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THE LITTLE REVIEW A MAGAZINE OF THE ARTS MAKING NO COMPROMISE WITH THE PUBLIC TASTE "ULYSSES" by JAMES JOYCE
THE EGOIST This journal is not a chatty literary review; its mission is not to divert and amuse: it is not written for tired and depressed people. Its aim is rather to secure a fit audience, and to render available to that audience contemporary literary work bearing the stamp of originality and permanence; to present in the making those contemporary literary efforts which ultimately will constitute 20th century literature. The philosophical articles which The Egoist publishes, by presenting the subject-matter of metaphysics in a form which admits of logical treatment, are promising a new era for philosophy. The power of its fictional work is investing that commonest but laxest of literary forms-—the novel (as written in English)—with a new destiny and a new meaning. In poetry, its pages arc open to experiments which are transforming the whole conception of poetic form, while among its writers appear leaders in pioneering methods radically affecting the allied arts. Obviously a journal of interest to virile readers only. Such should write, enclosing subscription, to THE EGOIST 23 ADELPHI TERRACE HOUSE. ROBERT STREET LONDON, W. C. 2. PUBLISHED MONTHLY Price, fifteen cents a number Yearly subscription, one dollar sixty cents
THE LITTLE REVIEW THE MAGAZINE THAT IS READ BY THOSE WHO WRITE THE OTHERS MARCH, 1918 Ulysses, 1. James Joyce Imaginary Letters, VIII. Wyndham Lewis Matinee Jessie Dismorr The Classics "Escape" Ezra Pound Cantico del Sole Women and Men, II. Ford Madox Hueffer Bertha Arthur Symons A List of Books Ezra Pound Wyndham Lewis's "Tarr" Raymonde Collignon The Reader Critic Copyright, 1918, by Margaret Anderson MARGARET ANDERSON, Editor EZRA POUND, Foreign Editor 24 West Sixteenth Street, New York Foreign office: 5 Holland Place Chambers, London W. 8. 25 cents a copy $2.50 a year Entered as second-class matter at P. O., New York, N. Y. Published monthly by Margaret Anderson
THIS MARK ON GOOD BOOKS By JAMES JOYCE A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN "Like some of the best novels in the world it is the story of an education; it is by far the most living and convincing picture that exists of an Irish Catholic upbringing. It is a mosaic of jagged fragments that does altogether render with extreme completeness the growth of a rather secretive, imaginative boy in Dublin. The technique is startling, but on the whole it succeeds. The interest of the book depends entirely upon its quintessential and unfailing reality. One believes in Stephen Dedalus as one believes in few characters in fiction." H. G. Wells in The New Republic. DUBLINERS "As a delineator of the more sombre aspects of Dublin life Mr. James Joyce is unequalled. For him it has remained in 'Dubliners' to illuminate with a searching flood of imagination and sympathetic understanding whole tracts of middle-class life in the gray and laughing city. He invests with a convincing reality and an abiding human significance what are apparently the most trivial and insignificant happenings." The Nation "He is a genuine realist; he puts in the exaltations as well as the depressions, the inner life as well as the outer. Spiritual passions are as powerful to him as physical passions."—The New Statesman. Each $1.50 net. In preparation EXILES A three-act play that will enhance interest in the Irishman whose "Dubliners" and "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" established him among the most significant literary creators of the day. Probably $1.00 net At all bookstores, or of the publisher B. W. HUEBSCH 225 Fifth avenue NEW YORK
THE LITTLE REVIEW Vol. V. MARCH, 1918 No. 11 ULYSSES JAMES JOYCE Episode 1 STATELY, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressing gown, ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him on the mild morning air. He held the bowl aloft and intoned: —Introibo ad altare Dei, Halted, he peered down the dark winding stairs and called up coarsely: —Come up, Kinch. Come up, you fearful Jesuit. Solemnly he came forward and mounted the round gunrest. He faced about and blessed gravely thrice the tower, the surrounding country and the awaking mountains. Then, catching sight of Stephen Dedalus, he bent towards him and made rapid crosses in the air, gurgling in his throat and shaking his head. Stephen Dedalus, displeased and sleepy, leaned his arms on the top of the staircase and looked coldly at the shaking gurgling face that blessed him, equine in its length, and at the light untonsured hair, grained and hued like pale oak. Buck Mulligan peeped an instant under the mirror and then covered the bowl smartly. —Back to barracks, he said sternly. He added in a preacher's tone: --For this, O dearly beloved, is the genuine Christine: body and soul and blood and ouns. Slow music, please. Shut your eyes, gents. One moment. A little trouble about those white corpuscles. Silence, all. The Little Review He peered sideways up and gave a long low whistle of call, then paused awhile in rapt attention, his even white teeth glistening here and there with gold points. Chrysostomos. —Thanks, old chap, he cried briskly. That will do nicely. Switch off the current, will you? He skipped off, the gunrest and looked gravely at his watcher, gathering about his legs the loose folds of his gown. The plump shadowed face and sullen oval jowl recalled a prelate, patron of arts in the middle ages. A pleasant smile broke quietly over his lips. —The mockery of it! he said gaily. Your absurd name, an ancient Greek! He pointed his finger in friendly jest and went over to the parapet, laughing to himself. Stephen Dedalus stepped up, followed him wearily halfway and sat down on the edge of the gunrest, watching him still as he propped his mirror on the parapet, dipped the brush in the bowl and lathered cheeks and neck. Buck Mulligan's gay voice went on: —My name is absurd too. Malachi, Mulligan, two dactyls. But it has a Hellenic ring, hasn't it? Tripping and sunny like the buck himself. We must go to Athens. Will you come if I can get the aunt to fork out twenty quid? He laid the brush aside and, laughing with delight, cried: —Will he come? The jejune jesuit. Ceasing, he began to shave with care. —Tell me, Mulligan, Stephen said quietly, —Yes, my love? —How long is Haines going to stay in this tower? Buck Mulligan showed a shaven cheek over his right shoulder. —God, isn't he dreadful? he said frankly. A ponderous Saxon. He thinks you're not a gentleman. God, these bloody English! Bursting with money and indigestion. Because he comes from Oxford. You know, Dedalus, you have the real Oxford manner. He can't make you out. O, my name for you is the best: Kinch, the knifeblade. He shaved warily over his chin. —He was raving all night about a black panther, Stephen said. Where is his guncase? — A woeful lunatic, Mulligan said. Were you in a funk? —I was, Stephen said with energy and growing fear. Out here in the dark with a man I don't know raving and moaning to himself about shooting a black panther. You saved men from drowning. I'm not a hero, however. If he stays on here I am off. Buck Mulligan frowned at the lather on his razor blade. He hopped down from his perch and began to search his trouser pockets hastily. —Scutter, he cried thickly. He came over to the gunrest and, thrusting a hand into Stephen's upper pocket, said: —Give us a loan of your noserag to wipe my razor. Stephen suffered him to pull out and hold up on show by its corner a dirty crumpled handkerchief. Buck Mulligan wiped the razor blade neatly. Then, gazing over the handkerchief, he said: —The bard's noserag. A new art colour for our Irish poets: snotgreen. You can almost taste it, can't you? He mounted to the parapet again and gazed out over Dublin bay, his fair oakpale hair stirring slightly. —God! he said quietly. Isn't the sea what Algy calls it: a great sweet mother. The snotgreen sea. The scrotumtightening sea. Epi oinopa ponton. Ah, Dedalus, the Greeks! She is our great sweet mother. Come and look. Stephen stood up and went over to the parapet. Leaning on it, he looked down on the water. -—Our mighty mother! Buck Mulligan said. He turned abruptly his quick searching eyes from the sea to Stephen's face. —The aunt thinks you killed your mother, he said. That's why she won't let me have anything to do with you. —Someone killed her, Stephen said gloomily. —-You could have knelt down, damn it, Kinch, when your dying mother asked you, Buck Mulligan said. I'm hyperborean as much as you. But to think of your mother begging you with her last breath to kneel down and pray for her. And you refused. There is something sinister in you.... He broke off and lathered again lightly his farther cheek. A tolerant smile curled his lips. —But a lovely mummer! he murmured to himself. Kinch, the loveliest mummer of them all! He shaved evenly and with care, in silence, seriously. Stephen, an elbow rested on the jagged granite, leaned his palm against his brow and gazed at the fraying edge of his shiny 6 The Little Review black coatsleeve. Pain, that was not yet the pain of love, fretted his heart. Silently, in a dream she had come to him after her death, her wasted body within its loose brown graveclothes giving off an odour of wax and rosewood, her breath, that had bent upon him, mute, reproachful, a faint odour of wetted ashes. Across the threadbare cuffedge he saw the sea, hailed as a great sweet mother by the wellfed voice beside him. The ring of bay and skyline held a dull green mass of liquid. A bowl of white china had stood beside her deathbed, holding the green sluggish bile which she had torn up from her rotting liver by fits of loud groaning vomiting. Buck Mulligan wiped again his razorblade. —Ah, poor dogsbody! he said in a kind voice. I must give you a shirt and a few noserags. How are the secondhand breeks? —They fit well enough, Stephen answered. Buck Mulligan attacked the hollow beneath his underlip. —The mockery of it, he said contentedly. Secondleg they should be. God knows what poxy bowsy left them off. I have a lovely pair with a hair stripe, grey. You'll look spiffing in them. I'm not joking, Kinch. You look damn well when you!re dressed. —Thanks, Stephen said. I can't wear them if they are grey. —He can't wear them, Buck Mulligan told his face in the mirror. Etiquette is etiquette. He kills his mother but he can't wear grey trousers. He folded his razor neatly and with stroking palps of fingers felt the smooth skin. Stephen turned his gaze from the sea and to the plump face with its smokeblue mobile eyes. —That fellow I was with in the Ship with last night, said Buck Mulligan, says you have g. p. i. He's up in Dottyville with Conolly Norman. General paralysis of the insane! He swept the mirror a half circle in the air to flash the tidings abroad in sunlight now radiant on the sea. His curling shaven lips laughed and the edges of his white glittering teeth. Laughter seized all his strong wellknit trunk. —Look at yourself, he said, you dreadful bard! Stephen bent forward and peered at the mirror held out to him, cleft by a crooked crack. Hair on end. As he and others see me. Who chose this face for me? It asks me too. I pinched it out of the skivvy's room, Buck Mulligan said. It does her all right. The The Little Review aunt always keeps plain looking servants for Malachi. Lead him not into temptation. And her name is Ursula. Laughing again, he brought the mirror away from Stephen's peering eyes. —The rage of Caliban at not seeing his face in a mirror, he said. If Wilde were only alive to see you! Drawing back and pointing, Stephen said with bitterness: —It is a symbol of Irish art. The cracked looking-glass of a servant. Buck Mulligan suddenly linked his arm in Stephen's and walked with him round the tower, his razor and mirror clacking in the pocket where he had thrust them. —It's not fair to tease you like that, Kinch, is it? he said kindly. God knows you have more spirit than any of them. Parried again. He fears the lancet of my art as I fear that of his. —The cracked lookingglass of a servant! Tell that to the oxy chap downstairs and touch him for a guinea. He's stinking with money and thinks you're not a gentleman. His old fellow made his tin by selling jalap to Zulus or some bloody swindle or other. God, Kinch, if you and I could only work together we might do something for the island. Hellenise it. Granly's arm. His arm. —And to think of your having to beg from these swine. I'm the only one that knows what you are. Why don't you trust me more? What have you up your nose against me? Is it Haines? If he makes any noise here I'll bring down Seymour and we'll give him a ragging worse than they gave Clive Kempthorpe. Young shouts of moneyed voices in Clive Kempthorpe's rooms. Palefaces: they hold their ribs with laughter, one clasping another, O, I shall expire! Break the news to her gently, Aubrey! I shall die! With slit ribbons of his shirt whipping the air he hops and hobbles round the table, with trousers down at heels, chased by Ades of Magdalen with the tailor's shears. A scared calf's face gilded with marmalade. I don't want to be debagged! Don't you play the giddy ox with me! Shouts from the open window startling evening in the quadrangle. A deaf gardener, aproned, masked with Matthew Arnold's face, pushes his mower on the sombre lawn, watching narrowly the dancing motes of grasshalms. 