The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Little Review, April 1916 (Vol. 3, No. 2), by Margaret C. Anderson

Title: The Little Review, April 1916 (Vol. 3, No. 2)

Author: Various

Editor: Margaret C. Anderson

Release Date: January 15, 2023 [eBook #69805]

Language: English

Produced by: Jens Sadowski and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net. This book was produced from images made available by the Modernist Journal Project, Brown and Tulsa Universities.

Four Poems

CARL SANDBURG

Gone

Graves

Choices

Carl Sandburg
From a silhouette photograph by Elizabeth Buehrmann

Child of the Romans

SHERWOOD ANDERSON

Theodore Dreiser is old—he is very, very old. I do not know how many years he has lived, perhaps thirty, perhaps fifty, but he is very old. Something gray and bleak and hurtful that has been in the world almost forever is personified in him.

When Dreiser is gone we shall write books, many of them. In the books we write there will be all of the qualities Dreiser lacks. We shall have a sense of humor, and everyone knows Dreiser has no sense of humor. More than that we shall have grace, lightness of touch, dreams of beauty bursting through the husks of life.

Oh, we who follow him shall have many things that Dreiser does not have. That is a part of the wonder and the beauty of Dreiser, the things that others will have because of Dreiser.

When he was editor of The Delineator, Dreiser went one day, with a woman friend, to visit an orphans’ asylum. The woman told me the story of that afternoon in the big, gray building with Dreiser, heavy and lumpy and old, sitting on a platform and watching the children—the terrible children—all in their little uniforms, trooping in.

“The tears ran down his cheeks and he shook his head,” the woman said. That is a good picture of Dreiser. He is old and he does not know what to do with life, so he just tells about it as he sees it, simply and honestly. The tears run down his cheeks and he shakes his head.

Heavy, heavy, the feet of Theodore. How easy to pick his books to pieces, to laugh at him. Thump, thump, thump, here he comes, Dreiser, heavy and old.

The feet of Dreiser are making a path for us, the brutal heavy feet. They are tramping through the wilderness, making a path. Presently the path will be a street, with great arches overhead and delicately carved spires piercing the sky. Along the street will run children, shouting “Look at me”—forgetting the heavy feet of Dreiser.

The men who follow Dreiser will have much to do. Their road is long. But because of Dreiser, we, in America, will never have to face the road through the wilderness, the road that Dreiser faced.

ARTHUR DAVISON FICKE

I.

II.

III.

EZRA POUND

I should be very glad if someone in America could be made to realize the sinister bearing of the import duty on books. I have tried in vain to get some of my other correspondents to understand the effect of this iniquity ... but apparently without success. It means insularity, stupidity, backing the printer against literature, commerce and obstruction against intelligence. I have spent myself on the topic so many times that I am not minded to write an elaborate denunciation until I know I am writing to someone capable of understanding and willing to take up the battle. Incidentally the life of a critical review depends a good deal on controversy and on having some issue worth fighting. Henry IV. did away with the black mediaevalism of an octroi on books, and the position of Paris is not without its debt to that intelligent act. No country that needs artificial aid in its competition with external intelligence is fit for any creature above the status of pig.

The tariff should be abolished not only for itself but because dishonest booksellers shelter themselves behind it and treble the price of foreign books, and because it keeps up the price of printing.

If there is one thing that we are all agreed upon: It is that the canned goods of Curtis and Company and Harper and Company and all the business firms should be set apart from the art of letters, and the artist helped against the tradesman.

As a matter of fact a removal of the tariff wouldn’t much hurt even publishers, as the foreign books we really want in America are the sort which the greed of American business publishers forbids their publishing ... but that is no matter.

It affects every young writer in America, and every reader whether he wish merely to train his perceptions or whether he train them with a purpose, of, say, learning what has been done, what need not be repeated, what is worthy of repetition. There is now the hideous difficulty of getting a foreign book, and the prohibitive price of both foreign and domestic publications. I don’t know that I need to go on with it.

Again and yet again it is preposterous that our generation of writers shouldn’t have the facility in getting at contemporary work, which one would have in Paris or Moscow. It’s bad enough for the American to struggle against the dead-hand of the past generation composed of clerks and parasites and against our appalling decentralization, i. e., lack of metropoles and centers, having full publishing facilities and communication with the outer world—(which last is being slowly repaired)—also our scarcity of people who know.

ALEXANDER S. KAUN

How he hates us, ordinary mortals! No, he seldom hates; he reserves his hatred for God, for life, for the universe. For us, weak bubbles driven on the surface by uncontrollable forces, he has only contempt. Yet, though hating and despising, he is infinitely dear to us: the thick melancholy vein that bulges across his wildcat forehead makes him almost human; the taut string of his remote harp vibrates at times with such yearning and pain that we feel nearly at home with that alien-on-earth, Mikhail Lermontov. We are glad with a petty gladness whenever we discover in him this weakness, his humaneness; we chuckle at the comfortable feeling of being able to observe him on the level plane, freed from the necessity of throwing our heads far back in order to perceive him on the lonely peak. He is our brother, we boast; and we inflict on him the severest punishment for a genius—forgiveness.

