THE LITTLE REVIEW

Seven Poems

William Butler Yeats

1
Upon a Dying Lady

2
Certain Artists Bring Her Dolls and Drawings

3
She Turns the Dolls’ Faces to the Wall

4

5

6

7
Her Friends Bring Her a Christmas Tree

Comment by Ezra Pound

1

Passages from the Letters of John Butler Yeats. Cuala Press, Dundrum, Dublin. 12 shillings.

To begin with one of the more recent; I have already sent a longer review of John Yeats’ letters to Poetry on the ground that this selection from them contains much valuable criticism of the art to which that periodical is “devoted”. I again call attention to the book for its humanism, for its author’s freedom from the disease of the age. It is good, for America in particular, that some even-minded critic, writing in detachment, without thought of publication, should have recorded his meditations. There can be no supposition that he hoped to start a social reform. Carlos Williams wrote a few years ago:

“Nowhere the subtle, everywhere the electric”. Quibblers at once began a wrangle about the subtlety of electricity. We can not massacre the ergoteur wholesale, but we might at least learn to ignore him; to segregate him into such camps as the “New Statesman” and the “New Republic”; to leave him with his system of “graduated grunts” and his critical “apparatus”, his picayune little slot-machine.

John Yeats writes as a man who has refused to be stampeded; he has not been melted into the crowd; the “button-moulder” has not remade him. He praises solitude now and then, but he has not withdrawn himself into a pseudo-Thoreauian wilderness, nor attempted romantesque Borroviana. Lest we “of this generation and decade” imagine that all things began with us, it is well to note that a man over seventy has freed himself from the effects of the “Great Exposition” and of Carlyle and Wordsworth and Arnold—perhaps he never fell under the marasmus.

I have met men even older than Mr. John Yeats, men who remembered the writings of the French eighteenth century. They had endured the drought, and kept a former age’s richness. When I say “remembered the writings of the French eighteenth century,” I mean that they had received the effect of these writings as it were at first hand, they had got it out of the air; there is a later set who took it up as a speciality, almost a fanaticism; they are different. Then there came the bad generation; a generation of sticks. They are what we have had to put up with.

2

James Joyce’s Novel. The Egoist, London. B. W. Huebsch, New York.

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was so well reviewed in the April number of this paper that I might perhaps refrain from further comment. I have indeed little to add, but I would reaffirm all that I have yet said or written of the book, beginning in The Egoist, continuing in The Drama, etc. Joyce is the best prose writer of my decade. Wyndham Lewis’s Tarr is the only contemporary novel that can compare with A Portrait; Tarr being more inventive, more volcanic, and “not so well written.” And that last comparison is perhaps vicious. It would be ridiculous to measure Dostoevsky with the T-Square of Flaubert. Equally with Joyce and Lewis, the two men are so different, the two methods are so different that it is rash to attempt comparisons. Neither can I attempt to predict which will find the greater number of readers; all the readers who matter will certainly read both of the books.

As for Joyce, perhaps Jean de Bosschère will pardon me if I quote from a post card which he wrote me on beginning A Portrait. It was, naturally, not intended for publication, but it is interesting to see how a fine piece of English first strikes the critic from the continent.

“Charles Louis Philippe n’a pas fait mieux. Joyce le dépasse par le style qui n’est plus le style. Cette nudité de tout ornement rhétorique, de toute forme idiomatique (malgré la plus stricte sévérité contre le détour ou l’esthétique) et beaucoup d’autres qualités fondamentales font de ce livre la plus sérieuse oeuvre anglaise que j’aie lue. Les soixante premières pages sont incomparables, ...”

The “most serious”, or to translate it more colloquially: “It matters more than any other English book I have read”. De Bosschère has not yet published any criticism of Joyce, but he is not the only established critic who has written to me in praise of A Portrait ... Joyce has had a remarkable “press,” but back of that and much more important is the fact that the critics have praised with conviction, a personal and vital conviction.

3

Certain Noble Plays of Japan. Cuala Press, Dublin. 12 shillings.

Noh, or Accomplishment. Knopf, New York, $2.75. Macmillan, London.

