Pot-Boilers

The Sorrows of Belgium, by Leonid Andreyev. New York: The Macmillan Company.

It does make you feel sorry. Sorry for a big talent corrupted by the omnipotent Huhn-Public. During the Russo-Japanese war Andreyev wrote his Red Laughter, a rough affair, yet powerful in its horror. This pamphlet is nothing but an editorial from an anti-German newspaper.

A test of man’s well-being and consciousness of power is the extent to which he can acknowledge the terrible and questionable character of things, and whether he is in any need of a faith at the end.—Nietzsche.

The Poets’ Translation Series

The object of the editors of this series is to present a number of translations of Greek and Latin poetry and prose, especially of those authors who are less frequently given in English.

This literature has too long been the property of pedagogues, philologists and professors. Its human qualities have been obscured by the wranglings of grammarians, who love it principally because to them it is so safe and so dead.

But to many of us it is not dead. It is more alive, more essential, more human than anything we can find in contemporary English literature. The publication of such classics, in the way we propose, may help to create a higher standard for poetry than that which prevails, and a higher standard of appreciation of the writers of antiquity, who have suffered too long at the hands of clumsy metrists. We do not deny that there are many good translations in English of classical writers—Lang’s Homer and Theokritos, Mackail’s Anthology or Aldington’s Apuleius, for instance; but too often such works are lonely and austerely expensive.

THE POET’S TRANSLATION SERIES will appear first in The Egoist (starting September 1st) and will then be reprinted and issued as small pamphlets, simple and inexpensive, so that none will buy except to read. The translations will be done by poets whose interest in their authors will be neither conventional nor frigid. The translators will take no concern with glosses, notes, or any of the apparatus with which learning smothers beauty. They will endeavor to give the words of these Greek and Latin authors as simply and as clearly as may be. Where the text is confused, they will use the most characteristic version; where obscure, they will interpret.

The first six pamphlets, when bound together, will form a small collection of unhackneyed poetry, too long buried under the dust of pedantic scholarship. They range over a period of two thousand years of literature—a proof of the amazing vitality of the Hellenic tradition.

If this venture has the success its promoters look for, other similar and possibly larger pamphlets will be issued.

1. (Ready September) The complete poems (25) of Anyte of Tegea, now brought together in English for the first time: translated by Richard Aldington. (8 pages) 2d. (2½d. post free).

2. (Ready October) An entirely new version of the poems and new fragments, together with the more important of the old fragments, of Sappho: translated by Edward Storer. (12 pages) 4d (4½d. post free).

3. Choruses from the Rhesos of Euripides: translated by H. D.

4. A choice of the Latin poetry of the Italian Renaissance, many now translated for the first time, by Richard Aldington.

5. The Poems of Leonidas of Tarentum, now collected—and many translated for the first time in English: by James Whitall.

6. The Mosella of Ausonius, translated by F. S. Flint. All the pamphlets—except the first—will be twelve pages long and cost four pence; 4½d. post free. The series of six 2s. post free. The pamphlets will be issued monthly.

To be obtained from: The Egoist, Oakley House, Bloomsbury Street, W. C., or from Richard Aldington, 7 Christ Church Place, Hampstead, N. W.

Subscriptions will be taken through The Little Review.

Wanted: A “Spoon River Anthology.”

A first edition of The Spoon River Anthology has been borrowed or filched from our office. First editions are scarce, and we prize ours beyond words. Will the guilty person please return it; or will any one wishing to dispose of his at a reasonable price let us know about it?

The Reader Critic

“CULTURE”

Richard Aldington, London:

... It is almost impossible to get English people to subscribe to an American literary review. English people are so conservative, so self-satisfied, that it will be years and years and years and years before they even become aware of the new spirit in America—and then it will be more years and years and years before they will take it seriously and still more years before they will pay to know anything of it. In a sense, you are more fortunate than we are—in England the big circulating libraries have almost stopped the sale of new books, and there is such an amazing mental lassitude that no one ever buys literary and art periodicals. England is well behind the four other great powers—France, Russia, Austria, and Germany. There seems to be a tremendous Renaissance in Russia, but that comes, I think, from their reading French stuff seriously. Have you ever tried to make an English person—I expect it’s the same with Americans—read a new French book, a book which has original ideas? If you haven’t, don’t!

... Is Comstock’s successor worse or better? It seems to me—who am down-trodden by a corrupt aristocracy—amazing that the Great Republic (?) should humbly let Comstock sit on its head for forty years; why even in stodgy, money-bagged, hypocritical old England, someone would have arisen—some Shaw—and assassinated him! There is no tyranny for the artist comparable to that of an “enlightened” (God save us) democracy. Notice that Vienna and Petrograd, the two capitals of benighted feudalism, are, at this moment, the two great art centres of the world. Paris has become a provincial town since the war; I don’t believe it will recover—at least not for a decade.

TO THE EDITOR, “WHO TENTS—INTENSE!”

“Ursus”:

How dare you seek the adventure of beauty? To release, to joy, to clout with hilarious freedom is to outguess the crowd. To outguess the crowd is to encourage critical suicide in episodal splendor. The unknowable is not wanted known; to venture is contagion.

Man ruts—knowingly, wilfully; slithers in purring abandon so long as steaks fry and pieces of silver rattle in the pocket. When you attempt to stir unthinking recesses, whip at latent possibilities, you prove that you outclass, and he stares fishily from his Mongolian eyes. You seek beauty; the average person tortures it! His father did not diet him upon such. Your creed is not his. Mass brains chemicalize into a common ingredient. Why precipitate? The world wants its filing cabinets to contain regular, trimmed memos.