But his contemporaries could not forgive him. A general sigh of relief echoed the official announcement of his death “in a fearful storm accompanied by thunder and lightning on the Beshta mountain in the Caucasus”. “Bon voyage”, exclaimed Nicholas I, rubbing his hands in glee over the departure of one of his most undesirable subjects, the uncompromising mutineer. The church refused to bury the arrogant denier. Society applauded Major Martinov whose bullet snapped the life of the unapproachable aristocrat, the mocker of customs and conventions, the maimer of feminine hearts, the careless, fearless duellist who played with life, his own or that of others, as with a valueless toy. The people—there was not such a thing in Russia of 1841.

Society organism cannot digest a foreign element. We are too local in our terrestrial standards to tolerate an individual who is made not of the same stuff that we are made of. Lermontov was a child of a different planet who fell upon our earth by some crude mistake, doomed to chafe twenty-six years among humans. As a child he protested against the fatal misplacement; he discharged his venom in demolishing flower-beds, in torturing animals with tears in his eyes, in brandishing his tiny fists against his grandmother, when he observed her mistreating the serfs. When he grew up—and he grew up early: at ten he loved a girl; at fifteen he conceived his greatest poems, Mtzyri and Demon—his protest had calmed down. He no longer wept or raged—he hated God and despised mankind. His contemporaries tell us that no one could stand his heavy penetrating look. Men hated and feared him; women hated and loved him, as they always do extraordinary things. Lermontov took revenge for his accidental association with mankind; he left behind him a long row of broken hearts and wounded ambitions. His rebellious spirit sought rest in chaos, in torturing others and himself, in creating around him an atmosphere of tragedy, in reckless fighting with the wild Caucasian mountaineers.

Pechorin, the hero of his autobiographical sketches collected in A Hero of Our Time, is the first Nietzschean in literature. His terse, unpretentious maxims and paradoxes have been re-echoed by Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Przybyszewski, and other writers of the superman-literature. As always is the case with deliberate or unconscious commentators, they liquefy the original. One carelessly dropped sentence of Lermontov is elaborated in tons of Dostoevsky’s gallous psychology, in mountains of Nietzsche’s brain-splittering philosophy, in cognac-oceans of the vivisectionist-Przybyszewski. Pechorin does not talk much; he is too aristocratic for extravagance in words. Pechorin does not compromise; he is not made of that stuff. He neither repents nor seeks atonement; in his hatred for reality he does not erect a consoling phantom in the image of a Superman; he would dismiss with a contemptible shrug Falk’s matrimonial and sexual tribulations. Pechorin is eternally alone. Those who approach him are scorched with his unhuman flame. Alone, in the steppe, after a mad ride which kills his horse, Pechorin hugs the soil and weeps “like a child”. Like a child pressing to its mother’s bosom, plaintively demanding the Why and the Wherefore of existence among strangers. Shall we chuckle at the suddenly-discovered weakness of our enemy? Or shall we modestly turn away our eyes from the stolen sight of a god in his nudity?

I once called Lermontov a sorrowful demon. Not a Lucifer, not a Mephistopheles, but a Russian demon, as the sculptor Antokolsky conceived him. Lermontov-Demon-Pechorin, a quaint superman, neither god nor devil, a pluralistic being, a combination of cruelty and compassion, of contempt and sympathy, of cynicism and sentimentalism, of the loftiest and the basest, of the unhuman and of the human-all-too-human. Dostoevsky?

[1] A Hero of Our Time, by M. Y. Lermontov. New York, Alfred A. Knopf.

MARGARET C. ANDERSON

There are people in the world who like poetry if they know the poet. There are a good many people in Chicago just now who understand and enjoy Amy Lowell’s poetry because she read it to them at the Little Theatre.

I know a poet who could make nothing of Vachel Lindsay’s things until Lindsay chanted them to him one day. And I know another who said to me, when I remarked that I didn’t like Alfred Kreymborg’s verse, “Oh, but you would if you knew him.” I am puzzled, because I know this man to be an intelligent being. And somehow I have always been under the naive impression that poetry was a matter of art.

But there are worse things. There is one type of person we always eject promptly from the office of The Little Review. He is the person who says that Amy Lowell’s poetry has no feeling in it. Now please listen: I want to quote you something. It is called Vernal Equinox, it was written by Miss Lowell, and it appeared in the September issue of Poetry; but I want to see it put down in these pages so that we may actually know it has been in The Little Review:

A poet whose new book will soon be talked of said to me, when I showed this to him, “Yes, it’s very clever, but it has no feeling.” He left the office gladly in three minutes.

Still there are worse things. The Chicago Tribune sent a reporter to the Little Theatre to hear Miss Lowell read and to record his impression of her work and personality for those who still peruse the newspapers. You may have seen the reporter’s article....

And still worse?... Lots of people have been splitting hairs over Amy Lowell’s work, but no human being has been heard to remark: “A beautiful thing is happening in America. Amy Lowell is writing poetry for us.”

