The Little Review

“ Because as “sanity” increases in the world The Little Review will strive more and more to be splendidly insane: as editors and lecturers continue to compromise in order to get their public, as book-makers continue to print rot in order to make fortunes, as writers continue to follow the market instead of doing their Work, as the public continues to demand vileness and vulgarity and lies, as the intellectuals continue to miss the root of the trouble, The Little Review will continue to rebel, to tell the truth as we see it, to work for its ideal rather than for a policy. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Last March we began the publication of The Little Review. Now, twelve months later, we face the humiliating—or the encouraging—spectacle of being a magazine whose function is not transparent. People are always asking me what we are really trying to do. We have not set forth a policy; we have not identified ourselves with a point of view, except in so far as we have been quite ridiculously appreciative; we have not expounded a philosophy, except in so far as we have been quite outlandishly anarchistic ”

“ The Little Review means to reflect this attitude toward life and art. Its ambitious aim is to produce criticism of books, music, art, drama, and life that shall be fresh and constructive, and intelligent from the artist’s point of view. For the instinct of the artist to distrust criticism is as well founded as the mother’s toward the sterile woman. More so, perhaps; for all women have some sort of instinct for motherhood, and all critics haven’t an instinct for art. Criticism that is creative—that is our high goal. And criticism is never a merely interpretative function ”

“ 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. ”

“ We have wanted to convince everybody—particularly those who seemed to need it most. And there is nothing more fatal: because what everybody thinks doesn’t matter; what a few think matters tremendously. I was brought up with a shock the other day, at an editors’ “meeting,” when Lucien Cary said that though The Little Review had one of the requisites of the ideal magazine,—youth,—it had the wrong kind of youth: the kind that has not yet caught up instead of the kind that has gone ahead. ”

“ I really don’t think The Little Review is critical at all. It is exuberantly uncritical—enthusiastic about the wrong things. But you will probably get tired of just being enthusiastic after a time, and start in to criticise. I’m sorry I don’t like it better. It has had some good things in it. What I principally object to is your own editorial attitude.
Constance Skinner, New York:
I have just read your first issue and want to send my godspeed to this magazine that feels. I am so sick of callousness and sneers and flippancy. ”

“ Now there are people who complain that within their limited allowance of magazines they are forced to do without The Little Review because it gives them nothing definite, nothing finished, nothing conclusive. But my idea of a magazine which makes any claim to artistic value is that it should be conducted more or less on the lines of good drama, or good fiction; that it should suggest, not conclude; that it should stimulate to thinking rather than dictate thought. Most magazines have efficient editors and definite editorial policies ”

“ And the audience, mostly women (God forgive them!) seemed like school children—no, I will not confound such innocent souls with the inert mass that confronted him! And this is our culture!
I think the spirit of your magazine is to other magazines what Powys is to other lecturers. He makes you forget that he is such. You become part of his theme, or is it, himself? And so it is I seem both to lose and find myself when I read the pages of The Little Review. ”

“ If you are as successful in pleasing women generally as you have been in pleasing her you need have no fear for the success of the magazine.
J. C. P.
New York.
Professor Foster’s essay on The Prophet of a New Culture is magnificent—a soul-searching, heart-breaking bit of writing, fiery and tragic. Nicholas Vachel Lindsay’s How a Little Girl Danced is a delightful thing—airy, high-minded, and full of his burning spirit. In fact, The Little Review is full of things that one reads with a keen zest. ”

“ Literary Journalism in Chicago Lucian Cary
Nothing succeeds like an indiscretion. I was indiscreet enough last winter to speak my mind (a little of it) about The Little Review, The Dial, Poetry, The Drama, and the audience to which these papers appeal. ”

“ Beauty involves too many elements to be championed lightly. Beauty from the aesthete’s point of view and beauty from the artist’s point of view are two widely different things. I might paraphrase Wilde and say that the new Beauty is the new Hellenism. Certainly I want for The Little Review, as I want from life, not merely beauty, not merely happiness, but a quality which proceeds from the intensity with which both beauty and ugliness, pleasure and pain, are present. ”

“ Stanislaw Saukalski will give our soft teeth a chance to crack a hard nut at the Art Institute. The “Lost Tune” will lead the flaming lava of this young volcano. Will the readers of The Little Review send in their impressions of this sculptor’s work? We may print some of them.—L. de B.
When You Buy Books— Won’t readers remember to order their books through the Gotham Book Society? You can get any book you want from them, whether it is listed in their advertisement or not, and The Little Review makes a percentage on the sales. ”

“ Then it is funny how each review wants a different part left out—one the childhood, one the youth, one the experiences of later life: there would be nothing left but the little anecdotes about already well-known people, which they all wish to keep, and, in quoting these, they one and all copy each other; it saves trouble. The Saturday had what the world calls ‘a cruel review’ of the book, but what was really an article of nothing but personal vituperation against its author. ”

