The Little Review, October 1917 (Vol. 4, No. 6)

Wyndham Lewis

Cantelman walked in the strenuous fields, steam rising from them as though from an exertion, dissecting the daisies specked in the small wood, the primroses on the banks, the marshy lakes, and all God’s creatures. The heat of a heavy premature Summer was cooking the little narrow belt of earth-air, causing everything innocently to burst its skin, bask abjectly and profoundly. Everything was enchanted with itself and with everything else. The horses considered the mares immensely appetising masses of quivering shiny flesh: was there not something of “je ne sais quoi” about a mare, that no other beast’s better half possessed? The birds with their little gnarled feet, and beaks made for fishing worms out of the mould, or the river, would have considered Shelley’s references to the skylark—or any other poet’s paeans to their species—as lamentably inadequate to describe the beauty of birds! The female bird, for her particular part, reflected that, in spite of the ineptitude of her sweetheart’s latest song, which he insisted on deafening her with, never seemed to tire of, and was so persuaded that she liked as much as he did himself, and although outwardly she remained strictly critical and vicious: that all the same and nevertheless, chock, chock, peep, peep, he was a fluffy object from which certain satisfaction could be derived! And both the male and the female reflected together as they stood a foot or so apart looking at each other with one eye, and at the landscape with the other, that of all nourishment the red earthworm was the juiciest and sweetest! The sow, as she watched her hog, with his splenetic energy, and guttural articulation, a sound between content and complaint, not noticing the untidy habits of both of them, gave a sharp grunt of sex-hunger, and jerked rapidly towards him. The only jarring note in this vast mutual admiration society was the fact that many of its members showed their fondness for their neighbour in an embarrassing way: that is they killed and ate them. But the weaker were so used to dying violent deaths and being eaten that they worried very little about it.=The West was gushing up a harmless volcano of fire, obviously intended as an immense dreamy nightcap.

Cantelman in the midst of his cogitation on surrounding life, surprised his faithless and unfriendly brain in the act of turning over an object which humiliated his meditation. He found that he was wondering whether at his return through the village lying between him and the Camp, he would see the girl he had passed there three hours before. At that time he had not begun his philosophizing, and without interference from conscience, he had noticed the redness of her cheeks, the animal fulness of the child-bearing hips, with an eye as innocent as the bird or the beast. He laughed without shame or pleasure, lit his pipe and turned back towards the village.=His fieldboots were covered with dust: his head was wet with perspiration and he carried his cap, in unmilitary fashion, in his hand. In a week he was leaving for the Front, for the first time. So his thoughts and sensations all had, as a philosophic background, the prospect of death. The Infantry, and his commission, implied death or mutilation unless he were very lucky. He had not a high opinion of his luck. He was pretty miserable at the thought, in a deliberate, unemotional way. But as he realised this he again laughed, a similar sound to that that the girl had caused.=For what was he unhappy about? He wanted to remain amongst his fellow insects and beasts, which were so beautiful, did he then: Well well! On the other hand, who was it that told him to do anything else? After all, supposing the values they attached to each other of “beautiful”, “interesting”, “divine”, were unjustified in many cases on cooler observation:—nevertheless birds were more beautiful than pigs: and if pigs were absurd and ugly, rather than handsome, and possibly chivalrous, as they imagined themselves; then equally the odour of the violet was pleasant, and there was nothing offensive about most trees. The newspapers were the things that stank most on earth, and human beings anywhere were the most ugly and offensive of the brutes because of the confusion caused by their consciousness. Had it not been for that unmaterial gift that some bungling or wild hand had bestowed, our sisters and brothers would be no worse than dogs and sheep. That they could not reconcile their little meagre stream of sublimity with the needs of animal life should not be railed at. Well then, should not the sad human amalgam, all it did, all it willed, all it demanded, be thrown over, for the fake and confusion that it was, and should not such as possessed a greater quantity of that wine of reason, retire, metaphorically, to the wilderness, and sit forever in a formal and gentle elation, refusing to be disturbed?=Should such allow himself to be disturbed by the quarrels of jews, the desperate perplexities, resulting in desperate dice throws, of politicians, the crack-jaw and unreasoning tumult?

On the other hand, Cantelman had a little more human, as well as a little more divine, than those usually on his left and right, and he had had, not so long ago, conspicuous hopes that such a conjuncture might produce a new human chemistry. But he must repudiate the human entirely, if that were to be brought off. His present occupation, the trampling boots upon his feet, the belt that crossed his back and breast, was his sacrifice, his compliment to, the animal.

