and Answers” in _The Ladies’ Home Journal_. It will have
little to do with accomplishment, but everything to do with that which
is of all things the highest manifestation of life.




                              Blue-Prints


                              HARRIET DEAN


                               Debutante

You are a faded shawl about the shoulders of your mother. A puff of wind
catches at your fluttering edge to jerk you away. But she draws you
close, growing cold in the warm young breeze. She holds you with her
shiny round pin, as all young ones are clasped to old by round things
grown shiny with age.

In your wistful tired eyes I see the trembling of her shawl as she
breathes.


                               The Pillar

   When your house grows too close for you,
   When the ceilings lower themselves, crushing you,
   There on the porch I shall wait,
   Outside your house.
   You shall lean against my straightness,
   And let night surge over you.




                       The Pathos of Proximity[1]


                           ALEXANDER S. KAUN

   [1] _The Works of Oscar Wilde in 13 volumes. Ravenna edition. New
   York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons._

Pull down the shades. Turn out the lights. So. We do not want loud
electricity. We shall have a jewelled light. For I am rich to-night.
Come, let us recline on Bagdad cushions and Teheran rugs (“Only savages
sit”, Mme. Zinovyeva, the Russian Lesbian, told us), and I shall scatter
over the fantastic patterns jewels and stones. How softly they illumine
the thick dark—these varicolored glowflies, these streams of wine,
emerald wine, and amethyst wine, and wine of topazes “yellow as the eyes
of tigers, and topazes pink as the eyes of a wood pigeon, and green
topazes that are as the eyes of cats”, and wine of opals “that burn
always with an icelike flame”, and wine of onyxes that are like “the
eyeballs of a dead woman”, and wine streams of sapphires and chrysolites
and rubies and turquoises and ambers and pearls.... I am rich to-night,
and we shall bathe our eyes in quivering rainbows, and our fingers shall
wander lightly through dimly-jewelled ripples, stirring up old visions,
exotic unhuman faces, enchanting monsters, dancing rhythmic words,
fantastic moonlit thoughts.

      What songless tongueless ghost of sin crept through the
         curtains of the night?

“In exquisite raiment, and to the delicate sound of flutes, the sins of
the world are passing in dumb show before us. Things that we have dimly
dreamed of are suddenly made real. Things of which we have never dreamed
are gradually revealed.”

      Lift up your large black satin eyes which are like cushions
         where one sinks!
      Fawn at my feet, fantastic Sphinx, and sing me all your memories!

A symphony of memories. A life as brilliant and as swift as a meteor. A
life of no shadows. Sun and flowers. A continuous rainbow. An Apollonian
race over iridescent rose-and-azure-clouds. A sudden plunge over hideous
precipice. The song broken. Yet the chord vibrates.

Uneasiness. The moon filters through the stained embrasure.

   Regardez la lune ... On dirait une femme qui sort d’un tombeau.
   Elle ressemble à une femme morte. On dirait qu’elle cherche des
   mortes.

   ... Elle ressemble à une petite princesse qui porte un voile
   jaune, et des pieds d’argent. Elle ressemble à une princesse qui
   a des petites colombes blanches.... On dirait qu’elle danse.

   ... On dirait une femme hystérique, une femme hystérique qui va
   cherchant des amants partout. Elle est nue aussi. Elle est toute
   nue. Les nuages cherchent à la vêtir, mais elle ne veut pas. Elle
   chancelle à travers les nuages comme une femme ivre....

   ... Cachez la lune! Cachez les étoiles!

No, it is not the moon that causes the uneasiness. It is that Egyptian
scarabæus in lapis lazuli that bedims the scattered jewels and enveils
me in sadness. An image beckons to me out of the ultramarine glimmer, an
image of a king, a lord, possessor of a golden tongue and of a
scintillating mind, yet an image repulsive in its carnal vulgarity, its
dull inexpressive eyes, its fat jowl, its unreserved mouth. On a stout,
democratic finger guffaws the scarabæus.

                   *       *       *       *       *

Lights! Turn on the lights.

I have been sybariticizing with thirteen beautiful little volumes of
Oscar Wilde, recently published by G. P. Putnam’s Sons. It is a useful,
although often painful, ordeal—ventilating the store-room of your old
gods. There was a time when I worshipped Wilde unqualifiedly. As a
freshman I wrote a pathetic paper in which I demanded the canonization
of the author of _De Profundis_. Alas, I have come to discern spots on
the sun.

As a decorative artist Wilde has no flaws. The perfect design applied in
his multifarious productions makes one compare him to the titans of the
High Renaissance: Nihil tetigit quod non ornavit. The graceful form
justifies even his obvious moral-fairy-tales, even his unoriginal,
Keats-esque and Poe-esque poems. It is for the style that we accept his
_De Profundis_, that insincerest attempt for sincerity. But Wilde strove
for more than mere external artistic effect. In his critical essays he
lifted the critic to the heights of co- and re-creation, and instructed
him to demand from a work of art eternal values. “The critic rejects
those obvious modes of art that have but one message to deliver and
having delivered it become dumb and sterile, and seeks rather for such
modes as suggest reveries and moods and by their imaginative beauty make
all interpretations true and no interpretation final.” We, his disciples
in aesthetic valuations, come to our master with his own criterion, and
find him on more than one occasion grievously wanting in the
requirements that he had set up for the artist. He either has no message
to deliver, as in his clever plays, or he delivers his message in such
an outspoken way that no field is left for suggestion or imaginative
interpretation. He had transgressed Mallarmé’s maxim—“To name is to
kill; to suggest is to create” not only in _The Ballad of Reading Gaol_,
the work that belongs to the crushed, semi-penitent Wilde; he committed
this unpardonable sin in his masterpiece, _Salomé_! That wonderful
harmonious ghastliness, woven out of moods and motives, surcharged with
suggestive tragedy and fatalism, suddenly breaks into a criminal
vulgarity through the introduction of a “real” dead head, which drives
away illusion and atmosphere, and strikes your nostrils with the odor of
theatrical grease paint.

The rehabilitation of Oscar Wilde was imposed upon the Anglo-Saxon world
by the continent, especially by Germany, the expropriator of English
geniuses, where the production of Wilde’s plays has rivalled in
frequency those of Shakespeare. I know of a German pundit who chose as a
topic for his doctor’s dissertations “The Influence of Pater on Oscar
Wilde”. But continental depreciation is as fast as Anglo-Saxon
appreciation is slow. Neue Zeiten, neue Vögel; neue Vögel, neue Lieder.
European literature in recent decades has had more meteors than stars.
Wilde’s flash is rapidly vanishing. You may call me a Cassandra, but I
venture a prophecy that soon Wilde will find his peaceful place in
American colleges alongside with Austen, Eliot, Meredith, etc.

_Salomé_ will always remain one of the world’s great symphonies,—a
symphony in which the motive of doom rends your soul from the first
sound to the last. _Poems in Prose_ will never lose their charm as
ivory-carved bits of ideal conversation—the art in which Wilde was
supreme, the art that is almost unknown in this country where it is
substituted by talk. His other works are doomed to be time’s victims.
Not because they are worthless, but for the reason of their
adaptability. One must be a prophet, a Nietzsche, who hurls his seeds
over many generations, in order to endure. Wilde was aware of this
danger, and he wished to be misunderstood, but he lacked the profundity
for such a merit. He did not mirror his age; but he had realized the
potentialities of his age, had popularized them to such a degree that
they have become the possession of the crowd. We are not any longer
dazzled by the clever witticisms in his _Plays_; they have become almost
commonplace. Even the graceful, radiating _Intentions_ appear to us
somewhat obvious. Why?—It is the pathos of proximity! Wilde’s paradoxes,
_mots_, theories, have proven so appropriate, adaptable, and digestible
for our age, that it took only one decade to absorb them into our blood
and marrow. Cleverism for the sake of cleverism has come to be an
epidemic in our days; cleverists find Wilde an inexhaustible source for
parasitic exploitation. Our Hunekers (and under this appellative I have
in mind the legions of our omniscient boulevardiers-critics) don a
Wildesque robe, and have little trouble in passing as genuine before the
good-natured public. Unfortunately the constitution of the Hunekers is
too weak to absorb Wilde’s big truths; they prefer the digestible chaff.

Adaptability spells forgetability. Crime and punishment.




                                Solitude


                              DAVID O’NEIL

   Youth!
   If there be madness
   In your soul,
   Go to the mountain solitudes
   Where you can grow up
   To your madness.




                              The Novelist


                           SHERWOOD ANDERSON

The novelist is about to begin the writing of a novel. For a year he
will be at the task and what a year he will have! He is going to write
the story of Virginia Borden, daughter of Fan Borden, a Missouri river
raftsman. There in his little room he sits, a small, hunched-up figure
with a pencil in his hand. He has never learned to run a type-writer and
so he will write the words slowly and painfully, one after another on
the white paper.

What a multitude of words! For hours he will sit perfectly still,
writing madly and throwing the sheets about. That is a happy time. The
madness has possession of him. People will come in at the door and sit
about, talking and laughing. Sometimes he jumps out of his chair and
walks up and down. He lights and relights his pipe. Overcome with
weariness he goes forth to walk. When he walks he carries a heavy
walking stick and goes muttering along.

The novelist tries to shake off his madness but he does not succeed. In
a store he buys cheap writing tablets and, sitting on a stone near where
some men are building a house, begins again to write. He talks aloud and
occasionally fingers a lock of hair that falls down over his eyes. He
lets his pipe go out and relights it nervously.

Days pass. It is raining and again the novelist works in his room. After
a long evening he throws all he has written away.

What is the secret of the madness of the writer? He is a small man and
has a torn ear. A part of his ear has been carried away by the explosion
of a gun. Above the ear there is a spot, as large as a child’s hand,
where no hair grows.

The novelist is a clerk in a store in Wabash Avenue in Chicago. When he
was a quite young man he began to clerk in the store and for a time
promised to be successful. He sold goods, and there was something in his
smile that won its way into all hearts. How he liked the people who came
into the store and how the people liked him!

In the store now the novelist does not promise to be successful. There
is a kind of conspiracy in the store. Although he tries earnestly he
continues to make mistakes and all of his fellows conspire to forgive
and conceal his mistakes. Sometimes when he has muddled things badly
they are impatient and the manager of the store, a huge, fat fellow with
thin grey hair, takes him into a room and begins to scold.

