Various

“ The feet of Dreiser are making a path for us, the brutal heavy feet. They are tramping through the wilderness, making a path. Presently the path will be a street, with great arches overhead and delicately carved spires piercing the sky. Along the street will run children, shouting “Look at me”—forgetting the heavy feet of Dreiser.
The men who follow Dreiser will have much to do. Their road is long. But because of Dreiser, we, in America, will never have to face the road through the wilderness, the road that Dreiser faced. ”

“ There are signs of our dangerously settling down to flat brilliant backgrounds, spots of vivid color, and much mention of “important as decoration”. It seems an unhealthy acquiescence.... “Is desire a thing of nothing, that a five-years’ quest can make a parody of it? Your whole life is not too long, and then only at the very end will some small atom of what you have desired come to you.”—Gordon Craig in his Art of the Theatre. It looks as if we are due for a period of the old, old, three-walled room with the new, new, “new” color.... ”

“ When all the world goes mad, one must accept madness as sanity, since sanity is, in the last analysis, nothing but the madness on which the whole world happens to agree.—Bernard Shaw, 1916.
A Sorrowful Demon [1] ALEXANDER S. KAUN
How he hates us, ordinary mortals! No, he seldom hates; he reserves his hatred for God, for life, for the universe. For us, weak bubbles driven on the surface by uncontrollable forces, he has only contempt. Yet, though hating and despising, he is infinitely dear to us: the thick melancholy vein that bulges across his wildcat forehead makes him almost human ”

“ Will you answer that there is an eternal and universal sense of the fitness of things with which every soul may be lightened that cometh into the world? Shall I not reply to you that this is a lie against life—that life is sacrificed every day to this lie? ”

“ This particular story is an extraordinary expression of him—of the prizes and peril of such a state. Oh, hell! what an insult is put upon us when we are invited to live, and to make such a choice.
Perhaps one makes it: then he is not happy until he has lost himself in an art that is “something more than an audible dramatization of human life.” Perhaps he is right. But—
But—but—
Sometimes I know that for the greatest artist there would be no chasm between what the heart desires and what the mind constructs. Tell me how to do that in poetry and I’ll give you a dollar. ”

“ This, then, is the prophecy, and thus has he proclaimed it: “By my hypothesis, Action Pictures are sculpture-in-motion, Intimate Pictures are paintings-in-motion, Splendour Pictures are architecture-in-motion.... The rest of the work is a series of after thoughts and speculations not brought forward so dogmatically.”
Now, the Arts are complete in themselves; they contain all. The moving picture has come to be a parasite on them.
Sculpture has become a vital thing to this age because of August Rodin. ”

“ To save the theatre, the theatre must be destroyed, the actors and actresses must all die of the plague. They poison the air, they make art impossible. It is not drama they play, but pieces for the theatre. We should return to the Greeks, play in the open air; the drama dies of stalls and boxes and evening dress, and people who come to digest their dinner.—Eleonora Duse.
The Theatre “Overtones” Alice Gerstenberg, who dramatized Alice in Wonderland, wrote Overtones, evidently as an experiment, and had it produced in New York. ”

“ Aldis’ little tragedy is a bitter one for all those medical men who have made strenuous efforts to let the public share their deep and vast knowledge without so much as asking for the slightest compensation. It shows beyond a doubt that not only are the Ellies of this world unwilling to imbibe science in a popular form, but also the Aldises of a much higher intelligence. It shows that the lure of patent medicine is a very strong one and that a doctor’s “vague advice” cannot offset it. ”

“ There always has been a fight on the part of the school to get what it wanted from the directors; but things can be done. Read the list of “illustrious names” of visiting instructors, years ago, and then compare the student roll of the same time. Once the Art Institute was an art school with art students, who were artists, who in spite of everything led the life of artists, knew the analogy between painting and the other Arts, swarmed to concerts and the theatres, and created their own atmosphere. ”

“ He is off to New York to live.
How he does wobble when he comes to his list of “able and honest”.
Poor Parker! that he should have to go into the list of best men, too—that list! The man can paint—technic seems to be only a superstition now but it once had a place in Art. Parker has that at least. Wendt, Buehr, Ravlin, and Davis should be rescued from the “able and honest” before your critic collapses completely in referring to Clarkson and Oliver Dennet Grover as some of “their best men.” ”

“ A few weeks ago I saw one of the older trustees spend considerable time before a canvas by a Boston painter that lacked all that goes to make a work of art,—a canvas on which the artist, with the aid of a pointed stick, had tried to prod his dead and colorless paint into some kind of motion. In spite of this I still believe that they will rise to the high intellectual and artistic understanding that they are supposed to possess, but which they have failed to display up to the present, as far as modern art is concerned. ”

“ Why conjure up an atmosphere of guilt that neither man nor woman felt? Why suggest such hair-bristling horror as to the accidental overturning of a dead man’s body, any more than over the accidental upsetting of a vase, or a statue, in the course of a dance? Why such strained effort to make that specialized expression of vibrant life which is the very pivotal centre of all life appear as the degradation of degradation, degrading everything else, even death? ”

“ Seriousness, thick, black, dense seriousness is the keynote of The Little Review.” However, the current issue of said magazine carries our editorial remarks in full, and with our hand on our heart we make a deep courtesy for the honor conferred upon us. Though we distinctly deplore the fact that absolutely no comment is made upon our criticism of The Little Review and Mr. Ficke’s remarkable “pome.” It is as if we were taken by the editorial legs and shaken. And we do not want legs shaken. We are a lady. ”