“ That is, to be sure, a respectable form of amusement, but there are some of us who would like occasionally to see something else. Perhaps the little theatres, like the little reviews, will become our refuge. ”

“ It is the story of one of those human beings—rare people—who live inner lives of extraordinary intensity. It is radiantly absorbing, to me.
M. C. A.
The Reader Critic
The Editor:
We have had cancellations, congratulations, and a lot of indignant letters about Ben Hecht’s “Dregs.” I print two of them below. As it happens, these stories are among the best things The Little Review has printed. With the exception of some of the poetry and two stories of Sherwood Anderson’s, they may be listed as the only “literature” we have published. Some one has compared them to Gorky. ”

“ The faces are bathed in a human light. A noisy, wholesome din fills the theater. And the little man comes down the road with his calm and solemn face, his sad eyes, his impossible mustache, his ridiculous trousers, and his nervous, spasmodic gait amid the roars and wild elation of idiots, prostitutes, crass, common churls, and empty souls converted suddenly into a natural and mutual simplicity. ”

“ Ellis’s position. A speaker can often suggest far more than she actually utters; the conclusions people are inspired to make for themselves are of far greater value than if they were cast forth with inspired eloquence. To antagonize an audience by forcing your point is to lose efficiency. In print one has not the personal element so strongly and immediately to consider. Perhaps she was subtler than Emma Goldman, but not so much weaker as you think.
The Little Review is the most satisfactory source of mental stimulation I have yet discovered. ”

“ There is the review intended to sell a book,—which comes out immediately after the appearance of the book, or sometimes before it; the review which gives reputation, but does not affect the sale, and which comes a little later; the review which snuffs a book out quietly; the review which is to raise or lower the author a single peg, or two pegs, as the case may be; the review which is suddenly to make an author, and the review which is to crush him. ”

“ If a sense of justice will not permit him to judge the whole by a part, his persistence is tribute only to the undeniable sincerity of aim felt throughout the work. A stronger tribute, of course, is the mere length of this review; the fact, that is, that whatever of critic be in the reading mind is drawn to reiterate questions and puzzle over their answer, as to the reason for the falling short of this novel from the better standards, manifestly striven after. ”

“ 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. ”

“ What should we expect to take place in 'the world' if a clergyman whom we had always seen active in his duty, pure in his life, refined in his habits, were wildly accused of removing from her home and secreting a pretty little coquettish miss, his clerk's niece, on the strength of her having been seen haunting his lodgings, and once conducted home by him after dark, and given by to her guardians with a sharp admonition? ”

“ Pigeon, clinching the milder speech. “But it seems to me,” said poor Vincent, “that a minister can no more be said to get his living off you than any other man. He works hard enough generally for what little he has. And really, Mrs. Tozer, I'd rather not hear all these unfortunate particulars about one of my brethren.” “He ain't one of the brethren now,” broke in the poulterer's wife. “He's been gone out o' Parson's Green this twelvemonths. Them stuck-up ways may do with the Church folks as can't help themselves, but they'll never do with us Dissenters. ”

“ Seeing that we are about to be severe on Young’s failings and failures, we ought, if a reviewer’s space were elastic, to dwell also on his merits—on the startling vigor of his imagery—on the occasional grandeur of his thought—on the piquant force of that grave satire into which his meditations continually run. ”

“ The quiet reader who sometimes lifts his eyes from the page (and closes them perhaps) to meditate upon what he has been reading, will perhaps ask himself wherefore I consider it to be as certain that no small critic should have read the Minute Philosopher, as that children can not be drowned while “sliding on dry ground?”—My reason for so thinking is, that small critics never read any thing so good. ”

“ Simplicity is delightful by way of variety, but always simplicity is worse than toujours perdrix. Children in a novel or a drama are charming little creatures: but in real life they are often insufferable plagues. What becomes of them in Paris I know not; but I am sure that they are never in the way of one's conversations or reveries; and it would be a blessing to society if English children were as inaudible and invisible. ”

“ Some thirty essays, and critical reviews reprinted from various magazines, and about twenty poems, serious, sentimental and satiric, which were written between 1881 and the author’s death in 1903.
“The book intrinsically strikes us as a failure.”
“In treating a writer who pays such attention to the small points of style, and who incidentally sneers at ‘the shallower sort of American scholars,’ an American reviewer feels justified in pointing out minute defects.”
“Among the essays, the best, we think, are those which deal with the technique of literature. ”

“ When a critic who has risen high enough to be allowed to sign his reviews in a daily paper calls a new book "a great human novel," you may be absolutely sure that the said novel consists chiefly of ridiculous twaddle. ”

“ It does not satisfy me, and I wish that the general reader, with whom the fault lies, could be made to say why, if he likes one short story by itself and four short stories in a magazine, he does not like, or will not have, a dozen short stories in a book. ”