ontends that the world as it seems to be
is self-contradictory, and therefore illusory, while the real world,
since it must be logically self-consistent, is bound to have certain
characteristics of a surprising kind. It cannot be in time or space,
it cannot contain a variety of interrelated things, it cannot contain
separate selves, or even that degree of division between subject and
object which is involved in knowing. It consists therefore of a
single Absolute, timelessly engaged in something more analogous to
1 See e. g. Santayana's Egotism in German Philosophy.


274 PHILOSOPHY IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
feeling than to thinking or willing. Our sublunary world is all
illusion, and what seems to happen in it does not really matter.
This doctrine ought to destroy morality, but morality is tempera-
mental and defies logic. Hegelians in fact urge as their basic moral
principle that we ought to behave as if the Hegelian philosophy
were true; but they do not notice that if it were true it would not
matter how we behave.
The attack upon this philosophy came from two sides. On the
one side were the logicians, who pointed to fallacies in Hegel, and
contended that relations and plurality, space and time, are in fact
not self-contradictory. On the other side were those who disliked
the regimentation and orderliness involved in a world created by
logic; of these the chief were William James and Bergson. The
two lines of attack were not logically inconsistent, except in some
of their accidental manifestations, but they were temperamentally
different, and were inspired by different kinds of knowledge. More-
over their appeal was quite different: the appeal of the one was
academic, that of the other was human. The academic appeal
argued that Hegelianism was false; the human appeal argued that
it was disagreeable. Naturally the latter had more popular success.
In the English-speaking world, the greatest influence in the over-
throw of German idealism was William James—not as he appears
in his Psychology, but as he came to be known through the series
of small books which were published in the last years of his life
and after his death. In an article published in Mind so long ago
as 1884, reprinted in the posthumous volume Essays in Radical
Empiricism, he sets out his temperamental bias with extraordinary
charm:
"Since we are in the main not sceptics, we might go on and
frankly confess to each other the motives for our several faiths. I
frankly confess mine—I cannot but think that at bottom they are of
an aesthetic and not of a logical sort. The 'through-and-through'
universe seems to suffocate me with its infallible impeccable all-per-
vasiveness. Its necessity, with no possibilities; its relations, with
no subjects, make me feel as if I had entered into a contract with
no reserved rights, or rather as if I had to live in a large seaside
boarding-house with no private bedroom in which I might take
refuge from the society of the place. I am distinctly aware, more-


BERTRAND RUSSELL 275
over, that the old quarrel of sinner and pharisee has something to
do with the matter. Certainly, to my personal knowledge, all
Hegelians are not prigs, but I somehow feel as if all prigs ought
to end, if developed, by becoming Hegelians. There is a story of
two clergymen asked by mistake to conduct the same funeral. One
came first and had got no farther than 'I am the Resurrection and
the Life' when the other entered. 7 am the Resurrection and the
Life,' cried the latter. The 'through-and-through' philosophy, as
it actually exists, reminds many of us of that clergyman. It seems
too buttoned-up and white-chokered and clean-shaven a thing to
speak for the vast slow-breathing unconscious Kosmos with its
dread abysses and its unknown tides."
I think it may be wagered that no one except William James
has ever lived who would have thought of comparing Hegelianism
to a seaside boarding-house. In 1884, this article had no effect, be-
cause Hegelianism was still on the up grade, and philosophers had
not learnt to admit that their temperaments had anything to do
with their opinions. In 1912 (the date of the reprint) the atmos-
phere had changed through many causes—among others the influ-
ence of William James upon his pupils. I cannot claim to have
known him more than superficially except from his writings, but it
seems to me that one may distinguish three strands in his nature,
all of which contributed to form his outlook. Last in time, but
first in its philosophical manifestations, was the influence of his
training in physiology and medicine, which gave him a scientific
and slightly materialistic bias as compared to purely literary phil-
osophers who derived their inspiration from Plato, Aristotle, and
Hegel. This strand dominates his Psychology except in a few
crucial passages, such as his discussion of free will. The second
element in his philosophical make-up was a mystical and religious
bias inherited from his father and shared with his brother. This
inspired The Will to Believe and his interest in psychical research.
Thirdly there was an attempt, made with all the earnestness of a
New England conscience, to exterminate the natural fastidiousness
which he also shared with his brother, and replace it by democratic
sentiment a la Walt Whitman. The fastidiousness is visible in
the above quotation, where he expresses horror of a boarding-house
with no private bedroom (which Whitman would have loved).


276 PHILOSOPHY IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
The wish to be democratic is visible in the claim that he is a sinner,
not a pharisee. Certainly he was not a pharisee, but he probably
committed as few sins as any man who ever lived. On this point
he fell short of his usual modesty.
The best people usually owe their excellence to a combination
of qualities which might have been supposed incompatible, and so
it was in the case of James, whose importance was greater than
was thought by most of his contemporaries. He advocated prag-
matism as a method of presenting religious hopes as scientific hy-
potheses; and he adopted the revolutionary view that there is no
such thing as "consciousness," as a way of overcoming the opposi-
tion between mind and matter without giving predominance to
either. In these two parts of his philosophy he had different allies:
Schiller and Bergson as regards the former, the new realists as re-
gards the latter. Only Dewey, among eminent men, was with him
on both issues. The two parts have different histories and affilia-
tions, and must be considered separately.
James' The Will to Believe dates from 1897; his Pragmatism
from 1907. Schiller's Humanism and Dewey's Studies in Logical
Theory both date from 1903. Throughout the early years of the
twentieth century the philosophical world was excited about prag-
matism; then Bergson outbid it in appealing to the same tastes.
The three founders of pragmatism differ greatly inter se; we may
distinguish James, Schiller, and Dewey as respectively its religious,
literary, and scientific protagonists—for, though James was many-
sided, it was chiefly his religious side which found an outlet in prag-
matism. But let us ignore these differences and try to present the
doctrine as a unity.
The basis of the doctrine is a certain kind of scepticism. Tradi-
tional philosophy professed to be able to prove the fundamental
doctrines of religion; its opponents professed to be able to disprove
them, or at least, like Spencer, to prove that they could not be
proved. It seemed, however, that, if they could not be proved,
they also could not be disproved. And this appeared to be the case
with many doctrines which such men as Spencer regarded as un-
shakable: causality, the reign of law, the general trustworthiness
of memory, the validity of induction, and so on. All these, from
a purely rational point of view, should be embraced in the agnos-
tic's suspense of judgement, since, so far as we can see, they are


BERTRAND RUSSELL 277
radically incapable of proof or disproof. James argued that, as
practical men, we cannot remain in doubt on these issues if we are
to survive. We must assume, for instance, that the sort of food
which has nourished us in the past will not poison us in the future.
Sometimes we are mistaken, and die. The test of a belief is not
conformity with "fact," since we can never reach the facts con-
cerned; the test is its success in promoting life and the achievement
of our desires. From this point of view, as James tried to show
in The Varieties of Religious Experience, religious beliefs often
pass the test, and are therefore to be called "true." It is in no
other sense—so he contends;—that the most accredited theories of
science can be called "true": they work in practice, and that is all
we know about it.
As applied to the general hypotheses of science and religion,
there is a great deal to be said for this view. Given a careful defini-
tion of what is meant by "working," and a proviso that the cases
concerned are those where we don't really know the truth, there is
no need to quarrel with the doctrine in this region. But let us
take humbler examples, where real truth is not so hard to obtain.
Suppose you see a flash of lightning, you may expect to hear
thunder, or you may judge that the flash was too distant for the
thunder to be audible, or you may not think about the matter at
all. This last is usually the most sensible course, but let us sup-
pose that you adopt one of the other two. When you hear the
thunder, your belief is verified or refuted, not by any advantage or
disadvantage it has brought you, but by a "fact," the sensation of
hearing thunder. Pragmatists attend mainly to beliefs which are
incapable of being verified by any facts that come within our ex-
perience. Most of our everyday beliefs about mundane affairs—
e. g. that so-and-so's address is such-and-such—are capable of veri-
fication within our experience, and in these cases the pragmatist's
criterion is unnecessary. In many cases, like the above instance of
the thunder, it is quite inapplicable, since the true belief has no
practical advantage over the false one, and neither is as advanta-
geous as thinking about something else. It is a common defect of
philosophers to like "grand" examples rather than such as come
from ordinary daily life.
Although pragmatism may not contain ultimate philosophical
truth, it has certain important merits. First, it realizes that the


278 PHILOSOPHY IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
truth that we can attain to is merely human truth, fallible and
changeable like everything human. What lies outside the cycle of
human occurrences is not truth, but fact (of certain kinds). Truth
is a property of beliefs, and beliefs are psychical events. More-
over their relation to facts does not have the schematic simplicity
which logic assumes; to have pointed this out is a second merit in
pragmatism. Beliefs are vague and complex, pointing not to one
precise fact, but to several vague regions of fact. Beliefs, there-
fore, unlike the schematic propositions of logic, are not sharply op-
posed as true or false, but are a blur of truth and falsehood; they
are of varying shades of grey, never white or black. People who
speak with reverence of the "Truth" would do better to speak about
Fact, and to realize that the reverend qualities to which they pay
homage are not to be found in human beliefs. There are practical
as well as theoretical advantages in this, since people persecute
each other because they believe that they know the "truth." Speak-
ing psychoanalytically, it may be laid down that any "great ideal"
which people mention with awe is really an excuse for inflicting
pain on their enemies. Good wine needs no bush, and good morals
need no bated breath.
In practice, however, pragmatism has a more sinister side. The
truth, it says, is what pays in the way of beliefs. Now a belief
may be made to pay through the operation of the criminal law. In
the seventeenth century, Catholicism paid in Catholic countries and
Protestantism in Protestant countries. Energetic people can manu-
facture "truth" by getting hold of the government and persecuting
opinions other than their own. These consequences flow from an
exaggeration into which pragmatism has fallen. Granted that, as
pragmatists point out, truth is a matter of degree, and is a property
of purely human occurrences, namely beliefs, it still does not fol-
low that the degree of truth possessed by a belief depends upon
purely human conditions. In increasing the degree of truth in our
beliefs, we are approximating to an ideal, and the ideal is deter-
mined by Fact, which is only within our control to a certain very
limited extent, as regards some of the minor circumstances on or
near the surface of a certain planet. The theory of the pragmatist
is derived from the practice of the advertiser, who, by saying re-
peatedly that his pills are worth a guinea a box, makes people will-
ing to give sixpence a box for them, and thus makes his assertion
more nearly true than if it had been made with less confidence.


BERTRAND RUSSELL. BY BOARDMAN ROBINSON





BERTRAND RUSSELL 279
Such instances of man-made truth are interesting, but their scope
is very limited. By exaggerating their scope, people become in-
volved in an orgy of propaganda, which is ultimately brought to
an abrupt end by hard facts in the shape of war, pestilence, and
famine. The recent history of Europe is an object-lesson of the
falsehood of pragmatism in this form.
It is a curious thing that Bergson should have been hailed as an
ally by the pragmatists, since, on the face of it, his philosophy is
the exact antithesis to theirs. While pragmatists teach that utility
is the test of truth, Bergson teaches, on the contrary, that our in-
tellect, having been fashioned by practical needs, ignores all the
aspects of the world which it does not pay to notice, and is in fact
an obstacle to the apprehension of truth. We have, he thinks, a
faculty called "intuition," which we can use if we take the trouble,
and which will enable us to know, in theory at least, everything
past and present, though apparently not the future. But since it
would be inconvenient to be troubled with so much knowledge, we
have developed a brain, the function of which is to forget. But for
the brain, we should remember everything; owing to its sieve-like
operations, we usually remember only what is useful, and that all
wrong. Utility, for Bergson, is the source of error, while truth
is arrived at by a mystic contemplation from which all thought of
practical advantage is absent. Nevertheless Bergson, like the prag-
matists, prefers action to reason, Othello to Hamlet; he thinks it
better to kill Desdemona by intuition than to let the King live be-
cause of intellect. It is this that makes pragmatists regard him as
an ally.
Bergson's Donnees Immediates de la Conscience was published
in 1889, and his Matiere et Memoire in 1896. But his great repu-
tation began with L'Evolution Creatrice, published in 1907—not
that this book was better than the others, but that it contained less
argument and more rhetoric, so that it had more persuasive effect.
This book contains, from beginning to end, no argument, and there-
fore no bad argument; it contains merely a poetical picture appeal-
ing to the fancy. There is nothing in it to help us to a conclusion
as to whether the philosophy which it advocates is true or false;
this question, which might be thought not unimportant, Bergson
has left to others. But according to his own theories he is right in
this, since truth is to be attained by intuition, not by intellect, and
is therefore not a matter of argument.


280 PHILOSOPHY IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
A great part of Bergson's philosophy is merely traditional mys-
ticism expressed in slightly novel language. The doctrine of in-
terpenetration, according to which different things are not really
separate, but are merely so conceived by the analytic intellect, is to
be found in every mystic, Eastern or Western, from Parmenides to
Mr Bradley. Bergson has given an air of novelty to this doctrine
by means of two devices. First, he connects "intuition" with the
instincts of animals; he suggests that intuition is what enables the
solitary wasp Ammophila to sting the larva in which it lays its eggs
exactly so as to paralyse it without killing it. (The instance is un-
fortunate, since Dr and Mrs Peckham have shown that this poor
wasp is no more unerring than a mere man of science with his
blundering intellect.) This gives a flavour of modem science to
his doctrines, and enables him to adduce zoological instances which
make the unwary think that his views are based upon the latest
results of biological research. Secondly, he gives the name "space"
to the separateness of things as they appear to the analytic intellect,
and the name "time" or "duration" to their interpenetration as re-
vealed to intuition. This enables him to say many new things
about "space" and "time," which sound very profound and original
when they are supposed to be about what is ordinarily meant by
those words. "Matter," being that which is in "space," is of course
a fiction created by the intellect, and is seen to be such as soon as
we place ourselves at the point of view of intuition.
In this part of his philosophy, apart from phraseology, Bergson
has added nothing to Plotinus. The invention of the phraseology
certainly shows great ability, but it is that of the company pro-
moter rather than the philosopher. It is not this part of his phil-
osophy, however, which has won him his wide popularity. He owes
that to his doctrine of the elan vital and real becoming. His great
and remarkable innovation is to have combined mysticism with a
belief in the reality of time and progress. It is worth while to see
how he achieved this feat.
Traditional mysticism has been contemplative, convinced of the
unreality of time, and essentially a lazy man's philosophy. The
psychological prelude to the mystic illumination is the "dark night
of the soul," which arises when a man is hopelessly balked in his
practical activities, or for some reason suddenly loses interest in
them. Activity being thus ruled out, he takes to contemplation.
It is a law of our being that, whenever it is in any way possible,


BERTRAND RUSSELL 281
we adopt such beliefs as will preserve our self-respect. Psycho-
analytic literature is full of grotesque examples of this law. Ac-
cordingly the man who has been driven to contemplation presently
discovers that contemplation is the true end of life, and that the
real world is hidden from those who are immersed in mundane ac-
tivities. From this basis the remaining doctrines of traditional
mysticism can be deduced. Lao-Tze, perhaps the first of the great
mystics, wrote his book (so tradition avers) at a custom-house
while he was waiting to have his baggage examined ;* and, as might
be expected, it is full of the doctrine that action is futile.
But Bergson sought to adapt mysticism to those who believe in
activity and "life," who believe in the reality of progress, and are
in no way disillusioned about our existence here below. The mystic
is usually a temperamentally active man forced into inaction; the
vitalist is a temperamentally inactive man with a romantic admira-
tion for action. Before 1914, the world was full of such people,
"Heartbreak House" people. Their temperamental basis is bore-
dom and scepticism, leading to love of excitement and longing for
an irrational faith—a faith which they found ultimately in the be-
lief that it was their duty to make other people kill each other. But
in 1907 they had not this outlet, and Bergson provided a good sub-
stitute.
Bergson's view is sometimes expressed in language which might
mislead, because things which he regards as illusory are occasionally
mentioned in a way which suggests that they are real. But when
we avoid these possibilities of misunderstanding, I think his doc-
trine of time is as follows. Time is not a series of separate mo-
ments or events, but a continuous growth, in which the future can-
not be foreseen because it is genuinely new and therefore unimagi-
nable. Everything that really happens persists, like the successive
rings in the growth of a tree. (This is not his illustration.) Thus
the world is perpetually growing fuller and richer. Everything
that has happened persists in the pure memory of intuition, as op-
posed to the pseudo-memory of the brain. This persistence is "du-
ration," while the impulse to new creation is the "elan vital." To
recover the pure memory of intuition is a matter of self-discipline.
We are not told how to do it, but one suspects something not un-
like the practices of Yogis.
If one might venture to apply to Bergson's philosophy so vulgar
1 The chief argument against this tradition is that the book is not very long.


282 PHILOSOPHY IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
a thing as logic, certain difficulties would appear in this philosophy
of change. Bergson is never tired of pouring scorn upon the mathe-
matician for regarding time as a series, whose parts are mutually
external. But if there is indeed genuine novelty in the world, as
he insists (and without this feature his philosophy loses its at-
tractive qualities) and if whatever really comes into the world per-
sists (which is the simple essence of his doctrine of duration) then
the sum-total of existence at any earlier time is part of the sum-
total at any later time. Total states of the world at various times
form a series in virtue of this relation of whole and part, and this
series has all the properties that the mathematician wants and that
Bergson professes to have banished. If the new elements which
are added in later states of the world are not external to the old
elements, there is no genuine novelty, creative evolution has created
nothing, and we are back in the system of Plotinus. Of course
Bergson's answer to this dilemma is that what happens is "growth,"
in which everything changes and yet remains the same. This con-
ception, however, is a mystery, which the profane cannot hope to
fathom. At bottom, Bergson's appeal is to mystical faith, not to
reason; but into the regions where faith is above logic we cannot
follow him.
Meanwhile, from many directions, a philosophy grew up which
is often described as "realism," but is really characterized by analy-
sis as a method and pluralism as a metaphysic. It is not necessarily
realistic since it is, in some forms, compatible with Berkeleian ideal-
ism. It is not compatible with Kantian or Hegelian idealism, be-
cause it rejects the logic upon which those systems are based. It
tends more and more to the adoption and development of James'
view, that the fundamental stuff of the world is neither mental nor
material, but something simpler and more fundamental, out of
which both mind and matter are constructed.
In the 'nineties, James was almost the only eminent figure, ex-
cept among the very old, that stood out against German idealism.
Schiller and Dewey had not yet begun to make themselves felt,
and even James was regarded as a psychologist who need not be
taken very seriously in philosophy. But with the year 1900 a
revolt against German idealism began, not from a pragmatist point
of view, but from a severely technical standpoint. In Germany,
apart from the admirable works of Frege (which began in 1879,
but were not read until recent years) Husserl's Logische Unter-


BERTRAND RUSSELL 283
suchungen, a monumental work published in 1900, soon began to
exert a great effect. Meinong's Ueber Annahmen (1902) and
Gegenstandstheorie und Psychologie ( 1904) were influential in the
same direction. In England, G. E. Moore and I began to advocate
similar views. His article on The Nature of Judgment was pub-
lished in 1899; his Principia Ethica in 1903. My Philosophy of
Leibniz appeared in 1900, and Principles of Mathematics in 1903.
In France, the same kind of philosophy was vigorously championed
by Couturat. In America, William James' radical empiricism
(without his pragmatism) was blended with the new logic to pro-
duce a radically new philosophy, that of the New Realists, some-
what later in date, but more revolutionary, than the European
works mentioned above, although Mach's Analyse der Empfindun-
gen had anticipated part of its teaching.
The new philosophy which was thus inaugurated has not yet
reached a final form, and is still in some respects immature. More-
over there is a very considerable measure of disagreement among its
various advocates. It is in parts somewhat abstruse. For these
reasons, it is impossible to do more than set forth some of its salient
features.
The first characteristic of the new philosophy is that it abandons
the claim to a special philosophic method or a peculiar brand of
knowledge to be obtained by its means. It regards philosophy as
essentially one with science, differing from the special sciences
merely by the generality of its problems, and by the fact that it is
concerned with the formation of hypotheses where empirical evi-
dence is still lacking. It conceives that all knowledge is scientific
knowledge, to be ascertained and proved by the methods of science.
It does not aim, as previous philosophy has usually done, at state-
ments about the universe as a whole, nor at the construction of a
comprehensive system. It believes, on the basis of its logic, that
there is no reason to deny the apparently piecemeal and higgledy-
piggledy nature of the world. It does not regard the world as
"organic," in the sense that, from any part adequately understood,
the whole could be inferred, as the skeleton of an extinct monster
can be inferred from a single bone. In particular, it does not at-
tempt, as German idealism did, to deduce the nature of the world
as a whole from the nature of knowledge. It regards knowledge
as a natural fact like another, with no mystic significance and no
cosmic importance.


