The Little Review, March 1916 (Vol. 3, No. 1)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 67467 *** THE LITTLE REVIEW Literature Drama Music Art MARGARET C. ANDERSON EDITOR MARCH 1916 Cheap Helen Hoyt Art and Anarchism Margaret C. Anderson Stravinsky’s “Grotesques” Amy Lowell Vibrant Life Sherwood Anderson Don’ts for Critics Alice Corbin Henderson Poems: Jeanne D’Orge The Cup The Stranger The Kiss The Interpreter The Sealed Package Memories The Russian Ballet Charles Zwaska Editorials Propaganda Poems: Richard Aldington Bloomsbury Square Epigram Lollipop Venders Lupo de Braila Vers Libre Prize Contest A. Neil Lyons Allan Ross Macdougall The Reader Critic Published Monthly 15 cents a copy MARGARET C. ANDERSON, Publisher Fine Arts Building CHICAGO $1.50 a year Entered as second-class matter at Postoffice, Chicago THE LITTLE REVIEW VOL. III MARCH, 1916 NO. 1 Copyright, 1916, by Margaret C. Anderson Cheap HELEN HOYT After all, what does a man amount to? It only takes some twenty—thirty—years or so To make a man, with everything complete. Longer, it is true, than growing cabbages Or currant bushes, or a cow,— Or a fair-sized hog; But not so very long, and there’s always time. When breeding’s good we get them fast enough.... Merely a matter of waiting till they grow.... Some food and clothes must be supplied— And shelter—and all that— But it’s surprising (in fact, without statistics, A person would scarcely believe it possible) How very little a man can live upon From birth until he reaches the enlisting age. For first he has to be born, of course, And that takes time,—makes us some trouble too— But it’s a simple matter on the whole, And not expensive: not at all expensive: You see, the women are the ones that attend to this And they work cheap. They _pour_ men from their bodies. Always pleased to undertake affairs of this sort, Women are,—O, most delighted. It’s their way. Willing and lavish: it doesn’t cost them much. They only have to give some flesh and bone And blood; and perhaps, one might say, A scrap of soul, to make the creature go; But these things nature furnishes; They’re free and plenty: And after a man’s once started, he’s not long growing; There’s always a generation on the way: More than we want, sometimes, or there is room for. Lord, how they swarm! In the cities like flies. If only horses were so plentiful! If only horses could be foddered so lightly And bedded so many to a stall as men! Certainly, men are less of a bother And also, think what men do for you that a horse can’t. You cannot teach a horse to hold a gun. A horse can’t shoot or burn or pillage or murder well in the least. And too, a man has this convenient feature, That you can make him go without whip or lash. You only have to charm him the right way. Other animals you charm by dazzling radiance: With men it’s always colors and bright sounds (Slogans and bands and banners are the best). Why, you can play upon them with the beat of drums Till they are got to an energy and fury fine as a bull’s How they will fight for you then! Tigers and wolves and wild-cats (Considering differences in weight and bulks of meat) Wouldn’t fight fiercer or longer or more willingly. You never could train a horse to be so clever. And therefore it’s curious, when you think of it, That horses should come so much more dear than men. To be sure, there isn’t the cheap source of supply Or the same over-stock as in the case of men: A horse is harder to raise and more expense— More trouble; more of a responsibility: But nevertheless, allowing for all this, It still is curious, that difference in value.... Now isn’t it? Rather? Art and Anarchism 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. Stravinsky’s Three Pieces, “Grotesques,” for String Quartets[1] AMY LOWELL First Movement Thin-voiced, nasal pipes Drawing sound out and out Until it is a screeching thread, Sharp and cutting, sharp and cutting, It hurts. Whee-e-e! Bump! Bump! Tong-ti-bump! There are drums here, Banging, And wooden shoes beating the round, grey stones Of the market-place. Whee-e-e! Sabots slapping the worn, old stones, And a shaking and cracking of dancing bones, Clumsy and hard they are, And uneven, Losing half a beat Because the stones are slippery. Bump-e-ty-tong! Whee-e-e! Tong! The thin Spring leaves Shake to the banging of shoes. Shoes beat, slap, Shuffle, rap, And the nasal pipes squeal with their pig’s voices, Little pig’s voices Weaving among the dancers, A fine, white thread Linking up the dancers. Bang! Bump! Tong! Petticoats, Stockings, Sabots, Delirium flapping its thigh-bones; Red, blue, yellow, Drunkenness steaming in colours; Red, yellow, blue, Colours and flesh weaving together, In and out, with the dance, Coarse stuffs and hot flesh weaving together. Pig’s cries white and tenuous, White and painful, White and— Bump! Tong! Second Movement Pale violin music whiffs across the moon, A pale smoke of violin music blows over the moon, Cherry petals fall and flutter, And the white Pierrot, Wreathed in the smoke of the violins, Splashed with cherry petals falling, falling, Claws a grave for himself in the fresh earth With his finger-nails. Third Movement An organ growls in the heavy roof-groins of a church, It wheezes and coughs. The nave is blue with incense, Writhing, twisting, Snaking over the heads of the chanting priests. _Requiem aeternam dona ei, Domine_; The priests whine their bastard Latin And the censers swing and click. The priests walk endlessly Round and round, Droning their Latin Off the key. The organ crashes out in a flaring chord, And the priests hitch their chant up half a tone. _Dies illa, dies irae,_ _Calamitatis et miseriae,_ _Dies magna et amara valde._ A wind rattles the leaded windows. The little pear-shaped candle-flames leap and flutter, _Dies