arce than the preceding Poor Relations; it has satiric por-
traits more than caricatures; and if it is less hilarious it is more entertain-
ing. In the course of time one becomes reconciled to letting Mr Mackenzie
have his head in the hope that he will eventually take the right path again.
THE BLOOD OF THE CONQUERORS, by Harvey Fergusson (12mo, 266 pages;
Knopf: $2.50) begins richly and colourfully; one scents a Hergesheimer.
The early scenes laid in the southwest ; the picture of lazy Latins succumb-
ing to American push; the social antagonisms and the fading customs-
these are vividly projected. But a pretty rag doll, the American society
girl from the effete east, is dangled in the picture, and the author's heroic at-
tempt to make the effigy burn with real passion could have but one result-
a smudge. Mr Fergusson writes smooth and vigorous English; his first
novel is in many ways admirable; let him beware of manikins in his next
-
one.
Lady Luck, by Hugh Wiley (12mo, 223 pages; Knopf: $2.50). Extraor-
dinarily ingenious are these variations on the theme of seven-come-eleven.
The Wildcat is the only picaresque of our moment and Mr Wiley has given
him a vocabulary and an attitude of mind which are exasperating and en-
dearing. Set together as a novel, the series of tales holds up well because
each one has its whirling centre of laughter. Mr Wiley knows how to plant
his big scenes so that one reads unprotestingly through certain excessive
lengths; which, since there is no advertising at the back of the book, might
well have been condensed.
THE OUTSIDER, by Maurice Samuels (12mo, 326 pages; Duffield: $2). This
is interesting both as a first novel of promise and as another contribution to
the literature of the demobilized soldier. The author has a curious trick of
making one sensible of his hero's emotions, without actually engaging those
of the reader. This is the chief fault in a book which is characterized by a
vivid visual sense and a good feeling for dialogue. It furnishes a discom-
fiting commentary upon both the war and the civilization it is vaunted to
have saved.
The Young ENCHANTED, by Hugh Walpole (12mo, 335 pages; Doran : $2)
reveals a competent English novelist inclining towards a school which has
Ernest Poole among its chief exponents on this side of the Atlantic. Mr
Walpole may find the rose-hued glasses restful to the eyes, but one wishes
that-like the pince-nez of his hero—they had been knocked off.


BRIEFER MENTION
217
The Book of Masks, by Remy de Gourmont, translated by Jack Lewis, with
an introduction by Ludwig Lewisohn (12mo, 265 pages; Luce: $2) is a
gracefully translated book of criticisms on the French symbolists which dif-
fers from most books of criticism in that, at the time of its appearance at
least, it dealt almost exclusively with rare or unknown contemporaries.
Since then de Gourmont's choices seem to be mounting one by one to im-
mortality and English translation. His procedure here is to sketch the out-
lines of a man in eight or ten pages, passing judgements on any broader
problems which come up by the way, while the book is especially significant
in its defence of novelty in art. Casanova has written at the head of his
letters to the detestable Faulkircher that “This much is certain: when I
struggle against filth, whether I win or lose I am dirtied”; and de Gour-
mont, perhaps that he may not be dirtied, writes only about those whom he
finds worthy of praise.
:
Peacock's Four AGES OF POETRY: SHELLEY's DeFENCE OF Poetry: Brown-
ING's ESSAY ON SHELLEY, edited by H. F. Brett-Smith (12mo, 112 pages;
Houghton Mifflin : $1.50). This revelant trio of essays is here assembled
in the same book for the first time, and their story, so to speak, is presented
in Mr Brett-Smith's introduction. Certainly compared with the Shelley
work, the one which inspired it, Peacock's Four Ages, has a rather tinsel
quality, and Browning's Essay on Shelley, one imagines, was but the oppor-
tunity to express in prose the poet's admiration of the “eagle's feather.” The
book is “handy” and trim enough, and holds, in the Shelley essay-were it
not trite to say it—the supreme apologia.
SELECTED POEMS AND BALLADS OF Paul Fort, translated by John Strong
Newberry, with an introduction by Ludwig Lewisohn, and an appreciation
by Carl Sandburg (8vo, 179 pages; Duffield: $3.50). A generous culling
from the generous works of one who, had he been an American, would have
become the Prince of Magazine Poets. Fort is a singer in the strictest sense ;
if a neighbouring farmer girl dies, or the harvest is brought in, or the moon
rises, or a book is read, Fort thereupon takes pen in hand, and sings. The
songs are always charming; the subjects are without end. Mr Newberry's
lines now and then get caught in dark and twisted alleys which the glib orig-
inal never thought of—as for instance, the tripping "un coeur grondant,
bientôt coeur muet aussi” becomes the tripped "a heart that grumbles, soon
turned silent utterly"-while "in the moonlight" may become “ 'neath the
silver of the moon”; but as a whole the translation is swift and honest.
Cross-CURRENTS, by Margaret Widdemer (12mo, 112 pages; Harcourt,
Brace: $1.75). Miss Widdemer has chosen a good title for her book. The
current of genuine emotion is continually crossed by the current of con-
formity in expression which pulls the reader unhappily backward. More-
over a woman who can publish in the year of disgrace 1921 a poem ad-
dressed to “The New Victory” and declaring “This stable world itself is
her great monument” is surely at cross purposes with the woman who wrote
This Way to the Strange People. Not that the latter is so wisely, but that
the former so foolishly, written. The book is like an egg without salt-
wholesome and savourless.
-


218
BRIEFER MENTION
The Living Frieze, by Mark Turbyfill (8vo, 83 pages; Monroe Wheeler :
$2). “Oh, I do not want realities !” the poet protests. “Give me their mis-
shapen lovely images And unreached forms." These are what he gives us.
There is a sense of strain perhaps inevitable to such striving. There is, too,
a curious frail beauty. The interest of the book is in what Turbyfill tries
for-his title is eloquent of his effort-rather than in what he actually
achieves. His intensity fails before his desire for delicacy. His imagery
fades before his anxious intellection. The book is less the authentic ges-
ture of the poet than the studied voice of the dancer.
COLLECTED POEMS, by Edward Thomas (12mo, 190 pages ; Thomas Seltzer:
$2.50). The present taste of the English for poetry is still an after-war
one. Tranquillity, a gentle melancholy, interpretation of the most peaceful
side of English life, these are the traits which English critics and editors are
lauding in Edward Thomas's work as in John Freeman's. It is beautiful,
but tired poetry. Edward Thomas himself did not outlive the war, but no
one has better given England's mood than he has in Melancholy.
The GEORGE SAND-GUSTAVE FLAUBERT LETTERS, translated by Aimee Mc-
Kenzie, introduction by Stuart P. Sherman (12mo, 382 pages ; Boni & Liv-
eright: $4). The correspondence of nearly twenty years between these posi-
tive and negative poles of art, ending only with the death of the latter,
George Sand. In Flaubert's letters the customary grumbling is tempered
with a constant tenderness; while George Sand shows up as a very intelli-
gent and lovable woman who happened to write books. Despite the pro-
nounced differences between Sand and Flaubert, the letters as a whole seem
to form a common ground of meeting and bring out few constrasts except
when Madame Sand writes in recommendation of a modus agendi, "Now,
let the wind blow a little over your strings,” or Flaubert scandalizes her
with “I feel an unconquerable repugnance to putting on paper something
from out of my heart." Yet at times the merger is complete, and we find
George Sand writing this Flaubertian sentence: “The question for us artists
is to know if abstinence strengthens us or if it exalts us too much, which
strength would degenerate into weakness.” Both writers are well oriented in
Mr Sherman's introduction, while an index makes the work very valuable
as a handbook.
a
SILHOUETTES OF MY CONTEMPORARIES, by Lyman Abbott (8vo, 361 pages;
Doubleday, Page: $3). The publishers call this a "collection of intimate
sketches of the great—by one of them,” but it is a book of reminiscences of a
world that never existed, except in the minds of earnest, energetic, and very
limited men. Echoes of old battles against old windmills fill the pages, and
the reader looks back almost wistfully to those cocksure days when all the
reformers chronicled here knew exactly what to do to save the world; before
Nietzsche and Shaw and Lenin, all of the scientists and most of the artists,
hopelessly mixed up the difference between right and wrong, threw the com-
pass overboard, lost the soundings, and generally changed the universe
from a well-ordered suburban back-yard into an uncharted and somewhat
baffling wilderness.


BRIEFER MENTION
219
REMINISCENCES OF ANTON Chekhov, by Maxim Gorky, Alexander Kuprin,
and I. A. Bunin (12mo, 110 pages; Huebsch: $1.50). This volume turns
a flash-light upon obscure nooks and crannies of Chekhov's life and person-
ality. Though it illumines his character only partially and by fitful spurts,
yet it gives us vivid glimpses of the man in his more human aspects. The
sketches are too brief and too discursive; they deal with incidents that are
too trivial and commonplace; yet their combined effect is to make Chekhov
as real as a skilfully portrayed character of fiction.
RooseveLT IN THE BAD LANDS, by Hermann Hagedorn (illus., 8vo, 491
pages; Houghton Mifflin : $5) adds another strong link to the apparently
endless chain. It is a publication of the Roosevelt Memorial Association-
a sumptuous and bulky tome, redeemed by agile contents. In its pages
Roosevelt sublimates his Daniel Boone complex, pursuing a lively libido-
and other big game-across the plains. Mr Hagedorn has composed a
sinewy narrative of credible actuality-manifestly a labour of love.
A LONDON Mosaic, text by W. L. George, pictures by Philippe Forbes-Rob-
ertson (8vo, 133 pages; Stokes: $4) is not a "passionate Baedeker”; it is
high-class, somewhat cynical journalism concerned with things in London
and things suggested by these things, and so on. Mr Forbes Robertson's
-
pictures are highly stylized and entertaining.
LONDON River, by H. M. Tomlinson (8vo, 251 pages; Knopf: $2.50) dis-
closes the life of the foreshore of London, a district whence, undoubtedly,
Conrad and McFee sign up the crews of all their ships. Tomlinson gives
us the lives of these men ashore, in taverns and homely shops and kitchens
where they spin their yarns of old sailing fleets and Yankee clippers out of
Boston. The prose style is rhythmical, quietly filled with an imagery which
makes the reader feel that “all his tides set seaward.”
AN ONLOOKER IN FRANCE 1917-1919, by Sir William Orpen, R.A. (large 8vo,
123 pages; 96 plates; Williams & Norgate, London) is as unassuming a
record as those of commanding officers are supposed to be and seldom are.
There are touches of war, some exceedingly effective; for the most part Sir
William has told of his own affairs as a painter at the front, and the show-
ing up of the brass hat has not been much better done. The continuation of
his service into the time of the Paris Conference, gave him golden oppor-
tunities for sketches and encounters; they are equally striking, equally amus-
ing, and equally smart, with an infrequent presentation of emotion simply
and eloquently uttered. The book is exceptionally well made.
The Pacific TRIANGLE, by Sydney Greenbie (illus., 8vo, 402 pages; Cen-
tury: $4) allows the reader to "sit in” on the problems of the Orient very
pleasantly; the tangle is viewed with the comfort and detachment appro-
priate to a Burton Holmes' travelogue or one of Stoddard's lectures. The
descriptive chapters, amply illustrated, combine fact and observation with
anecdote; the conclusions drawn from these elements, however, are for the
most part generalizations which take many things—the inner motives of
political governments, for example—too much for granted.


220
BRIEFER MENTION
:
a
MYSTERIOUS JAPAN, by Julian Street (illus., 8vo, 347 pages; Doubleday,
Page: $4). The astonishing thing about Julian Street is that having wan-
dered all about the world for a mumber of years, and having moved in every
sort of circle, high and low, he yet so meticulously preserves the exact point-
of-view of the perfect suburbanite, the scrupulous commuter. He is cur-
ious about the same things, funny about the same things, facetious in the
same fashion, in fact employs the same quips which have made delightful
for some years the matutinal conclave on Long Island station platforms.
However, as he reminds us off and on, he takes voluminous notes and asks
many questions, so many that one suspects at times he has been made mock
of by some ironically inclined, and he sets down observations and replies
in his most brisk journalese.
The Russian Workers' REPUBLIC, by Henry Noel Brailsford (12mo, 274
pages; Harpers : $2.50) is the best informed account that has yet been writ-
ten of the creative forces set free by the Russian Revolution. It is a record
of the struggles, triumphs, and failures of the Communist régime. It tells
the story of a magnificent attempt to adapt modern methods of production
to a greater measure of human happiness. Mr Brailsford is not blind to
the dark aspects of the Communist régime: to the economic collapse, the
starvation, and the iron rule of a fanatical few, but he does deny that the
Communist dictatorship is based solely on terror. He sees in the Commun-
ists “the lever, the active, nervous, conscious element in the sluggish Rus-
sian body." The Communists stand, Mr Brailsford says, "for rationalism,
for an intelligent system of cultivation, for education, and for an active
ideal of co-operation and social service, against superstition, waste, illiter-
acy, and passive sloth.” This book is the result of a two months' sojourn
in Russia during the autumn and winter of last year. Mr Brailsford ap-
proaches his task equipped with a profound knowledge of economic history,
a speaking knowledge of the Russian language, and a background of Rus-
sian conditions gained through a study of both the old and new régimes.
The RUSSIAN BOLSHEVIK REVOLUTION, by Edward Alsworth Ross (12mo,
302 pages; Century: $3.00) is an unbiased historical account of the events
which transpired in Russia between the overthrow of the Czar in March
1917, and the inauguration of the Bolshevik régime in November 1917. No
attempt is made to interpret events or to make out a case for either side. The
significant facts are set forth and the reader is invited to draw his own con-
clusions. Professor Ross possesses a gift for vivid narration and a keen
appreciation for historical values.
THE PROBLEM OF FOREIGN POLICY, by Gilbert Murray (12mo, 155 pages;
Houghton Mifflin : $1.50) is the work of one of the leading British advo-
cates of the League of Nations. It appears to have been written with an
anxious desire to be fair and dispassionate, and it is regrettable that with
an evident ability to understand and to illuminate, Professor Murray has
chosen to write so sketchily. His statement of the blunderings and in-
justices of post-war statecraft is undeniably unbiased. But the book con-
siders adequately only one phase of the international dilemma, and that is
the relation between France and Germany in its effect upon Europe.


MODERN ART
THE
(HE cases of Herman Melville, writer, and Thomas Eakins,
painter, have enough in common to make one at least think
about the vagaries of fame. Both Melville and Eakins, after doing
important work, died unconsidered deaths. The wraith of Melville
floated again into public notice on the same wave of popular South
Sea fiction that restored us Gauguin. It would be pleasant to think
that the merit of Gauguin's work and the merit of Herman Mel-
ville's work brought them fame, but merit had little to do with it.
Both had it, of course, but something more than merit is required.
Fame waits upon a happy combination of circumstance. Fame waits
till the sign is right. The critics who are now lashing themselves
into ecstasies over Moby Dick are the very fellows that Samuel But-
ler laughed at in life for the posthumous adulation they were to
lavish upon his wit, but since posthumous adulation is the only
sort, most people agree, that is unharmful to great artists, no par-
ticular damage is done, and there is no occasion for any one to be
peeved. On the contrary we can all rejoice together over Moby Dick
and the apparent permanency of the fame that has now come to this
sublime work. I say "apparent” since the author was famous once
before, and the sly contrast of fame and honour made by the wicked
Schopenhauer, "Fame once acquired is an easy thing to keep but
honour which all of us are supposed to start with, must merely not
be lost,” scarcely seems to apply. Schopenhauer would have urged,
doubtless, had the Melville affair happened in his day, that the first
little flirtation with fame was not the real thing. Let us hope that
this second one is.
What came to Herman Melville by accident has not yet come to
Thomas Eakins. For him the happy accident has not arrived. He
is still dead as far as the careless public is concerned and quite dead
to his fellow craftsmen. That his time will come is inevitable and
because of certain murmurs that may be heard in an ear that is held
close to the ground I do not think the time afar off. The merit of
the work is obvious, as obvious as was that of Typee or Omoo, but
as I said before, merit is not enough. Eakins has been cried up. He
has even been admired by some in high places. But no amount of


222
MODERN ART
exhortation can sway a panic and the movement of the masses away
from formalist art at the time of Eakins' death was a veritable
panic. All the gods went to smash and the earth, shortly after, fol-
lowed suit. An observer from Mars might have noticed a portent
in the arts of 1913 of what was to happen. Now that it has hap-
pened we can all see the connexion. The new French ambassador
to the Vatican goes there, it is said, not for reasons of piety, but be-
cause it is such a good place to hear news. Had there been a French
ambassador listening in the Vatican in 1913, it is hinted in all seri-
ousness, there would have been no world war, for all the nasty Ger-
man ideas could have been strangled at birth. How much simpler
it would be, for reasons of public safety, to have a war-expert keep
an eye on what our painters are doing. One might not believe one's
ears in the Vatican, but there's no denying what one's eyes do see
in the actual painted record and one gets it so much sooner. It was
certainly all there in the canvases of Derain and Picasso long before
the shootings at Sarajevo touched it off in nature. It's one reason,
if only one, that Picasso and Derain must be important for future
ages.
Now in Paris in the ateliers they are talking of something that
has not yet reached the Vatican-le retour à Ingres. It's something
to make sceptics laugh, especially when they call it a "retour" and
more especially when the retour is headed by Pablo Picasso, but it
has been notoriously evident for some time that the sheep who flock
in "movements” have been pining for a new direction and if they
can be rescued in even a semblance of order from the impasse Dada
the betting is at least even that they may be swayed towards the re-
tour. The fact that the vast majority of the sheep will get no near-
er to Ingres than Bouguereau is immaterial. Even a retour à Boula
guereau will help our Thomas Eakins. A wild mass of Bouguereaus
let loose upon a community teach broadcast the value of Ingres, and
Thomas Eakins is our American Ingres.
The weak spot in this retour" is that so much talk precedes the
action. Serious schools of art seldom are generated in the shop win-
dows of the boulevards. In fact I have never known one that was.
And decidedly they are not generated by the actors already in vogue.
Usually they are a protest to just those actors and grow to patron-
age
in dark and devious and unheralded ways.
As I write, word reaches me of a decision that may affect the


HENRY MCBRIDE
223
Eakins horoscope somewhat. Mrs Eakins wishes, it is said, to dis-
pose of her husband's paintings during her lifetime, to place them
effectively in the museums of the land. As a matter of fact it has
been this sequestration of the Eakins paintings in the Eakins home,
combined of course with the Eakins independence of money, that
has conspired to defeat the activities of the speculators, most of
whom, in the ordinary course of events, would have been willing
agents in “placing” him. Had long ago the Eakins collection been
sold at auction the Eakins fame had been better served. Amateurs
are presumed to buy works of art for the love of them but keen ob-
servers of the auctions have noticed that the various owners of an
artist's work unconsciously form committees for its exploitation-
and for the vindication of their own tastes.
SPEAKING of auctions, one is to occur on January 29th and 30th
that is sure to make history. It's the Kelekian Collection, one of
the best collections of French art that has come to America. It be-
gan to be famous instantly upon its arrival and though it was kept
hidden according to the best Fifth Avenue traditions—for Mr Kel-
ekian's first thought was to sell his collection en bloc and in America
the great millionaires who buy things en bloc are not much teinpted
by the objects that the public has access to—its varied attractions
soon became known. A connoisseur who is noted for his conserva-
tism said: "I never thought the time would come when I should like
a Matisse, but I must confess the one in the Kelekian Collection is
beautiful.” That remark sent me to the rooms where the pictures
were stored. I had been impatient for the type of Matisse that
would convert conservatives to arrive in this country, for hitherto
our importers had selected their Matisses with a view to shocking
the bourgeoisie. I found not one, but several blooming Matisses in
the Kelekian Collection—using the word of course in its American
sense. They were all my conservative friend had said they were.
Not only that, but the Renoirs, the Derains (seventeen of them)
the Degas (ten) the Picassos, the Seurats, the Signac, the Toul-
ouse-Lautrec, the Utrillo, Vlaminck, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Guil-
laumin, Guys, and Ingres, constituted the first worthy collection of
modern French art that I had seen in America. The millionaire, I
thought, who would buy these things en bloc from Mr Kelekian,
should have a happy lot. But it appears that our millionaire—I


224
MODERN ART
speak of him as one, for though, it is true, we have millionaires all
over the place, there is only one in these sad days who continues to
spend huge sums upon art-our millionaire, it appears, refuses to be
happy. Perhaps he became piqued, when Mr Kelekian, becoming
impatient or, from a dealer's point of view, careless, lent some of
his choicest morsels to the museums temporarily. At any rate now
we are to have the sale.
The local production continues to have a pallid air. “No great
poet ever existed on such slender revenues of thought," exclaimed
“B. V.” Thomson, thinking of Lord Tennyson. I wonder what he
would have said of the present strain of American artists. Whether
Sargent's work can be classed as a local product I have my doubts,
but at any rate, since the last chapter, some water-colours of his have
been seen at Scott and Fowles, recent paintings of George Bellows
have appeared in the Montross Galleries, family-owned paintings
by the late Abbott Thayer have been shown by Milch, Russell
Cheney made his debut at Babcock's as a landscapist, and the two
Water Colour Societies joining in one, fill the Fifty-Seventh Street
Galleries to overflowing. In this list, slight enough in all conscience
when one considers the long list of galleries and the long list of art-
ists who have "their livings to make” like the young ladies with the
white silk stockings in The Way of All Flesh, there is nothing that
suggests a theme. Mr Cheney made a commendable début with
straightforward, honest, old-fashioned landscapes, Mr Bellows intro-
duced us to another lot of old lady portraits the hands in which had
worried him dreadfully to do, the Thayer show was a little prelim-
inary to the memorial exhibition that occurs later at the Metropoli-
tan and suggested nothing more than that Thayer's real tragedy
consisted in being a cubist before his time. But the Combined Water
Colour Show was the prize Tennysonian item on the calendar. It
was absolutely undisturbing and the public peace was not shattered
necessary good may be accomplished by two shows
that are announced. John Marin challenges fate once more with a
collection of water-colour drawings, said to be more complete and
formidable than any he has yet shown, at Montross', and Carl
Sprinchorn's rhythmical compositions are to adorn Mrs Albert
Sterner's Gallery.
HENRY MCBRIDE
in
any way. This


MUSICAL CHRONICLE
TQUE
HE music of the late Camille Saint-Saëns has something of the
quality of an official music to the Third Republic. Elegant,
frosty, ironic, it nevertheless savours in some strange way of the offi-
cial art. Where the academically brushed portraits of Presidents
are exposed on the walls of galleried Versailles; where, above the
panel-work of public buildings classic-garmented Peace, Justice,
and Fraternity gracefully bear sheaves of corn, scales, and infants,
after the manner of the school of the Beaux Arts, there are its cous-
ins. We in this land do not readily recognize in this urbanity and
lightness the imprint of official-mindedness. We are more used to
a hippopotamus, a Nicholas Murray Butler, quality, in the intelli-
gences of our "friends of order.” Doubtless, Saint-Saëns would
have been most displeased had any one pointed out to him the affin-
ity between his work and that of the academical painters of France,
of the academical authorities in America. It would not have been
until there had re-entered his mind the haunting thought that the
criticism was inspired by German jealousy of his achievement, that
he would have found any consolation. He conceived of himself,
most indubitably, as Voltairean and disabused, a ray of French
clarity, reason, and irony incorporated. He loved smooth and ele-
gant effects in his music. He was a man of the world even in his
rhythms. At moments, particularly at those moments when he was
not engaged in engineering an opera of his composition on to the
stage of the Théâtre National de la Musique, he was informed by
a sense of the futility of human effort, and doubtless thought of
himself as a new ecclesiast. Such a one would scarcely have been
deceived by the pretended urbanities of our academic Castigliones,
would have viewed without enthusiasm the whiskers of Professor
Brander Matthews; have perceived in Mr Paul Elmer More the im-
perfect clubman; seen in Professor Irving Babbitt the presbyterian
minister manqué. And still, despite sparkle and Candidian disil-
lusionment, his was essentially the official mind; and the minds of
those in every country who fear growth and departure are only su-
perficially dissimilar.
The immense body of work left behind him by the indefatigable


226
MUSICAL CHRONICLE
a
little trotter was the outcome of a sincere orientation in musical
composition checked by an apparent terror of untrodden mental
paths. Side by side with Saint-Saëns, there lived and laboured
aplenty professors whose orientation was not of any intensity; we
would never find ourselves mistaking their dull work for his agree-
able and oftentimes amusing music. Saint-Saëns managed to write
much that remains pleasing to the ear; his surfaces have at times a
light if not very profound charm; a sort of cold and fresco-like love-
liness communicates itself through his marmoreal melodies, his
snappy rhythms and sugared piano embroidery. A living impulse
was somewhere in him. Will alone did not drive him. Young at
a time when ignorance of musical culture was an almost universal
trait in French musicians, he educated himself, studied the master-
works of the symphonists, studied the contrapuntalists, became
fluent after a fashion in the severer forms of music, edited Rameau,
understood the reforms of Liszt well enough to create a Gallic
equivalent for the garden-musical poems of the Magyar. While
the men among whom he grew, Gounod, Massenet, and Bruneau,
clung to the opera as a medium of expression, Saint-Saëns was
drawn to the forms in which music expresses itself absolutely. In
the latter years of the Second Empire, in the first years of the Third
Republic, in the shadow of Garnier's copper-roofed opera house, he,
at least, was wearing, in all sincerity, the sleave of symphonic music.
And if the impulse that was to create a vital French music pro-
ceeded more directly from the labours of the Belgian César Franck
than from his own, there can be no doubt that not only Lalo and
Chabrier, but the impressionists and d'Indy as well, would have
found themselves faced with an even less cultivated public than
that which received their compositions, had the lubricating influence
of the classicizing Saint-Saëns never been in play.
Unfortunately, together with the sincere impulse to make music,
there appears to have existed in the composer an equally sincere sen-
timent of the guiltiness of his emotions. His practice as symphonist
demonstrates some need in him of discovering in recognized au-
thority, in the accepted masterworks of the past, a sanction for his
every feeling. The new, the untested and the untried, appears to
have filled him with dark dread. The successful and solid works of
the in consequence of the timorousness, came to appear to him
not so much the purely personal expressions of the men who shaped
past, in