284 PHILOSOPHY IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
The new philosophy had originally three main sources: theory
of knowledge, logic, and the principles of mathematics. Ever since
Kant, knowledge had been conceived as an interaction, in which the
thing known was modified by our knowledge of it, and therefore al-
ways had certain characteristics due to our knowledge. It was also
held (though not by Kant) to be logically impossible for a thing
to exist without being known. Therefore the properties acquired
through being known were properties which everything must have.
In this way, it was contended, we can discover a great deal about
the real world by merely studying the conditions of knowledge.
The new philosophy maintained, on the contrary, that knowledge,
as a rule, makes no difference to what is known, and that there is
not the slightest reason why there should not be things which are
not known to any mind. Consequently theory of knowledge ceases
to be a magic key to open the door to the mysteries of the universe,
and we are thrown back upon the plodding investigations of science.
In logic, similarly, atomism replaced the "organic" view. It had
been maintained that everything is affected in its intrinsic nature
by its relations to everything else, so that a thorough knowledge of
one thing would involve a thorough knowledge of the whole uni-
verse. The new logic maintained that the intrinsic character of a
thing does not logically enable us to deduce its relations to other
things. An example will make the point clear. Leibniz maintains
somewhere (and in this he agrees with modern idealists) that if a
man is in Europe and his wife dies in India, there is an intrinsic
change in the man at the moment of his wife's death. Common
sense would say that there is no intrinsic change in the man until
he hears of his bereavement. This view is adopted by the new
philosophy; its consequences are more far-reaching than they might
appear to be at first sight.
The principles of mathematics have always had an important
relation to philosophy. Mathematics apparently contains a priori
knowledge of a high degree of certainty, and most philosophy as-
pires to a priori knowledge. Ever since Zeno the Eleatic, philoso-
phers of an idealistic caste have sought to throw discredit on math-
ematics by manufacturing contradictions which were designed to
show that mathematicians had not arrived at real metaphysical
truth, and that the philosophers were able to supply a better brand.
There is a great deal of this in Kant, and still more in Hegel. Dur-
ing the nineteenth century, the mathematicians destroyed this part


BERTRAND RUSSELL 285
of Kant's philosophy. Lobatchevsky, by inventing non-Euclidean
geometry, undermined the mathematical argument of Kant's trans-
cendental aesthetic. Weierstrass proved that continuity does not
involve infinitesimals; Georg Cantor invented a theory of continu-
ity and a theory of infinity which did away with all the old para-
doxes upon which philosophers had battened. Frege showed that
arithmetic follows from logic, which Kant had denied. All these
results were obtained by ordinary mathematical methods, and were
as indubitable as the multiplication table. Philosophers met the
situation by not reading the authors concerned. Only the new
philosophy assimilated the new results, and thereby won an easy
argumentative victory over the partisans of continued ignorance.
The new philosophy is not merely critical. It is constructive,
but as science is constructive, bit by bit and tentatively. It has a
special technical method of construction, namely mathematical
logic, a new branch of mathematics, much more akin to philosophy
than any of the traditional branches. Mathematical logic makes
it possible, as it never was before, to see what is the outcome, for
philosophy, of a given body of scientific doctrine, what entities
must be assumed, and what relations between them. The philoso-
phy of mathematics and physics has made immense advances by the
help of his method; part of the outcome for physics has been set
forth by Dr Whitehead in three recent works.1 There is reason to
hope that the method will prove equally fruitful in other fields, but
it is too technical to be set forth here.
A good deal of modern pluralist philosophy has been inspired
by the logical analysis of propositions. At first this method was
applied with too much respect for grammar; Meinong, for example,
maintained that, since we can say truly "the round square does not
exist," there must be such an object as the round square, although
it must be a non-existent object. The present writer was at first
not exempt from this kind of reasoning, but discovered in 1905 how
to escape from it by means of the theory of "descriptions," from
which it appears that the round square is not mentioned when we
say, "The round square does not exist." It may seem absurd to
spend time on such a ridiculous topic as the round square, but such
topics often afford the best tests of logical theories. Most logical
1 The Principles of Natural Knowledge, 1919; The Concept of Nature,
1920; The Principle of Relativity, 1922. AH published by the Cambridge
University Press.


286 PHILOSOPHY IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
theories are condemned by the fact that they lead to absurdities;
therefore the logician must be aware of absurdities and on the look-
out for them. Many laboratory experiments would seem trivial to
any one who did not know their relevance, and absurdities are the
experiments of the logician.
From preoccupation with the logical analysis of propositions, the
new philosophy had at first a strong tincture of Platonic and medi-
aeval realism; it regarded abstracts as having the same kind of ex-
istence that concretes have. From this view, as its logic perfected
itself, it became gradually more free. What remains is not such as
to shock common sense.
Although pure mathematics was more concerned than any other
science in the first beginnings of the new philosophy, the most im-
portant influence in the present day is physics. This has come
about chiefly through the work of Einstein, which has fundamen-
tally altered our notions of space, time, and matter. This is not
the place for an explanation of the theory of relativity, but a few
words on some of its philosophical consequences are unavoidable.
Two specially important items in the theory of relativity, from
the philosophical point of view, are: (l) that there is not a single
all-embracing time in which all the events in the universe have
their place; (2) that the conventional or subjective part in our ob-
servation of physical phenomena, though much greater than was
formerly supposed, can be eliminated by means of a certain mathe-
matical method known as the tensor calculus. I shall say nothing
on this latter topic, as it is intolerably technical.
As regards time, it must be understood, to begin with, that we
are not dealing with a philosophical speculation, but with a theory
necessitated by experimental results and embodied in mathematical
formulae. There is the same sort of difference between the two as
there is between the theories of Montesquieu and the American
Constitution. What emerges is this: that while the events that
happen to a given piece of matter have a definite time-order from
the point of view of an observer who shares its motion, events
which happen to pieces of matter in different places have not al-
ways a definite time-order. To be precise: If a light-signal is sent
from the earth to the sun, and reflected back to the earth, it will re-
turn to the earth about sixteen minutes after it was sent out. The
events which happen on the earth during those sixteen minutes are
neither earlier nor later than the arrival of the light-signal at the


BERTRAND RUSSELL 287
sun. If we imagine observers moving in all possible ways with re-
spect to the earth and the sun, observing the events on the earth
during those sixteen minutes and also the arrival of the light-signal
at the sun; if we assume that all these observers allow for the ve-
locity of light and employ perfectly accurate chronometers; then
some of these observers will judge any given event on earth during
those sixteen minutes to be earlier than the arrival of the light-
signal at the sun, some will judge it to be simultaneous, and some
will judge it to be later. All are equally right or equally wrong.
From the impersonal standpoint of physics, the events on earth
during those sixteen minutes are neither earlier nor later than the
arrival of the light-signal at the sun, nor yet simultaneous with it.
We can only say that an event A in one piece of matter is definitely
earlier than an event B in another if light can travel from A to B,
starting when the earlier event happens (according to A's time)
and arriving before the later event happens (according to B's
time). Otherwise the apparent time-order of the two events will
vary according to the observer, and will therefore not represent any
physical fact.
If velocities comparable with that of light were common in our
experience, it is probable that the physical world would have seemed
too complicated to be tackled by scientific methods, so that we
should have been content with medicine-men down to the present
day. But if physics had been discovered, it would have had to be
the physics of Einstein, because Newtonian physics would have
been obviously inapplicable. Radio-active substances send out par-
ticles which move very nearly with the velocity of light, and the
behaviour of these particles would be unintelligible without the
new physics of relativity. There is no doubt that the old physics
is faulty, and from a philosophical point of view it is no excuse to
say that the fault is "only a little one." We have to make up our
minds to the fact that, within certain limits, there is no definite
time-order between events which happen in different places. This
is the fact which has led to the introduction of the single manifold
called "space-time" instead of the two separate manifolds called
"space" and "time." The time that we have been regarding as
cosmic is really "local time," a time bound up with the motion of
the earth, with as little claim to universality as that of a ship
which does not alter its clocks in crossing the Atlantic.
When we consider the part that time plays in all our common


288 PHILOSOPHY IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
notions, it becomes evident that our outlook would be profoundly
changed if we really imaginatively realized what the physicists
have done. Take the notion of "progress": if the time-order is
arbitrary, there will be progress or retrogression according to the
convention adopted in measuring time. The notion of distance in
space is of course also affected: two observers who employ every
possible device for ensuring accuracy will arrive at different esti-
mates of the distance between two places, if the observers are in
rapid relative motion. It is obvious that the very idea of distance
has become vague, because distance must be between material
things, not points of empty space (which are fictitious); and it
must be the distance at a given time, because the distance between
any two bodies is continually changing; and a given time is a sub-
jective notion, dependent upon the way the observer is travelling.
We can no longer speak of a body at a given time, but must speak
simply of an event. Between two events there is, quite inde-
pendently of any observer, a certain relation called the "interval"
or "separation" between them. This interval will be differently
analysed by different observers into a spatial and a temporal com-
ponent, but this analysis has no objective validity. The interval
is an objective physical fact, but its separation into spatial and
temporal elements is not.
It is obvious that our old comfortable notion of "solid matter"
cannot survive. A piece of matter is nothing but a series of events
obeying certain laws. The conception of matter arose at a time
when philosophers had no doubts as to the validity of the concep-
tion of "substance." Matter was substance which was in space and
time, mind was substance which was in time only. The notion of
substance grew more shadowy in metaphysics as time went on, but
it survived in physics because it did no harm—until relativity was
invented. Substance, traditionally, was a notion compounded of
two elements. First, a substance had the logical property that it
could only occur as subject in a proposition, not as predicate. Sec-
ondly, it was something that persisted through time, or, in the case
of God, was outside time altogether. These two properties had no
necessary connexion, but this was not perceived because physics
taught that bits of matter are immortal and theology taught that
the soul is immortal. Both, therefore, were thought to have both
the characteristics of substance. Now, however, physics compels
us to regard evanescent events as substances in the logical sense, i. e.


BERTRAND RUSSELL 289
as subjects which cannot be predicates. A piece of matter, which
we took to be a single persistent entity, is really a string of entities,
like the apparently persistent objects in a cinema. And there is no
reason why we should not say the same of a mind: the persistent
ego seems as fictitious as the permanent atom. Both are only strings
of events having certain interesting relations to each other.
Modern physics enables us to give body to the suggestion of
Mach and James, that the "stuff" of the mental and physical
worlds is the same. "Solid matter" was obviously very different
from thoughts and also from the persistent ego. But if matter and
the ego are both only convenient aggregations of events, it is much
less difficult to imagine them composed out of the same materials.
Moreover what has hitherto seemed one of the most marked pecu-
liarities of mind, namely subjectivity, or the possession of a point
of view, has now invaded physics, and is found not to involve
mind: a photographic camera has it to precisely the same extent.
Two cameras in different places may photograph the "same" event,
but they will photograph it differently. Even chronometers and
measuring-rods become subjective in modern physics; what they
directly record is not a physical fact, but their relation to a phys-
ical fact. Thus physics and psychology have approached each
other, and the old dualism of mind and matter has broken down.
It is perhaps worth while to point out that modern physics knows
nothing of "force" in the old or popular sense of that word. We
used to think that the sun exerted a "force" on the earth. Now we
think that space-time, in the neighbourhood of the sun, is so shaped
that the earth finds it less trouble to move as it does than in any
other way. The great principle of modern physics is the "prin-
ciple of least action," that in going from one place to another a
body always chooses the route which involves least action. (Ac-
tion is a technical term, but its meaning need not concern us at
present.) Newspapers and certain writers who wish to be thought
forceful are fond of the word "dynamic." There is nothing "dy-
namic" in dynamics, which, on the contrary, finds everything de-
ducible from a law of universal laziness. And there is no such
thing as one body "controlling" the movements of another. The
universe of modern science is much more like that of Lao-Tze than
that of those who prate of "great laws" and "natural forces."
The modern philosophy of pluralism and realism has, in some
ways, less to offer than earlier philosophies. In the Middle Ages,


290 SILENCE
philosophy was the handmaid of theology; to this day, they come
under one heading in booksellers' catalogues. It has been generally
regarded as the business of philosophy to prove the great truths of
religion. The new realism does not profess to be able to prove
them, or even to disprove them. It aims only at clarifying the fun-
damental ideas of the sciences, and synthesizing the different sci-
ences in a single comprehensive view of that fragment of the world
that science has succeeded in exploring. It does not know what lies
beyond; it possesses no talisman for transforming ignorance into
knowledge. It offers intellectual delights to those who value them,
but it does not attempt to flatter human conceit as most philos-
ophies do. If it is dry and technical, it lays the blame on the uni-
verse, which has chosen to work in a mathematical way rather than
as poets or mystics might have desired. Perhaps this is regrettable,
but a mathematician can hardly be expected to regret it.
SILENCE
MARIANNE MOORE
My father used to say,
"Superior people never make long visits,
have to be shown Longfellow's grave
nor the glass flowers at Harvard.
Self reliant like the cat—
that takes its prey to privacy,
the mouse's limp tail hanging like a shoelace from its mouth-
they sometimes enjoy solitude,
and can be robbed of speech
by speech which has delighted them:
the deepest feeling always shows itself in silence;
not in silence, but restraint." N
Nor was he insincere in saying, " 'Make my house your inn.'
Inns are not residences.



LINE SYNCOPATION. BY WILLIAM GROPPER


=— — — −=−=−=− − √æ_ =--- ----



LINE SYNCOPATION. BY WILLIAM GROPPER


------~--~--~--~--~--~--~---- -----------···--~~~~ ·========== ==================-- ~~=== ===


A STRANGE MURDERER
BY MAXIM GORKI
Translated From the Russian by Marie Budberg
ABOUT two months before his death Judge L. N. Sviatoukhin
k said to me one day:
"Of all the murderers that have come before me during the last
thirteen years, one only, the packhorse driver Merkouloff, ever
awoke in me a feeling of terror before man and for man. The
ordinary murderer is a hopelessly dull and obtuse creature, half
man, half beast, incapable of realizing the significance of his crime;
or else a sly little dirty fellow, a squealing fox caught in a trap;
or else again an unsuccessful, hysterical monomaniac, desperate and
bitter. But when Merkouloff stood in front of me in the dock I
instantly scented something weird and unusual about him."
Sviatoukhin half closed his eyes, recalling the picture to his
memory:
"A large, broad-shouldered peasant of about forty-five, a thin,
good-looking face, such a face as one usually sees on holy images.
A long, grey beard, curly hair also grey, bald on the temples, and
in the middle of the forehead, like a horn, a provocative, cossack
forelock. From the deep orbits, quite out of keeping with that
forelock, a pair of clever grey eyes glanced shrewdly at me, soft
and full of pity."
Breathing a heavy, putrid breath—the judge was dying of cancer
of the stomach—Sviatoukhin nervously wrinkled up his earthen-
coloured, exhausted face.
"What startled me particularly was this expression of pity in
his eyes—where could it have come from? And I confess that
my official indifference disappeared, giving way to an anxious
curiosity, a new and unpleasant experience for me.
"He answered my questions in the dull voice of a man who is,
not used to or does not like talking much—his answers were short
and precise—it was clear that he intended to make a frank confes-


292 A STRANGE MURDERER
sion. I said something to him which I would never have said to
any other man in the same circumstances:
"'You've got a fine face, Merkouloff; you do not look like a
murderer.'
"At this he pulled up the chair in the dock, as though he were
a guest there rather than a prisoner, sat down firmly on it, pressed
his palms to his knees, and began to talk in a curiously melodious
voice, as though he were playing on a reed-pipe. Perhaps that is not
a very good simile, for a reed-pipe has also a dull note in it.
"'You think, sir, that if I have committed this murder it means
that I am a beast? No—I am not one—and since you appear to
be interested in me, I will tell you my story.'
"And he told me, calmly, consecutively, as murderers usually
do not do, without attempting to justify himself or to awaken com-
passion."
The judge spoke very slowly and indistinctly, his parched lips,
covered with a kind of grey scale, moved with difficulty and he
moistened them with his dark tongue, closing his eyes.
"I will try to recall his own words. There was a particular
significance in them. They were words that amazed and shattered
one. That compassionate glance of his, directed at me, crushed me
too. You understand? It was not plaintive but compassionate.
He felt sorry for me, although I was in quite good health at that
time.
"He committed his first murder in the following circumstances:
He was carting some sacks of sugar from the harbour one autumn
night when he noticed that a man was walking behind the cart and
had made a rent in the sack and was filling his pockets with the
sugar. Merkouloff got down, rushed at him, gave him a blow on
the temple, and the man fell down.
"'Well,' said Merkouloff, 'I gave him another kick and began
fixing the torn sack, while all the time he lay under my feet, his
face turned upwards, his eyes and mouth wide-open. I felt
frightened, so I knelt down and took his head in my hands, but it
rolled from one side to the other, as heavy as lead, while his eyes
seemed to wink at me and his nose bled all over my hands. I
jumped up, crying: "My God, I've killed him!"'
"Merkouloff then went off to the police station, whence he was
sent to prison.


MAXIM GORKI 293
"'Sitting in prison,' he said, 'and watching the criminals around
me, I seemed to be looking at everything through a fog—I just
couldn't take things in. I felt terrified, could not sleep or eat, but
kept thinking—How is it, how can it be? A man was walking
along the road, I struck him—and—no more man. What does it
mean? The soul—where is it? It isn't as though he were a sheep
or a calf—he could do this and that and believed in God, no doubt;
also, although his nature might have been different, he was just
the same kind of being as I am. And I—don't you see—crossed
his life, killed him as though he were a beast, no more. If it's like
that, why, then it might happen to me too any day: I might get a
blow—and it's all up with me! So terrified was I by such thoughts,
sir, that I seemed to hear the very hairs of my head growing.'
"While telling his story, Merkouloff looked me straight in the
face, but although his light eyes were motionless, I seemed to
see the twinkle of dark fear in his grey pupils. He had folded his
hands together, placed them between his knees, and was pressing
them hard. For this unpremeditated crime he got a very mild
punishment: his preliminary confinement was discounted and he
was sent off to a monastery for penitence.
"'Over there,' Merkouloff continued, 'they appointed a little old
monk to look after me. He was to teach me how to live. He was
such a gentle little man, who spoke of God in the finest way possible.
A very fine character, he was; and like a father to me, always ad-
dressing me as: "My son, my son." Listening to him, I could not
help asking myself sometimes: "Why, O God, is man so defence-
less?" Then I would say to the monk, "Take yourself, Father
Paul; you love God and He, most probably, loves you, too—yet I
have merely to strike a blow at you and you'll die like a fly. Where
then shall the gentle soul go? And the matter doesn't lie in your
soul—it lies in my evil thought: I can kill you at any moment. And
as a matter of fact my thought is not even an evil one. I can kill
you very gently, very softly—allow you to say a prayer first, then
kill you. How do you explain that?" But he couldn't, he only
kept saying: "It's the Devil who rouses the beast in you. He's
always goading you." I told him that it made no difference to me
who was goading me; all I wanted him to teach me was how to
avoid being goaded. I'm not a beast, I told him, there's nothing of
the beast in me; it is only my soul that is frightened for itself.


