for my splendid past, and you
seemed hardly to envy it.
The Stranger: I envy you your intelligence and moral sanity,
because the shy beginnings of something of the sort are innate in
me also. But how should I envy you your adventures? The
flight of eagles and the swimming of porpoises are admirable to
me in the realm of truth; I rejoice that there are such things in
the world, but I am not tempted to experiment in those directions.
So I relish your conversation here, though I should have made the
lamest of companions for you in the world.
Avicenna: You could not relish my virtue even in idea, had
you no spurs to brandish in your particular cock-pit. These very
escapades of yours among the shades, in search of pure under-
standing, are but the last gasp of a sporting spirit. Therefore I
tell you, Live while you may. The truth of your life is Allah's.
He will preserve it.


92 THE WISDOM OF AVICENNA
The Stranger: Undoubtedly. If time bred nothing, eternity
would have nothing to embalm. Of all men I am the last to
belittle the world of matter or to condemn it. I feel towards it
the most unfeigned reverence and piety, as to Hestia, Aphrodite,
Prometheus, and all the gods of generation and art; for I know
that matter, the oldest of beings, is the most fertile, the most pro-
found, the most mysterious; it begets everything, and cannot be
begotten; but it is proper to spirit to be begotten of all other things
by their harmonies, and to beget nothing in its turn.
Avicenna: What are you saying? Who taught you that?
The Stranger: Aristotle and reflection; and I am proud to
think that this conclusion is not very remote from that which
your great intellect has drawn from the same sources.
Avicenna: But who can have revealed to you a secret which
the Philosopher intentionally disguised, and which I too, following
his example, never proclaimed openly?
The Stranger: Many voyages have been made since your day,
and many discoveries; and the ruin of empires and religions has
repeatedly admonished mankind, if they have any wit at all, to
distinguish fact from fable.
Avicenna: That is indeed the distinction which I learned pri-
vately to make, and to discover concealed in the prudent doctrine
of the philosopher; but it was not at first blush, nor without a
special revelation, that my great intellect discovered the truth.
The Stranger: Perhaps you learned the doctrines of Aristotle
when you were too young to discount their language and freely
to confront them with the facts of nature. I remember a story—
probably there is no truth in it—that you had long found the
Metaphysics unintelligible until you came by chance upon a stray
commentary which solved the riddle.
Avicenna: The tale is true: not, of course, that having read
the fourteen books of the Metaphysics no less than forty times,
and knowing them perfectly by heart, both forwards and back-
wards, I failed to understand anywhere the meaning of the words,
or how one part supported or seemed to contradict another, or
what was written first and what added as a comment later, or in
fine all that pedants call understanding a book; but I had the soul
of a philosopher, and such understanding was not understanding
to me. What escaped me, and what I longed to discover, was how


G. SANTAYANA 93
the doctrine of the book could be true. For I too had eyes in my
head, the earth shone clear in the sunlight before me; I knew only
too well the hang of this naughty world; and I marvelled how a
philosopher whose authority was unquestionable could give an
account of things which so completely inverted their true order.
The more commentaries I read and the more learned men I con-
sulted, the less satisfaction I found; for not one of them had an
eye for the truth, or any keen interest in real things, but all were
absorbed in considering how words should be put together; and
their philosophy was nothing but the grammar of an artificial
tongue, a system of hieroglyphics with which to inscribe the prison-
walls of their blindness and ignorance. Sunk in this conviction,
and sullenly reconciled to it, I was walking one day in the souk of
Shiraz, saluting the merchants, viewing and praising the rarities
they displayed before me, buying or exchanging some jewel, ques-
tioning the strangers newly arrived concerning the disasters and
the marvels they had witnessed in all the islands of the sea and
in all the cities beyond the desert, when I perceived a venerable
and courtly man who appeared to be following me; and turning
to him I said: "Reverend Sir, didst thou wish anything of me?"
Whereupon he placed his hand on his breast, and raised it thence
to his forehead, and replied: "Young master, it is known to me
that thou art the hope of the old and the despair of the young;
and I bring thee a book of commentaries on the Metaphysics of
Aristotle, a rarity hitherto unknown and a morsel for a fine palate:
name thy price and it is thine."—"Not for me," I replied; "pray,
offer thy book to another. Have I not read the fourteen books of
the Metaphysics full forty times, and do I not know them by
heart, forwards and backwards, without understanding them?
What can thy commentary avail? A truce to the riddles of the
learned! Away with the gibberish of ancient fools! Give me a
book of love, if thou hast one, or a tale of some far country, or
the wild verse of a poet inspired by wine!" But the stranger was
not discouraged. He smiled a little in his beard and spoke again:
"Take it then for the calligraphy of the scribe; for it is fairly
penned in black and red, with scrolls in gold and green and purple
and silver."—"That is nothing," I retorted; "I have gold and
silver and green and purple in plenty, and many a book in red
and black script, choice thoughts of the poets, or maxims of ancient


94 THE WISDOM OF AVICENNA
sages, wise men without books."—"Take it then," he persisted,
"for the crimson damask it is wrapped in, and the silver clasp,
with its black opal, with which it is clasped." And I said: "I
have richer tissues and more beautiful clasps." Then his face was
darkened; and bending towards me, that no one might overhear,
he said sorrowfully: "Take it then for charity's sake: I am bereft
and old, and in need of comfort. It is thine for a silver penny."
Then I took a silver penny from my purse and gave it him, saying:
"Keep thy rare book for thy comfort, and take this for thy need."
But he refused. "Accept it," he said once more, "for the love of
Allah, as for the love of Allah I offer it: it is not worth a penny of
silver nor a shekel of gold, but ten thousand talents." And he left
the book in my hands, and with a quick step departed. Pondering
then in myself how this was perhaps no commentary on the Meta-
physics, nor an old scribe's treasure, but some message of love or
secret gift from a princess, I opened the clasp, and sitting on the
door-step of a saddler's shop, I began to read; and all day I read,
and when evening came on, without raising my eyes from the page,
I made sign to the saddler to fetch me a lamp; and all night I
continued, and all the following day; thrice I finished, and thrice
began again. And the eyes of my soul were opened, and the true
mind of the Philosopher descended on me, and I understood at last
all that he wrote and all that he left unwritten.
Awaking at length to the outer world, I questioned the saddler
and the merchants and the strangers and every passer-by, as to who
that old man might be; but none knew him, except that in the
darkest corner of some mosque perhaps I might find him praying.
I sped accordingly like the wind from one mosque to another, burst-
ing in here and vanishing there, my feet scarce touching the ground
and my garments flying behind me; so that the faithful standing
at intervals upon their carpets felt the swiftness of some influence
that had passed near them, and said: "What is this that has flown
by? Was it a blast with the scent of lilacs from the garden? Was
it a ray of sunlight between two cypresses severed by the breeze?
Was it an angel gathering up our prayers and bearing them swiftly
before the Lord?" At last in the farthest and smallest mosque
of the city, beside the burial-ground of the poor, I spied my lost
benefactor; and embracing him with a tender and a long embrace,
I cried: "O most venerable sage and my father in God, what a


G. SANTAYANA 95
blessing have I received at thy hands! All I possess is as nothing
to what I owe thee, and for the gift of knowledge all the riches of
the earth would be a small return; but what I can I will. Come
with me into the presence of the Emir: he shall know that thou art
the Solomon of the age—for it is not hidden from me that the
author of this divine commentary is none other but thou—and the
Emir shall bestow on thee a robe of honour, and thou shalt sit in
the seat of authority amongst his scribes and alchemists and physi-
cians and poets; and all shall be silent when thou openest thy lips,
and deem it a signal favour from Allah to be corrected by thee;
and I shall be the first to come before thee in the morning and the
last to depart from thee at night; because the fountains of Ararat
are not sweeter to me than the purity of the truth, nor are the
caresses of monarchs or the cozenings of princes of any worth in
my eyes compared with the smile of wisdom." But he gently dis-
engaged himself, and said: "It is too much. I am more than
rewarded. Long had the secrets thou hast read in this book lain
upon my heart. They were not for this age. Opinion amongst
mortals is like the song of a drunkard, merry and loud and ex-
ceedingly foolish and ravishing in its hollow sound; and the cold
light of truth is hateful to them as sunrise to the reveller. There-
fore I had resigned myself to silence and to suffering my discoveries
to go down with me to the grave. The truth is in no haste to be
known; it will be published at the last day. Thereupon a report
reached me of thy free nature and thy keen mind, and having my-
self seen and heard thee, I said in my heart: 'This young man will
understand, and in him my mind shall survive me.' Diligently
therefore I committed my commentary to writing, inditing it
scrupulously with my own hand, folding it in precious silks, and
binding it with a magic and a jewelled clasp; and the rest thou
knowest. But since thy understanding has been quick beyond all
expectation, and thy thanks generous beyond my desert, and since
in thee my soul has indeed come to a second life, far from accepting
any other recompense, let me complete my gift as is fitting: for
who would bestow the precious stone and withhold the setting?
Let us then hasten together to the cadi, in order that in a formal
writing and before witnesses I may institute thee heir to all I
possess; for I have chosen a life of poverty for the love of wisdom,
not from necessity. I have other fair books and other jewels, and


96 THE WISDOM OF AVICENNA
my camels' saddle-bags are heavy with gold. But for the journey
I shall soon make, gold and silver are useless, and before many
days all shall be thine."—"May Allah lengthen those days into
many years," I replied; "and be they many or few they shall be
spent in my house; for if in mind I am thy heir, in heart let me be
thy child." And from that hour we were as a father who has chosen
his son, and a son who has chosen his father, until death, the divider
of loves and the extinguisher of delights, separated us for ever.
The Stranger: And what—if it is not too much to ask—may
have been the gloss made by this sage, which so wonderfully clari-
fied the doctrine of Aristotle?
Avicenna: You will not find it in my writings, because it does
some violence to the conceit of mankind, who feeling within them
some part of the energy of nature wish to attribute that energy
to the fancies which it breeds; and I have always made it a law
to bow to custom in science as in manners. To rebel against com-
fortable errors is to give them too much importance. You will
never enlighten mankind by offending them; and even if by force
or by chance you caused them verbally to recognize the truth, you
would gain nothing in the end, for in their heads your accurate
dogmas would turn at once into new fables. The better way is to
coax and soften their imagination by a gentle eloquence, rendering
it more harmonious with those secret forces which rule their destiny;
so that as by the tropes and hyperboles of poets, they may not be
seriously deceived by your scientific shams. The very currency and
triteness of the lie will wear away its venom. Accordingly in my
published treatises I made no effort to pierce the illusion which
custom has wedded with the words of the Philosopher; but here,
alas, illusions have no place, and if you wish to hear the unmen-
tionable truth, in a few words I will repeat it.
My benefactor had entitled his profound work The Wheel of
Ignorance and the Lamp of Knowledge; because, he said, the
Philosopher having distinguished four principles in the understand-
ing of nature, the ignorant conceive these principles as if they were
the four quadrants of a wheel, on any one of which in turn the
revolving edifice of nature may be supported; whereas wisdom
would rather have likened those principles to the four rays of a
lamp suspended in the midst of the universe from the finger of
Allah, and turning on its chain now to the right and now to the


G. SANTAYANA 97
left; whereby its four rays, which are of divers colours, lend to
all things first one hue and then another without confusing or
displacing anything. The ignorant, on the contrary, pushing their
wheel like the blind Samson, imagine that the four principles
(which they call causes) are all equally forces producing change,
and co-operative sources of natural things. Thus if a chicken is
hatched, they say the efficient cause is the warmth of the brooding
hen; yet this heat would not have hatched a chicken from a stone;
so that a second condition, which they call the formal cause, must
be invoked as well, namely, the nature of an egg; the essence of
eggness being precisely a capacity to be hatched when warmed
gently—because, as they wisely observe, boiling would drive away
all potentiality of hatching. Yet, as they further remark, gentle
heat in general joined with the essence of eggness would produce
only hatching as such, and not the hatching of a chicken; so that a
third influence, which they call the final cause, or the end in view,
must operate as well; and this guiding influence is the divine idea
of a perfect cock or of a perfect hen, presiding over the hatching,
and causing the mere eggness in that egg to assume the likeness
of the animals from which it came. Nor, finally, do they find
these three influences sufficient to produce here and now this par-
ticular chicken, but are compelled to add a fourth, the material
cause; namely, a particular yolk and a particular shell and a
particular farmyard, on which and in which the other three causes
may work, and laboriously hatch an individual chicken, probably
lame and ridiculous despite so many sponsors. Thus these learned
babblers would put nature together out of words, and would re-
gard the four principles of interpretation as forces mutually supple-
mentary, combining to produce natural things; as if perfection
could be one of the sources of imperfection, or as if the form things
happen to have could be one of the causes of their having it.
Far differently do these four principles clarify the world when
discretion conceives them as four rays shed by the light of an ob-
serving spirit. One ray which, as the lamp revolves, sweeps space
in a spiral fan, like the tail of a comet, is able to illuminate the
receding past, and bears the name of memory. Memory only can
observe change or disclose when and where and under what auspices
one thing has been transformed into another, whether in nature or
in the spirit's dream; and memory only, if its ray could spread to


98 THE WISDOM OF AVICENNA
the depths of the infinite, would reveal the entire efficient prin-
ciple, the only proper cause, in the world; namely, the radical
instability in existence by which everything is compelled to produce
something else without respite. The other three principles, made
visible by the three other rays, have nothing to do with genesis or
change, but distinguish various properties of accomplished being;
namely, existence, essence, and harmony. The rays by which these
are revealed also have separate names. Thus the faculty that
discerns existence is called sense, since it is sense that brings instant
assurance of material things and of our own actuality in the midst
of them. The faculty that discerns essence is called logic or con-
templation, which notes and defines the characters found in exist-
ence and (in so far as may be opportune or possible) the innumer-
able characters also which are not found there. The faculty which
discerns harmony is called pleasure or desire or (when chastened
by experience and made explicit in words) moral philosophy. In
themselves things are always harmonious, since they exist to-
gether, and always discordant, since they are always lapsing in-
wardly and destroying one another; but the poignant desire to be
and to be happy, which burns in the heart of every living creature,
turns these simple co-existences and changes into the travail of
creation, in one juxtaposition of things finding life, happiness,
and beauty, and in another juxtaposition, no less unstable, finding
ugliness, misery, and death. Thus as the Lamp of Knowledge re-
volves, the red ray of sense and the white ray of contemplation and
the blue ray of memory and the green ray of love (for green, as
the Prophet teaches, is the colour of the beautiful) slowly sweep
the whole heaven; and the wise heart, glowing in silence, is con-
sumed with wonder and joy at the greatness of Allah.
The Stranger: Allegory has its charm when we know the
facts it symbolizes, but as a guide to unknown facts it is perplexing;
and I am rather lost in your beautiful imagery. Am I to under-
stand that matter alone is substantial, and that the other three prin-
ciples are merely aspects which matter presents when viewed in
one light or another?
Avicenna: Matter? If by that word you understand an
essence, the essence of materiality, matter would be something in-
capable of existing by itself, much less could it be the ground of
its own form or of its own impulses or transformations: like pure


G. SANTAYANA 99
Being it would be everywhere the same, and could neither con-
tain nor produce any distinctions. But the matter which exists
and works is matter formed and unequally distributed, the body of
nature in all its variety and motion. So taken, matter is alive,
since it has bred every living thing and our own spirit; and the soul
which animates this matter is spontaneous there; it is simply the
native plasticity by which matter continually changes its forms.
This impulse in matter now towards one form and now towards an-
other is what common superstition calls the attraction or power of
the ideal. But why did not a different ideal attract this matter, and
turn this hen's egg into a duckling, save that here and now matter
was predisposed to express the first idea and not the second? And
why was either idea powerful over the fresh-laid egg, but power-
less over the same egg boiled, except that boiling had modified the
arrangement of its matter? Therefore my benefactor boldly con-
cluded that this habit in matter, which is the soul of the world, is
the only principle of genesis anywhere and the one true cause.
The Stranger: I see: 'Tis love that makes the world go
round, and not, as idolatrous people imagine, the object of love.
The object of love is passive and perhaps imaginary; it is what-
ever love happens to choose, prompted by an inner disposition in
its organ. You are a believer in mechanism, and not in magic.
Avicenna: Excellent. If the final cause, or the object of
love, bears by courtesy the title of the good, believe me when I
tell you that the efficient cause, the native impulse in matter, by
moving towards that object, bestows that title upon it. Who that
has any self-knowledge has not discovered by experience in his own
bosom, as well as by observation of the heavens, and of animals and
men, that the native impulse in each of us chooses its goal, and
changes it as we change, and that nothing is pursued by us or sensi-
ble to us save what we have the organ to discern, or the innate com-
pulsion and the fatal will to love?
The Stranger: There indeed you touch the heart-strings of
nature; and I well conceive your enthusiasm at finding at last a
philosophy that vibrates with so much truth. But as for Aristotle,
does not such an interpretation entirely reverse his doctrine? Did
he not blame his predecessors for having regarded living matter as
the only principle of the world?
Avicenna: And most justly. Wisdom is not confined to the


ioo THE WISDOM OF AVICENNA
knowledge of origins or of this living body of nature—things
important only for the sake of the good and evil they involve. The
forms of things are nobler than their substance, and worthier of
study; and the types which discourse or estimation distinguishes in
things are more important than the things themselves. A philoso-
pher is a man, and his first and last care should be the ordering of
his soul: from that centre only can he survey the world. Naturalists
are often betrayed by their understanding of origins into a sort of
inhumanity; conscious of necessity, they grow callous to good and
evil. Moreover, those early naturalists were at fault in their own
science, because they identified matter with some single kind of
matter, like water or air, and made that substance the sole prin-
ciple of genesis; whereas the distribution, movement, habits, and
fertility of all sorts of matter must be taken into account if nature
and the soul of nature are to be described rightly. But the Philoso-
pher never blamed the naturalists for being naturalists in season,
and he was the greatest of naturalists himself. Doubtless in his
popular works he accommodated himself to the exigences of cur-
rent piety and of human conceit, seeming to make nature a product
of morals, which is absurd; and the converse is evidently the
truth.
The Stranger: I agree that the converse is the truth; but is
this truth to be found in Aristotle?
Avicenna: If it is the truth, it must have been his doctrine.
Do you imagine that the wisest of men, living at the place and
hour when human reason reached its noon, could be blind to so
great a truth, when it is obvious to me and even to you?
The Stranger: Admirable principle of exegesis, which assigns
all truth to Aristotle and absolves us from consulting his works!
Avicenna: On the contrary, for that very reason, we need to
consult and to ponder them unceasingly. Why else read a philoso-
pher? To count the places where his pen has slipped? To note
his inconsistencies? To haggle over his words and make his name
a synonym for his limitations? Even if with some fleck or some
crack, he is a mirror reflecting nature and truth, and for their sake
only do we look into him; because without this mirror, in the
dungeon in which we lie, we might be cut off from all sight of the
heavens.
The Stranger: Was it a slip of the pen or a limitation to
assert that the divine life has no material principle? Must we


G. SANTAYANA 101
not be wrong, then, in asserting that matter is the one principle of
existence?
Avicenna: Not at all. When the plectrum, in the hand of an
imperfect player, strikes the strings of the lute, the hard dull blow
is sometimes heard, as well as the pure music. In this way the mate-
rial principle, when not fully vivified and harmonized, can disturb
and alloy the spirit, in a life that is not divine. In the mind of
God no such material accident intrudes, and all is pure music.
But would this music have been purer, or could it have sounded at
all, if there had been no plectrum, no player, no strings, and no
lute? You have studied the philosopher to little purpose, if you
suppose that it is by accident only that the deity is the final cause
of the world, and that without any revolution of the spheres the
divine intellect would contemplate itself no less blissfully than it
now does. That is but a sickly fancy, utterly divorced from
science. The divine intellect is the perfect music which the world
makes, the perfect music which it hears. Hermes and Pan and
Orpheus drew from reeds or conches, or from their own throats,
such music as these instruments were competent to make; all other
sorts of harmony, musically no less melodious, they suffered to re-
main engulfed in primeval silence. So the soul of this world draws
from its vast body the harmonies it can yield, and no others. For
it was not the essence of the sounds which conches and throats and
reeds might produce that created these reeds and throats and
conches, but contrariwise. These sources of sound, having arisen
spontaneously, the sounds they naturally make were chosen out of
all other sounds to be the music of that particular Arcadia: even
so the divine intellect is the music of this particular world. The
Philosopher would never have so much as mentioned a divine in-
tellect, which he conceived as the inevitable note, eternally sus-
tained, emitted by all nature and the rolling heavens, if the rolling
heavens and nature had not existed.
The Stranger: I admit that such is the heart of his doctrine,
and if he was never false to it, he was a much purer naturalist
than his disciples have suspected. The eternity he attributed to
the world, and its fixed constitution, support this interpretation:
nature was the organ of deity, and deity was the spirit of nature.
Yet this confirmation creates a difficulty for you in another quarter,
since a Moslem must deny the eternity of the world.
Avicenna: Not if we distinguish, as we should, eternity from


102 THE WISDOM OF AVICENNA
endless time. The world is eternal, undeT the form of truth, as
the divine intellect apprehends it; but measured by its own measure
of days and years, the world had a beginning and will have an end.
So revelation teaches, and it is not by a feigned conformity that
I accept this dogma. My own time is over; I have passed into the
eternal world; and something within me tells me that universal
nature also is growing weary of its cycles, and will expire at last.
The Stranger: And when nature is no more, will God have
ceased to be?
Avicenna: Have you read the Philosopher and do you ask
such a question? The vulgar imagine that when change ceases,
empty time will continue after; or, that before change began empty
time had preceded; and it is a marvel to them how one moment of
that vacant infinity could have been chosen rather than another for
the dawn of creation. All this is but childish fancy and the false
speech of poets. Eternity is not empty or tedious, nor does time
occupy one part of it, leaving the rest blank. Eternity is but the
synthesis of all changes, be they few or many; and truth, with
the divine intellect which beholds the truth, can neither arise nor
lapse. They are immutable, though the flux they tell of is fugitive,
and themselves not anchored in time, though the first and the last
syllable of time are graven on them as on a monument.
The Stranger: Is eternity the tomb of time, and does intellect
resemble those Egyptian monarchs who went to live in their
sepulchres before they died? Ah, we Christians and artists have a
secret hidden from the children of this world, the secret of a happy
death. Sometimes life, by a rapturous suicide, likes to embalm
itself in a work of art, or in a silent sacrifice. The breathlessness
of thought also is a kind of death, the happiest death of all, for
spirit is never keener than in the unflickering intellect of God, or
in that of a philosopher like you or even like me, who can raise the
whole or a part of the flux of nature into the vision of truth.
Avicenna: Tombs, indeed, and visions, and death, and eternity
—why harp on them now, when you are still alive? Leave us while
yet you may. We have no need of you here, nor you of us there.
Soon enough you must join us, whether you will or no. Hasten,
before it is too late, to your thriftless brothers in the earth; or if
they will not listen, admonish your own heart, and be not deceived
by the language which philosophers must needs borrow from the


G. SANTAYANA 103
poets, since the poets are the fathers of speech. When they tell
you that Allah made the world, and that its life and love are an
emanation from him, and that quitting this life you may still live
more joyfully elsewhere, they speak in inevitable parables; for in
truth it is the pulse of nature that creates the spirit and chooses a
few thoughts (among many thoughts unchosen) and a few per-
fections (among all the perfections unsought) to which it shall
aspire; and the special harmony which this vast instrument, the re-
volving world, makes as it spins is the joy and the life of God. Dis-
honour not then the transitive virtue within you, be it feeble or
great; for it is a portion of that yearning which fills the world
with thought and with deity, as with a hum of bees. Love peoples
even these regions with us melancholy phantoms; and had my
body not moved and worked mightily on earth, you would never
have found among the shades even this wraith of my wisdom.