PAUL ROSENFELD
227
them, and of the times in which they were made, but as the mani-
festation of some absolute, some immutable, some heaven-ordained
beauty. Of this beauty by divine law established Saint-Saëns ap-
pears to have coveted all his days the protection, the corroboration,
the benediction. Whatever in himself threatened to infringe upon
its "rules” he regarded as “indecorous”; he would never, never, have
permitted himself, no matter how patently they appeared to him the
outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual triviality, a
reference to the whiskers of any one: not even musically. For, pre-
cisely as the academic painter, abhorring his feelings, sees whenever
he walks abroad the pictures of his predecessors in trees and road-
ways and housewalls, and thinks he is perceiving "beauty,” so, too,
Saint-Saëns, whenever he took to composing his ideas, began to hear
variations of classical music, and took what he heard for a mani-
festation of the absolute loveliness that had, he thought, previously
incarnated itself in Mozart and Mendelssohn. In the unceasing
business of correcting his emotions, he came to give in his art not
himself, but a pale and Frenchified simulacrum of the masters his
predecessors.
Is that not precisely what Gounod intended to say when he
uttered his famous pronouncement "Saint-Saëns can write you at
will an opera in the style of Wagner or of Verdi; a symphony in the
style of Mozart or of Schumann”? There was in Saint-Saëns al-
ways a good deal of the virtuoso amusing himself with the imita-
tion of various styles of composition. One of his piano-concerti
commences in a severe, contrapuntal, and Bach-like manner; later,
a skirt dance not worthy even of Offenbach appears. He assimi-
lated at other times the styles of Wagner, and Berlioz and Haendel,
of Lulli and Rameau and Byrd. His Symphonie avec Orgue is
based on the prose of the Dies Irae. Moreover, he was all the time
exposing himself to exotic influence, attempting to use unusual
material for his work. The list of his compositions includes
Egyptian concerti, Algerian suites, Breton and Auvergnian rhapso-
dies, Persian songs, Biblical oratorios, African fantasies, Chinese
operettas, Portuguese barcarolles, Danish, Russian, and Arabian
caprices, Greek tragedies, Shakesperean dance-music, preludes and
fugues of the eighteenth century. But for all this welter of colour,
the works remain frigid and without profile. Nothing the composer
wrote is without distinction; but little is warm and personal and


228
MUSICAL CHRONICLE
moving. As a flippant young critic once put it “M Camille Saint-
Saëns is less a personality than he is an impersonality.” His music
seems a bewildering and slightly glaciated echo of Mendelssohn;
and Mendelssohn himself was a good deal of an echo, a Saint-Saëns
of the fiery 'thirties. For both men were concerned with making
their feelings conform, guarding against their natural impulsions.
And feeling is after all the carrier of personality and of life.
Like the utterances of the academicians, the music of Saint-Saëns
subtly bids experimentation desist. Superficially, of course, the art
of this musician, so airy and dilettantishly brilliant, has little affair
with the French State. Saint-Saëns composed neither an ode to
Reason, a tone-poem on the battle of Valmy, nor a tri-partite sym-
phony entitled Liberty, Equality, Fraternity. But, essentially, his
work is inspired by the spirit that serves well the powers of state.
With disarming lightness, but with no little cynicism, it insinuates
abnegation of personality. Contours bid evolution desist. Forms
suggest deification of past experience, disdain of the unaccepted, the
untried, the unborn. You stand chilled and disturbed, doubtful of
your own convictions, unsure of your own desires, belittled and
wearied, quite as though you were assisting at a ceremony over
which President Nicholas Murray Butler presided. This music,
too, makes the power of feeling in you, the unborn worlds to which
it performs midwifery, appear the black devil. So it assists mate-
rially the powers of state that are eager to lull the unsatisfied sense
of justice, the unsatisfied sense of truth, the unsatisfied need of crea-
tion in men; eager to smother all revolutionary impulse of any sort,
and thus preserve themselves in complete power. And, although
the government in France could scarcely employ the composer, as it
does employ the academical painters, to reinforce its worship by
representations on the walls of public buildings, it nevertheless
found his powers serviceable in many instances. Musicians of the
sort of Saint-Saëns lend themselves readily for use as pawns in the
diplomatic play. Their inappeasable desire for acceptance at the
hands of the powerful ones of this world leads continually into the
circles which Foreign Offices are eager to flatter. They bring in the
guise of music the homage of officialdom. The honours bestowed
upon them are indeed bestowed through them at the officialdom
they informally represent. So it happened that just at the time
when French politicians were hatching the Franco-Russian alliance,


PAUL ROSENFELD
229
M Saint-Saëns et Dalilah, as he was boulevardesquely dubbed,
played before the court in Petersburg, and, with the extreme deli-
cacy which always characterized his inspirations, offered to the
Czarina, a princess of Denmark, a fantasy for piano on Russian
and Danish themes. Again, when the Entente Cordiale was brew-
ing, the same urbane M Camille was much lionized by British
royalty, played at Windsor, and at the palace of the Duchess of
Connaught. And, at one of the intervals when the ministers of the
Kaiser were striving for conciliation with France, they knew no
simpler fashion in which to bow to the irate lady than to invite the
venerable pére Saint-Saëns to Berlin, and there shower the old thing
with laurel wreathes.
And yet, mirabile dictu, the life of this man was not an entirely
unbroken triumph. It must have been very irritating to him to find
the absolute, to which he was so pathetically faithful, not at all
faithful to him. For although his entire spiritual existence was a
censer swung distinguishedly before the power of the present, the
present did not reward its votary as liberally as it might have been
expected to have done. In the days when he represented, as opposed
to his competitors, musical culture, he found it difficult to force
doors; later, when he stood for academic tradition as opposed to the
free creative impulse bequeathed France by César Franck, he found
them equally difficult to open. The last decades of his life saw him
obliged to maintain himself by playing many disgraceful rôles in
musical politics. He, who had learned most from Germany, played
the chauvinist even more continuously than did d'Indy. He re-
signed from the Société Nationale de la Musique rather than permit
it to perform German and Russian music. Still, not even these ma-
noeuvres availed. He had long since commenced to bore the time
which saw him live.
One cannot expect the time to come to be interested in him suffi-
ciently to become bored. For men are drawn back always to those
things alone that brought their world into being. It is the musi-
cians who feel and therefore create the future that remain through-
out the centuries modern. M Camille Saint-Saëns, however, wrote
mountainously and added not an iota to musical art. Something
had chosen in him between life and death; and we are not displeased
to see his work go towards the reward which its author so richly de-
served of men.
PAUL ROSENFELD


THE THEATRE
WER
I
ERE it not for the production of The S. S. Tenacity it
would be a very easy matter to confine what I have to say
about the current theatre to a discussion of the art of acting. But
this play, which is the work of Charles Vildrac and has been excel-
lently translated and presented, has had a curious reception here.
One critic vainly searched through his records of the season for a
play so dull (and so bawdy) as to justify this one; another seemed
equally impressed by the play's loveliness and by its sympathetic
treatment of the French proletarian; and quite a number of young
men of the most diverse affections have found themselves linked to-
gether to make the way of the producer not too hard. The plot of
the play is, I know, incredibly slender, and Mr George Gaul quite
failed to make specific the contrast in character which adds point
and irony to the little plot there is; but Mr Augustin Duncan as pro-
ducer managed to have the play entirely in the right tone, a thing
which even Liliom had failed to accomplish, and the gentle delicacy
of the play was so saved as to be exquisite. Mr Duncan himself
played Hidoux, the precise French counterpart of Doolittle, Liza's
father, in PYGMALION, and made me wonder why he had been wast-
ing his years with St John Ferguson. I do not expect a play of great
poetic beauty without a sensational interest to crowd its theatre;
but it is nice to expect a consistently intelligent appreciation of it
from a sufficient number of people.
>
I have to say about acting only one thing, in itself so simple that
I would not dare to say it were it not for these two things: that no
producer at the present moment seems to know it in the sense of
using it as a basis of his productions; and that I have seen one actor
who seems to know it so thoroughly and to work such miracles with
it as to make everything else in his miraculous equipment seem ad-
ded to him. The actor is Feodor Chaliapine and I do not aspire to
describe his genius in any way. I know only that the one over-
whelming emotion I have ever experienced in front of a stage was
given to me by the only actor who never for one moment acted di-
rectly upon his audience.
This has almost nothing to do with "being conscious of the audi-


THE THEATRE
231
ence.” I mean that the effect of every emotion of the Czar Boris
was transmitted to the men and women who surrounded him on
the stage; and I know, with some certainty, that Mr Chaliapine so
worked upon them that they were compelled to show the effect and
so transmit it to us. Let me take the simplest and silliest case of all.
In nearly every contemporary play it is thought necessary for senti-
mental love (less frequently, desire) to be expressed and believed
in. The object of nearly every producer is to make the audience par-
ticipate emotionally in this episode, to fall in love with the hero or
the heroine-hence the "types.” It is true that when I fall in love
I
with a young woman on the stage I feel some sympathy with the
feckless hero who is supposed to be doing the same. But that is my
own affair, and the affair of the playwright and producer is that I
should understand not my own emotions, but those of the people on
the stage. And Mr Chaliapine has convinced me that the only way
that is possible is for these emotions to be presented indirectly. He
drove the point home by the terrible scene in which, alone on the
stage, he terrified his audience not by making them share in his tor-
tured vision, but by showing the effect of them upon himself, and in
the last moment, when the ghost has vanished and the Czar only
recalls his own agony, he seemed to shudder because he could no
longer bear to think of what he had been compelled to suffer.
I have been interested in Mr Arthur Hopkins' productions for a
long time and have failed to identify their weakness. It is, of course,
that the method of sub-realism, carried to his extreme, prevents
the
actor from assaulting the audience (so much gained, at any rate)
but often does not allow of the indirect presentation of emotion. It
is extraordinary that the second act of The IDLE INN should do this
almost to perfection, the crowd being the mirror for the principals,
and that the rest of it should fail. I hasten to say that I saw Mr
Ben-Ami within a week after seeing Mr Chaliapine and that the ef-
fect of seeing him as Boris is to obliterate all other acting from
memory and to make it virtually impossible for any other actor to
be given his due. But I found him continually trying to deliver his
blows directly, and continually failing.
I am compelled, therefore, to vary my formula. It may not be
necessary to destroy the audience; it is necessary to destroy the audi-
ence as an impressionable object existing in the minds of the actors.
Our actors must learn to love one another.
G. S.
a


COMMENT
“... if one is intense (and it's the only thing for an artist to
be) one should be economically, that is carelessly and cynically
so; in that way one limits the conditions and tangles of one's
problem.”
- FROM THE LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES
IT.
T has become plain enough that the anti-Puritan literary move-
ment is far less a reformation than a counter-reformation. Under
its auspices Cotton Mather has come back like a king to earth, and if
Henry Ward Beecher has been turned out, it is for moral looseness.
Mr Frank has sung the national shame in the metres of Jules Ro-
mains and Jeremiah. Mr Brooks has applied the method of Taine
and the vocabulary of Dr Brill. Poe, Emerson, and Hawthorne
have been called "thin." At their expense old codgers like Whit-
man and Papa James have been exalted, and the passages from those
old codgers most admired have been those precisely in which they
wrote most like old women.
Messiahs, prophets, impossible white hopes have been invoked;
invidious comparisons with second rate but "spiritual” Scandinavi-
ans have been drawn and redrawn. Everything that happens here is
described in terms of martyrdoms, ordeals, atonements, betrayals,
layings hold on and burrowings into life, art, the soil, the soul.
Things that looked vigorous and easy out west have turned peni-
tential in New York. Excellent critics interpret the careless drive
of Mr Anderson's prose as the bi-product of a bloody sweat. In the
words of Miss Heap: "Why all the talk about struggle, Sherwood?"
The Devil shall have his due from us for once. A rapid glance
over the elements in American life which encourage and those which
destroy the creative life has persuaded us that we have been un-
just to the great machinery of publication. We have said bitter-
ly that the artist and the critic had to fight the vested interest in
established reputations and the great organs of publicity which can
always make popular masterpieces out of second-rate work. The
mere piling up of editions, the cost of production, the habit of ad-
vertising, all seemed to us dangerous because the one thing they do
not require is greatness. We are still doubtful of the
pure
benefi-


COMMENT
233
cence of these agencies; but we know they have the quality of their
defect. If everything else in America goes—there are moments when
nothing seems more likely—the artist will still have a chance be-
cause of the enormous capital invested in the production of inferior
work.
Let us consider books only. The same houses which put forth and
create, in their sense, the ersatz-chefs-d'oeuvre (a name we find suit-
able in spite of its ugliness) which consistently debase our taste and
deceive whatever hunger we have for authentic works of the crea-
tive genius, themselves issue accepted masterpieces and, on occa-
sions, bring out fairly good books. Furthermore, publishing, like
politics, has its lunatic fringe; fond idealists and illiterate specula-
tors both fancy that the thing can be pulled off; and as the worst
writers eventually gravitate into the orbit of the greatest houses,
these smaller gentry, with presses to be fed, have to content them-
selves with better ones.
We must remember that the first care of investment is to protect
and to perpetuate itself. Yet the capitalist system is sometimes
amazingly adaptable, and if people should ever stop buying books
the investors would find something else to do with their machinery.
There will always be time-tables and there will always be literature!
It is quite possible that everything between these two responses to
civilized human needs will perish. Perhaps the moving picture will
accomplish it. Certainly the universal habit of reading trash, which
is not more than a few centuries old, cannot be counted as a fixed
quantity in our speculations. And the moment that habit is broken
down, the artist in letters will be the only source (apart from time-
tables) upon which the presses will have to draw. At last the career
will be open to the talent—if the talent survives that long.
There have no doubt been other ages in which sensitive men felt
that the world had come to a full stop and that posterity, if the
habit of procreation continued, would have nothing in common with
themselves. That is a normal post-war attitude; three years after
the armistice, with no sign of a spiritual revolution, one returns to
what is called sanity. One realizes that life will go on and with life
the possibility of a change in it favourable to creative artists. In
spite of many things the acquisitive society, which in America either
gets or gets-there, has lost in prestige. It has been clever enough in
its decline to discredit a revival of the creative life by the simple ex-
a


234
COMMENT
pedient of inoculation: spiritualism has cut under the life of the
spirit. But there is still a chance.
It will come to nothing if we have no great men; it may come to
nothing if we have great men and no fragment of society to meet
them. They will add to Europe what Europe seems, at this dis-
tance, to be ready to welcome. While one waits, the critic has his
golden opportunity.
Mr Brooks has frankly held our older critics responsible for hav-
ing failed to make, in America, "an intellectual situation of which
the creative power can profitably avail itself.” The theme, an-
nounced by Arnold, has lost none of its potency in Mr Brooks'
ap-
plication of it to the supreme object which our critics have failed to
see "as in itself it really is,” namely "the living creative life of
America.” Reduced to smaller terms it is equally relevant. The
critic, observing and reporting on the art work of his contempor-
aries, can create that intellectual situation, can create that receptive
and requiring community to which we referred last month as the
first necessity for creative life in America.
Mr Brooks' practice of criticism does not bear out one weakness
of his theory. Naturally in a social order which seems almost wholly
inhibitory he speaks for “springing loyally to the support of grop-
ing minds that bear the mark of sincerity and promise.” He does not
invoke so heartily the unsparing judgement which demands that the
groping mind discover its path. What has happened in America
over and over again is this: the potential artist has stopped halfway
because no critic and certainly no public demanded of him the last
item of his strength as an artist. The American critic has hit soft
and the American writer has gone soft; and the public taste which
the critic could have formed has been, for the most part, a series of
sentimental enthusiasms. It has almost lost the faculty of intelli-
gent enjoyment. It has asked its authors to repeat, not to create;
and has faithfully stood by them as they grew progressively worse.
A social footnote: In spite of our specific dementi, we are ac-
cused of having awarded a prize, of having picked a prize book, and,
in short, of having brought competition into our arts. We do not
hope to destroy the instinct to get-there at one blow; but we repeat
that "there are fields of endeavour wherein the idea and the feeling
of competition are, quite simply, not required.”






A PORTRAIT. BY GASTON LACHAISE



THE
IM
w
DIAL
OXX ITO
MARCH 1922
BROADSHEET BALLAD
BY A. E. COPPARD
AT
T noon the tiler and the mason stepped down from the roof of
the village church which they were repairing and crossed over
the road to the tavern to eat their dinner. It had been a nice little
morning, but there were clouds massing in the south; Sam the tiler
remarked that it looked like thunder. The two men sat in the dim
little tap-room eating, Bob the mason at the same time reading from
a newspaper an account of a trial for murder.
“I dunno what thunder looks like,” Bob said, “but I reckon this
chap is going to be hung, though I can't rightly say for why. To my
thinking he didn't do it at all: but murder's a bloody thing and
someone ought to suffer for it."
“I don't think,” spluttered Sam as he impaled a flat piece of beet-
root on the point of a pocket-knife and prepared to contemplate it
with patience until his stuffed mouth was ready to receive it, “he
ought to be hung.'
“There can be no other end for him though, with a mob of law-
yers like that, and a judge like that, and a jury too . . . why the
rope's half round his neck this minute; he'll be in glory within a
month, they only have three Sundays, you know, between the sen-
tence and the execution. Well, hark at that rain then!”
A shower that began as a playful sprinkle grew to a powerful
steady summer downpour. It splashed in the open window and the
dim room grew more dim, and cool.
“Hanging's a dreadful thing,” continued Sam, “and 'tis often un-
just I've no doubt, I've no doubt at all.”
“Unjust! I tell you at majority of trials those who give


236
BROADSHEET BALLAD
truth.
.
•
.
their evidence mostly knows nothing at all about the matter; them
as knows a lot—they stays at home and don't budge, not likely!”
"No? But why?''
“Why? They has their reasons. I know that, I knows it for
hark at that rain, it's made the room feel cold."
They watched the downfall in complete silence for some moments.
"Hanging's a dreadful thing,” Sam at length repeated, with al-
most a sigh.
“I can tell you a tale about that, Sam, in a minute,” said the other.
He began to fill his pipe from Sam's brass box which was labelled
cough lozenges and smelled of paregoric.
“Just about ten years ago I was working over in Cotswold coun-
try. I remember I'd been into Gloucester one Saturday afternoon
and it rained. I was jogging along home in a carrier's van; I never
seen it rain like that afore, no, nor never afterwards, not like that.
B-r-r-r-r! it came down
bashing! And we came to a
cross-roads where there's a public house called The Wheel of For-
tune, very lonely and onsheltered it is just there. I see'd a young
woman standing in the porch awaiting us, but the carrier was wet
and tired and angry or something and wouldn't stop. 'No room'-
he bawled out to her—'full up, can't take you! and he drove on.
'For the love o' God, mate,' I says, 'pull up and take that young crea-
ture! She's... she's ... can't you see!' 'But I'm all behind as ’tis'
-he shouts to me— 'You knows your gospel, don't you: time and
tide wait for no man?' 'Ah, but dammit all, they always call for a
feller'-I says. With that he turned round and we drove back for
the girl. She clumb in and sat on my knees; I squat on a tub of vin-
I
egar, there was nowhere else and I was right and all, she was going
on for a birth. Well, the old van rattled away for six or seven miles;
whenever it stopped you could hear the rain clattering on the tar-
paulin, or sounding outside on the grass as if it was breathing hard,
and the old horse steamed and shivered with it. I had knowed the
girl once in a friendly way, a pretty young creature, but now she was
white and sorrowful and wouldn't say much. By and by we came
to another cross-roads near a village, and she got out there. 'Good
day, my gal—I says, affable like, and 'Thank you, sir,'—says she,
and off she popped in the rain with her umbrella up. A rare pretty
girl, quite young, I'd met her before, a girl you could get uncom-
mon fond of, you know, but I didn't meet her afterwards: she was
>
a


A. E. COPPARD
237
mixed up in a bad business. It all happened in the next six months
while I was working round those parts. Everybody knew of it. This
girl's name was Edith and she had a younger sister Agnes. Their
father was old Harry Mallerton, kept The British Oak at North
Quainy; he stuttered. Well, this Edith had a love affair with a
young chap William, and having a very loving nature she behaved
foolish. Then she couldn't bring the chap up to the scratch nohow
by herself, and of course she was afraid to tell her mother or father:
you know how girls are after being so pesky natural, they fear, O
they do fear! But soon it couldn't be hidden any longer as she was
living at home with them all, so she wrote a letter to her mother.
Dear Mother,' she wrote, and told her all about her trouble.
“By all accounts the mother was angry as an old lion, but Harry
took it calm like and sent for young William, who'd not come at
first. He lived close by in the village so they went down at last and
fetched him.
“ 'Alright, yes,” he said, I'll do what's lawful to be done. There
you are, I can't say no fairer, that I can't.'
'No,' they said, 'you can't.'
"So he kissed the girl and off he went, promising to call in and set-
tle affairs in a day or two. The next day Agnes, which was the
younger girl, she also wrote a note to her mother telling her some
more strange news:
“God above!' the mother cried out, 'can it be true, both of you
girls, my own daughters, and by the same man! Oh, whatever were
you thinking on, both of ye! Whatever can be done now!'”
“What!” ejaculated Sam, "both on 'em, both on 'em!”
“As true as God's my mercy—both on 'em-same chap. Ah! Mrs
Mallerton was afraid to tell her husband at first, for old Harry was
the devil born again when he were roused up, so she sent for young
William herself, who'd not come again, of course, not likely. But
they made him come, O yes, when they told the girl's father.
“Well may I go to my d-d-d-damnation at once!' roared old
"
Harry-he stuttered you know—'at once, if that aint a good
one!' So he took off his coat, he took up a stick, he walked down
street to William and cut him off his legs. Then he beat him till he
howled for his mercy,
but
you
old Harry once he were
roused up he was the devil born again. They do say as he beat
him for a solid hour; I can't say as to that, but then old Harry picked
couldn't stop
a


238
BROADSHEET BALLAD
him up and carried him off to The British Oak on his own back, and
threw him down in his own kitchen between his own two girls like a
dead dog. They do say that the little one Agnes flew at her father
like a raging cat until he knocked her senseless with a clout over
head; rough man he was.'
"Well, a' called for it sure," commented Sam.
"Her did,” agreed Bob, “but she was the quietest known girl for
miles round those parts, very shy and quiet.”
“A shady lane breeds mud,” said Sam.
“What do you say?-0 ahmud, yes. But pretty girls both,
?
girls you could get very fond of, skin like apple bloom, and as like
as two pinks they were. They had to decide which of them William
was to marry.”
“Of course, ah!”
“I'll marry Agnes'-says he.
“You'll not'—says the old man—'you'll marry Edie.'
“ 'No I won't —William says—it's Agnes I love and I'll be mar-
ried to her or I won't be married to e'er of 'em.' All the time Edith
sat quiet, dumb as a shovel, never a word, crying a bit; but they do
say the young one went on like a ... a young .
a
Jew.”
“The jezebel !" commented Sam.
“You may say it; but wait, my man, just wait. Another cup of
beer? We can't go back to church until this humbugging rain have
stopped.”
“No, that we can't.”
“It's my belief the 'bugging rain won't stop this side of four.”
“And if the roof don't hold it off it ’ull spoil they Lord's Com-
mandments that's just done up on the chancel front.”
“Oh, they be dry by now,” Bob spoke reassuringly and then con-
tinued his tale. “I'll marry Agnes or I won't marry nobody'—
William says—and they couldn't budge him. No, old Harry
cracked on, but he wouldn't have it, and at last Harry says: 'It's like
,
this.' He pulls a half crown out of his pocket and 'Heads it's
Agnes,' he says, for tails it's Edith,' he says."
“Never! Ha! ha!” cried Sam.
"Heads it's Agnes, tails it's Edie, so help me God. And it come
down Agnes, yes, heads it was—Agnes—and so there they were."
"And they lived happy ever after ?”
“Happy! You don't know your human nature, Sam; wherever
•


A. E. COPPARD
239
a
was you brought up? 'Heads it's Agnes,' said old Harry, and at that
?
Agnes flung her arms round William's neck and was for going off
with him then and there, ha! But this is how it happened about that.
William hadn't any kindred, he was a lodger in the village, and his
landlady wouldn't have him in her house one mortal hour when she
heard all of it; give him the rightabout there and then. He couldn't
get lodgings anywhere else, nobody would have anything to do with
him, so of course, for safety's sake, old Harry had to take him, and
there they all lived together at The British Oak—all in one happy
family. But they girls couldn't bide the sight of each other, so their
father cleaned up an old outhouse in his yard that was used for carts
and hens and put William and his Agnes out in it. And there they
had to bide. They had a couple of chairs, a sofa, and a bed and that
kind of thing, and the young one made it quite snug.
“'Twas a hard thing for that other, that Edie, Bob.”
“It was hard, Sam, in a way, and all this was happening just afore
I met her in the carrier's van. She was very sad and solemn then; a
pretty girl, one you could like. Ah, you may choke me, but there
they lived together. Edie never opened her lips to either of them
again, and her father sided with her, too. What was worse, it came
out after the marriage that Agnes was quite free of trouble-it was
only a trumped-up game between her and this William because he
fancied her better than the other one. And they never had no child,
them two, though when poor Edie's mischance come along I be
damned if Agnes weren't fonder of it than its own mother, a jolly
sight more fonder, and William-he fair worshipped it.”
"You don't say!"
“I do. 'Twas a rum go, that, and Agnes worshipped it, a fact,
"
can prove it by scores o' people to this day, scores, in them parts.
William and Agnes worshipped it, and Edie—she just looked on,
long of it all, in the same house with them, though she never opened
her lips again to her young sister to the day of her death.”
“Ah, she died? Well, it's the only way out of such a tangle, poor
woman.
"You're sympathizing with the wrong party.” Bob filled his pipe
again from the brass box; he ignited it with deliberation; going to
the
open window he spat into a puddle in the road. “The wrong
party, Sam; 'twas Agnes that died. She was found on the sofa one
morning stone dead, dead as a adder.”


240
BROADSHEET BALLAD
1
!
a
1
"God bless me," murmured Sam.
“Poisoned,” added Bob, puffing serenely.
"Poisoned!"
Bob repeated the word poisoned. “This was the way of it,” he
continued. “One morning the mother went out in the yard to col-
lect her eggs, and she began calling out 'Edie, Edie, here a minute,
come and look where that hen have laid her egg; I would never have
believed it she says. And when Edie went out her mother led her
round the back of the outhouse, and there on the top of a wall this
hen had laid an egg. “I would never have believed it, Edie'—she
says—'scooped out a nest there beautiful, aint she; I wondered where
her was laying. T'other morning the dog brought an egg round in
his mouth and laid it on the doormat. There now, Aggie, Aggie,
here a minute, come and look where the hen have laid that egg.' And
as Aggie didn't answer the mother went in and found her on the sofa
in the outhouse, stone dead.”
“How'd they account for it?" asked Sam, after a brief interval.
"That's what brings me to the point about this young
feller that's
going to be hung,” said Bob, tapping the newspaper that lay upon
the bench. “I don't know what would lie between two young women
in a wrangle of that sort; some would get over it quick, but some
would never sleep soundly any more not for a minute of their mortal
lives. Edie must have been one of that sort. There's people living
there now as could tell a lot if they'd a mind to it. Some knowed all
about it, could tell you the very shop where Edith managed to get
hold of the poison, and could describe to me or to you just how she
administrated it in a glass of barley water. Old Harry knew all
about it, he knew all about everything, but he favoured Edith and
he never budged a word. Clever old chap was Harry, and nothing
came out against Edie at the inquest-nor the trial neither.”
"Was there a trial then?”
“There was a kind of a trial. Naturally. A beautiful trial. The
police came and fetched poor William, they took him away and in
due course he was hanged.”
"William! But what had he got to do with it?"
"Nothing. It was rough on him, but he hadn't played straight
and so nobody struck up for him. They made out a case against
him—there was some onlucky bit of evidence which I'll take my
oath old Harry knew something about—and William was done for.
a
a


A. E. COPPARD
241
a
Ah, when things take a turn against you it's as certain as twelve
o'clock, when they take a turn; you get no more chance than a rabbit
from a weasel. It's like dropping your matches into a stream, you
needn't waste the bending of your back to pick them out—they're no
good on, they'll never strike again. And Edith, she sat in court
through it all, very white and trembling and sorrowful, but when the
judge put his black cap on they do say she blushed and looked across
at William and gave a bit of a smile. Well, she had to suffer for his
doings, so why shouldn't he suffer for hers. That's how I look at
it.
"But God-a-mighty ..!”
"Yes, God-a-mighty knows. Pretty girls they were, both, and as
like as two pinks.”
There was quiet for some moments while the tiler and the mason
emptied their cups of beer. "I think,” said Sam then, “the rain's
”
give over now."
“Ah, that it has,” cried Bob. “Let's go and do a bit more on this
'bugging church or she won't be done afore Christmas.”
.