294 A STRANGE MURDERER
"' "Pray," he said to me, "pray until you are exhausted." I did
so, I got thin doing so, my temples went grey, although I was only
twenty-eight at the time. But prayer could not still my fear; even
during prayer I went on thinking: Dear God, why is it? Here I
can cause the death of any man at any moment, and any man can
kill me at any moment he wants to! I can go to sleep and some one
can draw a knife across my throat, or bring down a brick or a log
on my head. Or any heavy weight. There are so many ways of
doing it! . . . These thoughts prevented me from sleeping, ter-
rified me. At first I used to sleep with the novices, and as soon as
one of them stirred, I'd jump up and shout out: "Who's fiddling
about? Keep quiet, you hounds!" Everybody was afraid of me
and I was afraid of everybody. They complained about me and I
was sent off to the stables. There I grew quieter, with the horses—
they're only soulless beasts. But all the same I only closed one
eye when I slept. I was frightened.'
"After his penitence was over Merkouloff got another job as a
driver, and lived in the market gardens outside the town, in a
sober, detached way.
"'I lived like a man in a dream,' he told me. 'Just kept silent
and avoided people. The other drivers used to ask me: "Why are
you living so gloomily, Vassili? Are you preparing to take the
cowl?" What should I want to take the cowl for? There are men
in cloisters as well as outside them—and wherever there are men
there is fear. I looked at people and thought: God help you!
Uncertain are your lives and you have no protection against me,
just as I have none against you! Just think, sir, how hard it was
for me to live with such a weight on my heart.'"
Sviatoukhin sighed and adjusted the small black silk cap on his
bald skull that shone like an old, bleached bone.
"At that moment, at those very words, Merkouloff smiled; and
that unexpected, uncalled for smile twisted and distorted his well-
cut face so acutely that I was instantly convinced that the man was
a fiend. Most probably he killed all his victims with precisely that
smile. I experienced a most uncanny feeling. He continued with
something like vexation in his voice:
"'So I went on walking about like a hen with an egg, the egg
being rotten and I knowing it. The moment is bound to come
when the egg inside me will burst, and what will happen to me


MAXIM GORKI 295
then? I don't know—I daren't guess what it will be—but I can
guess that it will be something terrible.'
"I asked him whether he had ever thought of committing suicide.
He was silent for a moment, his eyebrows moved, and he answered:
'I can't remember—no—I don't think I ever have.' . . . Then he
turned to me, wonderingly, with a look of inquiry in his eyes, and
said, I think quite sincerely: 'How is it I never thought of that?
That's a curious thing.'
"He struck his knee with the palm of his hand, glanced vaguely
at a corner of the court, and muttered pettishly:
"'Yes, yes, but don't you see, I didn't want to give my soul
a free hand. I was so tormented in my heart with curiosity re-
garding other people and by the shameful cowardice of that soul of
mine. I forgot about myself. As to my soul, it was just musing—
what if I kill this fellow—what will happen then?'
"Two years later Merkouloff killed the half-witted girl Me-
treshka, the daughter of a gardener. He told me about her murder
in a somewhat hazy manner, as though he himself hardly under-
stood the motives of the crime. One could gather from his words
that Metreshka was slightly crazy.
"'She used to have a kind of fit which blotted out her reason:
she'd throw down her work of digging flower beds or weeding and
walk along smiling, with her mouth open, as though somebody
unseen were beckoning to her to come. She'd knock against trees,
hedges, and walls, attempting to pass through them. One day she
stepped on an upturned rake and hurt her foot; blood was flowing
from the wound in a stream, but she still walked along, feeling no
pain—didn't even wince. She was an ugly girl, very fat, and
inclined to debauchery, owing to her silliness. She used to accost
the peasants, and they, of course, took advantage of her silliness.
She pestered me, too, with her attentions, but I had other things
to think about. What fascinated me in her was the fact that
nothing affected her: whether she fell into a ditch or down from a
roof, she came up safe and sound. Any one else would have sprained
his foot or broken a bone, but nothing happened to her. She was
all bruised and scratched, of course, but was as tough as could be.
She seemed to live in absolute security.
"'I killed her in public, on a Sunday. I was sitting on a bench
at the gate and she began to be amiable to me in a nasty manner—


296 A STRANGE MURDERER
so I just struck her with a faggot. She rolled down and never
moved. I glanced at her—she was dead. I sat down on the ground
beside her and burst out crying: "God, oh, God, what is the matter
with me? Why this weakness, this helplessness?"'
"He spoke jerkily, as though in a delirium, for some time, harp-
ing on the helplessness of men, and all the time a sullen fear shone
in his eyes. His dry ascetic face darkened as he said, hissing through
his teeth:
"'Just you think, sir, here, at this very minute, I can strike you
down dead. Just think of that! Who can forbid me to do it1?
What's to stop me? Nothing at all—nothing ..."
"He was punished for the murder of that girl by three years of
prison—the mildness of the punishment being due, he explained,
to the skill of his advocate—whom he did not hesitate to vilify:
'A young one, with dishevelled hair, a bawler. He kept on saying
to the jury: "Who could possibly say a bad word against this man?
Not one of the witnesses has been able to. Moreover it is admitted
that the dead woman was half-witted and debauched." Oh, those
advocates! It's all tomfoolery, waste of time. I'll be defended
from myself before the crime if you like, but once I've committed
it I don't want any one to help me. You can hold me while I stand
still, but once I have started running you can't catch me! If I
run I will go on running until I fall down with exhaustion. But
prison!—tomfoolery, an idle man's job, too.
"'I came out dazed from prison—unable to understand anything.
People walked past, drove past, worked, built houses, and all the
time I kept thinking: "I can kill any man I choose and any man
can kill me. Very terrible, this is." And it seemed as though my
arms were growing, growing, becoming a stranger's arms. I started
drinking, but I couldn't keep it up, it made me sick. As soon as
I had had a drop too much I began to cry—hid in a dark corner
and cried: "I am not a man but a maniac, there's no life for me."
I drank—and didn't get drunk, and was worse than a drunkard
when sober. I began to growl, growled at everyone, frightened
people away, and was terrified of them. I kept thinking all the
time: "Either he'll go for me, or I'll go for him."
"'And so I went on walking about, like a fly on a window pane:
the glass might break at any moment and I'd fall through, falling
God knows where.


MAXIM GORKI 297
"'My boss, Ivan Kirilich, I killed for the same reason—curiosity.
He was a cheerful, kindhearted man, and wonderfully brave. When
his neighbour's house was on fire he acted like an immortal hero—
crawled right inside the flames to fetch out the old nurse, then back
again for the nurse's trunk, just because she was crying for it. A
happy man was Ivan Kirilich, God rest his soul! It is true that I
tortured him a bit. The others I killed at once, but I tortured Ivan
—I wanted to see whether he would be frightened or not. Well, he
had a weak constitution and was strangled very rapidly. People
came running up at his cries, and wanted to beat me and tie me up.
But I said to them: "You'd better tie up my soul, not my hands,
you fools!"'
"Merkouloff finished his story, wiped the perspiration from his
face, and said, rather breathlessly:
"'You must punish me severely, your Honour, punish me with
death, or else—what is the good of it all? I can't live with people,
even in jail. I've got a crime against my soul. I have had enough
of it and am afraid that I'll want to begin testing it again—and
then more people will have to suffer for it. . . . You must put
me away, sir, you must. . . .'"
Blinking with his dying eyes, the judge continued:
"He put himself away of his own accord—strangled himself
in his cell, in a rather peculiar way—with the chains he was
manacled with—the devil knows how! I didn't see it myself, but
I was told about it by the governor of the prison. The latter said
it needed great will power to kill oneself in such a painful and
unhandy manner. That's what he said: 'unhandy.'"
Then, closing his eyes, Sviatoukhin murmured:
"It was probably I who inspired Merkouloff with the idea of
suicide . . . Ye-es . . . There, my dear friend, there's a simple
Russian peasant for you, but all the same . . . Ye-es . . . What
do you think of it?"


POSTHUMOUS RESPECTABILITY
BY ELIZABETH J. COATSWORTH
Where the wild berries grew
There you would find her,
Old skirt dragging down,
Hair fit to blind her,
Wet with the sopping fogs,
Withered with sun,
Hiding among the rocks
From everyone,
Taming the great wild geese
In wind storms strayed,
Selling about the town
The eggs they laid,
Facing on lonely moors
The spite of witches,
Sighting Square Joe's bad head
Poked out of ditches,
Living as wild beasts live,
Dying alone—
But leaving money enough
For a head-stone!


PIGEON BOY. BY FRANK DOBSON






From Living A
Property of Viscountess Rothcrmsre
TORSO IN WOOD. BY FRANK DOBSON






CONCERTINA MAX. BY FRANK DOBSON





LUCIENNE
BY JULES ROMAINS
Translated From the French by Waldo Frank
IX
MARIE LEMIEZ was at the hotel. She had come in two
or three minutes earlier, and I was glad to find her. Just
to sit with her it seemed would be enough to bring me back, safe
and solid, to myself. But before the last of the soup, I was
plunged deep into a bewildering meditation; and the queerest
part of it was that it seemed to have no bearing on the events
and feelings of that day, nor on the presence of Marie. What-
ever it was, I was sure it was significant. I should have liked to
argue it out in my mind, so as to gauge it better, know more
steadily what it was all about. It seemed to imply exalted
thoughts ... a perfect dissertation upon life . . . and yet it
lived in a plane as far from words as those vagrant reveries of
reminiscence: when we see once again an old-time walk through
woods, a winding path, a glimpse of sky too poignant to be named.
But this was no mere flow of easy fancies. Each moment of
this meditation came with a stress and went, leaving a vigorous
and substantial mark. Suddenly, a scene of my daily life: another:
my bodily presence here, now there: and every time an assemblage
of realities potently arranged, details "which could not have
been made up," as clear as proofs: above all, with every scene a
palpable imprint, each vision was a pressure tangible like a hand-
clasp or a heartbeat. I was not suffering: this flow of swift pulsa-
tions brought delight. And yet I felt that I was spending too
much of myself: I could not stand it long.
When I go behind the haunting savour of that reverie in order
to understand it, this is what I learn: times of my past far separate
are huddled close, times when I met other persons and measured
or mingled my life with other lives; I understand that these are
not various aspects of one life, but many lives, ill-bound together,


300 LUCIENNE
many selves of my self with no note in common, incompatible
ways of going after happiness, of submitting to duty. It is clear
that if I am to act with more consciousness than a brute or a
weather-vane, I must first bind all these selves together into a
constant unity, compose this whirlwind of thoughts into an har-
monious message for my soul.
Marie's first words fringed my meditation, did not touch it,
but made it retreat. I saw it withdraw and elude me, gather
away like smoke wind-driven, into some inner hollow whence
perhaps it would nevermore emerge. Of course I could not tell
everything to Marie. But I must tell her something. What bias
should I give to my remarks? Could I control them just enough
to make them sound conventional? Marie, I know, is not sus-
picious and none too canny. The hard thing will be to keep from
assuming my own clear-sightedness in her. If I bungle it, it will
be I who shall be reading in her some malicious thoughts of which
she is not dreaming; I shall be projecting my own suspiciousness,
hugely inflated, on to her. I swung back and forth between
extremes of caution and rashness. Then, taking advantage of a
sudden wave of courage, I jumped:
"Tell me, Marie, you've never mentioned a certain M Pierre
Febvre who seems to be at the Barbelenets' quite often. You
must have run into him. I've seen him before: but especially to-day.
We had quite a talk. He was returning to town, and we came
back all the way together. He appears to be very close to the
family. A second cousin or something of the sort. He does not
strike me as the same stuff, at all. Here's a curious new element
in our Barbelenet Group and I should like to know what you
make of him, where you'd put him in the picture? Here's a fine
point we did not count on. A gap in our careful study. You
know, it's a pity: I'm wondering whether we shan't have to begin
all over again. How could you, a scientist, let such a fact slip
by—unless you never saw him? Everything counts in science!
What do you say, my dear?"
I was a chatterbox! In less than an hour, these new traits
were born of my will—the laughing, lying shallowness of a gossip.
Marie's answer came quietly enough: "To be sure! Monsieur
Febvre. Yes, I met him. I even dined with him once."
"With him!"
"At their house."


JULES ROMAINS 301
"He flirted with you?"
"Flirted? Why not at all. He never flirted with me. I
remember he talked a good deal. Too much, I thought. Madame
Barbelenet with her overdone politeness had made some comment
on my 'erudition,' and the marvellous experiments I worked with
my pupils, and how an engineer could not beat me at mathe-
matics ... all that sort of thing, you know . . . how before
they knew me, they had never dreamed that a woman could be
as wise in such subjects as I was. He at once started off on
some question of mathematical physics ... a mere allusion at
first . . . but one thing led to another. He began to recall subjects
to which he had once been passionately devoted. Too bad, he
said, to have done two years of special at the Polytechnic, to have
passed I don't know how many examinations, and to end up by
being a sort of hotel manager. I think he is in charge of the
service and commissary on some great Transatlantic liner. He
seemed to forget all about the Barbelenets ... or at least to
lose sight of what they were. Every once in a while, he would
turn to them for their opinion or support: it was delicious to hear
him before these good people regretting the days when he thought
he had made the discovery of a general equation for the viscosity
of gas. You should have seen him brandish his dessert knife, and
look at M Barbelenet, as if Papa Barbelenet was going to come
back with some thundering denial of his latest scientific state-
ment."
"Surely a way, that, of paying court to you."
"If you like. Yet, I don't think so. My presence simply
released a whole train of thoughts that had long been dormant:
he was glad. So he spoke them out loud."
"And incidentally, he had the chance to dazzle the Barbelenets?
In particular, the girls."
"That is not my impression. You know, come to think of it,
it's rather strange! You would have thought he was one of those
unbearable creatures that pose for the gallery: and yet at bottom,
it was quite the opposite. I suppose I am saying it badly; but
you know me. I —"
"Quite. I understand. Were there other times?"
"Once or twice. Just in passing."
"But you never mentioned him."
"That dinner, my dear, was long before you knew the Bar-


302 LUCIENNE
belenets. And I confess I never gave it as much thought as I have
just now. Why? . . . Do you see any particular importance in
this gentleman?"
"Me! Why not at all. And yet, since he is the only young man
who seems to go there, couldn't one suspect that the family might
have designs?"
"True enough. I remember thinking that at the time."
"Did you notice anything between the girls and him?"
"Nothing special. He treated them familiarly, like cousins,
in fact. Moreover, if something were brewing I'd know it. What-
ever M Barbelenet's words the other day may have suggested, I
know what is going on in the house. Madame Barbelenet comes
to me at all times, and for far less important things than that.
You saw how it was with the piano lessons. The girls, too. Papa
Barbelenet does not count. He takes you aside and complains
about the sort of education they are giving his dear daughters, he
looks askance at me, at times. But the decisions are all made
without him. You know, I should not be a bit surprised if he
had thought of a marriage. It would be his style. Already he has
visions of himself as the father of two learned old maids. To
avoid such a calamity, he'd marry them off to section hands! But
he has nothing to say. And that's not the kind of son-in-law
Madame Barbelenet requires. No! Rather, some civil engineer
from the Company, with spectacles ... a 'Number One' at the
Polytechnic, they're all 'Number Ones,' I've noticed . . . someone
with a solid fortune."
"To be sure. . . . You really think then, if there'd been some
thought of Monsieur Febvre, you'd have known?"
"Absolutely!"
I contrived to drag out the evening with Marie, even though
she told me she had work to do. I was not afraid of being alone.
But as soon as I was, I knew that all the thoughts and feelings
of the day would return; I saw them lining up and waiting. I
was eager to join their restlessness, sure of being aroused and
exalted by them. And yet I was never really ready to face
myself.
It was eleven before I was again in my room. How various are
the ends of our days! If I were brave enough to face what I
have lived, I should love to make a frieze-like reverie of all these
ends of days together, all these ways of putting aside the harsh


JULES ROMAINS 303
diurnal burden. It would bring me happiness: solace, at least.
But I am not yet old enough for that. . . . This evening the narrow
room became a magic circle. Nothing so calm as a leisured going-
over of events lay in wait for me there. For some other time, the
incidents of the afternoon, the high lights of our talk, the strange
behaviour of Pierre Febvre, the long walk through the darkening
streets, the things he had said, the way I had acted, the meeting
with Cecile. . . . All of it was important, all of it must be gone
over. But not to-night. Or at least, in no obvious way.
I let down my hair. The comb slid with a faint music on the
marble dresser: I see in my mind a church, a street with trolley
tracks, wind blowing, trucks bearing down the street; a woman
passes, the church is in her path, she enters. All sorts of torments
live within this woman; and if she has gone into the church, it is
in order both to think no more of them, and to think of them
the better.
My eyes caught the comb, took pleasure in its curve, in its
reflections; watched the marble gleaming all around it. I was
sorry I was no longer a child. I knew what this comb would be
—a sleigh in a Northern land, a sleigh at halt in the immensity
of steppes. A sorrowful sun shines cold on the snow's monochrome.
The travellers have heard the cry of wolves, and one of the horses
has dropped dead on the snow. . . .
I was in bed: with no will to sleep, with no fear of wakefulness.
I marvelled at the ease with which at times we go on living. On
certain days, we get along only by holding to a train of thought:
we are frightened lest it escape us, we do our best to flatter and
cajole it. To-night, no thoughts are needed, my bed carries me
along with a strange sureness. I have from it, not the old feeling
of repose: a serenity rather, like that of high and silent places. I
hear soft-breaking in my mind sounds that are words . . . the
purity of heights.
Bit by bit there dawned on me a curious idea, and it delighted
me, and at the time it seemed as clear as could be. If I strive
to express it now, it is gone: but the emotion it called forth is
always there. Something like this, it was, but infinitely richer
in hue, vastly more seductive. . . .
In our life of everyday, our body is made to return to certain
things, goes back to them, knows them to be the same, knows they
will not stir from the same place. The bed, the bureau, the table,


304 LUCIENNE
the window . . . such things keep their distance, look the same,
and our way of seeing them is one. My body, also, though it moves,
goes over the same spaces, stretches out at last upon the immovable
bed. But these places and these things, this body of mine, though
they exist within our visible space and hold to their posts or circle
faithfully back to where they were, yet seem at the same time
to have been elsewhere, in some other space, this one invisible:
and in their strange adventure they have described outlandish
orbits which led them forth into new distances from each other,
made them assume utterly new relations, perhaps harder, perhaps
easier to bear: so that these familiar objects and myself are never
after all twice in the same rapport. I am never twice in the same
relation with the fleeing world: and like a house moved by a night's
enchantment from a hill to a valley, or from north to south, my
body is amazed at this variance. Yes: I cannot pierce this mystery,
but I touch it. I am for ever present at a magical act, I overtake
it, almost my eyes behold it. There are nights when my bed lies
in some low hollow, terribly aloof from the heights which flee
disconsolately far above my eyes: it is as if the earth were opening
bit by bit with the weight of my body; already the candle on
my little table is vastly far away, exiled in a domain I can no
longer reach: and the ceiling draws off, as I watch it, fading as
if it were the sky.
I had not yet thought of sleep, and a clock was striking mid-
night. It was a clock that I had heard many times, I am sure:
but I had never given it a thought, I did not know where it was.
The strokes came distantly from some small church perhaps, or
from a convent chapel. Ere the twelve strokes were done, another
clock set in: I heard them both with a great clarity. And yet
these were no strokes to awake any one, not even to disturb a
reverie. Nothing could have been more reticent than this toll of
the hours, nothing more secret than these public voices.
I was waiting! Perhaps unwittingly I had made note of the
strokes and knew that the two clocks would sound once more. My
body huddled close upon itself: an embrace equal from within and
from without held it firm-pressed. My lips were parted and trem-
ulous, and the breath came sharper and more rapidly. The height
of my breasts was strangely sensitized, as if here were the fragile
enclosure of my life. Within, my heart beat hastening: without,
came the twelve strokes of the clocks, faint and irresistible.


JULES ROMAINS 305
Suddenly, the first clock began to toll the midnight over. The
other one, which had caught up with it, toned forth almost at
once. The two voices alternated close upon each other. Their
mutual penetration grew, as if my body were defenseless against
their alliance. The stroke of the one made an opening wound
upon me: the stroke of the other kept the wound from closing.
My heart beat against the strokes, went out to meet them. There
was a triple pulsation, striving to be one: rushing madly toward
their own union upon the wreck of my body.
—Nobody! I almost cried, one stroke more and I am nobody!
I think, had I dared cry out I should have been assuaged: but
shame stopped me. I was afraid of bringing my room to witness
of this mysterious rite within my body: if I did not name it,
perhaps it might not really be. I longed for the innocent daring
of the saints and sibyls, who find a Word for their solace, who
dare create a Word to meet their passion. We are too timid
to glut our desires: false pride holds us back. In this room, the
sensible eyes of Marie Lemiez were somehow present. Critical
apparitions haunted this uncertain space about me. The mothers
of my pupils had their eyes upon me.—Quiet, Lucienne, be still!
Where do you think you are? Wasn't that the last stroke . . .?
At ten, next morning, I was still getting up. I did not manage
to feel remorse at this unusual lateness, but I did succeed in not
thinking about its cause. I had a lesson in town from eleven to
noon. I knew I should be on time, as always. But I was in no
hurry. The sun, flooding my room, tempered its chill. The marble
of my dresser shone with what we would call daring in human eyes.
When I touched it, I had the sense of springtime from its cold
hardness, of winding my way beneath the still bare trees; I felt
years endlessly in flight before me, a long perspective of events
that quivered like poplars ribboning a highway. All about me
were scattered the little articles of the ritual of dressing. The
hour was tardy, the room was in disorder and the bright sun
stressed it. I did not care. I thought of a young rich woman
wandering idly from room to room of her luxurious apartment:
she lingers over her dressing and she spreads about her a casual dis-
array which hands less delicate will have to put to rights.


306 LUCIENNE
Suddenly, there was a knock at my door. A letter, I thought. I
opened. M Barbelenet stood there.
"Pardon, Mademoiselle, pardon. Do I intrude? It's not right,
I know, to disturb you so early. But I wanted to be sure to find
you."
I offered him a chair.
"No. I can't stay but a moment. It's simply for this umbrella,
it must be yours? You must have left it, yesterday. I thought
you might need it perhaps, the weather is so uncertain. The maid
could have brought it. But to-day's cleaning day. She'd have
come later. I didn't mind the idea at all of the little journey
up to town."
I looked at the umbrella. It was indeed mine. I had no recol-
lection either of forgetting it or of having taken it along to the
Barbelenet house.
"Thank you, Monsieur. You should not have gone to all this
trouble."
"Oh, don't mention it; please don't mention it."
He stood in the middle of the room, so ill at ease, so plainly
eager to stay, so tortured by what still remained to be said, that I
felt sorry for him.
"Do sit down, Monsieur Barbelenet. It's quite a way from
the station, and up hill, too. Rest, just a moment."
In the instant that it took for him to sit, three or four theories to
explain his coming turned in my mind. I lighted on the worst of
them. They are shocked by what happened when I left; they are
scandalized by what Cecile must have told them, and they are
giving me the sack. To sugar the pill, they've sent the good-
natured papa. My own misfortune wrapped me round, at once. I
saw my room, the scattered signs of my ease. How wise you were,
poor Lucienne, to take a last holiday in the sun this morning!
To play at being a rich lady! Five minutes later would have
been too late. . . . Will you still know how to be poor'? The
tremulous days will once more cover you like a holy shift: the
quiet song will come back, and your spirit will float dimly like
a vault overhead, like music in a church? Will there be tears
again, at the day's close? . . . M Barbelenet was saying:
"To be sure, if you take the short cut, it's pretty steep. . . .
But I'm not so old that I need worry about getting tired. I don't
pamper myself. If you start worrying about yourself, it's all over.


