687 B 938,866 mu011 PROPERTY OF The University of Michiñan Libraries , 1817 ARTES SCIENTIA VERITAS ته 2 اور الام 4 16641 05/ 1541 78 06 Vol. 76 1927 THE DIAL V V VIU .se VE IV OXX I TO VOLUME LXXVI January to June, 1924 THE DIAL PUBLISHING COMPANY 13811 АР 2 15 Ч V. 70 С77 2 . Stacks Liit Griaid lokale Index 10641 INDEX VOLUME LXXVI PAGE AIKEN, CONRAD . BIRRELL, FRANCIS BLUM, Walter CORNELIUS BUERMEYER, LAURENCE 380 BURKE, KENNETH BURKE, KENNETH, translator Colum, Mary M. COLUM, Mary M. COLUM, PADRAIC. 336 81 CRAVEN, THOMAS . Disintegration in Modern Poetry 535 Emily Dickinson. 301 The Art of Apology 364 Journalist Critics 553 The Perfumed Paraphrase of Death 49 Communication Some Popular Fallacies in Aesthetics 107 Immersion 460 Death in Venice (Fiction) 213, 311, 423 Virgins (Fiction) 123 An American Critic: Van Wyck Brooks 33 Note on Hawaiian Poetry The South Seas Again Henri Matisse 404 Living Art 180 Making Modernism Difficult 357 Psychology and Common Sense 236 Light on the Dark Ages 75 The Cavern of Silence (Fiction) 42 Dublin Letter 53 Russian Letter 168 The Gods 409, 507 Translating the Untranslatable 457 Eliza in Chains 391 Mr Epstein's Sculpture 502 Aubrey Beardsley 280 Reminiscences of Leonid Andreyeo : 481 Artist Turned Prophet 66 The Cavern of Silence (Fiction). 42 Reminiscences of Leonid Andreyev . 481 Horses and Men . 274 Virgins (Fiction) 123 Death in Venice (Fiction) . 213, 311, 423 German Letter 58 Reminiscences of Leonid Andreyeo 481 Stephen Crane 73 E. M. Forster 452 . Damon, S. Foster DE UNAMUNO, MIGUEL EGLINTON, JOHN . ELIASBERG, ALEXANDER FAURE, ELIE . Ficke, Arthur DAVISON FORSTER, E. M.. Fry, ROGER GALLATIN, A. E. . GORKI, Maxim GREGORY, ALYSE How, Louis, translator. KOTELIANSKY, S. S., translator Lovett, Robert Morss Mann, HEINRICH MANN, THOMAS. . . . MANSFIELD, KATHERINE, translator MENCKEN, H. L. Miles, HAMISH IV INDEX PAGE Moore, MARIANNE • . . 265, 449 MORAND, PAUL Muir, EDWIN MURRY, J. MIDDLETON I 22 . PACH, WALTER, translator Piccoli, RAFFAELLO READ, HERBERT Russell, BERTRAND SANTAYANA, G.. SELDES, GILBERT Sir Francis Bacon 343 Well Moused, Lion 84 Paris Letter Childhood. Moralizings on Morand . 184 The Weariness of Ivan Bunin 194 The Gods 409, 507 Italian Letter . 159 The Definition of Comedy 257 An Attempt to Convert Kentucky 462 Does Ethics Influence Life? 353 A Motley Pantheon 243 The Sorrows of Avicenna 250 The Moods of Satire . 188 A Popular Novel. 541 D. H. Lawrence, Translator 191 Port of New York 544 Irish Letter 347, 523 The Lady Stuffed With Pistachio Nuts 283 Vienna Letter 529 Bad Han (Fiction) I, 137 In a Thicket (Fiction) A Lost Lady 79 Mrs Wharton's Age of Faith 277 The Best Butter? 361 In a Fog. Romain Rolland After the war 445 SELIGMANN, HERBERT J. STEPHENS, JAMES VAN VECHTEN, CARL . von HOFMANNSTHAL, Hugo WESCOTT, GLENWAY 516 \Wilson, Edmund WRIGHT, CUTHBERT . 548 Zweig, STEFAN INDEX VERSE BRANFORD, F. V. COATSWORTH, ELIZABETH J. . . . . COLUM, PADRAIC . Cumanncs, E. E. CUMMINGS, E. E. DE LA MARE, WALTER Doughty, LEONARD . HilLYER, ROBERT Larsson, R. ELLSWORTH PAGE The Idiot 309 Dedicated to Her Highness 422 The Old Houses 134 The Old Mare 133 The Princess . 135 Samson 135 The Sicilian Expedition 421 Le Tour des Francs 134 Mele Ahiahi 341 The Pigeons on the Beach 340 The Surf Rider 341 Four Poems 29 Epitaph 515 John of Belgrade . 246 Nocturne 256 Arrangement for an Inquiring Oboe 334 Swan Song Arranged for Two Pianos 407 In a Dance 249 Lullaby 444 As It Looked Then 158 Not Always Vision 264 Fullmoon 48 The Gift of Harun-al-Rashid 495 The Heart Replies 501 Leda and the Swan 495 The Lover Speaks 501 NORTH, JESSICA NELSON Powys, John CowPER. ROBINSON, EDWIN ARLINGTON . 346 SIMPSON, MABEL ✓Williams, WILLIAM CARLOS YEATS, WILLIAM BUTLER VI INDEX ART . BONNARD, PIERRE BURCHFIELD, CHARLES CHAGALL, Marc . CHAPIN, JAMES CUMMINGS, E. E. DAVID, HERMINE May . . Davies, Arthur B. . DE SEGONZAC, André DUNOYER DE VLAMINCK, MAURICE EPSTEIN, JACOB . · Gill, Eric GLINTENKAMP, Henry J. Scène Villageoise June Scrapped Engines May The Market Place February Dressing Room May Bullfight January Charles Spencer Chaplin . March Portrait of the Artist . January A Wash Drawing January A Paris Window May La Promenade en Voiture May La Terrace Salt Air Wanderers June The Morin in Spring February Rue à Nesles . March Dolores June Kathleen June Miriam · June Christmas Gifts January Hair Combing January The Money Changers January Blind Woman and Boy April Two Mexicans from Xochimilco April Woman and Man April Standing Saint January New England May Voyagers May Boy Stealing Forbidden Fruit March A Bronze. January A Girl February Femme Accroupie February Femme à Genoux April Femme Assise April Femme Debout April Before the Wind: Maine March A Town on the Maine Coast March Trees, Rocks, Sea: Maine March Il’oman With Goldfish May The Last Hour February Enfant au Cheval April Le Ménage des Pauores February Pencil Drawing February Three Pencil Drawings June The Ilands of Moses February Robert Louis Stevenson April New Arrivals at the Fair March The Old Ilarness Cart March GRÜNEWALD, MATTHIAS KENT, ROCKWELL KUNIYOSHI, YASUO LACHAISE, GASTON LAURENCIN, Marie Maillol, ARISTIDE . MARIN, JOHN Matisse, HENRI , MUNCH, EDVARD PICASSO, PABLO . : ROBINSON, BOARDMAN SARGENT, JOHN SINGER YEATS, Jack B.. INDEX VII BOOKS REVIEWED Authors and Titles PAGE • A. E. See E., A. Akins, Zoë. Déclassée: Daddy's Gone A-Hunting: and Greatness. 94 ANDERSON, EMILY, translator. Goethe, by BENEDETTO CROCE 372 ANDERSON, RASMUS B., translator. Creative Spirits of the Nineteenth Century, by GEORG BRANDES . 243 ANDERSON, SHERWOOD. Horses and Men 274 ANDREYEV, LEONID. HERMAN BERNSTEIN, translator. Katerina 561 Herman Bernstein, translator. Samson in Chains . 560 ANONYMOUS. BOHUN LYNCH, editor. Letters From the South Seas 81 ANONYMOUS. The Real Story of a Bootlegger 95 ANTINK, E., and M. SCHARTEN. A House Full of People 466 AsQUITH, HERBERT Henry. The Genesis of the War 364 AUTOLYCUS. Ulug Beg, An Epic Poem, Comic In Intention, in VII Cantos 467 BABBITT, IRVING, and others. Criticism in America 553 BARNES, DJUNA. A Book. 460 BARNETT, ADA. The Joyous Adventurer 370 BEARDSLEY, AUBREY. Collected and Annotated by R. A. Walker. Some Unknown Drawings of Aubrey Beardsley 280 Beer, Thomas. Introduction by Joseph CONRAD. Stephen Crane: A Study in Amer- ican Letters 73 BENÉT, STEPHEN VINCENT. Jean Hugenot 93 BENNETT, ARNOLD. Riceyman Steps 287 BÉRAUD, Henry. Le Vitriol de Lune 287 BERESFORD, John, editor. The Poems of Charles Cotton . 289 Bernays, EDWARD L. Crystalizing Public Opinion BERNSTEIN, Herman, translator. Katerina, by LEONID ANDREYEV Samson in Chains, by Leonid ANDREYEV BERTON, MME PIERRE. Basil Woon, translator. The Real Sarah Bernhardt Whom Her Audiences Never Knew 562 BOGAN, LOUISE. Body of This Death 289 BOSSCHERE, JEAN DE. See de Bosschere. Boyd, Ernest, and others. Criticism in America. 553 Boyd, Woodward. Lazy Laughter . BRANDES, GEORG. Rasmus B. ANDERSON, translator. Creative Spirits of the Nine- teenth Century 243 BRAYBROOKE, PATRICK. G. K. Chesterton Brooks, Van Wyck, and others. Criticism in America 553 Brownell, W. C., and others. Criticism in America 553 BUDD, ALFRED. RAYMOND MORtimer and Hamish Miles, editors. The Oxford Circus 188 BULLOCK, SHAN F. Foreword by A. E. Mors et Vita BUNIN, Ivan. The Dreams of Chang, translated by BERNARD Guilbert Guerney.- The Village, translated by ISABEL F. HAPGOOD . 194 BUTLER, A. J., translator. Amaranth and Asphodel 467 CABELL, JAMES BRANCH. The High Place.- Jurgen 361 CAMPBELL, Lily B. Scenes and Machines on the English Stage During the Renais- 95 CANNAN, Gilbert. Letters From a Distance 561 CATHER, Willa. A Lost Lady 79 CHASE, DANIEL. The Middle Passage 287 CHESTERTON, G. K. Fancies Versus Fads 94 CHURCHILL, WINSTON. The World Crisis CONGREVE, WILLIAM. The Complete Works of William Congreve 257 468 561 560 . . 198 202 200 sance 364 . VIII INDEX PAGE 202 468 200 200 CONRAD, JOSEPH. The Rover . 541 CONRAD, Joseph, introduction. Stephen Crane: A Study in American Letters, by Thomas Beer 73 Conrad, LAWRENCE H. Temper . 370 Corners, George F. Rejuvenation . 467 Cotton, Charles. John Beresford, editor. The Poems of Charles Cotton 289 Cournos, John. In Exile 289 CRANMER-Byng, L. Salma 371 CRAWFORD, Nelson Antrim, and DAVID O'Neill, editors. Today's Poetry 93 Croce, BENEDETTO. Emily ANDERSON, translator. Goethe . 372 Cummings, E. E. Tulips and Chimneys . 50 Curie, Marie. CHARLOTTE and VERNON KELLOGG, translators. Pierre Curie DAVENPORT, F. I. Adolescent Interests: A Study of the Sexual Interest and Knowl- edge of Young Women de Bosschere, Jean, illustrator. Uncanny Stories, by MAY SINCLAIR 199 DE LACRETELLE, Jacques. Brian Lunn, translator. Silbermann 465 DE LA Mare, Walter, collector. Come Hither 289 Deledda, GRAZIA. The Mother 465 Dell, Floyd. Janet March 92 Dos Passos, John. Streets of Night 548 DREIER, KATHERINE S. Western Art and the New Era 357 DRINKWATER, John, editor. The Outline of Literature 373 E., A., foreword. Mors et Vita, by Shan F. Bullock Eliot, T. S., and others. Criticism in America 553 FIELD, MICHAEL. Preface by T. STURGE Moore. A Selection From the Poems of Michael Field Finger, CHARLES J. Highwaymen 199 FIRBANK, RONALD. Introduction by Carl Van Vechten. Prancing Nigger 559 FORSTER, E. M. The Celestial Omnibus and Other Stories.-Howards End.-Pharos and Pharillon . 452 Gilman, CHARLOTTE Perkins. His Religion and Hers 290 GIRAUDOUX, JEAN. Louise Collier Willcox, translator. My Friend From Limousin 266 GOGARTY, OLIVER. An Offering of Swans 523 Gogol, NIKOLAY. The Overcoat . 559 GUERNEY, BERNARD Guilbert, translator. The Dreams of Chang, by Ivan BUNIN 194 GUTHRIE, RAMON. Trobar Clus 371 Hagreen, Philip, decorator. Thomas Moult, editor. The Best Poems of 1922 Hale, SWINBURNE. Frontispiece by Rose O'Neill. The Demon's Notebook, Verse and Perverse Hapgood, Isabel F., translator. The Village, by Ivan BUNIN 194 Hawes, CHARLES BOARDMAN. The Dark Frigate 199 H. B. V. See V., H. B. Hearn, Lafcadio. Two Years in the French West Indies Hemon, Louis. My Fair Lady 198 Higgins, F. R. Salt Air 527 HUME, Cyril. Wife of the Centaur 92 Jackson, David P. The Story of Man and Woman 290 JEFFREY, William. The Wise Men Come to Town 372 Katzin, WINIFRED, translator. Failures, by H. R. LENORMAND KELLOGG, Charlotte and Vernon, translators. Pierre Curie, by Marie Curie KER, William Paton. The Art of Poetry LACRETELLE, Jacques DE. See de Lacretelle. Lawrence, D. H. Birds, Beasts and Flowers 535 Fantasia of the Unconscious.- Kangaroo.-Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious.—Studies in Classical American Literature 66 LAWRENCE, D. H., translator. Mastro-Don Gesualdo, by Giovanni VERGA 191 LENORMAND, H. R. WINIFRED KAtzin, translator. Failures 201 LEWISOHN, LUDWIG. Don Juan 198 LIBEDINSKY, Iury. Translated by Arthur Ransome. A Week 287 . . 200 200 202 201 202 . 201 . . . INDEX IX PAGE 465 465 288 81 466 288 370 559 201 198 372 . 466 465 560 553 188 288 200 184 561 188 200 . . . Li Po. See Po. LITTLE, FRANCES DELANOY, translator. The Shadow of the Cross, by JEAN and JÉRÔME THARAUD Lunn, Brian, translator. Silbermann, by JACQUES DE LACRETELLE LYESKOV, NICOLAI. The Cathedral Folk LYNCH, Bohun, editor. Letters From the South Seas, anonymous MACHEN, ARTHUR. Dog and Duck MacKaye, Percy. This Fine-Pretty World McKENNA, STEPhen. Vindication MACKENZIE, COMPTON. The Parson's Progress . MAIS, S. P. B. Some Modern Authors Mann, Thomas. HERMAN GEORGE SCHEFFAUER, translator. Bashan and I MANSFIELD, KATHERINE. Poems . Marbury, ELIZABETH. My Crystal Ball Marks, Henry K. Undertow MASEFIELD, John. A King's Daughter Mencken, H. L., and others. Criticism in America Miles, HAMISH, and RAYMOND MORTIMER, editors. The Oxford Circus, by ALFRED BUDD MONCRIEFF, C. K. Scott, collector. Marcel Proust: An English Tribute Moore, T. STURGE, preface. A selection From the Poems of Michael Field MORAND, PAUL. H. B. V., translator. Open All Night MORLEY, CHRISTOPHER. Parson's Pleasure . MORTIMER, RAYMOND, and Hamish Miles, editors. The Oxford Circus, by Alfred Budd Moult, Thomas, editor. Philip Hagreen, decorator. The Best Poems of 1922 Naish, John, translator. Civilization and Ethics, by Albert SchweITZER. Nevinson, H. W. Changes and Chances Nichols, Robert. Fantastica OBATA, SHIGEYOSHI, translator. The Works of Li Po O'Brien, EDWARD J., editor. The Best Short Stories of 1923 O'Neill, David, and Nelson ANTRIM CRAWFORD, editors. Today's Poetry O'Neill, John. Souls in Hell O'Neill, Rose, illustrator. The Demon's Notebook, Verse and Perverse, by Swin- EURNE HALE Overton, Grant. The Thousand and First Night PAGE, Curtis Hidden, translator. Japanese Poetry PAUL, Eden and Cedar, translators. The Dominant Sex, by Mathilde and Mathias VaERTING. Petrie, W. M. FLINDERS. Social Life in Ancient Egypt PIRANDELLO, Luigi. Each in His Own Way, and Two Other Plays Po, Lı. SHIGEYOSHI OBATA, translator. The Works of Li Po Pupin, MICHAEL. From Immigrant to Inventor RAKSOME, ARTHUR. "Racundra's” First Cruise RANSOME, ARTHUR, translator. A Week, by lury LIBEDINSKY Ravage, M. E. The Malady of Europe REDMAN, Ben Ray. Masquerade REESE, LIZETTE WOODWORTH. Wild Cherry ROBINSON, James Harvey. The Humanizing of Knowledge ROGERS, Joel Townsley. Once in a Red Moon ROLLAND, Romain. Annette et Sylvie ROSENFELD, Paul. Port of New York, Essays on Fourteen American Moderns ROTHERT, OTTO A. The Outlaws of Cave-In-Rock SACKVILLE-West, V. The Heir SAMUEL, ARTHUR Michael. The Mancroft Essays SCHEFFAUER, HERMAN George, translator. Bashan and I, by Thomas Mann SCHWEITZER, ALBERT. John Narsh, translator. Civilization and Ethics SERGEL, Roger L. Arlie Gelston . SHERMAN, STUART P., and others. Criticism in America 353 373 370 93 560 93 371 200 466 457 290 95 561 93 202 202 287 373 289 372 . 462 199 445 544 562 288 373 198 353 371 553 X INDEX : PAGE 562 468 . 180, 207 . SHIEL, M. P. Children of the Wind . 93 SINCLAIR, MAY. JEAN DE Bosschere, illustrator. Uncanny Stories 199 A Cure of Souls . 560 SOMERVELL, D. C. Critical Epochs in History, Studies in Statesmanship SPINGARN, J. E., and others. Criticism in America 553 SQUIRE, J. C. American Poems 93 Steckel, William. James S. Van Teslaar, translator. Psychoanalysis and Psycho- therapy STEVENS, WallACE. Harmonium 84 STEVENSON, ROBERT Louis. The Complete Poems of Robert Louis Stevenson 371 STEWART, Donald OGDEN. Aunt Polly's Story of Mankind 94 SWINNERTON, FRANK. Young Felix 92 TanNENBAUM, Frank. Darker Phases of the South 467 TARKINGTON, Booth. The Midlander 288 THARAUD, JEAN and JÉRÔME. FRANCES DELANOY LITTLE, translator. The Shadow of the Cross 465 Thayer, Scofield, editor. Living Art THORNDIKE, LYNN. A History of Magic and Experimental Science During the First Thirteen Centuries of Our Era . 75 ToomER, JEAN. Cane 92 VAERTING, MATHILDE and Mathias. Eden and Cedar Paul, translators. The Dominant Sex 290 VAIL, LAWRENCE. Piri and I 199 Van TESLAAR, JAMES S., translator. Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy, by William STECKEL Van VECHTEN, Carl, introduction. Prancing Nigger, by Ronald FIRBANK 559 Verga, GIOVANNI. D. H. LAWRENCE, translator. Mastro-Don Gesualdo 191 V., H. B., translator. Open All Night, by Paul MORAND WALEY, ARTHUR, translator. The Temple and Other Poems 457 WalkER, R. A., collector and annotator. Some Unknown Drawings by Aubrey Beardsley 280 Waterhouse, Francis A. Random Studies in the Romantic Chaos WHARTON, Epith. A Son at the Front 277 Wiggin, Kate Douglas. My Garden of Memories 95 Willcox, Louise Collier, translator. My Friend From Limousin, by JEAN GIRAUDOUX 266 Williams, WILLIAM Carlos. The Great American Novel 94 Wilson, ROMER. The Grand Tour 198 WoodBERRY, GEORGE E., and others. Criticism in America 553 Woon, Basil, translator. The Real Sarah Bernhardt Whom Her Audiences Never Knew, by MME Pierre BERTON 562 Wright, HaroLD. Population 290 Wylie, ELINOR. Jennifer Lorn 283 468 184 201 . COMMENT Announcement: Living Art Bell, Clive, and Living Art . Brooks, Van Wyck, Receives Dial Award Cary, Miss Elizabeth Luther, and Living Art Cummings, E. E., and J. Middleton Murray New Republic, The, Advertisements of Stein, Leo. 203 469 96 291 374 568 568 INDEX XI THE THEATRE PAGE Akins, Zoë Ancient Mariner, The Beggar on Horseback Bronx Express, The Cohan, George M. Cornell, Katherine Duse, Eleonora Fashion Fata Morgana From Morn to Midnight Gale, Zona Georges Dandin Jones, Robert Edmond Kraus, Werner Lady From the Sea, The Lenihan, Winifred Living Mask, The Lonsdale, Frederick Macgowan, Kenneth Man and the Masses Manners, Lady Diana Miracle, The . Mister Pitt Mistress of the Inn, The Moon-Flower, The O'Neill, Eugene Outsider, The Outward Bound Pirandello, Luigi . Poppy Revue, André Charlot's . 474 563 384 384 205 474 98 383 474 205 294 563 205, 564 293 99 206 294 475 205 564 293 293, 383 294 . . 99 . . Saint Joan 474 205, 563 474 293 294 475 294 206 564 206 205 475 293 384 Simonson, Lee Song and Dance Man, The : Spook Sonata, The Spring Cleaning Tane, Sutton. Young, Roland . . MODERN ART . Burchfield, Charles Chanler, Robert W. David, Hermine Eilshemius, Louis Epstein, Jacob Independent Exhibition Independent Pictures at Whitney Studio Club, Sloan Selection of Jacob, Max Kuniyoshi, Yasuo Living Art Mauro, John Picasso, Pablo: “Back to Ingres" Sargent, John Singer Weber, Max 478 IOI 296 566 567 565 565 296 295 207 566 IO2 385, 476 295 . XII INDEX . MUSICAL CHRONICLE PAGE . Bauer, Harold Bliss, Arthur. Bloch, Ernest Cowell, Henry League of Composers, The Roussel, Albert Strawinsky, Igor Swedish Ballet, The Varèse, Edgar 104 105 103 389 103 105 104, 210, 479 . 388 298 MISCELLANEOUS MENTION . Achmatova, Anna Apollinaire, Guillaume Balmont, Konstantin Barrès, Maurice Billinger, Richard Boyd, Ernest. Ireland's Literary Rennaissance Briussov, Valerii . Buermeyer, Laurence Bunin, Ivan Classicism in Modern Italy . Cocteau, Jean. Thomas l’Imposteur . Coulon, Marcel. Le Problème de Rimbaud Craven, Thomas , Croce, Benedetto Dumas, Georges. Traité de Psychologie Ehrenburg, Ilya. Fedin, Konstantin Flora, Francesco. Dal Romanticismo al Futurismo Fry, Roger Gabory, Georges. Les Enfants Perdus Gippius, Zinaïda. Gogarty, Oliver. An Offering of Swans Gorki, Maxim Grebenshikov, Georgi Havet, Mireille. Carnaval Higgins, F. R. Salt Air Irish Literary Renaissance Irish Poetry Irish Statesman, The Ivanov, Vsevolod Ivanov, Vyacheslav Kasin, Vassilii Khodasevich, Vladislav Klyuyev, Nikolai Kusmin, Mikhail Léger, Fernand. Décors for La Création du Monde Mandelstamm, Ossip Mansfield, Katherine Mariengof, Anatolii Mayakovski, Vladimir Merezhkovski, Dmitri 179 268 169 449 529 53 172 236 169 164 272 273 107, 380 161 273 171 175 166 107, 236 272 169 523 170 170 272 527 53 524 53 175 172 178 178 178 172 271 178 194 177 177 169 INDEX XIII PAGE Milhaud, Darius. La Création du Monde Minski, Nikolai Moore, George Nikitin, Nikolai Pasternak, Boris Pilnyak, Boris Ponten, Josef. Der Babylonische Turm Proust, Marcel Radiguet, Raymond . Reinhardt, Max. Reisiger, Hans, translator of Whitman Remizov, Aleksei Serapionovy Brothers, The : Severyanin, Igor . Shershenevich, Wadim Sologub, Feodor Sostchenko, Mikhail . Strawinsky, Igor . Supervielle, Jules. L'Homme de la Pampa Theatre of the Actors in the Josephstadt, The Thibaudet, Albert. Paul Valéry Tichonov, Nikolai Tröltsch, Ernst. Naturrecht und Humanität in der Weltpolitik Ungar, Hermann. Knaben und Mörder. Die Verstümmelten Wassermann, Jacob. Ulrike Woytich Weiss, Ernst. Tiere in Ketten. Nahar Yesenin, Sergei Zvetayeva, Marina 270 170 347 175 178 175 61 267 449 531 63 170 175 176 177 172 175 270 272 531 273 178 64 62 58 62 177 179 DEPARTMENTS . . Briefer Mention Comment . Dublin Letter German Letter Irish Letter Italian Letter Modern Art Musical Chronicle Paris Letter Russian Letter Theatre, The Vienna Letter 92, 198, 287, 370, 465, 559 96, 203, 291, 374, 469, 568 53, 347, 523 58 53, 347, 523 159 100, 207, 295, 385, 476, 565 103, 210, 298, 388, 479 265, 449 168 98, 205, 293, 383, 474, 563 529 1 Made in Germany. Courtesy of V. Albertina, Vienna, STANDING SAINT. BY MATTHAUS GRUNEWALD THE VI NDIAL V OXXII JANUARY 1924 BAD HAN BY GLENWAY WESCOTT THE VIOLENT NIGHT THE Sunsettled into the tawny marshes. Lean cattle with large bony heads came down the lane to struggle around the water-trough. Summer was falling from the thin trees. Hannah Madoc stirred the fire. For two hours she had waited for her father to return from an election at Bieler. Supper was ready to set on the table. She sat by the window, hungry and re- sentful, preoccupied with the marshes, a broken dominating bright- ness. The snarled grass mile after mile piled by the wind, the thick sunlight in cups of white water, the herds of waterfowl in insubstantial letters on the sky. Beyond the yard the clay covered with burdocks and knot-grass fell away abruptly into bogs which disappeared in their turn in swales of harsh vegetation. A river crawled in loops and spirals through the valley, the bed of an ancient lake, twisting in tamarack swamps to the black, diminished water. From Hannah's window all this appeared as a spotted expanse, fecund but useless, a lure for the listless eye, bounded by stringy elms, by striped tamaracks- a tangled mass of livid twigs, curious leaves, flowers, and berries, their outlines lost in profusion. She drank a cup of black coffee, filled the tea-kettle, and sat down again. The sun crept among some trees. One by one with throaty cries the crows flew into the woods, their square notched wings like ragged sails. She stood sullenly in the open door peering into the yellow twi- 2 BAD HAN light, a tall girl, her shoulders heavy and her hips wide. The tea- kettle whined on the stove and the night clamour of crows rose in the woods. The marsh itself was silent but for a twitter of little nests on the edge of the sulphur sky. Hannah shivered and thought how the frost would blacken the tomato-vines in the night. Her coarse, stained hands lay loose in her lap. She was not twenty; her mother had been dead for ten years, and her father's house kept by a maiden aunt until she was thir- teen. She had seen the courtship of a widower fat and nervous, and was not surprised when her father, biting his lips and flicking his eyes as if he expected a tantrum, informed her that her aunt was going to be married and she would have to stay at home from school. The widower grew bald, and while he went courting wet his in- frequent hairs and combed them forward in stripes on his shiny head. He disciplined his moustache with wax. His lady laid the iron like a pair of scissors across the lamp chimney, and curled her colourless hair. She pinned a white ruffle inside her dress to dissemble the flatness of her breasts and fastened a fall of lace at her throat and descended the stairs with simpering dignity. Hannah remembered how she had crept out on the steps after her father was in bed to peer through the rails at the lovers. The widower smiled anxiously and patted her hand as he talked of him- self and his grown son. His beloved always nodded too emphatic- ally and mixed the words of her answers. All one evening he held his plump arm around her meagre waist and turned down the lamp to kiss her while Hannah trembled above in the dark. The fluttering old maid came up to the room they shared. Be- tween eyelids which seemed to be closed Hannah watched her in a flannel night-gown buttoned tight under her chin throw herself on her knees in an ecstacy of prayer, crying softly, and pressing her flat breasts against the bed. Hannah had seen at first no reason to dread her new responsi- bilities and although she discovered reasons enough, she knew no one to whom she might have complained. This evening she thought of her delinquent father, vain, abusive, and drunken. GLENWAY WESCOTT 3 Things might have been worse than they were: he had never struck her. She heard a rattle of wheels, loose bolts, and springs, the dragging of feet in the deep dust of the road before the house. David, the white horse, pulled the buggy into the yard beside the barn. Its stringy yellow legs glimmered as one moved over the other. It stopped. Her father tumbled slowly out of the buggy and stood for a long time gripping the wheel with both hands. His voice rose faint and shrill, cursing. The old man circled around David peering minutely for some- thing and stooped and picked up a club about four feet long. Shouting he struck the horse across the back; it jumped away and tipped the wagon upon two wheels. The old man's voice rose to a point. The neck sagging between the tufted withers and gaunt head turned apprehensively toward its master and it shifted its weight on the huge feet with fringed fetlocks. The old man's voice floated faintly through the open door. He raised the club a second time over the horse. The girl turned wearily away; she had seen it all before. She lit a lamp and set the boiled potatoes and salt pork once more over the weak blaze. She heard his feet stumble on the back porch and he stood in the door blinking at the light: a little man with a grizzled moustache, its many points brown with tobacco-juice, over a sharp jaw. His vague and bloodshot eyes seemed undivided by the bridge of the nose, side by side in the middle of his pale head. The nose arose under its tip and spread out wide and flat. With a dignified ges- ture he rubbed over his forehead a dirty hand with black finger- nails. "Your supper will be cold,” she said indifferently. "Cold, will it?” The voice was tired. The voice was tired. He scrutinized his daughter with care and pronounced, “You are a mean little hussy." He took a step into the room, staggered a little, and bent his weight against the back of a chair. "I know I know You always were a mean little hussy. You ought to have watered the cows." Each word was more gentle and murmuring; his head nodded sleepily. She said, “I had enough to get the supper. You can come home 4 BAD HAN and do it yourself instead of hanging around Bieler getting stewed.” He held up his head doggedly; his eyes were bright; saliva dripped from his hidden and dirty mouth. He straightened and elevated a proud trembling fist. “You are a mean little hussy," he shouted. “I'll whip you. Talk to your old father so. I'll whip you, that's what. I'll throw you out of my house, you miserable whelp.” Tears came into his watery eyes. The clenched fists shook and loosened. In the silence the tea-kettle whimpered on the stove and her father