Chapter II: Part 2

Then my office friend went on to assert that Whitman was undoubtedly an immoral, not to say degenerate, party, that he “got by with his stuff because it was raw,” and that everybody who professed any admiration for him was a suspicious character and one he “would think twice about before inviting to his home” (where his wife is).

It is rather a complicated matter, this sneering business; and after attending a Walt Whitman dinner I don’t know whose sneers disgust me more, Mr. Darrow’s or my friend’s. They are both, however, identical in spirit, the spirit of mediocrity and sincerity when sincerity becomes, as it most always does, the cloak for ignorant convictions and bigoted fanaticism.

And now we come to the third and last condition—boredom. Among the speakers at this memorable dinner was Mr. Llewellyn Jones. Mr. Jones is a critic of literature by profession if not qualification—although I do not say it, really. Of all the orators at good old Walt’s memorial gabfest Mr. Jones was the least offensive. He said nothing that shocked the taste or violated one’s innerself or harrowed one’s soul. I don’t, of course, remember what Mr. Jones did say. One never does, not only in the case of Mr. Jones but in the thousands like him. They occupy time and space and leave them empty. Not for them the sneer or the slobber. Mr. Jones wouldn’t sneer for the world. And as for slobbering Mr. Jones has too much good taste and discretion for that. Not that he is above them. His fear of them, his apparent uncertainty in distinguishing between these two characteristics and the characteristics of inspired opinion, indicate this plainly enough.

So to be safe Mr. Jones resorts to the time-honored entrenchment of mediocrity. He barricades himself behind the bulwarks of boredom. He discharges no cannon, he commits no sins, he makes no false steps or takes no false flights. He is boredom incarnate, the eternal convention in the arts whether he deals with Nihilism, radicalism, or stands pat on the isms of the past. Mr. Jones never gets anywhere, I repeat. I speak of all the Joneses. Nobody derives anything from him—from them—except ennui. He, they, never offend, never elate. He, they, are always Mr. Jones.

Listening to the Joneses is as elevating an experience as watching the water blop-blop out of the kitchen hydrant. And this idea leads me back to where I started—THE LITTLE REVIEW.

Can you imagine what a thorough contempt a kitchen hydrant would have for a fountain rising from the rocks, for a brook gurgling down the hillside, or a strong river capering to sea? It wouldn’t exactly sneer at them. Mr. Jones doesn’t. But it would feel moved to spirited reproof. How juvenile it is to gurgle, the hydrant would say, how vain and foolish it is to rise from the rocks, how upsetting it is to be continually capering to sea. I do not claim any super-intelligence in the matter of hydrants. But Mr. Jones and all the Joneses do say, and I have enough intelligence to understand them if not to sympathize with them, that THE LITTLE REVIEW is young and idiotic and given to unnecessary emotions and so forth. All of which is true, looked at from the elevation of a kitchen sink. “Why don’t you,” remonstrates the hydrant to the brook, “blop blop with me?”

An afterthought: at this Whitman dinner there was one among the speakers who sustained a dying faith in Walt, humanity, and _vers libre_ in general. He was Carl Sandburg who read a free verse poem of his own on Billy Sunday.

It is provided in the essence of things that from any fruition of
success, no matter what, shall come forth something to make a
greater struggle necessary.—_Whitman._

The Death of Anton Tarasovitch

A Short Story of the Present War

FLORENCE KIPER FRANK

Anton Tarasovitch lay dying. He lay in a pleasant cornfield whither he had dragged himself in the heat of the afternoon, for a shelter against the merciless sun. But now it was evening and the stars were out, and dying was not now so bad an affair as it had been in the dust and the blinding sunlight. True, the pain was at times terrible, but at other times it made one only light-headed, so that oneself or the part that was Anton Tarasovitch seemed to be a different thing altogether from the body of Anton Tarasovitch which lay beneath It shot to pieces, while It fluttered and hovered above.

He had not been lying for many hours in the Austrian cornfield. He knew that by the progress of the sun downward—downward until it made the long summer shadows that he loved in the fields at home; downward until it brought a breath of coolness and a gray light that had brushed out the clear distinction of shadows and sunlight; downward until it was gone forever and a few stars burned quietly in the sky overhead. It was the last sunset that Anton Tarasovitch was to see in this world. But time had no longer any meaning for Anton Tarasovitch. Lying on one’s back, so, and waiting to die, a minute can seem all there is of the world, and then an hour can be burned up like a minute, while one faints into unconsciousness, before one is slowly dragged back again to the thought, “I am I”—the thought that makes the world for each man, that creates for him the stars and the shadows and the sun sinking downward.

Yes, Anton Tarasovitch knew that now—that it was this thought that made the world. And when he stopped thinking it, the world would again be nothing. Down! down! down! one would plunge, and then the world would be nothing. But it would exist still for other men. Yet how could that be? Tomorrow the sun would come up again into the sky just as every day it had come up in the fields at home, making the long shadows that he had so loved in the mornings and in the evenings. Tomorrow other men would see the sun—many other men would see it. But if Anton Tarasovitch did not see it——! In vain he struggled to create for himself a universe in which there would be no Anton Tarasovitch. Well, he was not clever enough to understand such matters. Men in universities and men who wrote books had figured them out and knew all about them. But how was he, who had never been to a University, who had not been to school even, to understand!