JULES ROMAINS 3°7
Yes. I suppose my face looks tired. I've been through a terrible
night, I tell you, Mademoiselle"
"Madame was sick?"
"No, thank God! Oh, no one knows I'm here. You'll say
nothing, will you? It's best. Just imagine! I had to make an
inspection of the shops, late last night. There was a night-force
on very special work. When I came back, long past midnight . . .
you've been upstairs in our house, haven't you? Well, each of
the girls has her own room at the head of the stairs. Ours is at
the end of the hall. They should have been asleep long ago, of
course. Well, as I went by Marthe's door, I heard words; someone
was crying. I guessed what it was all about. But I had no idea
of how serious it was. I could not understand what they were
saying, but their tone of voice was enough. So I knocked, several
times. They paid no attention. I opened the door and went in.
Marthe was in bed: rather, she was sitting up in bed, all uncov-
ered, cold as it was, and sobbing away with her face hidden in
her hands. Cecile was leaning over her, and with clenched teeth
she was talking right into her face. She was so fierce about it, that
she did not even turn when I stood there. I rushed up and said:
'What has happened, children? Have you gone mad?' Marthe
cried out: 'Papa, Papa. She is too cruel. I can't stand it. I
haven't done anything. Why should she torture me? Why should
she come into my room to torture me?' Cecile gave me a stony
glare, as if she wanted to bite me. Then she got hold of herself
and began to smile: 'Father, you shouldn't have troubled. It's
nothing but a child's quarrel. I'm trying to say things to Marthe.
But she isn't fair. You can't tell her a thing without her making
a fuss as if you were flaying her alive. If you start feeling sorry
for her, she'll never stop crying. She's the spoilt child of the
house. The little Benjamin! The Cherub!' And she began
smoothing the pillow for Marthe's head.
"It was pretty hard finding out anything, but at last I suc-
ceeded in getting to the root of the matter. You already know,
don't you, Mademoiselle? Since our cousin Pierre Febvre put
his foot into the house, these two have quite lost their heads. I
knew there was going to be trouble. I knew from the first that
young man was not meant for us. He's a splendid fellow, honest
right through: but his ways are different. He's too clever . . .
far too clever. We should have taken care, warned our little girls,


308 LUCIENNE
if need be. But my wife has ideas. She saw it as a chance,
all ready made, for Cecile: she thought as soon as she had approved
of the match, there was nothing left to do. And then what? Both
of them fell in love with their cousin. I don't know which first.
Cecile, I believe, was a bit cool at the beginning. Pierre Febvre
has certain traits that could scarcely appeal to Cecile. But I'm
afraid she is a bit of a dog in the manger. With Marthe, it was
different. She is so affectionate. For instance, she adores you.
A fact! Oh, don't go and think she loves everyone. Far from
that. She must be really touched, and you know, she hasn't much
family spirit. But once she is attached to any one! You have
noticed how resigned she can be, stubborn and resigned all at once.
She was quite ready to have Pierre Febvre marry Cecile. Aston-
ishing, isn't it? But make her admit that she had no right to
care for her cousin who's almost engaged to her sister . . . drive
out of her head the notion that he prefers her, loves only her,
whomever he may marry . . . why, you might more easily chop
her into a thousand pieces. That's what exasperates Cecile: her
quiet resigned way of suggesting: 'Marry him if you like. That
does not concern me. That is a family matter. But I have his
heart!' . . . They spend the days tormenting each other. Music,
piano—I hate to say this to you, my wife imagines it was her
idea, that this was the way to round out their education—bah!
nothing but jealousy it was. Pierre Febvre on one of his visits
speaks of music, is surprised that they do not play . . . and the
thing is done. Next day, Marthe feels the call for playing piano,
Cecile feels it twice over. Simple enough: but I wouldn't dare
say it to most women. You are a superior person, I can say
many things to you. As for me, I have always been musical: I
used to study the flute. But it was because I loved music—
nothing else. Just a bit of a point. . . .
"But Mademoiselle, I did not come here to din all this in your
ears: when you must know more of it already. I came to tell
you what took place last night, for that concerns you somewhat,
and probably you haven't the least idea how. Your ears didn't
burn last night? Well, it's not my daughters' fault."
"What do you mean?"
"I am ashamed to have to tell you. Guess what new instru-
ment of torture Cecile has found for her sister? She has made
up her mind to prove that ever since he first saw you, Pierre


JULES ROMAINS 309
Febvre is in love with you. No lawyer ever had more arguments.
You should hear her. First of all, watch him when he speaks
to you: when you are there he has no eyes for any one else;
when you are not there, he has no words for anything but your
talent, your ways, the things you've said. Last evening, when
we were all sure he was going to stay to dinner . . . the cook had
even baked a special dish for him ... he just could not bear
seeing you leave and a force greater than he made him go too.
Wait: you haven't heard the worst. Cecile claims that she followed
you two, or at any rate met you both in town. And she is mad
enough—you won't be angry with me, Mademoiselle? I know all
this sounds inexcusably rude. Please, dear Mademoiselle, take it
in the spirit I am telling it. I am a bewildered father who has
come to you as to a confessor. I know perfectly well that Cecile
is a half-crazed girl who dreams out loud. But if I want your
advice, how can I have it if I don't tell you everything?"
"Please go on, M Barbelenet. I shan't be offended, whatever
you may say."
"Well then, she was mad enough to tell her sister that she
saw you two, Pierre Febvre and you, tenderly talking together
in the dark side streets, lingering over your fond farewells right
in the middle of the rue Saint Blaise: like a couple who don't even
bother to hide. ... I really must beg your pardon for repeating
such nonsense. But wouldn't it be wrong to keep you in the dark,
you who have been so good to my two girls, and so open? Don't
be too hard on poor Cecile. You have a perfect right, I know, to
be angry. After all, you're your own mistress: even if the tales
of Cecile were true ten times over, what business would it be
of ours? All the more—"
"Please, M Barbelenet, don't apologize. Go on. Act as if I
were someone else."
"Of course, Marthe came back at her sister, called her a liar,
a limb of Satan. Cecile could not have concocted a cleverer poison.
For you see, Pierre Febvre and you are the two persons in the
whole world who mean most to Marthe. Yes: and to think
it was you who were depriving her of him . . . you can understand
her anguish. She is not angry, she is not hostile. She wants to
do no one any harm. Simply, if she believed it, she would be
frightfully hurt. I'll tell you: the worst of all might not be that
her cousin should love you instead of her, it would be that you


310 LUCIENNE
might love Pierre Febvre. For in that case, there'd be no further
doubt: she would have to admit that someone counted more in
your life than she did. Whereas, so far, she has gone on hoping
that it might be she, after all, who counted most. I have come to
understand by certain things she said: you have no idea,
Mademoiselle, what you mean to that girl. Once at table, some one
of us happened to say that you would be marrying one day, and
that then you would give up teaching. Well, you'd never have
guessed it: Marthe who is usually so calm almost lost her temper.
You'd have thought she had been insulted. Ah, you see, at her
age children are exclusive: once they become attached to you, you
are no longer free to exist for any one else."
"Still, even before I came, Marthe felt as she feels now? She
was jealous of her sister. And no one was there besides M Febvre?"
"That's true. But the one fact does not exclude the other. I
tell you, you don't know the little one! To be at one and the
same time the favourite of Pierre Febvre and of you—she finds
that only natural and proper. Why do you think she is lukewarm
toward her mother? 'Simply because she knows she could never
have any exclusive privilege with her. My wife is not the kind
with whom it would be possible. Before you were there, of course
you could not count. But I assure you, I am convinced that what
hurts her most is the thought of having lost you."
"But that is all mere childishness. Why then does she let
Cecile arouse her so?"
"Cecile is terribly thorough. You know how it is: we believe
what is false far more easily than what is true, especially when
there's a chance of making ourselves suffer. If you took the
trouble, you might be able to disillusion her. But that would not
settle matters, would it? ... on the contrary. Yes, on the con-
trary."
"What does Madame Barbelenet say to all this?"
M Barbelenet was holding his hat in his hand: it stirred faintly.
Then, with his other hand he began to scratch his head, digging
his fingers into the close-cropped pepper-and-salt hair. His eyes
wandered from the floor to the dresser. He wrinkled up his brow,
opened his mouth. The old Gaul with the slightly moth-eaten
moustache became a respectable smuggler asked by a custom's
official about the contents of his valise.
"My wife? Oh . . . ah . . . yes. I must explain. It'd never


JULES ROMAINS 311
do. My wife, you see, of course she is in a better position than
any one for knowing what is going on in the house, and for
deciding things. She has more time than I. She's a capable
woman, besides. But you understand, she has her own way of
knowing things. I've often thought, what a pity she was not born
a man. She could have worked her way up to the sort of position
that calls for her sort of gifts. You see, managing a little home
like ours with all its little details and cares, is not exactly a great
task. Any one could do it. Some people are much more at home
with really important duties. You know, I feel quite sure that
in the courts, in the high places of government there must be men
who aren't a bit cleverer than Madame Barbelenet. They can
see clear through all those exalted questions where a man like me,
for instance, would get all muddled. And on the other hand . . .
do you follow? It's not exactly that my wife is bored with the
house. But she gets hold of certain ideas and she spends more
time on them than on what is really going on. I suppose that's
the way you must be, if you have a whole nation, for instance,
to rule.
"And then, there's her health that makes it hard for her to
see to all the details. I often wonder how she manages at all, she
suffers so much. Not acute suffering, perhaps, but it is always
there.
"You understand, we get along perfectly. But I couldn't go
and speak to her as I am doing to you. Never. Perhaps it's my
fault. Why think! Not once have we two had a real talk about
Pierre Febvre, nor about the future of Cecile and Marthe."
"But surely, after last night, you must have said something."
"A few words. . . . Not particularly about this."
"Didn't Madame Barbelenet hear the noise . . . the crying?"
"Not exactly. The rooms are quite far apart. Besides, when
there's going to be a change of weather, like to-day, my wife's
pains grow worse. I'll tell you also: she's very observant, nothing
really escapes her . . . but she does not always want to see things.
She wishes to hold on to her authority: and she thinks a parent
is likely to lose it, if she interferes too much."
"But surely Cecile confides in her mother! You say Madame
Barbelenet approved of this marriage plan. How could she, with-
out a talk at some time with Cecile?"
"Perhaps—but perhaps not the sort of talk you imagine. You


312 LUCIENNE
don't know my wife's ways of doing things. She hates to dot
her i's. And yet she is open enough. Nothing underhand. If
she disapproved of our Bishop, he'd know it soon enough: she's
the sort who would refuse to receive him at her house. But no
explanations. Of course, with my work taking me away from
morning till night, I can't be sure. Many things might have been
said without my hearing them. But I can't picture Cecile con-
fessing to her mama that she loves her cousin . . . nor my wife
calling Cecile to a conference on the subject of a husband. Not
in the least. It may be—but I'd be surprised."
"And yet someone must have begun thinking about this mar-
riage. Cecile or Madame Barbelenet or M Febvre."
"Certainly not Pierre Febvre. As to which of the two—my
wife or Cecile—I'll tell you. . . . Do you know what is meant
by family spirit? Please don't misunderstand. I don't mean to
be rude. One may come from an excellent family, have been
most splendidly brought up, be extremely devoted to one's people,
and yet have no idea of what family spirit can be. You may say
that Madame Barbelenet and Cecile are quite different. Perhaps.
But both of them have the family spirit."
Thereupon M Barbelenet tapped twice within his hat ... a
sort of parting tap, as one might dispose of a nail which one gave
up driving quite home. He knew that his explanation lacked some-
thing. But he felt he could do no better: he appealed to me
silently to supply the needed light in the dark matter, to smoothe
out for myself all these ravelled weaves that he had opened up.
"Family spirit" ... up and down went his head as he watched
to see if the words were working in me as in him. It was as if he
sought my connivance in some strange event which after all had
to be admitted sooner or later. He could not think of his wife
or of Cecile without a tinge of admiration. He was quite ready
to admit that in himself this "family spirit" was nothing out of
the ordinary, but he could not help being proud that in his own
house it should have flowered into so rare a brilliance. It was not
necessary that he should be a true acolyte, to feel the cult's splen-
dour in his own veins.
A little earlier as he talked, I had felt in my heart a glow
of sympathy, one of those sudden outbursts which lead us to
believe that we shall be able at one stroke to break through cer-
tain conventional barriers which men set up among themselves.


JULES ROMAINS 313
I wanted to throw all of life into a new solution, build up afresh,
this time upon a Truth. I was near saying: "Dear Papa Bar-
belenet, I am fond of you, and of Marthe too. You were unlucky
enough to marry an impossible harridan who thinks her silly ways
are majesty—Be so good as to be seated—who at bottom, loves no
one. She hasn't even common sense, she rules your household
from above, in order to avoid the discomfort of really managing
it; and to make things worse, she plays the chronic invalid in order
to be sure of just as much pampering and nursing as her mood calls
for. As to dear little Marthe, her ill luck is in having a shrew
for a sister in whom her mother's egotism has become spicily sea-
soned with envy and ill-will. Be brave, and see things clear, just
this once. It will do us all good." . . . And I might have added:
"Go and get Marthe. We'll have a talk, all three of us together.
I'll improvise a luncheon right here: I have three odd plates, and
the sun will shine on them as we take pot-luck." . . . There was
nothing absurd, nothing impossible in the impulse. Perhaps just
this event was clamouring to be. Perhaps Papa Barbelenet was
feeling its secret urge even as I was, a bit more dimly, I suppose,
for he is older and has more respect for the hard worn grooves
of life. Perhaps Marthe down there in her room felt the need,
at the same moment, to be with us: and the brief fancy may have
brought her consolation.
But it is over, now. I no longer want it. I am thinking of
my lesson. A bare five minutes to get ready. I shall be late.
To make up for it, I shall have to let the lesson run beyond the
noon hour. That means being late at the hotel. Marie Lemiez
won't wait: she'll be at the second course when I come in. The
whole meal will be out of joint; the joy of it somehow marred.
One more joyous thing on which I counted . . . gone. As if I did
not have troubles enough. A desert of afternoon to go through,
with my courage alone to keep me company till night: and not the
least chance that there would be one pleasure on the way.
My reverie must have cast its gleam on my face: M Barbelenet
was not acute enough to read it, but doubtless it awakened in his
mind a distant kindred echo. His will wanted more conversa-
tion: but he was caught deeply by the feeling that he must go.
. . . And yet, if he went like this, something intolerable would
remain behind. What he had brought me was a chaos of satis-
faction, hope, and fear; but none of them in so strong measure


314 LUCIENNE
as to outweigh the others. I had learned a good deal . . . more
than I needed. Yet not enough, since I saw no conclusion. What
I knew would arouse me painfully, and in no way could make me
act. Above all, the whole Barbelenet family had been slowly
filtering, all of this hour, into my room: invading my eyes, in-
vading me. The family grew, feeding upon my present, feeding
upon my future. It loomed very close; and I was overborne by an
enormous face whose features I made out with cruel clearness: it
leaned so heavy upon me I could scarcely breathe. But clear
though it was, the face's eyes were shut. I could not make out what
it wanted of me. It was like one of those dreams which wear us
out, precisely because they bring together in a single vision things
too familiar and things too horribly secret.
—No: M Barbelenet cannot go like this. I must find out what
they want of me. . . . "M Barbelenet, I am sorry, but I shall have
to ask you to leave, in a few moments. I have to get ready for a
lesson in town. And yet there remains something between us
that should be clear. . . . You came here to see me: surely, it
must have been because you wanted something?"
"Oh, Mademoiselle—to be sure, I should have been glad to go
home with the key for solving the whole situation, if you only
had it in your pocket."
"Do you think—I have?"
"It would be too good to be true."
"You think perhaps I've brought trouble into your home. With
your girls quarrelling over me, just last night."
"Not at all, Mademoiselle. What made you think that?"
"If I stopped coming, Cecile could no longer bring tales to
Marthe. For I suppose you will do me the honour of believing
that I meet M Pierre Febvre nowhere else."
"Mademoiselle, there's no question of that, at all."
"Cecile and Marthe would still be rivals, it is true. Why don't
you make your cousin speak out his mind?"
"Who knows, Mademoiselle? Perhaps that's where you could
help. I don't ask you to sound the girls. It wouldn't do much
good any more; and you'd find it harder now. But you might
possibly get at what Pierre Febvre thinks exactly."
"Why should you ask me to do that?"
"Perhaps it's not the right thing. Please don't be angry. When
I speak to you I feel that I am speaking to so serious, so uncommon


JULES ROMAINS 3*5
a person! I know you are a young lady, yourself; you seem
jollier, younger than many a girl, than Cecile, for instance. And
yet, with all that, one can say things to you ... as to someone
very wise."
"But I don't see, M Barbelenet, what is to keep you from asking
M Febvre—yourself or your wife. He's your cousin. He's a
man, a gentleman, I suppose. . . . Why should he object to being
questioned?"
"I'll see what my wife says. ... I know already what she'll
say. . . . You don't understand her, Mademoiselle."
"But you . . . you, M Barbelenet. Why shouldn't you go to
M Febvre, just as you came to me?"
"Of course ... of course. Why not? Well, then, I'll tell
you. Between ourselves, I don't like the idea at all. It would be
as if I were begging him to become my son-in-law. It would sound
as if I were scolding him for having gone so far, for having com-
promised my girls . . . telling him he owed us some reparation.
To be frank with you, it is impossible ... I haven't always been
on the spot, I may not have seen and heard everything; but
honestly, I don't think anything very terrible took place. If
Pierre Febvre felt like saying: 'Really, cousin, you're all mad in
that house of yours. I want neither Cecile nor Marthe. Just
because you've been kind to me is no reason why I must get
married. If it is, you should have a placard on your door. . . .
And with whom have I compromised your daughter? The switch-
man, I suppose, who may have seen me crossing the tracks, or the
lamplighter?' ... If he talked like that, I should be dumb."
"But whether he says it to you ... or to me . . ."
"It's not the same thing at all."
"Very well, put it to him casually, while Madame Barbelenet is
there. You want an answer? There's the way to get it."
"May be . . . who knows?"
He arose. He took a step or two. And while he spoke, his
eyes travelled up and down my door, carefully, attentively, as if
he were a carpenter making an estimate. He was having a fine
time with my poor door! And while he was at it, a brood of
lively thoughts came from me too, and played about my door.
"Of course, Mademoiselle, you won't tell a soul what we've been
saying. When you see the youngsters . . . to-morrow, isn't it?
... try to act as if there's been nothing."


