Various

“ There is a universe of the arts in the piano. But it is not a universe now. It is a stunt. The piano has been used for stunts for years and years and years. It will go on being used that way for years. Well, I am the last one to deprecate the art of these stunts. I think they are beautiful—some of them. I think they have their place. But they have served it too well. I love them more than I love all the opals and rubies and sapphires and emeralds and topaz and amethyst and pearl a jeweller can dip his fingers into and spread out for your dazzled senses. But I love poetry more than jewels. ”

“ Who will not approve of the efforts of modern painters to eliminate all extraneous considerations and make painting as pure an art as music? But why dogmatize again and anew? Why reduce creative art to scientific formulae, to mathematical calculations, to Procrustean standards? Why ridicule those who paint comme l’oiseau chante? Why belittle Kandinsky for his too-subjective symphonies? Why be so hard, Mr. Wright, so finite, so sententious, so encyclical? Why not have a little sense of humor, pray?
Gorky’s Memories My Childhood, by Maxim Gorky. ”

“ But the slowest revolution of all—and the most interesting—is that which is just beginning in the art of the piano. It is the slowest because it is not the public alone that is bound to the old form. The masters themselves have not visioned toward a need that would make a new form inevitable. The need is—a deeper music. And it is the most interesting because the convention that has bound the piano,—virtuosity,—is a more worthy convention than that which has restricted any of the other arts. ”

“ You may call me a Cassandra, but I venture a prophecy that soon Wilde will find his peaceful place in American colleges alongside with Austen, Eliot, Meredith, etc.
Salomé will always remain one of the world’s great symphonies,—a symphony in which the motive of doom rends your soul from the first sound to the last. Poems in Prose will never lose their charm as ivory-carved bits of ideal conversation—the art in which Wilde was supreme, the art that is almost unknown in this country where it is substituted by talk. His other works are doomed to be time’s victims. ”

“ It will come about in three ways: through the mechanical development of the piano, through a new type of music, and chiefly through the new type of pianist.
You will have your Mason and Hamlin— (this is not advertising; it is merely a conviction) —you will have that great dark-winged-victory standing alone on a stage; you will care a great deal about the color of the light around and above it—the tones of the walls within which your beautiful sounds are to live; you will touch that ivory and ebony—oh, there are no words! You will see those sounds against the color.... ”

“ It is the dream of the novelist that he will make men understand the spirit of the woman they saw in the streets. He wants to tell the store-manager of her and the little wiry man who has a desk next to his own. In the Wabash Avenue store there is a woman who sits on a high stool with her back to the novelist. He wants to tell her of Virginia Borden, to make her see the reality of the woman who failed, to make all see that such a woman once lived and went about among the women of Chicago. ”

“ That Gorky is deteriorating has become a truism. Exaggerated as the importance of his early works has been, one could not deny their freshness, elementary adroitness, soulfulness. But the god-fire was soon exhausted in the none-too-deep spirit of the tramp-poet. He gave us the few good songs he knew about the life of the has-beens, and then went hoarse. The public, Hauptmann’s Huhn, is not irresponsible for Gorky’s false notes. Compel the canary to imitate the nightingale and the poor bird will lose her short, simple, pretty twitter, and rend her little heart with shrill ejaculations. ”

“ When I talk of the “new music”—which will be different from Debussy and Schönberg and all the rest of them—I am not talking of how far beyond the limits of known harmony, or the anarchy which disregards any harmonic system, we shall go. Undoubtedly, as far as all that is concerned, “some day some one will dig down to the roots and turn up music as it is before it is tamed to the scale.” This seems to me a settled fact. But I am much more interested in the piano itself and the deliverer who is to set it free from the lie which has grown up around it and make it vibrate to a truer color. ”

“ He sets his toothache and his heartache to music, putting those sufferings into the music without remembering that sounds have their own agonies which alone they can express in a perfect manner.” This is where the “lions and panthers of the piano” have failed most: they have not loved the sounds enough. They have not allowed each sound its full life. This is the real reason why the piano has stopped short of itself. They might almost as well have played bells. You can strike bells which will bring out any number of tunes, loud or soft, with every possible variety of phrasing. ”

“ No revolution has ever been started by evasion. No one wants Margaret Sanger to be a martyr. The point is that every one must see to it that she is not made a martyr. There is no other way out of these issues. You can’t really believe in a thing without knowing that some time you will have to fight for it. Margaret Sanger is taking the stand that her type always takes—just because it is the type that insists on believing hard. ”

“ He never fails to communicate a mood to the instrument—the mood of his personal equation. And that is art. “Przybyszewski playing Chopin”—that would also be art. What have the excellent piano concerts you hear to do with art, with inspiration? Piano playing is certainly something to be surpassed. Music is the thing! And that means ecstasy, madness, divinity,—the beauty upon which all the ends of the world are come. The design of sound.... Each sound that comes out of the piano is something alive.... ”

“ Color itself should become form, proclaims Mr. Wright, and he quotes the manifesto of his beloved Synchromists: “In our painting color becomes the generating function. Painting being the art of color, any quality of a picture not expressed by color is not painting!” ”

“ That is why you hear an organ when he plays César Franck; that is why you realize how the Imagists have worked when he plays Debussy; that is why you get a sense of painting in all his music. Bauer puts on the sound like paint. He knows, as Romain Rolland has said, that every art tends to become a universe in itself; that music becomes painting and poetry, that painting becomes music, etc. And Bauer is not a genius. He has merely suggested what will happen to the piano, and paved the way for an openness of mind about it. ”

