I am distinctly of the opinion that The Little Review is worth while. It is one of the very few periodicals I read through from cover to cover. If this can be made to go it will be a greater triumph for the American people than for you. So many magazines of this type have been based upon unsound premises. They have become the vehicle for irrepressible self expression; they have followed freak paths of every variety; they have turned Pegasus into a mechanical hydro-aeroplane and have flattered themselves that, Icarus-like, they were scaling the summits to the sky and endangering their pinions near the sun, when, as a matter of fact, they were plunging through the sloughs below and the only evidence of the sun was its reflection upon the mud by which they were surrounded. With The Little Review, however, I have a fine sense of clarity.
F. D., New York:
Not long ago I wrote you a long, long letter about The Little Review. But I didn’t send it, because who am I to dogmatize about criticism? Anyway, I was severe upon you, because I was disappointed. I really don’t think The Little Review is critical at all. It is exuberantly uncritical—enthusiastic about the wrong things. But you will probably get tired of just being enthusiastic after a time, and start in to criticise. I’m sorry I don’t like it better. It has had some good things in it. What I principally object to is your own editorial attitude.
Constance Skinner, New York:
I have just read your first issue and want to send my godspeed to this magazine that feels. I am so sick of callousness and sneers and flippancy.
Your Paderewski article touches me nearly. Shall I send you a brief little picture of Paderewski playing one summer morning at Modjeska’s home in St. Ana Canon, California? Her face so fine, so sweet, with the “so be it” and imperishable sounding memory of broken harp chords, as she sat by silent and listened and looked across the years to Poland, to the heart of humanity as she had held it and shaped it in those days of her own power, ere she picked this starving boy from his attic and said to Warsaw: “Ecce homo.” Her husband listening better, because watching her, to what the long fingers, like lights flashing, were bringing from the depths. His (the player’s) beautiful wife leaning upon the piano, where he always wished to have her, where he could see her face as he played. Outside the sloping canyon wall beginning in a rare rioting, rose garden and reaching to a silver and blue rugged granite where mountain lions sometimes pace restlessly. A great clump of live oaks, four monster trees, their size ranging from ninety to one hundred and twenty feet from bough to bough, roofing with bronze and green leafage this last retreat of the woman who had been hailed greatest of all in three countries. Among the roses by the low open windows of the piano alcove the Polish maid standing, weeping, and the old lame man, her brother, limping along from his work, taking off his hat and standing there, too, unashamed of the tears flooding. And when he had finished playing they came in and caught his hands and kissed them and spoke. The lame man said: “I was in church, but it was holier. It was a rosary, but every head was a light.” The maid said: “Poland is not dead.” This madam translated to me, and the fire and mist in her eyes—surely the most wonderful eyes ever made—was something I could not look away from. She added: “Poland is not dead while Poles can weep. We must bless grief, it has given us our art.”
I am going to ask you to please discontinue my subscription to The Little Review, as your ideas which you set forth in your leading articles are so entirely crude and so vastly different from my own that I do not care to be responsible for its appearance in my home any longer.
[This reader has the honor of sending in the first cancellation. We might take his denunciation more seriously if it were not for our suspicion that what he really meant to say was this: “Your ideas are entirely crude because so vastly different from my own.”—The Editor.]