Fiction reviews by Llewellyn Jones in The Chicago Evening Post.
A typical literary judgment from The Dial: “But, in the main, his wholesomely harsh utterances ought to be, and must be, in some degree, tonic and bracing and curative.”
An editorial from The New Republic, a journal of opinion whose function, we believe, is to circulate ideas:
During the past ten months the German Ambassador at Washington has done nothing to promote a better understanding between his own government and nation and the American government and nation. He is consequently all the more to be congratulated upon his behavior at a moment of acute and dangerous contention between the United States and Germany. He has on his own initiative and perhaps at his own risk intervened on behalf of a possibly peaceful solution of the differences between the two governments. He has sought by means of a frank talk with President Wilson to break through the barrier of misunderstanding which the exchange of notes was building up between the two governments and to re-establish a genuine vehicle of communication. The conversation may not lead to agreement, but at the top of a peculiarly forbidding crisis it has at least made an agreement seem not impossible. Everybody who detests war, everybody who hopes that the friendship between the United States and Germany will not be involved in the wreckage of the hideous conflict, will be grateful to Count von Bernstorff for his enterprise.
The Reader Critic
Mrs. Jean Cowdrey Norton, Hempstead, Long Island:
Since coming in contact with The Little Review last December, I have more than enjoyed each issue with your own impulsive, warm-hearted, dauntless personality coming through its pages; and it is for that reason I do not hesitate to ask you for an explanation of a sentence that you wrote in the April number, which led me to subscribe for that horrible output, viz., The Masses. You pronounced it indispensable to intelligent living. On that I sent in a subscription, and whereas I am not so awfully stupid I cannot understand how you, who are evidently an artist with high ideals, could possibly have such a magazine on your desk. The cartoons are so untrue, so damnably vulgar,—which good art never is,—the insistent harping on the shadows of life, the exaggerated outlook which tinges the whole paper—quite as one-sided on its side as other papers are on theirs; all of which I know must be in complete contradiction to your self. It fills me with astonishment. We acknowledge with our ever-increasing complex civilization that we must more than ever perhaps help each other; but I don’t just understand which class this perfectly rotten sheet is intended to reach. If it’s the so-called down trodden, they are apt to have so much unhappiness any way I should say a good brace up does more good than harping on injustice in general; as for the class that “does not think,” its inartistic drawings alone would be enough to queer it. When I am down and out—I happen to be a working woman too—I most decidedly do not want to be made more down and out by more woes, that often spring from lack of intelligence, that both rich and poor suffer alike from. You will see I believe in the responsibility of the individual, that you Socialists rather avoid. I do not expect you to answer this letter, but I shall look in The Little Review for a stray line that will give me some idea of your outlook.
[I have so much to say in answer to this letter, and so little time to say it that I have asked someone who shares my view to do it for me. Mr. Davis says it much better than I could, anyhow. And I must add that I am not a Socialist. I am an Anarchist—which means, an Individualist; which means everything that people think it doesn’t mean.—The Editor.]
F. Guy Davis, Chicago:
I will try to indicate very briefly why I think so much of The Masses. The group that is getting it out are real students who know the crowd with all its hope and despair, much better than the crowd knows itself. They are interpreting the crowd. The mass would never like The Masses. It is too true. It is not got up for them. The Cosmopolitan is the ideal of the mass. The Masses is for the few brave spirits who want to know life as it is, the shadows as well as the flights up into the sunshine. The Masses to my mind has as broad a range of feeling reflected in its pages as any magazine I know of. Humor, tragedy, light, shade, drama, color, yes, and mud too, as you say. But isn’t mud a part of life? In some respects mud is the condition of life. The great need of the sensitive mind of today is contact with the vital life-giving things and ideas which come from the earth. The life of such a mind is like the life of a plant. Its roots must go down beneath the surface or it will die. The Masses to my mind is the spirit of the earth put into magazine form, and to read it understandingly is to put the roots of the soul down into the earth where they should be if a healthy growth is desired. One could get too much of that contact of course, but that is another matter.