316 LUCIENNE
"But M Barbelenet, as things stand, it's going to be rather pain-
ful to see your girls—especially if I am to have no explanation
from them. Put yourself in my place."
"Well, then? ..."
"Well, then. . . ." On the tip of my tongue stood: "There must
be an explanation." Suddenly I felt as abhorrently averse from
such an act as Madame Barbelenet. In certain details, Cecile had
lied . . . but only in certain details. Would I not be compelled,
first of all, to admit a number of essential facts? Only then could
I prove how wickedly Cecile had distorted them. ... Of course.
But what an odious discussion. What would be left of my dignity?
. . . And another thing . . . something alive only in my future
began to assert itself, to declare its rights, refused to be sacrificed
to my pride, and to my silly sense of honour. All the time, I
was silent.
And the good Papa Barbelenet seemed not astonished at my
silence. Perhaps he was embarrassed enough to understand.
I managed at last to say: "I must think all this over. Never
fear, I shan't be indiscreet. If I find I absolutely must have a
talk with your daughters, I'll warn you beforehand. In any case,
I thank you for having been so fair toward me."
"Why, that's the least—that's nothing. Until to-morrow,
Mademoiselle?"
"Perhaps—until to-morrow."
"What do you mean? Why perhaps? You must come. I
won't leave here till you promise you will come. Heavens, how
I'd regret my visit! Promise me."
"Very well—until to-morrow. I promise."
XI
—Why had he come? His words just before he left shed no
light, and yet they leave me less troubled. No one sent him
. . . not even his wife. No one. I don't think he kept anything
back at the last moment. If he did, he was not aware of it him-
self. ... I see fairly well what made him come: perhaps not
all the reasons, but at least the way in which he felt these reasons.
I could send them all to the Devil: the fact remains that we are
drawn to each other, terribly! If I were honest with myself: what
would I want to do at this very moment, what one thing would


JULES ROMAINS 317
assuage me? To see Cecile and Marthe, separately, then together:
to be with them in that shadowed parlour, where we could search
each other, wound each other, drag out the truth, speak cruel
words ... be downright offensive to each other, even, and yet
sure at least of this, that we won't part, even our insults will not
be irreparable since they cannot part us: no chance of any one's
getting up and flouncing angrily from the room. That is what
would soothe: you dare let your rage out to the bitter end, drain
your bad blood to the last drop, knowing that a barrier which is
a bond will hold you till there's been time to explain, till there's
been time for pardon.
I see it clear: Marthe's tear-filled eyes, and her blue-white hands
in mine. . . . Even Madame Barbelenet, I should like to face her
too, although heaven knows she wearies me, the mere thought of
her lofty vapours puts my teeth on edge . . . and yet I should like
to have her face to face, submit to her innuendoes, her insinuations,
draw her out, rob her of her secrets, force her to admit things she
has never dreamed even of admitting to herself.
I'd gladly do without lunch, if only I dared run down. Marie
Lemiez? My tete-a-tete with her is going to be a bore. There is
not the slightest bond between us. What brought us two together?
A lot I care for what we can say to one another. My meals with
Marie Lemiez, my friendship . . . watch it whiff up in the air
like a toy balloon that slips from a child's hand and bounces
against the ceiling. . . . Pierre Febvre? . . . Pierre Febvre, yes!
Do I want to see him, too, right off? Have it out with him? No.
No words yet, no words between us. But I want to see him. Not
even see him, as one calls seeing people. I want to see him as
you see a picture which you take from your desk when you are all
alone, as you see a face that rises in a dream. If I were in a
room with him, there'd have to be a lot of others. We would be
far apart, not to talk . . . just to look at each other.
And yet, what a tale I have for him, this visit of Papa Bar-
belenet. This quarrel of the girls ... a quarrel about me, and
him. There'd be something good in a long talk with Pierre Febvre,
something worthy of his laughter, his crowning laughter. I can
hear it now. He is walking at my side, on my left. He's taller
a little. Simple words between us, and yet we talk an occult
language. The meaning of our words cannot go farther than our-
selves. Yes, it would be sweet, to-day . . . nothing sweeter than


318 LUCIENNE
to talk with him. But I have learned something: the thing most
sweet is not always what draws us first. . . . There's something,
I don't know what, to hold me back from wanting to see Pierre
Febvre. His last words, as he was leaving? Why? Were they
a bit too eager? I want to believe this is why. I do not believe
it. . . .
The hour before dinner did not bring me my wonted longing
for the quiet of my room, the quiet filled with reading a good book,
going over a score. I was restless: I wanted an excuse for linger-
ing in the central streets. But even now, their life was paltry.
I had suffered from this, before. I had been a child in Paris, I
needed luminous streets, the crowd's swift recharging of work-
worn nerves. But I was not fastidious, now. In the feeblest
shop display, the thinnest gathering of three persons on a corner,
I found a heady hint of the great city. I played my game so
thoroughly that I decided on a tour of the shops, quite as if they
had indeed been a "sight." A Spring Sale was going on, it is
true: the stores were pretty full. Moving about, I caught my
fleeting image in the mirrors: it meant nothing. Now, suddenly
I stopped before a glass on a side wall: a display of veils lay
ahead, so that of course I had to stop as I did.
I looked at myself. Chance, so it seemed to me, made my first
glance as unwitting, as impartial as if I had seen a stranger. There
are these moments when the most familiar things grow strange,
when we must jog our minds to remember where we live, who
we are. In that flash of the glass, I had forgotten my own face.
I became acquainted with my face! And before all else, I found
delight in it. Then came a thought: That face is beautiful! No
doubt of it, it is a beautiful face. My own? So I am
beautiful? . . .
There had been joy first, then judgement: and the joy meant
most, for it included judgements less frail than this one. It was
not impersonal, far from it: quickly it pervaded my whole being,
brought me pride. But in what more convincing way could instinct
—divinely indifferent, impersonal instinct!—have brought to my
anxious personal will this joy of its discovery?
I am beautiful. Quite impersonally I know that I am beau-
tiful. And I have never openly been aware of it before. I have
studied my glass. Especially when I was young. I used to look


JULES ROMAINS 319
long in my glass. But always it was like an anxious arraign-
ment of myself. It was as if I had to mitigate a sentence already
spoken. What I looked for, studying my face, was a plea for
clemency, as if I had thought: "Of course, you are fatally excluded
from the class of truly beautiful women. There's no appeal from
that. Now, how can I fool the world . . . keep them from know-
ing this too clearly, keep myself from knowing? What trick of
light will help, what coiling of my hair? Was it this way a
coiffure helped my face? What expression best hides my
plainness?"
Mere chance, and the evil spell was broken! I am beautiful.
No doubt of it at all. It's not a question of other people's taste,
of my own indulgence: it is a fact. I have made a discovery, and
I feel already how vastly it is going to affect me. Almost, it
scares me a bit. Life was easier, I believe, when I thought of
myself as nothing more than passably goodlooking. If I am beau-
tiful, really, no more need of my daily sessions at the glass to
catch the best fleeting glimpses of my face, no more need to repress
from my mind what my eyes see too clearly. And yet this daily
effort had its charm. It had a savour somewhat like that of my
work during the first pinched months. Of course, if wealth came
and all life's largesse, I could stand them as well as the next: no
fear that they would be too much for me. But there's a different
thrill in sufficing to oneself, when life is lacking. In taking upon
oneself the task of being happy, of being beautiful. Even the
drawn brow and the dour lips of the ascetic have their delights.
It seems that I have never before really thought of beauty, of
the amazing splendour which dwells upon a human face when
beauty dwells there. I have admitted often enough that some
women are beautiful, that certain individual women whom I saw
here and there were beautiful. But almost at once, in the case
of a woman, an impalpable contempt came between me and her
beauty, veiled it, and it was on this veil that my thoughts rested
as if to buttress it. I acted as if there were two kinds of women,
two races almost, the beautiful . . . and the others, of whom I
was one. I never quite thought it out, but I seemed to admit
to myself that the truly beautiful paid for their glory by
exclusion from a more exalted, spiritual life. I had nothing but
a shrug for the barbarous question, "have women souls?" if
women in general were concerned. But the notion seemed to have


320 LUCIENNE
point when I was looking at some particularly lovely creature. It
was different with men. Beauty in a man implied nobility: it
was a mark of greatness, the fire of the mind. The banal face
of a "pretty boy" meant as little to me as other forms of pretti-
ness . . . bazaar pottery, sentimental pictures, popular novels
... all the things that good taste ruled out. I never asked myself
what love, addressed to me from such a face, might arouse in
my own animal nature. There was a curious inconsistency in this
fact, that what I called beauty in a woman I should have been
ashamed to delight in, in a man. Had I contrived this, so as
always to be able to feel contempt as soon as I saw beauty in a
woman, or was it rather my hidden wish to mortify the flesh?
For it was this had kept me from seeing beauty in myself: I
denied myself the right of every woman to know herself fair, to
have joy of her own fairness.
—I have moved, and here's another mirror. There can be no
common ground, no possible meeting between the little values of
our daily life and beauty. Even to think of it means never to
have known beauty, to have brushed by it blindly. Look at beauty
straight, and it invades your soul: and lo! there is naught else.
How profound and terrible it is. A beautiful face quiet before
you; and sudden in your mind roaring torrents, unquenchable
floods of power. Nothing has stirred ... no eyelid has trembled.
... I am not looking at myself, I am not thinking of myself.
Nor of any one. And yet I understand how for hours one might
watch the contour of a nostril, the pressure of a lip. Again and
again you must come back to that line of nose and cheek, dwell
with it, make it yours, and give yourself to its magic. And you
seem to say: "Beauty, consume me. Fill me, if you can. But
you can never fill me. For even as you possess me, you make me
also infinite."
—Pierre Febvre. . . . Yes, Pierre Febvre. I have the right
to think of him: and to wonder what he is to become in me, now
that I have this fresh vision of myself. My eyes were on him long,
the other day, and yet felt nothing of this. I was cool and col-
lected. How strange. How sad! Why is it sad? What do
you mean by sad? Was I indeed looking at him as I just looked
at myself? I think not. I looked close, but it was a shallow
closeness ... a defensive. To look at a man in order to defend
yourself is a sure way not to see him. When you can't help


JULES ROMAINS 321
seeing, that is when you see. ... I wish he were here now: the
two of us together somewhere where there was no need to talk.
On a tram for instance. I would sit opposite. And I'd know soon
enough if there was that terrific power in his face which I have
just discovered. I can see his features. A little effort—there he
is! But the picture is dead. Gathering him up in my mind, I
must have weakened him. Or else ... It is extraordinary that I
cannot say whether Pierre Febvre is beautiful. Every thought
and standard I have accumulated in all my life has lost value . . .
is out of circulation. The only ones that now remain are the ones
I have still to mint.
—But Pierre Febvre, does he know what beauty is? Then,
what does he think of me? He was interested, of course . . .
but I felt none of that overpowering disarray of spirit, which I
can imagine now so well. He did not tremble, he did not grow
pale. There was in his eyes no sudden panic of worship. . . .
Those things he said, about love arising between every man, every
woman . . . was he half joking? . . . and yet a truth hides there.
In jest, he touched on one of the secrets of life. Now, how fit that
with my own revelation? Thousands of passers-by on the Mar-
seille street, the myriad sparks that flash . . . I can see that. What
of beauty, then? What can there be in common between these
fleeting marriages and the deep havoc of the soul wrought by a
face of beauty? And suppose I could bring the two together: how
would they tally with what I have always thought of love? If I
loved a man, I am sure I should love no one else. For instance,
if I loved Pierre Febvre . . . and if I met someone else more
beautiful than he . . . the most beautiful man in the world? . . .
—These men came close to me, and looked at me. Two of them
at least had a gleam in their eyes that said I was beautiful. And
yet, they may love some other woman, passionately love.
—If I could only talk of all this with Pierre Febvre! I'd ask
him questions. No one else could possibly understand me. Marie
Lemiez wouldn't have the least idea what I was talking about.
He is clever ... a little frivolous? ... he has no real respect
for women. He does not mind making a game of them. But he
is not complacent. It is amazing to be at once so little complacent,
and so little timid! If I discussed this with him, he would not
be such a fool as to read into it something personal that is not
there: he'd simply go over the points, in all good faith. It would


322 LUCIENNE
be just like him even to dare use the case of us two as an example,
just to make things clear. What of it? A good laugh, and we'd
be quits . . . the laughter of Pierre Febvre. A bad word . . .
that gleam in his voice is far more luminous than laughter. There
is a secret in that too. His laughter and how it goes on in myself,
all kindled by it . . . and it has naught to do with beauty. Not
beauty, and yet you can't resist, nothing can resist. What you
think, what you see is transfigured. Everything is lifted by a
mysterious glow. If I heard Pierre Febvre laughing now, what
change would there come to my thoughts? If I heard him laugh,
just as I was looking in the glass . . . would my beauty be shat-
tered? Would beauty no longer count? No: truth would still
be truth. It would be suddenly bright, that's all. Like a song
that is still a song, though it has passed from a minor to a major
key. . . .
I had left the store. Without mirrors, without the lights, my
sense of beauty dimmed. People passing were full of other
thoughts. A sale of grain ... a job still to be done ... a game
of cards before dinner in some mean cafe.
I longed for Paris. . . .
—Six of the evening, Boulevard Montmartre: myriad shoddy
thoughts fill all these heads ... a lovely woman passes . . . and
the whole crowd knows it! They are weary, they are anxious to
get home: yet they have time . . . and spirit ... to offer them-
selves as victims of this sweet devastation by a face of beauty! I
can't think of the Cannebiere, like you, Pierre Febvre ... for I
have never seen it. I dwell with my Montmartre. I see no count-
less momentary marriages, like you. The crackling of sparks, you
said, upon all sides. True. But this evening, I can see only beauty.
A beautiful face is lighted within the evening lampglow, and the
passing crowds behold it. It leaves its mark on every face. Like a
spell of magic, it pierces and penetrates ... or like pain? A
lovely woman: and in every man the savour of his bitterness that
he cannot possess her, a sweet drop of poison on each man's lips,
more lingering than the day's toil. . . .
To be concluded



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SPANISH LETTER
July, IQ24
IN a view of the countryside of the Escorial, the monastery is
merely the largest of many rocks, distinguished by a greater
firmness and finish of line from the surrounding masses of stone.
In these days of spring there is an hour at which the sun, like a
golden bubble, is shattered upon the peaks, and a soft light, tinged
with blue, violet, and carmine, floods the mountainsides and valleys,
gently obliterating all contours. The builded stone then mocks the
plans of the builder and, in obedience to a mightier will, reverts
to an identity with the quarries that gave it birth.
Francisco Alcantara, who knows so many things about Spain,
is wont to say that this light of central Castile is a quintessence
of the lights of the provinces, just as the Castillian tongue inte-
grates in a way the dialects and languages of the surrounding
regions of Spain.
It is this light of Castile that a little before the coming of
night—like a cow, slow-moving over the heavens—transfigures
the Escorial into a gigantic mass of flint awaiting the impact,
the decisive shock that will open the veins of fire that furrow its
strong entrails. Sullen and silent the granite group with its great
lyric stone in the centre awaits a generation worthy of wresting
from it the spark of spiritual fire.
To whom did Philip II dedicate this enormous profession of
faith which, after St Peter's at Rome, weighs more heavily upon
the earth than any other credo in Europe? One answer to the
question may be found in the king's own words in the charter
of foundation: "This monastery we dedicate to the name of
blessed Saint Lorenzo because of the particular devotion which,
as aforesaid, we feel toward that glorious saint and in memory
of the grace and victory that God has granted us on and since
Saint Lorenzo's day." This grace of God was the victory of
Saint Quentin. But, after all, the patience of Saint Lorenzo,
admirable as it is, will not suffice to explain these colossal walls.
There can be no doubt that Philip II chose from among the


324 SPANISH LETTER
various plans laid before him the one in which he found expressed
his interpretation of the divine.
All temples, obviously, are erected ad majoram Dei gloriam;
but God is an idea and no authentic temple has ever been dedicated
to anything so abstract as an idea. The apostle who, while wan-
dering about in Athens, came upon an altar bearing, as he thought,
the inscription "To the unknown God" suffered from an illusion;
no such altar has ever existed. Religion is not content with an
abstract God, with a mere idea; it must have a concrete God who
can be actually felt and experienced. Hence it is that there are
as many images of God as there are men; each man in the seething
of his innermost soul fashions his God from whatever material
he finds at hand. The rigour of Catholic dogmatisms confines
itself to exacting that the faithful shall admit the canonical defi-
nition of God and leaves the individual free to imagine and feel
his God as he chooses. Taine tells of a girl who, on being taught
that God is in the heavens, exclaimed "In the heavens like the
birds? Then he must have a beak." That child might well be
Catholic; the definition of the catechism does not exclude the
beak of God. Looking about within us we search out what seems
most worthy in the seething mass, and of that we fashion our
God. Divinity is idealization of the nobler parts of man and
religion is the devotion that half of every individual yields to
his other half, the worship of his more vigorous and heroic by his
more abject and inert aspects.
The monastery is a voluminous commentary on the God of
Philip II or, in other words, on his ideal. What is the meaning
of this massive structure? If every monument is an effort devoted
to the expression of an ideal, what may be the ideal affirmed and
deified by this ostentatious sacrifice of effort?
There is a moment in the evolution of the European mind that,
although it is of the greatest interest, has as yet been very little
studied. It is a time at which the soul of the Continent suffered
one of those appalling intimate crises which, despite their gravity
and the acute pain that they cause, are manifested only by indirect
means. It is at this hour that the Escorial was built.
The most mature fruits of the Renaissance are products of the
middle of the sixteenth century. The Renaissance stands for a
fulness of life and the joy of living. Once again men feel that


JOSE ORTEGA Y GASSET 325
the earth is a paradise. Aspiration and reality perfectly coincide.
Bitterness, let us observe, is always born of the disparity between
desire and attainment. "Chi non pud quel che vuol, quel che pud
voglia" said Leonardo da Vinci. The men of the Renaissance
desire only what they can attain and attain all that they desire.
If at times restlessness and discontent do appear in their works,
they appear with a beauty that makes them totally unlike this
thing that we call Sorrow, this wailing crippled thing that to-day
drags its maimed limbs over our hearts. The expressions of this
happy state of mind prevailing during the Renaissance could not
be other than serene and measured, fashioned with rhythm and
balance—expressions in what was called the graceful manner.
Toward 1560, however, the European soul begins to feel an
uneasiness and discontent, a doubt as to whether life be as perfect
and complete as the foregoing age believed. Men begin to observe
that the lives they desire are better than the lives they lead, that
their aspirations are more lofty and extensive than their achieve-
ments, that their desires are forces confined in the prison of matter
and that they must waste the greater part of them in overcoming
the obstacles put in their way.
As a symbolic expression of this state of mind, we may contrast
with Leonardo's lines, these others of Michael Angelo, now be-
come the man of the hour, La mia allegrez'e la maninconia:
"0 Dio, o Dio, o Dio!
Chi m'ha a tolto a me stesso,
Ch'a me fusse piu presso
O piu di me potessi, che poss'io?
O Dio, 0 Dio, 0 Dio!"
A man who thus cries out against life cannot express his emo-
tions—the emotions of an imprisoned hero or a fettered Prome-
theus—in the tranquil and beautiful forms of Renaissance art.
Accordingly, precisely during these years, the norms of the clas-
sic style begin to undergo modifications. A mere increase in the
size of the graceful forms of the Renaissance constitutes the
first of these modifications. In architecture Michael Angelo insti-
tutes what is called the grand manner in opposition to the grace-
ful manner. The colossal, the superlative, the enormous is now


326 SPANISH LETTER
to triumph in art. It is Hercules and no longer Apollo that affects
the aesthetic sense. The herculean is the beautiful.
This is too suggestive a theme to touch upon now, however
slightly. Why is it that man found a delight for a time in ex-
cess, in the exclusive use of the superlative? What is the mean-
ing of this predilection for the herculean? But let us hasten on.
I wanted merely to point out that when the constellation of
Hercules rose on the horizon of moral Europe, Spain, at the
zenith of her power, was ruling the world and it was then that
King Philip in the heart of his native Guadarrama dedicated this
monument in the grand manner to his ideal.
To what ideal, we were asking, was this pretentious sacrifice
of effort dedicated?
A turn about the vast facades of Saint Lorenzo means a walk
of several kilometers. It has its advantages, therefore, as a hy-
gienic measure and will probably arouse a keen appetite. Alas,
there is no further reward. The architecture leaves with the ob-
server no impression transcending the stone. The monastery of
the Escorial is an effort without implications, anonymous and
aimless—a gigantic effort that reacts only upon itself and scorns
all else. Like Satan it worships itself and sings its praises into
its proper ear. It is an effort devoted to the cult of effort.
The Erechtheum and the Parthenon do not arouse thoughts
of the effort expended by the constructors. The white ruins under
the clear blue sky irradiate great auras of an aesthetic, political,
metaphysical ideality that never loses its power. Intent on ab-
sorbing these manifold exhalations, we are not preoccupied by
thoughts of the labour that was required to arrange and polish
the stones. It does not interest us.
In this monument of our forefathers, on the contrary, we see
in a state of petrifaction a soul all will and effort—with no
ideas or sensitiveness. The architecture is all desire, longing, and
impetus. Nowhere else can we see so clearly defined the essence
of the Spanish character, the hidden spring that has gushed forth
the history of the most abnormal nation of Europe. Charles V
and Philip II heard the confession of their people and these were
the words of the confession, spoken in a delirium of candour:
"We do not really understand the things that engross other races
and to which they devote their care and protection; we do not


JOSE ORTEGA Y GASSET 327
desire to be wise, nor to be intimately religious; we do not desire
to be just and least of all do our hearts crave moderation. We
desire only to be great." A friend of mine who visited Nietzsche's
sister in Weimar (she once lived in Paraguay and so speaks
Spanish) told me of Nietzsche's having once exclaimed: "The
Spaniards! the Spaniards! These men have desired to be too
much."
It has been our desire to set up an ideal, not of virtue or of
truth, but of our desire itself. The greatness to which we aspired
has never assumed in our minds any particular form; like our Don
Juan who was in love with love, but could never love any woman,
we have desired desire without ever desiring an object. We repre-
sent in history the explosion of blind, diffuse, brutal will. The
sullen mass of Saint Lorenzo expresses perhaps our poverty of idea,
but expresses at the same time our abundance of impetus. In
imitation of the work of Dr Palacios Rubio (an author of the
sixteenth century who wrote a Treatise on Martial and Heroic
Effort) we might call it a treatise on pure effort.
Plato, as we know, was the first to attempt to separate the human
mind into its components, or, as they were afterward called,
faculties. Knowing that the individual mind is too elusive and
unstable to afford opportunity for analysis, Plato sought to find
the elements of consciousness by study of races, as representations
of the individual on large scale. "In the nation," he says, "we
find the individual written in large characters." He noted in the
Greek race an indefatigable curiosity and a native dexterity in the
manipulation of ideas. The Greeks were intelligent; in them the
intellectual faculty was predominant. He observed, however, in
the barbarous peoples of the Caucasus a certain quality that he
found wanting in Greece and that seemed to him as important as
intellect. "The Scythians," says Socrates in the Republic, "are
not intelligent, as we are, but they have 0iS fiog. The Latin
equivalent is furor, that is effort, courage, impetus. With this
word as basis, Plato constructed the idea that we now know as will.
This is a genuinely Spanish faculty. Against the vast back-
ground of universal history, we Spaniards have represented a ges-
ture of courage. All our grandeur is in this one gesture—and all
our misery.
Our energy has been so isolated and undirected by thought that