wept. "I'll whip her," he said. Hannah stood up. Suddenly he picked up the broom and lunged at her. The blow fell among the dishes on the table. The lamp pitched to the floor, glass crashing in the kerosene. She did not move. The trembling twilight entered the room and some firelight fell on the floor. He stood still, his head hanging, crying to himself. The broomstick knocked softly on the edge of the table. She could not close her mouth and watched the little old man in the bluish, uncertain dusk. The wind curled through the door. "That damned bitch,” he muttered, and swung the stick in the air. She crouched, throwing her arms over her face, and screamed. The stick shook over her head. With a leap she caught it in her hands, wrenched it from him, and dropped it. She wheeled around the table, crumpled his limp arms against his chest, and pushed him backwards through the door. He fell off the porch with a dull thud on the hard ground. She slammed the door. Framed by the window a few cold colourless stars pushed into the sky beside the moon. Hannah trembled as they came, weak, harsh, and separate, into sight. Then she brought from the sitting-room another lamp with a globular shade hand-painted with blood-red roses. She swept the broken lamp and dishes into a dustpan and wiped up the kerosene; ate a little bread and butter, cleared the table, and washed the dishes. A sick stupidity overcome her, in which her mind escaped from an unjust and brutal responsibility. The red and yellow light, the GLENWAY WESCOTT 5 grotesque shadows, the pan of weakly bright water in which her red hands agitated, the stained cucumber-green walls shook insub- stantially before her eyes as she worked. At last the crows were subdued, but a cow bellowed. Hannah peered through the square panes of glass and saw the winter set- tling upon the swamps, the dead of winter-mounds of ice, blue snow clotting the roads, they two shut in for the long cruel yellow nights. Where was her father? She heard a feeble groan, but insisted to herself that she didn't care; he was drunk and mean. She held her throat in her hand. As she stepped out on the porch he groaned again. The moon- light palpitated on the ground and before her lay the shadow of the house, a deep square pit into which she strained her vision. His face was a pale spot on the black lawn; he lay on his back beneath her. “Are you there?” she said. "Girlie.” His voice was very faint. "Girlie. Why don't you help your father. I am hurt.” He moaned and tried to lift his head. “You don't deserve to be helped,” she said harshly. But she brought out the lamp and set it on a chair where it blazed uncer- tainly. She jumped down beside him and bent over his face. The eyelids were shut. A little blood soaked through the thin hair over the right temple. The grass was stiff with frost under the soles of her house-slippers. Hannah stooped and lifted the little body in her arms. The eyes unclosed wearily. She carried him carefully up the steps and laid him on the square bed in the sitting-room, and put the lamp on a table by his head. He seemed to be unconscious. She washed the shallow cut and pinned a towel over it; undressed him and cov- ered him with quilts and built a fire in the sitting-room stove. The pillow rose round and strong on both sides of the grey face with scooped-out cheeks. The eyes seemed to protrude in their widening sockets. The breath entered and returned slowly from his nostrils. The arteries in his unshaven neck fluttered weakly. Hannah folded a shawl over her head and ran out of the house down the road. 6 BAD HAN She returned. Sometimes her father stirred and pulled at the red and white checked bedspread with his fingers bent over from the swollen knuckles. Sometimes his waxy lids divided and the lustreless eyeballs roved over the ceiling. The girl's eyes fol- lowed his across the papered surface, the hoops of faded flowers in a mocking and aloof expanse. The beady eyes and bone-like lips of relatives in crayon enlargements fixed on her from the walls; the worn cheap chairs surrounded her in a circle. Her vision wandered, but returned inevitably to the old man in the bed. In the weight like stone of his bony head on the pillows was the contingency of death which she faced, her poor scraps of property around her. The fire sounded like a heavy flock of birds. She put more wood on it and when a buggy rattled into the yard opened the kitchen door. "He's in here, doctor.” The doctor was a reddish young man with protuberant lips and a moustache. “What happened to him?" “He came home from election drunk and fell off the back porch.” A heavy drinker?” "Yes." He lifted and turned the sick man as a child in his capable fat hands. He fingered the bruises and held a pink ear to the back and chest. “There are only a couple of ribs fractured,” he said, "but I'm afraid he's pretty bad off. Congestion in both lungs.” Hannah followed him to the door. “You never can tell about these old people. But I don't think he'll pull through and he may go like a flash. You'd better not stay alone.” The Robins boy said his mother would come. In half an hour she appeared, a peaked colourless woman. “It's got blacker than a cat," she cried in a petulant soprano. “You poor girl! What ever'll you do without your pa?” They sat by the stove. Some- times one or the other slept. Hannah remembered the stock and hurried out with a lantern to feed them. The bitter scent of the barns, the profound mottled eyes and brutal lips, the pure plush voices, warmed and comforted her. She found Mrs Robins standing by the bed. The cheeks sank “I see GLENWAY WESCOTT 7 from the nose which seemed polished in the lamplight. But he still breathed. A centreless viscous light pushed through the windows. Hannah went outdoors. The green stars were flickering. Black and bearded shadows moved under the heavy trees. The shocked corn stood in the field like a village of barbaric silver tents. In the west she turned her face toward the marshes of frost and water, toward the sharp-husked seed and stony leaf. The wind came pointed over the horizon folding the harsh grasses into one direction. Squawking the bitterns waded into the air, their inter- laced quills golden as rust and granite-blue. As she turned toward the house Mrs Robins stood in the door, the words on her lips. IN THE FLOWER Hannah rented her farm in November and went to work in Boyle's store and saloon. One mid-winter Sunday she returned to Bieler along the Sheboygan road. The hill beneath which the vil- lage lay was topped by a cemetery, an acre of blue and white stones cut with the names of the principal families. The hub of five roads which led to it like spokes, Bieler was more important than its population of one hundred and twenty sug- gested, more animated than the numb visage of January after- noon could indicate. In the dry light the cluster of trees, build- ings, and steeples looked both mean and mysterious. Under the black boughs of an orchard bee-hives were arranged upon small depopulated streets. The black mill-race, between miniature levees and willows, cut across the village under foot- bridges of timbers dropped from bank to bank. About eight feet wide, it issued beneath the thin ice of the pond through a wooden sluice covered with frozen moss into a meadow where a horse stood, its tail to the wind. On the edges a pane of ice was sustained by some dead weeds; in the centre the current ran black and un- checked. The houses on both sides of the road, brick and clapboard, were surrounded by picket fences and evergreens. A little sad deer of 8 BAD HAN iron with slant iron eyes stood among frugal dead grasses. Near him a woman in billowy skirts of grey calico floated over the ragged Snow. At the crossing of the Sheboygan road and the Grimes road were clustered the hall, the school, the church-pivots of life: flimsy structures with empty windows in hideous symmetry. The church was of brick, rectangular, topped by an obtuse shingled gable. The steeple was substantial at the bottom like a box and near the top became spinous to elevate in the sky its tin Protestant cock. Be- hind ranged the sheds, partitions, and mangers marred by cribbing horses. The road continued northeast through the village past a black- smith shop and another saloon with houses of old men set evenly beside it. Hannah walked eastward upon the brick walk which pertained to Boyle's. She met Mrs Baltus leaving her shuttered house, a seamstress whose husband served time for bigamy in which their marriage had involved him. Her mouth, a matter of large crooked teeth and thin lips, set up a standard of melancholy to which her intentional eyes did not adhere. The girl paused on the wooden porch of her new home. In the east the mill brooded, an abrupt unpainted monolith. The roof slanted all one way, from front to back. A narrow platform, four feet from the ground with steps at each end, extended across the front to unload wheat and rye from high-wheeled lumber wagons and to return middlings, shorts, or bran. One of the small uneven windows, opaque with dust, was full of "patent” flour in cloth bags marked in red and blue with the miller's name, the name Snow Queen, and a picture of a florid woman crowned with golden grain in a night containing one star like a gooseberry. The sprawling saloon faced it vaguely across a littered yard. The unroofed piazza was fenced with rows of hitching posts. One door admitted to the store, another to the bar. At the right the orchard was also populated with a beggary of sheds, broken chicken coops, and the pump. The apple twigs, thickened to knuckles where the fruit had hung, keeping still here and there a rotten brown residue, broke the January light into mysterious lumps on the bare ground, on the rags of grey snow. Guinea hens peered for refuse and curved their cold faces over their spotted, egg-shaped bodies, crooning to themselves. GLENWAY WESCOTT 9 Hannah saw no hope in the winter Sabbath and went up to her room, passing through the store where Mrs Boyle held her watery eyes on a shirt for her eldest son, and three children fought on the floor. Her room contained a bed with a torn red comforter, a chair with a broken back, a wash-stand without bowl or pitcher, and an imitation-oak tin trunk. Above her pillow the plaster was cracked in a black cross and the uncurtained window gaped upon the road. She had seen her tenants, an old German woman named Schuler, with her son and daughter-in-law, established in her home. The beds, chairs, tables, dishes, and clocks, the ploughs and wagons, David, the two cows and three steers, the hens and lean spotted sows—an auction had scattered them over the whole county. The old woman with a shiny cane had ordered her chair beside Han- nah's window, and slept where her father had died. Grey geese hissed by the water-trough. The foreign odour of hand-cheese cur- ing made the kitchen seem hot and unventilated, and a jar of sauer- kraut frothed behind the stove. But Hannah did not care, nor did she think of her father. Never since the violent night had she gone through the elements of the scene to take blame upon herself or to shift it upon his dead shoul- ders. She realized what no one else knew, but went past the memory on tiptoe; as she had walked down a lane in childhood past a certain gate behind which the air was poisoned, the grass defiled by the carcass of a horse or sheep, and hurried swiftly on, un- stricken, irresponsible. She swayed in the twilight and heard Wally Filber's hound howl on its chain. At last she stirred because of hunger and went down stairs quickly, toward the clattering of dishes. The family collected for supper, Boyle with them since the bar- room was empty. The bull-like lift of the throat from his collar seemed subdued. Gloom pendulous in mouth and cheeks, he ate as if at a manger, ignoring the uproar of his offspring, the peevish remonstrances of their mother. The eldest was a girl of fourteen called Cassie, pale-eyed and evasive. There were two boys black as their father and two girls and the baby, another black boy. Hannah supervised his bread and milk in the wooden trough of his high-chair, wiped his mouth, and picked up his spoon. Mrs Boyle watched with kindly sus- picion. She seemed constantly to stiffen some part of herself for 10 BAD HAN the shock of a force which struck her always in another place, and extended toward Boyle a scrutiny insistent but furtive. Hannah's head felt better, but she yawned through supper and when the dishes were washed and Mrs Boyle asked how she felt, she answered, "Pretty bad,” drank a whiskey-sling, and went up- stairs. She set her lamp on the wash-stand beside the very dark blue window, and undressed. The confined air was yellow, the plaster like porcelain. A door slammed beneath. Suddenly out of the dark came a cat-call and a cluster of male giggles, words shouted and guffaws from the middle of the road. Hannah knew what they meant and folded a skirt about her. Holding it with one hand across her breasts she took the lamp in the other and strode to the window. She held the lamp over her head, smiled coarsely, her lips drawn back from her teeth. Then she blew out the light and went to bed. She lay there heavy and tormented. The saloon was full. A clink of glasses and bottles wavered upward. A man snapped cards on the table, another pounded with his fist. Henry Kinney began to sing “Oh my darling Nelly Gray,” and stopped. The re- sult of Mrs Balthus' lamp was a pumpkin of light. She saw her- self standing naked and sombre on a monolith like the mill. The glassy tinkle shimmered, laughter, “darling Nelly Gray” again. The hound howled, far off. Her work was hard. At a quarter past six Mrs Boyle knocked. She jumped out of bed and slipped a cotton morning-dress over her head and knotted up her hair. Her breath was white in front of her and dimmed the mirror. She washed her face and hands at the kitchen sink and helped Mrs Boyle get breakfast, pancakes, bacon, and fried potatoes. Boyle descended black and sulky. They ate in silence and Mrs Boyle stirred up the children. By this time farmers who came to the cheese-factory would arrive for a stein of beer or groceries. Either Han or Mrs Boyle went into the store, the other would get the children off to school. After dinner she swept or scrubbed the two public rooms. Sometimes the proprietor would go out for an afternoon or leave early in the morning with a team to bring supplies from the station, when Han would attend the bar. So the winter passed. GLENWAY WESCOTT 11 . One afternoon in April she was scrubbing the saloon, her kitchen apron looped to her waist over a soiled black petticoat. Alone, sit- ting on her heels in the middle of the soapy floor, she heard some women talking in the other room. "It's harder to make a hen set early in the spring She listened and thought of the worms curling and uncurling and wiped up the floor. The door opened behind her. A young man stood with his legs wide apart, looking down. She smiled her crooked smile, wiped her hands on her skirt, and stood up awkwardly. “Gi' me a glass of beer. It's warm to-day.” “Yes sir, it is.” She leaned to the great keg with a mug swaying her breasts. His black hair curled like vines over his ears. "Maybe it's not so hot. I've got on .” He stopped in confusion and drank. She observed the thickness of flesh over his eyebrows. “Yes, flannels I know. They make you sweat like a trooper.” He looked gratefully at her. “But I tell you the horses were steaming. My mare was dripping and all foamy between her legs." “Did you come to mill ?” "Yeah, I brought in the last of our wheat and some rye and oats for the hogs. Give me another. Do you work here now?" He pronounced his th's like d’s and puffed his words out larger than other men. “Ever since my father died, last November." "Oh, old Mr Madoc Do you like it?" “Yes, it's all right. But now it's spring, I'd like to be out-doors Last year I ploughed, five acres down by the sheep-fold. Dad said my furrows were as crooked as a yearling's tail, but I had fun. And the corn grew. I had fun with the crows." “They play hob with the seed, the devils,” he said. “Oh, well, you don't care much about the seed when you're ploughing." “That's right, you don't. Well I must get on home. So long." "So long.” Mrs Boyle smiled craftily. "You and Jule Bier had quite a more. talk.” 12 BAD HAN Hannah had never heard his name but answered, “Yes, he's a good friend of mine.” The hazard successful, she added, "Where is their farm ?" “Why his father lives right here, on the other side of the mill- pond. But of course Jule's working for Harley Diggs, four miles or more out on the marsh road.” Hannah took long deliberate stitches. “Of course he's a German. But he's a good steady fellow. Ger- mans though, they're always kind of heartless. They were as poor as church mice when they first came. The woman was in a family way, always wore a shawl over her head like a gipsy. Straight from the old country they were, Jule must have been about five then. The baby was born dead and the mother died. Oh, they were poor! People gave them things or they'd have starved. That first winter, I've heard they lived on cabbages and cow-beets.” Hannah raised her eyebrows. “Oh, but they're not like that now?" “My stars, no! Old Mr Bier has even paid off the mortgage. How, I don't know. They set out to do things in that heartless way.” When Boyle did not return supper was gay and talkative. The women and children laughed together. From time to time Mrs Boyle looked as if startled at the clock. An old man came in with a tin pail for beer. When Hannah sent him wavering off in the dark two others entered, and she re- mained on duty. She had changed her dress and tied a black velvet ribbon around her forehead. She preferred this to waiting in the store where the women were short with her. They thought her a brazen flirt. Under heavy black hats tilted forward their eyes in triangles of wrinkles re- proached her. One would step to the door between the two rooms and see the crooked-browed girl laughing with her husband or cal- low bony sons and walk sourly back to her friends. She would say, “Is your new girl pretty good help now, Mrs Boyle ?" The others would raise their ugly millinery and weatherbeaten faces, sharing her hate, but careful to say nothing to offend the storekeeper's wife. The air was striped with smoke. At the card tables men looked down their pipes or bent their tongues about wads of tobacco. Cards GLENWAY WESCOTT 13 were snapped. One swore or spit in the direction of the brass spit- toon. Men stood along the bar on one foot, the other foot on the rail. Conversation rose in peaks of noise and subsided. From time to time a resolute wife appeared in the doorway, pronounced her man's name sternly, and he went, to be replaced by another. Behind the bar tier upon tier with hieratical precision rose the drinks: bottle upon bottle, brandy upon Duffy's, kümmel and anisette, Virginia Dare and red and white wine; doubled by the cracked mirror, glit- tering in the smoke like an uplifted ideal ; upward to the two elks' heads and the stuffed fox, a secondary fur of dust and cobwebs de- scended upon them, the regard of their glass eyes voluptuous and cruel. The spilled wine scintillated in puddles on the bar, on the soaked and veined surface. Hannah swept her towel through them and mopped up the yellow beer foam. She saw a man falter in the middle of a sentence to stare at her body. She leaned against the mantel, flanked by oranges and withered lemons in baskets of Ger- man silver, and pretended to fix her eyes on something far and in- definite, but watched the crowd covertly. A young man had stood at the bar all evening. He had treated everybody twice, taken several whiskeys, and began to be drunk. About a quarter to nine he told a long story, lowering his voice to a mumble. The others stopped talking, slid closer, seemed to listen with their lips parted by a suspended chuckle. The narrator's thick-lidded eyes crept automatically over Hannah. The story ended in laughter, the awkward laughter which veils a less companionable emotion, and the teller called for a glass of schnapps. Hannah said, “It's time for you to go home, Joe Belger. This is the last you're going to get.” “It is, is it?" He rolled his eyes, his lip hanging loose. “I'd like to know who's goin' to make me go. I wan' you to know, I'm no' drunk. I'm no' drunk. I can take all your damned swill yet.” Hannah faced him sullenly. "When I do, I guess I'll take you with me. Over into the hay- mow. And when I'm done with you, you'll not be so sassy.” "You drunken fool,” she said. "You're a pretty bitch.” He lifted a dirty hand from his pocket 14 BAD HAN and pulled it out. She saw it, an oval with black nails, but did not move. He patted her, smiling. She jerked away and swung around the end of the bar. The men drew back. She seized the drunkard by his coat-lapels and drove him backwards. Before he knew what had happened he rolled on the platform outside. The dark was bordered by horses who re- garded him mildly nodding their noses. She slammed the door. Hannah stalked back to her place. The other doorway had filled with startled women. The men muttered, "Good job, Han. Serves him right.” She turned on them. “Joe Belger's a fool, but he's better than any of you. You listen to his dirty stories and drink with him till he's stewed. You think it and he says it. Every last one of you would like to, but you haven't the nerve. haven't the nerve. You haven't the nerve and—” tossing her head at the doorway, “you're afraid of your wives." Her beauty threatened them in a chaos of bottles and mirrors. Fatigue drew everyone out into the night. The vertigo over, she slept, and resumed her monotonous life. During the spring Jule Bier came often. He timed his trips to mill or the blacksmith to find her alone. Between noon and twilight clouds rolled in a warm wind like barrels and piled over the horizon in various directions. The air was pierced by grape vines and cinnamon roses. In the dust Amelia Krohn, her peaked face enveloped in a blue sunbonnet, followed her cow and its alto bell. Ants crawled between the bricks of the walk. Above them Mrs Blau's dog trotted beside Mrs Bol- ton's dog, their tails precise. The narrow nighthawks promenaded heaven. Hannah appeared in the back yard. She wore a cotton dust-cap, her hair collected in white curl-papers on her low forehead. She hung a wooden pail on the pump and stared at the evening. On the tongue of a wagon a hen grouped her chickens; their red skin turned in the patches of feathers. A cherry tree scattered its sick round yellow leaves. Her beau was coming in two hours. The quiet persisted and darkened. Hawks returned to their chimneys. The heavy moon stepped from hill to hill. Night had come, night warmer than thought. Hannah filled her pail with water. GLENWAY WESCOTT 15 . She appeared to Jule white and ruffled, Sweetheart perfume on her breast, her hair divided in damp branches, her face pallid with powder. “Wait a minute. I will get my coat.” He leaned against the candy counter, until she returned. He spread a flowered laprobe over their knees. The moon con- tinued among pallors. The darkening air seemed crowded with pendant calices and stamens which set in motion slow sweet draughts. In the feathery tree-tufts some little birds sang, vesper sparrows and phoebes. In the centre the mill-pond was cold as a mirror, but upon the margin, lemon and frail, the rushes threw down their shadows. Marsh-trees closed over the road. From their roots the marsh fragrance aspired, harsh and narcotic; Hannah knew it well. Jule tapped the leather dash-board with the whip in his hands, pointing to a house on a hill, over above a pool surrounded with cat-tails. “That is my home.” It was only a black peak in the sky. From one of the barns a faint colour without radiance pene- trated a dusty glass. "Father is milking. I wish he wouldn't work so late, but he always has and always will, till he drops in his tracks.” The mare trotted downward past an old orchard and raspberry patch. Some turkeys roosted in a dying tree against the light. Unfolding her white veil she bared her black head, the costly glim- mer of her face. "Have you always lived here?” she asked. "Oh, not always. But since I was five years old. We came, you know, from Saxony." “Can you remember that?” “Yes. We lived by a great forest. The pine-trees came right down to our house. Nothing could grow under them, it was so dark. There were foxes and rabbits there and wolves. I got lost there once. I was out all night. I thought I should never get back." His knees pressed against her; they seemed to make a mark. She said, “But they found you.” "Yes, but I don't remember that." The road cut into a hill as it ascended so that the bank was above their heads. The moon crept away. In eccentric triangles a bat flapped over them, his track a channel of colourless sky leveed by trees. 