Is there, beyond everything acci-
dental and unforeseen in particular events, something which might
be called a metaphysical structure of historical humanity; and is
that structure essentially independent of the popular, intellectual-
political formations which are readily seen on the surface? Is it
that very structure which evokes this reality of a lower order?
May the great moments of universal history always appear to the
understanding eye in a design which admits of set conclusions?
And if so—what are the limits of such investigations? Is it pos-
sible in life itself (for human history is the summing-up of enor-
mous life-processes to which the usage of speech has already
instinctively given an ego and a personality, as when thinking and
treating of such higher units as "the Graeco-Roman era," "Chinese
culture," or "modern civilization") to find steps which must always
be taken, and in a sequence permitting of no exception? May the


362 THE DOWNFALL OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION
basic concepts of all organisms—birth, death, youth, age, lifetime
—possess in this sphere a strict sense which no one has yet grasped?
In short, are there universal biographic forms operating beneath all
history?
The Fall of the Occident, at first a phenomenon restricted in
place and time like the corresponding fall of Greece and Rome,
obviously becomes a philosophic theme which, once its full scope
is understood, encompasses all the great questions of existence.
If one wishes to discover through what curve the extinction of
Occidental culture is proceeding, he must first recognize what cul-
ture is, what relationship it has to visible history, to life, to the
soul, to nature, to the mind. He must see under what forms it
makes its appearance, and to what extent these forms (peoples,
languages and epochs, battles and ideas, states and gods, arts and
art works, sciences, laws, economic systems and attitudes toward
life, great men and great events) are symbols and are to be inter-
preted as such.
II
The means of grasping dead forms is the law of mathematics.
The means of understanding living forms is the analogy. In this
way the world's polarity is distinguished from its periodicity.
There has always been some awareness of the fact that the
number of forms under which history appears is limited, that ages,
epochs, situations, persons fall into types and repeat themselves.
Napoleon's actions are hardly ever discussed without a side-glance
at Caesar and Alexander, the first of which, as we shall see, was
inadmissible, the second correct. Napoleon himself noted the kin-
ship between his position and that of Charlemagne. The Conven-
tion spoke of Carthage when it meant England, and the Jacobins
called themselves Romans. With varying justice, Florence has
been compared to Athens, Buddha to Christ, early Christianity to
modern socialism, Rome's financial greatness in the time of Caesar
to the Yankees. Petrarch, the first passionate archaeologist (archae-
ology itself is an expression of the feeling that history is repeated)
thought of himself in connexion with Cicero; and only recently
Cecil Rhodes, the organizer of British South Africa, who had in
his libraries the ancient Lives of the Caesars in translations made
expressly for himself, linked himself with the emperor Hadrian.


OSWALD SPENGLER 363
It was to the ruin of Charles the Twelfth of Sweden that from
youth he had carried in his pocket the Life of Alexander by Curtius
Rufus, and wished to imitate this conqueror.
In his political memoirs—such as the Considerations of 1738—
Frederick the Great resorts with perfect security to analogies in
order to explain his version of the general political situation, as
when he compares the French to the Macedonians under Philip
in their opposition to the Greeks (Germans). "Already the Ther-
mopylae of Germany, Alsace and Lorraine, are in Philip's hands."
This characterized superbly the policies of Cardinal Fleury. Here
also is the comparison between the policies of the Hapsburgs and
Bourbons and the proscriptions of Antonius and Octavian.
But all this remained fragmentary and instinctive, and usually
corresponded less to some profound sense of form in history than
to a momentary desire for some clever or poetic expression.
Similarly the comparisons of Ranke (a master of artistic analo-
gies) between Cyaxeres and Henry I, or the invasions of Cimme-
rians and Magyars, are morphologically meaningless. Almost
equally so is his often repeated linking of the Hellenic city states
and the Renaissance republics. However, his comparison of
Napoleon to Alcibiades is profoundly, though haphazardly, cor-
rect. With him, as elsewhere, these comparisons originate in the
popular, romantic predilection of a Plutarch, where the similarity
of scenes on the world's stage is simply visualized, but not in the
strict sense of the mathematician who perceives the inner relation-
ship between two groups of differential equations in which the
layman sees nothing but differences.
It is obvious that at bottom the choice of such images is deter-
mined by caprice, not by an idea, not by a feeling of necessity.
We are still far removed from a technique of comparison. Com-
parisons, even to-day, are appearing in great numbers, but plan-
lessly and without coherence; and if they ever are accurate—in a
deeper, still unplumbed sense—it is thanks to good luck, less often
to instinct, never to a principle. It had not occurred to any one to
construct a method here. It had not been remotely suspected that
here lies a root, and precisely the one root, out of which a vast
solution to the problem of history can develop.
Comparisons could have been a benefit to historical thought,
in so far as they lay bare the organic structure of events. Their
technique must be perfected under the influence of a comprehensive


364 THE DOWNFALL OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION
idea, to the point where their selection is determined by a skilled
logical procedure. Heretofore they have been detriments because,
considered merely as a question of taste, they exempted the historian
from the insight and the inconvenience of regarding the form-
language of history and its analysis as his most difficult and press-
ing task, a task which is not even grasped to-day, to say nothing
of its being solved. They were partly superficial, as for instance
when Caesar was called the founder of a Roman state publication,
or even worse, when remote and highly complex phenomena of
previous ages which were essentially very foreign to us were
placarded with words of the day such as socialism, impressionism,
capitalism, clericalism. They were partly of a bizarre preposter-
ousness, as the Jacobins' cult of Brutus, that millionaire and
profiteer Brutus who as leader of the old Roman nobles stabbed the
man of democracy amid the applause of the patrician senate.
Ill
And so the issue, which comprised originally a restricted problem
of modern civilization, broadens into a completely new philosophy,
the philosophy of the future, if any at all can grow on the meta-
physically exhausted soil of the Occident, the only philosophy
which belongs at least to the potentialities of the Western Euro-
pean mind in its last stages. It becomes the idea of a morphology
of universal history, the idea of the world as history, which (as
distinguished from the morphology of nature, previously the sole
theme of philosophy) encompasses once more all forms and move-
ments of the world in their deepest and ultimate significance, but in
an entirely new arrangement, so as to produce, not a panorama of
everything known, but a picture of life, not of what has been, but
of what is in the process of becoming.
The world conceived, observed, constructed as history, in oppo-
sition to the world as nature—that is a new aspect of existence
which has never been applied heretofore, never ventured upon
through all its consequences, although perhaps it has been vaguely
felt and frequently suspected. Here are offered two possible chan-
nels in which man can possess and experience his environment.
According to their structure, not their substance, I sharply divide
the organic impression of the world from the mechanistic, the
aggregate of forms from that of laws, the image and symbol from


OSWALD SPENGLER 365
the formula and system, the once actual from the continually pos-
sible, the aims of a planning, ordering imagination from those of
a designedly dismembering research, or—to mention here a very
significant contrast never previously noticed—the value of the
chronological number from that of the mathematical number.1
Consequently, an investigation such as this cannot concern itself
with taking at their face value the daily events of an intellectual-
political character as they show on the surface, arranging them
according to cause and effect, and tracing them through their
apparent, intellectually comprehensible tendencies. Such a "prag-
matic" treatment of history would simply be a bit of natural
science in disguise, a state which the supporters of the materialistic
conception of history make no attempt to conceal, whereas their
opponents are merely insufficiently aware that the procedures of
both factions are identical. It is not concerned with what the
tangible facts of history per se are as phenomena of any one age,
but with what they signify, indicate through, their phenomenalism.
The historians of the present think that they have done more than
enough when they array details from the history of religion, social
conditions, and at a pinch art, in order to "illustrate" the political
character of an epoch. But they forget the decisive factor—
decisive for the very reason that history is an expression, a sign,
spirituality taken form. I have as yet found no one who took the
study of these morphological relationships in earnest, who had
passed beyond the field of political facts and penetrated the ultimate
and profoundest thoughts of the mathematics of the Hellenes,
Arabs, Hindus, Western Europeans; the meaning of their early
ornamentation, of their fundamental architectonic, metaphysical,
dramatic, lyrical forms; the selection and direction of their great
arts; the details of their artistic technique and choice of material;
to say nothing of their decisive significance for the form problems
of the historic. Who knows that there is a profound formal con-
1 It was an enormously important misconception of Kant's which is still
not overcome, that he quite schematically joined the inner and outer man
first of all by the ambiguous and primarily unstable concepts time and
space, and through this went on to connect in a completely false manner
geometry and arithmetic, whereas here the much deeper opposition of the
mathematical number to the chronological should at least have been cited.
Arithmetic and geometry are both spatial calculations and in their farthest
reaches become entirely indistinguishable. A temporal calculation, the
concept of which is intuitively thoroughly clear to the simple man, answers
the question of when, not what or how much.


366 THE DOWNFALL OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION
nexion between differential calculus and the dynastic principle of
government in the time of Louis XIV, between Euclidean geometry
and the Ancient governmental form of the polls, between the
spatial perspectives of Occidental oil painting and the conquest of
space by means of railroads, telephones, and long range guns,
between contrapuntal instrumental music and the credit system of
economics? Even the most real factors of politics, when observed
from this angle, take on a highly transcendental character, and
it happens probably for the first time that things like the Egyptian
administrative system, ancient coinage, analytic geometry, the
cheque, the Suez Canal, Chinese book-printing, the Prussian army,
and the Roman technique of road-building are all apprehended as
symbols and are explained as such.
Here it becomes evident that there has not been any specifically
historical method of perception. What has been called so, draws
its method almost exclusively from the realm of the one science in
which the methods of perception have reached a thorough develop-
ment: that of physics. People think they are carrying on investi-
gations into history when they trace the objective connexions
between cause and effect. It is a remarkable fact that philosophy
of the old style never thought of another possibility in the relation-
ship between the mind and the world. Kant, who in his chief work
laid down the formal rules of experience, considered nature as the
sole object of experience, although neither he nor any one else
noted this fact. Knowledge is for him mathematical knowledge.
When he discusses innate forms of perception and categories of the
mind, he never thinks of the quite differently constituted treatment
of historical phenomena. And it is significant that Schopenhauer,
who accepts from among Kant's categories only that of causality,
speaks of history with nothing but scorn.1 It has not yet pene-
trated into the realm of intellectual formulations that besides the
necessity of cause and effect (I should call it the logic of space)
there is also in life an organic necessity of fate (the logic of time).
And this is a fact of the most profound essential certainty, a fact
which is contained in all mythological, religious, artistic thought,
and which comprises the character and the kernel of all history as
1 It must be obvious how greatly the scope of formal combination and the
energy of abstraction in the field, say, of Renaissance research or the
history of migrations lag behind things which are taken for granted in the
field of function theories or of theoretical optics. Alongside the physicist
and the mathematician, the historian's accomplishments are negligible.


OSWALD SPENGLER 367
opposed to nature, although it is not accessible to the forms of
perception which the Critique of Pure Reason investigates. Phi-
losophy is, as Galileo says in a famous passage of his Saggiatore,
"scritta in lingua mathematica" in the great book of nature. But
we are still waiting for some philosopher to tell us in what language
history is written and how it is to be read.
Mathematics and the principle of causality lead to a naturalistic
arrangement of phenomena, chronology and the idea of fate to an
historical one. Both arrangements embrace the whole world.
Except that the eye, in which and through which this world is
realized, is different.
IV
Nature is the form beneath which the man of advanced cultures
gives unity and meaning to the immediate impressions of his senses.
History is the form through which his imagination seeks to grasp
the life process of the world with reference to his own life and thus
imbue it with a deepened reality. Whether he is capable of these
formations, and which of them dominates his waking conscious-
ness—that is a basic question of all human existence.
Here we have two cosmological attitudes possible to man.
Which implies that they are not necessarily realities. So if we seek
in the following pages for the significance of all history, first a
question must be answered which has not previously been stated.
For whom does history exist? A paradoxical question, as it seems.
Undoubtedly for everyone, in so far as everyone is a member and
element of history. But consider that the totality of history like
the whole of nature—the one, like the other, is a phenomenal aspect
—presupposes a mind in which and through which reality exists.
Without subject there is no object. If we leave out of account
every theory (which the philosophers have given us in a thousand
versions) it still remains unquestionable that earth and sun, nature,
space, the universe are a personal experience and, in their quality
of being as they are and not otherwise, are dependent upon human
consciousness. But the same is true of the panorama of history, of
the All in process of becoming and not at rest; and even if we knew
what it is, we should still not know for whom it is so. Certainly
not for "humanity." That is our own Western European feeling,
but we are not "humanity." Surely there was no universal history,


368 THE DOWNFALL OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION
no world as history, for not merely the primitive man, but also the
man of certain high cultures. We all know that as children our
consciousness of the world lights first upon naturalistic and causal
traits, and not till much later do those of an historic nature, as for
instance a definite sense of time, come into prominence. The word
distance assumes a tangible content for us much sooner than the
word future. But what if an entire culture, an advanced mental
condition, should centre about this anhistoric attitude? How must
reality, life, the world seem to it? In the world-consciousness of
the Hellenes all experience, not merely the personal past of the
individual, but the general past, was promptly transformed into
myth, i.e., into nature, into a timeless, motionless, undeveloping
present—with the result that, for the mentality of the Ancients,1
the history of Alexander the Great began to merge with the Dionysus
legend even before his death, while Caesar did not feel his descent
from Venus as absurd in the least. When we consider this, we
must admit that to us of the Occident, with our strong feeling for
temporal distances, it is almost impossible to recover such an atti-
tude; yet we are not entitled to simply leave this fact out of
account when facing the problem of history.
Historical research in its farthest reaches—where it includes all
kinds of psychological analysis of foreign peoples, times, customs
—means to the soul of entire cultures what diaries, autobiogra-
phies, confessions mean to the individual. But Ancient culture
possessed no memory in this specific sense, no historical organ. The
memory of the Ancients—and here we flatly impose upon a foreign
mentality a concept derived from our own mental habits—is some-
thing quite different; because there the consciousness lacks the
sense of past and future as regulatory perspectives, and is absorbed
to a degree beyond our knowledge by the "pure present," which
Goethe so often admired in all utterances of Ancient life, especially
in the plastic arts. This pure present, of which the greatest symbol
is the Doric column, represents in fact a negation of time (of direc-
tion). For Herodotus and Sophocles, as for Themistocles and a
Roman consul, the past flits forthwith into a timeless, static im-
pression of polaric, not periodic structure—for that is the ultimate
meaning of a thorough-going mythopoeic mentality—while for our
cosmological sense or inner eye it is an organism of centuries or
1 Translator's note. Spengler regularly uses the word antik, here translated
Ancient, to designate the cultural cycle of the Greeks and Romans.


OSWALD SPENGLER 369
millenniums, clearly arranged in periods, and directed toward ends.
But it is just this background which gives its peculiar colour to life,
Ancient as well as Western European. What the Greek called
cosmos was the picture of a world which does not become, but is.
Consequently the Greek himself was a man who never became, but
always was.
Thus, although the Ancient was very well acquainted with the
Babylonian and Egyptian cultures' strict chronology and calendar
computations, and thereby with the strong feeling for eternity and
the nothingness of the present moment which is revealed in the vast
observation of the heavens and the exact measurement of mighty
time intervals, yet he never made any of this essentially his own.
What his philosophers occasionally mention, they have simply
heard, not tested. Neither Plato nor Aristotle had an observatory.
At Athens in the last years of Pericles a popular decree was adopted
which threatened everyone with the heavy punishment of the
f laavyyelux who should spread astronomical theories. It was an act
of the most profound symbolism, which expressed the will of the
Ancient soul to debar all sense of distance from its cosmogony.
Thus the Hellenes, in the person of Thucydides, did not reflect
seriously on their history until they were essentially as good as
exhausted.1 But even Thucydides, whose methodic principles in
the introduction of his work have an exceptionally Western Euro-
pean aspect, understood them in such a way that he invented
historical details whenever it suited him. With him this passes as
an artistic measure, but we call the very same thing myth-making.
A real feeling for the significance of chronological numbers is out
of the question. In the third century Manetho and Berosos—
non-Greeks—wrote fundamental source-books on Egypt and Baby-
lon, two countries which had a sense of astronomy, and thus also
1 The attempts of the Greeks to establish something like a calendar or a
chronology after the example of the Egyptians began very late, and were
moreover highly naive. The computation by Olympiads is no era like
the Christian one for instance, and besides it was simply a literary make-
shift and not current with the people. There was no zero from which one
could count. We have the inscription of a treaty between Elis and Heraea
which was to be valid "for a hundred years after this year." But there
was nothing to indicate what year this was. After some time people were
bound to lose track of how long the treaty had been in effect, and manifestly
no one had considered this. But probably these men of the present very
soon forgot the whole matter. It is indicative of the legendary and child-
like character of the Ancients' conception of history that an orderly dating
of the facts in something like the "Trojan war," although it corresponds
in position to our Crusades, would seem a downright violation of style.


37o THE DOWNFALL OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION
of history. But the cultivated Greek and Roman was little con-
cerned with such matters, and greatly preferred the story-like
fantasies of a Hecataeus or a Ctesias.
Consequently Ancient history down to the Persian wars, and
also the structure of very much later periods, is the product of
essentially mythic thought. The history of the constitution of
Sparta—Lycurgus, whose biography is told in all details, was
supposedly an unimportant forest divinity of Taygetos—is a fiction
of the Hellenistic period; and up to the time of Caesar the inven-
tion of Roman history before Hannibal had not come to a stop. It
characterizes the Ancient sense of the word history that the Alex-
andrian novel-literature had the strongest influence materially on
the writing of serious political and religious history. No one
thought of distinguishing its content systematically from mere docu-
mentary data. When towards the end of the Republic, Varro
set about to fix the Roman religion, which was rapidly vanishing
from the popular consciousness, he divided the divinities, whose
service was most scrupulously practised by the state, into di certi
and di incerti—those about which something was still known and
those whose names alone were left despite a continuous public cult.
In fact the religion of the Roman society of his time—as not only
Goethe, but even Nietzsche accepted it without suspicion from the
Roman poets—was for the most part a product of Hellenistic
literature and had hardly any connexion with the old cult, which
was no longer understood.
Mommsen clearly formulated the Western European standpoint
when he called the Roman historians—Tacitus especially is meant
—people "who tell what should have been kept quiet, and keep
quiet what should have been told."
The Hindu culture, whose idea of the (Brahman) Nirvana is
the most decisive possible expression of a completely anhistoric
mind, has never possessed the slightest feeling for the "when" in
any sense whatsoever. There is no Hindu astronomy, no Hindu
calendar, thus no Hindu history in so far as we understand by
history the consciousness of a vital growth. We know even less
of the surface course of this culture, whose organic part was ended
before the rise of Buddhism, than of Ancient history from the
twelfth to the eighth centuries, surely a period rich in great events.
Both are preserved purely in dreamlike, mythical form. Not until
a complete millennium after Buddha, about 500 A. D., did anything


OSWALD SPENGLER 371
arise at Ceylon in the Mahavansa which had the remotest sugges-
tion of historiography.
The consciousness of the Hindu was so anhistorically inclined
that he did not even recognize the phenomenon of a book composed
by one author as an event fixed in time. Instead of an organic
sequence of personally demarcated writings, a vague textual mass
gradually arose in which everyone wrote down what he wished,
without allowing any place for the concepts of individual mental
property, of the evolution of a thought, of the intellectual epoch.
In this anonymous form—the form of all Hindu history—Hindu
philosophy lies before us. Compare with it the Occident's history
of philosophy, physiognomically embossed most saliently with
books and persons.
The Hindu forgot everything; the Egyptian could forget nothing.
There never was a Hindu art of the portrait (of the biography
in nuce); the Egyptian plastic arts knew hardly any other theme.
The Egyptian soul, of pronounced historical character, and press-
ing toward the infinite with a primeval passion, felt the past and
the future as its entire world; and the present, which is identical
with the waking consciousness, seemed to it purely the narrow
boundary between two incommensurable distances. Egyptian cul-
ture is an incarnation of care (the spiritual correlative of distance):
care for the future, as expressed in its choice of granite and basalt
as plastic material,1 the chiselled documents, the perfection of a
masterly administrative system, and the net of irrigation works 2;
and with this the care for the past is necessarily joined. The Egyp-
tian mummy is a symbol of the highest order. Egyptians eternal-
1 On the other hand it is a symbol of the first order and without parallel in
the history of art that the Hellenes following the early, Mycenaean period
turned away from stone construction to the use of wood—in a country
overly rich in stone!—which explains the lack of architectonic remains
between 1200 and 600. The Egyptian lotus column was a stone column
from the beginning, the Doric column was a wooden column. This
expresses the Ancient soul's deep hostility to duration.
2 Did an Hellenic city ever execute a work of magnitude which betrays a
thought of future generations? The road and irrigation systems which
have been proved to belong to the Mycenaean period (i.e., prior to the
Ancients) degenerated and were forgotten after the birth of the Ancient
peoples—thus, with the dawn of the Homeric era. Likewise Mycenae
itself was completely forgotten as an historic factor. We possess thou-
sands of inscriptions from the Mycenaean times, not a single one from the
Homeric. Yet that is no "retrogression," but the new style of a differently
constituted soul. That is "pure present."