The two men sit by a window and look down into Wabash Avenue. It is
snowing and people hurry along with bowed heads. So much do the novelist
and the fat grey-haired man like each other that the scolding does not
last. They begin to talk and the hours pass. Presently it is time to
close the store for the night and the two go down a flight of stairs to
the street.

On the corner stand the novelist and the store-manager, still talking.
Presently they go together to dine. The manager of the store looks at
his watch and it is eight o’clock. He remembers a dinner engagement with
his wife and hurries away. On the street car he blames himself for his
carelessness. “I should not have tried to reprimand the fellow,” he
says, and laughs.

It is night and the novelist works in his room. The night is cold and he
opens a window. There is, in his closet, a torn woolen jacket given him
by a friend, and he wraps the jacket about him. It has stopped snowing
and the stars are in the sky.

The talk with the store-manager has inflamed the mind of the novelist.
Again he writes furiously. What he is now writing will not fit into the
life-story of Virginia Borden but, for the moment, he thinks that it
will and he is happy. Tomorrow he will throw all away, but that will not
destroy his happiness.

Who is this Virginia Borden of whom the novelist writes and why does he
write of her? He does not know that he will get money for his story and
he is growing old. What a foolish affair. Presently there may be a new
manager in the store and the novelist will lose his place. Once in a
while he thinks of that and then he smiles.

The novelist is not to be won from his purpose. Virginia Borden is a
woman who lived in Chicago. The novelist has seen and talked with her.
Like the store-manager she forgot herself talking to him. She forgot the
torn ear and the bald spot where no hair grew and the skin was snow
white. To talk with the novelist was like talking aloud to herself. It
was delightful. For a year she knew him and then went away to live with
a brother in Colorado where she was thrown from a horse and killed.

When she lived in Chicago many people knew Virginia Borden. They saw her
going here and there in the streets. Once she was married to a man who
was leader of an orchestra in a theater but the marriage was not a
success. Nothing that Virginia Borden did in the city was successful.

The novelist is to write the life-story of Virginia Borden. As he begins
the task a great humbleness comes over him. Tears come into his eyes. He
is afraid and trembles.

In the woman who talked and talked with him the novelist has seen many
strange, beautiful, unexpected little turns of mind. He knows that in
Virginia Borden there was spirit that, but for the muddle of life, might
have become a great flame.

It is the dream of the novelist that he will make men understand the
spirit of the woman they saw in the streets. He wants to tell the
store-manager of her and the little wiry man who has a desk next to his
own. In the Wabash Avenue store there is a woman who sits on a high
stool with her back to the novelist. He wants to tell her of Virginia
Borden, to make her see the reality of the woman who failed, to make all
see that such a woman once lived and went about among the women of
Chicago.

As the novelist writes events grow in his mind. His mind is forever
active and he is continually making up stories about himself. As the
Virginia Borden whom men saw was a caricature of the Virginia Borden who
lived in the mind of the novelist, so he knows that he is himself but a
shadow of something very real.

And so the novelist puts himself into the book. In the book he is a
large, square-shouldered man with tiny eyes. He is one who came to
Chicago from a village in Poland and was leader of an orchestra in a
theatre. As the orchestra leader the novelist married Virginia Borden
and lived in a house with her.

You see the novelist wants to explain himself also. He is a lover and so
vividly does he love that he has the courage to love even himself. And
so it is the lover that sits writing and the madness of the writer is
the madness of the lover. As he writes he is making love. Surely all can
understand that!

   Because sexual love is the most useful and common type of
   excitement we are apt to think it necessary to life, when the
   truth is that it is excitement itself which is life’s
   essential.—_Rebecca West._




                               Asperities


                            MITCHELL DAWSON


                                 Threat

   If you should come into my cave
   Bringing molded beads of sunlight
   For offering—
   I would trample your beads
   And crush you
   With that great bone of darkness
   Which I have gnawed for years
   And which has left me
   Meagre as a gnarled root.


                               In Passing

   One moment—
   Your friend
   Has squeezed great drops from you
   Upon his palette;
   With your color he has wrought—
   Masterpieces, you say?
   But the empty tube
   Grown flat in his hand,
   Will he hold it or pick up another,
   Your friend—


                                 Teresa

   Do you remember Antonino—
   Swift-winged, green in the sun?
   Into the snap-dragon throat of desire
   Flew Antonino.
   Snap!...
   The skeleton of Antonino has made
   A good husband, a good provider.




                         Amy Lowell’s New Book


                              F. S. FLINT

Amy Lowell has sent me her book, _Six French Poets_,[2] who are: Emile
Verhaeren, Albert Samain, Remy de Gourmont, Henri de Régnier, Francis
Jammes, and Paul Fort; and it occurs to me that I must be her severest
critic—are we not rivals? When, in the summer of 1914, before the war
was dreamed of, she told me over her dinner-table of her intention to
write this book and of the names of the poets she had chosen, I objected
to Samain. Samain, I said, was exquisite, but not important; and he
could only be read a few pages at a time without weariness. Stuart
Merrill and Francis Vielé-Griffin, I went on, are both more considerable
poets; and both are Americans; and since you insist on including Remy de
Gourmont as one of your poets, you might increase your number to seven,
in many ways an appropriate number where poets are concerned; and so on.
But she only motioned the waiter to fill my glass with champagne; and
what can a man do against such argument and such a will? And now, even
if I wished to damn her book (I do not), she will have already heaped
coals of fire upon my head in her preface, where she says kind things
about me because I happened to mention the names of one or two books to
her, information she did not really need.

   [2] _Six French Poets, by Amy Lowell. New York: Macmillan
   Company._

Miss Lowell states that she has “made no attempt at an exhaustive
critical analysis of the various works” of her poets. “Rather, I have
tried to suggest certain things which appear to the trained poet while
reading them. The pages and pages of hair-splitting criticism turned out
by erudite gentlemen for their own amusement has been no part of my
scheme. But I think the student, the poet seeking new inspiration, the
reader endeavoring to understand another poetic idiom, will find what
they need to set them on their way.” That is so: this book contains six
causeries in which Miss Lowell tells you why she loves these poets, and
what she loves about them, interrupting her talk every now and then to
read some poem to you which illustrates her meaning, introducing every
now and then a fragment of biography to correspond with the stage of the
poet’s work to which she has brought you, or stopping every now and then
to pick out rare phrases and rare music of words for your especial
delight. No one, I suppose, will have listened to Miss Lowell’s causerie
in so happy a setting as the sitting-room on the third floor of a hotel
in Piccadilly in which she talked to us in the August of 1914. Through
the long French window open in the corner could be seen the length of
Piccadilly, its great electric globes, its shining roadway, and, on the
left, the tops of the trees of Green Park, dark grey in the moonlight;
the noise of the motorbusses and of the taxis reached us in a muted
murmur, and at the corner of the park opposite, beneath a street lamp,
stood a newsboy, whose headlines we strained our eyes from time to time
to catch. It was in this tenseness created by the expectation of news
that Miss Lowell read Paul Fort and Henri de Régnier to us (she reads
French beautifully); and it is the emotion of those evenings, more than
anything else, that her book brings back to me. This is not criticism, I
know; but I am a critic displumed. I have quoted Miss Lowell’s statement
of her aims; let me now give my impression of what she has done. You can
take up her book, and read it from beginning to end without weariness or
boredom; you will be continually interested, continually delighted,
continually moved. Miss Lowell’s method of quoting whole poems and long
poems as well as detached and beautiful fragments has filled her book
with an emotional content that almost makes me afraid to open it; the
fear of too much beauty. And, finally, she has flattered the sense of
personal superiority in us all by allowing little slips to remain where
we may find them, and preen ourselves on our cleverness. When you have
absorbed all these sensations, you will have come to Appendix A, which
is 140 pages of the finest translations into English that exist of the
six poets in question, or, it might truly be said, of the French poets
of the symbolist generation. In these translations, Miss Lowell has
rarely been tempted away from prose, and you have only to compare her
work with the work of other translators to be immediately aware of how
much she has gained by her prudence, her artistry had better be said.
That Miss Lowell had all the equipment for a task of this kind, her own
two books of poems left no doubt at all. In them you will find the same
delight in beautiful word and phrase which has undoubtedly led her to
modern French poetry as to a friendly country, and to the achievement in
these translations. If she had done nothing more than just publish
these, she would have earned our gratitude; but she offers them to you
as the least of her book (as an appendix!) after you have been amused,
interested, instructed and moved. I can conceive of no greater
pleasure—my pleasure in the book is of a different kind—than that of the
lover of poetry who reads in Miss Lowell’s book about modern French
poetry for the first time; it must be like falling into El Dorado. I
should add that the book contains an excellent signed photograph of each
poet.




                               The Picnic


                           MARJORIE SEIFFERT

       Here they come in pairs, carrying baskets,
   Pale clerks with brilliant neckties and cheap serge suits
   Steering girls by the arm, clerks too,
   Pretty and slim and smart
   Even to yellow kid boots, laced up behind.

       They take the electric cars far into the country;
   They descend, gaily chattering, at the Amusement Park.
   Under the trees they eat the lunch they have carried—
   Potato salad and boiled sausages, cream puffs, pretzels, warm beer.

   They ride in the roller-coaster, two in a seat—
   Glorious danger, warm delicious proximity!
   The unaccustomed beer floods their veins like heady wine,
   And smothered youth awakens with shrill screams of joy.

       The sun sets, and evening is drowned in electric lights;
   Arm in arm they wander under the trees
   Everywhere meeting others wandering arm in arm
   In the same wistful wonder, seeking they know not what.
   They have left the park and the crowds, the stars shine out,
   A river runs at their feet, behind them a leafy copse,
   Away on the other shore the fields of grain
   Lie sleeping peacefully in the starlight.
   Tonight the world is theirs, a legacy
   From those who lived familiar friends with river, field and forest—
   Their forebears—
   Through the night the same earth-magic moves them
   That swayed those ancient ones, long dead—
   And these, too, lean and drink,
   Drink deeply from the river, the flowing river of life.

       Slowly they return to the crowds and the brilliant lights,
   Dazzled they look aside, silently climb on the cars—
   They cling to the swaying straps, weary, inert, confused.
   The lurching car makes halt, they are thrown in each other’s arms,—
   Alien and unmoved they sway apart again,—
   The car moves on through the fields and suburbs back to the town.

