THE LITTLE REVIEW A MAGAZINE OF THE ARTS MAKING NO COMPROMISE WITH THE PUBLIC TASTES Margaret Anderson Publisher September, 1917 Inferior Religions Wyndham Lewis L’Homme Moyen Sensuel Ezra Pound Eeldrop and Appleplex, II: T. S. Eliot The Passion for Experience Imaginary Letters, IV: Ezra Pound The Nonsense about Art for the Many The Children and Judas Robert Alden Sanborn The Reader Critic: Yeats’s “Upon a Dying Lady” Gargoyles Phases of Crazes To our Readers Announcement for October Copyright, 1917, by Margaret Anderson. Published Monthly MARGARET ANDERSON, Editor EZRA POUND, Foreign Editor 24 West Sixteenth Street 15 Cents a Copy $1.50 a Year Entered as second-class matter at Postoffice, New York, N. Y. THE LITTLE REVIEW VOL. IV. SEPTEMBER 1917 No. 5 Inferior Religions[1] Wyndham Lewis I To introduce my puppets, and the Wild Body, the generic puppet of all, I must look back to a time when the antics and solemn gambols of these wild children filled me with triumph. The fascinating imbecility of the creaking men-machines, some little restaurant or fishing-boat works, is the subject of these studies. The boat’s tackle and dirty little shell keeps their limbs in a monotonous rhythm of activity. A man gets drunk with his boat as he would with a merry-go-round. Only it is the staid, everyday drunkenness of the normal real. We can all see the ascendance a “carrousel” has on men, driving them into a set narrow intoxication. The wheel at Carisbrooke imposes a set of movements on the donkey inside it, in drawing water from the well, that it is easy to grasp. But in the case of a fishing-boat the variety is so great, the scheme so complex, that it passes as open and untrammeled life. This subtle and wider mechanism merges, for the spectator, in the general variety of Nature. Yet we have in most lives a spectacle as complete as a problem of Euclid. Moran, Bestre and Brobdingnag are essays in a new human mathematic. But they are each simple shapes, little monuments of logic. I should like to compile a book of forty of these propositions, one deriving from and depending on the other.