Yet this much he understood—that he was dying for his country. This the general had told them, and he had known always, since a boy, that it was a brave and fine thing to fight for one’s country and to die if need be. Anton Tarasovitch was dying that his country might be saved.

Yet it was strange that the big Russia had need of him, just one common peasant. The great Russia had so many men that were strong and powerful, men with uniforms that glittered—men that were much cleverer and braver than Anton. Why should the country have need of him? Sasha needed him, and the children. Sasha needed him in the fields and she needed him in her heart too. She had often called him the light of her heart, in the strange words—so different from the words of other women—that Sasha often used. And he knew by her face that she needed him. She didn’t have to tell him so. He knew by the kindling of her face, as of a curtain behind which suddenly a candle appears. So her face would light up when she saw him. Sasha would mind greatly if she never saw him again.

He was dying because it was a glorious thing to die for one’s country—for the White Tsar, the little Father. You died to protect your country, so that your great country might live forever. But if you weren’t there to know that it lived forever!—now why couldn’t he think of the world without Anton Tarasovitch in it? Why did he land against a black wall every time he tried to think of tomorrow without Anton Tarasovitch?

It was needful that he die to save his country. What if, to the general, he _were_ only one of thousands and to Sasha and the children all of life—nevertheless, if every man should think that, then there would be no one at all to save the country. It was rather clever of him to figure it out so, especially with the fire in his side that made his head so light and his thoughts fly off from it and refuse to anchor down for more than a minute. It was clever of him to reason it out—Anton Tarasovitch who had never been to a University—that if every man should say to himself, “O, I don’t count. Just one more or less!”—then there would be no army at all to fight the Tsar’s battles.

Yet he was not fighting or dying now to save Sasha. Nor was he dying to save his children even in the years to come. That wouldn’t be bad—to die so that years afterwards, even though it might be many years afterwards, one’s children would prosper and would live more happily. That would be a sort of living when one was dead, because one’s children were in a way oneself in different bodies. But he couldn’t see how Maxim and Ignat and Sofya and Tatya would at any time be better off because he was dying right now. He couldn’t see but that the land would be poorer and that they would have to work harder because he and the other peasants were dying for the Little Father and for their country.

But if he couldn’t figure out just what people he was saving, at least he knew against what men he was fighting. He was fighting against the Austrians. The Austrians were a horrible people who spoke a language one couldn’t understand at all. When you tried to understand them, you couldn’t understand a word they were saying. He had known an Austrian once—a big blonde fellow who had stayed a few days at their little village. One day Anton had been walking with the tiny Tatya on the road that led to the market and they had met the Austrian, who had stopped and had given Tatya a flower out of his button-hole. Anton remembered Tatya’s crows of delight. The Austrian had smiled at her, a nice, friendly smile, and Tatya had grabbed for his hand as children will, even when the people they grab at are Austrians.

Tatya had seemed to like the Austrian. And Anton had had to confess to himself that he wasn’t a bad fellow. But he must have been pleasant only because of Tatya. No one could help being pleasant to Tatya. The Austrian had been for a moment friendly because of her. At heart he was a hateful fellow. All Austrians were hateful. They all hated the Tsar and the Fatherland and they all hated him, Anton, because he was a Russian.

There must be some Austrians lying in this cornfield now, wounded as he was wounded. But he could see no one. Flat on his back, he could see only the stars which were thick now against the sky. And he began to think that this was a cruel thing—that a man should be alone when he was dying. Even when a chap was just ill, he wanted someone to take care of him. Once when Anton had been ill of a fever he had been just like a baby, so weak and helpless. He had cried then because the milk that Sasha had brought him had been too hot for his tongue and had burned him. It was silly for a big man to cry, but that was the way you became when you were sick—weak and silly. He had never in his life cried when he was well. When men were well they were never silly.

Women—women were different! Five times had Sasha been so ill that it was terrible—four times for the children that were living and once for the little one that had died. Sasha had almost died too that time. She had been so white and so hopeless looking for weeks after! But in all the times she was ill she had not complained as much as he had, that one month that he was sick with the fever. That must be because women were used to pain. The good God had so ordained it. For every life that they brought into the world they had to suffer, not only at the time, but for months before and then for years afterward.

They were strange creatures, were women. If a child became ill or died, its mother suffered again, just as the day she had borne him. At least so Sasha had suffered when the baby had died—and other women that he had seen in the village.

Birth was a strange thing now! He had never really thought of it before, but wasn’t it a strange thing that each time a person was born into the world, there should be pain and the long months of waiting. Then in one second an Austrian shell could blow away the body that some woman had waited for and had carried in her own body. In one second—why, so he had been waited for—he, Anton Tarasovitch. Now wasn’t that wonderful!—and he had never until this minute really thought of it. He, Anton Tarasovitch, had been carried in the body of his mother and had been born in pain and in rejoicing. Why, it was like a miracle! And he had thought so lightly of it, had just taken it for granted that he should be born and that she should love him.

He would like to make it up to her in some way now. But it was too late. She had been dead for very many years now and he also was dying. Well, he could tell her about it when he saw her with the saints in Heaven.

