The Little Review

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HELEN HOYT

MARGARET C. ANDERSON

When “they” ask you what anarchism is, and you scuffle around for the most convincing definition, why don’t you merely ask instead: “What is art?” Because anarchism and art are in the world for exactly the same kind of reason.

An anarchist is a person who realizes the gulf that lies between government and life; an artist is a person who realizes the gulf that lies between life and love. The former knows that he can never get from the government what he really needs for life; the latter knows that he can never get from life the love he really dreams of.

Now there is only one class of people—among the very rich or the very poor or the very middling—that doesn’t know about these things. It is the uneducated class. It is composed of housewives, business men, church-goers, family egoists, club women, politicians, detectives, debutantes, drummers, Christian Scientists, policemen, demagogues, social climbers, ministers who recommend plays like Experience, etc., etc. It even includes some who may be educated—journalists, professors, philanthropists, patriots, “artistic” people, sentimentalists, cowards, and the insane. It is the great middle-class mind of America. It is the kind of mind that either doesn’t think at all or that thinks like this: “Without the violence and the plotting there would be nothing left of anarchism but a dead theory. Without the romance of it anarchism would be nothing but a theory which will not work and never can until nature has evolved something very different out of man. It is cops and robbers, hare and hounds, Ivanhoe and E. Phillips Oppenheim all acted out in life. It is not really dangerous to society, but only to some members of it, because unless every one is against it there is no fun in it.”

There is no fun talking about anarchism to people who understand it. But it would be great fun to make the middle-class mind understand it. This is the way I should go about it:

What things do you need in order to live? Food, clothing, shelter. What things must you have to get life out of the process of living? Love, work, recreation. All right.

Does the government give you the first three things? Not at all. It isn’t the government or law or anything of that sort that gives you food or clothes. It’s the efficient organization between those who produce these things and those who sell them to you. And it isn’t government that keeps that organization efficient. It’s the brains of those who work in it. You will say that government exists to prevent that organization from charging you too much for food and clothes. Then why doesn’t government do it? Heaven knows you’ve got all the government you can very well use and you pay too much for everything.

Does the government give you a house? If you happen to be an ambassador or something like that. Not if you happen to be a mail man. Maybe some one leaves you a house—which means that he once bought it or stole it or had it left to him. You can do any of these three things yourself. Or you can go without, as nearly every one else does. Sometimes the government helps you to steal one—but not you of the middle-class. What I want to know is why you are so crazy about the government?

Now, about work. What do you call work?—spending eight hours a day in an office to help make somebody’s business a success, and incidentally to earn the money for your bread and butter? But that’s a third of the time you’re given on earth. Another third has to be spent in sleep, and the last third in eating your dinner, “spending the evening,” getting undressed, getting dressed, eating your breakfast, and catching your train. I call that slavery. Work is something over which you can toil twenty-four hours a day if you feel like it, because if you don’t your life will have no meaning. It’s like art. What has the government to do with your work? About as much as it had to do with Marconi’s brain when he was conceiving his wireless.

What do you call recreation?—lounging in hotel lobbies, gossiping over tea tables, going to the movies? All right. But what has the government got to do with it? Or do you call it walking, riding, reading, lying in the sun? The government doesn’t give you good legs or a motor car or books or a stretch of beach to lie on. But it can keep some of the best books away from you and close up the bathing beaches on the hottest October day. Maybe you call recreation what it really means: re-creation. That means the time and the leisure to invite your soul. You’ve got government: have you got either time or leisure?

And as for love.... You love some one who loves you, and the world is good. Or you love some one who doesn’t love you and the world is hell. Or you love and love and can find no one to love. Or you love and cannot give, or love and cannot take, or maybe you cannot love at all. And where is the government all this time?

The government can bring you a letter from some one you love. But why must even that be done with graft?

Some one assaults a woman in a dark alley, you say, and where would we be without the government? What has that to do with love, first? Now clear up your minds: have you ever imagined why these things happen? Because some people are vicious, you say. But every one is vicious—every one who has life in him. You are: only you can take it out on your wife or on whatever prostitutes you can afford, or in eating large dinners, or in joy rides, in vulgar parties, in the movies, in luxury, in fads, in art, even in religion. It just depends upon your type. The point is that you have your outlets and the other wretch hasn’t. And second, since these things are always happening and you have plenty of chances to see how the government deals with them, the only sensible question left for you to ask is: Why aren’t they dealt with? You’ve got government and you’ve got crime on the increase. May it be that you will ever see this: that the thing needs treat-ment, not govern-ment?

