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Ebook has 1027 lines and 73854 words, and 21 pages
Editor: Margaret C. Anderson
THE LITTLE REVIEW
MARGARET C. ANDERSON EDITOR
APRIL, 1914
"The Germ" 1 Rebellion George Soule 3 Man and Superman George Burman Foster 3 Lines for Two Futurists Arthur Davison Ficke 8 A New Winged Victory Margaret C. Anderson 9 Correspondence: Two Views of H. G. Wells 12 Rupert Brooke and Whitman 15 More About "The New Note" 16 Sonnet Sara Teasdale 17 Sonnet Eunice Tietjens 18 The Critics' Critic M. H. P. 18 Women and the Life Struggle Clara E. Laughlin 20 "Change" 24 The Poetry of Alice Meynell Llewellyn Jones 25 An Ancient Radical William L. Chenery 28 Equal Suffrage: The First Real Test Henry Blackman Sell 30 Education of Yesterday and Today William Saphier 31 Some Book Reviews 33 New York Letter George Soule 46 William Butler Yeats to American Poets 47 Letters to the Little Review 49 The Best Sellers 55
THE LITTLE REVIEW Fine Arts Building CHICAGO
.50 a year
THE LITTLE REVIEW
Vol. I
APRIL, 1914
No. 2
"The Germ"
The idea was Dante Gabriel Rossetti's, who was then just twenty-two years old. Thomas Woolner, of the same age, and Holman Hunt and Millais, both somewhere in the neighborhood of twenty, were dragged willingly into the plan. William Michael Rossetti, aged nineteen, was made editor; James Collinson and Frederick George Stephens were added to the four original P. R. B.'s; John Lucas Tupper, Ford Madox Brown, Walter Howell Deverell, William Cave Thomas, John Hancock, and Coventry Patmore were intimately connected with the project; and Christina, then eighteen, offered her poems for publication therein.
Well--the situation demands a philosopher. We might undertake the r?le ourselves, except that we're too near the situation, having just started a magazine with certain high hopes of our own.
When whoso merely hath a little thought Will plainly think the thought which is in him-- Not imaging another's bright or dim, Not mangling with new words what others taught; When whoso speaks, from having either sought Or only found,--will speak, not just to skim A shallow surface with words made and trim, But in that very speech the matter brought: Be not too keen to cry--"So this is all!-- A thing I might myself have thought as well, But would not say it, for it was not worth!" Ask: "Is this truth?" For is it still to tell That be the theme a point or the whole earth, Truth is a circle, perfect, great or small?
Rebellion
GEORGE SOULE
Sing me no song of the wind and rain-- The wind and the rain are better. I'll swing to the road on the gusty plain Without any load, And shatter your fetter.
And when you sing of the strange, bright sea, I'll leave your dark little singing For the plunging shore where foam leaps free And long waves roar And gulls go winging.
Sorrow-dark ladies you've dreamed afar; I stay not to hear their praises. But here is a woman you cannot mar, In life arrayed; Her spirit blazes.
I shall not stiffen and die in your songs, Flatten between your pages, But trample the earth and jostle the throngs, Try out life's worth-- And burst all cages!
Man and Superman
GEORGE BURMAN FOSTER
In his voluptuous vagabondage Rousseau at length halted at Paris, where he managed to worry through some inconstant years. The thing that saved the day for him was the fragment of a pamphlet that blew across his path in one of his rambles, announcing a prize to be awarded by the Academy of Dijon for the best answer to an extraordinary question. Had the renascence of the arts and sciences ennobled morals? That was a flash of lightning which lit up a murky night and helped this bewildered and lonely wanderer to get his bearings. Thoughts came to him demoniacally which shaped his entire future and won him no small place in the history of humanity.
Answer is "No!" said Rousseau. And his answer was awarded the academic prize.
It seems strange that the history of his times sided with Rousseau's "No." Certainly it was the first fiery meteor of the French revolution. It pronounced the first damnatory sentence upon a culture that had already reached the point of collapse. In his own body and soul Rousseau had bitterly experienced the curse of this culture. It was largely responsible for his heart's abnormal yearning whose glow was consuming him. Instead of ennobling morals this culture had inwardly barbarized man. Then it galvanized and painted the outside of life. And then life became a glittering lie.
Thus Rousseau became prophet in this desert of culture, and called men to repentance. "Back from culture to nature," was his radical cry; back from what man has made out of himself to what nature meant him to be. Nature gave man free use of his limbs; culture has bound them with all sorts of bindings, until he is stiff, and short-winded, and crippled. According to nature man lives his own life; man is what he seems and seems what he is; according to culture he is cunning, and crafty, and mendacious.
The eighteenth-century man of culture hearkened with attentive soul to the dirge in which one of its noblest sons vented his tortured heart. The melancholy music bruised from this prophet's heart silenced the wit and ridicule of even a Voltaire, who wanted to know, however, whether "the idea was that man was to go on all fours again." In a few decades the feet of revolutionary Frenchmen were at the door ready, with few and short prayers, to bear to its last abode that culture whose moral worth even a French Academy had called in question, and for whose moral condemnation had awarded the first prize.
Now it is our turn! What is the good of our culture? Such is the query of a host of people who know nothing thereof save the wounds it has inflicted upon them--a host of people who face our culture with the bitter feeling that they have created it with the sweat of their brows, but have not been permitted to taste its joys. Such, too, is the query of others who, satiated with its beneficence, have been its pioneers,--a John Stuart Mill, political economist, who doubts whether all our cultural progress has mitigated the sufferings of a single human being; a Huxley, naturalist, who finds the present condition of the larger part of humanity so intolerable today that, were no way of improvement to be found, he would welcome the collision of boy's tale were from Genoa, they fitted him out with dry clothes and found enough money to keep him in food and shelter.