372 THE DOWNFALL OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION
ized the body of the dead, as they imparted eternal duration to the
personality, the ka, by the construction of effigies (frequently in
great numbers) whose resemblances were very nobly conceived and
were closely linked with the personality. It is well known that in
the best period of Greek plastic art effigies were expressly
forbidden.
There is a profound relationship between the attitude towards
the historic past and the conception of death as it reaches its
expression in the form of funeral. The Egyptian denies the transi-
tory, the Ancient affirms it in the total form-language of his culture.
The Egyptians preserved even the mummy of their history: the
chronological dates and figures. While nothing is handed down
of Greek history before Solon, not a date, not a genuine name, not
a tangible event (which lays an exaggerated stress upon what of
the remainder is known to us alone) we know almost all the names
and reigns of Egyptian kings for three thousand years, and natu-
rally the later Egyptians knew them without exception. As a
ghastly symbol of this will to duration, the bodies of the great
pharaohs lie with recognizable features in our museums to-day.
On the brilliantly polished granite pinnacle of the pyramid of
Amenemhet III, the words are still legible: "Amenemhet observes
the beauty of the sun"; and on the other side: "Higher is the soul
of Amenemhet than the height of Orion, and it is joined with the
underworld." That is conquest of the transitory, the present—
and un-Ancient in the highest degree.
As opposed to this mighty group of life-symbols, there appears
at the start of Ancient culture, corresponding to the oblivion which
spreads over every portion of their outer and inner past, the
cremation of the dead. It was entirely foreign to the Mycenaean
period to prefer as holy this form of burial above all the others
which are usually practised side by side among primitive peoples.
The graves of the kings even indicate the pre-eminence of earth-
burial. But in Homeric times, as well as Vedic, there follows the
sudden, materially inexplicable step from burial to cremation
which, as the Iliad shows, was performed with the full pathos of
a symbolic act—the solemn annihilation, the denial, of historic
duration.


OSWALD SPENGLER 373
Also, from this moment on the plasticity of individual spiritual
development is at an end. As little as Ancient drama permits of
genuine historical motifs, just so little does it admit the theme of
inner development; and we know how decisively the Hellenic
instinct revolted against the portrait in the plastic arts. Up to the
time of the Emperors, Ancient art knows only one material in any
way natural to it: the myth.1 Also the ideal portraits of Hellen-
istic plastic art are mythical, as well as the typical biographies of
the type of Plutarch's. No great Greek has written reminiscences
which fixed beneath his mind's eye some surmounted epoch. Socrates
never once said anything significant, in our sense, about his inti-
mate life. It is a question whether such things were even possible
to an Ancient soul, just as the projection of Percival, Hamlet,
Werther takes them for granted. In Plato we miss all conscious-
ness of an evolution of his doctrines. His individual writings are
purely formulations of very different standpoints which he held
at different times. He did not reflect on their genetic inter-rela-
tionships. The only (superficial) attempt at a self-analysis is
found in Cicero's Brutus, and that barely belongs to Ancient cul-
ture. But at the very start of the Occident's intellectual history
there is a work of the profoundest self-exploration: Dante's Vita
Nuova. Yet it follows that Goethe had very little of the Ancient,
or pure present, in him, since he forgot nothing, and his works, in
his own words, were simply fragments of one long confession.
After the destruction of Athens by the Persians all works of the
older arts were thrown into the discard—where we to-day have
rescued them—and no one in Hellas has ever been heard to have
bothered about the ruins of Mycenae or Phaestus. They read their
Homers, but never thought, like Schliemann, of excavating the hill
of Troy. They wanted myth, not history. In Hellenistic times
part of the works of Aeschylus and the pre-Socratic philosophers
had already been lost. But Petrarch collected antiques, coins,
manuscripts with a piety and thoroughness of observation proper
to this culture alone, as an historically minded man who looks
1 From Homer until the tragedies of Seneca, a stretch of a full thousand
years, the mythic figures such as Thyestes, Clytemnestra, Hercules are
seen again and again unchanged, despite their limited number, while in
the poetry of the Occident the Faustian man appears first as Percival and
Tristan, then changing with the calibre of the times, as Hamlet, as Don
Quixote, as Don Juan, in a last seasonable transformation as Faust and
Werther, and then as hero of the modern metropolitan novel, but always
in the atmosphere and conditions of a definite century.


374 THE DOWNFALL OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION
back on far-off worlds and yearns for distance (he was the first to
undertake the climbing of an Alpine peak) and who is essentially
a foreigner in his own times. This very association with the time
problem gives rise to the psychology of the collector. We feel
why this cult of the past, which might bestow perpetuity upon
him, must remain completely unknown to the Ancient, while the
Egyptian landscape, as early as the time of the great Thutmosis,
had been transformed into a single vast museum of tradition and
architecture.
Among the peoples of the Occident it was the Germans who
invented mechanical clocks, gruesome symbols of fleeting time,
whose strokes, ringing out over Western Europe day and night
from countless towers, are perhaps the most monstrous expression
of which the historical sense is capable.1 We meet with nothing
of the sort in the timeless Ancient landscapes and cities. Water-
clocks and sun-dials were invented in Babylon and Egypt, but
Plato first introduced the clepsydra into Athens—here again, not
until the end of Greece's florescence—and the sun-dial was taken
over still later, purely as an unessential implement of the daily
routine without their altering the Ancient sense of life in the least.
Here, further, should be mentioned the corresponding difference
(a very profound one, never adequately appreciated) between
Ancient and Occidental mathematics. The Ancient conception of
numbers deals with things as they are, as quantities, timeless, purely
in the present. That led to Euclidean geometry, to mathematical
statics, and to the final rounding-out of the spiritual system in the
study of conic sections. We deal with things in their development
and relation to one another, as functions. That led to dynamics,
to analytical geometry, and thence to differential calculus.2 The
modern theory of functions is the gigantic arrangement of all this
mass of thought. It is a bizarre fact, but solidly founded on spirit-
About the year 1000, and thus at the beginning of the Romanesque style
and the Crusade movement, the first symptoms of a new soul, Abbot
Gerbert (as Pope Sylvester II) the friend of Emperor Otto III, invented
clocks that strike and clocks with gears. In Germany also around 1200
the first clock towers appeared, and somewhat later portable watches.
Observe the significant connexion between the measurement of time and the
building of the religious cult.
With Newton this is called expressively computation by fluxions—out of
consideration for certain metaphysical ideas on the nature of time. Time
does not enter at all into Greek mathematics.
1


OSWALD SPENGLER 375
ual requirements, that Greek physics—as statics in opposition to
dynamics—did not know the use of the clock or feel the need of it,
and completely neglected temporal measurements, whereas we com-
pute by the thousandth parts of a second. The entelechy of Aris-
totle is the only timeless—anhistoric—concept of development that
exists.
Thus our problem is defined, in so far as life is the embodiment
of the spiritually possible, and the new concept of the spiritually
impossible modifies the aspect of things. We men of the Western
European culture—a phenomenon which can be accurately placed
within the years 1000 and 2000 A. D.—are the exception and not
the rule. "Universal history" is our outlook on the world, not that
of "humanity." The Hindu and the Ancient did not see the world
as unfolding, this was not for them a kind and form of vision; and
perhaps, when the civilization of the Occident, whose bearers we of
to-day are, is extinguished, there will never again be a culture, and
thus a human type, for whom "universal history" is a form, a con-
tent, of the cosmic consciousness.
VI
Then—what is universal history? A spiritual possibility, an
inner postulate, the expression of a feeling for form, of course. But
a feeling, no matter how definite, is not a completed form; and as
certainly as we all feel and experience universal history and believe
with perfect sureness that we are looking into its structure, it is
just as certain that we to-day know only forms of it, but not the
form.
It is safe that everyone, when asked, is convinced that he looks
with clarity and understanding into the periodic structure of
history. This illusion rests on the fact that no one has stopped to
reflect on it, and that we doubt our knowledge all the less because
no one suspects what should be doubted. In fact the design of
universal history is an untested intellectual possession which, even
among historians of repute, has been inherited from generation to
generation; and it greatly needs some of that scepticism which has
analysed and deepened the view of nature handed down to us
since Galileo.
Antiquity, middle ages, modernity: that is the incredibly meagre


376 THE DOWNFALL OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION
and senseless scheme whose absolute domination over our historic
consciousness had always hindered us from properly apprehending,
as to its rank, its formation, and above all its duration, the true
position of this little portion of the world in its relation to uni-
versal history—thus to the total history of superior mankind—as it
has unfolded since the German Empire on the soil of Western
Europe. It will hardly seem believable to future cultures that we
never questioned the validity of this simple, rectilinear, and sense-
lessly proportioned outline which becomes more meaningless from
century to century and does not allow for the natural incorporation
of new fields opening beneath the light of our consciousness. Even
the criticism which has been expended on it, and the extensive
modifications to which it was necessarily subjected—for instance,
the shifting of the start of "modernity" from the Crusades to the
Renaissance and from there to the beginning of the nineteenth
century—indicate merely that it itself is considered impregnable,
almost the result of a divine revelation, or at least is taken for
granted, like an apriori form of the historic perception described
by Kant.
But this form, current and unquestioned, gave no opportunity
for penetration; and since people did not renounce it, they re-
nounced accordingly the proper comprehension of historical rela-
tionships. Thanks to it, the great morphological problems of
history could not receive attention. It had kept the treatment of
form in history on a plane which would have been thought dis-
graceful in other sciences.
It is only necessary to point out that this outline places a super-
ficial beginning and end at points where in a deeper sense there can
be no talk of beginning and end. Here—it is hard to say why,
unless it is because we, the constructors of this historic view, feel
at home in just this—the landscape of Western Europe1 forms
1 Here the historian is victimized also by the fatal prejudice of geography
(let us not say subject to the suggestion of a map) which recognizes
Europe as a continent, so that he feels obligated to attempt a corresponding
ideal separation from Asia. The word Europe should be struck out of
history. There is no "European" as an historic type. It is idiotic, in the
case of the Hellenes, to speak of "European antiquity" (then Homer,
Heraclitus, Pythagoras were "Asiatics"?) and of their "mission" as that
of producing a cultural rapprochement between Asia and Europe. This
results from a banal interpretation of the map, and corresponds to nothing
real. It was solely the word Europe and the complex of thoughts arising
under its influence, which with complete injustice united Russia and the
Occident in our historic consciousness. Here, in a culture of readers
brought up on books, a sheer abstraction led to vast actual conse-


OSWALD SPENGLER 377
a stationary pole (expressed mathematically, a singular point on
the surface of a sphere) around which revolve in all modesty mil-
lenniums of mighty history and vast remote cultures. That is
a planetary system invented with the most pronounced personal
bias. A single spot is chosen as gravitational centre of an historic
system. From here outwards the events of history receive the right
light. From here outwards their significance is calculated in perspec-
tive. But here in reality is speaking the vanity (unchecked by
scepticism) of the Western European, in whose mind this phantom
of "universal history" unfolds. It is responsible for the optical
illusion, which has long since become a habit with us, whereby the
historic stuff of thousands of years, when at some distance as old
Egypt and China, shrinks into miniature, whereas the decades in
the vicinity of our own position, since Luther and especially since
Napoleon, well up to ghostly magnitude. We know that a cloud
only apparently moves slower the higher it is, and a train only
apparently creeps across a distant landscape, but we believe that
the tempo of early Hindu, Babylonian, Egyptian history was actu-
ally slower than that of our immediate past. And we find its
substance thinner, its forms more blunted and flattened, because we
have not learned to take into account the—internal and external—
remoteness. Nothing else exposes more clearly the lack of intel-
lectual freedom, of self-criticism, which distinguishes, to its
detriment, the historical method to-day from all other methods.
It is quite reasonable that the existence of Athens, Florence,
Paris should be more important than much else to the culture of
the Occident which for a considerable time—let us say since
Napoleon—has imposed its forms upon the whole world, super-
ficially at least. But it betrays the horizon of a provincial to
make this circumstance the structural principle of a universal
history simply because we live in relation to this culture. It would
justify the Chinese historian in projecting on his count a universal
quences. In the person of Peter the Great, it falsified the historic tendency
of a primitive folk-mass for centuries, although Russian instinct divides the
"Little Mother Russia" from "Europe" very rightly and with a profound
hostility embodied in Tolstoy, Aksakoff, and Dostoevsky. Orient and
Occident are concepts of genuine historic content. "Europe" is an empty
vocable. Everything in the way of great creations which the Ancients
produced, arose under the negation of a continental boundary between
Rome and Cyprus, Byzantium and Alexandria. Everything that is called
European culture arose between the Vistula, Adria, and the Guadalquivir.
And granted that Greece at the time of Pericles "lay in Europe," then
to-day it lies there no longer.


378 THE DOWNFALL OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION
history in which the Crusades and the Renaissance, Caesar and
Frederick the Great were passed over in silence as unimportant.
The politician and the social critic are at liberty to let their private
tastes dictate their evaluations of other times, just as the technician
of chemistry is at liberty to treat the field of benzol derivatives in
practice as the most important chapter of the natural sciences and
neglect, say, electro-dynamics; but the thinker must extricate his
personality from his syntheses. Why, from the morphological
standpoint, is the eighteenth century to be held more important
than one of the sixteen preceding? Is it not ridiculous to place a
"modernity" which encompasses a few centuries and is further-
more essentially localized in Western Europe, over against an
"antiquity" which comprises as many millenniums, and to which the
mass of all cultures previous to Greece is added as a mere appen-
dage, without any attempt at a deeper co-ordination? In order
to preserve this decrepit scheme, have they not disposed of Egypt
and Babylon as a prelude to the Ancients, whereas those self-
contained histories, each by itself, counterbalance "universal his-
tory" from Charlemagne to the world war and far beyond? Have
they not, with a look of embarrassment, relegated to a marginal
note the vast complexes of the Hindu and Chinese cultures, and
completely ignored the great cultures in America because their
"relationship" (with what?) was lacking? That is our "uni-
versal history." So the negro thinks who divides the world into
his village, his tribe, and "the rest," and who sees the moon as
much smaller than the clouds that swallow it.
I call this current Western European scheme, in which the high
cultures pursue their orbits around us as the supposedly central
point of all world events, the Ptolemaic system of history; and
I consider it as the Copernican discovery in the realm of history
that in this book a new system takes its place, the system wherein
all the fluctuating phenomena and expressions of the one life
reposing at the centre are included without any preference what-
soever: the Ancients and the Occident alongside of India, Babylon,
China, Egypt, Arabianism, and the Maya culture—isolated worlds
of change which are all equally important in the panorama of
history, and which surpass the Hellenes many times in magnitude
of spiritual conception, or in the force of their ascent.
To be continued


THREE POEMS
BY JAMES STEPHENS
DEATH
Slow creatures, slow,
Nuzzle and press,
And take their food
In the darkness.
No stir is now
In all that once was all!
No sight, no hap, no sound,
No aught, is there!
Unseen, the beam of the sun!
Unknown, the ring of the light!
—Unknown in the cave, unseen
By the slow, slow, hungers.
Naught rests but food!
All else that was is away:
Far away, in the gleam,
In the ring, in the beam, in the sun.
THE ROSE IN THE WIND
Dip and swing,
Lift and sway,
Dream a life
In a dream away.
Like a dream
In a sleep
Is the rose
In the wind,


380 THREE POEMS
And a fish
In the deep,
And a man
In the mind:
Dreaming to lack
All that is his,
Dreaming to gain
All that he is:
Dreaming a life
In a dream away;
Dip and swing,
Lift and sway.
THE MAIN-DEEP
The long-rolling,
Steady-pouring,
Deep-trenched,
Green billow.
The wide-topped,
Unbroken,
Green-glacid,
Slow-sliding,
Cold-flushing,
On-On-On,
Chill-rushing,
Hush-hushing,
. . . Hush-hushing .
Note: The last two verses should be uttered on one breath. J. S.



DESIGN BY C. E. BURCHFIELD CUT BY J. J. LANKES
THE WHIRLING WIND





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LUCIENNE
BY JULES ROMAINS
Translated From the French by Waldo Frank
XII
TWO hours before the hour of the lesson, and still I did not
know if I was going to the Barbelenets'. Nor had I thought
out a plan of action, if I did go. But I'm afraid my irresolution
was rather shallow. If, at this time, some accident had stopped
me, I should have been broken-hearted. I think, in spite of all
the accidents in the world, I should have managed to get there.
The house, opening to let me in, meant nothing. Door, hall-
way, the maid's look, my stepping into the parlour, the girls'
handshakes . . . naught in all this. There was an event in the
offing, but it was in no hurry to be born. So much the better. I
was not anxious to use up my little courage on little things. If
I had found the maid in lamentations, Marthe in tears, for instance,
I should have been exhausted at the outset. Perhaps the girls had
the same thought.
And yet our coming together was an irresistible thing. There
we were, there we must be close in a room, despite reluctance,
despite our wish to avoid pain. I suppose both of the sisters
had thought of some excuse for getting out of the lesson: Marthe
in order not to betray her resentment, Cecile because her con-
science was not quite clear. And yet, there irresistibly they were.
And strange as it may seem, those early moments were pleasant
for us all. Our being together was an enjoyable surprise, like an
achievement we had scarce dared to expect . . . and we handled
it rather gingerly, like a rare fragile thing.
Everything is here—I felt a grim smile in myself—everything
to bring us together, and to keep us so for life. Too bad the
situation cannot last. It is silly to think that the one equilibrium
between people is that of peace. Everything else we call a
crisis, and strain to be done with. We call pleasure only what


382 LUCIENNE
most obviously serves us, what our own narrow person accepts as
good. And yet there is often joy in the anguish and the torment
which loved ones bring us . . . the joy of our deep attachment.
But we are afraid, we do not cultivate such pleasure: it fades
unless some exterior circumstance nourishes it against our will. I
began to think of marriage. Five minutes more for thought, and
I am on the verge of a crucial discovery about marriage! The
conditions were not right. I sat down at the piano and fluttered
the scores.
"Did you find time to practise the measures that did not go
last time . . . the ones following C?" And without turning,
casually, I went on at once: "Wasn't that you, Cecile, whom we
saw evening before last on the rue Saint Blaise, the evening I
went out with M Febvre?"
"Yes ... it was I."
"I thought I recognized you. But I wasn't sure. It would
have been more natural to run into one of the girls who live in town,
or some member of their families. It's about the only time when
the rue Saint Blaise has any life at all. But if you had an engage-
ment, why didn't you come along with us?"
Then, I faced about. Cecile was pale. She glanced at me
anxiously, and at once her troubled eyes went to nearby things,
to the room's corner, back again to my own, and then escaped me
once more. A hesitant light appeared on the face of Marthe.
My ease and the embarrassment of her sister stirred the whole
question in her heart again. She longed to give me back her
trust in me.
Her ease misgave me. I felt she was too quick to act on the
veiled denial of my words. She had no right to make me out
as saying more than I had said. I had not committed myself.
I had renounced nothing.
"You, Cecile, try this passage alone. You almost always make
the same mistake in the left-hand coda. Look out, now."
She was at the piano. I saw her profile, the nose, the contour
of the mouth. The signs of youth in her face were almost per-
functory. It was as if her teeth were there only provisionally.
The lips were all ready to draw in, the eyes were ready to sink
deep in their sockets, into a web of wrinkles. An acrimonious old
woman stood behind this mask of Cecile's youth.


