Till they rose to touch the spheres!
Katherine Tappert.
Davenport, Iowa.
... I don’t know when I’ve read anything so inspiring as that letter from Galsworthy. Can’t all of you who are helping to make the magazine arrange to march up to it mentally and present your “copy” for approval before you decide to print it?
I like the article on Paderewski and the one about The Dark Flower. But do be careful of “beauty” and “passion.” It’s easy to make them commonplace. Also spare your adjectives a bit; you don’t need an adjective for everything. I realize that your abbreviations are made in the interest of readableness, but however informal you want to make it you only succeed in sounding hideously colloquial. It doesn’t read well, and it makes me feel that you’re trying to achieve through the style what ought to be achieved quite simply through the material itself. Not that I approve of anything stilted, but you can easily overdo the other side of it. And wouldn’t it be better to leave some of the things unsigned? People who don’t know that the various Anderson contributors are unrelated will think it’s rather a family monopoly.
The Ficke poems are exquisite; and how I love Nicholas Vachel Lindsay’s! Also I like the New York letter very much, but George Soule’s Major Symphony could just as well be unwritten. Poetry has to be so much better than that to be real poetry. Another thing: I think your quotations from Succession weren’t as efficient as you hoped. It’s a book that can’t well be quoted except to one who knows it.
You wanted frankness, so here it is. Otherwise, I have nothing but praise for the whole glorious undertaking!
Lois Allen Peters.
Philadelphia.
[Being a sister of the editor, Mrs. Peters speaks her mind with a freedom that enchants us. It also helps us—though we want to shake her for one or two of those remarks. However—may her letter serve as a model to timid but opinionated readers!—The Editor.]
If you will allow me to be perfectly frank about your first issue, I should like to tell you that The Little Review seems rather too esthetic in tone and spirit to avoid being “restrictive”—a wish you expressed in your editorial. There is not enough variety in it, for one thing. For another, some of its critical judgments are too personal—are too largely temperamental judgments—to be of any permanent value. You seem to have set out to exploit personalities; and there’s a juvenility in many of the articles that I’m afraid you’ll all blush for in ten years.
A Well-Meaning Critic.