But if you’re talking about love.... In love you will act just like a cave man or an Athenian or an early Christian or an Elizabethan or a modern, like a satyr or a traveling salesman or an artist—it depends upon your type. Governments may come and go, may change or cease to be, and nothing remains forever except “your type.”

But it’s just here that your government has its functions. It can do various things. And since the value of your life depends upon the intensity with which you love something or somebody, you might as well recognize what your government can do for you in this regard:

If you think that love and freedom ought to go together the government can put you in prison.

If you marry out of respect for the government, and grow to hate each other, the government won’t give you a divorce out of respect for you.

If you marry as a concession to the government, because you don’t want to ruin your business or have your wife insulted, the government will divorce you—and on the concession basis: but you pay for both the concessions.

If you believe that love is love, whether it brings you children or not, you may be happy and prosperous, but you will not be safe. The government can put your physician in prison.

If you’re very poor or very ill, and ought not have children, the government can keep information for prevention away from you; and it can put any one who tries to give you that information in prison.

If you should die from an abortion—and you surely will die if you contract blood-poisoning; and you surely will do that if you must be treated in secrecy and without skill—the government can hang your physician.

Why are you so crazy about the government?

Why do you want to govern anything or anybody?—even your own temper? Nietzsche said not to preserve yourself but to discharge yourself! Why not use your temper as well as your nice moods?

Why do you want to govern your child? To give him character? But who ever told you that life is for the making of character? Even if it were, you can’t give your child character. He can get it by going through a great deal. But if you govern him successfully he won’t go through a great deal. He will just be something that is like something else. He won’t be himself.

Why do you want to govern human nature? Because you want people to be good instead of bad? But how can you tell when they’re good and when they’re bad? Suppose you all agree that Jean Crones did a very bad thing? If you knew Jean Crones you should probably all see at once that he is a very good man—if he exists at all. Clear up your thinking!

Who ever told you that an anarchist wants to change human nature? Who ever told you that an anarchist’s ideal could never be attained until human nature had improved? Human nature will never “improve.” It doesn’t matter much whether you have a good nature or a bad one. It’s your thinking that counts. Clean out your minds!

If you believe these things—no, that is not enough: if you live them—you are an anarchist. You can be one right now. You needn’t wait for a change in human nature, for the millennium, or for the permission of your family. Just be one!

You have seen that “the blind, heavy, stupid thing we call government” can not give you a happy childhood. It cannot educate you or make you an interesting person. It cannot give you work, art, love, or life—or death if you think it is better to die.

And finally when you see that you can never get all the love you imagined from life; that you are trapped, really, and must find a way out; when you see that here where there is nothing is the way out, and that the wonder of life begins here—when you see all this you will be an artist, and your love that is “left over” will find its music or its words.

AMY LOWELL

First Movement

Second Movement

Third Movement

[1] This Quartet was played from the manuscript by the Flonzaley Quartet during their season of 1915 and 1916. The poem is based upon the programme which M. Stravinsky appended to his piece, and is an attempt to reproduce the sound and movement of the music as far as is possible in another medium.

SHERWOOD ANDERSON

He was a man of forty-five, vigorous and straight of body. About his jaws was a slight heaviness, but his eyes were quiet. In his young manhood he had been involved in a scandal that had made him a marked man in the community. He had deserted his wife and children and had run away with a serious, dark-skinned young girl, the daughter of a Methodist minister.

After a few years he had come back into the community and had opened a law office. The social ostracism set up against him and his wife had in reality turned out to their advantage. He had worked fiercely and the dark-skinned girl had worked fiercely. At forty-five he had risen to wealth and to a commanding position before the bar of his state, and his wife, now a surgeon, had a fast-growing reputation for ability.

It was night and he sat in a room with the dead body of his younger brother, who had gone the road he had traveled in his twenties. The brother, a huge good-natured fellow, had been caught and shot in the home of a married woman.

In the room with the lawyer sat a woman. She was a nurse, in charge of the children of his second wife, a magnificent blonde creature with white teeth. They sat beside a table, spread with books and magazines.