JULES ROMAINS 383
"You know, Mademoiselle Cecile, I truly think that each time
you sit down to play you say to yourself: 'I cannot help making
a mistake.' You are too nervous. You seem to be fascinated
by the mistake you are about to make. You must resist. Let's
try once more." ... So charitably directed, Cecile was bound to
go wrong. As the fingers came close to the hard passage, they
lost the little confidence they had. A panic seized them, they
began to race blindly forward, hurling themselves upon the self-
same error . . . and our silence, Marthe's and mine, gave it a
cruel accent.
I knew that I was being treacherous and cruel. Since I am not
naturally wicked, I had to find a motive to excuse myself. I
watched the girl's profile again. I thought of her ugly behaviour.
I thought it was almost an act of charity to force a spirit like
hers to make confession of its own evil, even through the sounds
of a piano. That false note so stubbornly repeated had a certain
suggestion of repentance, as if Cecile were striking contrite blows
on her own breast. I wanted to draw out her trial at the piano.
I got up, and as I came round to the instrument, I contrived to
look in the mirror that hung just to the right of the old uncle.
The glass told me again that I was beautiful. Who would
begrudge beauty three minutes of injustice?
Meanwhile, Marthe tried to read my thoughts in my eyes. She
was keen enough to sense that I was putting her sister on the
rack. Her grievance was not my own, but she could share
in my vengeance. And since she also was not naturally cruel,
this anodyne punishment sufficed her. . . . But all this did not
prove that Cecile had lied. In Marthe's eyes there was a delicate
reproach which did not meet me, so much as it tenderly let me
see that it was there. "Am I right to be hurt? Have you be-
trayed me? How have you betrayed me? . . ." Almost at once,
her plaint turned against herself: "What right have I to murmur?
Hasn't Pierre all the reasons in the world to like you best? I
was the least unpleasant of two cousins. But now that he has
seen you, heard you play, talked with you on so many subjects
about which I know nothing, how can I expect him to be so
dull as to prefer me to you?" And in her face was that childish
resignation which so sweetly became it.
But it was not enough to give up Pierre Febvre. The other


384 LUCIENNE
edge of her sacrifice came clear to Marthe, and at this incision
of her sorrow, she trembled and turned back. "And you too!
You too love Pierre Febvre. If you love him, no one else counts
in your life? You are going to forsake me, and forget me. For
you are not like me. There's no one else in the world but me won-
derful enough to be able to love Pierre, and love you too . . .
Yes, love you as you have never been loved."
I was aware of her questionings, but I did not wish to answer.
It was easier to let her merely feel by the subtlest tingle of my
eyes, of my manner, by some sentient sign of thinking, that this
torment of Cecile was dedicated to her. I offered her this, caress-
ingly, as a pledge. Had Cecile suddenly jumped from her seat
and left us in a rage, we should have had less pleasure of her
exhibition, than of this quiet need of keeping her close, with her
back turned on us so that we could go on, behind her suffering,
in this exchange of our hard harmonious feelings.
Some of all this must have reached Cecile. She must have
felt us on her shoulders like a weight ... or at least like some
malignant force feeding upon her, rejoicing at her expense. She
must have known something of the shame and anguish of a beast
of burden. . . . Our little game could not go on for ever. I
must let Cecile rest, and put Marthe to work. Cecile took the chair
on which Marthe had been sitting. The same exercise began.
Little had changed. . . .
A moment's cloud, and Cecile's grey-green eyes stared toward
me, and held me. Only when my eyes turned to her did they
leave me. The instant that my look wandered or dimmed, there
they were back upon me. They were irresistible. It would have
been as easy to ignore a constant knocking on the door of one's
bedroom. And they were clear in their meaning. Above all,
Cecile wanted all my thoughts for herself. A divided attention
was not enough, nor even that my awareness should embrace the
three of us so close bound in this pain. "Me! Me!" said the
grey-green eyes. "Give yourself to me. Be so good as to look -,
in me, to take from me what I have for you. Look! I could
easily resent the ill-will you have just shown me, draw back in
myself. I do not resent you. I do not draw back. There's some-
thing more important, and you don't understand. You have
known all along that I had some meaning for you. But you }


JULES ROMAINS 385
have felt this perversely. I am antipathetic to you. Yes, I know.
What of it? I have a secret for you, your secret for you. Just
because you don't like me, are you going to be so foolish as not
to try to understand?"
Up to this point, the utterance of the grey-green eyes was clear
enough. Then, I lost it. They were pleading with me to know
a certain thing, to get over some mistake, to take advantage on
the instant of what they had for me. Almost, the eyes railed
at me: "Fool! If only I were in your place. You don't
deserve it."
But in her appeal there was so little warmth! I was frozen,
repelled. I did not wish to understand.
And now the first signs of a strange disorder! Infinitely slight
at the beginning, it grew and grew in me as the time for leaving
neared: and at the lesson's end, I was submerged, I was nothing
else. . . .
Around me, nothing: I am wholly absorbed within myself, I
am all tremulous with an interior event whose inscrutable birth
is not more astounding than its unheard-of growth.
Nothing helps me to understand save the mysterious, almost
solemn way in which once or twice in my girlhood I was taken
ill. . . . There was one afternoon when I was seventeen or
eighteen. I was in the home of a friend. We sat about, chatting,
drinking coffee. An ordinary day. . . . Now, sudden, I feel an
imperceptible loosing as if a fibre as fine as a watchspring were
unsprung in me, as if a thread as delicate as a hair were breaking.
Everything about me quivers in a subtle shock, recoils. The air
clouds and thickens, fending me off from what is nearest to me.
I go on talking, smiling. But my body is as vast as a land;
mountains, sky, and silence alone bound me. There is a little
unheard signal, and myriad thoughts, some pleasant, some sad,
leap up from my body, scamper all about from countless coverts,
swarm my flesh. . . . An hour later I was in bed, and so racked
with fever that I had to clasp my knees to keep them from
knocking.
I think of this, when I think of what happened to me at the
Barbelenet house. And yet, I knew even then this was no fever.
My body was not immune. Chill struck my cheeks, chill gripped


386 LUCIENNE
my bowels, sinking deep in me and streaming through my legs.
But it was not my body. I knew this, above all, because of the
vast eventfulness with which my pain seemed fraught. Disease
has no future like this: its future is dark and low, like a black
passage against which one suddenly knocks one's head. The first
shock of fever has its stir of joy, even of passion: but it is wholly
within ourself, it bespeaks no flesh but our own. Life is suddenly
afraid: shuddering, it halts, draws back, and huddles close to its
own source. This was far otherwise: it seemed to loose itself from
me, to loose me from myself, to send life from me lilting, as if I
needed to break the bonds of my body. This moving maze that
had become my soul was outside: it was not lodged in forehead,
in breast, nowhere in the substance of my body. It was in front
of me, it lodged in that spiritual domain flush with our heads,
which we come to feel when we are in a crowd.
Only later did a clear vision come to dwell in my turmoil and
to give it light. . . . The face of Pierre Febvre, the body of
Pierre Febvre, Pierre looking at the world, and talking. I saw
the feint of his shoulder as he said: "To be sure, it'd be still
better if there was a bit of a bar for the tracklayers and the fire-
men. . . ." The black eyes, eyes perfectly black! The head
tilted sidewise while the black eyes smiled. A glance of them at
you, to make sure that the thought which has just delighted him
has pleased you too. ... A mobile glance. Not the restless
greed of eyes that smear their calculating will over the face of
the world. No, a creative restlessness, a free one. . . .
Beauty! But first his smile. The way in which a thought more
playful than the rest bounds from his eyes, runs in myriad tiny
wrinkles about his face. Face of Pierre Febvre suddenly shedding
smiles, as another might shed tears. Beauty, at last: stern beauty
in Pierre Febvre's face.
And the laughter which I do not hear, and do not want to:
I steel myself against the coming of that laughter. I imagine not
it, but my expectancy of it. I am like a huddled child watching
for some marvellous feat that is to come, hoping almost that it
will not come, frightened by the too great joy of its coming. The
laughter of Pierre Febvre that transfigures the world!
Well, there was nothing to do but to admit it: I am in love


JULES ROMAINS 387
with Pierre Febvre. I had just enough presence of mind left to
be amazed at the way love had come. ... I had thought often
enough of love, ever since the late days of my childhood. I was
sure that once or twice I had felt something very like its birth.
But in each case what I had read in some book interfered, or
amended what I felt. My instinct, moreover, was very arrogant
on the subject, and there were times of disillusion, times of in-
tellectual exhilaration, when I said to myself: My way of life
leaves me small chance of ever experiencing love. Well, what
of it? Don't I know all about it, beforehand? If I lived through
love, would it not be a bothersome corroboration of what I sense
already? If I give up love, I lose little, and I keep intact for
my work all of that spiritual power which women make such poor
use of. One thought only countered these complacent medita-
tions: I am in the dark only about the physical act; I seem
unable to imagine the torrential feeling that must possess a woman
when she is possessed by a man. Later in life, there will be plenty
of commonplace women, of the sort I can so easily dominate in
other ways, who will feel this basic ignorance in me, who will
despise me for it, who will take it as a symbol of my stunted
growth. And I ventured on: Once at least I must live that
experience, far away from everyone I know, with some anonymous
man, a man perhaps whose face even is unknown to me; perhaps
on some journey, my face veiled, so that I can forget everything
except the essence of the thing . . . keep it impersonal and
pure. . . . And then, rather hurriedly, I would change my mind.
I loved Pierre Febvre. This deep possession could be nothing
less. Love, salient and pure ... no alloyed emotion. That it
should be Pierre Febvre seemed not extraordinary. In fact the
whole event, seen from outside, seemed so obvious, so natural,
that I felt rather ashamed. Why then astonished? Love had
come, after all my wise speculations, and I had not recognized
it at all!
What was it that had taken me unaware? This almost febrile
vibrance of my flesh, this invading vision of the man, the sudden
strain of my life outside its natural limits . . . were these not
the traditional marks of love? Yes: in detail, in their mental
configuration. And this is why such signs of love are easiest
to picture, stand out most salient in my memory. That does not


388 LUCIENNE
make them the most significant or the most essential. Even then
I knew this, as I know it now.
What kept me from admitting that this was love was that I
had never associated with the name of love this subtle savour
of fear that filled me, this abject proneness of my soul which called
for fear. This was the strange, uncalled-for element, this what
the girl of yesterday could never have foretold, this what was
deepest. The supine posture of one condemned! The word may
not be exact, but I can find no better. True, there was no impli-
cation of despair, not even of sadness. I think of a victim who
accepts her fate, who knows it ineluctable, who is already giving
in to it . . . preparing, that is, to be happy under it. But con-
demned all the same, and supine!
I recalled the evening in bed when the two clocks tolled. The
thought was spontaneous and heedless. Surely these events were
not one, nor the states they brought upon me. And yet I felt
their consonance, even as two events in history may be joined,
however different in kind, however separate in time and place . . .
As if a single spiritual Power had that first time been manifest to
me in the tolling of the clocks: and drew away upon its cosmic
waves: and now suddenly it was very close again, it was upon
me in a new avatar far more menacing than the other: inscrutably
it worked its will upon me for the same submission, for the same
cry of submission. . . .
XIII
The following Friday, as I went in to lunch at the hotel, there
was a letter propped against my napkin. It was in Cecile's hand-
writing, and here approximately is what it said:
"Sunday next we are going by carriage to F les-Eaux.
M Pierre Febvre will call for mother and me about nine o'clock.
He is taking us, and is to show us the sights. We will go by
way of Notre Dame d'Echauffour, even though it is a bit longer.
Do you know the church? It is quite lovely, and mama will be
glad to take in at least a part of High Mass. Won't you come,
too? We should all be so happy. The carriage will get us back
before night. You can give me your answer Saturday at the lesson.
But we count on you."


JULES ROMAINS 389
P. S. "Father and Marthe cannot take the trip with us. They
are leaving for Paris Saturday afternoon. My father is going on
business, and Marthe will celebrate her birthday with her Aunt
who is her godmother. They will be back, though, Sunday evening
on the 6:59. So we can all have dinner together at the house."
On the reverse page another postscript:
"That reminds me. Marthe won't be able to have her lesson
to-morrow. Perhaps it's not worth while, then, for you to bother
to come just for me. That will give me a little holiday. So don't
send word, if you can come Sunday. If we don't hear, we'll expect
you."
"Cecile's handwriting?" asked Marie Lemiez.
"Yes. Nothing important . . . about to-morrow's lesson."
Marie Lemiez was talkative that day, but she had a hard time
getting even monosyllables from me. It's lucky that Marie is
not too keen. If she begins to pry into your mind, she is likely
to take what is nearest at hand. I was glad, indeed, to be with
her. She brought calm to my fever. I might have grown dizzy
in my whirling thoughts, had she not curbed me with her good
stolidity. Thanks to her, I managed to make some order out of
them. Without her there, I think they would have stampeded.
And as they flew about, I might have gotten nothing from them
but a vague and passionate and evanescent murmur.
What should I do? I knew there was no question at all. At
nine on Sunday I would be at the Barbelenet house—if not at ten
before nine! What I needed was to see Pierre Febvre again. How,
mattered little. If there had been a letter, not from Cecile,
but from Pierre Febvre himself, summoning me to some impossible
rendezvous, I could not have refused: but I should have gone
through a little farce ere I knew this. First, half an hour of
righteous indignation . . . time to trump up some acceptable
excuse for going. As it was, the event was playing the farce
for me.
Indeed, everything was far too easy and natural: it frightened
me. I wish I were duller than I am, or at least capable of remain-
ing half aware of what is going on. Marie Lemiez for instance,
would simply have been glad of the invitation, she would have


39o LUCIENNE
looked forward innocently to a glorious day and left well in the
shade such hidden aspects of the case as had best stay there. Surely,
Cecile's note breathes good faith. There must be something wrong
with the mind that looked there for trouble. . . . And yet how
am I going to blink the circumstance that Papa Barbelenet and
Marthe are left out of the party? This business trip to Paris, this
birthday party of an Aunt is a rather laborious coincidence. Also,
suddenly it is decided that there should be no lesson Saturday:
in other words, Cecile and I are not to face each other before
the excursion. Would we not be likely to touch on certain matters,
despite ourselves, that had best remain quiet? Even when we
were three, we did not quite succeed in striking the proper con-
ventional tone, much less holding it for an hour. With only two,
it would be even harder, particularly with both of us bursting with
suppressed emotion. The promptings of social law would be quite
powerless in such a case against deep instincts clamouring for
an issue.
Why the dinner? I cannot understand that dinner! Sunday
at seven, the family will be whole, once more. That is normal
and as it should be. The exile of Marthe and her father is to
last scarce twenty-four hours. In such circumstances, one looks
forward to the usual mood, to the usual "sort of thing." Why
am I injected into the family for the first time just then? But
it is quite true, if the dinner is surprising, the excursion is still
more so. Well, I shall have to get along without clarity. The
expedition of Sunday is before me like a sphere revolving dark but
luminous. It is enough.
The carriage waited at the station concourse. It was a break,
easily large enough for four, not counting the coachman. It was
half past nine before we left. I was afraid that Cecile's letter
meant that Pierre Febvre was going to drive. This would have
isolated him from us. But the driver was there, and all Pierre
did was to tell him how to go.
Madame Barbelenet ascended first, with the assiduous help of
her daughter. She wore a black silk dress that was a bit too
solemn for the occasion; in a motor it would have looked absurd,
but in a break it passed. It made us look like a family of petty
nobles pilgrimaging to Mass. Possibly, we were! Madame Bar-


JULES ROMAINS 391
belenet did not lose the chance, as she stepped to her seat, of
showing how she conquered over pain. She smiled. And her
smile seemed to say: "To-day we are going to be young and
foolish. Suppose I do have to pay for my escapade with three
months on my back? What of it?" Cecile motioned me in, next.
I was about to take the seat beside her mother; she stopped me.
"No, please, Mademoiselle Lucienne! You must let me sit there.
In case mama needs anything. It will be handier." I did not
exactly see what would be handier. But I obeyed.
At my left then, was to be Pierre Febvre. I could have seen
him better, opposite. His eyes would more easily have met mine.
On the other hand, it would have been harder to hide my condi-
tion. And to have him at my side seemed somehow good, sig-
nificant, like an omen.
What would he think of my profile? Would it be beautiful
to him? Was not my full face more perfect? I knew it best.
But he was quite as used to my profile. When I played the piano,
the evening of our walk, when he had come so near to an avowal,
it was like that he had seen me. The worst of it was that for
the entire journey we should have to face the combined gaze of
Madame Barbelenet and Cecile! Was the whole trip going to be an
arraignment? Above the heads of the two women, I already saw
the portrait of the judicial Uncle, completing the Tribunal.
Luckily, I had not foreseen this. It would be easier, since it
was unexpected. . . .
Our first remark was about the weather which, while not exactly
magnificent, was good enough. There was a crisp freshness in the
breeze. The clouds did not threaten. At worst, there might be
a few drops of rain in the afternoon. Then Madame Barbelenet
announced:
"In my opinion, an excursion like this is excellent for the
health, provided one is sensibly dressed. It is true that health can
scarcely be of much concern to Mademoiselle Lucienne. Mademoi-
selle, you look superb this morning."
Pierre Febvre turned in his seat to see me. I felt that I was
about to say something unheard-of, something that would shame
me utterly. He caught my impulse. Inarticulately, he chuckled.
Then, he asked me:
"Do you go in for sports, at all, Mademoiselle Lucienne?"


392 LUCIENNE
"No. At least I should never call it sports . . . exercise,
rather."
"I think you are wise. Perhaps that is why you look so
healthy—and yet not professionally healthy. I am in terror of
the athletic woman. We have scores of them on board. Their
blood circulates ostentatiously. Every time they breathe, you'd
think they were discovering oxygen. And despite it all, they are
dull. I have the prejudices of the South."
I did not dare look at Madame Barbelenet who, while she
listened to Pierre Febvre, went over my poor person with a ter-
rifying calm precision. Nor did I dare look at him. His voice
was enough to shake me: to have met his eyes just then might
have unhinged me. I could not keep staring for ever at the
carriage floor, nor at the coachman's back: I had to see one of
us! So I looked at Cecile: I lingered at her dress, at her breast, at
her neck, and my eyes came slowly to her eyes which left Pierre
Febvre to meet me. There was no chance of reading in her eyes.
The grey-green pupils held opaquely from me what stirred beyond
them. What I saw most clearly was a difference in level, a sort of
slope between her soul and mine. I had the sense of submitting
to some kind of wilful act, of being in a way the goal of a force
gliding upon me. But I could not understand the purpose of this
subtle trend upon me of the soul behind her eyes, I could not
guess what submission it desired of me. I learned then that a
will acting with force upon one's own, the mere knowledge of
such a will, is enough to engross and amaze one. We ask nothing
more of life. It is as if we were always yearning, always wait-
ing for just this essential adventure. But I saw as well, that
love only can exert such pressure lastingly upon us. The in-
fluence of Cecile wavered, my willingness to submit to its ill
pleasure dimmed as my thoughts of Pierre Febvre freshened, and
as I knew more strongly that I loved him. It was almost as if
the moment with Cecile had been a substitute for one with him:
as if I had begged of the grey-green eyes just for an instant to
take the place of the black ones which I dared not meet . . . had
allowed them, instead, to sway me, to possess me.
"Have you had news, recently, Mademoiselle, of your mother?"
Never before had Madame Barbelenet asked me so directly
about my family. I answered:
"Just the other day."


JULES ROMAINS 393
"The news was good?"
"Oh, very. My mother is very well."
"How I envy her, Mademoiselle! You really should make her
visit you for a week or two, so she can get acquainted with our
part of the country. Such a little trip would not tire her. And
the air would do her good. We should all be so happy to meet
her."
"My mother is not fond of travel. Besides, she has her own
ties in Paris. You know, I believe, that she is married again?"
I spoke rapidly, with an inner stiffening, as if I were defying
I know not what convention.
"Yes: Mademoiselle Lemiez told us. We know how splendid
you have been." Madame Barbelenet turned to her daughter.
"I doubt if we shall be in time for the Mass at Notre Dame
d'Echauffour."
"We might ask the driver to hurry his horse a little."
"The poor dumb brute! Surely, he has work enough carrying
us four. We four should be able to carry the venial sin of missing
Mass."
Then:
"It must be very hard for a young girl of feeling. A boy
would not suffer so much. But with your talent, you have your
independence at the tips of your fingers. How lucky it is for you.
I have always felt that a young girl should be able to earn her
own living, in case circumstance forced her to it. It is a great
resource. That does not mean that she must go to work, or give
up the thought of marriage. Merely, let it be there to fall back
on. I know of a Chief Engineer who had his daughter learn
stenography. And yet, Heaven knows, with her mother's for-
tune and all, the little one is not in danger of starving. You
might say: stenography is going a bit far. That Chief Engineer
is an up-to-date man."
"That reminds me," suddenly exclaimed Pierre Febvre, with
that childlike smile of his spreading from his eyes, "that I have
no trade either. I really must learn one. That'll be a good way
to round out my vacation."
Madame Barbelenet laughed. "What, you no trade! Pierre,
what nonsense are you saying."
"It is true. None whatsoever. I have the accomplishments
of an amateur. All scattered, spread thin . . . not a one of them


394 LUCIENNE
thorough. I know something of photography, something of
mechanics. I am a bit of an electrician. I could serve as doctor or
pharmacist, but only in a penitentiary or a prison ship; only, that
is, where the choice was not left to my patients."
"But your profession! Why don't you speak of that?"
"You are joking. It is not a profession. It is a medley of odd
jobs . . . the sort of thing that people ask you to do because you
wear a uniform. If I lent you my uniform, you'd do quite as well
as I. Really. . . . Now that I think of it, there is the hint of
a profession in it, after all. It might lead to hotel-keeping, if I
only perfected the technical side. I really should take advantage of
my stay at F les-Eaux to get into that. I am on excellent
terms with the proprietor and with the boots on my floor. Perhaps
I could strike up an acquaintance with one of the managers of
the smarter hotels. Yes indeed! what do you think of the idea,
Mademoiselle Lucienne?"
He looked straight at me. And I longed to place my head
on his shoulder and to tell him that I'd keep hotel with him all
the days of his life if he wished: I'd even play the piano evenings
in the foyer for the travelling salesmen.
"Of . . . your present profession? or ... of your idea?" I
said.
"Is hotel-keeping a real trade, I wonder? You see what I mean.
I don't believe it is. In a revolution, would hotel-keeping be
regarded as a necessary occupation, like tailoring for instance?
Hm . . . perhaps if I learned to cook. A splendid idea, that. A
hotel-keeper doubled with a cook. Better yet, married to a cook!
There's a combination to resist the worst social upsets. . . . Do
you know how to cook, Mademoiselle Lucienne?"
I blushed, as if he had made an official proposal.
"A little."
"Cooking interests me, you know. I think you'll find me full
of ideas. Yes, that would delight me: to be an inspiration in
matters of cuisine. Many a time on board, I have saved the chef
who has no imagination whatever. But without an executant, a
virtuoso at my side, I'd be helpless. Truly, Mademoiselle, we
ought to join forces."
I said to myself: He is making fun of you. Don't get caught
in his banter. If he loved you, he'd not be joking so before the
Barbelenets. He's shallow. . . . And I went on pondering: If we


