tent
of his debt to Jean Giraudoux, from whose manner and attitude M
Morand has certainly learnt a good deal. Not that he is an
imitator. M Giraudoux's trick of vision does not come naturally
to many; to M Morand it does. Or perhaps it is misleading to
suggest that such a kind of vision could come naturally to anybody.
It seems that it must be the outcome of a deliberate effort, which
has already had time to become almost a tradition in the most
advanced French literature. Its pedigree reaches back through
Rimbaud to Baudelaire.
This trick of vision is not easy to define, except as a function of
a peculiar use of its chief instrument—the image. Take a couple
of examples from the hundreds in M Morand's pages. The eye-
lids of Léa in The Six Day Night, are "the colour of a fifty-franc
note”; and again her "beautiful Jewish complexion” is “like a
sulphur-dusted vine.” In the baldest scientific terms, the process


186
MORALIZINGS ON MORAND
employed in these images is the assimilation of the organic to the
inorganic; still more precisely, the reduction of the vital to the
mechanical. Léa's eyelids can be turned out by the printing presses
of the Banque de France, her complexion pumped on to her by a
sulphur-spray. And this use of the image is strictly in keeping
with an attitude to life. In Baudelaire, the originator of the
method, the attitude to life determined the use of the image; it
follows, with a kind of inevitability, from the passionate invoca-
tion of “O mort, vieux capitaine!" It is a mechanized world from
which the poet seeks liberation in death; no wonder that he should
describe it as such. But with the modern epigoni one is never
quite sure. Have they built up an attitude on the foundation of an
inherited trick of imagery? Or is the attitude really theirs by
nature?
With M Morand one cannot tell. Or rather, one is secretly
pretty certain, but finds it almost impossible to give convincing
reasons for the certainty. I should say unequivocally that M
Morand's was a pose rather than an attitude. And if I were asked
to say why I believe this, I should have to fall back on that absence
of savagery at which I have already hinted—the savagery that is in
Baudelaire and Rimbaud, and indeed must be in the work of any
one who really feels that the human universe is mechanical. There
is all the difference in the world between a man who really believes
this and one who, like the arch-prestidigitator, Remy de Gourmont,
uses it as an intellectual hypothesis on which to execute variations.
M Morand's variations are astonishing; he is, in his way, a great
virtuoso. But it is only a game.
M Morand is no doubt perfectly well aware of that. His
answer would be, once more, that there is nothing else to do but
play it. Nowadays you must treat the life of this old Europe as
a spectacular kaleidoscope; if you take it more seriously, you
are lost. You go mad, turn Second Adventist, or flee to the ends
of the earth; or you do all three at once. N'importe où hors du
monde. All which is highly indecorous and inartistic, not to be
contemplated by a civilized Parisian. And yet-being no French-
man–I cannot help believing that the only way out will be found
by the people who are prepared to do indecorous and inartistic
things. Open All Night makes me only the more convinced of
it. When the pages are finished, and my half-smiles and my semi-


J. MIDDLETON MURRY
187
admirations are over, I am embittered and weary. This play-boy
business simply won't do. There is, after all, something horribly
indecent about it. The real indecorum is here. Far better flee
to the mountains and howl prophecies of doom: if that seems
barbarous, it is only another proof added to thousands that our
European tradition is kaput. Better still, perhaps, to sit tight and
look inside ourselves...
But that is moralizing once again. You are bound, if you
belong to this side of the water, to be set moralizing by Morand.
The very fact of him is a sign of the times. Once in the moralizing
strain you forget—it is somehow irrelevant—that he is quite
extraordinarily witty at moments (Donna Nemedios, "the mermaid
in the sea of Marxism”!) and that his vision of the reality can.
come uncomfortably near to what the reality is.
“Drawn up by the curb the cars of the spectators exhausted
the catalogue of strange shapes. There were torpedoes, yachts,
bathtubs, airships, whilst some of them were merely hastily covered
with a champagne-case. Their owners were those highly polished
and beautiful young men who stand for hours behind plate-glass
windows in the avenue des Champs-Elysées in tiled show-rooms
containing nothing but a palm, a Persian prayer-rug and a nickelled
chassis. They always remind me of the ladies sitting in their win-
dows in the low quarters of Amsterdam.”
The translation is strangely erratic. Pages
Pages are simply
simply ad-
mirable, almost inspired. Other pages are hopelessly clumsy.
The
proper names seem to have had their component letters shuffled
in a hat and sprinkled à discretion over the forms. And the proofs,
if they have been read at all, were read by someone less than
human. Further, for some reason or other, the final story, The
Northern Night, has been omitted. Probably in terror of the
Puritans. It is a pity. But I suppose American publishers know
their own business best. And Mr Seltzer, notoriously, is not lack-
ing in courage.
J. MIDDLETON MURRY


THE MOODS OF SATIRE
The OXFORD CIRCUS. A Novel of Oxford and Youth.
By Alfred Budd. Edited by Raymond Mortimer and
Hamish Miles. 12mo. 242 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. $2.
T is not hard to discover why parody has always been attrac-
.
reducing serious matters to a more convenient compass, of making
emotions amenable in common existence. This does not explain
the peculiarly sympathetic interest we have at the present moment
for the burlesque in art, why the appearance of a new book by
Compton Mackenzie, however serious and able, should move us
less than the parody of an old one. The Oxford Circus, for
example, is good fun; it is rather an extended joke done with a
great deal of wit and high spirits. These things make it interest-
ing to read; what makes it interesting to think about after one has
read it is the tone of satire, the existence in it of a masked ferocity
which would have been out of place in its great forerunner. The
irresponsible and indulgent mockery of Zuleika Dobson can never
be out of place; but I doubt whether it would be so appropriate
to our particular moment.
The "editors" of The Oxford Circus have an artistic rectitude
which would at all events have prevented them from roughening
the texture of their burlesque with the rasping tone of bitterness.
But the savagery which is in it, however entertaining, is all the
more interesting as a phenomenon, because it is not inappropriate.
It is a variation of the mood which may for a few years to come be
the most common in our literature. For some reason the fashion
is now to pretend that we are not victims of the war and that the
phrase "post-war psychology” not only is vague and journalistic,
but corresponds to no actuality. To concede so much is to confess
that war is an amiable interlude in human affairs; it is certainly to
be blind to the significant change the war has made in the tone
of the literary arts. One is aware that Strachey and Anatole
France practised irony in the nineteenth century, that the sense of
intolerable wrong was lively in Shakespeare as in Hardy, that it


GILBERT SELDES
189
was Dante and not James Joyce who spoke of this threshing-floor
of humanity. But the gigantic travesty of the record of man's
achievement which Joyce put into Ulysses differs from the delicate
dissection of the vanity of human wishes as recorded in Candide;
the dégringolade of Christian morality in South Wind is not the
same as the annihilation of human decency in Antic Hay. I choose
disparate examples without thought of their comparative literary
worth. The significance for us is in the tone; it is, if I may say so,
a moral interest.
I do not pretend to be able to describe the tone nor to indicate
the specific quality which appears in its diverse expressions. It
would, I think, be a labour worthy of any good critic to distinguish
these various forms from each other, and especially to show their
difference as a whole from the spirit of the Nineties with which
they are too easily confounded, and then to relate them to the gen-
eral current of satiric and ironic discourse as we know it in
Aristophanes and Rabelais and Dean Swift, among others. The
flippant irony of Paul Morand, the despairing futility of the early
dadaists, the proud bitterness of The Waste Land, the satiric
irreverence of Scott Fitzgerald, the libertarian satire of Donald
Ogden Stewart, the laughter, light in The Oxford Circus and
sardonic in Aldous Huxley—all these have something in common,
and their variations of the mood of satire, ranging to irony, is of
high significance.
There is a minor point which may give a clue to that significance.
It is the choice of literary parody as the medium for satire. In
America the Traprock school attaches itself to an object of im-
mediate interest; in The Oxford Circus a style, in Crome Yellow a
forgotten master, supplies the framework. In all of them one
feels an inclination to escape the energetic creative process which
distinguishes Gulliver's Travels and Ulysses, both of which had
counterparts, and, say, Penguin Island which seems to have,
directly, none. It is easy to say that this is pure dilettantism; but
the delight which one can take in surrendering the creative func-
tion must be fairly negative. It is possible for a young man to
hold the creative arts in the highest esteem, yet doubt wholly the
possibility of being creative himself. For him the world is indeed
a waste land; but there is nothing more entertaining than to culti-
vate our garden even if we are certain it will never bear fruit.


190
THE MOODS OF SATIRE
I do not mean that the creative impulse is dying out; but it
seems to me that the prevalence of parasitical forms of literature
may indicate how little we believe in the validity even of things
we cherish. The great wave of faith evoked directly after the war
by those who felt that the war had to justify itself otherwise than
by its fruits has not engulfed us; and everything corrosive and
sceptical, casual and hard, remains in our nature. Perhaps that is
why light-heartedness remains; perhaps if we continue in the line
of travesty the laughter will presently conceal-nothing.
GILBERT SELDES


D. H. LAWRENCE, TRANSLATOR
MASTRO-Don GESUALDO. By Giovanni Verga. Trans-
lated by D. H. Lawrence. 12mo. 454 pages. Thomas
Seltzer. $2.50.
H. LAWRENCE is a very great artist, perhaps the greatest
living master of English, as he has again demonstrated in
this translation. His task was of the most difficult. The original,
as he tells us, grew out of Giovanni Verga's experience of a broad-
side containing a seaman's narrative, ungrammatical, unliterary, in
the language of the people. It is the vivid harsh grossness of com-
mon speech that the translator was confronted with, and the task
of pulling up by its roots and transplanting a work in the alien
soil of another tongue.
This book is a creation of D. H. Lawrence though it introduces
us to the genius of Verga. In Lawrence's savorous language we
feel the murky, crowded movement of figures in a Sicilian town
of the early nineteenth century. The narrative picks out gross
peasants and decayed nobility; moves acrid through fire and terror
of plague, and the backwash in this small town of revolution; with
birth and death almost simultaneous in the one house. Through
it runs the pitying irony that conceived the figure of Mastro-Don
Gesualdo, shrewd, hard-headed, opposing to the jealousy of his
townsfolk and to the ultimate enemy, Life, his shrewdness, his
peasant's donkeyish endurance, and his vainly amassed possessions.
It is so swift as to be, like all monumentally simple and moving
works, almost confusing. There are so many characters. But it is
not confusing. Every character is distinct. The people are hit
off, cut out in a few phrases, laid bare in their human meanness or
suffering, with a word. Little time is lost on description. The
scene is bitten in, brilliantly. And the slow ponderous rhythm of
the book culminates, surely.
Verga could afford to be disdainful of his reader. Probably
he was not, actually. He worked like the few men who have had
their secret of life, in spare strokes, setting down something they
knew, which might or might not be understood, certainly not by


192
D. H. LAWRENCE, TRANSLATOR
the multitude. His novel has the harshness and oaken sombreness
of Hardy, the grossness of Tolstoy, a contempt and comedy that
would be devastating if it were not full of pity. In his Studies
in Classic American Literature Lawrence wrote:
"You can't idealize the soil, but you've got to try. And trying,
you reap a great imaginative reward. And the greatest reward
is failure. To know that you have failed, that you must fail.
That is the greatest comfort of all, at last.
“Tolstoi failed with the soil: Thomas Hardy too: and Giovanni
Verga; the three greatest.”
Here Verga's case is proved for readers of English. The book
is so direct that it seems resonant with the speech of a man, hard,
bronzed with weather and suffering, so full of wisdom that he
knows how to be brief and even abstract when he talks of im-
mediate things. It is full of the wish to love, qualified by a ruth-
less eye that will not shut out the animality, the tragicomic
lineaments of the objects of love. In Verga and in his book is the
abrupt struggle and duality of life itself, which is the keener and
more piercing in quality the farther it is removed from the simple
and melodramatic categories that suffice for what is called
morality. Those categories can exist only by excluding just the
fine essential detail with which Mastro-Don Gesualdo is so rich.
Truly, a chronicle of the will to love and admire-which is what
the idealist and perhaps all living beings are after–becomes its
own most ironical commentary. Life is quite a mixed affair. One
of its compensations is such a clear view of it as Verga's master-
piece contains.
Mastro-Don Gesualdo is a fine vehicle for Lawrence's prose.
Lawrence's words are heavy with earth-awareness, he seems to feel
with the expanse of the body, with skin pores and limbs and he
imparts to speech a kind of atomic weight so that it radiates the
sense, odour, colour, and massiveness, as well as trembling move-
ment of animate and inanimate being. It is a prose adequate as
the prose of no other living writer would be, to this sombre
chronicle. Lawrence has been able to give out this work again,
in his own idiom. He must have felt the work to be deeply true.
So it could, in translation, become something of his own. It is


HERBERT J. SELIGMANN
193
invidious to quote from a work that hangs so together, in all its
abruptness, and screams of mirth, and cries of tragedy, in one great
block. Yet here is one bit of its magic, compound of Verga and
Lawrence, with Don Gesualdo sitting at day's end, at table, facing
the open door:
“The girl had prepared him a pottage of fresh broad-beans with
an onion in, four new-laid eggs, and two tomatoes which she had
gone and plucked behind the house, feeling for them in the dark.
The eggs frizzled in the earthenware casserole, the full flask of
wine was in front of him; through the open door came a fresh
little wind that was a pleasure to feel, bringing the sound of the
trilling of the cicalas and the scent of the sheaves on the yard
floor :-his own harvest there under his eyes, his mule feeding
greedily at the barley rick, poor beast—a sheaf at every tug! Down
the slope beyond, from time to time, was heard the tinkling of the
sheep-bells in the enclosure; and then the oxen lying about the
yard, tied to the mangers full of hay, lifted their heavy heads,
breathing heavily, and you saw a glinting of their sleepy eyes, like
a train of fireflies passing.”
Even wrested from its context, it gives at once an intimate
immediacy to the scene. It is a pity that to the enjoyment of
so direct an utterance of genius as this, the publisher has inter-
posed many obstacles, including an ugly cover, poor paper slightly
if at all better than newsprint, and proof-reading that has let so
many errors—even misplaced lines—slip by that one wonders if the
book was proof-read at all. Evidently the publisher does not share
the artist's feeling that a book, like any fine work, has a life of its
own, lives and breathes in its own being. If he felt this, or had
true respect for this beautiful work, he could not so have mal-
treated it.
HERBERT J. SELIGMANN


THE WEARINESS OF IVAN BUNIN
The Village. By Ivan Bunin. Translated by Isabel
F. Hapgood. 12mo. 291 pages. Alfred A. Knopf.
$2.50.
THE DREAMS OF CHANG. By Ivan Bunin. Translated
by Bernard Guilbert Guerney. 12mo. 313 pages.
Alfred A. Knopf. $2.50.
IN
N Paris, in the early summer of 1922, a meeting was arranged
by a mutual friend between Katherine Mansfield and myself
and Ivan Bunin. Katherine Mansfield had greatly admired the
translation of The Gentleman From San Francisco which appeared
in The Dial shortly before-a translation of an utterly different
order from that made by Mr Guerney—but that was not the
reason why she, who cared to meet so few people, was anxious to
meet Bunin. Since reading The Gentleman From San Francisco
she had read in a French translation more of Bunin's work, in
fact, precisely the contents of these two books, and had been disap-
pointed in it. The Gentleman seemed to her, as it seemed to me,
to stand clean apart from the rest of Bunin's work. It had an
apocalyptic power, the strength and completeness of a new utter-
ance, which were extraordinarily impressive. We expected more
wonders, and we found none. The Gentleman was evidently the
product of an unique moment of inspiration, the reaction of an
adult, sensitive, much-travelled consciousness to the sudden horror
of the European war. It was a great story; but it was Bunin's only
great story.
It was not therefore for the sake of meeting Bunin himself that
Katherine Mansfield sought the encounter; it was because of her
passionate love of Chekhov. The common friend had told her
that Bunin had known Chekhov well. She wanted to hear a friend
of Chekhov's talking about Chekhov. Perhaps she would learn
something she had not known, hear the cadence of his voice more
clearly than she heard it in her mind, more visibly see his tired
and tender smile. I think that of all writers of my generation