THE POMEGRANATE
BY BERENICE K. VAN SLYKE
Breaking a scarlet pomegranate with his teeth,
He said, "I know a wall
Of sulphur yellow, streaked to brown with rain,
Where this tree used to sprawl.
"I know that southern sea with opal edge
Where gipsies camp in May
Driving their Camargue stallions down white sand,
White manes wilder than spray.
"I know the ragged boys with golden skin,
Watching their goats that wear
Wings on their hoofs, so lightly do they leap
The rocky chasms of air;
"At noon the boys on chestnut-shaded hills
Munch sour cheese washed with wine;
They speak but little, for they are content,
I see their dark eyes shine.
"It was not here," he said, "I saw that tree
Crested like chanticleer,
That gipsy caravan, those golden boys;
It was not here, not here."



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REMINISCENCES OF LEONID ANDREYEV
BY MAXIM GORKI
Translated From the Russian by S. S. Koteliansky and
Katherine Mansfield
III
IN Nijni Leonid met at my house Father Feodor Vladimirsky,
the archpriest of the town of Arzamas, who subsequently be-
came a member of the Second State Duma—a remarkable man.
Some day I will try and write about him fully; and meanwhile I
find it necessary briefly to outline the chief deed of his life.
The town of Arzamas, almost from the time of Ivan the Terri-
ble, obtained its water from ponds where, in the summer, swam
corpses of drowned cats, rats, fowls, and dogs, while in the winter,
under the ice, the water became tainted, and had a disgusting smell.
Father Feodor, having made it his object to supply the town with
wholesome water, spent twelve years in investigating personally the
hidden waters around Arzamas. Every summer, year in and year
out, he rose at dawn and wandered like a sorcerer about the fields
and woods, observing where the ground "perspired." And after
long labour he found hidden sub-soil springs, traced their course,
canalized them, conducted them to a forest hollow a couple of
miles from the town; and having obtained for a population of ten
thousand over a hundred thousand gallons of superb spring water,
proposed to the town the laying down of a water supply.
The town had a sum of money bequeathed to it by a merchant
to be used either for the laying down of a water supply or for
the founding of a credit bank. The tradespeople and the authori-
ties, who employed horses to carry the water in barrels from remote
springs outside the town, had no need of a water supply, and using
every means to hinder the work of Father Feodor, tried to get hold
of the capital for the establishment of a credit bank; while the un-
important inhabitants swallowed the tainted water of the ponds,
indifferent and passive, in conformity with their immemorial cus-
tom. Thus, having found water, Father Feodor was compelled to


106 REMINISCENCES OF LEONID ANDREYEV
carry on a long and tedious struggle with the stubborn selfishness
of the rich and the villainous stupidity of the poor.
When I arrived at Arzamas, under the surveillance of the police,1
I found him at the end of his work of gathering together the springs.
Exhausted as he was by drudgery and misfortune, that man was
the first Arzamasian who dared to make my acquaintance. The
wise Arzamasian authorities had most strictly forbidden the em-
ployees of the Zemstvo and all other civil servants to visit me,
and, in order to intimidate them, had established a police post just
under my windows.
Father Feodor came to me one evening, in pouring rain, soaking
wet from head to foot, soiled with clay, in heavy peasant boots, in
a grey cassock, and in a faded hat, which was so wet that it looked
like a lump of soaked clay. Pressing my hand tightly with his
horny digger's hand, he said in a stern little bass voice:
"Are you the unrepentant sinner who has been foisted on us for
the good of your soul? We will do your soul good! Can you
treat me to tea?"
In his grey little beard the small, dried up face of an ascetic was
hidden. From his deep sockets shone the meek smile of under-
standing eyes.
"I have come straight from the forest. Have you got any gar-
ments into which I could change?"
I had already heard a great deal about him. I knew that his
son was a political exile, one daughter was in prison "for politics,"
a second daughter was intent on her preparations to get there. I
knew that he had already spent all his means in this search for
water, had mortgaged his house, and was now living like a pauper,
himself digging ditches in the forest and stopping them with clay.
When his strength failed, he would implore the neighbouring
peasants, for the love of Christ, to lend him a hand. They would
help him; but the townspeople, sceptically watching the work of
this "queer" parson, would not lift a finger.
It was this man whom Leonid Andreyev met at my house.
It was October, a dry cold day; the wind was blowing; in the
streets scraps of paper, birds' feathers, and onion peel were flying
about. The dust scratched against the window panes, a huge rain
1 [Gorki was forbidden to reside in any of the large towns of Russia, and
as punishment for his political views was exiled by the authorities to the
remote provincial town of Arzamas.]


MAXIM GORKI 107
cloud moved from the fields to the town. Suddenly, into our room
came Father Feodor, rubbing his dust-covered eyes, shaggy, angry,
cursing the thief who had stolen his handbag and umbrella, and the
Governor General who refused to understand that a water supply
is more useful than a credit bank. Leonid opened his eyes wide and
whispered to me:
"What is this?"
An hour later, at the samovar, with his mouth quite agape, he
listened to the archpriest of the absurd town of Arzamas de-
nouncing the Gnostics for having fought against the democratic
principles of the Church and for trying to make instruction in the
knowledge of God inaccessible to the minds of the people.
"These heretics consider themselves seekers after the highest
knowledge, aristocrats of the spirit. But are not the people, in the
persons of their wisest guides, the embodiment of the wisdom of
God and of His spirit?"
"Docetists, Ophites, pleroma, Carpocrates," Father Feodor
droned on; and Leonid, nudging me with his elbow, whispered:
"There is the Arzamasian horror incarnate!"
But soon he was waving his hand in front of Father Feodor's
face as he proved to him the impotence of thought; and the priest,
shaking his beard, retorted:
"It is not thought that is impotent, but unbelief."
"But that is the essence of thought."
"You are sophisticated, Mr Author."
The rain lashed the window panes, the old man and the young
one scrimmaged among ancient wisdom, and from the wall Leo
Tolstoy, with the little stick in his hand—the great pilgrim of this
world—gazed down on them. Having overthrown everything pos-
sible in the time, we went to our rooms long after midnight. I
was already in bed, with a book, when there came a knock at my
door, and Leonid appeared, dishevelled, agitated, his shirt collar
undone. He sat down on my bed and began rapturously:
"What a parson! How he found me out, eh?"
And suddenly tears gleamed in his eyes.
"Lucky fellow you, Alexey, the devil take you. You always
have wonderfully interesting people round you, and I—am lonely
... or I have hanging on to me . . ."
He waved his hand. I began telling him of the life of Father
Feodor, how he had been seeking for water; of the book he had


108 REMINISCENCES OF LEONID ANDREYEV
written, The History of the Old Testament, the manuscript of
which had been taken from him by order of the Synod; of his book
Love the Law of Life, also forbidden by the Ecclesiastical censor-
ship. In that book Father Feodor proved by quotations from
Pushkin and from other poets that the feeling of love, as between
one man and another, was the basis of life and of the progress of
the world, that it was as powerful as the law of universal gravita-
tion, and resembled it in every respect.
"Yes," said Leonid musingly, "there are things I must learn;
otherwise I feel ashamed before the parson."
Another knock at the door. Enter Father Feodor, folding his
cassock round him, barefooted, sad.
"You are not asleep? So, well. Here I am! I heard talking,
I thought I'd come and apologize! I rather shouted, young people,
but don't take offence. I lay down, thought of you. You are nice
people. I decided that I had grown warm for no reason. Now,
here I am, forgive me! I'm going to bed."
Both sat down on the bed, and again began an endless conversa-
tion. Leonid, elated, laughed again and again.
"What a country this Russia of ours is! 'Look here, we haven't
yet solved the problem of the existence of God, and you are calling
us to dinner!' It is not Belinsky who says this, it is what all
Russia says to Europe. For Europe, in the main, calls us to dine,
to feed well, nothing but this!"
And Father Feodor, wrapping his thin, bony legs in his cassock,
smilingly replied:
"After all Europe is our god-mother, don't forget! Without
her Voltaires, without her men of science, we should not now be
disputing about matters philosophical, but should be silently
swallowing 'Bleeny' [pan-cakes]—and doing nothing else!"
At daybreak Father Feodor left us, and in a couple of hours he
was gone—to set about work again on the Arzamasian water sup-
ply. And Leonid having slept till evening, said to me then:
"Just think, in whose interest and for what purpose is it that in
this rotten little town a parson should live who is energetic, inter-
esting, and a wizard? And why indeed should the parson of this
town be a wizard, eh? What nonsense! You know one can live
only in Moscow. Come, leave this place. It is horrid here—rain,
dirt ..."
And immediately he began preparing to go home.


MAXIM GORKI 109
I write as my memory prompts me, with no care for sequence
or for chronology.
In the Moscow Art Theatre, when it was still in Karetny Row,
Leonid introduced me to his fiancee, a slim, fragile girl with lovely
clear eyes. Modest, reserved, she appeared to me unoriginal; but
1 soon became convinced that she was a person of an understanding
heart.
She realized splendidly the need of a maternal, watchful atti-
tude to Andreyev; at once she comprehended deeply the signifi-
cance of his talent and the tormenting fluctuations of his mood.
She was one of those rare women who, capable of being
passionate mistresses, are yet able to love with the love of a mother.
This double love armed her with a subtle knowledge, so that she
had a marvellous understanding of the genuine complainings of
his soul as well as of the high-sounding words of a capricious
passing mood.
As is known, a Russian "for a word witty does neither father
nor mother pity." Leonid, too, was very much carried away by
words "witty," and at times composed maxims in very dubious
taste.
"A year after marriage a wife is like a well-worn boot: one
does not feel it," he said once in the presence of Alexandra
Michailovna (his wife). She was capable of taking no notice of
such verbal play, and at times even found these pranks of
the tongue witty, and laughed caressingly. But, possessing in a
high degree a sense of self-respect, she could—if need be—show
herself very obstinate, even immovable. Subtly developed in her
was a taste for the music of words, for forms of speech. She was
small, lithe, elegant, and at times somewhat amusingly, childishly
grave—I nicknamed her Lady Shura.1 The name stuck to her.
Leonid valued her, and she lived in constant concern for him,
in a continuous tension of all her powers. Her personality was com-
pletely sacrificed to her husband's interests.
At the Andreyevs' house in Moscow, authors often met together;
it was very crowded and cosy. F. I. Chaliapin often put in an ap-
pearance, fascinating everyone with his stories. Lady Shura's
lovely eyes, smiling caressingly, restrained to a certain extent the
"breath" of Russian natures.
When "Modernism" was in full flower, an attempt was made
1 Shura is the diminutive of Alexandra.


no REMINISCENCES OF LEONID ANDREYEV
at the Andreyev gatherings to understand it. But on the whole it
was condemned, which was much the simplest way. There was
no time to think seriously of literature; war and politics were of
first importance. Blok, Byely, Bryussov, appeared "isolated
provincials"; in the most favourable opinion, queer fellows; in
the least favourable, something like traitors to "the great traditions
of the Russian commonwealth." I also thought and felt like that.
Was it the time for a "Symphony," when the whole of Russia was
gloomily making ready to dance the trepak? Events were moving
towards a catastrophe, the symptoms of its approach were becom-
ing ever more and more ominous. The Social Revolutionaries
were throwing bombs; and each explosion shook the whole country,
calling forth an intense expectation of a fundamental overthrow
of social life. It was in Andreyev's flat that the sittings of the
Central Committee of the Social Democrats—the Bolsheviks—
took place; and once the whole committee, together with the host,
was arrested and carried off to prison.
Having spent a month in prison, Andreyev came out as though
from the pool of Siloam, hearty and cheerful.
"It does one good to be tied down," he said, "it makes you want
to fly out in all directions!"
And he laughed at me.
"Well now, pessimist. Is not Russia coming to life? And you
rhymed: 'autocracy—gone rusty.'"
He published then his stories The Marseillaise, The Alarm, The
Story Which Will Never be Finished. But already in October
1905 he read to me the MS. of his story As it Was.
"Is it not premature?" I asked.
"The good is always premature," he answered.
Soon he went off to Finland, and was right in doing so: the
senseless brutality of the December events would have crushed
him. In Finland he was active politically; he spoke at meetings,
published in Helsingfors papers bitter attacks on the policy of
the Monarchists. But his mood was depressed, his view on the
future hopeless. In Petrograd I received a letter from him. Among
other things he wrote:
"Each horse has its inborn peculiarities, nations too. There
are horses for which all roads lead to the public house: our country
is now turned towards a goal most beloved by it, and for a long
time it will go on in a drunken frenzy."


MAXIM GORKI in
A few months later we met in Switzerland, at Montreux.
Leonid jeered at the life of the Swiss. He would say:
"We people of large plains can't live in these cockroach holes."
It appeared to me he had become somewhat faded, dimmed;
a glassy expression of fatigue and of disquieting sadness showed
in his eyes. Of Switzerland he spoke as flatly, as superficially,
and in the same words, as the freedom-loving inhabitants of
Tchukhloma, Konotop, and Tetiushi have been wont to speak for
ever so long. One of these defined the Russian notion of freedom
profoundly and pointedly in these words:
"In our town we live as in a public bath, without restrictions,
without ceremony."
About Russia Leonid spoke reluctantly and tediously; and once
sitting by the fireplace, he recalled a few lines of Yakoubovitch's
melancholy poem To My Country:
"Why should we love thee,
Art thou our mother?"
"I have written a play. Shall we read it?"
And in the evening he read Savva.
While he was still in Russia, hearing about young Ufimtsev
and his comrades who attempted to blow up the icon of the
Virgin of Kursk, Andreyev decided to work this episode into a
story; and immediately he proceeded to create the plan of the
story and definitely to outline the characters. He was particularly
fascinated by Ufimtsev, a poet in the domain of scientific tech-
nique, a youth who possessed the undoubted talent of an inventor.
Exiled to the Semiretchensk province, I believe to Karkaraly,
living there under the strict surveillance of men ignorant and
superstitious, who denied him the necessary tools and materials,
he invented an original motor of internal combustion, perfected
the cyclostyle, worked on a new system of dredging, invented a
"permanent cartridge" for sporting guns. I showed the designs
of his motor to engineers at Moscow, and they told me that
Ufimtsev's invention was very practical, ingenious, and clever. I
don't know the fate of all these inventions; having settled abroad
I lost sight of Ufimtsev.
But I knew that this Ufimtsev was among those superb dreamers
who, carried away by their belief and love, march in different ways


112 REMINISCENCES OF LEONID ANDREYEV
to one and the same goal—arousing, in their people, that sensible
energy which creates goodness and beauty.
I was sad and vexed to see that Andreyev had distorted such
a character, as yet untouched in Russian literature. It seemed
to me that in the way the story had been conceived, that char-
acter should have found the appreciation and the tone worthy
of it. We had a little argument, and perhaps I spoke rather
sharply of the necessity of representing exactly certain—most
rare and positive—phenomena of actuality.
Like all people of a definitely circumscribed "ego," with a keen
perception of their "selfness," Leonid did not like being con-
tradicted. He took offence, and we parted coldly.
I believe it was in 1907 or 1908 that Andreyev arrived at Capri,
after burying Lady Shura in Berlin. She died of puerperal fever.
The death of this sensible and good friend reacted very painfully
on Leonid's soul. All his thoughts and words centred in recollec-
tions of the senselessness of it.
"You understand," he said with strangely dilated pupils, "she
was still alive as she lay in bed, but already her breath smelt of
a corpse. It was a very ironical smell."
He wore a black velvet jacket, and even outwardly seemed
crushed, down-trodden. His thoughts and words were eerily con-
centrated on the problem of death. It so happened that he settled
down in the villa Caraciollo which belonged to the widow of an
artist, a descendant of the marquis Caraciollo, that supporter of
the French party who had been executed by Ferdinand Bomba.
The dark rooms of that villa were damp and gloomy; on the
walls hung unfinished grimy pictures that looked like mould stains.
In one of the rooms was a large smoke-stained fireplace, and in
front of the windows, shading them, grew a dense cluster of shrubs.
From the walls of the house ivy crept in at the window-panes.
This room Leonid turned into his dining-room.
One evening when I arrived I found him in a chair in front
of the fireplace. Dressed in black and bathed in the purple glow
of the smouldering coal, he held on his knees his little son Vadim,
and in low tones, with sobs, was telling him something. I entered
softly; it seemed to me that the boy was falling asleep. I sat down
on a chair by the door, and I heard Leonid telling his son how
Death stalked over the earth and mowed down little children.


MAXIM GORKI 113
"I'm frightened," Vadim said.
"Don't you want to hear?"
"I'm frightened," the boy repeated.
"Well, go to bed."
But the child pressed close to his father's knees and began crying.
For long we could not manage to comfort him. Leonid was in
a hysterical mood; his words irritated the boy, who stamped his
feet and cried:
"I don't want to sleep! I don't want to die!"
When his nurse took him away, I remarked that it was hardly
necessary to frighten the boy with stories like that, stories about
death, the invincible giant.
"But if I can't speak of anything else?" he said sharply. "At
last I understand how indifferent 'beautiful Nature' is, and I want
one thing only—to tear my portrait out of this frivolously pretty
frame."
It was difficult, almost impossible, to speak to him. He was
nervous, irritable, and it seemed as though he deliberately chafed
his wound.
"The idea of suicide haunts me; it seems to me that my shadow
crawls after me, whispering, 'Begone, die!'"
This aroused considerable anxiety among his friends; but now
and then he would drop hints that he was consciously and delib-
erately creating this anxiety. It was as though he wished to hear
once more what they had to say in justification and defence of life.
But the cheerful scenery of the island, the caressing beauty of
the sea, and the genial attitude of the Caprians to the Russians,
soon drove away Leonid's gloomy mood. In a few months he was
seized, as by a whirlwind, with a passionate desire for work.
I remember one moonlight night, sitting on the beach by the
sea, he said, with a shake of his head:
"Basta! To-morrow morning I'll begin to work!"
"The best thing you could do."
"Just so!"
And—a thing which he had not done for a long time—he began
to talk cheerfully of his plans for new books.
"First of all, old fellow, I will write a story with the despot-
ism of friendship for its subject. I'll pay off my score to you, you
rascal!"
And instantly he began—easily and quickly—to weave a humor-


114 REMINISCENCES OF LEONID ANDREYEV
ous story of two friends, one a dreamer, the other a mathema-
tician. The one spends his whole life in the clouds, while the
other, by carefully calculating the expense of these imaginary
travels, decidedly kills once and for all the dreams of his friend.
But immediately afterwards he said:
"I want to write about Judas. When I was in Russia I read
a poem about him, I don't remember by whom.1 It was very clever.
What do you think of Judas?"
At that time I had a translation of Julius Wexel's tetralogy
Judas and Christ, and a translation of Thor Hoedberg's story,
also Golovanov's poem. I suggested that he should read them.
"I don't want to; I have an idea of my own, and they might
muddle me. You had better tell me what they say. No, you had
better not, don't tell me."
As was his way in moments of creative excitement, he jumped
to his feet—he had to move about.
"Let's be off!"
On the way he gave me an account of his Judas, and in three
days brought me the manuscript. With that story began one of
the most productive periods of his creative activity. At Capri he
thought out his play Black Masks, wrote the caustic satire Love
of One's Neighbour, the story Darkness, created the plan of
Sashka Zheguliov, sketched out his play Ocean, and wrote several
chapters—two or three—of his long tale, My Memoirs, all these
in the course of six months. These serious works and plans did
not prevent Leonid from taking a lively part in composing the
play Alas, a piece in the classical "people's theatre" style, written
partly in verse, partly in prose, with songs, dances, and all kinds
of tortures perpetrated on the unfortunate Russian peasants. The
plot of the play is clearly enough indicated by the list of dramatis
personae:
"Oppressum: A merciless landlord.
Furiosa: His wife.
Philisterius: Brother to Oppressum, a prose litterateur.
Decadentius: Unsuccessful son to Oppressum.
Endurance: A peasant, very unhappy, but not always drunk.
Griefella: Endurance's beloved wife, full of meekness and
common sense, although pregnant.
1 By A. Roslavliev.


