... 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.