ELIZABETH GIBSON CHEYNE

The Cry

The Excuse

The Cross

[2] I do not know whether these poems have been published elsewhere or not. They were read by Ellen Gates Starr in a mass meeting in Kent Theatre on the University of Chicago campus—a mass meeting in protest against police brutality during the garment strike.

R. G.

There are signs of life at the Art Institute. In throwing out Charles Kinney, it stated the case against itself more emphatically than Kinney ever could have done. When an “institution” becomes violent over criticism there is too much work for one reformer.

This seems to have been a season for things Art to be stating the case against themselves. At the last meeting of the Chicago Society of Artists, when there was a slight murmur of dissatisfaction with the management of the Institute, one of the older men quickly reminded the painters that they were but guests of the Institute—and there was silence. Art has come by hard ways, but never to worse than this:—the guest of the Corn Exchange Bank!

Again at a meeting for the formation of the new Arts Club, before the matter of the Club could be discussed there had to be a speech assuring the Art Institute that the artists would never, in any way, ever do anything on their own, but would always conform to the ideas of the directors of the Institute. But where they really proved themselves was at the annual dinner, at the opening of the Chicago Artists’ Exhibition. Herded into a room they meekly submitted to oyster stew and a speech by a minister of the Gospel. Artists! That is their case as stated by themselves.

Kinney blames the directors pro tem., and the Dean, for the “factory system” in the school. Knowing that all the small towns in the West and Middle West having any kind of an Art School pattern after the Art Institute, he is excited and fears the factory system will prevail everywhere. But he might have hope that here and there accidentally a few artists may get mixed up among the other students and frustrate this plan.

It would be interesting to know whether the administration by its methods has so completely discouraged artists that they no longer seek the Art Institute as a place of study, or whether the administration is simply changing its methods to meet the demands of the kind of student now attending the Institute.

This much is certain: no administration could take away every ancient prerogative of art students; lead them gently into organization; impose discipline upon them; and appoint God a chaperone over their play—in fact make a crêche of the school—if there were any of the stuff in them of which artists are made.

There always has been a fight on the part of the school to get what it wanted from the directors; but things can be done. Read the list of “illustrious names” of visiting instructors, years ago, and then compare the student roll of the same time. Once the Art Institute was an art school with art students, who were artists, who in spite of everything led the life of artists, knew the analogy between painting and the other Arts, swarmed to concerts and the theatres, and created their own atmosphere. That was the time when Bernhardt came to the school in her yellow-wheeled carriage and walked down a double line of quaking, adoring art students. And when Calvé came to sing.... How many students there now know these names, know anything beyond fashion drawing?

They have indicted themselves. If there were artists the Art Institute could seek exhibitions. If there were art students we could have an art school, not a “factory.” And if the directors of the Art Institute and its patrons really wanted Art, and the directors would throw the Institute open to all kinds of exhibitions, we might even in time find Art.

WILLIAM SAPHIER

Learned essays on this or that poetry make little red devils dance in my brain and my right hand reach for a Japanese sword. They are invariably inferior to the spirit, and occupy only a small section of the horizon of their subject. I have translated these three poems because I felt that they were as good or better than the best things published in this country, and because so little is known of this kind of German poetry here. The first is by Julius Berstl and the second two are by Fritz Schnack. I know of many more, but I am unable to get their work just now. As you perhaps know, they are engaged at present in a different direction.

Highland

(From the German of Julius Berstl)

Young Days

(From the German of Fritz Schnack)

One Morning

(From the German of Fritz Schnack)

CHARLES ZWASKA

I.

And the youth returned to his village and found it vile. In the City he had seen visions of what a town might be.... Nicholas Vachel Lindsay had been studying Art in Chicago and on his return to Springfield published, in the fall of 1910, The Village Magazine: a scattering of verse, prose, sketches, and ornamental designs and propaganda. “Talent for poetry, deftness in inscribing, and skill in mural painting were probably gifts of the same person”, he tells us later, in speaking of the ancient Egyptians. “Let us go back”—the village must be redeemed. The first editorial in the magazine was On Conversion. The people of Springfield “should build them altars to the unknown God, the radiant one; He whom they radiantly worship should be declared unto them in His fullness.” The next was An Editorial on Beauty for the Village Pastor—it expressed the belief that the Sunday-school, the Christian Endeavor Society, the Brotherhood, Anti-Saloon League, and the Woman’s Aid were the forces that were to bring about beauty. Springfield was to be the new Athens! A broadside was distributed throughout the village: The Soul of the City receives the gift of the Holy Spirit:

Verses like the above aside, here was revealed to us a poet; the foundations were laid, it seemed, for a future. But the youth did dream and see visions. Much was said about Utopias and the New Jerusalem, and poetry languished in the youth that he might materialize some ultimate world state. The most inexcusable optimism of them all—“Rome was not built in a day.” True, but it was built: not merely talked about or prophesied. And the youth remembered not that it hath been said in Isaiah: “For, behold, I create a new heaven and a new earth: and the former shall not be remembered nor come into mind.” Yet the youth remembered the former still and did say much about the recoming of those civilizations which had been, at last to stay forever! His day, or the great poet who proceeded him by but a few years, he seemed to notice not:

But the youth was at heart the poet, the dreamer, attempting to convince by arguments, similes, rhymes; not as the great Poet, by mere presence! Nor could he stand the offer of rough new prizes, preferring the smooth old prizes. He clung to the organizations of the day, and to augment their “influence toward the Millennium” he published The Village Magazine. That, gentle reader, was in 1910.