8 The Little Review To ourselves.... new paganism.... omphalos. —Let him stay, Stephen said. There's nothing wrong with him except at night. —Then what is it? Buck Mulligan asked impatiently. Cough it up. I'm quite frank with you. What bave you against me now? They halted, looking towards the blunt cape of Bray Head that lay on the water like the snout of a sleeping whale. Stephen freed his arm quickly. —Do you wish me to tell you? he asked. —Yes, what is it? Buck Mulligan answered. I don't remember anything. He looked in Stephen's face as he spoke A light wind passed his brow, fanning softly his fair uncombed hair and stirring silver points of anxiety in his eyes. Stephen, depressed by his own voice, said: —Do you remember the first day I went to your house after my mother's death? Buck Mulligan frowned quickly and said: —What? Where? I can't remember anything. Î remember only ideas and sensations. Why? What happened in the name of God? —You were making tea, Stephen said, and I went across the landing to get more hot water. Your mother and some visitor came out of the drawingroom. She asked you who was in your room. —Yes? Buck Mulligan said. What did I say? I forget. —You said, Stephen answered, O, it's only Dedalus whose mother is beastly dead. A flush which made him seem younger and more engaging rose to Buck Mulligan's cheek. —Did I say that? he asked. Well? What harm is that? He shook his constraint from him nervously. -—And what is death, he asked, your mother's or yours or my own? You saw only your mother die. I see them pop off every day in the Mater and Richmond and cut up into tripes in the dissecting room. It's a beastly thing and nothing else. It simply doesn't matter. You wouldn't kneel down to pray for your mother on her deathbed when she asked you. Why? Because you have the cursed jesuit strain in you only it's injected the wrong way. To me it's all a mockery and beastly. Her cerebral lobes are not functioning. She calls the doctor Sir Peter Teazle and picks buttercups off the quilt. Humour her till it's over. You crossed her last wish in death and yet you sulk with me because I don't whinge like some hired mute from Lalouette's. Absurd! I suppose I did say it. I didn't mean to offend the memory of your mother. He had spoken himself into boldness. Stephen, shielding the gaping wounds which the words had left in his heart, said very coldly: —I am not thinking of the offence to my mother. —Of what, then? Buck Mulligan asked. —Of the offence to me, Stephen answered. Buck Mulligan swung round on his heel. —O, an impossible person! he exclaimed. He walked off quickly round the parapet. Stephen stood at his post, gazing over the calm sea towards the headland. Sea and headland now grew dim. Pulses were beating in his eyes, veiling their sight, and he felt the fever of his cheeks A voice within the tower called loudly: —Are you up there, Mulligan? —I'm coming, Buck Mulligan answered. He turned towards Stephen and said: —Look at the sea. What does it care about offences? Chuck Loyola, Kinch, and come on down. The Sassenach wants his morning rashers. His head halted again for a moment at the top of the staircase, level with the roof: —Don't mope over it all day, he said. I'm inconsequent. Give up the moody brooding. His head vanished but the drone of his descending voice boomed out of the stairhead. -—And no more turn aside and brood Upon love's bitter mystery For Fergus rules the brazen cars. Woodshadows floated silently by through the morning peace from the stairhead seaward where he gazed. Inshore and farther out the mirror of water whitened, spurned by light-shod hurrying feet. White breast of the dim sea. The twining stresses, two by two. A hand plucking the harpstrings, merging their twining chords. Wavewhite wedded words shimmering on the dim tide. A clod began to cover the sun slowly, wholly, shadowing the bay in deeper green. It lay beneath him, a bowl of bitter waters. Fergus' song. I sang it alone in the house, holding down the long dark chords. Her door was open: she wanted to hear my music. Silent with awe and pity I went to her bedside. She was crying in her wretched bed. For those words, Stephen: love's bitter mystery. Where now? Her secrets: old feather fans, tassled dancecards, powdered with musk, a gaud of amber beads in her locked drawer. A birdcage hung in the sunny window of her house when she was a girl. She heard old Royce sing in the pantomime of Turko the Terrible and laughed with others when he sang: I am the boy That can enjoy Invisibility. Phantasmal mirth, folded away: musk perfumed. And no more turn aside and brood. Folded away in the memory of nature with her toys. Memories beset his brooding brain. Her glass of water from the kitchen tap when she had approached the sacrament. A cored apple, filled with brown sugar, roasting for her at the hob on a dark autumn evening. Her shapely fingernails reddened by the blood of squashed lice from the children's shirts. In a dream, silently, she had come to him, her wasted body within its loose graveclothes giving off an odour of wax and rosewood, her breath bent over him with mute secret words, a faint odour of wetted ashes. Her glazing eyes, staring out of death, to shake and bend my soul. On me alone. The ghostcandle to light her agony. Ghostly light on the tortured face. Her hoarse loud breath rattling in horror, While all prayed on their knees. Her eyes on me to strike me down. Liliata rutilantium te confessorum turma circumdet: iubitantium te virginum chorus excipiat. Ghoul! Chewer of corpses! No, mother! Let me be and let me live —Kinch ahoy! Buck Mulligan's voice sang from within the tower. It came nearer up the staircase, calling again. Stephen, still trembling at his soul's cry, heard warm running sunlight and in the air behind him, friendly words. —Dedalus, come down, like a good mosey. Breakfast is ready. Haines is apologising for waking us last night. It's all right. —I'm coming, Stephen said, turning. —Do, for Jesus' sake, Buck Mulligan said. For my sake and for all our sakes. His head disappeared and reappeared. —I told him your symbol of Irish art. He says it's very clever. Touch him for a quid, will you? A guinea, I mean. —I get paid this morning, Stephen said. —The school kip? Buck Mulligan said. How much? Four quid? Lend us one. —If you want it, Stephen said. —Four shining sovereigns, Buck Mulligan cried with delight. We'll have a glorious drunk to astonish the druidy druids. Four omnipotent sovereigns. He flung up his hands and tramped down the stone stairs, singing out of tune with a Cockney accent. —O, won't we have a merry time, Drinking whiskey, beer and wine! On coronation Coronation day! 0 won't we have a merry time On coronation day! Warm sunshine merry over the sea. The nickel shaving bowl shone, forgotten, on the parapet. Why should I bring it down? Or leave it there all day, forgotten friendship? He went over to it, held it in his hands awhile, feeling its coolness, smelling the clammy slaver of the lather in which the brush was stuck. So I carried the boat of incense then at Clongowes. I am another now and yet the same. A servant too. A server of a servant. In the gloomy domed livingroom of the tower Buck Mulligan's gowned form moved briskly about the hearth to and fro, hiding and revealing its yellow glow. Two shafts of soft daylight fell across the flagged floor from the high barbacans: and at the meeting of their rays a cloud of coalsmoke and fumes of fried grease floated, turning. —We'll be choked, Buck Mulligan said. Haines, open that door, will you? Stephen laid the shavingbowl on the locker. A tall figure rose from the hammock where it had been sitting, went to the doorway and pulled open the inner doors. —Have you the key? a voice asked. —Dedalus has it, Buck Mulligan said. Janey Mack, I'm choked! 12 The Little Review He howled without looking up from the fire: —Kinch! —It's in the lock, Stephen said, coming forward. The key scraped round harshly twice and,when the heavy door had been set ajar, welcome light and bright air entered. Haines stood at the doorway, looking out. Stephen hauled his up-ended valise to the table and sat down to wait. Buck Mulligan tossed the fry on to the dish beside him. Then he carried the dish and a large teapot over to the table, set them down heavily and sighed with relief. —I'm melting, he said, as the candle remarked when But hush! Not a word more on that subject. Kinch, wake up! Bread, butter, honey. Haines, come in. The grub is ready. Bless us, O Lord, and these they gifts. Where's the sugar? O, jay, there's no milk. Stephen fetched the loaf and the pot of honey and the buttercooler from the locker. Buck Mulligan sat down in a sudden pet. —What sort of a kip is this? he said. I told her to come before nine. —We can drink it black, Stephen said. There's a lemon in the locker. —O, damn you and your Paris fads! Buck Mulligan said. I want Sandycove milk. Haines came in from the doorway and said quietly: —That woman is coming up with the milk. —The blessings of God on you! Buck Mulligan said, jumping up from his chair. Sit down. Pour out the tea there. The sugar is in the bag. Here, I can't go fumbling at the damned eggs. He hacked through the fry on the dish and slapped it out on three plates, saying: —In nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti. Haines sat down to pour out the tea. —I'm giving you two lumps each, he said. But, I say, Mulligan, you do make strong tea, don't you? Buck Mulligan, hewing thick slices from the loaf, said in an old woman's wheedling voice: —When I makes tea I makes tea, as old mother Grogan said. And when I makes water I makes water. —By Jove, it is tea, Haines said. Buck Mulligan went on hewing and wheedling: — So I do, Mrs. Cahill, says she. Begob, ma'am, says Mrs. Cahill, God send you don't make them in the one pot. He lunged towards his messmates in turn a thick slice of bread, impaled on his knife. —That's folk, he said very earnestly, for your book, Haines. Five lines of text and ten pages of notes about the folk and the fish-gods of Dundrum. He turned to Stephen and asked in a fine puzzled voice, lifting his brows: —Can you recall, brother, is mother Grogan's tea and water pot spoken of in the Mabinogion or is it in the Upanishade? -—I doubt it, said Stephen gravely. —Do you now? Buck Mulligan said in the same tone. Your reasons, pray? —I fancy, Stephen said as he ate, it did not exist in or out of the Mabinogion. Mother Grogan was, one imagines, a kinswoman of Mary Ann. Buck Mulligan's face smiled with delight. —Charming! he said in a finical sweet voice, showing his white teeth and blinking his eyes pleasantly. Do you think she was? Quite charming! Then, suddenly overclouding all his features, he growled in a hoarsened rasping voice as he hewed again vigorously at the loaf. —For old Mary Ann She doesn't care a damn But, hising up her petticoats He crammed his mouth with fry and munched and droned. The doorway was darkened by an entering form. —The milk, sir. —Come in, ma'am, Mulligan said. Kinch, get the jug. An old woman came forward and stood by Stephen's elbow. —That's a lovely morning, sir, she said. Glory be to God. —To whom? Mulligan said, glancing at her. Ah, to be sure! Stephen reached back and took the milkjug from the locker. —The islanders, Mulligan said to Haines casually, speak frequently of the collector of prepuces. —How much, sir? asked the old woman. —A quart, Stephen said. He watched her pour into the measure and thence into the jug rich white milk, not hers. Old shrunken paps. She poured again a measurful and a tilly. Old and secret she had entered from a morning world, maybe a messenger. She praised the goodness of her milk, pouring it out. Crouching by a patient cow at daybreak in the lush field, a witch on her toadstool, her wrinkled fingers quick at the squirting dugs. They lowed about her whom they knew, dewsilky cattle. Silk of the kine and poor old woman, names given her in old times. A wandering queen, lowly form of an immortal serving her conqueror and her betrayer, a messenger from the secret morning. To serve or to upbraid, whether he could not tell: but scorned to beg her favour. —It is indeed, ma'am, Buck Mulligan said, pouring milk into their cups. —Taste it, sir, she said. He drank at her bidding. —If we could only live on good food like that, he said to her somewhat loudly, we wouldn't have the country full of rotten teeth and rotten guts. Living in a bogswamp, eating cheap food and the streets paved with dust, horsedung and consumptives' spits. —Are you a medical student, sir? the old woman asked. —I am, ma'am, Buck Mulligan answered. Stephen listened in scornful silence She bows her old head to a voice that speaks to her loudly, her bonesetter, her medicineman: me she slights. To the voice that will shrive and oil for the grave all there is of her but her woman's unclean loins. And to the loud voice that now bids her be silent with wondering unsteady eyes. —Do you understand what he says? Stephen asked her. —Is it French you are talking, sir? the old woman said to Haines. Haines spoke to her again a longer speech, confidently. —Irish, Buck Mulligan said. —I thought it was Irish, she said, by the sound of it. Are you from the west, sir? —I am an Englishman, Haines answered. —He's English, Buck Mulligan said, and he thinks we ought to speak Irish in Ireland. —Sure we ought too, the old woman said, and I'm ashamed I don't speak the language myself. I'm told it's a grand language by them that knows. —Grand is no name for it, said Buck Mulligan. Fill us out some more tea, Kinch. Would you like a cup, ma'am? —No, thank you, sir, the old woman said, slipping the ring of the milkcan on her forearm and about to go. Haines said to her: —Have you your bill? We had better pay her, Mulligan, hadn't we? Stephen filled again the three cups. —Bill, sir? she said, halting. Well, it's seven mornings a pint at twopence is seven twos is a shilling and twopence over and these three mornings a quart at fourpence is three quarts is a shilling and one and two is two and two, sir. Buck Mulligan sighed and, having filled his mouth with a crust thickly buttered on both sides, stretched forth his legs and began to search his trouser pockets. —Pay up and look pleasant, Haines said to him smiling. Stephen filled a third cup, a spoonful of tea colouring faintly the thick rich milk. Buck Mulligan brought up a florin, twisted it round in his fingers and cried: —A miracle! He passed it along the table towards the old woman, saying: —Ask nothing more of me, sweet, All I can give you I give. Stephen laid the coin in her uneager hand. —We'll owe twopence, he said. - —Time enough, sir, she said, taking the coin. Time enough. Good morning sir. She curtseyed and went out, followed by Buck Mulligan's tender chant: —Heart of my heart, were it more More would be laid at your feet. He turned to Stephen and said: —Seriously, Dedalus, I'm stony. Hurry out to your school kip and bring us back some money. Today the bards must drink and junket. Ireland expects that every man this day will do his duty. —That reminds me, Haines said, rising, that I have to visit your national library today. —Our swim first, Buck Mulligan said. He turned to Stephen and asked blandly: —Is this the day for your monthly wash, Kinch? 16 The Little Review Then he said to Haines: —The bard makes a point of washing once a month. —All Ireland is washed by the gulfstream, Stephen said as he let honey trickle over a slice of the loaf. Haines from the corner where he was knotting easily a scarf about the loose collar of his tennis shirt spoke: —I intend to make a collection of your sayings if you will let me. Speaking to me. —That one about the cracked lookingglass of a servant being the symbol of Irish art is deuced good. Buck Mulligan kicked Stephen's foot under the table and said with warmth of tone: —Wait till you hear him on Hamlet, Haines. —Well, I mean it, Haines said, still speaking to Stephen. I was just thinking of it when that poor old creature came in. —Would I make money by it? Stephen asked. Haines laughed and as he took his soft grey hat from the hold fast of the hammock, said: —I don't know, I'm sure. He strolled out to the doorway. Buck Mulligan bent across to Stephen and said with coarse vigour: — You put your hoof in it now. What did you say that for? —Well? Stephen said. The problem is to get money. From whom? From the milkwoman or from him. It's a toss up, I think. —I blow him out about you, Buck Mulligan said, and then you come along with your lousy leer and your gloomy jesuit jibes. —I see little hope, Stephen said, from her or from him. Buck Mulligan sighed tragically and laid his hand on Stephen's arm. —From me, Kinch, he said. In a suddenly changed tone he added: —To tell you the God's truth I think you're right. Damn all else they are good for. Why don't you play them as I do? To hell with them all. Let us get out of the kip. He stood up, gravely ungirdled and disrobed himself of his gown, saying resignedly: —Mulligan is stripped of his garments. He emptied his pockets on to the table. —There's your snotrag, he said. And putting on his stiff collar and rebellious tie, he spoke to them, chiding them, and to his dangling watchchain. His hands plunged and rummaged in his trunk while he called for a clean handkerchief. God, we'll simply have to dress the character. I want puce gloves and green boots. Contradiction. Do I contradict myself? Very well then. I contradict myself. Mercurial Malachi. A limp black missile flew out of his talking hands. —And there's your Latin quarter hat, he said. Stephen picked it up and put it on. Haines called to them from the doorway: -—Are you coming, you fellows? —I'm ready, Buck Mulligan answered, going towards the door. Come out, Kinch. You have eaten all we left, I suppose Stephen, taking his ashplant from its leaningplace, followed them out and, as they went down the ladder, pulled to the slow iron door and locked it. He put the huge key in his inner pocket. At the foot of the ladder Buck Mulligan asked: —Did you bring the key? —I have it, Stephen said, preceding them. He walked on. Behind him he heard Buck Mulligan club with his heavy bathtowel upreared ferns or grasses. —Down, sir! How dare you, sir! Haines asked: —Do you pay rent for this tower? —Twelve quid, Buck Mulligan said. —To the secretary of state for war, Stephen added over his shoulder. They halted while Haines surveyed the tower and said at last: —Rather bleak in wintertime, I should say. Martello you call it? —Billy Pitt had them built, Buck Mulligan said, when the French were on the sea. But ours is the omphalos. -—What is your idea of Hamlet? Haines asked Stephen. -—No, no, Buck Mulligan shouted in pain. I'm not equal to Thomas Aquinas and the fifty-five reasons he has made to prop it up. Wait till I have a few pints in me first. He turned to Stephen, saying as he pulled down neatly the peaks of his primrose waistcoat: —You couldn't manage it under three pints, Kinch, could you? —It has waited so long, Stephen said listlessly, it can wait longer. —You pique my curiosity, Haines said amiably Is it some paradox? 