The woman who sat with the lawyer in the room with the dead man, was, like himself, flush with life. He remembered, with a start, that she had been introduced into the house by the boy who was dead. He began to couple them in his mind and talked about it.

“You were in love with him, eh?” he asked presently.

The woman said nothing. She sat under a lamp with her legs crossed. The lamplight fell upon her shapely shoulders.

The lawyer, getting out of his chair, walked up and down the room. He thought of his wife, the woman he loved, asleep upstairs, and of the price they had paid for their devotion to each other.

“It is barbarous, this old custom of sitting up with the dead,” he said, and, going to another part of the house, returned with a bottle of wine and two glasses.

With the wine before them the lawyer and the woman sat looking at each other. They stared boldly into each other’s eyes, each concerned with his own thoughts. A clock ticked loudly and the woman moved uneasily. By an open window the wind stirred a white curtain and tossed it back and forth above the coffin, black and ominous. He began thinking of the years of hard, unremittent labor and of the pleasures he had missed. Before his eyes danced visions of white-clad dinner tables, with men and bare-shouldered women sitting about. Again he walked up and down the room.

Upon the table lay a magazine, devoted to farm life, and upon the cover was a scene in a barn yard. A groom was leading a magnificent stallion out at the door of a red barn.

Pointing his finger at the picture, the lawyer began to talk. A new quality came into his voice. His hand played nervously up and down the table. There was a gentle swishing sound of the blown curtain across the top of the coffin.

“I saw one once when I was a boy,” he said, pointing with his finger at the stallion.

He approached and stood over her.

“It was a wonderful sight,” he said, looking down at her. “I have never forgotten it. The great animal was all life, vibrant, magnificent life. Its feet scarcely touched the ground.”

“We are like that,” he added, leaning over her. “The men of our family have that vibrant, conquering life in us.”

The woman arose from the chair and moved toward the darkened corner where the coffin stood. He followed slowly. When they had gone thus across the room she put up her hand and plead with him.

“No, no!—Think! Remember!” she whispered.

With a low laugh he sprang at her. She dodged quickly. Both of them had become silent. Among the chairs and tables they went, swiftly, silently, the pursuer and the pursued.

Into a corner of the room she got, where she could no longer elude him. Near her sat the long coffin, its ends resting on black stands made for the purpose. They struggled, and then as they stood breathless with hot startled faces, there was a crash, the sound of broken glass and the dead body of his brother with its staring eyes rolled, from the fallen coffin, out upon the floor.

(Apropos of recent criticisms of Imagism, vers libre, and modern poetry generally.)

ALICE CORBIN HENDERSON

[2] See page 23.

JEANNE D’ORGE

The Cup

The Stranger

(Eleven years)

The Kiss

(Fifteen years)

The Interpreter

(Sixteen years)

The Sealed Package

I will make it all into a package and put a heavy seal upon it, and label it “To be destroyed unopened when I am dead.”

These nine black months. These memories that must be cut away—like a cancer from the breast but without anaesthetics to deaden the pain. Cut away altogether lest they threaten life and reputation and the honor of the family.

Here is the signature of the man who caused it all, and the letter he wrote when he knew the terrible truth.

It includes a perfunctory offer of marriage which I was too proud to accept.

It also proves that I was virgin when he seduced me and protests that had he believed in my virtue he never would have touched me.

Here is the paper from the registry office recording the birth of a male child:—mother unmarried—father’s name withheld.

Here is the receipt for money paid on the adoption of a nameless child, and the promise in my own handwriting to the woman who adopted him:—never to make any further claims upon him—a resignation of all the rights of motherhood.

The rest is misery in black and white.

A diary of stoic days and nights when even dreams were wet with tears. An account of a secret sojourn in a strange city—veiled walks in twilight streets—skulking in corners—lies—deceit—trickery—truckling to convention. The copy of a prayer from Thomas-à-Kempis, and on the opposite page a character sketch of the drunken and facetious landlady in whose house the child was born.

Seal up the package.

If I look at it too long I am likely to go blind with rage at my own weakness.

I am likely to go mad and pull down upon me the pillars of society.

I am likely to go mad and destroy the world—

Seal up the package—hide it away—

Forget—forget.

The incident is closed.

Memories

[3] See page 24.