16 BAD HAN They spoke no more. Jule stopped the mare by the side of the road which pushed into the woods. Some oval pendulous leaves reached their knees like black flowers on the laprobe. He sighed and putting his arm behind her drew her to him. His other hand rested on her thigh. He began to kiss her face, but she pushed him away with both hands and turned toward the forest. He relaxed his embrace. Suddenly she thrust her hand under his coat and took him. They kissed. The stars swam to and fro like fish in a waveless sea. The black mare shifted from leg to leg. On the white laprobe the hazel- leaves vacillated. At last she shivered in her lover's arms and said, “We must go back.” She heard his sigh in the darkness and felt his lips in fare- well upon her throat and lips. He took up the reins. One night in August they went together to a dance at Silver Creek. The Sabbath had been a hot recess in the frenzied harvest. Men moved hammocks and chairs under the pale dried trees, and sat in their shirt-sleeves, wiping their faces, speechless. At inter- vals the locust pricked the air with his minute scream. The world twisted about and the boiling fields turned into the shadow of night. The little mare tipped her ears forward and backward. The hills were little horns of warmth pointed into the amber sky. As it faded the quaggy hollows filled with musk and fog, which eddied in cir- cles past her pink distended nostrils. "It only took us forty minutes to come,” Jule said, holding out a thick silver watch. Hannah jumped over the wheel. “I'll wait in the cloak-room.” He tied the mare in the shed and blanketed her. Men stood in the dusk whistling softly or talking of harvest, horses, or women. Jule swayed his body above the knees and his coat hanging between his legs caressed him. A deep trembling arose within like laughter. Loafers clustered on the steps about the lighted door: young boys and older men, one whose head was like a white pumpkin, one with a harelip, too repulsive to find favour, who collected only to peer at ankles and breasts. By the door Hannah breathed from a late rose pinned on her coarsely embroidered dress. The shuffle of feet, the sound of violins like a fall of arrows, laughter and talk played in the room. Al- GLENWAY WESCOTT 17 ready the air was bitter with perspiration, cheap perfume, and the smoke of many oil-lamps. She collected the tumult in a flower whose flesh was dark and mysteriously transparent. She drew back her drooping lips from her irregular teeth, sniffing the rank air. They danced. There were square-dances, circle two-steps, an oc- casional quadrille with a tall man in shirt-sleeves calling the changes and tapping the floor with his foot, and the waltz, the new whirling dance. The girls blanched and sighed curiously and shiv- ered. Overhead echoes of the cornet fell like spears. The young people did not dance gracefully. Labour had mould- ed them too gaunt, too heavy, too strong. The heel predominated in the movements of their feet. They stooped. Their arms hung as if weighted. Their faces became vacant as if they were sleepy. They clung drowsily. Sometimes the men stared curiously into the face of one with purple lips who was full of a wistful animal melancholy The evening's entertainment did not progress, but went round and round. Excitement progressed of its own impetus. In the intervals Jule and Hannah went down to the basement to drink beer and kümmel. Or they walked arm in arm under the trees. Sweet and restless the music circled between branch and branch. Behind a lilac he kissed her where her breasts withdrew under the coarse embroidered bodice. At eleven the boys and sad old loafers withdrew. The older men, family groups in democrats and drop-seats, drove away. In a kind of professional frenzy the orchestra scraped and pounded. They had commenced the evening with black ties and celluloid collars; now the cornetist blew in his under-shirt, his cheeks two blood-red balls. Between dances, ascetics for gain, they drank, smoked, swore, told dirty stories, their eyes on yellow-haired girls with their men taking the paths beneath the ashes. At twelve Jule and Hannah stood by the window. They heard the vain wind stroking the leaves. “Oh, the air is filthy in here,” she said. "Let's go. Get your coat and we'll take a walk.” Arm in arm they faded into the night of which they were native. In all the dusky corners of bush or tree men and girls lurked, whispering, and above them the stars, soundless, as if lip upon lip. The houses of Silver Creek were unlighted where the old and the 18 BAD HAN lonely lay, tossing in heat. From a window a black breeze sucked out a shred of curtain. Jule and Hannah were glad to feel the dust dull and noiseless under their feet. Sound retreated from their tired ears, faint and fair. They passed the church, shuttered and snowy, and turned down a lane. He swung his arm about her waist. There was a thorn-tree by the fence. Beyond it the corn rattled in hard subtle rows, and a frog murmured. He said, “The wheat field. We can lie upon the bundles.” She followed him carefully through the barbed-wire fence. The stubble cracked under their feet. The shocks of grain stood gravely under a firm sky sprinkled with stars. Jule tipped one shock over and spread its bundles care- fully under another. They lay down in the shadow, their faces and the field faintly luminous. Hannah pressed her lips into the beard- ed heads, ran them up and down the sleek straw. Her lover's hands pled for her; his patience was all around her, relentless and fresh. He murmured, “The air is smoky. There must be forest fires.” "Yes, it is bitter,” she said. She trembled and faced the down- pour of kisses on her mouth and throat. He left her then a moment and walked back and forth naked in the field. The stubble pricked his bare feet and the wind rubbed against him with a pair of hot slender horns. “Come back, Jule,” she called. "What are you doing?” “Nothing, dear. It is so warm He returned. She laughed in his arms. It was as if he held his own self. When he woke up the dew dripped upon them and he felt it with his finger wetting her cheek. UPWARD, UPWARD Hannah and Mrs Boyle sat sewing in the store. They had sent the children out upon the roads with bags and baskets to gather hazel-nuts. The day was cool and shiny. On the ground shadows followed the disorderly clouds: the women looked up as the light faded between the shelves of spices and dress goods, under suspend- ed rakes and tin pails. GLENWAY WESCOTT 19 “Mrs Boyle, don't think I'm fresh for what I'm going to tell you." . "Why, Hannah, what is it? It doesn't matter what you say. What is it?” She leaned over a dress for the baby which had begun to change her figure. "Mr Boyle, does he has he ever run after other women ?” She replied as if he might be hiding to hear her testimony. "You mean that he Has he said something to you? Tell me what he did.” The girl continued to sew. “Tell me, Hannah. My feelings won't be hurt.” “Oh, it doesn't really matter. He meant well enough, and didn't do any harm. What I want to know is, do you care? I mean, if he went further." Mrs Boyle hesitated over her treason. "Oh, yes, he has his wild streaks. Once he had a spell for Mrs Balthus. I never said anything." “But don't you hate him for it?" the girl asked. “Oh, no. He can't help himself. It's all my fault, I guess.' "Why is it your fault, I'd like to know?” "Well Han, I'm always tired out, and I ain't pretty like I used to be. I've had six children and twice been sick when it didn't come.” “But they were his children.” "A man hates a woman who's always having children who's sure to.” She nodded her foolish head like a toy. "He swore when I told him about this one, and when I cried he patted me, and said it was a dirty shame.” The two women sewed. A cockerel rose on his spindle legs to crow discordantly. Hannah put some potatoes on to boil and sat down again. A windy dusk tore the smoke out of the chimneys. "You ought to tell me. I have a right to know.” Hannah returned a tantalizing justice. "Yes, I suppose you have. But I haven't much right to tell, since he didn't say I should. And I've no hard feeling against him.' “You must remember he is my husband.” She crumpled her sewing in her small red hands. 20 BAD HAN Hannah answered crisply, tempted beyond her purpose. “He has said things several times that I've pretended not to understand. And touched me. I wouldn't have said anything, but last night—" “Yes ?" “It was half dark in here; the big lamp doesn't work. I didn't see him until he was close; his eyes were very queer and bright, and his shirt all open at the neck. He took my hand and pushed it under his shirt, sort of laughing, and held it tight in his arm-pit. I didn't know what to do, and he began to kiss me.” Mrs Boyle backed up against the counter, stiff and pale. “Didn't you do anything? You could have got away. You could have struck him. Didn't you cry? He'd have let you go; he wouldn't hurt a fly. You wretched girl! Why didn't you call ?” She shook her small face, the eyes full of tears. The girl was haughty. “There wasn't time. And besides he wasn't hurting me.” The woman pushed a dirty handkerchief into her eyes; Hannah put an arm around her. "Now listen, Mrs Boyle. It'll be all right. He has his fancies, but he really doesn't care for any of us. What'd he do without you? He'd look fine with all these little kids. Don't cry. He knows it; if he doesn't I'll tell him.” "Oh, no, don't say anything, don't say anything.” She was com- forted and clung to the girl. When Hannah saw Jule she said she wanted another place. "Why?” he asked with affectionate suspicion. "Oh, I'm tired of pouring drinks and measuring calico for old women.” "And Boyle, does he run after you?” She smiled. “Oh, yes. Not that I mind. But I'm sorry for his poor scared little wife.” “I'd like to beat him up,” he said, running his hands along the counter. “Don't be silly. Don't you know anybody who wants help? I'd like to get back to the country.” “Yes, I think I do. Mrs Balker over near where I work. I'll find out." Early in November Mrs Balker drew up before the store in a democrat. She drove her fat black horse herself, her hands pro- GLENWAY WESCOTT 21 tected by coon-skin mittens. She sat up very straight, a round hat secured by a dirty-looking veil tied under her chin. The little tin trunk was carried down from the bare room. Han- nah appeared on the platform among the hitching-posts, kissed the children and Mrs Boyle who cried a little, shook hands with Boyle, obscure and speculative, who wished her luck. She climbed up be- side her new employer, and tucked in the buffalo robe. Their road cut downward through a dreary forest. Tamaracks stood with their moth-eaten bark and untidy needles, each upon its little island of sod; ice of a startling whiteness, dead power-stalks and red stems between; a flimsy boundary of barbed-wire to re- strain steers and heifers in the summer; the road raised by sunken stones and timbers above the level of miniature canals full of su- mach the colour of dried blood. The old woman watched her furtively. The marshes were empty. Silver upon their jagged wings, crows alone went through the fu- nereal trees. Hannah heard the clamour of many in some thick pines where they baited a dizzy owl or fought over the rotten car- cass of a hog. The road veered upward again between farms, stubble-acres dotted with pyramids of manure capped with hoar-frost or fields striped with furrows. They passed a prosperous-looking farm with sprawling barns and an unpainted house. Hannah waved her hand to Jule, who led through the yard a gigantic black bull upon a pole fastened to his nose. The old woman broke her moody silence. "Who was that ?” "Jules Bier.” “Oh, yes, you know him.” She wheezed frankly into a blue handkerchief. “I hain't asked you why you left Boyle's. It's no matter, I dare say Boyle devilled you.” Hannah chuckled. "Oh, he was all right.” “Mind you,” she continued, “I see no harm in your havin' a little fun. You might as well take it when you can get it, Lord knows.” The solid rectangle of her face wrinkled into hard crescents. “But with those five children, or however many there may be by this time my Lord! It would have made a mess. She wasted no curiosity on Hannah; her wisdom absorbed her. The next farm surrounded the end of a lane bordered by plums 22 BAD HAN and evergreens into which the fat horse turned of his own accord. Behind the house, the red barn, horse stable, chicken coops, and outhouses, the earth dropped strangely so as to leave them on the horizon, and Hannah saw beneath another icy lake surrounded with weeds. Mrs Balker tumbled briskly over the wheel of the democrat and began to unhitch. Hannah knotted up the tugs and reins, un- buckled the holdback, glancing curiously at her new home. Within the stable a dappled white equally fat horse whinnied. In the yard littered with potato peelings and bare bones a few pullets flicked their circular lidless eyes at the dismal sky. The old woman, with a peculiar halting gait as if each step gave her a twinge in her sub- stantial hips, led the way into the house. Hannah looked over her shoulder at the disk of ice, the tilting fields, and saw a puff of smoke shell from the chimney, half a mile away, where Jule lived. She shifted quickly into the new order. From May to Septem- ber Mrs Balker kept a hired man, but during the winter she and a girl did the chores. She kept three brood sows and a young boar, two horses, five cows, chickens, cats, and a blind dog named Caesar who lay on a burlap bag behind the kitchen stove. She pre- ferred the outdoor work as her share since it spoiled her appetite to fuss over the stove. Formerly Mrs Balker had been a zealous Methodist, a rigid moralist, a "power in the community,” delicate in person, and a great reader. An epidemic of scarlet fever had removed, after a week of horror and delirium, her husband and two children. Habits, perceptions, and prejudices had gone with them. An embodied routine, a sturdy irony, a dead level of emotion impossible to be raised or furrowed, survived. The winter encircled these two women, solid and comfortless. By the first of December the water in the trough accumulated ice two inches thick. Mrs Balker in high boots and leather mittens broke it with an axe, and let out the five thin cows from their stanchions. They jostled and bunted in the doorway, wild with thirst. When they saw the black water pied with ice and steam- ing the colder air, they snorted; clouds blew from their thick muz- zles; and they drank short gulps. While the old woman wheeled out manure in a dripping wheelbarrow, they stood on one side of the stack, away from the wind, eating the shiny straw. GLENWAY WESCOTT 23 By lantern-light they carried the foaming milk in a can cau- tiously up the slippery path cut through the snow-banks, and set it to rise in large tin pans in the pantry. The door was barred against the fierce blue nights and they went up stairs carrying hot flat-irons wrapped in flannels to warm their beds. In the morning Hannah skimmed the leathery cream from the pans and put it away to sour. Every second day she made butter, putting the cream in a churn like a small barrel narrow at the top in which she worked a round dasher with a wooden handle. She held the churn between her spread knees and stared through the window at the shallow mauve snow from which the dry weeds and grasses were strung upward for the wind to play upon. When the pale blue buttermilk began to gather around the dasher she looked in shrewdly, at the proper moment threw in a dipper of cold water; and soon after drained out the butter, worked, salted, and packed it in jars for the market. For dinner she brought in a piece of beef from the meat-box which stood in the drifted snow outside the door, and thawed it behind the stove. After washing up the dishes she baked bread. About three o'clock Mrs Balker in her dirty short skirt and boots came in from the barn. “If it's the same to you, I'll take Nance and drive over to my sister's for the night. There's nothin' to do but milk and feed the critters." Her sister scolded her for not "keeping herself up better”; so she put a great copper kettle of water on the stove, and laid out her best clothes reeking with moth- balls. Hannah always took these occasions to meet her lover. At dusk she put on overshoes and heavy woolen leggins and set out across the fields. The sun had left a chocolate-coloured haze among the rich dead leaves of the oak-trees in the west. She kept to the way she knew, down a lane and along fences beneath some elms. The snow was rough in a path where her own feet had gone before. She came down a lane behind the barn. Two unbroken colts with hair like fur and manes combed out by the wind ran about the straw-stack. Hannah knew that Jule would be alone in the barns because his rheumatic employer did not venture into the severe cold. She knew he would say as he brought in the milk that he was going to spend the night at his father's. He would hitch the little mare to the 24 BAD HAN cutter, and put her in Mrs Balker's stable beside the whinnying black and white geldings. She remembered how the wind pounded on the windows or how the snow heaped up on the doorstep, and how happy they were sitting by the stove while the flat-irons heated. The colts ceased their curvetting; and came inquisitively to her, rolling their soft eyes, their pink nostrils palpitating. But when she put out a hand to touch them, they reared backward and began to circle again about the yellow stack capped with snow. She en- tered the fragrant gloom of the stable. Shadowy cattle creaked in their wooden stanchions. Jule's lantern hung over a box-stall on a nail festooned with cobwebs. On his knees he helped a new-born calf to suck the globular bag of its heifer mother. His face, when he lifted it, glowed with welcome and content. He treasured her as a part of himself. He did not brood upon her and did not idealize her. As his flesh thickened and concen- trated in a solidity of health, his imagination roved unsatisfied. And he was driven by his father's passion, by the old man labour- ing in a frenzy of mortification. He could not forget that he had eaten cast-off turnips and cabbages; that his son's life had been preserved by charity. He hurried among his cattle and sheep, a slight round-backed figure biting his moustache. He thought of a time when others would forget, as he could not, the bad days: the little boy and he, hand in hand, on roads rough with ice, begging for work from house to house; his pallid wife, the black shawl clutched under her chin, waiting for another baby. The succeeding years had not altered him. But they had enabled him by brutal labour, by shrewdness in raising sheep on stony hills good for little else, by European frugality, to buy, with a heavy mortgage at first, the small farm near Bieler, and gradually to rid himself of the debt. In this land of the free nothing would purchase the respect and forgetfulness of his neighbors but accumulated money. To his scrupulous peasant eyes much had been accumu- lated; but he grew old and had not achieved his desire. There palpitated far above him an alluring light of influence and leisure. One night as he listened to Jule's talk of a party at the Metho- dist church, another plan detached itself spontaneously from his desolate thought. He looked at his son, a man tall and broad with wide eyes and red lips, and thought of Selma Duncan. It was as GLENWAY WESCOTT 25 if the clouds of his disappointment and fatigue had opened to re- veal, in the lambent and feverish air, his desire crowned, walking free, in a yellow cotton dress. Another night he told his son what he wanted, very sternly to hide a terrible anxiety, hardly expecting to be obeyed. Jule saw his father's twisted hands tremble and his eyes fill with moisture. He felt neither resentment nor surprise. He commenced a court- ship automatically, without decision or design. The Duncans were the most influential family in the neighbour- hood. Old Mr Duncan, a pioneer, prominent in church work, had sat in the legislature and owned two farms, the larger of which he rented. His eldest son was a doctor in Milwaukee, a pale man with protuberant eyes and a sparse pointed beard, who came home infrequently. The daughters had graduated from a finishing school in Janesville. The younger was named Theodora or Ted; the elder, Selma, was twenty-five years of age and played the organ in church. One night in February Jule stopped at home on his way to see Selma. From the barn his father saw the mare tied and blanketed, and came in. "Hello Jule.” “Hello father. How are you feeling?" His face was white and drawn. "Oh, I'm all right.” "Why do you work so hard? You look tired.” "Oh, no.” He filled his pipe, too carefully. “Are you going over to Duncan's ?” "Yeah.” “Say Jule do you think she'll have you? Soon, I mean.” He hadn't asked her. He thought of Hannah; his voice hard- ened. “Yes, I think so.” "I'm getting old. I'd like to see you settled.” Jule untied the little mare and the cutter slid in the snowy road. His heart ached, but secretly even from himself, his content was undisturbed. For in his imagination he met the new girl. Narrow and straight she swayed from side to side there like a suspended veil. His speculation was of her as he followed the cattle over hills whose grass was like chamois or stooped under the ironwood or crooked plum—what she would think and say. She talked of books and music or read to him, her eyes dilated with unfamiliar purposes; and a new sensation wooed him. And it seemed that 26 BAD HAN Hannah said nothing and meant nothing. When he left her he was unchanged, nothing was changed; a confusion of sensation and experience reclaimed him in which he felt helpless and awkward. Snow creaked under the runners; the mare hurried. From the hill covered with locusts the lamps of Hill Farm, where the Dun- cans lived, leaped in the leafless cherries. Selma agreed to marry him. He was milking when Hannah came abruptly into the lantern light, her head in a black woolen shawl. Two locks of hair blew before her eyes, her cheeks were marked with cherry, she was beau- tiful. “Oh, I'm out of breath! I came around by the road, the snow is so deep.” He smiled at her contentedly and went on milking. “Can you come over ?" “I surely can.” "Well I must run back. I've still two cows to milk.” She dis- appeared, slamming the door, covered with a velour of frost, be- hind her. Then he realized what he had done and turned suddenly sick. His fingers squeezed the teats mechanically. The sweet-smelling milk beat in the pail; it left a faint tube-shaped mist in the black air. His head drooped heavily against the cow's belly. More miserable than he had ever been he took the milk into the house; washed at the kitchen sink, shrinking strangely from the cold water; said nothing to the old man and woman, but went out; and stumbled down the road in the slippery cutter-tracks. Hannah had finished her chores and sat in the kitchen, looking indifferently at a farm weekly. Her first glance took in his humour, but she was familiar with many moods and said nothing. He sat down dumbly in a corner. A lamp threw some green figures on the green wall stained with smoke. Behind the range the blind Caesar whimpered in his sleep. Jule began to be afraid that he would go away without telling her. His decision shifted like a ball rolled from side to side in a box. Meanwhile a craving for unity, for conclusion, struggled with every more familiar craving. Hannah waved the large, insignificant pages. Then she rose, put a shade over the lamps, and seated herself in one of two chairs GLENWAY WESCOTT 27 by the window. She surveyed the yard overflowing with moon- light. It dropped conclusively on the worn shingles. The fence- posts were black as ebony. Two paths shovelled in the snow cut the bright space with dark blue ditches. From the hollow arose the glitter of the ice-bound lake which lay before the brooding woman as if at the bottom of a stair. In a darkness vibrating with warmth and the anticipation of passion, Jule cowered. At last he came to the chair beside her, weak and miserable. She put one hand gently on his knee. He was beside himself; could neither commence their love-making nor arrest it. At last "Hannah.” "Yes?" “I have something to tell you." Before her inclined head, her knotted eyebrows, as if at the foot of a staircase, the ice glimmered. Occasionally a cutter would swim through the moonlight leaving the round silver notes of the sleigh-bells to heap and float in the air. The globe of lamplight seemed to revolve. He felt himself sinking in a soft, insane si- lence, where he struggled. “My father doesn't want me to go with you." Her startled, upturned cheek caught the oily moonlight. "Well I don't see that he has anything to do with it.” She stared haugh- tily, ostensibly without interest. "He's getting old and he has notions about things—what he wants me to do, I mean.” In a dull voice she repeated after him, "And what does he want you to do?” She bent toward him. He breathed heavily; he must make her understand; it was his last chance. "He wants me to marry Selma Duncan.” The girl moved obscurely. “Oh, Selma Duncan. Which one of them is that, the youngest one ?” “No, the pale one with light hair.” She was very still. "Didn't you ever go to the Methodist church? She plays the organ there." “No, I never went .” She shifted slightly in her chair toward him. "Have you been to see her ?” “Yes.” Scornfully, “Do you think she would have you ?” “Yes I know she will,” he answered in a low voice. . 