MAXIM GORKI 115
Sufferalla: Endurance's beautiful daughter.
Smackface: A most horrible police constable (bathes in full
uniform and all his medals).
Mangle: An unmistakable village policeman, but, in fact,
the noble Count Edmond de Ptie.
Kate: Secretly married to the Count, the Spanish
Marchioness Donna Carmen Intolerablia De-
testablia, in fact disguised as a gitana.
The Shadow of the Russian literary critic Skabitchevsky.
The Shadow of Koblitz-Usov.
Athanasius Schapov: in a perfectly sober state.
'We told you so': a group of persons without words or actions."
The play takes place in Skyblue Clay, Oppressum's estate, twice
mortgaged to the Noblemen's Bank and once mortgaged some-
where else.
A whole act of this play had been worked out fully, saturated
with delightful absurdities. Leonid wrote the prose dialogue,
which was terribly funny, so droll indeed that he himself laughed
like a child at his own inventions.
Never before or since have I seen him in a frame of mind so
active, so unusually industrious. He renounced, as it were for
ever, his dislike for the process of writing; and he could sit at
his table all day and all night, half-dressed, unkempt, cheerful.
His imagination blazed wonderfully bright and productive; nearly
every day he told me the plan of a new tale or story.
"Now at last I have taken myself in hand," he would say
triumphantly.
And he enquired about the famous pirate Barbarossa, about
Tommaso Aniello, about smugglers, carbonari, about the life of
Calabrian shepherds.
"What a multitude of subjects, what a diversity of life!" He
was in raptures.
"Yes, these people have accumulated something for posterity.
But with us: I picked up The Lives of the Russian Czars, and
read that they ate. I tried to read The History of the Russian
People—they suffered. I gave it up. The whole thing hurts and
bores."
But, while the plans he related were full of colour and sub-
stance, he composed carelessly. In the first version of his Judas


n6 REMINISCENCES OF LEONID ANDREYEV
several mistakes occurred which indicated that he had not even
taken the trouble to read the New Testament. When he was
told that Duke Spadaro sounds as absurd to an Italian as Prince
Bashmatchnikov would to a Russian, and that St Bernard dogs
did not exist in the twelfth century, he was annoyed.
"These are trifles!" he objected.
"One can't say, 'they drink wine as camels,' without adding
'drink water.'"
"Rubbish!" he said.
He behaved to his talent as an indifferent rider treats a superb
horse; he galloped it mercilessly, but did not love it, did not caress
it. His hand had not the time to draw the intricate designs of
his riotous imagination; he did not trouble to develop the power
and dexterity of his hand. At moments he himself realized that
this was a great hindrance to the normal growth of his talent.
"My language is ossifying. I feel it is getting more difficult
for me to find the necessary words."
He tried to hypnotize the reader by the monotony of his phras-
ing, but his phrasing was losing the convincing quality of beauty.
Wrapping his thought in the cotton-wool of monotonously obscure
words, he only succeeded in revealing it too much, and his stories
read like popular dialogues on philosophical subjects.
Now and then, aware of this, he was vexed:
"It is all cobweb, it sticks, but is not solid! Yes, I must read
Flaubert. I believe you are right. Indeed he is a descendant of
those mason geniuses who built the indestructible temples of the
Middle Ages."
At Capri Leonid was told an episode of which he made use for
his story Darkness. The hero of that episode was an old acquaint-
ance of mine, a Revolutionary. In reality the affair was very
simple: a girl at a brothel, having guessed intuitively that her
visitor was a revolutionary, hunted by detectives and driven to
take shelter there from the pursuit of the political police, treated
him with a mother's tender care and with the tact of a woman
who still possesses the sense of respect for a hero. But the hero,
a bookish man of clumsy soul, responded to the impulse of the
woman's heart with a sermon on morality, thus reminding her of
what she wanted to forget at the moment. Hurt by this, she
smacked his face—a smack perfectly deserved in my opinion.


MAXIM GORKI 117
Then, having realized the whole crudity of his mistake, he apolo-
gized to her and kissed her hand—I think he might have omitted
the kissing. That is all.
Sometimes, unfortunately very seldom, reality happens to be
more truthful and more pleasant than even a very talented story
that is based on it.
So it was in this case. But Leonid distorted the meaning as
well as the form of the event out of recognition. In the actual
brothel there was neither the agonizing and foul mockery at man,
nor any of those weird details with which Andreyev has enriched
the story so abundantly.
This distortion affected me very painfully: Leonid, as it were,
revoked and annulled the feast which I had been awaiting long
and hungrily. I know people too well not to appreciate very
highly the least manifestation of a good, honest feeling. Cer-
tainly I could not help pointing out to Andreyev the meaning of
his action, which to me was equivalent to murder for a mere whim,
for a wicked whim. He reminded me of the freedom of the artist,
but this did not change my attitude; even now I am not convinced
that such rare manifestations of ideally human feelings should be
arbitrarily distorted by the artist, for the gratification of a dogma
he loves.
We talked long on this theme. But although our conversation
bore a perfectly peaceful friendly character, still, from that moment
something had snapped between him and me.
The end of that conversation is very memorable to me:
"What are you trying for?" I asked Leonid.
"I don't know," he said, shrugging his shoulders and closing
his eyes.
"But you certainly have some desire; either it is always there
before all others, or it arises more often than all others."
"I don't know," he repeated. "I believe there is nothing of the
sort. Sometimes, though, I feel that I need fame, much fame, as
much as the whole world could give. Then I concentrate it in
myself, condense it to its ultimate capacity, and when it has
acquired the force of explosive matter, I explode, illuminating
the world with a new light. And after that people will begin
to live with a new mind. You see, what we need is a new mind,
not this lying old swindler! He takes from me all the best of
my flesh, all my feelings, and promising to return them with


n8 REMINISCENCES OF LEONID ANDREYEV
interest, returns nothing, saying, 'To-morrow! Evolution.' Then
when my patience is exhausted and the thirst for life stifles me,
'Revolution,' he says. And fondly goes on deceiving till I die,
having received nothing."
"You must have belief, not reason."
"Perhaps. But if so, then first of all belief in myself."
He paced the room in agitation; then sitting down on the table,
waving his hand in front of my face, he went on:
"I know that God and the Devil are mere symbols. But it
seems to me that the whole life of man, all the meaning of it,
consists in the infinite and boundless expansion of these symbols,
fed with the flesh and blood of the world. And having invested
these two opposites with all its powers—to the very last—man-
kind will disappear, but those two will become carnal realities
and will go on living in the emptiness of the universe, face to face
with one another, invincible, immortal. There is no sense in this?
But there is none anywhere, in anything."
He grew pale, his lips trembled, stark terror shone in his eyes.
Then he added in a low voice, feebly:
"Let us imagine the Devil as woman, God as man, and let them
beget a new being, certainly just as dual as you and I. Just as
dual."
He left Capri unexpectedly. Only the day before he had said that
he would sit down at his table and work for three months. But on
the evening of the very same day he said to me:
"You know, I have decided to leave this place. After all one
must live in Russia. Here one is overcome by a kind of operatic
levity; one wants to write vaudevilles, vaudevilles with songs.
Life simply is not real here, it is an opera: there is more singing
here than thinking. Romeo, Othello, and the rest of their kind—
Shakespeare made them; the Italians are incapable of tragedy.
Here neither Byron nor Poe could have been born."
"And what about Leopardi?"
"Well, Leopardi, who knows about him? He is one of those
who are talked about, but not read."
As he left he said to me:
"This, Alexeyushko, is also an Arzamas, a gay little Arzamas,
no more than that."
"Don't you remember how it fascinated you?"


MAXIM GORKI 119
"Before marriage we are all fascinated. You will be leaving
here soon? Do go away, it is time you went. You are beginning
to look like a monk."
During the time I was living in Italy my mind was very uneasy
on account of Russia. As early as 1911 people round me spoke
confidently of the inevitability of an all-European war and of the
certainty that that war would be fatal to the Russians. My uneasy
mood was particularly heightened by facts which indicated beyond
all doubt that in the spiritual world of the Great-Russian people
there lurked something morbidly obscure. Reading the volume
on agrarian risings in the Central Russian provinces published by
the Free Economic Society, I saw that those risings bore a par-
ticularly brutal and senseless character. An investigation of the
crimes of the population of the Moscow Circuit, based on an
examination of the reports of the Moscow High Court, astounded
me by its revelation of the tendency of the criminal will, shown
in the great number of cases of crimes against the person, violation
of women, and rape of minors. Even before then I had been
unpleasantly struck by the fact that, though in the Second State
Duma there had been a very considerable number of priests, men
of the purest Russian blood, these men had not produced a single
talent, a single statesman. And there was a great deal more that
confirmed my anxiously sceptical attitude towards the fate of the
Great-Russian race.
On my arrival in Finland I met Andreyev, and talking to him
told him my cheerless thoughts. Hotly and even as though
wounded by them he argued with me. But his arguments seemed
to me unconvincing: he had no facts.
But suddenly lowering his voice, with his eyes screwed up, as
though straining to look into the future, he began to talk of the
Russian people in words unusual with him—abruptly, incoherently,
and with great and undoubtedly sincere conviction.
I am unable, and if I could I should not like, to reproduce his
words. Their force consisted not in their logic nor in their beauty,
but in a feeling of tormented sympathy for the people, a feeling
of which, in such force and in such expression, I had not thought
Leonid capable.
He shook all over with nervous tension; and crying, almost
sobbing like a woman, he shouted:


120 REMINISCENCES OF LEONID ANDREYEV
"You call Russian literature provincial because the majority
of the great Russian writers are men of the Moscow province?
Good, let us suppose so. But yet it is a world-literature, it is the
most serious and powerful creative activity of Europe. The genius
of Dostoevsky alone is enough in itself to justify the sense-
less, even the out-and-out criminal life of the millions of the
people. And suppose the people are spiritually sick—let us heal
them and remember, as has been said, 'a pearl grows only in a dis-
eased shell.'"
"And the beauty of the beast?" I asked.
"And the beauty of human endurance, of meekness and love?"
he replied. And he went on to speak of the people, of literature,
more and more ardently and passionately.
It was the first time he had spoken so passionately, so lyrically.
Previously I had heard such strong expressions of his love applied
only to talents congenial to his spirit—to Edgar Poe most fre-
quently of all.
Soon after our conversation this filthy war broke out. Our
attitude, different towards it, divided me still further from
Andreyev. We scarcely met; it was only in 1916, when he
brought me his books, that we both once more deeply felt how
much we had gone through and what old comrades we were. But,
to avoid arguing, we could speak only of the past; the present
erected between us a high wall of irreconcilable differences.
I shall not be violating the truth if I say that to me that wall
was transparent and permeable; I saw behind it a big, original
man, who for ten years had been very near to me, my sole friend
in literary circles.
Differences of outlook ought not to affect sympathies; I never
gave theories and opinions a prominent place in my relations to
people.
Leonid Nicolayevitch Andreyev felt otherwise. But I don't
blame him for this; for he was what he wished to be and could not
help being—a man of rare originality, rare talent, and manly
enough in his seekings after truth.
The End


Courtesy of the Galerie Simon, Paris
LE POETE. BY PABLO PIC ASSO





Courtesy of the Galerie Flechtheim, Berlin
LE PIERROT. BY PABLO PICASSO





Courtesy of Paul Rosenberg, Paris
BAIGNEUSES. BY PABLO PICASSO


*=♥--æ （ æ） == — ） • • • • • •


i





LUCIENNE
BY JULES ROMAINS
Translated From the French by Waldo Frank
IV
THE first lesson was the following afternoon at four. The
trainman was waiting for me at the same place. It was broad
daylight and no train was due. The yard with its maze of rails and
locomotives, with its moveless silence broken only by the creak of
gravel underneath our feet, was now a sort of solitude. As I went
on, there came to me the vision of a rocky valley, then of the page
of a book. ,
The two girls received me.
"I suppose," said the elder, "the way seemed less unpleasant to
you, to-night? At night, it's truly an adventure. I'm sure you
are wondering how one manages to live here."
I wanted to tell her that after all this house of theirs among the
rails was no vulgar affair; and I could understand their growing
attached to it, as one does to the unusual. But I could say nothing:
or rather, I was shy of my own thoughts, as if their utterance would
create too great and quick an intimacy between us. Perhaps, had
the younger girl and I been there alone, I might have spoken.
There were cups and buttered bread on a tea-table. The girls
seemed expectant and I understood that someone, doubtless their
mother, was presently to appear. Meanwhile, the younger sister
watched me with great gentleness and penetration. Her trust, it
seemed to me, was too soon matured, and undeserved. What did
she know about me? I wished she had first decided to study me a
while. I felt warmly toward her, also. And I also had not studied
what I felt. My recognition of her had passed no test. If her
own abandon of reserve implied that she felt in myself a deeper
sympathy than I was aware of, was there not here, subtly, an en-
croachment which might cause trouble?
The door into the dining-room, suavely smoke-coloured like all


122 LUCIENNE
the woodwork and all the hangings, now opened measuredly before
Madame Barbelenet. The maid was not there. The girls had not
heard their mother, and were still in their seats. But this did not
make the entrance less impressive. Mme Barbelenet had to use
her own hands in order to part the portieres, but she performed this
with a ceremonial and ennobled air. It was as if these hands took
the place of the missing maid; and the servile task touched only
them, leaving inviolate the person of Mme Barbelenet herself. . . .
At last the maid appeared with the tea; its steam pervading the
room became charged with a subtle odour of coal smoke, and en-
veloped all in the sensation of travel. I could not make clear what
it was all about. Tea seemed to me an added irksome duty: I
had not mentally prepared for it, and it was the more wearisome
for that. Everything ran smoothly enough. Mme Barbelenet
and her girls showed no affectation. They were not posing as
wealthy. What they did was quite naturally ceremonious and
formal. I kept on saying to myself that this tea had no meaning
other than to give a pleasant personal tinge to my first professional
visit. I could not throw off a certain apprehension. The talk was
most ordinary. But I knew that Mme Barbelenet was the kind of
woman who would place an important announcement only at the
proper and ultimate end of a tedious cortege of perfunctory re-
marks. Was I going to be told that after due deliberation it had
been decided that the young ladies were not quite ready to begin
their piano lessons? Or, at best, that they would have to get along
for the present with only one lesson a week?
Already, I saw my poverty return. Once again, one hundred and
forty-five francs a month . . . even worse. For bad luck is thor-
ough, once it has a good start. Probably one or two other pupils
would drop out. Again, the little enamelled dish, again the endless
solitary walks, and the church apse and the darkling song in my
head. . . . Well, so be it. I had scarcely had time to get unused
to it all: I'd be back in swing soon enough. All that I'd have to
shut out was the delirious joy of yesterday; and I was ashamed of
that already.
What troubled me still more was that I lost all trace of the
thoughts of Mme Barbelenet. Perhaps in yesterday's talk I had
been completely self-deluded. And yet the image of her thoughts
had been so constant in my mind, so vivid, so convincing: how could


JULES ROMAINS 123
I help but believe them? That image had come quite of itself. To-
day something opaque stood between Mme Barbelenet and me.
There was a moment when she said: "Many persons think that
girls should marry early." Was she indirectly aiming at my own
personal condition? Why was I not married? Was I going to
get married? If a young girl leaves home, is she not open to all
sorts of dubious questions? . . . And then I recalled that Marie
Lemiez and others were in the same state as I. Mme Barbelenet was
surely too strong an ally of the established order to question the
principle of lives so conventionally accepted as those of high-school
professors. . . .
The talking fell off as of its own inertia. Mme Barbelenet sank
back into a heavy mood of suffering which, one felt, had given her
pause only for convention's sake. She showed that she wanted to
get up. Her daughters helped her, thrust aside chairs, opened the
door. I stood while Mme Barbelenet vanished into the still un-
plumbed depths of her house.
I was at last alone with my two girls: the lesson could begin.
We had decided that at first they should work together. Each
would have a chance at the piano, while the other paid close atten-
tion and profited by my corrections. So alternately.
I asked them which one would play first.
"You decide, mademoiselle" said the elder.
"Very well. Mademoiselle Marthe will begin." The younger
was called Marthe; the elder, Cecile.
Marthe came very gently forward. To my great surprise her
sister's look, following her, was black. "I guessed it," she said,
scarce opening her mouth. I turned toward her at once: she was
afraid that I was angry. She took a jesting tone—it did not quite
save her from stammering—and added:
"Yes, I like to guess what's going to happen. Well, I guessed
right."
I had not chosen Marthe through partiality. Quite the op-
posite. I wanted to show a little more regard for the older girl by
sparing her the pain of the first exhibition. I sat down at Marthe's
side.
We began with a few extremely simple exercises. Marthe's
hands moved close to mine. They were white with a bluish pallor


124 LUCIENNE
faintly tinged with green: sensitive, subtle, amazingly harmless
hands. Never have I seen hands less made for grasping. Of
course, the hand of any beginner, as it comes to the piano, is not
likely to be aggressive. Even practised hands can hover above
the keys. But Marthe's fingers touched the keyboard so secretly
that I was surprised to hear the notes. It was as if the keys pressed
down not through any impact of those little fingers, but by a subtle
balanced understanding between the mechanics of the instrument
and the girl's light gestures. She made few mistakes, and these
few were faint. I had scarcely the time to observe them before
they had melted out into a flow of correct notes. She played with-
out effort. She was attentive, but relaxed. She seemed to be quite
unresistant. She gave herself wholly to the page of music spread
before her eyes and to the sway of my suggestions. I was
astounded, not so much at her cleverness, at any positive gift which
she revealed, as at her neutrality. Our body, I pondered, is capable
of extraordinary feats. But usually we start with tension; it takes
months merely to learn to relax. . . . From time to time, she
smiled up toward me. I found her almost too submissive. We get
something from a person who resists us: he justifies a certain ag-
gression in ourselves, and this makes life pleasanter than to have
to give in to a monotonous sweetness: by resisting, he makes us try,
he gives us the chance of enjoying a victory. Above all, he saves
us by his resistance from merging into him, he keeps us sensuously
and joyously aware of our own limits.
I watched Marthe's hands upon the keyboard, and they seemed
too close to my own. With none other of my pupils had this thought
come to me. Promiscuity between this girl and me was growing
at a greater pace than understanding.
Cecile put me once more at my ease. Her hands on the keyboard
were also sensitive, but dry and tremulous a little. Their yellowish-
rose skin covered and revealed the thrusts of the flesh, the promi-
nence of the joints. One could prevision the parchment hands of
the old woman which with the years they would be. These fingers
were hesitant above the keys, then swiftly they came down with
their decision. In the pause, her mind had suffered with the effort.
Her eyes ran over the page in anxious haste, then gave their precise
orders to the fingers which waited bewildered as if they were blind.
From time to time her eyes glanced at me, and their look filled me
with a very general sense of my superiority.


JULES ROMAINS 125
I took good care, when she stopped, not to stress the evident
inequality between the playing of the two sisters. I was quite
willing to be unjust. I dwelt on the faults of the elder's playing
as if both girls had shared them. Indeed, my specific reproof was for
Marthe, to whom I appealed to put more life into her execution.
Then I asked them to play four-handed. I sat behind them.
The younger girl was at the treble. I counted on her leading her
sister a little. Moreover, the faults of Cecile would have rung more
clearly in the higher notes, and this might have hurt her pride.
The exercise was a series of scales related by simple modulations
which recurred in order. To have played it faultlessly would have
resulted in a drone of quite mechanical notes with about as much
delight in them as in the song of a buzz-saw or of a sewing-ma-
chine. What came forth now from the Barbelenet piano was a
most curious design. I shut my eyes to catch it better. The high
notes were borne softly upon those preceding: sometimes slow, some-
times swift, but ever without wilful suddenness, a little like the ir-
regular breathing of a sleeper. They were at once quiet and in-
advertent, casual and tender. I was drawn by their grace, and I
was disturbed by their lack of true distinction. The bass notes came
like footfalls on a dark stair: a stumble, a stop, a foot lighting twice
on one step, followed by two or three that were surer of themselves
and at ease and that suggested that at last the stride would hold
and that the groping was over: then a half fall occurred again.
And within it all, humiliation, anger, self-con tempt, the impulse
to give up; but as well a wistful crabbed courage, the refusal to be
beaten, the throb of a vivid life.
Most curious of all was the way in which the two disparate
plays accorded with each other. Almost always the bass notes came
a little late. Then they set out, in an ill-humoured hurry, to catch
up with the treble: it was almost an assault; and under it, the high
notes seemed to flinch and cower. When Cecile played a wrong
note—it happened nearly in every measure—the younger girl did
not stress her note to bring out the right sound; she at once softened
her play. I wondered, had I not been there, would she have gone
so far in her compliance as to play false too? . . . And all of it
more poignant still through the acerb dissonance of certain ill-
played chords, the wrangling movement of others, and a quaint
flavour of mould—if I dare use that term—which seemed to
pervade every note of that piano.