18 The Little Review —Pooh! Buck Mulligan said. We have grown out of Wilde and paradoxes. It's quite simple. He proves by algebra that Hamlet's grandson is Shakespeare's grandfather and that he himself is the ghost of his own father. —What? Haines said, beginning to point at Stephen. He himself? Buck Mulligan slung his towel stolewise roun his neck and, bending in loose laughter, said to Stephen's ear: —O, shade of Kinch the elder. —I'm always tired in the morning, Stephen said to Haines. And it is rather long to tell. Buck Mulligan, walking forward again, raised his hands. —The sacred pint alone can unbind the tongue of Dedalus, he said. —I mean to say, Haines explained to Stephen as they followed, this tower and these cliffs here remind me somehow of Elsinore. —That beetles O'er his Base into the sea, isn't it? Buck Mulligan turned suddenly for an instant towards Stephen but did not speak. In the bright silent instant Stephen saw his own image in cheap dusty mourning between their gay attires. —It's a wonderful tale, Haines said bringing them to halt again. He gazed southward over the bay. Eyes, pale as the sea the wind had freshened, paler, firm and prudent. The seas' ruler, he gazed over the bay, empty save for a sail tacking by the Muglins. —I read a theological interpretation of it somewhere, he said bemused. The Father and the Son idea. The Sen striving to be atoned with the Father. Buck Mulligan at once put on a blithe broadly smiling face. He looked at them, his wellshaped mouth open happily, his eyes, from which he had suddenly withdrawn all shrewd sense, blinking with mad gaiety. He moved a doll's head to and fro, the brims of his Panama hat quivering, and began to chant in a quiet happy foolish voice: —I'm the queerest young fellow that ever you heard. My mother's a jew, my father's a bird. With Joseph the joiner I cannot agree, So here's to disciples and Calvary. He held up a forefinger of warning If anyone thinks that I amn't divine He'll get no free drinks when I'm making the wine But have to drink water and wish it were plain That I make when the wine becomes water again. He tugged swiftly at Stephen's ashplant in farewell and, running forward to a brcw of the cliff, fluttered his hands at his sides like fins or wings of one about to rise in the air: and chanted Goodbye, now, goodbye! Write down all I said And tell Tom, Dick and Harry I rose from the dead. What's bred in the bone cannot fail me to fly And Olivet's breezy — Goodbye, now, goodbye! He capered before them down towards the forty-foot hole, fluttering his winglike hands, leaping nimbly, Mercury's hat quivering in the fresh wind that bore back to them his brief birdlike cries. Haines, who had been laughing guardedly, walked on beside Stephen, and said: —We oughtn't to laugh, I suppose. He's rather blasphemous. I'm not a believer myself, that is to say. Still his gaiety takes the harm out of it somehow, doesn't it? What did he call it? Joseph the Joiner? —The ballad of joking Jesus, Stephen answered. —O, Haines said, you have heard it before? —Three times a day, after meals, Stephen said drily. —You're not a believer, are you? Haines asked. I mean, a believer in the narrow sense of the word. Creation from nothing and miracles and a personal God. —There's only one sense of the word, it seems to me, Stephen said. Haines stopped to take out a smooth silver case in which twinkled a green stone. He sprang it open with his thumb and offered it. —Thank you, Stephen said, taking a cigarette. Haines helped himself and snapped the case to. He put it back in his sidepocket and took from his waistcoatpocket a nickel tinderbox, sprang it open too, and having lit his cigarette, held the flaming spunk towards Stephen in the shell of his hands. —Yes, of course, he said, as they went on again. Either you believe or you don't, isn't it? Personally I couldn't stomach that idea of a personal God. You don't stand for that, I suppose. —You behold in me, Stephen said with grim displeasure, a horrible example of free thought. He walked on, waiting to be spoken to, trailing his ashplant by his side. Its ferrule followed lightly on the path, squealing at his heels. My familiar, after me, calling Steeeeeeephen! A wavering line along the path. They will walk on it tonight, coming here in the dark. He wants that key. It is mine. I paid the rent. Now I eat his food. Give him the key too. All. He will ask for it. That was in his eyes. —After all, Haines began— Stephen turned and saw that the cold gaze which had measured him was not at all unkind. —After all, I should think you are able to free yourself. You are your own master, it seems to me. —I am the servant of two masters, Stephen said, an English and an Italian. —Italian? Haines said. —A crazy queen, old and jealous. Kneel down before me. And a third, Stephen said, there is who wants me for odd jobs. —Italian? Haines said again. What do you mean? —The imperial British state, Stephen answered, his colour rising, and the holy Roman catholic and apostolic church. Haines detached from his underlip some fibres of tobacco before he spoke. —I can quite understand that, he said calmly. An Irishman must think like that, I daresay. We feel in England that we have treated you rather unfairly. It seems history is to blame. The proud potent titles clanged over Stephen's memory the triumph of their brazen bells: et in unam sanctam catholican et apostolicaßi ecclesiam. Symbol of the apostles in the mass for pope Marcellus, the voices blended, singing alone, loud in affirmation: and behind their chant the vigilant angel of the church militant disarmed and menaced her heresiarchs. A horde of heresies fleeing with mitres awry: Photius and the brood of mockers of whom Mulligan was one, and Arius, waring his life long upon the consubstantiality of the Son with the Father and Valentine, spurning Christ's terrene body, and the subtle African heresiarch Sabellius who held that the Father was Himself His own Son. Words Mulligan had spoken a moment since in mockery to the stranger. Idle mockery. The void awaits surely all them that weave the wind: a menace, a disarming and a worsting from those embattled angels of the church, Michael's host, who defend her ever in the hour of conflict with their lances and their shields. Hear, hear! Prolonged applause. Zut! Nom de Dieu! —Of course I'm a Britisher, Haines's voice said, and I feel as one. I don't want to see my country fall into the hands of German jews either. That's our national problem, I'm afraid, just now. Two men stood at the verge of the cliff, watching: businessman, boatman. —She's making for Bullock harbour. The boatman nodded towards the north of the bay with some disdain. —There's five fathoms out there, he said. It'll be swept up that way when the tide comes in about one. It's nine days today. The man that was drowned. A sail veering about the blank bay waiting for a swollen bundle to bob up, roll over to the sun a puffy face, saltwhite. Here I am. They followed the winding path down to the creek. Buck Mulligan stood on a stone, in shirtsleeves, his unclipped tie rippling over his shoulder. A young man clinging to a spur of rock near him, moved slowly frogwise his green legs in the deep jelly of the water. —Is the brother with you, Malachi? —Down in Westmeath. With the Bannons. —Still there? I got a card form Bannon. Says he found a sweet young thing down there. Photo girl he calls her. —Snapshot, eh? Brief exposure. Buck Mulligan sat down to unlace his boots. An elderly man shot up near the spur of rock a blowing red face. He scrambled up by the stones, water glistening on his pate and on its garland of grey hair, water rilling over his chest and paunch and spilling jets out of his black sagging loincloth. Buck Mulligan made way for him to scramble past and, glancing at Haines and Stephen, crossed himself piously with his thumbnail at brow and lips and breastbone. —Seymour's back in town, the young man said, grasping again his spur of rocks. Chucked medicine and going in for the army. —Ah, go to God! Buck Mulligan said. —Going over next week to stew. You know that red Carlisle girl? Lily. —Yes. —Spooning with him last night on the pier. The father is rotton with money. —Is she up the pole? The Little Review —Better ask Seymour that. —Seymour a bleeding officer! Buck Mulligan said. He nodded to himself as he drew off his trousers and stood up, saying tritely: —Redheaded women buck like goats. He broke off in alarm, feeling his side under his napping shirt. —My twelth rib is gone, he cried. I'm the Uebermensch. Toothless Kinch and I, the supermen. He struggled out of his shirt and flung it behind him to where his clothes lay. —Are you going in here, Malachi? —Yes. Make room in the bed. The young man shoved himself backward through the water and reached the middle of the creek in two long clean strokes. Haines sat down on a stone, smoking. —Are you not coming in, Buck Mulligan asked. —Later on, Haines said. Not on my breakfast. Stephen turned away. —I'm going, Mulligan, he said. —Give us that key, Kinch, Buck Mulligan said, to keep my chemise flat. Stephen handed him the key. Buck Mulligan laid it across his heaped clothes. —And twopence, he said, for a pint. Throw it there. Stephen threw two pennies on the soft heap. Buck Mulligan erect, with joined hands before him, said solemnly: —He who stealeth from the poor lendeth to the Lord. Thus spake Zarathustra. His plump body plunged. —-We'll see you again, Haines said, turning as Stephen walked up the path. —The Ship, Buck Mulligan cried. Half twelve. —Good, Stephen said. He walked along the upwardcurving path. —Liliata rutilantium. Turma circumdet. The priest's grey nimbus in a niche where he dressed discreetly. Jubilantium te virginum. I will not sleep here tonight. Home also I cannot go. A voice, sweetened and sustained, called to him from the sea. Turning the curve he waved his hand. It called again. A sleek brown head far out on the water, round. Usurper. (to be continued) The Little Review IMAGINARY LETTERS (William Bland Burn to his Wife) Wyndham Lewis Petrograd, 1Sth Feburary, 1917. Dear Lydd, I am glad you decree that the debate shall continue. You seem to desire a debate to the death. I don't know why my coming to Russia should have provoked this stubborn battle in your brain; this kind of revolution against Russia! I suppose you are pretty jealous of this immense land, and you perhaps feel that my liaison with it is hardly intellectually respectable. Russia is too elementary! However, to approach your latest objections. Mine is not really a case of "national engouement" as you would persuade me (only engouement for Russian things instead of those of my own country). All Russian books of the last twenty years that I have read are disappointing. "Sanine" is certainly not as good as Bernard Shaw. Gorky was the best figure —and writer. Living here, you can get a better sense of the books of the Russian writers of the last century, but it is not like living among their books. Nor are the people around you as prepossessing as the fictitious nation. But where would art be if they were? The Russian novelists have given an almost unexampled illusion of a living people. Their Christianity, good sense and the method of realism each contributed to this. Not only are most Russians not Dostoevskys, they are not even Volchaninovs or Pavel Pavlovitches. Raskolnikoffs and Golyadkins mope and trot about in certain members, but they badly need the presence of their creator. When they were looked at by their great brother he entered into them as he looked and they ran mad at once, eventually exploding with energy. There are masses of the cheaply-energetic Oriental (non-Jew) and of the unsatisfactory-Teutonic. The springs of Dostoevsky's imagination I have chiefly found in thick, pungent, suddenly discovered Oases; in families, restaurants or moods 24 The Little Review of the town. But it is only the books that matter. And the Russian novels were made with this material, condensed, vividly exploited. They are better books than any Englishman or Frenchman wrote at the same period, not because genius varies, but because the material was richer and realler. When an Englishman was given a similar chance, we threw up Shakespeare. William Blake pushed on into the unimanent atmosphere of spooks and of legend and produced a powerful group of phantoms. He vituperated his enemies—enemies are always real and interesting —and plagiarised children and Elizabethans. In that way, with a queer and clever engineering of his own, he climbed up where Shakespeare and all successful genius resides; he established himself there as a matter of course; with a proselytizing lack of self-consciousness he took up his abode in that simple and exclusive heaven—first having enthusiastically removed all his clothes! Now, we can admit that a nation is not necessary for a fine book. If the human material should be found faulty, you can turn to scorpions and beetles, or, like Blake, you can affect the heavily historied bogey; awaken the man who built the Pyramids and pretend that it was he who awakened you. And there is the scholar's book, which is merely embarrassed by a handy matter, which naturally thrives on the remote, not brought to new life, matter, but left "where it is, with its academic perspectives, or whose only interest or use for immediate things is dispassionate and critical and whose success is a structure of delicate adjustments, not the belief of an incurable love. All the full and tragic artists partake of the destiny of the popular hero; thousands of people contribute to their success only in this case without meaning to; each man or woman hands in his or her fraction of vitality; wherever they go, there is a great crowd with them. Their brain is the record of their sympathies, people pour in and are piled up, with a persistent classification, until giant-like and permanent images, the "types" of drama or fiction are produced: Raskolnikoffs, Golyadkins and Alioshas. It is the sense of power bestowed by this throng that enables them to create so hotly, and with so unreasonable a faith. You remember my remarks about Colossi in a former letter. You can only get Colossi by sticknig two or more men together. The perfected unamalgamated man recedes from