Heaven! He would go there, of course, because he had always, since a boy, been obedient and had done just what the priests had told him. He ought to think now about Heaven. But somehow he did not care to think about it, and the strange part was that it did not trouble him that he did not care. Even if he woke tomorrow in Heaven, he would not be the same Anton. He might live forever, but that wouldn’t be the same thing as waking up in the morning with Sasha at his side. He tried to think what “forever” meant, and he fetched up against the same black wall that he had when he had tried to think of a world without Anton Tarasovitch to know himself in it. Forever! ever! ever! No stopping! On and on! But that would be horrible. No! no! he couldn’t bear that. One could do nothing, nothing, to get out of it. Even if one could be blown to pieces with a gun, say a thousand years from now, in Heaven, one’s soul would gather itself together again and go on and on, forever and forever.

No, he mustn’t think about it. If he thought about it any more, he would lift his hands and strangle himself, so as to be able to stop thinking about it. Now he would think about Sasha. When he thought about her, he could feel her right next to him. He couldn’t see her face exactly, nor could he see her standing there. And yet it was as if she really _were_ there, and he _could_ see her. That was the way it was when you loved a person. She was, as it were, in you, or at least right next to you, and yet she was separate from you, too.

He had liked life with Sasha. He didn’t know until now how much he had liked it. True, it was a hard life they had lived together. One was on the go every minute—in bad weather when the frost stung and to walk even a mile became an agony; and in good weather one was constantly on the go, when it might perhaps have been pleasant to sit under the trees and play with the children. But life was good, for all that. Of course, if they could have saved money—only a little money—it would have been better. But the little money they could save had had to go for the taxes. The taxes were for the Fatherland, the priest had told him. The taxes were paid so that when the need came, Anton would be able to die for his country. But there was something confusing about that. Life would be better if it were not for the taxes, and the taxes were paid so that he might—no, that was bewildering. With the fire in one’s side and in one’s brain, how could one think clearly about so difficult a matter? Besides, there were many matters of that sort that he, Anton Tarasovitch, was not clever enough to think about. One left such things to the priests, who were good men, and to the clever men at the universities.

The stars were sometimes a long way off now and sometimes very near to him. But neither near nor far away did they seem to care about him. They were the only things he could see in the world and they did not seem to care about him. Undoubtedly they had seen many men dying. He knew about the stars! A young teacher who had come to the village when he was a boy had talked about them and Anton had never forgotten.

The young teacher had not stayed long in the village. He was “dangerous,” they said, and Anton heard afterwards that he had gone to America. It gave one many thoughts to listen to the teacher. He had said that the stars were worlds, just like our own earth—the earth that Anton knew the good Christ had come down to save. Anton, who was just a boy, had wanted to ask him if Christ had had to save all these worlds that were stars. But that was only one of the many confusing thoughts one had in listening to the young teacher. One felt strange in listening to him, as if the world weren’t solid at all, but were flowing like a river. * * *

Anton felt very sorry for himself, lying there under the stars that did not care for him. He began to cry—silly, weak tears that tasted of salt as they touched his mouth. It was only at times that he knew that he was crying. At other times the soul of him entirely left his body and went shooting up and up, to be recaptured only with a struggle.

The two of them—the burning body and the light soul—would have held together better, he knew, if someone could grip his hand tightly. At least that was the way they had done in the fever. When Sasha had gripped his hand, as if by a miracle he had been restored for a moment to a complete man, and was no longer two pieces—a body below and a soul that went fluttering above it.

If only he could touch someone’s hand now—anyone’s hand—the hand of a human being! To be all alone with the cruel, flickering stars up above, that was no way to die—snuffed out into the darkness. That was no way for any man to go, even though he _were_ just a peasant. But Anton knew himself important now, almost as important as a general. He knew himself important, with a strange, tremendous importance. He was as important as almost anyone in the world, and he was dying alone in the darkness.

Then he remembered that there must be other men in the cornfield. He had thought of that before, and afterwards he had forgotten. If there were other men here—even one other man, an enemy—he would find that comrade and they would die together.

Slowly, painfully, inch by inch he dragged himself. The stalks were like an impenetrable thicket. They entangled him as snares or a forest of swords set about him. He dragged himself on his palms, inch by inch, butting away the cornstalks.

An Austrian was lying on his back, gazing upward. He was dead now, but Anton did not know it. There was a wound in his neck, and the flies had begun to gather.

Anton gave a sob as he saw the Austrian. One more effort and he would be near enough to touch him. Perhaps the Austrian would grip his hand—hard—as Sasha had gripped it.

The hand of the Austrian did not grip hard when Anton touched it. It fluttered a little, however—Anton was sure of that. So Anton covered the hand with his own, and with his own hand gripped hard, as Sasha had gripped the hand of Anton.

And so died Anton Tarasovitch, looking up at the stars.

Art as it appears without the artist, i. e., as a body, an
organization (the Prussian Officers’ Corps, the Order of the
Jesuits). To what extent is the artist merely a preliminary
stage? The world regarded as a self-generating work of
art.—_Nietzsche._

Rupert Brooke

(_A Memory_)

ARTHUR DAVISON FICKE

One night—the last we were to have of you—
High up above the city’s giant roar
We sat around you on the generous floor—
Since chairs were lame or stony or too few—
And as you read, and the low music grew
In exquisite tendrils twining the heart’s core,
All the conjecture we had felt before
Flashed into torch-flame, and at last we knew.

And Maurice, who in silence long has hidden
A voice like yours, became a wreck of joy
To inarticulate ecstasies beguiled.
And you, as from some secret world now bidden
To make return, stared up, and like a boy
Blushed suddenly, and looked at us, and smiled.