126 LUCIENNE
Which of them is the leader, which of them has the upper hand?
The younger quite listlessly sets the pace, strikes the right notes.
The older one knows this and allows it, but by no means like some-
one who submits: rather like a chief who condescends to exploit
the initiative of an inferior. What will come of it all? What role
am I playing here? I am interfering as little as I can manage:
and it is not true that I want Marthe to win. I have a feeling for
her, I know; yet I do not seem to mind watching this violation to
which she so docilely submits. I do not like Cecile: but there is
something attractive in the power which abounds in her cross-
grained body and jets from her fingers. I could let myself go, and
even my ear would come to accept this outrageous succession of
false notes and corrected notes which Cecile is so sedulously pro-
ducing. Fortunately there's something to rule the keyboard, to
rule both Marthe and Cecile—a page of printed music—and no
eyes can corrupt it. The younger girl feels that she is caught be-
tween this dual corroboration of the music before her and myself be-
hind. Perhaps that is why when Cecile makes the same fault that
she made three lines before, Marthe does not quite dare go so far
in her submission as to add a sharp to the D that she so humbly
strikes.
The exercise was over, the two girls faced about toward me.
I missed the comfort of being behind their backs. Now, I must
confront their eyes, and the question in them. It is my turn to
speak, and in a language more direct than rising and falling scales,
but perhaps scarcely less mysterious.
The two girls are trying to read me: their attention seems
greater than my words possibly could call for. I talk of a thumb-
passage, but their faces are very living, their eyes question deep.
At the end of the lesson, M Barbelenet appeared. His round
good humour, his laugh, the hearty handshake brought to me ab-
ruptly how very far from cheer and joy I was: and the contrast
made palpable the drabness of the room where we were seated,
the dreariness of the hour I had passed there. He offered to
accompany me again. Yesterday there had been but the small
talk that our way suggested: to-day, it was clear, he aimed at a
real conversation.
"Well, mademoiselle, are you satisfied with my daughters?"


JULES ROMAINS 127
"Very satisfied."
"You think you'll be able to do something with them?"
"Why, of course."
I began to suspect that M Barbelenet had doubts of the value
of piano lessons, or at least of piano lessons in such copious num-
ber. I had no illusion about the man's relative importance in his
household, but I saw here none the less a hostile germ which I
had best destroy. My words aimed to kindle M Barbelenet's
fondness for music: I made a picture of the pleasure he was
going to have of his two accomplished girls. At the same time
self-reproach rose in hot gusts, and if I was eloquent in my words,
this was the cause. I could not forgive myself for being unhappy
at that first lesson. Ingrate already! Taking your good luck
for granted and quarrelling about it. At once, joy countered:
leaping spontaneous against my gloom. The tracks, the lantern,
the distant lights, the day that dwindled . . . everything was
good. The thought of meeting Marie Lemiez after dinner warmed
me like a promise: we would chat in the glow of lights, we would
be brilliant, philosophically gay. Meantime, a talk like this was
a simple part of the day's work, and no healthy soul could possi-
bly mind it.
Now finally it dawned on me that I had mistaken the purpose
of M Barbelenet. He must have one, for here we were at the
end of our way and he recalling that he must purchase some
tobacco or some matches at a shop on the Avenue de la Gare, so
that he offered to go on with me.
"Do you know," he said, "that Cecile is nineteen and Marthe
seventeen and a half? They came close together."
"How is it they delayed so long before taking up music seriously?"
"I wonder, myself. Their mother, at one time, taught them a
little sight-singing. Years ago, they had a couple of months' les-
sons from a professor who was taken sick and had to leave."
"Was it their own idea to start over?"
"Oh, mademoiselle, they'd have studied Chinese if it had been
necessary!"
What did that outburst mean? It was clear that he was will-
ing to go on. I hunted for a word, not too abrupt, to help him.
I found one. He said:
"At all events, I am glad you are there. I have my work, you


128 LUCIENNE
know. My wife is a woman with a head. There's no reason
why I should worry. She can be counted on to run the household.
But young girls aren't as open with a mother as with someone their
own age. When you know them better, you'll give me your ad-
vice from time to time?"
Here was the tobacco shop. M Barbelenet was finding it hard
to think of words for what he had to say. He recalled his pur-
chase just in time.
We parted in the light of the shop-window. The man's face
stood out clear, his features drew from the glow a salient force.
Even to-day, when I picture him, it is in the illumination of that
shop, it is with the parting handclasp that he gave me then. These
hands were the hands of an office-worker only at their surface.
Underneath they were the hands of the peasant or of the labourer.
Deeper still there dwelt and slumbered in their flesh a more vio-
lent action than the workman's daily stint. His handclasp gave
me as one might say, a feeling of stratification: a gentle sweetness,
a hardness and ruggedness, and under all a spasm of inordinate
contraction which did not frighten me, so bare it was of any pos-
sible issue.
There was much of the old Gauls in M Barbelenet, but with a
shrinkage of all the elements. His body was smaller, the lofty brow
was pinched, the moustache was wide, but without splendour, and
there was no audacity in his eyes, only the startled candour of his
forbears. A servant he was, of the same race as the masters.
My way home was rather long, and the night made it irksome.
It is good at such times to have specific things to think of. Be-
sides, I was in that first stage of exhilaration where it is impossible
to relax into reverie. I had to make an interviewer of myself, put
acute and searching questions to my mind, call forth concise an-
swers, make myself finally admit for the best of reasons that I
agreed with myself. I had two topics of discussion, and I was
glad: they would keep me busy at least as far as the central streets,
and there'd be enough left over for my chat with Marie. I was
born the sort of child who, when it has two cakes, keeps the better
one for the last: it is clear then that I did not start off with the
most exciting of my topics. I gave it a caressing look, and put
it aside.


JULES ROMAINS 129
Those parting words of M Barbelenet, his reservations, the
6trange glimpse of family that they gave . . . here was a sub-
ject to make populous and gay a drearier street than the Avenue
de la Gare. So I kept it for a good talk with Marie Lemiez: the
two of us in her room, close with the tea-cups between us, the joy
of pitting our guesses and our thoughts against each other . . .
subtleties, laughter, a bit of mystery, the charm of the hunt, the
delicious tingling of our brains with theory and forecast. I gave
myself up for the present to the other subject which gleamed be-
fore me like a film caption, or like the name of a scientific work
in a bookshop window:
"What sort of resemblance is there between the Barbelenet
girls and their parents?"
I'll admit, I saw my answers right away. But the Avenue de
la Gare is long. I put them off just far enough to catch up with
them at the street's end, at the halo of the farthest lamp-post.
First of all, the father. What is there of him in Cecile? A
certain crossness? Perhaps. But only if one doesn't look too
close. For the father is worn down, the daughter is not. He has
neither will nor authority. And if I think of crassness in Cecile,
it is precisely because of her iron, dominant will. . . . And the
younger? What has she of her father? I seem to see only
differences. Yet, wait! Is there not in Marthe a certain weak-
ness, a self-abandon, an unconcern, the gift of "thinking of some-
thing else more pleasant," which are also in the bland eyes of her
father? There's something in that. ... If I bring all these ar-
guments to Marie, she'll not fail to remind me that on the authority
of the best writers, daughters have every reason for not taking
after their fathers. And yet is the resemblance any more clear
between the girls and their mother? What relation between the
harsh power of Cecile and the presidential pose of Mme Bar-
belenet? Mme Barbelenet takes her duties seriously. She finds it
very pleasant even to knit her brows from time to time: it heightens
her sense of responsibility. But I'm certain that she could do a
great deal more without overdoing in the least. Cruel of me, per-
haps, but I feel this even in her illness: she moves measuredly, ease-
fully, even toward her death. Call this self-control or detachment as
you like. Cecile is something altogether different. There's no se-
renity in her, not even the painful effort toward it. I don't know


130 LUCIENNE
if she is truly passionate: but I'm sure that circumstance could
shake her and wear her out. No dignity, either: not even for her
age. Austere, perhaps: and sombre. Yes, she is certainly sombre.
Her father is that, so little. . . . And how are you going to link
Marthe to her mother? Through her calm indifference? I've
already used that in connexion with her father. Too obvious.
There may be a sort of detachment in Mme Barbelenet: but un-
concern, heedlessness? Never.
I was about ready to confess that my debate had ended nowhere.
The conclusions that had seemed so clear at the beginning had
faded away, even while I was cleverly putting them off till the
walk's end. But the debate had served, none the less: for here I
was swiftly come to the laughing lights of the rue Saint-Blaise.
My evening with Marie Lemiez was quite as pleasant as I had
hoped, but altogether different. We were in her room. She
had arranged a party in my honour. There was a lavish outlay
of lights and napkins and cakes. I was touched. Marie had been
perhaps a little unaware during my hard times, but at least she
was generous enough to celebrate my new good luck. Does it
not take a greater heart to rejoice in another's happiness than to
sympathize in his misfortune? There is no sweeter peace than
to think well of one's friends, so that I was light and happy.
Marie demanded an exact account. My interview with Mme
Barbelenet made her laugh. But when I came to my return across
the yard and to the confessions of M Barbelenet, she was taken
aback. "What! he had the nerve to say 'I am so glad you are
there.' Where do I come in? Here I've been going to his house
for more than a year, and he's not yet noticed my existence. One
year wasn't long enough for me to win the confidence of the
old man. Well, that is great, I must say."
She folded her arms over her breast and laughed and made a
mock show of anger. But all the same, she was piqued.
"My dear Marie, don't you see that they look up to you too
highly to confide in you? You're too imposing a person, you too
—although a bit less so than Mme Barbelenet. I'm not the sort
whom people are afraid of." So I won Marie away from this
little hurt, and led her toward the problem which intrigued me.
"What was he driving at? He's not confided in you, perhaps,


JULES ROMAINS 131
but you must have noticed a great many things in all the time
you've been going to the house." I saw on Marie's lips her
confession that she had noticed nothing, that she was rather count-
ing on me for that. But she held back. She blushed. She was
like a witness carefully gathering his impressions and weighing
his words, before he will commit himself.
I could have hugged her for her trouble. She was worrying
less, I was sure, about an excuse for her own blindness than about
the bare chance that she might misinform me. Then, none too
convincedly, she told me that she had observed signs of wrang-
ling in the Barbelenet house.
"I'd not be surprised if there's been talk from time to time
about the future of the girls. It's the mother who wants them to
go on with their studies. Why, I don't know exactly. Perhaps
because she has no son. You understand? A son getting first
place at the Polytechnic—that's their sort altogether. I can see
her proudly saying: 'I've brought my son up all the way to the
Polytechnic, and I want him to go in number one.' Well, she
falls back on her daughters. The father's a simple soul, prob-
ably opposed to it all, more or less in the open."
"But if that's how things stand, why does he turn to me as to
an ally? He'd scarcely rejoice at having still another teacher in
his house."
"That's not how he sees things. For him, I'm a learned lady,
and my job is to manufacture learned ladies. But music is quite
another matter. I've heard him say, even, that in his youth he
played the flute, and how sorry he was not to have kept it up.
No: the piano does not look dangerous to him. It's an 'amenity';
and the"'amenities' lead to marriage."
"Then you and I stand for two hostile forces in the Barbelenet
house! I am broken-hearted."
"Nonsense, Lucienne. Why, not at all. It's fun! Papa Bar-
belenet's a good sort and his enmity is nothing. He'll simply
pour out his heart to you. Wait and see—whenever he takes
you across the tracks—and he'll make the days of your lessons
the days for his tobacco purchases. But this won't keep him
from being paternal to me, and leaving the last word to his wife."
I had some answer to that. We seemed to be discussing warmly
enough, arguing even. But I found that it no longer seemed to


132 LUCIENNE
matter how true these things might be. I made no serious resist-
ance to Marie's notions, with the result that gradually she believed
them, and her new conviction subtly convinced me. Doubtless,
I felt deep down that the truth was not really there, but what
difference did it make? What's the truth, I thought, between
good friends? It's not so urgent to know just now what Papa
Barbelenet was driving at. Perhaps it's even better not to know
just yet. What counts really is the happiness of this hour, the
need of keeping it and nourishing it; for such full pure happiness
is rare indeed, and if our words are food for it, surely it is their
warmth rather than their meaning.
Marie sits close to me: she gets up to brew more tea. Moving,
she talks and laughs. She is in her kitchen beyond the wood
partition, and I hear her stir the water in the saucepan, hear her
cough, hear her light and regulate the gas. This is joy. More,
when she starts talking from the kitchen, from her to me moves
a bright stream of words. The walls of the house and the ar-
rangement of the rooms fashioned by someone who did not think
of us, are not enough to keep us separate, to keep us from being
present, each to each, across the wood partition.
Momently, we are silent, she at her stove, I in my arm-chair.
And there is now this empty stillness, shaped like the apartment,
holding us separate indeed. But it is not truly empty, not truly
still. This space gives me the sense of fulness, of plenty, a sort
of crackling joy. It is like champagne bubbling over the brim.
We must go back to our Barbelenets. Even with Marie making
tea in the kitchen, talk of our Barbelenets must not quite fall away.
The distance is slight: a little effort to raise our voices is all that's
needed. What of it if Marie is wrong, finding all sorts of im-
aginary troubles in the Barbelenet house? What of it if I am too
cosy to disagree? Somehow the Barbelenets count for us to-night,
they are part of our good time, a greater part perhaps than I
could guess. If they were not out there in that house beyond the
stream of tracks, while we are here, we two, in a flat in the heart
of town, in this somewhat twisted shell—a room and hall and
kitchen—which our lives must fill, or if we held back from chatter-
ing about them, what would become of our good spirits, of this
joy of friendship gleaming in the night?


JULES ROMAINS 133
A fortnight later the girls persuaded me to bring along a "hard"
piece of music and to play it for them. I had avoided so far any-
thing which at all looked like a test of my talent. But already
in two weeks, their interest in me had changed. My way of
teaching them left no doubts in their minds as to my powers as an
instructor. At most, the older girl may have wondered where
precisely I stood in the hierarchy that intervenes between a good
piano teacher and a virtuoso. The younger girl had never doubted
me. She wished to hear me play in part for the simple pleasure
of the thing, mostly for the chance it would give her to admire me.
So, the next day, there I was with a folder of sonatas in the
crook of my arm. I had suspected that Mme Barbelenet would
find an excuse for being present: there were omens of forthcoming
tea, and bread and butter: but the thought of the ceremony bothered
me not at all. The maid ushered me into the parlour. And be-
fore my eyes could tell me, I knew that the entire family was
there. Again, like the first time, I had the feeling that five persons
were before me. My sense was so very like that earlier impres-
sion that I was sure it was a mere renewal of the same illusion.
I wanted to dispel it, I looked sharp from one to another. And
I saw that there were indeed five in the room: five besides myself,
not four! The fifth was a young man, quietly dressed, dark, clean-
shaven: as I came in he was seated between M Barbelenet and
Cecile.
I seem to recall a few murmured words of introduction from
M Barbelenet. But as soon as everyone was seated, Mme Bar-
belenet figuratively took the platform. . . . Slowly, as directly as
was proper, she made an official canvass of the situation. What
she said indeed was what she thought was needed to put each of
us at ease and to justify the presence of us all. Her daughters
had not been able to conceal the generous promise I had made
them; the family felt that it was perhaps imposing on me, but
it begged my pardon. I could not harbour a grudge against
people who had so little entertainment. Already her daughters
thought so highly of their teacher, and their judgement was so
widely felt that no one in the house could resist the chance to
hear me play. She would not be surprised if the maid was listen-


134 LUCIENNE
ing at the keyhole! As to M Pierre Febvre, their second cousin,
I would certainly see him at other times, since he was there on
a visit; and they had taken the liberty of asking him to stay that
he might have the pleasure of making my acquaintance. They
were certain that I would not be heartless enough to ask him to
leave before I went to the piano.
During the entire speech, my eyes did not stir from Mme Bar-
belenet's. My intentness was almost absurd, nor did I miss a
single syllable of what she said. One by one, her features came
to me, and they were salient and enlarged in a light whose source
I myself seemed to be: at the same time, her words flowing upon
me made irresistible marks upon my mind, like the prickings of
a fine-cogged wheel. Her face and her words were two elements
that at the end were one. Each successive word, each successive
feature of her face rose simultaneous from a single source. They
were identical, and they were fused. The maid listening at the
door came to me conjoined with the granular grey hair-tufted wart
of Mme Barbelenet. M Pierre Febvre's name struck my sense in
such close relation with the left eyelid of the lady, which was
tremulous and a little swollen, that I gave to her eyebrow and to
the low wrinkle on her forehead the rising nod which was called
for by the introduction of M Febvre.
With a disposition such as mine, I ought to have felt some-
what out of temper. I was resigned to the eventual presence of
Mme Barbelenet, but I had scarcely imagined anything like this!
I prompted myself: these people are taking advantage of your good
nature, they are utterly impossible, you are furious. But the truth
was, that I had no wish to get away, no wish for a miracle to spare
me this ordeal. I won't go so far as to say that in my secret
heart it was all supremely pleasant, but it was assuredly inter-
esting. An hour of scales with two provincial misses was not
an alternative to long for. No adventure in that. For once,
there lay before me a duty that had a certain zest.
And for the first time in a long while I was to have an audience.
Marthe filled the tea-cups and Cecile passed the cakes while I
asked myself what sonata I should play: I thought of the astound-
ing difference which could dwell within an outwardly identical
act. I play the same sonata when I am alone, when I am with
a pupil, before a small audience as now. . . . All alone in my


JULES ROMAINS 135
room at nightfall, weary, discouraged, and the walls and air ap-
pealing. All alone. The first notes of the piano make me shiver.
These heavy chords turn on their tonals like great bronzen doors.
Invisible events, long born, have waited this signal to arise. The
sad lull breaks. The cheating tenor of my life is torn. All that
seemed important, that I bent and suffered to uphold, moves out,
I know not where. There in the flash of an eye it flees and fades.
My soul ventures, rapid and breathless, across all sorts of avatars
that crumple after. There is an end of the world. Here on the
ruins, judgement is set up, and the first decrees of eternity are
dim in the catastrophic noise. Better not think of this too much.
If I do, how am I going to find my way to the little black revolv-
ing stool under the portrait of the magistrate uncle ... it
strikes me now as a sort of judicial instrument of torture. Without
even the courage to run away, I'd simply stay there paralyzed and
abject.
I must fight off this memory of my room, this sudden madness
of solitude. If I try, surely I can win some pleasure from this
event. It is not exalting perhaps to play lovely music to people
who can't half understand it: but there must be more to this than I
see, for I can't quite succeed in despising it.
All I need do is to sit quietly at the piano and think of no one:
not of Mme Barbelenet, not of Cecile, not of this new person. It
won't be so easy. I'll have to overcome a low sort of circum-
spection which is never there when I'm alone, but crops out when
there are people. Will Mme Barbelenet find my sonata sufficiently
brilliant for a family gathering? Will Cecile notice the technical
difficulties and admit at last that I am a very formidable person?
What does this M Pierre Febvre know about music? Was he
asked in, for his opinion, in order that they all might follow his
lead? If so, is he one of those false connoisseurs who are a thou-
sand times more of a menace than the merely ignorant, the merely
disingenuous music lover? Shall I play in a way that would im-
press a pseudo-expert? Or shall I put in my music subtleties and
finesse which only a true critic will understand, like a signal of
understanding between us? All these questions must be put aside,
or mastered. Still they keep on rising. Perhaps it is just as well
that they survive in my unconscious mind. But let them stay
there.