J. MIDDLETON MURRY
195
Katherine Mansfield had by far the deepest (because the most
instinctive) understanding of Chekhov. There was some personal
bond between them, such that though Chekhov was dead, some
essential communication seemed to pass between his spirit and
hers. He was always living to her, always at her elbow to remind
her of the necessity of that strange purity of soul which they
shared. Yet she had never known any one who had known him
in the flesh.
So she went to meet Bunin. There he was with his tired,
ascetic face and drooping eyes—Léon Bakst has drawn him well
for the frontispiece of the French translation-cordial and a little
hurt that The Gentleman From San Francisco had been translated
without a copy being sent him. We assured him that it was a
magnificent translation-Lawrence at his very best—a work of
art; and that it was only because nobody knew where he was that
no copy had been sent him. Then I waited for the question that
was bound to come, for the question that had brought us there.
It came.
"Et vous avez connu Chekhov, Monsieur Bunine?" Katherine
Mansfield's voice, when she spoke of Chekhov, always seemed to
change, to become yet more delicate and caressing, to enclose the
two of them in the silver thread of some secret understanding.
“Oui ... j'ai connu Chekhov.” Weary, devoid of all ex-
pression, flat, the voice fell like a leaden weight on the tight-
stretched silver thread. Bunin might have been speaking of
Monsieur Nimportequi to Madame Nimportequelle. It was no
use; he did not understand. Katherine Mansfield withdrew into
herself, and to hide her disappointment, talked brilliantly of a
hundred things in which she had no interest. Bunin had known
Chekhov, and had not known what manner of man he was.
I do not pretend to know how well Bunin knew Chekhov: the
conversation never got so far as that. But it did not really matter.
For Katherine Mansfield—and for me, also—a single meeting
should have been enough. You either knew that you were in the
presence of the greatest and purest artist of our time, or you didn't
know it. If you didn't know it, that settled you. Bunin didn't
know it: that settled him.
What a very off-hand way of dealing with an acknowledged
master of the short story,” as the wrapper calls him! Well, it


196 THE WEARINESS OF IVAN BUNIN
may be. It certainly is summary; but the question is whether it is
justice. I believe it is. Undoubtedly, The Gentleman From San
Francisco, even in this hopelessly inferior translation, seems to
me still a great and greatly significant story—a moment of in-
spiration, an utterance of prophecy, that I can account for and
understand. But the rest? Oh, it is good, adequate, competent,
there is no bad work among it all; but, in that extremely long run
which is the race for immortality, it has no staying power, because
it lacks the authentic and unmistakable core of individuality.
There is-speaking extremely~no final excuse for it, not even for
that remarkable and sometimes beautiful picture of the realities
of Russian peasant life, which is The Village. A four page sketch
by Chekhov called Waiting for Spring somehow contains more of
the truth, and of the particular truth of the peasant soul Bunin
was trying to convey, than his own three hundred pages.
All that Bunin might have done, Chekhov had done. Whether
Bunin would even have known of it, or thought of it, without
Chekhov is another matter. As it is, all his work except the one
great story, is a useless appendage to Chekhov's—useless, because
it has not the inward creative vitality of the master. And perhaps
it was to avoid his manifest destiny of a pale Epigonus that Bunin
travelled round the world. Caelum non animum mutant qui trans
mare currunt. Exotic subjects do not add a cubit to his stature
as a writer. They dwarf it rather. He has to endure a comparison
which he cannot sustain with Kipling and Conrad, and not even
his Russo-Asiatic inclinations towards acquiescence in Maia can
secure for him a real individuality. He is a weary man.
Well, Chekhov also was a weary man. But there is a weariness
of the mind-which all men of our generation have known-and
there is a weariness of the soul. They are very different things.
Chekhov's mind was weary, but his soul was indefatigable. He
was capable of effort and made it; he was a great man and a great
writer. But Bunin's weariness has touched his soul. He is neither
a great man nor a great writer. He had his moment of inspiration,
and we remember it. Perhaps he also remembers it, and the
memory is bitter.
Not that his work is not worth knowing. For those who are
interested in following out the last trickles of the conscious
Western mind into the desert of impotence, it may be even in-


J. MIDDLETON MURRY
197
dispensable. I do not know. Bunin is certainly an honest writer,
even though his oriental moments are occasionally pretentious. But
to me it seems that I knew all that Bunin has to say long, long
ago. I have heard the melody played perfectly by the hand of a
master; I have heard his infinite and subtle variations on the lovely
theme. I do not care to hear broken snatches that have a mean-
ing for me only when they recall the perfect music of Anton
Chekhov.
J. MIDDLETON MURRY


BRIEFER MENTION
The Grand Tour, by Romer Wilson (12mo, 291 pages; Knopf: $2.50)
contains graceful reveries and, at intervals, characterizations that survive
the other etchings, moods, and anecdotes piling up constantly until the
very end. The sculptor protagonist, Marichaud, indulging himself in a
series of ego-diagnostic scriptures and letters to his friends, lives for us
as he is meant to; in fragmentary encounters and amiable excursions into
other lives. In this “tour," rather romantic in its self-conscious élan,
Marichaud patently develops no convictions or sensibilities which can be
plausibly considered as extra to his initial equipment as an artist. It is
enough, apparently, that we see the artist in the rôle of epicure. Miss
Wilson certainly succeeds in evolving an entertaining pastiche in the Jean
Christophe tradition.
Lazy LAUGHTER, by Woodward Boyd (12mo, 295 pages; Scribner: $2).
Another easy novel handed us by the newest generation, with a little real
laughter sprinkled thin over sprightly school-girl pages. An uncommonly
clever school-girl of course, with a talent for writing and observation and a
cheerful ignorance that will carry her far.
My Fair Lady, by Louis Hemon (12mo, 226 pages; Macmillan : $2) is a
collection of stories—some of them no more than sketches-composed in
the same minor key with which the author evoked the memorable harmonies
of Marie Chapdelaine. By the simplest of means, he creates a mood of
tragic tenderness which sustains itself through the limpid grace of the
prose; not a stroke is added for the mere sake of the story.
Don Juan, by Ludwig Lewisohn (12mo, 305 pages; Boni & Liveright: $2)
is the history of a theoretical passion in terms of its practical impediments
-the story of a tame cagle caged by conventions and connubiality. The
novelist is far more interested, however, in the prison than he is in the
prisoner; his captive blinks and bemoans his fate interminably, yet some-
how the tragic implications are lost. Mr Lewisohn's creative impulse
seems to have been mainly resentment; the fable leaves one unmoved.
BASHAN AND I, by Thomas Mann, translated by Herman George Scheffauer
(12mo, 247 pages; Holt: $2.25). In this study of the relations between
dog and master Thomas Mann speculates on the mental life of his dog
Bashan with a delightful mixture of earnestness and dalliance. The keen
descriptions of Bashan's conduct, together with the ingenious conjectures
as to the faithful clownish character behind it, frequently produce a com-
fortable and fireside variety of humour. This novel was written during
the war, when amenities were rarest; but Thomas Mann looked to his dog
and did succeed in finding here that grace and humanity which were lack-
ing among his contemporaries.


BRIEFER MENTION
199
HIGHWAYMEN, by Charles J. Finger (illus., 8vo, 258 pages; McBride: $3)
embraces a series of narratives—briskly illustrated from wood-blocks by
Paul Honoré-in which life is reflected by the quickened pulse and the
debonair recklessness of the rogue. With such heroes as Dick Turpin,
Jack Sheppard, and Colonel Blood—not to mention the more modern Bill
of Tierra del Fuego—the author is forearmed in the matter of fascinating
heroes; it only remains for him to clothe their adventures in adequate prose,
and that is what he has done.
THE DARK FRIGATE, by Charles Boardman Hawes (illus., 12mo, 247 pages;
Atlantic Monthly: $2) is an adventurous narrative of the Cromwellian
period—a picture of roving life which will immediately appeal to swivel-
chair and other dreamers. So highly do the publishers regard it that they
have made it the basis of a prize for a novel "worthy of continuing the
Hawes tradition.” The pirate market, in other words, is active, and—to
judge by the size of the contemplated award—flourishing.
UNCANNY STORIES, by May Sinclair, with illustrations by Jean de Boss-
chere (12mo, 362 pages; Macmillan: $2.50). Miss Sinclair has been a
model of creative integrity so long that her devoted reader looks truculently
about for someone to blame for these short stories. They are bald fables
to illustrate aspects of what appears to be a passionate faith in the occult.
She has written other books to illustrate her convictions, and the validity
of her theses is not particularly the critic's problem; but the obvious
relation of Uncanny Stories to the teachings of Mr Conan Doyle and the
late Mrs Eddy is disappointing. Miss Sinclair's characterization has also
been simple; but her choice of a few identifying characteristics has been
so intelligent, and their recurrence has been so discreetly managed, that
her previous books have been full of a reality brilliant and poignant, al-
though thin. In this book we are introduced to a company of traitless and
interchangeable puppets, moving wanly through preposterous episodes,
several of which take place after death. M de Bosschere, whose designs
were usually so remarkable, seems to have followed Miss Sinclair very
closely in this aberration, which one hopes she will cause to be forgotten
promptly by a better and more normal book.
PIRI AND I, by Lawrence Vail (12mo, 245 pages; Lieber & Lewis : $2) easily
eclipses all recent fiction in the devastating ardour with which it clings
to an intellectual pose; everyone in the book wears his cleverness on his
sleeve, as conspicuous as a mourning band on an orange sweater. The
author has coiled himself around his vocabulary and choked his novel to
death; the reader is only politely sorry about the whole affair.
ONCE IN A RED Moon, by Joel Townsley Rogers (12mo, 347 pages; Bren-
tano: $2) starts as a mystery novel, but the characters run away with the
plot and it ends as social satire. Perhaps burlesque is a better word. The
author caricatures his own work; he expands his rhetoric into bombast and
his portraits into cartoons; he is a bit long-winded, but amusing and
vigorous.


200
BRIEFER MENTION
A SELECTION FROM THE POEMS OF MICHAEL FIELD, with a Preface by T.
Sturge Moore (12mo, 142 pages; The Poetry Bookshop: 55.). Certain
themes require that one should be overwhelmed, not merely pleased. Flaws
and the lack of monumental genius detract from the high felicity of some
of these poems. An amplifying of Sappho, moreover, which is not an
"expansion of gold to airy thinness beat" is, one feels, a fault in judgement.
But what flashes of ecstasy, what vibrations, what unstrained-for accuracy
of feeling and of speech arrest one in the texture of this all but major
poetry!
The Demon's NOTEBOOK, Verse and Perverse, by Swinburne Hale, frontis-
piece by Rose O'Neill (12mo, 103 pages; Brown: $1.80). Miss O'Neill's
picture and the resemblance of the verse to certain verses by other writers
suggest that there may be a little school of these demonic poets. Writers
having a community of subjects rather than a community of aesthetic aims
are likely to substitute the habits of a cult for experience, its trappings for
objective reality, and its passwords for expression. In this case, the result
is a perversion of talent to trivial and self-indulgent ends. It is to be
hoped that a natural dreaminess and indolence will prevent the production
in any mass of such books. Mr Hale philanders with coarse imagery,
dresses it up, and forces upon it a specious air of politeness. His verse is
vaporous and morally revolting.
The Best POEMS OF 1922, selected by Thomas Moult, decorated by Philip
Hagreen (12mo, 145 pages; Harcourt Brace: $2). It is hard to imagine
what such a collection of verse as this can do but help confuse or destroy
what incipient taste for contemporary poetry its more occasional readers
may be nursing. The preface states that it is the first time in literary history
that the poets of England and America have been assembled together in a
manner that gives the reader no guide to their nationality except what is
revealed by the work itself. The book displays enough frightful effusions
from both sides of the Atlantic to make that one distinction interesting,
perhaps. Mr Moult has garnered a very few good poems, as well, but with
not enough evidence of despair on his part to make us feel any sense of
discrimination at work.
MORS ET Vita, by Shan F. Bullock, with a foreword by A. E. (12mo, 63
pages; T. Werner Laurie, Ltd.). The mourning verses written imme-
diately after the death of the poet's wife are not a public requiem, but
intimate records for the eyes of friends. The reader who is a stranger
cannot be reverent enough not to be ill at ease. In Mr Bullock's very
literary elegy, the details which differentiate one sorrow from another are
lacking; genuine death comes to resemble a stock property. Death is
common, and its consequences must be uniquely delineated to add anything
to one's experience or to accomplish the intellectual refreshment of formal
tragedy. The rhetoric which comes naturally to one's lips in sorrow is
painful to remember or overhear; and an outsider averts his attention from
verses like these as he would from memories of personal anguish.


BRIEFER MENTION
201
FAILURES, by H. R. Lenormand, translated by Winifred Katzin (12mo, 231
pages; Knopf: $2). This is a tragedy of frustration by one of the most
vital and interesting of the younger French school in the theatre. In
fourteen alert and bitter little scenes the author exhibits that most harrow-
ing of all atmospheres, the French provincial town with its Grand Café,
its Gothic Cathedral, and the promenade of its Theatre Municipal filled
with the most desolating types that a playwright has ever had the heart to
put on paper. All this forms a background for the intimate tragedy of two
people, a man who begins as an artist and ends as a maquerau and his
rather wonderful mistress who sells herself to stage door Johnnies to give
her lover food. She is the realist of the two, but the man is one of those
deplorable people who make their emotions the instruments of an inex-
plicable instinct for self-torment. The rather wooden translation interprets
very badly the bitter freshness and distinction of this fine play.
THE ART OF Poetry, by William Paton Ker (12mo, 160 pages; Oxford: $2).
If it were still possible for Professor Ker to enter into discussion, one might
reproach him for having chosen such a pretentious title for a little book of
essays. Being a combination of unfamiliar elements, poetry cannot be for-
mularized; it is the part of literature which exists beyond the border of
the latest formula. Really to define the art of poetry would involve a state-
ment of the rules by which future poets will be guided : an impossible at-
tempt. Professor Ker did not make it, being too indulgent and too wisc.
He limited himself to the methods of dead poets, discussing them com-
petently, with observations which often are discoveries, and in a style which
flows as amiably as little streams near Oxford.
SOME MODERN AUTHORS, by S. P. B. Mais (12mo, 355 pages; Dodd, Mead:
$2.50). In his preface to this series of reports on contemporary English
and American writers the author says that 10,842 books were published
in 1922, and that under the circumstances he is "employed as a Taster”
for the general public. The result is a none too rigorously selected reading
list, enlivened by his delight with "awfully much” in modern letters. As
a piece of critical penetration it simply does not apply, but it will do good
service as a book of reference. Mr Mais gives so many summaries and
excerpts of the hundreds of books he discusses that the reader is left free
to form his own judgements.
RANDOM STUDIES IN THE ROMANTIC Chaos, by Francis A. Waterhouse
(12mo, 288 pages; McBride: $2.50). These essays bear the mark of an
original and inquiring mind that penetrates beneath the claptrap of con-
ventional belief; they turn the searchlight from a slightly new angle upon
some of the oldest of literary problems, and arrive at conclusions not always
convincing by a process always illuminating. The author has perhaps not
said the last word upon Romanticism, nor are his hands quite free of sin
against the goddess of consistency; yet he not only sees clearly and probes
deeply, but writes with the air of one who knows what he has to say and
does not hesitate to say it.


202
BRIEFER MENTION
PIERRE CURIE, by Marie Curie, translated by Charlotte and Vernon Kellogg
(illus., 8vo, 242 pages; Macmillan: $2.25) is eloquent in its simplicity-
the sincere tribute of understanding which one scientist pays to another.
The fact that they were husband and wife enters into the story with that
reticence which bespeaks a rare harmony; one feels the high passion of
two lives drawn together by a common purpose—the unity of an unselfish
co-operation. Madame Curie writes with clarity and without effort; her
account of the scientific adventures of her crowded life makes fascinating
reading.
G. K. CHESTERTON, by Patrick Braybrooke (12mo, 120 pages; Lippincott:
$2) was undertaken, the author says, at Mr Chesterton's insistence, but it
is entirely too tentative a study to have much value. Mr Braybrooke lacks
even the courage of his impressions, forgetting that when one ventures into
the field of critical appraisal, it is better to be wrong than to be reticent.
Many of his cautiously put forth expressions of opinion are as puzzling
as this one: “That Chesterton has humor is abundant by his conversation.”
G. K. C., he concludes, "must be read with the head between the hands";
manifestly Mr Braybrooke believes that he must be written about while
maintaining the same cramped position.
Two YEARS IN THE French West Indies, by Lafcadio Hearn (illus., 8vo,
449 pages; Harper: $4). The genius of Hearn remains two-dimensional.
The Eye sees, the brush moves, the colours assemble until the aquarelle
stands limned in soft and delicate tints. Superstitions, folk-lore, language,
colour, occupations of the Martinique creole of thirty-five years ago serve
equally as material for the aesthetic pencil. The serene flow of coloured
and adroit description, the rhythmic play of surface lights induce som-
nolence. One longs for the illuminating stab that will light up interiors,
the philosophic wonder of what stirs within and beyond the phenomena
under observation.
“RACUNDRA's" FIRST CRUISE, by Arthur Ransome (illus., 12mo, 258 pages;
Huebsch: $2.50). This log of five weeks spent among the islets of the
Eastern Baltic is refreshing in its simplicity; Mr Ransome writes a tonic
prose. The “Racundra" is a centreboard ketch with an auxiliary five
horse-power motor which "seemed to need forty horse-power to start it”—
and so it was never used. A sturdy little vessel, evidently, not even
remotely related to the tug described by A. E. Coppard—“all funnel and
hooter.” It carried its crew of three into many fascinating ports in a
corner of Europe unfrequented by the globe-trotter.
FROM IMMIGRANT TO INVENTOR, by Michael Pupin (illus., 8vo, 396 pages;
Scribner: $4) might profitably be placed in the hands of those members
of the forthcoming Congress who think that immigration is in need of
further restriction. It is a story of achievement, simply and honestly pre-
sented, by a man who would be turned back at Ellis Island to-day. What
it lacks in narrative skill, it makes up in human interest—a threadbare
phrase, but one which accurately mirrors biographies of this type.