TRIVIA
BY LOGAN PEARSALL SMITH
THE IDEAL
1
Bright shone the morning, and, as I waited (they were coming to
call for me early in their motor) I made for myself an enchanting
picture of the day before me—our drive to that forest beyond the
dove-blue hills, the ideal beings I should meet there, feasting with
them in the shade of immemorial trees.
And when, late towards evening, I was deposited, soaked and
half-dead with fatigue, out of that open motor, was there nothing in-
side me but chill and damp and disillusion? If I had dreamed a
dream inconsistent with the climate and social conditions of the
British Islands, had I not, out of that very dream and disenchant-
ment, created, like the Platonic Lover, an imperishable vision—the
ideal Picnic, the Picnic as it might be—the wonderful, windless
weather, the Watteau landscape, where a group of mortals talk and
feast as they talked and feasted in the Golden Age?
MERINGUES
"Aren't you ashamed of yourself?” asked my hostess, when she
'
found me alone in the supper-room, after all her other guests had
gone.
“Ashamed? Why should I be ashamed?” I answered, as I went
on eating. “I am simply following the precepts of Aristippus of
Cyrene, who maintains that we should live wholly in the present
Moment, which alone, he says, exists, and in which alone the abso-
lute good of life is before us. It is only by regarding each Moment
as an eternity, with no before and after, and by calmly and resolute-
ly culling, without fear or passion or prejudice, the Good it offers
it is only thus, he affirms, that Wisdom is made manifest; only
thus,” I explained, as I took another meringue, "that mortals may
participate in the felicity of the Gods, the bright Gods, who feed on
happiness for ever.”


LOGAN PEARSALL SMITH
243
THE MIRACLE
After lighting the spirit-lamp in preparation for tea, she turned
with her earnest eyes and gave me all her attention.
“But we have never had a real talk," she said, “about serious
things."
As she said it, I saw my danger: I was alone with that enthusiast
for Redemption, and she was going to talk to me about my soul.
“Now help me, O ye Guardian Powers!” Thus did I invoke
those more than mortal combatants who succour heroic minds in
their worst extremities, aiding the pure Knight to defend his honour
and life, and the weak damsel to preserve that which is dearer to her
than life itself.
Not in vain did I call upon that heavenly Assistance, not too long
was I forced to emulate those ladies—suddenly, at the very darkest
moment of my danger, a blaze of light filled the room; the spirit-
lamp flared up and almost exploded; and I found myself soon after
in the safe street, with soul still inviolate from that spiritual assault.
EBURY STREET
“Do you mean to cut me? What are you doing in Ebury Street ?”
she asked.
I felt a large, healthy blush suffuse my features. “There's a lady
who lives here,” I explained in some confusion—“No, I don't mean
what
you think, but a Mrs Whigham, who hates the way I write,
I
and threw out of the window the last book I published. I walk by
her house now and then to practice humility; to learn, as we all
should learn, to endure the contempt of the world.”
This Mrs Whigham was, however, an invented being, and I had
really come to Ebury Street for another look, in the window of a
shop there, at a Venetian mirror, in whose depths of dusky glass, I
had seen reflected, as I walked by one day, a dim, romantic, well-
dressed figure which I wanted to see again.


TWO GREEK HEADS
BY WALLACE GOULD
He, the Cumaean, has the neck of a young bull, but the face of an
OX-
ah, no, the face of a manly but mild Greek,
the face of a man not too intuitive, not too sagacious, not at all
sensual.
Only his head is before me, and yet
I see him standing motionless, composed, for a rubdown with oil, and
perhaps a sprinkling with sand, before entering the palestrian
contest.
He is not restive because of continence required
for none but male attendants ever touch his thighs.
The fellow is naïve.
He is impassible.
He is absorbed in dreams of his body.
He believes in the girl from another town, trusts her, and therefore
puts her out of mind-
and when, some day, he embraces her, he will contract his mighty
biceps only a little,
and will touch her perhaps twice with his chaste, spiritual lips.
He is ready for the Olympiad.
But he from Ialysos—
he is a sharp but likeable fellow.
I know him better than I do the Cumaean.
He attracts.
He captivates.
His beauty is of itself and at once magnetic, aggressive, adventurous,
irresistible-
bracing, warm, sustained, like the wind blowing all day from a
sunny sea.
More subtle than the fellow from Cumae,
he is quicker of glance, surer, more comprehensive.


WALLACE GOULD
245
Equally strong of feature, he is much more sensuous, much more
emotional
likewise of body.
Unlike the torso of the Cumaean, which, disciplined, solid, towers
straight from the massive hips to the massive but rather narrow
shoulders-
a cylinder of virgin flesh-
the torso of the Ialysian, disciplined, hard, tapers from the broad
but graceful shoulders to the slender waist-
a classic cone of human animation.
He is wily.
He is agile.
His spring is that of the panther.
He is a lover, a wit, a gentleman, a pleasing liar.
He is ready for a night with the Hetairai, ready for a day with the
runners, ready for death at Thermopylae.
a


1
A CENTURY OF SHELLEY
BY STEWART MITCHELL
VEL
ULTURES have been at Shelley now for just one hundred
years—uncommonly diligent birds. While the human being,
such as he once actually was, has gradually vanished into the mists of
idealization, the bones of the poet have been picked clean and dry.
Literature, in the sense Verlaine once used the word, affords no more
striking instance of its sinister processes than the growth of the Shel-
ley legend. Fortunately these processes are not quite so inscrutable
as those of God. Reading between the lines, after one discovers the
first discrepancies, is always easy enough, if ever one can overcome a
thoroughly human resentment towards literary heroes. Yet the he-
roes are themselves helpless—and frequently blameless—paper and
ink being the only conceivable limits to the recruiting of men of let-
ters. Moreover, curiosity about Shelley is a convenient approach to
English poetry of the period. Persistent, imposing, or ridiculous as
has been the growth of his cult, Shelley is none the less an excellent
guide to his century.
To begin at the beginning, in this case, is to begin nowhere: one
must start at the most recent end and work backwards through the
scribbling of critics and the squabbling of self-consecrated biog-
raphers—backwards through the days of Dowden and Symonds, past
Rossetti, Medwin, and Garnett, back to the original primitive times
of Thomas Jefferson Hogg and Edward John Trelawny, the first
friend, and the last, of Shelley, keen observers and amusing writers,
both, whatever else may be said. This literature has become vex-
ingly immense otherwise: Thomas Love Peacock and Buxton For-
man add to the embarrassment of riches. Counting up all the essays
on various kinds of Shelley, readers are apt to wax desperate and
stop short of any authentic notion of the delightful person who was
one of the least unpleasant of all English poets.
Experience shows that Shelley literature can be gone through
with comparative ease and rapidity. Of editors, Forman alone is
thoroughly satisfactory, he having for the first and last time reduced
and restored the writings of Shelley to their accurate and final form.


STEWART MITCHELL
247
Forman was a specialist at his work. To the editing of the writings
of Keats and Shelley, he devoted the greater part of his life. Once to
look into those eight fat volumes of the 'seventies, bound in pale
blue cloth decorated with gilt flowers, is to encounter a vast feeling
of respect for the simple, secondary virtues of good taste and pa-
tience. Among other accomplishments, Forman established the sup-
pressed text of Laon and Cythna, made over at the insistence of a
publisher into The Revolt of Islam, "Islam” meaning "submission
to God.” Because a brother falls in love with his own sister-one
thinks of The Cenci—Laon and Cythna is usually printed and near-
ly always read as The Revolt of Islam.
Forman also did a quantity of hod-carrying: he debated at length
questions of commas and periods, weeded out misprints, and cut
down editorial alterations to a minimum. His long footnotes on
punctuation are trivial and pedantic only to those who forget with
what desperation exact scholars dispute colons and question marks.
Shelley indulged the wicked habit of leaving blank spaces for words
he meant to find later and then frequently never returned to the
poem. According to Trelawny he was often so unfortunate as to be
quite unable to read his own hand-writing. Certain editors, having
first attempted to work themselves into the proper ecstasy of imag-
ination, tried to interpret scrawls and fill gaps—with disastrous and
silly results. Forman removed these embellishments.
For biographical information cautious readers should skim Dow-
den and then dive directly into Jefferson Hogg and Trelawny.
Hogg published his first two volumes in 1858; he had planned four
but stopped short after these one thousand pages because, as he an-
swered Trelawny, the public who wanted a demi-god, recoiled in
horror from his picture of a man. These two volumes are a thor-
oughly engrossing mixture of curious matter—a caustic commentary
on England and the English tumbled in together with a fairly inti-
mate and continuous narrative of Shelley's life from his eighteenth
to his twenty-first year. His record is curiously rich in early letters
and contains the only clear and reasonable account of three impor-
tant events: the expulsion from University College, Oxford, the
marriage with Harriet Westbrook, and the friendship with Godwin
and, through him, finally with his daughter.
Praise of one biographer by another is high praise. Trelawny,
sweeping aside the legends cluttered about the ideal Shelley, writes:


248
A CENTURY OF SHELLEY
“Those desirous of knowing what Shelley really was in his natural
state and habits, will find it in Jefferson Hogg's book, and in no
other that I have seen. (March, 1878.) Hogg has painted him
exactly as I knew him: his is the only written likeness that I have
ever read of him; at the same time it is necessary to know that Hogg
despised poetry, he thought it all nonsense and barely tolerated
Shakespeare.”
Trelawny himself was no second-rate witness, having been one
of Shelley's constant companions during the last year in Italy, or in
other words, seven years after Hogg's narrative breaks off. Records
of Shelley, Byron, and the Author first appeared in 1858, simul-
taneously with Hogg's Life. Twenty years later Trelawny consid-
erably enlarged his volume. From these two eye-witnesses the critics
and biographers have politely lifted nearly all the picturesque de-
tails which decorate their own pages, yet they have never hesitated
quietly to overlook any evidence which displeased them.
Trelawny is fully as rich in anecdote as Hogg; both are good read-
ing; neither was the fool some persons have pretended. Each has, in
turn, been called a public enemy: Hogg, because he shows Shelley
lamenting Oxford and clinging to the assurance of a fixed allowance
from his father, come what might; Trelawny, because he remarks
that the poet was stoop-shouldered, and twice nearly died from over-
doses of laudanum. Those interested in the method of emasculat-
ing texts by means of piecemeal quotation may relish the actual clos-
ing words of Trelawny's description of the burning of Shelley's body.
a
“_The oil and salt made the yellow flames glisten and quiver.
The heat from the sun and the fire was so intense that the atmosphere
was tremulous and wavy. The corpse fell open and the heart was
laid bare. The frontal bone of the skull where it had been struck
with the mattock, fell off; and as the back of the head rested on the
red-hot bottom bars of the furnace, the brains literally seethed, bub-
bled and boiled, as in a cauldron, for a very long time.”
a
But first and last comes Shelley's opinion of himself, not the fa-
mous letter of self-introduction to Godwin, 1812, but a later and less
youthful judgement taken from a conversation with Williams and
Trelawny some time during the last year of his life.


STEWART MITCHELL
249
“Mine is a life of failures. Peacock says my poetry is composed
of day-dreams and nightmares, and Leigh Hunt does not think it
good enough for The Examiner. Jefferson Hogg says all poetry is
inverted sense, and consequently nonsense. Every man should at-
tempt to do something. Poetry was the rage of the day, and I racked
my imagination to be a poet. I wrote, and the critics denounced me
as a mischievous visionary, and my friends said that I had mistaken
my vocation, that my poetry was mere rhapsody of words; that I was
soaring in the blue regions of the air, disconnected from all human
sympathy. I should have liked to be a sailor-
9)
a
a
Allowing for Trelawny's dramatics, here is the gist of Shelley's
opinion, as once he went over his life. However much one counts off
to depression of spirits, whatever one chooses to think of Shelley's
poetry, there can be no two interpretations of this paragraph.
These are serious confessions—to idealizers. Shelley not only in-
vited the Muse; he compelled her. He was not even precocious. Yet
he could scarcely have thought himself a failure—few men have the
trenchant courage to do that—though apparently his supplies of
self-confidence were inconveniently slender, seeing that precocity
and self-esteem are the invariable witnesses called in for genius. Be-
cause of this, Pope, an intellectual, antedated his youthful poems,
,
and more than one author has been half ashamed of his tardiness.
The chief difficulty remains: Shelley, man and poet, was one and
the same person; he was formerly as intensely admired among a
small circle of friends as he is to-day among a small circle of readers.
In the history of literature this is a comparatively rare phenomenon
one thinks of great men other men hate and little men they love,
but a Swift or a Shelley is the rare exception. Possibly they were
both so fortunate only because neither was ever seriously thought of
as a rival.
Hogg offers interesting data on Shelley's slow development:
youthful poems enclosed in letters to himself. There is no unreason-
able cruelty in quoting one stanza of one poem, "a mad effusion of
this morning" sent in a letter dated April 28, 1811, when Shelley
was almost nineteen. As for what literary persons are pleased to call
"promise,” this poem vies with some Whitman wrote before his
Leaves of Grass days. The following stanza is neither better nor
worse than scores of others Shelley was writing at the time:
a


250
A CENTURY OF SHELLEY
“Dares the lama, most fleet of the sons of the wind,
The lion to rouse from his skull-covered lair?
When the tiger approaches, can the fast-fleeting hind
Repose trust in his footsteps of air?
No? Abandon'd he sinks in a trance of despair
The monster transfixes his prey,
On the sand flows his life-blood away;
Whilst India's rocks to his death-yells reply
Protracting the horrible harmony.”
a
Between this and the Ode to the West Wind lie eight important
years--sometimes even more interesting than the causes of a man's
going to the bad are the mysteries of his arriving at the good. In-
terior success grows frequently with an alluring, almost tubercular
beauty.
This stanza has two points of interest, one particular to itself:
verses five and six are poisoned by that plague of young poets, unin-
tentional, and therefore unpleasant, repetition of sound. Nor was
this sort of metre, to say the least, to have been expected of Shelley.
Other than rousing Matthew Arnold to a most carelessly powerful
essay, Dowden's competent life of Shelley performed another great
service to students of the poet. Year by year, using his journals and
letters as his authority, Dowden lists the books that Shelley read.
These show that he almost invariably cast his own verse into the
metre and rhythm of the poetry he happened to have been reading
at the time—thus the composition of the Ode to the West Wind
falls in his Dante period. Much of the very early verse drops into a
species of Old Oaken Bucket jingle that apparently pervaded con-
temporary poetry. How much of it, one reflects, could be found in
Campbell or Southey, or the less fortunate lyric interludes of Scott.
Byron's fame brought with it a different method.
Shelley's own letters and journals fill
up
of seven years be-
tween the last pages of Hogg and the beginning of Trelawny.
Though these letters occasionally reveal a keen sense of fun—wit-
ness Mr Gisborne's nose and Byron's menagerie-they certainly
leave a heavy burden of proof on critics who would credit Shelley
with a sense of humour. At times the self-conscious, almost insipid
sentimentality of much of his correspondence rouses one's curiosity
as to the average level of letter-writing in those days. Yet Byron's
a
the gap


STEWART MITCHELL
251
correspondence, full of posing and play-acting, has the salt
tang
of
sea water. Some student of comparative literature could provoke a
world of learning by counting up Shelley's debt to Rousseau-per-
haps has done so, long since.
This debt existed, and Shelley paid it off in more than one way.
For instance, during a visit to Switzerland in the summer of 1816
when with the second Mrs Shelley he made a pilgrimage to Gibbon's
house at Lausanne, he carefully refrained from imitating his wife's
example of gathering souvenir acacia leaves on the terrace, “fearing
to outrage the greater and more sacred name of Rousseau” by pay-
ing honour to the "cold and unimpassioned spirit” of the historian.
Indeed, so intense was his almost maiden-like admiration of the phi-
losopher that in 1811 he wrote to Hogg that the Confessions of
Rousseau "are either a disgrace to the confessor, or a string of false-
hoods, probably the latter.” So much for the gilt of an idol. And
again, because he was the only disinterested person who ever had any
influence over the mind or vices of Byron, he talked pages of the cult
of nature into the third—and most popular and beautiful canto of
Childe Harold.
In Shelley, politics, atheism, love, and poetry were all mixed up
together. A touch of neurasthenia added to the confusion. In so
far, he was only one of the more interesting specimens of humanity.
Nevertheless, his eccentricity is a tale that grows in the telling;
granted he never could swim, he was a good shot and loved pistol
practice all his life, somewhat to the discomfort of those who
watched him handle fire-arms. Hogg says he could fairly glide
through a crowd, but would trip over his own feet, once he was alone.
His absurd dread of disease has been dwelt on again and again; as,
for instance, his catching elephantiasis by rubbing knees all day with
an absurdly fat woman who sat opposite him in a stage-coach. Not
till he had been examined and reassured by a physician did he re-
cover. Members of his entourage write vaguely of “spasms”—Tre-
lawny blames laudanum, and implies that he was too constantly
haunted by his own thoughts, in spite of incessant reading and writ-
ing. Peacock cites the vegetarian diet and concludes with his fa-
mous cure—“two mutton chops, well peppered.” Hogg thinks he
should have been a lawyer, "for he had the most acute intellect of
any man I ever knew”-poetry was the evil genius of his life.
Everybody knows something of the mare's nests Shelley made of


252
A CENTURY OF SHELLEY
a
his marriages, for "chatter about Harriet” together with sympathy
for Mary fill one of the early chapters of any Shelley legend. Har-
riet Westbrook, in all fairness, seems to have been a pretty, well-
educated, slightly pretentious girl, “not raw-boned enough for the
Scottish market," writes Hogg, recollecting their walks in Edin-
burgh. She unluckily allowed a much older sister, Eliza, not only
to join her household, but govern it finally, on the maxims of a semi-
mythical Miss Warne. Eliza's two manias were soothing her sister's
nerves and brushing her own long, black, glossy hair. As if all this
were not bad enough, Shelley added to his female and domestic circle
a Miss Brown, school-teacher and radical, a liberal correspondent,
who four months later had developed into such a "demon" that
family affairs exploded. Miss Brown, “an artful, superficial, ugly,
hermaphroditical beast of a woman, was given money and sent
away. Harriet gradually left off reading aloud; Eliza preached and
interfered, and the marriage was doomed.
As for the second Mrs Shelley, one glance at her picture, a page or
two of her writings, show her to have been exactly what Trelawny
found her—a sweet, well-intentioned, rather shallow, limited wom-
an. Not having any fortune to leave her, Mary's parents reared her
piously that she might one day qualify as a governess. Instead, she
was courageous enough to run off with a married poet-much to the
scandal of her father and his friends. Her virtue was sincerity, for
even the comparative ease of an assured income failed to make her
over into a professional reformer. She remained to the last visibly
disturbed, even vexed, by her husband's vagaries, doing her best to
keep him in good company and proper clothes. Never at any time
was she successful. Neither of these wives can be called an unfor-
tunate choice; both were passive, almost neutral characters; each
was something of an anchor in her own time.
The trivial dispute about Shelley's atheism boils down to a defini-
tion of terms. In the background lie Hume's essays. Hogg insists
on using the word merely to describe one who believes in God but
chooses to oppose him, much as a member of Parliament might op-
pose a ministry. Thus he interprets all the denunciations of priests
and practical religion. Thirty years after Hogg wrote, was discov-
ered the long-lost pamphlet, A Refutation of Deism, apparently
justifying Trelawny, who, during one year found Shelley always
the frank and enthusiastic denier of the existence of God. It is rash


STEWART MITCHELL
253
to assume that a man has ever definitely made up his mind—some
persons, like Byron, are constitutionally opposed to doing so. Hogg
says Shelley was habitually so contrary in argument that he can give
no definite report of what he believed. Thus Queen Mab was forti-
fied with reasoning drawn from the writings of Baron d'Holbach, a
titled atheist, and Helvetius, an inspired mathematician; yet if the
dull truth were known, the chief sources of Shelley's atheism would
probably be found to have been believers themselves.
Trelawny ridicules the attempt of his admirers to call atheism by
some other name once Shelley had become established, about the
middle of the last century. Whatever the effects on his spirits, Shel-
ley's conviction had the virtuous quality of cleansing his mind;
whether or not atheism is a belief logically possible, is quite beside
the question. Equally idle are forecasts of his probable conversion,
had he lived—Shelley was no boy, but a man of almost thirty at the
time he died. Possibly he would have ended like a great disciple-
Swinburne, who, for all the leisure, the learning, and the paganism
of a long life, finished his days writing inferior verses in order to es-
cape from boredom.
Nothing is easier than making sport of the fallacies of radical
thought, and particularly that of Shelley's time. All honest criti-
cism must use history-one should try to think back to the years be-
fore and after Waterloo: Pitt, Castlereagh, Napoleon, wars, riots,
and bread-lines, and the confused menace of imperial France. Surely
our own generation should experience no great difficulty with all this
-as of one hundred years ago. Mr H. N. Brailsford, in Shelley,
Godwin, and their Circle, has amply presented the case for freedom.
But the cause was hopeless, because by the time reform was actually
accomplished, new men and new issues were involved. Our political
and social evils, like our vices, leave us, more often than we leave
them. Thus, the world's great victories are frequently no more than
epitaphs.
The important thing is Shelley's personal courage. Godwin, it
must be remembered, was always courteous and sedentary; Pitt even
let his books pass as being much too dear to corrupt the multitudes.
Leigh Hunt, of kid gloves, jail, and The Examiner, was scarcely an
inspiring standard-bearer. There remained the Brothers Smith, Dr
Price, and Tom Paine. Although Shelley went over to their side, to
be sure, in a small popular secession from authority, yet he did this


254
A CENTURY OF SHELLEY
in the face of a timidity that led him instinctively to shun people
and then blame others for avoiding him. He was never widely
known in revolutionary circles; possibly he was secretly scoffed at
as the gentleman amateur. His father once called in the Duke of
Norfolk: Shelley should sit in Parliament with his father as a Whig;
Shelley himself objected, the more strenuously after a dinner at
Westminster and a meeting with various members. Fondly enough,
his mother had fancied him riding to hounds, with his class.
Altogether, he ran his own course of life with nothing more than
vexing verbal interference. In June, 1815, when the world was ex-
periencing one of its frequent salvations at Waterloo, Shelley was
nearly twenty-three. Not only was Shelley not there, but he never,
so far as is known, even remotely considered the possibility of his be-
ing there—a singular commentary on our own descent into the Dark
Ages. Still, Napoleon was a "hateful and despicable being," se-
duced by "vulgar ambition,” a pirate of “talents altogether con-
temptible and commonplace.” “Excepting Lord Castlereagh, you
could not have mentioned any character but Buonaparte whom I con-
temn and abhor more vehemently." (Letter to Godwin, December
27th, 1812.) Fanciful skimmers of history will object that those ,
were the days of professional armies when, as a matter of fact, both
Prussia and France had been using the draft for years. In England,
although the opportunities for dying were not nearly so widespread,
voluntary service was always to be had—even with the Iron Duke.
Appealingly picturesque as it is, Shelley's "passion for reforming
the world” had necessarily to take for its goal the entire good faith
of all men. Otherwise, it would end in gossamer and moonshine.
For him, the question was more difficult than exchanging inertia for
broken heads, or trading off one fanaticism for another just as spe-
cious. Revolution had already played into the hands of an emperor,
once. As usual, life forced men to unreasonable choices: they might
join Castlereagh's bread lines or Napoleon's conscripts, and be
damned. As for practical consequences, Shelley's pamphlets were
little more than a cataract of words; gradually he himself came to
admit the fact, and turned more strenuously towards his books and
his poetry. At the time he definitely settled in Italy, his political life
was over; the best of the leaflets went into his verse. The year Shel-
ley was drowned, Castlereagh, as if he had a taste for the dramatic,
cut his throat with a pocket-knife.