any semblance of human or material power. As he refines he loses in stamina and scale, carried to its farthest limit it is the gnat's song, a sigh, a shadow. These things are in different categories, not, as is popularly assumed, a big and a little of the same species. One thing is not better than the other. You pay your money and take your choice. But when twenty men are conglomerated into a giant, it is not, in the case of genius, simply an addition sum. The fine fellow is the head of the Colossus. But we must admit that he never succeeds in quite actively canalizing the mass. There is always the slovenly character of all giants about the organism. His superb megaphone is not so successful as the attenuated voice of the whittled-down human reed. Dostoevsky was a peculiarly untidy and undependable freak of vastness, addicted to interminable nervous seizures (do you know of a single story of his in which there is not an epileptic?), drunken to a fault; but a true god. And every Russian I meet I know to be a posthumous fragment of my favourite Deity. So there you are. It is useless your talking about "national engouements"; it is idle your hinting that my caprice for Colossi (and such dirty, uncouth and childish ones at that — not nice clean Greek ones!) is unintelligent and compromising. You stick to the gentlemanly silver buzzing of the French critical perfection. I wish to live in the sanguine, unsavoury fairy-land where the Giants consort and where the Man-Child wanders. I hope this will not divide us. For I like the fastidious things as well; as much as you do. I now am going to break the ice and refer to something that so far, in my shyness, I have avoided. You, for your part, have pretended also not to have been conscious of it. So we have discussed nearly everything except this. I think it is unfortunate that we have not had it out, before, and gazed at it in mutual horror. I refer to my ugliness. The horrible thought steals over me as I write this that you may have thought I considered myself handsome—or at least unique! And I even seem to remember occasions on which you looked quizzingly and pityingly at me when I was speaking of beauty; as though you considered that I would not have spoken in that way had I not imagined that I had my share of looks. Also I do not, let me say for your instruction, consider myself tall. Unlike most little men, I know that I am short and stunted. And as to my looks, there is no blotch or puff in my face with which I am not bitterly acquainted. I know that my lower lip protrudes 26 The Little Review ill-temperedly. My hands are a Palagial nightmare, ou plutôt abyssal. The horrible straight thick thatch of hair does not seem to me a silken chevelure. My stumpy muscular limbs, my objectionable buttocks that protrude, the back of my head that also protrudes, preventing me from ever getting a hat to fit me properly. I have all these details noted and oh! hated and deplored. My small and staring eyes, with the pockets underneath, I know do not redeem, as eyes are said frequently to do, the disgusting mask in which they are set. I have the face of a blind man, sunk in a dark and filthy stupor; my raised triangular eyebrows and jutting lip give this impression. I am physically, I know, one of the most ungainly blighted and repusive of God's creatures. Why, then, was I filled so full of this will to Beauty, of these convulsions towards realization of power? Why was I given the wisdom to hate myself? Is the body I was given such a botched and valueless thing, because Nature regarded a fine body as wasted in my case, seeing I should live in and through other people, and never, in that sense, be at home? "Here, you haven't much use for a showy thing of this sort, Mr. Burn. With a nobby brain like that you won't have much use for these trifles. Take this poor devil's, Mr. Burn, you need a fine coat less than he does. The World is at your feet. I know, Mr. Burn! " This was chucked over to me! There is probaly an imbecile somewhere with the head of a god, and a bearing that would be appropriate to me. Neither he nor I are selling matches. But when I approach the world with my books, they think I am vending laces and never quite get over the notion. I can console myself, however. I can say, "You can enter into his form and possess it more than he ever will do himself. What is your imagination for?" A sort of burglar's consolation, although damned real. So this plague of mine is probably a sacrifice, I am relieving someone of this winsome, glad, alluring carcase. Alas! But you will see in all this, I expect, nothing but an attempt to extenuate my ugliness and put it in a more favourable light, a rather romantic light, even. But I am not doing that. I know that there is no getting away from or forgiveness for such preposterous and hate-producing plainness. For it is a sort of uncomeliness that arouses one's worst feelings; is it not? With such a physique, I should never have married, I am aware. Thank God, Yorke, toy a miracle (the miracle of your beauty, I suppose) appears to have escaped the contamination of my flesh or to have sailed over it in some way. But how horrible it must toe for you, my dear girl! A score of times I have said to myself that I would not come back to you, but release you from such a repulsive little satyr. All cats are grey in the dark, we know. But how that ugly bumpy little body, and big head, with its rough red puffy skin must disgust you when I take you in my arms—you, who have a dower of bodily perfection and whom I smirch even at this distance in thinking of you. And the abominable lechery that the sight of you awakens in me. What a gruesome beast I must be! Can you stand me? Tell me the truth! We have not got on quite so well lately. Your letters are curious. You seem to be becoming unduly critical of my mind, a tendency you have not formerly displayed. Are you accusing my mind of what you would really say of my body? Is it because you have never been harsh enough to curse and comment upon my distressing person, that you now attack my mind? Must you abuse and at last complain of something? Perhaps this letter may deflect your criticism into its natural channel. Or do you consider my mental enthusiasms part and parcel of my ugliness? Do you see my twisted and thwarted body with a wave of exasperation, in my enthusiasm for the epileptic pages of the unfortunate Feodor? One truth, however, I have tested enough for it to be no more experimental. I am fixed on that. The body does not matter the smallest fraction where the mind is concerned. I can imagine beauty as fluently and fully as if I had the head of Apollo. The smallness of my eyes does not contract the surging and spreading of my understanding. The twists in a body can only impress themselves on a spirit that dwells constantly therein. Mine comes back to its disgraceful bed, and lies cramped and ill in it. But it was nurtured straight before it ever lay there. A fine and comely appearance is useful for repose only. Goethe's god-like person gave him plenty of calm sleep. If I said too much you would sneer and think that the grapes were sour!! If my body were weakly and sick and my mind were one of those that had the power to go here and there and break into other minds, that body would not prevent me from imagining physical heroism. Or rather, I could imagine it no better if my mind had been originally installed in a sinewy carcase, like Hackensmidt's. I am debarred from nothing in my world: only from you. I know I have not got you as I otherwise should. I know it was madness to choose such a beauty. Schopenhauer's wretched phrase "Women consider that they supply the beauty" had stuck in my head. And yet why abuse him? It is true, up to a point, women do reply for the beauty. But! — Obviously there is a limit beyond which they are likely to regard their proverbial fairness as inadequate! My face, I am aware, is far the other side of that limit! You know how physical beauty knocks me over. The "beautiful young man" species holds me as tongue-tied and gets me in the same way that social eminence does the humble or inexperienced. I simply stand gaping at a handsome young man. Each of his gestures or smiles is balm to me. My face, like some belching ocean plant, spread towards the light, seems to expand in front of his comeliness in the idiotic hope of a cure. Such boys are as soothing as rain to a man with a fever. And after passing some time with one of these dazzling pictures, I feel less ugly myself, instead of, as you would suppose, uglier by contrast. Women do not affect me in the same way. I do not feel that their beauty is so hard or so deep; therefore that the same divine properties of healing do not go with it. Young Adrian Mitchell, Willie Plant, Menzies, Peele: willowy, well dressed, bland perfection! They could do nothing wrong in my eyes. Women must feel cheap beside a really beautiful young man. But beauty of any sort takes my breath away and routs all my unbattled bag of tricks — dreams, values, prejudices. And so in this way, too, my ugliness is a bad weakness, and is an element of unreliability in my life. It is, from another standpoint, of serious worldly disadvantage to me. Women simply will not stand it or overlook it. But men also do not consider my peculiar ill-looks as consonant with what my books claim; with what I know my writing is. I enter a room—there stands before the assembled company a walking lampoon of Mankind; for those of penetration a sort of lewd drunken and preposterous version of William Blake, his bottom and the back of his head sticking waggishly out, an idiotic grin on his face! What a reincarnation! If I could only have my posterior shaved down a bit! I think I must have convinced you that my silence has not hidden complacency. Possibly that huge mass of humility at the rear of my cranium should not be so despised, although nothing can compensate me for those horrible cushions that prop me up like a child when I sit down. The choice of such an extremely good looking woman as yourself for my wife was the result of all that I have just been explaining to you. Beauty was all I wanted to begin with, not children, flea hunter, gooseberry or canned meat. It was only When I married you and duly found you undressed at night, that the dull old Nature-hack woke up and gave a snort. He became an institution. Familiarity bred contempt. I produced Yorke! I was mildly surprised to find myself on such intimate terms with anything so beautiful. No beautiful man could stand as much ugliness as you have. For a long time I have felt that I had your secret, that you were not really of the Beautiful, but in reality ugly, like me, and that your passions put you in my side. But when one says that you are a woman, ca dit tout. Let us see what your next letter will be! W. Bland Burn. Petrograd, 9th March 1917. Dear Lydia, Your letter was short and preternaturally unsweet. You drop the discussion entirely; I at least succeeded in making you loosen your hold on that. My photograph of myself meets with a very cold reception. In fact, your undemonstrativeness, amounting to disdain, has hurt me very much! Cheerless and unprepossessing as it is, you might have paid a little more attention to it. After all, it is me: Bland, your husband!—need I add, Yorke's father? Or perhaps I am not Yorke's father? Yes, I am. I should know that tell-tale rump anywhere. Your letter I find wounding, there, in two ways. First, you illnaturedly drop our little controversy. That was disagreeably meant. And secondly, the first photograph that a husband sends to his loving wife is ignored and persiflage opened to a flank. In exchange for my aunt sallies you send me a very disagreeable object. Was it necessary? Am I expected to call you "my Gothic husband?" I am not going to. Your vanity finds strange paths and means to satisfy itself. I suppose I shall be accused of "obtuseness" in your next letter if I do not rave over the abortion you sent me and say how much character and genius there is in your lip and—the other items. Decidedly, times have changed! A charming wife! Are you too fastidious to refer to parts of my anatomy more distinctly than -—Mother items"? Are they to be relegated with dignity to the distant plane of an item? And they are not items! Ah, no certainly not items, whatever else they may be! As to my lip, it may not contain any genius, but you have frequently placed your two lips on either side of it and given a throaty trill of a laugh, provoking it to libidious misdemeanour you would prefer to forget. You would prefer to forget?—And our frolics have borne fruit! You are after all, my dear lady, only a reproductive machine, painted up in order not to be too unappetising. But you are a machine that has two legs which enable you at any time to run away if you feel inclined. Anytime in the last five years you could have done so. The first inclination that you have shown to use your legs in that way has been in the last few months. I therefore must suppose that you have some adulterous plans, in which, I do not, however, take the faintest interest. You can burn my letters and photographs, and pawn the jewels and other pledges of my unhappy love! Now go to Hell. —Yours, W. B. Burn. (to be continued)
MATINEE Jessie Dismorr The Croisette trembles in the violent matutinal light; shapes quicken and pass; the day moves. My nerves spring to the task of quisitiveness. The secret of my success is a knowledge of the limitedness of time. Economy is scientific: I understand the best outlay of intention. Within this crazy shell, an efficient machinery mints satisfactions. Your pity is a systematic mistake. I may yet grow arrogant on the wastage of other lives. The holes of my sack spill treasure. Who but I should be susceptible to the naked pressure of things? Between me and apprenhension no passions draw their provoking dissimulative folds. I have not clouded heaven with the incense of personal demand. Myself and the universe are two entities. Those unique terms admit the possibility of clean intercourse. All liaisons smell of an inferior social grade; but alliance can dispense with fusion and touch. I treat with respect the sparkling and gesticulating dust that confronts me: of it are compounded fruits and diamonds, superb adolescents, fine manners. This pigment, disposed by the ultimate vibrations of force, paints the universe in a contemporary mode. I am glad it is up-to-date and ephemeral; that I am to be diverted by a succession of fantasies. The static cannot claim my approval. I live in the act of departure. Eternity is for those who can dispose of an amplitude of time. Pattern is enough. I pray you, do not mention the soul. Give me. detail and the ardent ceremonial of commonplaces that means nothing. Oh, the ennui of inconceivable space! My travelling spirit will taste too soon of emptiness. I thrill to the microscopic. I plunder the close-packed cells and burrows of life. The local has always the richness of brocade: it is worth while to explore the design. I spell happiness out of dots and dashes; a ray, a tone, the insignificance of a "dangling leaf. Provided it has a factual existence the least atom will suffice my need. But I cannot stomach shadows. It is certain that the physical round world would fit my mouth like a lolly-pop. You ask: To what end this petty and ephemeral busines, this last push of human sensation? Is one then a neophyte in philosophy, demanding reasons and results? I proclaim life to the end a piece of artistry, essentially idle and exquisite. The trinkets stored within my coffin shall outlast my dust.