28 BAD HAN "Well have you asked her to marry you ?” She laughed softly and harshly. “Yes I have.” There was an empty moment. She struck him in the face. She struck him again and again. She scratched his cheek with her fingernails and the blood oozed out near his mouth. After a short struggle he was able to hold her arms in his large hands. She relaxed. The blood, ebbing out of her face, distorted by anger, left it inanimate and dirt-coloured. Some slow tears col- lected upon her cheeks; they dripped faster and faster. She set her teeth upon cries which were choked and lifeless. He had never seen her cry. In the struggle her dress had been torn, baring her left shoulder and the breast which shook heavily. He stooped and kissed her gloomy flesh, stiff with sorrow and de- sire. She held his head against her breast and ran her fingers through his hair and wept, and at last a fierce smile appeared and hung upon her lips. The pulsing blood shook his eyes so that he could not see. And they were dominated by another body, a white electric intellectual outline. Again, the warmth was hot, the sweet too sweet, his strength too strong; but he thought he was free. He lifted her in his arms and carried her up the steep steps to her bed. Before midnight he trotted down the road, a bright blue trough, toward his home. To be continued FOUR POEMS BY E. E. CUMMINGS I O Thou to whom the musical white spring offers her lily inextinguishable, aught by thy tremulous grace bravely to fling Implacable death's mysteriously sable robe from her redolent shoulders, Thou from whose feet reincarnate song suddenly leaping flameflung, mounts, inimitably to lose herself where the wet stars softly are keeping their exquisite dreams-0 Love! upon thy dim shrine of intangible commemoration, (from whose faint close as some grave languorous hymn pledged to illimitable dissipation unhurried clouds of incense fleetly roll) i spill my bright incalculable soul. II perhaps it is to feel strike the silver fish of her nakedness with fins sharply pleasant, my youth has travelled toward her these years or to snare the timid like of her mind to my mind that i 30 FOUR POEMS am come by little countries to the yes of her youth. And if somebody hears what i say—let him be pitiful: because i've travelled all alone through the forest of wonderful, and that my feet have surely known the furious ways and the peaceful, and because she is beautiful III Picasso you give us Things which bulge: grunting lungs pumped full of sharp thick mind you make us shrill presents always shut in the sumptuous screech of simplicity (out of the black unbunged Something gushes vaguely a squeak of planes or between squeals of Nothing grabbed with circular shrieking tightness solid screams whisper.) Lumberman of The Distinct your brain's axe only chops hugest inherent Trees of Ego, from whose living and biggest E. E. CUMMINGS 31 bodies lopped of every prettiness you hew form truly IV at the ferocious phenomenon of 5 o'clock i find myself gently de- composing in the mouth of New York. Between its supple financial teeth deliriously sprouting from complacent gums, a morsel prettily wanders buoyed on the murderous saliva of industry. the morsel is i. Vast cheeks enclose me. a gigantic uvula with imperceptible gesticulations threatens the tubular downward blackness occassionally from which detatching itself bumps clumsily into the throat A meticulous vulgarity: a sodden fastidious normal explosion; a square murmur, a winsome flatulence In the soft midst of the tongue sits the Woolworth building a serene pastile-shaped insipid kinesis or frail swooping lozenge. a ruglike sentience whose papillae expertly drink the docile perpendicular taste of this squirming cube of undiminished silence, supports while devouring the firm tumult of exquisitely insecure sharp algebraic music. For the first time in sorting from this vast nonchalant in- ward walk of volume the flat minute gallop of careful hugeness i am conjugated by the sensual mysticism of entire vertical being, i am skilfully construed by a delicately experimenting colossus whose irrefutable spiral antics involve me with the soothings of plastic hypnotism .i am accurately parsed by this gorgeous rush of up- ward lips. cleverly perching on the sudden extremity of one immense tooth myself surveys safely the complete important profane frantic inconse- 32 FOUR POEMS quential gastronomic mystery of mysteries life. Far below myself the lunging leer of horizontal large distinct ecsta- sy wags and. rages Laughters jostle grins nudge smiles push- deep into the edgeless gloaming gladness hammers incessant putrid spikes of madness (at Myself's height these various innocent ferocities are superseded by the sole prostituted ferocity of silence, it is) still 5 o'clock I stare only always into the tremendous canyon the tremendous canyon always only exhales a climbing dark exact walloping human noise of digestible millions whose rich slovenly obscene procession always floats through the thin amorous enor- mous only lips of the evening And it is 5 o'clock in the oblong air, from which a singular ribbon of common sunset is hanging, snow speaks slowly PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST. Property of Stewart Mitchell BY E. E. CUMMINGS A WASH DRAWING. BY E. E. CUMMINGS - 6 } BULLFIGHT. BY E. E. CUMMINGS AN AMERICAN CRITIC: VAN WYCK BROOKS BY MARY M. COLUM THER WHERE is one type of critic who is more important to a country than all but the greatest of its artists, and he is the one who by his criticism creates the conditions in which the artist can work and flourish as a free spirit. Creating these conditions is not within the power of the purely aesthetic critic; this can only be achieved by the man who is both a social critic and an aesthetic critica social critic who has a sense of history and an aesthetic critic who is a philosopher and a psychologist. It is a rare enough combination, but America has produced it in Van Wyck Brooks a mind that is so especially the product of America that, from one point of view, he might be said to be the most purel : American writer. He seems to be able to wake up every morning and regard Amer- ica, and everybody who ever wrote in America, or who signified anything in American life, with fresh, eager, and ever-interested eyes. His mind perpetually revolves around the idea of a national culture in America, and he pursues all sides of the subject with such a vividness of interest and vividness of language, that when you have read three or four of his books, you begin to believe that the creation of such a culture is one of the few causes left worthy of the devotion and self-sacrifice of men. Lessing was once able to make almost all Germany feel like that about German culture, and W. B. Yeats and A. E. were able to make almost all Ireland feel like that about Irish culture. It is obvious that a writer who can make people feel like this has an intensely national quality. It is obvious also that a writer with his combination of gifts is of an order of critics rare in literature in English. He represents rather the Continental European conception of a critic—a conception which has never been partial to the idea of a critic as simply a manufacturer of literary or aesthetic standards, or as a maker of rules and regulations for artists to follow. The Anglo-Saxon idea of a critic, when not regarding him as a censor of morals, is as a formulator of aesthetic standards and a corrector of taste. Criticism 34 AN AMERICAN CRITIC: VAN WYCK BROOKS was never really of great importance in English literature, for Eng- lish, unlike certain other literatures, proceeded in a steady evolu- tion without any halt in its development; English culture was al- ways adequate to English needs—that is, up to our time; and every exigency in its civilization was met by a great artist who was able to give a dream and a philosophy to his people. English culture never reached an impasse as German culture did before Lessing, or as American culture has in our time, and as, perhaps, some other European cultures are on the point of reaching. For that reason, the function of a critic in England was a limited one. The purely aesthetic critic has, in the last analysis, to take his place in literature with other literary men, and his work has to be judged simply for its literary value. But the really important critics have a value beyond their value as literary men: the real test of their work is the forming value of their ideas and the extent of the influence they exert both on life and literature. Standards change, but an idea that has fundamental validity, such as the great critics like Lessing and Taine have contributed, is likely to last as long as the literature of which it is a part. Amongst the major functions of a critic is that of a pathfinder for the artist and a recognizer and appreciator of the artist when he arrives. Such functions are not amongst those expounded by Mr T. S. Eliot in his article, The Functions of Criticism, in the October number of the Criterion: what Mr Eliot pleads for is a literary dictatorship. But it is the business of criticism to abolish literary dictators. Mr Brooks is in no sense a dictator; his conception of the func- tions of criticism is very remote from that of literary dictatorships. He is a pathfinder, a contributor of transforming ideas. Really fine critics, like really great artists, are national and racial products. They spring from the roots of the race and civilization to which they belong, and their work is, first of all, a service to that race and civilization. Although Van Wyck Brooks has writ- ten books on subjects remote from America, he is, first of all, an American critic, and his real contributions to criticism are all re- lated to American culture. His first book, The Wine of the Puri- tans, published when he was about twenty-two, contains one of the soundest and most impressive chapters in contemporary criticism. Here he makes the discovery which has to be made anew for every country that would create a literature—the discovery that all great MARY M. COLUM 35 art is national. "A man's work,” he says, “is more the product of his race than of his art, for a man may supremely express his race without being an artist, while he cannot be a supreme artist with- out expressing his race.” The recognition of this simple fact is the recognition of a major truth in literature and in criticism. It was a remarkable discovery for a young man of twenty-one or twenty-two, at a time when the best-known artists of his own coun- . try were trying to show by word and example that great art was cosmopolitan. Many critics are engaged at the moment in giving ingenious explanations of why Sargent is not really a great artist. But the true explanation is in this chapter of The Wine of the Puri- tans. "When Monet paints a London Bridge at dawn he does not for a moment become an Englishman: the subject is an accident- he carries France to London with him. But when Sargent paints a portrait of the Duke of Connaught he does become for a moment so far as he becomes or remains anything—an Englishman.” "Sargent is a miraculous technician without soul and without phil- osophy.” This particular chapter contains so many truths of criticism of major importance to America, that one or two quotations from it will be appropriate. “A dilletante is an artist without a country, an artist who feels no vital connection with some one spot of soil and the myriad forms of life that have grown out of it. He is unduly concerned with perfection of technique, ignoring the ruder elements of life which come to him.” “Every degree of fastidiousness is also a degree of stagnation.” 99 Do not these sentences shed a light on almost every expatriate American artist who has existed from the founding of the Repub- lic? This book, The Wine of the Puritans, was published fifteen years ago, in 1908. After its publication, oddly enough, the con- sideration of American culture seems to have dropped from his mind for several years, for his next three books deal with John Addington Symonds, H. G. Wells, and three European writers, Obermann, Maurice de Guérin, and Amiel, whom he writes of in a little book called The Malady of the Ideal. This last book seems to be the only one of these three which has a real connexion with 36 AN AMERICAN CRITIC: VAN WYCK BROOKS his mind. Indeed, I can only explain his book on Wells and his admiring attitude towards Wells as a sort of mental aberration. It seems incredible now, but he does actually speak of Wells in the same breath as Nietzsche and Heine and Matthew Arnold, and does seriously state that Wells represents fine thinking in a war against muddle-headedness. All one can say is that, with fine think- ing represented by such a champion, one devoutly hopes that mud- dle-headedness wins. In 1915, with America's Coming of Age, he returns once more to the subject of his first book, to his real theme, American culture, which he has never let go of since. In 1918 appeared Letters and Leadership, and in 1920 his study of Mark Twain. These three books represent, up to the present, his finest and most original work. In them he contributes, not a new critical theory like Taine, but a new critical point of view like Lessing. He considers the writer as leader, and from this point of view he studies the chief figures of American literature. It is an acid test from which all of the greatest European writers can come out triumphantly, but in Amer- ica no one emerges but Whitman. The reason why all the other Americans failed is considered in these three books. The character of the old American culture was decided by the Puritan philosophy which, “by making human nature contemptible, and putting to shame the charms of life unleashed the acquisitive in- stincts of men, disembarrassing those instincts by creating the be- lief that the life of the spirit is altogether a secret life, and that the imagination ought never to conflict with the law of the tribe.” That the imagination ought not to conflict with the law of the tribe is not an idea peculiar to America, for, if we look into the history of nations we find that almost all art and literature represent the triumph of the artist over the guardians of the tribal laws and the keepers of the national myths—in short, a triumph over the hun- dred per centers—the hundred per cent patriot, the hundred per cent moralist, and the hundred per cent religious doctrinaire. But peculiarly American was the idea that the things of the spirit are remote from life and ought not to interfere with the practical con- duct of life. It was this second idea reinforcing the first that made American intellectual life the least free in the world. Scolding the American people for the aridity of their intellectual and creative life is not the function of a critic; investigating and explaining the causes of it is. And this investigating and explain- MARY M. COLUM 37 ing is what Mr Brooks has done in his three books. He has stated the terms on which a great American culture is possible, and by doing so he has released creative elements in the American mind. He started early with a discovery which, however, he does not formulate until he comes to write Letters and Leadership—that in- herited American culture has failed to meet the exigencies of Amer- ican life, “to seize and fertilize its roots.” The critic who is the discoverer of this sort of impasse in a country's life is often an un- popular person, because he has, so to speak, to set dynamite under so many national myths and so much national self-complacency, even though he blows up shams to create a real national and racial pride. Racial pride is somehow connected with artistic production, or perhaps each is dependant on the other. Having made the discovery of this impasse, Van Wyck Brooks proceeds to investigate its cause. He makes a study of the in- herited American culture through the great writers of the Puritan tradition. Something has always been wanting in their work. “There is not, excepting Walt Whitman, one American writer who comes home to a modern American with that deep, moving, shak- ing impact of personality for which one turns to the abiding poets and writers of the world. A certain density, weight and richness, a certain poignancy, a 'something far more deeply interfused,' simply is not there." He comes to this conclusion about American literature and makes a study of American culture as one who has inherited it all. “To me Thoreau, Emerson, Poe and Hawthorne are possessions for ever. This does not alter the fact that if my soul were set on the accumulation of dollars not one of them would have the power to move me from it. Not one of them, not all of them, have had the power to move the soul of America from the accumu- lation of dollars, and when one has said this one has arrived at some sort of basis of literary criticism.” Plainly one has, for each of the writers he mentions then failed in the duty of a great writer to give a dream and a philosophy to his people. Not one of them was a great enough writer to become the image of the American nation, for it is the great writers of a 38 AN AMERICAN CRITIC: VAN WYCK BROOKS nation who become its image in the minds of posterity and in the minds of other races, even though, as W. B. Yeats has said, “he represents like Aristophanes no man of worth in his art, the worth of his own mind becomes the inheritance of his people.” The Puri- tan writers allowed themselves to be created entirely by the civiliza- tion around them, and took no real part in influencing that civiliza- tion. They were content to have the acquisitive mind as master over them, and even to minister to it. The pioneering instinct of economic self-assertion was the law of the tribe, and they had no desire to set themselves against it, and for that reason they handed on no tradition of combating it. Their ideal for themselves might be self-fulfilment, but they saw no necessity for making this a na- tional ideal. As we read his careful studies of these writers-of Emerson, of Lowell, Bryant, and Hawthorne, and his profound study of Mark Twain, we see that they were the victims of what, in the realm of the spirit, is a vice—which is indeed the only vice—the vice of prudence. It was this vice which crippled all those early American writers, and was the legacy they handed on to their successors. "Be prudent. Do not allow the imagination to conflict with the law of the tribe.” One almost fancies that it must be written as a motto on the portals of the Authors League of America ! Whitman alone was different. “Because by releasing, or tend- ing to release the creative faculties of the American mind, he broke the pioneer law of self-preservation.” The function of most of the others was not to release creative energies, but to “divert those energies from taking the wind out of the myth of progress." "How invaluable,” he remarks, "was their literature [he is speaking par- ticularly of Longfellow and Bryant] to the tired pioneer, fore- runner of the tired business man.” Perhaps Emerson was not really the ideal diverter of the tired pioneer, but Mr Brooks, who has written a most subtly appreciative tribute to Emerson, can also write, “Emerson's really equivocal individualism on the one hand asserted the freedom and self-reliance of the spirit, and on the other, justified the unlimited private expediency of the business man.” This sentence has a curious American urbanity. But it probably means the same thing as Santayana's rougher judgement, “Emerson was a shrewd Yankee with an instinct for the winning side.” At all events, nothing that Mr Brooks has said removes that terrific impression. MARY M. COLUM 39 The chapter in America's Coming of Age in which these writers are considered is indeed a masterpiece of critical writing, combining as it does, a grasp of the temperament of each writer with a sort of shuddering sensitiveness to literature that is almost a sixth sense. His analysis of Poe and of Hawthorne remain always in one's mind. These, “the two principal artists in American literature were out of touch with society as few other artists in the world had been before.” Sometimes he can sum up both the writer's temperament and work in a single short sentence, as in this astonish- ing revelation of Poe's work, “A sensation of intolerable remorse pervades it.” Do not these few words describe Poe to us for ever- every line of his poetry, every sentence of his stories, even every conclusion in his criticism? "A sensation of intolerable remorse!” All the magical lines of his poetry that we remember by heart, it is for that very quality that we remember them. And again he says of him, "He has discovered in literature the chemical secret of life; he has produced chemical men, chemical emotions, chemical landscapes; in 'Eureka' he has produced even a chemical philoso- phy, so much like real philosophy that, until you try to feel it, you will never guess it the most sterile of illusions." So much for that poor Celt astray in a Puritan civilization, very far from that con- ception of wisdom which could say enthusiastically, “I know the blessedest soul in the world and he nods a drunken head.” His analysis of Hawthorne, whom he calls “the most deeply planted of American writers,” and of Lowell, whom he thinks "the most naturally gifted of them all,” has the same power of flashing revelation. Of Hawthorne he says, "For if, like the greatest poets, he sees life as a fable, with a fable's infinitely multiplied corres- pondences, he feels it rather as a phantom than as a man. His gift is meagre and a little anaemic his poetry is not quite the same thing as wisdom.” And of Lowell, “The quality of his emotion is thoroughly social; its quality is far denser and of wider scope than that of any other American poet save Whitman. What it almost entirely wants is intellectual structure, intellectual contact, ideas." All the great figures of American literature pass before us in this chapter called Our Poets, relentlessly analysed, appreciated, re- vealed; that is, all except Whitman, to whom he devotes a separate chapter. Whitman is his only real enthusiasm. For Emerson he has a warm appreciation. For the others, for the qualities of their minds 40 AN AMERICAN CRITIC: VAN WYCK BROOKS that he considers real, he has a sort of bleak, unsatisfied admiration. He calls this chapter on Whitman The Precipitant, because "he precipitated the American character.” "All those things which had been separate, self-sufficient, inco-ordinate—action, theory, ideal- ism, business—he cast into a crucible; and they emerged, harmoni- ous and molten, in a fresh democratic ideal, which is based upon the whole personality.” He made fast what he himself called “The idea and fact of American Totality.” Whitman, for Mr Brooks, fulfils what he calls the functions of a poet in the most primitive sense of the word—a man who gives to a nation a certain focal centre in the consciousness of its own character. Whitman is in fact for him what none of the other great American writers, except Emerson, approach to being—a leader. He fulfils in his own per- sonality what is, for Mr Brooks, one of the conditions of the crea- tion of a great American culture the substitution of the ideal of self-fulfilment for the ideal of self-assertion. Whitman had no doubts about the necessity for the triumph of the creative mind: the terror which he must have caused still reverberates in sections of American society-sections for whom the creative mind represents the mind of a vagrant—something outcast from civilized life. If Whitman's life was almost a complete success as far as self- fulfilment is concerned, Mark Twain's was, as he shows, almost a complete failure. I can think of no other biographical study of a literary man written in our time which is such a masterpiece as Mr Brooks' book on Mark Twain. One remembers Chesterton's beauti- ful book on Browning, but the writing of that must have been child's play in comparison with the writing of The Ordeal of Mark Twain a work in which the author evolves a new meth- od, by grafting on the methods of Taine and Sainte Beuve the dis- coveries of psychoanalysis. The result is a study the thoroughness of which has never been surpassed. The man, and through the man, the writer is laid bare to us in every corner of his soul, in every cell of his brain, almost in every pulse of his heart. Mr Brooks shows us Mark Twain as a great unfulfilled satirist. "He was intended by nature to be a sort of American Rabelais, who would have done as regards the financial commercialism of The Gilded Age, very much what the author of Pantagruel did as regards the obsolescent medi- aevalism of the sixteenth century. But instead Mark Twain be- came involved in the 'popular complex of the Gilded Age' in which one was required not merely to forgo one's individual tastes . MARY M. COLUM 41 and beliefs and ideas, but positively to cry up the beliefs and taste of the herd.” The Ordeal of Mark Twain is not only the spiritual history of a man; it is almost the spiritual history of the American people. This and Letters and Leadership, out of all his books, are the most impressive, and, after reading them, one cannot but realize that Van Wyck Brooks belongs to the highest order of critics. He has given a conception of literature and life that is as fine and inspir- ing as any in that order. Where he falls below them is in intensity of temperament and emotion. Not until we come to his book on Mark Twain—his last published book—do we get what he him- self calls “the deep, shaking impact of personality” that we en- counter in the great critics as well as in the great artists; we do in- deed get it there, but it is not often reinforced by that intensity, that almost wildness of emotion, that thrills us in the work of the great European critics. In comparison with them he seems a little cool and self-possessed. We cannot imagine him capable of shin- ing, reckless enthusiasms, or capable of allowing his mind to wan- der off into that yearning and almost foolish ecstasy that Taine wanders into over Alfred de Musset. Perhaps, to many this will not seem a very great drawback, but for my own part, I feel sure that the whole secret of a rich and nervous and swiftly-moving style such as Taine's lies just in that capacity for sublime emo- tional folly. Van Wyck Brooks, measured with these great Eu- ropeans, has an American sedateness. But measured with him contemporary critics writing in English seem narrow and limited in ideas, lacking in the sense of reality and the power of inspiring others. While many of the best-known of them are obsessed with trivial aesthetic theories, he, almost alone, has related literature to life. His influence in America has been far-reaching; almost every one of the recent American writers whose work is of value, owes him something. His ideas have reached places where their origin is unsuspected—the usual fate of original criticism. Taking his work as a whole, one comes from it with a firm belief in the last- ing validity of his ideas and in the lasting service he is rendering to American literature—to that literature of whose flowering he dreamed in his very first book. “I think a day will come when the names of Denver and Sioux City will have a traditional and antique dignity like Damascus and Perugia.” It is well that the critic, too, should write out of a dream. . THE CAVERN OF SILENCE BY MIGUEL DE UNAMUNO Translated From the Spanish by Louis How N the centre of the kingdom there was a large thick wood. In every kind of tree with perennial foliage grew luxuriantly. They did not turn yellow in the fall, nor had they need in the spring to clothe themselves again in tender green. The sun did not enter to warm the grass; the foliage was too thick. And divers brooks wandered about in the wood. No wild beasts infested it. Simple paths, traced by the feet of those that came there, and al- most always running along the banks of the brooks, following their course, led to an open space that was in the middle of the wood. Nobody could recall that it had ever rained in that open space; and a very old and rooted tradition held that really it never did rain in that clearing in the wood. Even on stormy days, which were very few, it seemed as if there must be a hole in the clouds, made to prevent that mysterious open