       They leave the car in pairs, the picnic baskets
   Rattling dismally plate and spoon and jar.
   Each clerk takes his girl to her lodgings in awkward silence,
   Indeed their eyes have not met since by the river
   Those wondrous moments
   Linked them to earth and night, not to each other.
   They look askance,—“Good-night”—the front door closed.
   They do not meet again except by chance.




                      Editorials and Announcements


                   _Wanted: Some Imaginative Reason_

“Nietzsche was an individualist, a hater of the State and of the
Prussians, a sick man, a great artist in words to be read with delight
and—your tongue in your cheek.” This is from John Galsworthy’s “Second
Thoughts on this War” in the January _Scribner’s_. And so it goes on: he
identifies Nietzsche with the new German philosophy (which the poor man
would have hated as he did Prussianism), he talks of the Will to Power
and the Will to Love as two forces at opposite poles (quite in the
manner of the Chestertons), and he derides Shaw’s clear-headed
understanding that there is no real struggle of ideals involved in the
war as the statement of a brilliant intellect with “no flair, no
feelers, none of that instinctive perception of the essence and
atmosphere of things which is a so much surer guide than reason.” These
things are heart-breaking. If the artists can not understand the
prophets of their time why should we expect the masses to do so?


                      _“Homo Sapiens” Is Obscene!_

Anthony Comstock’s successor, John Sumner, has arrested Alfred Knopf for
publishing Przybyszewski’s _Homo Sapiens_. It was suggested that
magistrate Simms read the book before passing judgment. The assistant
district attorney protested that “no such cruel punishment be imposed on
the court”; but Mr. Simms promised to try it.

                   *       *       *       *       *

_P. S._ Since writing the above something has happened which my brain
still refuses to believe. I have just been told that Mr. Knopf has
pleaded “guilty” to this asinine charge, in order to avoid the expense
and the publicity, and that _Homo Sapiens_ will no longer be circulated
in this country. If it is true it is the most inexcusably ridiculous
thing that has happened for many months. It is incredible!


                     “_The World’s Worst Failure_”

Read Rebecca West’s brilliant articles in _The New Republic_.


            _Margaret Sanger and the Issue of Birth Control_

Nothing makes me so positively ill as the average radical. The average
conservative is a ghastly figure, but at least he is true to type. The
average radical is a person who professes to believe something that he
does not believe. If he did, he would be in trouble. No one gets into
more involuntary trouble than the splendid fools who think they can do
quite simply what they believe in, and who proceed to do it.

Margaret Sanger’s trial is set for the twenty-fourth of this month. She
is under three indictments, based on twelve articles, eleven of which
are for _printing the words_—“prevention of conception.” It is these
words which are regarded as “lewd, lascivious, and obscene.”

Many “radicals” have advised Mrs. Sanger that the wisest thing to do is
to plead guilty to this “obscenity” charge and to throw herself upon the
mercy of the court—which would mean that she could get off with a light
sentence or a small fine. And what would become of her object, which has
been to remove the term “prevention of conception” from this section of
the penal code, where it has been labelled as filthy, vile, and obscene?
No revolution has ever been started by evasion. No one wants Margaret
Sanger to be a martyr. _The point is that every one must see to it that
she is not made a martyr._ There is no other way out of these issues.
You can’t really believe in a thing without knowing that some time you
will have to fight for it. Margaret Sanger is taking the stand that her
type always takes—just because it is the type that insists on believing
hard. _We_ should do all the rest. If you will wire your protest to the
District Attorney, office of U. S. Marshal, Post Office Building, New
York City, it will help. You may write Margaret Sanger, or send
contributions to her, care of Ethel Byrne, 26 Post Avenue, New York
City. Please, please do it!


                     _The Russian Literature Group_

The introductory lecture, which took place January 14 and was rather
well attended, will be followed by a series of talks on characteristic
features in Russian literature. The pivots of the discussion will be
Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and the
moderns. Mr. Kaun presents the point of view of a Russian, not that of a
foreign student.

The next lecture will be Friday, February 11, at 8:30 P. M., in room
612, Fine Arts Building.




                              American Art


                        (An Indefinite Comment)

I report, without regret, my inability to present a definite article
about the Annual Exhibit of American Painters and Sculptors. Not that
the exhibit is vague—American art is a definite thing: travelling
collections, annual exhibits, “friends” and organizations have made it
so. But visit after visit left me without words. The feelings I did have
were alternately those of amusement, anger, disgust, indifference, mild
excitement, and most of the time: “Oh well, what’s the use?”

In this exhibit the only thrills or “artiste emotions”—such as one
demands of art—were very minor notes and immediately they were
felt—thump! (Register amazement and then anger.) You come across
something good: its neighbors and surroundings deaden its appeal. Thus,
Massonovich’s _Moon-Dark_—poet’s magic! But alas! it is the only
landscape in the exhibit. Next to it is Oliver D. Grover’s Italian
platitude, near it a Redfield—“blast” his “school” of landscapes,
please, someone! Peyraud, Stacey, Butler—oh, what emptiness! The Inness
Room cuts into the exhibit separating two rooms from the rest of the
galleries. Passing through it one is reminded of the Inness
tradition—how it has been ignored! Or at least how his spirit has been
ignored. Monet, Renoir, Manet, and some other modern French are hanging
elsewhere in the Institute; and then there is Whistler; and again recall
Inness; Massonovich, on you rests the perpetuation, not of “American
Landscape” but of that spirit we shall always be searching for in
landscapes, if landscapes we must have. One parting remark about
landscapes. Hayley Lever comes in for some praise and much scolding. He
has a good color sense, but strength and virility in composition seem to
be lacking. Recall what Jerome Blum has done and you will understand why
this half-way person ought to be jolted.

And the portraits. One of Katherine Dudley’s
decorative-German-poster-“Every Week” cover-design-women, is now the
property of the “Friends”—“American Art as it was in the early part of
the twentieth century”. Yes, indeed, to represent it clearly to
posterity you must include at least one of the numerous society
dilettantes. However, Gordon Stevenson, Blows, Henri, and Davey as
portrait painters are worth watching.

And the rest of the show? Most of the exhibitors have been represented
for years. Their pictures are all so familiar. Many of the paintings
have appeared year after year. Birge Harrison has a rather atmospheric
beach scene; Beal, Albright, Dougherty, Hassam, Sargent, Mary Cassatt,
Symons, Ballin, Weir, Schofield. All are familiar and recognised in the
Market Place. These people are standing still. I imagine they are old:
grey without magnificence. And being haunted by the truth of that
lingering statement that there is no such thing as an old _artist_—why,
dare we say that they are _not_ artists?

Sculptor? There is none.

American Art?—To the Annual Exhibit, Ladies and Gentlemen, for a
definite demonstration!

                                                         “The Critic.”




                              Photography


“My, isn’t that real! Just as it really is! My dear, haven’t you often
seen Grant Park just like that?—a little changed, of course.”... She who
had spoken was considered not a high-brow but just a good normal
cultured woman. Not being a fanatic about art, or anything else, for
that matter, she knew absolutely what she was talking about. The thing
she was talking about was a painting of Grant Park by Frank C. Peyraud
looking east from the top of some Michigan Boulevard office building....
It was indeed “real.” Peyraud’s one-man exhibit at the Art Institute
shows him up for what he is—an imitator without imagination, a
reproducer, a copyist of nature in her most obvious moods. Not an artist
or a creator his landscapes are all “real,” “true-to-life” and they are
all enjoyed.... The Public knows where the originals are and the
association and comparison gives them pleasure and the artist fame....

                   *       *       *       *       *

“Oh, _how_ clever, and can’t you just hear the policemen, and the
buggy-wheels and the bark of the dogs and the grind-organ! Oh, its just
wonderful what they can do in music and with an orchestra. I _would_
like to hear that played again!” A woman speaks—not the one referred to
above but one who holds the same position in her set towards music as
her friend towards “art” in her circle.... Of course, she can appreciate
music, when it is so natural and real.... Carpenter is to be
congratulated: the percussions are given a splendid and unusual chance
to show their versatility—it is they, it seems to me, and they alone who
benefit by this splendid display of music.

“My dear, I just love Stevenson and you know, my dear, those places in
his novels are _so_ real—you can just see them so plainly. Of course,
I’ve never been in Scotland or England or France or, my dear, even in
New York but really Stevenson is so descriptive, his stories are _so_
gripping it really is as good as traveling. And I have a lovely new
book,[3] just out with beautiful pictures and awfully dear binding,
showing how the places Stevenson describes actually exist! You know this
book amounts to a liberal education—it’s just the same as going abroad.
I just adore places and scenes and travel in books—don’t you? And
Stevenson,” she ended with a sigh, “is _so_ romantic.” Which reminds me
of a line of the Intolerable Wilde’s in a letter from Reading—“I see
that romantic surroundings are the worst surroundings possible for
romantic writers.” ... “And, my dear, it brings Art so close to everyday
life, does it not?—to have artists portray for us our everyday
surroundings and show us how nice they are.”

   [3] _On the Trail of Stevenson by Clayton Hamilton._ _New York:
   Doubleday, Page and Company._

Long, long ago one Woman spoke to an Artist—will her type _never_ become
extinct?

“But, Mr. Turner” (Artist; contemporary of John Ruskin) “I never saw
such colors in a sky in all my life.”

“My dear madam,” he returned, “don’t you wish you had?”

                                                             —C. A. Z.




                            Book Discussion


                           A Brilliant Enemy

     _Modern Painting, by Willard Huntington Wright. New York: John
                             Lane Company._

It is a hard book. None of Clive Bell’s sunny cynicism, none of
Kandinsky’s colorful musicalness; surely nothing in common with the
watery ecstacies of our official Chicago modernist, Arthur Jerome Eddy.
While reading the voluminous book I experienced an uneasy, an uncertain
feeling in regard to the author: to hate him, or just to dislike him?
Let me confess that when I turned over the last page I lowered my head
in respect for a brilliant enemy.