From Living Art
LE MENAGE DES PAUVRES.
BY PABLO PICASSO





From Living Art
PENCIL DRAWING.
BY PABLO PICASSO





IN
disarmingly have attained to the hushed peaks of the parthenian
Kittatinnies, this fortunate pilgrim may gravely be taken leave of,
obedient to the old saying, thereafter die.
later winding down along the poplared ways of industrious New
Jersey, of antique Hoboken, and of the humane Tube. He will
then proceed, in scholarly and pious admiration, up and along
the forthright opulence of storied Fifth Avenue. He will hand
over to the door-keeper in the art-gallery of Mr Newman Emerson
Montross a votive umbrella.
There he will at once discover himself—and without hav-
ing exposed his person to the discommodations of mal de mer-
Rome. By "Rome” I designate that central spiritual core, wherein
glow focused those racially many strains in the inward life
of an outwardly split time—those strains of direct and lumi-
nous passion which, for them who possess the anima naturaliter
oculata, almost can burn away and quite disperse those Horrid
Powers of Darkness which, so clangorously and so stinkingly, mar-
shal and press about us. We are daily knocked on the head in a
ANNOUNCEMENT
N case there be any unhappy person from the spiritual state
known as Missouri who after fifty monthly issues of The DIAL
have, each in quaint turn, greeted the American News Company
and God's sun—if there be any such who yet does cling limpet-
wise to the vain notion that the contemporary movement in art-
the movement fathered by Cézanne, God-fathered by El Greco,
and strappingly alive dappertutto to-day—that this movement is
not what it is, is not at once the richest and the most beneficent
complex in the whole snarled spiritual life of our queer age, this
person should be presented by his fellow-citizens, in convocation,
with a scallop-shell of legitimate pilgrimage and a tough umbrella.
He should be escorted New Yorkward. And when the little
earnest party, straggling upward as well as onward, shall thus
as of one who will soon have beheld Rome, and who so may,
alone with his umbrella, proceed carefully onward, at first picking
his way amongst the Alpine huts of Hither Pennsylvania, and
(albeit gasolene-poisoned) within the walls of Living
But the human heart (like Mr Hughes' Government
dry-shod
Black Age.


204
ANNOUNCEMENT
at Washington) still lives. And to-day it lives most transparently
in the art of painting. Those who find not in either of those twin
shrunk Caesars, Calvin C. Coolidge and William T. Manning,
that perfect peace after which the heart hankereth, will do well to
look in at The Dial Collection. The ritualist, too, will there find
occasion to exercise his natural activity. For upon a table, in the
midst of those pictures therein reproduced, will be exposed-in
a recumbent posture—the intransigeantly sized folio denominated
(to paraphrase the well-known poet, Stevenson) “in the days of
the little dead” LIVING ART. To the ritualist, to him who is
concerned most adamantinely in the technique itself of worship,
will be given opportunity to remove from the altared folio each and
every picture therein exposed. He will be permitted to hold (in
either or indeed in both hands: here at least no precedent will sift
grim Fundamentalist from bright Modernist) above, beside, or
below the original picture upon the environing wall the consecrate
facsimile. His eyes will thereupon be opened. He will perceive
and apperceive that one is two and two is one. He will furthermore
constate that Mechanical Development, which came down upon
humanity like "the Assyrian” and “like the wolf,” may be turned to
finer uses, may be employed as a potent prism wherethrough to
multiply, and in the original colours, "the glance of the Lord."
Stained glass may or may not be a lost art: upon this matter it
is possible to be of two minds. The wise man will anyhow not
break his head over a question which is not to-day culturally
central. He will rather go to that picture gallery where from
January twenty-sixth to February fourteenth the spiritual head of
our epoch, what I have-remembering a happier and a less dis-
mantled period—called by the somewhat mortared, by the some-
what architectural name, "Rome," will be as is the fashion of
our uprooted and mortarless civilization—briefly tenting. There
he will find an art which-howsoever adrift—yet sprouts stoutly.
Standing amid the singular masterpieces of his own generation, he
will be aware—not without humility and not without pride—that
not the Sainte Chapelle herself has lightened and has burned more
variously, or has gleamed with a more subtle and a more intricate
charm, or has prevailed with a more true inward poignance. Gothic
blazonries collapse, but also to-day
“Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,
Stains the white radiance of eternity.”
11
1



I
**
;
C
ri
Photograph: Druet
From Living Art
FEMME ACCROUPIE.
BY ARISTIDE MAILLOL





a reverential attitude toward the stage and an inclination toward
modernism in any field are not sufficient causes for the creation of
intellectual bias—if they exist—and still feel that the directors
have a specific idea of what the theatre can be and, what is even
more important for the patron, a genuine talent for the theatre
itself. This exists apart from Mr Jones' abilities as an artist and
Mr O'Neill's capacities as a dramatist; and it has given THE
SPOOK SONATA a sense of homogeneous growth, an existence and a
style. Of the play itself it was interesting to note that in it the
method of expressionism seemed to have reached not so much a
more successful in that mode, than From Morn To MIDNIGHT;
genius, however neurotic, has this capacity to outstrip and antici-
the mood which the directors created. Mr Howlett and Miss
pate talent. And although THE SPOOK SONATA is irritating at
Eames in particular profited by the occasion to do excellent work.
THE THEATRE
THE reappearance of George M. Cohan has usually the effect
of making everything else in the perishable theatre seem flat
and tawdry in comparison; this year, by the grace of a slight diver-
sion from his usual path, he has managed to call a great many
features of the durable theatre into question. (I use these attrac-
tive words not in Gordon Craig's precise sense; the light and the
serious theatre would be an equally accurate description of the two
types.) For if Mr Cohan with his material, with his background
can give so much aesthetic satisfaction, can give
such intense pleasure to the contemplative mind, what becomes of
the theatre burdened with loftiness and torn asunder with experi-
and experience,
mentation?
I do not know of another experimental theatre for which the
auspices were so favourable as they were for the Provincetown
Players of this year, in a theatre directed by Kenneth Macgowan,
Eugene O'Neill, and Robert Edmond Jones; and I hasten to say
that their first production, The Spook Sonata of Strindberg,
soes far to answer the question I have just asked. It is clear that
a theatre; in the present case you can omit the religion and the
mhoments and seems to wander, the actors in it definitely accepted


206
THE THEATRE
Between the extremes I have mentioned lies, for once, the work
of the Theatre Guild which is usually definitely one or the other.
The text and the production of Saint Joan both seem to me to be
unsuccessful, to be uncertain of direction and mood. I suspect that
an English law forbidding the representation of the figure of Christ
on the stage led Shaw to use Joan instead; and having Joan he
gave her a political significance in the development of nationalism
which would be more appropriate to the French Revolution and
which hardly furthered the main, the religious and historical, inter-
est of the play. It is easy to understand that the martyrdom of
Joan is not in itself the essence of the matter; nor is it the historical
criticism implied in the character which Shaw presents.
The
interest is in our modern relation both to the martyr and to the
assassins, and that is why the Inquisitor and the bishops are pre-
sented with such eloquent justice and are endowed with such gentle
wisdom. I find in this no excuse for the epilogue which is dull in
the theatre. Nor do I find in the spoken words sufficient authority
for Miss Lenihan's Joan. She did many things well, but even the
high courage of her scene with the Bastard seemed to lack an inner
fire. And it does not matter whether Joan was surrounded by
angels or attended by demons, in the mediaeval sense, or was
hysterical or inspired in our sense; the truth which Shaw made no
effort to escape is that Joan was possessed, and therefore was able
to gain possession of the souls of others. Miss Lenihan appreciated
and presented beautifully the brightness of Joan and her com-
mon sense; but it is no trick to call a Dauphin “Charlie" unless you
can make him a King. It was the radiating energy, the violence of
a thousand hearts beating within her bosom, that Miss Lenihan
failed to give to Joan; the rest was always interesting, always
intelligent; it could not be moving.
The name of Mr Cohan's play is THE SONG AND DANCE MAN.
After his superb acting—the diversion I mentioned above is that
he is not acting himself, but a character with a definite leading
emotion—the thing to note in it is the actual eloquence of most of
the first act and the general skill-marred by the worst of Broad-
way—of the production. Looking over a list of other current
pieces I find that the shadow Cohan has cast on them is thick and
dark.
GILBERT SELDES


MODERN ART
NE of the first results of The Dial's publication of a folio
of facsimiles of living art—and I expect many—will be an
immediate inquiry into the reason why no such institution as the
German Ganymed Press which made these astonishing prints exists
in this country; and since Americans are loth to deny themselves
anything and are thought to have a particular genius for facsimiles
themselves, the demand will straightway follow that we facsimile
the Press that so admirably facsimiles works of art.
A difficulty in the way of our doing such work—and I state
it not to be pessimistic, but merely in the effort to begin at the
beginning—is that something quite foreign to the present state of
mind in America seems to be required for it, an infinite degree of
patience upon the part of the workman; two years, I'm told, having
been required for the present folio. Then, as though patience in
itself were not a great deal to expect of a workman, these Germans
have had to understand the language of art and the special accents
not of one, but in this instance of many artists, so to render all
the vagaries of touch. I know nothing of the Ganymed processes,
but I know enough of the camera and reproductions in general to
know that science and machines cannot interpret, and where an
artistic effect is repeated by machinery a human being who knew
art guided the apparatus to its end. That has been the error that
has stopped us hitherto in this country that those who have guided
the machines have not known art.
To me, an American, the present accomplishment seems marvel-
lous. I have had the privilege of comparing one or two of the
originals with the facsimiles and, with a bit of luck, I guessed
which was which, but I must confess it was only guessing. In
particular, the reproduction of Picasso's painting in tempera, Le
Bain des Chevaux, amazes me. I have not seen the original for
some years, but had this reproduction been passed to me in an
ordinary room and, say, under glass, I should have accepted it
unsuspectingly. The few among my friends who have already
seen the folio have each had their own amazements. One told me
he was thrown absolutely into confusion by the two Signacs, not


208
MODERN ART
being able to tell the real water-colour from the printed semblance,
and another had that experience with the strange It Is Written, by
Marc Chagall. Lower Manhattan, a water-colour by Marin
must have presented unheard of difficulties to these engravers, yet
they rose to them conqueringly. It is simply an explosion of emo-
tion with almost none of the usual passages that are met with in
ordinary water-colours, yet all the disdainful audacities of the style
are faithfully rendered. It is possible not to like it, but it is not
possible to deny it is a Marin.
With this duplication the Marin dispute and indeed most of the
other disputes connected with contemporary work may be
indefinitely extended, for all of the hotly discussed artists are
illustrated in this folio of Living Art. Discussions about art and
even disputes about art are very necessary in live and fully
developed communities and in fact the term “live” may not be
applied to communities where they do not occur. And "live"
artists, profoundly in earnest over their work, never worry over
these discussions—it is only the sluggish and the political who fear
the public and try to hush it up. The edition in itself is not an
indefinite extension, as it is limited to five hundred copies, but it is
easy to believe that each of these copies will be much scanned if
the public libraries and museums that now dot the land see their
duty. It is a handicap that art labours under that its great master-
pieces gravitate to the big cities and vast sections of the populace in
great countries like this, where distances are magnificent, are
obliged to get along without it.
The thirty plates in the folio are not all facsimiles, ten carefully
reproduced photographs of sculpture being included as well as two
renderings of oil-paintings. The artists are these; Paul Signac,
Pierre Bonnard, Henri Matisse, André Derain, Maurice de
Vlaminck, André' de Segonzac, Marie Laurencin, and Aristide
Maillol, from France; Pablo Picasso, from Spain; Wilhelm
Lehmbruck, from Germany; Wyndham Lewis, Duncan Grant, and
Frank Dobson, from England; Marc Chagall and Alexander Archi-
penko, from Russia; Ernesto de Fiori, from Italy; Constantin
Brancusi, from Roumania; Jules Pascin, from Bulgaria; Edvard
Munch, from Norway; Boardman Robinson, Charles Demuth,
John Marin, Gaston Lachaise, and Alfeo Faggi, from the United
States.


HENRY MCBRIDE
209
take it upon
A formidable list. Certainly most of the challenging spirits in
the present-day world of art are included, and sometimes by their
most challenging performances. I have already hinted that the
Lower Manhattan of Mr Marin will test the openness of the minds
of many advanced students, and in addition there is La Danse aux
Capucines by Henri Matisse. M Matisse seldom deigns to explain
to the outside world the genesis of his paintings and not only loves
to be loved, like Richard Strauss, for the "absolute" quality of his
compositions, but yearns to see the public occasionally charmed
against its will. In the present case I think I may take it
myself to say that this Danse aux Capucines is a painting of a
painting and that only a portion of the great mural dance that
Matisse painted just before the war for a German enthusiast shows
in this arrangement of his studio corner. I have a sort of traitorous
shame is thus betraying a "fact” in connexion with an abstract
appeal, but since I have overcome it myself I think others may
too. Matisse is undoubtedly one of the great painters of modern
times and there are scores of his canvases that must seduce all
those who succumb to virtuosity in painting, but in the Danse he
throws all enticements to the winds and simplifies to an extent that
would put even Giotto to shame. I am one of those charmed by it
against my will. When I first saw the mural in the studio of the
artist I was not precisely bowled over by it, preferring many other
things in the studio to it, but now, of all the collection by which
this folio has suddenly enriched me, it is this Danse aux Capucines
I have chosen for my wall; and it glows there in a vital, relentlessly
arresting way through all the day and through all changes of
light
HENRY McBride


MUSICAL CHRONICLE
S
TRAWINSKY a success in New York! But it was yesterday
only that the Concertino was hissed, whole families uniting
in the sport; and day before yesterday only that a Philharmonic
audience sat mute motionless aghast during a parade of little Fire-
works, or passed from diaphragm to diaphragm spasms of painful
equilibration. Nevertheless there appears to exist a power not
ourselves, thank heavens, which makes for motion, and therefore
Renard was wildly summoned back again by the audience of the
International Composers' Guild the evening of December second,
not more than a half dozen people seeking the year 1910 through
the exits. Earlier in the evening, the ecstatic Herzgewaechse of
Schoenberg had been recalled, too; all the world was in a good
humour which things by Delage, Lourie, and Hindemith had not
been powerful to dampen. But the song with its strange accom-
paniment on harp, celesta, and harmonium had not been recalled
by a house as unanimous. While the applause was becoming insist-
ful, and Mesdames Leoni and Miller, Messrs Mattfeld and
Salzedo were remaining ominously on the stage, hisses and protests
ventured up, and several people turned about to where some of the
applause came from and said loudly “Not again! Not again!"
And there might have been motives other than aesthetic curiosity
and delight beneath the demandful clapping. People must have
known the newspaper critics a-squirm to a man upon the seat-
leather underneath them. Also, the sudden unprepared high f
pian pianissimo had been shock, and people were curious to know
whether it had been intentional and whether it would come again
from Miss Leoni's head. But after Renard, nothing other than a
state of approaching satisfaction made the applause. The joy was
universal, and sustained. The full Vanderbilt Theatre wanted the
burlesque over again for the reason that in Strawinsky it had sud-
denly come upon the showman of genius who had given it just the
delight it wanted, and wished to hold on tightly to its new-found
friend.
To be sure, Renard is not the greatest Strawinsky. It is not
a large form. The rhythmic curves are short. And the instrumental


PAUL ROSENFELD
211
Fs
invention is not extraordinary; more of the quality of Le Chant
du Rossignol than of the Sacre. And still, the work is Strawin-
sky. It is an idea. The material has a uniform and appropri-
ate colouration. The music is robust, rough to threadbareness,
homely. The trumpet and drum begin it, and one hears the village
band; and throughout, the musical background has the quality of
peasant improvisation, sardonic, humorous, and dramatic, quite in
keeping with the spirit of the ancient animal fable which it sets
off. It may be the cock's little self-caressful refrain would not
have been written had not another cock crowed from off the battle-
ments in Le Coq d'Or. And still, Strawinsky's pattern, in its
simplicity, its platitude, and unapparent subtlety, sets one in the
barnyard, and into the atmosphere of birch bark shoes and red
grinning peasant faces and the cruel and comic tale of primitive
life. And it is improbable that any of the flavour of the bright lit-
tle score failed to manifest itself that Sunday night. The audi-
ence saw the living spirit of a composition taken to themselves by
instrumentalists and singers and tossed and caught and tossed again
with verve and enjoyment. The singers remained stationary; there
was very trifling mimetic play. After the "animals” had finished
yelling their huzzas normal and falsetto, and while the old fable
was enrolling itself, one saw an action as though a ballet were in
progress upon the stage where singers and players in evening black
sat about and stood. The self-complacency of the cock sunning
himself upon his perch and priding himself that he was guarding
the house; the hypocritical attitudes of mother fox disguised as a
nun and entreating master cock to come down and be confessed;
the writhing of poor cock in the hands of the crafty wretch and the
fatal curiosity of the latter when cat and goat began their serenad-
ing, were there, somehow. One saw them through the ear.
But if Renard is not the greatest Strawinsky, there remains
enough of relentless truthfulness to self in the writing to force a
new equilibrium on the hearer. The relative brittleness, shrillness,
threadbareness of the tonal flow startles; it is somewhat like a
flower from which one turns at first, and to which, driven by some
inexplicable curiosity, one returns again, to breathe a little less
uncomfortably. And still, the International's audience made the
grade perfectly. It seems the style of Strawinsky has become
“nature.” There is a time when every new style seems dissonant