illa, dies irae_, The swaying smoke drifts over the altar, _Calamitatis et miseriae_, The shuffling priests sprinkle holy water, _Dies magna et amara valde_. And there is a stark stillness in the midst of them Stretched upon a bier. His ears are stone to the organ, His eyes are flint to the candles, His body is ice to the water. Chant, priests, Whine, shuffle, genuflect, He will always be as rigid as he is now Until he crumbles away in a dust heap. _Lacrymosa dies illa,_ _Qua resurget ex favilla_ _Judicandus homo reus._ Above the grey pillars, the roof is in darkness. ---------- [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. Vibrant Life 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. Don’ts for Critics[2] (_Apropos of recent criticisms of Imagism, vers libre, and modern poetry generally._) ALICE CORBIN HENDERSON Don’t confuse vers libre and Imagism. The two are not identical. One pertains to verse, the other to vision. Don’t attempt to “place” Imagism until you know what it is. Don’t substitute irritability for judgement. Don’t attempt to establish absolutes—positive or negative—by precedents of a half or a quarter of a century, or a mere decade ago. Don’t be a demagogue. Don’t try to speak the last word—you can’t. Don’t be dishonest with yourself. Analyze your own inhibitions. Don’t believe that beauty is conventionality, or that the classic poets chose only “nice” subjects. Don’t forget that the age that produced the cathedrals produced also the grotesques. Don’t be afraid to expand. Don’t deny the poet his folly, or expect him to appear always pompously on stilts. Think of the poets who have fun in their make-up, and you think of some of the greatest—Shakespeare, Chaucer, Villon,—(by no means excepting Lewis Carroll, whose Jabberwock is almost “_pure_” poetry and the poetic prototype of much excellent modern painting.) Don’t relax your own appreciation of humor to the soft, easy level of the newspapers. Don’t squirm when a poet is a satirist. We need the keen vision. Not all pessimism is unhealthy, and not all optimism healthy. Don’t think that Spoon River is more sordid than Athens, Greece, or Athens, Georgia, than Sparta or Troy, or—the Lake Shore Drive. Don’t think that the poet must always _copy_ something or somebody, and that something usually of a recent date. Correspondences, to be valuable, must be genuine and of the spirit, rather than of the letter.—When Mr. Powys brackets the names of Chaucer and Edgar Lee Masters, he is illuminating. When Mr. Hervey or Mr. Willard-Huntington-Wright discover each a different one of Mr. Masters’ copybooks, and publish their discoveries, the absurdity is manifest. Picture Mr. Masters sitting with Robinson’s book in one hand, and somebody’s Small Town in the other, inditing Spoon River with his teeth! Don’t expect a poet to repeat himself indefinitely, however much you may admire his earlier work. You may appreciate his later work in time. Don’t condemn the work of a man whose books you have not read. Unfortunately there are no civil service examinations for critics. Don’t think that competition is unhealthy for the poet, or that his poetry suffers thereby. Don’t be confident, as Mr. Arthur J. Eddy said at the “Poetry” dinner, that no good thing is ever lost. Ask Mr. Eddy, who is a lawyer, to prove that no good thing is ever lost. Don’t expect poets to refrain from writing about one another—even in praise. If you don’t enjoy the feast, don’t eat it. When the poets tear one another to pieces, don’t you enjoy it? But if, like most critics of poetry, you are a poet also, take warning. Be prepared! Don’t wait until a poet is dead before you discover him. Don’t gnash your teeth and expect the public to take it as a sign of force and insight. Don’t forget that prosody is derived from poetry, not poetry from prosody. Don’t waste your time trying to squeeze exceptions into the rule. Remember that exceptions in poetry, as in music, are the variations that give life. Don’t measure English poetry by English poetic standards alone. Consider the sources of English poetry, and don’t begin with Chaucer, or stop with Tennyson. Don’t think that English or American poetry may not assimilate as much new beauty and richness from foreign sources in the future as it has in the past. Don’t consider rhyme as the be-all and end-all of poetry. Rhyme is sometimes as beautiful as the reflection of trees in water; it is sometimes as monotonous as a stitch in time. Don’t substitute vituperation for the “critique raisonné”—almost an unknown quantity in this country. Don’t look first at the publisher’s imprint. Don’t cling to convictions that you fear to have upset. Don’t, because you fail to share the convictions of a fellow critic, think that he is a bigger fool than you are—unless you can prove it. Don’t imagine that printing a poem as prose makes it prose. A musical masterpiece may be distorted by unrhythmic playing, yet the composer’s rhythm remains intact in the score. Don’t object to conceptions in poetry that you might find striking and powerful in bronze or plaster. “The Hog Butcher of the World” is one picturesque attitude of Chicago.... Is the truth unbearable? One may still love Chicago in spite of its dirty face. Don’t try to establish even a distant kinship between poetry and ethics. The relation is illicit. Don’t tell the poet what he must, or must not, write about—he doesn’t hear you. Don’t be tedious. Don’t take ten times as much space as the poet to prove that he is a bad poet. Your sin against the public is more grievous, and your art less, than his. Don’t make up your review from the publisher’s advance notice. The poet might like to know what you think about his work—not what he told the publisher to tell you. Don’t expect a poet to punch a time-clock, or record only