II.

In the year 1912 there went forth from Springfield this same lad. Into the West he went—through Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, and into New Mexico. He went preaching a gospel,—his own “Gospel of Beauty.” His sustenance he earned by reciting his own rhymes to those who were willing, in exchange, to give him bread. Thus did he make us uncomfortably imagine him a new John the Baptist, François Villon, or even Saint Francis of Assisi.... In the year 1914 his account of this adventure was published. Three rhymes, he claims, contained his “theory of American civilization.” This is from one of them:

And “At the end of the Road”—by faith and a study of the signs—he proclaimed the New Jerusalem for America, particularly for his home-village.... Now, there is a peculiar value attached to this journey—the influence on the poet, not the preacher’s influence on the people. It was after this trip that we got The Santa Fé Trail, The Fireman’s Ball, written in a style in which were later written The Chinese Nightingale and The Congo. And, because of the relation of its style to these, we even judge I heard Emmanuel Singing a good thing. This, then, is Lindsay’s importance among us; his contribution of this style of vaudeville chanting. This is the poet. He does not count when writing Galahad, Knight Who Perished, King Arthur’s Men Have Come Again, Incense, Springfield Magical, or declaring “by faith and a study of the signs.”

III.

On November first, 1915, at Springfield, Illinois, Vachel Lindsay signed a book on The Art of the Moving Picture. The last chapter was called “The Acceptable Year of the Lord.” From having seen forecastings in photoplay hieroglyphics the children in times-to-come can rise and say: “This day is the scripture fulfilled in your ears”:

This, then, is the prophecy, and thus has he proclaimed it: “By my hypothesis, Action Pictures are sculpture-in-motion, Intimate Pictures are paintings-in-motion, Splendour Pictures are architecture-in-motion.... The rest of the work is a series of after thoughts and speculations not brought forward so dogmatically.”

Now, the Arts are complete in themselves; they contain all. The moving picture has come to be a parasite on them.

Sculpture has become a vital thing to this age because of August Rodin. Meunier has moved us too. Also Monolo and Fagi. Now comes Lindsay: “I desire for the moving picture not the stillness but the majesty of sculpture.... Not the mood of Venus de Milo, but let us turn to that sister of hers—the great Victory of Samothrace”.

... I have seen much of Lindsay’s advice followed word for word since this book of his was published. Tyrone Power in The Dream of Eugene Aram. Power’s face and figure were more majestic on the stage than in this picture. There was a “sculpture-group,” as you would call it, in this picture—a farmer and two squires on a hilltop. It was in silhouette, a sketch and not sculpture. The nearest I have seen to the majesty and immobility of sculpture, marble or otherwise, was the head of William S. Hart in The Aryan. The picture was shadowed so as to center on his poetic face, the fascination of which none but Forbes Robertson’s has. Hart’s face on the screen, his eyes looking into the eyes of you, at his throat a handkerchief of white—a bust by an artist indeed! But the shadows parted, and the hieroglyphic-crowded background came into view. Hart’s head moved, became part of a moving picture and sculpture was no more. The moment was worth it—but it moved.... “Moving pictures are pictures and not sculpture”, says Lorado Taft in a public statement, objecting to Lindsay’s phrase. “To a sculptor the one thing cherished as most essential to his art is its static quality, its look of absolute quiescence. It is the hint of eternity which marks and makes all monumental art”.... Has Lindsay no feeling for sculpture?

Frank Lloyd Wright has models in plaster of some of his buildings—“modern” skyscrapers, hotels, and homes, growing, rising upward, white and beautiful. It was these works of architecture which called forth the phrase “flowers in stone”. He alone, it seems, has made art of architecture in our day. He objects to Lindsay saying his art can be that of moving pictures; its very literalness, its actualness being the very negation of the soul and constitution of art. In The Dumb Girl of Portici the Smalleys, as inspired as any of the producers, used the entire Field Museum in Jackson Park, Chicago, as a background for a pageant of Italian royalty, of the middle ages. Insisting on architecture can spoil pictures. It did this one.

Painting-in-motion—rhythm. Rhythm seems alien to the application of the theory of jerky fade-away close-ups. “Intimate Dutch interior” scenes fading into the close-up and then back into the entire scene again. Intimate, friendly, and moving, but lacking in rhythm and the flow of naturalness. Some think that “moving lines”, made an art in themselves, will be an achievement of the moving film. Have you ever been struck dumb by the lines made by a dancer across the stage, the moving of life across life? I have seen it in the moving-picture only in the flight of gulls (unconscious actors) or in pictures of rivers and trees and the sea; in short—nature. But nature is nature. The painter’s art! Botticelli’s Spring, or The Birth of Venus—pictures containing the essence of rhythmic natural movement. Never yet have the movies given us this. If Lindsay must prophesy and “take the masses back to art” there are artists living today—who are for today. Lindsay seems to know nothing of them. His knowledge of painting seems to have stopped with his art school days. The later work of Jerome Blum, for example, has this movement, this rhythm, not only in composition and line but in the color as well. Reds and greens and blues that vibrate, paintings that live.