STEWART MITCHELL
255
When one thinks of all the sound and fury of his life, Shelley's
poetry seems amazingly remote. Byron, who obviously held himself
aloof, wrote poetry more directly tuned to the time. So men's oppo-
site selves are the commonest tests of their poems. To call verse ab-
stract was once thought rich praise. Nowadays, a reasonably exact
line of boundary between rhetoric and poetry is the real issue, ever-
lastingly, yet no sane man, however reputable, would dare try to
separate one part of Shelley from another. The anthologies are
usually ridiculous: as with Rossetti, the dull malice of hero-worship
seems unable to tell good from bad.
To return to Shelley's last, disconsolate-sounding judgement on
himself, gives one pause. The more closely men of letters come to
resemble a self-perpetuating priesthood, the more deftly do they
draw the veil of mystery about their ritual. Even their revelations
smack of the stage. Nevertheless, they who fancy poems leap full-
armed, like Minerva, from the headaches of Jove can hardly do bet-
ter than read Buxton Forman's brochure on the Ode to the West
Wind. There lies the history of a poem from beginning to end, ac-
cording to the manuscripts of its author. Shelley made one false
start, turned off from his first conception to a second, scribbled and
hesitated for a page or two, decorated his margins with sketches, and
finally from a third beginning, soared up to the original version of
his ode. Mrs Shelley included the discarded odds and ends in her
edition of 1839; Forman, while endeavouring to verify her curious
arrangement of these fragments, stumbled on his discovery. Ma-
cauley, even, once he had seen the first draft of Lycidas, found him-
self disenchanted.
No pleasant knowledge of the nineteenth century is quite complete
without Hogg and Trelawny. But to read them is almost to be per-
suaded of the immense futility of literature. In Jefferson Hogg the
literary verdicts of three generations are set side by side-the ob-
vious end is the nihilism of personal taste. Shelley, himself, paid
unstinted praise to a novel called The Missionary. Where is Samuel
Rogers, now, and where was Jane Austen, then? One might go on
for ever naming favourites, but these are uncomfortable questions,
because literature insists on calling attention to its lucky guesses and
overlooking its brainstorms. What is Shelley himself outside of
school-books and college courses? Passing a man off as a poet for
poets is only a subterfuge—a store-house label such as critics paste


256
A CENTURY OF SHELLEY
on certain unread novelists. Truth is, sooner or later all authors
draw up their knees unnoticed and are gathered to their fathers.
Resurrections are rare, and deliberate diggings-up are the pastimes
of scholars. Trelawny's close is characteristic of him:
“Byron, for eleven or twelve years, was the choice spirit of his age,
and cheered on his way by the applause of multitudes; Shelley, on
the contrary, for about the same space of time, as he himself said,
was denounced as a Pariah; wherever recognized, he was shunned.
No two men could be more dissimilar in all ways, yet I have seldom
known two men more unhappy.”
Consequently he supposes genius a gift fatal to men. One thinks of
donations somewhat less picturesque.
Now and then Hogg, too, lets out items of singular interest in the
secret history of aestheticism. Of artistic tastes of poets, he writes:
"When I first knew Shelley he was alike indifferent to all works
of art. He learned afterwards to admire statues, and then, at a still
later period, pictures; but he never had any feeling for the wonders
of architecture; even our majestic cathedrals were viewed with in-
difference. I took him into York minster several times, but to no
purpose; it was thrown away, entirely lost on him.”
Appreciation of music, it will be noticed, is overlooked, for Shelley
died long before the days of music's decline into popularity. En-
dowed orchestras, for instance, were practically unknown. Hogg's
paragraph could be corroborated at some length. Our own fashion
is to feel for all the arts—even men of letters are said to know their
favourite canvases and tunes, by name. Shelley, however, found
poetry and politics too confining.
The guiding notion of that time was a vigorous reaction from all
the ideals of the eighteenth century, a healthy, enthusiastic hatred
for the long reign of Neo-Classicism. Shelley, Keats, and Words-
worth were somewhat more excitable about this matter than either
Coleridge or Byron—the latter's judgements on authors of the
pre-
ceding century are nearly always interesting. Much of the present-
day growing respect for the days of Queen Anne is explained by the
time-worn trick of critical selection.


STEWART MITCHELL
257
For, contrary to their reputation, critics are not so distrustful of
enthusiasm as they seem. As a matter of history, no breed of authors
has more frequently been swept off its feet. When Goethe was
young, and Herder and Lessing were famous, any unusual arrange-
ment of words, any new way of looking at a statue, was hailed with
unbelievable excitement. There were rival camps, to be sure, but
.
,
critical quarrels nearly always originate in personal antipathies,
rather than art; so much so, that a review is more often a weapon
than a judgement. Nowadays, to read Götz von Berlichingen is to
find it dull—relatively, as well as absolutely. Yet once it was the
morning star.
Looking back to the high places of Shelley's poetry: the last loud
stanzas of Laon and Cythna, Julian and Maddalo, the close of The
Cenci, the prismatic colours of Prometheus Unbound and Hellas,
the West Wind-one sees blue cataracts with their mists blowing
over into the greatest verse of Rossetti and Swinburne. Shelley was
their acknowledged god; now that the high priests are gone, one puz-
zles over his destiny. The poets of a hundred years hence will be,
.
the least of them, inevitably superior to ourselves by a century. Pos-
sibly Shelley is doomed to be eclipsed by “classicism,” for our own
future begins to smell sweet about us, in the air, like rain. If ever
he be definitely set aside the most hackneyed of his lines may one day
sound as far away as Sedley's:
“Love still has something of the sea
From whence his mother rose,'
as singularly simple, unforgettable, and yet difficult to value.
The more one reads about Shelley, the more certain one becomes
that the so-called popular interest is not so much his poetry as his
life. To know that he once lost a brand-new pair of coat-tails and
kicked the offending dog in the neck, would seem to be more impor-
tant than the ability to tell Hellas from Queen Mab. This personal
tradition has led to amusing results. Brooding on fragments of
Hogg, otherwise excellent young men have gone so far as to bully
unwilling colleges into expelling them, forgetting that Shelley him-
self was vexed and mortified at his punishment and always regretted
it. The open-shirted poet undoubtedly dates from the popularity of
the Amelia Curran portrait, done at Rome in 1819. Incidentally,


258
A CENTURY OF SHELLEY
a
one notes the gradual beautification of Miss Curran's wooden like-
ness, through a series of engravings, as one of the most pleasing chap-
ters in the history of one hundred years of hero-worship.
From a torrent of literature, certain famous critical essays have
emerged. Arnold's luminous angel beating his wings in vain has
never ceased to infuriate a faction of the self-selected school of Shel-
ley, “school” being used in the liquid sense. Of the human creature,
as distinguished from the poet, the best estimate is Bagehot's. Mr
Santayana, in Winds of Doctrine, has most capably explained his
mind. Francis Thompson's appreciation is obviously enthusiastic.
Forman, Hogg, Trelawny, and an essay or two, supply the last
pieces indispensable to the puzzle picture. Consequently, one hesi-
tates to inhabit the doomed world of commentators.
Not even well-meaning idolaters have cost him his great name. In
spite of his short-comings, in spite of all the nonsense he has inspired,
he remains one of the first keen pleasures of life. There are heroes
no less heroic for having been human; one has seen waves the more
beautiful for their having broken short.



000
$
I
LA SAINTE RUSSIE SORTANT DE SES TEMPLES DE MYSTIQUE
BY GEORGES CHRISTIAN


1


THE BURNING BEARD
BY MANUEL KOMROFF
THE
HE anchor was lifted and as it rose above the water's surface
huge fakes of Shanghai mud thumped back into the coffee-
coloured river. Again the game was resumed in the smoker.
Kalt, the German sea-captain, who was returning from a three-year
internment in Java, hesitated before the window. The low, rolling
banks of the Shanghai River widened as the vibration of the
steamer increased and the salt air of that churning bit of water that
is neither the Yellow nor the Eastern Sea, seeped through the
cracks and loose rubber weather-stripping of the doors and win-
dows. Again the coloured chips were carefully measured out upon
the green table—but still Kalt hesitated. .
From Java to Singapore he had lost two thousand Dutch dollars.
From Singapore to Hongkong he had lost over three thousand, and
from Hongkong to Shanghai another two thousand. He had now
reached the limit of his resources and if he continued to lose he
would have to forego his intended stay in America and return
direct to his native land. This was not a pleasant thought. But
then, if he played he might gain back and even ... in warm
countries luck turns as quickly as milk. At last he decided.
" “Why should I play like an ordinary gambler? Have I no other
amusement in life?” He started for the door and was about to
leave when his ears caught the soft clicking sound of the chips and
snap
of new cards. . . He lit a cigar and took his place
at the table.
It was two days from Shanghai to Nagasaki, Japan, where the
steamer took its coal, handed up basket by basket passing through
busy little hands all night long. During these two days Kalt again
lost, and again he lost on the way to Yokohama.
Once more the nose of the boat turned seaward, this time for the
final leap—the twenty odd days' drive across the restless Pacific.
Kalt kept to his cabin.
Above him on the deck he could hear the Captain walk in solemn
inspection and give orders to the first mate. Above him also he
the fresh
.


260
THE BURNING BEARD
knew that the chips were already being counted out in stacks upon
the green cloth.
To play or not to play? The thought burned in his brain. To
win! America, the promised land where money buys everything.
But to lose once more would be to lose all. For he realized that
nowhere can the lack of money be felt more than in America. To
play or not to play?
“Am I a common gambler?” he asked himself.
“Must I toss my
last in a game of chance and in the end throw myself over like
a useless log, spent and wasted by too much grinding and too little
care? —The strong man wins, but the super-man plays not at
all.”
Three times his hand grasped the knob of the door and three
times he released his hold. At length he flung himself on the bed
and gazed blankly at the ceiling where the very boards seemed to
move back and forth intermeshing like the cards in the game.
Then he heard his door open and something creep into the room.
He sat up and there on the floor knelt a little hunchback with a
bright red beard. “Help me! Help me!” he pleaded. Kalt
. !
jumped from the bed.
“Help me! Help me! I am so hungry,” cried the little man
on the floor. But Kalt was no longer listening, he had opened the
lid of his case and was taking out the remainder of his money.
“Lucky,” he kept mumbling to himself. “What is more lucky
than a hunchback?” He fixed his hair with one pass of the conib,
'
took the key from the door and was about to leave when he turned
back.
“Here, you lucky little devil!” he said.
“Let me rub this money
on your hump. It will bring me luck--and God help you if it
don't!"
“Help me, I am hungry,” but Kalt only rubbed more briskly,
stepped into the hallway, locking the little creature in his room,
and darted up the stairs to the smoker. The game had just begin.
The little man in the cabin ate the fruit that was about to turn
bad, devoured the stale candies, munched on a bag of crystallized
plums, ate the skins of two bananas, and found half a box of bis-
cuits and a large cake of Swiss chocolate. Then he felt better, for
he stood on a chair to view himself in the glass, and discovered a
small flask of brandy. He drank a little, rubbed his belly, and then


MANUEL KOMROFF
261
.
commenced to wash the coal from his hands and face. He sham-
pooed his head and beard and lit one of Kalt's cigars and settled
himself on the couch to the painful duty of combing clean his mat-
ted beard which soon glistened between the black teeth of the comb
like a juicy flame.
Shortly after midnight Kalt returned the victor. He rubbed his
winnings on the little man's hump and suddenly turned him round
and said: "Where do you come from?''
"Who, I? Why I come from nowhere . . I mean all over.
From the home of the French Consulate in Turon. I was also for
a while in the Palace at Saigon . . . I was all over.
..
At Paris I
was at Versailles. . . . But just now I come from nowhere.
... Nowhere at all."
“You must be a jester, a court jester.”
"Who, I? ... I am the most serious man in the world. No-
body is so unfortunate.”
“Unfortunate? Why, you are the only bit of luck I've had in
weeks. You lucky little jester, you must stay with me always.”
"Who, I? I tell you I am not a joker. I am serious.. I
am the most unlucky person in the world, and even in China.
serious."
“But you said you were at Versailles. ...
“I was all over. I even worked on top of the Eiffel Tower, but
I tell you I am not a joker, I am serious. I am,
"Who are you!"
"Who, I? I am Abe, the painter. ... I can also calcimine and
gild.”
“What? A house painter!"
"First class ... the best."
“But what are you doing here ?''
“I told you—I am unlucky. The most unlucky in the world.
You can't imagine how misfortune can pile itself on one per-
I am like a paint that never dries. Wherever I go the same
thing. First my mother, she crippled me so I wouldn't have to
serve in the military. Then we had a little massacre and I had
to leave Poland. In Germany I had a bad time so I went to
France. But there everything goes by seasons. . . . I am handy on
the ladder, I am handy on the scaffold, I have long hands and for
ceiling work I don't have to bend . . . but everything goes by
I am
son.
.


262
THE BURNING BEARD
.
.
.
seasons.
When there was no work it was bad. Do
you
know
what bad is? Bad is bad, and worse it can't be. Well, then I saw
a sign that said: 'French China—French China is a rich country.
Unlimited opportunities. A young America. Be a settler. Why
not? The Government pays transportation.' Well, what should
I know? Did I know what it was till I got there? Could I paint
the coolies' houses when they don't use paint ?''
"They have no houses ?”
"Poor! You should see how people can live! And I, can I
compete with coolie labour? I went straight to the governor and
at once he gave me a job to paint his house. But when it was fin-
ished—what then? Then he told me: 'Abe, you want to make
money—buy up some land and plant rubber. Then I had to tell
him the truth, and I told it to him plain. He turned pale."
"What did you tell him?" inquired Kalt.
'
"I told him that I had no money. No money!' he cried. Not
'
a cent!' Then he gave me a lecture and said I had no right to
go to a new country without money and take free transporta-
tion and fool the Government.
"Well, I left that unlimited land and came straight to Shanghai,
but there, too, it is bad without money. So many foreigners, and
only the Chinese work. 'How do you earn your money?' I asked
one fellow. 'Easiest thing in the world,' he said. You play rou-
lette. Come along, I'll show you.' He took me to the place and in
one night before my very eyes he made four hundred dollars—it
made me dizzy. So I tried it myself, but I am too unlucky. In one
hour I lost my five dollars ... always unlucky. Well, there was
nothing to do, so I decided to go to America. I waited for a boat
and when it docked I packed myself away in the cellar with the coal.
But soon my food ran out and I became so hungry that I could not
stand it any longer. What can the captain do to me? He will
make me work.”
"No! no!" interrupted Kalt. “I won't let you go. You are
my luck. You must stay here."
“But I am hungry."
"Never mind. You will eat the best of everything. Leave it
The steward is a countryman of mine. Leave it to me."
.
In the morning Kalt arranged to have double portion meals sent
to his stateroom and from that day on he kept his prisoner under
to me.


MANUEL KOMROFF
263
lock and key. Before the trip was over he had not only won back
what he had lost but was a gainer by thirty thousand dollars.
Now, however, arose the question as to how he was to get Abe
past the immigration authorities at San Francisco.
When the time came and most of the passengers had already
left the steamer and were occupied with the customs officers on the
pier, Kalt opened the door of his stateroom and led Abe out of
the room on a long leather leash. Abe was dressed in a green
Chinese mandarin coat that reached to the floor. In his hand he
carried a large lady's fan and his red beard stood out against the
green coat and seemed to sparkle with light.
“This is my jester,” Kalt explained, presenting his passport.
"What is he?” asked one of the officers.
"A jester!"
“I am not a joker,” protested Abe from under his silken gown.
"I am the most serious—"
“Keep still.”
“It says nothing about your servant in the passport.”
"He is not a servant. He is my jester. Can't you see how little
he is!”
“But we don't allow slaves in America."
“He is not a slave. I only have him tied so I don't lose him.
.. He is so little.”
“But what nationality is he?''
"Why, he he has no nationality. He is just a plain jester.
No jesters have nationalities."
"What good is he—what do you do with him ?”
“Why he is no good, he is only lucky to have with you."
“Oh, I see-like a rabbit's foot."
“Yes, all jesters are lucky. Didn't you ever have one come
through here before ?”
"No."
"Didn't you ever see one before ?"
“Not a real one-but I heard of them and I saw one once on the
stage.
“That's it!" replied Kalt with greater assurance.
“That's what
they are used for. Besides, no jesters need passports. They're
lucky for the country. There are no regulations prohibiting jesters
anywhere. I am surprised you never had one before.”
.
-


264
THE BURNING BEARD
you say?”
The immigration officer turned to his companion. “Well, what
do
“I don't know any regulations against these kind of people. It's
not like coolies or Russians. Besides, he is so small he couldn't
count for a real person.'
"All right. Passed! Who's next?”
In this way Abe came to America. They lived for about a
month in a large hotel in New York when suddenly one day Abe
said: “Captain Kalt, I must tell you a secret. Do
Do you know
what makes my beard so red? ... I am poisoned! Plain poisoned.
No, I didn't eat anything bad. ... I am poisoned with lead.
Twenty years a painter, and my skin don't sweat. That's why my
beard is so red. ... All my soul comes out in one place. It breaks
out like fire. Nobody knows what is inside of me. I burn inside
like wet lime. Such an unlucky person you never saw. ... That
is why I can't stay with you any longer. I must paint. I don't
like to be a joker. A joker is not a serious person. If you only
knew what is inside of me ... that is why my beard is so red.”
Now Captain Kalt has gone into the importing business and Abe
has joined the painters' union. Last week he was to do our bath-
room, but he never showed up till this morning.
.
“How can I help it?” he said. “I am so unlucky-on my last
job the paint didn't dry.”
>
.


INSTRUCTIONS FOR A BALLET
BY MAXWELL BODENHEIM
Raise the right foot-bound in sheer
Reasons of white and gold-
One inch from the black stage-floor.
Then perform these torpid words:
"Money is dangerous to men:
It shames the clearness of their thoughts.”
After thus accounting
For the loquacious smallness
Of those rare gifts that come from doubting men,
Tear the left foot vigorously
From the black grip of the floor,
And attend its nakedness
With this coronation of words:
“Money is emptiness
Curiously violated by colour.
Crown it with originality
That burns with careless discernment,
And amaze the limpid
Familiarity of Time.”
After thus accounting
For an improbable situation,
Abandon the farce and shrewdly
Tiptoe across the stage,
Peering down at your feet
And mistaking their lean mysteries
For possibilities in syncopation.
Having thus emulated
The tension of a psycho-analyst
Who confuses routines with causes,
Suddenly kneel upon the floor, ,
Limp with the collapse of sightless longing,
And raise one hand to the sky
While clenching the other hand at your audience,


266
INSTRUCTIONS FOR A BALLET
Thus expressing the thoughtful perturbations
Of Occidental religions.
Then dance across the stage,
Giving complex decisions to your legs
And interrupting the dance with a pause
In which you question its cumbersome cause.
Having thus defended
The broken rhythm of Western philosophers-
Sprinkled with a carnival of details-
Change the dance to a borrowed waltz,
Picking suave tricks from a harp
That lacks an ascending scale of notes,
And insisting that the result is music.
The end of the ballet should portray
A gradual sinking to the floor,
With plentiful whispers resenting
The final intrusion of Buddha.


GUILLAUME APOLLINAIRE
BY GABRIELLE BUFFET
GON
a
UILLAUME APOLLINAIRE has had a profound influence
on the literature and perhaps still more on the arts and the
spirit of this modern period. His influence emanated from his
personality rather than from his work—of which he did little, in
spite of the wonderful activity of his sensitive intelligence. No
doubt it was just this lively activity which made the idea of a long,
sustained piece of writing intolerable to him; such a continuous and
absorbing effort would have locked him up in himself and kept him
from the new contacts which were the food of his spirit. It is there-
fore impossible to consider the writing separately from the man,
whose force and originality are not by any means adequately mir-
rored therein. Apollinaire spent the best of his creative powers in
living, in the search for new joys and new forms, in pushing back
existing boundaries. He was possessed of different and almost con-
tradictory forces; a poetic and lyric tendency so powerful as to make
his thought come in rhythms automatically when he wrote—at times
to change the most banal letter into a poem; and a spirit of research
which seized him and carried him towards those experiments in writ-
ing which, though cut short by his premature death, form the point
of departure for the whole modern evolution. His work comprises
several volumes of poetry and prose, which I shall cite in order of
their appearance:
L'Enchanteur Pourissant, published in 1903 in a journal called
Le Festin d'Ésope. A sort of prose poem which gave free rein to all
his lyrical verve; it made him famous.
Le Bestiaire, a collection of short poems full of wit and delicacy.
Hérésiarque & Cie., 1912, said to be his prose masterpiece; a
collection of strange tales in which he gets an intensity at once
mysterious and fantastic; he never attempted the genre again.
Alcools, 1913, his most important work in verse. I find here the
palpable conflict between the mind and the muse, the search for the
new word, the attempt to let flow unimpeded the clear spring of
poetry.


268
GUILLAUME APOLLINAIRE
Le Poète Assassiné, written early in the war, complex, a sort of
obscure, lyrical autobiography, mirror of the author's vision of life
and of himself.
Calligrammes, which contains many verses composed at the front
together with examples of his new discovery—calligrammatic poetry.
La Femme Assise, posthumous prose.
He collaborated in no end of journals and reviews, the Mercure
de France among others, where his chroniques displayed an intelli-
gence and a style of exceptional subtlety. He translated and anno-
tated many erotic authors, Aretino, the Marquis de Sade, and so
forth; founded and edited several reviews, Le Festin d'Ésope, al-
ready mentioned, 1903-1904, Les Soirées de Paris, 1913-1918,
which he consecrated mainly to the defence of modern painting.
The influence of Guillaume Apollinaire on painting is one of the
most curious manifestations of his personality. The abstract inves-
tigations of the cubists fitted in with his own innovative needs and
he found a starting point for his experiments among the pure
inventions of his friends, the younger generation of painters. An
important exchange took place between them. Apollinaire's sym-
pathy, the ardour with which he defended and encouraged them
publicly, the constant effort on his part to facilitate the public's
comprehension of these often incomplete and arid works, were an
important factor in the vitality of modern painting. He lived on
intimate terms with innovators like Picabia, Picasso, Derain, Vla-
minck—it was he who hit on the name Orphism for Picabia's
-
painting and differentiated the two schools. He wrote a book on
Les Peintres Cubistes. In return the new spirit set upon him its
indelible mark, and his work from that time on was impregnated
with the tendency towards abstraction and negation—negation of
the spirit of lyricism within him-negation of traditional literary
and poetic procedures. From that time on he tried to separate
poetry from all romantic sentiment, from all convention of art and
good taste. He wanted to make use of every element that life
affords without restriction. Speaking of poets he said:
“In the field of inspiration their liberty cannot be less than that
of the daily paper which deals on one page with the most divers
matters, covers the most widely separated countries. One would


GABRIELLE BUFFET
269
like to know why the poet should not have at least an equal liberty
and why he should have to be circumspect about spatial relation-
ships, in an age of telephones, wireless telegraphs, and airplanes.”
For him words are to be used without literary artifice, free and
direct as in conversation. Hence the “poèmes conversations” of
Calligrammes. André Billy tells of their invention in a subtle ar-
ticle on Guillaume Apollinaire.
“He, Dupuy, and I are sitting at Crucifixe with three glasses of
vermouth. Suddenly Guillaume bursts out laughing—he has com-
pletely forgotten to write the preface to Robert Delaunay's cata-
logue, which he promised to put in the last mail that evening.
Quick waiter, paper, pen, ink. Three of us will get through with
this in no time.' Guillaume's pen runs already:
‘Du rouge au vert tout le jaune se meurt.'
The pen stops.
But Dupuy dictates:
'Quand chantent les aras dans les forêts natales.'
The pen starts off again, transcribing faithfully.
It is
my
'Il y a un poème à faire sur l'oiseau qui n'a qu'une aile.'
Reminiscence from Alcools—the pen writes without hesitation.
A good thing to do, if there is any hurry,' I said, 'would be to
send your preface over the telephone.'
And so the next line became:
‘Nous l'enverrons en message telephonique.'
I no longer remember all the details of this peculiar collabora-
tion, but I can state that the preface to the catalogue of Robert
Delaunay came out entire.”
turn:
a
He was undoubtedly the first to discuss the ideas of a whole gen-
eration, ideas which later, having been clearly defined, became the
slogan of Dadaism: “Aesthetic value is no more than suggestion,
the grip of a strong mind on a weaker, the skill of a juggler doing a
trick before spectators.” But at that time, and in Apollinaire's
mind, the formula was not so crudely explicit; he foresaw the trend
of the modern spirit and worried at the same time about its con-
a


270
GUILLAUME APOLLINAIRE
sequences. He did his best, however, to explain it and to relate it
to a logical tradition, and give it a foundation. He wrote in the
Mercure de France:
“The new spirit announces its direct inheritance from the clas-
sics of solid good sense, a sure critical judgement, well integrated
views upon the universe and the soul, and a sense of duty that strips
the feelings bare and limits or rather governs their expression. It
claims to inherit from the romanticists a curiosity which explores
every field capable of furnishing a literary material that could
possibly exalt life. It searches for truth quite as readily in the
domain of ethnology, for example, as in that of the imagination.
These are the principal traits of this new spirit.
“Let us add that in spite of, and perhaps precisely because of, this
will to veracity which dominates all the investigations, endeavours,
and reachings out of the new spirit, we should not be surprised to
see a good number of its efforts turn out barren and even ridiculous.
The new spirit is full of snares and dangers.
“But that is all part of the spirit of the day, and to condemn
these endeavours wholesale would be an error comparable to the
one attributed rightly or wrongly to M Thiers, who is said to have
declared that railroads were nothing but scientific toys and that the
world could never produce enough iron for a track from Paris to
Marseilles.
"The new spirit then encourages literary experiments which are
often hazardous and sometimes far from lyrical. And it is for this
reason that lyricism plays only a small part in modern poetry, which
is often content to experiment without bothering to give its experi-
ments a lyrical significance. The poet, the new spirit, are gathering
material, and this material is to furnish a foundation of truth, the
simplicity and modesty of which ought to repel no one who realizes
what great, what very great things may result therefrom. In years
to come, students of the literary history of our time will be aston-
ished to learn of poets and dreamers who, like the alchemists, and
without even a philosopher's stone for pretext, gave themselves to
experiment which made them a butt for journalists and snobs.
“But their inquiries will be useful, will constitute the foundation
of a new realism, which will be perhaps not inferior to the wise and
poetical realism of Ancient Greece.”
,


GABRIELLE BUFFET
271
From 1914 Guillaume Apollinaire was haunted by the notion
of the possibility of a union of poetry and painting. He had
printed a subscription announcement of a work entitled Et Moi
Aussi Je Suis Peintre. His Calligrammes are a good sample of the
"new trick” which he was to attempt before the public. The fol-
lowing letter to André Billy will illustrate better than any expla-
nation his state of mind:
Paris, July 29, 1918.
Mon cher André:
I have been a long time writing to thank you for the fine and
sensitive article which you wrote about Calligrammes. It was by a
lover of poetry and a true friend. I hope I may repay you for it!
Observe that I find you rather hard on clichés. They are a modern
method of which one would be wrong to deprive oneself. This
book was the first one of its kind, and nothing stands in the way of
somebody else's going farther towards perfection in this manner
than its originator; some day there may be very fine calligrammatic
books. War book as it is, it has life in it and will go farther than
Alcools, I think, provided fortune smiles on my poet's reputation.
That's what I think. As for the reproach that I am a destroyer, I
reject it formally, for I have never destroyed, but on the contrary
have tried to build. The classic form of verse was knocked in the
head before my time, yet I have often used it, so often in fact that
I gave new life to the verse of eight feet, for example. In the arts,
too, I have destroyed nothing; I tried to give a chance to new
schools, but not at the expense of the old. I attacked neither sym-
bolism nor impressionism. I applauded publicly poets like Moréas.
I never put myself forward as a wrecker, but always as a builder.
The Merde in music from my manifesto-synthesis published by
the Futurists did not apply to the work of the ancients but to their
name raised as a barrier to new generations. As for Calligrammes,
they are an idealization of vers-libre poetry, a precise use of typog-
raphy at the moment when typography is closing brilliantly its
carrier in the dawn of the new methods of reproduction, cinema
and phonograph
If ever I stop my investigations it will be because I am tired of
being treated as a fool simply because experiments seem silly to
people who are satisfied with following the beaten track.
But God is my witness that I have wanted no more than to add


272
GUILLAUME APOLLINAIRE
new domains to art and letters in general, without at all ignoring
the value of the true masterpieces of past and
present.
Guillaume Apollinaire.
Apollinaire was not destined however to carry farther his literary
experiments and his struggle to free the new spirit. He had been
wounded in the head in 1917, and had never completely recovered.
In November 1918 he died of influenza two days, I think, before the
armistice. He was thirty-eight years old.



