Various

“ And then he imagines that in reality sex passion is a smashing force that knocks people into each other’s arms, tumbles their heavens, smears their lives. He imagines that men and women love without thought, mate with the irresponsibility of hyenas. And imagining all this Wedekind creates a sort of droll fiend to prove it. Behold her—a creature to confound saints and sinners, to tear the beauty out of men’s souls and dance with muddied feet upon the finery of life. He dangles her before our eyes, naked and glorious—the diseased siren of the ages. And he calls her Lulu, the earth spirit. ”

“ There have been revolutions in literature, authors have changed the size and construction of the novel, publishers have changed the color of their bindings, poets have changed the form of their poetry and the essence of its style, thinkers even have altered slightly the trend of their thought. Music, painting, decorating, carving—everything changes with time except talk, which only increases. What a staggering illustration of the theory that it is only the weak things which survive. For talk is the commonest of weaknesses. ”

“ Slobberdom, Sneerdom, and Boredom Ben Hecht
It is the custom of inspired opinion to pay little attention to mediocrities, to dismiss them with a shudder. I understand The Little Review to be an embodiment of inspired opinion, an abandonment of mental emotion—Youth. Like some of the people who read it and even some of them who write for it, it flies at the throats of contemporary Chimeras and leaps upon the Pegasi of the moment. It slashes and roars, hates and loves. It never considers the right and never considers the wrong. It does not endeavor to be just and fair. ”

“ When one hears that a Walt Whitman dinner is to be given on a certain night in the Grand Pacific Hotel all one has to do to remain happy and free from suffering is to stay at home. My friend K—— and I went to a Walt Whitman dinner because we were young and curious and hungry, and because Walt, after all, is a great artist.
The dinner proved to be like most dinners of its kind—a glorious opportunity for saccharine drool at the expense of a great name. Appreciation and love of an artist—a poet—are highly commendable qualities if practiced in private, if put into proper print. ”

“ As I believe that the literary generation which has the floor in America today is the weakest and the bleakest that ever made semi-darkness of good sunlight, so I believe that the elect of the new generation contains individuals who are true heaven-borns; that they bring their own light with them and do not stand about stretched for reflection; that they refuse to allow the world-lie to shut the passages of power within them, between the zone of dreams and the more temperate zones of matter. ”

“ We have always preferred to distinguish Germany from Prussia; we have found delight in the thought that there is a Munich as well as a Berlin, a Nietzsche as well as a Haeckel, a Rheinhard as well as a Bernhardi.... Today we witness the hegemony of Prussia, a hegemony political as well as spiritual, for the great war has crowned with triumph not only the Krupp guns but also the Prussian idea of efficiency and preciseness. ”

“ That was no way for any man to go, even though he were just a peasant. But Anton knew himself important now, almost as important as a general. He knew himself important, with a strange, tremendous importance. He was as important as almost anyone in the world, and he was dying alone in the darkness.
Then he remembered that there must be other men in the cornfield. He had thought of that before, and afterwards he had forgotten. If there were other men here—even one other man, an enemy—he would find that comrade and they would die together. ”

“ But time had no longer any meaning for Anton Tarasovitch. Lying on one’s back, so, and waiting to die, a minute can seem all there is of the world, and then an hour can be burned up like a minute, while one faints into unconsciousness, before one is slowly dragged back again to the thought, “I am I”—the thought that makes the world for each man, that creates for him the stars and the shadows and the sun sinking downward. ”

“ A few scattered listeners must catch the harmonies intended for a whole nation, the majority having been sophisticated to extinction. The herds in Chicago and elsewhere will go on indefinitely in their own swaggering way, blind and deaf, sure beyond correction that the chief desirability lies in digestion, decoration, and diversion ... while Rabindranath Tagore and the beautiful element he personifies are ever-present, waiting within reach of all, working out the biggest things in the world, and living the last word of true joy. ”

“ If you’ve not got imagination you can’t help it; if you’ve not got strength you can get it. It won’t make you an artist but it will make it impossible for you to be confused with the caterpillars. If you’ve got a vision—an Idea—and can find the strength to fly toward it you’ll be an artist in life. This is not to confuse the artist with the prophet. You can’t very well do that because the terms are so interdependent. There has never been an artist without the prophet in him, and there has never been a prophet who was not an artist. ”

“ It really all comes to one end: Life for Art’s sake. We believe in that because it is the only way to get more Life—a finer quality, a higher vibration. This bigger concept doesn’t mean merely more Beauty. It means more Intensity. In short, it means the New Hellenism. And that is a step beyond the old Greek ideal of proportion and moderation. It pushes forward to the superabundance that dares abandonment.
Art and nothing else! Art is the great means of making life possible, the great seducer to life, the great stimulus of life.—Nietzsche. ”

“ The Austrian had smiled at her, a nice, friendly smile, and Tatya had grabbed for his hand as children will, even when the people they grab at are Austrians.
Tatya had seemed to like the Austrian. And Anton had had to confess to himself that he wasn’t a bad fellow. But he must have been pleasant only because of Tatya. No one could help being pleasant to Tatya. The Austrian had been for a moment friendly because of her. At heart he was a hateful fellow. All Austrians were hateful. They all hated the Tsar and the Fatherland and they all hated him, Anton, because he was a Russian. ”