space from being wet by the waters of heaven. And in that open space was the cavern. The cavern consisted of an opening in the rock, a mouth of stone, within which a little pathway ran down, very steep, but easy to follow. The pathway ran into the cave, until at about two hundred steps' distance, it turned abruptly behind a projecting boulder and was lost to sight. Nobody knew, nobody could know, what there was in the depths of the cavern behind the boulder. None of those that had passed that point had ever returned, or had ever given any sort of sign by which their fate might be guessed. Children had entered there, youths, and full-grown men-women, old men—sane peo- ple and mad, unhappy and gay; and not one had given the least hint of what was within there. Once they had rounded the turn, nothing further was known of them: neither the sound of a fall, nor a scream, nor a groan, nor even a sigh. They were swallowed in complete and utter silence. MIGUEL DE UNAMUNO 43 But this silence of the cavern occurred only when it received its devotees. On certain days, more often in autumn than in the other seasons of the year, and at certain hours—at the drawing in of evening—there came from the depths of the cavern a mysterious music veiled in the mist of an aroma, intoxicating and unearthly. There came the sound as of the song of a numerous procession, a moving, melancholy song as sung by many persons. But the melancholy of that distant and melodious complaint was very sweet and soothing. It was on hearing that, that a great many of all those who continually hovered around the cavern's mouth, hur- ried into the depths inside. All kinds of investigations had been made. A man would go in tied with a stout rope, so that he might be pulled out when he signalled: and every time this was tried, the rope had finally been pulled out, untied, and without there having been any signal. Once they had welded a metal belt around a man's waist, and welded a chain to that: and they had pulled out belt and chain without the man. How could he have freed himself? Another time a man had gone in carrying the corpse of a friend- they wanted to see whether the cavern received the dead. The next morning the corpse was found in the pathway in front of the turning; but of the living man that had carried it in nothing more was ever known, just as in every other case. And after that there could be no doubt that the cavern admitted only the living. Another experiment was thought of and several times tried: and that was to drive animals into the cave. These came out shortly afterwards, but they came out frightened and upset; and they never again in their whole lives made any sound. They came out mute. An animal that returned from the cavern did not bark, or mew, or bleat, or low, or roar, or cackle, during the rest of its life. And no one ever saw the cave entered by a toad, a rat, a lizard, a fly, or a gnat. More than once, too, they had tried having several people go in attached one to another by their hands. And as soon as the first one had reached the turning and gone around, he was loosed from his neighbour, no matter how firmly he might be held, and he was lost in the silence of the cavern's depth; or else the whole string of men was lost there. Every class of people had been lost in the mysterious and musi- 44 THE CAVERN OF SILENCE cal cave. Once the father of a family was drawn in by that mys- tery, and his children gathered at the entrance to call him: “Father! Father!” and they were drawn in after him. But what alarmed the king and the whole kingdom was the frequency with which pairs of young lovers and young married people let them- selves be swallowed up by the cave. It was one of the favourite wedding-journeys: a journey with no return. And despite the prolific habit of that kingdom, where a family with fewer than ten children was rare, the continual loss of young couples disquieted the rulers. A sacred respect had prevented all the kings of that country from prohibiting access to the cavern. And there had even been one king lost in it: since when no other had ever ventured near. But the fatal enchantment became such that finally it was de- cided to place sentinels at the mouth of the cave, who by force of arms should prevent any one from entering. But it always ended by the sentinels' going in themselves; and when once the guard had surrendered, all those that had been kept outside followed along in. Not a little strange was the behaviour of the suicides. It would seem natural that in that country there should not have been any, because whoever was tired of life or disgusted with it, had only to go into the depths of the cavern instead of killing himself: and nevertheless, it was not so. There were a great many cases of suicide in the kingdom of the mysterious cavern, and the greater part of them took place in the very mouth of the cave. And it was observed that those were people who had intended to go in, but who turned back after a few steps, before reaching the fatal turn- ing. Once a poor man that suffered with a chronic disease so pain- ful that he could no longer bear it, committed suicide, and left a letter saying that if he had started into the cave and then come back, it was because he feared that there inside his pains might continue and he be unable to kill himself—it was for fear of an immortal pain. The government made use of the cavern for capital punishments. Instead of executing the condemned, it made them go into the cavern; and naturally they did so with the greatest pleasure. Not all of them, however. There were some that began to tremble horribly and refused to enter, and this despite the fact that a guard of archers at the cave's mouth threatened to shoot them if they MIGUEL DE UNAMUNO 45 didn't. And more than once the soldiers had to carry out from the entrance, close to the turning, the corpse of some criminal who preferred death to being buried there. Once there arrived from a far and vague country, from a dis- tant land whose mere existence was known, an old blind beggar, accompanied by a young boy. The old man spoke only his own language, a language completely and totally unintelligible to those of this kingdom. When he addressed the lad that led him, no mat- ter how short were his words, nobody could guess what he was talking about. But the lad could mumble a bit of the language of this kingdom. Sometimes the old man sang; and his singing had a remote resemblance to the far-away and mysterious song that was heard arising from the cavern's depths in the twilights of autumn, and veiled in a mist of intoxicating aromas. It was a song like the song sung over his work by Lazarus, the brother of Martha and Mary, during his second life, after Christ had raised him from the grave. And everyone stopped to listen to the poor blind man; and all who heard him felt moved to go to the wood, and to enter until they reached the open space, and to lose them- selves in the cavern. And it came to pass that the old blind beggar turned his steps, he and the lad, to the wood, and then on into the open space, and to the cavern; and pushing through a thick crowd, went on, guided by the lad, and following the pathway entered into the cave, sing- ing. And the boy that led him did not return; but the old blind man did return—the only person in centuries! Everybody flocked to see him. He came back blind, as he went. And no one under- stood a word of what he said; nor could they, by his tone, or by his gestures, or by his bearing, guess at anything whatever. He disappeared in the thick woods, and no one heard of him again. But his return from the cavern, that unique return, stamped on that people an irremovable impression. And in that kingdom the whole of life, absolutely the whole, de- pended on the secret of the cavern. All art, all science, literature, the government, everything revolved around it. Not but that peo- ple died there as they do elsewhere. Oh, yes, the majority of the inhabitants died as one dies in other countries, of the same diseases, and in the same way. In the vicinity of the cavern's mouth there was always a multi- 46 THE CAVERN OF SILENCE tude of fascinated people, who passed hours, days, months, years, in some cases an entire lifetime, gazing at the turning of the path. And when there rose from the depths that suave and melancholy song, sung by a distant chorus, the multitude crowded together to intoxicate itself with the strange music and with the no less strange aroma that veiled it. The greater part of those unfortunates did not dare to go inside, and they perished miserably in the neigh- bourhood of the cavern's mouth, longing for its depths. The nearby groves of the wood were full of cabins and tents where those unhappy ones bewitched found a shelter. And when some one of them finally decided to enter, the rest stared at him in ter- ror and in envy. And always, always, always, despite their re- peated disappointments, they bade him, while they said good-bye: “Let us know what there is inside. Answer when we call to you.” And never did any of those that went in answer. There were a great many people in the kingdom, certainly most people, who had never gone near the cavern or even the wood that enfolded it, but they were not less than others held by the fascina- tion of the cavern's secret. Some, and those not few, were even indignant that such a thing should be talked about; but perhaps they were the ones that thought about it most. And people were not even lacking—though in numbers to be counted on the fingers—who denied that such a cavern really existed. In that kingdom all philosophy, all science, all literature, was, as we have said, suffused with the secret of the cave; and all the philosophy, all the science, all the art, all the literature that ex- pressly purported to ignore that secret, was most of all suffused with it. The less people spoke about it, the more it was present in their imagination. There were—and how could it have been otherwise ?—there were among the thinkers of that kingdom no end of hypotheses and theories about what the cavern might contain. Somebody sug- gested penetrating it by another road, having engineers open it up: but it was impossible to find a workman that would dare give the first blow with his pick. Besides, people remembered that one king had wanted to close up the cavern's mouth with a wall, and that those who began to work either left off to go into the cave, or else very soon died. And every morning the work done the day before was always found undone. And for this reason it had to be abandoned. MIGUEL DE UNAMUNO 47 Among the neighbouring peoples the secret of the cavern was a subject for jests mingled with fear. All the foreigners that had come into the kingdom to investigate the secret, either had not in- vestigated at all, or had not returned home to recount what they saw because being conquered by the strange enchantment they had been lost in the cavern, or they had gone back without having even been able to enter the wood. The foreigner that did enter the wood and penetrate as far as the open space where it never rained, invariably went into the depths of the cavern. To this there was no exception. Of the foreigners that were unable even to enter the wood-it caused them such repulsion—and who founded all their reports on what they heard said by persons who had never been in either, some pretended to take the whole affair as a joke, others shrugged their shoulders, and still others gave a symbolical explanation of the matter. These explanations, however, the symbolical and allegorical, were the most discredited of all by those that knew anything what- ever about the wood. It was no case of a symbol, but of a very real reality. It is no case of a symbol, no: and not of an allegory either. It is not a case of abstract thought, of sociological reflections dressed in a concrete and allegorical form. Nothing of all that. Yesterday, the eighth of this month of September, this month so charming in my Basque mountains, I walked past the castle of Butrôn along the banks of the river of the same name; which is the boundary of Gorliz beach. And I afterwards returned to Bilbao, to this Bilbao of mine, and went to bed in the very room I occupied as a boy. And I was slow in going to sleep, turning and turning in my bed, and preparing what I am to say the day after to-morrow in honour of the sculptor of Bilbao, Nemesio Mogrovejo, dead in the flower of his years. Among Mogrovejo's works there is a relief representing the tor- ment of the Count Ugolino, just as Dante so sculpturally relates it to us in the Divine Comedy. And last night I went to sleep, after turning many times, with the Divine Comedy in my mind. Toward midnight I was awakened by a loud clap of thunder and a violent downpour. And on waking I discovered that I knew this tale of the secret of the cavern. And I knew it for the first 48 FULL MOON time, without any explanation or symbol, with all its inherent con- tradictions. And the whole of it, entire, with all the details. I lighted the light and began to write it, to write it to dictation. To whose dication? I don't know. Whence came this tale? I don't know that either. The only thing I do know is that it is not a symbol, it is not an allegory, it is not what it is. Somebody told it to me—I don't know who—and I tell it to you as somebody told it to me. FULL MOON BY WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS Blessed moon noon of night that through the dark bids Love stay- curious shapes awake to plague me Is day near shining girl? Yes day! the warm the radiant all fulfilling day. ? tor A BRONZE. BY GASTON LACHAISE THE PERFUMED PARAPHRASE OF DEATH BY W. C. BLUM W poetry lover HERE it is a question of a first rate new poet one hardly cares to count any more on poetry lovers. They swallow apparently anything and everything and seem not to know the dif- ference between fresh asparagus and canned. To prefer canned, my father says, is only perverse, but not to know the difference And let no one think I have made up this out of straw. There actually exist people who, having read Pound's Chinese translations, will assure you that they are much the same as Witter Bynner's or Miss Lowell's or almost anybody's. These Chinese translations make a test or measure for literary taste, a nice instrument of precision in a field where all is usually vague. But to tackle the poetry of E. E. Cummings' is to leave such things behind. He is quite the most incommensurable among modern poets. He has done so many things well, even many new things, the same thing seldom more than twice; he has rejuvenated so many verse forms, that it is hard to find any common divisor for his work. For some time his name has been a sort of symbol of extreme modernism, and his writing has lately been said to "knock literature into a cocked hat." I think however that while extreme he is only superficially “modern” and that far from knock- ing literature into a cocked hat, he is quite content to sharpen some very well known tendencies of that fairly inclusive body of prac- tice. With his typographical innovations, his extraordinary and ingenious appeal to the lust of the eye, he once led the fashion, or one of them. But it is rather the satisfaction which he offers to the lust of the ear and to other old, often indecent, desires which poetry was supposed to gratify that I wish to emphasize; notably the desire for rapid unfailing lyrical invention. And I think that for any one who is still capable of being stirred up by lyric poetry, this book will appear with the same freshness and profusion as might an early book by Keats or Verlaine. Tulips and Chimneys, by E. E. Cummings. 8vo, 125 pages; Seltzer: $2. 1 50 THE PERFUMED PARAPHRASE OF DEATH No study is necessary to know this poetry as poetry. One recog- nizes immediately the radiance of the words on the page, making the whole page luminous, a quality which Matthew Arnold's words, for example, so seldom have. And if a poem is read aloud one recognizes that here too everything is right and more than right. "Softer be they than slippered sleep the lean lithe deer the fleet flown deer" These primary and striking virtues of Cummings' poetry imply in the poet much more than merely a good eye and a good ear, though by no means all the literary virtues. It is only natural for reviewers to endow the writer whom they admire with the abilities and intentions they admire, and I shall try not to make this mistake. At least two reviewers have called attention to Cummings' feeling for American speech, and one has written of his "accuracy in noting the cadences of talk and making music of it.” The reviewer then quotes as an example the famous Buffalo Bill poem. Now the cadence of talk is presumably the result of feeling in the one who talks, and it can be argued that the most accurate use of a cadence is the one which carries most feeling. And of feeling, of typical recognizable feeling, I think Cummings' phrases carry surprisingly little. He does not bother with the typical. Rather it is some peculiar and particular phrase or expression which he is apt to value. Thus he wrote a sonnet, a very good one, round abslatively posolutely. The phrase about Buffalo Bill: "Jesus he was a handsome man” is accurate in the sense that it is well put together, stands on its feet, but it does not give the impression of a living voice one half so strongly as, for example, Eliot's “Well now that's done: and I'm glad it's over" One would not venture to say that any person spoke or appeared in these poems who was anything but frankly a grotesque, a marion- ette. Cummings' lack of interest in giving the impression of a liv- W. C. BLUM 51 ing human being is comparable to his indifference to actual scenery in general, and I have been splitting hairs over this word accuracy because it suggests accuracy in representation, accuracy to "life.” One finds few descriptions in this poetry which give one that in- tense joy of recognition (recognition as though of the very essence of the thing described) which is one of the chief pleasures of read- ing much mature poetry. The modern common-sense doctrine of literary description fig- ures very clearly in a passage in Chekhov's The Sea Gull where a young author complains about his difficulties in describing a moonlit night, not omitting the shimmering radiance, scented air, and the faint sounds of a piano. Trigorin, the famous author, he says, would have written merely that the neck of a broken bot- tle glittered in the light and that there was a black shadow under the mill dam, and there you would have had the night before you. This is the doctrine of the fresh and essential detail which dispas- sionately evokes an entire passionate memory. Cummings, how- ever, does not bother with this remarkably powerful common sense method; he always edges away, interposing an emotional word, firing it like a rocket, where one would expect an appeal to the senses. He obtains the metaphor which equals the phenomenon (or our memories of it) in emotional intensity, rather than the image which evokes the memory and leaves the responsibility so to speak with the phenomenon. This paraphrasing of life is not anything new in English poetry. One finds it everywhere in the most respectable quarters, in Keats, in Milton, decidedly in Shakespeare. Cummings is not a poet who dislikes conceits and mouth-filling lines. Lord Byron himself could not have got more noise out of tiresome words than Cum- mings with his "moments when my once more illustrious arms are filled with fascination when my breast wears the intolerant brightness of your charms" nor has anybody made more luminous metaphors. "On dappled dawn forth rides the pungent sun with hooded day preening upon his hand” 52 THE PERFUMED PARAPHRASE OF DEATH “Nights speechless carnival the painting of the dark with meteors" His tearingly romantic wit enjoys particularly the confusion of the terms of grammar and of simple arithmetic, the shuffling of words for emphasis or out of childlike perversity, brutal surprises like Catullus' glubit and excrucior. Nothing is more typical of him, however, and more peculiarly his own than his use of adjec- tives, his opposition of matter of fact words to words vaguely emo- tional, of exact, accurate, skilful, to wonderful, enormous, terrible: “Her petaled flesh doth entertain The adroit blood's mysterious skein” This trick (much more than a trick considering his incredibly keen feeling for such words) which he pushes farther than any pre- decessor has dared, gives him control over most poignant, fragile, untouched emotions. It also gives his verse an appearance of per- verse abandon. Decidedly the poet does not want his verse any safer than standing on a tower in a gale. Suave, dangerous speed, dizzy falling, or veering in a reverberating emptiness—always the appeal to the motor and visceral sensations, the sensations of ef- fective effort, of change of position, of alarming passive motion (as in an elevator) and to the primitive emotions of power and helplessness which lie just behind. Sometimes he makes this ap- peal direct by a word, a verb as in "the erect deep upon me in the last light pours its eyeless miles" but most of all by rhythm. His verse moves always continuously without hitches like a snake in the sunshine. The subject matter appears to be mainly love and death. HAIR COMBING. BY ERIC GILL - THIN INTRAVITJESUS IN TEMPLUM:DEI &EJICIEBAT OMNES VENDENTES & EMENTES IN TEMPLO 1 THE MONEY CHANGERS. BY ERIC GILL 1 11 11 My CHRISTMAS GIFTS. BY ERIC GILL VV Irish Statesman, edited by our admirable A. E., a publicist DUBLIN LETTER December, 1923 E have now a good weekly journal in Dublin, the new almost of the Miltonic order, who has thus found an opportunity for giving a much needed direction to the perplexed and disorgan- ized opinion of respectable people in Ireland. It is part of the de- sign of the new weekly to give a lead to Irish literature, but there is not at present much Irish literature to organize: literature being one of the last of the social activities to “come in” after a period of revolution. I see that A. E. refers to an assertion in The Dial that the Irish Literary Movement had come to an end, and says that the funeral oration pronounced was premature, for that since it was uttered Irish literature has been enriched by three notable books, The Return of the Hero, by Michael Ireland; the beautiful Deirdre, by James Stephens; and lastly by the long expected novel of Padraic Colum, Castle Conquer. But I must have expressed my- self very clumsily if what I said could be taken for an assertion that Irish literature is dead: on the contrary, I think literature is the particular vocation of Ireland. What I wished to say, when I had the pleasure of reviewing Mr Boyd's book, Ireland's Literary Renaissance, was that it told a story complete in itself, though Heaven alone knows which of the writers studied by Mr Boyd has struck the most fruitful vein. The three works mentioned fit easily into his scheme, and introduce no novel element (I speak from hearsay of Mr Colum's novel, which I have not yet read). I should like to add here that in my last Letter I made a very generally shared mistake in attributing The Return of the Hero to Mr Stephens. It proves to have been a remarkable tour de force in Mr Stephens' manner by a writer whose ordinary style is quite different. Mr Stephens, at all events, appears to have struck a fruitful vein. If the question, What is the chief distinction of Irish literature? were addressed to the principal Irish authors of the present day, most of them I think would answer that it is the possession of a 54 DUBLIN LETTER national mythology. A. E.'s doctrine of the "national being,” which traces back the destiny of nations to divine origins; Mr Yeats' symbolism; Mr Stephens' gift of devout if playful realism in the presentation of epic personages; the dramatic movement, which requires a stereotyped legendary world; the real and power- ful fascination of the remains of ancient Irish literature all these influences have contributed to make the reconstitution of Irish mythology the distinctive achievement of the Literary Renaissance. Most of the writers concerned in the Renaissance would probably agree about this; not so, I fear, Ireland generally; for the Irish have lost all reverence for, and even interest in, their ancient divinities, almost as much so, in fact, as the English have lost interest in theirs; though our authors are fond of making the special claim for Ireland, that almost alone of European nationalities it has re- mained affiliated to antiquity. Irish idealism, which attributes so much importance to mythology, is thus left a good deal to itself; and the barrier which divides the popular consciousness from this inner circle of belief is perhaps the natural limit of the Irish Liter- ary Renaissance, beyond which it cannot pass. I pointed out in my last Letter that Christianity and Paganism were brought into dra- matic opposition in the mediaeval literature of Ireland as perhaps in no other literature, and that the writers of the Literary Revival have been bent on making amends to Oisin for his discomfiture at the hands of Saint Patrick. To a group of young Protestant writ- ers this appeared almost in the light of a patriotic privilege: hard- ly so to Catholic Ireland, which has looked on with only a moderate enthusiasm at the glorification of its pagan past. A little band of Protestant poets engaged in interpreting the spirit of the most Catholic of European nationalities is there not in the mere state- ment of the situation some suggestion of the natural limitations of the Irish Literary Renaissance ? For the spirit of revival had also breathed on Catholic Ireland, and the ideal in which Catholic Ire- land was chiefly interested—the revival of the Gaelic language which disappeared in the time of O'Connell—was really somewhat embarrassing to the ideal of a new Irish literature in the English language. Moreover, Catholic Ireland by no means shared in that indifference to politics which Mr Boyd has noted as peculiar to the Literary Movement in its earlier days, when the Protestant Union- ist O'Grady was hailed as its father. JOHN EGLINTON 55 I am aware that it has for a long while been quite out of date in Ireland to regard