136 LUCIENNE
It is time to take my place. The ceremony is ripe. The flow
of talk—and I have not resisted—rises and reaches:
"Mademoiselle, we are ready to hear you."
I am at the piano. I glance at the keyboard, at the varnished
top, at the lighted candle on my left, and I am sure of myself.
All is well within when things outside are like this. When a re-
flection on wood, a gleaming contour, a flame speak to me, not of
the dry salience of themselves, but of their solemn fusion, and make
response fairly to the look in my own eyes, I know that I am
ready for the event: I know that my soul is willing and is there
with its resources, above all with its amazing power to find its
own ease at just the needed depth.
I start to play. The instrument is fairly in tune, now. The
mildew flavour of its notes is as weak as a dim recollection. . . .
With the first notes I know that things are to go well. No fear
of that panic of the nerves which spreads hundredfold from head
and body, bringing confusion to the wrists, the hands, the fingers,
tying up the needed flow of play into knots that must be
broken. ... I am enjoying myself! No ecstasy, as when I play
in my room. But something better, surely, than mere unction to
my vanity. I am flattered that these people have all bothered
to hear me, that they are listening so intently. This is my moment
of eminence! I am not the poor girl who has to work for a living.
Those two well-dowered daughters will admire me, will envy
me so long as the breath of music lasts; only at the pause will
their duller thoughts and their more rational views come back.
But something deeper is in my joy at playing. Where does this
vision come from, of a country church, of a festival, unassuming,
secular, before a handful of peasants? An old woman leans at
a post: the telling of beads, the droning of an organ. . . . Nothing
grandiose in this, no vaticinal madness, no ecstasy in a cell: and
yet it is religious!
The worries I had fended off are still in sight, but at a com-
fortable distance. I can distinguish them, but they do not trouble
me. This pleasure of mine has no confusion about it. Everything
around me, everything making this circumstance of life, is there
with clear-cut traits. My audience, gathered behind me—I can
feel it as sharp as this chord I am striking: nor do the three ac-
cidentals of the chord, the forced twist of my two fingers, make


JULES ROMAINS 137
the audience less clear. Every one of my thoughts is sharpened
against the others.
I am sensible of the four Barbelenets distinct behind me. Marthe
is closest—she gets up to turn the page, but a little late. Mme
Barbelenet a wide gap from Marthe. Here, the family line forms
an angle, reaches M Barbelenet who sits far back, comes forward
again, closing with Cecile who is exactly behind me. I am not
unaware of M Pierre Febvre, nor do I merge him with the family.
He is very palpably there. Why do I ask myself what I would
feel if he and I were alone, he seated where he is and I at the
piano? I am sure my fingers would stiffen, my eyes would miss
the notes, I should have to stop. . . . And yet his added presence
in the room brings more zest to my playing, keeps me from slip-
ping into a dull facility: it makes me see each line of the score
as an abrupt adventure, something of value, something of delight.
Since the family is there, his added presence is a ferment. I
think all of them would be listening less well, were he gone. For
their interest is remarkable; it flows upon me, it upholds me, it
draws in and out the fluctuations of my play with an elastic
rhythm: I feel it spreading even to the wide pages of the music,
feel it quicken the light on the score, enhance the meaning.
The sonata is done, I turn about on my stool. I am absent
from the praise. I dwell with the faces. I see eyes well-lit. In
the bronze eyes of Marthe glows a fire that is deeper and darker
than before. It is like a tremulous gleam straining toward some-
thing like a kiss. Toward what? What have I to do with this
tension in her eyes? What has the music? What has this un-
guessed thing?
I do not dare to look straight at Cecile. And I want to see her.
I feel the need of courting her, flattering her—asking her for
instance what she thinks of the piece, or telling her (a lie) that
she will be quite ready a little later to play music of just that
sort. I have an oblique vision of her grey-green eyes: they cast
a withered sadness. I want to move her to words that will re-
lieve that look. I cannot. Even more than at other times I feel
the darkness of her body.
M Pierre Febvre gets up; slowly winding past the family he
makes his way to the piano and looks at the score. His eyes are
black like Marthe's, more wholly black: there is neither gold


138 LUCIENNE
nor orange in his eyes. He has come across the room with ease.
He is very close. He fingers the pages I have played. I can guess
by the faint stir of his eyelids and his nostrils that he has found
the most moving passage, my favourite passage: he is humming
the joyous bit silently to himself. Then he knows music, he loves
music! Even the way he handles the pages and turns them shows
me that. Perhaps he is not sorry I have noticed this: but I am
grateful for his delicate silence.
And now Mme Barbelenet is expressing the official praise of
the assemblage: "Mademoiselle, it has been a delight to hear
you: really we don't know which to admire more, the skill of
your fingers in the themes that almost dance, or the tender ex-
pression which you put into the more feeling parts."
With each phrase, she leaned toward M Pierre Febvre, as if
in plea for his support. He said simply:
"Mademoiselle plays extremely well."
M Barbelenet is beaming. He is like some householder who
has offered his guests a bottle of his best vintage: he is intoxicated
with their delight: he has no need of drinking.
I was asked to play again. M Pierre Febvre, whose place had
been between Cecile and M Barbelenet, took a chair now between
Mme Barbelenet and Marthe. I could not help thinking of this
change; I drifted off into vague speculations about the place of
this young man in the family. It seemed wrong to have such
vulgar thoughts while I was making lovely music, but I could
not resist the notion that M Pierre Febvre was qualified by age
and bearing to be a fiance in that house. He was reserved, it is
true: one could not make out which of the two girls he had chosen.
But perhaps this reticence was not surprising before a stranger
like me, or in a gentleman like him.
I must add that such thoughts irritated me. M Pierre Febvre
seemed of quite another mould from the people of this house.
There was nothing affected about him. He seemed to be making
an effort to hold himself down to the level of his hosts. One
glance at him was enough to turn Mme Barbelenet into a carica-
ture, to bring out the provincial silliness of the two girls. Could
one quite picture him protected in his loves by the judicial effigy
of the uncle? Indeed, what was one to think of him, if his idea
was marriage? Either all these mediocrities were to his taste—


JULES ROMAINS 139
in which case he was a Barbelenet disguised or veneered, a less
natural, hence less likable Barbelenet; or else he had spotted a
copious dowry underneath the humble appearance of the family—
and in this case he was despicable. I saw him again, fingering
the pages of my music, bending and bulging the album against the
palms of his hand. And this gesture which I had liked in him
became even a little odious. I looked at my beautiful shimmering
pages as if I might discover on them the prints of coarse skin.
With my cup of tea before me this idea dwelt with me still.
I was not averse to it, if only because it eased the wearisome re-
marks they were all making, the banal answers I was forced to
give them. This young man impresses me,, I felt: and despite all
my hostile thoughts he continues to impress me. Why is that?
For after all, it is not a bad thing to have some control of the
fancies that shape our attitude toward people. Did I judge him
with my own eyes when I found him so distinguished, or with the
eyes of the world1? Have I been thinking by proxy for the lady
at the news-stand, or for the tobacconist, or for the travellers on
a train when M Pierre Febvre has just stepped in? Or perhaps
even worse, have I not seen him with the eyes of Marthe or of
Cecile? He is dressed well enough. But what effort have I ever
made to test my own standards of men's clothes? I am certain
his clothes could have cost no more than those of M Barbelenet. I
think they are less new. They are not more fashionable; their cut
is not so much better. Yet in their creases and folds there is some-
thing alive, something cheerful and harmonious: no mere mournful
wrinkles here of the worn goods. The cloth, black it seems, is well
chosen. In combination with the small black knit cravat it sets off
the pallor of the face, gives dignity to his bearing. It makes me
think of evening parties, of jewels, of gay lights. But the subtle
traces of usage, the hint of dust and ash, gloss over the idea of stiff
ceremony with a something freer. No mere stale elegance, either.
The same gesture of his clothes which evokes a vision and a thrill
of smartness ends on a note of nonchalance and contempt.
Perhaps it is foolish to read so much into what might well be
a lucky accident. His face, his face by itself, what is that worth?
His eyes are beautiful, extremely so, I am about ready to admit.
But it is no uncommon thing to find eyes quite as deep and brilliant
in vulgar faces. There is a type of beautiful eye that goes very


140 LUCIENNE
well with low passion and low ideals. Do the features taken as a
whole give the man distinction? It is probable, but I can't be
sure. I can see at once that this clean-cut face could not be that
of a priest: but could it not be the face of a cheap actor, or of a
servant? One must dare ask such questions. . . .
Just here, a faint stir in Mme Barbelenet's face warned me
that she was growing aware of my absence from the general talk,
of my engrossment in M Pierre Febvre. What would they think
of me? Neither conscience nor indifference would make Mme
Barbelenet hesitate a moment in interpreting according to her
own lights any ambiguous act. How indeed could I expect her
to guess at the utterly impersonal nature of my curiosity? I
managed not to blush, but I was in anguish for some moments.
I had just enough presence of mind to begin at once to undeceive
Mme Barbelenet. What I did was to state emphatically to my-
self, but for her benefit:
"My interest in your cousin is precisely what I might feel for
a vase, Madame, or for that portrait of your uncle over the piano.
Do not go and imagine anything absurd. I confess that I have
been a little indiscreet toward the rest of your family. For I was
trying to figure out if this young man was not by chance engaged
to Cecile or Marthe. Simply that: and I am still so rude as to go
on figuring. Do you notice the way I have just looked at Cecile
and then at her cousin, quite as one might look at two candelabras
which one wished to match? Observe: now I compare Marthe
and Cecile. Then, with a cast of the eye like an amateur or like
an artist measuring a pose, I put Marthe and M Pierre Febvre
together—weigh the probabilities of them as the couple."
This manoeuvre did not keep me from a rather active part in
the general conversation which just then turned on the inadequacy
of the local shops and the need of going to Paris for one's principal
wants. I was voluble and complacent: I should have resented
my manner in another woman. But I was more than half suc-
cessful. I turned Mme Barbelenet back into the channels of her
own personal problems. She would be too busy there, to do much
further prying. There might or might not be the thought of this
marriage: it sufficed for the good lady to know that I had had the
notion to make her rush at once to her family's defense against
any invading thought whatever. Everything else, for the nonce,
was of no importance.


JULES ROMAINS 141
But Mme Barbelenet could not take this protective attitude
without somewhat revealing herself. Even mentally one does not
defend oneself in quite the same way against a truth as against a
lie. If I had been a little more clear-headed, I might then and
there have got to the bottom of the entire matter. But it was
enough for me that I had warded off I know not what absurd
suspicion.
VI
The following morning at about ten, I was on the rue Saint-
Blaise where it meets the rue de l'Huile and the alley of the
Devant-la-Boucherie. I had just finished giving a lesson, and I
was happy. Nothing stood between me and my freedom until
lunch time. I had a way of idling through the central streets at
the hour when the housewives buy their provisions and when the
shops, primed with purchasers and goods, shed gaiety on the streets
as if they were incandescent—or rather as if they were hedges
alive with birds. Everything inspired me with a desire to be mov-
ing—to loiter, to stop, to pry about, to cross the street and loiter
on again—without the slightest wish to go elsewhere. Here is the
goal, ran my thoughts. If you come to the end of a street there's
nothing to do but turn back, change sidewalks if you like, or make
believe that you've lost your way in one or another of the twisting
alleys. Here, at the city's heart, lives self-sufficiency, lives self-
joy. All other things in the world are shoved to the mind's edge,
and flow there and break there distantly, and fade until they are
scarce seen, scarce heard, a'murmur of recollections without strength
to make us recognize them and to make us miss them.
I think almost furtively of the station: just enough to feel the
satisfying contrast of the heart of town: the rue Saint-Blaise, the
rue de l'Huile, the alley of Devant-la-Boucherie. Station, plat-
forms, tracks, the unceasing draughts of air, fate of separation,
crises of soul, the poignant tremulous words; less overtly the heart-
beats that lift to our lips, if we can hear them, dim gusts of words:
flight, deprivation, exile—and the vision of something like a hand
that closes in vain on the life that has escaped. Let me not think
of it!
I am happy now, at ten o'clock in the morning, ten o'clock in the
sun, on this rue Saint-Blaise. I have done my stint in a near-by


142 LUCIENNE
house that is a part of the good enveloping thickness of the town.
I am free to live and do nothing else but live, until the noon hour:
even beyond that, until the drooping heavy last half of the day. I
also have my job and my pay. The cobbler with his glue-pots and
his row of new soles and I can nod like burghers to each other.
For I am no simple passer-by, not I. I belong here. I have
my place, and it's not a bad one either. Even after they have
given me my pay, the folk for whom I work have regard for me.
My work is a rare sort, it has an excellence and a name, that even
those soles do not possess in the same high degree, for all their
smartness and their shininess. I don't earn as much as the doctor
or the lawyer: but their superiority is quite accidental. The best
physician in town, M Lanfranc, if he knew me, would doff his hat
to me with not the least condescension.
This sum I've just earned in an hour—one hour, but an hour
well-placed from nine to ten, early enough to leave me the full
free morning of the lady of leisure, yet late enough so that I need
not get up at dawn like a working woman, a most convenient hour
in which to dispose of my mercenary task without danger of sadness,
for it is the hour when the night's rest has its flower and the tart
sting of the coffee is joyous in our blood—well, this sum I've just
earned doesn't seem so very much so long as it remains a mere coin
in my bag. But wait till it leaves the silver body that imprisons
it, wait till it gets out to pasture on this hospitable street: it will
turn into three dozen eggs, or a fat plucked chicken, or a whole
heap of those good-natured vegetables that fill the tiers in front
of the greengrocer's like a crowd at the circus.
Indeed, I must make a purchase or two. If I merely walk and
look about, something solemn and convinced will be missing from
my good time. I take supper in my room, it is only natural that I
should provide for it at the hour of the housewives: it would be
foolish to wait till the close of day has faded these verdurous dis-
plays.
So my alert thoughts carried me along, and across them glanced
a memory that was not dark: my yesterday's adventure at the
Barbelenet's—memory of a sensation, of a face, of candle-glow on
the page of music. But what came was rather the return of a full
spiritual savour through the opening which my memory made.
I decided at last to go into a shop where a half-dozen women were


JULES ROMAINS 143
waiting to be served and fingering the while heads of lettuce,
potatoes, cheeses.
One of these women looked familiar. She was about forty, and
seemed to have something equally of the housekeeper and of the
servant. I wondered where I had seen her. What came first, as I
sought back, was a sense of pleasure mingled with unease, and
tinged with recentness. Then I felt that there was no cause for
avoiding this woman, no need of turning away. Next, I thought
of the tuft of greyish hair that adorns the wart of Mme Barbelenet.
But not till the woman came up and began to speak did I recognize
her maid.
Here in the shop she struck me as ampler, ruddier, far more of a
person. It is true that in the house of her mistress, I had scarce
noticed her at all. Yesterday I had had a mere dim sense of an
admiring manner, as I was helped on with my coat.
"You also, Mademoiselle, getting ready for lunch?"
"O no, I eat at the Ecu." (That was my hotel and the best
in town.) "But I have a few things to buy."
"That was a real treat you gave us yesterday, Mademoiselle.
Even from the kitchen I could hear you easily. The young ladies
were proud of their teacher."
"That was good of them. They told you, did they?"
"Not me. But everybody was talking at dinner."
Everybody—that meant the family, doubtless M Pierre Febvre
as well, for he must have stayed. I should have enjoyed hearing
what he had to say about me—about me as a pianist, of course.
But how find out?
The maid left the shop just as I did. In the street the moment
came to part, but just as there was nothing more to say except
perhaps good-bye, she broke into a flood of words. Later I under-
stood that she was making use of these words, as one twirls a sling
faster and faster before letting fly the shot. Absently, I took ac-
count of this verbal whirlwind in which praise, vegetables, the price
of eggs, and the privileges of girlhood were vertiginously mixed.
At last I was struck by this:
"Ah, Mademoiselle, it is common enough to blame the parents:
but when it is a question of the happiness of their children, it is
not so easy."
I nodded—to encourage her.


144 LUCIENNE
"I guess I'd do better to stick in my kitchen and mind my own
affairs, but I'd love to know all the same what you think of that
marriage."
"Oh—I don't think of it at all."
"Not at all. Just it. Not at all. The young man's fine enough,
all right. But as for me, I don't think much of these folks who
can't make up their minds. What about you?"
"Well—"
"Is he old enough, yes or no, to decide what he ought to do?"
"It would seem so."
"If they were my girls, I'll just tell you, I'd have the whole thing
cleared up soon enough."
"But don't you think it's on the way?"
"On the way? To what, then? Perhaps to his marrying the
younger? And then what? A pretty affair, I should say. The
elder one'll do anything before that happens: and I can put myself
in her place. Heavens! At the beginning, don't forget, there
wasn't the slightest question of Mile Marthe. Not the slightest.
The parents always intended to marry the elder one first. If it
hadn't been for this chance, Madame would have preferred to wait
a year or two longer, until M Barbelenet retires."
"It's too bad things haven't turned out better."
"Yes, it is too bad. You've not been going there long, but I can
see that you know about everything already. Only for that, I'd
never have breathed a word. It's natural the young ladies should
hide nothing from you. There's no one else could give them such
good advice."
"Oh, you think so?"
"Yes indeed. I can see by the way you talk, that you're thinking
it's always a waste of time and trouble trying to manage stubborn
people. And I guess with her sweet smart ways Mile Marthe's
easier to handle than the other. Understand, I'd get along better
with her than with Mile Cecile. But at bottom, perhaps, there's
more heart to Mile Cecile. Mile Marthe—of course, she loves her
mother, since it's her mother: but no more than she should, I'll
tell you. Yes, yes. There's no use talking, the elder one's in
her rights. I'm tiring you with all this. You must have your ears
humming, what with listening to this and then to that. Good day,
Mademoiselle. This weather we've been having for two weeks—
it's not the sort '11 bring down the price of greens."


JULES ROMAINS 145
Holding to the centre of the street, the servant went her way.
Hers was not the bearing of an ordinary domestic. No one would
have thought of treating her abruptly, of staying in her way, of
bumping against her basket—at least in any civilized town. There
was the danger in the Barbelenet house of losing sight of her: of
taking her there for some sort of convenient furniture that could
be shifted about with a mere motion of the voice. Here, her
meaning was otherwise. As she went upon her steady way down
the centre of the rue Saint-Blaise, I felt that Mme Barbelenet
sat at the instant in her arm-chair, and knit her brow in order to
stress her formal battle with pain, and to savour in full the strenu-
ous command of her household. Somehow Mme Barbelenet was not
absent from the rue Saint-Blaise. Mme Barbelenet had her share
in the dignified stride of her servant. The rue Saint-Blaise,
busiest and most commercial of all the streets in town, grew to be
very specially the place where the Barbelenets bought their food—
a sort of domestic street. There at the right, one story up, two
closed shutters formed a large green rectangle that was somewhat
awry in the white of the facade. A vague sleepiness would have
been enough to make me see the portrait of the judicial uncle hold-
ing forth in the street.
What was that Marie Lemiez had told me? In two years' time
I'd still have my two pupils! They have only one wish: to get
married and throw their scales out of the window. I recognize
the insight of my dear Marie. . . . But the two sisters could not
wed the one M Pierre Febvre. One of them will, doubtless in
short order. The other will simply have to go hunt elsewhere: she
may very well decide that dancing is more to the point than music.
The dream of long prosperity with which I had humoured myself
for two weeks went up in sudden smoke. This was my first thought,
a selfish one, and I turned it over and over, unconvinced. I could
not force myself to admit that I had been deceived. I seemed in
a hurry to think of other things, of more exciting matters. The
servant had thrown a vivid wavering light on a situation of which
I still did not hold the key. Strictly speaking, I was not even sure
that M Pierre Febvre was the fiance: she had not mentioned his
name. Her allusions of course pointed to him. It was not likely
that another man haunted that house. Still, strange things happen.
Then I forced myself to see the dishonesty of my even question-


146 LUCIENNE
ing anything so clear. A last vestige of tact had kept the maid
from mentioning names: perhaps not even that, but merely the
fact that no misunderstanding was possible. Why should I wish
to argue such a point?
So I had not slandered M Pierre Febvre after all! It was there,
there in the drawing-room of the Barbelenet's, in the domain of the
uncle's portrait and of the worked brass jardiniere, that love had
come to his soul! It was there that a reality as fair as dreams of
youth had dawned on his passionate manhood. For the black eyes,
the warm pallor of his face, that tremulous twinge of his eyes and
nostrils hinted his ardour.
The one hitch was in making a choice between the girls. What
a tribute to the Barbelenets! What better proof could there be,
that this was no casual passion, no passing fondness due more to
chance than to a true emotion. Did it not come to this: "I am no
common suitor of the sort who meets a girl and is swayed by the
note of a voice, by a smile well-timed, by a treacherous conspiring
of light and feature. My love is so essential, its dwelling place is
so deep in the heart of her I love that it lies beyond the mere shallow
surfaces of personality, and it knows only the ultimate nature of
her being. I am in love with the Barbelenet soul, I am in love
with the Barbelenet family. And since this family has two daugh-
ters, is it not natural that I should oscillate between the two, find
first in the one then in the other, that flower of the Barbelenet soul
which best expresses it and promises the greatest fulfilment of my
love for those ecstatic depths? What a pity that bigamy is not
allowed!"
I was eager to know more details. I longed for an excuse to
return there: to-morrow's lesson seemed too far away. At this
distance, what could I do but make up a lot of gratuitous theories
to cheat my impatience? Truth, in such cases, is a contact, like
an odour. It is futile to expect to find it at the end of an argument.
To be continued


MO-TI
BY LOLA RIDGE
You talked in mellow day-ends
as the rallying sun
spread quivering spokes of gold
like an iridescent fan behind the pagodas,
and smells of bamboo shoots cooked in spices
drifted out of the blown fires.
You pitted your words against the words of princes . . .
but softly ... in even tones . . . and few listened . . .
so that you were not nailed on four boards
or smeared with honey and left naked where sands crawl
living under the sun.
Perhaps only a few boys listened
while the rice was cooling in the bowls
and auburn sunsets
changing into lavender and jade
shuffled into the lilac dusks.
A few boys listen always when one gives out of his silence.
I do not think there were girls who listened . . .
girls . . . whose lustrous pale skins
threw back in dusky echoes
the faint gold light of evenings
that loitered with silken slippers upon the pinnacles.
Not your speech could have touched their deep quietness. . . .
Incomprehensible . . . moving darkly under the froth of little
words and the soft purling of their blood that perhaps
sang to meet your blood . . . you passing them all unknowing
while the light on the horizon was like a topaz wine.