It Sojourns in a Strange Land

CHARLES ZWASKA

We were disappointed—and we had no right to be. Authorities say this organization brings the music of the nineteenth century to its logical conclusion. Logical—see? Authorities are always that. So let’s be logical and philosophical and reason that what belongs to the nineteenth has no place this far into the twentieth century. Granted. “Well, then, what do you want?” they question. I should answer The Faun or something beyond this, finding its manner and inspiration in this form—interpretive, impressionistic, compressed, emotional. Of all the Ballets presented by Diaghileff’s Ballet Russe that is, to me, the most indicative of what the future is to be, so far as ballet and ballet music is concerned. We’ve had Isadora Duncan, and Jacques Dalcrose has been at work. Following are some impressions.

L’Oiseau de Feu.—The setting an irritating green: scroll-work gates in the background. Mere finical, petty child’s scribbling in its conventionalized balancing. The characters and their work about on the same level. Bakst costumed them, but the strength of the Hunter’s garb is not carried into his action—he’s a most unvirile huntsman. And the finale! a coronation: quite the proper climax for this. Rather interesting though to have curtain fall on the incoming procession. The music—Stravinsky’s—fascinating.

Schéhérazade.—“Barbaric” they say—yes, it’s a harem scene, you know. But broad and daring as Bakst’s color is it’s not very far from the usual harem scene. The lighting was not as good as it should have been. A serious offense, for the shadows interfered with the action several times; but they aided the bizarreness of the kaleidoscopic whirl at the height of the “barbarities.” This is known as “good ensemble work”—good, yes, but unusual? No longer so. They say there are no “principals” in this very modern ballet, but it seems that one person gets the “principal parts”—I refer to Bolm. Right here I’d like to quarrel with his work—he is “principaled” too often to escape notice. His Le Negre was lithe, one necessity of the role, but it was nothing else! His supposedly ecstatic whirls would break annoyingly. A tiny dressed-up monkey. The end of his leap to Zobeide’s couch was most ungraceful, awkward. These same broken whirls, leaps, and evident stumblings—they seemed nothing else—appeared in Prince Igor. Seeing these two ballets on the same bill emphasizes this persistent failing. He, as the Desired One and the Desiring in Schéhérazade, made the infatuation rather absurd, inhuman. The Grand Eunuch, strange to say, was the human one—his wavering and final surrender of his duty to the caresses of the females! As a whole: all the passion, all the “lust,” superbly expressed human-ness—“barbaric,” perhaps, but human.

Carnaval.—A deep blue background—a background that backs. Two settees, weak spots they seemed. But nevertheless, against and into this blue came Pierrot, Schumann music, and Colombine. Pierrot seemed grotesque, absurd—lovers usually do. Excellent pantomime, then other lovers come upon the scene. Pierrot steps out of the picture into the dark outer stage, his white and spots of springtime green lying in a heap in the center. The lovers maneuver. After their not vain pursuits, momentary, yet so poignant, Colombine returns to a most itching, subtle, ecstatic melody—and with her is Arlequin!! The knave! see the curve of his back and the curve of his thighs and legs! Pierrot must be in on this! and Carnaval proceeds. Arlequin is now and then out of the picture posing on the frame, the dark fore-stage, looking on: and in such moments we have all—everything for our eyes, our ears and our hearts: color, movement, sound, in themselves emotions but also emotions of hearts that are seeking.

Les Sylphides.—Genee. In what years was she at her height? And how many generations preceded her as exponents of her particular form of the Dance? I dare say “in those days” when the “people wanted” such things they wanted them well done. “People” still want it, but evidently not done well. The background—Belasco!—well, never mind that. The Chopiniana that Rabinoff’s Russians did had at least finesse; this one has terrible ragged edges. Even the solo works, waltzes, and prelude seemed chosen with little taste—the presenting of the thing at all was offensive taste.

Prince Igor.—The red of the tents not “barbaric,” the paganism of the costumes a trifle faded, and the leaps of the warriors (Bolm, the “chief warrior,” you remember) not convincing. The mob, or “ensemble,” if you must, properly wild and abandoned. The music is the kind that you beat time to with your feet, you know—primitive I think they call it. Well, the “very moderns” failed us again—do you see?