It is a hard book, brothers-dilettanti. It gives us a merciless
thrashing, we who love without being able to state why and wherefore. We
are ordered to go to school, children, to study chemistry and color, to
approach a work of art as scientifically equipped as a surgeon venturing
to operate on a human body. As a reward we are promised the bliss of
unadulterated aesthetic emotion. Ah, that aesthetic emotion! For a time
we believed that it was possible to grasp that slippery “blue bird” by
following Clive Bell’s maxim on the significance of form. Alas, this
theory is obsolete. Color itself should become form, proclaims Mr.
Wright, and he quotes the manifesto of his beloved Synchromists: “In our
painting color becomes the generating function. Painting being the art
of color, any quality of a picture not expressed by color is not
painting!”

With a sigh of relief we reach the chapter on Synchromism. All art up to
the year 1912 has been nothing but preliminary experimentation. In
Rubens were consummated the aims of the old painters (beginning with the
fifteenth century; the Primitives are dismissed as not deserving
consideration)—organization and composition. The new cycle opens in the
nineteenth century with Turner, Constable, and Delacroix, who experiment
in naturalism. Manet introduces thematic freedom—not more. The
Impressionists and Neo-Impressionists close the second, naturalistic,
cycle, having enriched art with laborious investigations into the
secrets of color in relation to light. All these have been but
precursors forging weapons for the third and _last_ (!) cycle—the final
purification of painting. Synchromism, of course. Of this last cycle
Cezanne was—hear, Messieurs and Mesdames Questioners—the primitive!
Still Cezanne and Matisse and Picasso ignored color as a generator of
form, until two Americans, MacDonald-Wright and Russell, rent asunder
the ultimate veil from purity and truth, and the new and final deity
emanated from their canvasses, the unsurpassable Synchromism.

There is so much truth in Mr. Wright’s statements, particularly in his
negative statements, that we may disregard his fanatic credo. Who will
deny that painting has been “a bastard art—an agglomeration of
literature, religion, photography, and decoration”? Who will not approve
of the efforts of modern painters to eliminate all extraneous
considerations and make painting as pure an art as music? But why
dogmatize again and anew? Why reduce creative art to scientific
formulae, to mathematical calculations, to Procrustean standards? Why
ridicule those who paint _comme l’oiseau chante_? Why belittle Kandinsky
for his too-subjective symphonies? Why be so hard, Mr. Wright, so
finite, so sententious, so encyclical? Why not have a little sense of
humor, pray?


                            Gorky’s Memories

     _My Childhood, by Maxim Gorky. New York: The Century Company._

That Gorky is deteriorating has become a truism. Exaggerated as the
importance of his early works has been, one could not deny their
freshness, elementary adroitness, soulfulness. But the god-fire was soon
exhausted in the none-too-deep spirit of the tramp-poet. He gave us the
few good songs he knew about the life of the has-beens, and then went
hoarse. The public, Hauptmann’s Huhn, is not irresponsible for Gorky’s
false notes. Compel the canary to imitate the nightingale and the poor
bird will lose her short, simple, pretty twitter, and rend her little
heart with shrill ejaculations. I have in mind Gorky’s later dramas and
stories.

The book before me makes me think that Gorky has come to recognize his
fallacy in attempting to treat subjects alien to his inherent capacity.
At any rate in this case he is free from pretentiousness. His childhood
memories are related simply, realistically, sans philosophizing, sans
allegorizing. It is left for the reader to deduce the “moral” from the
sordid panorama that is revealed before him, that malodorous dunghill
swarming with human beings, whose crawling and writhing is called life.
The book should have been much shorter; the super-abundance of details
makes it Dreiserian or Bennetian.

And here I should like to touch upon a sore which reviewers customarily
do not discuss, for fear of _mauvais ton_. Why are the English
translations so careless and comical? The book in question is full of
such glaring errors, such nonsensical misunderstandings, such atrocious
ignorance, that it has made me pull my hair in despair of solving the
dilemma whether I should laugh at the comicalness or whether I should
rage at the impertinence. I am quite sure that the translator (his name
is not revealed) knows as much Russian as Percy Pinkerton, the crucifier
of Artzibashev; he mutilated Gorky from a German translation, I suspect.
The book has another jolly feature—illustrations. They are reproductions
from popular Russian paintings, with inscriptions that are supposed to
illustrate the text. The naive forgery is too crude and unskilful to
mislead even the unsuspecting reader. Will the publishers ever acquire
respect for the printed word?


                              Instruction

      _The Greatest of Literary Problems, by James Phinney Baxter.
                       Boston: Houghton Mifflin._

Have you the sense of humor to guess which is the Problem? Shakespeare
or Bacon! About seven hundred gigantic pages on this vital question,
with illustrations and data. Are you curious to know who wins? I shall
not tell. Why should the reader be spared the reviewer’s agony in wading
through the bewildering labyrinth of speculations and arguments till he
reaches ... the same point that he started from. Bon voyage!


                            Instruction Plus

    _Tales from Old Japanese Dramas, by Asataro Miyamori. New York:
                         G. P. Putnam’s Sons._

      _Some Musicians of Former Days, by Romain Rolland. New York:
                        Henry Holland Company._

These books, like the preceding one, are intended to be instructive;
they attain their purpose, however, thanks to gracefulness of style and
fascination of subject. Mr. Miyamori has condensed the plots of the most
famous _joruri_—the epical dramas of the Yeddo period, which are to this
day chanted in Japanese theatres. It is an exotic atmosphere of oriental
fairyland, tapestries of childlike love and naive passion, of smiling
bloody tragedies and blissful harakiris. When lovers are prevented from
being married they do not employ the cumbersome process of elopment, but
transport themselves into the other world by committing _shinju_ or
double suicide. The author tells us that Metizahormach shinju dramas
have had such powerful influence on the audiences that there have been
numerous instances of lovers performing that delicious suicide after
leaving the theatre. I fear that for the occidental reader the dramas
will not prove as convincing—alas.

After _Musicians of To-Day_ the last book of Rolland has little appeal.
Journalistic notes, interesting information, brilliant suggestions—and
we look in vain for the profound spirit of the old Romain.


                       Hospitable Mr. Braithwaite

       _Anthology of Magazine Verse for 1915, by William Stanley
              Braithwaite. New York: Gomme and Marshall._

Mr. Braithwaite has chosen the guests for his house party with kindly
catholicity. Amy Lowell, John Gould Fletcher, and H. D. sit
uncomfortably in his New England parlor eyeing one another furtively.
Clement Wood clowns in a corner. Vachel Lindsay before the mantel-piece
declaims to James Oppenheim and Louis Untermeyer, who listen with an air
of importance. Edgar Lee Masters sits on the _corpus juris_ and
meditates upon the beauties of silence. Sara Teasedale dances in the
hallway. Harriet Monroe reclines on a porch chair, listening to the
rain. A crowd in the library recreate themselves by reading from a set
of British Poets. Percy MacKaye gloomily reads the war news to a group
in the dining-room, while little Arvia, his daughter, lisps happily to
herself. And alone in the kitchen is Robert Frost roasting chestnuts.

Who will say that Mr. Braithwaite could have better performed the duties
of host? Did he omit any of the “older established names”? And did he
not make a special Cook’s tour to far off islands (not shown in the
atlas of the _Boston Transcript_ office) for the purpose of bringing
home with him certain “new discoveries”?

Mr. Braithwaite pats his guests admiringly upon the back and regrets
that there are other excellent poets for whom he has no accommodations.
Ezra Pound, Richard Aldington, T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, Maxwell
Bodenheim, perhaps he will invite you next time. Is it not a pleasant
anticipation?


                              Empty Souls

      _The Later Life, by Louis Couperus. New York: Dodd, Mead and
                               Company._

This is the second part of the tetralogy of “Small Souls” which began to
appear in English last year. The slowly-developing epic is pregnant with
promises, but, oh how slowly the skein unrolls. We are still in the
midst of Dutch bourgeoisie, dull, stony-faced, petty, filthy; again the
incessant rain, ever-cloudy skies, bicycle rides, large dinner-parties
at Mama’s. Small souls. Last year I asked the question whether in
depicting Dutch life Couperus could not find a single big soul, one
interesting individual. This second book gives us pale glimmers of
potentialities, very pale indeed. The big man is big only relatively; he
has been in America, worked in factories, and is now ... lecturing on
peace.

The book introduces a feature that may interest the sexologist: frequent
passionate love among near kinsmen. Two sisters are in love with their
brothers. A romance between uncle and niece. The heroes and heroines are
awakened to love for the most part at the dangerous age of forty. I
recall that Przybyszewski presents in two of his works love between
brother and sister. Shall we say that ideal sex-relationship requires
the closest kinship of body and spirit? In the Pole’s lovers the force
driving them together is the harmonious coincidence of two morbidly
developed intellects with a common craving for beauty and fullness. In
Couperus we face mutual yearning of small, pale, empty souls. But I am
not interested in sex-problems, not yet.

                                                                    K.


                           Two Points of View

    _Violette of Pere Lachaise, by Anna Strunsky Walling. New York:
                          Frederic A. Stokes._

A gigantic background—the eternal graves and trees and monuments of the
old Paris cemetery. The rest is fudge. A mouse born out of the bowels of
a mountain. Nauseating feminine sentimentalism. Boring talk, talk, talk.

                                                                    K.

The reviewer above is absolutely mistaken about Mrs. Walling’s book, I
believe. It is the story of one of those human beings—rare people—who
live inner lives of extraordinary intensity. It is radiantly absorbing,
to me.

                                                              M. C. A.




                           The Reader Critic


_The Editor_:

_We have had cancellations, congratulations, and a lot of indignant
letters about Ben Hecht’s “Dregs.” I print two of them below. As it
happens, these stories are among the best things_ THE LITTLE REVIEW _has
printed. With the exception of some of the poetry and two stories of
Sherwood Anderson’s, they may be listed as the only “literature” we have
published. Some one has compared them to Gorky. But this is not a very
accurate judgment. As a reviewer pointed out in the November issue,
Gorky could feel his stories, could imagine them deeply, but he could
never quite tell them. The supreme virtue of Ben Hecht’s “Dregs” is that
he could tell them. That is the art. Of course I have nothing to say to
those people who deplore Mr. Hecht’s subject matter and urge me to use
some moral judgment in selecting things for_ THE LITTLE REVIEW. _There
is no such thing as moral judgment in literature. There should be no
such thing in life, but unfortunately_—

_A Sorrowful Friend_:

THE LITTLE REVIEW: _Literature, Drama, Music, Art_. Which of these four
shrines did you intend to desecrate in offering Ben Hecht’s “Dregs”? Or
have you added an “unwritten” class to your list, comprehensive enough
to include such bold portrayals of viciousness and filth, of
licentiousness and lust, as these three degenerate—manifestations!

