And the need of a world of men for me.
The first line of the verse is missing. The three lines however serve the purpose of my comparison. I had also set down these lines by Browning:
One lyric woman in her crocus vest,
Woven of sea-wools.
I intended to include this with my quotations. For here in my view is a figure as original and precisely felicitous as anything the Imagists have given us.
That this dragging in of some wrongly attributed words—so obviously wrong as to deceive no one—for the sole purpose of discrediting an important article is dishonest, is clear from the fact that Smith does not drag in any other quotation from the many given, nor produce any other evidence whatsoever in support of his contention that my article is inept and careless throughout. In fact he has nothing more damaging to offer than his own fatuous statement that he happens “to consider my article an ill-digested congeries of vague views”; which, when one comes to examine it is found to contain a baseless assertion and a clear admission that my article is above and beyond Smith’s head.
As to the silliness of Smith’s letter, this may be judged from the following: Smith begins with the generalization that magazines die “whose pages are as a rule careless, inconsidered and inept” (note the repetition and consequent lack of thoroughness). The publications of the capitalist press answer this description. The news sheets, for instance, are rotten with carelessness, inconsideredness and ineptness. They would be rottener if they could. Yet they do not die. On the contrary they sell by the million. If so, then The Little Review should sell by the million. But Smith says it will die. And Smith is a careful, serviceable, and accurate man.
By way of comparison Smith relieves himself of this matchless composition. “Your magazine will die,—as a steam engine would grow useless in which no direction towards any cylinder was given to the indubitable forces generated in the boiler.” What is the precise meaning of this bombastic twaddle? In homely words, it means that a steam engine is (not “would grow”) useless when the steam power developed in its boiler is not utilised in any cylinder. Anyone who examines this analogy will agree with me that Smith is a careful, serviceable, and accurate man.
From the general Smith comes to the particular and quotes what he is pleased to call an example of my “ineptitude and carelessness” as an example of the general “ineptitude and carelessness” of The Little Review. Without knowing anything as to the circumstances under which the wrongly attributed words found their way into print, without stopping to inquire to what extent I contributed to the mistake, and upon no other evidence whatsoever than the said wrongly attributed words, he proceeds to saddle me with the astounding intention “to obliterate all sense of accuracy, all love of clear and rational communication, all fidelity to honest statement, and all interest in truth” (which makes four ways of uttering the same inverifiable statement).
Finally Smith challenges the editor of The Little Review to print his ghastly ineptitude. She has taken the short way and done so. It serves Smith right.