THE CLASSICS "ESCAPE" Ezra Pound IT IS well that the citizen should be acquainted with the laws of his country. In earlier times the laws of a nation were graven upon tablets and set up in the market place. I myself have seen a sign "Bohemians are not permitted within the precincts of this commune"; but the laws of a great republic are too complex and arcane to permit of this simple treatment. I confess to having been a bad citizen, to just the extent of having been ignorant that at any moment my works might be classed in law's eye with the inventions of the late Dr. Condom. I have been unable to speak promptly regarding the suppression of the October number; I am a long way from the New York Post Office. However, as I, whom the law appears to concern, was ignorant of it, it is possible that others with only a mild interest in literature may be equally ignorant; I therefore quote the law: Section 211 of the United States Criminal Code provides: "Every obscene, lewd, or lascivious, and every filthy, book pamphlet, picture, paper, letter, writing, print, or other publication of an indecent character and every article or thing designed, adapted or intended for preventing conception or producing abortion, or for any indecent or immoral use; and every article, instrument, substance, drug, medicine, or thing which is advertised or described in a manner calculated to lead another to use or apply it for preventing conception or producing abortion, or for any indecet or immoral purpose; and every written or printed card, letter, circular, book, pamphlet, advertisement, or notice of any kind giving information directly or indirectly, where, or how, or from whom, or by what means any of the hereinbefore-mentioned matters, articles, or things may be obtained or made, or where or by whom any act or operation of any kind for the procuring or producing of abortion will be done or performed, or how or by what means conception may be prevented or abortion produced, whether sealed or unsealed; and every letter, packet, or package, or other mail matter containing any filthy,vile or indecent thing, device, or substance; any every paper, writing, advertisement, or representation that any article, instrument, substance, drug, medicine, or thing may, or can be, used or applied for preventing conception or producing abortion, or for any indecent or immoral purpose; and every description calculated to induce or incite a person to so use or apply any such article, instrument, substance, drug, medicine, or thing, is hereby declared to be non-mailable matter and shall not be conveyed in the mails or delivered from any post-office or by any letter carrier. Whoever shall knowingly deposit, or cause to be deposited for mailing or delivery, anything declared by this section to be non-mailable, or shall knowingly take, or cause the same to be taken, from the mails for the purpose of circulating or disposing thereof, or of aiding in the circulation or disposition thereof, shall be fined not more than five thousand dollars, or imprisoned not more than five years, or both". That, gentle reader, is the law, the amazing, grotesque, and unthinkable, ambiguous law of our country. The Little Review will continue to print that law monthly in order that it may become known. For it is well that the citizens of a country should be aware of its laws. It is not for me to promulgate obiter dicta; to say that whatever the cloudiness of its phrasing this law was obviously designed to prevent the circulation of immoral advertisements, propaganda for secret cures, and slips of paper that are part of the bawdy house business; that it was not designed to prevent the mailing of Dante, Villon, and Catullus. Whatever the subjective attitude of the framers 34 The Little Review of this legislation, we have fortunately a decision from a learned judge to guide us in its working. "I have little doubt that numerous really great writings would come under the ban if tests that are frequently current were applied, and these approved publications doubtless at times escape only because they come within the term "classics", which means, for the purpose of the application of the statute, that they are ordinarily immune from interference, because they have the sanction of age and fame and USUALLY APPEAL TO A COMPARATIVELY LIMITED NUMBER OF READERS." The capitals are my own. Judge Hand was quoted in our December issue. The gentle reader will picture to himself the state of America IF the classics were widely read; IF these books which in the beginning lifted mankind from savagery, and which from a.d. 1400 onward have gradually redeemed us from the darkness of mediavalism, should be read by the millions who now consume Mr. Hearst and the Lady's Home Journal!!!!!! Also there are to be no additions. No living man is to contribute or to attempt to contribute to the classics. Obviously even though he acquire fame before publishing, he can not have the sanction of "age". Our literature does not fall under an inquisition; it does not bow to an index arranged by a council. It is subject to the taste of one individual. Our hundred and twenty millions of inhabitants desire their literature sifted for them by one individual selected without any examination of his literary qualifications. I can not write of this thing in heat. It is a far too serious matter. We shall continue to publish the text of this law until the law is amended. Let us pray for a speedy victory in the field, but let us also recognize that it will not be acclerated by a prolongation of our internal darkness. No more damning indictment of American civilization has been written than that contained in Judge Hand's "opinion". The classics "escape". They are "immune" "ordinarily".
Cantico Del Sole The thought of what America would be like If the classics had a wide circulation Troubles my sleep, The thought of what America, The thought of what America, The thought of what America would be like If the classics had a wide circulation Troubles my sleep, Nunc dimittis, Now lettest thou thy servant, Now lettest thou thy servant Depart in peace. The thought of what America, The thought of what America, The thought of what America would be like If the classics had a wide circulation... Oh well! It troubles my sleep. Ezra I. Y. H. X.
"Tarr", by Wyndham Lewis "Tarr" is the most vigorous and volcanic English novel of our time. Lewis is that rarest of phenomena, an Englishman who has achieved the triumph of being also an European. He is the only English writer who can be compared with Dostoevsky, and he is more rapid than Dostoevsky, his mind travels with greater celerity, with more unexpectedness, but he loses none of Dosteovsky's effect of mass and of weight. Tarr is a man of genius surrounded by the heavy stupidities of the half-cultured latin quarter; the book delineates his explosions in this oleaginous mileau; as well as the debacle of the unintelligent emotion-dominated Kreisler. They are the two titanic characters in contemporary English fiction. Wells's clerks, Bennet's "cards" and even Conrad's Russian villians do not "bulk up" against them. Only in James Joyce's Stephen Dedalus does one find an equal intensity, and Joyce is, by comparison, cold and meticulous, where Lewis is, if uncouth, at any rate brimming with energy, the man with a leaping mind. -— Ezra Pound. 36 The Little Review WOMEN AND MEN Ford Madox Hueffer II. The Literature of the Subject AND when Ghama had made Man he desired that Man should have a companion. So he took the coldness of ice and the heat of fire and the softness of the dove's breast and the ferocity of the tiger and the fidelity of the Chakrawakra and the untrustworthyness of the Bandalog and the humility of the gazelle and the vanity of the peacock and the soft and weeping voice of the nightingale and the loquacity of the mocking bird and of all these ingredients he fashioned Woman. And Man rejoiced in his companion and went away with her. But within a fortnight he returned to Ghama and said: "Oh Ghama take away this creature with which thou hast afficted me; for all day she chatters so that my head is like to burst and all night she is never silent so that I am unable to get any sleep and her laugh is as discordant as the cracking of pine trees in a gale. And water pours unceasingly from her eyes so that life is a burden to me." Then Ghama took Woman to himself again. But within a week the man came back to Ghama and said: "Oh Ghama give me back again her that you have taken. For my ears crave incessantly for the soft laughter of her voice so that by day I have no rest. And at night I am consumed as if by fire with the desire of her warm caresses. By day the light of the sun is a burden if I have not her companionship in the shade of the desert and at night the light of the moon is blighted if she is not with me when I walk by the broad and misty expanses of the river." Then Gama gave Woman back to Man. And within three days Man came back again to Ghama and said: "Oh Great God Ghama take away now again this creature with which thou hast cursed me. For she is possessed of all those evils which before I reported to you and in a ten times worse degree. The Little Review So that in truth I cannot support my life with her." "Neither canst thou live without her," said Ghama. Then said Man: "Oh Ghama, what sort of a creature is this thou hast created since I cannot live either with her or without her." "That I cannot tell you," Ghama answered. The Digit of the Moon. I was once very well acquainted with two Russian exiles who had escaped from the East of Siberia. They had gone overland, hiding in forests, crossing immense deserts, swimming broad rivers and avoiding humanity except when it was absolutely necessary for them to purchase food at the hut of a native. At the start they were the best of friends. Their tastes, their aims, their political aspirations and their friendships they both held in common. There was nothing about which they could differ but the journey—the desolate and solitary journey lasted for months and months over that immense stretch of territory. They were absolutely alone; they spoke to no other soul. And gradually these two men who had as it were their souls in common, who suffered the same perils, who relied upon each other's help to overcome the same difficulties—gradually these two men began to differ. They differed about the uniform of the convict guards on the island of Sagalien, about the date of the birth of Ivan the Terrible, about the doctrines of Karl Marx. The quarrels grew more and more bitter; they were entirely alone. At last they travelled each upon the further horizon, just keeping each other in sight but never speaking, never shaking hands. So it went on for months and months. And one of my friends assured me that if the other man united to him in soul and purpose had come near him, such was his nervous exacerbation that he would undoubtedly have shot his companion and have perished miserably himself. On the other hand when for a whole day he lost sight of his friend he nearly went mad from loneliness. "It was very funny," he said reflectively, "I could neither live with him nor without him." It is such a journey as this over the months and years of time and the forests and deserts of a life-time that a man undertakes when he selects a woman for his mate and sets out. And it will be observed that the words used by my Russian friend about his companion are identical with those used by man about woman in the The Little Review Sudian legend that I have quoted.* The Englishman's mind is of course made up entirely of quotations. A person entirely without intellect himself, he is the man of all the world who best knows his poets. And the poets best known to him are of course Shakespeare and the English translators of the Bible. When his quotations do not come from either Shakespeare or the Bible he thinks they do, so that it comes to the same thing. The moment you put before him any argument he at once floors you with a quotation which has a Biblical or a Shakespearean ring. It will be observed that the experience of Flaubert and his friend was exactly parallel to that of my two Russians. Yet, Du Camp never said that Flaubert was like a woman. He just said that the great writer got on his nerves. The Englishman has of course two quotations about woman. One of them generally he knows to come from Byron and the other from the Vicar of Wakefield — "Oh woman in our hours of ease"... And— "When lovely woman stoops to folly" So that outside Shakespeare he gathers that woman is uncertain coy and hard to please—which is all that he knows of the quotation from Byron. He also gathers from Goldsmith that she finds too late that men betray, and this makes him rather proud of himself as a potential "gay dog". To the Bible he goes for guidance as a rule upon most matters —except about women. He regards of course the Holy Scriptures * Note: Such instances are by no means uncommon when two men set out upon journeys together. There is an exactly parallel instance in the case of Flaubert and Maxime du Camp. They journeyed together into the deserts of Egypt. They were the closest of friends. But at one time the society of Flaubert got to such an extent on the nerves of Du Camp that, says ce cher Maxime: "Je n'y tins plus; une pensée terrible me secoua.' Je me dis: 'je vais le tuer! Je poussai mon dromadaire jusqu'à le toucher, je lui pris le bras: 'Ou veux-tu te tenir? En arrière ou en avant?' Il me repondit: 'J'irai en avant!' J'arrêtai mon dromadaire at quand notre petite troupe fut a deux cents pas en avant de moi, je repris ma marche. Le soir je laissai Flaubert au milieu de nos hommes et j'allai preparer mon lit de sable a plus de deux cents metres du campement." as works too sacred to be used in the acquiring of merely worldly knowledge. The only women that he much considers in the Bible are Delilah and Ruth. The Virgin Mary he does not much care to think about: his tendency is faintly to regard Her as an improper member of an otherwise respectable family. He is not a very logical person, God's Englishman. Delilah he will not much think of because he wears his hair short. But when it comes to Ruth there is no Englishman who cannot give you the quotation about her. I can do it myself. And Ruth said: "Entreat me not to leave thee; or to leave off from following after thee. "For where thou goest I will go and where thou lodgest I will lodge. Thy people shall be my people and thy God my God. "Where thou diest will I die and there will I be buried. "The Lord do so to me and more also if aught but death part thee and me." This the excellent Englishman — before marriage — regards as the whole duty of woman. After his marriage his view changes somewhat. He rather objects to her entreating him not to leave her. He goes to his club where the hall porter has the strictest possible injunction to let nothing in petticoats enter. But the woman having been carefully taught by the man has a general idea that the only person who ought to stop her is the keeper of the gates of a suburban cemetery. This causes a good many misunderstandings in the course of many lives. For the woman as a rule does not understand that when she was told to behave like Ruth the gentleman did not really mean it. - Roughly speaking, in Germany the woman is better drilled than in England. It is not so long since I saw a dinner party of German professors. The gentlemen were all eating an enormous and excellent repast. The wives sat round the walls of the dining-room knitting. They knew they were the inferior animals. They had been carefully taught even before marriage that they were not Ruth. Besides Ruth said nothing about dinners. Perhaps she did not expect to eat with Boaz. In France where they manage these things better they do not read the Bible. That makes them inferior Christians—inferior creatures altogether. But whilst the French have not their eyes on the dizzy altitude where our gaze is permanently fixed, they have the leisure to evolve a fairly satisfactory arrangement as to the living together of the sexes. It is perfectly true that every Englishman and every German would