Editorials and Announcements
Rupert Brooke on the War
In her Letter from London two months ago Miss Amy Lowell made a reference to Harold Munro’s Poetry Book Shop in London which may have seemed a little unfair to people who know the high aim of Mr. Munro in that undertaking of his. Miss Lowell did not intend it to be so; in fact she plans for an early number of The Little Review an article which shall set forth the interesting work that is being done there. In the meantime we have been shown a letter from Robert Brooke, one of the Poetry Book Shop group, which is certainly not open to the charge of “preciousness”. Mr. Brooke is in the War; he is a Naval Sub-Lieutenant for service on land, attached to the Second Naval Battalion and was sent with the relief force to Antwerp “just too late”. The letter reads: “There I saw a city bombarded and a hundred thousand refugees, sat in the trenches, marched all night, and did other typical and interesting things. Now we’re back for more training. I will probably get out again by Christmas.... There’s nothing to say, except that the tragedy of Belgium is the greatest and worst of any country for centuries. It’s ghastly for anyone who liked Germany as well as I did.... I’m afraid fifty years won’t give them the continuity and loveliness of life back again! Most people are enlisting. —— and his brother have gone into cavalry; I’m here: among my fellow officers being Denis Brown, one of the best musicians in England; Kelly, the pianist who won the Diamond Sculls; one of the Asquiths; a man who has been mining in the Soudan; a New Zealander—an Olympic swimmer; an infinitely pleasant American youth, called ——, who was hurriedly naturalized “to fight for justice” ... and a thousand more oddities. In the end, those of us who come back will start writing great new plays.” Our London correspondent, Mr. E. Buxton Shanks, sends a note with infinite pathos in it. “I enclose a letter for December,” he writes. “Unfortunately it may be my last. The greater part of my regiment went to France last Monday and I expect to follow it before long, so that this may be not only my last Letter to The Little Review, but also my last piece of literature for ever and ever.”
Russia in Storm
From Russian newspapers and private letters that have been smuggled through into this country we learn about the great resurrection that is taking place in the land of extremes. The war has shaken the dormant giant, and life is pulsating with tremendous vigor. The abolition of liquor-trade has had an unbelievable effect on the population; the fact that this reform was promulgated by the government which has thereby lost nearly a billion yearly revenue, is of inestimable significance. The Czar and his counsellors have finally awakened to recognize the impossibility of reigning over a country without citizens, and liberal reforms on a wide scope are being announced. Nationalities and parties are united under a new slogan: “Down with Nationalism! Long live Patriotism!” Even the reactionary organs have abandoned their chauvinistic tone, and they preach equality and freedom and the abolition of the bureaucratic régime which they ascribe to Germanistic influences. The revolutionary parties, however, are not intoxicated with the momentary upheaval; they have had too many bitter experiences to be lulled by promises from the throne. Of all the warring nations the Russian socialists were the only party to take an openly antagonistic attitude towards their government. They were demonstratively absent from the Douma when the war manifesto was announced, and later they gave out a declaration in which they expressed their condemnation of the government and its policy. Recently an official communication stated a discovered conspiracy among the radical members of the Douma. It is clear that the revolutionists intend to forge the iron while it is hot; this time affords them a rare opportunity for forcing the Autocrat to yield to the demands of the people and in defiance of popular sentiments and drummed up patriotism, the uncompromising fighters brave their way forward to the ultimate goal. It is great life in Russia!
Alexander Berkman on the Crime of Prisons
Mr. Alexander Berkman, author of Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist, which is reviewed in this issue, will deliver two lectures in Chicago, Sunday, December 6, in Room 512 of the Masonic Temple. His subject in the afternoon will be War and Culture; in the evening The Psychology of Crime and Prisons.
Winter Rain
Eunice Tietjens
Winter now has come again;
All the gentle summer rain
Has grown chill, and stings like pain,
And it whispers of things slain,
Love of mine.
I had thought to bury love,
All the ways and wiles thereof
Buried deep and buried rough—
But it has not been enough,
Heart of mine.
Though I buried him so deep,—
Tramped his grave and piled it steep,
Strewed with flowers the aching heap,—
Yet it seems he cannot sleep,
Soul of mine.
And the drops of winter rain,
In the grave where he is lain
Drip and drip, and sting like pain,
Till my love grows live again,
Life of mine!