the emotions of his fellow townspeople. Don’t limit a poet to primary emotions, or find decadence in a refinement that may exceed your own. Don’t fancy that brutality is strength, or delicacy weakness. Don’t fancy that the poem that gives up its meaning quickest gives most, or lives longest. Don’t make the mistake of believing that vers libre is easier to write than rhymed metrical verse—or the reverse. Don’t think because you say a thing, it is so. Your venture is as uncertain as the poet’s. Authority, unless bestowed by the Mayor, is the gift of time; and then not unassailable. Don’t reverence only dead poets or be certain that the dead poets would think just as you do about contemporary poets. Don’t discard the past for the future, or the future for the past. We learn about the earth from the telescope, and about the stars from the microscope. DON’T be as negative as this list, or sit on the fence. It is better to be on the wrong side than to straddle. ---------- [2] See page 23. Poems[3] JEANNE D’ORGE The Cup My body is no more clay But rapture—touched and golden: The Cup—the Cup From which my lover drinks And drinking makes immortal. The Stranger (_Eleven years_) Oh you spoil everything! I am glad you are only my teacher— My mother would know better: She would not make me treat my friend badly as you do; She would let me go to the Park and ride on the Merry-go-round with him; Even if he is a sailor and a stranger he is grown-up and kind: What harm can he do me? Would he beat me? Would he run away with me in his sloop? Would he murder me? You shake your head and say nothing! You have nothing to say— And now you have spoiled everything. You scared me so that when he came as he promised I edged away and hid my face and almost cried— He couldn’t understand and of course he was hurt and went away And I never shall see him again— It is all spoiled. And you spoiled it—by saying nothing—nothing— You never say anything— You never speak a true word. The Kiss (_Fifteen years_) I shut my eyes and remember He kissed me, My playmate suddenly kissed me Again and again— Now I remember all I knew long ago.... And more. Kisses take your breath, stab to the heart with sweetest, strangest pain; Oh, you can grow faint under their sweetness— What will the Bridal night be.... A rush through terror and fire and death Into swift heaven. The Interpreter (_Sixteen years_) I wish there were Someone Who would hear confession: Not a priest—I do not want to be told of my sins; Not a mother—I do not want to give sorrow; Not a friend—she would not know enough; Not a lover—he would be too partial; Not God—he is far away; But Someone that should be friend, lover, mother, priest, God all in one And a Stranger besides—who would not condemn nor interfere, Who when everything is said from beginning to end Would show the reason of it all And tell you to go ahead And work it out your own way. 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 The Beauty and the Doom of that last day— No heart was in me but an empty gaping wound That reddened all the hours. We were afraid to speak: to look: to touch— At dusk within the house a dog barked wildly And at that—I heard a voice—a wizard’s voice That gave me back my heart. You spoke—and words were wands that touched and changed Passion to glory—thistles into palms You even made the silly barking of a dog Eternal in mine ears. So now the mangiest pup that howls about the world Has voice and power and magic To rend my heart in twain Or bid it rise and forth again. ---------- [3] See page 24. The Russian Ballet: 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! Editorials _THE ESSENTIAL THING._ THE LITTLE REVIEW is a magazine of Art and Revolution. If you ask me which it believes in most I shall have to say—Art. Because there is no real revolution unless it is born of the same spirit which produces real art. A man like Bill Haywood doesn’t agree with this. “Why do you ask why some one doesn’t start the revolution?” he says; “don’t you see that we’re in the midst of a revolution now?” No, I don’t see it. I see evolution at work in labor—not revolution. But I see something more than evolution at work in the arts—music, painting, poetry. “... to obtain victory over man and circumstance there is no other way but that of feeding one’s own exaltation and magnifying one’s own dream of beauty or of power.” You can argue that D’Annunzio, who said this, is neither a very great man nor a very great artist. Nevertheless it is what Beethoven did; and it is what Jeanne d’Arc did.... It is what Bill Haywood does; but it is not what most labor leaders do, or what most radicals do. It is not what the laborers themselves do. How horrible it is to realize that when a man is slaving for his very life he can not be selective in what he does, that he has no dream left to magnify, and yet that he must have or perish.... This is why I would go to hear John Cowper Powys even if he spoke in such a benighted place as the Hebrew Institute. Boycotts are important, but they will not help a revolution as a dream will. Mr. Powys will help you to find both an exaltation and a dream.... “_DON’TS FOR CRITICS._” I went to a meeting of the Friday Club the other day, where Mary Aldis was to read a very good paper which she called “A Passionate Inquiry into Imagism.” After she had finished, Harriet Monroe rose to defend the poetry of H. D.