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Read Ebook: The Little Review March 1916 (Vol. 3 No. 1) by Various Anderson Margaret C Editor
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In a strange land; so strangely treated! That prophets might be understood in another land their priests distort them that barbarians may comprehend!
Editorials
THE LITTLE REVIEW is a magazine of Art and Revolution. If you ask me which it believes in most I shall have to say--Art. Because there is no real revolution unless it is born of the same spirit which produces real art.
A man like Bill Haywood doesn't agree with this. "Why do you ask why some one doesn't start the revolution?" he says; "don't you see that we're in the midst of a revolution now?" No, I don't see it. I see evolution at work in labor--not revolution. But I see something more than evolution at work in the arts--music, painting, poetry.
"... to obtain victory over man and circumstance there is no other way but that of feeding one's own exaltation and magnifying one's own dream of beauty or of power." You can argue that D'Annunzio, who said this, is neither a very great man nor a very great artist. Nevertheless it is what Beethoven did; and it is what Jeanne d'Arc did.... It is what Bill Haywood does; but it is not what most labor leaders do, or what most radicals do. It is not what the laborers themselves do. How horrible it is to realize that when a man is slaving for his very life he can not be selective in what he does, that he has no dream left to magnify, and yet that he must have or perish....
This is why I would go to hear John Cowper Powys even if he spoke in such a benighted place as the Hebrew Institute. Boycotts are important, but they will not help a revolution as a dream will. Mr. Powys will help you to find both an exaltation and a dream....
M. B.
Propaganda
Margaret Sanger has been "forgiven" by the government, but the statutes regarding family limitation remain the same. Any unfortunate unknown can be whisked into jail for propagating birth control, just as usual. Mrs. Sanger didn't even demand redress for her husband, who spent a month in prison. Surely he was entitled to a dismissal on the same grounds--more entitled to it, even in the eyes of the law: he had never circulated the pamphlets or in any way agitated for birth control. He is an artist, not a propagandist. But he served his sentence, and nothing was done or is being done about it. Mrs. Sanger means to go on with her work. What does the government mean to do about it?
Emma Goldman is about to stand trial for the same "offense." In her case there will be no "influential" women rushing back and forth to Washington to interview the President in her behalf. I only wish there would be. It would insure her freedom for the next year, and it would be so amusing to figure out on what grounds the Good Presbyterian could effect the release of the Arch Anarchist. But Emma Goldman will fight her case alone, and on its merits. If she does not succeed in effecting a revision of the penal code regarding the whole matter of birth control she will spend the next year in prison, I understand. You can all help by sending your protests to Magistrate Simms and also by giving your support to Dr. Long and Dr. Haiselden or any other person who gets involved in these laws of the dark ages.
Why do you object to Jean Crones' reasoning? I reprint his second letter, transposed into English:
Why did I do it? While in Europe millions of Christians are slaughtering each other in the most bloody massacre, and in this free country thousands of men and women are tramping the streets without food and shelter, and at the same time the church holds dinners that cost a cover, beginning with Beluga caviar and champagne--the money which was beggared from poor working men and women, the money which the blood of poor workers has run for.
These conditions are a scandal. This is the failure of Christianity--an insult to honesty and a challenge to humanity. Let the church answer my charges toward the world and I shall stand for the charges made against me.
Some of these commissioners raise the objection that motor busses will add seriously to the traffic congestion. That is true, but how is the thing managed in New York? Fifth Avenue is narrower than Michigan, and it is always more crowded. Other commissioners object to the wear and tear on the boulevards which have not been constructed for such heavy traffic. But the Chicago Motor Bus Company "has agreed to pay the Lincoln Park Commissioners ,300 a year for each mile of their route and the South Park Commissioners ,000 a year per mile."
The thing that really halts the plan at present is the attitude of a couple of private citizens who complain to the South Park Board that motor busses will destroy the beauty of the boulevards! You know the type of mind whose thinking runs in such channels? The type that doesn't give a hang who pays the taxes which maintain the boulevards; the type that is fond of talking about democracy and what great things we do for the foreigner in America.
Of the men who rhyme, so large a number are cursed with suburban comforts. A villa and books never made a poet; they do but tend to the building up of the respectable virtues; and for the respectable virtues poetry has but the slightest use. To roam in the sun and air with vagabonds, to haunt the strange corners of cities, to know all the useless and improper, and amusing people who are alone very much worth knowing; to live, as well as to observe life; or, to be shut up in hospital, drawn out of the rapid current of life into a sordid and exasperating inaction; to wait, for a time, in the ante-room of death; it is such things as these that make for poetry.