L’Après Midi d’un Faune.—Green. Some how I was expecting purple, the hazy opaque purple of a woodland when the sun enters it from one side; and still I think that purple would have fitted the Debussy music and the mood of the faun,—a mood, of course dependent on the music. But it was green, with rather weak spots of red. This scene framed by a Greek border of pale and dark blue and white. In front of this frame, looking into the picture at the languid, piping faun, moved nymphs. They seemed part of the border—a decoration from an urn or from the walls of some temple. The faun leaves his knoll and moves into the decorative sphere of the maidens. Beautiful movement, repressed, conventionalized. A scarf is left by one of the maidens; they have all left the faun. He has nothing but this to remember them by. Returning to his mossy rock he possesses the scarf. No lover more delicately held the body of his love or with more reverence knelt toward her. The curtain lowers here—the faun is left to dream. “Now, look here, my friends,” as the Lecturer would say, stamping across the stage; “away with all this nonsense and hypocrisy, this clatter about ‘indecent,’ ‘revolting,’ ‘vicious,’ ‘offensive,’ ‘decadent,’ and such blabber! Admit that your life, you critics, living for art as you pretend to, is made up of just such things—in fact if you were honest you’d admit your entire life is wholly, first and last, rooted, aye, dwelling on just this episode, and yet you cry aloud unto the heavens ‘indecent,’ ‘revolting,’ ‘offensive’ when it is beautifully simple and much more perfectly presented before you than you’ll ever experience it yourself. And as for the substitution of the scarf, well, the psychology of the incident is perfect and the whole thing is heightened by art, my friends, art—and you of course, living as you do amongst the fleshpots and the Market Place and knowing not of the Groves of Dionysius and the Temples on the hillsides at Athens—can’t see it. Well. The gods have pity on you and may you be shown joy in the hereafter—God knows your chastity will keep you from it here.”

Le Spectre de la Rose.—Fragmentary concession to those who “loved” Les Sylphides and, botanically speaking, a “shoot” from that ballet and the (unpresented here) Papillons of Schumann. Necessary, no doubt, to remind us of our ballet history and, like historical data, necessary but uninteresting. Bakst’s bedroom setting does justify the presenting of this, however.

Soleil de Nuit.—M. Leonide Massine—Youth! If you were present at creation’s turmoil perhaps les Bergers would always have been delightful and les Paysannes always happy and colorful—and, of course, we would have had many more serious and glorious Bouffons! The purity of this ballet—color, music (Rimsky-Korsakov), dancing and pantomime—is astounding, and beautiful!

Cleopatre.—I have been to Egypt! All ages have known Cleopatra—her evil and magnificence; and none will forget that she had slaves. No age since hers can know of her allurements and the grandeur of her reign of the souls of two of her slaves as the Russians have shown them to ours! A temple in Egypt: of pillars once believed eternal, along the then sacred Nile. Amoun, one of her slaves, loving and loved by another, Ta-or, craves the caresses of the great Cleopatra! He succeeds: they are granted midst colorful revels, music made by Assyrians and dancing by dancers from Greece. The moment is too short ... he pays for it with his life. The revelers leave, and none in their indifference so cold as the Queen herself. In the thickness of a red evening, the hall deserted, one heart still beats. Ta-or grieves over her lost love—alone. I have been to Egypt ... learned the ways of women—and the world!

Petrouchka.—Primary things: red, blue, yellow; love, hate, jealousy; people and artists. All told together in a ballet whose dramatic unification finds its remarkable inspiration in the music. No doubt Stravinsky’s most important music for the stage. Pétrouchka, eternal paradox of beauty encased in ugliness. His jealousy of the Moor, who also loves the Ballerine, is the ballet, and the music. Foremost the music! Pétrouchka, in whirling frenzy alone with night and the stars; the Ballerine haunting him with piercing notes blown from a silver horn; his discovery of the Moor with his love; and the mannekins entering into the public square, halting the folk-music of the peasants and squires; Pétrouchka’s death in the snow and the appearance of his spirit. All these episodes are music. Here one gets the ingenious use of an orchestra, extraordinary combinations of instruments. Carpenter attempted this, you remember, in his Perambulator. Igor Stravinsky has accomplished it. He with Leon Bakst, is the most important figure of the Russian Triumph. They worked together to achieve Pétrouchka.