He then began dissecting his laugh, comparing it to the pig’s grunt and the bird’s cough. He laughed again several times in order to listen to it.

At the village he met the girl, this time with a second girl. He stared at her “in such a funny way” that she laughed. He once more laughed, the same sound as before, and bid her good evening. She immediately became civil. Enquiries about the village, and the best way back to camp across the marsh, put in as nimble and at the same time rustic a form as he could contrive, lay the first tentative brick of what might become the dwelling of a friend, a sweetheart, a ghost, anything in the absurd world! He asked her to come and show him a short cut she had indicated.

“I couldn’t! My mother’s waiting for me!” in a rush of expostulation and semi-affected alarm. However, she concluded, in a minute or two, that she could.

He wished that she had been some Anne Garland, the lady whose lips were always flying open like a door with a defective latch. He had made Anne’s acquaintance under distressing circumstances.

On his arrival at Gideon brook, the mighty brand-new camp on the edge of the marsh, he found that his colleague in charge of the advance party had got him a bed-space in a room with four officers of another regiment. It had seemed impossible that there were any duller men than those in the mess of his particular battalion: but it was a dullness he had become accustomed to.

He saw his four new companions with a sinking of the heart, and steady gnawing anger at such concentration of furious foolishness.

Cantelman did not know their names, and he hated them in order as follows:

A. he hated because he found him a sturdy, shortish young man with a bull-like stoop and energetic rush in his walk, with flat feet spread out to left to right, and slightly bowed legs. This physique was enhanced by his leggings: and not improved, though hidden, in his slacks. He had a swarthy and vivacious face, with a sort of semitic cunning and insolence painted on it. His cheeks had a broad carmine flush on general sallowness. The mind painted on this face for the perusal of whoever had the art of such lettering, was as vulgar stuff, in Cantelman’s judgement, as could be found. To see this face constantly was like hearing perpetually a cheap and foolish music. A. was an officer, but naturally not a gentleman.

B. he disliked, because, being lean and fresh-coloured, with glasses, he stank, to Cantelman’s peculiar nose, of Jack London, Summer Numbers of magazines, bad flabby Suburban Tennis, flabby clerkship in inert, though still prosperous, city offices. He brought a demoralizing dullness into the room with him, with a brisk punctiliousness, several inches higher from the ground than A.

C. he resented for the sullen stupidity with which he moved about, the fat having settled at the bottom of his cheeks, and pulled the corners of his mouth down, from sheer stagnation. His accent dragged the listener through the larger slums of Scotland, harrowing him with the bestial cheerlessness of morose religion and poverty. The man was certainly, from every point of view, social prestige, character, intelligence, far less suited to hold a commission than most of the privates in his platoon.

D. reproduced the characteristics of the other three, in different quantities: his only personal contribution being a senile sing-song voice, from the North, and a blond beam, or partially toothless grin, for a face.

This was the society into the midst of which Cantelman had been dropped on his arrival at Gideon brook, ten days previous to this. They had all looked up, (for it was always all, they having the inseparability of their kind) with friendly welcome, as brother officers should. He avoided their eyes, and sat amongst them for a few days, reading the Trumpet-Major, belonging to B. He had even seemed to snatch Hardy away from B. as though B. had no business to possess such books. Then they avoided his eye as though an animal disguised as an officer and gentleman like themselves had got into their room, for whom, therein, the Trumpet-Major and nothing else exercised fascination. He came among them suddenly, and not appearing to see them, settled down into a morbid intercourse with a romantic abstraction. The Trumpet-Major, it is true, was a soldier, that is why he was there. But he was an imaginary one, and imbedded in the passionate affairs of the village of a mock-county, and distant time. Cantelman bit the flesh at the side of his thumbs, as he surveyed the Yeomanry Cavalry revelling in the absent farmer’s house, and the infantile Farnese Hercules, with the boastfulness of the Red, explaining to his military companions the condescensions of his infatuation. Anne Garland stood in the moonlight, and Loveday hesitated to reveal his rival, weighing a rough chivalry against self-interest.

Cantelman eventually decamped with the Trumpet-Major, taking him across to Havre, and B. never saw his book again. Cantelman had also tried to take a book away from A. (a book incompatible with A’s vulgar physique). But A. had snatched it back, and mounted guard surlily and cunningly over it.