148 MO-TI
Did women . . . scattering dry words
as trees dead leaves
that are no more communicants of the green sap . . .
women with shining secrets in their eyes . . .
alertly curious eyes,
not baffled because not wondering . . .
catch a garbled word or so
and mutely
quiver along the margins of their silences?
Not again, Mo-Ti,
when heated days turn yellow at the edges,
and the sun comes down like a peacock to drink out of the rivers,
will lemon-pale boys,
pressed against the narrow darkness of their eyes,
bring to you their spindling hungers . . .
(what becomes of all the boys that have touched silence for a white
shaken moment ...
does the shy wild light that comes into their eyes
there beat itself out like a too long shut-in thing?)
I do not know if they talked with you in those gone saffron twilights.
Only your
words have floated out of the night, enfolding them and you in its
seamless shadow . . .
words still seeking in vain noise
for some green hush to rest upon . . .
words carrying light like sunsets upon wings.



THE VIOLINIST. BY ADOLPH DEHN






TWO DANCERS. BY ADOLPH DEHN





FIRST CATCH YOUR HARE
BY LOGAN PEARSALL SMITH
MR ARNOLD BENNETT, in a recent criticism of our younger
novelists, attacked them on the ground that they all were
without the power of creating characters, which, he said, was the
foundation of good fiction, and nothing else. Thereupon Mrs
Woolf took up the cudgels, and most cogently retorted by remark-
ing that it was precisely in the generation of Mr Bennett himself
and his contemporaries, Mr Wells and Mr Galsworthy, that char-
acter, and the power of creating it, disappeared from English litera-
ture. Mr Beresford then joined in the hunt; and the spectacle of
Mr Arnold Bennett, Mrs Virginia Woolf, and Mr J. D. Beresford
tumbling over each other in full cry after this illusive hare, is one
of such fascination, that even the most grizzly and retired of critical
greyhounds must be irresistibly tempted to leap from his kennel and
join the exhilarating chase.
The essence of fiction, the sine qua non of novel-writing, is the
game they are after: that is the creation of character, they agree
with Mr Bennett; but where, in what covert the elusive puss is
hidden, is among them a matter of lively dispute. I should like to
suggest (if I may join them) that the field to which they confine
themselves is rather too narrow. It isn't a question merely of Eng-
lish fiction; or, in English fiction, of the Victorians, the Georgians,
and our contemporary novelists. Indeed, to make sure that one has
left no covert unexplored, one should include, I think, not only
foreign novels, but the drama, and even the epic; for these portray
character as well as novels; they are also, if I may permit myself
the pun, "forms" in which our essential hare may be found lurking.
If, then, we wish to arrive at some definite idea of what we mean
by character-creation in fiction; and, taking the word in its widest
meaning, we summon up before our memories all the vast popula-
tions which people these worlds of the imagination, we shall see,
I think, that those personages divide themselves pretty definitely
into two groups. By far the greater majority of them are stock
figures, devoid of any independent existence. Personification of the


150 FIRST CATCH YOUR HARE
passions, idealizations of abstract qualities, embodiments of simple
forces, or types of various professions, these heroes and lovers and
heroines and villains and lords and misers and millionaires and
clergymen and lawyers, all have their names, their places in the
social fabric; they all are endowed, and sometimes over-endowed,
with the characteristics of their sex; they are upholstered in different
kinds of clothes; they are often described and analysed and dis-
sected at enormous length—and yet they almost all remain puppets:
we see the strings that pull them; and when the play or novel in
which they figure is over, their life ceases, they are laid aside, and
we think of them no more.
But in the works of certain great writers, some of the figures
(though by no means all) present a very different appearance.
They seem to be framed in a different manner and composed of
other materials, to be real human beings, discoveries and not in-
ventions; they are no sooner brought into existence than they seem
to have always existed: and when the novel is closed, or the curtain
falls upon the drama, they go on living in our imaginations, and
are as familiar to us as our relations, and our best-acquainted friends.
These are the figures which we call "characters," and the power of
evoking them is what we call "character-creation." It is a power
possessed in the highest degree by Shakespeare; we find it also in
Scott, in Jane Austen, in Thackeray; and Dickens possessed it
almost to madness. It is commonly regarded as the greatest gift
of these novelists, and the very essence of their art. And yet,
curiously enough, none of our critics, with, as far as I know, only
one exception, have attempted an analysis of this creative power,
or at least any real discrimination between stock figures and these
"created" characters. This exception is that obscure, almost for-
gotten diplomatist and politician of the eighteenth century, Maurice
Morgann, who published in 1777 one small masterpiece of criticism,
an Essay on the character of Falstaff, which is well known to
Shakespeare scholars, and in which he deals with this question in a
profoundly interesting way. What is the essential difference, he
asks, between Shakespeare's characters, and the stock figures of the
other playwrights? The answer he gives—and I think it is essen-
tially a true answer—can be paraphrased in our modern vocabulary
as follows. No personage can be put whole into a work of art;
the writer can only present the qualities and aspects which he needs


LOGAN PEARSALL SMITH 151
for his purpose; and in other playwrights the parts which are not
seen, do not in fact exist; their makers have told us all they know
about them; there is nothing more in these figures, as they conceive
them, than what we see, and their hidden interiors are, as we
may put it, filled, like dolls, with saw-dust.
But Shakespeare's characters are created as vital wholes; they
possess independence as well as relation; they are living organisms,
in which each part depends upon, and implies, the complete person.
Although we see them in part only, yet from these glimpses we
unconsciously infer the parts we do not see; and when Shakespeare
makes them act and speak, as he sometimes does, from their unpor-
trayed but inferred aspects, he produces an astonishing effect of
unforeseen, yet inevitable truth.
Morgann does not discuss the means by which Shakespeare pre-
sents these characters to us, so as to make them seem real and living
in our eyes. We have only however to look at one of his plays
to perceive his method. He does not, of course, describe them—
that as a dramatist he could hardly do—but he makes them, as it
were, talk themselves into existence. The impression of individual
character is produced by an individual way of speech; each per-
sonage possesses an idiom, a diction, a rhythm, a sort of sing-song
of his own, so distinctive that, without reading their names, we can
recognize each speaker by his voice. And when we look into it, we
see that all our great character-creating novelists have adopted this
Shakespearean method; we find it in Scott, in Jane Austen, in
Thackeray, and above all in Dickens, who created hundreds of
living beings, endowing each with his own inner song, his excited
or drowsy twitter, his personal "note," as distinctive as the note of
a wren or chaffinch. Dickens and the othef Victorians no doubt
abused this enchantment, this way of making their characters sing
themselves into existence; they reiterated their little tunes and
catch-phrases so monotonously that their successors became dis-
gusted with this method, and adopted the method of description and
analysis instead. Is this perhaps the cause of that loss of character-
creating power which Mrs Woolf notes in them—the reason why
our novelists no longer people our imaginations with living forms?
Human nature nowadays, Mr Beresford suggests, is too complex,
too self-conscious, too irresolute, to be moulded into salient and
definite characters like those of our older writers. But does human


152 FIRST CATCH YOUR HARE
nature change so rapidly? Are many of us more complex, more
self-conscious, more irresolute than Hamlet? And yet has not
Shakespeare created in Hamlet a most unmistakable and distinct
and living being? And, let us note, Hamlet is made real to us
very largely by his speech-rhythms and intonations—there is, for
instance, as Mr Bradley has finely noted, nothing in the play more
intensely characteristic, and more unmistakably individual, than
Hamlet's trick of verbal repetitions. "Words, words, words"—
"very like, very like"—"thrift, thrift, Horatio"—"except my life,
except my life, except my life"—is not the very essence of Hamlet
embodied in these little phrases? Could any number of pages of
analysis and description have made him more living to us?
If then this power of conceiving and creating and presenting
character is found in the greatest of our playwrights and novelists,
and in them alone (for no really second-rate writer possesses it);
if moreover we find it present in proportion to their greatness, and
if its presence always gives enduring value to their works, is it not
possible that we have found in this creative power the sine qua non,
the quintessential quality of fiction? Is our hunt over, our hare
captured, and ready to be jugged and served up at last?
I do not think so; the doctrine, which is now so fashionable, of
the single, essential, all-sufficing ingredient, has always seemed to
me too great a simplification of aesthetic problems. Even suppose
we do find a sine qua non in art, a quality in the absence of which
aesthetic value is always absent, how can we say that other quali-
ties, non-aesthetic in themselves, do not acquire an intrinsic art-
value, when they combine with the essential quality in, as it were,
a kind of chemical combination?
But however that may be, once we think of foreign literature,
we will see that character-creation is not really even a sine qua non
in fiction—that it is hardly more an essential element in it than
portraiture is an essential ingredient in the art of painting. To
make hare-soup, one must, of course, first catch one's hare; but
there are many other excellent kinds of soup brewed in the world's
kitchens. How many of these living and self-subsistent beings,
like Hamlet, or Falstaff, or Pickwick, or Mr Micawber, do we find
outside of English literature? Hardly as many, I would almost ven-
ture to say, as in one play of Shakespeare, or one novel of Dickens
or Jane Austen.
It would be pleasant to sit down and read through the whole


LOGAN PEARSALL SMITH 153
of European fiction to find if this is really so; but not having leisure
now for that perusal, I can only look into the phantasmagoria of
memory to see what personages of foreign literature start to life
at the evocation of their names. The Achilles and Agamemnon of
Homer appear and speak with their individual voices; and Nausicaa
is clad with an exquisite immortality. In my memory of the Greek
drama I find ideal types and noble beings, but no really independent
self-subsisting characters. Nor do I find them in Racine, nor in
French fiction—in Stendhal or in Balzac. The truth is, I think, that
this kind of creation is a special characteristic of English literature.
We may find its roots perhaps in Chaucer, but it was in Shakespeare
that it burst into exuberant and amazing blossom; and it is from
Shakespeare that our great novelists derived their conception of it,
and their method of portrayal.
Continental writers, whose ideal has been, for the most part, the
classical one of turning events into ideas, and making them into food
for the mind, have found typical personages, rather than "char-
acters," better and more transparent vehicles for their criticism of
life, for their study of human relations and passions and circum-
stances. There are exceptions no doubt—there is Cervantes who
created Don Quixote; and there are the Russians, who have imitated
English fiction. In our own day also there is Proust, who, as I
should like to suggest to my fellow-harriers, has succeeded in mould-
ing into living characters, with their own idiosyncrasies of speech,
the most subtle complexities of our modern and self-conscious human
nature. Nevertheless character-creation as we find it in English
literature, is not on the whole an essential element in Continental
fiction.
If we should attempt to take, from a classical and Continental
standpoint, a general view of our English novels, might they not
appear, in spite of—and even perhaps on account of—their swarm-
ing abundance of living characters, somewhat trivial and super-
ficial as analyses of life? Are not our immense miscellaneous Eng-
lish novels rather like immense picnics and meaningless outings,
in which a lot of odd people meet together in irrelevant horse-play,
and then separate or pair off for no especial reason? Are not the
different episodes in these novels of more importance than the whole
impression they create? And have the individual characters in them
much more than a casual relation with the novel in which they hap-
pen to appear? Could not the great characters of Dickens have


154 LINES FOR ALL DEAD POETS
figured just as well in almost any other of his novels? And hasn't
the power of creating independent beings in some ways embarrassed
even our greatest writers? Didn't that monster of exuberance,
Falstaff, pull down, like Samson, the structure of the plays in which
he figured, and even the most consummate of English artists en-
danger the scheme of his great Epic by making his Devil so much
more alive, and so much more interesting, than his God?
"By all means," a Continental spectator of our coursing might
address us, "by all means hunt your hare, and when you catch it
and serve it up, we hope that we shall be invited to the feast. The
brown hare of your meadows is a creature which, though it some-
times goes mad in March, possesses admirable and even magical
properties—and certainly its antics are a source of inexhaustible
amusement. But it is indigenous to England, and is scarcely to be
found abroad, save in Russia, whither its breed has been imported
from your shores. The game we are after, our lievre, is the moun-
tain hare; to us it seems a creature of a rarer, of a more quintessen-
tial, and indeed of an almost divine quality; and its native home is
on those ranges of thought, upon those high, Muse-haunted moun-
tains where the ancient Greeks, not unaccompanied by the Im-
mortals, were wont to pursue the chase."
LINES FOR ALL DEAD POETS
BY MABEL SIMPSON
Do you think to take with your roots O Trees
The bodies of them I love?
To.press them down with your feet and your knees
Till they rise in green above?
Do you think to smoothe away their throats
O Rain that falls all night?
Do you think to still their beautiful notes,
And hush their footfalls light?
Rest Roots . . . Sleep O Rain!
Only earth can be earth again.


DUBLIN LETTER
July, 1924
TRADE RETURNS can tell the physical fact that a nation
is or is not active, but they will not reveal a psychological
or spiritual fact, nor enable nations to know each other except
as rivals and possible enemies. Trade is not individual, it is
scarcely even national: it is anonymous and international, and
the very important information that we glean from it ends largely
with itself. We may say, from business data, that Ireland or
Spain or America is or is not lazy, but we cannot say that one
of them is intelligent and another not, nor that they are or are
not contented or ambitious or quarrelsome.
Certainly, a nation with a low mental content will have a low
export trade. This could, however, be as true of a country that
was largely self-sufficing and was not overpopulated. Psycholog-
ical facts, that is, truth regarding the energies of a nation, must
be sought elsewhere. Politics will not teach us much. They lie
in the almost elemental region of self-preservation: they are daily
matters, and almost three parts automatic; and the religion of a
country is too largely habitual to be a gauge of energy. A nation's
sports and arts are all that is left to consider, and these are her
true interpreters, or are the only interpreters that tell the truth
about her.
Every fake that is known is possible in the realms of business
and politics, but games must be won by winners, and art can only
be produced by artists. There are no synthetic champions in run-
ning or jumping, and if the dud-artist does not get his label by
return of post, he yet will get it in fairly good time.
The contention here is, that games and arts are not individual
energies. They are national.
In games the chance of a freak or sport is possible, but it may
be generalized that no second-rate country produces champions in
a game that calls for endurance and speed. Speed is intelligence.
And in art, it may be completely stated that no second-class coun-
try has ever produced a first-class artist.


156 DUBLIN LETTER
When England was great so were her literature and her sports.
When France was great she produced great painting. When Ger-
many was great she produced great music. One or another of
these nations might be essentially the greatest: but, in their spheres,
the supremacy of each was unquestionable, and the nations about
them, whether prosperous or not as traders, were merely satellites,
sharing in, but adding little to the arts they revolved about.
Within the last hundred years Ireland has taken part in what-
ever games were within reach. Nationally she may not have
made any great show, but she has scattered champions broadcast
to England and America and elsewhere: and in literature she has
made a more than respectable contribution to the general stock.
Up to quite recently Irish painting, poetry, and fiction were not
of grave importance, but the history of Irish drama is extraordinary.
It is the truth to say that since Shakespeare almost every first-
class name in English drama is that of an Irishman, or of a person
who was born or educated in Ireland—Congreve, Wycherley, Sheri-
dan, Goldsmith, Wilde, Shaw, Synge—the tale of champions comes
to our own day, and is not yet finished. We are now doing better
work in poetry; and in painting—witness, Orpen, Lavery, Mac-
Evoy, Kelly, Shannon, Yeats, Russell. And in fiction also we
are settling into our stride. Whatever our commercial energy may
seem like, our national form is good.
In games we are doing better than one should have dared to
prophesy. Last season, in the football matches, we were beaten
by England and Scotland: but we gave the victors a run for
their money, and took the last ounce out of them. We beat Wales
and France, and are considering, with a certain bashfulness, that
we may lick the universe next year.
In the same season we captured the Nobel Prize, and we crowned
a play by Mr Sean O'Casey.
On the strength of these deeds Dublin is taking the air with a
dignity that is engagingly modest, but she may shortly be enquiring
as to the grounds on which London and New York consider them-
selves to be Capital cities.
Mr O'Casey's play is called Juno and the Paycock, and it is
in every way worthy of that delicate and delightful title. Never
was a Peacock so iridescent or with such a spread of tail as our
Paycock. Never was a Juno such a dote as our Juno. The play


JAMES STEPHENS 157
is Irish in every word of it, but it is magnificently more.—It is
Dublin, and how wonderful a thing is that to say! Dublin flocked
to see itself at the Abbey Theatre. It packed the little building
nightly, and was turned, in morose multitudes, away from the too-
crowded house, and from the finest acting that has ever been seen
in Ireland, or, perhaps, that has ever been seen anywhere.
Will another audience get this play as we do? Will they get
the terror, the tragedy, the trickery, the tenderness, the laughter and
happiness of it, as we do?
Perhaps they won't. Time must tell if its appeal is more than
local. But we know that a great play and a great playwright has
come. He does not empty words and actions on to a stage. He
spills life there, and spills it with a gleeful exuberance that bodes
well for him, and for us.
Any man named Casey should do great deeds as naturally
as a man named Dempsey or Sullivan packs an upper-cut; but
it was Dublin herself that wrote this play. Ireland has used Mr
Yeats to write her lyrics, but she adopted the gentle poet with
a certain formalism, as of one who should lament kings only
and should make love only to a queen. So, royally, she chose
poor Terence MacSwiney to starve to death for her, which is
almost the same thing as making love to a queen. She is a
man-killer, is Ireland. But Dublin has used Mr O'Casey for.,
her purposes simply, cleanly, civically, cordially. She is h'.dlture
vourite aunt. .ope when
We may mark time a little in order to get our win Jie same way
the alarums and battlings that we have been throlage culture and
past ten years, but our form is all right—Sean Q prefer a machine-
it; or, rather, for there is a distinction, Dublhe. Walking in Sicily,
nated by men who have
they are richer, but because
ng to their reports of sky-
iian peasant, listening to these
a young painter in a second-
aries of the Latin Quarter. I
ind, in the Tyrol, on the Volga,
e to test the feelings of peasants,
and bad alike, have little force,
)tees of "culture."


BOOK REVIEWS
AMERICANIZATION
Culture and Democracy in the United States.
By Horace M. Kallen. 8vo. ^47 pages. Boni and
Liveright. $j.
THIS book expresses the point of view of a man bored with
pessimism about America, but unable to find any other ground
for optimism. Dr Kallen would be the first to admit that a
view may be true in spite of being boring and frequently expressed.
Perhaps, however, where such matters as optimism and pessimism
are concerned, he would argue—and I should agree—that there is
no "truth," only moods, like those of the creator during the six
days of the creation. If so, the way to make America good is to
learn to like it, which is a matter of discipline and way of life, not
a matter of thought. Most people, like the prisoner of Chillon,
can learn to like it by the mere process of staying in it a number
of years.
Dr Kallen is very largely concerned with the problem of the
immigrants. On this problem, he has a view which is definitely
opposed to that of the Americanizers. He believes it possible
for the various national groups to retain their character in America,
and form, as it were, an Occidental League of Nations under the
American flag. He does not wish or expect to see Irish, Italians,
Jews, Poles, et cetera, all becoming exactly alike through imita-
tion of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, or even through
imitation of Mr Henry Ford. The richness and diversity of
European culture, he thinks, can, in this way, be reproduced on
new soil. Democracy, for him, means group-autonomy, not a dead-
level uniformity. He wants an organism, in which diverse organs
co-operate to a common end, not a heap, in which similar grains
of sand are piled up to make a structureless total.
Two questions must be sharply distinguished: Is Dr Kallen's
method of Americanizing desirable? And is it probable? On
the former, everyone will agree with him who has any sense of


BERTRAND RUSSELL 159
the texture and pattern of a world interesting to those who live
in it. His opponents will be the persecutors, the administrators,
and the militarists—i. e. those who regard human beings as mere
raw material for the gratification of their own passions. I do
not propose to range myself with these men, and I shall concede
the whole of Dr Kallen's case as to what is desirable.
But when it comes to what is probable, I confess, though with
very inadequate knowledge, that I am unconvinced. I think Dr
Kallen may be right about the Jews, who are accustomed to being
a non-territorial minority, who are everywhere in a foreign country,
and whose culture is not geographical, so that they can emigrate
with less mental shock than is involved in the case of Gentiles.
The one thing Jews cannot stand up against is oblivion by
Gentiles of the fact that they are Jews; this method, however,
is adopted nowhere except in England. As regards America, it
seems probable that the Jews will long preserve their racial
solidarity and their special culture.
As regards other national groups, such as the Poles and the
Italians, the matter seems quite otherwise. The traditions of
European countries are built upon the village. In early New Eng-
land, villages of the English type were created, and English culture
was successfully transplanted. But in the modern world villages
are an anachronism; they survive in Europe from force of habit,
not from any present economic necessity. Consequently all culture
based on the village is moribund. Men lose it in Europe when
they move into the towns, and they lose it in just the same way
when they emigrate. Dilettanti may admire village culture and
peasant arts, but all those who practise them prefer a machine-
made civilization when they get the chance. Walking in Sicily,
I have found that every village is dominated by men who have
returned from America, not only because they are richer, but because
of the glamour and romance attaching to their reports of sky-
scrapers, subways, et cetera. The Sicilian peasant, listening to these
stories, feels what would be felt by a young painter in a second-
rate Western town in listening to stories of the Latin Quarter. I
have found the same thing in Ireland, in the Tyrol, on the Volga,
and wherever I have had the chance to test the feelings of peasants.
The traditions of Europe, good and bad alike, have little force,
and are valued only by a few devotees of "culture."