The agonizing lack of an audience excuses Diaghileff in laying aside a completely perfect matinee program in favor of one that would attract modern children with their innocent parents, but, artistically, there is no justification of this bowing to the “public” and to “morals” in the reasoning that moved them to tone down the color of the slaves in Schéhérazade. The contrast was needed: black was in the color plan, especially for Le Negre. This makes us suspicious that the other uneven and faulty spots were caused by just such managerial schemings. Seeing some the second and third times strengthened these suspicions! The journalistically “notorious faun” on its third performance (a matinee) moved less lithely and, that there be no “effrontery of good taste,” posed stupidly, stiffly, while the tense vibrating music panted for movement—for entry into life. And Cleopatre! Much as it was Americanized by being “less sensuous, etc.,” the second performance descended to mere Grand Opera pageantry, or nearer, to a Grand Opera Gala Performance vaudeville. The actual center of interest, the Queen’s couch, was draped by a still, unamourous—yet Decency and the Parents’ League be praised!—unoffensive lover.

In a strange land; so strangely treated! That prophets might be understood in another land their priests distort them that barbarians may comprehend!

RICHARD ALDINGTON

Bloomsbury Square

Epigram

LUPO DE BRAILA

“Misfit clothing”—I saw these words this morning on a small shop sign and they kept dancing before my eyes. Misfit clothing. In vain all my attempts to concentrate on the object of my visit to the Art Institute.

I sat down to search my brain for the cause of this phenomenon, and I soon recalled another such visit I once made under similar difficulties.

It was at the San Francisco Exposition. I discovered by chance the so-called Annex of the Fine Arts Building, a stable-like structure in comparison to the main building. It housed the Norwegian, Hungarian, and Spanish exhibits—by the way, almost the only ones worth seeing. At that time another vision kept me from seeing the exhibit for some moments. It seemed as if some short bald men danced along green velvet walls, each one plucking his heart beats with gusto and, after arranging them in a queer design on a crystal glass plate, offering them to the stars and children.

This recollection cleared the air and I realized that surroundings have a strong effect on me. I have come to enjoy the result of the finest faculty we possess, our imagination. I have come to admire the result of a year’s work of our Chicago Artists.

Three hundred and twenty-one paintings, says my catalog; and in order to simplify matters I decide to look at some of the most popular names first—names usually found on the juries.

Artists, according to Rodin, are different from other mortals because they love their work. Let us see: Adam Emory Albright, Alfred Juergens, Lucie Hartrath, John F. Stacey, and Dahlgreen. Each one of them has between three and seven paintings. With all that canvas they must have sailed on the most enchanting seas, and surely have brought back a holiday for our eyes and hearts.

The first one I encounter is An October Afternoon by Mr. Alfred Juergens; visions of little coral trees with hanging heads against a faint green dream sky, embroidered brown leaves in the foreground and cool blue hills like thoughtless sighs in the background, appear on the catalog page. But see what Mr. Juergens has done with this subject. I can scarcely believe my eyes. A mushroom dog in front of some formless and lifeless trees; amateur composition, thoughtless technique, and dirty color. And Mr. Juergens has a steady job on the jury. I wonder what is his reason for painting: he certainly does not love his work. Something suddenly interferes with my thoughts on this subject: it is the jingling of coin in a visitor’s pocket. I look around and find number 174 by the same gentleman, and it reminds me of a cat walking on the keyboard of a stringless piano.

They say this is the best exhibition of the Chicago Artists. If it is, Mr. Juergens has done nothing to make it good. He has six such things on the walls.

Mr. Albright, a painter of children playing in the open, has seven pictures in the exhibit, five of them on one wall. One is called The Barn Yard. The name reminds me of the reproduction of a painting by Malchevski I saw in a Polish library a few days ago. It was called Art in the Back Yard and showed a little satyr playing a flute for a little girl and a few turkeys. There was romance in the fence boards, and marvelously clean colors; it shouted life and joy. Mr. Albright’s old-maid’s conception of childhood made me feel sad. His shapeless hens, his flattened children on the wall, weak composition, dirty colors, and no sign of life in the whole thing, or feeling of out-of-door air. Almost disgusted, I look further:—A Summer Dream. I look for the dream and find it in the fact that the biggest of the boys has borrowed his older brother’s head, and the painting is full of some dirty yellow color. A horrible dream. I wish Mr. Albright as well as Mr. Juergens would at least clean their pallets if they can not change their conception of things.