LITTLE REVIEW—how _could_ you do it? You who have hitherto held so
bravely to the tenets of beauty and truth in thought and expression,
held to them courageously through storms of adverse criticism, consent
to print descriptions of the bestial abnormalities of the scum of
mankind! If _you_, who profess to look to a higher, better realization
of life, consent to crawl in the gutter with the vermin, what can we
expect of the lesser publications?

You have polluted an edition of your magazine; it is true that flames
will destroy the manuscript, but what of the hideous memory that
remains? Take heed—LITTLE REVIEW; remember that cleanliness is akin to
godliness and—look to your soul!

_Florence Kiper Frank, Chicago_:

May I call your attention to the fact that Mr. Edward J. O’Brien, in his
annual review of the year’s fiction, not only lists all the stories
printed in THE LITTLE REVIEW during 1915 among those possessing
“distinction,” but double-asterisks (verb) the three sketches of Ben
Hecht’s published under the title “Dregs.” This in the chaste and
genealogical Boston Evening Transcript! And, following to the best of my
ability Mr. O’Brien’s rather vague reference to and nebulous listings of
the stories to be published in his anthology, _The Best Stories of 1915
and Year Book of American Fiction_, I can but come to the startled
conclusion that Ben Hecht’s three stories are all to be reprinted in the
estimable collection. Good for Ben Hecht, THE LITTLE REVIEW, and Mr.
O’Brien’s catholicity of judgment! Some of us there are who like to have
our opinions backed and bolstered by authority. And what more august
authority than the printed word of Boston. Some of us—but of course not
your insurgents. Perhaps Mr. Hecht will resent congratulations. I tender
them, nevertheless—with apologies. Good stuff, Ben Hecht! Do us
some—more of them.

_Sada Cowan, New York_:

I’m truly grateful to your reviewer who found my play, _The State
Forbids_, “negative as literature.” If he had found it bad architecture
or mediocre sculpture I should have been less pleased.

Play making, to my mind, is not a form of literature (even though its
medium chances to be words) but it is an art of spacing ... focusing ...
building. Structure upon structure! Foundation. Ornament. Design. An art
as distinct from other forms of word utility as color medium is from
plastic art. Drama is related to literature only in so far as all arts
are inter-related. No more than this. By drama I mean, of course, plays
intended (at least in the writer’s mind) for production. These alone are
plays. For one reason or another they may never reach the boards, but
they must have lived in the writer’s fantasy as things produced. _Desk
drawer dramas_ are not plays.

I believe that the hope of the modern drama lies in the artist who can
learn to look upon himself as a builder ... a _maker_ and not a writer
of plays.

And so again I thank your critic whose charity has made me feel that I
am on the road which leads to “Somewhere.” Even though at the end of my
journey I may not yet have reached the first mile stone.

_Virginia York, Washington, D. C._:

It is published in windy Chicago, THE LITTLE REVIEW. Claimed by
management, editors and its readers to be the very, very last, last word
in prose and poetry; it is sold at fifteen cents a copy. Normal-minded,
healthy folk will find it cheap at that price, because normal-minded,
healthy folk will find in it fifteen laughs for fifteen cents, despite
the fact that it is entirely a serious publication.

Years ago an editor sent me to the government hospital for the insane
just outside Washington, to interview a certain man. As I passed into
the building an elderly gentleman of profoundly respectful manner
presented me with a neatly-bound pamphlet which he said he had written,
edited and illustrated entirely by himself. Examining it later, the
cover-page proved to be a mass of meaningless, whirling lines labeled in
carefully printed letters, “The Croucher At The Door.” The reading
matter was wholly unintelligible.

A poet-friend has given me the October number of THE LITTLE REVIEW. The
vers libre poetry in the small magazine might easily be called “The
Croucher At The Door” for all the sense to be made of it. In fear and
trembling that my own unworthy brain might finally have addled,
relatives and friends were invited to peruse the contents of the volume.
I thank heaven they could make nothing of it.

One contribution entitled _Cafe Sketches_, by Arthur Davison Ficke, is
herewith reprinted for the benefit of readers of this page who are
denied access, and accompanying the laugh, to THE LITTLE REVIEW. Mr.
Ficke, after telling in the first verse that he is in a cafe, surrounded
by a “cortege of seven waiters,” mourning for a “boundlessly curious
lady,” recites in mournful meanderings:

       Presently persons will come out
   And shake legs.
   I do not want legs shaken.
   I want immortal souls shaken unreasonably.
   I want to see dawn spilled across the blackness
   Like a scrambled egg on the skillet;
   I want miracles, wonders.
   Tidings out of deeps I do not know ...
   But I have a horrible suspicion
   That neither you
   Nor your esteemed consort
   Nor I myself
   Can ever provide these simple things
   For which I am so patiently waiting.

       Base people!
   How I dislike you!

Maybe you think this is funny, but certainly it is not intended to be.
Seriousness, thick, black, dense seriousness is the keynote of THE
LITTLE REVIEW. This is vers libre with a vengeance. “Persons will come
out and shake legs. I do not want legs shaken.” Here we have the spirit
of the dance! It is quite evident Mr. Ficke does not wish joy to be
unconfined.

There have been many descriptions of dawn, probably none so unique as
“the dawn spilled across the blackness like a scrambled egg on the
skillet.” The second verse is short and to the point, but it is much to
be thankful for both in point of length and the statement that we are
abhorred.

In order to restore our thoughts to something sane, to take away from us
the taste of such gibberish, consider for a moment the following eight
lines by Harriet Howe, recently published in THE LITERARY DIGEST.
Comparison between the two authors is utterly impossible, totally
unnecessary:


                           SUNSET AFTER RAIN

   The cradle of the valley
       Is filled with floating mist,
   The summits of the mountains
       Are veiled in amethyst.

   The trees spread grateful branches
       Above a smiling sod,
   For thirsting slaked, for hunger fed,
       All things are praising God.

_Huntly Carter, London_:

The letter by C. Smith of Chicago, in the October issue of THE LITTLE
REVIEW, is so phenomenally stupid and so intellectually dishonest that
it is almost beneath notice. If I consent to notice it, I do so in order
to warn Smithsonian understudies that they will be severely dealt with
if they attempt to repeat Smith’s brazen offence of writing to a
significant journal and coolly suggesting that a single and relatively
unimportant wrong attribution is to be regarded as a fair and honest
sample of the whole subject matter of an article occupying several pages
and mainly devoted to a metaphysical explanation of the origin and
nature of poetry. Furthermore, suggesting that I am applying to a poet
(Browning) a rigid test of poetry, seeking to prove his words poetically
good or bad by my poetical experience, when as a matter of fact I am
offering certain words, some of which are wrongly attributed to
Browning, as indisputable evidence that in venting the emotions
versifiers find descriptive figures efficacious.

No doubt some of the words flaunted by Smith are wrongly attributed to
Browning. They are so wrongly attributed that anyone can see they are
wrongly attributed. And any “sane, intelligent and decently responsible
man” (to use Smith’s yellow press tautology) would have given me an
opportunity of saying they are wrongly attributed before venturing to
put on silly airs of hypercriticism. Then he would have learnt that the
first and third line of the quotation belong oddly enough, to another
piece of poetry, and have got mixed up with Browning’s stuff in some
unaccountable way. I have not the least idea how the mix took place. All
I know is that my article was finished off in great haste to catch the
mail. It was sent in handscript and not typescript. And there was no
time to send me a proof; otherwise the quotation would certainly have
been corrected, and the many errors which now appear in my article would
have disappeared. I feel I am justified in saying it was not my
intention to send the words which have crept into print by the discovery
that I have actually written down Browning’s very words. Here is
Browning:

   And the sun looked over the mountain’s rim:
   And straight was a path of gold for him,
   And the need of a world of men for me.

The first line of the verse is missing. The three lines however serve
the purpose of my comparison. I had also set down these lines by
Browning:

   One lyric woman in her crocus vest,
   Woven of sea-wools.

I intended to include this with my quotations. For here in my view is a
figure as original and precisely felicitous as anything the Imagists
have given us.

That this dragging in of some wrongly attributed words—so obviously
wrong as to deceive no one—for the sole purpose of discrediting an
important article is dishonest, is clear from the fact that Smith does
not drag in any other quotation from the many given, nor produce any
other evidence whatsoever in support of his contention that my article
is inept and careless throughout. In fact he has nothing more damaging
to offer than his own fatuous statement that he happens “to consider my
article an ill-digested congeries of vague views”; which, when one comes
to examine it is found to contain a baseless assertion and a clear
admission that my article is above and beyond Smith’s head.

As to the silliness of Smith’s letter, this may be judged from the
following: Smith begins with the generalization that magazines die
“whose pages are as a rule careless, inconsidered and inept” (note the
repetition and consequent lack of thoroughness). The publications of the
capitalist press answer this description. The news sheets, for instance,
are rotten with carelessness, inconsideredness and ineptness. They would
be rottener if they could. Yet they do not die. On the contrary they
sell by the million. If so, then THE LITTLE REVIEW should sell by the
million. But Smith says it will die. And Smith is a careful,
serviceable, and accurate man.

By way of comparison Smith relieves himself of this matchless
composition. “Your magazine will die,—as a steam engine would grow
useless in which no direction towards any cylinder was given to the
indubitable forces generated in the boiler.” What is the precise meaning
of this bombastic twaddle? In homely words, it means that a steam engine
is (not “would grow”) useless when the steam power developed in its
boiler is not utilised in any cylinder. Anyone who examines this analogy
will agree with me that Smith is a careful, serviceable, and accurate
man.

From the general Smith comes to the particular and quotes what he is
pleased to call an example of my “ineptitude and carelessness” as an
example of the general “ineptitude and carelessness” of THE LITTLE
REVIEW. Without knowing anything as to the circumstances under which the
wrongly attributed words found their way into print, without stopping to
inquire to what extent I contributed to the mistake, and upon no other
evidence whatsoever than the said wrongly attributed words, he proceeds
to saddle me with the astounding intention “to obliterate all sense of
accuracy, all love of clear and rational communication, all fidelity to
honest statement, and all interest in truth” (which makes four ways of
uttering the same inverifiable statement).