“ This the general had told them, and he had known always, since a boy, that it was a brave and fine thing to fight for one’s country and to die if need be. Anton Tarasovitch was dying that his country might be saved.
Yet it was strange that the big Russia had need of him, just one common peasant. The great Russia had so many men that were strong and powerful, men with uniforms that glittered—men that were much cleverer and braver than Anton. Why should the country have need of him? Sasha needed him, and the children. Sasha needed him in the fields and she needed him in her heart too. ”

“ The Little Review has one virtue in addition to its eagerness. It is informal. Informality is the breath of life to journalism. Nobody can write anything the way people want him to unless he feels perfectly free to write the way he wants to. It is far more a matter of manners than a matter of truth. A journal which insists on formality almost never has any good writing in it. Good writing is nothing but the artistic expression of a personality. Scientifically speaking, it can be nothing else. Not that one must be thinking about expressing his personality in order to write well. ”

“ I am sick of the Argumentatives, people with an irritating command of phrases, who balance paradoxes on their noses and talk backwards or upside down with equal lucidity; who must be contradicted or they suffer; who rumble bizarrely from the depths of every philosophical sub-cellar they can ferret out in order to be startling; who shriek and howl and wail and protest and—the Devil take them—tell the truth and make it impossible to believe. Their only reason for talking is to impress. They are as noisy as cannon and as effective as firecrackers. ”

“ He is always near when people dare to be simple. There are many who call him a God still, but they do not use their eyes. You who see so directly must never forget that bad curve of him below the shoulders. Forever, the artists lying to themselves have tried to cover that bad curve of Pan as it sweeps down into the haunches of a goat. Pan is the first devil you meet when you reach that rectitude of heart which dares to be naked and unashamed. ”

“ I recall that evening in connection with Noguchi’s lines about Koyetsu:
What need there be but prayer and silence? There is nothing more petty, even vulgar, in the grey world of art and poetry, than to have a too-close attachment to life and physical surroundings; if our Orientalism may not tell you anything much, I think it will teach you at least to soar out of your trivialism. ”

“ The Little Review is a magazine that believes in Life for Art’s sake, in the Individual rather than in Incomplete people, in an age of Imagination rather than of Reasonableness; a magazine that believes in Ideas even if they are not Ultimate Conclusions, and values its Ideals so greatly as to live them; a magazine interested in Past, Present, and Future, but particularly in the New Hellenism; a magazine written for Intelligent people who can Feel; whose philosophy is Applied Anarchism, whose policy is a Will to Splendor of Life, and whose function is—to express itself. ”

“ She is in love with her own beauty. Her body thrills her with its whiteness and its movement. She already has felt its power. Were I in these plays I would as soon think of kissing Lulu as biting a stick of dynamite. But I am not an ideal conception. There are other men—Wedekind digs them up from every corner of life—who fall at her feet and who shoot each other and themselves for the sake of being contaminated by her caresses. Queer men, idealists. ”

“ It is the virtue of The Little Review that it permits its contributors to use “I” as often as they please; that it permits them to make fools of themselves occasionally. This means that it is not impossible to write well for The Little Review. I do not say that it is not possible to write badly for The Little Review. Perfect freedom to be idiotic does not inevitably eliminate idiocy.
But I have no more compliments for The Little Review.
Poetry is another matter. Miss Monroe’s magazine has printed some bad verse. But this is not, as its most envious critics imagine, its distinction. ”

“ The mere imitation, however accurate, of what is in Nature, entitles no man to the sacred name of ‘Artist.’ ... We can, at any time, double the true beauty of an actual landscape by half closing our eyes as we look at it. The naked Senses sometimes see too little—but then always they see too much.” I blush at the necessity of digging up ancient truths, but, my dear friends, read the reviews of Mr. Steele’s novel and you will admit with me the crying need of teaching the American critics the A-B-C of art. ”

“ And he began to think that this was a cruel thing—that a man should be alone when he was dying. Even when a chap was just ill, he wanted someone to take care of him. Once when Anton had been ill of a fever he had been just like a baby, so weak and helpless. He had cried then because the milk that Sasha had brought him had been too hot for his tongue and had burned him. It was silly for a big man to cry, but that was the way you became when you were sick—weak and silly. He had never in his life cried when he was well. When men were well they were never silly. ”

“ There are lines in the new poetry that could come forth, and have their being, only from the inner giant that heretofore has been asleep except in the hearts of the rarest few whose mothers mated with Gods, merely using men for a symbol and the gift of matter.... ”

“ The atmosphere I want to create should be most impersonal, not touched or scarred by the sharpness of modern individualism or personality, but eternally soft and grey; under the soft grey atmosphere you would expect to see the sudden swift emotion of love, pain or joy of life, that may come any moment or may not come at all. ”

“ I am convinced that some at least of the Imagists are not without the secret of this power, and if they will be guided by the vision they gain thereby, to the extent of forgetting their literary erudition, it will transform their conception of poetry. The strict literature at which they aim is not proper poetry. In fact, literary technicians do not, as a rule, write poetry for the simple reason that even if they dream the poet’s dream of reality they at once proceed to smother it under literary form. ”

“ For this country to be dragged into the whirlpool of the world war would be a more unpardonable folly than the puerile Vera Cruz affair. Our entrance into the war would change the actual situation of the fighting powers as much as the solemn declaration of war by the Liliputian San Marino has changed it; in the absence of an army deserving mention we could depend solely upon our navy which would be able to accomplish nothing more than joining in some calm bay the invincible fleet of the Ruler of the Waves and indulge in philosophical watchful waiting. ”