The rest of this might be entitled: “An open letter to Vachel Lindsay”, for it is “not so dogmatically set forth” and is mere man-to-man talk.

I have seen most of your suggestions swallowed whole by moving-picture makers.... Your hieroglyphics idea—well, James Oppenheim was an accomplice in that. “On Coming Forth by Day” or your suggestion to use the Book of the Dead—a Chicago woman, the patient, too-patient, beautifully reverent Lou Wall Moore has been working for years on an adaptation of one of the books which, when it does appear on the stage, will have more rhythm and terrible swiftness than ever your moving picture could, the splendor of color, space, height, distance, and most magical of all, the voice:

As for your “too ruthless a theory” of having silence in the theatre, or rather just the hum of conversation, let me tell you of the “midnight-movies” in our town: Can you imagine a crowd of people standing in line outside a theatre at one or a quarter after in the morning? And inside an audience—or optience?!—which for interest and variety can equal any of the moving-pictures shown or yet to be shown. I wish you could hear the ludicrous, cutting, knowing remarks made by these people about your pictures, when, after twelve-thirty the piano stops, and the oppressive silence outweighs the interest of the picture. (The piano formerly stopped at eleven, but the management decided that the only way to maintain order was to keep the piano going.) Well, the silence never lasts: snoring, wheezing, roaring, shouting and laughing and calls for “Silence”, “Wake up, the rest of us wanna sleep”, “You’re off key”, or “What time shall I call, sir?” These people are here: business men; newsboys, hobos, drunks, who sleep here all night; salesmen; night clerks; telegraphers; bell-boys; hotel and restaurant maids; scrub-women; actors; vaudevillians; cabaret singers; pressmen; newspapermen; chauffeurs, teamsters; traveling men; gentlemen of leisure; painted youths and scented women. They “get” the psychology of the pictures. Helen’s hazards call forth telegraph tappings to each other; close-ups showing jealousy, rage, or overdone emotion get “woof-woofs” and howls and hoots; the murder prevented “just in time” gets its sarcasms; and “immoral situations” their due appreciation. But—this, which seemed on the way to become our most individual phase of night-life, is passing. The jolly manager, who passed up and down the aisle like a hen among her brood, keeping us awake until one o’clock, has been replaced by a uniformed policeman; the council has legislated women out after two o’clock; and a “ride in the wagon” or ejection faces the one who would “get gay”. Now, as a place of interest, it is passing in this day of short-lived gayety and censored originality. The Law, Lindsay, will not allow your plan to work. In the neighborhoods?—the audiences themselves do not know why they are there. Why disturb them?

Your educational film also I have seen applied. Saved From the Flames worked out in co-operation with the New York Fire department. It teaches a lesson. So does The Human Cauldron—your own phrase, I believe, taken from the first line of page forty-two, your book. This picture was done with the aid of the New York Police department. Both were stupid, inane in story and treatment, and on the whole a bore. Even Walthall couldn’t save The Raven from cardboard clouds and angels and “visions”.

Your scenario, the “second cousin to the dream that will one day come forth”, seems quite symbolic of your prophecies. Pallas Athena, Jeanne D’Arc, and Our Lady Springfield; a treeless hill top in Washington Park: this then is the rank of the Goddesses. Springfield is to have secular priests and her patriots are irresolute! “Without prophecy there can be no fulfillment. Without Isaiah there can be no Christ”.—A truly Christian interpretation of the Hebrew’s great Isaiah, to whom Christ was but a disciple! But so you will have it.... We need Isaiahs and John the Baptists, but they were prophets and fore-runners of a Christ, a personality—not a Utopia, World State or International Brotherhood. If you appear before us as an Isaiah we demand to hear of your Christ. You recognize the demand of Confucius for rectification of names. Do you realize Nietzsche’s transvaluations for our day? Faith as opposed to affirmation! Zarathustra has spoken! There is now the mountain peak—and you are still rhyming about a hill top.

LUPO DE BRAILA

A burst of passion in a pagan god’s eye was the sunrise as I saw it from the top of Mount Rose one morning last summer. Trembling and with squinting eyes I looked at the grand spectacle, fearing to go blind if I opened my eyes.

The sun stretched its arms and with flaming fingers lifted the bluish-grey blanket from the Nevada hills and the Truckee Valley. Feeling that the beauty of this moment could not be surpassed, I turned my face toward California and ran down the western side of Mount Rose.