Home as an Emotional Adventure
Margaret C. Anderson
I was going Home!
It was seven o’clock on a clear, cold, snowless night in December—the ideal night for a journey. Behind me, Chicago:—noise, jangle, rush, and dirt; great crowds of people; a hall room of agonizing ugliness, with walks of a green tone that produces a sort of savage mental biliousness and furniture of striped oak that makes you pray for destruction by fire; frayed rugs the color of cold dishwater and painted woodwork that peels off like a healing sore; smells of impromptu laundry work, and dust that sticks like a hopeful creditor; an outlook of bare brick walls, and air through the window that should have been put through a sieve before entering. All these—and one thing more which makes them as nothing: the huge glory of accomplishment.
Before me?... It was snowing hard as we steamed in. There came a clanging of brakes, a cold blast of snowy air through the opened doors, a rush of expectant people; and then, shining in the glow of a flickering station light, one of the loveliest faces I’ve ever seen—my sister’s,—and one of the noblest—my “Dad’s.” Then a whirring taxi, a luxurious adjustment to comfort in its dark depths, a confusion of “So glad you’re here,” and “Mother’s waiting at home”; a surging of all my appreciation at the beauty of young Betty, with her rich furs and stunningly simple hat and exquisitely untouched face; a long dash through familiar streets until we reached the more open spaces—the Country Club district where there are only a few homes and a great expanse of park and trees; and finally a snorting and jerking as we drew up before a white house from which lights were shining.
Now this little house is all white, with green shutters and shingles, with a small formal entrance porch, like a Wallace Nutting print, in front, and a large white-pillared, glass-enclosed living-porch on one side. A red brick walk of the New England type leads up to it, and great trees stand like sentinels at the back. On a winter night, when the red walk and the terrace are covered with soft snow, when the little cedar trees massed around the entrance sparkle with icy frost, when the warm light from the windows touches the whiteness with an amethyst radiance—well, it’s the kind of house that all good dreamers sometimes have the reward of dreaming about. And when Mother opened the door, letting out another stream of light and showing her there against the warm red background of the hall, I was convinced that getting home was like being invited to paradise.
Of course we talked and laughed for an hour; and underneath it all I was conscious, above everything, of the red and white room in which we sat; of the roaring, singing fire; of the shadows it threw on the luxurious rugs and old mahogany; of the book-lined walls; of the scattered magazines on the long table; of the chiming grandfather’s clock; of the soft lights; and—more than all—of the vase of white roses against the red wall.
“But you must hear the new Victrola records!” Mother cried. And so I lay back in a deep chair with my face to the fire, and listened—listened with my soul, I think, to some of the world’s great music: Sembrich and Melba and Homer and Gluck; Paderewski and Pachmann, orchestras, operas, and old, old songs; and finally my favorites—the violin ones. There was Kreisler, with his perfect art, playing old Vienna waltzes, haunting Provence folk songs, quaint seventeenth-century gavottes and dances; Maud Powell putting new beauty into the Schubert Ave Maria, and that exquisite tone-picture of Saint-Saëns called The Swan; and last of all Mischa Elman, with his deep, passionate singing of Bach’s Air for the G String and Tschaikovsky’s Ye Who Have Yearned Alone. There’s a beauty about those last ones that is almost terrible, so close is it to the heart of human sorrow.
“Well,” said Dad, a little later, “I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’m going to bed. And first I mean to have some milk and a piece of pumpkin pie. Does that attract a city girl?”
It did—to the extent of three glasses of milk, besides the pie. “You’ll not sleep,” warned Mother; but I retorted that I didn’t care; I was too happy to sleep, anyhow. And, besides, the kitchen, in its immaculate gray and whiteness, was so refreshing that I wanted to stay there awhile. Large baskets of grape fruits and oranges and red apples stood on the pantry shelves; the stove was polished until it looked like a Sapolio advertisement; and a clock, ticking loudly, gave the room that curious sense of loneliness that a kitchen needs. I can conceive of a library without books, or a fireplace without a fire, but never of a kitchen without a loud-ticking clock.
After a while we all trooped up to bed—up the white staircase with the mahogany rail, and into fresh white bedrooms in such perfect harmony with the snow outside.
“This house is positively sensuous!” I told Mother. “It’s an emotional adventure just to come into it....”
