Under the Cypresses
Under the cypresses
No nightingales will sing this spring;
For I have strewn the ground
With the shards of broken illusions,
And I will build of them a citadel of austerity
With towers whence I can search the sky
For a rainbow that is stronger than painted china.
Dear nightingales,
There are still the saccharine gardens of Verona,
Where the moon-moth waves his fragile wings.
What We Are Fighting For
Margaret C. Anderson
I have been much criticised for an article on Gabrilowitsch in the last issue. I have been told rather violently that I didn’t know what I was talking about; that to say Gabrilowitsch had stood still artistically or that the music critics were deaf because they didn’t like Scriabin’s Prometheus was simply to brand The Little Review again as the kind of magazine which delights in any sort of snap-shot judgment that may sound startling or “new.” But the fact of the matter is this: if The Little Review is ready to stand behind any of its judgments (and it is very ready), I can think of nothing that has appeared which I will so eagerly and convincingly defend as that article on Gabrilowitsch or my remark that Prometheus was extraordinarily beautiful. I can “prove” the first in at least three ways, and I have some one in mind (a Russian) who will write a poem on his reactions to Prometheus that will make you all wish you had imaginations too.
But this is not important. It merely leads me to an announcement of a series of articles—a sort of campaign—that we have been planning for the last two months. If we are to prove that we have a real “function” it will be this of depreciating values that have ceased to be important and appreciating new ones that have emerged—or, as I should say, values that are about to become unimportant and those that are about to emerge. In view of such a function I am quite willing to agree with my critics that the Gabrilowitsch article wasn’t worth anything: it merely stated things that are already quite well known, and a magazine that means to announce transvaluations before the approximate ten-year period during which even the uninspired come to accept them has no business to concern itself with mere restatements. Of course the most frequent criticism brought against The Little Review is that it goes to artistic and emotional and intellectual lengths no well-balanced person wants to go. I only wish this were true: I mean, we haven’t gone any real lengths—and that is just what’s the matter with us. We have made statements that seemed fearfully radical and new to a lot of people who don’t know what’s going on in the world; and I’m afraid we have listened to these people and tried to “convert” them. We have wanted to convince everybody—particularly those who seemed to need it most. And there is nothing more fatal: because what everybody thinks doesn’t matter; what a few think matters tremendously. I was brought up with a shock the other day, at an editors’ “meeting,” when Lucien Cary said that though The Little Review had one of the requisites of the ideal magazine,—youth,—it had the wrong kind of youth: the kind that has not yet caught up instead of the kind that has gone ahead. After trying to face that squarely for five awful minutes I was forced to decide that he was right. I mean in this way: I know the quality of our youth is all right, just as I know that people who write true things and live false ones are all wrong; but the wisdom of it is quite another matter. And one of our big mistakes has been a hope that preaching will help.
There’s nothing pompous in saying that the thoughts of only a few people matter. This has always been so and always will be. Every new valuation has come about just that way—championed by a group and then endorsed by a majority long after it has ceased to matter much. But for a magazine that means to count—well, I can’t decide whether our predicament of having got into a sort of Billy Sunday slump is humorous or very sad. Hereafter we shall pretend that there are no impossibilists in our audience.
But the announcement: In each of the future issues of The Little Review, beginning with June if possible, we shall have a special article attacking current fallacies in the arts or in life—getting down to the foundations. Each one will be written by a person who knows thoroughly what he is talking about, and each will be “true and memorable,” to use Will Comfort’s good phrase. For instance, suppose we begin with the modern theatre. It will be interesting to find why Clayton Hamilton calls a play as false, as distorted, as unwholesome and demoralizing as The Shadow a great drama, and why Percy Hammond, who is looked upon even by some of the discerning as a critic worthy to be trusted in the work of spreading ideas, should have nothing but superlatives for the same outrage. (To do him justice, Mr. Hammond did modify his praise with a single naive sentence: “I could find some flaws in The Shadow”; and then, to put his other foot in, “but the playing glossed them over until they were forgivable”—which is precisely the crime and tragedy of such productions). This type of intellectual blundering is apparent everywhere among the critics of literature, of music, of art, of the drama, and among the strangest of all human creatures—the historians (“men who reserve their judgments for a hundred years”) and the philosophers (men whose judgments are good for everything except to live by). If you happen to be equipped with knowledge of the intricate hypocrisies of the music schools, or the way the newspapers treat a competent art critic, or the methods of a manager in making a good play a bad one, or how dissatisfied the railway employees really are or ought to be—send us an article on the subject. The conditions of acceptance are these: You must know English prose; you must write it as though you are talking instead of writing; you must say quite frankly and in detail the things you would not be allowed to say in the prostituted, subsidized, or uninteresting magazines; and you must be true. This begins our warfare.