One day last week when the massive shoulders of Jerome Blum stepped in between me and a canvas that had transformed his studio into a strange land for me, I wanted to hold his hands for fear the next canvas would take the joy produced by the one in front of me. He came back from an eight-months’ trip through Japan and China recently, and he brought with him over twenty paintings with pulsating nature and unrestrained joy in every one of them. The rhythmic lines dance through the curling roofs and weird trees—and all of them are bathed in sunshine. At the same time they are a close study of this strange land, its people and their habits, by a forceful and unusual artist—a man who says “yes” to nature in no uncertain terms. His bold colors are handled in a most sensitive manner, and when I wanted to place him among the Chicago artists I found that he belongs to an entirely different class and could not even be compared to some of the vacillating and doubtful men who paint in this town.

He has a portrait of a Chinese girl in a green gown, and some scenes along a canal and in a Chinese garden, that have tempted my usually honest mind to some queer contemplations. I have found myself wandering to the windows and other unusual entrances to his studio, figuring out how one might find access to that place without a key and at a certain dark hour. I have only one hope left now of owning one in a figurative way, and it is that the trustees of the Art Institute may see the light and....

I hope Jerome Blum will not be compelled, like some of the best men this country has produced, to go to other shores to gain the recognition due a man of his ability. A few weeks ago I saw one of the older trustees spend considerable time before a canvas by a Boston painter that lacked all that goes to make a work of art,—a canvas on which the artist, with the aid of a pointed stick, had tried to prod his dead and colorless paint into some kind of motion. In spite of this I still believe that they will rise to the high intellectual and artistic understanding that they are supposed to possess, but which they have failed to display up to the present, as far as modern art is concerned.

It is impossible for me to describe any of Blum’s canvases except to say that they tear you away from the dirty grey and ill-smelling Chicago, to a country you have seen in your dreams as a child. We will have a chance to see this artist’s work, beginning April fifteenth, at O’Brien’s, on Michigan Boulevard.

Lucille Swan Blum will exhibit at the same time and place some very graceful Japanese dancers, Chinese children, Corean, Chinese, and Japanese mothers with their babies and other far-eastern types. Best of all is a Chinese philosopher, reduced almost to design to emphasize the idea of the age and wisdom of this people—folded hands, an emotionless face, all seeing eyes....

(A scattering of words anent Washington Square, “Henry VIII”, Yvette Guilbert, “The Merry Wives of Windsor”, and sundry other things and people, as far as space and time allow.)

ALLAN ROSS MACDOUGALL

From my garret window I look out on Washington Square. Snow and ice still lie there, and the trees are black and mean.

On the first page of his new book, “Moby Lane and Thereabouts”, Neil Lyons says: “Spring has many ushers, and is heralded by divers signs. Some people look for these signs among the hedgerows; others seek them in the sky, or listen for them in the night, whilst other people neither look or listen, but go smelling about, or stand upon hill-tops, tasting.” My sign shall be, I think, the grimy trees of the Square. And sometimes as I sit here looking out on the icy barrenness I wonder if, when Spring’s breath does touch the earth, whether flowers will come up—flowers that I long to see: crocuses, anemones, daffodils. It’s all very well to see them in shop windows, but God! to see them come up out of the earth and unfold! But I fear our Square is too sophisticated. I know a man will come—a common tobacco-chewing man with a stunted soul who belongs to a Union and gets paid so much coin by the hour—and he will arrange squares, and oblongs, and diamond shaped plots of earth. Then will he proceed laboriously and without joy to stick tulips or some other straight official flower into these geometrical, soulless patterns. And throughout the year in the Square, nature will be kept in bounds and orders.

“Henry VIII”

It seems scarcely possible that Sir Herbert Tree would have the calm artistic audacity to come to this country and present his production of “Henry VIII” in the moth-eaten scenery and costumes that were used in the London production in the year 1910. Yet he did, and oh! the wearisome drab antiquity of it all! But the “People” liked it and gave the beknighted actor-manager “one of the greatest premieres that New York has witnessed these many years”.

Mention is made in the programme of “the inspiring aerchiological advice” of Percy Macquoid, R. I. The advice may have been quite inspiring. I do not doubt it. But the results of that advice! That medley of costumes! Those photo scenes of Windsor Castle and Blackfriars Hall and Westminster Abbey! They were bad when first conceived and painted, and five years in a London storeroom has not improved them to any degree compatible with their presentation to an audience that has looked upon the work of Bakst, Urban, Jones, Sime, and Rothenstein.

And what can be said of the lighting? There was one comic spotlight that followed Sir Herbert (or ought I to say Wolsey? I hardly know; they were never quite distinct) around the stage like a little motherless puppy. Sometimes it went before, sometimes it frisked after, on the tail of his magnificent scarlet gown. It had a grand time! But it never seemed to be doing the thing it ought to be doing.

But let me not bore you as these things bored me. Pass we now to the acting. In London the honors of the play were carried off by Arthur Bouchier as Henry, and his wife, Violet Vanburgh, as Katherine. A repetition was performed here. Lyn Harding as Henry, and Edith Wynne Matheson as Katherine, carried every one before them. And Tree? Well, he had his moments. There was his superb entrance with the look he flashed at Buckingham: fine too was the acting in the scene of his downfall. Between these two highlights such ordinary acting has seldom been seen in a man of Tree’s reputation. In a cold classic way Miss Matheson was splendid. I liked her much, and but for her some of the scenes in the play would have been colourless. There was the usual mob of supers who got caught in doorways and tripped over furniture, but on the whole they behaved as well as an ordinary stage manager can make such people behave.

