47 
Secession, a little journal published by Americans in Vienna, has called itself to 
our attention by firing manifestos and copies of its first issue at us. In the 
manifestos it says that it intends to expose the secret history and private 
correspondence of its American contemporaries, the Dialthe Broom, and the 
Little Review. I have looked over the names of its staff: I remember having sent 
numerous rejection slips to some of them—but correspondence? If they can 
gather in enough of our correspondence they can be assured of one issue with 
some “noise” in it. 
They 
to usher in the new epoch” because they have “noticed many 
things deserving laughter in the present literary game.” Why not join the laugh 
and incidentally the epoch? No one had to tell Scott that he was rediscovering 
the South Pole: he could read the signs. 
In the first number of this rabid sheet is an Expose of the Dial in which this 
spanking editor of the 
U 
guard” arraigns the Dial for having no 
“obligation to homogeneity.” Obligation and reconciliation—are these words 
for laughter or not? His attack on Sherwood Anderson in the same article 
has an acrid scholastic stink. It throws him completely out of any connection 
with his own manifesto. Why make the physical age of the creative artist a 
measurement? Why swipe the time-honoured measure of the rocking-chair 
brigade ? 
I am not rushing to the rescue of the Dial. I don’t even appreciate the Dial. 
It seems to exist very altruistically and unassumingly to indorse in a small way our 
past efforts by publishing the work of the better-natured of our former 
contributors to a larger audience. Otherwise it is a safe, sane and decent 
magazine. 
I shiver with fear at the expose of the Little Review. I cross my fingers.—jh. 
t * 
A 
SHUFFLE ALONG 
(APROPOS THE BALLET INTIME 
AT THE TOWN HALL) 
LL the critics who attended the recent modern jubilee at the Town Hall, 
seemed to be labouring under the thoroughly modern delusion that to 
criticize a new work of Art they must bring all the values of the now 
commonplace mind,—imagination, capacity for aesthetic emotion, homogeneous 
reaction, and the power to say something equal to the thing criticized. This is a 
great mistake, for, like Art, art criticism has been and is progressing. Pure 
psychic experience has been replaced by pathological abandon. An Artist must 
now be judged by the strong maniacal rhythms of his neuroses, by the malefic 
activities of his glands, and by the general acuteness of his moral nostalgia. 
These are the familiar and more or less vulgar terms, and later on in my article 
I will show you, my dear readers, that there is a lofty and spiritual terminology 
for all these exalted and intense conditions of mind.