Finally Smith challenges the editor of THE LITTLE REVIEW to print his
ghastly ineptitude. She has taken the short way and done so. It serves
Smith right.

_M. Silverman, Chicago_:

Your last issue is a failure—with two exceptions, Miss Goldman’s article
on “Preparedness” and Mr. Hecht’s letter. Both of them are human,
understandable, and sincere. They shout—but do not roar. All the others
are ostentatious, plebeian, and lack artistic restraint. They are not
beautiful. They _holler_ and produce a sense of heaviness and
overexertion. Sympathy and politeness are apparently the cardinal
virtues of the highly esteemed editor. Hence this “democratic” hash.

To be more specific: Your editorial, “Toward Revolution,” is the acme of
nonsense. I tried to take you seriously but I couldn’t. It is
pamphletory, and should have no place in THE LITTLE REVIEW.

“The Ecstasy of Pain” is a stage hurricane, and, to paraphrase Mr.
Goldbeck, it is like Chicago: vast, but not impressive. It lacks
artistic touch and symmetrical wholeness. The fourth paragraph is
excellent. The rest was unnecessary. The fragmentary mind of Mr. Kaun is
phosphorescent, produces tiny sparks which are soon lost in the
darkness. Higher mathematics is the best remedy for Mr. Kaun’s mind.

“The Spring Recital” is a bore. The author of _The “Genius”_ seems to
have a mania for torturing the innocent public. I read “The Spring
Recital” twice, yes twice; and when I got through with it I felt
extremely uncomfortable. I don’t understand it and it doesn’t mean
anything to me. I challenge anyone to explain to me: What does this
piece of “dramatic” “quatch” mean?

All the other articles—well, they are harmless.

_Woods Dargan, Darlington, S. C._:

I enclose a check for $1.50, and ask that you enter my name for one
year’s subscription—that is, if you will let one of the rabble creep in.
Frankly, I know no more about art (with a capital A or otherwise) than a
rabbit. I don’t even know what an “Imagist” is! And for the life of me I
cannot understand why the temperamental, fussy gentleman named Alexander
S. Kaun should not use a singular verb with a singular noun, just like
ordinary people. But when he says, as he does in the first line of the
fourth paragraph of his article, “the dearer a person or a thing _are_
to me, etc.,” I know there must be intellectual purpose in it, some
esoteric effect that gets to the cultured few but passes over my head;
so I bow before the unknown beauty of it, thinking, “Odd, but no doubt
it’s all right.”

Also, to my untutored mind, the frequent use of profanity in an
everyday, conversational way in two or three of the articles is amusing,
and makes me wonder. It reminds me of the days when I first took up the
art, and used to feel a shudder of delight when I ripped out a good,
mouth-filling, “Damn it all to hell!” Perhaps it has lost its charm for
me as a literary ornament because I swear so much myself, just as a
matter of habit without deriving the oldtime pleasure from it.

Other places where these boys put it all over me are in music and
Russians. It is one of my secret sorrows that I know I know nothing
about music. I like it, but it never occurs to me to fade away and fill
an early grave if I hear somebody’s nocturne murdered—that is, if I know
it is being murdered, which is highly unlikely. And as to the Russians,
old Dostoevsky is my limit so far, but I’m game, and am going in for all
the others,—the more gloomy and morbid the better.

Then, there’s this Mr. Theodore Dreiser. As we say in this neck of the
woods, in our uncouth manner, “He must be a bear-cat.” (By the way, I’d
give a lot to know what “demiurge” means in the sense in which it is
applied to him. Mr. Masters used it in _The New York Times_ some weeks
ago, and now I find it again in Mr. Powys’ appreciation. I don’t know
what they mean.) Well, I’ve had his book, _The “Genius,”_ for sometime,
and mean to read it all as soon as I can get round to it. Perhaps I’ll
know what “demiurge” means then—but I doubt it.

For all that I have said I would not have you think that I am wholly
lacking in soul. I have some things in common with these fellows, for I
have no religion or morals, and I enjoy getting drunk, riotously,
gloriously drunk, once or twice a year.

And now, after telling you at more length than any decent person should
what has puzzled me in your Review, permit me to say what I like. The
first part of your own contribution, “Life Itself,” strikes me as the
real thing. I understand all that, being a common person. For the last
part, as I’ve said, I know nothing of art, and life doesn’t mean those
things to me, naturally. But I like it. I can, after a fashion, see how
it _might_ mean them. The review of Dreiser by Mr. Powys that I have
mentioned already is good writing and good sense. How true it is, I am
not yet in a position to guess. Then, Mr. Edgar Masters always writes
vividly, deeply. I am glad to add “So We Grew Together” to what I know
of his stuff. It is almost as good a portrait and short story as some of
the best of the Anthology.

That fellow Ben Hecht can write. Personally, I have a sort of leaning
toward the dregs, but, as a general thing, I don’t know that there’s
much use in writing about them just so. But he’s certainly good. He can
write. I never heard of him before, but I shall look out for him in
future.

For the sake of what I find good I’m willing to put up with what I fail
to grasp, and so I look forward to much pleasure and instruction from
THE LITTLE REVIEW. Luck to it. As long as you, Miss Lowell, Mr. Masters,
and Mr. Hecht contribute, so long will it be cheap at any price. And,
who knows? I may yet learn from my friend Mr. Kaun the hidden beauties
of a singular subject with a plural verb.




                      _The January-February Issue_


   On account of having no funds during January we have been forced
   to combine the two issues. Subscriptions will be extended
   accordingly.




                           FINE ARTS THEATRE


                        For TWO WEEKS, Beginning
                            January 17, 1916


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                    Wednesday and Thursday Evenings
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   Eight talks on Literature, Art and the Drama on successive
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                                Lecturer


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        Saturday, January   29th,  3:30—Subject to be announced.
        Saturday, February   5th,  3:30—Subject to be announced.
        Saturday, February  12th,  3:30—Subject to be announced.
        Saturday, February  19th,  3:30—Subject to be announced.
        Saturday, February  26th,  3:30—Subject to be announced.

                    An Invitation Cordially Extended

                              No Door Fee


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   Nobody is going to be cold this winter if the Consumers Company
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                          BUY YOUR BOOKS HERE

   If you wish to assist The Little Review without cost to yourself
   you may order books—any book—from the Gotham Book Society and The
   Little Review will be benefitted by the sales. By this method The
   Little Review hopes to help solve a sometimes perplexing business
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                            POETRY AND DRAMA

   SEVEN SHORT PLAYS. By Lady Gregory. Contains the following plays
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   THE MAN WHO MARRIED A DUMB WIFE. By Anatole France. Translated by
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   THE GARDENER. By Rabindranath Tagore. The famous collection of
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   DOME OF MANY-COLORED GLASS. New Ed. of the Poems of Amy Lowell.
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   SPOON RIVER ANTHOLOGY. By Edgar Lee Masters. Send $1.35.

   DREAMS AND DUST. A book of lyrics, ballads and other verse forms
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   SOME IMAGIST POETS. An Anthology. The best recent work of Richard
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   THE DAWN (Les Aubes). A symbolic war play, by Emile Verhaeren,
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   THE NEARING CASE. By Lightner Witmer. A complete account of the
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   Three Other Styles of Binding. Mail your order today.

   NIETZSCHE. By Dr. Georg Brandes, the discoverer of Nietzsche.
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   WAR AND CULTURE. By John Cowper Powys. Send 70c.

   SHATTUCK’S PARLIAMENTARY ANSWERS. By Harriette R. Shattuck.
   Alphabetically arranged for all questions likely to arise in
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   Leather Edition. Full Gilt Edges. Net $1.10 postpaid.

   EAT AND GROW THIN. By Vance Thompson. A collection of the
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   FORTY THOUSAND QUOTATIONS. By Charles Noel Douglas. These 40,000
   prose and poetical quotations are selected from standard authors
   of ancient and modern times, are classified according to subject,
   fill 2,000 pages, and are provided with a thumb index. $3.15,
   postpaid.

   THE CRY FOR JUSTICE. An anthology of the literature of social
   protest, edited by Upton Sinclair. Introduction by Jack London.
   “The work is world-literature, as well as the Gospel of a
   universal humanism.” Contains the writings of philosophers,
   poets, novelists, social reformers, selected from twenty-five
   languages, covering a period of five thousand years. Inspiring to
   every thinking man and woman; a handbook of reference to all
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   MY CHILDHOOD. By Maxim Gorky. The autobiography of the famous
   Russian novelist up to his seventeenth year. An astounding human
   document and an explanation (perhaps unconscious) of the Russian
   national character. Frontispiece portrait. 8vo. 308 pages. $2.00
   net, postage 10 cents. (Ready Oct. 14).

   AFFIRMATIONS. By Havelock Ellis. A discussion of some of the
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                               LITERATURE

   COMPLETE WORKS. Maurice Maeterlinck. The Essays, 10 vols., per
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   1 vol., net $1.50. Volumes sold separately. In uniform style, 19
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   INTERPRETATIONS OF LITERATURE. By Lafcadio Hearn. A remarkable
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   can become. English literature is interpreted from a new angle in
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   BERNARD SHAW: A Critical Study. By P. P. Howe. Send $2.15.

   MAURICE MAETERLINCK: A Critical Study. By Una Taylor. 8vo. Send
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   W. B. YEATS: A Critical Study. By Forest Reid. Send $2.15.

   DEAD SOULS. Nikolai Gogol’s great humorous classic translated
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   ENJOYMENT OF POETRY. By Max Eastman. “His book is a masterpiece,”
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   THE PATH OF GLORY. By Anatole France. Illustrated. 8vo. Cloth. An
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   THE PILLAR OF FIRE: A Profane Baccalaureate. By Seymour Deming.
   Takes up and treats with satire and with logical analysis such
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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
   volumes. Mr. Hearn, who was at once a scholar, a genius, and a
   master of English style, interprets in this volume the literature
   of which he was a student, its masterpieces, and its masters, for
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   IDEALS AND REALITIES IN RUSSIAN LITERATURE. By Prince Kropotkin.
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   VISIONS AND REVISIONS. By John Cowper Powys. A Book of Literary
   Devotions. Send $2.10.