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DRAWING FOR A WOODCUT. BY JACOBA VAN HEEMSKERCK






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​DRAWING FOR A WOODCUT. BY JACOBA VAN HEEMSKERCK


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DRAWING FOR A WOODCUT. BY JACOBA VAN HEEMSKERCK


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DRAWING FOR A WOODCUT. BY JACOBA VAN HEEMSKERCK





THE MOSQUE OF THE EMPRESS
BY MARY ALDIS
IM
N the year twelve hundred after the birth of Christ, the Mo-
hammedan Timao, emperor and strategist, was away in the
West at the wars, conquering and possessing himself of territory.
Before he set forth he had been very proud of the beauty of his
capital city, Samarkand, and had taken pleasure in building wide
gardens and turreted mosques and even temples; these last because
he worshipped the temples of the Greeks.
It was known to all, however, that the architects who planned
the work and the sculptors and tile makers and the metal workers
and all the others must pretend to the Emperor that it was his
thought which animated their designs, otherwise he would put
them to death. No one but the Emperor should create beauty in
Samarkand. The names of those who wrought were never told.
If a builder or designer disappeared, it would be whispered about
that he had dared to claim a share in the adornment of Samarkand.
Next to the city that was his pride and plaything, the Emperor
loved his favourite wife Abdula-Yeshi, whom he had brought from
Egypt. Some said she was of royal blood, some that she was a
peasant, some that her birth was supernatural. However that was,
Timao had crowned her Empress, placing with his own hands upon
her forehead a crown of black opals. Since her coming he had
taken no other wife.
Strong indeed was the desire of conquest which could take him
from the soft curves of her brown breasts and the touch of her
long fingers and the sound of her low voice. He wished to take
her with him and considered it silently as she pleaded but feared
to risk his dark opal in dangerous surroundings; so, after a night
of anguished happiness, he left her sleeping and set out.
The Empress was sorely bereft and could find nothing to interest
her. Often she would look into the waters of the lake and question
in her heart if she should let herself down into their coolness.
Then she would remember that last night together and, thinking
of the time when the Emperor's arms would again enclose her, she
would go back to her bed and her troubled dreams.


274
THE MOSQUE OF THE EMPRESS
Finally to take up her thoughts she formed a plan. Timao had
taken joy in building beauty. She would cause to be built a
mosque which should be more beautiful than any in Samarkand.
Timao had told her that any one save himself who wrought in the
city of Samarkand should be put to death. She determined that
her mosque should surpass in beauty all the rest. She would see
if he would forfeit the life of his best-beloved. Those around
who had feared for her life were astonished at her sudden excite-
ment and delight.
She summoned to her from far and near all the architects and
sculptors and tile workers of reputation for skill and knowledge
she could learn of in the empire. She charged them that but three
colours were to be used in ornament. The green of the young
hibiscus leaves in spring and the blue of the sea at noon of a
summer day were to be united with the gold of the yellow sands
which are lighted by the dying sun; here and there black-black
like the shining skin of her slave from Nubia. This was all they
might use in decoration. The body of the mosque must be of stone,
white as the tops of the far-off mountains. One hundred thousand
slaves were assigned to perform the labour and the mosque must
be finished in four years.
After she had spoken she divided those she had summoned into
several groups, gave command that they be cared for in all ways,
and ordered that plans be made ready in the space of six months.
Soon she grew impatient and would often visit the various draft-
ing rooms where work was going on, to comment and encourage.
Her presence gave those who laboured such new life that they
wondered at their own skill and looked upon their work with ad-
miration.
Seeing with what love they laboured, a new plan came to her,
and smiling to herself she said to them that she desired to honour
their skill and that each one who wrought well to her bidding
would have his name graven for all time upon a stone tablet to be
placed by the great entrance door of the Mosque of the Empress
Abdula-Yeshi. So she thought to test still further the love of the
Emperor.
Long since she had selected the site—where the rising sun should
strike across sweet waters and reveal to all the names of those
who had at her command created beauty. A multitude of work-


MARY ALDIS
275
men were daily bringing to the spot great blocks of marble, white
as the tops of the far-off mountains.
Finally the plans pleased her and the work was begun. Day
by day the thousands upon thousands of brown arms heaved and
pulled and struggled and toiled, and at night great torches and
bonfires were kept blazing so that the work might not cease.
Anxiously she watched the green that was like the green of the
young hibiscus leaves in spring and the blue of the sea in mid-
summer mingle with the gold of the yellow sands at sunset, until
a façade of surpassing beauty lifted its jewelled surface to the
light of day. Anxiously she watched the ribbed towers and tur-
rets until she was sure that their outline was so perfect no human
hand could ever again equal their loveliness. And the interior?
Golden and white, blue and green, and fine black like the shin-
ing skin of the slave from Nubia, the interior glowed and trembled
and shone, seeming fearful as a young maiden of displaying her
fresh blown beauty. The Empress Abdula-Yeshi could not be-
lieve that it was she who had caused such beauty to come into
being. Faithful to her promise, the names of all those who had
designed the mosque were engraved in stone on a tablet by the
great doorway for all to read. Every labourer who had toiled
was given rich gifts and proclamation was made that all who had
helped in the building of the Mosque of the Empress were to be
accorded honour.
When it was finished there lacked a month of the four years
set for the task and Abdula-Yeshi was possessed, now with a desire
that the Emperor should behold her handiwork, now with longing to
feel again his hands upon her breast, and now with fear that he
would take her life in forfeit. She could not tell which of these
three things was strongest.
One day after she had prayed long in the Mosque that soon,
soon she might feel his arms closing around her, suddenly a mes-
senger came into her presence and threw himself at her feet. In
three days the Emperor would come, the city must be made beau-
tiful for his entry, and she, Abdula-Yeshi was to go forth to
meet him outside the gates and ride beside him as he entered the
city. Abdula-Yeshi's heart sang as she made her preparations.
When the day came she determined the entry should be through
of the city where they would see most quickly the Mosque
1
that gate


276 THE MOSQUE OF THE EMPRESS
that she had built. In royal purple and gold and with a great
.
train of attendants she went out to meet the Emperor Timao
as he came.
When the great gate called the Gate of the Leopard had been
passed and a mile beyond the Empress gave signal that the train
should halt. She laughed softly to herself when the elephant
on which she rode would not stand still, but swung his heavy
trappings to and fro, stamped his great feet into the yellow sands
and trumpeted his desire.
Finally the Emperor came, her lord, her lover. Worn and
brown and haggard he looked and the clothes of his attendants
were stained and frayed. His animals were weary and walked
with heavy feet, and yet he was a Conqueror. His eyes burned
as he looked at her across the ceremonial greeting of their clasped
hands. Through the shouts and clamours of the people all about
them she heard his voice: “I set no eunuch over thee because I
loved thee. Hast thou been faithful ?”
At her answer, "No lover but Death may possess me after thee,”
his shout rang out and he laughed with a great laughter as he
saluted the people.
Slowly the two caravans were united, turned, and set in mo-
tion for the entry into Samarkand; the Emperor Timao and his
brown, lithe empress, very grave in her dignity, riding together
at the head.
Shortly the Lake of Sweet Waters came in sight. A little
further, and the Mosque of the Empress glowed before them.
Many besides Abdula-Yeshi watched the Emperor's face as he
gazed without speaking at this newest ornament of Samarkand
and many trembled. As they came nearer his eye fell upon the
stone tablet and he caused the procession to stop while with heavy
look he read. After a time his lips formed the words, "The name!
The name of the person who dared—” but Abdula-Yeshi leaned her
body against him. “Until to-morrow,” she said, “keep your ques-
tioning. All shall then be answered. To-day belongs to us and
love. Look into my eyes.” The Emperor obeyed her, and turned
his face to look into her eyes; but as the procession filed past, he
twisted his neck to see the Mosque again, and over his face came
a great wonder of angry admiration.
Abdula-Yeshi came to him that night in a slight dress the colour
a


MARY ALDIS
277
of the young hibiscus plant in spring and it was bordered with
gold like the golden sands. Over the soft curves of her brown
breasts hung a necklace of lapis lazuli and her hair was as black
as the skin of the Nubian slave. So she stood, silent, by the
Emperor's couch, and he looked at her and held out to her his
arms, and she sank into them and his mouth found hers.
At dawn she slept, and the Emperor rose and stood over her
and said in his heart, “Behold two things of perfect beauty in
Samarkand,” and he took a small dagger and marking the place
under the curve of her left breast where his kisses had lately been,
he drove it straight and stepped back, gazing at his work.
In the morning, clad in the slight robe that was the color of
the young hibiscus leaves in spring, the necklace of lapis lazuli
upon her soft, brown breasts, her hair that was black like the skin of
the Nubian slave wound about her delicate head for a coronet, they
laid the Empress Abdula-Yeshi in the center of the Mosque which
she had built. Fair, fair she looked, as if fallen asleep after love.
The Emperor commanded they bury her deep-now Death pos-
sessed her.
All then went away and after many hours Timao the Emperor
came forth from the Mosque. He caused to be taken down and
broken into a thousand fragments the carven names of those who
had laboured at the Empress' bidding; he sealed the great door
so that none could enter, and he went away again to war.


SLABS OF THE SUNBURNT WEST
BY CARL SANDBURG
Into the night, into the blanket of night,
Into the night rain gods, the night luck gods,
Overland goes the overland passenger
train.
Stand up, sandstone slabs of red,
Tell the overland passengers who burnt you.
Tell 'em how the jacks and screws loosened you.
Tell 'em who shook you by the heels and stood you
on your heads,
Who put the slow pink of sunset mist on your faces.
- - - - ---------
Panels of the cold grey open night,
Gates of the Great American Desert,
Skies keeping the prayers of the wagon men,
The riders with picks, shovels, and guns,
On the old trail, the Santa Fe trail, the Raton pass
Panels, skies, gates, listen to-night while we send up our
prayers on the Santa Fe trail.
1
(A colossal bastard frog
squats in stone.
Once he squawked.
Then he was frozen and
shut up for ever.)
Into the night the overland passenger train,
Slabs of sandstone red sink to the sunset red.
Blankets of night cover 'em up
Night rain gods, night luck gods, are looking on.
March on, processions.
Tie your hat to the saddle and ride, O Rider.
Let your ponies drag their navels in the sand.


CARL SANDBURG
279
Go hungry; leave your bones in the desert sand.
When the desert takes you the wind is clean.
The winds say so on a noisy night.
The fingerbone of a man
lay next to the handle of a frying pan
and the footbone of a horse.
“Clean, we are clean,” the winds whimper on a noisy night.
Into the night the overland passenger train,
And the engineer with an eye for signal lights,
And the porters making up berths for passengers,
And the boys in the diner locking the ice-box,
And six men with cigars in the buffet car mention
"civilization,” “history,” “God."
>
Into the blanket of night goes the overland train,
In the black of the night the processions march,
The ghost of a pony goes by,
A hat tied to the saddle,
The wagon-tongue of a prairie schooner
And the handle of a Forty-niner's pickax
Do a shiver dance in the desert dust,
In the coyote grey of the alkali dust.
And six men with cigars in the buffet car mention
"civilization," "history,” “God.”
a
a
а
Sleep, O wonderful hungry people.
Take a shut-eye, take a long old snooze,
and be good to yourselves;
Into the night the overland passenger
train
And the sleepers cleared for a morning sun
and the Grand Canyon of Arizona.
II
A bluejay blue
and a grey mouse grey
ran up the canyon walls.
.


280
SLABS OF THE SUNBURNT WEST
a
A rider came to the rim
Of a slash and a gap of desert dirt-
A long-legged long-headed rider
On a blunt and a blurry jackass-
Riding and asking, “How come? How come ?"
a
a
And the long-legged long-headed rider said:
“Between two ears of a blurry jackass
I see ten miles of auburn, gold, and purple---
I see doors open over doorsills
And always another door and a doorsill.
Cheat my eyes, fill me with the float
Of your dream, you auburn, gold, and purple.
Cheat me, blow me off my pins onto footless floors.
Let me put footsteps in an airpath.
Cheat me with footprints on auburn, gold, purple
Out to the last violet shimmer of the float
Of the dream—and I will come straddling a jackass,
Singing a song and letting out hallelujahs
To the doorsill of the last footprint.”
a
And the man took a stub lead pencil
And made a long memo in shorthand
On the two blurry jackass ears :
‘God sits with long whiskers in the sky.'
I said it when I was a boy.
I said it because long-whiskered men
Put it in my head to say it.
They lied .
about you.
God .
.
They lied.
“The other side of the five doors
and doorsills put in my
house-
how many hinges, panels, doorknobs,
how many locks and lintels,
put on the doors and doorsills
winding and wild between
the first and the last doorsill of all?


CARL SANDBURG
281
“Out of the footprints on ten miles
Of auburn, gold, and purple—an old song comes:
These bones shall rise again,
Yes, children, these bones shall rise.
“Yonder past my five doors
are fifty million doors, maybe,
stars with knobs and locks and lintels,
stars with riders of rockets,
stars with swimmers of fire.
“Cheat my eyes—and I come again-
straddling a jackass—singing a song-
letting out hallelujahs.
“If God is a proud and a cunning Bricklayer,
Or if God is a King in a white gold Heaven,
Or if God is a Boss and a Watchman always watching
I come riding the old ride of the humiliation,
Straddling a jackass, singing a song,
Letting out hallelujahs.
"Before a ten mile float
of auburn, gold, and purple,
footprints on a sunset airpath haze,
I ask:
How can I taste with my tongue a tongueless God?
How can I touch with my fingers a fingerless God?
How can I hear with my ears an earless God?
Or smell of a God gone noseless long ago,
Or look on a God who never needs eyes for looking?
a
"My head is under your foot, God.
My head is a little pan of alkali dust
your foot kicked loose-your foot of air
with its steps on the sunset airpath haze.“
(A bluejay blue
and a grey mouse grey
ran up the canyon walls.)


282
SLABS OF THE SUNBURNT WEST
“Sitting at the rim of the big gap
at the high lash of the frozen storm line,
I ask why I go on five crutches,
tongues, ears, nostrils—all cripples-
eyes and nose—both cripples-
I ask why these five cripples
limp and squint and gag with me, ,
why they say with the oldest frozen faces:
Man is a poor stick and a sad squirt;
if he is poor he can't dress up;
if he dresses up he don't know any place to go.
“Away and away on some green moon
a blind blue horse eats white grass.
And the blind blue horse knows more than I do
because he saw more than I have seen
and remembered it after he went blind.
"And away and away on some other green moon
is a sea-kept child who lacks a nose I got
and fingers like mine and all I have.
And yet the sea-kept child knows more than
I do and sings secrets alien to me as light
to a nosing mole underground.
I understand this child as a yellow-belly
catfish in China understands peach pickers
at sunrise in September in a Michigan orchard.
“The
power
and lift of the sea
and the flame of the old earth fires under,
I sift their meanings of sand in my fingers.
I send out five sleepwalkers to find out who I am,
my name and number, where I came from,
and where I am going.
They go out, look, listen, wonder, and shoot a fire-white rocket
across the night sky; the shot and the flare of the rocket dies
to a whisper; and the night is the same as it always was.
They come back, my five sleepwalkers; they have an answer for
me, they say; they tell me; Wait—the password all of them


CARL SANDBURG
283
heard when the fire-white rocket shot across the sky and died
to a whisper, the password is: Wait.
“I sit with five binoculars, amplifiers, spectroscopes
I sit looking through five windows, listening, tasting, smelling,
touching
I sit counting five million smoke fogs.
Repeaters, repeaters, come back to my window sills.
Some are pigeons coming to coo and coo and clean their tail feathers
and look wise at me.
Some are pigeons coming with broken wings to die with pain in
their eyes on my window sills.
“I walk the high lash of the frozen storm line;
I sit down with my feet in a ten-mile gravel pit.
Here I ask why I am a bag of sea-water fastened to a frame of bones
put walking on land-here I look at crawlers, crimson spiders
spotted with purple spots on their heads, flinging silver nets, two,
four, six, against the sun.
Here I look two miles down to the ditch of the sea
and pick a winding ribbon, a river eater, a water
grinder; it is a runner sent to run by a stop-watch;
it is a wrecker on a rush job.”
A bluejay blue
and a grey mouse grey
ran up the canyon walls.
III
a
Battering rams, blind mules, mounted policemen,
trucks hauling caverns of granite, elephants
grappling gorillas in a death strangle, cathedrals,
arenas, platforms, somersaults of telescoped rail-
road train wrecks, exhausted egg heads, piles of
skulls, mountains of empty sockets, mummies of kings
and mobs, memories of work gangs and wrecking crews,
sobs of wind and water storms, all frozen and held
on paths leading on to spirals of new zigzags-


284
SLABS OF THE SUNBURNT WEST
a
An arm-chair for a one-eyed giant;
two pine trees grow in the left arm of the chair;
a bluejay comes, sits, goes, comes again;
a bluejay shoots and twitters ... out and across . .
.
.
tumbled skyscrapers and wrecked battleships,
walls of crucifixions and wedding breakfasts;
ruin, ruin—a brute gnashed, dug, kept on-
kept on and quit: and this is It.
Falling away, the brute is working.
Sheets of white veils cross a woman's face.
An eye socket glooms and wonders.
The brute hangs his head and drags on to the job.
The mother of mist and light and air murmurs: Wait.
The weavers of light weave best in red,
better in blue.
The weavers of shadows weave at sunset;
the young black-eyed women run, run, run
to the night star homes; the old women
sit weaving for the night rain gods,
the night luck gods.
Eighteen old giants throw a red gold shadow ball;
they pass it along; hands go up and stop it; they
bat
up
flies and practise; they begin the game, they
knock it for home runs and two-baggers; the pitcher
puts it across in an out- and an in-shoot drop; the
Devil is the Umpire; God is the Umpire; the game
is called on account of darkness.
A bluejay blue
and a grey mouse grey
ran up the canyon walls.


CARL SANDBURG
285
IV
Good night; it is scribbled on the panels
of the cold grey open desert.
Good night; on the big sky blanket over the
Santa Fe trail it is woven in the oldest
Indian blanket songs.
Buffers of land, breakers of sea, say it and
say it, over and over, good night, good night.
Tie
your
hat to the saddle
and ride, ride, ride, O Rider.
Lay your rails and wires
and ride, ride, ride, O Rider.
The worn tired stars say
you shall die early and die dirty.
The clean cold stars say
you shall die late and die clean.
The runaway stars say
you shall never die at all,
never at all.


GLIMPSES OF THOMAS HARDY
BY LLEWELYN POWYS
EVISITING last year the old fashioned home of my child-
R
structure hidden away in one of those large neglected shrubberies
that are so often to be found in English gardens.
I was alone and had time to look about me.
Except for the fact that the laurels were more overgrown than
they had been the place seemed unaltered. It was as though the doc-
trine of impermanence, of the perpetual flux of all things, had in
this obscure and solitary place at last found refutation—the same
brown damp leaves were under my feet, the same smell of slugs and
blackbird droppings was in the air, as in the old days twenty years
before.
Being in a mood to pursue my sentimental investigations to the
uttermost I bent down and crawled into the small erection. Then it
was that my attention was still further arrested, for there before me
on the deal boarding of the interior, brown and weather-stained, my
eye lit on an infinitesimal drawing of a man's head! In spite of the
fact that a white twig of ivy had grown up near the pencilled out-
lines the sketch was still clearly visible—the round skull, the hooked
nose, the goblin eyebrows.
In one single flash it all came back to me-a far off August after-
noon with the sound of the mowing machine on the lawn outside and
the murmur of wasps about everywhere. My brother, John Cowper,
had just come back from a visit to Thomas Hardy and we had called
him into our garden house.
“What did he look like?” we had asked, vaguely realizing, as
children would from over-heard conversations, that he had been to
see someone of
consequence.
"He looked like this,” my brother had answered, as with a pencil
stump he had drawn the tiny picture.
It was during those holidays that Mr Hardy and his wife paid a
visit to Montacute. Before lunch he sat for some time in the draw-
a


LLEWELYN POWYS
287
ing room talking to my mother and I remember wondering as I came
into that cool retreat from the bright sunshine outside what there
could possibly be about this middle-aged gentleman with dusty shoes
and bloodless lips that could so excite my brother's interest.
I saw little of him that day. He spent the afternoon walking
about the village, visiting the old manor, and the church, and the
abbey. On his return, however, we managed to cajole him into our
play house under the laurels and there in the book that we kept he
wrote his name and the words “A wayfarer.”
He sat on a rough seat and talked about what he had seen and
the antiquity of the village. It was during this time that I heard
him explain to my brother why the chancels of so many mediaeval
churches are constructed with a slight deviation from the straight line
of the nave. It was an explanation that interested me and I have
remembered it ever since. In his last agony on the cross our Lord's
head is supposed to have fallen to one side, a realistic touch in the
tragic drama of the crucifixion that the old world builders as they
constructed in symbolic shape the foundations of their churches were
in no mood to forego.
I was with my brother when he took Mr Hardy to the station in
the late evening and I remember very well telling him as we sat on
the small country platform awaiting the train about the quaint and
picturesque dances that took place at our village festivals. “What
are the names of the dances ?” I recollect his asking with an interest
which at that time I could hardly explain and alas! could still less
satisfy.
Many years were to pass and many events were to happen before
I saw him again.
At last in 1919 finding myself, the pestilence of the war having
subsided, once more in England, I went to visit him at Max Gate. I
reached Dorchester at three o'clock and had an hour to spare. I spent
the time in wandering about the streets of the town which of all
others is dear to the lovers of the Wessex novels. Dorchester! what
a place it is! On that sombre afternoon it seemed to have about it
the very smell of antiquity; and, under the influence of Hardy's ge-
nius, as I was just then, I could almost come to believe that the mod-
ern life I knew was an illusion of a false memory.
As I passed down the High Street I was not unaware that my eyes


288
GLIMPSES OF THOMAS HARDY
were resting upon an architectural formation that in almost every
detail had been preserved unchanged for hundreds of years.
Could the dusty skeletons buried under the damp flag-stones of St
Peter's church, guildsman, burgher, and cavalier, have taken to
themselves flesh again, on that chill afternoon, they would have
scarcely been conscious of any alterations in the familiar irregularity
of their ancient city. Pausing for a moment outside the sacred build-
ing, crumbling and weather-stained, under which their bones lay, I
stood looking at the statue of William Barnes, and the figure of the
Dorset poet, dressed so soberly in knee-breeches and buckled shoes,
seemed to conspire with the ancient church to bring home to me the
continuity of the passing generations.
Had not Thomas Hardy himself been the friend of this old man
whose bitter cry “They will one day be putting a monument up to
me, who now deny me bread” has had so strange a fulfilment? Had
not Hardy himself, with a sick heart, noted the glint of the after-
noon's sun on the brass of the old man's coffin as it was being borne
away under the distant beech trees forty years ago? Lower down
the street, near the Phoenix Tavern, I came upon a long line of old-
fashioned carriers' carts, each with the name of its destination care-
fully inscribed upon it. Already groups of simple people, with bun-
dles and packages in their arms, had begun to collect round these
mud-stained vehicles, waiting, with that particular expression of ani-
mal-like docility that is so characteristic of country folk, the appear.
ance of the "Tranters” who were to convey them by lane, turnpike,
and goose-green to the warm, lamp-lit interiors of their various cot-
tages.
No sight could possibly have reminded me more certainly that I
was back again at the very heart of Hardy's Wessex, at the very
fountain and source of that deep and peculiar romance which is still
to be found in the barton yards and apple orchards of that county,
through the pleasant meadows of which the Frome and Stour find
their way to the sea.
After following down one of the famous avenues I crossed over a
bridge and approached Max Gate. It was a dismal afternoon in the
late autumn and the prospect now that it drew towards evening was
melancholy in the extreme. A flock of rooks kept whirling about the
trees whose naked branches sheltered Mr Hardy's house from view.


LLEWELYN POWYS
289
a
A cold gusty wind flicked at the shrivelled and decaying leaves that
lay in the ruts by the road-side. “It will snow before to-morrow,” I
thought.
Eventually, lifting the latch of the tall iron gate I passed along a
curving drive, moss-grown, and worn, and singularly obscure. Reach-
ing at last the darkened porch I rang at the bell and waited. Pres-
ently, to my no small content, I found myself seated near a good log
fire. I looked round me. A little white dog lay stretched on the
hearth rug. Near the chimney-piece I noticed the portrait of Shelley
and on the top of the bookshelf a small bust of Sir Walter Scott.
There were several interesting pictures on the walls but what fasci-
nated me more than any was a small water-colour of Westminster
Abbey with Hardy's own initials and the date 1863 daintly engraved
upon one of its corners. He came in at last, a little old man (dressed
in tweeds after the manner of a country squire) with the same round
skull and the same goblin eyebrows, and the same eyes keen and
alert. What was it that he reminded me of? a night hawk? a falcon
owl? for I tell you, the eyes that looked out of that century-old skull
were of the kind that see in the dark.
I found him as full of interesting conversation as ever. He told
for instance, that he considered it possible that John Keats on
the occasion of his landing at Lulworth, at the time he composed his
last sonnet, may have gone to visit relations at a village called
Broadmayne which lies between Dorchester and Winfrith, quite
some distance inland. He himself, he said, remembered people of
the same name who lived in this village and were stablemen like
Keats' own father, one of them, so he asserted, born about 1800, be-
ing remarkably like John Keats in appearance.
I spoke of some wooden stocks that I had come upon while visiting
Cerne Abbas and he assured me that he could remember well as a boy
seeing a man in the pillory at Dorchester.
I had lately been watching the movements of a pair of herons on
a wide marsh near Weymouth called Lodmoor and this interested
him. He said they were always known as cranes by the Dorset peas-
antry and remarked upon the shyness of their nature and the ex-
treme difficulty of getting near to them ever, adding that curiously
enough, he himself had observed them most closely from train win-
dows.
me,


290
GLIMPSES OF THOMAS HARDY
It was dark before I left, but taking up his hat he walked with me
to the iron gate. We stood for a moment before parting and I be-
came aware that he was peering out into the night in the direction of
Weymouth. Was he, I wondered, merely looking for the reflections
.
of the lights of that ancient sea-side town in their accustomed quar-
ter or was he with a deeper interest in his thoughts scanning once
again the dim outlines of the downs whose close-grown, fragrant
smelling turf covered so securely the bones of his fathers and the
bones of the old men before them?
As in meditative mood I retraced my steps back to the town, I be-
gan suddenly to feel a succession of tiny objects strike against my
face. It had begun to snow. "Truly," I thought, “Winter has come
at last.”



