Read Ebook: The Little Review November 1915 (Vol. 2 No. 8) by Various Anderson Margaret C Editor

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Editor: Margaret C. Anderson

THE LITTLE REVIEW

Literature Drama Music Art

MARGARET C. ANDERSON EDITOR

NOVEMBER, 1915

"Life Itself" The Editor The Zeppelins Over London Richard Aldington Portrait of Theodore Dreiser Arthur Davison Ficke Theodore Dreiser John Cowper Powys "So We Grew Together" Edgar Lee Masters Choleric Comments Alexander S. Kaun The Scavenger's Swan Song Dregs: Ben Hecht Life Depths Gratitude Editorials John Cowper Powys on War Margery Currey The Washington Square Players Saxe Commins Rupert Brooke's "Lithuania" at the Little Theater Book Discussion: An Inspired Publisher Gogol's "Taras Bulba" Gorky's "Chelkash, and Other Stories" Andreyev's "The Little Angel" Chekhov's "Russian Silhouettes" Artzibashef's "The Breaking Point"

Published Monthly

MARGARET C. ANDERSON, Publisher Fine Arts Building CHICAGO

.50 a year

Entered as second-class matter at Postoffice, Chicago

THE LITTLE REVIEW

Vol. II

NOVEMBER, 1915

No. 8

"Life Itself"

MARGARET C. ANDERSON

"But you don't know Life," they are always saying. I wonder what it is they mean?

And every human being knows these things.

"But you don't know life itself," I am always saying. I wonder what it is I mean.

I think it is something wonderful like color and sound, and something mystical like fragrance and flowers. And something incredible like air and wind, And something of grey magic like rain; It is faded deserts and the unceasing sea; It is the moving stars; It is the orange sun stepping through blue curtains of sky, And the rose sun dropping through black trees; It is green storms running across greenness, And gold rose petals spilled by the moon on dark water; It is snow and mist and clouds of color, It is tree gardens and painted birds; It is leaves of autumn and grasses of spring; It is flower forests and the petals of stars; It is morning--yellow mornings, green mornings, red mornings, gold mornings, silver mornings, sun mornings, mist mornings, mornings of dew; It is night--white nights, green nights, grey nights, purple nights, blue nights, moon nights, rain nights, nights that burn; It is waking in the first of the morning, It is the deep adventure of sleep; It is lights on rivers and lights on pavements; It is boulevards bordered with flowers of stone; It is poetry and Japanese prints and the actor on a stage; It is music; It is dreams that could not happen; It is emotion for the sake of emotion; It is life for the sake of living; It is silence; It is the unknowable; It is eternity; It is death.

And only artists know these things.

The Zeppelins Over London

RICHARD ALDINGTON

... The war saps all one's energy. It seems impossible to do any creative work in the midst of all this turmoil and carnage. Of course you know that we had the Zeppelins over London? Let me give you my version of the affair.

What rather detracts from our heroism is the fact that the Zeppelin had already dropped all its bombs in the middle of London, but we didn't know it till afterwards.

I deduce these reflections. 1. That as an engine of frightfulness the Zeppelin is over-rated. And the damage it does is comparatively unimportant. 2. That it is uncultured of the Germans to risk murdering the English Imagists and ruining the only poetic movement in England, for the sake of getting their names into the papers. 3. That I notice I never go to bed now earlier than twelve, and frequently go for a walk about eleven o'clock.

I can't of course tell you where the bombs fell, as it is strictly forbidden. Still I can say this: that no public building of any kind was touched; that it looks jolly well as if our Teutonic friends made a dead set at St. Paul's and the British Museum; that, without exception, the bombs fell on the houses of the poor and the very poor--except for a warehouse or so and some offices; that one bomb fell near a block of hospitals, containing paralytics and other cripples and diseased persons, smashed all the hospital windows, and terrified the unhappy patients into hysterics; that, lastly, it is a damned lie to say there are guns on St. Paul's and the British Museum--the buildings are too old to stand the shock of the recoil. Voil?!

... Remy de Gourmont is dead.... Camille de Saint-Croix also. It is hard to write of friends recently dead....