328 SPANISH LETTER
it has been merely an untamed impetus, an ardent but blind desire
that continues indefatigably to deliver its furious but aimless
assaults. By its very nature it can have no purpose. A purpose
is always the product of intelligence, of calculating or planning.
For the man of valiant effort, therefore, action holds no interest.
Action is energy directed toward an end and the end is the measure
of its value. For the man of valiant effort, however, the value of
an act is not measured by its end, by its utility, but by its sheer
difficulty, by the amount of courage expended to encompass it. He
is not interested in action, but only in feats of heroism.
Allow me at this point to bring up a recollection from my own
life. For personal reasons I shall never be able to look upon the
Escorial landscape without seeing vaguely before my eyes, like
the pattern of a fabric, the image of another little town, far away
and as unlike the Escorial as can be imagined. It is a little Gothic
town on the banks of a dark and gentle river, hemmed in by round
hills entirely covered with deep forests of fir and pine, bright
beeches, and splendid box-trees.
In that town I spent the equinox of my youth, it was there that
I acquired the half at least of my hopes and practically the whole
of my discipline—in Marburg on the banks of the Lahn.
But to return to my story. Several years ago I spent a summer
in this Gothic town on the Lahn. Hermann Cohen, one of the
greatest philosophers of our time, was then writing his work on
aesthetics, Aesthetik des Reinen Gefiihls. Like all great creators,
Cohen was of a modest disposition and often discussed with me
questions of beauty and art. The problem as to what constitutes
the genus novel contributed more than any other question to give
rise to dispute between us. I spoke to him of Cervantes. Cohen
thereupon put aside his work to reread Don Quixote. I shall never
forget those nights that filled the steep black heavens with agitated
golden stars, trembling like the heart of a child. I would direct my
steps to the home of the master and find him bowed over the great
book of our race, translated into German by the romanticist Tieck.
And almost always the venerable philosopher, raising his noble
head, greeted me with these words: "But, my dear fellow, this
Sancho is always using the very word that Fichte makes the basis of
his philosophic system." True enough, Sancho often uses the word
hazaiia; it is a good mouth-filling word for him, hazana has been


JOSE ORTEGA Y GASSET 329
translated by Tieck as Tat-handlung; that is, an act of will or
determination.
Germany had been, for centuries, the intellectual nation of poets
and thinkers when, in the works of Kant, the will asserted its right
to a position beside that of thought, ethics to an importance equal
to that of logic. In Fichte the scale inclines to the side of will;
he assigns a greater importance to the deed than to logic and rates
the Tat-handlung, the act of courage, as above reflection. This is
the basis of his philosophy. Behold how the nations change! Is
it not patent that Germany took to heart the teachings of Fichte
that Cohen saw anticipated by Sancho?
But what can pure effort lead to? To nothing at all; or rather
to but one end, melancholia.
Cervantes in Don Quixote wrote the critique of pure effort. Don
Quixote like Don Juan is a hero of a low order of intelligence. His
ideas are so ingenuous, stagnant, and rhetorical that they are really
not ideas at all, but rather paragraphs of stereotyped quotations.
Except for a nondescript mass of hackneyed thought, as old and
well-known as the songs of sailors, his mind is empty. But Don
Quixote is a man of valiant effort. The fact of his courageous
energy, untainted by mockery, may easily be disengaged from the
comic debacle that he made of his life. "The sorcerers," he says,
"may rob me of success, but my courage and will they cannot take
from me." He is a man of valour; his valour constitutes his sole
reality and around it he raises a world of inept phantoms. Every-
thing about him he uses as a pretext to call into play his will-
power, kindle his courage, and launch his enthusiasm. But there
comes a time when there arise in that incandescent soul, grave
doubts concerning the sense of his heroic deeds. And then
Cervantes begins to heap up words of sorrow. From chapter fifty-
eight to the end of the novel, all is bitterness. "Melancholy over-
flowed his heart," says the poet. "From sheer heaviness of heart
he stopped eating," he continues. "He was all sorrow and mel-
ancholy." "Let me die," he says to Sancho, "a prey to my
thoughts and my afflictions." For the first time an inn is an inn to
him. And finally there is the anguish of this, his confession: "The
truth is that I do not know what I achieved by my travails; I do not
know what I attained by my efforts."
Jose Ortega v Gasset


BOOK REVIEWS
LIVING ART
Living Art. Twenty Facsimile Reproductions After
Paintings, Drawings, and Engravings, and Ten Pho-
tographs After Sculpture. By Contemporary Artists.
Folio. The Dial Publishing Company. $60.
THE publishers of Living Art were right in giving that title to
their magnificent collection. Except for five omissions—the
French painters Marquet and Braque and the sculptor Despiau,
the German painter Kokoschka, and the Polish sculptor Lipschitz—
they present therein almost all of the participants in that spiritual
surge, filled with the deep poetry of mysticisms and myths in ges-
tation, which is turning upside-down both the Old World and the
New. To people not familiar with these singularly unacademic
forms I can imagine the study of this folio causing astonishment
or even indignant stupefaction, like that of a person who, ex-
pecting a quiet stroll down accurately planned streets between
regular colonnades, finds himself tumbling into an abyss of ruins
and brambles. So this is Living Art! Yes, by your leave, it is.
It is just this tangled rout of shapes and colours, and to unaccus-
tomed eyes it looks like anarchy. Yet within it a new order is con-
fusedly evolving. A friend of mine recently accused me of being
the victim of some serious mental disorder because I could not
decide on a regular newspaper, and was always changing. I humbly
confessed to him my belief that in me there was being born a new
structure, however odd it might seem to him, and that whether he
could see the embryo or not, I, at least, had already made out its
skeleton. Furthermore, his newspapers, which he urged on me,
were as blind to this change as he. A system which is too clear and
too well marked, may well be, in most cases, nothing but a rut whose
steep walls hide, for those who are in it, the whole living and
moving universe.
Having said this, I am quite ready to admit that this living art,


ELIE FAURE 331
which is attempting everywhere to pierce with its still hesitant
roots the crust of a soil hardened by too many winters and made
uniform and compact by too many feet and too many millstones,
is far more living in theories and in intentions than it is in hearts.
It is an art which, if not didactic, if not even philosophical, is at
least undeniably intellectualistic; which does not mean, however,
that it is devoid of expressive power, or indeed of humanity. But it
undoubtedly lacks innocence, and is perhaps a little too conscious of
the emotions which it strives to awaken. The rhythm of our moral
evolution has been such that what is most alive within us, after the
immense inquiries of the nineteenth century into every branch of
our spiritual activity, is, above all, intelligence, and intelligence in-
tent upon revealing whence it came and whither it is going. Intel-
ligence, in love with itself, has acquired a sensuous and concrete
understanding of its own methods, which enables it to reverse the
usual processes of art, and starting with pure reason to arouse
feeling secondarily. In this meeting of modern artists—the only
moderns among the artists, and the only living—I can see none
but Pierre Bonnard, perhaps, who relies first of all upon sponta-
neous emotion and unexpected fantasy for the realization of those
miraculous harmonies of his, in the depths of which life is sur-
prised, wandering and palpitating like larvae and flowers and
wings, amid crushed gems and whirling pollen. And yet, the unity
of the living spirit is such that Bonnard is in no wise out of place
in this group. On the contrary, its constant preoccupation with
demonstration and experiment seems to be legitimized by his charm-
ing discoveries and by the caprices which mark his always entertain-
ing journey through a world which, by his own confession, is ever
new to him, and where he roams without the slightest prejudice.
That life of the intelligence, which to-day animates the freest
art of the two worlds, is explained if one goes back to French
Impressionism, whose ruins Bonnard needed only to survey in order
to find growing grass, lizards in crannies, and bees and butterflies
concealed by a carpet of flowers. After Impressionism, indeed,
dissociation was everywhere. Forgetful of the flesh, and of the
viscera, and the skeleton underneath, Impressionism had, by a pas-
sionate analysis, explored the farthest reaches of colour, wandering
and shining in reflections and transparent shadows. After Impres-
sionism, the artist could only renounce, or rebuild. Rebuild from


332 LIVING ART
the ground up, for Impressionism itself represented, in our visual
researches, the ultimate effort of anarchic dissolution which political
and social ideology was accomplishing at the same time, and which
the research of science, unable as yet to perceive any possible syn-
thesis, was encouraging. That is what Paul Signac, for example,
understood when he attempted a chromatic harmony which I will
not call premature, but too abstract and too limited, in which depth
was sacrificed to surface, the conception to the effect, and feeling to
demonstration—because the social and philosophical elements of a
new harmony did not yet exist among the contemporary debris.
Materialistic painting kept rigorously to the appearances of matter
and attempted to give to those appearances the authority of a law.
It had forgotten the reality of form, as science had forgotten the
reality of force, and as politics had forgotten the reality of man
whom it had come to look on as an abstract being.
It is therefore a very deep and very broad spiritual current in
which living art is trying to force its way up-stream, as deep and as
broad as that of the old static condition of science, or that of the
old political ideology which estimated social values only from the
point of view of well-being and of morality. The ideal of anatomi-
cal perfection which has reigned from the time of Pheidias, in the
Occident, the execution of whose programme had been merely re-
sumed by the Renaissance, even though half-upset by such powerful
men as Michael Angelo, Titian, Tintoretto, Greco, Rubens, Rem-
brandt, Velasquez, Watteau, Goya, Delacroix, Corot, Courbet, and
finally by Renoir and Cezanne, the ideal of anatomical perfection
is being effaced in order to make way for an expressive symbolism
which, in our day, is carrying the art of Europe back to the Oriental
origins of thought. A movement which had its birth in France;
which Germany, prepared therefor by its philosophy and its music,
has been following for a long time, unfortunately with its invincible
didacticism; which is also agitating Italy—too deeply haunted, it is
true, by its magnificent past not to essay the paradox and naively
oppose to that past a Futurism which limits itself to being the
antithesis of that past; which Eastern Europe was prepared to fol-
low because of its Asiatic origin; and which is beginning to stir
America and even England—the White nations least influenced by
Asia—in their turn. For twenty years Matisse the Frenchman and
Picasso the Spaniard of French tendencies have stood at the two


ELIE FAURE 333
poles of painting. The one, through his insistent pursuit of the
organization of coloured rhythms, analogous perhaps to that which
China, Japan, India, and Persia have entertained from the begin-
ning, which has given to their art so decisive an accent, which has
made it so resolute to turn away from material nature in order to
create a spiritual nature, more summarized, more essential, more
expressive, and more cadenced than the other. The second of
these artists assumes his place through his incessant search for an
arabesque which shall be free from anatomical servitude, as if his
double ancestry—Andalusian and Sicilian—whispered the counsels
of his Arab ancestor in his secret mind. On one hand the ceramist,
the lacquerer, and the rug-weaver grouped around the caravanserai
and the pagoda; on the other the decorator of mosques, the juggler,
and the dancer of the souks of the Levant.
It was evidently this search for absolute symbolic expression
through the moving arabesque which led Picasso, influenced by the
sudden eruption into all our concepts, of the idea of duration (the
work of physicists, biologists, four-dimensional geometry, the dy-
namism of the Italians, and the cinematograph) to think of
Cubism at about the same time that Braque did, and thus to re-
turn, by a side-path, to the essential idea of construction which
haunts all superior brains. It is extremely interesting to observe
that at the hour when Matisse and Picasso were advancing farther
and farther in their interpretation of the Asiatic soul and of the
imagery which manifests it, the European soul was rediscovering
its true roots in the industrial architecture and in the design of
vehicles which its mechanical evolution sternly demanded. The
metal hearts of aeroplanes, automobiles, and ships, their trenchant
and severe contours, the structure, determined by function, of gar-
ages and of factories, were restoring, in Occidental rationalism, the
same chromatic and linear rhythms for which these painters were
seeking justification in Oriental art. Cubism, at bottom, is abso-
lutely in agreement with this need to build, and to build logically
through the subordination of architectonics to the most precise func-
tional requirements, a need which characterizes modern civilization
in Europe, in America, and in all more Occidental ized countries.
The industrial architecture of the engineers seems to me to furnish
the most striking example of that universal evolution of the intel-
ligence away from anecdotal sentimentalism, ornament, and super-


334 LIVING ART
abundant and useless detail—the characteristic of living art in
painting and sculpture, the characteristic which, for an hour per-
haps, perhaps for a century, reconciles Occidental utilitarianism
resolved upon attaining its purposes by the most direct road, with
Oriental aestheticism, indifferent to everything that is not signifi-
cant ensemble swept clear of all incident. Certain American silos
make me think of Egyptian temples or of the towers of Chaldean
observatories. Note that this nearly universal mechanization of the
spirit implies also development in feeling: the American engineers,
the Italian, the French, the German, the Dutch, the English, the
Japanese—I think of the first three above all, I must say, and in
that order—are very simple workmen, who end by creating in their
edifices an irresistible impression of harmony through the logic of
technique, to which the machine-instinct of their time is leading
them even if they do not know of it. While coming from the oppo-
site direction, the subtle and complicated painters of living art
rediscover that logic of technique which is to reform their feeling
and give spontaneity to the feeling of their successors.
Already the simplified, generalizing, unpicturesque work of, for
example, the sculptors Maillol and Despiau, of the Italian sculptor
[de Fiori] reproduced in Living Art, and of the painter and drafts-
man Dunoyer de Segonzac, displays that deep equilibrium which is
steadfast throughout controversies and social upheavals, that tra-
ditional impersonality in the personal and passionate interpretation
of the world which ever maintains art's harmonious continuity.
This impersonal quality, the architect, still more the engineer, has
perhaps been designated to recall to the painters and sculptors, to
the musicians also no doubt, and even to writers, not to speak of
philosophers and statesmen. The French painter Derain, whom
Andre Salmon, a critic also French, calls "the regulator," one of
the most alive of the living artists, seems to me to display particu-
larly well this return to balanced forms—forms the creation of
which, in periods of unanimous anarchy like this, is perhaps the
sole end of our ardent research. For a long time his work has
oscillated, pendulum-like, between Matisse's preoccupation with
colour and Picasso's preoccupation with linear stylization. He has
passed surely and slowly through those two energetic though per-
haps cerebral affirmations, enriched, by the way, with the exotic
tributes which we have been receiving during the last twenty years


ELIE FAURE 335
from the art of Asia, mediaeval America, Polynesia, and Africa;
and he now seeks behind them, traces of the great European paint-
ing, which he wills to incorporate with our reconquered instinct.
Perhaps in the future his work will be looked upon as the most
vigorous spiritual synthesis of an epoch which was torn
between a past profoundly conscious of formal appearances, but
too tyrannical, and a future overflowing with mysteries of form,
but too unsure.
Elie Faure


DESERT ARABIA
Travels in Arabia Deserta. By Charles M.
Doughty. Two volumes. 8vo. 1313 pages. Boni
and Liveright. $17.50.
LET no one hereafter write about Arabia, or about the Sem-
J ites, or the Hebrew Scriptures without first knowing Arabia
Deserta. It is an indispensable background; in it there is a life
as old as the oldest written history. To say that Doughty's book
gives the soul of a people is to say less than the truth: it gives
the soul and the body, the garb and the odour of the Semite of the
desert.
What is in these volumes is gossip, but gossip of an epical kind:
it is as if a man with an enormous receptivity began to talk to us
about a neighbourhood, and kept up his talk day after day and
week after week. But the neighbourhood that this man talks into
existence is "the huge and mostly waste Arabian Peninsula," with
its tribes that are at once the grandest and the most abject of
human beings, the Semites of the desert who "are like to a man
sitting in a cloaca to his eyes, and whose brows touch heaven."
And what an epical speech he has found to give us this epical
gossip in!
"The man was Said, a personage of African blood, one of the
libertines of the emir's household. He sat before us with that
countenance and stiff neck, which by his estimation should magnify
his office: he was lieutenant of the lord of the land's dignity in
these parts. Spoke there any man to him, with the homely Arabian
grace ya Said! he affecting not to look again, seemed to stare in
the air, casting eyes over your head and making merchants' ears,
bye and bye to awaken, with displeasure, after a mighty pause:
when he questioned any himself he turned the back, and coldly
averting his head he feigned not to attend your answer."
No Western could have been less of a Semite than this man who
went into desert Arabia alone and went wandering from tribe to


PADRAIC COLUM 337
tribe, and from hair-booth to hair-booth. "The sun," he says,
"made me an Arab, but never warped me into Orientalism." He
was an Englishman of the heroic and simple kind, and he re-
mained an Englishman although he took on the endurance of
the Arab of the desert. He was a poet, a disciple, as he says, "of
the divine Muse of Spencer and Venerable Chaucer." He carried
into the desert with him, forty years ago, the spaciousness of
Chaucer and Spencer, and an English, as we must believe, that
had a pristine freshness; he came out of the desert with a book
that is no less a monument of language than it is a record of
travel. The English of Travels in Arabia Deserta is of an amazing
copiousness and an extraordinary dignity; he has grafted on to
its seventeenth century vigour a thorny Arabic growth.
But in spite of this Arabic grafting, in spite of its archaic words
and its odd locutions, Doughty's English remains in the mind,
not as words written, but as words said. All through the thou-
sand pages of the volumes we have the sense of speech. Open
Travels in Arabia Deserta at any page and you will hear a man
talking—
"A shouting without in the night made us start from slumber
on the cold stones; the nomad dogs barked with all their throats,
the gate Arabs from the booths cried to those in the kella 'a grazzu
was upon them!' Our cut-throats ran now in the feeble moonlight,
with their long matchlocks, upon the kella terrace. The cowardly
young Mohammed, in this war-like rumour, when he had digged in
the smouldering coffee-hearth a pan of coals, whereat to light their
gun-matches, came braving after. The sickly M Aly had cast
on his military cloak, and standing in the door of his chamber,
with a Turkish yell or rather the voice of some savage beast, gave
the words of command, 'Run up, lads, and shoot at them, shoot!'
Himself came groping out on the gallery, and after them he
stumbled with my carbine to the tower-head. Presently they heard
it called from the tents that all was nothing—a false alarm; and
Hasan ran down again, to sleep, with his gaggling Moorish
laughter. Haj Nejm descended groaning, the valiant old man
misliking this trouble in the night time; their captain shouting
terribly and all of them loudly attesting Ullah in their witless
wild manner."


338 DESERT ARABIA
Compare with this, or with any passage of Doughty's, this passage
or any passage out of Colonel Lawrence's introduction to the
book:
"Each tribe has its district in the desert. The extent and nature
of these tribal districts are determined by the economic laws of
camel-breeding. Each holds a fair choice of pasture all the year
round in every normal year, and each holds enough drinking water
to suffice all its households every year; but the poverty of the
country forces an internal subdivision of itself upon the tribes."
And you have all the difference between what is written and what
is said.
The spell of Arabia Deserta is in the voice that we hear con-
tinuously—a voice that has got the wilderness into it—something
brooding and of another world.
All that is in his volume is, as he says, "the seeing of a hungry
man and the telling of a most weary man." But it is his con-
tinuous hunger and his long-drawn weariness that helped him to
make us realize that "huge and mostly waste Arabian Peninsula"
where a morsel of bread and salt eaten with another becomes a
sacrament. I know of no other writer who has been able to place
as Doughty has been able to place, a whole society in a book. For
it is a society that he gives us—that ancient society out of which
has come the prophets and the great creeds. If it is not the strang-
est society that is on this earth it is certainly the most tragic
society. Men and women roam over a vast infecundity, hungry al-
ways, sleepless with the cold at night, smitten by the sun in the day-
time. And they are tragic, not because of the physical hardships
they endure—the Esquimaux or the Chinese may endure hardships
as great—but because these hungry and barely-clad wanderers have
united themselves to a dream that is the loftiest, the most con-
sistent, the least humanly-indulgent of human dreams. Doughty
moves through this society, sharing its hunger, its cold, and its
burning marches, its languors and its great loneliness, knowing its
great men and its kindly men, its wastrels and its witless ones.
Sometimes he sees them as the worst of all the children of Adam;
sometimes he sees them as all but the noblest of men. He puts
both judgements down, leaving us to reconcile them. It is hard to


PADRAIC COLUM 339
write about a book that gives us so much. Travels in Arabia Deserta
is an heroic book—heroic in its length, heroic in the very language
that it is written in, a book that has come out of an heroic endur-
ance and that celebrates an heroic and tragic peoples. "What
went ye out into the desert to see?" was asked of old. "A reed
shaken in the wind? But what went ye out into the desert to see?
A man clothed in soft garments? Behold, those who are clothed
in soft garments are in the houses of Kings." Doughty went out
into the desert, and he saw what belongs to the desert—men hard-
ened in an infecundity and of a high and brooding fantasy. He
has told us of these men in the great speech that as it seems comes
upon men in the desert.
Padraic Colum


MR HEMINGWAY'S DRY-POINTS
Three Stories and Ten Poems. By Ernest Hem-
ingway. i2mo. $8 pages. Contact Publishing Com-
pany. Paris. $1.50.
In Our Time. By Ernest Hemingway. i2mo. 30
pages. The Three Mountains Press. Paris. $2.
MR HEMINGWAY'S poems are not particularly important,
but his prose is of the first distinction. He must be counted
as the only American writer but one—Mr Sherwood Anderson—
who has felt the genius of Gertrude Stein's Three Lives and has
been evidently influenced by it. Indeed, Miss Stein, Mr Anderson,
and Mr Hemingway may now be said to form a school by them-
selves. The characteristic of this school is a naivete of language
often passing into the colloquialism of the character dealt with
which serves actually to convey profound emotions and complex
states of mind. It is a distinctively American development in prose
—as opposed to more or less successful American achievements in
the traditional style of English prose—which has artistically justi-
fied itself at its best as a limpid shaft into deep waters.
Not, however, that Mr Hemingway is imitative. On the
contrary, he is rather strikingly original, and in the dry compressed
little vignettes of In Our Time has almost invented a form of
his own:
"They shot the six cabinet ministers at half-past six in the morn-
ing against the wall of a hospital. There were pools of water in
the courtyard. There were dead leaves on the paving of the court-
yard. It rained hard. All the shutters of the hospital were nailed
shut. One of the ministers was sick with typhoid. Two soldiers
carried him downstairs and out into the rain. They tried to hold
him up against the wall but he sat down in a puddle of water.
The other five stood very quietly against the wall. Finally the
officer told the soldiers it was no good trying to make him stand
up. When they fired the first volley he was sitting down in the
water with his head on his knees."