A WOOD CARVING. BY WILLIAM ZORACH


1



13
A WOOD CARVING. BY WILLIAM ZORACH





LONDON LETTER
February, 1922
THE
HE New Year always begins with the prodigious and never
stale joke of the Honours List. A number of men are rewarded
for their praiseworthy success in making money; some of them are
supposedly rewarded for their services in the Domains of Art. This
year Knighthoods (which carry little weight) have been conferred
on Hawtrey and Du Maurier, two actors remarkable for never hav-
ing wasted their talents (which are considerable) on plays unlikely
to be commercially successful. One would think that they had had
their reward already, but the peculiarity of the Honours List is that
it adds honour to prosperity. To him that hath—! Nor has Litera-
ture been forgotten. We have a new O. M. The Order of Merit, it
must be explained, is an honour so exalted that it is given only to
victorious generals, politicians who refuse peerages, and such writers
as Meredith, Hardy, and Henry James. To these great names is
now added that of Sir James Barrie, the gifted author of Peter Pan
and Mary Rose.
Other comic news? Well, some gentleman of taste has had the
discreet idea of writing a whole book about Max Beerbohm, in spite
of the polite (of course) but evidently agonized protest of the vic-
tim; and the Young English Poets in the tall shapes of the Sitwells
and Aldous Huxley have formally presented Madame Tetrazzini
with a wreath. Have they added an epitaph? And, dear lady, did
she really deserve it? Wouldn't Melba, Dame Nelly, have been
fairer game? Also, why were not Mr Sassoon and Mr Shanks there?
What, I wonder, can be the impressions of a reader of The DIAL
when he first visits London? He has come probably from Paris,
where he finds opposite the Madeleine the windows of Bernheim
full of Derain and Matisse, and where he has seen on three succes-
sive nights three different plays at the Vieux Colombier, flawlessly
performed. In London he wishes to discover what of interest is go-
ing on. He asks for an Art paper, and is given The Studio. A stone
is liker to bread. He asks for the best critical magazine, and is
given, rightly, the Mercury. Now it is right that the Academic case


292
LONDON LETTER
should be well presented (and the other reviews are too crusted to
a
realize that a defence is needed) but we need also a paper to repre-
sent the modern movement, a paper with "attack.” The Athenaeum
was distinctly good, but it went. Why not an English edition of
The DIAL?
DRAMA
There being no theatre in London devoted to the performance of
the Classics, your chance of seeing a Congreve or a Ben Jonson is in-
finitely small. At the time of writing no Shakespeare play is being
acted in London, and when there is one, it is usually too badly pro-
duced to attract any but anti-Shakespearean enthusiasts. When I
say London, I mean the West End, for on the Surrey side of the
Thames there is the Old Vic, a popular theatre given up to Shakes-
peare
and opera in English. The enthusiasm there is great; greater
than the performances warrant, but we are grateful for the chance
of seeing all Shakespeare. Perhaps if the theatre succeeds in raising
the funds for which it is asking, its work will improve. At Hamp-
stead (at the other end of London) an attempt has been made to run
a repertory theatre with plays by such authors as Ibsen, Shaw, Gran-
ville-Barker, Eugene O'Neill, and Wilhelm von Scholtz. The ex-
periment, little audacious as it seems, has not been a success. It was
half-hearted. The only chance of succeeding is to have everything
right-choose the plays carefully, collect a good and permanent
company, take a comfortable and not too inconveniently placed
theatre, and then catch a genius to do the producing. Won't some-
one try?
It must be admitted that if a serious play is produced in London,
the critics rend their ink-stained frock-coats, and cry "Gloom!
Gloom!” They are hard-worked men who want to be tactfully titi-
vated. The only recent play to receive their unanimous and enthusi-
astic paeans was The Faithful Heart, a play which would, I believe,
be admirably labelled as "sob-stuff" in the States, where such ar-
ticles are manufactured in large quantities for the English market.
The critics were divided about Miss Clemence Dane's Will Shake-
speare. Perhaps you'll have it soon in New York. Written in verse,
pretentious to a degree, fantastic in the worst sense, and, I thought,
quite uninteresting, it still might be endurable if well produced. As
it was, it became a corpse in a week, and artificial respiration could
a


RAYMOND MORTIMER
293
not prolong its melancholy existence. We are warned that the same
producer is soon and at last to give us James Elroy Flecker's unpub-
lished play in verse, Hassan. The prospect is not attractive. The
man of ideas, if they are bad ideas, is worse than the man without
any.
Heartbreak House, which the critics loathed, and which failed
largely in consequence, is the only important play that has had even
six weeks run. I believe that it has been performed in the States,
but I do not know if it received many performances and was gen-
erally seen. The absence of an obvious guiding thread and the sub-
stitution of incident for plot make it less good reading than much of
Shaw; but on the stage it proves to be much less extravagant and
less "in the Russian manner than it seemed when first read. Shaw
writes for the theatre, and that means that he writes down to the
theatre here and there in the play. All playwrights have to. But a
poor joke passes quickly on the stage-acting may carry it off. When
you read it, it sticks in your gizzard.
As a work with other than an artistic purpose Heartbreak House
should not, I think, satisfy its author. It is, we are told, a picture of
cultured, leisured Europe before the War, and Shaw presumably
started to paint it with a mixture of pity and indignation. But how
are we affected by the spectacle of this houseful of people indulging
in "the happiness of yielding and dreaming instead of resisting and
doing, the sweetness of the fruit that is going rotten"? Are we in-
furiated by their selfishness, are we saddened by their futility? Not
many of us, I fancy; but then probably most of those who enjoyed
the play were themselves inhabitants or at least habitués of Heart-
break House. I for one did not leave the theatre angry or humiliated
or burning to join the Fabian Society. I was not even convinced that
the House was too pleasant to last: certainly it was an extraordi-
narily pleasant House, and I don't believe in hearts being broken
there. Indeed I should enjoy a week-end in such delightful com-
pany. We read the preface perhaps, and came to curse them. We
stayed to bless. For when have people been wittier? The truth is
that this is a comedy of Manners, and there has not been a better one
since Congreve.
"In this house we know all the poses; our game is to find the man
under the pose.” This is the heart of the comedy, and its action con-
sists of the gradual finding out of everyone. At first Lady Utter-
wood seems a sentimental and heartless fool, Hector a silly bragger,
a
a


294
LONDON LETTER
Boss Mangan a strong man, Randall an imperturbable cynic, and
Ellie a pathetic victim. Then the Captain's Seventh Degree of Con-
centration turns out to be Rum, and all the characters exactly the
opposite of what they appeared. If Shaw intended something more
than a comedy of manners, it must have been obscured partly by the
delighted exercise of his comic powers, partly by what Mr Eliot in a
former London Letter called his incapacity for continuous reasoning.
If I were told that The Way of the World had undoubtedly been
written as an indignant satire on the loose morality of cultured Eng-
land at that time, I might believe that Congreve had so intended it.
But I should never believe that the value of the play and my pleasure
in it were the result of such an intention.
During the disgracefully short run of Heartbreak House, two per-
formances of Chekov's Uncle Vanya were given at the same theatre
by the Stage Society. The co-incidence of place, the claim of
Shaw to have written in "the Russian manner,” and dislike or mis-
understanding of both plays made many critics compare them. As
.
well compare Love for Love with The Trojan Women. Uncle Vanya
is the most beautiful and poignant modern play that I have seen.
Also, in spite of under-rehearsal and other disadvantages inevitable
in work done in such circumstances, in spite too of its being a par-
ticularly difficult play to "get over” to an English audience, it was
the most effectively performed play of the year. Atmosphere is
everything, in such a play, and the atmosphere was perfect. This
was not because the actors, good as they were, were men of genius,
but because the producer was a great artist. The importance of the
producer is still not grasped in this country, and yet he is as impor-
tant as the author and more important than any of the actors. Gor-
don Craig has been preaching this for years, and now Moscow has
sent us a man to illustrate the fact. We are grateful for the presence
in London of Comisarjevsky.
BALLET
For the last few years Monsieur Diaghileff has been the only per-
son connected with the Theatre whom we could rely upon to give us
what we wanted. He has spent a good part of each year in London,
and I believe, has found his warmest welcome here. One could go
every other night to see his Ballet and never be bored; and one went.


RAYMOND MORTIMER
295
All London became balletomane, and never ceased discovering new
nuances in this amazing art. The Good-Humoured Ladies and Chil-
dren's Tales we loved. La Boutique Fantasque, with décor by De-
rain was a triumph. Then came The Three Cornered Hat with
-
décor by Picasso. “Give us more!" we still cried, and Pulcinella
was produced (Picasso again). It was enchanting, but it was not
generally liked. Then Massine left the Ballet, and we soon realized
that it was not so much the dancer as the choreographer who was ir-
replaceable. For when Chout was produced, with music by Pro-
kofieff, the choreography was neither dramatically nor plastically
interesting, and Larionov’s décor was cubism at its dullest. Chout
met with merited failure. A last effort was made by M Diaghileff.
We were given a revival of Stravinsky's Sacre du Printemps, with a
new choreography arranged by Massine before he went. It was co-
lossal, the most important and magnificent achievement of M Diag-
hileff's wonderful instrument. But London would not have it. The
critics could at last give tongue, and the kill soon came. The mu-
sical critics had put up with Derain for the sake of Rossini, and with
Picasso for the sake of Falla, but they joyfully joined hands with
the dramatic critics in a savage onslaught on Stravinsky's master-
piece. The music was horrible; of course. And the choreography,
what did it mean? Being quite ignorant of the modern movement
in painting and sculpture, they could not understand. For the danc-
ing, which like so much modern art, was inspired by the primitive,
was as undramatic and as abstract as the work of Lipchitz or Archi-
penko. The ballet was performed three times.
What was M Diaghileff to do? Il lui fallait vivre: nous en
voyions tous la nécessité. "What do the English like?” he asked.
“Clothes! Clothes! Clothes !" came the reverberating answer to the
tune of Chu Chin Chow. "What music?” A thousand provincial
orchestras answered with the strains of Casse Noisette and the Pa-
thétique. Good! “Messieurs Picasso et Derain, je vous donne
.
congé. Monsieur Matisse, je regrette que vous ne me servirez à rien.
Mais où est donc ce vieux Bakst?” Tchaikovsky was dead, but his
music was obtainable, so that did not matter. M Bakst was alive,
just. And so he set about designing hundreds of dresses, the dancers
set about learning a thirty-year-old ballet, The Sleeping Princess,
and the Press set about informing us that the dresses were to cost
two million francs and that Tchaikovsky's music was all that music


296
LONDON LETTER
should be. Stravinsky himself proclaimed this in every news-sheet.
We can only hope that he is as good a business-man as he is a
musician.
The result is what you can imagine-a ballet of the early Nine-
ties, a ballet in which even such artists as Madame Lopokova and
Monsieur Idzikovsky can make no effect, a ballet all clothes and
three hours long, a ballet that delighted those who hated the Sacre.
It is as if Matisse began to paint in a manner undistinguishable from
that of Marcus Stone. I am not sure whether to wish M Diaghileff
success or not. If this work succeeds, will he continue on the same
lines, or will Stravinsky have his reward? If it fails, shall we have
any more ballet at all? Two millions are two millions even at the
present exchange.
FINE ARTS
I do not know what living English painters are known in the
States. Mr Farquharson and Mr Leader and the old Academicians?
Or, more probably, Sir William Orpen and Sir John Lavery, Sir
Ambrose McEvoy and Sir Alfred Munnings?
But I mean real painters. They are not many and are mostly in-
cluded in two groups, the London Group and the X Group. The
Autumn show of the London Group was the best they have given. I
wish they could give a similar show in New York, in exchange for
an exhibition here of modern American work. These painters are
not ashamed of having gone to school, metaphorically at any rate, in
France. They have all seen Cézanne and Seurat and Van Gogh;
for a painter of to-day to be unaffected by these would be as ridicu-
lous as for a Fifteenth Century Florentine to have disregarded Ma-
saccio. But these painters, at least the best of them, remain English.
Their work is almost too unassuming; there is no danger of its being
spoiled by too violent a desire to be sensational or original. Duncan
Grant is clearly a born painter, intelligent, delicate, above all highly
poetic; traditional, but in the best tradition. If his works come to
New York, buy them. I doubt if any English painter has ever done
better work than he has, at his age, except Gainsborough and Con-
stable—and the last Gainsborough you bought cost you nearly seven
hundred thousand dollars.
Grant's influence on the Group is strong, but the work of Keith
a


RAYMOND MORTIMER
297
Baynes, Vanessa Bell, Meninsky, and Elliott Seabrooke is good
enough to stand comparison with all but the best French work, and
is better than a lot, because it is produced without regard for the
market or the fumiste fashions of the moment.
The X Group is led by Wyndham Lewis, many of whose works
have been reproduced in The Dial. He is pugnacious and writes
extremely well. This group is considerably further to the left than
the London Group, and is less closely affected by Paris. Roberts is
the best painter in it, and it possesses a promising sculptor in Frank
Dobson, the only one I can think of here. If these two can continue,
they may produce better results eventually than the other group.
I
personally doubt it. Outside these two groups there is hardly a
painter who shows work of much interest. Except always Sickert.
In conclusion let me note the encouraging fact that the modern
movement has at last found an enterprising and clear-sighted Lon-
don dealer in Mr Turner of the Independent Gallery. He exhibits
work by English artists as well as by most of the best Frenchmen.
It is a most welcome and necessary institution. I hope it will soon
have as many windows as Bernheim's.
RAYMOND MORTIMER


DUBLIN LETTER
February, 1922
THE
a
HE future historian of Irish literature will have a difficult task
in presenting his subject-matter as a smooth and running narra-
tive, and Mr E. A. Boyd has been justified by recent events in writ-
ing his history of the Literary Renascence when he did, though even
he could hardly have foreseen how complete was to be the change in
the whole mentality of Ireland within a year or two from the date
to which he brought it. The hero of that work, Mr W. B. Yeats, is
already—the frequent fate of Irish political and literary heroes-
something of a "back number” in Ireland. But yesterday the Abbey
Row, the odium theologicum investing the Countess Cathleen,
seemed charged with all the moving forces of Ireland's spiritual des-
tiny, and already these things have receded into the dim past, almost
as much as the Belfast Address of Professor Tyndall. For the last
year or two, so far as literature is concerned, A. E. has perhaps been
the dominating figure, but if he reads this page he will, I feel sure,
smile in approving acceptance of my memento mori! Ireland may
be a land of just and old renown, but it is certainly not a land in
which freedom slowly broadens down from precedent to precedent.
Each new phase of its political and spiritual history seems to require
new personalities to express it; and just as Griffith and Collins have
blotted out Redmond and Devlin, so the literary influence of P. H.
Pearse and his band has seemed, at all events for the moment, to
cast into the shade the movement in which Mr Yeats was so re-
cently the protagonist. It is no doubt the sense of a period having
come to its termination that has put Mr Yeats upon his mood of
reminiscence in his new volume, Four Years 1887-1891, in which he
tells a really moving tale of the moulding of his early ambitions in
London.' An idyll like that of Yeats' youth—for it is almost an
idyll—is hardly likely to be repeated in an Ireland closed in to its
own traditions and “civilization,” as A. E., apparently, wishes to see
it. It is hard to see how an Ireland in which Sinn Fein ideals have
1 Four Years 1887-1891 was published in The Dial for June, July, and
August, 1921.
1


JOHN EGLINTON
299
triumphed will continue to produce men of the type of Mr Yeats'
remarkable father, moving easily between one country and the other,
bringing to England the charm of irresponsibility and unworldli-
ness, and back to Ireland the liberal atmosphere of a larger world."
In this type the union has been to some extent justified, at all events
intellectually. These men, amphibious in their nationality, "spe-
cialized” in ideas almost as the Jews in finance. Some of them cul-
tivated a certain idealistic hatred of England, but this sentiment,
far from developing as it has done in Ireland, into a disturbing po-
litical fanaticism, was consistent with being good citizens, and cer-
tainly with being excellent company; for as Oscar Wilde told Yeats,
"We Irish are too poetical to be poets; we are a nation of brilliant
failures, but we are the greatest talkers since the Greeks.”
I knew Yeats before he went to London, for we were at the High
School together, and I sat next to him in class for some time. He
came and went as he pleased, a lank, loose-coated figure, for he was
several
years older than any of us in the class, and even had the be-
ginnings of a beard. He was remarkable for the manner in which he
attached himself to the most unlikely boys, even those who were
avoided by the others, as if they presented a problem to him, and I
think we all felt it a kind of distinction to be seen walking with him.
a
Certainly I remember feeling honoured when he borrowed a copy of
Gray's poems from me, and returned it scrupulously next day. He
was strong in algebra and Euclid, and I recollect the readiness with
which, during an examination, he would shift his position so as to
make it convenient for me to "cog” from him. It is true that in an-
other class-room, the classical master's, our relations were reversed,
and I think I was able to be of some small assistance to him in trans-
lating Demosthenes. Yeats' manner of translating, with the crib
laid inside his book for all to see, was an unfailing delight to the
classical master, a cruel man to the rest of us, who sat quivering with
laughter while Yeats did his turn, and I remember the doubtful look
which would come over Yeats' face when he would become aware of
how his efforts were being received. We had to read aloud our
weekly compositions, and I think his were a little above us all, the
English master not excepted: and I remember the constrained pause
in the proceedings when Yeats told us that "no one could write an
essay now except Herbert Spencer and Matthew Arnold.” He held
1 John Butler Yeats died in New York on the third of February.


300
DUBLIN LETTER
his manuscript thrust out in front of him and declaimed his sentences,
just as he did with those of Demosthenes, and curiously I don't think
any one laughed. One week the master took it into his head to make
us write our essays in verse, and we looked forward to Yeats'—it
was already circulated that he was a poet—but on that day he took
care to be absent.
When Yeats left us at the High School, with small Latin and
less Greek,” he continued to be our man of destiny, and presently we
began to hear that he was a great poet, and read with wonder his
contributions in the Dublin University Review. The loan of a book
by him to one of the boys at the top of the school was an event, as it
turned out, of much importance to some of us, and even to certain
developments in Irish literature: this was Sinnett's Esoteric Bud-
dhism, a book which captured the intelligence of half-a-dozen youths
-amongst them, Charles Johnston, now of New York—who were
preparing to enter Trinity College. The Head Master beheld with
dismay the ravages of this spiritual infection, which touched his
most promising students with the indifference of the Orient to such
things as college distinctions and mundane success. With Yeats, I
imagine, it had the effect of putting an end to his interest in Herbert
Spencer, whom he used to quote to us, and in natural history. Shortly
after this, his family moved over to London, and his adventures
there are told with much charm in Four Years. These years were
the equivalent for him of the four years which most of us spend, gen-
erally to much less purpose, in one of the universities; he came,
I
will not say under the influence of, but into fruitful contact with
William Morris, W. E. Henley, and others, of whom he gives excel-
lent and sympathetic portraits. But the detachment which enabled
him to react to these powerful influences, and to build up his own
style and personality, came to him chiefly, I should say, from
Theosophy.
Yeats has all his life been founding organizations. The earliest
thing I can remember about him is his trying to start a Natural His-
tory Society in the High School. I don't know whether he had any-
thing to do directly with founding the Dublin Branch of the Theo-
sophical Society, of which A. E. was from the first the leading spirit,
but he has said of it that it "has produced more for Irish literature
than Trinity College.” Later on, he founded the Irish Literary So
cieties of London and Dublin. The notion of "schools" of
poets,


JOHN EGLINTON
301
>
abhorrent to most poets, is congenial to him; and indeed, if he could
have his way, I think he would make of the whole profession of
literature one vast secret order, training its novices in the occult sci-
ences and instructing them in a system of symbolic images, somewhat
as they seem to have done in the bardic colleges of ancient Ireland.
Certainly the ambition which, as he tells us, began to define itself in
his mind as he walked the London streets, could come to fulfilment
only through the agency of some order of hierophants. “I thought
to create,” he says, “a sensuous musical vocabulary, and not for my-
self only but that I might leave it to later Irish poets, much as a
mediaeval Japanese painter left his style as an inheritance to his
family, and was careful to use a traditional manner and matter."
And contrasting himself with Morris, who “set out to make a revo-
lution,” he goes on: “I, that my native scenery might find imagi-
nary inhabitants, half planned a new method and a new culture.'
Unfortunately for those who, like Mr Yeats, would predetermine
tradition (fortunately, I think, in other respects) individuality, like
cheerfulness with Dr Johnson's would-be philosopher friend, is "al-
ways breaking in”; and even Mr Yeats' own individuality, as he
confesses, sometimes refused to conform, and "did something alto-
gether different.” The Lake Isle of Innisfree, for instance, escaped
him before he could quite purge it of “rhetoric" and "inversions.”
Mr Yeats has not quite succeeded in creating for Ireland its future
poetic vocabulary: I hope at least that he has not, much as I admire
his preoccupation with style. He has, however, succeeded indirectly;
for he has done more to raise the standard of writing in his own
country, both in prose and poetry, than any other Irish author, past
or present.
JOHN EGLINTON


BOOK REVIEWS
A NEW DRAMATIC ART
Four PLAYS FOR DANCERS. By W. B. Yeats. 12mo.
138 pages. The Macmillan Company. $2.
THE
9
THE Noh play as Fenollosa and Ezra Pound made it known to
us showed a drama that is quite different from any that Eu-
rope had ever known. The Noh play is concerned with the disem-
bodied. It is briefer than our one-act play. The excitement that it
holds is partly the excitement of the seance. It dramatizes too—we
have hardly any way of expressing this—a place—the revelation of
a place, the legend of a place.
That which makes the finale of a European tragedy—the death
of the hero is often the point at which the Noh play begins. In the
best of the plays that Ezra Pound, working over Fenollosa's collec-
tion, put together, in the Nishikigi, the action takes place after the
deaths of the chief characters, and it consists in the effort of two who
had been lovers to become united after death. In this play, as Fe-
nollosa noted, "action, words, and music are vague and ghostly
shadows.” One must have the Noh plays published by Ezra Pound
.
in 1917 in mind while reading Mr Yeats' Four Plays for Dancers.
The poet has brought these remote plays into the circle of his own
art. He has added something that was not in the Japanese, a formal
chorus. His chorus (it is always "three musicians”) are not the
ideal spectators of the Greek drama; they are adepts, rather-hu-
man beings that have the power of evoking and revealing; they do
not wear masks as the actors do; their faces are made up as masks.
Mr Yeats' people are not the disembodied; they are living people
who are outside the world of our affairs because of some dream or
some ecstasy, and a sense of something timeless goes with them all.
This timelessness, doubtless, becomes more impressive in the play-
ing, where the actors' masks give them a changeless aspect.
These plays are not for the theatre that we know: they are for a
room or for a hall where a score or so of persons might assemble to
hear poetry and watch some remote and austere action. All the
a


PADRAIC COLUM
303
properties that the eight or nine players need are a curtain, a few
musical instruments—a flute and a drum—and, of course, some
wonderful masks. The chorus announces the scene that the audience
must bring before their minds, and the chorus suggests (but only as
music might suggest) the motif that it is for the drama to work out.
For instance, the motif of The Hawk's Well is in the lure that the
powers beyond the world set to draw men into some impossible
dream. The Three Musicians sing:
“What were his life soon done!
Would he lose by that or win?
A mother that saw her son
Doubled over a speckled shin,
Cross-grained with ninety years,
Would cry, 'How little worth
Were all my hopes and fears,
And the hard pain of his birth!'”
In The Dreaming of the Bones, the play that is most like the
Japanese Noh, inasmuch as the protagonists are disembodied and
the haunting of a place is dramatized, the motif is suggested in:
"Why does my heart beat so?
Did not a shadow pass?
It passed but a moment ago.
Who can have trod in the grass ?
What rogue is night-wandering?
Have not old writers said
That dizzy dreams can spring
From the dry bones of the dead?
And many a night it seems
That all the valley fills
With those fantastic dreams.
They overflow the hills,
So passionate is a shade,
Like wine that fills the top
A grey-green cup of jade,
Or maybe an agate cup.”
a
In the acting the most impressive of the plays would surely be


304
A NEW DRAMATIC ART
The Only Jealousy of Emer. In it, although the three human char-
acters are remote, there is passionate human relationship, and the
cry that the Ghost of Cuchulain makes, "O my lost Emer,” is the
most poignant utterance in all Yeats' dramatic writing. As in the
Japanese play there is in this particular play the excitement of a
seance. The action by the masked players should be startling.
The strangest of the four plays is Calvary in which Christ, Laza-
rus, Judas, and the Three Roman Soldiers figure. But the idea of
this play is clear only after we have read an elaborate note upon it
and have been made acquainted with the esoteric doctrine that both
Chance and Choice exist in God—“If they did not He would not
have freedom; He would be bound by his own choice.” This idea is
in Judas' remarkably dramatic speech:
"It was decreed that somebody betray you-
I'd thought of that—but not that I should do it,
I, the man Judas, born on such a day,
In such a village, such and such his parents;
Nor that I'd go with my old coat upon me
To the High Priest, and chuckle to myself
As people chuckle when alone, and that I'd do it
For thirty pieces and no more, no less,
And neither with a nod, a look, nor a sent message,
But with a kiss upon your cheek. I did it,
I, Judas, and no other man, and now
You cannot even save me.'
a
a
These plays have not the dramatic conclusiveness that is insisted
upon in the plays of our tradition. That is perhaps because the peo-
ple in them are outside of time. But the plays have an amazing
dramatic suggestiveness that the acting with the masks, the dancing,
and the music must undoubtedly heighten. In them Mr Yeats
makes a dramatic structure that admirably fits his art; in them he
can be abstract and circumstantial, dramatic and lyrical, expression-
istic and traditional. Above all, he can be ritualistic. Would that
some players here, dignified, fine of voice, and learned in gesture and
dance would perform them. Perhaps the Neighbourhood Play-
house will do it. Meanwhile, with its illustrations in the forms of
Dulac's masks, we have a slender volume that is worth much reading
in Four Plays for Dancers.
PADRAIC COLUM


AN AMERICAN ARISTOCRAT
LIFE AND LETTERS OF Henry LEE HIGGINSON. By
Bliss Perry. Illustrated. 8vo. 557 pages. Atlantic
Monthly Press. $4.
WHAT
THAT can the Freudians make out of the career of Henry Lee
Higginson? There were in his life three major frustrations:
defective eyesight, which prevented him from pursuing his studies
at Harvard College with his friends; poor health and mediocrity of
talent, which turned him back from the musician's career, so ar-
dently desired; and sheer bad luck, which kept his cavalry regiment
inactive throughout most of the fighting in the Civil War, where his
intimates, friends and relatives, were distinguishing themselves,
while the young major eager to give his all for the cause so devoutly
believed in was limited to a single brief skirmish, in which he was
wounded and ultimately invalided out of the service! Yet out of
these three major frustrations of purpose Higginson built one of the
most useful and harmonious of American lives. He so identified
himself with Harvard University, whose degree in course he was
never to attain, that he became one of its governing corporation and
its greatest single benefactor, and incidentally was more deeply
woven into the life of its undergraduates than any of its own grad-
uates. Out of the frustration of the five years spent in Europe in
the vain endeavour to make himself a musician came the splendid
conception and fulfilment of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, which
it is fair to say has done more than any other agency for the develop-
ment of musical taste and standards in the United States. And
from those chafing years in the army came, perhaps, not only that
tender fellowship for his more favoured comrades in arms, which
flowered in the tribute to their memory of the Soldiers' Field, but
also that stout-hearted and generous faith in his fellow men and his
country, which suffused the fifty odd years of his career as banker
and citizen. A rich harvest, all told, from such a defeated sowing
of youth's desires!
The spiritual alchemy through which one man converts his de-
feats into victories, while another stagnates under thwarted desires,
must always be to a large degree personal and mysterious. Why
a