There he stayed for some time, waiting until some Genoese bark should put into port. Meanwhile he was very much interested in the stories the seafarers of all lands told to people who would listen to them. Again and again he heard mariners wondering whether there might not be a shorter passage to the rich Indies of the East than the long overland route through China. The question interested him, and he took to studying it with care.
One day an old sailor on the beach told him of his voyages in the western ocean, and how once his ship had come so close to the edge of the world that but for the miracle of a sudden change in the wind they must certainly have been carried over the side. The same bearded seaman told Christopher many other curious things; how he had himself seen beautiful pieces of carved wood, cut in some strange fashion, floating on the western sea, and had picked up one day a small boat which seemed to be made of the bark of a tree, but of a pattern none had ever seen before.
Then, and here his voice would sink and his eyes grow large with wonder, he told Christopher how men who were explorers were certain that somewhere in that unsailed western sea, just before one came to the edge, was an island rich in gold and gems and rare, delicious fruits, where men need never work if they chose to stay there, or if they came home might bring such treasures with them as would put to shame the richest princes of all Europe. It was said that there one caught fish already cooked, and that there people of great beauty lived, with dark red skins and wearing feathers in their hair.
"And is no one certain of this?" asked Christopher, his eyes wide with excitement. "Not even the men who have found the African coast and the isle of Flores?"
The old sailor shook his head. "Nay, nay, boy. The wonderful island lies so close to the world's edge that 'tis a perilous thing to try to find it."
"Still," said Christopher, "'twould be well worth the finding, and some time when I'm a man and can win a ship of my own I'm going to make the venture."
But the sailor shook his head. "Better leave the unknown sea to itself, lad," said he. "A whole skin is worth more to a man than all the gold of King Solomon's mines."
"Is it true," asked the boy after a time, "that there are terrible monsters in the Dark Sea?" That was the name given in those days to the ocean that stretched indefinitely to the west. "I've seen pictures of strange creatures on ships' maps, but never saw the like of any of them."
"No, nor would you be likely to, lad," said the sailor, "for such as see those monsters don't come back. But true they are. A great captain told me once that part of the Dark Sea was black as pitch, and that great birds flew over it looking for ships. You've heard of the giant Roc that flies through the air there, so strong that it can pick up the biggest ship that ever sailed in its beak, and carry it to the clouds? There it crushes ship and men in its talons, and drops men's limbs, armor, timber, all that's left, down to the Dark Sea monsters who wait to devour the wreckage in their huge jaws. Ugh, 'tis an ugly thought, and enough to keep any man safe this side the world."
"In some places fair, in some dark," mused Christopher. "It would be worth sailing out there to find which was the truth."
"Where would be the good of finding that if you never came back, boy?"
Christopher shrugged his shoulders. "Just for the fun of finding out, perhaps," he said.
A month later Christopher saw a galley flying the flag of Genoa enter the harbor. When the captain came on shore the boy went to him, and telling him who he was, asked for a chance to go as sailor back to Genoa. The captain knew the boy's father, Domenico Colombo, and gave Christopher a place on the galley. She was sailing north, homeward bound, and a few days later, having safely avoided all hostile ships and storms, the galley came into sight of the beautiful white city in its nest against the hills.
It was a happy day when the young sailor landed and surprised his father and mother by walking in upon them. News of Colombo's defeat by the ship of Naples had come to Genoa, and Christopher's family had given him up as lost.
But narrow as his escape on that voyage had been, such chances were part of the sailor's life in that age, and Christopher was quite ready to take his share of privation and danger with his mates. It was only by weathering such storms that he could ever hope to be put in charge of rich merchantmen or to command his own vessel in his city's defense. So he sailed again soon after, and in a year or two had come to know the Mediterranean Sea as well as the back of his hand.
Captains found he was good at making maps, and paid him to draw them, and when he was on shore he spent all his time studying charts and plans, and soon became so expert that he could support himself by preparing new charts. Yet, in spite of all his study, he found that the maps covered only a small part of the sea, and gave him no knowledge of the waters to the west. There he now began to believe the long-looked-for sea passage to the East Indies must lie.
Christopher grew to manhood, and then a chance shipwreck threw him in Lisbon, the capital of Portugal. The Portuguese were the great sailors of the age, and the young man met many famous captains who were planning trips to the western coast of Africa and about the Cape of Good Hope.
Some of the captains took an interest in the sailor who made such splendid maps and was so eager to go on dangerous exploring trips, and they brought him to the notice of the King of Portugal. One of them, Toscanelli, wrote of the young Christopher's "great and noble desire to pass to where the spices grow," and listened with interest to his plans to reach those rich spice lands by sailing west.
The ideas of Columbus seemed too visionary to most princes, and it was years before he was able to persuade the Spanish sovereigns, Ferdinand and Isabella, to grant him three small ships and enough men to start upon his voyage. But on August 3, 1492, he finally set sail from Palos, in Spain.
All the world knows the history of that great voyage, of the tremendous difficulties that beset Columbus, how his men grew fearful and would have turned back, how he had to change the ship's reckoning as he had seen his cousin change the compass, how he had sometimes to plead with his men and sometimes to threaten them.
In time he found boughs with fresh leaves and berries floating on the sea, and caught the odor of spices from the west. Then he knew he was nearing that magic land of riches sailors dreamt of, and thought he had found the shortest passage to the East Indies and Cathay. That would have been a wonderful discovery, but the one he was actually making was infinitely greater. Instead of a new sea passage he was reaching a new continent, and adding a hemisphere to the known world.
Such was the result of the dreams and ambitions of the boy born and bred in the old seaport of Genoa.
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