EDMUND WILSON 341
Mr Hemingway is remarkably successful in suggesting moral
values by a series of simple statements of this sort. His more
important book is called In Our Time, and below its cool objective
manner really constitutes a harrowing record of barbarities: you
have not only political executions, but criminal hangings, bull-
fights, assassinations by the police, and all the cruelties and enormi-
ties of the war. Mr Hemingway is wholly unperturbed as he
tells about these things: he is not a propagandist even for humanity.
His bull-fight sketches have the dry sharpness and elegance of the
bull-fight lithographs of Goya. And, like Goya, he is concerned
first of all with making a fine picture. He is showing you what life
is, too proud an artist to simplify. And I am inclined to think that
his little book has more artistic dignity than any other that has
been written by an American about the period of the war.
Not perhaps the most vivid book, but the soundest. Mr Hem-
ingway, who can make you feel the poignancy of the Italian soldier
deciding in his death agony that he will "make a separate peace,"
has no anti-militaristic parti pris which will lead him to suppress
from his record the exhilaration of the men who had "jammed
an absolutely perfect barricade across the bridge" and who were
"frightfully put out when we heard the flank had gone, and we
had to fall back." It is only in the paleness, the thinness of some
of his effects that Mr Hemingway sometimes fails. I am thinking
especially of the story called Up in Michigan, which should have
been a masterpiece, but has the curious defect of dealing with rude
and primitive people yet leaving them shadowy.
In Our Time has a pretty and very amusing cover designed
from scrambled newspaper clippings. The only objection I have
to its appearance is that the titles are throughout printed without
capitals—thus: "in our time by ernest hemingway—paris." This
device, which used to be rather effective when the modernists first
used to use it to call attention to the fact that they had something
new to offer, has now grown common and a bore. The American
advertisers have taken it over as one of their stock tricks. And
it is so unsightly in itself that it is rather a pity to see it become—
as in the case of Mr Hemingway's book and Mr Hueffer's "trans-
atlantic review"—a sort of badge of everything that is freshest
and most interesting in modern writing.
Edmund Wilson


THE PAGEANT OF ART
History of Art. (Volume II, Medieval Art: Volume
III, Renaissance Art: Volume IV, Modern Art). By
Elie Faure. Translated by Walter Pach. Illustrated.
8vo. 433, 401, 5/7 pages. Harper and Brothers.
$7.50 each volume.
THIS momentous work attains an imaginative height not else-
where reached in the whole field of art criticism. Here is
history conceived as an endless pageant: M Faure has reviewed the
world's plastic expression as a panorama of flaming accomplish-
ments, and organized it into a symbol of the march of mankind.
One feels that to the author, at least, all that is significant in
humanity has been represented, and that the aggregate poetry of
life is contained in his procession of images. Certainly this history
is the most exalted and successful effort that has ever been put
forth to give a permanent, well-ordered form to the vast and intri-
cate activity of the creative spirit. M Faure's work, with all of
its very specific concerns, is in itself a form of art, a poem inspired
by and dedicated to the splendours of plastic beauty. The imag-
inative aspect of the history I have already discussed in The Dial,1
in a review of Volume I, Ancient Art, which the author has ex-
plained was written at the flood of a youthful worship for the Hel-
lenistic tradition. In the succeeding volumes, I find the same
mystic adoration, more mature perhaps, and more individualistic,
but hardly less rhapsodic.
It is not strange that M Faure with his poetic mind and his
Hegelian habit of generalizing should have overlooked much that
in ordinary life qualifies and conditions the nature of the aesthetic
will. With but few exceptions the artist is revealed as living in a
superior world, an intensely emotional atmosphere of religious
ecstasy; he is revealed as the interpreter of extraordinary conflicts;
and even in the latter part of the fourth volume, which deals with
contemporary workmen, we are led to believe that the artist is
somehow unearthly and aloof, that he dwells in an element so
vehement and so fevered with high passion as to preclude all human
1 February, 1922.


THOMAS CRAVEN 343
approach. In spite of its monumental array of incontrovertible
fact, the history reads more like a review of mythologies than an
account of mundane desires and constructive aspirations. The
creative spirit works too perfectly in its pages; the end is too neatly
envisaged; the journey too certain and heroic. After a few chapters
one becomes fairly drunk with beauty, but it is not a healthy
debauch of realities such as one might get from too much Rem-
brandt or Daumier—rather is it a sort of metaphysical grogginess
engendered by the dazzling operations of demi-gods. The struggles,
the bitterness, the sharp disappointments inseparable from all
creative labour of man are reduced to negative factors when bathed
in the great light of accomplishment, of success. The emotional
warfare waging in the heart of such labour is not ignored—M
Faure is himself too much the artist to be unaware of its importance
—but in the lyrical and uplifted strain of his history this turmoil
is always in shadow, always under-emphasized. Even in those
chapters where it is deliberately introduced it resembles an
Olympian struggle pre-ordained to triumphal conclusion.
The underlying thesis is that man sees, feels, and forthwith
breaks into song. This lyrical attitude, so captivatingly system-
atized in Croce's doctrine of Expressionism, seems to dominate the
aesthetic opinions of to-day. Croce, of course, is but the spokes-
man of a world-wide tendency, and to consider M Faure his disciple
would be as unjust as to pin the Italian label on those writers who
translate Expressionism into the language of psychology. But the
fact that he has wholly adopted the Expressionistic idea—this in
spite of an occasional Platonic gloss—is evident; and this point of
view has been responsible for whatever is misleading in the history.
It is possible, however, that it has also been responsible for the
romantic beauty of the work; if so, the veering away from truth
has, in part, been justified. But only in part—for it is my belief
that any presentation of the spirit of art which lauds the inspira-
tional attitude at the expense of the more prosaic but equally vital
instinct of construction is far from complete. One of the most
important elements of the creative problem lies in that intellectual
borderland between inspiration and objectification. Here is the
meeting-ground of the motif and the demands of expressive media;
here the finished product begins to assume its true significance.
Means do not, let it be said, determine ends, as is so often the case


344 THE PAGEANT OF ART
with utilitarian activity, but they affect them profoundly; and I
cannot be persuaded that any inspiration, any emotional reaction
to experience, has ever been objectified in its original purity. By
placing undue prominence on the sensational aspects of art, and
neglecting the trials of composition, the author entices us to the
conclusion that the emotion speeds on with unhampered freedom
to successful expression.
We see in M Faure's history, as in the writings of Taine, his
master, an unbroken connexion between the native impulse and the
final form of the artistic object. The battle with a recalcitrant
medium, which stands in the way of desire, and which can only
be brought to terms by the force of individual will—and then only
by some compromise—has been overlooked. The artist, as the
word implies, is a carpenter, but a carpenter who asks that a life-
less material carry within itself a living meaning. Here is the
centre of the problem—the conflict between impulse and reason, a
struggle that cannot be escaped. The constructive instinct finds
its first outlet in the play of children; and in its primary stages is
capable of simple combinations which are both tonic and delight-
ful. Hence the preference of certain critics and artists for naive
forms. But in mature aesthetic endeavour the elements of ex-
perience are highly complicated by conceptions of purpose. These
conceptions are generally of intuitive origin, and for this reason it
is commonly believed that inspiration occupies the central posi-
tion in artistic work; but the initial conception, when brought into
contact with the media of presentation, is invariably modified, and
unwilling to be governed by the original stimulus, proceeds, as often
as not, in the opposite direction.
The patron of art, whether pope, noble, or modern parvenu, and
the artist have quarrelled perpetually over the essential discrepancy
between conception and presentation—and it is also upon this
central point that the creative struggles of the artist are based.
The world of art has at least one bond in common with the world
of the layman: the desired object or condition is not always to be
had. The intervening circumstances of life appear in art as stub-
born components which refuse to accommodate themselves to a
formal scheme, and on this account, must either force a change of
structure or be cast aside. Thus what I have called purposive action
in art consists not in directing energy to specific and foreseen ends,


THOMAS CRAVEN 345
but in a kind of embarkation on a voyage of discovery, with a
goal generally conceived, but not infallibly charted. On this voyage
the quality of the work is determined: the expedients invented to
overcome difficulties are altogether as significant in creative labour
as the intuitions motivating them. Art, in this abstract fashion,
partakes of the unsatisfactory conditions and alternatives of life.
It is no glorious whirl of lyricism from beginning to end.
Beholding this history, this completed structure of beauty and
appreciation, it is with some reluctance that I put forward these
objections. Nor do I see precisely how a reconstruction would bring
the author closer to the core of the matter. I venture to suggest
that M Faure append to future editions of his work an analysis of
his own experience in composing it. That experience, being
analogous to all creative activity, would, I think, add a qualifying
touch to his historical lyricism.
Thomas Craven


BRIEFER MENTION
Sembal, by Gilbert Caiman (i2mo, 309 pages; Seltzer: $2). Now that
Mr Carman has successfully rid himself of this opus he ought to be in a
position to do vastly better. For he writes easily, clearly, and knows how
to make the story march. The present one concerns a dirty, repellant
little Jew who rises from the slums to become a political champion of the
new freedom. The political part of the book, which evidently occa-
sioned Mr Canaan a great deal of thought, is a frightful bore, but
the too-brief glimpses of the London Ghetto and of the more prosperous
Jewish purlieus at the West End, are admirable. So admirable that there
will be many to lavish upon this author the advice that Richard Ford used
to give to young George Borrow: "Give us more Jews."
A Perfect Day, by Bohun Lynch (i2mo, 183 pages; Seltzer: $2). This
book represents the purring of a great drowsy well-fed jib-cat over a
saucer of cream. Only a "he-man," a spiritually complacent and phys-
ically gross man, could possibly have been insensitive and shameless
enough to write it. It seems strange that a writer of Mr Lynch's experi-
ence should not have realized that there is something singularly vulgar
about publishing abroad one's gratification at having been born in a state
of society which derives its good in life from an excess of physical
comfort.
The Home-maker, by Dorothy Canfield (i2mo, 320 pages; Harcourt,
Brace: $2) gives yet another illustration of the platitude that the tradi-
tional duties of husband and wife may profitably be interchanged. The
argument is cautious rather than polemical, and the instance recounted is
so unusual that it obscures the point it seeks to prove. The story is a
slight one, and the several stages of its development are soon guessed.
The characters are presented with the neat inflexibility of diagrams.
Only in the treatment of the children is there warmth and penetration;
they are endowed with vitality and charm by a sympathetic knowledge
that never blunders into condescension.
The Long Walk of Samba Diouf, by Jerome and Jean Tharaud (i2mo,
201 pages; Duffield: $1.75) was received by the French press as answer
to Batouala. It is by no means a controversial novel, being the simple
history of a Senegalese private during the War, but it pictures his people
as prosperous and contented under Ffench rule. The brothers Tharaud,
as is their custom before attacking a new subject, took pains to document
themselves, and one is willing to accept most of their detail on trust.
Their description of Samba Diouf's psychology, however, is of somewhat
less than scientific value. The plot, which is amusing and direct, loses
nothing in the translation by Willis Steele.


BRIEFER MENTION 347
Cheat-the-Boys, by Eden Phillpotts (l2mo, 329 pages; Macmillan: $2.25).
The Lavender Dragon, by Eden Phillpotts (i2mo, 200 pages; Mac-
millan: $2.25). Cherry Stones, by Eden Phillpotts (l2mo, 69 pages;
Macmillan: $1.25). What Chateaubriand would have urged if con-
fronted with these three volumes by Mr Phillpotts is a conjecture. Doubt-
less he would have wriggled away from the situation by insisting that all
depends upon what one means by the word "infinite." Certainly to most
of us Mr Phillpotts takes a deal of pains. His plots are ingenious and
fairly well worked out. He even gives one a sense in the Devonshire pages
that the scenes have been sketched upon the spot. Yet this careful, "sane,"
plodding workmanship does not appear to be enough. Chateaubriand
himself commands in a measure the hidden fire that never glows for an
instant in poor Mr Phillpotts' writings. Was then Chateaubriand fool-
ing himself and us? Is there not something more than mere workmanship?
On the other hand many people like Mr Phillpotts' books. Not, perhaps,
any one that one knows. Yet even in these days when intellectuals in
every direction are bowing low to the opinions of the common people it
scarcely seems necessary to bring Mr Phillpotts forward as representing
anything in particular. Of the three books just issued, it is the novel,
Cheat-the-Boys, that can be most recommended to those who consume
best-sellers. The Lavender Dragon is a satire, perhaps; or perhaps a
fable. It is sure to puzzle Mr Phillpotts' regular readers very much.
It preaches a sort of exalted, property-sharing socialism where all is love
and happiness; but the details of the plan are sketchy. Cherry Stones is
the title for a small group of poems; careful but uninspired.
Gold, by Jacob Wassermann, translated by Louise Collier Willcox (l2mo,
431 pages; Harcourt, Brace: $2.50) shows a creative force that is still
dynamic, but that has deteriorated through the dominant influence of un-
balanced emotion. The most obvious fault of the narrative is structural:
a hiatus of thirty-odd years in the action. The first part of the book is
portraiture that contains life and truth, and is the expression of an
original and exhaustively active mind, of a true eye, and a steady hand.
In the latter part, plausibility is disregarded, the symbolism of the char-
acters becomes grotesque, and the trend of the story veers between mis-
anthropy and sentimentality; all sense of values is submerged in a
bitterness, verging on brutality, that is due to the war.
Childhood in Verse and Prose ; An Anthology, chosen by and with preface
by Susan Miles (i2mo, 406 pages; Oxford University Press: $3). These
selections of prose and verse, taken from the fourteenth and succeeding
centuries, carefully indexed by source, author, and first line, command
one's gratitude. Besides unknown, and certain unfamiliar masters, we
have Herrick, Bunyan, Scott, Marjorie Fleming, Ruskin, Hardy, and
W. H. Hudson to enchant us out of our hackneyed objection to the inter-
necine character of anthologies; to dissipate our grievance that favourite
pieces are not here, and our gloom because sorrow of and for children
would seem, in this book, to preponderate over joy.


348 BRIEFER MENTION
Heliodora, and Other Poems, by H. D. (i2mo, 127 pages; Houghton
Mifflin: $1.50). Accustomed as we are in modern poetry, to reminiscent
rhythms and revised cultures, we cannot but participate in the triumph
of an author who has achieved a tension, a balance, a mood and language
which are Greek—without a trace of alien feeling. The perfect cadences
and formal beauty of these poems, the Periclean world made for us here,
of matter delicately sumptuous, are dazzling; "that flame, that flower
(ice, spark, or jewel)" the "green, grey-green fastnesses of great deeps,"
the camellias, "the wind-indented snow," the "bright gloss of pearls,"
recalling in their vibrant emotion heightened by a chiselled severity of
aspect, Pygmalion's statue "which understood my heart's quick sound."
Sunrise Trumpets, by Joseph Auslander (i2mo, 73 pages; Harper: $2).
These poems illustrate the failure that verges always upon success. Mr
Auslander constantly seduces the reader with the expectation of outstanding
poetry, but somehow contrives to leave that expectation unfulfilled; he has
many beautiful lines, many striking passages, and not a single perfect
poem. At times he is misled into seeking vivid imagery when subdued
imagery is what his theme requires; at times he blunders into the arms of
a gross and ruinous technical carelessness; but always the spirit of poetry
breathes through his work, giving promise of high ultimate achievement.
Poems, by Lady Margaret Sackville (i2mo, 63 pages; Allen & Unwin: 5s.).
Despite a sometimes unselfprotective hazarding of thought which is slight,
in forms which provoke comparison with metrical inventions of a sterner,
wilder magic, we find in this book, certain conspicuously perfect poems,
an alluring actuality, imaginative esprit, an elate chivalry, a stately com-
pleteness, and throughout—clear, energetic, prepossessing craftsmanship.
Essays by Present-Day Writers, edited by Raymond Woodbury Pence
(i2mo, 360 pages; Macmillan: $1.60). The compiler of these essays
observes that "the essay of the present-day is preeminently the familiar
essay." One has no quarrel with informal writing which enriches. In this
book, however, one resists a cruel commingling of the work of certain gifted
authors, with squibs—not essays—which evince a madness of bad taste
not often known to man.
Training in Literary Appreciation, by F. H. Pritchard (i2mo, 237
pages; Crowell: $2). This is a thoroughly sound book on the difficult
subject of literary appreciation. It would be invaluable to any young
reader who feels impatient with the more popular magazines and is
anxious to train his taste towards something better; to exchange let us
say the Cosmo for The Dial. We feel confidence in Mr Pritchard and
believe him to possess a fine sensibility for words and literary cadences.
For example how just is his commendation of Shelley's use of the word
breathe in his Stanzas Written in Dejection. Mr Pritchard points out
that no other word could have given us just the same sense of the monot-
onous sound of a becalmed ocean breaking on a sandy shore, and he is
perfectly right.


BRIEFER MENTION 349
Edward Fitzgerald and Bernard Barton, Letters Written by Fitzgerald
1839-1865, edited by F. R. Barton, with a foreword by Viscount Grey
(8vo, 190 pages; Putnam: $2.50). Charming, charming letters; and a
charming book generally, since the introduction by Viscount Grey is
admirable and the notes of F. R. Barton, discreet. One never gets to the
end of Fitzgerald's fascinations. The present letters, written to a quiet
Quaker, have not all the abandon of the famous missives showered upon
Fitzgerald's literary friends, but nevertheless, one is continually coming
upon killing two-line glimpses of Carlyle, Tennyson, and the rest; and
besides, even good behaviour, in Fitzgerald's case, is compatible with
having a good time. His genuine affection for Bernard Barton is a pleasant
thing to contemplate and offsets the opinion, sometimes held, that Fitz-
gerald is volatile.
The Blue Lion and Other Essays, by Robert Lynd (i6mo, 211 pages;
Doran: $2.50). This is a delightful book of occasional prose pieces.
Mr Robert Lynd has long been recognized as a writer of ability and this
small volume should do much to confirm his literary reputation in this
country. He is a master of straightforward unaffected writing and seems
quite untouched by those two attributes that so often prove fatal to
essayists—egotism and sentimentality.
A Primer of Modern Art, by Sheldon Cheney (illus., 8vo, 383 pages;
Boni & Liveright: $6) is a glib, journalistic summary of the various
movements in the plastic arts since the collapse of Impressionism. Mr
Cheney's ambition to write down to the untutored layman has been admi-
rably carried out, and one only wishes that he had a definite approach
to his subject. He has an abundance of information, but it is purely
technical; his extraordinary acquaintance with names has tempted him
to include everybody and to extol nondescripts; and his aesthetic, when
discernible amid a mass of entertaining detail, is only a restatement of
Clive Bell's narrow postulate, significant form. The philosophic meaning
of form—the relation of art to contemporary thought—is practically
ignored: with Mr Cheney anything is art, that is, anything which emerges
from the brains of God's chosen few.
The Basis of Social Theory, by Albert G. A. Balz (i2mo, 252 pages;
Knopf: $2.50). It is a good sign that the most recent attempt to give a
psychological basis to social theory does not split the matter into two
halves, the individual with his native equipment on the one hand and the
action of the environment on the other, as is customary among social
scientists. The human being becomes human in an environment, and a
social environment at that. One cannot understand social phenomena by
postulating a Caliban thrust into an environment which forces him to be
a gentleman and then describe this process as socialization. From birth to
death the individual and his environment fight out the matter by a process
of give and take, and there is no telling where the individual begins or
the environment leaves off. For this much good sense in the midst of the
psychological confusion of tongues, we hereby express our gratitude.