160 AMERICANIZATION
It must be admitted that religion is an exception in this respect.
Dr Kallen psychoanalyses admirably the religiosity of the pioneer,
whose church gives him the feeling of safety derived from the past.
This no doubt accounts for the fact that the immigrant in America
is more pious than the stock from which he has come. Italy, for
example, is a free-thinking country, at least among the men;
the political history shows how slight is the power of the Church.
Yet in America the great majority of Italians vote as the priests
direct. This increase of religiosity is an effect of emigration, not
of economics. Most of what is regarded as typical of America
is really only typical of modern methods of production, and is
found in Europe where such methods prevail. But the piety of
immigrants may perhaps be due to home-sickness (usually sub-
conscious) and is certainly not due to industrialism. If this is
the right analysis, it may be expected to lessen with each suc-
cessive generation. Whatever the explanation, it seems to be the
only element of European culture that can be successfully trans-
planted. Religious bigotry, which is rapidly disappearing in
Europe, is having a glorious renascence in America. In the arts,
on the contrary, what is best in America is not copied from Europe.
In architecture and poetry, America is making a new and original
contribution, but not, so far as I can see, a diversity of contribu-
tions which can be distinguished as Jewish, Slav, Italian, et cetera.
1 find it difficult, therefore, to accept Dr Kallen's prophecy except
as regards theology, where its realization is a mere nuisance.
America is developing new social forms which, just because they
are new, are not wholly agreeable to persons who, like the present
reviewer, are deeply impregnated with a traditional culture. But
the purpose of the world, if it has one, is clearly not to be pleasant
to me. To most people, America is pleasant; therefore it should
be judged good. In any case, American culture is strong, and
almost certain to defeat that of Europe. Whatever new excellence
it may bring forth must be on its own lines, not on those of agri-
cultural Europe. Abstractly, Dr Kallen would of course admit
this, but in the case of his theory of the immigrant I am not sure
that he has sufficiently recognized its implications.
There is much else that is interesting and valuable in Dr
Kallen's book, but I have left myself only space to urge the reader
to find this out for himself. Bertrand Russell


DEPOSING THE LOVE OF THE LORD
Selected Religious Poems of Solomon Ibn
Gabirol. Translated into English Verse by Israel
Zangzvill. Edited by Israel Davidson. i6mo. 247
pages. The Jewish Publication Society of America.
$2.50.
ON reading through this collection of devotional poetry, the
reader must first of all be impressed by the constancy of the
subject-matter. Here the poet keeps his eye focussed long and
lovingly on one thing, which is God and His Creation. But there
is also a certain deadly disproportion here: it seems that in spite
of his prolonged focus, Gabirol had not succeeded in finding an
eloquence equal to his engrossment. The first inclination is to
lay this discrepancy to the translator; it is appalling to sit down
and translate an entire book of verse, and it would be readily
pardonable if that imaginative inventiveness which is the best
communicant of conviction—if not the proof of iv—were found
missing in the result. For too often Gabirol assures us rather
than persuades; loving the Lord, he deposes accordingly. It is
a record without pungency; at least if one is allowed to examine
churchly texts for their sheer cunning of diction, boldness of
image, for the picturesqueness of their passion, in short, rather than
for its honesty.
But in Mr Davidson's introduction to this volume there is
material which justifies us in laying this scepticism against the
original rather than the translation. For Gabirol wrote his religious
poems at a time when it was the accepted thing to write re-
ligious poems, or, as the Rev. Matthew Henry says of Nehemiah,
wrote "where religion was in fashion, and an air of it appeared
on men's common conversation." Gabirol wrote "according to the
genius of the place," and the genius happened to be one of piety—
and while this does not in any way invalidate the sincerity of his
poems, it does justify us in laying less importance upon his re-
ligious engrossment than we might have done otherwise. Especially
since we are told the additional fact that if the devotional lyric
was in vogue, it was Gabirol who contributed most to breaking


162 DEPOSING THE LOVE OF THE LORD
down this vogue, as he was perhaps the first writer of secular
Hebrew verse. "Where religion was in fashion," then, Gabirol
inaugurated a profane tradition, which indicates that his engross-
ment in the Lord was by no means a complete thing with him,
and may explain our feeling that Gabirol, in his proper business
of recalling that Vast Gulf between Self and Maker, conveys
less to us of God's greatness than of his own smallness.
On the whole, the poems in unrhymed translation are much
the better, and this is especially true of the long closing rhapsody
where the original, we learn from Mr Zangwill, was rhymed,
but very freely and irregularly; perhaps poet and translator both
have profited by this greater liberty. This, for instance, has some-
thing of the true Biblical ellipsis:
"Calling unto the void and it was cleft,
And unto existence and it was urged,
And unto the universe and it was spread out."
In this poem Gabirol could become eloquent over the astronomy
of his day. And perhaps one explanation of the paleness in most
of his poems is that too often he was accepting the fashion of
praising the anthropomorphic Creator, whereas in reality he already
had the modern touch of being more interested in the Creation.
In any case, it is only when he starts moving among the astral
bodies that we get any sense of splendour in his faith. For the
documents of his religious fervour seldom flower. The great bulk
of his lines are at best neutral; they are the mere labels of religious
experience, the signs without the persuasion, the typical rather
than the excellent.
One might draw a moral: The poet must possess the whole sin-
cerity of his subject if he is to produce art, and the poet must
have something beyond sincerity to produce art. The art-emotion
transcends the emotion of his subject-matter. Beginning with
engrossment in his material, the artist hunts the means to his ex-
pression, and these means in turn become hypertrophied into an
aim of themselves. But both steps are equally necessary, for the
invention of means is the result of engrossment in the material.
With Gabirol there was no invention to become hypertrophied;
the result is documentary truth without persuasion.
Kenneth Burke


A SHEPHERD OF LIGHT
What Is Man. By J. Arthur Thompson. 8vo. 33i
pages. G. P. Putnam's Sons. $2.
WE were lost somewhere in the wilds of Nebraska.
Perhaps this is an exaggeration, for we were only half an
hour away from Omaha. But it looked like the wilds, and it be-
haved like the wilds, for the blizzard howled merrily through the
double-barrelled windows of the Pullman car. Then something
happened. A piston-rod flew off or was blown off (the information
of the deck hand with the red flag and the frozen nose was some-
what hazy) and we came to a standstill.
By and by the room grew chilly. Then a fatherly conductor
came and said, "You had better all move to the last car," and told
us that they would cut off all the steam except in the last car and
would try to keep us warm until help came from the nearest station.
So we piled into the last car, a club affair of sorts, and we sat
and shivered. There were half a dozen passengers. Two women
who were going to spend Sunday with their relatives in a town sixty
miles away and who reached their happy destination exactly nine-
teen hours late. A few men who might be anything at all. One
cordial low-life who evidently was a member of the state legis-
lature (any of forty-eight state legislatures might do) and another
individual who even more evidently was a Minister of the Gospel.
It was impossible to decide his particular branch of the service.
But this much was certain; that at Nicaea he would have voted
the whole Athanasian ticket and would have pestered old Con-
stantine with letters urging him "to make an example of that traitor
Arius."
These were the dramatis personae.
The play that was to follow can be imagined by any sensible
citizen who has ever been stalled under similar circumstances.
Politician: This is a damned outrage on a cold night like this when
a man can't have a little something to warm himself with.
Minister: I thank Heaven that there is at least one civilized country


164 A SHEPHERD OF LIGHT
on this earth where decent people do not have to expose them-
selves to the sight of drunken men and women reeling down the
streets of their cities.
Politician: Lord help us, I never saw so many drunks in all my life
as to-day. Why last week in Chicago, I counted, actually
counted, thirty fellers with a jag between Dearborn Street
and . . .
Minister: Perhaps so. But the people I associate with thank their
Maker that the curse . . . et cetera, et cetera.
Now how and in what way I got into the dialogue I do not re-
member. I think that kindness impelled me to take a hand in the
debate. It was getting colder and colder all the time and the
Dominie was in danger of suffering physical damage from his
frozen and thirsty opponent. Besides, I had seen nothing for the
last two years, heard nothing, smelled nothing but Bibles. New
Bibles with maps of the modern Jerusalem. Musty old Dutch
Bibles with diagrams of Heaven and Hell. Bibles for which
people had been boiled in oil. Bibles for which whole races had
been driven into exile. Greek Bibles. Vulgates. Revised Bibles
and revised revised Bibles. Hundred percent Bibles in which
all the Jews were made to look like evangelistic ministers. Con-
cordances, concordances on concordances, and God knows what not.
This vast mass of theological literature had not been able to kill
an elementary feeling of kindness to my neighbours, and I waded
in to help the reverend gentleman.
This of course was a foolish thing to do; for within an incredibly
short space of time I was in the midst of the Homoousian marshes,
and then discovered to my surprise that the wet political opponent
of the dry clerical enthusiast was himself a fundamentalist of no
mean calibre, who instantly made common cause with his former
enemy to destroy the nefarious heresies which the eagle eye of
ye true believer is sure to detect in any sentence bearing a faint
resemblance to pure English grammar.
Within fifteen minutes we had reached the spot where this coun-
try held no place for men and women and children who doubted
one single iota or comma or semi-colon of the Book that knows no
Error. After an hour of this I got tired and played what I con-
sidered my trump card.


HENDRIK WILLEM VAN LOON 165
"How about Leviticus XI: 19?" I asked.
This was a mean thing to do.
Out of nine years spent within the confines of the Dutch Re-
formed Church and four years spent with the family of a clergy-
man and two years of devout administrations on the part of a
Walloon clergyman (a charming man of great learning) I have
retained a somewhat heterogeneous collection of Old Testament
facts. The New Testament came to interest me much later in life.
I hardly knew that it existed, for it did not interest those good
people whose creed was entirely based upon hate and horror, and
they only referred to it at the very end of the cathechism as some-
thing that had to be known (since it was an official part of the
Holy Books) but which in no way could be compared with those
pleasant ideals of murder, bloodshed, and divine wrath so beauti-
fully expounded and set forth in the chronicles of Jehovah and his
merry followers.
Nowadays I rarely have a chance to use my intimate knowledge
of Leviticus and Numbers. The people I play with have never
heard of either, and they would as soon read William Dean Howells
as Moses. But I still can recite a number of texts at the most in-
opportune moments, and I hold them in store to confound mine
enemies.
Leviticus did its work as per usual.
Neither Athanasius nor Draco had ever heard of the particular
verse to which I referred.
I played my advantage for a further gain.
"If every iota and comma and statement in the Old Testament
were true, every statement in Leviticus must be true too?" (It was
utterly childish, but was there ever a debate of this sort that was
not childish?)
"Every statement in God's word is the truth, and those who
doubt will bear the consequence," quoted the pastor.
"And they had better go back where they came from," amended
his partner, who had detected the Dutch accent.
"Even if Jehovah slipped up on his ornithology?"
"I don't know what you mean," said he of the law, surlily.
"He means," chanted the man of the cloth, who was beginning
to see a dim light, "that God there told the faithful about cer-
tain birds they must not eat."


166 A SHEPHERD OF LIGHT
"Yes," answered the heretic, "and among those birds was the
bat!"
"Well, what of it? Ain't it some sort of a bird? It looks
like one. It has got wings!" shouted the hope of the democratic
party.
"Not exactly," came from clerical headquarters. "Not ex-
actly. Our modern bat is not a bird. We all know that. But
if God said that it was a bird, have we anything to prove that in
those ancient days, the bat was not a bird?"
Let me spare you the rest.
I only needed these few Nebraskan recollections as a text for
the sermon inspired by Professor Thompson's work.
It would be an arrogance to write a mere blurb of this book,
or mention the contents briefly and discourse with learned mien
upon things about which I know remarkably little.
It is the sort of book you want to send to an intelligent boy of
seventeen who has just gone through the mill of the usual boarding-
school and who, in sheer doubt and spiritual desperation, is on
the verge of becoming a very unpleasant little cynic. He knows
vaguely that he has been lied to. He cannot quite follow the line
of reasoning which has been employed to "convert" him. He needs
something tangible to explain the modern world of which he is
so eager a part. Give him Thompson and let him alone. The
cure will be perfect.
But there is something else which I want to say about this book.
Thompson is only one of many. He writes better than the majority
of his biological confreres. He popularizes difficult questions in
the best sense of the word. He gives us what the French call a
"haute vulgarisation." But the material he uses is the familiar
material which our biological and zoological and chemical and
physical laboratories produce in ever increasing quantity.
It just happens that this book draws attention to the labours of
the men who at starvation wages do the real work of the world.
We in the East hardly know or understand the difficulties of the
scientific pioneers in many Western states.
We read about Bryan and laugh, and say "poor nut" or words to
that effect and let it go at that.
We see in the paper that the Rev. So-and-so has smashed the devil
of evolution on the public platforms of the great and glorious town


HENDRIK WILLEM VAN LOON 167
of Minneapolis and that the rafters have resounded with the al-
leluias of the faithful. This amuses us greatly and we light an-
other cigarette and forget about it. But the thing is a real menace.
There will be endless little libraries (and big ones too) that will
regard a book like this as Anathema.
The people that ought to read it will not be allowed to see it.
The booksellers of the land, having (like our judges) taken
upon themselves the gratuitous role of "Censor Morum," will write
indignant letters to the publisher and will ask how a reliable house
like Putnam's could print such terrible stuff, and they will refuse to
handle the offending volume.
The entire organization of the Homines Obscurantissimi (who
like the poor are ever with us) will be hastily mobilized and will
pass the word that will condemn the book to failure among those
who need it most.
This will be done quickly and unostentatiously.
The shepherds of Ignorance are faithful in Zion.
And Zion is not merely the name of a funny little town on distant
Lake Michigan.
Hendrik Willem van Loon


THE MAN WHO DIED TWICE
The Man Who Died Twice. By Edwin Arlington
Robinson. 12mo. jg pages. The Macmillan Com-
pany. $1.25.
THROUGHOUT Mr Robinson's work, one feels his admira-
tion for "courage that is not all flesh recklessness." This em-
phasis upon the predominance of the soul's conflicts over those of
the intellect, is conspicuous in The Man Who Died Twice. A
musician, gigantically endowed—who has "mistaken hell for para-
dise," since he is not
". . . the sanguine ordinary
That sees no devils and so controls itself,
Having nothing in especial to control"—
has died, but not completely. Brought back to life, he finds in
moral triumph "more than he had lost," and gives what is left of
his reviving genius to those who have reclaimed him. An early
friend descried him among
"The caps and bonnets of a singing group
That loudly fought for souls,
. . . beating a bass drum
And shouting Hallelujah with a fervor
At which ... no man smiled."
Reserved though he is, and non-committal in respects in which
the psychoanalysis-infected poet is not, Mr Robinson is entirely
explicit in trusting the reader with his beliefs, tastes, and judge-
ments; and his intuitively dramatic expanding of a theme carries
conviction even in respect to "the success of failure," a subject
which he repeatedly presents, and without collapse of interest
develops at length as in The Man Who Died Twice. In it as in his
other work, the triumph of truth is galvanically thrilling. In its


MARIANNE MOORE 169
pursuit, he declares, you may not untroubled enjoy "the perennial
weed Selfishness": "No doubt you call it Love"; on the other hand,
"hell shall have . . . No laughter to vex down your loyalty."
His inability to think selfishly with blind aboriginal zeal, differen-
tiates him from the sybarite or mere connoisseur; and in this basic
spiritual sensitiveness, he recalls Hardy, although one feels no
consanguinity of dogma between these poets, Hardy's tenacious
incredulity and Mr Robinson's persistently tentative credulity being
obversely helpful. It is in an extra-normal sense of responsibility
that one feels a resemblance—in the capacity for suffering and the
incapacity intentionally of inflicting it; in a sense of "the eternal
tragedies" that render as Mr Robinson says, "hope and hopeless-
ness akin": this fidelity to experience leading him to visualize
"sunlit labyrinths of pain" as it has actuated Hardy to uphold
in his "pleasing agonies and painful delights" with titanic inevi-
tableness, a concept of romance which in its superiority to actuality,
is surely deathless.
Mr Robinson deplores "the brain-waste of impatience," and as
a concomitant of deliberate, searching scholarship, we perceive in
his work, the dominance without protest, of humility. With an
acuteness of perception and of speech which are the attributes of
a truly sentient view of life, he shows us Fernando Nash, now "dis-
integrated, lapsed and shrunken,"
"The king who lost his crown before he had it,
And saw it melt in hell,"
"Pounding a drum and shouting for the lost."
Yet Mr Robinson seems not to be immune from the aggressive
superficiality of critics who share least, the basic quality of his
reserve; and at a time when
"The ways of unimaginative men
Are singularly fierce . . ."
wise craftsmanship must suffer not the ridicule but the ridiculousness
of final dictum as unsubstantial as a Hollywood substitute for
mediaeval masonry when it affirms his writing to be "aurad with


170 THE MAN WHO DIED TWICE
the dim halo of futility"; as it must suffer also, the appraisal which
resembles praise. As Mr Robinson has said,
"The dower of ignorance is to distrust
All that it cannot feel,"
and one recalls with gratitude Professor Saintsbury's good sense in
refusing to place posterity's verdict upon the work of living writers.
Mr Robinson's work is completely self-vindicating, however, in
its sensitive, self-corroborating, rhetorically measured, elegant ar-
ticulateness. It is true that in a capacious treatment of large
themes which embody more than one climax, parts of the design
must be subordinate and the necessary line which is not emotionally
inevitable, is sometimes a difficulty. In the poems Merlin and
Lancelot, the reader's imagined familiarity with the subject-matter
puts the author at the disadvantage of being more than adequately
splendid, but Mr Robinson is at all times a poet—at all times cir-
cumstantially exact, the actuality of his treatment of characters in
the Bible and in history making it difficult to think of him as re-
stricted to one place or to an epoch. His intuitively aesthetic use
of experience is notably embodied in the fluently sustained, aris-
tocratic manipulating of what passes for casual talk in the play,
Van Zorn; and in The Man Who Died Twice, there is the actual
sound of
". . . those drums of death, which, played by Death
Himself, were beating sullenly alone."
This tale of Fernando Nash with its "flaming rain," and the "com-
petent plain face of Bach" as its presiding influence, exhibits that
personal attitude of Mr Robinson's—of care for humanity and for
art which makes his work stand out with a self-sustaining stiffness
which is not mere exterior North American correctness, and gives it
an aspect of solitary, mystical security of possession. Captain
Craig's biographer says: "I felt the feathery touch of something
wrong," and in a day of much shallowness, muddy technique, and
self-defended mystery, one is grateful for this highly developed
obedience to a sensibility which is a matter not only of the nerves,
but of the whole man.
Marianne Moore


BRIEFER MENTION
Green Shoots, by Paul Morand, introduction by A. B. Walkley, preface by
Marcel Proust, translated by H. I.Woolf (i2mo, 152 pages; Seltzer.'$1.75).
In these three portraits of women, we find not to be improved upon bits
of actuality, and a graceful, seven-zephyred, corybantic suavity of inter-
pretation which could be, in itself, impeccable—but does not M Morand
owe it to the docile reader to discriminate more pedagogically between fact
and fiction? In the preface, Mr Walkley is hospitably, undogmatically
genial, and the litterateur will find in Marcel Proust's introduction, a
comment on Flaubert, which he will prize.
The Comely Lass, by Thomas Moult (i2mo, 312 pages; Knopf: $2.50)
although technically tragic, is really an idyll of the Yorkshire coast and
the Pentshire moors. It should be read in leisurely fashion, fully to savour
each quaint and right word, to explore each whimsical nook along the
firm road of its simple but comprehensive development. The book bespeaks
not only a fine skill in story-telling, but a tender care for the understanding
rendition of human nature, and a long-lived, brooding wonder at the nature
of the sea. Like a piece of handmade furniture or pottery, it is simple in
its essence, yet so rare in this day that its effect is almost exotic and wholly
delightful.
Yvette and Other Stories, by Guy de Maupassant, from The Collected
Novels and Stories of Guy de Maupassant, translated and edited by Ernest
Boyd (i2mo, 251 pages; Knopf: $2). Lovers of the great Gallic genius
whose art is so full of its own biting candour will feel nothing but
gratitude to Mr Alfred A. Knopf for arranging for the translation and
publication of the complete works of their master. An attitude of mind
that has felt the influence of Guy de Maupassant is exactly what is
wanted in this country where more than half of the population is
studiously trained to deceive itself.
Imperturbe, by Elliot H. Paul (i2mo, 313 pages; Knopf: $2.50). To one
who happened to skip the intervening step (a "war-novel" it would seem)
Mr Paul's forward-march from his first to his third novel is tremendous.
The material is held in hand, firmly; the writing is specific, the structure
clear. All of these things indicate a coming writer; why they do not
proclaim an arrived one is easy to see. Mr Paul sinks a case of syphilis
into the centre of his book; wisely omitting the details of nausea, he yet
fails to justify it in relation to events and characters. It does not do what
it is intended to do in shaping the character of the hero. There is also a
certain amount of purely theoretical "character-work" in the few women
in the book. There are odd echoes of the thoughts of S. Dedelus. These
are the weaknesses of a book which is mature in theme and strong in
execution. That is not so bad.