In his present rustic encounter, then, he was influenced in his feelings towards his first shepherdess by memories of Wessex heroines, and the something more that being the daughter of a landscape-painter would give. Anne, imbued with the delicacy of the Mill, filled his mind to the injury of this crude marsh-plant. But he had his programme. Since he was forced back, by his logic and body, among the madness of natural things, he would live up to his part.

The young woman had, or had given herself, the unlikely name of Stella. In the narrow road where they got away from the village, Cantelman put his arm around Stella’s waist and immediately experienced all the sensations that he had been divining in the creatures around him; the horse, the bird and the pig. The way in which Stella’s hips stood out, the solid blood-heated expanse on which his hand lay, had the amplitude and flatness of a mare. Her lips had at once no practical significance, but only the aesthetic blandishment of a bull-like flower. With the gesture of a fabulous Faust he drew her against him, and kissed her with a crafty gentleness.

Cantelman turned up that evening in his quarters in a state of baffling good-humour. He took up the Trumpet-Major and was soon surrounded by the breathing and scratching of his roommates, reading and writing. He chuckled somewhere where Hardy was funny. At this human noise the others fixed their eyes on him in sour alarm. He gave another, this time gratuitous, chuckle. They returned with disgust at his habits, his peculiarity, to what he considered their maid-servant’s fiction and correspondence. Oh Christ, what abysms! Oh Christ, what abysms! Cantelman shook noisily in the wicker chair like a dog or a fly-blown old gentleman.

Once more on the following evening he was out in the fields, and once more his thoughts were engaged in recapitulations.=The miraculous camouflage of Nature did not deceive this observer. He saw everywhere the gun-pits and the “nests of death”. Each puff of green leaves he knew was in some way as harmful as the burst of a shell. Decay and ruins, it is true, were soon covered up, but there was yet that parallel, and the sight of things smashed and corruption. In the factory town ten miles away to the right, whose smoke could be seen, life was just as dangerous for the poor, and as uncomfortable, as for the soldier in his trench. The hypocrisy of Nature and the hypocrisy of War were the same. The only safety in life was for the man with the soft job. But that fellow was not conforming to life’s conditions. He was life’s paid man, and had the mark of the sneak. He was making too much of life, and too much out of it. He, Cantelman, did not want to owe anything to life, or enter into league or understanding with her! The thing was either to go out of existence: or, failing that, remain in it unreconciled, indifferent to Nature’s threat, consorting openly with her enemies, making a war within her war upon her servants. In short, the spectacle of the handsome English spring produced nothing but ideas of defiance in Cantelman’s mind.

As to Stella, she was a sort of Whizbang. With a treachery worthy of a Hun, Nature tempted him towards her. He was drugged with delicious appetites. Very well! He would hoist the unseen power with his own petard. He would throw back Stella where she was discharged from (if it were allowable, now, to change her into a bomb) first having relieved himself of this humiliating gnawing and yearning in his blood.

As to Stella, considered as an unconscious agent, all women were contaminated with Nature’s hostile power and might be treated as spies or enemies. The only time they could be trusted, or were likely to stand up to Nature and show their teeth, was as mothers. So he approached Stella with as much falsity as he could master.

At their third meeting he brought her a ring. Her melting gratitude was immediately ligotted with long arms, full of the contradictory and offending fire of the spring. On the warm earth consent flowed up into her body from all the veins of the landscape. The nightingale sang ceaselessly in the small wood at the top of the field where they lay. He grinned up towards it, and once more turned to the devouring of his mate. He felt that he was raiding the bowels of Nature: not fecundating the Aspasias of our flimsy flesh, or assuaging, or competing with, the nightingale. Cantelman was proud that he could remain deliberate and aloof, and gaze bravely, like a minute insect, up at the immense and melancholy night, with all its mad nightingales, piously folded small brown wings in a million nests, night-working stars, and misty useless watchmen. They got up at last: she went furtively back to her home. Cantelman on his way to camp had a smile of severe satisfaction on his face. It did not occur to him that his action might be supremely unimportant as far as Stella was concerned. He had not even asked himself if, had he not been there that night, someone else might or might not have been there in his place. He was also convinced that the laurels were his, and that Nature had come off badly. He was still convinced of this when he received six weeks afterwards, in France, a long appeal from Stella, telling him that she was going to have a child. She received no answer to that nor any subsequent letter. They came to Cantelman with great regularity in the trenches; he read them all through from beginning to end, without comment of any sort. And when he beat a German’s brains out, it was with the same impartial malignity that he had displayed in the English night with his Spring-mate. Only he considered there too that he was in some way outwitting Nature; he had no adequate realization of the extent to which, evidently, the death of a Hun was to the advantage of the animal world.