JULES ROMAINS 395
were alone, would he go on like this? Perhaps. But the same
words would have a different sound. At least, they would for me.
For I would hear in them, playful though they are, hear even in
his laughter the serious bestowal of his life. It is true, the Bar-
belenets don't affect him as they do me. Even Marie noticed
that. Making the four Barbelenets listen to his regrets about
mathematics! It isn't that he suppresses them or shocks them.
He simply annexes them to his own mood with the calmest
arrogance, and assumes that of course they must be delighted. He
is indeed the sort who, if he were shipwrecked on some savage coast,
would offer the chief a cigarette and start a discussion on the
mysteries of Fate. . . .
He was watching the gravel of the road fly past. With the
most innocent air in the world, he turned to Madame Barbelenet
and said:
"I am glad you are here. Mademoiselle Lucienne is not fair to
me. She takes me for a mere spinner of fancies. We who are
cousins, we know how serious we all are, in our family." Then
he came back to me: "Really, Mademoiselle, I suppose at least
that you do not consider Madame Barbelenet frivolous. Well,
she will tell you that all of us at bottom are exceedingly serious
folk. It's not even the blood. A mere alliance has the same effect.
My work, what you call my work, gives me a somewhat casual
manner. But in spite of that, I think everything I say. For
instance: I have a good deal of sympathy for the monastic ideal
of life. But I have never said, even at the end of a rich meal,
that I wanted to take orders. For if I said it, I would think it.
And if I thought it, there'd be grave danger that I might do it.
"When I spoke to you just now of my idea of learning the
profession of hotel-keeping, I was serious. I admit I had never
had the idea before. But it must have been latent in me just
the same. . . . And when I propose a partnership with you, I
am perhaps indecorous in the extreme, but I am certainly as sincere
as when I say that you are charming, or that this carriage is moving
at a fair rate of speed. Absolutely! Madame Barbelenet is quite
right to frown, in order to make me understand that I am speeding
beyond all decency. But I must let my inspiration have its way.
I must go on to the end. Having gone so far! . . . Very well,
then, I can quite readily imagine myself wedded to you, if you
will have me; and the two of us conducting a first-class tourist


396 LUCIENNE
hotel in the most entrancing of places. On one of the great
European highways, for instance. But please don't go and think
that the hotel is a formal condition for the rest. We might try
something else, if you wished. . . ."
In my memory of that moment, it is not confusion that is most
clear, nor joy, but a blank amazement. I was forevermore freed
of a great many conventional ideas about what is possible, and
what is not, in social intercourse. I had always thought that when
persons of breeding were together, there were strict limits to what
could happen and to what could be said: that it was almost
physically impossible for conventions to be overstepped. A gath-
ering of seven or eight in a bourgeois parlour: don't we know in
advance what will be said, or at least what will not be said, and
what will not be done? One word or deed swerving from the
traditional frame would surely be enough to smash in the walls,
and scatter the company to the four winds. Even the thought
of such a break brings terror to the calmest. Everyone, with the
whole momentum of his mind and soul, adheres to the conven-
tions, just as each part of his body obeys the common laws of
weight and space . . . Madame and Mademoiselle Barbelenet,
Pierre Febvre and I, all dressed up and riding to church . . .
where could there have been less room for a strange event? I
was learning my lesson. It was marvellous enough that Pierre
Febvre should have dared be so utterly improper. But what was
simply prodigious was the calm with which his behaviour was
received. How could such enormity exist so naturally among us?
Madame Barbelenet merely frowned and lifted her eyebrows
faintly. She held her head back a little as if she wished to increase
the distance between Pierre and her: but it was hard to say if
she did this to emphasize their apartness or merely to have more
perspective for looking at him. As to Cecile, she was leaning
toward me!
Then Madame Barbelenet turned toward me. You would have
said she was looking for the mark of a blow on my cheek. Cecile
looked too, but straight into my eyes. Her thoughts crouched
deep within her grey-green eyes, the better to leap up into the
depths of mine. At last Madame Barbelenet broke the silence:
"Heaven be praised, you don't have to listen often, do you,
Mademoiselle, to such a talker as my cousin? I almost said my
nephew, since he's young enough to be that, and his mother was


JULES ROMAINS 397
like a real sister to me. Several times, we spent a whole month
together, when I was a girl, on the splendid estate of my uncle,
Justice Le Mesnil, in the Drome. That is his portrait you may
have noticed, in the parlour over the piano. My uncle, the Justice,
at that time, my dear Pierre, was your mother's guardian. Per-
haps you did not know that it was there, at his estate, at a fare-
well party for the hunting season that we met for the first time
the young man who was to propose to your mother? Yes: I may
even say that for a while your father seemed to hesitate whether
to pay court to your mother or to me. I congratulate him on his
excellent final choice."
"It seems my mother once told me something of all that."
"You saw so little of her, after you grew up! First college.
Then your profession. Our cousin's mother," Madame Barbelenet
turned to me, "died while her son was on one of his first crossings.
There is no doubt, he never had quite enough of the maternal
influence. And you will tell me, I am sure, Mademoiselle, that
there was no need to say this: you had noticed it."
She laughed majestically; and went on:
"You forgot to tell us, dear Pierre, how your father is getting
on with his hunting? One might say, Mademoiselle, that the hunt
has played an unusual role in the life of our cousin's father. It
was at the hunt that he found his wife; and I wonder if it was
not the hunt that made him a widower."
"Oh!"
"It is true, dear Pierre. That year, your parents stayed a week
longer in the country: it was the fag end of the season, and the
weather was damp. All this, despite the delicate health of your
mother ... all this, just for a last hunting party which those
gentlemen had planned."
"But you know, Mama had been very ill the year before."
"All the more reason, my dear. Men are often very selfish. It
is well that young girls should know this, lest they be too bitterly
disappointed. Yes, very thoughtless, only too ready to believe that
everything is splendid, if their own affairs are satisfactory."
She sighed. "Do you think, dear Pierre, your mother would
have survived as long as I have, if she had been forced to live in
the house where I am living?"
Down a long slope the road led straight to Notre Dame


398 LUCIENNE
d'Echauffour. The livelier clatter of the horse's hoofs, wheels
singing at the brakes like blades on grindstones, a sudden sun
piercing through sumptuous clouds, warm air, the earth's sharp
odour: now the first houses of the town, the relaxed ease of a
relay in our journey ... all these made my head swim madly,
and doubtless there were still better reasons. . . .
My thoughts grew lighter and lifted humming, in the air. I
did not strive to keep them bound together. What if they clashed
and buzzed against each other? Prescience and memory became
so strange, I no longer knew them. I thought of a wagoner walking
beside his horse along a morning road. He has drunk his wine. His
way is between poplars, leafless but in bud. He has no thoughts,
but he is bathed in a hundred thoughts the sweeter since they are
not his own. The shadows and reflections of these thoughts ripple
about him rounded and puffed like those white clouds above me;
and it is good that they are not his thoughts, for the highway
he walks and the wine he has drunk have made them universal.
And then I said to myself: Nothing can be as good as this!
All other joys have a hidden curse within them. There is fever
in them or blood. They are onerous or they are servile. All other
joys are cowards, for they are ever clamouring as if they wanted
something. Love itself, O let love grow light like this, let it
waft along with me upon this easeful level of my exhilaration.
If love asks more of me, I shall not listen. Lukewarm sun, song
of the wheels, earth pungent, mingled hours. . . . Love itself
must embrace this infinite nearness of delicious lives; it must rise
exultant with them all to the height of the clouds.
XIV
Marthe said: "You must want to tidy up a little. Let's go
to my room." Of course, after so many hours on the road, I
needed just this. The others, too. The household is spread
through the entire house. The cook is getting dinner; Cecile, I
think, has joined her in the kitchen. No one saw us go up.
Marthe closed the door and shut the bolt. "Now you'll not
be disturbed."
Then waveringly: "I can leave you alone, if you wish."
"Why not at all! You are not in the way, dear. I shall just
wash and run a comb through my hair."


JULES ROMAINS 399
I scarcely looked at the room. I did not know if Marthe
was proud of it or a trifle ashamed. One or the other might
have been possible. So, with my back to the room's breadth, I
simply said:
"It's very nice—your room." And then I saw a coverlet on
the bed, all needlework, a thing that seemed to burst with the drab
hours that had gone to making it, hours of work in the gloom
of cinder-stained windows. I breathed in an air of such desolate
propriety that sudden the thought came to me of a woman insolent
in beauty, a woman shedding perfumes and carnal laughter, and
the light on her naked shoulders strangely one with the broidered
velvet of the night cafe. . . .
I went up to the little dressing-table and I took hold of the
mirror with relief. I had had no glimpse of myself since F les-
Eaux, where we had lunched. There, in the hotel dining-room,
was a narrow panel glass too far from our table to be of use. I
had managed only a covert glance or two. My eyes drank in
Marthe's mirror with a joy like the traveller's whose throat is
parched with dust and who at last finds water. I thirsted for a
mirror. Again and again I said to myself, intently, passionately:
I am beautiful. I am a lovely woman, a woman to be loved. My
shoulders should be bare, my lips should be rouged, I should be
standing before the aromatic chaos of a true boudoir table: I
am not made for embroidering a quilt in eighteen months, I am
not made for this dreadful little room, for its tedium, for its odour
of sanctimonious must . . . like an old cupboard. A little powder
on my face . . . not enough, not as much as I'd like ... if
Pierre came suddenly in, I'd give him my lips, right before this
little Barbelenet girl. . . . Instead, I bit my lips.
Marthe came very close beside me. Her eyes went to the mirror,
found my eyes in the mirror, and so appealingly, so movingly, that
at last I noticed.
"What is it, Marthe?"
She came still closer; she placed a hand on the table and bowed
her head.
"You won't be coming any more, Mademoiselle Lucienne?"
"What? What did you say?"
She stepped back, and lifted her head.
"You won't be giving us lessons, any more1?"
"I absolutely do not understand you."


400 LUCIENNE
"I mean—when you're not living here?"
"When I'm not living here?"
"Why yes. . . ." She sank into an armchair, cupping her chin
in her hands. "Yes. When you are married."
"Married?"
"Oh, how wrong you are to distrust me! I think everything
is as it should be. You don't consider me so stupid as to compare
myself with you."
"My dear, dear Marthe, I promise you, I do not understand."
"Cecile imagines I am going to hate you. She'd be glad. I
think she is almost as stupid as she is wicked. . . . On the con-
trary, I hope that you may never be unhappy. If they had let
me go to Notre Dame d'Echauffour, I'd have offered a prayer
for you . . . for you, not for him. No, not for him!"
"Dear dear Marthe!"
"And yet, it is sad that life must be like this. He found it
mighty easy to make you believe him . . . just as he had found
it with me. But if I hadn't managed to speak to you, that after-
noon, would you even have thought of me? would you have
guessed?"
"Perhaps I have thought of you more than you imagine,
Marthe."
"Bah! You'd have forgotten me, just as if I'd been any other
one of your pupils. And it's not fair: for perhaps there's no one
else in the world would have done for you . . ." Her voice
trembled. I felt the tears coming.
"Marthe, you are mad. You are a dear child, my dear sweet
little sister. I shall never forget you. I shall never give you up."
She let me take her. In my arms, she looked long at me. Then,
hesitant, she said:
"Do you think I have talent for the piano?"
"Why yes, Marthe. Very real talent. Why?"
"Oh, nothing."
She was pondering again.
"You'll be going to Marseille, I suppose?"
"To Marseille?"
"Yes. I mean, when the time comes. You'll have to. But
you'll be alone so much. It seems to me you'd be better to keep
up your music . . . with someone. Oh, you don't know me.
You haven't had a chance. I can work lots harder!"


JULES ROMAINS 401
Her eyes sparkled. All about me, I felt the swift tiding up
of her emotion.
"Marthe, Marthe! We are both talking nonsense. You speak
as if certain things had happened ... of which there hasn't been
the slightest, not the slightest question." I opened the door. "I
suppose they are waiting downstairs."
She held back. She paid no attention whatever to my words.
"Promise me ... at any rate . . . you won't say No."
"What a stubborn child you are, Marthe dear. Heaven knows
what you are dreaming. Well, all right then: to you I shall
never say No."
M Barbelenet was at my left: Madame Barbelenet across the
table: Pierre Febvre was at her right: Cecile and Marthe sat at
either end, Cecile between Pierre and her father, Marthe between
Madame Barbelenet and me. The table was ceremoniously set.
Solemnity was in the air.
We had already been together, we six, in the parlour: never
at table. This dinner was an event that had never existed before,
and it was my presence that made it new. Therefore I was the
group's most sensitive point, I was the spot at which the mutual
unease gathered. But the malaise would have been slight enough,
if our union had been merely new.
The dinner weighed upon me like an occult rite. I tried to
avoid its intimations as best I could. I took temporary refuge
in the solidity of Madame Barbelenet.
Her face was directly in front of mine, and my eyes went out
to it spontaneously. But it was more than that. Her face drew
me and held me close to itself, somewhat as the thought of a task
to be done . . . land to plough, wood to chop . . . draws down
the workman, however weary he is. There was an urgent under-
standing between her face and my mind. I followed the furrows
between the cheek and the jaw, the other furrows at the double
chin. I halted at the wart. I went around it. My eyes were
irritated by its granulous texture, the pink ring round its base, the
tuft of greyish hair twisting on top. Then I jumped to the left
eye; I hung on the puffy eyelid, and the faint quiver that ran
through it seemed to come from me.
Finally, the nose. It was a generous nose, the sort of nose
known as Bourbon; and it filled me with an impulse to take a


402 LUCIENNE
bite of it, as if it were some succulent food which my body yearned
for so urgently that even to look at it diminished my hollow
hunger. I was in a nightmare that kept on dawning, that had no
end, and that made me feel how the dinner had begun with an
act of magic: the absorption into my empty body of a rich morsel
of Madame Barbelenet! Indeed, it was only the sight of real
food, a plate of noodle soup, that brought me back from my
madness to the people about me.
M Barbelenet sent eager and hospitable glances at my plate,
at my wine glasses, at his wife. He seemed to be checking up
the details of glasses for the different wines, verifying if I had
been well served, making sure that his wife approved of the start
of the ceremony. But if he watched these visible facts, it was
only for their invisible values. Only if the dinner began auspi-
ciously upon the white field of the table linen was there hope that
it might progress as it should in its more spiritual planes. There
was this deep significance to his practical glances.
Marthe and Cecile, facing at the table's ends, did not look at
each other. Marthe leaned hollowly over her plate and her frail
blue-white hands played with the knife rack. Cecile's head was
high, and her breast also: but her eyes carried no farther than
the centrepiece. She seemed wholly apart from us: or at least
unwilling to mingle with us superficially: only her hidden thoughts
partook of our presence.
Pierre Febvre would have amused me, if my turbulent emotions
had allowed. His face streamed with the tiny wrinkles of his
smile: everything was there save the smile itself. He was not
quite at his best: he found it hard to adjust himself to the cere-
mony and to enjoy it. The gusto with which one offers a cigarette
to the savage chieftain was marred this time by irritation at having
to be there at all, when it would have been so good to be some-
where else. From time to time, he looked at me as if I were a
fellow conspirator, a comrade shipwrecked like himself. He
studied M Barbelenet a little as on board ship one might study
a seaman before setting him to a task too complex for him: think-
ing it over, one decides not to. At Madame Barbelenet, who shut
off his horizon to the left, he sent furtive glances that seemed
to say: "Over there, the thing's more serious."
Madame Barbelenet shook her head and leaned toward her
cousin. In her right hand was a fork; the other was poised on


JULES ROMAINS 403
a glass medicine tube which rose from the table like those little
columns that support the hands of statues. And her left eyelid
trembled, as if difficult words were about to issue from it.
"My dear Pierre, have you heard from your father if the
season has been good in the South?"
"My father is almost as bad at letter-writing as I am. Usually,
we know very little about what the other is doing. I suppose
he's been having his aches and pains: it's the time for them. And
I don't think he is hunting. The season is over, unless he per-
suaded the Mayor to hold a battue''
"But there are important steps which one should not take
without consulting one's father."
"Oh, you think so? True . . . perhaps. Would you say that
changing from a Company that plies to Senegal to another Com-
pany that plies to America was a grave step? Possibly not?"
"That depends."
"I ask, because last year when I did make a change, I com-
pletely forgot to tell him. He didn't know, until he received a
postal marked New York. And I had not thought of it, either,
until I dropped the card in the box. The point is that the thing
had absolutely no practical importance. My father is never within
sixty degrees of longitude of anything that concerns me. He
could not possibly have had anything to say, if I had told him
beforehand. Of course, there are questions of form."
"And also, as you know very well, there are graver questions
than a change of Company."
"Especially at Pierre's age," put in M Barbelenet. "For
instance, if I, at my time of life, with all my old habits, were to
make such a change, there'd be a pretty shake-up. But at your
age, I could easily have changed from the East to the North, or
from the Orleans to the P. L. M."
Papa Barbelenet's observation was not as empty-headed as it
sounded. He felt like all of us the need of avoiding too great
tension: he had thought out his random remark as a clever crafts-
man slips a chip between his vise and the wood that he is working.
And all of us were grateful; particularly his wife who had no
wish to hurry her ceremony.
So a new course appeared, and passed around the table. The
maid's presence tempered us. Then Madame Barbelenet forged
ahead once more:


404 LUCIENNE
"At any rate, perhaps I'd better write. You have been a little
under my care, these past months, Pierre. No doubt of it! Aren't
we all the family you have here? You must have felt this when
you first called. And isn't it clear that without us, nothing that
concerns you could have taken place?"
Pierre Febvre frowned and looked at me. He did not like
this notion of Madame Barbelenet. He was quick enough to see
truth in it, even to imagine all sorts of consequences that were
far indeed from her thoughts. He smiled drily. What he needed
was the release of his laughter to save him from feeling too sorry
for himself.
"As to you, Mademoiselle Lucienne, no one can take the place
of your mother."
I was blushing! I was blushing as I had never blushed in all
my life. And feeling like a small child, in the bargain. I called
on all my irony to save me; I assembled all my reasons for con-
sidering this woman absurd, superannuated, grotesque; I thought
of her wart, of her heavy jowls, of her quivering eyelid, of the
portrait of the judicial Uncle, of the copper jardiniere, of the—
Be so good as to be seated—and it was all no use. I was
a little girl before her: and her authority came full upon me,
inundated me, dazed me as if it had been a searchlight. There
was no resistance in me, and no refuge. Underneath the har-
bouring goodwill of her voice, I thought I felt tinges of regret
and of reproof. Perhaps I was mistaken. But all about the simple
words was a murmur of ironical and critical observation. Still,
I bent down like a slave. I did not challenge the right of Madame
Barbelenet to be severe as if I were a child. I was merely grateful
that she was not worse. In my eyes, there must have shone some-
thing like humble thanks.
Shame! I felt for myself and for Pierre Febvre.—If only he
is not watching me, just now. It was unbearable to think that
Cecile might have caught this fainting of my pride. I envied the
heroes who hold out against odds, the martyrs of life. If only it
were a question of defending my right to happiness against all
the Barbelenets in the world. How brave I'd be. What joy to
crouch low, to be hard, to be resistless. What joy, if only an
enemy were out there, face to face, against my skin and my flesh.
An unequivocal enemy!
Madame Barbelenet proceeded:


JULES ROMAINS 405
"I am quite certain that we must make no advance whatever,
until you have informed your mother." A pause. "The wrongs
that parents may have done their children do not free their
children of a certain consideration. There is a proper way of
making them feel that you are asking them for their permis-
sion, only after you have decided for yourself. That is punish-
ment enough."
A further silence: "I am no partisan of our modern bad
manners. No one disapproves more heartily than I of the child
who repays the sacrifices of her parents with disobedience and
ingratitude. Still, if I had thrown my daughters out on the world
to make their way as best they could, I should find it only natural
if they consulted me merely as a matter of form. And I would
not be jealous if they found in another family the love and the
nurture which they had not had from me. Am I not right, Pierre?"
At this very moment, I became aware of the flavour of the food
I was eating. There was a slice of meat before me, and in the
centre of the table reigned a superb leg of mutton. I justified my
thoughts at such a moment with the memory of Pierre's hymn to the
Barbelenet cuisine. "Profound cooking" merged indissolubly with
my recollection of the first stir of love. And then, suddenly, the
whole world rose before me, transfigured, immense, various and open
like a Cathedral. The taste of the mutton, the family about me, my
past life, and my most exalted thoughts, found their place in my
vision with mysterious ease. It was a cosmos: colour of copper
and dark blood. A heady nurture flowed through it and made
fate savorous and made fate good. Beauty and love partook of
the stocky substance of the Barbelenet flesh: even the maternal
wart was there. It was a cosmos in which visions of beatitude
could spring from a group of Barbelenets, from table wine which
the most innocent of them poured that moment in my glass. . . .
Toward the close of dinner, Cecile had murmured some pretext
and left the table. Marthe's eyes followed her out, and then
fell back into that quiet of hers that was like a convalescent's. We
all went on talking.
Gradually, the fact of Cecile's leaving grew and was a sen-
sitive spot in my mind, a painful spot: unbearable at last. It
was as if her leaving had made a hole scarce larger than a pin-
prick, one that increased and swelled until it gaped like an abyss.