tell you that every French husband is unfaithful. So he probably is. But then every English and every German husband—though he will not tell you so—knows that he is much more unfaithful than any mere Frenchman could be. Isn't that why we go to Paris? Yes surely and ginger shall be hot in the mouth. The real difference is that the Frenchwoman, not having it perpetually dinned into her that she is Ruth, does not expect much fidelity from her husband and what the eye does not see the heart does not grieve after. On the other hand the French woman takes a great deal of care to have a controlling voice i n her husband's business affairs. There is no inferiority in her consciousness. She knows that she is a better business man than her husband. But if he is a good boy she lets him go out and play now and then. And the net result is that one does not hear in a French club the imbecilities about women that one will hear in an English or a German one. In America where they have not begun to think about life but merely exhaust themselves in the uplifting search after the dollar, the men are entirely emasculated. They never talk about women at all in their clubs. Poor America! Like the young puppy it has all its troubles before it. As it at present stands the United States has reduced the English and the German system to lunacy. France on the other hand has advanced that system to a reasonable modus vivendi. The most important, as it is the most singular, of contributions to modern literature on the sex question is an extraordinary work called in English "Sex and Character". This book is noteworthy because it had an immense international vogue. It was towards the middle of '06 that one began to hear in the men's clubs of England and in the cafés of France and Germany—one began to hear singular mutterings amongst men. Even in the United States where men never talk about women, certain whispers might be heard. The idea was that a new gospel had appeared. I remember sitting with a table full of overbearing intellectuals in that year, and they at once began to talk—about Weininger. It gave me a singular feeling because they all talked under their breaths. I should like to be precise as to the strong impression I then received, because if I could convey that impression exactly I should give a precise idea of what is the attitude of really advanced men towards woman-kind. To begin with my companions: There may have been ten of them and every one of them except myself had a name of some distinction in the world of advanced ideas in England. It was indeed a gathering with a formal name. Let us say that it was called the Pincushion, though the real name was of course much more serious. I once perpetrated an epigram—the only epigram of my whole life. God knows how a person so frivolous as myself ever came to be made a member of the Pincushion Club. But a member I once certainly was. And I was asked, by a young person in a voice of awe, what was this mysterious and authoritative assembly? I answered—and this was the one epigram of my life—"What the Pincushion Club says to-night the Daily News will say to-morrow." For the benefit of those few of my readers who are not also students of that instructive journal I should point out that this means that the members of the Pincushion Club were, to a man, serious, improving, ethical, advanced, careless about dress and without exception Young Liberals. The date of which I am speaking fell in 1906 and it will be remembered that it was just about that time that Miss Pankhurst interrupted the late Sir Henry Campbell Bannerman at the Albert Hall. I had more or less sincerely—but how very stupid it was of me!—imagined that these Young Liberals would sympathise with the attempts of woman to attain a share in the government of the country. And so they did of course, for were they not to a man Young Liberals? But the odd thing was that they were extraordinarily angry with Miss Pankhurst and her followers. They were anxious to point out to me that they were the most advanced body of men that could be found in the world. Their sympathies with anything advanced could not possibly be doubted. To suspect them on this point would be worse than suspecting the Pope of heresy. It would be too shocking! But when it came to Miss Pankhurst they exclaimed all together that she was really a bad girl. They said that it was such bad manners to interrupt a Liberal Prime Minister, for ail Liberal Prime Ministers are by nature inclined to favour advanced ideas. And all my friends showed themselves pained to the point of tears and I knew then that next day the Daily News would say that Miss Pankhurst was a very naughty girl indeed. And then suddenly all their voices sank low together. I really thought that for the first and last time someone of that circle was going to relate an indecent anecdote. But that would have been impossible. No! they were talking about Weininger. And the odd thing was that every one of them had read "Sex and Character", whereas I had never even heard the name of that young German doctor of medicine. That singular and whimsically nonsensical work had spread through the serious male society of England as if it had been an epidemic. If it had been the Influenza upon its first visit it could not more effectively have laid them low. They knew all about the book, they knew even all about the romantic young doctor who had laid this terrific egg at the age of twenty or so, or who like an eel had died of the effort. Their tones were extraordinarily curious. They contained a mixture of relief, of thanksgiving, of chastened jubilations, of regret and of obscenity. It was as if they were some sort of inverted monks rejoicing because someone had proved that the Christian miracles were all false; or rather it was as if they were all high-minded bankrupts to whom some new law-giver of genius had proved that the paying of debts was unnecessarily scrupulous. And that indeed is what they were. For the young doctor who went mad and died at the age of twenty-three had proved to them that women were inferior animals. He had proved it to the satisfaction of all their intelligences; out of the mouth of this babe and suckling had come the wisdom for which they had craved. And they were—all these Young Liberate—unfeignedly thankful. They were more thankful than any men that I have ever known. The burden of years had fallen from their shoulders. For, for years and years they had had, as Liberal minded men, to live up to the idea that women should have justice done to them. Now Dr. Weininger had come along and proved that women were inferior animals. He had proved it by all the sciences that are open to a very very young German doctor of medicine. He had proved it by medicine, by biology, by classical law, by theology, which is the oldest of all sciences and by "characterology" which was a science so new that it had been invented by Dr. Weininger himself. And how thankful my Liberal friends were! Once more they could look the world in the face. In one particular at least they could find themselves in agreement with the bagman, the music-hall singers and all those unthinking and jovial people who make up the man in the street. Yes, they were unfeingedly thankful for it meant that the Young Liberal Party need not any more be burdened with the woman question. They were able then and there to throw women over and that was an immense gain for the Party. For the Young Liberal Party is always being made fun of by bagmen and by music-hall singers. In this respect they would at least be able to be at one with the ordinary male man. It made them very happy. As for me I was discouraged for I really imagined that Weininger had proved his case. But immediately I resigned my membership of the Pincushion Club. I couldn't stand the Young Liberal any more. They had given themselves away too thoroughly! I did not read Weininger for some time afterwards because, being naive and ingenuous I really believed my Young Liberal friends when they assured me that "Sex and Character" was a scientific work. I was at that time a little tired of the Doctor posing as a prophet in these matters. We all know the distinguished president of the British College of Physicians who assures us quite arbitrarily that woman has no frontal lobe of the brain—this is quite untrue— and that therefore she is unable to drive railway trains. This also is quite untrue. We all know, too, the distinguished president of the Scottish College of Surgeons who assures us that because woman lacks one rib—that I believe is true—therefore she cannot write epic poems, and we all know the several other distinguished medical gentlemen who assure us that because of matters which one cannot discuss in drawing-rooms all women are necessarily dishonest. Nevertheless after a time I did read this new scientific work. Dr. Weininger's book is a collection of arbitrary theories invented by Dr. Weininger himself and of second-hand nonsense collected as it were from the music halls. What Dr. Weininger's own immense discovery amounts to is, that some men are more like women and some women are more like men. This enormous discovery had already been made by my grand aunt Bromley—the lady who said that you can never trust a man when he is out of your sight. It was also made by Shakespeare, Euripedes, the writers of the Bible, of the Egyptian Book of the Dead. I should imagine that the only persons who were not acquainted with this world shaking discovery —the only recorded persons who never discovered it for themselves were Adam and Eve. But Dr. Weininger, commencing his great work at the age of about fourteen, did certainly elaborate the idea, for as he grew older he must have discovered that this proposition startled nobody when it was put boldly. 44 The Little Review I imagine the gifted boy approaching the scribes and elders of his day and attempting to expound the law to them. Says he: "I have discovered that some men are more like women and some women are more like men." A profound silence greets his remark. The gifted boy goes away to reflect on the cause of his failure. He discovers that what is wanted is that his discovery should be wrapt up in scientific terminology. And after several years he sets down the proposition thus: Sometimes M = Mn + Wx and W = Wx + Mn This means exactly the same as the original proposition but it looks more formidable. With this as a basis Dr. Weininger launches out upon a yet more adventurous discovery. He discovers that for a happy marriage it is best for a manly man not to marry a manly woman because each will want to be head of the house, and that it is better for a womanly man not to marry a womanly woman because then the house will have no head at all and will therefore not be well conducted. This discovery was also made by my grand aunt Bromley and no doubt our first parents were able to observe it working in the households of Cain and Abel. And Dr. Weininger, no doubt finding that his discovery lacked mysteriousness, proceeds once more to express it thus: (M7 + W1) ------= X (W7 + M1) (M7 + W1) -------= Y (W1 + M7) (M1 + W7) -------= Y (W7 + M1) X being satisfactory and Y unsatisfactory union. This it will be admitted is a very impressive way of stating an extraordinarily worn out platitude and without doubt Dr. Weininger deserves all the success that he obtained. He proceeds to state that this Algebraic theory will be found to be true in the cases of the The Little Review 45 marriage of animals and of plants. But he does not support this dogma with any scientific examples. Why should he? And this is positively all the hard scientific fact that his great volume contains; the rest is sheer arbitrary statements. This is how it is done. Dr. Weininger proceeds to question: "What is genius?" He answers: "Genius is memory." And he devotes an immense long chapter to proving that Homer, Shakespeare, Goethe, Schiller, Freiligrath, Bismarck and Richard Wagner all had wonderful memories. He supports the theory with quotations from the autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini, the confessions of Jean Jacques Rousseau, Novalis, Cicero and Heinrich Heine. All this part of a chapter on genius he documents in the most weighty and the most teutonic manner. No reader could possibly doubt that here is a truly scientific work. Towards the end of the chapter Dr. Weininger, thumping his pulpit shouts: "Thus I have proved that genius is memory." Then as it were in a low voice he says "No woman ever had a good memory, therefore no woman was ever a genius." And in that moment he jumps down from the pulpit before anyone has time to make objections. Or again he asks: "What is greatness?" and he answers: To be great is to have a strong sense of one's own individuality." He proceeds to cite the cases of Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Charlemagne, Prince Eugene, Frederick the Great, Marshall Bluecher, Napoleon, the first Count Moltke and William I of Germany. All these people he says had a strong sense of their individual importance. He proceeds to document his theory with quotations from Jean Paul, Novalis, Schelling, Kant and Nietzsche. He mentions Shelley, Lucretius and Hume with disapproval. He approves of Archimedes, Johannes Müller, Karl Ernst von Baer, Conrad Sprengel, Friedrich August Wolff, Franz Bopp, Leibnitz, Newton and Thucydides. He quotes Empedocles, Plotinius and Goethe. Once more there is the splendid German scientific manner. Once more he thumps his pulpit, shouts: "To be great is to have a sense of one's own individual importance." Once more he slips out the sentence: "No woman has ever had a sense of her own individual importance. Therefore no woman was ever great." And once more he vanishes discreetly from view. For these allegations against women Dr. Weininger adduces no authority. He does not quote Novalis or Amiel or Schelling or Jean Paul Richter or even the most obscure of German philosophers. He just boldly makes a statement. In this way: "—And even women with the best and least limited memories never free themselves from this kind of association by feelings. For instance if they 'feel reminded' by a word of some definite colour, or by a human being of some definite thing to eat—forms of association common with women—they rest content with the subjective association, and do not try to find out the source of the comparison, and if there is any relation in it to actual fact. The complacency of self satisfaction of women corresponds with what has been called their intellectual unscrupulousness, and will be referred to again in connection with their want of the power to form concepts." The aim of this passage is to prove that women have no memories. Or again, says Dr. Weininger, "The consciousness of identity of the male even although he may fail to understand his own past, manifests itself in the very desire to understand that past. Women, if they look back on their earlier lives never understand themselves and do not even wish to understand themselves, and this reveals itslf in the scanty interest they give to the attempts of man to understand them. The woman does not interest herself about herself." Or yet again: "There is nothing more upsetting to a man than to find, when he has discovered a woman in a lie, and he asks her: "Why did you lie about it?" that she simply does not understand the question, but simply looks at him and laughingly tries to soothe him, or bursts into tears." Or once more: "Truth must first be regarded as the real value of logic and ethics before it is correct to speak of deviations from truth for special motives as lies from the moral point of view. Those who have not this high conception should be adjudged as guilty rather of vagueness and exaggeration than of lying; they are not immoral, but non-moral. And in this sense the woman is nonmoral!" This last passage shows Dr. Weininger at his astutest. With an admirable cunning he wraps up a truism in scientific language that The Little Review 47 that may awe the simple-minded and comfort the erudite. This is at the opening of the paragraph. And then when he has proved to his own satisfaction that he is