[This letter I think will find an echo in the minds of many of our first subscribers. I have several faults to find with its point of view, but one especially: I cannot see why personal qualities such as freshness, spontaneity, enthusiasm, etc., are in any way a guarantee for an interesting or important magazine. Being temperamentally spontaneous, my actions will always be characterized by impulsiveness, etc. But I know that spontaneity will never help me to write an immortal poem. You must keep things in their proper correspondences. I very spontaneously accept the cooperation of a group of writers who can really write. Literature is their medium. Playing the piano is mine. When I play the piano very beautifully to the original _Little Review_ “worshippers” they will know it is not because I am young and fresh and enthusiastic but because I know a great deal about how the piano should be played. I can’t do such things to words. Wyndham Lewis does it in this issue in a passage—“Leonardo’s beauty consisted in a red rain on the shadowed side of heads”.... That is a matter of great prose. And the only reason for a magazine of the Arts to be published is that it shall produce great prose, great poetry, great reproductions of sculpture, painting, and music. We are going to have the latter as soon as possible.—_M. C. A._] Phases of Crazes H. L. C., Chicago: I have just read your circular letter in which you state your aims and set forth your plans for the future. It is the best-written letter of the kind I have ever read. But I don’t like your promises, so I am going to risk your Reader Critic (that at least is always interesting: no one ever seems to be safe from you) and tell you why. I wish you didn’t have such a craze for foreigners and self-exiled Americans. I think you have missed your chance right here in your own country. I am sure there are writers if you would go after them who, if they couldn’t write so well, would on the other hand be writing in a familiar manner about subjects known to us and in so doing be creating a literary tradition of our own. I am tired of these floods of Russian, French, Scandinavian, Irish and Hindoo stuff that have swept the country. The war will probably reduce the importation of foreign books, and I for one think this will be a good thing.... [I should think there might be room in America for one magazine which will print work just because it is good, no matter where it is produced. All we ask in this is to be allowed a choice of crazes. To us is seems that there is an indiscriminate craze in the theatre, in books, in magazines, and even in exhibition rooms, for the American product with all its sins upon it. Let your fears for the contamination or stifling from abroad of American letters be at rest. Congress and the established publisher have attended to all that. Ignorance is protected from invasion far better than the country itself.