212
MUSICAL CHRONICLE
and perverse, anarchistic and calculated. The green of the trees
and it are separated as though they lie on uncommunicating unre-
lated planes. But, gradually, the green of the foliage and the new
style commence approaching one another till one day, the styles of
Wagner and Whitman and Cézanne, of Debussy and Joyce and
John Marin upset and disequilibrate us no more than does the fall
of snow in January. They have become part of the inherited
experience. It seems the evening in the Vanderbilt Theatre was
the moment of time in America when Strawinsky's style and with
it that of his “generation” passed into the universe of accepted
facts; and another “crazy" music rested with the pigmentation of
the leaves. It doesn't at all matter that the Philharmonic audi-
ences, and the body of the critics and musicians have not taken
cognizance of it. Where do we go from here?
PAUL ROSENFELD






Made in Germany
RUE A NESLES.
BY MAURICE DE VLAMINUR



THE INDIAL
OXX II
MARCH 1924
DEATH IN VENICE
BY THOMAS MANN
Translated From the German by Kenneth Burke
ON
a spring afternoon of the year 19, when our continent
lay under such threatening weather for whole months, Gustav
Aschenbach, or von Aschenbach as his name read officially after his
iftieth birthday, had left his apartment on the Prinzregentenstrasse
in Munich and had gone for a long walk. Overwrought by the try-
ing and precarious work of the forenoon—which had demanded a
maximum wariness, prudence, penetration, and rigour of the will-
the writer had not been able even after the noon meal to break the
impetus of the productive mechanism within him, that motus animi
continuus which constitutes, according to Cicero, the foundation of
eloquence; and he had not attained the healing sleep which—what
with the increasing exhaustion of his strength—he needed in the
middle of each day. So he had gone outdoors soon after tea, in the
hopes that air and movement would restore him and prepare him
for a profitable evening.
It was the beginning of May, and after cold, damp weeks a false
midsummer had set in. The English Gardens, although the foliage
was still fresh and sparse, were as pungent as in August, and in the
parts nearer the city had been full of conveyances and promenaders.
At the Aumeister, which he had reached by quieter and quieter paths,
Aschenbach had surveyed for a short time the Wirtsgarten with its
lively crowds and its border of cabs and carriages. From here, as
the sun was sinking, he had started home, outside the park, across
the open fields; and since he felt tired and a storm was threatening
Made in Germany


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from the direction of Föhring, he waited at the North Cemetery
for the tram which would take him directly back to the city.
It happened that he found no one in the station or its vicinity.
There was not a vehicle to be seen, either on the paved Ungerer-
strasse, with its solitary glistening rails stretching out towards
Schwabing, or on the Föhringer Chaussee. Behind the fences of the
stone-masons' establishments, where the crosses, memorial tablets,
and monuments standing for sale formed a second, uninhabited
burial ground, there was no sign of life; and opposite him the Byzan-
tine structure of the Funeral Hall lay silent in the reflection of the
departing day; its façade, ornamented in luminous colours with
Greek crosses and hieratic paintings, above which were displayed
inscriptions symmetrically arranged in gold letters, and texts chosen
to bear on the life beyond; such as, “They enter into the dwelling
of the Lord,” or, “The light of eternity shall shine upon them.”
And for some time as he stood waiting he found a grave diversion in
spelling out the formulas and letting his mind's eye lose itself in
their transparent mysticism, when, returning from his reveries, he
noticed in the portico, above the two apocalyptic animals guarding
the steps, a man whose somewhat unusual appearance gave his
thoughts an entirely new direction.
Whether he had just now come out from the inside through the
bronze door, or had approached and mounted from the outside
unobserved, remained uncertain. Aschenbach, without applying
himself especially to the matter, was inclined to believe the former.
Of medium height, thin, smooth-shaven, and noticeably pug-nosed,
the man belonged to the red-haired type and possessed the appro-
priate fresh milky complexion. Obviously, he was not of Bavarian
extraction, since at least the white and straight-brimmed straw hat
that covered his head gave his appearance the stamp of a foreigner,
of someone who had come from a long distance. To be sure, he was
wearing the customary knapsack strapped across his shoulders, and
a belted suit of rough yellow wool; his left arm was resting on his
thigh, and his grey storm cape was thrown across it. In his right
hand he held a cane with an iron ferrule, which he had stuck
diagonally into the ground, and, with his feet crossed, was leaning
his hip against the crook. His head was raised so that the Adam's-
apple protruded hard and bare on a scrawny neck emerging from a
loose sport-shirt. And he was staring sharply off into the distance,
with colourless, red-lidded eyes between which stood two strong,


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215
vertical wrinkles peculiarly suited to his short, turned-up nose.
Thus—and perhaps his elevated position helped to give the impres-
sion—his bearing had something majestic and commanding about
it, something bold, or even savage. For whether he was grimacing
because he was blinded by the setting sun, or whether it was a case
of a permanent distortion of the physiognomy, his lips seemed too
short, they were so completely pulled back from his teeth that these
were exposed even to the gums, and stood out white and long.
It is quite possible that Aschenbach, in his half-distracted, half-
inquisitive examination of the stranger, had been somewhat incon-
siderate, for he suddenly became aware that his look was being
answered, and indeed so militantly, so straight in the eye, so plainly
with the intention of driving the thing through to the very end and
compelling him to capitulate, that he turned away uncomfortably
and began walking along by the fences, deciding casually that he
would pay no further attention to the man. The next minute he
had forgotten him. But perhaps the exotic element in the stranger's
appearance had worked on his imagination; or a new physical or
spiritual influence of some sort had come into play. He was quite
astonished to note a peculiar inner expansion, a kind of roving
unrest, a youthful longing after far-off places: a feeling so vivid, so
new, or so long dormant and neglected, that, with his hands behind
his back and his eyes on the ground, he came to a sudden stop, and
examined into the nature and purport of this emotion.
It was the desire for travel, nothing more; although, to be sure,
it had attacked him violently, and was heightened to a passion,
even to the point of an hallucination. His yearnings crystallized;
his imagination, still in ferment from his hours of work, actually
pictured all the marvels and terrors of a manifold world which it
was suddenly struggling to conceive. He saw a landscape, a
tropical swampland under a heavy, murky sky, damp, luxuriant,
and enormous, a kind of prehistoric wilderness of islands, bogs, and
arms of water, sluggish with mud; he saw, near him and in the
distance, the hairy shafts of palms rising out of a rank lecherous
thicket, out of places where the plant-life was fat, swollen, and
blossoming exorbitantly; he saw strangely misshapen trees sending
their roots into the ground, into stagnant pools with greenish reflec-
tions; and here, between floating flowers which were milk-white and
large as dishes, birds of a strange nature, high-shouldered, with
crooked bills, were standing in the muck, and looking motionlessly
✓


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to one side; between dense, knotted stalks of bamboo he saw the
glint from the eyes of a crouching tiger—and he felt his heart
knocking with fear and with puzzling desires. Then the image
disappeared; and with a shake of his head Aschenbach resumed his
walk along past the fences of the stone-masons' establishments.
Since the time, at least, when he could command the means to
enjoy the advantages of moving about the world as he pleased, he
had considered travelling simply as an hygienic precaution which
must be complied with now and then despite one's feelings and
one's preferences. Too busy with the tasks arranged for him by his
interest in his own ego and in the problems of Europe, too burdened
with the onus of production, too little prone to diversion, and in no
sense an amateur of the varied amusements of the great world, he
had been thoroughly satisfied with such knowledge of the earth's
surface as any one can get without moving far out of his own circle;
and he had never even been tempted to leave Europe. Especially
now that his life was slowly on the decline, and that the artist's
fear of not having finished-this uneasiness lest the clock run down
before he had done his part and given himself completely—could
no longer be waived aside as a mere whim, he had confined his
outer existence almost exclusively to the beautiful city which had
become his home and to the rough country house which he had
built in the mountains and where he spent the rainy summers.
Further, this thing which had laid hold of him so belatedly, but
with such suddenness, was very readily moderated and adjusted by
the force of his reason and of a discipline which he had practised
since youth. He had intended carrying his life work forward to a
certain point before removing to the country. And the thought of
knocking about the world for months and neglecting his work dur-
ing this time, seemed much too lax and contrary to his plans; it
really could not be considered seriously. Yet he knew only too
well what the reasons were for this unexpected temptation. It was
the urge to escape—he admitted to himself—this yearning for the
new and the remote, this appetite for freedom, for unburdening, for
forgetfulness; it was a pressure away from his work, from the
steady drudgery of a coldly passionate service. To be sure, he
loved this work and almost loved the enervating battle that was
fought daily between a proud tenacious will—so often tested—and
this growing weariness which no one was to suspect and which
must not betray itself in his productions by any sign of weakness or


THOMAS MANN
217
negligence. But it seemed wise not to draw the bow overtightly,
and not to strangle by sheer obstinacy so strongly persistent an
appetite. He thought of his work, thought of the place at which
yesterday and now again to-day he had been forced to leave off,
and which, it seemed, would yield neither to patience and coaxing
nor to a definite attack. He examined it again, trying to break
through or to circumvent the deadlock, but he gave up with a shudder
of repugnance. There was no unusual difficulty here; what balked
him were the scruples of aversion, which took the form of a fastidious
insatiability. Even as a young man this insatiability had meant to
him the very nature, the fullest essence, of talent; and for that
reason he had restrained and chilled his emotions, since he was
aware that they incline to content themselves with a happy approxi-
mation, a state of semi-completion. Were these enslaved emotions
now taking their vengeance on him, by leaving him in the lurch,
by refusing to forward and lubricate his art; and were they bearing
off with them every enjoyment, every live interest in form and
expression?
Not that he was producing anything bad; his years gave him at
least this advantage, that he felt himself at all times in full and
easy possession of his craftsmanship. But while the nation honoured
him for this, he himself was not content; and it seemed to him that
his work lacked the marks of that fiery and fluctuating emotionalism
which is an enormous thing in one's favour, and which, while it
argues an enjoyment on the part of the author, also constitutes, more
than any depth of content, the enjoyment of the amateur. He
feared the summer in the country, alone in the little house with the
maid who prepared his meals, and the servant who brought them
to him. He feared the familiar view of the mountain peaks and
the slopes which would stand about him in his boredom and his dis-
content. Consequently there was need of a break in some new direc-
tion. If the summer was to be endurable and productive, he must
attempt something out of his usual orbit; he must relax, get a
change of air, bring an element of freshness into the blood. To
travel, then—that much was settled. Not far, not all the way to
the tigers. But one night on the sleeper, and a rest of three or
four weeks at some pleasant popular resort in the South.
He thought this out while the noise of the electric tram came
nearer along the Ungererstrasse; and as he boarded it he decided to
devote the evening to the study of maps and time-tables. On the


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platform it occurred to him to look around for the man in the straw
hat, his companion during that most significant time spent waiting
at the station. But his whereabouts remained uncertain, as he was
not to be seen either at the place where he was formerly standing, or
anywhere else in the vicinity of the station, or on the car itself.
II
The author of that lucid and powerful prose epic built around
the life of Frederick of Prussia; the tenacious artist who, after
long application, wove rich, varied strands of human destiny to-
gether under one single predominating theme in the fictional
tapestry known as Maya; the creator of that stark tale which is
called The Wretch and which pointed out for an entire oncoming
generation the possibility of some moral certainty beyond pure
knowledge; finally, the writer (and this sums up briefly the works
of his mature period) of the impassioned treatise on Art and the
Spirit, whose capacity for mustering facts, and, further, whose
fluency in their presentation, led cautious judges to place this
treatise alongside Schiller's conclusions on naïve and sentimental
poetry-Gustav Aschenbach, then, was the son of a higher law of-
ficial, and was born in L-, a leading city in the Province of
Silesia. His forbears had been officers, magistrates, government
functionaries, men who had led severe, steady lives serving their
king, their state. A deeper strain of spirituality had been manifest
in them once, in the person of a preacher; the preceding generation
had brought a brisker, more sensuous blood into the family through
the author's mother, daughter of a Bohemian band-master. The
traces of foreignness in his features came from her. A marriage of
sober painstaking conscientiousness with impulses of a darker, more
fiery nature had had an artist as its result, and this particular artist.
Since his whole nature was centred around acquiring a reputa-
tion, he showed himself, if not exactly precocious, at least (thanks
to the firmness and pithiness of his personality, his accent) ripened
and adjusted to the public at an early age. Almost as a schoolboy
he had made a name for himself. Within ten years he had learned
to face the world through the medium of his writing-table, to
discharge the obligations of his fame in a correspondence which
(since many claims are pressed on the successful, the trustworthy)
had to be brief as well as pleasant and to the point. At forty,


THOMAS MANN
219
wearied by the vicissitudes and the exertion of his own work, he
had to manage a daily mail which bore the postmarks of countries
in all parts of the world.
Equally removed from the banal and the eccentric, his talents
were so constituted as to gain both the confidence of the general
public and the stable admiration and sympathy of the critical.
Thus even as a young man continually devoted to the pursuit of
craftsmanship—and that of no ordinary kind-he had never known
the careless freedom of youth. When, around thirty-five years of
age, he had been taken ill in Vienna, one sharp observer said of
him in company, “You see, Aschenbach has always lived like this,"
and the speaker contracted the fingers of his left hand into a fist;
"never like this," and he let his open hand droop comfortably from
the arm of his chair. That hit the mark; and the heroic, the ethical
about it all was that he was not of a strong constitution, and though
he was pledged by his nature to these steady efforts, he was not
really born to them.
Considerations of ill-health had kept him from attending school
as a boy, and had compelled him to receive instruction at home. He
had grown up alone, without comrades—and he was forced to
realize soon enough that he belonged to a race which often lacked,
not talent, but that physical substructure which talent relies on
for its fullest fruition: a race accustomed to giving its best early,
and seldom extending its faculties over the years. But his favourite
phrase was "carrying through”; in his novel on Frederick he saw
the pure apotheosis of this command, which struck him as the es-
sential concept of the virtuous in action and passion. Also, he
wished earnestly to grow old, since he had always maintained that
the only artistry which can be called truly great, comprehensive,
yes even truly admirable, is that which is permitted to bear fruits
characteristic of each stage in human development.
Since he must carry the responsibilities of his talent on frail
shoulders, and wanted to go a long way, the primary requirement
was discipline—and fortunately discipline was his direct inheritance
from his father's side. By forty, fifty, or at an earlier age when
others are still slashing about with enthusiasm, and are contentedly
putting off to some later date the execution of plans on a large
scale, he would start the day early, dashing cold water over his
chest and back, and then with a couple of tall wax candles in
silver candlesticks at the head of his manuscript, he would pay out


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to his art, in two or three eager, scrupulous morning hours, the
strength which he had accumulated in sleep. It was pardonable,
indeed it was a direct tribute to the effectiveness of his moral scheme,
that the uninitiated took his Maya world, and the massive epic
machinery upon which the life of the hero Frederick was unrolled,
as evidence of long breath and sustaining power. While actually
they had been built up layer by layer, in small daily allotments,
through hundreds and hundreds of single inspirations. And if
they were so excellent in both composition and texture, it was solely
because their creator had held out for years under the strain of one
single work, with a steadiness of will and a tenacity comparable
to that which conquered his native province; and because, finally,
he had turned over his most vital and valuable hours to the problem
of minute revision.
In order that a significant work of the mind may exert immedi-
ately some broad and deep effect, a secret relationship, or even con-
formity, must exist between the personal destiny of the author and
the common destiny of his contemporaries. People do not know
why they raise a work of art to fame. Far from being connoisseurs,
they believe that they see in it hundreds of virtues which justify
so much interest; but the true reason for their applause is an un-
conscious sympathy. Aschenbach had once stated quite plainly in
some remote place that nearly everything great which comes into
being does so in spite of something—in spite of sorrow or suffering,
poverty, destitution, physical weakness, depravity, passion, or a
thousand other handicaps. But that was not merely an observation;
it was a discovery, the formula of his life and reputation, the key to
his work. And what wonder then that it was also the distinguishing
moral trait, the dominating gesture, of his most characteristic
figures?
Years before, one shrewd analyst had written of the new hero-
type to which this author gave preference, and which kept turning
up in variations of one sort or another: he called it the conception
of "an intellectual and youthful masculinity” which "stands mo-
tionless, haughty, ashamed, with jaw set, while swords and spear-
points beset the body.” That was beautiful and ingenious; and it
was exact, although it may have seemed to suggest too much pas-
sivity. For to be poised against fatality, to meet adverse con-
ditions gracefully, is more than simple endurance; it is an act of
aggression, a positive triumph—and the figure of Sebastian is the