learned, balanced,thoughtful and scientific he makes a statement from quite another department of knowledge and trusts that his former erudition may carry him over. This is Dr. Weininger's one technical trick and he uses it with such consummate skill that he certainly hoodwinked a large portion of the world of his day. Here for instance we may read how he affected his publishers: "In the two chapters, The Nature of Woman and her Significance in the Universe, and Woman and Mankind, we drink from a fountain of the ripest wisdom. A tragic and most unhappy mind reveals itself here, and no thoughtful man will lay down this book without deep emotion and admiration, many, indeed, will close it with almost religious reverence." It is almost incredible that any human being can have written in this way of any book written by human hands, yet there the words stand in cold print. And what does it all amount to? It is as if a first class cricketer should demand the religious attention of the public to his pronouncement upon literary style or as if a field marshal should demand to be listened to on the subject of the divorce law. It amounts exactly to that. Dr. Weininger was something of a biologist, something of a psychologist, something of a metaphysician. He had passed his time—his short life—in the reading of innumerable books; he could turn out some really good, compiled chapters on logic, aesthetics, metaphysics. And his reading on these subjects was probably unrivalled by any German student of his day. He was nothing more or less than a conscientious book-worm and an absolutely unscrupulous theorist, these characteristics going so often hand in hand. He lived in the little town of Jena where opportunities for observing life are as wide or as narrow as in any other little town of a handful of learned inhabitants and where the atmosphere is as conducive to the study of books as is anywhere possible. He was an immensely hard worker, he had an enormous memory, he had an extremely arrogant sense of his personal worth. (It will be observed that he says that the characteristics of genius are memory and an arrogant sense of one's personal worth.) Without doubt the poor fellow thought himself a genius and perhaps he was. Then this book-worm came across a stupid girl just as Christina Rossetti came across a stupid young man. There was nothing on the face of Weininger to show that he Was a great man. 48 The Little Review He was rather ugly, arrogant and rude. The stupid girl ignored his distinguished qualities, deceived him and threw him over. The result of this experience—it was the only real experience of this short life —is to be found in the passage that I have quoted—the one beginning. There is nothing more upsetting to a man than to find, when he has discovered a woman in a lie".... And this passage is a real outpouring of the soul of poor Weininger. The stupid young girl had gone to the theatre in Weimar with another and more attractive young man. Afterwards she lied about it to the doctor and naturally he had never experienced anything more upsetting. At last she deserted him for the more dashing young student. Then Weininger, outraged and driven mad by his solitary experience, retired into his study to revenge himself against the sex. And when he had written his book he shot himself on the fourth of October, 1903. As I have said, Dr. Weininger hardly documents his book at all; the list of actual women whom he mentions by name limiting itself to a score or so. Of these the most prominent are, from an English point of view, George Sand, Christina Rossetti and George Eliot. Of George Sand he says in the familiar anti-feminine tone that she ought to have been a man. George Eliot he says, "had a broad massive forehad, her movements like her expression were quick and decided and lacked all womanly grace." Christina Rossetti he likewise declares to have been masculine in her character! Of another connection of my own, Annette von Droste Hulshorff he says upon one page that she was the most original poetess that Germany produced and that "her frame was wiry and unwomanly and her face masculine, and recalling that of Dante." This is when Dr. Weininger is anxious to prove that all women of distinction have had masculine attributes. Now, I am exceedingly acquainted with portraits and with anecdotes of this poetess who really did write some extremely charming verse. In her youth she was fresh coloured, soft in outline and smiling. Towards the end of her life she certainly grew thin and rather hook-nosed but in her general characteristics, and particularly in her long-drawn-out love affair with the poet Levin Schucking, she was certainly as feminine as any one could desire. But it is not enough for Dr. Weininger to belabour Annette with attributes of masculinity upon page 67 when he is anxious to say that she is an original poetess. On a later page when he desires to prove that no woman ever wrote original poetry he says that Annette's work was unoriginal, outmoded and feminine. In this way does this distinguished writer have his aruguments both ways. And similarly when he wishes to prove that distinguished women, being always masculine-minded, mate themselves with effeminate men, he mentions Daniel Stern the mistress of Liszt and then says that Liszt's compositions were effeminate. He says that "Mme de Stael, whose work on Germany is probably the greatest book by woman ever published, is supposed to have been intimate with August Wilhelm Schlegel" — an effeminate. But he never mentions the catalogue of other lovers whom Mme de Boigne assigns to Mme de Stael — lovers who were all sufficiently masculine. And he does not even spell Mme de Stael's name correctly. It is in this way that Dr. Weininger's large book is built up-— by leaving out documentation as far as possible when he is upon the question of woman; by falsifying his documentation or by misreading other documents when documentation is forced upon him. And as a matter of fact he approaches women very sparingly at all in this work. About ten per cent of it is devoted to proving the littleness of the inferior sex; about ninety per cent is devoted to those passages in which he analyses the nature of the greatness of man. And this ninety per cent is documented carefully enough. Writing on questions of sex characteristic is vastly more difficult than writing upon international differences, and there are few men so bold that they would write upon the characteristics of China without having visited that empire or ever having known with some intimacy a Chinaman. Most men will tell you that the nature of women is vastly more incomprehensible to them than is the empire of the Mongols. Yet there is hardly any man, be his acquaintance with women ever so little or his experience of them ever so limited, that would not willingly sit down to write you a great long book about what he will call the fair sex. So it was with Dr. Weininger who shot himself in 1903 because a silly girl went from the town of Jena to the theatre of Weimar with a fellow-student. That some experience of a foreign country would have been necessary to him before he wrote about that foreign country, he would have been ready to agree. Yet though the heart of another is a dark forest, he was ready to set out writing on the mysteries that are to be found in innumerable darknesses without having touched more than one tree in all the forests of this world. For it is literally the fact that the one trace of experience in all this long book is the poor young man's expression of astonishment when he found that a woman could lie to him. He regarded himself as The Little Review God Almighty; that, I suppose, is why his publisher recommends us to lay down his book with almost religious reverence. I am aware that it may seem almost foolish to break so gravely upon a wheel so frail a butterfly, and indeed I have only set about the task because this work represents for so many men of the present day a fifth gospel. Before the day of Weininger their testament was a work called "Parerga und Paralipomena", and a chapter of that work called "Ueber die Weiber". But this celebrated chapter beginning with the world-renowned words: "Dass man das kurzbeinige, breithupige u. s. w. Geschlecht das schoene nennen sollt—" this celebrated chapter is not meant even by its author to be taken very seriously, for the sub-title of this collection is given as "little philosophic sketches" and it is bound up with such half humorous philippics as the exceedingly funny essay called "Ueber Larm und Geraeusch". Schopenhauer knew quite well that he was exaggerating; that he was exaggerating even humorously. He documents his tremendous essay with the most solemn and portentous notes. He puts into it the fruits of as much reading as the ordinary scholar would give to his work of a whole life-time. But the whole effect is slightly whimsical, is slightly nonsensical. It produces the impression of a good Tory filled with port wine and at peace with the universe, declaring loudly that all Liberals are a set of swine whose sole preoccupation is that of handing over the British Empire to the Germans. He knows that it isn't true but he goes on adducing fact after fact in a fine nonsensical fury. Schopenhauer's experience of women was twice as broad as Weininger's, but it was only half as deep. He knew two of these mysterious creatures, his mother who worried him to madness with her silly tongue and his housekeeper whom eventually he threw downstairs. She broke her leg and he was under the necessity of paying her a pension for the rest of her life and quite naturally this annoyed him. The rest of the knowledge of life that this learned philosopher had he acquired at the public dining table of a restaurant in Frankfurt. Here he was accustomed to sit every day during lunch time. Beside him on the table cloth he would lay a ten Taler piece in gold. And this piece of money he declared that he would give to the poor as soon as he heard one of the many officers who sat at table with him, talk of anything more sensible than racing or women. He was never called on for the ten Talers. So that perhaps Schopenhauer heard something about the fair sex after all. But he was a very great philosopher and quite the ugliest man of his day. His mother Johanna Schopenhauer was the most popular novelist of her day and Arthur was entirely dependent on her. This alone would have been sufficient to have irritated any philosopher for she was a tiresome woman—and he was a tiresome man. Before Schopenhauer there was no writer who systematically and scientifically attacked the other half of the human creation. (to be continued)
BERTHA Arthur Symons NO, dear Madame, it has never greatly interested me to be taken for a poet. And that is one reason why I have for the most part shunned poetical persons; you are the exception, of course, but then you are beautiful, and I forgive you for being that. And yet I too have been taken for a poet. Shall I tell you about it, before I tell you about Bertha, who did not know what a poet was? It was one midnight, in London, at the corner of a somewhat sordid street. I was standing at the edge of the pavement, looking across at the upper windows of a house opposite. That does not strike you, dear Muse of imaginary cypresses, as a poetical attitude? Perhaps not; and indeed I was thinking little enough of poetry at the time. I was thinking only of someone who had quitted me in anger, five minutes before, and whose shadow I seemed to see on the blind, in that lighted upper room of the house opposite. I stood quite motionless on the pavement, and I gazed so intently at the blind, that, as if in response to the urgency of my will, the blind was drawn aside, and she looked out. She saw me, drew back, and seemed to speak to someone inside; then returned to the window, and pulling down the blind behind her, leant motionless against the glass, watching me intently. In this manner we gazed at one another for some minutes, neither, at the time, realizing that each could be seen so distinctly by the other. As I stood there, unable to move, yet in mortal shame of the futile folly of such an attitude, I realized that my appearance was being discussed by some loungers not many yards distant, And the last, decisive, uncontroverted conjecture was this: "He's a poet!" That point settled, 52 The Little Review one of them left the group, and came up to me. He was a prizefighter, quite an amiable person: I welcomed him, for he talked to me, and so gave me an excuse for lingering; he was kind enough to borrow a shilling of me, before we parted; and the action or slipping the coin into his hand gave me the further excuse of turning rapidly away, without a last look at the motionless figure watching me from the lighted window. Ah, that was a long time ago, Madame; but you see I remember it quite distinctly, not, perhaps, because it was the occasion when I was taken for a poet. Do you mind if I talk now about Bertha? I met Bertha much more recently, but I am not sure that I remember her quite so well. This was at Brussels. It was in the time of the Kermesse when, as you know, the good Flemish people are somewhat more boisterously jolly than usual; when the band plays in the middle of the market-place, and the people walk round and round the band-stand, looking up at the Archangel Michael on the spire of the Hotel de Ville, to see him turn first pink and then green, as the Bengal lights smoke about his feet; when there are processions in the street, music and torches, and everyone sets out for the Fair. You have seen the Gingerbread Fair at Paris? Well, imagine a tiny Gingerbread Fair, but with something quite Flemish in the solid gaiety of its shows and crowds, as solid as the bons chevaux de bois, Verlaine's bons chevaux de bois, that go prancing up and down in their rattling circles. Quite Flemish, too, were the little mysterious booths, which you have certainly not found in Paris, Madame, and which I should certainly not have taken you to see in Brussels. You paid a penny at the door, and, once inside, were scarcely limited in regard to the sum you might easily spend on very little. What did one see? Indeed, very little. There was a lady, perched, for the most part, in an odd little alcove, raised a bed's height above the ground. As a rule, she was not charming, not even young; and her conversation was almost limited to a phrase in which Mon petit bénéfice recurred somewhat tiresomely. No, there was not much to see, after all. But Bertha was different. I don't know exactly what was the odd fascination of Bertha, but she fascinated us all; the mild Flemish painter, with his golden beard; our cynical publisher, with his diabolical monocle; my fantastical friend, the poet; and, Madame, be sure, myself. She was tall and lisom: she apologised for taking the The Little Review 53 place of the fat lady usually on exhibition; she had strange, perverse, shifting eyes, the colour of burnt topazes, and thin painful lips, that smiled frankly, when the eyes began their queer dance under the straight eyebrows. She was scarred on the cheek: a wicked Baron, she told us, had done that, with vitroil; one of her breasts was singularly mutilated; she had been shot in the back by an Englishman, when she was keeping a shooting-gallery at Antwerp. And she had the air of a dangerous martyr, who might bewitch one, with some of those sorceries that had turned, somehow, to her own hurt. We stayed a long time in the booth. I forget most of our conversation. But I remember that our publisher, holding the monocle preposterously between his lips, announced solemnly: Je suis un poète. Then he generously shifted the credit upon the two of us who were most anxious to disclaim the name. Bertha was curious, but bewildered. She had no conception of what a poet was. We tried French, Flemish, and English, poem, verse, rhyme, song, everything in short, and in vain. At last an idea struck her: she understood: we were café-chantant singers. That was the nearest she ever came. Do but think of it, Madame, for one instant: a woman who does not so much as know what a poet is! But you can have no idea how grateful I was to Bertha, nor how often, since then, I have longed to see her again. Never did any woman so charm me by so celestial an ignorance. The moments I spent with Bertha at the Fair repaid me for I know not how many weary hours in drawing-rooms. Can you understand the sensation, Madame, the infinite relief?.... And then she was a snake-like creature, with long cool hands. The Little Review