“ There is a kind of conspiracy in the store. Although he tries earnestly he continues to make mistakes and all of his fellows conspire to forgive and conceal his mistakes. Sometimes when he has muddled things badly they are impatient and the manager of the store, a huge, fat fellow with thin grey hair, takes him into a room and begins to scold.
The two men sit by a window and look down into Wabash Avenue. It is snowing and people hurry along with bowed heads. So much do the novelist and the fat grey-haired man like each other that the scolding does not last. ”

“ I have been sybariticizing with thirteen beautiful little volumes of Oscar Wilde, recently published by G. P. Putnam’s Sons. It is a useful, although often painful, ordeal—ventilating the store-room of your old gods. There was a time when I worshipped Wilde unqualifiedly. As a freshman I wrote a pathetic paper in which I demanded the canonization of the author of De Profundis. Alas, I have come to discern spots on the sun.
As a decorative artist Wilde has no flaws. ”

“ Miyamori has condensed the plots of the most famous joruri—the epical dramas of the Yeddo period, which are to this day chanted in Japanese theatres. It is an exotic atmosphere of oriental fairyland, tapestries of childlike love and naive passion, of smiling bloody tragedies and blissful harakiris. When lovers are prevented from being married they do not employ the cumbersome process of elopment, but transport themselves into the other world by committing shinju or double suicide. ”

“ All are familiar and recognised in the Market Place. These people are standing still. I imagine they are old: grey without magnificence. And being haunted by the truth of that lingering statement that there is no such thing as an old artist—why, dare we say that they are not artists?
Sculptor? There is none.
American Art?—To the Annual Exhibit, Ladies and Gentlemen, for a definite demonstration!
“The Critic.” ”

“ And so the novelist puts himself into the book. In the book he is a large, square-shouldered man with tiny eyes. He is one who came to Chicago from a village in Poland and was leader of an orchestra in a theatre. As the orchestra leader the novelist married Virginia Borden and lived in a house with her.
You see the novelist wants to explain himself also. He is a lover and so vividly does he love that he has the courage to love even himself. And so it is the lover that sits writing and the madness of the writer is the madness of the lover. As he writes he is making love. ”

“ What songless tongueless ghost of sin crept through the curtains of the night?
“In exquisite raiment, and to the delicate sound of flutes, the sins of the world are passing in dumb show before us. Things that we have dimly dreamed of are suddenly made real. Things of which we have never dreamed are gradually revealed.” ”

“ The perfect design applied in his multifarious productions makes one compare him to the titans of the High Renaissance: Nihil tetigit quod non ornavit. The graceful form justifies even his obvious moral-fairy-tales, even his unoriginal, Keats-esque and Poe-esque poems. It is for the style that we accept his De Profundis, that insincerest attempt for sincerity. But Wilde strove for more than mere external artistic effect. In his critical essays he lifted the critic to the heights of co- and re-creation, and instructed him to demand from a work of art eternal values. ”

“ It gives us a merciless thrashing, we who love without being able to state why and wherefore. We are ordered to go to school, children, to study chemistry and color, to approach a work of art as scientifically equipped as a surgeon venturing to operate on a human body. ”

“ I’m truly grateful to your reviewer who found my play, The State Forbids, “negative as literature.” If he had found it bad architecture or mediocre sculpture I should have been less pleased.
Play making, to my mind, is not a form of literature (even though its medium chances to be words) but it is an art of spacing ... focusing ... building. Structure upon structure! Foundation. Ornament. Design. An art as distinct from other forms of word utility as color medium is from plastic art. Drama is related to literature only in so far as all arts are inter-related. ”

“ As the novelist writes events grow in his mind. His mind is forever active and he is continually making up stories about himself. As the Virginia Borden whom men saw was a caricature of the Virginia Borden who lived in the mind of the novelist, so he knows that he is himself but a shadow of something very real. ”

“ As a reviewer pointed out in the November issue, Gorky could feel his stories, could imagine them deeply, but he could never quite tell them. The supreme virtue of Ben Hecht’s “Dregs” is that he could tell them. That is the art. Of course I have nothing to say to those people who deplore Mr. Hecht’s subject matter and urge me to use some moral judgment in selecting things for The Little Review. There is no such thing as moral judgment in literature. There should be no such thing in life, but unfortunately—
A Sorrowful Friend:
The Little Review: Literature, Drama, Music, Art. ”

“ Stupid, pernicious prudery long has blinded us to sexual truth. Science was slow in entering this vital field. In recent years commercialists eyeing profits have unloaded many unscientific and dangerous sex books. Now the world’s great scientific minds are dealing with this subject upon which human happiness often depends. No longer is the subject tabooed among intelligent people.
We take pleasure in offering to the American public, the work of one of the world’s greatest authorities upon the question of sexual life. ”

“ A puff of wind catches at your fluttering edge to jerk you away. But she draws you close, growing cold in the warm young breeze. She holds you with her shiny round pin, as all young ones are clasped to old by round things grown shiny with age. ”

“ I believe that the hope of the modern drama lies in the artist who can learn to look upon himself as a builder ... a maker and not a writer of plays.
And so again I thank your critic whose charity has made me feel that I am on the road which leads to “Somewhere.” Even though at the end of my journey I may not yet have reached the first mile stone.
Virginia York, Washington, D. C.:
It is published in windy Chicago, The Little Review. Claimed by management, editors and its readers to be the very, very last, last word in prose and poetry; it is sold at fifteen cents a copy. ”