TWO LETTERS
42 Ave. de Parc Montsouris
Paris 14e, August 10, 1924.
Dear Mr. Thayer:
I can't resist your delightful letter, and you will pardon an
answer. But what a style! What a lot of words you use to
say so very little! Of course I remember the night I dined with
Paul Rosenfeld at the Yale Club, and there is, as you suggest,
nothing astonishing in my failure to remember the name of the
other man who was there. A simple reminder that you were the
other man would have been sufficient. Your heavily-creaking irony
is a Big Bertha expending its ammunition to no really good pur-
pose. Of course I also accept your statement that I told the
story—(Vollard's version, to be sure, not yours)—as there is
every probability that you remember better than I do what was
talked about that night. As you imply, I probably did most of
the talking, and the hearer is almost always a better authority
than the speaker in the case of rambling talk. For the details
this is not necessarily so, and when you attribute to me a version
of a story, which is an "idiotic farrago" and a stranger to every
impulse of my mind, I know that I couldn't have said that. How-
ever you can see no essential difference between the two stories
so far as the present discussion goes, and seem inclined to admit
that perhaps I did tell Vollard's story. We will therefore continue
the conversation on that basis.
I shall even go further, and shall admit that I used the story
to illustrate something having to do with the intellect, and though
I do not remember what I said that night yet I do know what must
have been the purport of it. You will even find something on the
subject in print in the by-you-so-highly-esteemed contemporary, the
New Republic, under the title, "If Rubens were born again". What
I was talking about was not at all the force of the mind, but the
direction and range of interests. As I said in that article, men
like Renoir depended for their distinction on the possession of a
talent for some one thing—in this case painting—and that in the
absence of that talent they would have been no more than skilled


LEO STEIN & THE EDITOR 351
craftsmen.* Vollard's story—not yours—illustrated the range of
Renoir's literary interests, those, that is, of a schoolboy. The Revue
Blanche represented for the moment the most interesting novelty
in French letters—let us say what the Dial does in America—and
Renoir, apparently, was not curious enough about this to take the
numbers out of their covers. It was doubtless my fault if on that
memorable night at the Yale Club I talked over your head in
speaking of the intellect, but you have had time to grow up since
then, and if today you can see no difference between Renoir's
disregard of a criticism of his own work and his lack of interest
in what the better contemporary writers were doing, then your
incapacity to see differences amounts to a disease. Of course
even this case would not prove that Renoir had no intellectual
interests, but in fact, I have never heard that he had any. The
story, in short—Vollard's version—is not proof but simply an
illustration.
In regard to him whom in handsome phrase you call "the chief
ornament of our time"—a bit heavy that, isn't it'?—you advise
me "to take counsel from a young man, Jean Cocteau". I don't
know when Cocteau turned up on the scene—he was not around
in my time—but since for five years—from 1905 to 1910 or
thereabouts—Picasso and I were intimate; since during that time
we met commonly several times a week, ate and drank together,
went to exhibitions together, talked at length about painting and
other things; since throughout the period of early cubistic develop-
ment we had endless discussions of the matter; since even after
our intimacy had cooled because of my disagreement with his
chosen direction, he came back at me with the matter frequently
so that our last, protracted and quite amiable—which was not
always the case—discussion took place just before I left Paris
in the spring of 1914—for these reasons among many, I have
risked my own judgment in regard to the "chief ornament of our
time". Of course when I ceased to be of "their" opinion "they"
concluded that I never had understood anything,—but that is
inevitable whether the matter is art, philosophy, politics, or science.
Another thing. You humbly suggest in your letter that per-
haps you were not very well educated. Not for worlds would
* A mere craftsman may have much shrewdness and vigor of mind, as
every one knows.


352 TWO LETTERS
1 have hinted this, but now that you mention it I confess that
the notion had crossed my mind. You evidently know your letters,
probably you can do sums, but I am not at all sure that you have
made much progress in the art of reading. Or perhaps your
memory is not always so good as it is for the inessential details
of that night at the Yale Club. In any case, if you will look
again at my article on Picasso, you will find in the first paragraph
a text not of my own making: "Keep him down to a real in-
tellectual problem . . . and the power of the man comes out
in pure expression." The specific negation of high intellectual
quality in Picasso's work is a retort to a specific assertion of it by
others. A person with a really well-trained mind might succeed
in remembering paragraph l when he came to paragraph 8, but I
admit that I should have shown more regard for human frailty
and should have put paragraph 8 in the place where paragraph
2 stands. One should certainly spare one's readers the agony of
effort, above all things, intellectual effort.
I don't think there is more that needs to be said about matters
of importance, but for good measure I will add a supplementary
word or two. You say that in the article on Picasso I "refrained
from the use of the words 'egoism' and 'cowardice', yet surely these
are the frank words which had best summed up (my) charges."
What you call frank, I call foolish. I am myself really pretty
good at summing-up, and I do not think that I can accept your
well-meant services in my behalf. You are just a wee bit deficient
in subtlety.
You say that you "resent the free slinging of psychological
epithets and innuendoes as a rough and ready method of settling
any difference, of whatever nature, which may in our time, arise."
An admirable sentiment, with a net thrown so widely that nothing
can escape. But why do you so abound, as Henry James might
say, in comprehensiveness? I have not a copy of my letter but
I remember only saying that the way in which memory alters
what the mind receives throws light upon the mind. That is not
a comment on 'all', 'each', 'every', 'whatsoever', and all other in-
clusives. Admitting as we may that my story was Vollard's—and
while owning to the fallible character of my memory I may still
insist that there are some things that I jolly well never could
have said—then your mind did alter my story, and if your mind
can operate in public without revealing anything of its character


LEO STEIN & THE EDITOR 353
by its mode of operation, then your mind must be more subtle than
a moment ago I was prepared to grant. There's a difficulty,
certainly, but for the time being my vote goes for the solution of
a moment ago.
Finally, allow me to quote another sentence. "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 foolishness and waste' ". The annoying structure
of this sentence may be due to a slip of the pen, but don't you
see how high an estimate the statement referred to puts upon
Picasso's talent, and don't you think that "you, unhappy man,"
is a phrase a little overcharged with emotion?
Of course you will kindly publish this letter as an essential
part of our little interchange of compliments, but whether it is
to be the last word or whether you will supply some further relevant
matter rests, obviously, with you.
Faithfully yours,
Leo Stein
Edgartown,
Massachusetts.
September 4th, 1924.
Dear Mr Stein:
God forbid it should be said of a journal of which I am editor
that letters of so generous and persuasive a character as yours go
in it unanswered. Then too, the easy—in passages one might
almost call it degage—tone of this your second letter is, after the
heat of your first, grateful. It is convenient to have two speeds.
Yet I find this letter of yours—frank and friendly though it be—
not the easiest in the world to answer. ... I do not of course
mean that what you write is at all cogent. When one's cause is
good, and when one is ready to defend it, a cogent argument from
one's adversary is precisely what one desires: it may be met; and
squarely; and, one always hopes, decisively. This your letter I
find, to my considerable disillusionment, somewhat less "logical,"
somewhat less, indeed, "to the point," than, as I had already
stated in The Dial, one has learned to expect, justifiably, from
Leo Stein. Error, as the Philosopher observed, is multiple. And
the multiple is hard to nail down.
For example, near the end of your first paragraph you state


354 TWO LETTERS
that I "seem inclined to admit that perhaps (you) did tell Vollard's
story." Nothing of the sort. "A really well-trained mind," like
yours, one which has, I am confident, "made much progress in
the art of reading," will, fortunately, only require to reread a
trifle more attentively the fifth paragraph of my letter to your-
self to discover that to which I was "inclined." If a man tells
me that the earth is flat and that therefore it is, like a pancake,
good to eat, I first deny that the earth be flat. But if I despair
of persuading this man (let us imagine him, just for the purpose
of illustration, to "abound" in self-assurance) that the earth is
not flat, and yet do humanely desire to restrain him from ruining
his teeth and stomach upon earth and stones, I am "inclined"
to do the next best thing, that is, to point out that if the earth be
flat, nevertheless this "fact" in no way negates the principle I cham-
pion, namely, that earth and stones make not good eating. ... I
trust you find this illustration helpful.
Since I did, however, for the sake of the argument, consent
to consider how things would stand had you given "exactly Vol-
lard's version" (were, that is, the earth flat) I am more than willing
to follow you into your important second paragraph. The third
sentence from the end appears to give, somewhat tardily, your
understanding of the essential difference between what I reported
you as having said and what you think you said. "It was doubt-
less my fault if on that memorable night at the Yale Club I
talked over your head in speaking of the intellect, but you have had
time to grow up since then, and if today you can see no difference
between Renoir's disregard of a criticism of his own work and his
lack of interest in what the better contemporary writers were
doing, then your incapacity to see differences amounts to a disease."
But you yourself assert that your version of the story was that
of Vollard: and Vollard's version specifically emphasizes the fact
that in the Revue Blanche there had appeared "maint eloge de I'art
impressionniste." "Maint eloge" that is, of the group of men
of whom Renoir was one. I confess to the disease of incapacity
to see the difference between disregarding the Revue Blanche and
disregarding "criticism of his own work."
Why drag in "the better contemporary writers"? Even if
Vollard had not written (to quote again what I had already in
my previous letter quoted and what you, with your trained mind,
apparently steamed vigorously and blindly past) "C'etait la Revue


LEO STEIN & THE EDITOR 355
Blanche, une Revue de 'Jeunes', tres appreciee du public, et oil je
me rappelais avoir lu maint eloge de Vart impressionniste" (even if,
that is, the earth had been not only flat, but also marvellously like
unto a pancake) are you so parochial in your science as to
believe that "lack of interest in what the better contemporary
writers were doing" could "illustrate" (I do not say "prove") that
a great artist "had no intellectual interests"? If your knowledge
of humanity be so small, at least, I take it, you have read many
books. Are you then not acquainted with the fable of that sculptor
who "could only think in bronze"? Have such as he "no intel-
lectual interests'"? And because he exhibits "lack of interest in
what the better contemporary writers (are) doing"? And can you
not understand those simple, honest words of perhaps the greatest
individual sculptor of them all—"Io rispondo, che si dipinge col
ciervello et non con le mani"*} You "never heard" that Renoir
had any "intellectual interests"? My God, man, he was "inter-
ested" in PAINTING!
The point is, of course, as I have already in The Dial twice tried
to make clear, that you understand by the word "intellect" the
kind of intellect that you yourself happen to possess. All else is
merely what you here call "a talent for some one thing." I cannot
believe that you are so childish as to imagine that the art of great
painting is merely a trick of the hands, like a knack for counting
dollar bills. But I must believe, after reading this letter, that
you remain wholly innocent of the knowledge that the difference
between the work of a master like Renoir and that of the ordinary
dabbler in oils and canvas implies a difference in the men them-
selves, and a difference in at least three particulars—in nerves, in
heart, and in head. And that rhythms, howsoever unscientifically,
nay unconsciously, invented and developed, rhythms so subtle, so
complex, and so intricately coordinated, as those which compose
the canvases of a Renoir, of a Picasso, are, for such as possess eyes
wherewith to see, as downright proof of "high intellectual quality"
in the painters themselves as was that footprint found by Robinson
Crusoe downright proof of the presence upon his island of another
human being. ... It is impossible to "illustrate" Renoir's lack of
"intellectual interests" because his thousand canvases prove his
"intellectual interests." They were not yours: that's all.
Yet there is in that second paragraph of your letter one to me quite
startling (as coming from you) and wholly disarming sentence:


356 TWO LETTERS
"What I was talking about was not at all the force of the mind,
but the direction and range of interests."
Had I so understood you, there could surely have been no differ-
ence between us. And had you now written me this sentence only,
I should have been constrained to confess I could see no good
reason why my honest memory (upon this point diametrically
opposite to yours) should receive more confidence than the honest
memory of Leo Stein. Unfortunately you wrote, and in the same
paragraph, several other sentences not without bearing upon this
point. As we enter here upon a somewhat close bit of exegesis,
you will, I trust, permit me, for the sake of clarity, again to quote
that arrestingly innocent sentence:
"What I was talking about was not at all the force of the mind,
but the direction and range of interests."
Now I take it, you mean then to grant that Renoir did possess
"force of mind." Yet, farther on in the same paragraph, you write
"Of course even this case [Renoir's "lack of interest in what the
better contemporary writers were doing"] would not prove that
Renoir had no intellectual interests, but in fact, I have never
heard that he had any." Does, then, "force of mind" not, pretty
generally, imply "intellectual interests'"? And is then to illustrate
that an artist "had no intellectual interests" as you now do, the
same thing as to point out, innocently, as you now say was all you
then did, "the direction" of his mind and its "range of interests" %
The conclusion which you deny having drawn when I quote you as
having drawn it—"Mr Stein drew from these data the logical con-
clusion that Renoir was not a man of intellect"—you go on to draw
once again, and this time in writing, namely, "that Renoir had no
intellectual interests." Or do you, I wonder, hold it speculatively
possible for a man without "intellectual interests" to be "a man of
intellect'"? I grant you it is speculatively conceivable that a man
possessing "force of mind" should exist without "intellectual in-
terests." Also, conversely, that a man without "intellectual
interests" should possess "force of mind." But could we legit-
imately call such a one, i. e. "a man without 'intellectual in-
terests,'" "a man of intellect"? I, anyhow, should not do so.
The sole difference I can find between what you declare you "jolly


LEO STEIN & THE EDITOR 357
well never could have said," what is indeed "a stranger to every
impulse of (your) mind," and what you now here write, is that,
in writing, being fortunately withdrawn from the perhaps unduly
seductive environment of the Yale Club Lounge, you are suffi-
ciently unexpansive to grant you have not "proven" it. But my
"incapacity to see differences amounts to a disease." And I "offer
a sheer monstrosity of recollection."
You recommend me to your article in The New Republic entitled
"If Rubens were born again"; and referring thereto I first chance
upon your allusion to
"the intellectualist vagaries of the 'modern' painters, a class from
which all intellect has been carefully sorted out by the demands of
more serious and more engaging occupations."
Now in my last letter to yourself I wrote of your illustrating
(in that conversation which I so grossly misreported) "the absence
of intellectuality in modern art." . . . But in recommending me
to "If Rubens were born again" you now write:
"As I said in that article, men like Renoir depended for their
distinction on the possession of a talent [the italics are my own]
for some one thing—in this case painting—and that in the absence
of that talent they would have been no more than skilled crafts-
men."
I therefore gather you refer me in particular to the following
passage:
"Today no really first rate man becomes a painter unless his first
rate qualities are so restricted that he can do only that one thing.
For instance among recent French painters the two who had the
greatest qualities, Cezanne and Renoir, could do only the one
thing, and Cezanne was so inept that he could hardly do that.
Renoir was the perfect type of the great modern artist, a man
brilliantly gifted for his peculiar expression but with no such
varied capacities as to make a choice of trade incumbent upon him.
As in the case of Corot and Monet and Rodin as well, if he had
not had his particular art available he would have been at best
a skilled laborer."


358 TWO LETTERS
Now in Vollard's book, Renoir is quoted as saying:
"Mon capitaine, devant ma bonne humeur, et, j'ose le dire, mon
esprit d'ingeniosite,—je savais clouer une caisse comme pas un,—
avait trouve que j'avais Vesprit militaire et aurait voulu me voir
continuer la carriere des armes. Si j'avais fait tous les metiers
qu'on a voulu me faire entreprendre! . . . Je vous ai deja raconte
que, dans ma jeunesse, Gounod, alors professeur de solfege a Vecole
communale, ou j'etais, avait insiste aupres de mes parents pour me
faire etudier le chant. J'ai meme retrouve, l'autre jour, un ami de
ma famille qui se souvenait d'un temps ou j'executais des soli a
Veglise Saint-Eustache!"
There appears to have been in Renoir, as in every great artist, a
spark. A spark of a nature which we do not denote by the word
"talent."
You are so good as to liken La Revue Blanche to The Dial,
hoping thus, I gather, to bring home to me the intellectual im-
maturity of that man who, having received a stack of our intelli-
gent French prototype, did not "take the numbers out of their
covers." Now my oldest friend will not tolerate The Dial in
his house. After having read our first monthly issue, he conveyed
to me his reaction to The Dial in the following terms:
"I felt that the whole drift and purpose of it was to insult, belittle,
and deride everything I either worship or admire—from my God
and the Christian Religion, to those basic principles of Art and
Life, which not we Christians alone but the Great Dead of All
Time, have held, taught, and died for: and that I should be for
ever craven and recreant if, for any reason, I let you or anyone
imagine I was indifferent to it—much less that I approved or
enjoyed it."
But I do not draw therefrom the erroneous conclusion that the
most scholarly man I know has the "literary interests" "of a
schoolboy." . . . Nor, when the most distinguished scientist of
our time confesses to me, unblushingly, that he has never heard the
name of Renoir, do I find this an illustration of the "fact" that he
has "no intellectual interests." I am aware that there is more
than one world in this world, Mr Stein.


LEO STEIN & THE EDITOR 359
You had already informed us, rightly, through the pages of The
New Republic, of your intimacy with Pablo Picasso: I did not
make my suggestion in ignorance of that fact. But, surely, in-
timacy is no reason for not understanding; nor is it a reason, since
you cannot understand, for not accepting the good counsel of Jean
Cocteau.
No, Mr Stein, you do yourself wrong. The mere placing, in
that article upon Picasso, of paragraph 8 where paragraph 2 now
stands would not have helped our untrained and uneducated minds
one whit. Had you really wanted to make the distinction you
now unsleeve between "high intellectual quality" (this phrase
occurs for the first time in this letter to myself) and "intellect,"
you would have had to do far more than juggle, howsoever per-
spicaciously, those wholly logical paragraphs: you would have had
to rewrite those paragraphs in toto: you would have had to say
what you now say you meant. You would have had there to
write "high intellectual quality" and most certainly not "His
intellectual baggage is of the slightest, and the total output of
intellect in his work is negligible." . . . But you would thus
have forgone the warming satisfaction of excommunicating and
ejecting, and with so Constantinopolitan a roundness, from out
the logothetical hierarchy of your own aesthetic limitations, a
man who does not measure up your way.
I cannot, for the life of me, understand your objection on the
ground of its "comprehensiveness" to that sentence of mine which,
by the bye, (since we rather seem to be going in for "slips of the
pen") in three wholly inessential particulars, you misquote. You
will perhaps permit me to restore my own words and punctuation?
"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."
Having quoted, you continue as follows:
"An admirable sentiment, with a net thrown so widely that
nothing can escape. But why do you so abound, as Henry James
might say, in comprehensiveness? I have not a copy of my letter
but I remember only saying that the way in which memory alters
what the mind receives throws light upon the mind. That is not


360 TWO LETTERS
a comment on 'all', 'each', 'every', 'whatsoever', and all other in-
clusives."
I certainly did not accuse you individually of "a comment on
'all', 'each', 'every', 'whatsoever', and all other inclusives." None
of our psychological friends, when hard pressed, grab up their
whole two-edged psychological arsenal. They would be more
amusing (and therefore more tolerable) if they did. They merely
grab up, without warrant, the howsoever improper ambiguous
weapon nearest to hand. And that is all you did, also without
warrant.
You accuse me, in my reference to our evening together at the
Yale Club, of "heavily-creaking irony" which, you say, "is a Big
Bertha expending its ammunition to no really good purpose." I
was not ironical. I expressly stated I was not ironical. I admired
that evening, I continue to admire to-day, "your noble and Mosaic
mind." I regret only its "direction and range of interests," a
"direction and range of interests" for which, I believe, it was not
by Nature intended.
I am much dashed that what you courteously—and I hope rightly
—term "a slip of the pen" should pan out so banal. You and I
would have preferred something psychologically significant.
As for that specific phrase, "you, unhappy man," to which
you call particular attention, I can find in it no more emotion than
the situation warrants: to have "made a life study of painting"
and yet not only to miss the true significance of the most interest-
ing painter of one's time, but also to devote one's wide learning
and one's powerful intellect to minimizing his importance and to
discouraging his recognition—this appears to me a destiny for
which the word "unhappy" was, upon my part, a very charitable
euphemism. The man to whom Fate has apportioned so ungrateful
a role as yours continues to strike me as—and in a most pathetically
exalted degree—"unhappy."
Furthermore, I don't consider my phrase "the chief ornament of
our time" "a bit heavy." But then, here in New England we are
very old-fashioned. Your own manner of writing is, I make no
doubt, when mailed in Paris, lighter.
Faithfully yours,
Scofield Thayer





…….
：
| （）
BY MARC CHAGALL
THE IDIOT.


THE I! DIAL

NOVEMBER 1924
THE DOWNFALL OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION
BY OSWALD SPENGLER
Translated From the German by Kenneth Burke
IN this book for the first time an attempt is hazarded at deter-
mining history in advance. Its purpose is to pursue, through
its still unrun stages, the destiny of a culture, and precisely the one
culture on the earth at this time which is nearing completion: that
of Western Europe.
The possibility of settling a problem of such enormous scope
has never before been squarely faced; or if it has, the methods for
treating it have not been known or have been inadequately
handled.
Is there a logic of history?