406 LUCIENNE
I wanted to ask: "What has become of Cecile?" I tried to
soothe myself with pictures of her in the kitchen, giving some
order to the maid, helping her place the coffee cups on a tray:
or in her room brushing her hair. I failed. The desired picture
would not come. It was like trying to have a certain dream:
we hail it, we dictate it and describe it ... it holds off: and in
its place, some nightmare complete and strange.
My heart was beating hard, I could feel the pulse in my temples.
I argued in vain:—The dinner has used you up. The emotion.
The wine. I glanced at Pierre, at Madame Barbelenet. She was
speaking of some relatives who lived in Paris. They were
debating the exact situation of the Saint-Roch Church. I was
about ready to join in, just to forget Cecile, to give her time to
come back.
My unease grew physical. I felt that I must be pale. I must
look like someone who is going to be a trifle ill. Here was an
excuse for leaving the room. I could slip out, and no one would
be astonished.
I went straight to the kitchen. The maid was fussing with
the large coffee pot.
"Mademoiselle Cecile is not here?"
"Why no, Mademoiselle"
"Haven't you seen her?"
"Why no, Mademoiselle."
"Oh, she must be in her room."
"Why no, Mademoiselle. She's not in her room. I've just
been up. I needed some napkins that we keep in her closet. Do
you want anything, Mademoiselle Lucienne?"
"No. No, thank you. It's all right."
Without further thought, I cross the hall and leave the house.
Suddenly the night, the wind, the lights of the train yard. I
scan an instant, as one scans the sky to find the Great Bear. The
signals fall into position: deep down, near, still farther. ... I
see the rails gleam at the place where I make my usual ford across
the tracks.
The fire signals are evenly spread and still. I start across the
rails in the one direction that I know. I watch especially for
the signal wires, since they shine less brightly than the rails and
are strung higher. I bear straight toward a large lamp-post . . .


JULES ROMAINS 407
the one against which I crouched that first time I voyaged across
the tracks. I can make out someone against the lamp-post shaft:
someone who is quite still, who seems to be waiting. The light
spreads high above into the blackness, it scarce illuminates this
form which seems almost a part of the shaft itself.
I try to walk very silently on the gravel, and to keep in the
long sweeps of shadow. I am only three tracks away from this
waiting form: it is a woman.
She has heard me. She moves as if she were trying to hide
against the lamp post. Then, suddenly, she plunges farther on
across the tracks.
"Cecile! Cecile!"
She wavers, and in that moment I leap and catch her, between
two tracks.
"Cecile, what are you doing?"
The lamp-glow floods full on us, but it is all mingled with
the night, like the glow of the moon. It brings out the hollow
darkness in the girl's white face. Already this Cecile is a trans-
figured being.
"What are you doing here?"
Her eyes steal sidewise as if she were getting ready to make a
dash. Then she looks straight at me, and I see that her eyes are
like two great black holes. The lips stir, and in the pale light
from above them their stir is portentous.
"Leave me alone. I ask nothing of you."
"Cecile, I implore you. Come with me . . . And swear . . .
But first come back."
"I'm all right. Leave me alone. I ask nothing of any one."
"I implore you, dear Cecile."
"Why do you follow me out here? What have you got to do
with me? You have what you want. Well, then"
"What do you mean ... I have what I want?"
"You don't need me any more, I suppose? Then what is it to
you if I do what I want?"
"Cecile, you don't know what you're saying. Come!"
"I know perfectly well what I'm saying. I am entirely sane.
No one is going to stop me from doing what I want. Besides,
who cares?"
"Oh, Cecile! And your mother and father? And all of us?"
"Rot! I'm going to start thinking of myself."


408 LUCIENNE
"Cecile! Cecile!"
"Tell me, one more thing I'd like to know. ... Is Marthe very'
unhappy, do you think?"
"Very unhappy?"
"Yes. About the whole story?"
"But"
"The little bitch! It'd be just like her to find some twist
to keep her from suffering. You see, I am getting coarse. You
didn't know I was like this."
"You frighten me, Cecile."
"At any rate, you have nothing to complain of. It's not as if
you ever cared for me. I'm not the sort people care for. I
understand."
"What makes you think that, Cecile? I care for you very
deeply."
"It is true that you came out to see what was happening to
me. That's something. And yet you're the only one who gave
me a thought, eh? The little bitch didn't budge from her chair.
Sipping her coffee. And your Pierre Febvre. . . ."
"Cecile, be still! Aren't you ashamed of what you're saying?"
"That's right. Let us both be still. Here comes my train.
Get out! I don't suppose you want to go under, too? Get
out then. I tell you: get away!"
A fire dawned on the line's horizon, a little fire and yet its
moving made it vaster than all the lamps together. It was like
a shell aimed straight at us from the horizon. The murmur that
moved along with it, almost too faint for human ears, was terrible
like an unceasing thunder.
I hurled myself bodily on Cecile, I drew her forward and man-
aged to get her down against the base of the lamp post. The
corner of the shaft tore in her shoulders, but I grasped two steel
laths as tight as I could and pressed with all my weight, pinning
and crushing her body between the iron shaft and my breasts. She
struggled. She crowded her two hands against my breasts and
pushed with all her might. Her grey-green eyes spat hate at me,
with a sort of quick despair.
And the train growled toward us. My back was turned to it.
It seemed inconceivable that it should not fall full upon us. It
was unthinkable that it could hold to its tracks, that those little


JULES ROMAINS 409
thrusts of iron could save us from its monstrous mass. I feel it
plunge right into my entrails, uproot us, uproot the lamp-post
like a weed. My fingers grasped the laths more fiercely—sure
in this panic of my body.
Then a great breath, a quaking of earth, the locomotive ... it
was like a house, hall flaming, lights and screaming cars: and each
step sweeping past was the one that was going to scythe us.
Cecile spat in my face.
The last car passed, dragging its red light. The noise of the
train became a sorrowful ululation like a death, but fleeting and
scatheless.
I let Cecile loose. I wiped the saliva from my face. I began
to weep. Cecile took my hands in hers, pressed them, brought
them to her lips. My hands were bruised.
Then Cecile let them fall.
"Oh, I'm not thanking you," she said.
I took her hands in mine.
"You're going to swear to me that you'll not do this again."
There were tears in her eyes as they met mine.
"All right. I swear."
"Sworn ... in all good faith?"
"Sworn," she said.
Then I asked her: "What train was that. I don't know it."
"No. You've never crossed at this time. It's No. 14. A mere
express. But she's good enough."
"We must get back ... at once. What will they be saying?"
Once more, we made a passage of the tracks. Cecile was clever
at guiding. She said:
"We'll steal up to my room. You can wash your eyes. I'll
brush my hair. That'll do."
We went in cautiously. We went up the stairs straining to
keep quiet our steps. My shoes creaked, Cecile turned and smiled
down at me.
Her room was very like the room of Marthe. While we were
tidying up, Cecile said:
"Do you think ... after that ... we could be friends
at all?"
Never had her face seemed so young, so pure of its harshness.
"I want to kiss you, Cecile."


410 LUCIENNE
She came graciously. And she whispered in my ear as I
kissed her:
"We are even, now."
They were just getting up from table to go in to the parlour.
"So there you are!" said Papa Barbelenet. "We were beginning
to worry. Anything wrong?"
"Mademoiselle Lucienne was a little indisposed," said Cecile.
"I took her for a short walk in the air. Then she lay down a
moment in my room."
Pierre looked at us as he had looked that evening when Cecile
crossed us, and he had read aloud the sign of the rue Saint Blaise.
Madame Barbelenet looked also: she seemed to be saying that
she did not believe a word of it, but she did not intend to intrude
upon our little secrets. To Marthe, the fact that I had been alone
with Cecile, walking and up in her room, was enough: she wanted
to know no more. That hurt.
Cecile went on:
"Papa, before we leave the dining-room, seeing things are as
they are," she could not quite hold back a tinge of irony from
her voice, "don't you think we should open a bottle of cham-
pagne . . . some of that which came last year?"
"A splendid idea!" exclaimed Papa Barbelenet, who was only
too glad of the chance to show off his cellar. "I'll send down
the maid."
"No, Papa. Let Marthe go. The maid is preparing the coffee
in the parlour. Marthe will find it easy enough. And she'll be
so glad to go. Won't you, Marthe dear?"
Marthe did not demur. Merely as she got up she sent me a
tiny signal of reproach, as if I were somehow involved in what
her sister was doing.
But before she could reach the door, Cecile sent after her:
"It will make Marthe happy to bring the champagne which
we are going to drink ... in honour of the early engagement
of Mademoiselle Lucienne and Cousin Pierre. . . . That's it, I
suppose?"
The End


SEA UNICORNS AND LAND UNICORNS
BY MARIANNE MOORE
with their respective lions—
"mighty monoceroses with immeasured tayles—"
these are those very animals
described by the cartographers of 1539,
defiantly revolving
in such a way that the hard steel
in the long keel of white exhibited in tumbling,
disperses giant weeds
and those sea snakes whose forms looped in the foam, "disquiet
shippers."
Not ignorant of how a voyager obtained the horn of a sea unicorn
to give to Queen Elizabeth
who thought it worth a hundred thousand pounds,
they persevere in swimming where they like,
finding the place where lions live in herds,
strewn on the beach like stones with lesser stones—
and bears are white;
discovering Antarctica, its penguin kings and icy spires,
and Sir John Hawkins' Florida
"abounding in land unicorns and lions,
since where the one is,
its arch enemy cannot be missing."
Thus personalities by nature much opposed,
can be combined in concert such
that when they do agree, their unanimity is great,
"in politics, in trade, law, sport, religion,
china collecting, tennis, and church going."
You have remarked this fourfold combination of strange animals,
upon embroideries,
enwrought with polished garlands of agreeing difference—
thorns, "myrtle rods, and shafts of bay,"
"cobwebs, and knotts, and mulberries"
of lapis lazuli and pomegranate and malachite—


412 SEA UNICORNS AND LAND UNICORNS
Britannia's sea unicorn with its rebellious child
now ostentatiously indigenous of the new English coast
and its land lion oddly tolerant of those pacific counterparts to it,
the water lions of the west.
This is a strange fraternity—these sea lions and land lions,
land unicorns and sea-unicorns:
the lion civilly rampant,
tame and concessive like the long-tailed bear of Ecuador—
the lion standing up against this screen of woven air
which is the forest:
the unicorn also, on its hind legs in reciprocity.
A puzzle to the hunters, is this haughtiest of beasts,
to be distinguished from those born without a horn,
in use like St Jerome's tame lion, as domestics,
rebelling proudly at the dogs
which are dismayed by the chain lightning
playing at them from its horn—
the dogs persistent in pursuit of it as if it could be caught,
"deriving agreeable terror" from its "moonbeam throat"
on fire like its white coat and unconsumed as if of salamander's
skin.
So wary as to disappear for centuries and reappear,
yet never to be caught,
the unicorn has been preserved
by an unmatched device
wrought like the work of expert blacksmiths,
with which nothing can compare—
this animal of that one horn
throwing itself upon which headforemost from a cliff,
it walks away unharmed;
proficient in this feat, which like Herodotus,
I have not seen except in pictures.
Thus this strange animal with its miraculous elusiveness,
has come to be unique,
"impossible to take alive,"
tamed only by a lady inoffensive like itself—
as curiously wild and gentle;
"as straight and slender as the crest,
or antlet of the one-beam'd beast."



SWORDSMAN'. BY ERNST BARLACH





Courtesy of the Folkwang Verlag, Hagen
IN THE STOCKS. BY ERNST BARLACH





HOV^I^^HV8 JLS NYIGI X 8： * LN VSV GHAI ĐONIA GIGITIS





MARIANNE MOORE 413
Upon the printed page,
also by word of mouth,
we have a record of it all
and how, unfearful of deceit,
etched like an equine monster on an old celestial map,
beside a cloud or dress of Virgin-Mary blue,
improved "all over slightly with snakes of Venice gold,
and silver, and some O's,"
the unicorn "with pavon high," approaches eagerly;
until engrossed by what appears of this strange enemy,
upon the map, "upon her lap,"
its "mild wild head doth lie."


GERMAN LETTER
October, rgsj
IF I announce my intentions of reporting two bizarre evenings
spent at the theatre recently, and follow this with the name
of Ernst Barlach, then I must be prepared for a politely astonished
lifting of the eyebrows. Not, by any means, that this name is
unknown to the world at large. It is undoubtedly known, and is
associated with certain works of plastic art—plastic indeed in a
very pure and genuine sense of the word. It is associated with
veined, broad-surfaced wood-carvings which have great powers of
expression, and which in their humanity, their postures of suffering
and supplication, show a Russian-Christian influence, while they
remain staunchly personal in the language of their forms. Ad-
mitted then: a sculptor of genius. Yet the discussion is to be of
theatrical matters? Precisely, and in connexion with this artist.
Then he has essayed something in the line of stage-settings? No;
in the drama rather. And we should like to add "with the greatest
success," if only we could say with whom this escapade was suc-
cessful. Not with the public, in any case. In so far as the
public was present at the second performance of his piece (which
I saw) it manifested through its bearing, its eloquent silence, the
feelings expressed in Wagner's line: "I am astounded, but I do
not understand."
Or among the experts, the litterateurs, the professional drama-
tists? I doubt it. This "outsider" shows much too slight a
desire to fraternize; he stands aloof from them with his work—
it is, in fact, apart from all literature. There is about it some-
thing of untamed origin, something cumbrously primitive, a
refusal to conform, a flouting of accepted usage, a touch of the
uncivilized even. It is a work sui generis, dislocated and exor-
bitant, radically bold and singular—in my unauthoritative opinion,
it is the most powerful and most peculiar accomplishment of the
new drama in Germany.
I am getting myself into difficulties. I am obliged to give some
analysis of this abnormal product if I am to satisfy whatever


THOMAS MANN 415
curiosity I may have awakened by the above characterization. To
discharge this obligation is practically impossible. We can give
expression to the feelings of symbolic emotion which this remark-
able edifice of words and images arouses by its golem-like, earth-
bound groping, its blindness and inarticulacy. But we cannot
analyse the work itself. We can give its title: it is Der Tote Tag
(The Dead Day). It is so called because here there is a feeble
day which "hangs dead between heaven and earth" and which
"the sun eyes gloomily and aslant." For an atrocity took place,
an enormous wrong: the love-crime of the mother who killed the
steed sent by the Spirit-Father for her boy, who is half a son of
the gods, half a child of man. She does this lest the steed bear
him into the future, lest the future become the empty, discarded
cradle of the past. Do I begin venturing too glibly into the difficult
province of poetry? I shall not go on. That too would be an
atrocity and a murder. I have indicated that the characters of
the piece are mythical. There are the father and the son. There
are also gnomes and ministering spirits; an invisible serf by the
filthy name of Steissbart (Steiss: rump; Bart: beard) of whom
we simply hear the voice and who is probably a cramped, dwarfed
brother to the son of the gods; and a house spirit named Besenbein
(Besomlegs) who has brush instead of legs and shuffles through
the house at night to clean it—also, he steals the hoofs of the
murdered horse, in order to jump away on them in place of the
son. There is an incubus who to his own misery chokes people
in their sleep; further, a vaguely significant old man called Kule
and a blind man with a staff whose eyes were blinded by
the pictures of the world, but occasionally in his night-time
"beautiful pictures of a better future were standing: rigid, but of
splendid beauty, still sleeping, but whoever awoke them would give
the world a better sight. It would be a hero who could do that."
He carries with him in his sack a groaning block of stone, and it is
he who at a certain moment speaks the pious and gallant words:
"Who takes upon himself the burden of others' sorrows, he alone
is the true man."
The scene of the action? A heavy-beamed rustic kitchen with
dark lofts: and underneath, a cellar into which the murdered horse
has been lowered—the mother's love-crime which makes the day
overcast and stagnant, so that it does not move forward like a


416 GERMAN LETTER
horse from morning to evening, but is like a dead horse that has
fallen with us, and we are lying beneath it, about to stifle. . . .
The anxiety in Maeterlinck's early plays is trivial in comparison to
the unrefined and folksong-like power with which this sinister piece
holds our senses in the clutches of a dream. Some of his humble
and penetrating maxims might tempt us to think of Claudel, except
that any literary reminiscence seems unpardonable in the face of
his isolation. If any linguistic influence is to be traced, then it
would certainly derive from Zarathustra—although Barlach's
diction is much more German, more like the folk-tale in its gnarled
simplicity, than the orientalizing pathetics, antithetics, and
quibbling thought-jingles of this prototype. One can get some idea
of his way of speaking—and also of his heroic scorn for the idyllic
—by reading the exhortation which the despoiled "son" addresses
to his gnome-brother Steissbart:
"Sei munter dagegen, lass vor uns deiner Rede Bocklein tanzen.
Rupf dir das griine Blattlein Schnurrigkeit und lass dabei deines
Geschmackleins Lustmeckern klingen"
The Miinchener Kammerspiele had the fine courage to stage
this tragedy of man, the heroic spirit-son who eternally remains
the mortal child of the jealously clinging earth. The performance
was excellent. It could be repeated once or twice, then the public
stayed away. That is not hard to understand, for hours of con-
centrating on the whispered and semi-lucid are not a pleasant eve-
ning's entertainment for everyone. But it brings up the question
of the relationship between great poetry and popular appeal. It
would be wrong to say that Barlach's piece was not suited to the
stage. It has powerfully typified characters, sensational situations, a
meaty, thoroughly dramatic diction. It would be wrong to say
that it really alienated by all its strangeness. At bottom it is
German and familiar, like a song in Des Knaben Wunderhorn;
in its legendary motifs it is close to the national genius—it is pro-
foundly within the tradition of folk art. But it is not popular—
for this property is plainly quite independent of the other and in
our sphere is seldom found in combination with it. The first part
of Goethe's Faust is folk-art in the highest sense—furthermore,
without any of the romantic bourgeois coquetting such as taints the


THOMAS MANN 417
folk-quality of Wagner's Ring. But it would be hazardous to call
this work popular; and in any case it is far less so than the
Wilhelm Tell of Schiller, to whom the conception of folk-art does
not apply, whom Fontane once called a "half-foreigner," and whose
dramas really have more to do with the French Grand Stecle than
with things German. Is culture possible in countries or in ages
when the folk-quality has no possibility of being popular? And
why is this possibility lacking? Because the folk no longer exists,
but merely the mob and the public? But how could the folk have
ceased to exist when it is actually creating! For unless I am com-
pletely in the wrong, Barlach's drama is genuine folk-poetry, deeply
rooted in the national character and soaring high above with its
pinnacles in the spiritual—a child of man which, as is finally said
in the text, "gets its best blood from an invisible father."
I come to the second of my adventures in the theatre. It cer-
tainly deserved this name, although its outstanding values seemed
to leave a strongly intellectual impression upon me, the stamp of
the literary experiment, which greatly differentiated it from the
guileless aloofness of the previous production. I refer to a work
of the young Bert Brecht, who has already been spoken of in my
letters, a fortunately early arrived playwright of the Expressionist,
or in actuality post-Expressionist, neo-Naturalis'.ic school. He is
a strong, but somewhat careless talent who has been pampered by
the public in Germany. And he is beginning to arouse attention
abroad as well: at present in Christiania Bjorn Bjornson is playing
his drama, Trommeln in der Nacht.
His new work is called Leben Eduards des Zweiten von England,
and is a reworking of Marlowe's play by the same name. It retains
the compositional freedom of the original, the form, or non-form of
the scenic history, and translates Marlowe's diction into a sharply
accentuated, glaringly coloured German with a free-verse rhythm.
This diction, literary history with the rouge of the latest modernity
on its cheeks, is scurrilously unreal and over-done until it becomes a
style; it sounds at times like a travesty of the Tieck-Schlegel
translations of Shakespeare, although it cannot be denied poetic
and dramatic effects, and on occasion a blunt power of expression.
In a monologue on the battlefield of Killingworth, Queen Anne has
such things to say as the following:


418 GERMAN LETTER
"Weil Eduard von England, Bit? und dringlichen Anspruch
Nicht horend, mich verstossen zu Mortimer Kaltherz,
Will ich anlegen mein Wittfrauenkleid.
Denn viermal Hess ich mir mein Hoar bespein durch ihn,
So dass ich> lieber als so, kahlkopfig stiind'
Unter dem Himmel. . . ."
That is a sample, and all these people are always talking like that.
But the King happened to spit on the Queen's hair because he
loved Daniel Gaveston, his minion, with that kind of love which
he owed to his wife: "this Gaveston," "Gaveston the whore," as
he is always called by the opponents of an aberration whose fatal
consequences to the country form the content of the history.
I do not need to dwell on this content. It is generally and pain-
fully well-known. I shall be content merely to certify that this
play, which the Kammerspiele took on also, had a much stronger
attendance than the Barlach poem—and this despite the fact that
the performance was one of the most unpleasant sights that I have
ever witnessed. Brecht himself had superintended the staging
of his play. He is a passionate director, and the Deutsche
Theater in Berlin has employed him in this capacity. In the pro-
ducing of this history of Edward he was especially determined to
eschew all princely display and to disregard, with an ascetic malice,
every historic spectacle. The scene was dominated by a deliberate
niggardliness, a demonstratively proletarian shabbiness, all done
within the code of Expressionism. A fellow in a kind of dirty
painter's frock would appear before the curtain as announcer and
would say in a woebegone manner: "December 14, 1307, return
of the minion Daniel Gaveston on the occasion of Edward the
Second's coronation. London."—"Mismanagement during the
reign of King Edward in the years 1307-1312. London." The
view of the British capital was in the style of the most impov-
erished suburban theatre; a dilapidated Whitechapel and the dais
on which Edward took his place with his "two women" were the
last word in greasy make-shifts. The part of the favourite, whom
we must certainly imagine as a winsome, if somewhat loose and
immoral chap, was—obviously here again out of sheer malice—
taken by an actor whose personal tediousness placed the King's
unhealthy passion beyond all human comprehension, no matter