172 BRIEFER MENTION
Atlas and Beyond, by Elizabeth J. Coatsworth, woodcuts by Harry Cimino.
(i2mo, 61 pages; Harper: $2). Feeling for rhythm is apparent in these
poems—the author's own, and feeling for that of others; frequently, how-
ever, instinctiveness vanishes, the insistent weightiness of enunciation
which replaces it, not resulting in "spherical harmony." We have the
enticing minutiae of appearance and of behaviour, of the lower animals;
in other of the verses, imagination which consistently, always opulently,
and often contagiously, assembles the stage properties of resplendent visi-
bility; pleasure in compelling as complements, symbols so contradictory as
Pan's pipe and the crucifix; a clandestine thrill in the contemplation of
forbidden fruit; and a bronze-breasted, steel-gauntleted voluptuousness
which is not always alluring.
Poems, by J. E. Spingarn (i2mo, 143 pages; Harcourt, Brace: $2). Mr.
Spingarn's reputation as a critic makes it difficult to understand why he has
not been more exacting in the case of his own output as a verse-writer.
And yet the human personality revealed in these simple rhymes is so
disarming that one is tempted to wish that the secret of this mysterious
thing could be obtained by just being a gallant sympathetic liberty-loving
gentleman! But, alas, it cannot; and while we are left with nothing but
respect for a writer who could feel as Mr Spingarn felt when he wrote
so indignantly on the death of Harry Thurston Peck, it still remains that
what we call poetry is a rarer and more difficult matter than even the
most righteous and most chivalrous emotions.
Sonnets and Verse, by Hilaire Belloc (8vo, 166 pages; McBride: $2.75).
It is good to have under one hand and between two covers the best and the
worst of this dogmatic English-Frenchman. Does this swashbuckling cock-
sureness, this self-conscious bravura, spring from the absence of one clear,
solid, honest, autochthonous root? It would almost seem so, when we note
the unctuous, mock-manly, "we-could-an'-if-we-would" tone of the verses
addressed to Balliol Men and to Sussex Beer. It is the same with these
brave "Ballades," bristling with pikes and halberds and pseudo-mediaeval
gonfalons. Too many cults, like too many cooks, spoil the poetic broth.
And there is Rome, too. A treble dose of tradition has proved too much
for Mr Belloc. It has gone to his head, instead of remaining quietly in
his blood.
Prophet and Fool, by Louis Golding (i2mo, 121 pages; Dutton: $2.50).
Our world is factory-built instead of being the hand-woven product we
should prefer. When poets brood over the contrast, they take various
attitudes, though most of them reject the real world altogether, retreating
into pale fancies. A few can transmute it into dreams of a more courageous
sort. Mr Golding follows neither of these extreme courses, but instead
writes about the contrast between the ideal and the real. Even his titles,
like Shepherd Whistling Ragtime, and Sunset Over Suburb, contain the
two horns of his dilemma. Other of his poems describe conventional
landscapes or protest against the war, and these can be labelled more
anonymously as Georgian verse.


BRIEFER MENTION 173
My University Days, by Maxim Gorki (i2mo, 327 pages; Boni & Live-
right: $3). Admirably translated, this rambling story of Gorki's early
days plunges us into that mysterious Russian life that seems in some
strange way, in spite of the perverse violences, to be so relaxed and lenient,
so spacious, so easy, so indulgent! It is a life that with its gardens of rain-
soaked raspberry-canes, its windy streets, its grocery shops, its bakers' shops,
its Volga barges and fishermen, its students and girls of pleasure, and
above all, with its racy, shameless, interminable philosophizing, has a
quality unlike anything else in the world. The vividness of the human
vignettes limned in this book is as astonishing as the sturdy and catholic
tolerance with which its author relishes every aspect of mortal frailty.
The art of Literature learns its business here under the lash of Life; and
the margins of beauty are boldly thrust back, so as to include within their
compass "everything that hath breath."
Myself When Young, Confessions, by Alec Waugh (i2mo, 259 pages;
Brentano: $2.5'o). When Mr Alec Waugh as a young boy put on
record his criticism of the English Public School System in a book
entitled The Loom of Youth, one felt that the clever vivacity of his
temperament might help him at some future date to become a writer
of real worth. It would indeed be a sanguine man who could still cherish
expectations of this kind after reading the present volume, made up of
reminiscences and meditations that reveal a mind devoid of taste, devoid
of distinction, and devoid of understanding. From a literary point of
view the book is trash from beginning to end.
The Failure, by Giovanni Papini, translated by Virginia Pope (i2mo, 326
pages; Harcourt, Brace: $2). This is a remarkable book, a striking book;
but a book that drives the exhausted reader away from itself into the most
opposite temperamental camp. One turns from this fidgety, fuming, fever-
ish subjectivism to anything "that loves the sweet air." One turns from
it with a vow to read nothing, to the end of one's days, but large, patient,
friendly, ironical, classic works of art! But it is well that this itching
boil of megalomania should draw to a head. Papini's Life of Himself
is piquant sauce for his Life of Christ. Unorthodoxy—Orthodoxy—they
ply the same splashing oar "dans cette galere." Fire-works for fire, ver-
mouth for wine, cuckoo's-spit for the dew of the morning, the turgid
pragmatism of Giovanni Papini, whether in its fits of blasphemy or in its
fits of faith, has nothing in it either of tolerance or illumination.
Looking at Life, by Floyd Dell (i2mo, 312 pages; Knopf: $2.50). This
book is a collection of occasional essays. Mr Floyd Dell represents that
curious phenomenon, so characteristically American, of a high-brow popular
writer. We feel that as a leader for Rand School intellectuals he does
admirable service. He is an experienced journalist with a facile style
and his interests extend to all the more pressing problems of the present
day. We enjoy reading these essays not so much for the light that they
throw on these hard matters as for a certain elfish, pucklike quality that
we find in them.


174 BRIEFER MENTION
Tapestries of the Lowlands, by Heinrich Gobel, translated from the
German by Robert West (4to, illus., 97 pages; Brentano: $15). Only
the Germans do these things well. This work, the first of four huge
volumes on tapestries, would have been impossible without prodigious
patience and erudition. Everything that has ever been known relating
to the history and technique of weaving is amassed herein, and supple-
mented by extensive and beautiful illustrations. Inasmuch as Gobel
designedly avoids aesthetic issues, the layman will find the book rather
laborious reading, but to the specialist, antiquarian, and those interested
in the development of an art now practically lost, it will be invaluable.
The Story of the Renaissance, by Sidney Dark (i2mo, 203 pages; Doran:
$1.25). To add to the vast literature of the Renaissance without a
definite point of view is almost an effrontery. Mr Dark has not even
the saving grace of understanding the opinions of others. His book is a
pedantic summary of superficial events; it is devoid of scholarship, imagina-
tion, and spiritual insight, and its excessive condensation is as undramatic
as an abridged dictionary. Doubtless the work will be immediately adopted
as a text-book for American students.
A Plea for Monogamy, by Wilfrid Lay, Ph.D. (i2mo, 305 pages; Boni
& Liveright: $4). In this inaccurately named book, Dr Lay appears less
as a psychologist than as an expert in the sexual aspects of matrimony. The
book may promote general happiness, though many of his proposals seem too
radical to be widely adopted. Since the details of this relation must remain
a matter for individual adjustment, the chief interest of his theory is its
possible consequence to society, its tendency to retard or to promote what
we value as civilization. In this respect its value is questionable. The
school of psychoanalysts to which Dr Lay belongs finds nothing so glam-
orous as normality; they resent and obscure the fact that human develop-
ment has been well served by unhappy or abnormal men and women,
sneering, for example, at Leonardo's "infantilism." This absurdity alien-
ates many intelligent men, particularly artists, from psychoanalysis. The
cause is also weakened by such vulgar, redundant rhetoric as that in which
Dr Lay expresses, or more exactly, adumbrates his thought.
The Achievement of Greece, by William Chase Greene (8vo, 334 pages;
Harvard University Press: $3.50). "The ancient Greeks within a few
hundred years passed through an amazing variety of experiences that
raised most of the human problems that men have ever had to meet."
This concentrated history Professor Greene undertakes to review and
criticize, his contribution being less in revelations than in high moral
fervour and the earnestness of his attempts at just values. It is possible
that every scheme of living has some strain in its texture which is "immoral"
to other schemes, yet the author would have us incorporate only those
Grecian traits which are European virtues, while we must shun all things
which are vices to us although they were not so to the Greeks. Such
exhortations fall dissatisfactorily between the useful simplicity of maxims
and the imposing complexity of systems.


TWO LETTERS
42 Avenue de Parc Montsouris
Paris 14e
June 12, 1924.
Sir:
The other day I saw by chance the June Dial. It is true that
my interest in painting is not exclusive; I am even more inter-
ested in psychology. I therefore should like to know how you
come to write things like that about me. Of course, at first
reading I was annoyed but then the wonder grew, and grew,
how any one could make so big an ass of himself as you did. I
suppose you must have believed that when you said you recalled
something that you actually did "recall" something, but how
comes it to pass that any one with such a fantastically unveracious
memory as yours does not take reasonable precautions to prevent
fatuity. It is true that any one whose unaided mind could in
recollection change Vollard's story about Renoir into the idiotic
farrago you attribute to me cannot pretend that mind to be of
very good quality, but one would expect some limit. I cannot
imagine how you came by your "recollection". I don't remember
ever to have met you, and all that I have written about Renoir
was in an article in the N. R. some years ago. (By the way,
if you can do better go to it.) You offer a sheer monstrosity of
recollection. I should like to be favored with some items of
an explanation. If you are as accommodating as you are absurd
you will favor me with a reply.
Yours truly,
Leo Stein
The Editor of The Dial.


176 TWO LETTERS
Edgartown,
Massachusetts.
July 7th, 1924.
Leo Stein, Esq.
42 Avenue de Parc Montsouris,
Paris 14c
Sir:
Your letter has been forwarded to me here.
I had the honour to be introduced to you by Mr Paul Rosenfeld
at the Yale Club in New York City. It is wholly natural you
should not remember ever to have met me. Although you and
I and Mr Rosenfeld dined and passed the evening alone together,
the three or four years which intervened between that occasion
and your odd chancing upon The Dial would explain adequately
this lapse in memory. Furthermore, I came to that dinner as a
young man of no importance invited to meet an eminent critic
of the arts: you were aware of the extraordinary gulf between
us, and it is appropriate you should have ignored and forgotten
your inferior. I, oppositely, came to this occasion having read
much to admire, and I remained hearing much to wonder at. Nor
have I forgotten meeting Leo Stein. After dinner we sat together
in the lounge and you there not only illuminated Renoir and your
own attitude to the arts in general, but also contributed to our
evening a quite masterful analysis (and here I speak without
irony) of the obscure and agreeably complicated causation of The
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. I admired your noble
and Mosaic mind: I admired your noble and Mosaic presence:
and upon that night the furrows of my memory lay open to many
weighted words. There, and from you, I gratefully learned the
right usage of the excellent word "somatic" (you will perceive
that I, like Picasso, was "badly educated"); there, and from you,
I ungratefully learned, in its blank wholeness, what the intellect,
in your sense of that word, sees, and what the intellect, in your
sense of that word, does not see, in art and in life.
Lest you imagine I fabricate (for why should you recall whereof
you discoursed upon one night from out the thousand other
nights through which your heavy-shotted eloquence has wrought
the indicative period?)—lest you imagine I fabricate, allow me to


SCOFIELD THAYER 177
try to recall the occasion to you by the mention of a merely concrete
circumstance. At the close of the evening Mr Rosenfeld and I
escorted you across Vanderbilt Avenue into the Grand Central
Station and up to the gateway of your train. There you were
met by friends and we took leave of you. I understood you were
travelling up the Hudson for a visit with friends in the country.
You style my reference to the anecdote you told us of Renoir
an "idiotic farrago." Allow me to quote my own sentence:
"I recall Mr Stein's anecdote of how another critic sent Auguste
Renoir the numbers of a certain journal containing a series of
articles by that critic upon Renoir, and of how these journals
were later discovered, uncut, serving to prop the model's stand;
and I recall how Mr Stein drew from these data the logical con-
clusion that Renoir was not a man of intellect—'in no serious
sense a thinker.'"
I was not in this place interested in narrating in detail either
your account or M Vollard's account of the incident in point:
I was interested solely in making quite clear just how much sig-
nificance was to be attached to your assertion in the pages of The
New Republic that any attribution of "intellectuality" to Pablo
Picasso was "rubbish." I felt that by showing how you judged
of the "intellectuality" of another very great artist the not always
over-sophisticated readers of that always indispensable journal
might better know how to take your ungenerous judgement upon
one whom I look upon as the chief ornament of our time; that
they might learn to read unreservedly to admire the imposing
carriage of your own massive intellect, that they might learn to
read unreservedly to relish the deliberate imagination of him who
wrote:
"His dark brilliant eyes were the most absorptive that I have ever
seen, and I wondered at times, when he was looking at a drawing
or an engraving that anything should be left upon the paper."
—but that they might not be misled to attribute either critical
verity or aesthetic discernment to the judgement of no matter
how able a logician, of no matter how brilliant a rhetorician


178 TWO LETTERS
(both of these in themselves good and valuable titles) upon one
whose logic is dynamite, upon one whose rhetoric is the rhetoric
of the great poets.
Collating, in the light of your pertinent letter, my memory of
your own agreeably annotated version of the indignity (or rather,
I should say, high honour) offered La Revue Blanche, with the
finely meagre and significant version of M Ambroise Vollard, I
wonder at this term "idiotic farrago" applied so definitively to my
own I had thought merely illustrative, innocent enough, and, in
the argument, surely appropriate telescoping of an incident I had
mentioned solely to point a moral. When I, for my part, consider
that it is to be presumed you acquired the story from some more
"interior" source than from this monumental and every-public-
schoolboy-knows volume upon The Life and the Work of Pierre-
Auguste Renoir, it would never occur to me to put my finger upon
petty discrepancies in these two good stories of the same "good" in-
cident. Surely Renoir himself would have preferred some license
for his narrator. You may still retort that your story was Vollard's
story, that you did get it from Vollard's book, that you told it, word
for word, as it stands for all to read, dramatic and succinct, upon
page number ten.1 I can only reply that my memory of the
evening I met you appears to me to be better than your own; and,
in particular, that I recall discussing precisely this story and
your own astounding employment of it to illustrate the absence
of intellectuality in modern art with Mr Paul Rosenfeld as, toward
midnight, we walked together out of the Grand Central Station
and along Park Avenue and over Murray Hill and down to
where Park Avenue becomes Fourth. But anyhow, if you did
give exactly Vollard's version, in what slightest respect does my
foreshortening of this incident concern, let alone negate, the point
1 For the benefit of such itinerant subscribers to The Dial as do not have
their Vollard at hand, I quote the passage entire:
"J'observai, pres de la chaise du modele, une pile de numeros d'une Revue,
ay ant encore leurs bandes. C'etait la Revue Blanche, une Revue de 'Jeunes',
tres appreciee du public, et oil je me rappelais avoir lu maint eloge de Part
impressionniste.
—moi: Voila une publication bien interessante!
—renoir: Ma foi, out/ c'est mon ami Nathanson qui me Venvoie; mais
je vous avouerai ne Vavoir jamais ouverte.
Comme j'etendais la main, Renoir vivement:
—Ne derangez rien, c'est dispose pour appuyer le pied de mon modele."


SCOFIELD THAYER 179
I made? The point that the cumbersome thing which you, with
the bias of the unenlightened scientist, conceive of under, and
designate by, this word "intellectuality" is not at all either what
the intelligent man in the street means by "intellect" (although
you appear to employ this latter word with the same ungainly
significance you attach to the, in form at least, to you, no doubt,
more congenial word "intellectuality") or what a painter who
antedated by some centuries him whom you so characteristically
call "the chief of the modern clan" meant when he stated, with the
somewhat autocratic absolutism of the Jesus Christ of his own
Last Judgement:
"Io rispondo, che si dipinge col ciervello et non con le mani."
It was not lack of intellect of Buonarroti's kind which made
Pierre-Auguste Renoir more intent upon his own canvas and upon
his own model than upon the expository pages of the howsoever
estimable Revue Blanche. Nor is it due to any lack of this brand of
intellect in the genius of the painter Pablo Picasso which makes his
work for you, unhappy man, "a wilderness of foolery and waste."
In those vigorously penned pages in The New Republic you
refrained from use of the words "egoism" and "cowardice." Yet
surely these are the frank words which had best summed up your
charges. Before again so unjustly accusing, might you not take
counsel from a young man, Jean Cocteau? Of his friend, Pablo
Picasso, he has written:
"Son coeur est mal connu. La familiarite maladroite des uns
rencontre un mur. Quelquefois, il abonde paresseusement dans
le sens de la sottise des autres. Cette politique royale le fera
convaincre d'egoisme et de lachete par un temoin superficiel.
"Mais ici je laisse la parole a ses amis anciens. Consultez Ger-
trude Stein, Guillaume Apollinaire, Max Jacob, Andre Salmon,
Maurice Raynal. Vous trouverez chez eux le materiel propre a
rebatir les belles heures detruites."
Since for the moment my enthusiasm and attention are almost
wholly engaged by the contemporary scene, I cannot just now
accept your happy proposal that I should write in competition


180 TWO LETTERS
with your own important essay upon Pierre-Auguste Renoir; inter-
esting and novel as the competition you propose could no doubt
be made; especially inasmuch as I imagine it would be discovered,
at the finish, that we had been racing in precisely opposite
directions.
You will, I am sure, be glad to know that your own interest
in psychology is nowadays shared by a great many people; among
them myself. In this connexion perhaps you will permit me to
recall (or perhaps I should say "believe" I recall) the most dis-
tinguished of Harvard professors of my time confessing, wittily,
his lack of interest in psychology: "There is no psychology of
love!" I am informed that under Harvard Bridge the water no
longer materially flows, but under a good many other bridges, since
that time, considerable water has, howsoever yellowly, churned on.
One is aware of those very desolate bridges which span, in a
capital now also, if differently, desolate, the everything-but-blue
Danube. One is likewise aware that just here, among us in New
York, the founder of a refreshingly less "yellow" and less
"desolate" school of psychology to-day draws a business-salary not
equalled by even that most distinguished of Harvard professors.
. . . But I have already called to your attention the richness of
the contemporary American advertising field.
Yet I do resent the manners of those psychologists who march
their way into the delicate and complex realms of art. Their
attitude toward the artist I have found to be, generally speaking,
that of the vivisectionist to the cat. And they swagger. And
they always get the stick by the wrong end. I also resent the
free slinging of psychological epithets and innuendoes as a rough
and ready means of settling any difference, of whatsoever nature,
which may, in our time, arise. I therefore resent the second and
third sentences of your letter to myself. I therefore find myself
entitled to call to your attention that although your letter is
otherwise typewritten the words "in painting" are written in above
the typewritten line. It would appear that in typing your letter
you missed these words. It would appear that we have auspiciously
uncovered what you and I, in our indispensable jargon, denominate
"a blocking." A "blocking" which might explain much.
Yours faithfully,
Scofield Thayer






/
From Living Art
WOMAN WITH EWER. BY DUNCAN GRANT


THE

DIAL
SEPTEMBER 1924
THE BOUNTY OF SWEDEN
A Meditation
BY WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
THIRTY years ago I visited Paris for the first time. The
Cabbalist, Macgregor Mathers, said, "Write your impressions
at once for you will never see Paris clearly again." I can remember
that I had roused him to this by certain deductions from the way
a woman at the other end of the Cafe moved her hands over the
dominoes. I might have seen that woman in London or in Dublin,
but it would not have occurred to me to discover in her every kind
of rapacity, the whole being of the legendary harpy. "Is not all
style," as Synge once said to me, "born out of the shock of new
material V
I am about to write as in a kind of diary impressions of Stock-
holm which must get whatever value they have from excitement,
from the presence before the eyes of what is strange, mobile, and
disconnected.
II
Early in November a journalist called to show me a Reuter
paragraph saying that the Nobel Prize would probably be con-
ferred upon Herr Mann, the distinguished novelist, or upon myself.
I did not know that the Swedish Academy had ever heard my
name. I tried to escape an interview by talking of Rabindranath
Tagore, of his gift to his School of the seven thousand pounds
awarded to him, and almost succeeded in dismissing the paragraph


182 THE BOUNTY OF SWEDEN
from my memory. Herr Mann has many readers, is a famous
novelist with his fixed place in the world, and so in every way
fitted for such an honour; whereas I am but a writer of plays
which are acted by players with a literary mind, for a few eve-
nings, and I have altered them so many times that I doubt the
value of every passage. I am more confident of my lyrics, or of
some few amongst them, but then I have got into the habit of
recommending, or commending myself to general company for
anything rather than my gift of lyric writing, which concerns
such a meagre troop.
Every now and then, when something has stirred my imagina-
tion, I begin talking to myself. I speak in my own person and
dramatize myself, very much as I have seen mad old women do
upon the Dublin quays, and sometimes detect myself speaking
and moving as if I were still young, or walking perhaps like an
old man with fumbling steps. Occasionally I write out what I
have said in verse, and generally for no better reason than because
I remember that I have written no verse for a long time. I do not
think of my soliloquie