THOMAS MANN
221
most beautiful figure, if not of art as a whole, at least of the art
of literature. Looking into this fictional world, one saw: a delicate
self-mastery by which any inner deterioration, any biological decay
was kept concealed from the eyes of the world; a crude, vicious
sensuality capable of fanning its rising passions into pure flame, yes,
even of mounting to dominance in the realm of beauty; a pallid
weakness which draws from the glowing depths of the soul the
strength to bow whole arrogant peoples before the foot of the cross,
or before the feet of weakness itself; a charming manner main-
tained in his cold, strict service to form; a false, precarious mode
of living, and the keenly enervating melancholy and artifice of the
born deceiver—to observe such trials as this was enough to make
one question whether there really was any heroism other than
weakness. And in any case, what heroism could be more in keeping
with the times? Gustav Aschenbach was the one poet among the
many workers on the verge of exhaustion: all those over-burdened,
used-up, tenacious moralists of production who, delicately built
and destitute of means, can rely for a time at least on will-power
and the shrewd husbandry of their resources to secure the effects of
greatness. There are many such: they are the heroes of the period.
And they all found themselves in his works; here they were indeed,
upheld, intensified, applauded; they were grateful to him, they ac-
claimed him.
In his time he had been young and raw; and misled by his age
he had blundered in public. He had stumbled, had exposed him-
self; both in writing and in talk he had offended against caution
and tact. But he had acquired the dignity which, as he insisted, is
the innate goad and craving of every great talent; in fact, it
could be said that his entire development had been a conscious
undeviating progression away from the embarrassments of scepticism
and irony, and towards dignity.
The general masses are satisfied by vigour and tangibility of
treatment rather than by any close intellectual processes; but
youth, with its passion for the absolute, can be arrested only by
the problematical. And Aschenbach had been absolute, problemati-
cal, as only a youth could be. He had been a slave to the intellect,
had played havoc with knowledge, had ground up his seed crops,
had divulged secrets, had discredited talent, had betrayed art—yes,
while his modellings were entertaining the faithful votaries, filling
them with enthusiasm, making their lives more keen, this youth


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DEATH IN VENICE
artist was taking the breath away from the generation then in its
twenties by his cynicisms on the questionable nature of art, and of
artistry itself.
But it seems that nothing blunts the edge of a noble, robust mind
more quickly and more thoroughly than the sharp and bitter cor-
rosion of knowledge; and certainly the moody radicalism of the
youth, no matter how conscientious, was shallow in comparison
with his firm determination as an older man and a master to deny
knowledge, to reject it, to pass it with raised head, in so far as it
is capable of crippling, discouraging, or degrading to the slightest
degree, our will, acts, feelings, or even passions. How else could
the famous story of The Wretch be understood than as an outburst
of repugnance against the disreputable psychologism of the times:
embodied in the figure of that soft and stupid half-clown who
pilfers a destiny for himself by guiding his wife (from powerless-
ness, from lasciviousness, from ethical frailty) into the arms of an
adolescent, and believes that he may through profundity commit
vileness? The verbal pressure with which he here cast out the
outcast announced the return from every moral scepticism, from
all fellow-feeling with the engulfed: it was the counter-
move to the
laxity of the sympathetic principle that to understand all is to for-
give all—and the thing that was here well begun, even nearly com-
pleted, was that “miracle of reborn ingenuousness” which was
taken up a little later in one of the author's dialogues expressly
and not without a certain discreet emphasis. Strange coincidences !
Was it as a result of this rebirth, this new dignity and sternness,
that his feeling for beauty—a discriminating purity, simplicity,
and evenness of attack which henceforth gave his productions such
an obvious, even such a deliberate stamp of mastery and classicism-
showed an almost excessive strengthening about this time? But
ethical resoluteness in the exclusion of science, of emancipatory and
restrictive knowledge-does this not in turn signify a simplification,
a reduction morally of the world to too limited terms, and thus
also a strengthened capacity for the forbidden, the evil, the morally
impossible? And does not form have two aspects? Is it not moral
and unmoral at once-moral in that it is the result and expression of
discipline, but unmoral, and even immoral, in that by nature it
contains an indifference to morality, is calculated, in fact, to
make morality bend beneath its proud and unencumbered sceptre?
Be that as it may. An evolution is a destiny; and why should


THOMAS MANN
223
to seize upon
his evolution, which had been upheld by the general confidence
of a vast public, not run through a different course from one ac-
complished outside the lustre and the entanglements of fame? Only
chronic vagabondage will find it tedious and be inclined to scoff
when a great talent outgrows the libertine chrysalis-stage, learns
and express the dignity of the mind, and superimposes
a formal etiquette upon a solitude which had been filled with un-
chastened and rigidly isolated sufferings and struggles and had
brought all this to a point of power and honour among men.
Further, how much sport, defiance, indulgence there is in the self-
formation of a talent! Gradually something official, didactic crept
into Gustav Aschenbach's productions, his style in later life fought
shy of any abruptness and boldness, any subtle and unexpected con-
trasts; he inclined towards the fixed and standardized, the con-
ventionally elegant, the conservative, the formal, the formulated,
nearly. And, as is traditionally said of Louis XIV, with the ad-
vancing years he came to omit every common word from his vocabu-
lary. At about this time it happened that the educational authori-
ties included selected pages by him in their prescribed school readers.
This was deeply sympathetic to his nature, and he did not decline
when a German prince who had just mounted to the throne raised
the author of the Frederick to nobility on the occasion of his
fiftieth birthday. After a few years of unrest, a few tentative
stopping-places here and there, he soon chose Munich as his per-
manent home, and lived there in a state of middle-class respect-
ability such as fits in with the life of the mind in certain in-
dividual instances. The marriage which, when still young, he had
contracted with a girl of an educated family came to an end with
her death after a short period of happiness. He was left with
a daughter, now married. He had never had a son.
Gustav von Aschenbach was somewhat below average height,
dark, and smooth-shaven. His head seemed a bit too large in com-
parison with his almost dapper figure. His hair was brushed
straight back, thinning out towards the crown, but very full about
the temples, and strongly marked with grey; it framed a high,
ridged forehead. Gold spectacles with rimless lenses cut into the
bridge of his bold, heavy nose. The mouth was big, sometimes
drooping, sometimes suddenly pinched and firm. His cheeks were
thin and wrinkled, his well-formed chin had a slight cleft. This
head, usually bent patiently to one side, seemed to have gone


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through momentous experiences, and yet it was his art which had
produced those effects in his face, effects which are elsewhere the
result of hard and agitated living. Behind this brow the brilliant
repartee of the dialogue on war between Voltaire and the king had
been born; these eyes, peering steadily and wearily from behind
their glasses, had seen the bloody inferno of the lazaret in the Seven
Years' War. Even as it applies to the individual, art is a heightened
mode of existence. It gives deeper pleasures, it consumes more
quickly. It carves into its servants' faces the marks of imaginary
and spiritual adventures, and though their external activities may
be as quiet as a cloister, it produces a lasting voluptuousness, over-
refinement, fatigue, and curiosity of the nerves such as can barely
result from a life filled with illicit passions and enjoyments.
III
Various matters of a literary and social nature delayed his de-
parture until about two weeks after that walk in Munich. Finally
he gave orders to have his country house ready for occupancy within
a month; and one day between the middle and the end of May he
took the night train for Trieste, where he made a stop-over of only
twenty-four hours, and embarked the following morning for Pola.
What he was hunting was something foreign and unrelated to
himself which would at the same time be quickly within reach;
and so he stopped at an island in the Adriatic which had become
well-known in recent years. It lay not far off the Istrian coast,
with beautifully rugged cliffs fronting the open sea, and natives
who dressed in variegated tatters and made strange sounds when
they spoke. But rain and a heavy atmosphere, a provincial and
exclusively Austrian patronage at the hotel, and the lack of that
restfully intimate association with the sea which can be gotten
only by a soft, sandy beach, irritated him, and prevented him
from feeling that he had found the place he was looking for. Some-
thing within was disturbing him, and drawing him he was not
sure where. He studied sailing dates, he looked about him ques-
tioningly, and of a sudden, as a thing both astounding and self-
evident, his goal was before him. If you wanted to reach over
night the unique, the fabulously different, where did you go? But
that was plain. What was he doing here? He had lost the trail.
He had wanted to go there. He did not delay in giving notice


THOMAS MANN
225
of his mistake in stopping here. In the early morning mist, a week
and a half after his arrival on the island, a fast motor-boat was
carrying him and his luggage back over the water to the naval port,
and he landed there just long enough to cross the gangplank to the
damp deck of a ship which was lying under steam ready for the
voyage to Venice.
It was an old hulk flying the Italian flag, decrepit, sooty, and
mournful. In a cave-like, artificially lighted inside cabin where
Aschenbach, immediately upon boarding the ship, was conducted by
a dirty hunchbacked sailor who smirked politely, there was sitting
behind a table, his hat cocked over his forehead and a cigarette
stump in the corner of his mouth, a man with a goatee, and with
the face of an old-style circus director, who was taking down the
particulars of the passengers with professional grimaces and dis-
tributing the tickets. “To Venice!” he repeated Aschenbach's re-
quest, as he extended his arm and plunged his pen into the pasty
dregs of a precariously tilted inkwell. “To Venice, first class! At
your service, sir.” And he wrote a generous scrawl, sprinkled it with
blue sand out of a box, let the sand run off into a clay bowl, folded
the paper with sallow, bony fingers, and began writing again. “A
happily chosen destination!” he chatted on. “Ah, Venice! A
splendid city! A city of irresistible attractiveness for the educated
on account of its history as well as its present-day charms!” The
smooth rapidity of his movements and the empty words accom-
panying them had something anaesthetic and reassuring about them,
much as though he feared lest the traveller might still be vacil-
lating in his decision to go to Venice. He handled the cash briskly,
and let the change fall on the spotted table-cover with the skill
of a croupier. “A pleasant journey, sir!” he said with a theatrical
bow. "Gentlemen, I have the honour of serving you!” he called out
immediately after, with his arm upraised, and he acted as if busi-
ness were in full swing, although no one else was there to require
his attention. Aschenbach returned to the deck.
With one arm on the railing, he watched the passengers on board
and the idlers who loitered around the dock waiting for the ship
to sail. The second class passengers, men and women, were hud-
dled together on the foredeck, using boxes and bundles as seats. A
group of young people made up the travellers on the first deck,
clerks from Pola, it seemed, who had gathered in the greatest ex-
citement for an excursion to Italy. They made a considerable fuss


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about themselves and their enterprise, chattered, laughed, enjoyed
their own antics self-contentedly, and, leaning over the hand-rails,
shouted flippantly and mockingly at their comrades who, with
portfolios under their arms, were going up and down the waterfront
on business and kept threatening the picnickers with their canes.
One, in a bright yellow summer suit of ultra-fashionable cut, with
a red necktie, and a rakishly tilted panama, surpassed all the others
in his crowing good humour. But as soon as Aschenbach looked
at him a bit more carefully, he discovered with a kind of horror
that the youth was a cheat. He was old, that was unquestionable.
There were wrinkles around his eyes and mouth. The faint crimson
of the cheeks was paint, the hair under his brilliantly decorated
straw hat was a wig; his neck was hollow and stringy, his turned-up
moustache and the imperial on his chin were dyed; the full set of
yellow teeth which he displayed when he laughed, a cheap artificial
plate; and his hands, with signet rings on both index fingers, were
those of an old man. Fascinated with loathing, Aschenbach
watched him in his intercourse with his friends. Did they not know,
did they not observe that he was old, that he was not entitled to
wear their bright, foppish clothing, that he was not entitled to play
at being one of them? Unquestioningly, and as quite the usual
thing, it seemed, they allowed him among them, treating him as
one of their own kind and returning his jovial nudges in the ribs
without repugnance. How could that be? Aschenbach laid his
hand on his forehead and closed his eyes; they were hot, since
he had had too little sleep. He felt as though everything were not
quite the same as usual, as though some dream-like estrangement,
some peculiar distortion of the world, were beginning to take posses-
sion of him, and perhaps this could be stopped if he hid his face
for a time and then looked around him again. Yet at this moment
he felt as though he were swimming; and looking up with an un-
reasoned fear, he discovered that the heavy, lugubrious body of the
ship was separating slowly from the walled bank. Inch by inch,
with the driving and reversing of the engine, the strip of dirty
glistening water widened between the dock and the side of the ship;
and after cumbersome manoeuvring, the steamer finally turned its
nose towards the open sea. Aschenbach crossed to the starboard
side, where the hunchback had set up a deck-chair for him, and a
steward in a spotted dress-coat asked after his wants.
The sky was grey, the wind damp. Harbour and islands had


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227
been left behind, and soon all land was lost in the haze. Flakes
of coal dust, bloated with moisture, fell over the washed deck,
which would not dry. After the first hour an awning was spread,
since it had begun to rain.
Bundled
up in his coat, a book in his lap, the traveller rested,
and the hours passed unnoticed. It stopped raining; the canvas
awning was removed. The horizon was unbroken. The sea, empty,
like an enormous disk, lay stretched under the curve of the sky.
But in empty inarticulate space our senses lose also the dimensions
of time, and we slip into the incommensurate. As he rested, strange
shadowy figures, the old dandy, the goatee from the inside cabin,
passed through his mind, with vague gestures, muddled dream-
words—and he was asleep.
About noon he was called to a meal down in the corridor-like
dining-hall into which the doors opened from the sleeping-cabins;
he ate near the head of a long table, at the other end of which
the clerks including the old man had been drinking with the boister-
ous captain since ten o'clock. The food was poor, and he finished
rapidly. He felt driven outside to look at the sky, to see if it
showed signs of being brighter above Venice.
He had kept thinking that this had to occur, since the city had
always received him in full blaze. But sky and sea remained
dreary and leaden, at times a misty rain fell, and here he was reach-
ing by water a different Venice than he had ever found when ap-
proaching on land. He stood by the forestays, looking in the dis-
tance, waiting for land. He thought of the heavy-hearted, en-
thusiastic poet for whom the domes and bell towers of his dreams
had once risen out of these waters; he relived in silence some of
that reverence, happiness, and sorrow which had been turned then
into cautious song; and easily susceptible to sensations already
moulded, he asked himself wearily and earnestly whether some new
enchantment and distraction, some belated adventure of the emo-
tions, might still be held in store for this idle traveller.
Then the flat coast emerged on the right; the sea was alive with
fishing smacks; the bathers' island appeared; it dropped behind to
the left, the steamer slowly entered the narrow port which is named
after it; and on the lagoon, facing gay ramshackle houses, it
stopped completely, since it had to wait for the barque of the
health department.
An hour passed before it appeared. He had arrived, and yet
he


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DEATH IN VENICE
had not; no one was in any hurry, no one was driven by impatience.
The young men from Pola, patriotically attracted by the military
bugle calls which rang over the water from the vicinity of the
public gardens, had come on deck, and warmed by their Asti, they
burst out with cheers for the drilling bersagliere. But it was re-
pulsive to see what a state the primped-up old man had been
brought to by his comradeship with youth. His old head was not
able to resist its wine like the young and robust: he was painfully
drunk. With glazed eyes, a cigarette between his trembling fingers,
he stood in one place, swaying backwards and forwards from gid-
diness, and balancing himself laboriously. Since he would have
fallen at the first step, he did not trust himself from the spot-yet
he showed a deplorable insolence, buttonholed everyone who came
near him, stammered, winked, and tittered, lifted his wrinkled,
ornamented index finger in a stupid attempt at bantering, while
he licked the corners of his mouth with his tongue in the most
abominably suggestive manner. Aschenbach observed him darkly,
and a feeling of numbness came over him again, as though the world
were displaying a faint but irresistible tendency to distort itself into
the peculiar and the grotesque: a feeling which circumstances pre-
vented him from surrendering himself to completely, for just then
the pounding activity of the engines commenced again, and the ship,
resuming a voyage which had been interrupted so near its comple-
tion, passed through the San Marco canal.
So he saw it again, the most remarkable of landing places, that
blinding composition of fantastic buildings which the Republic
lays out before the eyes of approaching seafarers: the soft splendour
of the palace, the Bridge of Sighs, on the bank the columns with
lion and saint, the advancing, showy flank of the enchanted temple,
the glimpse through to the archway, and the huge giant clock. And
as he looked on he thought that to reach Venice by land, on the rail-
road, was like entering a palace from the rear, and that the most
unreal of cities should not be approached except as he was now
doing, by ship, over the high seas.
The engine stopped, gondolas pressed in, the gangway was let
down, customs officials climbed on board and discharged their duties
perfunctorily; the disembarking could begin. Aschenbach made it
understood that he wanted a gondola to take him and his luggage
to the dock of those little steamers which ply between the city and
the Lido, since he intended to locate near the sea. His plans were