THOMAS MANN 419
how well-disposed one might have been. And when the dear "Gav"
was already loaded with honours and dignities, when he was Lord
High Chamberlain, Chief Secretary, Earl of Cornwall, Lord of
Man, he still wore the abominable and unhistoric sack coat in which
he had returned from Ireland. He did not need to be ashamed
before his deadly enemies, the "sumptuous peers," for they were
successfully engaged in justifying by their appearance the expres-
sions of an opponent who called them "rowdies" and "bums."
They all had yellowish and greenish faces; and these were the brave
troops who fought the battle at Killingworth and who looked like
inanimate firemen.
In short, the performance had peculiar effects which branded it
as a kind of dramatic "Proletkult"—very instructive for foreigners
who are interested in German experiments in the direction of an
anti-bourgeois theatre. I do not mean to imply that the contribu-
tion of the actors was negligible. Herr Erwin Faber, who belongs
really to the Bavarian National Theatre Association, and who acted
the King as a visiting star, has a strong modern gift of expression.
Along with him, a young player named Schweighart attracted atten-
tion in the slight role of Baldock, a simple servant of Edward's
who, in order to save his own life, betrayed his beloved master to
the enemy by reaching him a handkerchief. The Judas torture
of this poor lad was transmitted with a direct and penetrating
artistry, and was the human acquisition of the evening.
Thomas Mann


BOOK REVIEWS
ETHICS OF THE ARTIST
Buddenbrooks. By Thomas Mann. Translated by
H. T. Lowe-Porter. i2mo. 2 volumes. 748 pages.
Alfred A.Knopf. $5.
ALTHOUGH Buddenbrooks was written by Mann in his
L twenties, it is the work of a writer who, if not mature,
quite obviously placed a high value upon maturity as a literary
acquisition. While thanks to the solidity of the North German
civilization which Mann was depicting, at this early age he had
already seen people "placed," had already seen so many points
in the progress of their lives from ambition to success or frustra-
tion, that he could plot the entire curve of their careers. This,
I take it, is a major aspect of experience. And meditation upon
this experience is one aspect of philosophy. Buddenbrooks is
rich in both.
Buddenbrooks is the story of a North German merchant family
through four generations, developing from a genial, normal stock
which enjoyed life and took the good things of life without ques-
tion, through two generations of growing introversion, where the
openness to externals became less of an appetite and more of a
moral obligation, finally culminating in the artist whose sensi-
tiveness to outside impressions has "o'erleapt itself and fallen on
t'other," so that he is unable to accept normal every-day life even
as a duty, but takes to music and poetry like a drug. This is called
the Decay of a Family. Over against this, almost as an artistic
necessity, we have the rise of bolder and more unscrupulous mer-
chants, vigorous, good-natured, destroying the older family through
necessity rather than malice, as fit for living as Nietzsche's blond
beast, and above all, thick-skinned. The story is pursued patiently,
stroke upon stroke, often with a delicate sense of chapter develop-
ment and transition; and when it is over we have this major form
of a march through four generations, a curve as natural as the
cycle of a storm, or the incubation of a malady.


KENNETH BURKE 421
There are certain books which are the result of a genre, and these
books are understood and appreciated best after we know the
aesthetic conditions under which they arose. There are other
books (much rarer) which serve to justify a genre, so that the
aesthetic conditions are understood and appreciated best after we
know the books. Buddenbrooks and Death in Venice fall within
the latter category. They are the profound justification of a
typical nineteenth-century attitude, where the instability of moral
dogma was compensated for by the stress of moralism, specific
religion gave way to religiosity, and the physiognomy of God
retreated behind the idea of divinity.
In the sharp piece of self-analysis with which Thomas Mann
introduces his Betrachtungen Eines Unpolitischen, he speaks of his
"conscientiousness—a quality which comprises such an essential
element of my writings that one might almost say they consist
of nothing else: conscientiousness, an ethical-artistic quality, to
which I am indebted for whatever effects I may have gotten."
This conscientiousness has a double manifestation. It is first a
"morality of production" which ranks the author among the great
technicians of literature. This aspect of his writing culminates
in his short novel, Death in Venice, where almost every paragraph
contains some particular reward of vigilance, some formal inven-
tion, the solution of some literary problem.
The other aspect of his "conscientiousness" is the development
of an attitude towards life which is, before everything else, patient,
or even cautious. The total body of Mann's work is the formula-
tion of an ethics: not an ethical system, but an ethical proclivity,
a highly complex reception of life through the modes of "Romantik,
Nationalismus, Biirgerlichkeit, Musik, Pessimismus, Humor." If
I understand Paul Elmer More correctly, I should say that Thomas
Mann is a sceptic in Mr More's sense of the word. Which is,
it seems to me, almost the equivalent to saying that he is fully
the artist. For it is in the artist that we find formulations of
life (symbolizations) which are as complex, as poised, as life
itself. And perhaps what More means by scepticism, Mann means
by anti-radicalism: a state of suspense before too easy a simplifica-
tion. (I say easy, aware that a man may expend a whole life, and
an heroic energy of discipline, in the pursuit of a doctrine, and yet
have taken the "easier" channel of escape. Prior to this plunge
into one direction, there is room for an initial scepticism or anti-


422 ETHICS OF THE ARTIST
radicalism which might deprive said man of precisely this life in-
terest on which he will practise his energy of discipline. Over
against the discipline of the soldier or the athlete—the early martyr
or the modern business man—there is a discipline of evaluations,
a discipline of poise rather than a discipline of projection. This is
what I understand by scepticism, or anti-radicalism.)
So Mann is above all "conscientious." And it was precisely this
conscientiousness which kept him from being either a bourgeois
or a Bohemian, kept him vacillating between his sympathy for
the mediocre, the blunt, the unthinking and his deep understanding
of hyperesthesia. From Goethe, through Nietzsche, he accepts
"life" as the basis of values; and yet he also associates the develop-
ment of the aesthetic sense with the hypertrophy of channels which
are useless, even positively inimical, to the purposes of this "life."
With all this we are now familiar. This type of preoccupation
is precisely what the nineteenth century left us as one of its most
complex and irritating inheritances. While it is in Mann's works
that the mood is recovered in all its vitality and significance;
since his are the sort of books that justify the genre.
However, I have been seeing Buddenbrooks too much in retro-
spect, too much the way Mann himself looks back upon it in his
Betrachtungen Eines Unpolitischen (Mann's craftsmanship has
been rewarded in that he does not have to "renounce" his earlier
work—as is the fashion—but deepens it as he proceeds). Before
all else, Buddenbrooks is an epic novel (a large canvas with many
details and people and single events, all drawn together into one
organism).
It includes people who are characters, and others who are charac-
teristic, and others who are types. At times, that is, it focusses
upon strict psychological analysis, while at other times it develops
caricature with the vivacity of Dickens, although without Dickens'
excesses of sentiment and vulgarities of style. Or again, Mann
will centre his faculties on the charting of an event, as for instance
the clinical record of a death, which he can carry off with a subtle
mixture of emotionalism and technicality. Buddenbrooks (and
the English version is an admirably smooth piece of work) is one
of the few "epic" novels in which the handling of major proportions
has not misled the author into a neglect of line-for-line texture.
Kenneth Burke


THE FLAMING TERRAPIN
The Flaming Terrapin. By Roy Campbell. i2mo.
83 pages. Lincoln MacVeagh. The Dial Press. $2.
IT is something, after all, to have the courage to be damnably
poetical. It is something to be unafraid of the ample gesture,
the upswung arm, and the frenzied eye, of the cloaked figure
standing prophetically out against the horizon and wind-driven
clouds, of lone defiance flung shatteringly up to Heaven and down-
wards to the ruck of the groundlings. It is still (1924) something
to be shameless in one's rank superbity of spirit, to have no urbane
shrinking from the preposterous eloquence of trumpets or thunder
or hurricanes, to be grotesquely lacking in the fallacious virtues of a
"sense of humour," even to conceive of the writing of poetry on
the grand scale:
"Far be the bookish Muses! let them find
Poets more spruce, and with pale fingers wind
The bays in garlands for their northern kind.
My task demands a virgin muse to string
A lyre of savage thunder as I sing."
"Write what I sing in red corroding flame,
Let it be hurled in thunder on the dark,
And as the vast earth trembles through its frame,
Salute with me the advent of the Ark!"
Thus Mr Campbell, about half-way through his poem. But
long before then we have attuned our ears to his mood, and realized
that in this extraordinary poem we are far from the mimble-
mamble of the slim-volumed Georgians, as far too from the elegant
nervosities of pseudo-Eliots and pseudo-Cocteaus. Full circle!
We have spun back, for the moment at least, into the full-throated
mode of twenty, thirty years ago, to a poetical Tradition: back to
the poetic fashioning of a cosmogony, more cataclysmic, if less
clearly planned, than Francis Thompson's:


424 THE FLAMING TERRAPIN
"I see him as a mighty Terrapin,
Rafting whole islands on his stormy back,
Built of strong metals molten from the black
Roots of the inmost earth: a great machine,
Thoughtless and fearless, governing the clean
System of active things: the winds and currents
Are his primeval thoughts: the raging torrents
Are moods of his, and men who do great deeds
Are but the germs his awful fancy breeds."
—back to an exuberant relish of the sheer sonority and clangour of
words, words enjoyed for their own gust, and flung down to fit
each other with an easy rapture of phrase that one could not find
in the marble-faced achievements of Stephen Phillips:
"Round the stark Horn with buckled masts she clove,
Round the lean fore-arm of the World she drove,
Round the stark Horn, the lupanar of Death,
Where she and that fierce Lesbian, the Typhoon,
Roll smoking in the blizzard's frosty breath,
While, like a skinny cockroach, the faint moon
Crawls on their tattered blanket, whose dark woof
Of knitted cloud shrouds their dread dalliance, proof
To the white archery of the sun, and those
Thin javelins that cold Orion throws."
—or back yet farther to the illimitable Shelleyan scorns of the
long passage in the third part of the poem, when
". . . On earth again
Foul Mediocrity begins his reign:
All day, all night God stares across the curled
Rim of the vast abyss upon the world:
All night, all day the world with eyes as dim
Gazes as fatuously back at him.
He does not hear the forests when they roar
Some second purging deluge to implore,
When cities from his ancient rule revolt
He grasps, but dares not wield, his thunderbolt."


HAMISH MILES 425
"Youth of the world! pale lichens crawl apace
On Earth's fair limbs and cloud her shining face:
We lie in graves and dungeons and our chains
Are nought but our own sluggard nerves and veins!"
And on, more and more tempestuously, till the poet is left, gaunt
on his appropriate mountain-top, clutching at the salvation of
one last grand assertion:
"Though times shall change and stormy ages roll,
I am that ancient hunter of the plains
That raked the shaggy flitches of the Bison:
Pass, world: I am the dreamer that remains,
The Man, clear-cut against the last horizon!"
Mr Campbell has contrived to declaim a poem which, so far as
its prodigious eloquence is concerned, leaves all of his contem-
poraries gasping—or politely smiling at an outburst of energy so
ridiculously primeval. It might be easy enough to carry out a
white-fingered dissection of its structural flaws: the symbolism
wavers sometimes into disjointed and bewildered images, the
shorter, galloping lines of the fifth part of the poem are disap-
pointingly ineffective, and the towering effects of the horrific (and
it would be hard to match, since Thomas Beddoes, Mr Campbell's
sense of this element) are distorted sometimes by sheer, merciless
accentuation into perspectives of a Dore-esque falsity. But so
doing one would leave untouched the core of its vitality, the over-
weening energy of its writer's impulse. And before this, even if
he seems now and then to be lashing himself forward with his
thongs of epithets, one is left justifiably amazed. It is something,
after all, to have the power to amaze.
Hamish Miles


A RESPONSIBLE NOVELIST
The Able McLaughlins. By Margaret Wilson.
i2mo. 262 pages. Harper and Brothers. $2.
THE judges of the Harper Prize Contest indicated "vigour and
distinctive quality" as the signal merits of The Able McLaugh-
lins. There is to be noted also a certain consideration, a quietness
of presence, as if the novel were written, as not too many novels
are, with some idea of how much a novelist has to answer for.
That this is enough all readers could vouch who have considered
how insidious the counsels of a novel might be, in their clinging
intimism, their enlargement of trivialities that probably could
best have remained trivial. The ego is never perhaps more
ably seduced than by the astute novelist when he offers some
engrossing personality, some flattering deputy life, into which
we may and do, with never a doubt, plunge ourselves and interest-
ingly adventure.
In the command of our sub-conscious chaos the novelist has a
great power if he has any at all. If he can conjure up a respectable
passion he is the ruler of our fascinated attention. For late or
soon we shall demand to be thoroughly worked upon, to have an
action with which to overwhelm ourselves. We shall want to hear
the hum of conflagration, to be startled with the rush-by of engines,
the wail and fall of sirens, the passing pandemonium of hoofs and
gongs. We shall want to be alarmed out to see the crowd, the
slither of hose, the burly firemen stooping into smoke. It matters
very slightly how well or how poorly a novelist can measure life,
or how much or little sense he may have generally; if he can turn
us out for the fire he has a great purchase upon us.
This consideration might give the novelist some pause in his
coming and doing. He might ponder how much he really knows
of this place of wrath before he gives himself up to remarkable
deliverances about it. He might consider what he can write that
will be worth a moment of any man's thinking. Aware of the
power upon us of even his faint picturings of passion, he might
for his own good reflect how he can deal truly with that derisive


CHARLES K. TRUEBLOOD 427
restlessness, neither telling lies by mincing, nor cartooning reality
by viciousness of depiction. He might sit down seriously and
perhaps with humility and give us some honest and well phrased
testimony as to his actual watch o'er our mortality. He might
write with more of the simple, sound pertinence to fact that
characterizes good biography, and with less of the art of fiction.
And he might write less.
Perhaps these were some of the modifications of spirit in which
The Able McLaughlins was written; for besides the robustness
already noted, it has a certain sobriety, a level-wordedness, an
economy of terms, that bespeak a sense of the meet and a respect
for fact. Its aim seems to have been at competence merely, at
adequacy, or perhaps at that slight, ironical, studied inadequacy,
the effect of which is often so much greater than the largest arch
of hyperbole. The minims of comment in this book reach their
marks.
Furthermore, while the tale does not accomplish, or very much
attempt, the finely edged picturing that is the aim of latter-day
realism, it does indicate the genuine merit of complete definiteness.
There has been a fashion—arising no doubt from the plain justice
of the criticism in most cases—to deride certain novels as being
merely short stories made long. Such derision fails of its mark in
this case; the author has done her most to make a long story short.
There are quantities of volubility in this book—a county history;
but it is out of sight. What is in sight is so much and so well
to the point that the reader, weary perhaps of delineation fashion-
ably drawn out, is lead to remark the merit there is in simple
pertinence. The omission of the irrelevant has been done with
a skill which leaves the sensation of significance without which
no book can have impression or presence.
This choice of matter seems to have been guided by the sound
idea that the sole business of a novel is to be not a plot or a
statement of what happened, but an asseveration, a triumphant
demonstration that certain persons, unlike all other persons, were.
The novelist is the artist, the intent fancier, the astute casuist of
persons, who discerns life as a declaration of personality, or perhaps
as the defeat of that declaration. The persons of this book, there-
fore, are all its force and being. It is satisfied with them, and
they—complying with Scots tradition—are satisfied with them-


428 A RESPONSIBLE NOVELIST
selves: they never lose "their sense of being McLaughlins," and
never fail to act up to it. So much does the tale insist upon them,
and they upon themselves, and so direct is the home sense of
reality with which they touch the mind, and fill up the feeling
of acquaintance, that the reader might readily come to regard their
story as the history of a family he has known well. This surely
is a chief talent in a novelist—to give us, genuinely and strongly,
the sensation of familiarity.
Notwithstanding its developed insistence upon persons this is not
a dramatic book. It aspires to no particularly great scenes; in
fact it rather slips by easily—speaks about them afterward, casually,
in a manner which calls for citation to any who appreciate sojourn-
ing, however briefly, in the subtle house of sophistication. It pre-
sents no particularly high astounding conflicts of character. Its
brisk going in the light of broad noon is the manner of biography.
It is almost behaviourist in its psychology. It avoids alike the
spectacular modes of representation common to If Winter Comes
and like incendiary stuff, and the weed patches of introspection,
out of which, in many another novel, the reader has no doubt
scrambled, stuck over with trivialities he could well have spared,
and cannot get rid of.
The aspiration of the book seems simply to speak so sincerely,
clearly, and truly about certain Scots persons of whom the author
has thought, and thinks much, that the reader will know them
beyond all peradventure, and she hopes, approve of them, as
she does, beyond all qualification. And so vigorously is the sincerity
of the book exercised in their behalf that these Covenanting pioneers
who came from Ayrshire to Iowa in the 1850's, compel appreci-
ation, if not that unqualified approval which seems to sing in
the mind of the author, even worded as she is.
They are broad and typical persons, and their well-kept Scotch
ways are described with a relish, a savour, a satisfaction, in which—
notwithstanding their narrator's considerable humour, and con-
siderable care to stop sedately short of complacency—there some-
times shines the authorly yearning to pull the long bow of eulogy.
Yet the tale is consideringly written, and so coolly told that none
can take offence, and the most blase will heed and be won to turn
another page.
For many a sceptical reader, however, The Able McLaughlins


CHARLES K. TRUEBLOOD 429
requires all the command over the modes of representation that
the author can muster. It has need to choose its ground carefully,
if incredulity is not to break loose over its whole scene, for it
deals with the well-known Scarlet Letter situation and posits a
generosity with respect to Wully McLaughlin, the hero, that would
strain the persuasive skill of any novelist to depict convincingly.
It is true that Wully is a robust and interesting person, handsomely
described; though his mother, the famous Isobel McLauglin, "of
whom it was said that she could make a pair of jean pants in
twenty minutes," is better. But the things here that stand the
story in good stead are its whole sincerity and general faith to fact:
it is these that carry the reader forcibly and with some effect of
diminished disbelief through Wully's wide, simple, and incredible
generosity. The sceptical reader is in fact thus caught on the
horns of a dilemma. If he disbelieves the story, he must disbelieve
the people. But they strike the mind too genuinely, in their whole
effect; he believes them perforce, and must therefore believe their
story, and though he may suspect that the author has a chronic
nearsightedness for anything that looks like defeat for her admired
McLaughlins, he must concede that this tale is victorious with
admirable casuistry.
Though it is of persons and not of plots, the book should be
found well done by professors of the art of fiction. It is no
amorphous congestion of characterizings. It possesses the coherent
progress and the bodied circumstance that are good narrative. It
insists upon itself as proper narrative must insist, with that con-
tinuity of impact, that controlled pervasiveness, which holds and
fills up the attention. It presses its points home incisively, holding
the story tight, from moment to moment, in a manner worthy of
notice perhaps by that now canonized patron of fictioneers,
de Maupassant.
Charles K. Trueblood


AN INTRODUCTION TO JOYCE
James Joyce: His First Forty Years. By Herbert
S. Gorman. i2mo. 234 pages. B. W. Huebsch,
Inc. $2.
MR GORMAN'S introduction to James Joyce is very well
suited to its purpose. It is, on the whole, an intelligent and
comprehensible account of what Joyce has done. The author of
Ulysses has, on the one hand, been so stupidly denounced by the
people who regard him as a madman and, on the other, come to
seem so esoteric through the offices of his admirers, who have had
to fight for him against all the prejudices and have consequently
become a little snobbish, that the ordinary reader is likely to become
bewildered and to decide that, in either event, James Joyce must
be a phenomenon which lies somehow outside of literature. The
function of Mr Gorman's book is to establish Joyce as a great
writer like another. A first-rate piece of criticism it is not—though
it has bits of good criticism in it: the comparison, for example,
between Joyce's short stories and Maupassant's, and some of the
discussion of the character of Bloom. But it must be counted to
Mr Gorman for righteousness that he has written such a book at
all; and that, with all his critical deficiencies, his failure some-
times quite to grasp his subject, he has committed no absurdities
of the really fatal kind—none of the disconcerting stupidities which
have put so many eminent English critics and novelists under the
suspicion of not knowing chalk from cheese. Posterity, if it reads
contemporary criticism of Joyce, will not know which to admire
the most—Mr Murry, who called him "a fool," Mr Bennett, who
said he had no form, Mr Aldington, who feared he would have
a bad effect on younger writers, Mr Garnett, who believed that
the same thing had been done much better by Mrs Woolf in Jacob's
Room, or Mr Bell, who regarded him as a "petit maitre."
Even as a popular exposition of Joyce, however—at least, so
far as Ulysses goes—Mr Gorman's book is in some ways unsatis-
factory. He has a great deal to say about Joyce and Flaubert,
but it seems to me that he really misses the point about Flaubert