To a West Indian Alligator

(_Estimated age, 1957 years_)[2]

EUNICE TIETJENS

Greetings, my brother, strange and uncouth beast,
Flat-bellied, wrinkled, broad of nose!
You are not beautiful—and yet at least
Contentment spreads your scaley toes.

The keeper thwacks you and you grunt at me,
Two hundred pounds of sleepy spleen.
He tells me that your cranial cavity
Will just contain a lima bean.

How seems it, brother, you who are so old,
To lie and squint with curtained eye
At these ephemera, born in the cold,
These human things so soon to die?

You were scarce grown, a paltry eighty years,
Too young to think of breeding yet,
When Christ the Nazarene loosed the salt tears
Which on man’s cheeks today are wet.

Mohammed rose and died—you churned the mud
And watched your female laying eggs.
Columbus passed you—with an oozy thud
You scrambled sunward on your legs.

So now you doze at ease for all to view
And bat a sleepy lid at me,
You eat a little every year or two
And count time in eternity.

So, brother, which is wiser of us twain
When words are said and meals are past?
I think, and pass—you sleep, yet you remain,
And where shall be the end at last?

[2] _I cannot vouch for the science of this. It is “Alligator
Joe’s” estimate._

Villon’s Epitaph[3]

WITTER BYNNER

I who have lived and have not thought
But gone with nature as I ought,
Letting good things occur,
And now amazed and cannot see
Why death should care so much for me.
I never cared for her.

Scarron’s Epitaph[3]

WITTER BYNNER

He who now lies here asleep
None would envy, few would weep:
A man whom death had mortified
A thousand times before he died.

Peaceful be the step you take,
You who pass him—lest he wake.
For his first good night is due.
Let poor Scarron sleep it through.

[3] From the French of François Villon.

Editorials and Announcements

_Our Credo_

I have lost patience: people are still asking “What does THE LITTLE REVIEW stand for?” Since we have been so obscure—or is it that people have been so dull?—I shall try to answer all these plaintive queries in a sentence. May it be sufficient: I cannot “explain” every day why the sunrise seems worth while or, as Mr. Hecht would say, why the brook rises from the rocks.

THE LITTLE REVIEW is a magazine that believes in Life for Art’s sake, in the Individual rather than in Incomplete people, in an age of Imagination rather than of Reasonableness; a magazine that believes in Ideas even if they are not Ultimate Conclusions, and values its Ideals so greatly as to live them; a magazine interested in Past, Present, and Future, but particularly in the New Hellenism; a magazine written for Intelligent people who can Feel; whose philosophy is Applied Anarchism, whose policy is a Will to Splendor of Life, and whose function is—to express itself.

_Mr. Comstock’s Dismissal_

This great blessing comes sooner than we could have expected, and yet, as _The Chicago Tribune_ remarks, it is belated by about forty years. Mr. Comstock has been Post Office Inspector all that time. I remember a few years ago in New York hearing an interesting woman send a group of people into paroxysms by the passionate childish seriousness with which she said, “I wish Anthony Comstock would die!” Now that the government has accomplished this desideratum, it is almost time for it to be congratulated. I wonder how long it will be before this same government can “see its way clear” to suppressing the agent provocateur and letting his victims go free, or—well, never mind: it is beyond hoping.

“_Succession_”

When one of my friends fails to like Ethel Sidgwick’s _Succession_ I am left in a predicament: on what basis are we henceforth to understand each other? Succession goes so deep into music, into personality, into life that has its foundations in art.... You can explain all the subtleties of your most difficult emotions by referring to how Antoine felt on page so and so. How does one live without Antoine?

_The Strike_

And God said: “Let there be!” And there was.

And when the modern god, the omnipotent Proletariat, says: “Let there not be!” ...

You say the strike of the Chicago car men is of purely local significance. You crack jokes about the pleasure of walking and about the adventure of jitney-rides. You are calm and complacent, you blind and deaf men and women dancing on a dormant volcano.

You are right. Your complacency is justified. Why fear the million-headed mule who has borne his yoke for centuries? He grumbles?—Oh, it’s a trifle: just fill his flesh-pot, and he will take up anew with bestial delight his eternal task of enriching the few at the expense of his blood and marrow.

But fear the eruption of the volcano! For it will not remain dormant forever. Have we not witnessed the spasmodic awakenings of the giant? Recall the achievement of the Russian proletariat in 1905. Did it not wrest concessions from the obstinate Czar by means of a passive revolution? Recall the general strike in Belgium. Did it not cripple its commerce and industry for months?

The strike of the Chicago car men is pregnant with potentialities. It is a symptom of a refreshing storm. Those who produce everything and possess nothing have slept long in ignorance of their power. But they are slowly awakening. And when they become aware of the magic wand in their hand, whose passive motion can stop the wheels of the universe.... Take heed, O merrymakers at Belshazzar’s feast. Behold the MENE, TEKEL, PERES on the wall.

K.

“_The Country Walk_”

A young Englishman by the name of Edward Storer—I am assuming that he is young and that he is English—has protested effectively against the condition which decrees that a piece of writing, a painting, a sculpture has to be judged as a commodity _before_ it can be judged as a work of art by issuing little four-page leaflets containing portions of his work denied publication by the commercialism of the times. The first, which is called _The Country Walk_, has some quite uninspired though rather charming prose poems in it. _The Lark_, for instance:

Out of the young grass and silence you arise, frail bird,
spinning upwards to the sky. Faster beat the wings, and shriller
is the voice, and soon you are lost in the high blue, so that
scarcely can I hear your voice or see the maddened flutterings of
your wings.