Echo
(Translated from the German of Fritz Schnack by William Saphier)
Into the forest your voice flew
Clear and light as a bird from its nest.
From your mouth the sound departed
Swinging gaily into the black forest.
It flew
Through dusky deep solitude
Mysterious quiet, pale night,
Gravely-bent tree tops, fairy-tale flowers.
It danced past
Queer animals and strange things,
It touched them with quick moves
And they were frightened by the gay bird.
Green looks stared through the night
And angry phosphor glints pierced the foliage
Where owls were moving their beaks deceitfully.
Here your gay bird was frightened
And fearfully returned
Beaten by the envy of the black branches.
Shuddering it fell into the blue day
Tired, lame-winged, dead.
America’s Ignition
Will Levington Comfort
... The quickened pulse of America did not appear with the outbreak of war. It came with the winter cold, like all revival spirit—a strange and fervent heat, breaking down the old, vitalizing the new everywhere. No one doubts now—no one who can tear his eyes from the ground even for a little—doubts now that the new social order is upon us.
America, in opening her breasts to the agony of Europe, in her giving of solids and sympathy, has stumbled upon the ancient and perfect formula for receiving the greater good. In forgetting herself a little, her own human spirit has been ignited.
If someone announced that there lived in the Quattor Islands a man who knew the exact way to bring into the world, not only the spirit, but the action of brotherhood and fatherland, there would be some call for maps and steamship passages. If the Quattor Islands were not already on the maps, they would presently appear, but not before the earliest pilgrims had set out. And if someone should add that all expression of the arts so far in the world is wumbled and imperfect compared to that which is about to be, if a certain formula is followed; and that this man in the Quattor group has the formula—many more would start on the quest, or send their most trusted secretaries.
And yet the truth and the way is all here, and has been uttered again and again by every voice that has lifted itself above the common din.
The wise men carried gifts. You would expect to give something for the secret. You might expect to be called upon to sell all you have and give to the poor. You would not be surprised even if the magnetic Islander said:
“It is not your frankincense and myrrh that I want, though I thank you. That which I have is for you. I am more anxious for you to know and live it, than you can be to have and hold it. But the mystery is that it will not come to abide with you, while you are passionate for possession. The passion to give to others must be established within you before you can adequately receive—”
You are beginning to see how ancient is the gospel. It is old, older than that. It belongs to the foundations. Personally and nationally, the law works the same way. That which is true, is true in all its parts. There is an adjustment by which that which is good for the whole is good for the part; that which is good for the nation is good for the man; but each, whole and part, nation and man, must have for the first thought not self-good but the general good. One nation, so established in this conviction that its actions are automatically founded upon the welfare of the world, could bring about the true fatherland in a generation; and one human heart so established begins to touch from the first moment the profound significances of life.
Personally and nationally, this plain but tremendous concept is beginning to manifest itself here in America. I do not write as a patriot. It is not my country that is of interest, but humankind. America’s political interests, her trade, all her localizations as a separate and bounded people, are inimical to the new enthusiasm. The new social order cannot concern itself as a country apart. American predatory instincts, her self-worship, her attempt at neutrality while supplying explosives for the European slaughter arenas, her deepening confinement in matter during the past fifty years, have prepared her for the outright demoralization of war, just as surely as Europe is meeting today the red harvest from such instincts and activities. For action invariably follows the thought.
Yet the hearts of men in America are changing. I do not write as a religionist, but as one very much of the world. For the hearts of men do change, and it is only through such changes that the material stagnation of a people can be relieved without deluges of blood.