religious differences as of any importance, but the facts are surely significant. Under the eyes of the leaders of the Literary Renaissance was growing up a literary movement which Mr Yeats and his colleagues at first made light of, just as Mr Birrell made light of the political theorists of Sinn Fein—a literary movement headed by Patrick Pearse, as distinctively Cath- olic as Yeats' movement was Protestant, and one which the French might have called “l'action irlandaise.” It rejected Symbolism. Kathleen ni Houlihan had never been so clear and exalted a figure as when she trod the boards of the Abbey Theatre in Mr Yeats' plays; but she depended for her existence on the co-existence of a symbolic wrong, and with the disappearance of that wrong she must vanish as a ghost at cock-crow. To the Irish Activistes she was al- ready nothing. And finally, when the hour was riper than any one but Pearse was aware, he fired a “shot heard round the world” in the Easter week of 1916. None of us noticed at the time her dis- appearance, but it is a fact that Kathleen ni Houlihan has never been heard of since. On reflection, therefore, I am not so sure that our Catholic writ- ers would agree whole-heartedly with the leaders of the Literary Renaissance and their Diadochi, that the main distinction of Irish literature is the possession of a national mythology. They could hardly do so, in fact, without some disloyalty to their own spiritual ancestry, and to the spiritual warriors who made Ireland the Island of Saints. I am not sure that Mr George Moore would do so, hater of Catholicism though he is; or Mr James Joyce, who seems like Mr Moore to belong to the Renaissance of Rabelais and Boccaccio, which has at length touched Ireland, rather than to that of Mr Standish O'Grady. Will an Irish Reformation follow? There are two prevalent opinions about Ireland, so mutually contradictory that one might suppose that each of them sprang from an entirely different experi- ence of Irish life. One, which has been a little upset recently, is that Ireland is almost too saintly and good: that what it requires is dancing, music, relaxation, a break-up of Puritan fixity, a libera- tion within itself (certainly without help from the comic genius of urban England) of those pagan elements preserved faithfully in its folk-lore and ancient literature; a certain light-hearted anti-cleri- 56 DUBLIN LETTER calism without any suspicion of dogmatism, iconoclasm, or odium theologicum. The Irish Literary Renaissance has always taken this view. The Gaelic League has been supposed from time to time to be anti-clerical, and attempts have even been made, by repre- senting it in this attractive light, to conquer the prejudices of the "Sour Faces,” who have often thus been led on to a point at which they have been disconcerted by meeting the countenance of clerical- ism itself, wreathed in smiles, which they have been expected to reciprocate. An Irish Renaissance without the attendant evil of an Irish Reformation, certainly no Tom Paine or "Fleet-Street atheism” (Yeats' phrase)—this has been the attractive programme of our literary idealism. For Irish idealists share to the full that antipathy to the Reformation expressed by Messrs Chesterton and Belloc, who have proved satisfactorily that a movement which its leaders apparently believed to be spiritual and disinterested, was really materialistic and self-seeking. On the other hand, that instinct for material prosperity asso- ciated with the Protestant Reformation may really be that part of it which Ireland would have been the better for The Protestant Reformation did more than satisfy the rights of "private judge- ment”: apparently, it rendered those nationalities which accepted it immune for the most part from political revolution. However, I am by no means sure that I should like to have seen the Protestant Reformation accepted in Ireland, even though I think it would probably have made it a happier country. Indeed, I know not what would have softened the peasant hardness of the Irish tem- perament but some kind of religious movement. But one grows weary of that idealism which disapproves of the direction which a civilization has taken, and which denounces the faits accomplis of history. If English Protestantism failed in Ireland it was because it encountered a conservative instinct stronger than itself, and no doubt with a destiny of its own. For that the religious situation in Ireland will now begin to change is certain, and that neither Catholicism nor Protestantism will gain by the change is equally certain. We live in an age when the faculty of conviction seems to manifest itself with greater power in denial than in affirmation. Compare our feelings when a man asserts his belief in God with our feelings when any one has the hardihood to declare, as in Rus- sia, that belief in God is the bane of humanity. Contrast the whole- JOHN EGLINTON 57 hearted asseverations of Nietzsche with the faint persuasiveness of any Christian apologist. In a compact little community such as we can conceive Ireland becoming in the course of two or three generations, in which modern ideas will have had time to work their way, no religious authority can feel sure that the development of popular religious feeling will not have taken some perverse direc- tion. Ireland, which in the Middle Ages showed so remarkable an apti- tude for presenting the opposite ideals of Paganism and Christian- ity, may quite possibly in the coming times be an actual battle- ground of these ideals. JOHN EGLINTON GERMAN LETTER Munich December, 1923 at least through his Christian Wahnschaffe, which was a film be- fore a film was made of it and yet remains a wholly extraordinary book, product of a deeply earnest virtuosity such as is not often met with in the entire world and perhaps stands alone to-day- Wassermann, then, has published a new novel, Ulrike Woytich, a part of the Wendekreis cycle, with title and dimensions char- acteristic of this fertile writer's schemes and ambitions. This is another work produced with his imposing resourcefulness and skill, his devotion to matters of social criticism, ethics, and relig- ion; and one could say of it that if it is not always very living, it is entertaining to the highest degree, and artistically compelling.' "Perhaps at no other time (the poet says in a preface] have men been at once so knowing and so unaware, so burdened with inten- tions and so disheartened, so held in by disillusionment and driven starless along life's course, as in the two or three generations of this half-century (from 1870 to 1920). It is as though they were storming up a steep slope, in embittered rivalry, with the exertion of all their nervous and mental energy; and once there, although they see the fatal abyss at their feet, they are carried on by the ferocious movement, and it is impossible to stop: the foremost shudder, the unchained mob behind them does not so much as hear their cry of terror and warning, and all pitch into the depths.” These words, so illustrative of the author's grave, impressive style, comprise the content and the subject of the novel, which be- gins very effectively with the burning of the Vienna Ringtheater in 1881, and covers forty years—or rather does not cover them, but omits whole decades, the war, the upheaval in Central Europe, so that, to use the author's own figure, it forms a two-part mirror in which the heroine shows herself to the observer, with her destiny, Adam Urbas, a short story generally considered Wassermann's master- piece in the genre, will appear in an early issue of The DIAL. THOMAS MANN 59 her times, and her environment: "youth in one part of the mirror, and in the other, directly adjoining, and without transitions, age. This heroine, Ulrike Woytich, is a symbol; she represents the embodiment of that unfortunate era which it is the author's Balzac- ian dream to encompass epically—a girl bristling with vital en- ergy, “burdened with intentions and disheartened," "held in by disillusionment and starless,” who utilizes her considerable store of cleverness, industry, and clear-headedness to accomplish a great deal, and in the long run nothing. Her arrivism-beginning as she worms herself into the family of a secretly very wealthy Vienna art dealer, whose millions she brings to the light—is varied and rich in inventiveness, or is skilful gossiping. There is a genuine moral force in the age-bankruptcy of the graceless wanton, a bank- ruptcy of the heart, expressing itself in her futile love for a pure child whose feelings she hopes in vain to attract. And no one who has an idea of Wassermann's talent needs to be told that a rich, flowery pattern of social documentation is woven about the cen- tral figure, and a fulness of plot and human character enlivens this portrait of the times. Absolutely, we are dealing with a work projected on a magnifi- cent scale and told with the greatest dignity; a work, further- and let us give the truth its dues—which sometimes attains its magnificence a little at the expense of its human intimacy and in- tensity, while its gestures of dignity sometimes touch a nerve in us which it itself totally lacks: the humorous. I beg not to be mis- construed! The smile this author momentarily elicits from us is almost identical with that which art evokes in us as form, as an in- wardly serene playing even when the subject-matter is deepest and most tragic—but only almost identical, it goes the slightest bit over the line, is of a slightly extra-aesthetic nature, the result of an accidental comicality which the reader alone, and certainly not the author, is aware of. The less one dares expect to find any per- ception of this in the author, the more powerful and confusing is its irritation. It would be endlessly difficult and hazardous to say just what it consists in. The reason cannot be laid to sham, for Wassermann is genuine, perhaps not always genuine in what he narrates, but genuine in his capacity as na. iator, and that is the main thing, provided even that it were the source of that faint comicality. Not always true, then, in his narrating, he is a true 60 GERMAN LETTER narrator, with story-telling in his bones, and with an instinctive glibness which has a good conscience and reaches moral sublima- tion. He could sit with legs crossed at some Oriental street-corner, surrounded by people who were listening wide-eyed and open- mouthed to his unusual stories. We do the same, as we read him; and if we are ever tempted to say to ourselves, "He is fibbing," we correct this immediately by adding, “But since when were story- tellers not allowed to fib?” There is here a composed and majes- tically effusive fluency of diction; a pathos of antitheses which are filled in not always intellectually, but verbally and rhythmically; a romantic exaggeration in the portrayal of life—all of which in- contestably takes the breath away. A badly brought up son and his mother, for instance-how is it with them? "He spent ten times as much as her generosity conceded him. He entered the army. For a while things seemed to improve; she breathed more easily. Then came the affair with Anna Heinroth, a girl with a soiled reputation and a shady past. She soon had an unwholesome power over him; everyone stood facing a problem. His extravagance rose to the point of madness. Within a few months he had gone through his entire inheritance. That woman's influence showed in everything he said. He acted towards his mother like a drunken stable-boy. Suspicions, accusations, fits of rage, threats, assaults suddenly, like a clap of thunder, the news that he had married the person. Josephe refused to re- ceive her. In this she remained inflexible. Everything was mount- ing to a catastrophe. Shortly after, he committed the forgery of the documents. One hour before the arrest Josephe and her law- yer succeeded, after they had put down an enormous sum as se- curity and had been to the minister of justice, in falling into the hands of the law." As I said before, that is not very intimate or intensive. But it is exciting, and we listen with open mouths, since the security is enormous and since someone "succeeds in falling into the hands of the law.” Yes, I am not being misconstrued? Ulrike Woytich is a vastly planned book, and was accomplished with remarkable capability. It is having the greatest success here, and will also succeed abroad. THOMAS MANN 61 Wassermann recently celebrated his fiftieth birthday. In the gen- eration that follows him no narrative talent of his scope has as yet proclaimed itself. That shall not prevent me from selecting out of this new epic generation several which are names already and which it cannot harm foreigners to learn something about: the name of Ernst Weiss, for instance, that of Hermann Ungar, and that of a younger story-teller who has already come to the fore and is very highly thought of by publisher, reading public, and press—Josef Ponten. An adept at the natural sciences, a geographer, a thor- ough-going geologist, Ponten has written a book on Greece which I should certainly put into my trunk if I were visiting that coun- try; and a kind of coral which he discovered in the archipelago is named after him. He discovered his creative talent relatively late, but his novel, Der Babylonische Turm, which appeared during the war, excited hearty interest. I give some notion of the peculiar freedom of the book, its mixed realism and fantasy, when I say that the action takes place among modern building-contractors in Cologne, but that the legendary rogue, Till Eulenspiegel, appears there in person. Ponten is not only a passionate connoisseur and amateur in architecture, which he glorifies poetically, notably in his short-story, Der Meister, but also he is very close to music. Der Babylonische Turm contains an extraordinarily beautiful chapter, entitled Trio, which describes the conception of a piece of chamber music; in the literature of the world it has a famous coun- terpart, to which it is not inferior: I mean the musical inspiration of the composer Lemm in Turgenev's House of Gentlefolk. Since the Turm Ponten has written no more long novels, but has pro- duced an extensive list of original short stories which our maga- zines are competing for. He was born on Belgian territory, some- where beyond Aix-la-Chapelle, and his art has a noticeably Flem- ish element about it—at times recalls de Coster in the folk-quality of its spiciness, although one could not speak of any real depend- ence. It is quite different with Ungar, who made his début a few years ago with a volume of short stories, Knaben und Mörder, which created a great stir. These first fruits of the young Bohemian do not disclaim Russian influence in their attitude toward life, in their manner, at once tender and ferocious, of observing and depicting 62 GERMAN LETTER the human. Here Dostoevsky's domination over the European youth of 1920 manifests itself. Ungar's metropolitan talent has nothing in common with the folk-tale style of the Rhinelander. It is a cult of suffering, a nasty and expert familiarity with the dishonourable and the depraved, a Slavic-Christian devotion to wretchedness; and it attracts by the art it borrows from the East of making us feel the spiritually extreme, eccentric, and grotesque as the essentially human. Especially the Story of a Murder, this tale of the hunchbacked barber Haschek, his victim the “general” who is in reality only a renegade surgeon-major, and his son the "little soldier,” the hero and narrator of the whole, was a small early masterpiece, so rich in its understanding of sorrow, its psy- chological subtlety, symbolism, its comedy and despair, in its moral boldness of expression, and its skill in the handling of mystery, that one can appreciate the expectations which the public has since attached to this young Prague writer. It requires some good will, and especially it requires good nerves, to see these expectations ful- filled in the novel with which Ungar recently followed up his previous work. It is called Die Verstümmelten, and is a frightful book, a sexual gehenna, full of smut, crime, and the profoundest melancholy, a monomaniacal aberration if you will, but in any case the aberration of an essentially pure artistry which, we may hope, will ripen in time to a less cramped and one-sided vision and inter- pretation of life and humanity. Ernst Weiss is closer to Ungar than to Ponten. He has become known through a two-volume novel, the first part of which is called Tiere in Ketten and the second Nahar; it is the story of a prosti- tute who is reborn in the second volume as a tigress on a tropical island—a powerful and brilliant work, delightful in its crudeness. It might be reduced to the aesthetic formula: expressionism tem- pered by Austrianism. For Weiss is Viennese; and, probably against his will, he grafts the mellow culture and taste of his home country to the crassness, ruggedness, and civilization-hatred of the school which passes under the ambiguous name of expressionism. This gives his productions an iridescent beauty, a glow of opal and mother-of-pearl, which for me personally possesses the greatest charm. In addition there is the metaphysical stimulus of the work, as it plays profoundly and ingeniously with the idea of metempsy- chosis, yet without any dilution of philosophy, but with what might be called an animal sympathy—and this gives the idea pulse THOMAS MANN 63 Euc and warmth. In the novel of the harlot Olga there is really some- thing of the love of Madahöh, who lifts lost children up toward een heaven with fiery arms; and the life of the creature in the steaming jungle is fascinatingly carried through. In short, we have in Weiss a significant artist, undoubtedly the strongest talent in our newest prose fiction. ter 11 Has America already heard of the recent splendid German edi- tion of the works of its greatest son, Walt Whitman? In any case, I must here raise a voice in its praise, and call it an occasion, an act of mediation, of the highest order. Hans Reisiger, the trans- lator, has long had a good name as a writer of lyrics and short- stories. Here he has given his best; his accomplishment will al- ways be counted among the greatest and most famous of this na- ture. It is a genuine acquisition for Germany. In two powerful volumes, the first of which is provided with a biographical in- troduction that is a little masterwork of love, he has set before us the life work—even the prose-of your great wild and gentle sing- er in a version which makes it a national acquisition for us; and we Germans cannot thank him enough for the years of devotion and keen industry whereby he has brought this mighty spirit, this vigorous and profound new humanity closer to us—us who are at once old and unripe, and to whom contact with this future-laden humanism can be a blessing if we but know how to receive it. To any one at least who is convinced that there is no more burning intellectual task for Germany than to realize anew the concept of humanity which had become an empty shell, a mere school phrase—to him this work is a true gift of God. For he will readily see that what Whitman names “democracy” is precisely what is called in more classical and old-fashioned terms “humanity.” As he will also see that it cannot be done with Goethe alone, but that a dash of Whitman belongs there too, if the feelings are to be won over to a new humanism. And they have much in common, these two fathers, above all their sympathy with the organic, the sensual, the "calamus." To tell the truth, it does me good, it eases my conscience, to speak of Whitman after I have dealt with productions which, re- gardless of their qualities, do not extend beyond the sphere of belles-lettres—while we are all inclined to assent to the current feeling that it is not art, not culture in the sense of taste and even “inner-wordliness and asceticism” which is the important thing to- 64 GERMAN LETTER day, but problems of co-existence, problems of political morality and human organization. So, at the close, which I consider the place of honour, I shall set the enthusiastic announcement of a work which knows, not how to sing, but how to discuss in the most astute and effective manner, the things which give the writings of the great American poet their supra-aesthetic significance. If someone in Germany speaks of "democracy,” the persons he is talking with usually take it to be nothing other than a form of government, the republic in other words, and meet him with the arguments which are always ready to hand against this system and which he himself is familiar with ad nauseam. But that does not get very far; the rebuttal is weak, it is along the lines of party politics, whereas in speaking for democracy one does not involve party politics, but declares himself for certain mental necessities which the German, in the interest of his internal good health, dare not leave out of account. What they consist in, these necessities; just what democracy really is; and of what a significant and far from negligible nature are the forces of resistance which the Ger- man temperament has historically opposed to it—all this is pro- nounced with complete clarity in an unpretentious brochure which I recommend to everyone for examination. It is called Naturrecht und Humanität in der Weltpolitik, and was written by Ernst Tröltsch, a scholar who, it grieves me to say, recently died. Beginning with theology, in later years he devoted himself especially to the philosophy of culture and history; he taught at the University of Berlin. This article was published posthumously—and was simply a lecture which Tröltsch had de- livered shortly before his death on the occasion of the anniversary of the Deutsche Hochschule für Politik. It is not content to point out with remarkable precision the difference between the German attitudes and those of Western Europe and America on matters of politics, history, and ethics—in short, contrasting the ideas behind the German romantic counter-revolution with the older, bourgeois- conservative-revolutionary ideas of natural law, humanity, and "progress.” It does not stop at observation and analysis, but after a certain point becomes a pedagogical appeal. With a convincing warmth he establishes and defends the historical necessity for Ger- man thought to approach again that of Western Europe, with which it is indissolubly bound by reason of definite religious and THOMAS MANN 65 o ideological elements of our cultural life, although he makes the reservation that the corruption and hypocritical misuse of the ancient Christian idea of humanity should be subjected to every criticism. He establishes, I say, and defends the full possibility of our effecting this approach, so vital to the world at the present time, without any radical denial of our own intellectual identity. I cannot put into a few words the whole sequence of the ideas in this work. But what was here stated outright with in- vigorating definiteness by an erudite thinker, had for a long time been alive emotionally, as a vague stirring of the conscience, in many a German—perhaps in those very people who had remained long and deep-rooted on the enchanted mountain of German romanticism. And this had led to avowals which were ill received as evidence of bootlicking and mugwumpery by those who mistake their improvidence for loyalty. We in our better knowledge shall not let ourselves be misled as to the demands of existence by a dark sentimentality which con- fuses self-discipline with self-denial. The ideas of world citizen- ship and world union which characterize European humanism and its propensity for natural law originated in the older stoic and mediaeval junction of law, morals, and safety; we have learned to despise these ideas deeply as mere utilitarian enlightenment, deeply and with what was undoubtedly once great revolutionary justice. Yet such ideas of humanity, habitually compromised and misused, derided and exploited by the powers that be, conceal an unescapable core of regulative truth, of practical, rational de- mands, which no people even for reasons which at the start are purely theoretical-can be guilty of denying to any radical degree without having its sense of human values harmed not only from the standpoint of society, but in a manner vastly more profound. This has been proved. We shall not eagerly swallow the wretched cooky that each new day of experience offers to our historical pes- simism, since our romantic instinct depends secretly upon this pes- simism and cannot be separated from it. In the face of corrupt thinking we shall preserve our own thoughts from corruption; for we can show ourselves more German in this way than by a sullen retreat to the cult of ideas whose total degeneracy has plunged us into a catastrophe which would be worthless if it did not have the power to instruct us. THOMAS MAN BOOK REVIEWS ARTIST TURNED PROPHET PsychOANALYSIS AND THE UNCONSCIOUS. By D. H. Lawrence. 12mo. 120 pages. Thomas Seltzer. $1.50. FANTASIA OF THE UNCONSCious. By D. H. Lawrence. 12m0. 312 pages. Thomas Seltzer. $2.25. Ву STUDIES IN CLASSICAL AMERICAN LITERATURE. D. H. Lawrence. 8vo. 264 pages. Thomas Seltzer. $3. KANGAROO. By D. H. Lawrence. 