—poetry which Mrs. Aldis had confessed left her unmoved. Miss Monroe “explained” the miracle of such poetry as H. D’s _Oread_ so that even those who don’t “get” these things ought to have understood. And still—what is the use? I am convinced that the secret and the beauty of the Imagists lies somehow _in the look of the words_, and that if you have only a feeling for the sounds of words you will never love Imagism. Witter Bynner, who was also there, made an amusing little speech about how the Imagists substitute color for sound, sensation for emotion, and concentrate upon technique instead of upon that for which technique is intended. And then Alice Corbin Henderson had the last word. “After all the discussion about Imagism I am surprised to find that no one really seems to know what it is!... When Mrs. Aldis told me the title of her paper I said that what I should like would be a dispassionate inquiry. She said she didn’t think that possible—apparently it isn’t; but as I was thinking over the many heated criticisms of Imagism and modern poetry that have appeared lately, I began to make a list of Don’ts for the critics.” (They are printed on another page). “Of course, if the critics can’t find out what Imagism is there isn’t any need telling them; though it might be well to point out again that it isn’t a matter of technique: it is a matter of vision.” _A TRIBUTE._ Jeanne D’Orge, who makes her first appearance in print in the present issue, has the semblance of a fountain laced with colored flames.... But you dip a hand in the laced water and—it is chilled and edged. There is a defiant, battered God with many swords beneath her casual flow of words—a God that sometimes suddenly cries out, as at the end of her _Sealed Package_. The poems she has in the present number are part of a series called _The Torch_, in which with sledge-hammer, burning accurateness she paints the emotions of a woman, from childhood to womanhood—a woman who is an utter wistful-lipped pagan. M. B. Propaganda _BIRTH CONTROL_ Margaret Sanger’s case has been dismissed, “because she is not a disorderly person”—and what has been gained for the issue of birth control? Nothing, except perhaps a little education through publicity; and that appears to be very little when you reflect what has just happened to young Dr. Long, now lying in jail in Chicago because of an abortion which resulted in the death of his wife. Think of a society that dares to meddle in people’s lives to the extent of making them face death rather than face a scandal. Think of a doctor (the cad by the name of Goldstine, I believe) who _notifies the police_ as the proper agents to deal with such a tragedy. Think of a public which makes it a crime for these operations to be performed intelligently and without danger of blood poisoning. Think of physicians who will not fight for their right to do this. And think of splendid Dr. Haiselden! Margaret Sanger has been “forgiven” by the government, but the statutes regarding family limitation remain the same. Any unfortunate unknown can be whisked into jail for propagating birth control, just as usual. Mrs. Sanger didn’t even demand redress for her husband, who spent a month in prison. Surely he was entitled to a dismissal on the same grounds—more entitled to it, even in the eyes of the law: he had never circulated the pamphlets or in any way agitated for birth control. He is an artist, not a propagandist. But he served his sentence, and nothing was done or is being done about it. Mrs. Sanger means to go on with her work. What does the government mean to do about it? Emma Goldman is about to stand trial for the same “offense.” In her case there will be no “influential” women rushing back and forth to Washington to interview the President in her behalf. I only wish there would be. It would insure her freedom for the next year, and it would be so amusing to figure out on what grounds the Good Presbyterian could effect the release of the Arch Anarchist. But Emma Goldman will fight her case alone, and on its merits. If she does not succeed in effecting a revision of the penal code regarding the whole matter of birth control she will spend the next year in prison, I understand. You can all help by sending your protests to Magistrate Simms and also by giving your support to Dr. Long and Dr. Haiselden or any other person who gets involved in these laws of the dark ages. “_THE BEAUTIFUL GESTURE_” Why do you object to Jean Crones’ reasoning? I reprint his second letter, transposed into English: Why did I do it? While in Europe millions of Christians are slaughtering each other in the most bloody massacre, and in this free country thousands of men and women are tramping the streets without food and shelter, and at the same time the church holds dinners that cost $15 a cover, beginning with Beluga caviar and champagne—the money which was beggared from poor working men and women, the money which the blood of poor workers has run for. These conditions are a scandal. This is the failure of Christianity—an insult to honesty and a challenge to humanity. Let the church answer my charges toward the world and I shall stand for the charges made against me. _MOTOR BUSSES ON CHICAGO BOULEVARDS._ There is really a definite plan on foot for this miracle. A Motor Bus Company has been formed, and the necessary certificates from the State Public Utilities Commission secured. Its plan is to operate from the south end of Jackson Park to the north end of the city limits. People who haven’t limousines, who can’t afford taxis, and who can’t possibly walk the whole distance of the parks, will be able to drive through the beautiful parts of the city—the _only_ beautiful parts, it is necessary to add. For ten cents they can have an astounding romance. They can sit on top of an omnibus, under the sun or the stars, and watch Lake Michigan stretching out to the other side of the world. That is, they can do this if the Park Commissioners decide to allow them. Some of these commissioners raise the objection that motor busses will add seriously to the traffic congestion. That is true, but how is the thing managed in New York? Fifth Avenue is narrower than Michigan, and it is always more