Portrait of Theodore Dreiser

ARTHUR DAVISON FICKE

There were gilded Chinese dragons And tinkling danglers of glass And dirty marble-topped tables Around us, that late night-hour. You ate steadily and silently From a huge bowl of chop-suey Of repellant aspect; While I,--I, and another,-- Told you that you had the style neither of William Morris Nor of Walter Pater.

And it was perfectly true .... But you continued to occupy yourself With your quarts of chop-suey. And somehow you reminded me Of nothing so much as of the knitting women Who implacably counted stitches while the pride of France Went up to death.

Tonight I am alone, A long way from that Chinese restaurant, A long way from wherever you are. And I find it difficult to recall to my memory The image of your large laboring inexpressive face. For I have just turned the last page Of a book of yours-- A book large and superficially inexpressive,--like yourself. It has not, any more than the old ones, The style of Pater. But now there are passing before me Interminable figures in tangled procession-- Proud or cringing, starved with desire or icy, Hastening toward a dream of triumph or fleeing from a dream of doom,-- Passing--passing--passing Through a world of shadows, Through a chaotic and meaningless anarchy, Under heavy clouds of terrific gloom Or through ravishing flashes of knife-edged sunlight-- Passing--passing--passing-- Their heads haloed with immortal illusion,-- The terrible and beautiful, cruel and wonder-laden illusion of life.

Theodore Dreiser

JOHN COWPER POWYS

Criticism need not always impose itself as an art; but it must at least conform to some of the principles that govern that form of human activity. The worthlessness of so much energetic modern criticism is that it proceeds--like scum--from the mere surface of the writer's intelligence. It is true that all criticism resolves itself ultimately into a matter of taste;--but one has to discover what one's taste really is; and that is not always easy.

Taste is a living thing, an organic thing. It submits to the laws of growth; and its growth is fostered or retarded by many extraneous influences. In regard to the appreciation of new and original works of art, it belongs to the inherent nature of taste that it should be enlarged, transmuted, and undergo the birth-pangs of a species of re-creation. In the presence of a work of art that is really unusual, in an attempt to appreciate a literary effect that has never appeared before, one's taste necessarily suffers a certain embarrassment and uneasiness. It suffers indeed sometimes a quite extreme discomfort. This is inevitable. This is right. This means that the creative energy in the new thing is getting to work upon us, unloosening our prejudices and enlarging our scope. Such a process is attended by exquisite intellectual excitement. It is also attended by a certain rending and tearing of personal vanity.

There is an absurd tendency among some of us to suppose that a writer is necessarily a great writer because he is daring in his treatment of sex. This is quite as grotesque an illusion as the opposite one, that a great writer must be idealistic and uplifting. There is not the remotest reason why he should concern himself with sex; if he prefers--as did Charles Dickens for instance--to deal with other aspects of life. On the other hand there is not the least reason why he should be "uplifting." Let him be an artist--an artist--that is the important matter! All these questions concerning "subjects" are tedious and utterly trifling.

Achilles is not really a very attractive figure--take him all in all; and we remember how scandalously AEneas behaved to Dido. The ancient epic writers, writing for an aristocracy, caught the world-stream from a poetic angle. The modern epic writers, writing for a democracy, catch it from a realistic one. But it is the same world-stream; and in accordance with the epic vision there is the same subordination of the individual to the cosmic tide. This is essentially a dramatic, rather than an epic epoch, and that is why so many of us are bewildered and confused by the Dreiser method.