306
AN AMERICAN ARISTOCRAT
Higginson blended courageously into the confused volume of Amer-
ican activities after the Civil War, while the more subtly minded
Henry Adams, his contemporary and associate, withdrew more and
,
more into an arid criticism of his time and race, is largely a tempera-
mental and personal matter. But why Higginson, with no outstand-
ing gifts of mind, no one supreme achievement-except his orches-
tra, and in that he must perforce work through others—maintained
the best standards of an aristocracy already fast slipping from his
people into our turbulent present, is of more importance. When he
died in November, 1919, Henry Lee Higginson was a survival, a
monument, in State Street, in Boston, in New England, in the
United States, of other times and other ideals. There is no suc-
Major Higginson was born into the best and strongest
aristocracy that America has ever known and in its best period. The
Reverend Francis Higginson whom Cotton Mather called “the first
in a catalogue of heroes” was the immigrant ancestor, the founder
of the house in the New World, and after six generations of inter-
marriages the Higginsons were related to a large number of notable
Boston families—Cabots, Lees, Jacksons, Lowells, Channings, Put-
nams, Morses, Paines, et cetera, whose names in succeeding genera-
tions recur again and again in the voluminous correspondence of
Major Higginson.
cessor.
“In Boston in my boyhood the houses were for the most part de-
tached garden houses; there was no quarter for the rich; they and
the poor, successful and unsuccessful members of the same family
,
perhaps—at least of the same stock—dwelt in the same quarter;
there were only enough foreigners to exercise benevolence on, not to
intrude; families and friends built courts (no thoroughfares) to
dwell together, and there was a personal recognition and cooperation
in all affairs—social, municipal, ecclesiastical, educational, which
was wholesome. We all lived in this little world; all our work and
all our play were there."
So wrote Colonel Henry Lee to Sarah Orne Jewett of the Boston
of the 'forties and early 'fifties, in which young Higginson passed
his youth. That was before the hegira from those sheltered courts
where the tribes first dwelt between Washington and Tremont
Streets to the Hill, then over into the swamps of the Back Bay. Be-
fore Calumet and Hecla, the granger railroads, Telephone, Fruit,


ROBERT HERRICK
307
and all the other corporate adventures in industrialism, whose rich
spoils were to sap the Puritan fibre; before the supreme rule of State
Street, and before State Street succumbed to Wall Street. It was
still honourable to be plain merchant; finance was an afterthought.
This Puritan aristocracy was open to free competition, as any healthy
aristocracy must be—to a competition not merely of wealth or of
political intrigue, but of intellectual and moral distinction, admit-
ting to its ranks physicians and divines, educators and administra-
tors, a Bowditch, a Brooks, a Holmes, an Agassiz, or an Eliot.
Learning, service, and character—especially character—were its
passwords, not money nor social notoriety. What the family
thought, what the tribe believed and did, had a pervasive influence
with all its members, yet not narrow conformity, rather a passionate
individualism and integrity of soul was the result. The supreme
goal of this aristocracy was not success, at least a success measured
in wealth, though it held tenaciously to the rewards of effort and es-
teemed achievement wherever accomplished. Nor did it talk much
in the language of that sentimental idealism of service promulgated
by Roosevelt and preached by Wilson.
Major Higginson had no illusions about his own talents, as artist
or banker. Of his youthful ambition to become a musician he wrote
in his old age:
“I, too, wished to write music, studied two or three years in earn-
est and very hard, and wrote a few songs good enough for the fire in
the grate. Disappointed! yes, but what of it? I could saw wood,
and so have sawed. There are wood sawers needed and they are
paid well—in cash, though not in joy, unless the woodpile can light
a good fire and heat mankind.”
Of his own woodpile he had the same unexaggerated estimate:
а
“I have always played second fiddle or third fiddle since I have
been down-town. I have been the senior for a great many years and
was the practical senior for a great many years more, but there has
always been in the firm and abler man than Iindeed a much abler
man. . . I think for most people the place of second fiddle is
preferable to the first fiddle. If only a man will consider the success
of the work of the firm, of the government, of the country, rather
than of himself he will probably come to the same conclusion. .


308
AN AMERICAN ARISTOCRAT
I am not thinking of my own value. ... If instead of spending
all the money that has been spent outside I had kept it, I should have
five or six millions to-day, and very likely more. But it is all in the
day's work.”
a
A cardinal point in the creed of his race, to which from his boy-
hood Higginson was sensitively responsive, was to give generously
of what one had. His father's admonitions to his young son in Ger-
many were equally divided between exhortations to personal thrift
and to generosity to others. And the boy gave away the half of his
small income to needier students. Even his personal passion for
music had in it something unselfish. To his father he wrote in de-
fense of his inclination—"I do not believe there is anything more re-
fining than music, no greater or stronger preservative against evil
it has opened pleasures to me that otherwise very possibly
would never have been discovered.” On his eightieth birthday, sixty
years later, he completed his thought in these final words to the
members of the Boston Symphony Orchestra—"Ever since my boy-
hood I have longed to have a part in some good work which would
leave a lasting mark in the world. To-day we have a noble orchestra
—the work of our hands—which gives joy and comfort to many
people.”
The strength of Higginson was his simplicity and integrity of na-
ture. His mind was never subtle. For him there were but two sides
to all human issues—the right and the wrong one-in the Civil War,
in the conflicts of class interest, in the World War—and the right
side was invariably the one adopted by his own class. In this sense
he was always a conformist, but never partisan, never rancorous. He
opposed strenuously any government regulation of industry or inter-
ference with the free play of capital. For human society remained
always to him what it had appeared to be in the Boston of his youth,
an open arena for the generous competition of all comers where the
ablest and the best usually won their way rightfully to leadership
and should not be trammeled in their endeavours. (“Theodore talks
nonsense about Wall street where most of the men are honest-far
honester than the politicians, who promise this or t’other for votes.
He talks about the corporations being wicked, which means that the
directors are wicked," et cetera.) Higginson never grasped the full
meaning of the restless spirit in the new world beneath his feet. Yet
he said in an address to Harvard students—"Pray bear in mind that


ROBERT HERRICK
309
any large work which you build up, be it a factory or a railroad or
,
anything else, is not yours absolutely. It has been done for the world
and done with the help of the world.” And, "I do not believe that
because a man owns property it belongs to him to do with it as he
pleases. The property belongs to the community, and he has charge
of it, and can dispose of or use it, if it is well done and not with sole
regard for himself or to his stockholders.” This is the responsible
aristocrat's conception of property rights.
Property existed for Major Higginson to use, that is to give away
where it might do good to others. Abounding activity was his own
exhilaration. “This eternal progress and regress and progress again
seems to be the most cheering thing in our lives here. I've always
been saying to myself, What next? Come, move on. This is good,
but what next? How can we ever be content ?" And, "I believe in
toiling terribly and the only thing I ask of my body is to give me the
power to work and work until I drop. In this modern world there is
so much to do, so many places to fill, so many errors to correct, so
many men and women to help, that one's own pleasure or comfort
seems of no consequence." Under the strain and self-examination
of the world war he wrote the historian Rhodes in November, 1914:
"We need more true democracy, true fellowship between man and
man, and more wish to serve our fellows, for on it depends religion,
morality, the usefulness and happiness of life--God's blessing, else
why are we here? It was our youthful doctrine and it wears well.
Why feel a faith and not try to live according to it? If my nearest
and dearest playmates had lived, they would have tried to help their
fellows, and as they had gone before us the greater the need for me to
try.”
“It was our youthful doctrine and it wears well”! A simple faith
nobly lived, which for sixty years of ever active life Henry Lee Hig-
son carried in him out of the past into the shaken world of our own
present. This Boston banker, his fine face lined with a battle scar,
went each day almost until his death to the plain front room of that
old stone building on State Street (where his father had sat before
him) to transact his business, which was so largely business for
others, in a democratic unostentation. He was not a great banker,
not a "captain of industry,” not a creator of wealth, but probably
this country has never known a more perfect example of citizenship
and of the trusteeship of power. He lived and laboured for others.
a
ROBERT HERRICK


BLOOD AND IRONY
371
CYTHEREA. By Joseph Hergesheimer. 12mo.
pages. Alfred A. Knopf. $2.50.
MBS
1
R HERGESHEIMER has recently opened his lips and told
us what is likely to happen when an aristocrat writes fiction.
Regrettably he has at the same time published his third successive
inferior novel, so that as one learns from the essay on John Partins
that blood when it is blue leads to irony, one begins to under-
stand Mrs N. P. Dawson, of the New York Globe, and other en-
thusiasts for Mr Hergesheimer's work. The last portion of the last
chapter of Cytherea is decidedly Cabell in manner; the protagonist,
after a long and somewhat tedious discourse, is formulating his gen-
eral apologia when he looks toward his interlocutor and
“Daniel Randon was asleep.”
If that isn't irony, they exclaim, then they don't know what irony
is. Well, it isn't and they don't. It's farce—the kind of thing an
intelligent writer of comedy would omit from his script in the usu-
ally vain hope that the stage manager wouldn't create the business.
Mr Hergesheimer's case as a novelist is extremely simple. The
chronology of his eight years as a practising writer indicates that in
1914 he published The Lay Anthony, a work which was no doubt at
that time called promising; there followed Mountain Blood, the
only one of his longer books I have not read. Quickly, with every
sign of a fertile talent and with a few signal flags announcing a pos-
sible genius discovered in the hold, he put forth The Three Black
Pennys and Java Head. He was, even at that time, The Saturday
Evening Post's propitiatory offering to the mysterious art-god-mon-
ster at the end of the labyrinth, and he had had his diversions: several
volumes of short stories which ought to have made it spiritually un-
necessary to publish anything but his finest novels. There followed
Linda Condon, a grandiose theme smothered in the higher cosmetics;
Steel, which began by attacking the problem of a returned soldier's
psychological reactions to civil life and ended I do not know how
for I could not finish it in the Post, whence it has not emerged. And
now Cytherea:
а


VIVIAN SHAW
311
Ores m'en irai-je d'icy et me cacherai dedans le mont Horsel, en
requérant de faveur et d'amoureuse merci ma doulce dame Vénus,
car pour son amour serai-je bien à tout jamais damné en enfer. Voicy
la fin de tous mes faicts d'armes et de toutes mes belles chansons.
car toujours demeura ce pauvre chevalier auprès de Vénus la
haulte et forte déesse ès flancs de la montagne amoureuse.
O
a
I do not mean that one turns to Swinburne and reads the perfect
paragraph at the beginning of Laus Veneris because Mr Hergesheim-
er has tried to do the same thing in prose. To write of Mount
.
Horsel or of Cythera or of Eryx in modern idiom, to show a Wor-
shipper defeated and destroyed by his own weakness or the strength
of his circumstance, is a not undignified project. Mr Hergesheimer
has hardly attempted it. He has named over the names and, having
invoked their magic, has filled his book with such trivialities that at
the end one believes he has succeeded completely in his effort to write
an adult-size This Side of Paradise.
What happened in the few years between Java Head and Cythe-
rea is so typical of the fate of American novelists that one may for a
moment omit the dissection of Mr Hergesheimer's failure to dis-
cover the reasons for it. Simply, he became “a great writer.” The
reasons are easy to discover. The number of half-decent American
novelists is not great and of that number few combine the qualities
found in The Three Black Pennys and Java Head. Here was a man
with a decided gift for telling a story, a sense of verbal felicity and
of structure, if not of composition, a moderately daring experimenter
in the form of the novel, an American with an aptitude for the early
American scene—a novelist, it seemed, thoroughly equipped for
whatever he might undertake. There was a certain loftiness about
him which made him an eminently exportable commodity. He was
an American and lived in America; he was not an exquisite, yet he
had tone; there was something almost good form about his work and
he could be shown when English visitors called.
It was the moment at which Mr Hergesheimer should have been
subjected to merciless criticism, the decisive hour when nothing
should have been forgiven him. He had already put himself out of
the class of the absolute best-seller; he had to deal only with the in-
telligent and semi-intelligent, and especially from the first of these
he might have demanded that they hold him by a sort of sacred con-


312
BLOOD AND IRONY
tract to give them nothing less than the very best he could do. Peo-
ple talk endlessly about an artist's background as if it were some-
thing from which he can draw whatever he needs, as if his contact
with his time and place imposes nothing upon him. Actually the
background of an artist is as important for what it demands of him
as for what it affords him. If it require anything less than every-
thing from him, it will destroy him much more effectively than if it
gives him nothing.
For a variety of reasons the American community asked little of
Mr Hergesheimer. In the sense that it asked everything of Theo-
dore Roosevelt or James J. Hill or Frank Woolworth, it asks noth-
ing of its creative artists; the demand does not exist, nor the compe-
tition. And the critics who might have created an insistent public
taste, a taste satisfied by nothing less than the highest creative effort
and totally contemptuous of repetition and fake, were busy with
other things. Art, to them, was either sombre or silly. That it could
be enjoyed and that civilized people cannot enjoy slovenly work, did
not occur to them. A hundred talents before Mr Hergesheimer's had
passed; nothing more was asked of Mr Dooley and nothing more
came; Mr Chambers was a little too good and was brought to heel;
and the greater the talent the more certain it was to escape from cri-
tical discipline.
The result in Mr Hergesheimer's case is clear. The Three Black
Pennys was a not wholly successful experiment in form; but no
greater success was required, and the form of Cytherea is very nearly
as bad as it can be. In Java Head the great weakness was Mr Herges-
heimer's tendency to deal eternally in surfaces (one English critic,
recognizing the “tone” called his work lacquer). Cytherea is all sur-
face, all characteristics and no characters. In each of his early novels
there seemed a sort of despair towards the end of ever resolving his
chords; he did not disdain melodrama—why should he ?—but his ac-
cidents were never wholly used; he could determine nothing with
them as he could determine nothing without them. In Linda Con-
don he hardly used it, to be sure; in Cytherea he uses it, smiles faintly
at the fools who might fancy that it comes off, which it does not, and
goes in for the indeterminate end. Even the praiseworthy things
have been slightly corrupted. The first chapter of Java Head pivots
on Laurel Ammidon, a little girl of eleven, in that brief
the
only fully presented and successful character in his work; he has, to
space


VIVIAN SHAW
313
be sure, other successful portraits. In Cytherea the children are
hopeless.
I do not think that in my present mood regarding Mr Hergesheim-
er I am inclined to overrate his earlier work, and since I never, in
print or elsewhere, staked my reputation on his future, I do not feel
at all that he has let me down. I recognize in his brief career some-
thing which would be nearer to tragedy if he had been a great genius,
and which impresses me as having bearing on the whole American
position. It would not occur to me to consider his latest novel in
that relation if it were possible to consider Cytherea seriously as a
work of art; I have found this impossible and I feel that no injustice
has been done by my neglect of the several good things in the book.
They are things which in a novelist of Mr Hergesheimer's experi-
ence should simply be taken for granted. It might also be taken for
granted that such a novelist would have learned not to waste one
hundred and fifty pages without preparing for the most important
scenes of his intrigue. He sets a social scene; he attempts to create
the character of his protagonist by showing him in action. What is
necessary is that at a given moment it shall seem right (not morally,
if you will, but in character) for Lee Randon to leave his wife for a
woman whom he has just met. Lee Randon is therefore shown pre-
venting another man from leaving his home for a moving picture
actress. The latter, Mina Raff, is one of Miss Willa Cather's opera
singers driven up-stage and compelled to be chaste, and the whole
episode is such a patchwork that Lee Randon fails to emerge and one
inevitably feels that the author has gone through all these pages for
the sole purpose of plausibly introducing Randon to Savina Grove in
such a way as to compel them to talk seriously to one another.
The theme is not presented, the atmosphere not surcharged with the
fragrance of the skin or the stink of the goat's hoof. Everything is
wasted because Savina, non-existent until a few moments before
the first meeting, could have accomplished everything needful in
a phrase.
I wonder whether Mr Hergesheimer can really be so unsophisti-
cated about his admirers as he seems.
VIVIAN SHAW


A STUDY OF LANGUAGE
LANGUAGE. By Edward Sapir. 12mo, 258 pages.
Harcourt, Brace and Company. $1.75.
O
NE result of the peculiar separateness from general intelli-
gence of linguistic, mathematical, and musical faculty is that
the higher branches of learning built upon these faculties seem to
the average man distressingly remote and difficult. We have only
to hear the stimulus word "dry-as-dust” to react at once with "gram-
marian.” The whirling solar system, the mysteries of space, the
wonders of electricity, the fossils in the earth's bowels excite a nat-
ural interest; but we wonder that any one should by choice devote
his life to the dative and the gerund-or for that matter, to calculus
or counterpoint.
It is not strange, then, that of all departments of scholarship, phi-
lology has been the most sharply defined and rigorous, the most
critical, the one approaching nearest to the methods of exact science.
It could attain these qualities precisely because of its aloofness from
the give and take of life; because, in spite of its professions to be
the very foundation stone of the humanities, it was essentially un-
human. The technique of modern philology has something superb
about it. It is as austere as anything in the world. The work of an
accepted leader like Brugmann is of an order unsurpassed in any
branch of learning. But it cannot be popularized. No one has tried
any Easy Lessons in Brugmann. And when professional philologists
have left their unsparingly exact minutiae in order to broaden out,
they have regularly swerved straight into the abstractions of con-
ceptual logic and philosophy. Paul's Principles is a beautifully
done book; but it is written for University professors and those who
aspire to be such. Whitney's Life and Growth of Language starts
out promisingly, yet nine-tenths of it presupposes a cultivated philo-
logical interest.
Here is where Edward Sapir's work, appropriately entitled simply
Language, is new. It comes from the pen of a philologist for those
who are not; is scholarly throughout, never approaching the primer,
and yet intelligible to any one of intellectual interests whether or not


A. L. KROEBER
315
he knows anything about language; in short, is broad in its grasp and
approach. Sapir has brought to this work a truly unusual combina-
tion. It is clear that he is natively endowed with linguistic faculty
to a remarkable degree. He gives evidence of being thoroughly
trained in the orthodox philology—that is, the technical study of the
Indo-European and Semitic languages. And as chief of the ethno-
logical research which the Canadian Government has carried on for
the past ten years, he has been thrown into first-hand contact with
the manifold forms of speech of unlettered, primitive peoples, the
native tribes of America. Add aesthetic interests and some literary
experience to this philological background, and it is apparent that
there might well come a book combining range with concreteness,
scholarship with humanity, as sound professionally as it is untechni-
cal and free from metaphysical leanings or logical formalism. This
is precisely what Language is.
For instance, in the chapter on Drift—the irresistible tendency of
all languages to change-Sapir takes a phrase like Who did you see?
and shows why in spite of its “incorrectness” we all at times slip into
it. Whom has become isolated, the only word of its class, the only
emphatic and interrogative word normally at the head of its sen-
tence, that maintains the objective ending. Unconsciously, the "m”
“”
makes us uncomfortable. The rules teach it, but the rules are no
longer living; they are in conflict with the irrational but psychologi-
cally valid drift of modern English, and we feel happier with who
than with whom in our mouths. The uneducated abandon them-
selves unrestrainedly. The sophisticated and timid vacillate be-
tween the discomfort of breaking with the authority of tradition and
the irritation of a usage that has slipped into silent contradiction
with the real forces that make English a living tongue. But all alike
we edge ever farther away from the whom because of the “hesitation
values” which are hooking themselves to it. These hesitation values
are due to several factors. Consequently the hidden repugnance
that
is slowly strangling whom is stronger in some phrases than in others.
We feel it most mildly in The man whom I referred to; few edu-
cated people would say who I referred to. The resistance to whom is
slightly greater in The man whom they referred to; still stronger in
Whom are you looking at? and at its height in Whom did
-in which the impulse to say Who raises its head most vigorously.
Try them for yourself; you will agree. The reader who is not in-
you see?


316
A STUDY OF LANGUAGE
;
terested in why he does things or in the motives of his fellow-men
will stop there, content with the sanction of one learned authority for
his lapses. The one who is, can follow the causes farther as the au-
thor develops that the dying of whom is but one of many symptoms
of the larger tendencies at work in English and all other languages.
The whole chapter is a masterpiece of refined psychological penetra-
tion. “We do not object to nuances as such; we object to having
them formally earmarked for us.” Nothing of the conventional
grammarian here; but much for the grammarian to bite on.
And so there is much in the chapter on Types of Linguistic Struc-
ture, a subject in which philologists have for a century been at their
most logical, prejudiced, hard and fast, ineffective, and worst, with
a classification into isolating, agglutinative, and inflective types—
compartments that accommodate perhaps thirty per cent of the lan-
guages of mankind. “There is something irresistible”—to an unimagi-
native mind, Sapir might have added—"about a method of classifica-
tion that starts with two poles, exemplified, say, by Chinese and
Latin, clusters what it conveniently can about these poles, and throws
everything else into a 'transitional type.'' Or again, as to senti-
mental satisfactions in science: "Champions of the 'inflective' lan-
guages are wont to glory in the very irrationalities of Latin and Greek
except when it suits them to emphasize their profoundly 'logical
character. Yet the sober logic of Turkish or Chinese leaves them
cold.”
Sapir's own classification, which follows these thrusts, is too finely
integrated a conception to be mutilated in abbreviation here. One
does not pack the delicate structure of an organism into a sentence,
nor try to convey the quality of a great painting in a twenty-stroke
sketch. The professionals will have their reaction to this new ap-
proach--unless they find it most convenient to ignore altogether.
How far Sapir's scheme will stand permanently, only time can tell.
But if courage, freshness, range of exact knowledge and especially of
insight, amount to anything, its ultimate influence will be revolu-
tionizing. It is stimulating to hear the dry bones rattle in the box;
and, to one who is a bit of philologist himself, a thrill to see them re-
articulate with originality.
The general reader will be even more interested in the chapter on
Language, Race and Culture; and writers, in the final one on Lan-
guage and Literature. This last starts off with a fascinating search


A. L. KROEBER
317
a
for the causes that make one piece of literature reasonably translat-
able, and another-a ballad of Swinburne, for instance—so hope-
lessly baffling in any but its original medium. Sapir finds the reason
in two levels of which speech is composed: a generalized, latent layer,
and an upper one in which the particular conformation of each lan-
guage inheres. Literature that moves chiefly in the upper stratum is
as good as untranslatable. Yet every language, being a medium of
its own, exacts in some measure a style peculiar to it. Latin—and
Eskimo-lend themselves to an elaborately periodic structure that
would be boring in English, which in turn demands a looseness that
would be insipid in Chinese. And this has "a compactness of phrase,
a terse parallelism, and a silent suggestiveness that would be too tart,
too mathematical, for the English genius.” Verse depends more spe-
cifically still on the unconscious dynamic habits of language-on in-
herent sense of contrasting syllable weight in Greek, number and
echo in French, the same plus alternating pitches in Chinese, contrast
of stresses primarily in English. Where no poet appears, it is not
from weakness of his mother tongue as an instrument, but because
the culture of the nation is not favourable.
There is not a diacritical mark in this book, yet its philology is
sound; not a foot-note reference, yet it is scholarly; not a page that is
difficult for an interested layman, yet it opens new paths of thought.
A rare felicity pervades it, a freedom from the hackneyed; and its
balance equals its spontaneity. It is unique in its field, and is likely
to become and long remain standard.
A. L. KROEBER


THE ART OF THE NOVEL
The CRAFT OF Fiction. By Percy Lubbock. 12mo.
277 pages. Charles Scribner's Sons. $3.
“THE
a
a
THE Novel,” said Coleridge, "is a sort of mental camera ob-
scura manufactured at the printing office, which pro tempore
fixes, reflects, and transmits the moving phantasms of one man's de-
lirium, so as to people the barrenness of a hundred other brains af-
flicted with the same trance."
It is always a pleasure to see a fine mind at work. Apparently
Coleridge couldn't help saying something definite and right even
when he was calling names; “pro tempore fixes, reflects, and trans-
mits” let us say "the moving figment of one man's imagination, so as
to people ..." the rest does not matter. We have a definition
a
with something of the critical finality of Aristotle. Years after one
has decided that a famous passage in the Poetics is nonsense, one dis-
covers that the trouble with most troublesome plays is their lack of a
due beginning, middle, and end. The problem of the novelist is to
fix, reflect, transmit. He does not always solve it.
Dr Lubbock has written the first book in which the problem is
stated and a few solutions are examined. The only thing more im-
portant than a detailed criticism of the book is an indication of why
the book is important. I can think of few contemporary writers and
no critics who can afford to disregard The Craft of Fiction, and if
there are readers who are still capable of taking aesthetic pleasure in
the novel, after all that has happened to debase that form of litera-
ture, I urge them, in the interest of "creative reading," to disregard
the occasional obscurity of Dr Lubbock's presentation and learn from
him nearly all that can be learned, except from the novelists them-
selves, of the art.
Not that the novelists have always been aware of what they were
doing or always lucid about it. There are Flaubert's letters, James'
Notes, and the prefaces he wrote for the New York Edition of his
novels and tales—and there is very little else except discussions on
style, talk about the province and the function of the novel, and The
Confessions of a Young Man. Some eighteen months ago I ventured
I
)


GILBERT SELDES
319
a
to call the James volumes the only indispensable books for the study
of the art of fiction, and with that judgement, I fancy, Dr Lubbock
would agree. It had been generally assumed, before the publication
of these prefaces, that the art of fiction consisted in the acquisition
of an agreeable or striking verbal style. What James did, simply,
was to show where the problem fell. He was, quite apart from the
material of his work, a great artist and a great scholar in his craft,
and so he provided a critical commentary of his own methods which
destroyed, for ever I trust, the myth of the novel which writes itself
-the hypothesis of one-man, one-novel.
I feel unusually like a fool to be wasting time setting down com-
monplaces, but I do not know any other way to make clear the point
of departure. Compare Leonardo's Battle of the Standard with a
set piece by, say, Vereschagin, and subject for subject the emotion
derived from the Leonardo may differ only in degree from the other.
But regard a drawing by Picasso and the woman who sat for it, and
the emotions produced will actually differ in kind. The difference is
the result of the treatment of the subject, and the "success" of a
given work of art will depend largely upon the coincidence of treat-
ment and subject. For at least a generation the critics of fiction have
been indifferent to treatment, as if a novel were, like a human being
or the multiplication table, an end in itself, “all subject.” As if any
theme could be persuasively and beautifully rendered without the
most devoted attention to the process.
The reason for this is that the novel, “the most independent, most
elastic, most prodigious of literary forms,” has been used as a me-
dium for the transmission of ideas. Its reference to actuality is great,
since it uses the material of ordinary communication; and it has not
yet freed itself from its universal adaptability. A magazine instructs
a writer to "fictionize the purchasing agent's angle,” so there can be
nothing to prevent a million readers from wanting and getting the
idea of success or whatever in their fiction, and it is unlikely that the
million will care to find out how the idea is presented, if the book be
palatable reading. The critics will continue to discuss the social phi-
losophy of Mr Lewis, the dirtiness of Zola, the profound revelation
of human nature in If Winter Comes, and the "separate world” of
Dickens, Dostoevsky, and Henry James. All of these things are im-
portant; but constant emphasis upon them makes for chaos in the
novel because no one takes thought that the thing be decently done.
a


320
THE ART OF THE NOVEL
Dr Lubbock's book mentions no living writer, but I can make my
point best by naming three and setting beside them a fourth. It
takes a minimum of perspicacity to see that James Joyce, Dorothy
Richardson, and Marcel Proust will in some fashion control the
novel for a decade. The three unfinished works: Ulysses, Pilgrim-
age, and A la Recherche du Temps Perdu already present problems of
structure and plan which simply do not arise in the case of the fourth
novelist who may, for all that, have an even greater influence on our
,
thinking and living: I mean D. H. Lawrence. What Lawrence has
to say is so pressing or so perverse, is said with such vehemence, that
it overbears the reader in spite of the occasional incoherence of his
utterance. He is always on the point of losing the “grace of in-
tensity” and always recovers himself with the sacred fury of his emo-
tion. It is not civilized; but civilization is not the only thing re-
quired of a rider in the night. It is clear enough that Mr Lawrence
has done little for the art of the novel; the other three writers, by
their experiments with the form, have done much. What one gets
from the juxtaposition of their names is the certainty that the novel
as an art form is capable of satisfying the inquiring mind.
The advantage of settling the question so is that once you grant
the novel its dignity everything is added unto you. You see, instant-
ly, why War and Peace is one of the greatest books and one of the
worst novels. You see, perhaps for the first time, exactly why one
can call Madame Bovary a highly artistic novel in spite of Flaubert's
continual shifting of "the point of view”; why it is right to start the
book at the farthest point from Emma, in the childhood of Charles.
The reason why the later novels of Henry James use the indirect
method, why the first person so signally succeeds in David Copper-
field and the scène à faire is so signally missed in Vanity Fair—the
explanation of these things is yours, and, above them, a sense of
artistic discipline, acting with divine rightness in the novel.
“The best form is that which makes the most of its subject—there
is no other definition of the meaning of form in fiction. The well-
made book is the book in which the subject and the form coincide and
are indistinguishable—the book in which the matter is all used
up
in
the form, in which the form expresses all the matter. When there is
disagreement between the two, there is stuff that is superfluous or
there is stuff that is wanting; the form of the book as it stands before
us has failed to do justice to the idea."