(Walter Villerant to Mrs. Bland Burn)

Ezra Pound

My Dear Lydia:

Russians! No. William is matto over his Russians. They are all in the beginning of Fumée—all the Russians. Turgenev has done it: a vaporous, circumambient ideologue, inefficient, fundamentally and katachrestically and unendingly futile set of barbarians. Old Goff says of savages: “I like savages. They do nothing that is of the least use, they do nothing the least intelligent, they do nothing of the least interest. They are bored. They have ceremonies. The malice of boredom: the medicine man makes them dance in a ring for hours in order to degust their stupidity, per assagiarlo, to bask in the spectacle of a vacuity worse than his own.”

I mistrust this liking for Russians; having passed years in one barbarous country I can not be expected to take interest in another. All that is worth anything is the product of metropoles. Swill out these nationalist movements. Ireland is a suburb of Liverpool. And Russia! The aged Findell comes back in ecstasy, saying “It is just like America.” That also bores me. They say Frankfurt-am-Main is just like America.

Paris is not like America. London is not like America. Venice is not like America. Perugia is not like America. They are not the least like each other. No place where the dew of civilization has fallen is “just like” anywhere else. Verona and Pavia are different. Poictiers is different. Arles is a place to itself.

Dostoevsky takes seven chapters to finish with an imbecile’s worries about a boil on the end of his nose. Dostoevsky is an eminent writer. Let us thank the gods he existed. I do not read Dostoevsky. Several young writers have impressed me as men of genius, by reason of tricks and qualities borrowed from Dostoevsky. At length when the craze is over, I shall have to read Dostoevsky. And so on.... I have also read Samuel Butler. And Poetry? As the eminently cultured female, Elis writes me that her little cousin will have nothing to do with it. Rubbish! Her little cousin will read Li Po, and listen to the rondels of Froissart. I know, for I tried her.

Elis has imbibed a complete catalogue, with dates, names of authors, chief works, “influence” of A, B, C, on M, N, O, etc., etc., with biographies of the writers, and “periods”. Buncomb! Her cousin, who knows “nothing at all”, is ten times better educated. No? She “doesn’t like poetry”. Anglice: she doesn’t like Swinburne. It is not the least the same thing. And she is worried by most of Dowson, etc.

Elis appeals to me as possessing “manner” or “prestige”, i. e. professorial aspects, to coerce the rebellious infant.

She says I used to read Swinburne “so splendidly”. Damn it all! I believe this to be true. The “first fine”, etc. “The hounds of swat are on the wobbles wip wop”. Magnificent sound. Now as a matter of fact I tried to read A. C. S. to the small cousin and broke down lamentably. The constant influx of “wrong words” put me out of it altogether.

And Browning is full of jejune remarks about God. And only parts of Landor are left us. And Elis says the girl will be no use to me whatsoever. (Neither she may, perhaps. But who is any use to me? Hackett I see once a month in a state of exhaustion, i. e. H. in a state of exhaustion). He makes two negative but intelligent remarks, and departs before the conversation develops. Your spouse is afar from us both. We are surrounded by live stock.

I enjoy certain animal contacts ... without malice. I have a “nice disposition”. I pat them like so many retrievers ... ebbene? I live as a man among herds ... for which I have a considerate, or at least considerable, if misplaced, affection. “Herds” is possibly a misnomer. A litter of pups that amuses me. I am not prey to William’s hostilities ... save that I dislike ill-natured animals.

As for poetry: : : how the devil can anyone like it ... given, I mean, the sort of thing usually purveyed under that label?

The girl asked me the only sane question I have ever had asked me about it.

“But is there no one like Bach? No one where one can get all of it?”

That staves in my stratified culture.

The Odyssey? But she does not—naturally, she does not read greek. She is “wholly uneducated”. That is to say I find her reading Voltaire and Henry James with placidity.