Yvette Guilbert

Five years ago I saw Yvette Guilbert in London. I loved her all. Her red hair; the skinny arms of her, clothed in long black gloves; and her Gallic body with the low-necked white crinoline that gowned it. And how she sang!! And her acting! For five years I have carried the memory of her around with me, matching other people up with her but never finding her equal. On Sunday, March nineteenth, I saw her again. The black gloves and the white crinoline were gone, and she had grown a little stouter. The red hair was there, and the smile. Her voice had changed a bit and her personality had mellowed. She sang songs that were grave and moving, like Fiona Macleod’s Prayer of Women, and others that were gay and jocular, like The Curé Servant. But whatever she sang—and I didn’t know a word of what she sang—carried me away completely. Not a mood did I miss—not a suggestion of a mood. Perfect is her art. She has my adoration.

“The Merry Wives of Windsor”

The latest addition to the Shakespeare Festival that is being thrust upon the apathetic people of this place is the Hackett-Allen production of The Merry Wives of Windsor. Three things can be said without any further comment. Joseph Urban did the stage settings. Richard Ordynski directed the production. Willy Pogany designed the costumes. Gordon Craig says somewhere that any medium is easier to work in than human beings. After seeing the work expended on The Merry Wives of Windsor by three geniuses, and watching the actors in that play, we understand completely.

Soulless New York

Witter Bynner, grown somber and blase,—the effect of living in soulless New York, he says—has become a sort of Greek Chorus to me. In various strophes with divers variations, in sundry public and private places, he chants the dismal fact that New York is soulless and that there is a danger of it robbing me of my joy in life. Not while its streets remain as they are will I lose the joy I possess! I cannot remember any city that I have been in where my sense of the comic has been tickled so often by happenings in the streets. So many comedies are enacted by the curbstone, so many quaintly funny things happen every hour on the streets, that it would be impossible for me to forget how jolly life really is. Of course I see tragedies too, but they seem to be there only for the purpose of balance!

For some time to come I’ll Dalcroze down the avenues and numerical by-ways of this “soulless” city. And my smile will always be handy; and my whistle wet, ready to pipe Gathering Peascods or The Parson’s Farewell or anything merry and bright to dance to.

“Overtones”

Alice Gerstenberg, who dramatized Alice in Wonderland, wrote Overtones, evidently as an experiment, and had it produced in New York. Now it is crowding vaudeville houses. As an experiment only is it important. Cyril Harcourt intends collaborating with Miss Gerstenberg to produce a three-act play on the same lines: characters being followed by their “real selves”, veiled, with voices confused. A Shaw play might be done this way—it is a method effective for moralizing and bringing home a point. But why would Darling Dora need an overtone or an undertone; or Blanco Posnet or Fanny’s Father? If there is any reason for the dramatic presentation of characters at all it is the drama of themselves—their actions and their thoughts as opposed to those of others.... Imagine Rebecca West being followed through three acts by a “real self”; or Ulric Brendel—“... I am homesick for the mighty nothingness”.

“The New Manner”

(Vague Questionings)

It evidently means—this phrase—“that which is accepted as new”.... There are signs of our dangerously settling down to flat brilliant backgrounds, spots of vivid color, and much mention of “important as decoration”. It seems an unhealthy acquiescence.... “Is desire a thing of nothing, that a five-years’ quest can make a parody of it? Your whole life is not too long, and then only at the very end will some small atom of what you have desired come to you.”—Gordon Craig in his Art of the Theatre. It looks as if we are due for a period of the old, old, three-walled room with the new, new, “new” color.... I don’t believe we will find the future in Michael Carr’s butterfly proscenium and moving-picture screen shadows; but, surely, it is not The Man Who Married a Dumb Wife, or Androcles and the Lion, although Barker’s Midsummer Night’s Dream costumes are the most far-reaching originalities yet seen. Nor will it be like A Pair of Silk Stockings, The Sabine Women, Overtones, The Charity that Began at Home, The Taming of the Shrew, nor Urban and his present enormous New York output of “designs” and “follies”. Our only light seems to come from Gordon Craig’s work in Florence. “In his work is the incalculable element; the element that comes of itself and cannot be coaxed into coming”. Or from Sam Hume’s enthusiasm over the “Dome”; Reinhardt, of course, has almost acquired his permanent “angle of repose”—the newness of the American stage being, in fact, the Reinhardt of yesterday. If I had my way, I’d destroy all books about the theatre excepting those of Gordon Craig, for inspiration, or those of Arthur Symons for appreciation.... Then, perhaps, we should begin to understand the Theatre.