Then suddenly all is silent, and softly you drop to earth again
to rest your aching body against the good brown earth.

_The June-July Issue_

On account of being so late with our May number we have decided to combine the June and July and thus come out promptly again on the first of the month. Subscriptions will be extended accordingly.

_Edgar Lee Masters_

In the August issue there will be a new poem by Edgar Lee Masters, author of _The Spoon River Anthology_, and also a photogravure portrait of the poet which has just been taken by Eugene Hutchinson.

The Submarine

(_Translated from the Italian of Luciano Folgore by Anne Simon_)

It sinks. In the twilight of the water
the conquered submarine
falls straight to the bottom
and seems like a black corpse
thrown to the coral below,
thrown to the tomb that devours
with liquid joy
the refuse and remains of the old world.
The propellers, devourers of motion,
buzz no more,
the rudder has ceased turning,
the prow no longer points its sharp beak,
but the submarine extends itself
on the viscid bed,
and a multitude of unknown
fish, coral and sea-nettles
try to enter the closed apertures.

And yet once you leaped in the sun
like a sentinel of burnished steel
shining in the distance,
and then rapidly returned to the green gorge
where the sun never reaches,
but where you find
the tremendous task
that is always with you and that whispers courage
in the void of your soul.
And once with your agile metallic prow
you agitated the green water
all around your shining body,
and you did not feel the torments
of the winds nor the black
clouds of the hurricane
that remained like spiteful women
in a corner of the horizon,
with hair dishevelled and the eye eager
to spy below, from the firmament,
the lost, the shipwrecked, the unknown
that have no pilot.

Once from your sonorous sides,
quietly, but vigilant and mad,
the torpedo shot out,
making its track in silence,
and carrying
within its thin body
death, and the infinite
power of dynamite.
As you passed the sharks fled,
as you passed the corals
suspended their tenacious and clumsy work,
and the fish with rapid movement
swam away.
You seemed like an enormous monster
of a fantastic destiny
and yet you are only a light submarine,
a slender ship
that the blow of a beam
could sink, that a whirlpool could submerge
in the abyss.

I do not know your story,
but I will sing your glory
that is part of the desire
of audacious men.
Submarine, Destiny may have willed
you to sink silently,
and remain lost forever in the viscid bed of the sea-weed,
(O submarine, able to challenge the unconsciousness of the seas
and the impotence of the lighthouses,)
but you are alive and strong;
there is no death, but only an appearance
of death that remains. Destiny
newly moulds you
in a long phantom
and you are run, submarine,
by the courage of men
who, in the unfathomable silence of the water,
are piloted
by the will of the strong.

New brothers will arise
and pursue you
because your shining back
carries a banner, not tri-colored,
nor French,
but the only color
that dazzles;
the banner of the battle
that amidst disasters combats
with this ferocious mystery
that is foolishly determined to shut us out
from the doors of Nature.

Blaa-Blaa-Blaa

I am sick of words—spoken words—verbal refuse thrown off by the mental hypochondriacs who imagine themselves suffering from thought and afflicted with ideas.

I am sick of the artificial inanities of the drawingroom—the polite poppycock, the meaningless, emotionless enthusiasms. I often have entered a room where male and female husks sat, their faces wreathed in empty grimaces—animated masks discharging automatic phrases—and wished to God I was dumb and could be forgiven for silence. Listening is not so bad because one doesn’t have to listen.

I am sick of the salon-like groups who gather for the purpose of thinking aloud and then forget to think and make up for it in noises. Monotonous varieties, dropping pop-bottle gems from their lips, each individual amusing and delighting himself beyond all understanding with his sterile loquaciousness. Here in the salon groups, the discursive congregations which come together in all manner of odd places and all manner of regular places, garrulity approaches torture. Here the professional discourser flops and waddles about in his own Utopia. He doesn’t crave understanding but attention. As for truth, as for taking the pains to express his innermost reactions to a subject, this is impossible. The discourser doesn’t know what he thinks, doesn’t know what the truth is until he starts discoursing. And then he discourses himself into a state of mind. I have heard him discourse himself into the most startling convictions; into matrimony and out of it into religion and out of it, into and out of every variety of damn-foolishness imaginable.

Persons who use written words instead of spoken words as the parents of their thought suffer from the same hypnosis. But in writing this is commendable. It is commendable for a writer to be insincere if he can be more logical and enlightening as a result. The result may be _De Profundis_ or _Alice in Wonderland_. It is my notion that men are sincere only in their appetites. A man craves food and woman and other stimulants with unquestionable sincerity. But in the realm of thought I have arrived at the conclusion that sincerity is an inspired and not inspiring condition of the mind.

I am sick of the blaa-blaaing hordes, from the smirking “supes” of the let’s-adjourn-to-the-other-room species to the simpering cacophonists of the Schöngeist nobility.

I am sick of the open mouths, the trailing sentences dying from weakness, the painstaking use of wrong words and the painstaking use of correct words; of the stagnated humor of deodorous sallies.