And Dante? But she does not read italian. Nor latin. And besides, Dante! One needs a whole apparatus criticus to sift out his good from his bad; the appalling syntax from the magnificence of the passion. Miss Mitford said “Dante is gothic.” Out of the mouths of prudes and imbeciles! Gothic, involved, and magnificent, and a master of nearly all forms of expression. And what, pray, is one to reply to a person who after having read Maison Tellier, refuses to stand “The fifth chariot of the pole, already upturning, when I who had etc., ... turning as Pyramus whom when the mulberry had been tasted ... not otherwise than as etc.” The quotation is inexact, but I can not be expected to carry english translations of Dante about with me in a suit case. Dante is a sealed book to our virgin, and likewise Catullus, and Villon is difficult french ... and Sappho ... perhaps a little Swinburnian? Ille mi par esse ... is possibly better than the Aeolic original; harder in outline. (If this bores you, give it to Elis). Chaucer writes in a forgotten language. One must read earlier authors first if one is to run through him with ease as with pleasure. What the devil is left us? What argument for a person too sincere to give way to the current mania for assenting to culture? The fanaticism of certain people who believe they ought to “read poetry” and “be acquainted with” art. A person, I mean, who has taken naturally to good prose; who is so little concerned with appearing educated that she does not know whether Shelley is a dead poet or still living, ditto, Keats. It is quite oriental. Ramdath told me a tale from the Mahabharata, but it was only when I found it in the Mahabharata that I discovered it had not happened to Ramdath’s grandpapa. If people would forget a bit more, we might have a real love of poetry. Imagine on what delightful terms the living would compete with their forbears if the doriphory of death were once, for even a week or so, removed from the “brows” or “works” of the “standard” authors. No more Job and Stock’s “Works of the Poets”, series including Mrs. Hemans, Proctor and Cowper 7/6, 5/, 2/6, hymn-book padded leather with gilding, real cloth with gilding, plain covers. The great Victorian age has done even better. Culture, utility!! I found in lodgings a tin biscuit-box, an adornment. It represented a bundle of books, of equal size, bound in leather, a series, the spiritual legacy of an era, education, popularity. The titles of the tin books were as follows:

History of England.
Pilgrim’s Progress.
Burns.
Pickwick Papers.
Robinson Crusoe.
Gulliver’s Travels.
Self-Help.
Shakespeare.

Is it any wonder we have Gosse cautioning us against De Maupassant’s account of Swinburne, and saying that De M’s unbridled fancy gave great offence when it reached the recluse at Putney. Or dribbling, i. e. Gosse dribbling along about “events at the Art Club which were widely discussed at the time” (italics mine) when he might have said simply “Algernon got drunk and stove in all the hats in the cloak-room”.

Yours,
Walter Villerant.

Margaret Anderson

Carl Van Vechten has an article about Mary Garden in The Bellman which he prefaces with the aesthetic discovery that in her art Mary Garden leaves nothing to accident. Oh subtle critical mind!... Mr. Van Vechten should write art notes for The New York Times,—which I believe he has done. I remember once, in a discussion on music, I asked him furiously whether he knew anything about the subject, only to learn that he had been a Times music critic for years—which is quite as it should be.

I understand that The Seven Arts is about to suspend publication because of the withdrawal of its chief patron, Mrs. Rankine, on account of an irreconcilable disagreement between her and the editorial body concerning a war policy. There are intelligent people, I hear, who are prepared to defend her action. But there is no conceivably intelligent defense for such an action. It is simply another case of the proverbial and astounding American “nerve”. In the case of a magazine of the Arts it is a truly colossal nerve. How dare Mrs. Rankine or any other patron take the responsibility of the several thousand readers who subscribed to The Seven Arts because they wished to read what its editors had to say? Whether they agreed or not with what was said has nothing to do with it. It is even conceivable that some of them may have enjoyed reading what they did not agree with, or that some of them (ghastly but possible) approved of the Seven Arts attitude toward the war. Only one thing is certain: that none of those subscribers read the magazine because of anything Mrs. Rankine contributed to its pages.

But a certain type of American mind is capable of anything. This moral nation is now facing the issue of prohibition. If the prohibitionists are successful great vineyards in California will be burned. To burn a vineyard!—is it conceivable? A vineyard is a beautiful thing....

For months, everywhere I have looked for life I have found death—except in two cases: once in the instance of death itself, and once in the spectacle of an old woman.