EDMUND WILSON 431
in relation to Joyce. He apparently imagines that Flaubert was
merely an "impersonal naturalist" whose achievement was to cross
the "distinct line marking off fiction from actual life"—whatever
that means. Actually, of course, one of the chief ways in which
Flaubert redeemed the novel from the mere status of a "document,"
toward which it is always tending, and brought it nearer to the
artistic dignity of great poetry and great poetic drama than per-
haps any one else, unless it be Joyce, who has ever lived, was by
insisting upon as rigorous a standard of precision and beauty in
the style of prose fiction as Virgil or Dante or whoever insisted
upon for poetic style. The language must exactly fit the matter,
it must change with the subjects it describes. The way in which
Joyce has exemplified the influence of Flaubert has not been in his
psychological explorations, but in his attempt to bring the lan-
guage of prose fiction closer and closer to the realities with which
it deals. He has found a characteristic rhythm and tone for the
mind of each of his characters. Mr Gorman does not make this
clear; and he fails to indicate at all the way in which the style
of the different episodes in Ulysses is varied to render not only the
different characters, but also the different times of day—from the
clear sharp impressions of morning and the blankness and flatness
of midday to the mild confusion of sights and sounds and thoughts
and feelings in the bar in the late afternoon, when the ringing of
the hoofs of the viceregal cavalcade coming in through the window
seems somehow to mingle with the bronze and gold of the bar-
maid's hair, and to the incredible triumph of the nocturnal scene,
where we see everything with the eyes of drunkenness, like a
slowed-up moving picture, in which the intensified vision of reality
is continually lapsing into phantasmagoric dreams. If Mr Gorman
had gone through the episodes in this way, he would not have had
to evade, as he does, the discussion of the chapter which follows
the drunken scene: here Joyce represents the lassitude and stale-
ness of the early hours of the morning, the let-down after the
excitement of the drinking party, by a weary, tedious, slipshod
style as flavourless as the incidents it reports.
This chapter would seem also to perform another function and
to raise another question which Mr Gorman fails to discuss at all.
Joyce has not only taken pains to give Mr Bloom universal and
historical significance by making his adventures run parallel to


432 AN INTRODUCTION TO JOYCE
those of Ulysses; but he has also in the latter part of his book
arranged a further series of lights which combine to spot Bloom on
his little stage as a typical figure of humanity. Thus the chapter
in which Bloom sits with the medical students at their carouse in
the lying-in hospital is not only a parallel to the episode of the
Oxen of the Sun in the Odyssey and a rendering of a riotous
drinking party, but also a series of parodies of English prose style
from its beginnings to the time of the narrative, by means of which
you are apparently invited to contrast what man has thought of
himself in the past with what Mr Joyce thinks of him in the pres-
ent. For the parodies in this chapter are not, as has sometimes
been said, parodies of individual authors, but parodies of different
periods, that is, of different points of view. They are a moving
picture of the literary self-consciousness of the British Isles; and
they reach their conclusion, not at the end of the chapter, but in
the next chapter but one of the cabmen's shelter, in which Mr
Joyce presents his interminable and tasteless rigmarole of sloppy
syntax and journalistic cliches as not only an appropriate medium
for the incident and the hour, but also as the typical language and
tone of the literature of the present journalism. "This," he seems
to say, "is how humanity once wrote and thought about itself;
this is how it writes about itself to-day; but if the truth were
actually told about it, it would be something quite different from
any of these: it would be what I have put into my book." He will
even supply another chapter in which Mr Bloom and his environ-
ment are subjected to a scientific examination. Everything that
the scientific method can do to explain or describe human life and
the universe in which it finds itself is here brought to bear on Mr
Bloom: we have a technical record of the physical phenomena
which constitute the boiling of the water in the tea-kettle, an
astronomical description of the heavens, an inventory of the con-
tents of the side-board, and all sorts of medical, mathematical,
statistical, and encyclopaedic data on Mr Bloom and his home.
Bloom is not only Bloom: he is the twentieth-century man and
all that he thinks he knows about himself.
Finally, I believe Mr Gorman is a little misleading about the
point of Mrs Bloom's soliloquy. Mrs Bloom really justifies both
Stephen and Bloom in the end by choosing them, in preference to
the other men she has known, as the subjects of her more exalted


EDMUND WILSON 433
reveries. She is not an unfaithful Penelope, as Mr Gorman sug-
gests, though she has betrayed Bloom in the flesh; the Slaying of
the Suitors takes place when, after the idea of Stephen has com-
menced to develop itself in her mind, the thought of her late lover
and men like him becomes intolerable to her taste, and when her
purest emotions rise free just before she falls asleep, and return
to her courtship with Bloom when he called her "a flower of the
mountain." For Joyce, when he has told the silliest and the
worst, even among the ignominies of middle-class Dublin, has
always made the human spirit appear worthy and wonderful, the
justification of life in itself. It is Mrs Bloom, the stout body of
humanity, upon whom the whole structure of Ulysses rests; like
the earth, which gives the same life to all, she feels the kinship
between all creatures, she says yes to them all; she pities the "poor
donkeys slipping half asleep" in the steep streets of Gibraltar, as
she does "the sentry in front of the governor's house . . . half
roasted" in the sun; and she gives herself to the boot-black at the
General Post Office as readily as to Professor Goodwin; but in the
end she will prefer to breed from the highest type of life she knows,
she will choose Bloom rather than the others; and she will recog-
nize Stephen's superiority and give him the supreme place in her
imagination. As Stephen's ecstasy on the sea-shore when he realizes
his vocation as an artist, in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,
outweighs the sordidness and the horror of nearly everything else
which we see in the book, so in Ulysses Mrs Bloom's final ecstasy,
the ecstasy of a sort of universal love which moves with the forces
of nature, carries off the sad Odyssey of Bloom. They are the
moments when humanity, feeling its power of creation, realizes its
divinity; they are the justifications, respectively, of the man and
of the woman; and they are among the finest things in modern
literature.
I must further take Mr Gorman to task for his habitual inac-
curacy. He speaks of Francesca da Rimini "in the undying flames"
of Hell; he describes the Odyssey, in respect to Ulysses, as
"Homer's epic of the same name"; he puts Mr J. C. Squire, instead
of Mr Desmond MacCarthy, down as the "Affable Hawk" of The
New Statesman; and he represents M Valery Larbaud as having
asserted in La Nouvelle Revue Franchise that Joyce wrote his
different chapters in different-coloured crayons to make plain their


434 AN INTRODUCTION TO JOYCE
"symbolism," and is apparently surprised to discover that the
Quinn manuscript is all written in black ink; what Larbaud ac-
tually did say was merely that Joyce had hit upon the device for
straightening out his immense mass of material, of indicating with
different-coloured crayons which notes were needed for which
chapters. As for Ulysses itself, he is vague about the Homeric
correspondences, of which one would like to have had an exact
list; he describes the passing of the viceregal procession, as if it
were merely one of the intermediate incidents in the Wandering
Rocks chapter, instead of the concluding incident which unites all
the others in indicating how their various characters react to it;
and in the Cyclops episode he describes the "Citizen" as "mad" and
"unnamed," and says that Bloom withdrew from the assemblage
in order to collect a racing debt. In point of fact, the Citizen was
not unnamed; his name was Giltrap; and why Mr Gorman thinks
him mad I do not know. Also, Bloom had not gone out to collect
a racing debt; that was the joke; it was only the loafers around
the Citizen who assumed that he had. These are all small matters
in themselves, but there are enough of them to make one regret
that so supremely accurate a writer as Joyce could not have found
a more accurate expositor.
In another respect, too, Mr Gorman has failed to profit by the
example of his subject. He has written his whole book in a lazy
style which I find it difficult to forgive him. His use of the words
"cerebral," "cerebrates," and "cerebration" ends by getting on
one's nerves; one or other of them must occur, without exaggeration,
on an average of every fifth page. Mr Gorman will write: "A
doubt has been planted there, the cruel seed of his cerebration."
You end by not being quite sure what he means. When he says
that Joyce is "the first cerebral Irishman," I cannot think of any
connotation of "cerebral" which would make his statement true.
Are not Swift and Bernard Shaw "cerebral"? Was not Berkeley,
the philosopher, "cerebral"? Furthermore, Mr Gorman allows
himself to lapse continually into such nerveless and slovenly lan-
guage as the following:
"Before any commment is indulged in it may be wise to set down
several selections. ... It is these four characters who carry on the
action, an action mainly revelatory of the soul-states of the quar-


EDMUND WILSON 435
trette. ... So slight is the resemblance that it seems unnecessary
to linger regarding it. . . . Indeed, as time goes on Stephen be-
comes more and more under the influence of liquor which arouses
his obsessions. . . . Much transpires in this scene."
In other words, Mr Gorman allows himself to write exactly like
the cliche chapter in Ulysses, the chapter which begins,
"Preparatory to anything else Mr Bloom brushed off the greater
bulk of the shavings and handed Stephen the hat and ashplant and
bucked him up generally in orthodox Samaritan fashion."
And in regard to his neglect of this chapter, one can only make
one of two assumptions: either that he didn't understand it, or
that he has it on his conscience. I hope that the latter may be the
case; for let Mr Gorman remember that James Joyce was sent not
merely to delight us, but to put the fear of God into our hearts.
Edmund Wilson


BRIEFER MENTION
Confusion, by James Gould Cozzens (i2mo, 404 pages; Brimmer: $2).
This is the first novel of an intelligent, rather sophisticated, rather sensitive
person, with intellectual gifts and no form ready in which to present them.
The novel doesn't seem necessarily the vehicle for all that is carried in
Confusion; to make it appropriate there are scenes, plots, and characters.
But what is more important is the author's real feeling for certain lovely
aspects of life, and his real youth—the first being what he may bank on
if he finds his way in fiction or finds another mould for himself, the second
being the reason for not picking faults in a book the author did well to
write and will do well to cause to be forgotten by a better.
The Master Criminal, by J. Jefferson Farjeon (i2mo, 304 pages; Dial
Press: $2) should be popular with those who like speed in detective stories.
The complications, while not without ingenuity, are handled with a certain
easy simplicity typical of the best English product. There is, however,
less garrulity and more of the sinister in Mr Farjeon than in Mr J. S.
Fletcher. The large, fair, rubber ball villain is O. K.
The Don Juanes, by Marcel Prevost; translated by Jenny Covan (i2mo,
298 pages; Brentano: $2) reflects on contemporary morality in the rather
lurid story of four women who, falling in love at forty, are debarred
from happiness by their past—or, as it seems to the reader, by more
particular fates incapable of generalization. The novel presents a com-
plexity of emotions shrewdly laid bare; yet the contrast between its
elaborate picture of sophistication and its coldly intimate revelation of
underlying simplicities is rendered in such a manner as to make both
seem unreal.
With Benefit of Clergy, by Florence Hackett (i2mo, 286 pages; Boni &
Liveright: $2) is close to the soil; it reveals the Irish imagination almost
without exception in its best estate. The style is distinguished in its
simplicity, and in its ability to catch the meanings which lie just under
the surface of phrases. As a picture of life, this novel by an observant
and a discriminating writer has power and the flavour of reality.
The Fortunes of a Household, by Herman Robbers; translated by Helen
Chilton and Bernard Miall (i2mo, 344 pages; Knopf: $2.50)
is an excellent example of this eminent Dutch writer's work. The contrast
between the common life of a family and the individual lives of its mem-
bers is rendered with extreme delicacy. The tedium of assisting at the
cautious construction of the characters is hardly, however, effaced by the
solid, clear memory they leave. The book is built of a myriad close
observations that never quite take the place of intuitive justness of imagi-
nation; its effectiveness is cumulative.


BRIEFER MENTION 437
Fraycar's Fist, by Mary Heaton Vorse (i2mo, 401 pages; Boni & Live-
right: $2) is a collection of short stories dominated by two leit-motifs: the
sea, and divinely ordained love at first sight. The action of the stories is
varied, and in almost every case speeds along like a swift horse directed
by a practised rider. The ocean and the rough Atlantic shore are delineated
with devotion and an occasional touch of magnificence. But the characters
are phantoms far too similar to one another in their dark beauty and
imperiousness. They loom up for a moment through seacoast storms, only
to be driven into unreality by mystical tempests. The book is fairly well
managed melodrama that satiates before it is done and then falls away
like froth.
Modern Greek Stories, translated by Demetra Vaka and Aristides Phout-
rides (i2mo, 270 pages; Duffield: $1.90). In A. Karkavitsas we find
a writer of admirable restraint and polish, and in George T. Bizyenos
a narrator of distinguished ability. The only story in this volume
that is wholly unsuccessful is one dealing with modern psychology in
the laborious manner of a novice. The remaining tales, mere sketches
as some of them are, all picture with unconstrained vividness the tra-
ditional ideals and communal backgrounds of Greek peasant life. It is
an interesting and creditable collection.
The Happy Marriage, by Archibald MacLeish (i2mo, 80 pages; Houghton
Mifflin: $1.25). These poems are shot through with flashes of imagina-
tion that make them notable even though the verse is uneven and occa-
sionally descends to the level of mere prose. The author stands on the
border-line between the traditional and the Modernist tendencies, and
seems unable to determine on which side of the fence to fall; but he is
most effective when not too consciously striving to keep pace with recent
developments.
The Janitor's Boy, and Other Poems, by Nathalia Crane (i2mo, 82
pages; Seltzer: $1.50). An occasional dead word, unevenness of rhetoric,
and flaws of rhyme and rhythm are to be found in these poems by a child
eleven years old. The work is not perfect; neither is it marred by self-
conscious, missish assumptiveness. Its conspicuous quality is its vigour,
manifested in resilient humour and sometimes captivating diction—the
product, it would seem, of rich association and inheritance.
Religious Lyrics of the XIVth Century, edited by Carleton Brown
(i2mo, 358 pages; Oxford University Press: $3.50). This resplendent
collection of lyrics—to be followed by a collection of thirteenth century,
and one of fifteenth century lyrics—is a notable volume. That concise-
ness of word and intention which is characteristic of the highest poetry,
a Latin glamour in certain instances, of cadence and of design, with
mystical beauty, and the augmenting of knowledge by notes, glossary, and
the scholarly arrangement of the poems, as here combined, signally illus-
trate in accordance with the editor's plan, the contribution of the fourteenth
century to the development of the English lyric.


438 BRIEFER MENTION
An Autobiography, by Anthony Trollope, with introduction by Michael
Sadleir (i6mo, 335 pages; Oxford University Press: 80c). This new
edition in the World's Classics Series of Anthony Trollope's autobiography,
with an expert, indeed exquisitely alert introduction by Michael Sadleir,
is greatly welcome. In addition to unconsciously revealed secrets of
authorship, and deliberate observations upon methods and purposes of
novel writing, the chic wariness, "the pride," "the humility," the open-
ness, the verbal harmony of the novels are well reflected in the auto-
biography—this "brisk and manly" record which is, in its contagious
opposition to stupidity and cupidity, a model of self revelation.
Pierre Loti, Notes of My Youth, Fragments of a Diary Assembled by His
Son, Samuel Viaud, translated from the French by Rose Ellen Stein
(i2mo, 178 pages; Doubleday, Page: $2). A teasing, pleasing, little book.
In spite of a sentimentality that is almost syruppy, Pierre Loti is a genuine
writer and even in youth knew the secret of being interesting. Little
glimpses that we get of Terre del Fuegan savages, of Mohammedan
odalisques, and brave soldier friends are vivid enough and leave one
sighing for more. It is the swift curtain over unfinished episodes that
teases. The translation is excellent. The peculiar Loti rhythms may
be less distinctly felt in the English.
Some Thoughts of Hilaire Belloc, by Patrick Braybrooke (8vo, 125
pages; Lippincott: $2.50) is one of a rather ambitious series of critical
estimates, all dripping from the same fluent pen. Mr Braybrooke not
long since polished off G. K. Chesterton, and he has—so one is informed—
John Morley in preparation. As an interpreter, one observes in his work
a curious inability to get behind his subject; in fact, he plants himself
confidently in the foreground, and the impression one gets of Mr Belloc
is quite dim, owing to the shadow which Mr Braybrooke himself casts.
This is not intentional on the critic's part, but it is none the less unfor-
tunate; it is due to a habit of immature and illogical thinking.
The Real John Burroughs, by William Sloane Kennedy (i2mo, 250
pages; Funk & Wagnalls: $2.50). This is a book quite obviously written
by an egotistic old man who is envious of the recognition that has been
accorded to his friend John Burroughs. In its pages the old naturalist
is successfully damned with faint praise. It was, indeed, no difficult task.
The influence of American publicity on so simple a soul as John Bur-
roughs could do him little good, and although essentially an honest man
he was, undoubtedly, traduced more and more from the innocent and
dignified manner of his early life.
At a Venture, by Charles A. Bennett (8vo, 184 pages; Harpers: $2.50) is
crammed with nimble thrusts at contemporary life and with literary
spoofing of a high order. It is marked by gaiety and intelligence—qualities
which reappear in the characteristic drawings by Clarence Day, Jr. Mr
Bennett's themes and his parodies suggest Stephen Leacock; there is
discrimination in his wit and the necessary seasoning of irony has been
added to give it point.


BRIEFER MENTION 439
Taking the Literary Pulse, by Joseph Collins (8vo, 317 pages; Doran:
$3). In his earlier volume Dr Collins set himself to culling the hot
passages in modern letters and presenting them with a certain regretful
piety; thus, readers could go straight for these nuclei without having to
read the less efficient pages of the originals, or without having to feel
ashamed of their itch. But here, in his retailings of other men's works,
the author seems to have run short of cases, and simply drops into the
capacity of a rather pleasant and indiscriminate reader of better-class
books. In a chapter on Purity and Pornography he writes, "I have seen
many minds disintegrate apparently under the influence of Kant, Spinoza,
Nietzsche . . . but I have never seen a mind break up while being fed on
Aretino, Rabelais, or Paul de Kock." One wishes that this important
proposition had been either asserted or denied by someone whose other
statements inspired more confidence.
Critical Ventures in Modern French Literature, by Arnold Whit-
ridge (i2mo, 187 pages; Scribner: $1.75). In this book of critical ap-
preciations Mr Arnold Whitridge displays all the virtues and many of
the failings of a cultured and conventional gentleman. His firm straight-
forward scholarly style seems sometimes, so to speak, almost too ade-
quate. One grows weary of his restrained manner; one begins to suspect
him of priggishness, of a capacity for being tedious. In spite of the
deep veneration that one feels for the noble genius of Mr Whit-
ridge's grandfather, one has in times past been impatient of the school-
master in him also, but surely Matthew Arnold would never, one thinks,
have penned the following sentence: "What devil is it that occasionally
incites men of letters to flaunt their nastiness before the public? Why
must the world be burdened with Hazlitt's Liber Amoris, or Sainte-
Beuve's Livre d'Amour?"
The Ethics of Journalism, by Nelson Antrim Crawford (i2mo, 264
pages; Knopf: $2.75) is largely an examination of the psychological
phenomena which determine the deficiencies of American newspapers; one
fourth of the book is given over to codes of ethics and rules which are
now more honoured in the breach than in the city room. The author
believes that ignorance, inertia, and fear are the chief barriers to a higher
type of journalism, and in order to overcome them, he places his faith in
a sort of super-school of ideal equipment, which would not merely furnish
the specialized training of journalism, but would "dispel the ignorance
characteristic of college students and graduates." The book is valuable
as a summary of possible service in comparison with existing practice.
Old Masters and Modern Art, by Sir Charles Holmes (8vo, 235 pages;
Harcourt, Brace: $7.50). A perfect picture of the modern museum-
director's state of mind. In regard to the ancient masters there is much
non-venturous, submissive thinking and for the contemporaneous masters
there is total non-comprehension. Of the dozen or so museum-directors in
the United States, eleven at least would write just such a book as this of
Sir Charles's. ... In the effort to be as optimistic as possible one of our
directors may be presumed to be intelligent—but his address is not known.