The earlier and limited edition of this work of Ernest Fenollosa contains four plays, with an introduction by W. B. Yeats. The larger edition contains fifteen plays and abridgements and all of Fenollosa’s notes concerning the Japanese stage that I have yet been able to prepare for publication. This Japanese stuff has not the solidity, the body, of Rihaku (Li Po). It is not so important as the Chinese work left by Fenollosa, but on the other hand it is infinitely better than Tagore and the back-wash from India. Motokiyo and the fourteenth-century Japanese poets are worth more than Kabir. Fenollosa has given us more than Tagore has. Japan is not a Chinese decadence. Japan “went on with things” after China had quit. And China “quit” fairly early: T’ang is the best of her poetry, and after Sung her art grows steadily weaker.

It would be hard to prove that the Japanese does not attempt (in his art, that is) to die in aromatic pain of the cherry blossom; but his delicacy is not always a weakness. His preoccupation with nuances may set one against him. Where a Chinese poet shows a sort of rugged endurance, the Japanese dramatist presents a fine point of punctilio. He is “romanticist” against the “classical” and poetic matter-of-factness of the Chinese writer. The sense of punctilio is, so far as I can make out, a Japanese characteristic, and a differentiating characteristic, and from it the Japanese poetry obtains a quality of its own.

The poetic sense, almost the sole thing which one can postulate as underlying all great poetry and indispensible to it, is simply the sense of overwhelming emotional values. (For those who must have definitions: Poetry is a verbal statement of emotional values. A poem is an emotional value verbally stated.) In the face of this sense of emotional values there are no national borders. One can not consider Rihaku as a foreigner, one can only consider him human. One can not consider Odysseus, or Hamlet, or Kagekiyo as foreigners, one can only consider them human.

At one point in the Noh plays, namely in the climax of Kagekiyo we find a truly Homeric laughter, and I do not think the final passages of this play will greatly suffer by any comparison the reader will be able to make. If I had found nothing else in Fenollosa’s notes I should have been well paid for the three years I have spent on them.

If I dispraise Tagore now I can only say that I was among the first to praise him before he became a popular fad. The decadence of Tagore may be measured. His first translations were revised by W. B. Yeats; later translations by Evelyn Underhill, facilis et perfacilis descensus, and now they say he has taken to writing in English, a language for which he has no special talent. If his first drafts contained such clichés as “sunshine in my soul”, he was at least conscious at that time of his defects. Praise was rightly given to his first poems because it was demonstrated and demonstrable that they were well done in Bengali, i. e. that they were written in a precise and objective language, and in a metric full of interest and variety. The popular megaphone took up phrases made to define the originals and applied them to the translations. Imagine a criticism of Herrick and Campion applied to a French or German prose translation of these poets, however excellent as a translation in prose! As the vulgarizer hates any form of literary excellence, he was well content with obscuring the real grounds for praise. The unimportant element, that which has made Tagore the prey of religiose nincompoops, might easily have passed without comment. However, it has proved the baccillus of decay. Sir Rabindranath having been raised in a country where the author need not defend himself against blandishment ... I mean the force of the babu press is scarcely enough to turn anyone’s head or his judgement.... Sir Rabindranath is not particularly culpable. His disciples may bear the blame as best they may; along with his publishers. But no old established publishing house cares a damn about literature; and once Tagore had become a commercial property, they could scarcely be expected to care for his literary integrity.

He might still wash and be clean; that is to say there is still time for him to suppress about three fourths of the stuff he has published in English, and retain some sort of literary position.

Another man who stands in peril is Edgar Masters. He did a good job in The Spoon River Anthology. What is good in it is good in common with like things in the Greek anthology, Villon and Crabbe: plus Masters’s sense of real people. The work as a whole needs rewriting. The difference between a fine poem and a mediocre one is often only the fact that the good poet could force himself to rewrite. “No appearance of labour?” No, there need be no appearance of labour. I have seen too many early drafts of known and accepted poems not to know the difference between a draft and the final work. Masters must go back and take the gobbetts of magazine cliché out of his later work; he must spend more time on Spoon River if he wants his stuff to last as Crabbe’s Borough has lasted. There is a great gulph between a “successful” book and a book that endures; that endures even a couple of centuries.

I would not at any cost minimize what Edgar Masters has done, but his fight is not yet over.

4

The Interpretation of the Music of the XVIIth and XVIIIth Centuries, by Arnold Dolmetsch. Novello, London. W. H. Gray, New York.