crowded. Other commissioners object to the wear and tear on the boulevards which have not been constructed for such heavy traffic. But the Chicago Motor Bus Company “has agreed to pay the Lincoln Park Commissioners $1,300 a year for each mile of their route and the South Park Commissioners $1,000 a year per mile.” The thing that really halts the plan at present is the attitude of a couple of private citizens who complain to the South Park Board that motor busses will destroy the beauty of the boulevards! You know the type of mind whose thinking runs in such channels? The type that doesn’t give a hang who pays the taxes which maintain the boulevards; the type that is fond of talking about democracy and what great things we do for the foreigner in America. Of the men who rhyme, so large a number are cursed with suburban comforts. A villa and books never made a poet; they do but tend to the building up of the respectable virtues; and for the respectable virtues poetry has but the slightest use. To roam in the sun and air with vagabonds, to haunt the strange corners of cities, to know all the useless and improper, and amusing people who are alone very much worth knowing; to live, as well as to observe life; or, to be shut up in hospital, drawn out of the rapid current of life into a sordid and exasperating inaction; to wait, for a time, in the ante-room of death; it is such things as these that make for poetry. —_Arthur Symons._ Poems RICHARD ALDINGTON Bloomsbury Square I walk round Bloomsbury Square. Bright sky over Bloomsbury Square; Bright fluttering leaves Between the sober houses. I carry my morning letters, Some telling of lives spoiled and cramped, Some telling of lives hopeful and gay, Some full of yearning for London And our wider life. In Bloomsbury Square The worms of a little moth Are spinning their Cocoons, Weaving them out of bright yellow silk And bits of plane bark Into strong, comfortable houses. But hundreds of them Have wandered on to the iron fence And go wearily wandering, Spending a little silk here And a little silk there, And at last dropping dead from weariness.... “Our wider life”— That is our wider life: To wander like blind worms Spending our fine useless golden silk And at last dropping dead from weariness. Blue sky over Bloomsbury Square; Bright fluttering leaves Between the sober houses. Epigram Rain rings break on the pool And white rain drips from the reeds Which shake and murmur and bend; The wind-tossed wistaria falls. The red-beaked water fowl Cower beneath the lily leaves; And a grey bee, stunned by the storm, Clings to my sleeve. Lollipop Venders 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. A Vers Libre Prize Contest Through the generosity of a friend, THE LITTLE REVIEW is enabled to offer an unusual prize for poetry—possibly the first prize extended to free verse. The giver is “interested in all experiments, and has followed the poetry published in THE LITTLE REVIEW with keen appreciation and a growing admiration for the poetic form known as _vers libre_.” The conditions are as follows: Contributions must be received by April 15th. They must not be longer than twenty-five lines. They must be sent anonymously with stamps for return. The name and address of the author must be fixed to the manuscript in a sealed envelope. It should be borne in mind that free verse is wanted—verse having beauty of rhythm, not merely prose separated into lines. There will be three judges, the appointing of whom has been left to the editor of THE LITTLE REVIEW. (Their names will be given in the next issue, as we are hurrying this announcement to press without having had time to consult anyone.) There will be two prizes of $25 each. They are offered not as a first and second prize, but for “the two best short poems in free verse form.” As there will probably be a large number of poems to read, we suggest that contributors adhere closely to the conditions of the contest. A. Neil Lyons (_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: “She was forty years old at a venture. She had lots of mouth and a salmon-coloured face and a pretence of a nose and small watery eyes. All these amenities were built up on a triple foundation of chin, which was matched by an exceeding amplitude of bosom and waist.” 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’: “Mrs. Godge, who was lately the mother of twin babies, is now the mother of memories.” 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 imagine poor old Unity at this period of her life as having been a little, fresh, dark-haired maiden of Quaker habit. I know she must have been beautiful because ALL young things are beautiful. I imagine this poor bound soul in the dark with its toil and its thoughts—half-formed thoughts, half-formed memories, half-formed wishes. Nothing real about her or within her save the darkness. And I can imagine how it was, therefore, that—— “Yes! They found Jack Munsey in her cottage. They found him in the night. And so, in the name of Christ, whose name they give to all their wickedness—that Christ, who forgave a woman that was not blind for sins beside which this sin of Unity’s was pure and white—in the name of this God, I say, they seized her sightless, wondering soul and threw it, a sacrifice, to those bloody wolves they call their virtue.” 