I am sick of the Argumentatives, people with an irritating command of phrases, who balance paradoxes on their noses and talk backwards or upside down with equal lucidity; who must be contradicted or they suffer; who rumble bizarrely from the depths of every philosophical sub-cellar they can ferret out in order to be startling; who shriek and howl and wail and protest and—the Devil take them—tell the truth and make it impossible to believe. Their only reason for talking is to impress. They are as noisy as cannon and as effective as firecrackers.

I am sick of the delicate, searching souls who prick themselves with their own words, who operate on fly specks, who grope and search and struggle for fine and truthful things, who deal in verbal shadings intelligible only to themselves—and then not for what they said but for what they meant to say or desired to say or wouldn’t say for the world.

I am sick of their kinsmen, of the surgical tongues who dissect, who vivisect and auto-sect.

I am sick most of all of my own talk. But I continue to talk. I talk out of boredom and manage only to increase it. I talk out of vanity and spread disillusionment. I talk out of love and have to apologize. A victim of habit, I continue speaking, although I know the spoken word is the true medium of misunderstanding. Words, words, they keep tumbling out of my mouth and blowing away like dust before the wind. A pock on them.

There have been revolutions in literature, authors have changed the size and construction of the novel, publishers have changed the color of their bindings, poets have changed the form of their poetry and the essence of its style, thinkers even have altered slightly the trend of their thought. Music, painting, decorating, carving—everything changes with time except talk, which only increases. What a staggering illustration of the theory that it is only the weak things which survive. For talk is the commonest of weaknesses. Blaa, blaa, blaa—why not a revolution? What ails the radicals? Do they not realize that the time is ripe? They have changed the moral forms, the literary forms, why not the spoken forms? Why not a substitution of expressive grunts and whoops and growls and chuckles and groans and gurgles and whees and wows? Or is this matter one not for the radical but for

“The Scavenger.”

The Nine!—Exhibit!

Sometime in the winter a rumor got about that nine artists of Chicago were to form themselves into a group and hold an independent exhibition.

At once the other artists were divided into two factions, those who jeered and those who applauded, those who said unpleasant things and those who had the enduring hope that at last something better was to be done in our exhibitions.

The Great Nine, as the group began to be called—whether by themselves or by others, it matters not: the phrase is a handicap—consists of Frederic C. Bartlett, William Penhallow Henderson, Lawton Parker, Karl Albert Buehr, Louis Betts, Charles Francis Browne, Ralph Clarkson, Wilson Irvine, and Oliver Dennett Grover. They were too generous in their number. Five, and there would have been no comment; nine, and there was aroused indignation, criticism, and a “show us” spirit which should have put the Nine on their mettle and made them give a stunning and silencing show.

On May thirteenth, after one postponement when expectation was tense, the exhibition opened. What had we? A new setting and old stuff!

One of the East Galleries had been chosen. William P. Henderson designed and executed the room. He made a piece of work having faults but being the best thing about the exhibition, a contribution in itself. The walls with their subtle color, divided into spaces by pilasters of deep wistaria, red, and gold, rising on slender stems and blossoming out above; the screen of red at one end with the Zettler torso against it—they complimented themselves upon using this; the beautiful vases; and the green of the trees made a room too obtrusive for pictures, or one in which pictures are intrusive.

Were the setting less self-sufficient, still there are many things to be said. The sophisticated, almost exotic, color of the walls, emphasizing in the work of some all that is crude and materialistic in execution or interpretation, makes their work appear to less advantage than would the usual bleak gallery. And why so many pictures? Why not one picture in each space and that the best each artist could offer? How much more satisfactory the room would then be. Anyone who follows exhibitions will agree that each exhibitor has shown better work at other times.

Frederic Bartlett’s group is in many ways the best, and holds its own in the room. Surpassingly beautiful in color are Mr. Henderson’s things. The little nude is exquisite, but he should not easily be forgiven his portrait of Florence Bradley, even if it is not meant as a character study. However, he is one of the artists who can do more than put paint on canvas. He can make Art in many ways, as men did in the “high white days” of art.

The artists themselves have seen from this first effort wherein they have failed. This grouping must have been a very arbitrary one. Let us hope that a group founded on mutual endeavor and on equal ability will continue the effort to make our exhibitions comparable in some degree with the best European efforts.

Chicago has now so many artists that it is impossible for them all to be gathered into the old Chicago Society. There should be many societies. Competition and co-operation among them would make the art life here less anemic and super-sensitive and bigoted.

R.

Book Discussion

THE APOTHEOSIS OF PETTINESS

_One Man, by Robert Steele. New York: Mitchell Kennerley._

“There is nothing which reflects the smugness of a people so much as the manner and temperament of its vice. And the temperament of American vice is more distinctly and monotonously bourgeois than any of its virtues”—from Ben Hecht’s “Phosphorescent Gleams” in the May LITTLE REVIEW. I have pondered over this maxim while reading Mr. Steele’s novel which is hailed by the critics as “the essence of America.” The hero is essentially American, horribly so. If the “average” type of any nation is repulsive, the American “Average” is a thousandfold more so. For he is more petty than vicious. The “one man” gives a confession of his life, full of puny deeds, from committing petty larceny to “picking up” a girl in the street and taking her to a “swell” hotel. The nauseating details have the flavor of the adventure stories which you may hear at a gathering of travelling salesmen in a provincial hotel lobby. What makes the boring Odyssey intolerably loathsome is its note of syrupy Christian penitence which the hero expresses after each penny-crime by falling on his knees and praying to his convenient god for forgiveness.