   SIX FRENCH POETS. By Amy Lowell. First English book to contain a
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   LANDMARKS IN RUSSIAN LITERATURE. By Maurice Baring. Intimate
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   $2.00.

                                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
   points out the nature, the value and also the tragic limitations
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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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   paid.

   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.

   THE CROCK OF GOLD. By James Stephens. Send $1.60.

   THE INVISIBLE EVENT. By J. D. Beresford. Jacob Stahl, writer and
   weakling, splendidly finds himself in the love of a superb woman.
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   OSCAR WILDE’S WORKS. Ravenna edition. Red limp leather. Sold
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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.
   $1.85 postpaid.

   CRAINQUEBILLE. By Anatole France. Translated by Winifred Stevens.
   The story of a costermonger who is turned from a dull-witted and
   inoffensive creature by the hounding of the police and the too
   rigorous measures of the law into a desperado. Send $1.85.

   VIOLETTE OF PERE LACHAISE. By Anna Strunsky Walling. Records the
   spiritual development of a gifted young woman who becomes an
   actress and devotes herself to the social revolution. Send $1.10.

   THE “GENIUS.” By Theodore Dreiser. Send $1.60.

   JERUSALEM. By Selma Lagerlof. Translated by Velma Swanston. The
   scene is a little Swedish village whose inhabitants are bound in
   age-old custom and are asleep in their narrow provincial life.
   The story tells of their awakening, of the tremendous social and
   religious upheaval that takes place among them, and of 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
   Fell. Stories which reveal the Russian mind, nature and
   civilization. Send $1.47.

   THE FREELANDS. By John Galsworthy. Gives a large and vivid
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   conflict, centering upon a romance of boy-and-girl love—that
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   $1.45.

   FIDELITY. Susan Glaspell’s greatest novel. The author calls it
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   WOOD AND STONE. By John Cowper Powys. An Epoch Making Novel. Send
   $1.60.

   RED FLEECE. By Will Levington Comfort. A story of the Russian
   revolutionists and the proletariat in general in the Great War,
   and how they risk execution by preaching peace even in the
   trenches. Exciting, understanding, and everlastingly true; for
   Comfort himself is soldier and revolutionist as well as artist.
   He is our American Artsibacheff; one of the very few American
   masters of the “new fiction.” Send $1.35.

   THE STAR ROVER. By Jack London. Frontispiece in colors by Jay
   Hambidge. A man unjustly accused of murder is sentenced to
   imprisonment and finally sent to execution, but proves the
   supremacy of mind over matter by succeeding, after long practice,
   in loosing his spirit from his body and sending it on long quests
   through the universe, finally cheating the gallows in this way.
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   THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT. By H. G. Wells. Tells the story of the
   life of one man, with its many complications with the lives of
   others, both men and women of varied station, and his wanderings
   over many parts of the globe in his search for the best and
   noblest kind of life. $1.60, postpaid.

                                SEXOLOGY

   Here is the great sex book of the day: Forel’s THE SEXUAL
   QUESTION. A scientific, psychological, hygienic, legal and
   sociological work for the cultured classes. By Europe’s foremost
   nerve specialist. Chapter on “love and other irradiations of the
   sexual appetite” a profound revelation of human emotions.
   Degeneracy exposed. Birth control discussed. Should be in the
   hands of all dealing with domestic relations. Medical edition
   $5.50. Same book, cheaper binding, now $1.60.

   Painful childbirth in this age of scientific progress is
   unnecessary. THE TRUTH ABOUT TWILIGHT SLEEP, by Hanna Rion (Mrs.
   Ver Beck), is a message to mothers by an American mother,
   presenting with authority and deep human interest the impartial
   and conclusive evidence of a personal investigation of the
   Freiburg method of painless childbirth. Send $1.62.

   FREUD’S THEORIES OF THE NEUROSES. By Dr. E. Hitschmann. A brief
   and clear summary of Freud’s theories. Price, $2.

   PLAIN FACTS ABOUT A GREAT EVIL. By Christobel Pankhurst. One of
   the strongest and frankest books ever written, depicting the
   dangers of promiscuity in men. This book was once suppressed by
   Anthony Comstock. Send (paper) 60c, (cloth) $1.10.

   SEXUAL LIFE OF WOMAN. By Dr. E. Heinrich Kisch (Prague). An
   epitome of the subject. Sold only to physicians, jurists,
   clergymen and educators. Send $5.50.

   KRAFFT-EBING’S PSYCHOPATHIA SEXUALIS. Only authorized English
   translation of 12th German Edition. By F. J. Rebman. Sold only to
   physicians, jurists, clergymen and educators. Price, $4.35.
   Special thin paper edition, $1.60.

   THE SMALL FAMILY SYSTEM: IS IT IMMORAL OR INJURIOUS? By Dr. C. V.
   Drysdale. The question of birth control cannot be intelligently
   discussed without knowledge of the facts and figures herein
   contained. $1.10, postpaid.

   MAN AND WOMAN. By Dr. Havelock Ellis, the foremost authority on
   sexual characteristics. A new (5th) edition. Send $1.60.

   A new book by Dr. Robinson: THE LIMITATION OF OFFSPRING BY THE
   PREVENTION OF PREGNANCY. The enormous benefits of the practice to
   individuals, society and the race pointed out and all objections
   answered. Send $1.05.

   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
   of the present aspects of the psychoanalytic hypotheses. Price,
   $1.50.

   SELECTED PAPERS ON HYSTERIA AND OTHER PSYCHONEUROSES. By Prof. S.
   Freud, M.D. A selection of some of the more important of Freud’s
   writings. Send $2.50.

   THREE CONTRIBUTIONS TO SEXUAL THEORY. By John C. Van Dyke. Fully
   illustrated. New edition revised and rewritten. Send $1.60.

   THREE CONTRIBUTIONS TO SEXUAL THEORY. By Prof. Sigmund Freud. The
   psychology of psycho-sexual development. Price, $2.

   FUNCTIONAL PERIODICITY. An experimental study of the mental and
   motor abilities of women during menstruation by Leta Stetter
   Hollingworth. Cloth, $1.15. Paper, 85c.

                                  ART

   MICHAEL ANGELO. By Romain Rolland. Twenty-two full-page
   illustrations. A critical and illuminating exposition of the
   genius of Michael Angelo. $2.65, postpaid.

   INTERIOR DECORATION: ITS PRINCIPLES AND PRACTICE. By Frank Alvah
   Parsons. Illustrated. $3.25, postpaid.

   THE BARBIZON PAINTERS. By Arthur Hoeber. One hundred
   illustrations in sepia, reproducing characteristic work of the
   school. $1.90, postpaid.

   THE BOOK OF MUSICAL KNOWLEDGE. By Arthur Elson. Illustrated.
   Gives in outline a general musical education, the evolution and
   history of music, the lives and works of the great composers, the
   various musical forms and their analysis, the instruments and
   their use, and several special topics. $3.75, postpaid.

   MODERN PAINTING: ITS TENDENCY AND MEANING. By Willard Huntington
   Wright, author of “What Nietzsche Taught,” etc. Four color plates
   and 24 illustrations. “Modern Painting” gives—for the first time
   in any language—a clear, compact review of all the important
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   only with the war. Send $2.75.

   THE ROMANCE OF LEONARDO DA VINCI. By A. J. Anderson. Photogravure
   frontispiece and 16 illustrations in half-tone. Sets forth the
   great artist as a man so profoundly interested in and closely
   allied with every movement of his age that he might be called an
   incarnation of the Renaissance. $3.95, postpaid.

   THE COLOUR OF PARIS. By Lucien Descaves. Large 8vo. New edition,
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   Academy Goncourt under the general editorship of M. Lucien
   Descaves. Send $3.30.

                         SCIENCE AND SOCIOLOGY

   CAUSES AND CURES OF CRIME. A popular study of criminology from
   the bio-social viewpoint. By Thomas Speed Mosby, former Pardon
   Attorney, State of Missouri, member American Institute of
   Criminal Law and Criminology, etc. 356 pages, with 100 original
   illustrations. Price, $2.15, postpaid.

   THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELAXATION. By G. T. W. Patrick. A notable and
   unusually interesting volume explaining the importance of sports,
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   PSYCHOLOGY OF THE UNCONSCIOUS. By Dr. C. G. Jung, of the
   University of Zurich. Translated by Beatrice M. Hinkle, M.D., of
   the Neurological Department of Cornell University and the New
   York Post-Graduate Medical School. This remarkable work does for
   psychology what the theory of evolution did for biology; and
   promises an equally profound change in the thought of mankind. A
   very important book. Large 8vo. Send $4.40.

   SOCIALIZED GERMANY. By Frederic C. Howe, author of “The Modern
   City and Its Problems,” etc., etc.; Commissioner of Immigration
   at the Port of New York. “The real peril to the other powers of
   western civilization lies in the fact that Germany is more
   intelligently organized than the rest of the world.” This book is
   a frank attempt to explain this efficiency. $1.00, postpaid.

   SCIENTIFIC INVENTIONS OF TODAY. Illustrated. By T. W. Corbin. The
   modern uses of explosives, electricity, and the most interesting
   kinds of chemicals are revealed to young and old. Send $1.60.

   THE HUNTING WASPS. By J. Henri Fabre. 12mo. Bound in uniform
   style with the other books by the same author. In the same
   exquisite vein as “The Life of the Spider,” “The Life of the
   Fly,” etc. Send $1.60.

   SCHOOLS OF TOMORROW. By John Dewey and Evelyn Dewey. Illustrated.
   A study of a number of the schools of this country which are
   using advanced methods of experimenting with new ideas in the
   teaching and management of children. The practical methods are
   described and the spirit which informs them is analyzed and
   discussed. Send $1.60.

   THE RHYTHM OF LIFE. By Charles Brodie Patterson. A discussion of
   harmony in music and color, and its influence on thought and
   character. $1.60, postpaid.

   THE FAITHFUL. By John Masefield. A three-act tragedy founded on a
   famous legend of Japan. $1.35, postpaid.