12mo. 421 pages. Thomas Seltzer. $2. T last Mr D. H. Lawrence is being acclaimed by critics and public alike as the most significant fiction writer of his gen- eration. And yet in those days when the drugging rhapsody of his words sounded to ears too angry or too insensible to heed he wrote, we believe, his most moving and important prose. Stalking al- ways through his pages with wild intractable glance was the tiger of lust, the tiger of lust that the Anglo-Saxon race had beaten back and back, until it crouched down cowering with only its two un- conquerable eyes glimmering out of the darkness. Not, indeed, that sex has not been a theme for poets and philosophers since time immemorial, but Mr Lawrence, it would appear, was the first writer to embody in artistic form the intimations of psychoanalysis with his own singular and authentic vision. Suddenly those vague conflicts and enmities, those tense wary advances, cold with- drawals, and entombed intimacies between the sexes were revealed and amplified. Henry James could expose with the delicate scalpel of his intellect the nerves of thought underlying complex situa- tions, but Mr Lawrence ignored thought altogether, hardly ac- knowledged its existence, and like a man under the spell of some mystical admonition in himself, slipped past every artistic warn- ALYSE GREGORY 67 ing down and down until he reached the subsoil of creation itself. In Sons and Lovers, in The Rainbow, in Twilight in Italy, and in a few of his poems Mr Lawrence is, we believe, at his best. Here his febrile and tortured genius flows richly and turbulently. Every passing stir upon his sensitiveness is passionately or beautifully recorded. The mother-complex in Sons and Lovers is artistically convincing without being obtrusive, the picture of the old miner, his father, done with sharp and restrained veracity, and even if the author himself as the hero seems a trifle priggish, no one could read this book through without feeling in its pages something wholly new and vital in the literature of our day. Perhaps The Rainbow is less integrated as a work of art, but it also contains passages of greater beauty, passages in which every seed and flower in the English landscape seem to share that same vibration of life which moves so inscrutably in the frames of men. As animals prey on each other in order to sustain life to which every passing hour is a recurrent threat, so Mr Lawrence showed us men and women in their obscure destructive combats for empire, in their isolations and irremediable woes and curative returns to the soil. Not until the appearance of Women in Love did we begin to detect the real trend of his developing philosophy. And then what a sorry—what a very pitiful and unexpected spectacle met our startled eyes! The very tiger that he had loosed so magically with his own hands, the tiger of sex was slowly turning and driv- ing him back, inch by inch, into the hermetic cell of dogma. Birkin and Gerald are but two aspects of Mr Lawrence himself, just as Gudrun and Ursula are animated dolls set up to play off his the- ories one against the other. Gerald must be destroyed by Gudrun because he has sunk all his capital in sex and thereby lost his power to dominate her. Birkin struggles to find his necessary manly con- nexion with the outside world while Ursula seeks to imprison him for ever in the stultifying circle of their intimacy. Only the fever- ish Hermione in spite of artistic distortion has reality; and per- haps Mr and Mrs Crich, who are presented with that narrowed percipient power of Lawrence's for probing straight through to the essential and mute differences between certain associated couples. If Women in Love left us with a residue of doubt in our minds The Lost Girl corroborated our worst fears and in spite of some lovely passages toward the end of the book it is as a whole boring and unconvincing, a shell of the Lawrence we have honoured. And 68 ARTIST TURNED PROPHET Aaron's Rod continues the disillusion. Here Birkin and Gerald are replaced by Aaron and Lilly. It is Lawrence hypnotizing him- self, ceding his ground step by step to the avenging tiger, scatter- ing his messages through the pages as would a prisoner about to be entombed and already beginning to lose direct communication with the outside world. Always the dénouement is the same. It recurs in Lady-Bird, in The Captain's Doll, in The Fox. “Away, oh women, out of the world of disturbing ideas, of politics, of men's activities! Seek your salvation and ours in the dark caverns of willing obedience! Up, men, and assert your power. The only way you can keep your women docile is by seeking out some male purpose greater than sex.” It is as absurd to think of a clever English girl like Alvina Houghton submerging herself for ever in her Italian husband as for March in The Fox, an eager, intelligent, modern young woman, once clear of the fog of sensuous desire, submitting her soul to the limited, murdering bully she married. It is not, however, until Mr Lawrence steps clean out of the field of fiction into that of metaphysics that he delivers himself over completely into our hands. But perhaps if, as Mr Bertrand Russell says, “Metaphysics is the attempt to conceive the world as a whole by means of thought,” Mr Lawrence cannot even be termed a metaphysician; for it is rather with the "brutish sting” of his inflamed sensibilities than with the pen of reflection that he traces his manifestos and slips with them into that exalted area where are usually assembled the most profound and imaginative minds of the day-scientists, poets, philosophers. Yet it is hardly a case of slipping, either. For not reverently, with no deprecatory bow, no indeed, but with one great whirling leap in hobnailed boots Mr Lawrence lands squarely on his two feet in the midst of this grave and eclectic company, apparently oblivious to the fact that he is not alone in the universe. It is hardly necessary to say that from the pens of mystics have come truths beautiful and eternal, and science is for ever resolving the world for us into new and liberating shapes and sequences. But it is, we feel, when these two aspects of insight are artistically fused that the greatest literature is written. In Mr Lawrence's Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious, and Fantasia of the Unconscious there is neither the exquisite intimate discovery of a poet like Blake nor the passion- less appeal to intellect that one demands from a scientific state- ment. There is only Mr Lawrence looking about him with slightly ALYSE GREGORY 69 dilated and belligerent eyes. And really what a comic picture he presents in his new rôle of spiritual leader to mankind: this beard- ed, fox-eyed, irascible prophet with a thundering Jehovah-complex turning suddenly full blast upon the rapt and fluttering procession of women who have flocked with such unprotesting reverence at his temperamental and erratic heels and in stentorian tones crying out, “And so, men, drive your wives, beat them out of their self- consciousness and their soft smarminess and good, lovely ideas of themselves.” To try to understand the divagations and recoils of Mr Lawrence's logic in its eccentric movements is as difficult as to follow the zig-zag flight of a snipe disturbed on a frosty morning. He is one of those very familiar writers on the complexities of sex, who, starting with the assertion that men and women are for ever and ever ad infinitum different-mentally, morally, biologically different—and can never therefore hope by the barest possibility to understand each other, forthwith proceeds to devote endless pages to instructing this mysterious other sex as to its own secret desires. He cries out pugnaciously that man is alone, alone, alone, for ever isolate and adrift upon this planet and then hems him in on all sides with dangerous currents, “dynamic flows,” "blood polari- ties,” each with subtle and puissant commands upon his balance. He disposes of Freud's Interpretation of Dreams as “insulting to the integrity of the human soul” and in its place sets up another of his own which may be pleasing to the soul, but certainly pays small attention to the reason. Of course, it would be impossible for Mr Lawrence to write a book without saying many shrewd and illuminating things, but in this case they are vitiated at the root by his obsession to attain se- curity and control in the sexual relation. “Ah, how good it is to come home to your wife when she believes in you and submits to your purpose that is beyond her,” he writes. Is his sarcastic dis- dain when alluding to American women either to be deplored or wondered at under the circumstances? Nobody, least of all Mr Lawrence, likes his most tender and intimate desires to be greeted with airy laughter. In Studies in Classic American Literature we see this versatile Englishman in still another attire, that of interpretive critic of literature. Like some of the scientists he takes such pleasure in de- riding he has always a new thesis up his sleeve, or rather the old thesis in some new form. America is, as it were, suffering from a 70 ARTIST TURNED PROPHET father complex. She ran away, bolted, in fact, from the domination of Europe, only to find herself unable to establish a separate life of her own. Her strident assertions of a new freedom are but hysteri- cal cries with which she seeks to quiet her unassuageable tension and fear, for underneath smoulders always a secret rebellion against her ancient masters. Slaves on the one hand-slaves per- ishing for the need of a despot—and on the other a few self-tor- tured and deluded idealists, idealists driven up into the arid air of false sentiment, denying the deep voice of their own subcon- scious knowledge and predilections—here we have the great New World according to our distinguished visitor. The very concept of democracy is created for the sole purpose of undermining the Eu- ropean spirit, of breaking the spell of the old mastery, and once this is accomplished American democracy will evaporate into thin air and American life will begin; the old fear will be replaced by a new mastery, the mastery of a deep native, individual soul. Such is Mr Lawrence's main theme which he buffets from page to page as an excited school boy might bat at an evasive and recalcitrant baseball, emitting strange guttural noises the while which we are, it is supposed, to understand as the “real, right” American vernacu- lar. A veritable Babe Ruth of literature, indeed, in the matter of vigour and “bully” hits, dashing muscularly forward and returning with swinging strides to his home base. Benjamin Franklin was the arch rationalizer. It was he who set up "the first dummy American," invented a list of virtues “which he trotted inside like a grey nag in a paddock.” He is the practical type of American, while Crèvecoeur, on the other hand, is the emotional, the first of his countrymen to transcribe with veracity the savagery and strangeness of the animal life about him, a savagery which the upper levels of his mind refused to accept and so subverted into spurious idealism. Here according to Mr Lawrence is the typical American artist whose real insights are for ever being betrayed by the falseness of existing ethics. But per- haps this dualism remarked by the author is even more clearly il- lustrated in the case of Fenimore Cooper's Deerslayer, where the hunter says “Hurt nothing unless you are forced to” and yet exults in the hunt and exists only by killing. For, says Mr Law- rence, “Idealism in America is a sort of by-play. The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.” And so with a chance cunning he thrusts his finger ALYSE GREGORY 71 straight through the flimsy draperies of our public pretences and touches the sharp and jagged blade beneath. For can any one deny that this is not true of America ? Do we not see it exemplified in the figure of Woodrow Wilson, also alluded to by the author? What other country could have raised to such absolute power a person so rational, sanctimonious, and soft-spoken on the surface, and so impenetrable, so secretly implacable at the centre? And is not the same division to be found in our institutions? In our ad- ministration of justice, in business, even in our theatres ? A callous unassailable hardness beneath, and on the surface a thousand assur- ances of justice and good-will. In writing of Edgar Allan Poe Mr Lawrence connects his lively theories about sex with his no less active interpretation of Amer- ica to the great detriment of the author of Ligeia. But what a light one gets on his own limitations when he tells us that The Fall of the House of Usher is "an overdone vulgar fantasy" and that Poe's "so-called” style is false and meretricious. Perhaps in the end what emerges from this book as most inter- esting, most significant, is the indestructibility of man's craving for worship. Tear his illusions from him one by one; show him the very earth upon which he exists as insignificant in the whole scheme of the universe; attack his gods as mere distortions of his own obscure instincts calling up to him through strange laby- rinthian passages; then lead him stealthily down, step by step, until he is brought face to face with the origin of these instincts which rise like poisonous vapours from his own imperishable egoism. And what does he do? He falls down upon his knees and wor- ships! From a subman he raises up a superman and unweary of the old game puts into his mouth an entire new morality, a new morality with which once more to ensnare the human race, or at least that unfortunate half of the human race who because of their sex have been long accustomed to the manipulation of such adroit and artful traps. One wishes that one might close here and cancel for ever from one's mind the memory of Mr Lawrence's latest novel, Kangaroo. Would that he himself had remained uncorrupted by the disease of ideology which so exasperates him in others and in the throes of which he likewise now lies prostrate. When we read sentences such as the following we find it hardly possible to believe that their author is one of the most established in the Anglo-Saxon 72 ARTIST TURNED PROPHET world of letters and has already, if we remember correctly, pub- lished sixteen or more books including plays, novels, essays, short stories, and poems. “His presence was so warm. You felt you were cuddled cosily, like a child in his breast—that your feet were nestling on his ample, beautiful 'tummy.'” [Or] “I am sorry to have to stand, a sorry sight, preening my wings on the brink of the ointment pot, thought Richard. But from this vantage point let me preach to myself. He preached and the record was taken down for this gramophone of a novel.” Surely such expressions as these, and there are many of them, are unpardonable when coming from an artist who expects serious consideration from even the most lenient critics. In bartering with the little tin gods which perform so nimbly and obediently for Mr H. G. Wells Mr Lawrence's eyes have become glazed and his ears dulled. In spite of his vigorous honesty and his insight he has not the kind of background or information that could justify even so fragmentary a venture into the fields of sociology, economics, or psychology. Nor has he those temperamental qualities of rever- ence and detachment which are necessary if a fact, most delicate and evasive of all things in life, is to be convincingly established and lucidly interpreted. But though the construction of Kangaroo is bad, the characters unreal, the dialogue and reflections vulgar and wearying beyond belief, we are every now and then reminded by a passing phrase that Mr Lawrence is still living and still potential. And even if he should never write a sentence again penetrated with that quality of mobile response to the savage and destructive beauty of life at its foundation which has been so uniquely his gift to our literature, but should turn gradually into an inflammable and churlish fanatic whom everyone hastens for the sake of peace to placate, we shall still continue to revere and respect him. For have we not, to balance against his worst liter- ary indecorums, certain other transcendently revealing pages; and to have written even two books and a few poems that contain flashes of pure genius, that most sacred of all gifts which life has to offer, is to have done more than enough to justify the acclaim he has received in a disoriented age with many bogies and few gods. ALYSE GREGORY STEPHEN CRANE STEPHEN CRANE: A STUDY IN AMERICAN LETTERS. By Thomas Beer. With an Introduction by Joseph Conrad. 8vo. 256 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. $2.50. . THIS work violates all the union rules for literary monographs. First of all, it is extremely short and straightforward—scarce- ly running, I believe, to thirty-five thousand words. Secondly, it contains no series of obscene photographs of its subject, showing him at the breast, in his first breeches, as a freshman at the Ohio Wesleyan, at the annual banquet of the B'nai Brith, tramping in the Tyrol, shaking hands with William H. Taft. Thirdly, there is not the slightest visible effort to achieve a "definitive” estimate of his place in history as artist, patriot, and Christian—no long summary of the plots of all his books, no judicious weighing of his debts to Aristotle, Dante, and Bret Harte, no interminable discus- sion of his relative rank among his contemporaries. A strange “study,” indeed! In only one way does it show normalcy: it has a long, pointless, and wearying introduction by a literary big-wig. This time the big-wig is no less a fellow than Joseph Conrad; nevertheless, Conrad's dull introduction damages what is other- wise an exhilarating and extraordinary book. For it is precisely by throwing overboard all the usual apparatus criticus, all the traditional hocus-pocus of the professors, that Beer clears the way for his brilliant portrait of Crane-a portrait done con amore, with endless shrewdness and zest. Here, at last, step- ping out of his cloud of legends—and what American author of them all, save only Poe, has ever been gabbled about so much in boudoirs and barrooms ?—the author of The Red Badge of Courage emerges, an infinitely shallow and silly boy and yet somehow a man of genius, a Park Row celebrity and yet of the blood royal. Crane’s life, outwardly, was indistinguishable from that of a prime- val Greenwich Villager. He, too, lived in a garret and borrowed He, too, when money began to reach him, betook him- self abroad. He, too, talked a great deal more than he worked. But somehow, out of all that falsity and banality, there emerged wisdom—somehow, in the midst of facile word-daubing for the his way. 74 STEPHEN CRANE magazines and newspapers, such incomparable things as The Red Badge, The Monster, and The Blue Hotel got themselves upon paper. Stunts, every one-carefully planned, laboriously worked up. But what stunts! Crane had to wait a long while for his biographer, and mean- while a rank growth of evil tales almost obliterated the actual man. He was the heaviest drinker since Daniel Webster. He used mor- phine, cocaine, hashish. He was the lover of Sarah Bernhardt. He died owing millions to street-walkers and newspaper reporters. But the wait was worth while, for when the whitewasher came at last he was happily not a Puritan. I suspect, indeed, that Mr Beer was genuinely disappointed when he found that the Crane legend was mainly bunkum; his verdict of "not guilty” has a Scotch, remonstrative tone. It is not, however, Crane the prey of scandal who interests him most, but Crane the literary artist—the artist hatched fabulously in rural New Jersey and thrown headlong into a New York whose chief toffs in letters were Richard Harding Davis and Richard Watson Gilder. Of the two, Davis was vastly the more intelligent. He saw what was strange and valuable in Crane, and tried to draw it out; he beat the drum for the younger man, and once actually blacked an eye in his defence. But poor Gilder, the literary snob par excellence, held gingerly aloof. The sheer gusto and momentum of The Red Badge must have pene- trated even that stuffed shirt, but from Maggie and The Monster he recoiled. Howells was more appreciative. But even Howells had a blue pencil behind his ear while he applauded. Mr Beer's account of all these transactions is charmingly frank, lively, and acute. The Crane that he sets before us is not a labora- tory animal pickled in a bottle, but a living man projected against a background of other living men, some of them important and all of them amusing. Howells, Hamlin Garland, Henry James, Con- rad, Robert Barr, Clyde Fitch, Harold Frederic—these are some of the characters in the tragi-comedy. Not one of them simply walks on; even the least of them is fully alive. The book, indeed, consti- tutes the best record of the purple Nineties in America that I have ever encountered. It reveals a capacity for evoking the men and events of a dead generation, for reducing large and complex scenes to simplicity and clarity, for puzzling out the inner springs of liter- ary feuds and tendencies that must not be allowed to go to waste. H. L. MENCKEN LIGHT ON THE DARK AGES A HISTORY OF MAGIC AND EXPERIMENTAL SCIENCE, DURING THE FIRST THIRTEEN CENTURIES OF OUR ERA. By Lynn Thorndike. 2 volumes. 8vo. 1871 pages. The Macmillan Company. $ro. ROFESSOR THORNDIKE, well known as author of The History of Medieval Europe, has undertaken a very difficult yet fascinating task in tracing the growth of methods of science during the first thirteen centuries of our era. The materials for his book lay chiefly in unpublished manuscripts scattered over Europe; and into Europe he has plunged with hyper-professorial zeal, read- ing, analysing, annotating, classifying, and finally condensing the vast bulk of all that material into a mere one thousand seven hun- dred and four pages of text, about one hundred of indices, and nearly as many of bibliographies (besides those contained in foot- notes). The physical labour alone is appalling, yet it has been done with something like gusto. The great figures emerge with clear-cut personalities; the most incoherent treatises are reduced to essentials; and the whole is summed up with plenty of picturesque detail and entertaining anecdote. Some famous names—notably Roger Bacon and Thomas Aquinas—are put rather authoritatively in their places; others, like Robert Grosseteste and Adelard of Bath, appear with more credit than they have ever before received in modern times. The scope of the the book is enormous. It begins with the decadence of classical culture: with Pliny, Ptolemy, Galen, Plu- tarch, Apuleius, Philostratus, and their fellows. It ends trium- phantly with special emphasis on the twelfth and thirteenth cen- turies, on the famous names of Michael Scot, Albertus Magnus, Thomas Aquinas, Roger Bacon, Arnald of Villanova, and Ray- mond Lull. Thus the book deals exclusively and thoroughly with Mediaevalism, of which we really know so little, from its beginning in late classical times to the rise of the Renaissance. Needless to say, science and magic during classical times and the Renaissance have already won sufficient attention elsewhere to satisfy the lay 76 LIGHT ON THE DARK AGES reader. Yet, though it may seem absurd to ask for more, we can- not help wishing for a third volume with equally scholarly accounts of the flowering of occult science under such names as Paracelsus and Agrippa. A history of magic could not well end before the seventeenth century, and its last manifestations are the most perplexing There is one serious charge to be brought against the book: this lies in Professor Thorndike's treatment of magic. By the title, one expects a systematic account of the development of occult theory. What did the old magicians think they could do? In what kind of macrocosm did they believe? And what did they actually ac- complish? Professor Thorndike's answers to these questions are perhaps what we might have expected, yet not what we hoped for. Though he says that "magic is here understood in the broadest sense of the word, as including all occult arts and sciences” and that its name applies “not merely to operative art but also to a mass of ideas or doctrine,” still in the long run it appears that he really treats magic as the superstitious side of science: it is merely what eventually turned out to be untrue. It is magic if you believe that a husband's constancy may be secured by the marrow of a wolf's left foot; it is science if you believe that a magnetized needle tends to point northward. This is a trivial and (I may add) an unscholarly point of view. Definitions of magic should not depend on subsequent proof that it was not practicable. Nor should his readers be led to believe that the many intelligent people who wrote on magic were chiefly concerned with concocting absurd amulets and philtres to satisfy the occasional desires of the public. They were philosophers with a logical metaphysics; they were scientists experimenting with telepathy, hypnosis, and other seemingly miraculous powers. To be sure, they wrote of these things usually under symbols, but in the light of the knowledge we have to-day, the symbols are easily pene- trated. Again we must admit that their metaphysics and even their practices continually led them to sign their names to theories which are extremely silly and often repulsive; but that is only in- cidental. Professor Thorndike has limited himself to the inci- dental, treating of the essential foundations of their work very seldom. Of the many branches of magic, Professor Thorndike is really S. FOSTER DAMON 77 systematic towards astrology alone. We could not, perhaps, ex- pect a chapter on the development of so trivial a thing as palmistry; but we might expect it of such immense subjects as alchemy and theurgy. To Professor Thorndike, ceremonial magic is almost un- known; black magic is reduced mainly to popular recipes for fasci- nating women, cursing with sterility, and the like; magical healing is almost exclusively sympathetic magic; and so forth. In brief, Professor Thorndike, extremely competent in the exoteric, hardly suspects the existence of the esoteric. The "occult” remains oc- cult—that is, concealed. As an instance: what is alchemy, and what did it accomplish? Professor Thorndike treats it as a superstitious chemistry which at- tempted to make gold and the panacea, its real accomplishments lying in minor chemical discoveries. This, we assert, is erroneous: ever since 1850 it has been fairly well known that alchemy is quite different from mere chemistry, In the Religio Medici Sir Thomas Browne long since told the world, from personal experience, that alchemy was "something more than the perfect exaltation of gold” and that it had taught him “a great deal of Divinity” among other things. There are plenty of first-hand references from trustworthy people explaining (what the alchemists themselves explained) that alchemy was not at all what it pretended to be, that its language was almost wholly symbolic, that—to paraphrase Chaucer-we must understand not only its language, but its purpose as well. And though we willingly excuse Professor Thorndike from apply- ing such literary references to his treatment of the subject, we still wonder that the books themselves shed no light on the mystery. But he is merely puzzled: in attempting to analyse Geber's Book on Quicksilver, for instance, he is content to say that it is "the most incomprehensible of all. In it we read of raising the dead and of the use of such liquids as 'a divine water.' And again, Spiritism. This subject has deeply interested the modern world for the past seventy-five years. Now there have al- ways been vengeful spirits, apparitions at the moment of death, haunted houses, poltergeists, and rappings; yet this is a subject which Professor Thorndike omits almost completely. Of course, there was little organized theory or practice of this subject till the day of the Foxe sisters; but even so, the earlier material should have been collected. 