GILBERT SELDES
321
I shall add only the briefest summary of Dr Lubbock's chapters,
for they are actually a logical outcome of his definition. He finds
two types of treatment obtaining: one goes in for the picture, the
other for the dramatic scene. Compare Marius the Epicurean with
The Awkward Age or with Gyp, for extreme examples. As the novel
"aspires” to the dramatic, the picture, in Balzac for instance, sets off
and at best gives off the moments of action. The novelist determines
first what his relation to his story is to be. Shall he tell it to the
reader, as Thackeray does; or let some one else tell it, as Dickens lets
Copperfield; or push the matter one step further, going behind a
character and revealing the story through a perceptive mind with
which the author is half-identified—the manner in which Strether
figures in The Ambassadors. This is, as Dr Lubbock says, the es-
sence of the business; failure here means failure all along the line;
and the novelist must know his subject, absolutely, before he deter-
mines what his attitude is to be. If the subject were Emma's soul
the whole structure of Madame Bovary would be faulty; what we
get of Emma's soul is much and contributes to the subject, but it
isn't in itself the subject. The subject is What Maisie Knew, and
not the love affairs of Claude and the rest : the chosen attitude is
per-
fect. In War and Peace the theme is not the frustration of young
ambitions by the Napoleonic épopée; the climax of the private lives
and that of the invasion of Russia come at the same time, but they
are not the same climax; the interruption of the lives of the Rostovs,
Bezuhovs, and Bolkonskys should continue the story of their lives,
and does not: the attitude of Tolstoi is at fault for the book implies
a relation which the narrator does not see since he has not chosen a
position from which he could see.
What the novelist tries to do, in one sense, is to make the reader
forget that the other side of the canvas is always blank. Or, in the
way which is most vivid to me, he tries to enter a fourth dimension
in time, so that the past and the present may coincide for him. He
knows that the reader is at present with the book and that anything
that happens is technically in the past. And he has to contrive that
certain things in that past should happen in the present. (I will not
say “seem to happen” because there are moments when one does not
admit the pretence, unless one is Thackeray idiotically intruding
upon a scene, or a believer in the "experimental” novel.) He has
infinite liberty with his retrospect, and the great novelist will so man-
age his proportions, his passage of time, that the reader will accept


322
THE ART OF THE NOVEL
his terms and the thing which must eventually come to pass before
the eyes of the reader will be seen as it happens. In The Ambassa-
dors the theme is the change which takes place in the soul of Strether,
and it would lose all its intensity if it were told as something already
accomplished. True, the reader knows that he has the finished work
in hand; but the method which James chose is completely successful
because it presents every slight modification of Strether's spirit as it
occurs. The author's own statement of the problem is in the terms
not of time, but of his relation to the subject:
.
.
“Other persons
were to people the scene, and each with
his or her situation to treat, his or her coherency not to fail of, his or
her relation to my leading motive, in a word, to establish and carry
on. But Strether's sense of these things, and Strether's only, should
avail me for showing them; I should know them but through his
more or less groping knowledge of them, since his very gropings
would figure among his most interesting motions.
.
“His very gropings” are immediate, on the scene, and this novel,
in which the sense of the lapse of time is so delicate, is almost all
played in successive moments of direct vision, for even while Strether
is preoccupied with the past, his consciousness is in the present for us.
I know that one could have been more effective in praise of Dr
Lubbock's book by applying all it teaches to a few recent novels. It
would be an instructive occupation; it is, he suggests with some rea-
son, the only interest at this moment in the criticism of fiction. I
have not done so because I do not see how any critic can fail to do so
I
in the future. The choice of examples, also, might have been em-
barrassing.
GILBERT SELDES


BRIEFER MENTION
Adam & Eve & Pinch Me, by A. E. Coppard (12mo, 140 pages; Knopf: $2)
is an American issue of the work of a new English writer who was first pre-
sented to America in the pages of The Dial about a year ago; the present
volume was reviewed at length shortly thereafter. Its appearance under an
American imprint requires no revaluation of its extraordinary virtues; one
is pleased to note that foreign writers are not kept waiting until their repu-
tation boils over before they are presented to America. One wonders also
what the professional American story-teller will make of this subtle tech-
nique and poetic inclination.
ENTER JERRY, by Edwin Meade Robinson (12mo, 315 pages; Macmillan:
$1.75). Although in this book sincerity and literary scroll-work are mixed
together in the familiar proportions of the Howells school, it is an unusually
sincere and vivacious account of a boy's life from earliest remembrance until
he was ready to enter college at seventeen. We have had cartloads of vi-
vacious stories of boys, and latterly we have had some attempts at sincere
reminiscence. The combination is unexpected and felicitous. Mr Robinson
has slept on his culture longer than some of the recent literary lions, and yet
he seems to have an adequate bowing acquaintance with the latest generaliza-
tions. He has made no new discoveries and knocked out no new windows,
but he has remembered to good effect.
GOD AND WOMAN, by Johan Bojer, translated by A. R. Shelander (12mo, 346
pages; Moffat, Yard: $2). Martha and Hans improve their station in life
until they are the owners of a large estate. But Martha is sterile, and her
frustrated yearning for a child becomes even more acute now that they have
so much to hand down to another generation. A nephew is adopted, where-
upon Bojer settles his attention on establishing just wherein this adopted
child fails to supply the demand for a natural child; thus, there is jealousy,
distrust, and greed, since the boy is plainly waiting for the adoptive parents
to be out of his way, and they are quite conscious of this. As the story pro-
gresses the author becomes destructive of human happiness almost to the
extent of vandalism.
Beggars' Gold, by Ernest Poole (8vo, 234 pages; Macmillan: $2). Into this
cake various incongruous ingredients have been carelessly stirred—elaborate
symbolism, realism, the old socialism that went out with the war, and pro-
phecies of world-wide spiritual redemption. If you don't like one flavour,
concentrate your
mind on
another. The characters must be accepted on their
writer's authority, they are not projected. The book will appeal to genial,
indiscriminate sentimentalists who just love the rosy tints of The Song of
the Lark. And yet Mr Poole had his hands on an excellent theme, if he had
been content to treat it baldly and to dig up all its implications, instead of
flying off into the Millenium on the wings of time-worn eloquence. He sees
life with reasonably understanding, if impatient eyes, but he doesn't see very
much of it.


324
BRIEFER MENTION
T'he PATRIOTEER, by Heinrich Mann, translated by Ernest Boyd (12mo, 389
pages; Harcourt, Brace: $2) is a vigorous satire embodied in a novel of epic
scope, marred by a too insistent theme, which eventually erects itself into a
thesis. The innumerable episodes and characters are all marshalled with
the one purpose of elucidating this thesis. Yet although the author evident-
ly regards himself primarily as a pamphleteer or prophet-he has exposed
Imperialistic Germany as neatly as Sinclair Lewis exposed Main Street,
he is an artist of distinction, a negligent artist, perhaps, like the later Tol-
stoy. The characters are handled with easy competence, the plot moves con-
vincingly, and many of the scenes are as vividly conceived as that of the
summer day when “the swallows swam in the heavens as if in stagnant
water."
PRIVILEGE, by Michael Sadleir (12mo, 339 pages; Putnam: $2) has the fash
of a sword and the prick of a rapier. It begins by being feverishly vivid
and almost neurotically ironic, but that proves a key too difficult to sustain,
and towards the close, the temperature abates. In style, it is clipped and
aristocratic; each thrust is driven home. A novel in which theme and treat-
ment are mutually exacting and place demands upon the author which he
has surmounted with a high degree of success.
VERA, by the Author of Elizabeth and her German Garden (12mo, 319 pages;
Doubleday, Page: $2). This book is a caricature of fiction's latest darling,
the misunderstood husband. All the best sellers of the past few seasons
have been misunderstood men, and now “Elizabeth” has drawn an excellent
composite picture of the entire collection. Wemyss is being wounded at
every turn by any one who does not absolutely agree with him and echo his
moods. Being a detestable man of vindictive habits, he proceeds to make
life unbearable for everyone concerned. Like all good caricatures this one
is witty and overdrawn, with an uncanny resemblance to most family skele-
tons. By the way, is there anything wrong with English domestic architec-
ture ? Authors, over there, have lately developed a habit of dropping their
characters out of the bedroom windows. It is very dangerous—Vera died
of it.
The CRYSTAL HEART, by Phyllis Bottome (12mo, 227 pages ; Century: $1.90).
Probably Miss Bottome wrote this book on a dare, to prove she could draw
a female character without faults or frailties. Being an unusually excellent
craftsman she almost persuades us to believe in Joy Featherstone. But sin-
ners having so much more human appeal than saints, we trust Phyllis Bot-
tome will return to flesh and blood in her next book.
The Tower Of OBLIVION, by Oliver Onions (12mo, 437 pages; Macmil-
lan: $1.75) is in this bright author's later manner, and good as that is for
certain purposes it is to be hoped that something of Grey Youth, for exam-
ple, hasn't been irrevocably lost. This story of a man who begins to grow
backward through time is neatly involved as was A Case in Camera; unlike
that work, it crumbles at the end, both the moment of horror and the mo-
ment of tragedy failing to impress.


BRIEFER MENTION
325
PROMETHEUS ILLBOUND, by André Gide, translated by Lilian Rothermere
(Demy 8vo, 113 pages ; Chatto and Windus, London). Le Promethée mal
enchainé is an odd choice, from among all Gide's books, to offer first to the
English reading public; it belongs to Gide's symbolist period, and at present
that is a long way off. Nevertheless the book is singular, amusing, and ex-
pressive. In it one finds several of the intellectual themes which have
always haunted Gide's mind. Can men ever act disinterestedly, and where
could such action lead? To virtue or cruelty? What good does it do
a man to have a conscience? Does it only torture him? . To this
Gide replies: “Conscience has no true moral value, it is of no practical use,
but it is a magnificent luxury, the supreme luxury. The free act is not
more blessed than another, but it is an infinite pleasure, the best of
games.” And the book arrives at a sort of aesthetic of the moral act. La
Porte étroite is a much ampler development of these notions, which l’Im-
moraliste also presents in a still different light. But since 1913 and les
Caves du Vatican, Gide has found a far richer and completer conception of
liberty. And his grand-nephew, Aragon, who is really his true intellectual
heir, has recently displayed, in his astonishing novel Anicet, a picture of
human liberty and the human will which corresponds with what Gide would
tell us if he were now telling anything. But he is silent. Prometheus Ill-
bound has a ton boulevardier which is amusing and characteristic of Gide.
It has that clear, fluctuating, complexity so dear to Gide's spirit. It has
that concision and relief which give such value to Gide's prose. If one
knows Gide one will enjoy rereading the story; if not, the story may help
one to know him.
The FUGITIVE, by Rabindranath Tagore (12mo, 200 pages; Macmillan : $2).
In this volume is to be seen the rare, shimmering beauty typical of Tagore,
a glow as of remote sunsets, of sea-sand glittering on far-off beaches, of
snow on the peaks of dawn-flushed mountains, and of music heard in a
dream. For these short essays and sketches are one and all pervaded with
a faint dreaminess, the work of a meditative and mystical soul. For the
most part they have the vagueness of wind-blown perfume, yet there is a
rich spiritual beauty in them all.
а
A YOUNG GIRL'S DIARY, with a preface by Sigmund Freud, translated by Eden
and Cedar Paul (8vo, 285 pages; Seltzer: $5). This book covers the daily
experiences and impressions of a girl from the ages of eleven to fourteen and
a half. Of equal importance, we learn what she got for Christmas, her
marks at school compared with those of her sister, epigrams on life ("Mad.
says that you can't trust men as a rule, but that her lover is quite different,
that he is as true as steel. I am sure V. is too.") and the silent digging of
her and her girl friends in search of it, a search producing such perfect
gems as this: "We came across the words Embryo and Foetus, and I said
nothing at the time but tied 2 knots in my handkerchief to remind me, and
yesterday I looked them up.” Twenty philosophers, each peeping through
keyholes for three-score years and ten, might have discovered more, but it
is the charm of this diary that counts, and that could never have been com-
piled.


326
BRIEFER MENTION
WALT WHITMAN IN MICKLE STREET, by Elizabeth Leavitt Keller (12mo, 223
pages; Kennerley: $2.50) attempts to tell the story of what might be called
the domestic life of the freedom-loving poet during his last six years, when
he was stranded in Mickle Street, Camden. Probably most, though not all,
the statements in this book are accurate, and throughout appear
evidences of
conscientious effort to tell the truth. And yet the final effect of the narrative
seems to fall far short of the whole truth. Perhaps more Whitman biogra-
phies would attain the ease, simplicity, and convincingness of this frag-
mentary one were biographers free, like Mrs Keller, to look at their subject
in only one of his many and contradictory aspects. Mrs Keller does not
profess to be well versed in Whitman literature and certainly she fails to
understand the inner nature of the man himself. Moreover, the truth of
proportion and shading which these limitations forbid is made still more
impossible by her half-conscious but everywhere dominating purpose to do
justice to Mrs Davis, Whitman's housekeeper, even at Whitman's expense.
The book is interesting, but will be of value—and that a questionable serv-
ice-only until someone studies thoroughly and impartially, from every
side, the last years of Whitman.
Louise Imogen GUINEY, by Alice Brown (12mo, 111 pages; Macmillan:
$1.50). This is an intimate, sympathetic study of one whom the writer
would have us believe to be among the most sadly neglected of our authors.
Composed with the warmth with which one is wont to write of an old friend
recently dead, this volume is more personal than critical, more sincere than
convincing; it gives us a picture of Miss Guiney as a rare and exotic soul,
occupied with the creation of delicate works of art beyond the appreciation
of the multitude; but while one is convinced that her poetry is notable, one
cannot hastily admit the superlative in : "She has done the most authentic
and exquisite verse America has yet produced.”
SOME MODERN FRENCH WRITERS, by G. Turquet-Milnes (12mo, 302 pages;
McBride: $2.50). The sub-title of this volume is A Study in Bergsonism
and while the author, with her list of moderns-Barrès, Bourget, Anatole
France, Claudel, Romains, Moréas, Péguy, and Clermont-together with
her opening chapters on Bergson himself and Contemporary French
Thought in general, has not failed to live up to her main title, she furnishes
her reader not a little chuckling amusement in her efforts to justify the sub-
title. Every modern Frenchman she discusses is dragged in under Bergson-
ism, some by the hair of their heads, and others, when they apparently of-
fered no hair to be clutched, literally one might almost say by the throats,
gasping in wild surprise and gurgling inarticulate objections. What her
difficulties were may be guessed from the last sentence of her essay on Ana-
tole France: “All the same, after reading much Anatole France it is good to
take down Cranford”!! After that one need not hesitate to report that Miss
Turquet-Milnes' favourite formula is : So and So does not paint evil be-
cause he is interested in evil but because he is so passionately the crusader
for good. And her native determination to make each and every one of her
subjects sick over the immorality in which the world is plunged at the mo-
ment ceases to be even amusing long before half the essays have, with the
best of intentions, been read.


BRIEFER MENTION
327
Victor Hugo, by Marie Duclaux (12mo, 268 pages; Holt: $3). It is quite
possible that Swinburne's panegyric on Victor Hugo, written for the En-
cyclopedia Britannica in those good old Mid-Victorian days of excess and
vituperation (and still retained, humorously enough, to represent that staid
institution's critical estimate of Hugo!) has made carefree "Hugolatry”
for ever a dangerous pastime. At any rate one is surprised to find so famous
an English Francophile as Mme Duclaux successfully restrained in this
smoothly-written and satisfactory volume. One of that group of biographies
called Makers of the Nineteenth Century, the book presented its author with
the somewhat formidable task of comprising within two hundred and fifty
pages the life story of an iridescent personality and discussion of the work
of a writer who, even for a Frenchman, was to say the least prolific. But
no detail of the life is neglected, and incidents such as Sainte-Beuve's love
for Mme Hugo, or the lifelong liaison between Juliette Drouet and the poet
himself, are genuine tributes to Mme Duclaux' breadth of understanding
and her sympathy of mind. Nevertheless, in spite of all generosity, the
question arises as to whether this is not "just another book on Hugo.” For
the beginner it will be informative; but for the student ?
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.
Modern Essays, selected by Christopher Morley (12mo, 351 pages; Har-
court, Brace: $2) contains many good essays and some trivial ones, almost
all of them made unpalatable by the "we will go off in a corner and talk
about Mr Belloc” style of the introductions. The essays which one does not
know where to find elsewhere give one much pleasure: Mr Sherman's on
Samuel Butler, for example. One cares less to see Mr Beerbohm's A
Clergyman and the work of other special cases in this company.
THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE, by H. L. Mencken (8vo, 492 pages; Knopf: $6)
is so enlarged and re-worked in this second edition as to call for at least a
repetition of the good things said when the book first appeared. It is now
bulky, but as entertaining reading as ever; it is entertaining, but as sound
linguistics as its author and a host of helpers can make it. It includes Mr
Mencken's rewriting of the Declaration of Independence, contributions by
Ring Lardner, and quotations from J. V. A. Weaver. The earlier chapters
are a superb statement of the American case; and in the re-working Ms
Mencken seems to have grown more tolerant of English. One recalls Henry
James and his note about a language only definable as not in intention Yid-
dish.
a
SHE SENSE OF HUMOR, by Max Eastman (12mo, 257 pages; Scribner: $2).
The scientific gentlemen who reconstruct departed Dinosauria and Masta-
dons from the basis of a single tooth or a couple of vertebrae have a com-
paratively easy job compared with that of Max Eastman who has set himself
the task of constructing the skeleton of Aurora Borealis from the jaw bone
of an ass. The author is clever in his use of English, the framework is
beautifully built up and fitted together, but, after all, these dry theories are
not “sudden glory" and one longs for a less serious approach to the joy of
living. The first half of the book is the exposition of Mr Eastman's own
ideas. In part two he catalogues and traces the philosophy of humour from
Plato to Freud.


328
BRIEFER MENTION
Essays on ENGLISH, by Brander Matthews (16mo, 284 pages; Scribner's:
$2) resolves itself into a brief against those unwise youngsters who declare
that the English language is degenerating. It also points out, with some
repetition, the manner in which the spoken tongue in the United States and
Great Britain is steadily drifting apart. Professor Matthews, who affirmed
in an interview some time ago that he found no time to read the younger
writers, unwisely persists in criticising those same “younger writers” while
he should be occupying himself with such topics as are included in this
book. Here he is on safe ground, ground that he may explore in his study
without being caught in the strong winds of modern trends. When he does
venture out the figurative hat and umbrella of his theories are liable to be
blown away while he affords the spectacle of a bewildered gentleman vainly
chasing them about.
THE ENJOYMENT OF ARCHITECTURE, by Talbot F. Hamlin (illus., 8vo, 349
pages; Scribners: $3) is a new edition of a decidedly uneven work. The
author loves his subject and is quite enthusiastic about it, but his emotional
appreciation carries him into rhetoric and platitude; his aesthetic is limited
and inaccurate, but in practical matters he is secure, well-informed, and in-
telligent. There is room just now for a good book on architectural processes
and Mr Hamlin is capable of writing it, if he would stick to building where
the strain must be proportionate to the stress, and leave out the Ruskin.
THE GRAPHIC Arts, by Joseph Pennell (illus., 8vo, 315 pages ; University of
Chicago Press: $5) consists of shorthand reports of lectures on illustration,
etching, and lithography. Intimate to the point of impudence; ironical and
dogmatic; with justifiable animosity against the slovenliness of American
engraving, and with a sincere plea for a revival of the crafts, this volume is
not only highly informative, but equally interesting. Mr Pennell believes
that art is a matter of craftsmanship, but in this case his aesthetics is not
damaging—the lectures are concerned almost entirely with processes which
he understands as well as any man living, both in historical development
and in practice. The illustrations are printed with exceptional accuracy
and most of them are worth looking at.
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HERE, THERE AND EVERYWHERE, by Lord Frederick Hamilton (8vo, 332
pages; Doran: $4). Lord Hamilton, a chatty gentleman of advanced years,
has recently delivered himself of triplets. The youngest of this literary
progeny starts with a tiger hunt in India, and then rambles, with an ever-
lessening interest, to the Barbados, Bermuda, and South America. Usually
it is so difficult to get away from garrulous reminiscences that it is a great
comfort in reading this book to be able to throw it across the room and turn
to something less voluminous.
The Glass of Fashion, Anonymous (illus.; 8vo, 176 pages; Putnam: $2.50)
gives A Gentleman With a Duster further opportunities for chasing dirt.
Having scrubbed the mirrors of Downing street, he now moves over to the
West End and there captures fly-blows by breathing moral indignation on
the pier-glass of London's élite.


MODERN ART
HE John Marin exhibition of water-colours in the Montross
kind. There were some who saw and many who did not. There
were some, including myself, who got great pleasure from it and
others who got only pain. There were some, including myself, who
made great claims for it, and others who only scoffed. Upon the
whole it was the sort of experience that should fortify the artist and
convince him that he was being an artist. It parallels the history of
all truly individual characters in the world of art. The effort to put
one's own life into one's work always stirs the mob to either pain or
laughter, and I suppose it should, the mob, after all, being a product
of nature, and there for just that purpose, to test the true metal of
an artist. There are countless painters who have energy and force
of character and know full well what the mob is there for, but with
all the will in the world to rouse the unwieldy mass and provoke it
to a riot, they cannot so much as attract a glance. Along comes a
modest man like John Marin, whose only prayer, apparently, is to
be let alone, and who furthermore has embarked in the usually con-
sidered safe calling of the landscapist—and instantly the world di-
vides into two sections of unequal proportions, the lesser proclaim-
ing “That stuff is great,” and the greater insisting “It is an insult to
intelligence.” 'Twas ever thus, and so Mr Marin is receiving sin-
cerest compliments from those among his friends who have a taint
of the worldly in their make-up, and who feel that all the first effects
of the exhibition are exactly as they should be.
The antagonism to Marin is the more curious in that, strictly
speaking, he is not an innovator. He seems to grow more and more
abstract as he grows older, but he is not the first to be abstract nor is
it the fact that he is abstract that makes him notable. First and
foremost he is a poet who is stirred at times to emotional heights. It
merely happens that the men of this period, in large numbers at least,
have seen fit to cede to the camera the things that belong to the
camera, and he was among the first to realize that the emancipation
from the literal gave artists a new freedom. Marin is very free.
His colour is delightful and always was, but it is the free way in


330
MODERN ART
>
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which he handles his colour that most astonishes. He takes great
chances with nature and puts great washes in smashingly. It is do
or die with him every time and in all the long series of drawings that
he has submitted to the public notice I have never seen him succumb
to a cheap success. His failures, and they are frequent, are not for
want of lofty aiming.
The feeling that runs throughout his work shows the inevitable
tendency to deepen as the years draw on. At first he was a lyric poet
content with the "wind on the heath” and the play of clouds on a
summer day, but lately his pictures sound a dour and tragic note.
I noticed it first in the series devoted to Stonington, Maine, and
shown in New York some time ago, and this year the astonishing
water-colours of Downtown New York, 1921, are even bitter. It
seems to me that all of these pictures were painted in a furious state
of mind and that the brushes were not dipped in love. In a way they
seem like "accusations” of New York and would do wonderfully to
illustrate a little volume of extracts from the letters of Lafcadio
Hearn—those in which he dressed out New York from "away
back," as Walt would say. But I think them great. There is an ex-
altation of feeling in them that I can match nowhere else in contem-
porary American art, and a sweep of the brush that makes all other
water-colours, both here and in Europe, seem infantile. As it hap-
pens, I preferred two of the New York drawings to the one that was
used as frontispiece to the February Dial. This drawing shared to
the full the adult fervour that qualified all of the 1921 drawings,
but there is something nervously rasping in the execution of the
work that hurts just at present, although I may get used to it later
on. It looks to me as New York sounds, that I admit, but there I'm
with Lafcadio, I don't like the way New York sounds.
I said the Marin failures are frequent. They are more frequent
now than in the early stages of his career