The book has been hailed as a masterpiece. It is as far from a masterpiece as a lewd “photo” is from art. The facts may be true, even autobiographical, as some critics presume; the confessions will furnish good material for Billy Sunday and his lesser brethren. But photography, even if it be pornography, is not art. Let me quote the ever-new Edgar Poe: “Art is the reproduction of what the Senses perceive in Nature through the veil of the soul. The mere imitation, however accurate, of what _is_ in Nature, entitles no man to the sacred name of ‘Artist.’ ... We can, at any time, double the true beauty of an actual landscape by half closing our eyes as we look at it. The naked Senses sometimes see too little—but then _always_ they see too much.” I blush at the necessity of digging up ancient truths, but, my dear friends, read the reviews of Mr. Steele’s novel and you will admit with me the crying need of teaching the American critics the A-B-C of art.

ICY OLYMPUS AND THE BURNING BUSH

_The Need for Art in Life, by I. B. Stoughton Holborn. New York:
G. Albert Shaw._

_The Spirit of Japanese Art, by Yone Noguchi. New York: E. P.
Dutton and Company._

The complete man must consist of three essential fundamentals—the Artistic, the Intellectual, the Moral (mark the initials: aim!); man’s aim should be the full expression of his tripartite nature; he must not leave out any of the three sides, nor develop any one at the expense of the rest. Unfortunately our age has achieved only two-thirds of the diagram, the I and the M, remaining wretchedly poor in the A part. When we look back we find that in the Renaissance period the A and I were overdeveloped, with the total lack of the M side. The Middle Ages present the presence of A and M and the absence of I. It is the Greek ideal we must look for in our endeavor for the complete expression of man. The Greek gentleman, the καλος κάγαθος, the reserved, the moderately good, the not excessively just, the harmonious, the symmetrical—he shall be our standard, our criterion for the completeness of being. Is not Mr. Holborn clever and Olympian and icy-cold?

Now listen:

The evening had already passed when I returned home with that
hanging of Koyetsu’s chirography under my arm. “Put all the
gaslights out! Do you hear me? All the gaslights out! And light
all the candles you have!” I cried. The little hanging was
properly hanged at the “togonoma” when the candles were lighted,
whose world-old soft flame (wasn’t it singing the old song of
world-wearied heart?) allured my mind back, perhaps, to Koyetsu’s
age of four hundred years ago—to imagine myself to be a waif of
greyness like a famous tea-master, Rikiu or Enshu or, again,
Koyetsu, burying me in a little Abode of Fancy with a boiling
tea-kettle; through that smoke of candles hurrying like our
ephemeral lives, the characters of Koyetsu’s writing loomed with
the haunting charm of a ghost.

It is painful for me to stop quoting the religious ravings of dear Noguchi. And all this pathos is about a bit of old Japanese writing! I can see the indignant Mr. Holborn’s moderate condemnation of the Oriental’s unreserved passion, canting the cold-beautiful Μηδὲν ἄγαν (nothing in excess). But, O forgive me, Olympian gods, I must come back to the Burning Bush where Yone Noguchi worships Hashimoro, Hiroshige, Kyosai, Tsukioka, Utamaro, and other such rhythmical names; I am aware of the abyss of excess that yawns before me, but the exotic wine is so luring, so intoxicating, the call of the Orient is so irresistible—I plunge:

I will lay me down whenever I want to beautifully admire Utamaro
and spend half an hour with his lady (“Today I am with her in
silence of twilight eve, and am afraid she may vanish into the
mist”), in the room darkened by the candle-light (it is the
candle-light that darkens rather than lights); every book or
picture of Western origin (perhaps except a few reprints from
Rossetti or Whistler, which would not break the atmosphere
altogether) should be put aside. How can you place together in
the same room Utamaro’s women, for instance, with Millet’s
pictures or Carpenter’s _Towards Democracy_? The atmosphere I
want to create should be most impersonal, not touched or scarred
by the sharpness of modern individualism or personality, but
eternally soft and grey; under the soft grey atmosphere you would
expect to see the sudden swift emotion of love, pain or joy of
life, that may come any moment or may not come at all.

I recall an evening at “The Vagabonds,” where some ultra-modern paintings were exhibited and bravely discussed. An idiotic friend of mine suggested that the Vagabonds pass an evening in contemplating the canvasses in absolute silence. The obliging chairman, who is a fair parliamentarian, had the suggestion voted upon with the result of one vote in favor of it. I recall that evening in connection with Noguchi’s lines about Koyetsu:

What need there be but prayer and silence? There is nothing more
petty, even vulgar, in the grey world of art and poetry, than to
have a too-close attachment to life and physical surroundings; if
our Orientalism may not tell you anything much, I think it will
teach you at least to soar out of your trivialism.

I refuse to say any more about the book, for I am tempted to quote him all the way through. If you wish to forget yourself and your environment, to melt away in the unreal atmosphere of Japanese prints—read Yone Noguchi’s little book.

K.

