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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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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?
Among the artists there was none that I liked better than Phil May. His sense of the comic and his economy of line appealed to me and my lack of ability to draw. His Cockney folk gave me more pleasure than any of the staid humans I knew. He....
But I forget myself. I started out to write of Neil Lyons.... All the words I have spun for the prelude are merely to say that during my re-reading of the work of Neil Lyons in the past few months I have been struck again and again by its likeness to the drawings of Phil May: the same joy, the same delight was there in the reading as there was in the contemplation of the drawings.
If you know Phil May's work think of one of his drawings of a fat middle-aged woman, and then listen to this drawing of another, by Neil Lyons:
"She was forty years old at a venture. She had lots of mouth and a salmon-coloured face and a pretence of a nose and small watery eyes. All these amenities were built up on a triple foundation of chin, which was matched by an exceeding amplitude of bosom and waist."
Don't you recognize the same swift, sure lines?
But I must get away from this parallel. Never at his best is the artist as great as the writer. There is no line or collection of lines in May's work to match this in Lyons':
"Mrs. Godge, who was lately the mother of twin babies, is now the mother of memories."
That sentence is only a shadow of the quiet poignancy of the tale that follows it. Oh, the wonder of the man who can see every side of the common people and set them down with such verve, such relish, such keen poignancy and hilarious joy! Let me quote from the story of blind Unity Pike, "the wanton":
"Yes! They found Jack Munsey in her cottage. They found him in the night. And so, in the name of Christ, whose name they give to all their wickedness--that Christ, who forgave a woman that was not blind for sins beside which this sin of Unity's was pure and white--in the name of this God, I say, they seized her sightless, wondering soul and threw it, a sacrifice, to those bloody wolves they call their virtue."
I would fain go on quoting, showing you the wit of this man, gentle, and on occasion barbed and stinging: his humor, kindly, of the soil; his great jollity and high good spirits. I would indeed like to introduce you to "Clara," the hussy, who is fat and motherly and with a heart and mind unbounded. I would like to take you to "Arthur's," the midnight coffee-stall where you would meet with street-walkers and soldiers, scavengers and tramps and hear from the lips of a gutter snipe one of the most perfect and touching love tales ever told.
I wait expectantly your showers of gratitude!
The Reader Critic
The whole story of social evolution in a nutshell is as follows: every phase of the social order at any stage of social evolution is maintained by a social ego or group sufficiently powerful to dominate the rest of the surrounding social body,--and this phase can be changed only by revolution--bloodless or otherwise,--on the part of a new social ego desiring this change and developing power to establish and maintain it.
It, of course, goes without saying that no social dominance has ever been entirely wise or beneficent, and that until very recently in social history there has been no knowledge of sociological scientific truth to speak of upon which to base social domination. But the hope of the world lies in the ever-progressing discovery of such truth, and in its application to the social order by ever-evolving social egos that will more and more base their social ideals upon such truth, gradually dominating the whole social order with ideals so based.
After having read your "A Deeper Music" in the February issue I wondered whether you had ever heard Mr. de Pachmann play the piano. There is nothing in the world like it--nothing more wonderful. I am not speaking of an ebony Mason and Hamlin alone on a stage, but of any piano at all, with that madman bending his head over the keys of it.
I feel sure that had you heard him you would have included him in your article and would not have put words into Bauer's mouth. You would have known that it is possible to play the piano very badly and play it more beautifully than any one else; both of these in one afternoon. The design of sound! But he, too, is becoming pass? like Paderewski. But there is little likelihood of a type arising from these two.
Do you know of any one who plays the piano as Casals plays the 'cello?
Have you looked at any of Scriabine's later piano pieces? I wonder if he expresses any of the moods which you prophesy will be caught by some new composer. I knew a boy in Petrograd who went to the conservatory every day with a volume of Scriabine and one of Bach under his arm. We called him the "Scriabine chap." He probably has had thirty-second quavers punched into him by a German machine gun, for I am sure he couldn't or didn't dare be as loyal to both Nicholas and Wilhelm as he was to Scriabine and Johann S. B.
The social ego that has such control "can do anything." It can stop war with a turn of its hand and establish in its stead world-wide service, kindness, brotherhood, peace, joy and beauty. And there is nothing else in the universe that can do this.
It is for lack of a social ego having such control and that unity in establishing the above-mentioned principles in the social order, alone, that "men continue to support institutions they no longer believe in, that women continue to live with men they no longer love, that youth continues to submit to age it no longer respects," and it is the only agency that can help one to be free when one wants to be free or make one a personality instead of a nonentity.
Do you remember Whitman's "lithe, fierce girls?" Such are the flame-tongues of Revolution--the priestesses of social passion.
If Woman only knew her power to work white magic with banality and stir up the hero-poet in man! But we who have dragged her by the hair for ten thousand years must continue to drag her enfeebled body and spirit with us for penalty--even as we are praying her to touch us to Fire!
When you say that all we need at this hour is a few great spiritual leaders--you are tremendously right. And shall not one of those be some "lithe fierce girl" who knows how to wake the militant social troubadour in man?
The enclosed is because you, like Margaret Sanger, belong to the new revolution--the thoroughbred thing compact of esprit, audacity, faith, and elan.
Price, .10 Postpaid
NEW REVIEW PUBLISHING ASS'N 256 Broadway New York City
Organized Socialism collapsed in the European crisis; but Socialist thought is providing us with an authentic, realistic interpretation of the causes and consequences of the Great War.
The whole world is interested in the attitude and conclusions of the Socialists.
Mr. Boudin's book deals with the prime cause of the war--Imperialism. He makes us understand the underlying forces of this world-drama. Mr. Boudin indicates that Imperialism is the political expression of a change in the economics of Capitalism; that Imperialism is motivated upon the export of capital, principally in the form of iron and steel as "means of production" in undeveloped countries.
All phases of the war are covered, including the "cultural" and "racial". The historian, the economist and the sociologist unite in a volume of the utmost interest and importance.
POETRY BOOKSHOP CHAPBOOKS
READY DECEMBER 1ST.
THE POETRY BOOKSHOP 35 Devonshire St., Theobalds Rd., London, W. C.
PIANO TRIUMPHANT
The artistic outgrowth of forty-five years of constant improvement--a piano conceived to better all that has proven best in others.
GEO. P. BENT GRAND
Could you but compare it with all others, artistically it must be your choice. Each day proves this more true.
Geo. P. Bent Grand, Style "A"--a small Grand, built for the home--your home.
GEO. P. BENT COMPANY
Manufacturers of Artistic Pianos Retailers of Victrolas 214 South Wabash Avenue, Chicago
Harold Bauer
and the Mason & Hamlin Tension Resonator
Having achieved in the Mason & Hamlin, the most beautiful piano tone the world has ever known, its makers, many years ago, set before themselves the problem of maintaining for all time, that which they had created.
A system of highly tempered steel rods, running from various points of the grand piano rim to a common center, was evolved and termed the Mason & Hamlin Tension Resonator.
This construction, which is to be found in no other piano, because patented, is the only known method of permanently preventing deterioration of tone quality through the otherwise inevitable flattening of the sounding-board.
Harold Bauer was the first artist to use a Mason & Hamlin Tension Resonator Piano in public. In the fifteen years which have followed that epoch making event there have been but few really great artists who have not enthusiastically endorsed this great master's final choice.
CABLE PIANO COMPANY, Wabash & Jackson.
A LITTLE EDITORIAL
Books are not articles of merchandise. They are the projected materialization of the human spirit.
The hands of congenial souls alone must touch them.
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