I climbed into a big mahogany four-poster; but not to sleep—oh no! I sat bolt upright with the silk comfortlet (oh luxury of luxuries!) around my knees, and gazed out the windows: for from both of them I saw a fairyland. It was all white—all except the amethyst shimmerings of boulevard lights; and white flakes dropped one by one through the amethyst. Away in the distance on both sides were faint outlines of woods—bare, brown woods now covered warmly with snow. And over it all a complete and absolute stillness. Just as in spring I used to feel fairies leaping from every separate violet and tulip and hyacinth for their twilight dance on the wet grass, so now I felt a great company of snow fairies dancing in the faint rays of amethyst that darted into the woods—dancing and singing and glittering in their silver frostiness. And then a slow quiet wind would sound far off in the branches of the oak trees; and gradually the fairy carnival ceased and I went ecstatically to sleep.
The next morning, after breakfast in a dining-room of old blue and white and mahogany, I stated my ideas of what one ought to do in such a house. “I don’t want to go anyplace or see anyone or do anything. Don’t plan luncheons or teas or other things. It will take a week to store up all the impressions I want to. So please just let me stay here quietly and absorb the atmosphere.”
And so my precious week began. In the mornings I’d put on boots—for the snow was deep by this time—and take long tramps through the woods. Then each afternoon had its distinct adventure: sometimes it would be a mere wandering about from room to room standing before a specially-loved picture or buried in a favorite old book. And what an enchanting thing it is to read in such a setting: to look up from your book knowing that wherever your eyes fall they will be rested; to feel your imagination sinking into the soft depths of a reality that is almost dream stuff!
Sometimes the afternoon would have its hard-fought game of cards between Dad and me—with the table drawn close to the fire, and Bertha running in from the kitchen with a hearty offering of cider and hot doughnuts. (Bertha always seemed to sense the exact moment when we declared, with groans, that to wait another hour for dinner would be a physical impossibility.) Sometimes at four o’clock I’d conceal myself in a mass of cushions in the big swing on the porch, and wait for the darkness to come on, loving every change of tone in the grayness until the boulevard lights blossomed like flowers and made another fairyland. And always we’d have tea by candle-light—on the porch in deep wicker chairs, or before the leaping fire.
Sometimes after tea I’d take a two-mile tramp down town, stopping at the post-office (because a post-office in a small town is a place worth seeing at five o’clock in the evening) and trying deliberately to get cold and tired before reaching home again, so that the warmth and comfort would come as a fresh shock and joy. And then a quite wonderful thing would happen: namely, the miracle of a superlatively good dinner. I shall never forget those dinners! Not the mere physical pleasure of them, but their setting: Mother feeling a little gossipy, and talking cozily of the day’s small happenings; Dad in a mood of tolerant amusement at our chatter; and Betty, usually in white, looking so adorable that even the roses on the table couldn’t rival her.
But most perfect of all were the long evenings! First we’d read aloud a little Pater, just for the ravishing music of his language, and then Betty would sing. I don’t know any lovelier singing than Betty’s; it’s so young and fresh and wistful. And when she’d finish with the Brahms Lullaby I could have cried with the beauty of it all. Later, when everyone had gone to bed, I would creep downstairs again to lie by the fire and have the obliging Mr. Mischa Elman play me another concert. Ye Who Have Yearned Alone was the thing he’d play most often, for it has a surging sadness that keeps one humble in the midst of happiness. Everything of yearning is in it: the agonies of countless tragic loves; the sad, sad strivings for joy and comprehension; the world-old miseries of “buried lives”; hopes and fears and faiths—and crucifixions; ecstacies dying out like flames; utter weariness of living—and utter striving to live.
Oh, you people who have homes! Why don’t you realize what they might yield you! When you find yourself uneager, stupefied with contentment, ashamed of your vicious comfort—why not share your homes?... Back in Chicago, I have a vision strong and soothing, like a poppy seed that brings sleep. I close my eyes at night; and suddenly my bare walls are lined with books; soft lights are lighted; in a great fireplace burns a crackling fire that has in it sometimes soft sounds like bird-singing; and out of the rumble of elevated trains, drowning the roar of traffic and bringing a deep stillness, come the singing tones of a violin, rising and falling over an immortal melody—Ye Who Have Yearned Alone.