How dare you seek the adventure of beauty? Shall you consecrate yourself to individual newness, to truth, against age-old creeds? Against mountains of odds?

Then I congratulate you. You are different—you shall be singular and never plural. Go your way! You may find beauty because of the adventures in seeking it.

Arthur Davison Ficke, Davenport, Iowa:

Witter Bynner has sent me a copy of his letter to you on the subject of the imagists, with the rubric—“Come at them yourself! Print something about them! The public mustn’t think itself alone in disliking them!” In spite of our very old friendship,—or perhaps because of it,—he and I have never agreed on any subject under the sun; and now, when I find that the greater part of his letter is just what I should like to say, I am dissuaded from following his suggestion only by the fear that he and I must both be wrong since we are at last in agreement. But I suppose that even an unholy alliance cannot poison a good cause; and I therefore beg you to append this as a footnote to Bynner’s communication.

AN OBJECTION

John F. Weedon, Chicago:

Your menu promises “Literature, Drama, Music, Art,” and as your guest I sat down to enjoy one of those “feasts of reason and flows of soul,—so extremely rare since The Chap Book went out of print,—and I was immediately plunged into five or six pages of dyspeptic regurgitation of war dope.

I hate the war,—I am sick of the war. It is not, according to my well-worn lexicon, either Literature, Drama, Music, or Art. I came near pitching your magazine into the waste paper basket and getting a drink to take the taste out of my mouth.

Really, we caterpillars are tired of the war. Can we not find refuge from it even in The Little Review, or will you always get the head of Charles the First into your Memorial?

However, I admit the picture of Rupert Brooke alone was worth the price of admission; and Ben Hecht,—I don’t know who he is,—I could love like a brother. Lucian Cary is enjoyable, and your stuff is good but a little inclined to be sophomorish. I bet old Dr. Johnson would have insisted that “you define your terms, young man.”

Anyhow, as an elderly gentleman with a large family I bow to the superknowledge and exuberance of your youth, and freely admit you are giving full value for the money. But you will cut out the “vaarrr”—von’t you?

The following letter, typical of many that come in, expresses much of what we have hoped to do through The Little Review.

Until I read Mr. Ben Hecht’s article on The American Family in the August issue I had not believed that any one in America would have the courage to give expression to the terrible truth about our most prized institution, the family. It is splendid; it is the kind of thing we “struggling daughters” need to keep us from being unselfish once too often.

I imagine there are not enough emancipated souls in Chicago who are understanding your work to make a word of sincere appreciation a mere bore.... My social position is such that just a suggestion of the revolutionary things which are “going on inside” would be a matter for intense horror to most of my friends. The Little Review is one of the sources from which I am deriving strength to cling to my ideals, and to keep on hoping until school is finished and it is time to strike for freedom.

THE “ARTIST IN LIFE”

M. Isadore Lyon, Chicago:

Please permit me to point out to all the Mrs. Quackenbushes in one that the obviously clear though much misunderstood article, The Artist in Life, so far from being a snobbish self-revelation of pessimism is a clarion feast of optimism; it is the optimistic urge back of it which presupposes people do possess latent will power, latent art love back of—deep under—the lethargic brooding sleep of the Mass. It is a strong plea to cease crawling in slumpy illusions and become self-conscious, self-directed beings. I would ask the Quackenbushes to read it from this view point.

SOLD ONLY TO

PHYSICIANS, LAWYERS, EDUCATORS, CLERGYMEN, SOCIAL WORKERS AND WRITERS. Price heretofore $5.50. Identically same work, in less expensive binding, now $1.60.

This is the revised and enlarged MARSHALL ENGLISH TRANSLATION of

THE
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QUESTION

By August Forel, M. D., Ph. D., L. L. D., of Zurich. Every Professional man or woman, dealing with social, criminal, medical and religious matters will find this book of immediate value. Without doubt the most complete and authoritative as well as the most amazing book ever written on sexual matters. Subject treated from every point of view by this celebrated scientist in terms of the average reader.

The chapter on “Love and Other Irradiations of the Sexual Appetite” is in itself a profound revelation of human sex emotions. Complete exposition of degeneracy and treatment. Discussions of contraceptive means. Should be in the hands of everyone dealing with domestic relations.

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Poetry

A Magazine of Verse

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Padraic Colum, the distinguished Irish poet and lecturer, says: “POETRY is the best magazine, by far, in the English language. We have nothing in England or Ireland to compare with it.”

William Marion Reedy, Editor of the St. Louis Mirror, says: “POETRY has been responsible for the Renaissance in that art. You have done a great service to the children of light in this country.”

CAN YOU AFFORD TO DO WITHOUT SO IMPORTANT A MAGAZINE?

POETRY publishes the best verse now being written in English, and its prose section contains brief articles on subjects connected with the art, also reviews of the new verse.

POETRY has introduced more new poets of importance than all the other American magazines combined, besides publishing the work of poets already distinguished.

THE ONLY MAGAZINE DEVOTED EXCLUSIVELY TO THIS ART.

SUBSCRIBE AT ONCE. A subscription to POETRY is the best way of paying interest on your huge debt to the great poets of the past. It encourages living poets to do for the future what dead poets have done for modern civilization, for you.

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Transcriber’s Notes

Advertisements were collected at the end of the text.

The table of contents on the title page was adjusted in order to reflect correctly the headings in this issue of The Little Review.

The original spelling was mostly preserved. A few obvious typographical errors were silently corrected. All other changes are shown here (before/after):