Next I visit Sunshine Alley, by Lucie Hartrath. It is the alley of poverty of ideas and bad color. Miss Hartrath evidently wants to paint what she sees, but she does not happen to see anything startling. She, too, has six such things on the walls.

The mediocre work of John F. Stacey and Anna L. Stacey really deserves no attention. Especially bad is the portrait of John by Anna (there is little love expressed in it) and The Beach Road, Belvedere, California, by John, takes the prize for being the poorest painting in the exhibition. John F. has only one painting that looks as if it were made by a man who loves his work—The Golden Hills of California.

Next comes a man I dislike to place among the lollipop venders—he being a very nice quiet and honest man; but why does Mr. Dahlgreen paint?

Now, when I come to Messrs. Griffith and Irvine, I find their anaemic work quite good in comparison to the work I have seen until now. Of course, I did not expect paintings with as wide a scope as the work of the Zubiaure Brothers, Zuologa, Edward Munch, Hodler, Welti, Malchevski, Franz, Stuck, Fritz Erler, Putz, Elie Reppin, etc., to say nothing of the latest developments of modern art and ideals—I mean the disciples of Cezane, Matisse, Van Gogh, Gauguin, etc.—because Chicago is still a frontier town. All the latest improvements plus the Art Institute cannot change its real character: a frontier town with frontier town ideals. In this case, all criticism being comparative, I did not look for the highest standard. Had I done so, three words might have been my comprehensive criticism. As it is, all I expected was clear feeling, clean color, good design, and a certain amount of delicacy in handling. This has been fulfilled only in a measure by Mr. Bartlett, whose strength and individuality places him at the head of the landscape painters exhibiting. He reminds me very much of Trubner, especially his Autumn Afternoon. I also like his daring composition in Under Chinese Tower, Munich. Pauline Palmer’s work is full of broadly-painted sunshine, though the foliage in some of her trees seems too heavy and shapeless.

Next in merit I think comes Marie Lokke, whose yellow sail in The Old Pier takes the wind out of many a neighbor. Hermann More’s A Summer Afternoon, is a good example of clear feeling and clean color. I also like Mr. Kraft’s delicate Silver Mist and An Autumn Afternoon, and Mr. Ingerles’s, The Fascinating Ozarks.

There is also a class of painters who can best be described as able and honest. At the head of these artists stands Mr. Peyraud and Edward B. Butler. There are also Frank V. Dudley, H. Leon Roecker, Edgar S. Cameron, J. H. Carlsen, Lawton Parker, Charles Francis Brown, A. H. Schmidt, William Wendt, Alfred Jansson, Alson Clark, Karl A. Buehr, Grace Ravlin, Edgar Payne and the following portrait painters: our own Franz Hals, Mr. Christian Abrahamsen, Oscar Gross, Gordon Stevensen, Cecil Clark Davis and Arvid Nieholm.

Mr. Werner’s mannerism is too monotonous.

Mr. Ufers and Mr. Higgins have taken yellow ochre into the open and made good use of it. I have taken these two men separately because both have done good work and I expect much improvement in the near future. Their work at present looks too much like illustrations. Miss Dorothy Loeb is the only one who has a real sense of rhythm in line.

The Chicago Society of Artists, which runs this exhibition every year, seems to be controlled at present by a number of men who have inherited a long-discarded weak imitation of a technique once used by Segantini. They have excluded almost everything that showed some originality and feeling, but have accepted and hung a few very poor and meaningless things, so that they may shine by contrast. However, it seems to me they are at the end of the rope. The public refuses to buy the dope and their best men have sent in nothing to this show. I refer to Clarkson, Reynolds, Betts, Oliver Dennet Grover, Henderson, Rittman; and Lawton Parker has only one little canvas.

(John Lane Company, New York)

A roomy garret with a wee dirty window in the sloping roof. Some trunks with old fine clothes and older musty books—books of hymns and sermons, most of them were. Broken limp chairs. A fire that would not “draw.” Bits of worn carpets on the floor. A smelly oil lamp on one of the trunks. Such was the place of my solitary confinement, for rebellion, at least once a week. I admit to having even deliberately whistled and danced a highland fling on dreary Sundays in order to provoke my God-fearing, Sabbath-respecting elders to send me to the garret! How could they, unsuspecting, unimaginative Olympians, know that it was one of the places where I had real joy?