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._ The Reader Critic _ANARCHY_ _Alice Groff, Philadelphia_: Anarchy is scientifically a reductio ad absurdum and those who claim to be anarchists are self-deceivers,—minds that cannot complete a circuit of reason. There is no place in reason for anarchy, hence there is not and cannot be an anarchist on a basis of reason. All who call themselves so are either _archists_ of the most rabid sort or helpless flies in the sticky syrup of laissez faire. The only professed anarchists that make any impression upon the world are of three kinds: either they are spirits of revolt of the most bitterly, materialistically tyrannical sort; or they are those who suffer with the oppressed and strive individually to set them free, even to the point of _self_-martyrdom; or they are sentimentalists who maunder maudlinly on about love and justice and yet do absolutely nothing to bring about the love of justice or the justice of love, either in their preaching or their practice. But none of these are really anarchists, they are only varieties of _archists_ who wish to impose their _own_ social ideals upon the social order in place of those that already prevail. The whole story of social evolution in a nutshell is as follows: every phase of the social order at any stage of social evolution is maintained by a social ego or group sufficiently powerful to dominate the rest of the surrounding social body,—and this phase can be changed only by revolution—bloodless or otherwise,—on the part of a new social ego desiring this change and developing power to establish and maintain it. Now the only way in which such a social ego can develop such power is by obtaining control of _the means of living_,—food, clothing, shelter, and the natural and financial resources back of these means; and this control can be obtained only by _archists_,—_dominationists_,—organized into a social ego or group that is a unit on any special social ideal. Rebellions come and rebellions go, but the only rebellion that ever reaches successful revolution is made by a social ego powerful enough to get control of the necessities of life _by force_,—force material, intellectual, or psychic. This disposes forever of the professed repudiation of force by the philosophical anarchists, so-called. As for the poetic anarchists, who draw moving pictures of the beautiful time to come, when humanity will voluntarily organize to abolish all man-made law (which _they_ consider the only social evil, not realizing that the evil is not in law, per se, but in the _kind_ of law), and who look to “Mother Nature” for social guidance,—these will wait and look till the crack of doom, in vain. For “Mother Nature” is an old-wife of incredible stupidity, socially considered, and must needs be pulled up by the hair of her head at every whip-stitch, by her ever-evolving offspring, in order that they may transform her social stupidity into scientific truth. Social evolution depends entirely upon the discovery of such scientific truth and its application to the social order, and such application can be made only step by step through a social ego powerful enough to compel such application. From this it may be seen that by whatever name we may call ourselves,—monarchists, democrats, anarchists,—we are really _archists_ striving to impose our ideals as social egos upon the social order, and succeeding—only when we can get control of the means of living—in dominating the rest of the social body with them,—until a new social ego gets the power to cry “The king is dead! Long live the king!” It, of course, goes without saying that no social dominance has ever been entirely wise or beneficent, and that until very recently in social history there has been no knowledge of sociological scientific truth to speak of upon which to base social domination. But the hope of the world lies in the ever-progressing discovery of such truth, and in its application to the social order by ever-evolving social egos that will more and more base their social ideals upon such truth, gradually dominating the whole social order with ideals so based. _Anonymous_: After having read your “A Deeper Music” in the February issue I wondered whether you had ever heard Mr. de Pachmann play the piano. There is nothing in the world like it—nothing more wonderful. I am not speaking of an ebony Mason and Hamlin alone on a stage, but of any piano at all, with that madman bending his head over the keys of it. I feel sure that had you heard him you would have included him in your article and would not have put words into Bauer’s mouth. You would have known that it is possible to play the piano very badly and play it more beautifully than any one else; both of these in one afternoon. The design of sound! But he, too, is becoming passé like Paderewski. But there is little likelihood of a type arising from these two. Do you know of any one who plays the piano as Casals plays the ’cello? Have you looked at any of Scriabine’s later piano pieces? I wonder if he expresses any of the moods which you prophesy will be caught by some new composer. I knew a boy in Petrograd who went to the conservatory every day with a volume of Scriabine and one of Bach under his arm. We called him the “Scriabine chap.” He probably has had thirty-second quavers punched into him by a German machine gun, for I am sure he couldn’t or didn’t dare be as loyal to both Nicholas and Wilhelm as he was to Scriabine and Johann S. B. _Yes, I have heard Pachmann many times, and he was always wonderful. I meant, of course, to put him in the article, but at the last minute he slipped my mind ... perhaps because I was trying to write of a “deeper” music, and since Pachmann is “master of the small essential thing and master of absolutely nothing else” he doesn’t quite come into the realm of the new vision of the piano._ _Isn’t there a good deal of similarity between Casals’ playing of the ’cello and Bauer’s playing of the piano?_ _Scriabine’s later piano things have something of what I meant, and do you remember the piano parts of “Prometheus?” Stravinsky, too—you know how he uses the piano in “Pétrouchka.” But the new vision is beyond these—something more rich and shattering.... I can’t say it. Let’s just wait and see.