But one knows very well he is right. People don't in ordinary life--certainly not in ordinary democratic life--talk like Oscar Wilde, or utter deep ironic sayings in the style of Matthew Arnold. They don't really--let this be well understood--concentrate their feelings in bitter pungent spasmodic outbursts, as those Rabelaisean persons in Guy de Maupassant. They just gabble and gibber and drivel; at least that is what they do in England and America. The extraordinary language which the lovers in Dreiser--we use the term "lovers" in large sense--use to one another might well make an aesthetic-minded person howl with nervous rage. But then,--and who does not know it?--the obsession of the sex-illusion is above everything else a thing that makes idiots of people; a thing that makes them talk like Simple Simons. In real life lovers don't utter those wonderful pregnant sayings which leap to their lips in our subtle symbolic dramas. They just burble and blather and blurt forth whatever drivelling nonsense comes into their heads. Dreiser is the true master of the modern American Prose-Epic just because he is not afraid of the weariness, the staleness, the flatness, and unprofitableness of actual human conversation. In reading the great ancient poetic epics one is amazed at the "naivete" with which these haughty persons--these gods and demi-gods express their emotional reactions. It is "carried off," of course, there, by the sublime heightening of the style; but it produces just the same final impression,--of the insignificance of the individual, whether mortal or immortal, compared with the torrent of Fate which sweeps them all along.

And the same thing applies to Dreiser's attitude towards "good and evil" and towards the problem of the "supernatural." All other modern writers array themselves on this side or that. They either defend traditional morality or they attack it. They are anxious, at all costs, to give their work dramatic intensity; they struggle to make it ironical, symbolical, mystical--God knows what! But Dreiser neither attacks morality nor defends immorality. In the true Epic manner he puts himself aside, and permits the great mad Hurly-Burly to rush pell-mell past him and write its own whirligig runes at its own careless pleasure. Even Zola himself was not such a realist. Zola had a purpose;--the purpose of showing what a Beast the human animal is! Dreiser's people are not beasts; and they shock our aesthetic sensibilities quite as often by their human sentiment as they do by their lapses into lechery.

To a European mind there is something incredibly absurd in the notion that these Dreiser books are immoral.

Unlike the majority of French and Russian writers Dreiser is not interested in the pathology of vice. He is too deeply imbued with the great naive epic spirit to stop and linger in these curious bye-paths. He holds Nature--in her normal moods--to be sufficiently remarkable.

It is the same with his attitude towards the "supernatural." The American Prose-Epic were obviously false to reality if the presence of the supernatural were not felt. It is felt and felt very powerfully; but it is kept in its place. Like Walt Whitman's stellar constellations, it suffices for those who belong to it, it is right enough where it is--we do not want it any nearer!

But what matter! The huge epic canvas is stretched out there before us. The vast cyclopean edifice lifts its shadowy bulk towards the grey sky. The thing has been achieved. The creative spirit has breathed upon the waters. Resting from his titanic labor, what matter if this Demiurge drowses, and with an immense humorous indifference permits his characters to nod too, and utter strange words in their dreams!

The carelessness of Dreiser's style, its large indolence, its contempt for epigrammatic point, its relaxed strength, is not really a defect at all when you regard his work from the epic view-point.

There must be something in a great cosmic picture to take the place of the sand and silt and rubbish and rubble which we know so well in life, under the grey sky! And these stammered incoherences, these broken mutterings, fill in this gap. They give the picture that drab patience, that monotonous spaciousness which is required. Symbolic drama or psychological fiction can dispense with these blank surfaces. The prose-epic of America cannot afford to do without them. They suggest that curious sadness--the sadness of large, flat, featureless scenery, which visitors from Europe find so depressing.

There was a Europe once. But the American prose-epic is the American prose-epic.

"So We Grew Together"

EDGAR LEE MASTERS

Reading over your letters I find you wrote me "My dear boy," or at times "dear boy," and the envelope Said "master"--all as I had been your very son, And not the orphan whom you adopted. Well, you were father to me! And I can recall The things you did for me or gave me: One time we rode in a box-car to Springfield To see the greatest show on earth; And one time you gave me red-top boots, And one time a watch, and one time a gun. Well, I grew to gawkiness with a voice Like a rooster trying to crow in August Hatched in April, we'll say. And you went about wrapped up in silence With eyes aflame, and I heard little rumors Of what they were doing to you, and how They wronged you--and we were poor--so poor! And I could not understand why you failed, And why if you did good things for the people The people did not sustain you. And why you loved another woman than Aunt Susan, So it was whispered at school, and what could be baser, Or so little to be forgiven?.....

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