The high hope is upon us. In being apart from war, America has been enabled to see. One must always remove himself from the ruck to see its movement. In the past six months, within these western shores, the voices of true inspiration have been heard. From a literary standpoint alone, this is the most significant fact since Emerson, Whitman, and Thoreau, took pen in hand forgetting themselves a little while each day. There is a peculiar strength upon American production of all kinds, as a result of this very act of getting out from under European influence.
England and France and Germany are merely national voices now. The voice of the partisan is but a weak treble against the basic rumble of war. War is a confession, as suicide is a confession, as every act of blood and rage is a confession, of the triumph of the animal in the human mind.... If you have received letters from friends in England or Germany or France since the war; friends whom formerly you admired for their culture and acumen, you have been struck by the dullness and misery of the communications, the uncentered points of view, the incapacity of human vision in the midst of the heaviness and blackness of life there; if, indeed, you have read the recent newspapers and periodicals of these countries, you will require no further proof of the fact—that a nation at war is an obscene nation, its consciousness all driven down into the physical, its voice tonally imperfect from hate and fear, its eyes open to red illusion and not to truth.
Even in America the voice of the nationalist is a part of the old and the unclean. The new social order does not recognize the rights and desires of any isolated people. Humankind is basically one in meaning, in aim and in destiny. The difference of one nation from another in relation to the sun’s rays, in character, country, environment, race, color and structure of mind—these are primal values, the very values that will sum up into the essential grandeur of the whole. Personally and nationally there are no duplicates in the social scheme. The instruments of this magnificent orchestra are of infinite diversity, but the harmony is one.
The spiritual source of all human achievement is already a harmonic whole. That globe is complete. It is our business as men to make a pattern of it in matter—to make the dream come true in flesh, each man and each nation bringing his labor, which can only be bent into a fitting arc, by the loss of the love of self.
It requires but a little vision to observe Nature at work upon this concept in a thousand ways. She always seeks to preserve her balances. If a certain plant, or bird, insect, beast, man or nation, rises by intrinsic force and predation to dangerous increase, a destroying parasite is invariably fostered within its shadow. In good time these two growths turn to rend each other, a mutual cleansing. The Prussian war-office is a counter-growth to British imperialism. That which survives will be humbler and wiser.
I saw in a doctor’s office in Canada the picture of an English bull-dog standing large against the background of a British flag, and beneath was this line:
“What we have, we’ll hold.”
I found that the picture had a national acceptance in the British colonies and at Home. Yet a child stopping to think would have seen breakers ahead for a nation so lost in material things, as thus to challenge the Fates.... There is a fairy-tale of a man building a great boat for the air. It looked to win, and in the effrontery of achievement, he set forth to conquer God. Just then a hornet stung him....
All this to suggest that the new dimension of life must come from America, if it comes at all; and from this vantage-point, the reality is mightily appearing—in the new poetry, in the new novels, in music, painting, and the crafts. The generation just coming into its own, contains the builders whose work is to follow the destroyers of war. They are not self-servers. They do not believe in intellect. Their genius is intuitionally driven, not intellectually. Just as steam has reached its final limitation as a force, and is being superseded by electricity, the limitations of which have not been sensed so far even by the most audacious, so the intellect as a producing medium, has had its period—a period of style-worship, vanities of speech and action, of self-service, or parading, of surface show and short-sightedness, without parallel in the world.
For the intellect is a product of sunlight, its energy supplied by human blood which dies. The new dimension comes from the fountain-head of energy, and its first realization is the unity of all nature. The intellect is as old as your body is; the giant that is awakening from sleep in the breasts of the rising generation is immortal.
The thing that was called genius in the last generation met a destructive force in the material world, almost as deadly and vindictive as that encountered by Copernicus. The voices of the few heralds were scarcely heard, but there is a battle-line of genius in the new generation, timed for the great service years following the chaos of war. They will bring in the liberation of religion from mammon; they will bring in the religion of work, the equality of women, not on a mere suffrage matter alone, but in spirit and truth; they will bring in their children un-accursed.