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229
complied with, his wants were shouted down to the water, where
the gondoliers were wrangling with one another in dialect. He was
still hindered from descending; he was hindered by his trunk,
which was being pulled and dragged with difficulty down the
ladder-like steps. So that for some minutes he was not able to avoid
the importunities of the atrocious old man, whose drunkenness gave
him a sinister desire to do the foreigner parting honours. “We wish
you a very agreeable visit,” he bleated as he made an awkward bow.
"We leave with pleasant recollections! Au revoir, excusez, and bon
jour, your excellency!” His mouth watered, he pressed his eyes
shut, he licked the corners of his mouth, and the dyed imperial
turned up about his senile lips. "Our compliments,” he mumbled,
with two fingertips on his mouth, “our compliments to our sweet-
heart, the dearest prettiest sweetheart . And suddenly his
false upper teeth fell down on his lower lip. Aschenbach was able
to escape. "To our sweetheart, our handsome sweetheart," he
heard the cooing, hollow, stuttering voice behind him, while sup-
porting himself against the handrail, he went down the gang-way. .
Who would not have to suppress a fleeting shudder, a vague
timidity and uneasiness, if it were a matter of boarding a Venetian
gondola for the first time or after several years? The strange craft,
an entirely unaltered survival from the times of balladry, with
that peculiar blackness which is found elsewhere only in coffins
it suggests silent, criminal adventures in the rippling night, it sug-
gests even more strongly death itself, the bier and the mournful
funeral, and the last silent journey. And has it been observed that
the seat of such a barque, this arm-chair of coffin-black veneer and
dull black upholstery, is the softest, most luxuriant, most lulling
seat in the world? Aschenbach noted this when he had relaxed
at the feet of the gondolier, opposite his luggage, which lay neatly
assembled on the prow. The rowers were still wrangling, harshly, ,
incomprehensibly, with threatening gestures.
But the strange
silence of this canal city seemed to soften their voices, to disembody
them, and dissipate them over the water. It was warm here in
the harbour. Touched faintly by the warm breeze of the sirocco,
leaning back against the limber portions of the cushions, the travel-
ler closed his eyes in the enjoyment of a lassitude which was as
unusual with him as it was sweet. The trip would be short, he
thought; if only it went on for ever! He felt himself glide with
a gentle motion away from the crowd and the confusion of voices.


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DEATH IN VENICE
It became quieter and quieter around him! There was nothing to
be heard but the splashing of the oar, the hollow slapping of the
waves against the prow of the boat as it stood above the water
black and bold and armed with its halberd-like tip, and a third
sound, of speaking, of whispering—the whispering of the gondolier,
who was talking to himself between his teeth, fitfully, in words
that were pressed out by the exertion of his arms. Aschenbach
looked up, and was slightly astonished to discover that the lagoon
was widening, and he was headed for the open sea. This seemed to
indicate that he ought not to rest too much, but should see to it that
his wishes were carried out.
“To the steamer dock!” he repeated, turning around completely
and looking into the face of the gondolier who stood behind on a
raised platform and towered up between him and the dun-coloured
sky. He was a man of unpleasant, even brutal, appearance, dressed
in sailor blue, with a yellow sash; a formless straw hat, its weave
partially unravelled, was tilted insolently on his head. The set of
his face, the blond curly moustache beneath a curtly turned-up nose,
undoubtedly meant that he was not Italian. Although of some-
what frail build, so that one would not have thought him especially
well suited to his trade, he handled the oar with great energy, throw-
ing his entire body into each stroke. Occasionally, he drew back his
lips from the exertion, and disclosed his white teeth. Wrinkling
his reddish brows, he gazed on past his passenger, as he answered
deliberately, almost gruffly: “You are going to the Lido.” Aschen-
bach replied: "Of course. But I have just taken the gondola to
get me across to San Marco. I want to use the vaporetto."
"You cannot use the vaporetto, sir."
“And why not?"
"Because the vaporetto will not haul luggage.”
That was so; Aschenbach remembered. He was silent. But the
fellow's harsh, presumptuous manner, so unusual towards a
foreigner here, seemed unbearable. He said: “That is
my
affair.
Perhaps I want to put my things in storage. You will turn back.”
There was silence. The oar splashed, the water thudded against
the bow. And the talking and whispering began again. The
gondolier was talking to himself between his teeth.
What was to be done? This man was strangely insolent, and
had an uncanny decisiveness; the traveller, alone with him on the
water, saw no way of getting what he wanted. And besides, how


THOMAS MANN
231
softly he could rest, if only he did not become excited! Hadn't
he wanted the trip to go on and on for ever? It was wisest to let
things take their course, and the main thing was that he was com-
fortable. The poison of inertia seemed to be issuing from the seat,
from this low, black-upholstered arm-chair, so gently cradled by the
oar strokes of the imperious gondolier behind him. The notion that
he had fallen into the hands of a criminal passed dreamily across
Aschenbach's mind—without the ability to summon his thoughts
to an active defence. The possibility that it was all simply a plan
for cheating him seemed more abhorrent. A feeling of duty or
pride, a kind of recollection that one should prevent such things,
gave him the strength to arouse himself once more. He asked:
"What are you asking for the trip?"
Looking down upon him, the gondolier answered: “You will
pay."
It was plain how this should be answered. Aschenbach said
mechanically: “I shall pay nothing, absolutely nothing, if you
don't take me where I want to go.
"You want to go to the Lido.”
“But not with you.”
“I am rowing you well.”
That is so, Aschenbach thought, and relaxed. That is so; you
are rowing me well. Even if you do have designs on my cash, and
send me down to Pluto with a blow of your oar from behind, you
will have rowed me well.
But nothing like that happened. They were even joined by
others: a boatload of musical brigands, men and women, who sang
to guitar and mandolin, riding persistently side by side with the
gondola and filling the silence over the water with their covetous
foreign poetry. A hat was held out, and Aschenbach threw in
money. Then they stopped singing, and rowed away. And again
the muttering of the gondolier could be heard as he talked fitfully
and jerkily to himself.
So they arrived, tossed in the wake of a steamer plying towards
the city. Two municipal officers, their hands behind their backs,
their faces turned in the direction of the lagoon, were walking back
and forth on the bank. Aschenbach left the gondola at the dock,
supported by that old man who is stationed with his grappling hook
at each one of Venice's landing-places. And since he had no small
money, he crossed over to the hotel by the steamer wharf to get


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DEATH IN VENICE
change and pay the rower what was due him. He got what he
wanted in the lobby, he returned and found his travelling bags in a
cart on the dock, and gondola and gondolier had vanished.
“He got out in a hurry,” said the old man with the grappling
hook. “A bad man, a man without a license, sir. He is the only
gondolier who doesn't have a license. The others telephoned here.”
Aschenbach shrugged his shoulders.
“The gentleman rode for nothing," the old man said, and held
out his hat. Aschenbach tossed in a coin. He gave instructions
to have his luggage taken to the beach hotel, and followed the cart
through the avenue, the white-blossomed avenue which, lined on
both sides with taverns, shops, and boarding houses, runs across the
island to the shore.
He entered the spacious hotel from the rear, by the terraced
garden, and passed through the vestibule and the lobby until he
reached the desk. Since he had been announced, he was received
with obliging promptness. A manager, a small frail flatteringly
polite man with a black moustache and a French style frock coat,
accompanied him to the third floor in the lift, and showed him his
room, an agreeable place furnished in cherry wood. It was deco-
rated with strong-smelling flowers, and its high windows afforded
a view out across the open sea. He stepped up to one of them after
the employee had left; and while his luggage was being brought up
and placed in the room behind him, he looked down on the beach
(it was comparatively deserted in the afternoon) and on the sun-
less ocean which was at flood tide and was sending long low waves
against the bank in a calm regular rhythm.
The experiences of a man who lives alone and in silence are both
vaguer and more penetrating than those of people in society; his
thoughts are heavier, more odd, and touched always with melan-
choly. Images and observations which could easily be disposed of
by a glance, a smile, an exchange of opinion, will occupy him un-
bearably, sink deep into the silence, become full of meaning, become
life, adventure, emotion. Loneliness ripens the eccentric, the
daringly and estrangingly beautiful, the poetic. But loneliness also
ripens the perverse, the disproportionate, the absurd, and the illicit.
-So, the things he had met with on the trip, the ugly old fop with
his twaddle about sweethearts, the lawbreaking gondolier who was
cheated of his pay, still left the traveller uneasy. Without really
providing any resistance to the mind, without offering any solid


THOMAS MANN
233
stuff to think over, they were nevertheless profoundly strange, as
it seemed to him, and disturbing precisely because of this contra-
diction. In the meanwhile, he greeted the sea with his eyes, and
felt pleasure at the knowledge that Venice was so conveniently
near. Finally he turned away, bathed his face, left orders to the
chambermaid for a few things he still needed done to make his
comfort complete, and let himself be taken to the ground floor by
the green-uniformed Swiss who operated the lift.
He took his tea on the terrace facing the ocean, then descended
and followed the boardwalk for quite a way in the direction of the
Hotel Excelsior. When he returned it seemed time to dress for
dinner. He did this with his usual care and slowness, since he was
accustomed to working over his toilette. And yet he came down a
little early to the lobby where he found a great many of the hotel
guests assembled, mixing distantly and with a show of mutual
indifference to one another, but all waiting for meal time. He took
a paper from the table, dropped into a leather chair, and observed
the company; they differed agreeably from the guests where he had
first stopped.
A wide and tolerantly inclusive horizon was spread out before
him. Sounds of all the principal languages formed a subdued
murmur. The accepted evening dress, a uniform of good manners,
brought all human varieties into a fitting unity. There were
Americans with their long wry features, large Russian families,
English ladies, German children with French nurses. The Slavic
element seemed to predominate. Polish was being spoken nearby.
It was a group of children gathered around a little wicker table,
under the protection of a teacher or governess: three young girls,
apparently fifteen to seventeen, and a long-haired boy about four-
teen years old. With astonishment Aschenbach r.oted that the boy
was absolutely beautiful. His face, pale and reserved, framed with
honey-coloured hair, the straight sloping nose, the lovely mouth,
the expression of sweet and god-like seriousness, recalled Greek
sculpture of the noblest period; and the complete purity of the
forms was accompanied by such a rare personal charm that, as he
watched, he felt that he had never met with anything equally
felicitous in nature or the plastic arts. He was further struck by
the obviously intentional contrast with the principles of upbringing
which showed in the sisters' attire and bearing. The three girls,
the eldest of whom could be considered grown up, were dressed


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DEATH IN VENICE
with a chasteness and severity bordering on disfigurement. Uni-
formly cloister-like costumes, of medium length, slate-coloured,
sober, and deliberately unbecoming in cut, with white turned-down
collars as the only relief, suppressed every possible appeal of
shapeliness. Their hair, brushed down flat and tight against the
head, gave their faces a nun-like emptiness and lack of character.
Surely this was a mother's influence, and it had not even occurred
to her to apply the pedagogical strictness to the boy which she
seemed to find necessary for her girls. It was clear that in his
existence the first factors were gentleness and tenderness. The
shears had been resolutely kept from his beautiful hair; like a
Prince Charming's, it fell in curls over his forehead, his ears, and
still deeper, across his neck. The English sailor suit, with its
braids, stitchings, and embroideries, its puffy sleeves narrowing at
the ends and fitting snugly about the fine wrists of his still childish
but slender hands, gave the delicate figure something rich and
luxurious. He was sitting, half profile to the observer, one foot in
its black patent-leather shoe placed before the other, an elbow
resting on the arm of his wicker chair, a cheek pressed against his
fist, in a position of negligent good manners, entirely free of the
almost subservient stiffness to which his sisters seemed accustomed.
Did he have some illness? For his skin stood out as white as ivory
against the golden darkness of the surrounding curls. Or was he
simply a pampered favourite child, made this way by a doting
and moody love? Aschenbach inclined to believe the latter. Almost
every artist is born with a rich and treacherous tendency to recog-
nize injustices which have created beauty, and to meet aristocratic
distinction with sympathy and reverence.
A waiter passed through and announced in English that the
meal was ready. Gradually the guests disappeared through the
glass door into the dining hall. Stragglers crossed, coming from
the entrance, or the lifts. Inside, they had already begun serving,
but the young Poles were still waiting around the little wicker
table; and Aschenbach, comfortably propped in his deep chair,
and with this beauty before his eyes, stayed with them.
The governess, a small corpulent middle-class woman with a
red face, finally gave the sign to rise. With lifted brows, she
pushed back her chair and bowed, as a large woman dressed in
grey and richly jewelled with pearls entered the lobby. This
woman was advancing with coolness and precision; her lightly


THOMAS MANN
235
powdered hair and the lines of her dress were arranged with the
simplicity which always signifies taste in those quarters where
devoutness is taken as one element of dignity. She might have
been the wife of some high German official. Except that her
jewellery added something fantastically lavish to her appearance;
indeed, it was almost priceless, and consisted of ear pendants
and a very long triple chain of softly glowing pearls, as large as
cherries.
The children had risen promptly. They bent over to kiss the
hand of their mother who, with a distant smile on her well
pre-
served though somewhat tired and peaked features, looked over
their heads and directed a few words to the governess in French.
Then she walked to the glass door. The children followed her:
the girls in the order of their age, after them the governess, the
boy last. For some reason or other he turned around before cross-
ing the sill, and since no one else was in the lobby his strange dusky
eyes met those of Aschenbach who, his newspaper on his knees, lost
in thought, was gazing after the group.
What he saw had not been unusual in the slightest detail. They
had not preceded the mother to the table; they had waited, greeted
her with respect, and observed the customary forms on entering the
room. But it had taken place so pointedly, with such an accent of
training, duty, and self-respect, that Aschenbach felt peculiarly
touched by it all. He delayed for a few moments, then he too
crossed into the dining-room, and was assigned to his table, which,
as he noted with a brief touch of regret, was very far removed from
that of the Polish family.
Weary, and yet intellectually active, he entertained himself dur-
ing the lengthy meal with abstract, or even transcendental things;
he thought over the secret union which the lawful must enter upon
with the individual for human beauty to result, from this he passed
into general problems of form and art, and at the end he found
that his thoughts and discoveries were like the seemingly felicitous
promptings of a dream which, when the mind is sobered, are seen
to be completely empty and unfit. After the meal, smoking, sitting,
taking an occasional turn in the park with its smell of nightfall,
he went to bed early and spent the night in a sleep deep and un-
broken, but often enlivened with the apparitions of dreams.
To be continued


PSYCHOLOGY AND COMMON SENSE
BY THOMAS CRAVEN
THE mild, academic carping of Mr Laurence Buermeyer is not
the first
cry
of distress provoked by my writings. Whenever a
new philosophy of expression is published, a definite, practicable
system based upon the fundamental factors of creative activity and
a true intimacy with the media of art, the laboratory specialists
"accustomed to giving Binet-Simon tests to young children,” and
the amateur aesthetes of French cafés come forward with grumbling
complaints against exclusive standards. It is not without sig.
nificance that the "popular fallacies” trumped up by the professor
should so closely resemble the objections levelled at me last sum-
mer by a Polish critic residing in Paris—special pleading is the
same the world over; and recent converts to the modernist cause,
appalled at the asperity of my methods, have attacked my philos-
ophy on the ground of its incompleteness. If I have wounded the
sensibilities of young enthusiasts, it is because I cannot, in the name
of common sense, accept every eccentricity parading under the
banners of the new movement, and because I have stood consistently
for dignity and decency in art as opposed to shallowness, ancient or
contemporary, sincere or malevolent.
Mr Buermeyer's attitude typifies the confusion of the man who
takes his modernism without reserve. He is an excellent general
psychologist, but in matters pertaining to art deficient in expe-
rience. I should deal gently with him but for the indirect manner
of his assault. His elaborate parallel between myself and Mr
Roger Fry is nonsense, pure and simple; and his attempt to discredit
my aesthetics by attributing it originally to Mr Fry, and then
verbosely arraigning the Englishman is a piece of Chinese injustice
that I cannot lightly pass over. It was I, and not Mr Buermeyer,
who first discovered the weaknesses of Mr Fry's theories. More
than two years ago in the pages of The Dial I pierced the vulner-
able passages of Vision and Design, and voiced my own opinions on
the indivisibility of form and content, the true teleology of art, the
absurdity of non-representative form, and the uselessness of "pure