THE THEATRE
IN the week preceding the writing of this report I went to the
theatre six times without any great leaping up of the heart.
One satisfactory circumstance was that the play which is generally
considered the best play of the season, and of which I had heard
the most varied praise, held up against its press-agents: What
Price Glory. It is a play which seems to make no effort whatever
to be a great war play and very little more to be a play at all. It
isn't a great war play, but it is an easy and ingratiating comedy
neatly wedged into the setting of the war and sustained by the
easiest roughneck humour and smoothest American which I can
recall on the stage. There are a few phrases which seem inappro-
priate, but the tone and language and rhythm of Captain Flagg
and of Sergeant Quirt and of their men come nearly all the time
with felicity from their lips. When a bombing party is ordered
one of the men says, "I pitched yesterday; me arm's sore," in per-
fect American. I cannot imagine any one who has passed beyond
Depot Brigade failing to recapture in these tones the whole misery
and entertainment of army life.
The substitution of the word "baboon" for the word "bastard"
as a generic term for "soldier" has not affected the play much.
The hardboiled attitude toward women remains—it is, essentially,
a play about blind hate, between the two men, and fornication.
And it is, as I have said, an entertaining comedy. One suspects
from the title and from the scene in the dugout when death and
damnation descend, that an indictment of war in more furious
terms was intended. If the authors, Messrs Laurence Stallings
and Maxwell Anderson, are pacifists they can none the less remain
content with their work. The war shows out none too nobly in
the trivial episode they have recorded.
Molnar's play of an actor who impersonates a soldier to test
his wife's fidelity is presented by the Theatre Guild with all the
smoothness and ease of a Belasco production and with nothing
else. It is a play with loads of hokum: the actor stopping in his
love-making to accept a compliment on his art or to reject a com-


THE THEATRE 441
pliment to a rival; the reiterated playing of a few bars of Chopin;
the stage momma, the tailor who is paid in passes, the friend of
the family. The great scene of impersonation is superb for the
actor and pretty good fun for the audience. Only at the end,
when the actor faces his dilemma: did she yield because she pene-
trated the disguise, leaving him a bad actor, or did she fail to
recognize him, leaving him a superb actor, but a cuckold, only then
when he does not know which he prefers and does not know
whether his wife loves him, does the play touch any point of
subtlety. Mr Lunt, appropriately florid in the manner of Ditrich-
stein in The Concert at the beginning, didn't miss the good thing
at the end. The Guild missed nothing, either; The Guardsman
is a safe production, adding nothing to its laurels.
It is lucky for me that I feel justified in the foregoing unsup-
ported statements, because about The Crime in the Whistler
Room I do not feel at all pontifical. I am not sure that the dream
mechanism and the expressionistic mode are the inevitable method
for projecting Mr Wilson's ideas and emotions; I am not sure that
(assuming that in spite of the method they were projected) they
are particularly interesting. The one thing I am sure about is
that the method resulted at times, and magnificently in the school-
room scene, in moving and absorbing drama and that the ideas
rose at times, as in the rhythmic speech of the dead man, to a wise
and almost solemn beauty. This is a great deal. Those who are
interested in the conflict between radicals and conservatives (in
life, not in politics) may find the rest of the play equally interest-
ing, although I cannot see how they can find it all entertaining,
for Mr Wilson has worked against the pace of his own method
and lengthened some of his scenes appallingly. The bourgeois
household and the irruption of the faker-father are both good;
the cheap jack young novelist is, as acted, a silly caricature. The
theme of the play must be that of the werewolf, recreant and in-
human and untamed by his contact with life; and this theme you
have to search for through a slight fog. It is decidedly up to Mr
Wilson to indicate to us whether the fog is due to the incapacity
of his form to carry his intelligence. His intelligence itself is not
in doubt.
Gilbert Seldes


MODERN ART
THOUGH it is true I have been for months far from the
purlieus where intellectual gossip echoes, still it is also true
that even in these backwoods vibrations from the really sensational
doings of the world penetrate, and if anything uncommon happens
to Mars or the rest of the universe some distorted version of the
affair gets to us finally. So, realizing with a sense of guilt, the
complete absence from our recent news, of any rumours of any
attempts to relate art to life, or life to art, as Oscar Wilde had
it, one jumps to the discouraging conclusion that there hasn't been
any, that nothing hair-raising in this line has occurred, that all
America, like your correspondent, has been taking a vacation from
art. There seems something more than shameful in this, alike
for me and the rest of you. We don't take a vacation from
politics, from motoring, from newspaper-reading, but we do leave
off thinking of art the moment that school is out. We leave off
so easily that the wonder is we ever take it on again when winter
chill obliges us to huddle in company near stoves. I met by
accident just two artists during the course of the summer, and one
of them asked me what chance I thought had Washington of win-
ning out—Washington then had not yet won out in the baseball
championship)—and the other one asked me if I knew of a vacant
job that would give him a chance to write about art.
Well, I can't shed tears about it. The situation is not as it
should be, but the situation has not been as it should be for art
in America for many years, and won't be mended by a scolding.
I find myself instead looking about for extenuating circumstances
and finding them in the increased number of new books. To be
sure, I don't know who reads them, and people don't rush to me
saying, "You must read Broom's translation of The Poet Assas-
sinated," 1 with all the vehemence they expend in conjuring me to
read, say, Prancing Nigger, or Lytton Strachey's latest. But The
Poet Assassinated gets published, and Mr Cheney's Primer of Mod-
1 The Poet Assassinated. By Guillaume Apollinaire. 8vo. 158 pages.
Broom Publishing Company. $5.


HENRY McBRIDE 443
em Art * gets published, and so does Miss Dreier's2 book on the same
subject, and so does The Dial's 3 impressive portfolio of facsimiles
of the pictures that are written about. There are more books than
there used to be, and I hold it to be a good sign. I don't know
who reads 'em, as I said, and I don't know what the financial
advisers of the publishers say to them after their exploits; but
get a book printed and somebody somewhere reads it; and in the
case of facsimiles somebody frames and hangs them up. The
discouraging autumn in which the writer's cupboard is absolutely
bare and holds not a bone nor a crust to sustain one into the
unalluring future is, nevertheless, a thing we are used to. All
the autumns in the art world are bleak, but somehow we do survive
them and in the end something always happens. It may happen
this year in the fall exhibition of the society known as the American
Salons, which I see is announced. The society includes a number of
likely people, and there has always been a necessity for a lively
early-winter show. The invariable holding back of all the master-
pieces until spring is the real reason why the art writers are so
reluctant to take up their pens in November.
But to get back to the consoling altruisms of the publishers!
The Broom Publishing Company was exceedingly sporty in bring-
ing out the late Guillaume Apollinaire's master-work, and it is
disappointing that the stir over it fails to materialize. Americans
refuse to touch it with the kitchen tongs, and we don't, apparently,
give it the test of a reading. We judge it, as far as I can make
out, by the sense of smell. We don't take hold of the work for the
same reason that we do not produce such things. We are afraid
of the loud, frank cry, of sweeping gestures, and satire. We have
had no Rabelais in our past. Our nearest thing in that line is
Walt Whitman, a Walt Whitman who yawps barbarically and
never laughs. But Apollinaire wrote in a country that not only
produced a Rabelais, but a Voltaire, a Scarron and—and this is
intended as a reproach to Apollinaire—a Rostand. There was
1 A Primer of Modern Art. By Sheldon Cheney. Illustrated. 8vo. 383
pages. Boni & Liveright. $6.
2 Western Art and the New Era. By Katherine S. Dreier. Illustrated.
8vo. 139 pages. Brentano. $7.
s Living Art. Twenty Facsimile Reproductions After Paintings, Drawings,
and Engravings, and Ten Photographs After Sculpture. By Contemporary
Artists. Folio. The Dial Publishing Company. $60.


444 MODERN ART
nothing that could be thought in that land that might not be put
into words, no one to hold one back in the use of racy illustrations
and nothing, even these dull times, to prevent one from having a
good time writing. One's friends and one's public would not take
it amiss if one stopped in the middle of the idlest prank to indulge
in a deep thought; and if by chance, it occurred to one to play
with an idea, why, all the company amiably played along with
the idea to the end. Here we scarcely have a public for ideas,
and certainly there is no relish for a book that is so difficult to
label as this one is. Were poor Apollinaire alive and here, he
might push the satire down our throats with the help of a rollicking
band of art students such as the crew who helped him do the trick
in Paris, but it is far from certain. Walt Whitman cut sorry
enough a figure peddling his poems in person, and there was nothing
in Walt's experiences with and for fame that would have contented
the gallant Guillaume. The Broom Publishing Company by this
time doubtless thinks it was a bit rash in thus testifying to the
poet's memory, but the venture has at least the merit of pointing
anew to certain things that are done better in France and which
often cannot be done here at all.
Mr Cheney's book on modern art has had some acrid criticism
from other historians of the period in spite of the disarming title
he gave to it; but perfect agreement is too much to expect from
students of the present. The welcome fact is that he found pub-
lishers for it, Boni and Liveright, and that now a large book on
cubism and all its related forms of expression is printed and may
be looked at. As a primer it is somewhat voluminous. This suits
the artists, of course, as all of them, naturally, like to be mentioned,
but time has a savage way of thinning the ranks of pretenders
to celebrity, and the public, when it peers at all into questions of
the arts, likes to have such matters made easy for it. Mr Cheney,
like the famous Mr Vanderbilt of the previous generation, damns
the public and tells it to shift for itself. His book, as it happens,
presents all of the cards to those who do like to pick and choose.
I can't think of anybody modern who has been left out. The
layman who takes a casual glance at the volume will suppose the
entire world to have turned cubist over night, and even I, some-
what conversant with the subject, am surprised to see we are as
cubist as we are.
Henry McBride


COMMENT
"For of the soule the bodie forme doth take;
For soule is forme, and doth the bodie make."
Edmund Spenser
I THINK the faces of men of letters will most often be found
—and in an especial degree—expressive of both their character
and their work. Of course in their faces—as in those of other
men—there must often persist deposits—and what is less easily
borne with: detritus—of an earlier and sometimes inapposite stock.
High foreheads may be awaited, and with show of reason, in fami-
lies generally possessed of intellect. But our forbears, when we
track them out, multiply far too bewilderingly all over the lot, for
us to retain faith in their general integrity or discretion. And when
the simian forehead does reappear—the word is always "reappear"
—it is odds the simian mind has reappeared also. There are here in
control, surely, physiological laws, laws which work at once upon
the skull and upon the contents thereof, laws which work to a
parallel formation. These we shall not easily master, the less
easily because they seem so often so unaccountably abrogated.
Thus he who more than any other English writer on occasion spoke
—and therefore thought also—with "that large utterance of the
early Gods," he who comprehended, as other men have not
had it in them to comprehend, "deep-brow'd Homer," he into whose
noble and natural intellect "new planets" might and did so magis-
terially and with so wide a liquid and lucent leeway "swim"—that
man's forehead was low. So to us unaccountably may outcrop
earlier and disparate strata: simian—in the instance in point, cock-
ney—physiognomical formations. And sometimes—as in this case
of Keats—with little or no apparent physiognomical significance.
. . . But surely in men who have lived long, in men whose indi-
vidual bias and character has had time to wholly encompass, clench,
and mould those features inherited from that so anindividual past,
that past which we all so ignominiously together inherit,—in such
the face should be indeed indicative.
But would the faces of men of letters be more expressive than


446 COMMENT
those of other men, of, let us say, labourers or merchants? Inas-
much as we think with our heads, and inasmuch as our faces are
the mobile indications of those workings within, it would appear
that, speaking by and large, in proportion as those workings are
distinct—trenchant—our faces will accordingly be distinctly—
trenchantly—moulded. Now the born man of letters—like the
born man of science—is the man whose intelligence is more subtle
and more complex than that of other men. In practical affairs
the intelligence may be profitably applied: it may also prove therein
a hindrance and a betrayal. The subtle edge of a delicate instru-
ment, if degraded to cutting wood, buckles and betrays: the subtle
intelligence, consistently applied to gross matter, wearies and for-
gets. For the acquirement from a railway coach window of an
infinity of tabulatable snapshots the complex mechanism of the
most gifted camera is not in order: it takes too long to make up its
mind; and it obscures the plate by reporting inutile atmosphere.
Daily business is, deplorably, a railroad; and, engaged therein, one
is surely blessed in the possession of a snapshot mind. But for the
business of the man of letters, the business which he follows on a
like footing with the poet, the noble business of expressing the
heart through words, the gifts of the mind are indeed in order.
If he be without them, his heart may with desire wax big, and it may
break each springtide: we shall not hear it. . . . Let the lover,
let the mime and dancer—them whose eyes and lips and feet syl-
lable a rich vocabulary—deploy their variegated eloquence with
scant benefit of thought. He who would utter his heart in words
must think.
And thought moulds the face. Yes, the faces of men of letters
should be and are, in an especial degree, expressive. No one could
look at the face of Marcel Proust and not get some inkling of the
man behind—of that immaculate and penetrative egotism, of that
egotism which he so manifestly tended and watered, of that ego-
tism which has been so consummately terraced for our beholding.
No one can observe the face of Mr George Moore without simul-
taneously glimpsing the waned colours of a landscape—or is it not
perhaps rather a figured wall-paper?—in which sloping-shouldered
and shuffling-gaited protagonists assert, and with a surely valid
niceness, the just potency of apricot pyjamas. And who has had
called to his attention the likeness of the present head of Gerhardt


COMMENT 447
Hauptmann to that of Geheimrat von Goethe, and not recalled at
once the difference between their prose styles, too? Who has seen
pictured that indecent, snail-nude cranium of Italy's Hero-Poet,
and not seen pictured that indecent, snail-nude soul, as well?
Who can regard the bouncing facial deportment of the bouncing
Thomas Babington Macaulay, and not cry out "What a Jack-in-
the-pulpit is here!"
There exists no daguerreotype of Edgar Poe which does not
register high genius and high misery. That prodigiously vaulted
forehead; that forehead of clear stone; that forehead which has
been set—with a pathos the eyes tell us—upon a cheaply-got
amalgam of cement and of rubble; an amalgam which assents to
Destiny; an amalgam which slumps askew. Who can contemplate
that well-bitten likeness of the Antique Sage of Ferney, and not
mumble to himself "How odd a thing is an ape! And how odd it is
an ape may peer across so much, may wryly peer across blood-smok-
ing, yet by him so apishly re-visioned and de-ducted and en-par-
terred ages! And how live, how worshipful a thing, an old dried
ape's odd mask may be!" No man can look upon the face of
John Keats, and not—for all that strangely Lamian forehead—
perceive and know the richness of a poet's heart. Who can look
into the face of Shelley, and not believe in Angels and in Anarchy?
Who can peruse the flesh-encumbered and flesh-obfuscated physiog-
nomy of that Great Bear, of that Great Unbroken Human Bear,
.whose puffing way it was tenderly (if oft-times lungingly) to lead
James Boswell by a string, and wonder that James Boswell danced?
And not envy that intelligent gentleman that illuminated captivity?
It is not for nothing that of the writings of Maxim Gorki we
would reread most often those which relate of his own actual expe-
riences; and, in particular, of his own brief and menaced childhood,
and of the expanded and protracted childhood of his odd friend,
Leo Tolstoy. Looking into that pained face we recognize, we con-
ceive, the painful and contested springtime of the North: white,
wide twilights hesitant upon still plains; the tentative exhilaration
of meagre and nude birches; an elk, earthy of skin, corporal of neck,
an elk whose freshly-budding antlers admonish of resurgence within.
The whiff and penetration of apprehended sperm, plangent in twi-
light; the need of the aware male—odd, tentative, remote; and yet
so multifariously plangent, and yet so multitudinously astride


448 COMMENT
earth's creaking saddle. ... A face that is also like the wet and
roving muzzle of a dog, faithful to the quarry. What a face to
smell out hard-beset Youth!
But what one of all these men—excepting, of course, Voltaire—
was or is in quite the same literal, or lettered, degree as was
M Anatole France a man of letters? The late Joseph Conrad—
whose own head concisely spoke his dogged labours and his dogged
heroes—the late Joseph Conrad noted—and with that painstaking
exactitude of the master mariner, that exactitude which he trans-
ferred from mastership over vessels to mastership over words—
Joseph Conrad noted that he himself was not, rightly speaking, a
man of letters. By which, I take it, he meant to convey he was
but a simple and severe Romancer, a Teller of Bold Tales, a
Fabulist of Men and of the Moon—merely this bald thing. It
was not his to be the elaborate and the invaluable, the recessed and
the acrid-scented, repository of a complex culture, of an age upon
age enriched and ennobled and involved civilization. It was not
his to exhibit in strange and rare and gainly hazardings old gems.
. . . Just these were the elaborate tasks whereto was born Anatole
France.
Since Voltaire—how right it is that talents of such sophistication
should not have to rely upon Nature even for their own names,
that therein also they should demonstrate their peerless contriving!
—since Voltaire no Frenchman has so adroitly manipulated so
varied and so glistering a philosopher's array of sage notions and
of odd ideas. And such work is done from the head. A Romancer
may tell from his kidney; a poet may sing from his heart: a man
of letters composes from as well as with his head. So he feels
there, too. It is small wonder the head and face of Anatole France
say to us so brimmingly much.
Thomas De Quincey made an often-cited distinction between the
Literature of Power and the Literature of Knowledge; the litera-
ture which "moves," and the literature which "teaches." Although
this writer defined the second of these as addressing the "discursive
understanding," yet a consideration of the passage in point indi-
cates he had in mind rather that aspect of Knowledge which he
would better have termed information than that surely distinguish-
able aspect which can more exactly be called understanding. The
confrontation of the "cookery book" by "Paradise Lost" appears



Property of M Loys Delicti
ANATOLE FRANCE. BY ANDERS ZORN


I ^


COMMENT 449
a shade facile. . . . This distinction becomes more interesting if
under Knowledge we think rather of the act of understanding than
of the acquirement—and the utility—of information. The dis-
tinction has often been made in this more interesting sense also.
The distinction then lies between that literature which like a lyric
poem of Lord Byron or like a tragic scene by Shakespeare energizes
and exhilarates emotionally, and that literature which, like a page
in Plato, or like one of those luminous expositions in the talk of
Goethe, gives us rather the quiet emotional satisfaction of complete
understanding. Yet Knowledge also is Power. I do not of course
here intend that sense which has long since become proverbial, the
sense in which Knowledge is conceived as an implement, an imple-
ment powerful. I mean that knowing is a kind of converted feel-
ing; that a thought is merely a differently conscious, a more defined
and subtilized emotion; that the process induced in us by reading a
page of Plato is more than analogous to that process induced by a
lyric of Lord Byron; that these processes are, in their essentials,
one. The energy in question may act from different centres; this
energy may act through different channels; it yet remains, as well
in its effect upon the reader as in its origin in the writer, essentially
a unit: we discover here no difference in kind. The satisfaction of
Knowledge and the exhilaration of Power admit of no ultimate
division; they are varyingly divergent modes of the same pleasure-
giving activity.
And thus our man of letters turns his phrases, as our poet his
rhymes, from out his heart. Only in the man of letters, the head
and the heart are one.
I think the face of Anatole France betrayed all this. It too, like
his clear prose, lay open from his heart. We look at it and we seem
to be looking at the quick of the man himself. And since he was
thus manifoldly a man of letters, since he had gathered up into his
luminous being the manifoldly luminous heritage of French Civili-
zation and Culture,—for this reason we seem to see in his mature
face—that face which he had so happily come by, that face which
he himself had yet farther refined and subtilized—we seem to see
in this mature face, as in this mature prose, the explicit and trans-
lated (I here intend this word—I hope not improperly—in a sense
not wholly without kinship to that in which, according to the High
Mythology of Judaea, the Divine Being was capable, upon occa-


450 COMMENT
sion, to translate, and to immediately clarify—beside Himself—
what had else, but for Divine Intervention, rested in Nature mor-
tally obscure)—in this face we at length behold the explicit, the
translated, the immediately clarified, quick of France.
In the etching of Anders Zorn it seems to hang a little forward
and to one side, as does, sometimes, a full-blown garden flower.
It is a face which remained to the end unfalteringly en fleur.





BY PABLO PICASSO
KING LEAR.


THE m DIAL

DECEMBER 1924
VIkGINIA WOOLF
EYCLIVEBELL
WHEN, in 1919, M rs Woolf published Night and Day, tl at
able journalist, Mr Massingham, who might have been the
most successful editor in England could he but have let alone the
two subjects of which he knew nothing—art and literature—flew
into a rage. This he did because someone had likened Mrs Woolf
to Jane Austen; which so provoked him that, a propos de bottes, he
flung off one of those high-minded, ill-founded, gossipo-critical
notes of his, ostensibly to show how unlike they were, in fact show-
ing only how much he disliked the art of Mrs Woolf, and proving
nothing beyond the fact that the art of both was beyond his com-
prehension. The art of Mrs Woolf, to be sure, is very different
from that of Miss Austen; but the critic, I surmise—I have no no-
tion who he was—wished to call attention, not to a similarity of
manner, but to the fact that in Mrs Woolf we have an authoress
who, by purely feminine means (herein resembling Miss Austen
and differing from Charlotte Bronte and George Eliot) had cre-
ated something which takes its place, not with the best contempo-
rary literature only, but in the great tradition of English letters.
I must say that if this unknown critic had read no more of her
writings than the two first novels his judgement did infinite credit
to his insight. For most of those even who had followed her career
from the time when she first found editors not unwilling to give a
chance to a girl who happened to be the daughter of Leslie Stephen,
most, I say, felt that, till the publication of Jacob's Room, she had
never publicly proved what they had never doubted—that she pos-
sessed genius of a high order. For you must not forget that her


452 VIRGINIA WOOLF
earliest work—reviews, generally long ones, written for The Times
Literary Supplement, at that time perhaps the best critical weekly
in the world—was anonymous. Simultaneously she was writing,
and confiding in manuscript to a few friends, purely imaginative
work, stories and sketches; and it is significant that to her friends
these appeared less interesting and characteristic than her reviews.
I think I can see why. In reviews, as in her purely imaginative
writings, she depended on that familiar impressionist method of
hers: she read the book, saw it whole from her peculiar yet widely
out-looking corner, and then created a form to match her impres-
sion. Thus, her critical essays have the quality, the individuality,
and some of the intensity of works of art; and it will be a thousand
pities if they are not soon collected into a volume, since such a vol-
ume would give a great deal of pleasure to people who are worth
pleasing. But, besides her creative gift, Mrs Woolf possesses a
delicate intellect, and already in these early days possessed what
one may call "inherited culture." Now in her purely imaginative
pieces she could make but sparing use, at that time, of this intel-
lectual equipment; whereas, in reviews, she was not obliged to fly
off into space trusting solely to the thread of imagination, but,
whenever she chose, could catch hold of and rest upon the recog-
nized props of criticism. She had a right to chop ideas and toy
with history; and she did. And it was in these moments of rest
from the painful business of self-expression that she gave us our
first taste of that delicious wit which I would like at once to dis-
tinguish from those flights of humorous fancy which continually
enchant us in the novels.
"Little is known of Sappho, and that little is not wholly to her
credit. Lady Jane Grey has m