“SPIRITUAL ADVENTURES”
Anonymous:
At your suggestion I have begun to read Arthur Symons’s “Spiritual Adventures.”
“Christian Trevelga” strikes me, as you predicted, most strongly so far. Symons is one of the subtlest of minds; everything he writes is worth reading. This is of his best certainly. What is one to make of him? I don’t know. I don’t know whether his kind of subtlety is of any earthly value, or whether it is as valuable as Shelley’s. I can never give up faith in the human race quite as completely as he does, nor adopt his attitude of autocratic detachment; yet I never seem to have any real faith, either.—Vae victis!
He is removed from all sense of human values, and lost, always, in abstract patterns. This particular story is an extraordinary expression of him—of the prizes and peril of such a state. Oh, hell! what an insult is put upon us when we are invited to live, and to make such a choice.
Perhaps one makes it: then he is not happy until he has lost himself in an art that is “something more than an audible dramatization of human life.” Perhaps he is right. But—
But—but—
Sometimes I know that for the greatest artist there would be no chasm between what the heart desires and what the mind constructs. Tell me how to do that in poetry and I’ll give you a dollar. Perhaps it can be done in music—I don’t know. But in poetry the human heart and the mathematical soul are always fighting—and so far as I know they have not yet come to an agreement—not in English poetry, at least. The artist and the human being never get to be bedfellows. It’s either sickening humanitarianism or stark designing—the second is the less painful.
Well!—I loathe the world, including Symons and all the arts.
Ezra Pound, London:
Thanks for the January-February issue. Your magazine seems to be looking up. A touch of light in Dawson and Seiffert—though The Little Review seems to me rather scrappy and unselective. I thought you started out to prove Ficke’s belief that the sonnet is “Gawd’s own city.” However, he seems to have abandoned that church. I still don’t know whether you send me the magazine in order to encourage me in believing that my camp stool by Helicon is to be left free from tacks, or whether the paper is sent to convert me from error.
I am glad to see in it some mention of Eliot, who is really of interest.
The Egoist is about to publish Joyce’s “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” in volume form (since no grab-the-cash firm will take it) and do Lewis’s “Tarr” as a serial. I think you will be interested in the two novels, and I hope you will draw attention to them, and to the sporting endeavor of The Egoist to do in this dark isle what the Mercure has so long done in France, i. e., publish books as well as a magazine.
Incidentally, Chicago should not depend on New York for its books.
Anonymous:
Will you ask that Lollipop Vender man, in the March issue, what happened to his little dirigible? He was sailing along dropping bombs, hitting the mark every time, when something seemed to happen and he came limply wobbling down to—nothing.
I hope the last half of that article was not meant to be satire or wit or anything like that. He speaks with too much authority to have much sense of humor, and—ye gods!—the situation is far too desperate for wit—of that kind. Now there’s Bartlett—read what he says of Bartlett! Haven’t we answered all attacks for years with “There’s Bartlett”? It was only intuition and self-preservation on our part at first, perhaps—but now hasn’t Bartlett proved that he is a “real artist”? He is off to New York to live.
How he does wobble when he comes to his list of “able and honest”.
Poor Parker! that he should have to go into the list of best men, too—that list! The man can paint—technic seems to be only a superstition now but it once had a place in Art. Parker has that at least. Wendt, Buehr, Ravlin, and Davis should be rescued from the “able and honest” before your critic collapses completely in referring to Clarkson and Oliver Dennet Grover as some of “their best men.” Ask him anyway—what happened?
Alice Groff, Philadelphia:
Why did not Sherwood Anderson write up “Vibrant Life” clean and true? Why did he not have the courage to paint every one of those emotions in clear color—to outline every one of those actions in the beauty of naturalness? Why does he artificialize everything? Is he afraid of the crouching tigers of conventional morality?
Why should not vibrant life assert itself after its kind, even in the presence of death? What desecration was there in this man and woman coming together in such presence, drawn by the invincible magnetism of sex? What of falsity to life was there in the lawyer’s giving and answering the call of life as to this woman, even though he had a wife whom he loved?
Why conjure up an atmosphere of guilt that neither man nor woman felt? Why suggest such hair-bristling horror as to the accidental overturning of a dead man’s body, any more than over the accidental upsetting of a vase, or a statue, in the course of a dance? Why such strained effort to make that specialized expression of vibrant life which is the very pivotal centre of all life appear as the degradation of degradation, degrading everything else, even death?
Will you answer that there is an eternal and universal sense of the fitness of things with which every soul may be lightened that cometh into the world? Shall I not reply to you that this is a lie against life—that life is sacrificed every day to this lie? Shall I not say to you that vibrant life must not allow itself to be sacrificed to such lies—that vibrant life must create anew continually a sense of the fitness of things for itself and for its every new expression—that it must do this with authority, shaking itself bravely free from the clutch of the dead hand, whether as to traditions, standards, customs, morals, ideals or love even? Shall I not say to you that Life must assert its right to Live? Shall we not organize life on such basis?