Bernhardt on Reinhardt

Sarah Bernhardt has been playing a patriotic play, Les Cathedrales, in London. “It is such a great play I intend taking it into the provinces and then back to London again”, she says. We have said it is a patriotic play; nothing more need be said. Bernhardt plays one of the seven cathedrals, Strasburg. In the interview, quoted above, given to the London magazine, Drawing, Bernhardt has also this to say: “And now, it seems to me that artists in the Allied Countries, and also authors, painters, composers, and all those concerned in the theatre have to bind themselves into a league for removing all traces of German nature and influence from our plays and theatres.... Now the German showman Reinhardt flooded Paris and London with the Berliner deluge of the spectacular. He claims artistic superiority on the grounds of having introduced several novel trivialities. But to trace the real curve of truth I must say that he did nothing of the kind. He merely revived, in Sumurun and Oedipus Rex, certain outworn conventions which existed before his time! But he has not the honesty to acknowledge it.” Later she does say something worth thinking over: “What he has done is to use Eastern methods for Western ideas when he should have used Eastern ideas for Western methods.” Plagiarism is an irrelevant charge to bring against an artist, but acknowledging an artistic right to adaptation means expansion and, despite nationalism, a universal one-ness.

“And Lesser Things”

“—— and Other Poets”, by Louis Untermeyer. New York: Henry Holt and Company.

Very, very clever. The ultimate emptiness of cleverness. These parodies are “not a piece of buffoonery so much as a critical exposition”,—the poet expects them to approach this “elevated and illuminating” standard; but they never reach satire, which is really the thing that is covered by the above quotation from Isaac Disraeli.

Untermeyer’s verse, including Challenge and that so quantitatively published in the magazines,—still speaking comparatively,—has the same relation to poetry as Urban’s scenery for The Follies has to his Boston Opera settings; or of all of Urban’s work to that of the numerous German poster school of five or eight years ago. Untermeyer is lenient in parodying poets of his own ilk—but it is easy to determine which of those he does not respect by his obvious, spiteful absurdities.

For years now newspaper paragraphers, “poets”, and editors have been saying such things as “It is time we are getting ourselves talked about” when mentioning Ezra Pound. Untermeyer stoops to it; he is still the “once born” when being “critical” about Amy Lowell: “A blue herring sings”. What he is really parodying here is his colleague Walt Mason’s prose-printed jingles which are syndicated throughout newspaperdom; he is not giving a “critical exposition” of polyphonic prose. It will need a keener critic or poet than he to do it—or to produce a parody or satire whose art equals that of the thing satired—Masters’s things for example. By ambling through thirty-seven lines Untermeyer imagines that he is being master of the situation as regards Masters. And the last line of the parody on James Oppenheim might very well have been written by Untermeyer himself as one of his own: “Clad in the dazzling splendor of my awakened self”.... No matter what may have been your attitude toward the poets parodied these things leave your feelings unchanged—except that he makes more definite your attitude towards him.

Impartial and Otherwise

The Making of Germany, by Ferdinand Schevill. Chicago: A. C. McClurg and Company.

Great Russia, by Charles Sarolea. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Imperial Germany and the Industrial Revolution, by Thorstein Veblen. New York: Macmillan.

These books are not war-literature—a compliment not often deserved in these days of ink-war demoralization. The lay, unbiased reader, who is inclined to learn facts rather than to find interpretations substantiating his prejudices, will enjoy the three books as a rare treat. They are very much unlike. Mr. Schevill is a historian par excellence, and lends a broad perspective to the related facts. He also lends a rich romantic flavor to his narrative, an emotional undercurrent—so unfrequent a feature with academic writers. His point of view may not be universally acceptable; even in history there are events and phenomena which belong to the autonomous region of taste and opinion. The scene of the triumphant Prussians solemnizing their victory in Versailles, for example, may arouse differing emotions and reflections. Mr. Schevill bows in reverence before the three heroic figures of Emperor William (“not unlike the legendary Barbarossa”), Bismarck, and Moltke. We may likewise not share his enthusiasm for the German idea of State, as superior to Anglo-Saxon individualism. But we cannot help admiring the general brilliancy of the treatment of the gigantic subject, and if we are capable of getting instructed, our reading of the book will amply reward us.

M. Sarolea is a Belgian, hence pro-Ally and anti-German, hence unreservedly Russophil, hence not wholly impartial. It is a poor service to Russia, the unqualified praise of all her institutions and traits on the part of her friends. Exaggerated eulogy is apt to arouse suspicion. If M. Sarolea had interchanged his Mercurian sprightliness for Professor Veblen’s solidity, both would have gained considerably. Mr. Veblen takes us as far back as the pre-historic Baltic tribes in order to prove his point of the peculiar aptitude of the Prussians for borrowing. He certainly succeeds in his attempt, but at the expense of the reader’s patience and eye-sight which is subjected to the perusal of endless pages of miniature type. His scientific style is surcharged with profound sarcasm, and if you are fond of delicate subtleties the book will afford you “great sport.” Schevill, historian; Sarolea, publicist; Veblen, economist—the common feature of the three, particularly of the first and of the last, is respect for the reader who is treated with facts and not with phantoms for the sake of argument.

K.

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