   INCOME. By Scott Nearing. An economic value is created amounting
   to, say, $100. What part of that is returned to the laborer, what
   part to the manager, what part to the property owner? This
   problem the author discusses in detail, after which the other
   issues to which it leads are presented. Send $1.25.

   THE STOIC PHILOSOPHY. By Gilbert Murray. An account of the
   greatest system of organized thought that the mind of man had
   built up in the Graeco-Roman world before the coming of
   Christianity. Dr. Murray exercises his rare faculty for making
   himself clear and interesting. Send 82c.

   A MESSAGE TO THE MIDDLE CLASS. By Seymour Deming. A clarion call
   so radical that it may well provoke a great tumult of discussion
   and quicken a deep and perhaps sinister impulse to act. Send 60c.

   DRIFT AND MASTERY. An attempt to diagnose the current unrest. By
   Walter Lippmann. Send $1.60.

   FIRST AND LAST THINGS. By H. G. Wells. A confession of Faith and
   a Rule of Life. Send $1.60.

   THE SOCIALISTS AND THE WAR. By William English Walling. No
   Socialist can adequately discuss the war without the knowledge
   that this remarkable new book holds. 512 pages. Complete
   documentary statement of the position of the Socialists of all
   countries. Send $1.50.

   DREAMS AND MYTHS. By Dr. Karl Abraham. A lucid presentation of
   Freud’s theory of dreams. A study in comparative mythology from
   the standpoint of dream psychology. Price, $1.25.

   WHAT WOMEN WANT. By Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale. $1.35 net;
   postage, 10c.

   ARE WOMEN PEOPLE? A collection of clever woman suffrage verses.
   The best since Mrs. Gilman. Geo. H. Doran Co. Send 75c.

   HOW IT FEELS TO BE THE HUSBAND OF A SUFFRAGETTE. By “Him.”
   Illustrated by Mary Wilson Preston. Send 60c.

   ON DREAMS. By Prof. Sigmund Freud. Authorized English translation
   by Dr. M. D. Eder. Introduction by Prof. W. Leslie Mackenzie.
   This classic now obtainable for $1.10.

   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”


                               THE BLAST

   These days of great struggles urgently demand a militant labor
   voice to aid the workers in their battles.

   _The Blast_ will be such a voice. A revolutionary labor weekly,
   edited by ALEXANDER BERKMAN.

   The time has come to gather together, so to speak, the scattered
   forces of discontent and help them find definite expression.

   I am planning to have for _The Blast_ regular correspondences
   from the various industrial centers of America, Europe and
   Australia. I hold that one of the most important things in the
   publication of a revolutionary weekly is to keep the rebels
   throughout the world in closer touch with each other and informed
   of the labor and revolutionary situation in the different
   countries. It helps to stimulate the spirit of solidarity and
   encourage activity.

   The other departments of _The Blast_ will be: a strong
   anti-militarism and anti-preparedness column; a page dealing with
   the vital, social and economic questions; a “Chain Gang”
   department, containing news from Labor’s prisoners of war—on
   trial and in prison—stories of prison life, etc.; a column
   devoted to the discussion of special labor questions and general
   human problems; a Children’s Department, with the view of
   ultimately establishing a circle of Ferrer Schools throughout the
   country.

   First issue of _The Blast_, January 15th, 1916.

   The life of the paper and the success of its work will depend
   upon _your_ interest and co-operation.

   Send subscriptions or contributions to _The Blast_, Box 661, San
   Francisco.




                                 REVOLT

           _The stormy petrel of the revolutionary movement._

   Men and women active in the combat for emancipation will supply
   news from the firing line. Some of our best writers and artists
   promised their co-operation.

           HIPPOLYTE HAVEL, Editor. ROBERT MINOR, Cartoonist.


                           _ADVISORY BOARD_:

                           Leonard D. Abbott
                         Elizabeth Gurley Flynn
                           Alexander Berkman
                              Harry Kelly
                           Margaret H. Sanger

   Are you interested in our efforts? If so send in your
   subscription or contribution. No funds are behind our
   undertaking.

   Mail your subscription or contribution to the

              _REVOLT_, 30 Lexington Ave., New York, N. Y.

        One Year 1.00 Six Months 50 cents Three Months 25 cents




                                 Poetry


                          A Magazine of Verse

                            543 Cass Street
                                Chicago

   PADRAIC COLUM, the distinguished Irish poet and lecturer, says:
   “POETRY is the best magazine, by far, in the English language. We
   have nothing in England or Ireland to compare with it.”

   William Marion Reedy, Editor of the St. Louis _Mirror_, says:
   “POETRY has been responsible for the Renaissance in that art. You
   have done a great service to the children of light in this
   country.”

   CAN YOU AFFORD TO DO WITHOUT SO IMPORTANT A MAGAZINE?

   POETRY publishes the best verse now being written in English, and
   its prose section contains brief articles on subjects connected
   with the art, also reviews of the new verse.

   POETRY has introduced more new poets of importance than all the
   other American magazines combined, besides publishing the work of
   poets already distinguished.

   THE ONLY MAGAZINE DEVOTED EXCLUSIVELY TO THIS ART.

   SUBSCRIBE AT ONCE. A subscription to POETRY is the best way of
   paying interest on your huge debt to the great poets of the past.
   It encourages living poets to do for the future what dead poets
   have done for modern civilization, for you.

   One year—12 numbers—U. S. A., $1.50; Canada, $1.65; foreign,
   $1.75 (7 shillings).

                                 POETRY
                       543 Cass Street, Chicago.

      Send POETRY for one year ($1.50 enclosed) beginning .........
      .......................................................... to
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   You should know that in the February number of “THE DRAMA” there
   will be published for the first time in English a play by
   Artzibashef. It is a war drama which has stimulated thinking
   people in Russia to think some more. A penetrating study of
   Eugene Walter as the leader of dramatic realism in America and a
   scintillating essay on the folly of theatrical advertising are
   two of other articles which combine to make the February issue
   invaluable to people who are interested not only in drama but in
   life.

   We should like to announce that we have on sale back numbers of
   “The Drama” with the following plays in them: Galdos’ _Electra_,
   Bjornson’s _Leonarda_, Becque’s _The Crown_, Hebbel’s _Herod and
   Marriamne_, Schnitzler’s _Light-O’-Love_, Heijerman’s _The Good
   Hope_, Freytag’s _The Journalists_, Giacosa’s _The Stronger_,
   Donnay’s _The Other Danger_, Gillette’s _Electricity_, Andreyev’s
   _The Pretty Sabine Women_, Goldoni’s _The Squabbles of Chioggia_,
   Capus’ _The Adventurer_, and Augier’s _The Marriage of Olympe_.

   These plays can be obtained by the sending of seventy-five cents
   to the office of The Drama Quarterly, 736 Marquette Bldg.,
   Chicago.

   In entering upon its third year, THE MISCELLANY feels that it has
   found a place in “the order of things.” A specimen copy will be
   sent to readers of THE LITTLE REVIEW. Issued quarterly; one
   dollar per year.

                             THE MISCELLANY
           17 Board of Trade Building, Kansas City, Missouri.


          We do with Talking Machines what Ford did with Autos




                            YOU ASK WHY THIS
                         BEAUTIFUL, LARGE SIZE
                            TALKING MACHINE
                             SELLS FOR ONLY
                                  $10

   Size 15¾ inches at base: 8½ high. Ask for oak or mahogany finish.
   Nickel plated, reversible, tonearm and reproducer, playing
   Edison, Victor, Columbia and other disc records, 10 and 12
   inches. Worm gear motor. Threaded winding shaft. Plays 2 ten-inch
   records with one winding—Tone controlling door. Neat and solidly
   made.

   If you have never been willing to spend $25 for a talking machine
   this is your chance.

   The MUSIGRAPH is as large, good-looking, right-sounding as
   machines selling for $25.

   How do we do it? Here’s the answer: Gigantic profits have been
   made from $25 machines because of patent right monopoly. Millions
   have gone for advertising $25 machines, and these millions came
   back from the public. The attempt is to make $25 the standard
   price. It’s too much.

   The trust price game is broken. Here is a machine which gives
   perfect satisfaction (guaranteed) for only $10. It will fill your
   home with dancing, good music, fun and happiness. Money back if
   it isn’t as represented. MUSIGRAPHS are selling by the thousands.
   People who can afford it buy showy autos, but common-sense people
   gladly ride Fords—both get over the ground. Same way with talking
   machines, only the MUSIGRAPH looks and works like the high-priced
   instruments.

   WHAT BETTER CHRISTMAS GIFT CAN YOU THINK OF? Musigraphs play any
   standard disc record, high-priced or even the little five and ten
   cent records. Hurry your order to make sure of Christmas
   delivery.

   We are advertising these big bargain machines through our
   customers—one MUSIGRAPH in use sells a dozen more.

   One cash payment is our plan. So to-day, to insure Christmas
   delivery, send $10, by P. O. money order, check, draft, express
   order or postage stamps. All we ask is that you tell your
   neighbors how to get a MUSIGRAPH for only $10.


                               GUARANTEE.

   This machine is as represented, both as to materials and
   workmanship, for a period of one year. If the MUSIGRAPH is not as
   represented send it back immediately and

                          Get your money back.

                       Address MUSIGRAPH, Dept. K
                Distributors Advertising Service (Inc.)
                  142 West 23rd Street, New York City




                                  THE
                                 SEXUAL
                                QUESTION

   Heretofore sold by subscription, only to physicians. Now offered
   to the public. Written in plain terms. Former price $5.50. _Now
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   Do you know, for instance, the scientific difference between love
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                    GOTHAM BOOK SOCIETY, DEPT. 564.
            _General dealers in books, sent on mail order._
                     142 W. 23d St., New York City.

       In answering this advertisement mention THE LITTLE REVIEW.




                               THE EGOIST


                        An Individualist Review

   Subscribe to THE EGOIST and hear what you will get:

   Editorials containing the most notable creative and critical
   philosophic matter appearing in England today.

   Some of the newest and best experimental English and American
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                          Transcriber’s Notes


There is obviously some text missing after the first line of the
“program” on page 6, between “... a different ...” and “... are the most
beautiful ...” (in “A Deeper Music”). This had to be left uncorrected.

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. 13]:
   ... On the corner stands the novelist and the store-manager,
       still talking. ...
   ... On the corner stand the novelist and the store-manager, still
       talking. ...