—The Editor._ _Alice Groff, Philadelphia_: “Spirit can do” absolutely _nothing_, without body. Social spirit can do absolutely nothing without the means of life for the body. The social ego that would “start the revolution” must aim first to get control of the means of living—food, clothing, shelter, and the resources, natural and economic, back of these. Revolutions succeed only when they get such control; if they do not get it they are soap bubbles blown by a little child. Why waste time pelting with idle words the social egos that have such control, instead of going to work to _wrench_ it from them, _even with war_? The social ego that has such control “can do anything.” It can stop war with a turn of its hand and establish in its stead world-wide service, kindness, brotherhood, peace, joy and beauty. And there is nothing else in the universe that can do this. It is for lack of a social ego having such control and that unity in establishing the above-mentioned principles in the social order, alone, that “men continue to support institutions they no longer believe in, that women continue to live with men they no longer love, that youth continues to submit to age it no longer respects,” and it is the only agency that can help one to be free when one wants to be free or make one a personality instead of a nonentity. All that you say about a “deeper music” is true, though I would say a more winged music—(I would not dare use to you the word spiritual)—or a subtler music, or something of that sort; but all that you deprecate in music, by critical suggestion, is also true and necessary, scientifically and fundamentally, without which your deeper or higher or subtler or more winged or more spiritual music would be nothing but soap bubbles without plenty of soapy water to make them out of. I am one of those who can appreciate this deeper music—but I know also that it cannot be created ex-nihilo. As to Ben Hecht, his power of expression is wonderful. His writing is literature par excellence, but it lacks a _soul_. If in his meticulous analyses of life he could suggest the vision of the swallowing up of the macrocosm in the macrocosm—could suggest what humanity as a whole could do to wipe out the evils that feed upon the individual—he might be god-like. But like all of the rest of you he is a dead fly in the sickening syrup of _laissez faire_, at the mercy of Mother Nature. Now it isn’t worth while for you to resent this. Go to work and read what I have been able to get out of _The Egoist_, showing up anarchy for all that it is worth. _Edgcumb Pinchon, Los Angeles_: Glad to see you get into trouble—you have the Flame! May it flash on our universal dullness and faithlessness as the sun on sword blades—— Do you remember Maupassant’s story: An exhausted French regiment—ten miles to go—the men mutinous, disgruntled; a broken-down carriage by the road-side—horses and driver gone—a mother and her daughter forlorn in the carriage, needing assistance to the next town. The snow is deep, their slippers are thin and they are fashionably—and uselessly—garbed. The soldiers make a sedan chair of the carriage poles, and fighting among themselves for the honor of bearing a hand at the poles they finish the march with spirit and bravado——? Do you remember Whitman’s “lithe, fierce girls?” Such are the flame-tongues of Revolution—the priestesses of social passion. If Woman only knew her power to work white magic with banality and stir up the hero-poet in man! But we who have dragged her by the hair for ten thousand years must continue to drag her enfeebled body and spirit with us for penalty—even as we are praying her to touch us to Fire! When you say that all we need at this hour is a few great spiritual leaders—you are tremendously right. And shall not one of those be some “lithe fierce girl” who knows how to wake the militant social troubadour in man? The enclosed is because you, like Margaret Sanger, belong to the new revolution—the thoroughbred thing compact of esprit, audacity, faith, and elan. _Socialism and War_ By LOUIS B. BOUDIN Author of _Theoretical System of Karl Marx_, “_Government by Judiciary_”, _etc._ Price, $1.10 Postpaid NEW REVIEW PUBLISHING ASS’N 256 Broadway New York City _A STUDY OF THE GREAT WAR OF IMPERIALISM._ Organized Socialism collapsed in the European crisis; but Socialist thought is providing us with an authentic, realistic interpretation of the causes and consequences of the Great War. The whole world is interested in the attitude and conclusions of the Socialists. Mr. Boudin’s book deals with the prime cause of the war—Imperialism. He makes us understand the underlying forces of this world-drama. Mr. Boudin indicates that Imperialism is the political expression of a change in the economics of Capitalism; that Imperialism is motivated upon the export of capital, principally in the form of iron and steel as “means of production” in undeveloped countries. All phases of the war are covered, including the “cultural” and “racial”. The historian, the economist and the sociologist unite in a volume of the utmost interest and importance. POETRY BOOKSHOP CHAPBOOKS READY DECEMBER 1ST. IMAGES. By RICHARD ALDINGTON. 8d net (postage 1d). CADENCES. By F. S. FLINT. 8d net (postage 1d). ANTWERP. By FORD MADOX HUEFFER. Decorated by WYNDHAM LEWIS. 3d net (postage 1d). CHILDREN OF LOVE. By HAROLD MONRO. 6d net (postage 1d). Second Impression. THE POETRY BOOKSHOP 35 Devonshire St., Theobalds Rd., London, W. C. 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. 