THOMAS CRAVEN
237
plasticity.” And now comes the professor lamely reiterating my
own arguments! He bewails my failure to "acknowledge obliga-
tion to Mr Fry.” Of course not! I might with equal impertinence
ask Mr Fry to express his indebtedness to me. "The most sig.
nificant point of resemblance between them" (myself and the British
critic) writes Mr Buermeyer, is “their common insistence on con-
structiveness, i.e., avoidance of close reproduction from nature.”
The idea that art is not imitation is as old as the hills; it is one of
the cardinal tenets in every valid aesthetic; it is the common prop-
erty of all intelligent men; and it has appeared in one form or
another in the history of the beautiful from the scattered notes of
Leonardo da Vinci to the logical expositions of Croce.
Now to business. I shall leave Mr Fry to his own defence, and
reply only to those points relating to my thesis. According to Mr
Buermeyer, my explanation of form is seriously inexact; it seems
that I have arbitrarily construed the term to serve my own ends,
and that my conception is limited and exclusive. A safe criticism,
certainly, and one that might be urged against every pragmatic
rationale. I cheerfully admit that form, universally considered,
is the result of any process which unifies and orders the idle and
gross materials of life. For a general aesthetic, non-historical and
non-practical, such a definition is adequate; but for a precise inquiry
into the constructive aspects of art it is too vague and hypothetical
to carry any meaning; it arises from an abstract world totally dis-
sociated from the tangible problems involved in creative forces;
it lifts irrelevant and insignificant actions into the sphere of the
beautiful, and fails even to touch the inwardness of creative labour.
Like most psychological and philosophical theories, in attempting
to embrace everything it grasps nothing. For practical purposes
the word form must be treated in much the same fashion as the
word value—it is not only a desiderate, but a term with a technical
connotation. In order to differentiate, let us say, between a Sisley
and a Cézanne, I have designated form as a sculptural conception.
I gave to a baffling and cryptic expression the concrete meaning of
the studio, and showed its function in the development of realism.
I was thus able to separate the sculptural elements of painting from
other constituents such as pattern and line, colour and tone.
My two articles were carefully entitled The Progress of Painting;
and I made it perfectly clear that my purpose was to analyse the


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PSYCHOLOGY AND COMMON SENSE
nature and evolution of the predominant tendencies of art. Mr
Buermeyer is right in declaring that injustice was done to many
painters; but he must not forget that in compressing the history of
so vast a subject into a few pages I was forced to sacrifice dis-
tinguished individual talent. Renoir is a case in point. No one
doubts Renoir's importance as an artist; but as a force operating
on other creative minds he has not been so influential as Cézanne,
or, for that matter, as Matisse, Picasso, and a number of lesser
figures. Considered as an object, a painting by Renoir is a thing
of superlative beauty; but as a constructive tendency his work has
not opened new vistas. In fact, Renoir's effect on his followers has
invariably been disastrous, mainly because, like Mr Buermeyer him-
self, they have mistaken his surfaces for his compositional affilia-
tions. Contrasted with Cézanne, Renoir owes little to the Italian
Renaissance-save in the modelling of his surfaces, which are sculp-
tural to the extent of the bas-relief, his major interests were in
colour and tone, and a decorative line. His pictures are patterns
similar in composition to the canvases of Watteau; the lines have
their origin in masses of juxtaposed tone, exquisite in colour, but
wanting in structural depth.
In connecting Cézanne with the Renaissance I was at pains to
emphasize the spiritual identity of the old and the new art; it is
fortunate, however, that Mr Buermeyer has dwelt on the technics
of the issue it gives me an opportunity to expose his meagre knowl-
edge of processes. The Italian masters, instigated by Giotto, con-
ceived their paintings as sculptural extensions; and Cézanne, am-
bitious to achieve equivalent results with an Impressionistic palette,
studied their methods profoundly. He proved conclusively that a
sculptural form may be realized by organized planes as well as by
continuous modelling; and this truth has stimulated a host of diver-
sified modern temperaments into new fields of endeavour. Renoir
stands between Cézanne on the one hand, and Gauguin, Van Gogh,
and Matisse on the other. I submit this as a general statement-
there are a few deep Renoirs and some relatively flat Cézannes. To
Gauguin, Van Gogh, and Matisse, painting was an elaboration of
pattern; to Cézanne it was an extension of planes derived from his
efforts to increase the palpability and depth of the Renaissance
masterpieces.
The difference between these two points of view must be taken


THOMAS CRAVEN
239
into account before we can arrive at the significant facts of painting
as a progressive activity. For this reason I discarded the abstract
definition of form, and gave the word an objective and practical
meaning. Whereupon Mr Buermeyer argues that I have confused
form with solidity and organization in three dimensions. The
"confusion” was intentional-it enabled me to give my thesis pre-
cision, and to discriminate accurately between the various types of
construction. The duality involved in my interpretation can be
escaped by substituting pattern for two-dimensional form, and order
for all unifying activity.
Composing in two dimensions, the artist employs either lines or
areas of tone and colour. Having established his boundaries or his
tonal spaces, he proceeds, as in the case of Renoir, to build up
his
masses by sculptural modelling. The analogue is the bas-relief.
Most painting is of this character—the imposition of solidity upon
a flat pattern. In a true tri-dimensional structure the process from
the beginning must be of a more tactual character, and the design
must be the result of volumes (as distinguished from masses) placed
in harmonious recession. How an order of this kind enhances the
emotional appeal of pictures I have already explained. The ability
to conceive such an order is exceedingly rare: Cézanne, of all the
modernists, approximated it; and his achievements in this direction,
together with the imaginative content of his art, affiliate him
definitively with the Renaissance. Renoir, for the most part, con-
structed his pictures on a pattern basis, a basis of highly saturated
tones and naturalistic values; but to counteract literalism and to
relieve his objects, he manipulated his lights to his own ends, plac-
ing them where they were needed to accentuate mass, and not where
they naturally fell. The consequent rotundity of his nudes has
led superficial critics to couple him, rather than Cézanne, with the
Renaissance. If the observer will take the trouble to compare these
two painters in canvases revealing a complexity of figures and ob-
jects, he can readily see that compositionally, and therefore funda-
mentally, it was Cézanne who carried on the classical tradition
and restored its prestige.
Mr Buermeyer has missed altogether my construction of the
term line, or contour. I used the word as currently defined by
painters. Line specifies the general movement of mass or volume,
or a series of such—an arm, torso, a number of figures, objects, or


240
PSYCHOLOGY AND COMMON SENSE
planes functioning in a design. It is an indication of direction;
and my phrase "the clean line or contour,” does not refer to the
single stroke of the draughtsman, but to any unbroken form or
sequence of forms. Hence it follows that the expression is appli-
cable to Renoir and not to the Cubists.
As concerns my “formula,” let me say to Mr Buermeyer that it is
most elastic. In any case it springs from direct recognition of the
facts of painting, and not from the exigencies of an all-enveloping
verbal aesthetic. Art is not only an expression of experience and
desire, but as I have said time and again, a problem of relationships.
It may be offensive to the theorist to speak of the puzzling trials
attending the consolidation of imaginative material as problems,
most frequently the solutions are discovered by flashes of insight-
but problems they are nevertheless, demanding reason and reflec-
tion. A motif, whether experienced or imagined, is never exter-
nalized artistically in the full character of its primary conception.
Once design enters, every form or shape realized on the canvas alters
the nature and character of the original stimulus. It is undeniable
that lines, masses, and forms have a life of their own which is
nearly always at variance with natural appearances. Art embodies
then, not only a reflection of psycho-physical experiences as sum-
marized in the first section of my articles, but a highly complex
constructiveness with unique characteristics. From these character-
istics many combinations have been gleaned, and codified in terms
of formulae; the procedure is similar to the laws of colour mixtures
wherein, for instance, certain proportions of two colours are known
to produce a third. In composition and arrangement such laws are
indispensable—they are part and parcel of the painter's equipment;
for example, diverging lines must be supported by opposites to
insure balance. The artist applies these equilibrating devices almost
unconsciously, at least after his initial experiences, but all the same
the formulae are constructive realities, and occupy a most important
position in the growth of a picture from the experienced raw ma-
terial to the completed aesthetic fact-perhaps the most important,
after the first emotional step has been taken.
Painting unfailingly runs to formula in more than one sense.
The strawberry reds shading into blue-greens and deep earth-
colours of Renoir's later pieces supply us with an excellent mani-
festation of colour-formulae; and his practice of focusing his lights


.
241
THOMAS CRAVEN
on the "bumps” of his forms represents his use of a sculptural
formula, an expedient to gain relief. Here the synthetic processes
are the outcome of compositional experience and are perfectly
legitimate. That correct geometrical perspective is destructive to
rhythm is a commonplace, but as a standard of judgement it has
become a formula, a rule of thumb which, like many others, is kept
in mind by all modern painters. A tri-dimensional conception in-
cludes the whole technique of a pattern with the added virtue of
voluminous space. In plain language it opens the fat doors of
decoration and plunges us into the profound and moving realism
of immense depths. It is for this reason that I have stressed the
constructive superiority of recessive painting—it offers a greater
field for the artist. To declare it the only valid form of artistic
expression is frankly absurd—I made that'clear enough—but it re-
mains the most comprehensive. Since writing my survey in The
DIAL I have seen a set of Chinese paintings which have confirmed
my belief that it was not only in the Occident that the masters of
art recognized and strove for the third dimension.
With due respect to Sisley and Pissarro, I stand unequivocally
against Impressionism. The school brought forth inimitable dainti-
ness of surface, but its contributions to design are negligible. Where
indeed are the Impressionists of yesteryear, and what have they
bequeathed the world? The innumerable apostles of spectrum
scales have already passed into oblivion; and their glamorous
formula, sunlight and stupidity, is too transparent to capture the
youngest students of to-day. The effect of the movement on subse-
quent painters has been confined exclusively to colour; but the high-
keyed palette is obsolescent, and painters throughout the world,
having renewed their interest in design and having realized the
need for deep blacks and sombre earth-colours as a foil to the
brilliant tints, have swept aside Monet's iridescent halos.
Another item: Mr Buermeyer's ideas of naturalism are beside the
issue. Naturalism may hold ascendancy in the philosophic world,
but it is of small importance in the life of the constructive mod-
ernist. The term, as pertinent to painting, disagrees with philo-
sophic usage. The fact that a painter like Utrillo or Marin selects
a homely subject, a “natural” subject, by no means implies that he
presents his material by naturalistic devices. This method reduces
the painter to a slavish duplication of appearances, binds him to
1


242
PSYCHOLOGY AND COMMON SENSE
literal values, and allows for little freedom in design. Naturalism
reached its artistic height in the works of Memling, Hals, and
Velasquez; it survives to-day among the fashionable portraitists,
and the more academic landscape painters; and the sum total of its
expressive means is a nice transcript of flesh-tones, faithful render-
ing of values, and the sheen of textures.
To wind up this long reply I must remind Mr Buermeyer that
he approaches art in the conventional attitude of the dealer and
the curator; to him the whole significance of painting is restricted
to the precious object. He worships the picture, the glorious pos-
session; he would have art a finished and indefectible treasure, a
perfect chrysolite. To those who have adopted this attitude any
thesis damaging in the slightest degree to the worth of canvases,
either owned or coveted, is anathema. Personally I am in sympathy
with the artists; they at least esteem the object as valuable only
when it serves as a stimulus to further creative effort. When a
painter has exhausted a picture; that is to say, when it no longer
affords him constructive assistance, he is ready to hang the work in
a museum, or if sufficiently indifferent to its appeal to other artists,
to push his foot through it. I have considered art as an unending
activity revealing itself in a progressive interplay of tendencies, an
attitude decidedly hostile to the best academic theory of aesthetics.
The academic advocate in the last analysis seems to be only the
guardian of special interests; I have viewed painting as a living
issue, and have discarded that part of the past which has nothing to
offer present needs. The connoisseur and the creator have always
been at odds.
In emphasizing the Renaissance I have been guilty of nothing
more than plain justice; the old Italian art has always afforded the
widest suggestive field, and it still endures as the soundest founda-
tion for aesthetic preparation both technical and spiritual. In no
instance have I judged painting by Renaissance standards—I have
simply aligned structural tendencies with their actual origins.


Permission of Alfred Stieglitz
BY JOHN MARIN
BEFORE THE WIND: MAINE.
1






Permission of Alfred Stieglitz
BY JOHN MARIN
TREES, ROCKS, SEA : MAINE.






ORASION
카
​as
Permission of Alfred Stieglits
A TOWN ON THE MAINE COAST.
BY JOHN MARIN


4
1


A MOTLEY PANTHEON
BY BERTRAND RUSSELL
NORTY years ago,
years ago, there was a parlour game which the old weru
fond of inflicting on the young. It consisted of making a list
of the ten greatest men, or the six greatest soldiers, or something of
the kind. In Creative Spirits of the Nineteenth Century,' Brandes
gives us what one must suppose is his list of the twelve greatest men
of that century. No doubt my readers know all about Paul Heyse,
Esaias Tegnér, and Frederick Paludan-Müller, who are three of his
"creative spirits.” I must confess that I did not, and was surprised
to find them in the catalogue, though I have no reason to suppose
that they do not deserve their place. There are others in the list,
however, against whom I feel more positive—for instance, Gari-
baldi. No doubt Italian unity was important; without it, we should
not have had Fascismo and Mussolini, or d'Annunzio and Fiume,
or President Wilson's surrender about Shantung. But the “creative
spirit” of Italian unity was Mazzini, not Garibaldi; Garibaldi
merely translated Mazzini's thoughts into drama. John Stuart
Mill, another of the chosen Twelve, can hardly be called creative.
His ideas came from his father and Bentham. Bentham certainly
was one of the creative spirits of the Nineteenth Century; fifty years
of English politics consisted in carrying out his ideas. Even in the
purely literary field, where Brandes might be expected to have a
surer touch, he is surprising. Apart from Mill, the only Englishman
in his list is Swinburne, by whose death (he says):
"The English-speaking world, one of the largest groups on earth,
lost its greatest lyric poet; in fact, the greatest lyric poet that ever
wrote the English tongue, when skill and virtuosity are considered.”
1
It is proverbially difficult to judge of poetry in a foreign lan-
Creative Spirits of the Nineteenth Century. By Georg Brandes. Trans-
lated by Rasmus B. Anderson. 8vo. 478 pages. Thomas Y. Crowell
Company. $3.00.
On this subject, see Lansing.
2


244
A MOTLEY PANTHEON
guage, in which obvious rhythms are more easily appreciated than
subtler melodies; but even so, such a judgement shakes one's con-
fidence in a critic. “Sabrina fair,” for example, has “skill and
virtuosity” far beyond the compass of Swinburne-not to mention
thousands of other instances which swarm into one's mind. There
is, however, one interesting fact in the essay on Swinburne, namely
that, in the house of Karl Blind:
"Swinburne, soon after the publication of 'Poems and Ballads,'
met for the first time Giuseppe Mazzini, who exacted from him a
promise not to write any more erotic verse, but to dedicate his muse
to the cause of liberty.”
As long as he was allowed to drink to excess, he kept this promise ;
but when Watts-Dunton had made him sober, he took to praising
British imperialism and attacking the Boers. Moralists have much
to answer for.
The first essay in the volume was written in 1869, the last in
1915. This period is so long that little unity can be expected.
The last essay is on Napoleon, and is written under the influence of
the war. There is nothing in it that throws any new light on the
subject, and one cannot help wondering why it was written. There
are interesting facts about Napoleon: that Josephine's poodle bit
him in the calf on their wedding-night as he was getting into bed;
that he lost Genoa because the funds for its relief had been diverted
by the War Minister to the payment of Josephine's milliner; that
after the divorce he wrote to Josephine demanding that she should
sympathize with his loneliness—and so on and so on. But the full-
dress historical facts have lost their power to interest us, through
familiarity; moreover the trail of rhetoric is over them all, in spite
of the accident that they really happened. Psychologically, Na-
poleon is worthy of study because of the contrast between his amaz-
ing intelligence and his commonplace and vulgar temperament.
Alexander and Caesar could say things worthy of great conquerors;
Napoleon could never rise above bombast. But Brandes, for some
reason, admires him, and attempts to defend him against the usual
charges.
The most interesting essay in the book is the one on Ibsen. We
are given to understand that from the Reformation till 1870 Scan-


BERTRAND RUSSELL
245
dinavia slumbered—so much so that when Björnsen wrote an early
play about Mary Stuart he was obliged, in deference to Protestant
orthodoxy, to give John Knox the most honourable rôle. Ibsen dis-
liked the society of a small Norwegian town, wrote satires on it, and
so was accused of immorality. Consequently he fled to the South,
and in the Neapolitan sun found strength to write about northern
gloom. Brandes makes much of his misanthropy, and suggests
that he took up the cause of Woman partly from hatred of Man.
"He did not originally possess a large amount of sympathy for
woman. There are authors who have a peculiar affinity for women,
who have, indeed, a decided feminine element in their own natures.
Ibsen does not belong to this class. I am quite confident he takes
far more pleasure in conversation with men than with women, and
he has certainly passed much less time in the society of women than
is the wont of poets.”
A cynic might suggest that this accounts for his being still able,
in middle age, to idealize Woman; but far be it from us to subscribe
to such a notion. Much of his work-notably The Master Builder
—was still unwritten at the time of Brandes' essay (1883); prob-
ably a good deal would have had to be modified if the
essay
had
been brought up to date.
I have said nothing of the essays on Renan and Flaubert. They
say the usual things pleasantly, but add little to our understanding
of their subjects. It is a mark of the one-sideness of what passes
as "culture" that such a book can be written without the inclusion
of a single man of science. When one views the Nineteenth Cen-
tury in perspective, it is clear that science is its only claim to dis-
tinction. Its literary men were mostly second-rate, its philosophers
sentimental, its artists inferior to those of earlier times. Science
ruthlessly forced novelties upon it, while men of “culture” tried
to preserve the old picturesque follies by wrapping them in a mist
of muddled romanticism. Until "culture” has made its peace with
science, it will remain outside the main current of events, feeble and
querulous, sighing for the past. The world that science has been
making may be disgusting, but it is the world in which we have to
live; and it condemns to futility all who are too fastidious to
notice it.


