The Reader Critic
Rev. A. D. R., Chicago:I earnestly request you to discontinue sending your impertinent publication to my daughter who had the folly of undiscriminating youth to fall in the diabolical snare by joining the ungodly family of your subscribers. As for you, haughty young woman, may the Lord have mercy upon your sinful soul! Have you thought of the tremendous evil that your organ brings into American homes, breaking family ties, killing respect for authorities, sowing venomous seeds of Antichrist-Nietzsche-Foster, lauding such inhuman villains as Wilde and Verlaine, crowning with laurels that bloodthirsty Daughter of Babylon, Emma Goldman, and committing similar atrocities? God hear my prayer and turn your wicked heart to repentance.A. Faun, Paris:In one of your issues I read with delight Wilde’s paradox: “There is nothing sane about the worship of beauty. It is entirely too splendid to be sane.” I fear you are getting too sane—you, who some time ago invited us “to watch, in the early morning,a bird with great white wings fly from the edge of the sea straight up into the rose-colored sun.” In my illusion I pictured you enthroned in a tower, high above the street and the crowd, perceiving reality through dim stained glass walls. Alas, there is evidently an accommodating lift that connects your tower with the sidewalk. You have become so sane, so logical, so militant in attacking the obvious.... Oh, Pan and Apollo!A Proletarian:Glad to see your magazine getting more and more revolutionary and courageously attacking the rotten capitalistic order. But why not dot the i’s? Why shrink from discussing economic problems? Why not give us the real dope? Go ahead, we are with you!David Rudin, New York:Permit me to voice a different opinion from that expressed by Charles Ashleigh in his review of Galsworthy’sThe Mob. It is my contention that Mr. Galsworthy has sympathetically and powerfully portrayed the uncompromising idealist, the champion of an unpopular idea in this virile disrobing of the spangled strumpet Patriotism.In these stirring times of destruction to appease insatiable kaisers, czars, kings and the uncrowned masters of despotismThe Mobcomes as an opportune declaration of the minority against war, against invasion, and against “Love of country.”Stephen More, the type of man whose conscience and sense of justice cannot realize that “idealism can be out of place,” makes a brave, aggressive stand against the allied forces of position, friends, love, and the blind hatred of the despicable mob, armed only with an unprejudiced, faithful ideal. Such passion and sincerity of purposesurely should presage victory. The real victory is won at the moment when More dies for his idea at the hands of the very mob that many years later erects a monument to him—and worships. They await the next victim of the crucifix—and it begins again: inflammatory patriotism, destruction, and a chaotic, purposeless Hell on earth.D. G. King, Chicago:Your articleTo The Innermostin the October number is a manly poke at the snug, smug, dead-alive ones, the mollycoddles, the got-in-a-rut-can’t-get-out-without-considerable-effort ones, and others of the won’t-do-and-dare class that this farcical world of ours is plentifully sprinkled with! It’s the best thing I’ve seen yet from your militant pen.
Rev. A. D. R., Chicago:
I earnestly request you to discontinue sending your impertinent publication to my daughter who had the folly of undiscriminating youth to fall in the diabolical snare by joining the ungodly family of your subscribers. As for you, haughty young woman, may the Lord have mercy upon your sinful soul! Have you thought of the tremendous evil that your organ brings into American homes, breaking family ties, killing respect for authorities, sowing venomous seeds of Antichrist-Nietzsche-Foster, lauding such inhuman villains as Wilde and Verlaine, crowning with laurels that bloodthirsty Daughter of Babylon, Emma Goldman, and committing similar atrocities? God hear my prayer and turn your wicked heart to repentance.
A. Faun, Paris:
In one of your issues I read with delight Wilde’s paradox: “There is nothing sane about the worship of beauty. It is entirely too splendid to be sane.” I fear you are getting too sane—you, who some time ago invited us “to watch, in the early morning,a bird with great white wings fly from the edge of the sea straight up into the rose-colored sun.” In my illusion I pictured you enthroned in a tower, high above the street and the crowd, perceiving reality through dim stained glass walls. Alas, there is evidently an accommodating lift that connects your tower with the sidewalk. You have become so sane, so logical, so militant in attacking the obvious.... Oh, Pan and Apollo!
A Proletarian:
Glad to see your magazine getting more and more revolutionary and courageously attacking the rotten capitalistic order. But why not dot the i’s? Why shrink from discussing economic problems? Why not give us the real dope? Go ahead, we are with you!
David Rudin, New York:
Permit me to voice a different opinion from that expressed by Charles Ashleigh in his review of Galsworthy’sThe Mob. It is my contention that Mr. Galsworthy has sympathetically and powerfully portrayed the uncompromising idealist, the champion of an unpopular idea in this virile disrobing of the spangled strumpet Patriotism.
In these stirring times of destruction to appease insatiable kaisers, czars, kings and the uncrowned masters of despotismThe Mobcomes as an opportune declaration of the minority against war, against invasion, and against “Love of country.”
Stephen More, the type of man whose conscience and sense of justice cannot realize that “idealism can be out of place,” makes a brave, aggressive stand against the allied forces of position, friends, love, and the blind hatred of the despicable mob, armed only with an unprejudiced, faithful ideal. Such passion and sincerity of purposesurely should presage victory. The real victory is won at the moment when More dies for his idea at the hands of the very mob that many years later erects a monument to him—and worships. They await the next victim of the crucifix—and it begins again: inflammatory patriotism, destruction, and a chaotic, purposeless Hell on earth.
D. G. King, Chicago:
Your articleTo The Innermostin the October number is a manly poke at the snug, smug, dead-alive ones, the mollycoddles, the got-in-a-rut-can’t-get-out-without-considerable-effort ones, and others of the won’t-do-and-dare class that this farcical world of ours is plentifully sprinkled with! It’s the best thing I’ve seen yet from your militant pen.