A LIST OF BOOKS Ezra Pound WHEN circumstances have permitted me to lift up my prayer to the gods, of whom there are several, and whose multiplicity has only been forgotten during the less felicitous periods,I have requested for contemporary use, some system of delayed book reviewing, some system whereby the critic of current things is permitted to state that a few books read with pleasure five or six years ago can still be with pleasure perused, and that their claims to status as literature have not been obliterated by half or all of a decade. George S. Street There was in the nineties, the late nineties and during the early years of this century, and still is, a writer named George S. Street. He has written some of the best things that have been thought concerning Lord Byron, he has written them not as a romanticist, not as a presbyterian, but as a man of good sense. They are worthy of commendation. He has written charmingly in criticism of eighteenth century writers, and of the ghosts of an earlier Piccadilly. He has written tales of contemporary life with a suavity, wherefrom the present writer at least has learned a good deal, even if he have not yet put it into scriptorial practice. (I haste to state this indebtedness). The writers of moeurs contemporaines are so few, or rather there are so few of them who can be treated under the heading "literature", that the discovery or circulation of any such writer is no mean critical action. Mr. Street is "quite as amusing as Stockton", with the infinite difference that Mr. Street has made literature. Essays upon him are not infrequent in volumes of english essays dealing wtih contemporary authors. My impression is that he is not widely read in America (his publishers will doubtless put me right if this impression is erroneous); I can only conclude that the possession of a style, the use of a suave and pellucid english has erected some sort of barrier. "The Trials of the Bantocks", "The Wise and the Wayward", "The Ghosts of Piccadilly", "Book of Essays", "The Autobiography of a Boy", "Quales Ego" "Miniatures and Moods", are among his works, and in them the rare but intelligent reader may take refuge from the imbecilities of the multitude. Frederick Manning In 1910 Mr. Manning published, with the almost defunct and wholly uncommendable firm of John Murray, "Scenes and Portraits", the opening paragraph of which I can still, I believe, quote from memeory. "When Merodach, King of Uruk, sat down to his meals, he made his enemies his footstool, for beneath his table he kept an hundred kings with their thumbs and great toes cut off, as signs of his power and clemency. When Merodach had finished eating he shook the crumbs from his napkin, and the kings fed themselves with two fingers, and when Merodach observed how painful and difficult this operation was, he praised God for having given thumbs to man. " 'It is by the absence of things', he said, 'that we learn their use. Thus if we deprive a man of his eyes we deprive him of sight, and in this manner we learn that sight is the function of the eyes.' "Thus spake Merodach, for he had a scientific mind and was curious of God's handiwork. And when he had finished speaking, his courtiers applauded him." Adam is afterwards discovered trespassing in Merodach's garden or paradise. The characters of Bagoas, Merodach's high priest, Adam, Eve and of the Princess Candace are all admirably presented. The book is divided in six parts: the incident of the Kingdom of Uruk, a conversation at the house of Euripides, "A Friend of Paul", a conversation between St. Francis and the Pope, another between Thomas Cromwell and Macchiavelli, and a final encounter between Leo XIII and Renan in Paradise. This book is not to be neglected by the intelligent reader, (avis rarissima, and in what minute ratio to the population I am still unable to discern.) C. F. Keary C. F. Keary is recently dead. He had written divers novels greatly admired in certain circles and a volume of pagan poems entitled "Religious Hours", printed with black borders like a book of devotions. He was a contributor to the more solid english quarterlies and reviews. The poems are in the tradition of english poetry as it was before Keats and Shelly, they are consistent within themselves, and it is extremely difficult to appraise such work in a hurry. One must sink into the given period. It is not my period, nor even one of my periods, and I have not yet found the right critic to do the job for me. I hope to give some adequate notice of the novels after I have arranged suitable complete numbers in appreciation of Henry James and of Remy de Gourmont, in each case a lengthy matter, for the number of critics qualified to cooperate is, one need hardly say, very limited. Mr. Gosse, for instance, has spent so many years concealing the fact that he could not read his friend Henry James; and the general critic is both ignorant of the subject, and incapable of treating it. The Egoist has collected a few essays in their January number. R. H. C. in the New Age has printed one or two paragraphs. One's first step is to dissociate, firmly and completely, Henry from William, and from the James family in general, or rather to observe that this process of dissociation has been for some time under way. D. G. Rossetti had also a brother named William. The one person really qualified to write of the subject is Mrs. Wharton, whose cooperation is perhaps unobtainable. Mr. Hueffer is in the army, and can scarcely be called upon. But with or without these two most desirable critics we will set forth on some sort of apprecition of the greatest prosateur of our time. "Others" The Cuala Press has issued a volume of Mr. Yeats' latest poems, the quality of which is well known to our readers and needs no further expositon. Among other books received for review is a sequence by Moireen Fox, a new book of short poems by Joseph Campbell, and the "Others" Anthology for 1917. This last gives I think the first adequate presentation of Mina Loy and Marianne Moore, who have, without exaggerated "nationalism", without waving of banners and general phrases about Columbia gem of the ocean, succeeded in, or fallen into, producing something distinctly American in quality, not merely distinguishable as Americans by reason of current national faults. Their work is neither simple, sensuous nor passionate, but as we are no longer governed by the North American Review we need not condemn poems merely because they do not fit some stock phrase of rhetorical criticism. (For example an infinitely greater artist than Tennyson uses six "s"'s and one "z" in a single line. It is one of the most musical lines in Provencal and opens a poem especially commended by Dante. Let us leave the realm of promoted typists who quote the stock phrases of text-books.) In the verse of Marianne Moore I detect traces of emotion; in that of Mina Loy I detect no emotion whatever. Both of these women are, possibly in unconsciousness, among the followers of Jules Laforgue (whose work shows a great deal of emotion). It is possible, as I have written, or intended to write elsewhere, to divide poetry into three sorts; (1.) melopoeia, to wit, poetry which moves by its music, whether it be a music in the words or an aptitude for, or suggestion of, accompanying music; (2.) imagism, or poetry wherein the feelings of painting and sculpture are predominant (certain men move in phantasmagoria; the images of their gods, whole countrysides, stretches of hill land and forest, travel with them); and there is, thirdly, logopoeia or poetry that is akin to nothing but language, which is a dance of the intelligence among words and ideas and modification of ideas and characters. Pope and the eighteenth-century writers had in this medium a certain limited range. The intelligence of Laforgue ran through the whole gamut of his time. T. S. Eliot has gone on with it. Browning wrote a condensed form of drama, full of things of the senses, scarcely ever pure logopoeia. One wonders what the devil anyone will make of this sort of thing who has not in their wit all the clues. It has none of the stupidity beloved of the "lyric" enthusiast and the writer and reader who take refuge in scenery description of nature, because they are unable to cope with the human. These two contributors to the "Others" Anthology write logopoeia. It is, in their case, the The' Little Review utterance of clever people in despair, or hvoering upon the brink of that precipice It is of those who have acceded with Renan "La bêtise humaine est la seule chose qui donne une idée de l'infini." It is a mind cry, more than a heart cry. "Take the world if thou wilt but leave me an asylum for my affection" is not their lamentation, but rather "In the midst of this desolation, give me at least one intelligence to converse with." The arid clarity, not without its own beauty, of le temperament de l'Américaine, is in the poems of these, I think, graduates or post-graduates. If they have not received B. A. 's or M. A. 's or B. Sc-s they do not need them. The point of my praise, for I intend this as praise, even if I do not burst into the phrases of Victor Hugo, is that without any pretences and without clamours about nationality, these girls have written a distinctly national product, they have written something which would not have come out of any other country, and (while I have before now seen a deal of rubbish by both of them) they are, as selected by Mr. Kreymborg, interesting and readable (by me, that is. I am aware that even the poems before me would drive numerous not wholly unintelligent readers into a fury of rage-out-of-puzblement.) Both these poetrial have said a number of things not to be found in the current numbers of Everybody's, the Century or McClure's. "The Effectual Marriage", "French Peacock", "My Apish Cousins" have each in its way given me pleasure. Miss Moore has already prewritten her counterblast to my criticism in her poem "To a Steam Roller". Kreymborg's anthology contains poems by Eliot; by Cannell, who manages to get still a drop more poetry from that worn subject, the deity (monotheist); and by Carlos Williams who often delights me by his opacity, a distinctly unamerican quality, and not without its own value. Mr. Kreymborg is getting his eye in.
THE READER CRITIC Astronomy The Evening Standard addresses us: "Amateur and professional astronomers all over the world will heave a great sigh of relief at the news that the 100-inch mirror of the new Mount Wilson telescope has safely completed its perilous nine-mile ascent of the mountain side and is now securely installed in the observatory. "The priceless mirror (says the San Francisco correspondent of the Daily Express), which took twelve years to cast and shape and cannot be duplicated in the rough, owing to the war, is expected by many in its explorations of the abysses of space— "(a) To solve at last the mystery of the canals of Mars. "(b) To bring no fewer than 100,000,000 new suns into the observer's ken." On s'encanaille. "(c) To advance materially the solution of the mystery of the origin of the universe by determining still further the nature of the gassy nebluae, which, science is generally agreed, are unborn world—suns and planets visibly in the making." They will doubtless tie the Pleiades in a bow-knot and loose the bands of Orion. "The mirror weighs four and a half tons, and all sorts of remarkable mechanical precautions have been adopted to prevent any climatic or other interference with the 100-ton telescope of which it forms the most important part." O world, thou Socratic star, the gods and fairies have left thee. X. Criticism M. S. F., As you ask me, I will tell you what I think of The Little Review. The first two years I received it, it was a constant source of joy to me; but for the last year and a half it has been filled with pointless eccentricities and gargoyles, —with once in a while a very beautiful thing in it. One thing for which I shall love the memory of The Little Review it its freedom and fearlessness: it is startling and therefore fine. Raymonde Collignon There is a new diseuse loose on London. She will go to France after the war, and heaven knows when she will get to America, but she will sometime. She is singing folk-song without the vegetarian and simple-life element. She is the first singer to work on Walter Rummel's reconstructions of Xllth. century Provencal music. Her name is Raymonde Collignon. Verb. sap. She is really a consummate artist.—E. P.
COMPLAINTS Your Complaint Before complaining that your magazine has not arrived please remember the War Freight congestion The Garfield holidays Government control of railroads Our Complaint If our subscribers would send us notice of changes of address it would help us to keep our youth, and also save further congestion of the mail service. Do not expect your postoffice to forward your magazine. Any forwarding of second-class matter is a re-mailing and requires postage. The Little Review Respecting no vested interests, no publishers' interests, no aged magazines and reviews nor staffs of the same. IN THE APRIL NUMBER: Unanimism, by Ezra Pound Ulysses (Episode II), by James Joyce The Novels by Dorothy Richardson, by May Sinclair Imaginary Letters, IX., by Wyndham Lewis Reproductions of the work of modern American artists Etc., Etc. IN THE MAY NUMBER: The Ideal Giant, by Wyndham Lewis Imaginary Letters, X., (On Suburbias), by Ezra Pound Ulysses (Episode III), by James Joyce Etc., Etc. 24 West Sixteenth Street, New York City THE QUILL A Magazine of Greenwich Village Announces the Publication of a folio GREENWICH VILLAGE by its ARTISTS Fifteen Sketches and Photographs by HUGH FERRISS, MAUD LANGTREE, FOREST MANN and GLENN O. COLEMAN and a Map of the Village. The Cover has been designed by HAROLD TRUE. Two Dollars Postpaid from ARTHUR H. MOSS at 143 West Fourth Street, New York City. THE PAGAN A magazine that is bound to take the place of the fine magazines lately given up because It publishes every printable form of fine art,—stories, plays, poems (original and translated), drawings, etchings, etc. 15 cents a copy $1.50 a year THE PAGAN PUBLISHING COMPANY 147 Center Street New York City In Greenwich Village, New York SOLVE YOUR FOOD PROBLEM by EATING AT The STRUNSKY RESTAURANTS Good cooking—pleasant envirnments— liberal portions—moderate prices. "THE WASHINGTON SQUARE RESTAURANT" 19 West Eighth Street. " Three STEPS DOWN" 19 West Eighth Street. Between 5th and 6th Avenue, CAFETERIA 19 West Eighth Street. (Upstairs) Phone Stuyvesant 1880 Open for lunch and dinner. "THE STUYVESANT SQUARE RESTAURANT" 201 Second Ave. " THE STUYVESANT CAFETERIA" 201 Second Avenue, (Down Stairs). Between 12th and 13th Street. Phone Stuyvesant 3379. Open for lunch, dinner and evenings. WEB VAN DAM 1 Sheridan Square In the Webb Van Dam you will see Just a place to have your tea There you are taken by the hand To a Wigwam in No Man's Land There you have a nice young feller To guide you down to the cyclone cellar Crullers with cider you'll eat and drink Then home you'll go to sit and think And in your dreams you'll seem to be A Greenwich Villager just like me. Your Chance To Help If every subscriber will get two or three mew subscribers, it will help us greatly with the important numbers to come. Send us names also of any of your friends who will appreciate sample copies. THE FLYING STAG PLAYS FOR THE LITTLE THEATRE THE BEST ONE-ACT PLAYS produced by the Washington Square Players, the Provincetown Players, the (Greenwich Village Players, and others, will be included in this series. NOW READY THE CHESTER MYSTERIES, a Passion Play, as played on Christmas eve by the Greenwich Village Players-. No. 1. 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