“ Theodore Dreiser is old—he is very, very old. I do not know how many years he has lived, perhaps thirty, perhaps fifty, but he is very old. Something gray and bleak and hurtful that has been in the world almost forever is personified in him. ”

“ The painter’s art! Botticelli’s Spring, or The Birth of Venus—pictures containing the essence of rhythmic natural movement. Never yet have the movies given us this. If Lindsay must prophesy and “take the masses back to art” there are artists living today—who are for today. Lindsay seems to know nothing of them. His knowledge of painting seems to have stopped with his art school days. The later work of Jerome Blum, for example, has this movement, this rhythm, not only in composition and line but in the color as well. Reds and greens and blues that vibrate, paintings that live. ”

“ Art has come by hard ways, but never to worse than this:—the guest of the Corn Exchange Bank!
Again at a meeting for the formation of the new Arts Club, before the matter of the Club could be discussed there had to be a speech assuring the Art Institute that the artists would never, in any way, ever do anything on their own, but would always conform to the ideas of the directors of the Institute. But where they really proved themselves was at the annual dinner, at the opening of the Chicago Artists’ Exhibition. ”

“ Hart’s head moved, became part of a moving picture and sculpture was no more. The moment was worth it—but it moved.... “Moving pictures are pictures and not sculpture”, says Lorado Taft in a public statement, objecting to Lindsay’s phrase. “To a sculptor the one thing cherished as most essential to his art is its static quality, its look of absolute quiescence. It is the hint of eternity which marks and makes all monumental art”.... Has Lindsay no feeling for sculpture? ”

“ Society applauded Major Martinov whose bullet snapped the life of the unapproachable aristocrat, the mocker of customs and conventions, the maimer of feminine hearts, the careless, fearless duellist who played with life, his own or that of others, as with a valueless toy. ”

“ We are glad with a petty gladness whenever we discover in him this weakness, his humaneness; we chuckle at the comfortable feeling of being able to observe him on the level plane, freed from the necessity of throwing our heads far back in order to perceive him on the lonely peak. He is our brother, we boast; and we inflict on him the severest punishment for a genius—forgiveness. ”

“ Painting-in-motion—rhythm. Rhythm seems alien to the application of the theory of jerky fade-away close-ups. “Intimate Dutch interior” scenes fading into the close-up and then back into the entire scene again. Intimate, friendly, and moving, but lacking in rhythm and the flow of naturalness. Some think that “moving lines”, made an art in themselves, will be an achievement of the moving film. Have you ever been struck dumb by the lines made by a dancer across the stage, the moving of life across life? ”

“ In an age when the cult of slimness is uppermost in everybody’s mind, is it possible that the doctor consulted by Mrs. Aldis was so untrue to his mission as a public benefactor that he gave only “vague advice,” or is Mrs. Aldis maligning the whole medical profession and trying to show that by his “vague advice” the doctor was really responsible for Ellie’s death by driving her into taking “the bottles in the woodshed, hundreds of ’em. All labelled ‘Caldwell’s Great Obesity Cure Warranted Safe and Rapid.’”? ”

“ Gordon Craig says somewhere that any medium is easier to work in than human beings. After seeing the work expended on The Merry Wives of Windsor by three geniuses, and watching the actors in that play, we understand completely.
Soulless New York Witter Bynner, grown somber and blase,—the effect of living in soulless New York, he says—has become a sort of Greek Chorus to me. In various strophes with divers variations, in sundry public and private places, he chants the dismal fact that New York is soulless and that there is a danger of it robbing me of my joy in life. ”

“ When he grew up—and he grew up early: at ten he loved a girl; at fifteen he conceived his greatest poems, Mtzyri and Demon—his protest had calmed down. He no longer wept or raged—he hated God and despised mankind. His contemporaries tell us that no one could stand his heavy penetrating look. Men hated and feared him; women hated and loved him, as they always do extraordinary things. ”

“ I cannot remember any city that I have been in where my sense of the comic has been tickled so often by happenings in the streets. So many comedies are enacted by the curbstone, so many quaintly funny things happen every hour on the streets, that it would be impossible for me to forget how jolly life really is. ”

“ But in poetry the human heart and the mathematical soul are always fighting—and so far as I know they have not yet come to an agreement—not in English poetry, at least. The artist and the human being never get to be bedfellows. It’s either sickening humanitarianism or stark designing—the second is the less painful.
Well!—I loathe the world, including Symons and all the arts.
Ezra Pound, London:
Thanks for the January-February issue. Your magazine seems to be looking up. A touch of light in Dawson and Seiffert—though The Little Review seems to me rather scrappy and unselective. ”

“ Learned essays on this or that poetry make little red devils dance in my brain and my right hand reach for a Japanese sword. They are invariably inferior to the spirit, and occupy only a small section of the horizon of their subject. ”

“ At the same time they are a close study of this strange land, its people and their habits, by a forceful and unusual artist—a man who says “yes” to nature in no uncertain terms. His bold colors are handled in a most sensitive manner, and when I wanted to place him among the Chicago artists I found that he belongs to an entirely different class and could not even be compared to some of the vacillating and doubtful men who paint in this town. ”

“ A Boy, Chicago:
I am a boy sixteen years old, and one could not expect me to know much about poetry—especially free verse. But I have heard of your magazine as a magazine that was ready to print what all kinds of people thought. So I have written a little verse—it is not a poem—telling you something about what is going on inside my mind, for these matters trouble every boy’s mind, although you may think that we are light-minded at my age.
BLINDNESS
I suppose I must be blind. ”