The first was an “absurd and unmerited exile,” impossible to bear; and it gave me forever, though I could not be there, the picture of a woman with a high thin nose lying in a coffin,—part of that beauty which alone is indestructible. The second was Sarah Bernhardt in an act of Camille,—a thing immortal beyond any words that I can find.

William Carlos Williams

Fools have big wombs. For the rest?—here is pennyroyal if one knows to use it. But time is only another liar, so go along the wall a little further: if blackberries prove bitter there’ll be mushrooms, fairy-ring mushrooms, in the grass, sweetest of all fungi.

For what it’s worth: Jacob Louslinger, white haired, stinking, dirty bearded, cross eyed, stammer tongued, broken voiced, bent backed, ball kneed, cave bellied, mucous faced—deathling,—found lying in the weeds “up there by the cemetery”. “Looks to me as if he’d been bumming around the meadows for a couple of weeks”. Shoes twisted into incredible lilies: out at toes, heels, tops, sides, soles. Meadow flower! ha, mallow! at last I have you. (Rot dead marigolds—an acre at a time! Gold, are you?) Ha, clouds will touch world’s edge and the great pink mallow stand singly in the wet, topping reeds and—a closet full of clothes and good shoes and my-thirty-year’s- master’s- daughter’s two cows for me to care for and a winter room with a fire in it—. I would rather feed pigs in Moonachie and chew calamus root and break crab’s claws at an open fire: age’s lust loose!

Talk as you will, say: “No woman wants to bother with children in this country”;—speak of your Amsterdam and the whitest aprons and brightest door-knobs in Christendom. And I’ll answer you: “Gleaming door-knobs and scrubbed entries have heard the songs of the housemaids at sun-up and—housemaids are wishes. Whose? Ha! the dark canals are whistling, whistling for who will cross to the other side. If I remain with hands in pocket leaning upon my lamp-post—why,—I bring curses to a hag’s lips and her daughter on her arm knows better than I can tell you; best to blush and out with it than back beaten after.

Ezra Pound

Various people have expressed certain doubts as to whether ... The Little Review ... etc....

Good people, be at rest: the price of The Little Review will never be raised for present subscribers or for those who subscribe before January 1, 1918. After that we can make no promises. The quality will not decline; if we give “twice as much of it” the new readers will have to pay more. If we had given you only Mr. Yeats’s fourteen poems we would already have given you more literature than is to be found in the “four big” magazines since the beginning of our present volume.

Next month you will have a whole play by Lady Gregory. Mr. Lewis, after having been in some heavy fighting is now in hospital, and that leisure has made sure the supply of his prose for some time. I have now at my elbow the first eighty-eight pages of the best book Ford Madox Hueffer has written. Why “the best book”? Five years ago Mr. Hueffer read me this manuscript, an unfinished work for which there was presumably “no market”. I read the typescript which was brought me last evening; so familiar is the text that I can scarcely convince myself that it is five years since I heard the even voice of the author pronouncing it. I do not think my memory is particularly good, I think there must be some quality in a man’s style and matter if it is to stay fresh in another man’s mind for so long. Mr. Hueffer’s Women and Men will run in The Little Review from January 1918 to May 1919 inclusive, unless interfered with by force majeur. Perhaps it is not his best book.

Lest there be any confusion about Olivers, Madoxes, Madox Browns, Francis Hueffers, etc. Ford Madox Hueffer is the author of various novels, and of The Heart of the Country, The Soul of London, Ancient Lights, Collected Poems, of On Heaven, the first successful long poem in English vers libre, after Whitman. This poem appeared in Poetry for June 1914, and has certainly as much claim to permanence as, say, Meredith’s Love in the Valley.

Beside his own achievement, Mr. Hueffer has done one definite service to English letters. This service is unquestioned, and recognition of it does not rest upon any personal liking or disliking of Mr. Hueffer’s doctrines of writing. In 1908 he founded The English Review; for a year and a half he edited that magazine and during that time he printed work not only by the great men of letters, Anatole France, Thomas Hardy, Swinburne, Henry James, not only by men of public reputation like Wells, and Conrad and Bennett, but also by about all the younger men who have since made good. For example by Lewis (in 1909), and by other now well-known young men who have both made good and declined since that date. His editorship of the review marks a very definite period; at the end of it, as its glory was literary, not commercial, it was bought by certain jews, who thought Mr. Hueffer a damn fool (possibly because of his devotion to literature), and who gave the editorship into other hands. Comparison of current numbers of The English Review with the first numbers issued from 84 Holland Park Avenue, will give any thinking person all the data he wants in deciding between the folly of Hueffer and the folly of manufacturing, political hebrews. In fact, if a crime against literature could bring any shame upon that class of person, this family would go into penitence, which needless to say they will not. But the careful historian of literature will record and remember their shame. The files of the review being stored in the British Museum, the data will continue available. There will be no faking the records.