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 problem—whether the book you want is listed here or not the Gotham will supply your needs. Price the same, or in many instances much less, than were you to order direct from the publisher. All books are exactly as advertised. Send P. O. Money Order, check, draft or postage stamps. Order direct from the Gotham Book Society, 142 W. 23rd St., N. Y., Dept. K. Don’t fail to mention Department K. Here are some suggestions of the books the Gotham Book Society is selling at publishers’ prices. All prices cover postage charges. 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Published at $1.25; our price 60c, postage paid. SANINE. By Artzibashef. The sensational Russian novel now obtainable in English. Send $1.45. A FAR COUNTRY. Winston Churchill’s new novel is another realistic and faithful picture of contemporary American life, and more daring than “The Inside of the Cup.” Send $1.60. BOON—THE MIND OF THE RACE. Was it written by H. G. Wells? He now admits it may have been. It contains an “ambiguous introduction” by him. Anyhow it’s a rollicking set of stories, written to delight you. Send $1.45. NEVER TOLD TALES. Presents in the form of fiction, in language which is simplicity itself, the disastrous results of sexual ignorance. The book is epoch-making; it has reached the ninth edition. It should be read by everyone, physician and layman, especially those contemplating marriage. Cloth. Send $1.10. 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. 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A novel by the navvy-poet who sprang suddenly into attention with his “Children of the Dead End.” This story is mainly about a boarding house in Glasgow called “The Rat-Pit,” and the very poor who are its frequenters. Send $1.35. 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 heights of self-sacrifice to which they mount. Send $1.45. BREAKING-POINT. By Michael Artzibashef. A comprehensive picture of modern Russian life by the author of “Sanine.” Send $1.35. 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 presentation of English life under the stress of modern social conflict, centering upon a romance of boy-and-girl love—that theme in which Galsworthy excels all his contemporaries. Send $1.45. FIDELITY. Susan Glaspell’s greatest novel. The author calls it “The story of a woman’s love—of what that love impels her to do—what it makes of her.” Send $1.45. 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. Send $1.60. 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 activities of modern art which began with Delacroix and ended 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, with 60 illustrations printed in four colors from paintings by the Japanese artist, Yoshio Markino. By the members of the 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, laughter, profanity, the use of alcohol and even war as furnishing needed relaxation to the higher nerve centres. Send 88c. 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 SEXUAL QUESTION Heretofore sold by subscription, only to physicians. Now offered to the public. Written in plain terms. Former price $5.50. _Now sent prepaid for $1.60._ This is the revised and enlarged Marshall English translation. Send check, money order or stamps. Ignorance Is the Great Curse! Do you know, for instance, the scientific difference between love and passion? Human life is full of hideous exhibits of wretchedness due to ignorance of sexual normality. Stupid, pernicious prudery long has blinded us to sexual truth. Science was slow in entering this vital field. In recent years commercialists eyeing profits have unloaded many unscientific and dangerous sex books. Now the world’s great scientific minds are dealing with this subject upon which human happiness often depends. No longer is the subject tabooed among intelligent people. We take pleasure in offering to the American public, the work of one of the world’s greatest authorities upon the question of sexual life. He is August Forel, M.D., Ph.D., LL.D., of Zurich, Switzerland. His book will open your eyes to yourself and explain many mysteries. You will be better for this knowledge. Every _professional man and woman_, those dealing with social, medical, criminal, legal, religious and educational matters will find this book of immediate value. Nurses, police officials, heads of public institutions, writers, judges, clergymen and teachers are urged to get this book at once. The subject is treated from every point of view. The chapter on “love and other irradiations of the sexual appetite” is a profound exposition of sex emotions—Contraceptive means discussed—Degeneracy exposed—A guide to all in domestic relations—A great book by a great man. 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 poetry. A page of current French poetry. Reviews of only those books which are worth praise. News of modern music, of new painting, of French literary and artistic life. A series of translations of Greek and Latin poetry and prose, done by young modern poets (began September 1st, 1915). PUBLISHED MONTHLY Price—Fifteen cents a number Yearly subscription, One Dollar Sixty Cents Buy some of the back numbers. They are literature, not journalism. OAKLEY HOUSE, BLOOMSBURY STREET, LONDON, W. C. Transcriber’s Notes Advertisements were collected at the end of the text. The table of contents on the title page was adjusted in order to reflect correctly the headings in this issue of THE LITTLE REVIEW. The original spelling was mostly preserved. A few obvious typographical errors were silently corrected. All other changes are shown here (before/after): [p. 10]: ... white teeth. They sat beside a table, spread with book and magazines. ... ... white teeth. They sat beside a table, spread with books and magazines. ... [p. 13]: ... critics of poetry, you are a poet also, take warning. Be Prepared! ... ... critics of poetry, you are a poet also, take warning. Be prepared! ... *** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 67467 ***