Arnold Dolmetsch’s book has been out for some time. No intelligent musician would willingly remain without it. No intelligent musician is wholly without interest in the music of those two centuries. But this book is more than a technical guide to musicians. It is not merely “full of suggestion” for the thorough artist of any sort, but it shows a way whereby the musician and the “intelligent” can once more be brought into touch. If Dolmetsch could be persuaded to write a shilling manual for the instruction of children and of mis-taught elders it might save the world’s ears much torture. Dolmetsch’s initial move was to demonstrate that the music of the old instruments could not be given on the piano; any more than you could give violin music on the piano. His next was to restore the old instruments to us. There is too much intelligence in him and his book adequately to be treated in a paragraph. I am writing of him at greater length in The Egoist. His citations from Couperin show the existence of vers libre in early eighteenth-century music. I do not however care unduly to stir up the rather uninteresting discussion as to the archaeology of “free” verse.

5

Prufrock and Other Observations, by T. S. Eliot. The Egoist, London. One shilling.

The book-buyer can not do better.

John Rodker

This Little Pig Went to Market
(A Search for the National Type)

Ezra Pound

This little American went to Vienna. He said it was “Gawd’s Own City”. He knew all the bath-houses and dance halls. He was there for a week. He never forgot it—No, not even when he became a Captain in the Gt. American Navy and spent six months in Samoa.

This little American went West—to the Middle-West, where he came from. He smoked cigars, for cigarettes are illegal in Indiana, that land where Lew Wallace died, that land of the literary tradition. He ate pie of all sorts, and read the daily papers—especially those of strong local interest. He despised European culture as an indiscriminate whole.

Peace to his ashes.

This little American went to the great city Manhattan. He made two and half dollars per week. He saw the sheeny girls on the East Side who lunch on two cents worth of bread and sausages, and dress with a flash on the remainder. He nearly died of it. Then he got a rise. He made fifteen dollars per week selling insurance. He wore a monocle with a tortoise-shell rim. He dressed up to “Bond St.” No lord in The Row has surpassed him.

He was a damn good fellow.

This little American went to Oxford. He rented Oscar’s late rooms. He talked about the nature of the Beautiful. He swam in the wake of Santyana. He had a great cut glass bowl full of lilies. He believed in Sin. His life was immaculate. He was the last convert to catholicism.

This little American had always been adored—and quite silent. He was quite bashful: He rowed on his college crew. He had a bright pink complexion. He was a dealer in bonds, but not really wicked. He would walk into a man’s office and say: “Do you want any stock? ... eh ... eh ... I don’t know anything about it. They say it’s all right.” Some people like that sort of thing; though it isn’t the “ideal business man” as you read of him in Success and in Mr. Lorimer’s papers.

This little American had rotten luck; he was educated—soundly and thoroughly educated. His mother always bought his underwear by the dozen, so that he should be thoroughly supplied. He went from bad to worse, and ended as a dishwasher; always sober and industrious; he began as paymaster in a copper mine. He made hollow tiles in Michigan.

His end was judicious.

This little American spoke through his nose, because he had catarrh or consumption. His scholastic merits were obvious. He studied Roumanian and Aramaic. He married a papal countess.

Peace to his ashes.

This little American ... but who ever heard of a baby with seven toes.

This story is over.

Iris Barry

His Girl

Widow

At the Ministry

September 1916

The Black Fowl

At the Hotel

Towards the End

Margaret Anderson

America is a confounding place.

About four years ago I wanted to start a magazine. Two things in life interest me more than other things: Art and good talk about Art. The Little Review was launched as an organ of those two interests.

For three years, at irregular intervals, it reflected my concern about various other matters. When I got incensed over the sufferings of what is called the proletariat I preached profound platitudes about justice and freedom. I had always had the sense to know that all people can be put into two classes: the exceptional and the average. But when I decided that the only way to prevent the exceptional from being sacrificed to the average was for everybody to become anarchists, I preached the simple and beautiful but quite uninteresting tenets of anarchism. I have long given them up. I still grow violent with rage about the things that are “wrong”, and probably always shall. But I know that anarchism won’t help them. I have known good anarchists who are as dull as any other good laymen. And I have no interest in laymen. Only sensibility matters.

I had always known that education doesn’t produce sensibility, but I came to think that something could produce it. Now I know that nothing under the heavens will make any one sensitive if he is not born that way.

I had always known that people didn’t want Art, but I imagined that they would be glad to be made to want it. Now I know that they are “not merely indifferent to it: they hate it malignantly”.

Therefore, to sum up: all these ideas were not interesting enough to have bothered about.

But the curious thing about America is that while she thinks such insipid and pleasant and harmless ideas are abominable and dangerous, she also thinks they are interesting!