The Little Review is now the first effort to do comparatively what The English Review did during its first year and a half: that is, to maintain the rights and position of literature, I do not say in contempt of the public, but in spite of the curious system of trade and traders which has grown up with the purpose or result of interposing itself between literature and the public.

We act in spite of the public’s utter impotence to get good literature for itself, and in despite of the efforts of the “trade” to satiate the public with a substitute, to still their appetite for literature by providing them, at a cheaper rate and more conveniently, with a swallowable substitute.

Whereanent a very successful journalist has said to me: We, i. e. we journalists, are like mediums. People go to a spiritist séance and hear what they want to hear. It is the same with a leading article: we write so that the reader will find what he wants to find.

That is the root of the matter; there is good journalism and bad journalism, and journalism that “looks” like “literature” and literature etc....

But the root of the difference is that in journalism the reader finds what he is looking for, what he, the reader wants; whereas in literature he must find at least a part of what the author intended.

That is why “the first impression of a work of genius” is “nearly always disagreeable”, at least to the “average man”. The public loathe the violence done to their self-conceit whenever an author conveys to them an idea that is his, not their own.

This difference is lasting and profound. Even in the vaguest of poetry, or the vaguest music, where in a sense the receiver may, or must, make half the beauty he is to receive, there is always something of the author or composer which must be transmitted.

In journalism, or the “bad art” which is but journalism thinly disguised, there is no such strain on the public.

I am now at the end of my space. Of Remy de Gourmont’s feeling toward such a magazine as we are now making I will write in the December number.

Maxwell Bodenheim

American literature is divided into three plaintive continents: clear cold psychological data; sentimental unbeautiful lying; and social propaganda. The first is a photograph; the second, a pretty vase; and the third, a decorated sledge-hammer.

The American Writer earnestly strives to accomplish something; he starts out with a fixed and lofty objective which ranges from a “portrayal of the soul of the masses” and an exposure of the iniquities of the present social system, to “an unfolding of the poetry that lies in simple people”. He seizes upon ideas that have been current coin in Europe for the past century, writes them much worse than they were originally written, and is hailed as a genius. His characters are marvels of realism—stop any milkman on the corner and he will talk exactly as Dreiser’s Witla talks, and act just as ordinary human beings in the “Arcadia Residence Hotel” or Winklehofer’s Alley would act. He writes on the theory that human beings lack eyes and cannot see the conditions about them, but must be carefully told in lengths of four hundred pages that a grafting politician is looting a city, that a man can immerse himself in moneymaking and lose his soul, that working-people are unjustly treated, that women are asserting their economic independence, and that society people drink and have gossamer-morals. If he is striving to educate people who are inclined to argue pro and con about these subtle matters, he could become a far more effective elementary teacher by compiling with his fellow-writers an encyclopedia which could be printed in serial form, or by having his work made into text books for schools and colleges. Since his aim is really the spreading of information about human beings, descriptive and psychological, his prose style is always simple, strong and clear, as the phrase goes, and he leaves imagination and beautiful word-mosaics to weak-kneed poets, who believe in making lyrical, elaborate lies about human beings and life in a desperate effort to escape the simple, strong and clear nightmares of conditions and sights about them. But what am I saying? Modern American poets have also become realistic in a different way. It has become a rigid shibboleth among American poets of the present day, that writing about a rose or a sunset inevitably proves that a man is a minor poet, and that steam-cranes, shoe-string peddlars, farm-hands, the Panama Canal, ice-wagon drivers and machinists are the only fit subjects for a spirited poet. And so the most sincere of the present landslide of American poets write about these subjects in a bold and true manner, providing a sort of unadorned kindergarten which your soul is supposed to attend. And the least sincere among them sing of realistic sights, but seem a little ashamed of their content, hiding it with picture-puzzle styles, which you piece together only to discover that they lead to very simple meanings.