Poems
RICHARD ALDINGTON
Bloomsbury Square
I walk round Bloomsbury Square.
Bright sky over Bloomsbury Square; Bright fluttering leaves Between the sober houses.
I carry my morning letters, Some telling of lives spoiled and cramped, Some telling of lives hopeful and gay, Some full of yearning for London And our wider life.
In Bloomsbury Square The worms of a little moth Are spinning their Cocoons, Weaving them out of bright yellow silk And bits of plane bark Into strong, comfortable houses. But hundreds of them Have wandered on to the iron fence And go wearily wandering, Spending a little silk here And a little silk there, And at last dropping dead from weariness....
"Our wider life"-- That is our wider life: To wander like blind worms Spending our fine useless golden silk And at last dropping dead from weariness.
Blue sky over Bloomsbury Square; Bright fluttering leaves Between the sober houses.
Epigram
Rain rings break on the pool And white rain drips from the reeds Which shake and murmur and bend; The wind-tossed wistaria falls.
The red-beaked water fowl Cower beneath the lily leaves; And a grey bee, stunned by the storm, Clings to my sleeve.
Lollipop Venders
LUPO DE BRAILA
"Misfit clothing"--I saw these words this morning on a small shop sign and they kept dancing before my eyes. Misfit clothing. In vain all my attempts to concentrate on the object of my visit to the Art Institute.
I sat down to search my brain for the cause of this phenomenon, and I soon recalled another such visit I once made under similar difficulties.
It was at the San Francisco Exposition. I discovered by chance the so-called Annex of the Fine Arts Building, a stable-like structure in comparison to the main building. It housed the Norwegian, Hungarian, and Spanish exhibits--by the way, almost the only ones worth seeing. At that time another vision kept me from seeing the exhibit for some moments. It seemed as if some short bald men danced along green velvet walls, each one plucking his heart beats with gusto and, after arranging them in a queer design on a crystal glass plate, offering them to the stars and children.
This recollection cleared the air and I realized that surroundings have a strong effect on me. I have come to enjoy the result of the finest faculty we possess, our imagination. I have come to admire the result of a year's work of our Chicago Artists.
Three hundred and twenty-one paintings, says my catalog; and in order to simplify matters I decide to look at some of the most popular names first--names usually found on the juries.
Artists, according to Rodin, are different from other mortals because they love their work. Let us see: Adam Emory Albright, Alfred Juergens, Lucie Hartrath, John F. Stacey, and Dahlgreen. Each one of them has between three and seven paintings. With all that canvas they must have sailed on the most enchanting seas, and surely have brought back a holiday for our eyes and hearts.
They say this is the best exhibition of the Chicago Artists. If it is, Mr. Juergens has done nothing to make it good. He has six such things on the walls.
Next comes a man I dislike to place among the lollipop venders--he being a very nice quiet and honest man; but why does Mr. Dahlgreen paint?
Mr. Werner's mannerism is too monotonous.
The Chicago Society of Artists, which runs this exhibition every year, seems to be controlled at present by a number of men who have inherited a long-discarded weak imitation of a technique once used by Segantini. They have excluded almost everything that showed some originality and feeling, but have accepted and hung a few very poor and meaningless things, so that they may shine by contrast. However, it seems to me they are at the end of the rope. The public refuses to buy the dope and their best men have sent in nothing to this show. I refer to Clarkson, Reynolds, Betts, Oliver Dennet Grover, Henderson, Rittman; and Lawton Parker has only one little canvas.
A Vers Libre Prize Contest
The conditions are as follows:
Contributions must be received by April 15th.
They must not be longer than twenty-five lines.
The name and address of the author must be fixed to the manuscript in a sealed envelope.
It should be borne in mind that free verse is wanted--verse having beauty of rhythm, not merely prose separated into lines.
There will be three judges, the appointing of whom has been left to the editor of THE LITTLE REVIEW.
There will be two prizes of each. They are offered not as a first and second prize, but for "the two best short poems in free verse form."
As there will probably be a large number of poems to read, we suggest that contributors adhere closely to the conditions of the contest.
A. Neil Lyons
A roomy garret with a wee dirty window in the sloping roof. Some trunks with old fine clothes and older musty books--books of hymns and sermons, most of them were. Broken limp chairs. A fire that would not "draw." Bits of worn carpets on the floor. A smelly oil lamp on one of the trunks. Such was the place of my solitary confinement, for rebellion, at least once a week. I admit to having even deliberately whistled and danced a highland fling on dreary Sundays in order to provoke my God-fearing, Sabbath-respecting elders to send me to the garret! How could they, unsuspecting, unimaginative Olympians, know that it was one of the places where I had real joy?
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