In the smallest trunk there were back numbers of Punch. Pencils and paper were there also. When the steps sounded no more on the stairs, and I had stopped my stage crying, I would take out my drawing materials and an issue of Punch and start to copy the easiest drawings I could find.

Among the artists there was none that I liked better than Phil May. His sense of the comic and his economy of line appealed to me and my lack of ability to draw. His Cockney folk gave me more pleasure than any of the staid humans I knew. He....

But I forget myself. I started out to write of Neil Lyons.... All the words I have spun for the prelude are merely to say that during my re-reading of the work of Neil Lyons in the past few months I have been struck again and again by its likeness to the drawings of Phil May: the same joy, the same delight was there in the reading as there was in the contemplation of the drawings.

Now, this likeness not only existed in the handling of the subject, but also in the choice thereof. The Cockney men, women and children that Phil May has drawn Neil Lyons has written about. The pictures of the peasantry that May has left are alike in line and spirit to those Lyons has drawn verbally in Cottage Pie and Moby Lane.

If you know Phil May’s work think of one of his drawings of a fat middle-aged woman, and then listen to this drawing of another, by Neil Lyons:

Don’t you recognize the same swift, sure lines?

But I must get away from this parallel. Never at his best is the artist as great as the writer. There is no line or collection of lines in May’s work to match this in Lyons’:

That sentence is only a shadow of the quiet poignancy of the tale that follows it. Oh, the wonder of the man who can see every side of the common people and set them down with such verve, such relish, such keen poignancy and hilarious joy! Let me quote from the story of blind Unity Pike, “the wanton”:

I would fain go on quoting, showing you the wit of this man, gentle, and on occasion barbed and stinging: his humor, kindly, of the soil; his great jollity and high good spirits. I would indeed like to introduce you to “Clara,” the hussy, who is fat and motherly and with a heart and mind unbounded. I would like to take you to “Arthur’s,” the midnight coffee-stall where you would meet with street-walkers and soldiers, scavengers and tramps and hear from the lips of a gutter snipe one of the most perfect and touching love tales ever told.

Oh, but you must read them all yourself. Will you, if I give you the names of the various volumes? Here they are, then: Arthur’s, Sixpenny Pieces, Cottage Pie, Clara, Simple Simon, Moby Lane.

John Lane, he of the Bodley Head Publishing Company, who gave the world The Yellow Book, the works of Anatole France and Stephen Leacock, is the publisher.

I wait expectantly your showers of gratitude!

—Allan Ross Macdougall.

Piano Triumphant

The artistic outgrowth of forty-five years of constant improvement—a piano conceived to better all that has proven best in others.

GEO. P. BENT GRAND

Could you but compare it with all others, artistically it must be your choice. Each day proves this more true.

Geo. P. Bent Grand, Style “A”—a small Grand, built for the home—your home.

Geo. P. Bent Company

Manufacturers of Artistic Pianos
Retailers of Victrolas
214 South Wabash Avenue, Chicago

 

Harold Bauer

and the Mason & Hamlin Tension Resonator

Having achieved in the Mason & Hamlin, the most beautiful piano tone the world has ever known, its makers, many years ago, set before themselves the problem of maintaining for all time, that which they had created.

A system of highly tempered steel rods, running from various points of the grand piano rim to a common center, was evolved and termed the Mason & Hamlin Tension Resonator.

This construction, which is to be found in no other piano, because patented, is the only known method of permanently preventing deterioration of tone quality through the otherwise inevitable flattening of the sounding-board.

Harold Bauer was the first artist to use a Mason & Hamlin Tension Resonator Piano in public. In the fifteen years which have followed that epoch making event there have been but few really great artists who have not enthusiastically endorsed this great master’s final choice.

CABLE PIANO COMPANY, Wabash & Jackson.

 

A LITTLE EDITORIAL

By Jessie Quitman

Books are not articles of merchandise. They are the projected materialization of the human spirit.

The hands of congenial souls alone must touch them.

The spirits of books shrivel and droop in department stores and shops.

Miss Cabaniss of the Venetian Library does not sell or loan books.

She shares them with you.

In her salon in the Venetian Building she may be found most any hour of the day.

There also will be found the intellectual artistocracy of Chicago. After converse, any book may be taken home, in assurance and without fear, for it has been touched by no unholy hands.