Then there is another class of contemporary American poets, who strive hard to achieve subtle meanings, not realizing that only literary style is subtle, and that meanings are all on about the same intangible level. These poets write poems that seem experiments in differential calculus, until you suddenly discover that they are in reality many simple concepts mixed in a temporarily baffling fashion. In their plaintive search for originality of thought and emotion American writers achieve only twisted echoes of old-world literature, for the simple reason that outside of scientific research and pure philosophy ideas are eunuchs drained by centuries, and dressed in variations of old costumes. Any modern writer with a little research can discover that some old Hindoo or Chinaman or European said exactly what he is saying, and in a far more imaginative and beautiful way. But literary style alone remains a comparatively untouched region, because the great majority of writers, since the beginning of the Christian era, have always been clutched by some great burning message which they fancied the world needed or by some new situation in which human beings would act differently than they ever before acted, or by some important moral that required hundreds of pages for illustration. When they abandoned these important kingships it was either to lose themselves in aimless tears, to become vaguely exuberant, or to shrewdly analyze the mob-desires of their days and settle down to careful entertaining. In all of these aims, literary style became chief-cook-and-bottle-washer—an obedient servant, who was thoroughly whipped if he ever became rebellious, and achieved moments of sheer word-beauty, which failed to illuminate the aim of the writer, or which momentarily crystalized the writer’s formless rhapsodies.

Therefore absolutely new and beautiful word-designs are possible, since words alone, unconnected with great messages or sentimental self-portrayals, have been practically ignored by writers of the Christian Era.

When American writers become thoroughly decadent, and are not ashamed to frolic ardently with words, writing in a passionate surge in which imagination becomes a tipsy priest, marrying words and meaning, and waltzing arm in arm down the road with them, beauty in American literature will have its inception. One critic claims that this situation is impossible, because of the complacent democracy of this country, in which every country bumpkin and rich man with a large library considers himself an infallible judge of literary values, among other questions of art. Because of this he believes that only those writers who deal in elementary social instruction or sentimental commonplaces, can secure a hearing. But even if a small aristocracy were in control of the literary situation here, beautiful books would have to be distributed free of charge and would gain very little in circulation, because the average American is an unmellowed self-confident nondescript who considers culture to be for sale at bargain-prices. Each European country has had centuries in which to condense into that quiet sophistication which demands in fiction and poetry other intangible food than economic sermons or descriptions of the surface facts of its daily life, or sentimental ecstasies, while the American is still a little growing boy, interested only in literary marble-games. The American political situation has nothing to do with this—if we changed to a kingdom or an economic utopia tomorrow the American citizen would still purchase tons of Gouverneur Morris and Edna Ferber, and would still wistfully and wearily try to wade through occasional volumes from writers who have been recommended to him as “highbrows”.

A Play in One Act

Arthur Symons

[8] “Deck” possibly meaning “coverlet”.

(from the New York Press)

Tribune: “Edith Wharton’s Summer (Appleton) is a masterpiece of accurate, graceful and fascinating composition ... a climax of graphic power is reached which has seldom been approximated in contemporary fiction. But then—the pity of it all! the pity of it all! Was it worth while to use such gifts, to employ such rare and exquisite an artistry, in the exploitation of so sordid and so seamy a side of life?... If now and then, and here and there, man must be so fallen and so lost, let us rather ‘Walk backward with averted gaze and hide the shame.’”

Times: “Mr. Lewis’s (The innocents, by Sinclair Lewis. Harper) native endowment is essentially Dickensian, because his mental affinity is stronger for what is sweet and clean and bright, upward looking and forward pressing, in human nature, than it is for the rotten, the dour and the hopeless. He sees and duly uses these poisoned and poisonous elements of human life, but in his estimate of the forces that inspire, etc., etc.”

(To get the full value of the reviews of Mr. Lewis’s work one must read his countless stories and novels. But it would be well, perhaps, to mention that he is a rising young manufacturer of literary all-day suckers, who turns out a novel in about the time it took Flaubert to write a paragraph of Madame Bovary)—I. S.

This is an invaluable book. It is a compilation of all the outworn thought of the last two generations.—jh.

We want monthly eight pages more for French, eight pages more for painting and sculpture (when extant), sixteen pages more if we are to print both the Hueffer prose series and the new novel promised by James Joyce, at the same time. We see no reason why we should not publish music (not criticism of music) if any happens to be written. Even our most rabid detesters can not expect us to double our format unless we can, at about the same time, double our list of subscribers. It is, placid reader, up to you.