78 LIGHT ON THE DARK AGES However, Professor Thorndike has given us such a quantity of information that it is useless to complain of what he has not done. His method has been not so much to expose the secret doctrines and to trace their growth, as to describe manuscripts as he found them. He shows how fact gradually shook itself loose from theory and how experimental proof was gradually established. He re- constructs the personalities of many men once of great authority, and estimates the value of their work. And besides this, he digs up a lot of interesting things. He tells us the legend of Nectane- bus; he proves that Roger Bacon (alas!) did not discover gun- powder; he shows that the Mediaeval Church was far more liberal in its attitude towards occultism than any church of to-day. There are chapters on the Gnostics, Hermetic Books of the Middle Ages, Prester John and the marvels of India, ancient dream-books. It is not too much to say that of real magic (apart from vulgar superstitions) there is hardly a word in these two weighty volumes. None the less, the future writer of a real History of Magic will find this book indispensable, if only because it tells where all the material is to be found. As a contribution to the history of science, this work cannot be praised too highly; it will not soon be replaced. Meanwhile the lay reader will find in it an amazing fund of fact and legend which he will not hurry over. S. Foster DAMON A LOST LADY A Lost LADY. By Willa Cather. 12mo. 174 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. $1.75. . ISS CATHER'S new novel does something to atone for One of Ours. Miss Cather seems to suffer from a disability like that of Henry James: it is almost impossible for her to describe emotion or action except at second hand. When James wanted to present Milly Theale, who was dying for lack of love, he aban- doned the direct record of her emotions as soon as the situation be- came acute and allowed the reader to watch her only through the eyes of Merton Densher, and when the relation between her and Densher commenced to become really dramatic he evaded it alto- gether and left the culmination of the tragedy to the divination of a second observer who talked with Densher after Milly Theale's death. I am aware of the aesthetic advantages which James urged in favour of this reflective method, but I am inclined to believe that in his case it was arrived at through a limitation of imaginative scope. His tendency was always to present only so much of the drama of his daring and sophisticated protagonists as might have been observed or guessed by some rather timid and inexperienced person who happened to be looking on; What Maisie Knew is per- haps the most satisfactory of all his novels because in this case the person who is looking on and whose consciousness has to be laid be- fore us is not even a grown-up person, but merely a little girl, who consequently makes a minimum demand for experience or adult emotion on the part of the author. For a converse reason, One of Ours was one of Miss Cather's least satisfactory performances be- cause in it she was confronted with the problem of rendering direct- ly not only the frustrated passions and aspirations of a young Mid- dle Westerner on the farm, but also his final self-realization as a soldier in the war. But in A Lost Lady Miss Cather falls back on the indirect method of James (who was a great artist, as novelists go, for all his not in- frequent incapacity to fill in with colour the beautiful line and com- position of his pictures); and she achieves something of James' 80 A LOST LADY success. Here her problem is to present the vicissitudes of a young and attractive woman with a vivid capacity for life married to an elderly Western contractor of the "railroad aristocracy.” For this purpose she invents another of those limpid and sensitive young men to whom she has always been rather addicted and makes him the glass through which we see her heroine. It is interesting to note that on the only two important occasions when she tries to show us something which was not directly witnessed by young Niel Herbert, in the first case—the brief scene between the lady and her lover in the house at night—she strikes perhaps the only false melodramatic note to be found in the whole story (“ ‘Be careful,' she murmured as she approached him, 'I have a distinct impression that there is some one on the enclosed stairway. Ah, but kittens have claws, these days!'”) and in the second—the expedition in the sleigh-she is able to save the situation only by introducing a sec- ond limpid young man to be a witness to phenomena unmanageable for the first. In any case, A Lost Lady is a charming sketch performed with exceptional distinction and skill. In fact, Miss Cather is one of the only writers who has brought genuine distinction to the description of the West. Other writers have more enthusiasm or colour or vitality—in which last quality Miss Cather is a little lacking-but Miss Cather is almost the only one who has been able to overlay any sort of fine artistic patina upon the meager and sprawling rural life of the Middle West. There are exquisite pages of landscape in A Lost Lady and the portrait of the veteran railroad pioneer is surely one of the most sensitive and accurate we have of the Amer- ican of the post-Civil-War period—a type greatly preferable, I grant Miss Cather, in its simplicity and honour and for all its cul- tural and intellectual limitations, to the commercial sharpers who succeeded it.—Not, however, that Miss Cather sentimentalizes the Middle West or booms it as spiritually richer than it is like Mr Vachel Lindsay, for instance: through all her work there run two currents of profound feeling-one for the beauty of those lives lived out between the prairie and the sky, but the other-most poignantly in A Wagner Concert, my favourite among her short stories, and now in certain scenes of A Lost Lady-for the pathos of the human spirit trying to flower in that barren soil. EDMUND WILSON THE SOUTH SEAS AGAIN ISLES OF ILLUSION. Letters from the South Seas. Anonymous. Edited by Bohun Lynch. 12mo. 331 pages. Small, Maynard and Company. $3. TO 10 get anything out of the South Seas nowadays one should be what the metempsychosisists call "a fresh soul”—and thor- oughly a fresh soul. But is there anything special to the South Seas—is there anything that can be got there and not got anywhere else? I do not doubt but there is. Once in Hilo, I remember, I met a man who had been in Samoa. Really in Samoa-not on a beach in Samoa, not on a plantation in Samoa, not with the mis- sionaries, not with the traders. But in the Samoa of the awa-drink- ing chiefs and the inviolate taupo girls. He was a fresh soul, and he was able to get something out of it all. I remember his repeat- ing to me a dialogue on the beach. I knew something about the Polynesian soul when he told me what had been said to him. The anonymous writer of the letters which make up Isles of Illusion is by no means a fresh soul. He is of the eighteen and nineties. He has literary ambitions. Add to this that he is an Ox- ford man for whom the Melanesians are "niggers” and for whom the imported Chinese are “Chows” and you will perceive that he has many cycles to go through before he becomes a fresh soul. He was master in an English public school. He broke away to make a fortune and to find freedom in the South Seas. He got there, a wearied and a distraught man. First he went to the New Hebrides where he was thoroughly uncomfortable. Then he went to an island near Tahiti that is under French administration, and there he became more comfortable. And there we leave him after eight years in the South Seas. He had taken a native girl; he had had two children, one still-born. And he had parted with the woman and the child. The publishers, and, I suppose, the editor, consider this book "a record which for stark reality and straightforwardness of revela- tion is almost unique in recent literature at least.” I find very little that is really revealing in the book. It is all too much of a tirade- 82 THE SOUTH SEAS AGAIN a tirade against European civilization, a tirade against the greed and brutality of European man in the Melanesian and Polynesian Islands, a tirade against missionaries, a tirade against Australia and the Australians, a tirade against things in general. If the man could only have got away from himself for a while and shown us with some approach to disinterestedness the beauty and the ruin that mark all the islands of the South Seas! European man never showed more of the blond beast than in his prowlings through the Islands of the Pacific. By the test of our treatment of the Kanaka-Maori people the European-Christian civilization is shown to be as hollow as the Peace of Versailles. We came to the Islands, mark you, in the Age of Enlightenment. The Americans were drawing up their Declaration of Independence when Captain Cook went to the other side of the world and dis- covered the Friendly Islands, the Society Islands, and the Sand- wich Islands (the Spaniards had come to the Marquesas and prob- ably to the Hawaii some time before, but the Islands were prac- tically unaffected by their visit). Well, in the full blaze of the enlightenment, in the epoch of Gibbon and Voltaire and Samuel Johnson, and Washington, and Jefferson, and liberal kings and progressive empresses, we came amongst a people who had built up an interesting civilization without metals, pottery, or the loom, without the horse or the ox, amongst a people who were handsome and healthy, who had a great decorative art, who had a wonderful ballet, who had an elaborate poetry, who had a language that was full of the very sounds of nature and that had wonderful capability of expressing visible images. What is there left of the people now, or their art or their language? In the Marquesas, the handsome valley-dwellers whom Melville praised have shrunk to a sorry rem- nant of eighteen hundred diseased persons—that under French dis- pensation. In the New Hebrides English-speaking profiteers, mainly Australian, kidnap consumptive Kanakas to force them to work on the ancestral bits of land that they have stolen from them. If the Kanaka tries to swim from the ship, they shoot at him. But not to kill, to maim, so that the sharks can get him. This the author of Isles of Illusion, who did some Kanaka-driving himself, describes as amongst the practices of the New Hebrides. And what have we done with regard to the culture they built up in the course of their thousands of years separation from us who are prob- PADRAIC COLUM 83 ably related to them? "It is an awful pity,” says the writer of Isles of Illusion “that the real Tahitian language is practically ex- tinct. No one speaks it, and only the old people of very noble blood understand it. It is an awful bastard tongue that is spoken now; it has lost all the lovely old words, for example, descriptive of the different kinds of fear that come by night. Fortunately an old French priest has taken the trouble to write a grammar and dictionary of the ancient tongue. But the worst that could happen to the Polynesian and the Melanesian has happened, and now let us be hopeful about them. The Polynesian is coming back; he has survived the diseases that we brought to his islands, and he is building up something like a resistance to them. In New Zealand, in Hawaii, in Tahiti, in Samoa, the native is coming up again. Perhaps, in the case of Samoa one should say that the native was coming back; that was under the German administration with its policy of non-interfer- ence with the natives; the island is now under a mandate given to the New Zealanders, and those who know the get-rich-quick methods of the British Colonials are not as hopeful for the survival of faa Samoa as they used to be. But the Marquesan is doomed, and the much less interesting New Hebredian is doomed. The French will soon be able to fill Typee's valley with Chinese coolies, and the Australian will soon see the last New Hebredian Kanaka drop in his traces. And nothing can be done about it. If only we could expropriate the plantation-owner, and the government of- ficial, and give the lesser islands over to a religious order that was not interested in making money out of the sweat of the Kanaka- to the Marists, say, for whom the author of Isles of Illusion says a good word—“They encourage the natives in all their old customs, and have much more influence—despite their poverty—with their flock than do the Presbyterians. They are the only people here who know anything about the folklore and old customs of the na- tives.” Of course the Protestant Missions would object. But per . haps they could be given “compensations,” as a Great Power would be given "compensation,” in other territory. Or give Hawaii a mandate over the lesser islands of Polynesia and Melanesia. The Polynesian people have some political influence in Hawaii, and the governing families are well-disposed to the Polynesians of the other islands. PADRAIC COLUM WELL MOUSED, LION 12mo. 140 HARMONIUM. By Wallace Stevens. . pages. Alfred A. Knopf. $2. I T is not too much to say that some writers are entirely without imagination—without that associative kind of imagination cer- tainly, of which the final tests are said to be simplicity, harmony, and truth. In Mr Stevens' work, however, imagination precludes banality and order prevails. In his book, he calls imagination “the will of things,” “the magnificent cause of being,” and demonstrates how imagination may evade "the world without imagination”; ef- fecting an escape which, in certain manifestations of bravura, is uneasy rather than bold. One feels, however, an achieved re- moteness as in Tu Muh's lyric criticism: “Powerful is the painting and high is it hung on the spotless wall in the lofty hall of your mansion.” There is the love of magnificence and the effect of it in these sharp, solemn, rhapsodic elegant pieces of eloquence; one assents to the view taken by the author, of Crispin whose mind was free And more than free, elate, intent, profound." The riot of gorgeousness in which Mr Stevens' imagination takes refuge, recalls Balzac's reputed attitude to money, to which he was indifferent unless he could have it “in heaps or by the ton.” It is "a flourishing tropic he requires”; so wakeful is he in his appetite for colour and in perceiving what is needed to meet the require- ments of a new tone key, that Oscar Wilde, Frank Alvah Parsons, Tappé, and John Murray Anderson seem children asleep in com- parison with him. One is met in these poems by some such clash of pigment as where in a showman's display of orchids or gladiolas, one receives the effect of vials of picracarmine, magenta, gamboge, and violet mingled each at the highest point of intensity: "In Yucatan, the Maya sonneteers Of the Caribbean amphitheatre MARIANNE MOORE 85 In spite of hawk and falcon, green toucan And jay, still to the nightbird made their plea, As if raspberry tanagers in palms, High up in orange air, were barbarous.” One is excited by the sense of proximity to Java peacocks, golden pheasants, South American macaw feather capes, Chilcat blankets, hair seal needlework, Singalese masks, and Rousseau's paintings of banana leaves and alligators. We have the hydrangeas and dog- wood, the "blue, gold, pink, and green” of the temperate zone, the hibiscus, "red as red” of the tropics. moonlight on the thick, cadaverous bloom That yuccas breed . with serpent-kin encoiled Among the purple tufts, the scarlet crowns.” and as in a shot spun fabric, the infinitude of variation of the col- ours of the ocean: . the blue And the colored purple of the lazy sea,” the emerald, indigos, and mauves of disturbed water, the azure and basalt of lakes; we have Venus "the centre of sea-green pomp” and America "polar purple.” Mr Stevens' exact demand, moreover, projects itself from nature to human nature. It is the eye of no "maidenly greenhorn" which has differentiated Crispin's daughters; which characterizes “the ordinary women” as “gaunt guitarists” and issues the junior-to-senior mandate in Floral Decorations for Bananas: “Pile the bananas on planks. The women will be all shanks And bangles and slatted eyes." He is a student of the flambeaued manner,” 86 WELL MOUSED, LION not indifferent to smart detail hang of coat, degree Of buttons" One resents the temper of certain of these poems. Mr Stevens is never inadvertently crude; one is conscious, however, of a deliber- ate bearishness—a shadow of acrimonious, unprovoked contumely. Despite the sweet-Clementine-will-you-be-mine nonchalance of the Apostrophe to Vincentine, one feels oneself to be in danger of un- earthing the ogre and in Last Looks at the Lilacs, a pride in un- serviceableness is suggested which makes it a microcosm of can- nibalism. Occasionally the possession of one good is remedy for not pos- sessing another as when Mr Stevens speaks of “the young emerald, evening star," "tranquillizing the torments of confus- ion.” Sunday Morning on the other hand—a poem so suggestive of a masterly equipoise-gives ultimately the effect of the mind disturbed by the intangible; of a mind oppressed by the properties of the world which it is expert in manipulating. And proportion- ately; aware as one is of the atuhor's susceptibility to the fever of actuality, one notes the accurate gusto with which he discovers the negro, that veritable “medicine of cherries” to the badgered analyst. In their resilence and certitude, the Hymn From a Watermelon Pavilion and the commemorating of a negress who "Took seven white dogs To ride in a cab,” are proud harmonies. One's humour is based upon the most serious part of one's na- ture. Le Monocle De Mon Oncle; A Nice Shady Home; and Daughters With Curls: the capacity for self-mockery in these titles illustrates the author's disgust with mere vocativeness. Instinct for words is well determined by the nature of the liber- ties taken with them, some writers giving the effect merely of presumptuous egotism-an unavoided outlandishness; others, not: Shakespeare arresting one continually with nutritious permutations as when he apostrophizes the lion in A Midsummer Night's Dream -"Well moused, lion.” Mr Stevens' "junipers shagged with ice,” MARIANNE MOORE 87 is properly courageous as are certain of his adjectives which have the force of verbs: “the spick torrent," "tidal skies," "loquacious columns”; there is the immunity to fear, of the good artist, in “the blather that the water made." His precise diction and verve are grateful as contrasts to the current vulgarizations of "gesture,” "dimensions,” and “intrigue.” He is able not only to express an idea with mere perspicuity; he is able to do it by implication as in Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird in which the glass coach evolved from icicles; the shadow, from birds; it becomes a kind of aristocratic cipher. The Emperor of Icecream, moreover, despite its not especially original theme of poverty enriched by death, is a triumph of explicit ambiguity. He gets a special effect with those adjectives which often weaken as in the lines: . "That all beasts should be beautiful As large, ferocious tigers are” and in the phrase, “the eye of the young alligator,” the adjective as it is perhaps superfluous to point out, makes for activity. There is a certain bellicose sensitiveness in “I do not know which to prefer The blackbird whistling Or just after,” and in the characterization of the snow man who nothing himself, beholds The nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.” In its nimbleness con brio with seriousness, moreover, Nomad Exquisite is a piece of that ferocity for which one values Mr Stevens most: "As the immense dew of Florida Brings forth The big-finned palm And green vine angering for life.” 88 WELL MOUSED, LION Poetic virtuosities are allied—especially those of diction, imag- ery, and cadence. In no writer's work are metaphors less "winter starved.” In Architecture Mr Stevens asks: “How shall we hew the sun, How carve the violet moon To set in nicks? Pierce, too, with buttresses of coral air And purple timbers, Various argentines” and The Comedian as the Letter C, as the account of the crafts- man's un simple jaunt,” is an expanded metaphor which becomes as one contemplates it, hypnotically incandescent like the rose tinged fringe of the night blooming cereus. One applauds those analogies derived from an enthusiasm for the sea: “She scuds the glitters, Noiselessly, like one more wave." “The salt hung on his spirit like a frost, The dead brine melted in him like a dew." In his positiveness, aplomb, and verbal security, he has the mind and the method of China; in such conversational effects as: “Of what was it I was thinking? So the meaning escapes,” and certainly in dogged craftsmanship. Infinitely conscious in his processes, he says "Speak even as if I did not hear you speaking But spoke for you perfectly in my thoughts.” One is not subject in reading him, to the disillusionment experi- enced in reading novices and charlatans who achieve flashes of MARIANNE MOORE 89 beauty and immediately contradict the pleasure afforded by offend- ing in precisely those respects in which they have pleased—showing that they are deficient in conscious artistry. Imagination implies energy and imagination of the finest type involves an energy which results in order “as the motion of a snake's body goes through all parts at once, and its volition acts at the same instant in coils that go contrary ways.” There is the sense of the architectural diagram in the disjoined titles of poems with related themes. Refraining for fear of impairing its litheness of contour, from overelaborating felicities inherent in a subject, Mr Stevens uses only such elements as the theme demands; for ex- ample, his delineation of the peacock in Domination of Black, is austerely restricted, splendour being achieved cumulatively in Ban- tams in Pine-Woods, The Load of Sugar-Cane, The Palace of the Babies, and The Bird With the Coppery Keen Claws. That "there have been many most excellent poets that never ver- sified, and now swarm many versifiers that need never answer to the name of poets,” needs no demonstration. The following lines as poetry independent of rhyme, beg the question as to whether rhyme is indispensably contributory to poetic enjoyment: “There is not nothing, no, no, never nothing, Like the clashed edges of two words that kill” and “The clambering wings of black revolved, Making harsh torment of the solitude.” It is of course evident that subsidiary to beauty of thought, rhyme is powerful in so far as it never appears to be invented for its own sake. In this matter of apparent naturalness, Mr Stevens is fault- less-as in correctness of assonance: "Chieftan Iffucan of Ascan in caftan Of tan with henna hackles, halt!” The better the artist, moreover, the more determined he will be to 90 WELL MOUSED, LION set down words in such a way as to admit of no interpretation of the accent but the one intended, his ultimate power appearing in a selfsufficing, willowy, firmly contrived cadence such as we have in Peter Quince at the Clavier and in Cortège for Rosenbloom: That tread The wooden ascents Of the ascending of the dead." One has the effect of poised uninterrupted harmony, a simple ap- pearing, complicated phase of symmetry of movements as in figure skating, tight-rope dancing, in the kaleidoscopically centrifugal circular motion of certain mediaeval dances. It recalls the snake in Far Away and Long Ago, “moving like quicksilver in a rope- like stream" or the conflict at sea when after a storm, the wind shifts and waves are formed counter to those still running. These expertnesses of concept with their nicely luted edges and effect of flowing continuity of motion, are indeed . pomps Of speech which are like music so profound They seem an exaltation without sound.” One further notes accomplishment in the use of reiteration—that pitfall of half-poets: “Death is absolute and without memorial, As in a season of autumn, When the wind stops. When the wind stops." In brilliance gained by accelerated tempo in accordance with a fixed melodic design, the precise patterns of many of these poems are interesting "It was snowing And it was going to snow" and the parallelism in Domination of Black suggest the Hebrew MARIANNE MOORE 91 idea of something added although there is, one admits, more the suggestion of mannerism than in Hebrew poetry. Tea takes prec- edence of other experiments with which one is familiar, in emo- tional shorthand of this unwestern type, and in Earthy Anecdote and the Invective Against Swans, symmetry of design is brought to a high degree of perfection. It is rude perhaps, after attributing conscious artistry and a se- verely intentional method of procedure to an artist, to cite work that he has been careful to omit from his collected work. One re- grets, however, the omission by Mr Stevens of The Indigo Glass In The Grass, The Man Whose Pharynx Was Bad, La Mort du Soldat Est Près des Choses Naturelles (5 Mars) and Comme Dieu Dispense de Graces: “Here I keep thinking of the primitives- The sensitive and conscientious themes Of mountain pallors ebbing into air.” However, in this collection one has eloquence. “The author's violence is for aggrandizement and not for stupor”; one consents therefore, to the suggestion that when the book of moonlight is written, we leave room for Crispin. In the event of moonlight and a veil to be made gory, he would, one feels, be appropriate in this legitimately sensational act of a ferocious jungle animal. MARIANNE MOORE BRIEFER MENTION CANE, by Jean Toomer (12mo