THE SLAV IN CONRAD

_Victory, by Joseph Conrad. New York: Doubleday, Page and
Company._

The Slavs are not adventurous people in the Western sense of the word; for the most part an inland race spread over the great monotonous Plain, they are inclined for melancholy introspective searchings and spiritual struggles rather than for actual physical adventures. Their writers need not create for their heroes an atmosphere of dizzying stunts and elemental cataclysms; they find sufficient dramatic “plot” in the soul experiences of the restless yearning men and women who dwell not on a South Sea island but in ordinary cities and villages, fighting their human fights, wrestling with God and man, gaining their ephemeral victories, but more often suffering defeats. Yet, despite their lack of adventurousness, the stories of the Russian and Polish writers, from Dostoevsky to Kuprin and from Orzezsko to Zeromsky, have seldom caused a yawn in their reader.

The checkered life of Conrad has placed a distinct stamp upon his works, distinct from both the writers of his race and from the Western writers. We observe a dualism in his art, an eternal collision between fact and fiction, between realism and symbolism. His inborn Slavic mysticism is weighed down by the ballast of his rich experiences, and he continually wavers between the Scylla of lyric melancholy and the Charybdis of picturesque plot, preserving the equilibrium at times more and at times less skilfully. The reader thus finds in Conrad that which he is after. For my part, I am rather distracted by the over-complex plot of _Victory_; I should much prefer to meet Heyst and Lena in less dizzy surroundings, for then the interesting psychology of the quaint lovers would appear accentuated, like the flame of a candle, and would not be blurred by a pyrotechnic mass of startling coincidences and marvellous adventures. The atmosphere of Doom that breathes throughout the story is reduced in the end to a sensational Eugène Sue-like climax—a heap of dead bodies.

K.

SICK IDEALISM

_Erdgeist (Earth-Spirit): A Tragedy in Four Acts; Pandora’s Box, by
Frank Wedekind. New York: Albert and Charles Boni._

Poor, foolish Frank Wedekind. Hapless Idealist. Luckless dreamer. Have you read _Der Erdgeist_ and _Pandora’s Box_? He wrote them—this enfevered fancier. In two kindred flashes of madness he illuminated several hundred sheets of paper and out of them—out of their blood-shot words and illegitimate truths—a new figure is born for the bookshelf. Not an old figure in new binding and fresh rouge. Not a Lescaut or a Thaïs or a Nana. This mocking idealist of virtue removes indeed the eighth veil from Salome. He hurls into the midst of the twittering parlor thinkers and sex chatterers a most disturbing answer to the eternal question, “What is woman?” It didn’t disturb me because I don’t believe it. And anyway, I don’t mean that kind of disturbance. I mean, virtuous reader, it is impossible to consume Wedekind without blushing. If you were disappointed in Shakespeare and Balzac and Casanova and Jacques Tournebrouche and could find nothing to blush at in them, do not despair. Here is a fellow, this Wedekind, who will daub a real blush out of a rouge pot, a miserable fellow whom you can condemn and ostracize and, having relegated him to his proper place, enjoy thoroughly or secretly or not at all.

It was Wedekind who first made people blush by a tasteless dissertation on the ignorant smugness recognized by society as the proper state for a young woman’s mind. He called it _Spring’s Awakening_. It was chiefly instrumental in awakening theatrical writers and managers. They spread the blush at $2 a head and waxed fat. But how did they spread the blush? Did they talk like Wedekind did? Did the mawkish plagiarist Cosmo Hamilton talk like Wedekind—tastelessly, vilely, brutally, and—horrors!—indelicately? Not he. Mr. Hamilton and the other get-rich-quick propagandists wouldn’t talk that way for the world. They are nice gentlemen. Not for them the idealist’s leer. Rather the bathroom wink. They will reveal a delicious girl in her delicious boudoir wearing a delicious nightie. They will make her out a virtuous girl, charmingly endowed but utterly stainless.

Having established this fact they roguishly introduce into her boudoir an estimable young man and permit him to caress her dramatically. But the whole proceeding is stainless. It is drolly suggestive of unspeakable things—see box office receipts. But suggestiveness is necessary to bring home to people the blindness of virtue and the dangers that beset the underpaid young women who ignorantly make it its own reward—(if that means anything). Anyway, when the audience leaves it has been enlightened. Its taste has not been offended. Virtue has been shown to be a dangerous thing—that is, uneducated virtue has. Everyone agrees. And if not they disagree. In either case the discussion properly conducted (under the auspices of the “Amalgamated Virgins of the 21st and 22nd Wards”) is pleasing and improving. The press argues delicately and in good taste about sex hygiene. A new physiology is placed in the public schools containing information on the most effective way of brushing the teeth of the young and preserving the hair of the old.

And last week Coroner Hoffman told me that it was impossible to estimate how many girls were killed annually in Chicago by abortive operations. He put the number in the hundreds. Hooray! Death is the wages of sin.

But all quibbling aside, what does this low fellow Wedekind whom I started out by calling an idealist (I will prove it shortly) do? To begin with, he talks about sex. Not about stockings and undergarments and perfumed kisses, ankles, asterisks and anomalies. Everyone knows that this kind of talk, particularly when produced in drama form, is in the first place inexcusable, and in the second place unnecessary, and in the third place vulgar. And in the fourth place, instead of making the best of a bad job—that is, making his contributions a mental stimulus for snickering roués and ladies sensitive of their status—he insists upon being nasty without being covert. Is there anything more unpardonable? Nobody can enjoy nastiness. The argument is an endless one. It leads to nothing except blows or blushes.