Any magazine that concerns itself with such ideas is sure to get an audience. Your audience will think that you are crazy or that you want a sensation, or, what is worse, that you are a sort of “Pollyanna” throwing sunshine and optimism into dark places in order to help the world. But it will be interested in reading you for one reason or another.

And now after working through unbelievable aridness The Little Review has at last arrived at the place from which I wanted it to start. At last we are printing stuff which is creative and inventive, and, thank heaven, not purely local. The audience mentioned above, in the aggregate, resents it. We no longer interest that audience. The layman says that we are now given over to the bizarre and the “aesthetic” (that adjective which in America means something vaguely inconsequential, if not something shameless and immoral). People who like to “help” magazines with “artistic” leanings are not to be allured by Art. People who can’t prove that they know anything about good letters dare to tell us that we don’t know anything about them. Editors who make it a point of honor to discover artistic value in the work of their contemporaries feel that we are meticulous and too “arty”. And the writers themselves are the most absurd. Maxwell Bodenheim writes that he “knows” Ezra Pound judges poetry on the basis of his personal dislikes. That is as necessarily untrue as anything can be. Any one who is unwilling to praise what seems to him unworthy of praise, anyone whose interest in a poet’s work abates when the work shows no signs of further progress—any such critic will come in for this kind of slander. Any such critic will get himself talked about the way people love to talk in New York: if you try to discuss a man’s work with them they say “that man is my enemy”, or “that man is my friend”. It’s very puzzling: they seem to think their remarks have something to do with literature.

Another remarkable thing that happens in New York: if you walk upon the street with a sensitive and rare and distinguished person you will find that he attracts more curious and resentful attention than the most badly-made, the most atrociously dressed, or the most grotesquely deformed human beings who surround him.

But this is the attitude of all America.

I have made several thoughtless statements about “Help us to make The Little Review a power”, etc. I know that nothing on earth will do that except our own contents. They tell me that Henley was a power in England with The National Observer when its circulation had shrunk to eighty subscribers. I should be willing to pursue dominion even to that point, but it will probably not be necessary. Our circulation grows in spite of criticism and misunderstanding.

You can help us to give you more each month by subscribing for your friends who are interested in a magazine which is not interested in the public taste.

Louis Gilmore

Garments created by Bertha Holley give the wearer the distinction in color and line of an artist’s portrait. Their beauty is essential, therefore permanent, and raises one forever above the confusion and extravagance of changing fashion. Moreover, each garment forms part of an accumulative, interchangeable wardrobe which may be acquired at once or gradually, as a booklover acquires books, and when complete enables the possessor to meet every occasion with variety and charm.

BERTHA HOLLEY

Twenty-one East Forty-ninth Street
New York City
Telephone: Plaza 1495

“Hello Huck!”

Recall that golden day when you first read “Huck Finn”? How your mother said, “For goodness’ sake, stop laughing aloud over that book. You sound so silly.” But you couldn’t stop laughing.

Today when you read “Huckleberry Finn” you will not laugh so much. You will chuckle often, but you will also want to weep. The deep humanity of it—the pathos, that you never saw, as a boy, will appeal to you now. You were too busy laughing to notice the limpid purity of the master’s style.

MARK TWAIN

When Mark Twain first wrote “Huckleberry Finn” this land was swept with a gale of laughter. When he wrote “The Innocents Abroad” even Europe laughed at it itself.

But one day there appeared a new book from his pen, so spiritual, so true, so lofty that those who did not know him well were amazed. “Joan of Arc” was the work of a poet—a historian—a seer. Mark Twain was all of these. His was not the light laughter of a moment’s fun, but the whimsical humor that made the tragedy of life more bearable.

A Real American

Mark Twain was a steamboat pilot. He was a searcher for gold in the far West. He was a printer. He worked bitterly hard. All this without a glimmer of the great destiny that lay before him. Then, with the opening of the great wide West, his genius bloomed.

His fame spread through the nation. It flew to the ends of the earth, until his work was translated into strange tongues. From then on, the path of fame lay straight to the high places. At the height of his fame he lost all his money. He was heavily in debt, but though 60 years old, he started afresh and paid every cent. It was the last heroic touch that drew him close to the hearts of his countrymen.

The world has asked is there an American literature? Mark Twain is the answer. He is the heart, the spirit of America. From his poor and struggling boyhood to his glorious, splendid old age, he remained as simple, as democratic as the plainest of our forefathers.

He was, of all Americans, the most American. Free in soul, and dreaming of high things—brave in the face of trouble—and always ready to laugh. That was Mark Twain.

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