JOHN OF BELGRADE
BY LEONARD DOUGHTY
Out of the rout of the gay bon-ton
With my taste macaber I choose John. .
John of Belgrade died last night,
They found him dead by candle light.
It was little John got of this world's good;
Squalid lodging and bitter food:
All men's scorn, and women's hate,
And jeering of children that passed his gate.
He crept to his kennel last night to die,
And lit the candle they found him by.
Limp in his rags with the death-froth smeared
Over the yellow mat of his beard.
The rigour had not yet struck him stark
When they huddled him into the shallow dark
Of a little grave digged into the bones
Of an elder generation of Johns.
They shut the hut on his loathèd name,
And went their ways, and all was the same.
Only I know they found a book
Hid in a little vermined nook
Dug in the foul hut's crazy blocks;
'Twas the Hürnen Seyfried of old Hans Sachs.


LEONARD DOUGHTY
247
Spotted and sprouted with fungi-tints,
And the print was bleared with his finger-prints,
And other blotches, dabbled and dim,
That were not fungi, but tears of him.
And I halfway heard or seemed to hear
A laughter that chuckled between each tear.
That night at the palace the Emperor's rout
Was gay as day, till the stars went out.
And then it was day and John was dead,
And the Emperor alive with his crown on his head.
Much had died at the rout that night,
As far as such things die outright.
A woman died that I know was there,
Though she walked next day with a rose in her hair.
And the king's best friend who was next to the throne,
Died the very same hour as John.
(Though it was not known till the war came on!)
What died that night ’mid the palace-host
Were the things that John had never lost.
And what lived on, John never found,
Unless he got them underground.
So on his brow in lieu of this
I lean and lay a poet-kiss.
('Tis my love of John and my hate of the labour,
And not the theme makes my verse macaber.)


248
JOHN OF BELGRADE
I think there are many shall love me yet
In the years when I too shall forget.-
As these forget! 'tis a bitter bond
That binds me still to the demi-monde.
But though love's a mood that's off and on,
Be at rest: I shall always love
you,
John.


CHARLES SPENCER CHAPLIN. BY E. E. CUMMINGS





IN A DANCE
BY JESSICA NELSON NORTH
That
you
have come to see
Under all things the flesh-
What does it prove?
Fabric and shining knee
Still intermesh,
And no less slenderly fresh
The dancers move.
This much at least is true
In a world of spurious wonder,
Flesh lying under
Texture and form and hue,
Wallows—and sings—and dies—
And after all beautiful things
Disconsolately cries.
Wrapped in the web of the loom
For a while it shines and rejoices,
But at length inclines to the voices
Of the inner room.
Things we see in a dance
Seem momentous and sweet-
Shoulders gleam, and feet
Rhythmic retreat and advance.


THE SORROWS OF AVICENNA
A Dialogue in Limbo
BY G. SANTAYANA
THE SPIRIT OF AVICENNA: Great is Allah: even I, alas, could
Th.
not deceive him. By every promise of faith and Canon of the
law, I should now find myself in The Paradise of the Prophet, re-
clining on silken cushions and sipping delicious sherbets; the fresh
sweet sound of bubbling fountains should comfort me; I should be
soothed by the scent of great sleeping flowers, their petals like
amethysts and rubies and sapphires and liquid opals. I should
be charmed by the sight of peacocks spreading their fans; and the
nightingales in the thicket of ilex should sing to me like my own
heart. Some tender young maid, wide-eyed and nimble as a gazelle,
should be not far from me; her hair should be lightly touching my
cheek; my hand should be wandering over her bosom. From the
impregnable safety of my happiness I should be looking abroad
through all the heavens and surveying the earth; the maxims of the
wise should be on my lips and in my soul the joy of understanding.
Walking upon the bastions of Paradise, my arm linked in that of
a friend, of him that my soul trusts utterly, I should be repeating
the words of the poets, and he in answer, without haste or error,
should be composing for me tenderer and more beautiful verses of
his own; and we should be marvelling and sighing together at the
ineffable greatness of God and the teeming splendour of the earth.
Yes, legally, I should have been saved. Was I not exactitude itself
in every religious duty ? Did I ever allow myself the least licence,
on the ground that I was a philosopher, unless I had a text to justify
me? Did I blasphemously lay my assurance of salvation in my
own merits or in the letter of the law, rather than in the com-
placency of the Compassionate and the Merciful One, who having
made us can forgive and understand? Ah, if ever Allah could be
deceived, certainly I should have deceived him. But the Omniscient
looked into my secret heart, and perceived that I was no believer,
and that whilst my lips invoked his name and that of the Prophet,


G. SANTAYANA
251
my trust was all in Aristotle and in myself. Sharpening therefore
in silence the sword of his wrath, he overruled my legal rights by a
higher exercise of equity and reduced me, as you see, to the miserable
condition of a pure spirit. Here among heathen ghosts I pine and
loiter eternally, a shadow reflecting life and no longer living, vainly
revolving my thoughts, because in my thoughts I trusted, and miss-
ing all the warm and solid pleasures of Paradise, because I had
hoped to win them without blinding my intellect, or suffering old
fables to delude me.
THE SPIRIT OF A STRANGER STILL LIVING ON EARTH: Is it not
some consolation to consider that if you were not able to deceive
Allah, Allah was not able to deceive you?
AVICENNA: Small consolation. Pride of intellect is the sour
refuge of those who have nothing else to be proud of. Strong as my
soul was in other virtues, and generous my blood, intellect prevailed
too much in me, dashed my respect for my vital powers, and killed
the confidence they should have bred; it overcame the illusions
necessary to a creature, and caused me to see all things too much as
God sees them.
THE STRANGER: A rare fault in a philosopher.
AvicennA: May Allah impute it to me for humility and not for
blasphemy, but I never wished to resemble him. Yes, I know what
you are about to say. The divine part in us, though small, is the
most precious, and we should live as far as we may in the eternal.
Far be it from me to deny that, or any other maxim of Aristotle;
especially now, when that exiguous element in myself is all that is
left of me. But, frankly, I pine for the rest. Are not even the souls
of
your friends the Christians, wretchedly as they are accustomed
to live, waiting now in their forlorn heaven for the last day, when
they shall return to their bodies, and feel again that they are men
and not angels? Intellect, being divine, comes into our tents
through the door; it is a guest and a stranger to our blood. Its
language is foreign to us, and painfully as we may try to learn it,
we always speak it ill. How often have I laughed at Arabs plum-
ing themselves in Persian, and at Persians blasphemously cor-
rupting the syllables of the Koran which they thought to recite;
for few, like me, are perfect masters of both tongues. And do you
suppose Allah does not smile at our rustic accent when we venture
to think? But there are other tricks of ours which he does not


252
THE SORROWS OF AVICENNA
laugh at, because he cannot imitate them. May we not pride our-
selves a little on our illusions, on our sports, on our surprises, and
on our childish laughter, so much fresher and sweeter than his
solemnity? Rather than be eternal, who would not choose to be
young? Do not the Pagans and Christians (who have never under-
stood the greatness of Allah) confess as much, when in their fables
they relate how the gods have become men for a season, shepherds,
lovers of women, wanderers, even wonder-workers and beggars;
or how they have prayed, fasted, wept, and died? Of course, such
tales are impious; Allah can never be deceived or diminished; and
to live in time, to dwell in a body, to thirst, to love, and to grieve
are forms of impotence and self-deception. If we knew all, we
could not live. But it is precisely this sweet cajolery, this vivid
and terrible blindness of life, which Allah cannot share, in which
his creatures shine. In order to know the truth, Allah alone suf-
ficed; he did not create us to supplement his intelligence. He
created us rather that by our incorrigible ignorance we might diver-
sify existence and surround his godhead with beings able to die and
to kill, able to dream, able to look for the truth and to tell them-
selves lies, able above all to love, to feel the life quickened sud-
denly within them at the sight of some other lovely and winsome
creature, until they could contain it no longer, and too great, too
mad, too sweet to be endured it should leap from them into that
other being, there to create a third. If this madness was not
worth having, as well as intellect, why did Allah create the world?
Ah, he was solitary, he was cold, he shone like the stars in the wilder-
ness on a frosty night; and when he bethought himself of his
coldness and shuddered at his solitude, that pang of itself begat
the companion with which his Oneness was pregnant, the Soul of the
World; in order that the Intellect itself might grow warm in the
eyes
of the Soul that loved it, and be the star of her dark voyage,
and that his solitude might turn to glory, because of the Life that
flowed from him into the bosom of that loneliness and quickened
it to all forms of love. Now this divine Soul of the World had in
turn flowed into my soul more copiously than into that of other
mortals. I had health, riches, arts, rare adventures, fame, and the
choicest pleasures of both body and mind; but happiness I never
had. So long as I still lived, sailing before the wind of my pros-
perity, I hardly perceived the division and misery of my being, or


G. SANTAYANA
253
fancied that with my next triumph they would cease; but now I
perceive them. I might have been happy, if I had not been a
philosopher, or if I had been nothing else. As it was, too much
intellect made brackish the sweet and impetuous current of my days.
Philosophy in me was not a harmony of my whole nature, but one
of its passions, and the most inordinate, because I craved and strug-
gled to know everything; and this passion in me availed only to
mock and embitter the others, without subduing them. I renounced
nothing, I rejected nothing; being but a man, I lived like a god,
and my pride blasted my human nature. All actions worked them-
selves out in me without illusion, in the ghastly light of truth and
of foreknowledge. Horror was never far from my pleasures. The
fever of my ambitions must needs be perpetually accelerated, lest
the too clear intellect in me should look upon them and they should
die. I scorned the modesty of the sages who made of intelligence
a second and a sundered life; and as for lack of faith I missed the
Paradise of the Prophet, even so, for lack of measure and renun-
ciation, I missed the peace of the philosopher. I was wedded to
existence as to a favourite wife, whom I knew to be faithless, but
could not cease to love. Before the flight of time, before death,
before Allah, I clasped my hands and wept and prayed, like a
woman before her dying child or her estranged lover. Master in
every cunning art, I was the slave of fate and of nature; all I
enjoyed I did not enjoy, because I craved to enjoy it for ever. I
sighed for constancy in mortal things, in which constancy is not.
I strove to command fortune and futurity, which will not be com-
manded. I married a wife, and then another, and each was a
burden more weary than the last. I became the father of children,
and they died, or turned against me in their hearts. I made myself
lord over science and over great estates, and I found myself the
slave and steward of my possessions, and a vain babbler before
the vulgar whom I knew I deceived. And yet, so long as the soul
of nature fed the fountain of my being, it could not give over
gushing and spreading and filling every cleft and hollow of oppor-
tunity. Even now, when the fountain is cut off, I yearn for that
existence which was my torment; and my unhappiness has outlived
its cause, and become eternal.
THE STRANGER: Since Spirit is not attached to one form of life
rather than to another, may it not consent to dismiss each in turn?


254
THE SORROWS OF AVICENNA
If we do not renounce the world, we must expect the world to for-
sake us. The union of spirit with nature is like the sporting friend-
ships of youth which time dissolves naturally, without any quarrel.
It was a happy union, and in a life like yours, full of great feats,
there is more satisfaction in having lived than regret that life is
over. But you know all this better than I; and if you choose play-
fully to lament your eclipse on earth (while you shine immortally
here) I suspect you do so merely to rebuke me gently for playing
the truant while I am still at school, and troubling you here pre-
maturely by my illicit presence, when I ought to be living lustily,
as you did, while yet I may.
AVICENNA: You? If I had been condemned to live in your skin,
and in the world, as it appears to be now, when there is nothing but
meanness in it, I should not lament my present condition, because
sad as it is, at least it is not ignoble. The only good thing remaining
in your world is the memory of what it was in my day, and before:
so that I am far from chiding you for spending your life, as far as
possible, in our society, by rehearsing the memorials which remain
of us, and which enable you, even in your day, to employ your time
humanly, in the study of wisdom. I did that, too, with intense
zeal; but the earth was then propitious, and my soul was mighty,
and every other art and virtue was open to me, as well as the wisdom
of the ancients. You do well to water your little flower-pot, as I
ranged over my wide preserves. Life is not a book to read twice:
and you cannot exchange the volume fortune puts in your hand for
another on a nobler subject or by a better poet. In reading it you
should not look ahead, or you will skip too much. It is not the
ending that matters. This story has no moral; it stops short. The
ending is not there, it is here; it is the truth of that life seen as a
whole. Brave men, like me, who skip nothing, are not disappointed;
at every turn they come upon something unforeseen, and do some-
thing bold. In the market of fortune I bought my apples without
weighing them. If one had a worm in it, I threw it away laughing,
my eye already on the next. Reason is like a dog that explores the
road and all the bye-ways when we walk abroad; but he cannot
choose a direction or supply a motive for the journey, and we must
whistle to him when we take a new turn.
THE STRANGER: Ah, you lived in an age of freedom. You were
not ashamed of human nature, and if life was full of dangers, you


G. SANTAYANA
255
were full of resource. Had we that strength, life would yield mat-
ter enough even in our day; but no wealth of instruments can
enrich a mind that has not elevation for commanding them. You
prize the world because you were its master. Had you ever been
the slave of business and love and opinion, as men are in my time,
you would not regret being rid of them. You praise them because
you made sport of them intellectually; and destiny has done no
injustice to your true nature in relegating you to this land of
unconquerable mind. Mind in you was always supreme. Fortune
and passion were merely the pawns in its game. That is why you
can now regret them. Mere life and mere love have no memory;
the present dazzles them with its immediate promise, which the
next moment denies or transforms. They roll on, and the flux of
nature sucks them up altogether. But when intellect, as in you,
comes to dominate life and love, these acquire a human splendour.
The stream becomes the picture of a stream, the passion an ideal.
As the privilege of matter is to beget life, so the joy of life is to
beget intellect; if it fails in that, it fails in being anything but a
vain torment.
AVICENNA: Certainly I was a man, and not a beast. I gloried in
my actions, because I understood and controlled them; they were
my retainers, standing with swords drawn before my gates, my
servants spreading the feast before me, my damsels singing and
dancing before my ravished eyes. Now, alas, I am a monarch with-
out subjects; reason in me has nothing to rule, and craft nothing to
play with. Dear warm plastic flesh of my body and marrow of
my bones, once so swiftly responsive to every heavenly ray, where
are you scattered now? To what cold thin dust are you turned?
What wind whirls you about in vain revolutions amid the sands
of the desert? Never, alas, never (since Allah denies you the hope
of resurrection) will you be gathered again into a mirror without a
flaw, into a jewel of a thousand rays, in order that the potency of
life, which never ceases to radiate from the Most High, might be
gathered and reflected in you, to your joy and to his glory. Barren
you shall ever be of intelligence; and barren my intelligence must
remain in me here, impotently pining for the flash in which it grew.
The STRANGER: Is not sterility in ultimate things a sign of
supremacy? We disciples of Aristotle know that there is something
ultimate and supreme in the flux of nature, even the concomitant


256
NOCTURNE
form or truth which it embodies, and the intellect which arrests
that form and that truth. This intellect ought to be sterile, because
it is an end and not a means. The lyre has performed its task when
it has given forth the harmony, and the harmony, being divine, has
no task to perform. In sounding and in floating into eternal silence,
it has lent life and beauty to its parent world. Therefore I account
you happy, renowned Avicenna, in spite of your humorous regrets;
for what survives of you here is the very happiness of your life,
realized in the intellect, as alone happiness can be realized; and if
this happiness is imperfect, that is not because it is past, but because
its elements were too impetuous to be reduced to harmony. This
imperfect happiness of yours is all the more intelligible and com-
forting to me on account of its discords unresolved; they bring you
nearer to my day and to its troubles. You have all we can hope
for; and your frank lamentations, proving as they do the splendour
of your existence, seem to me pure music in contrast to the optimism
I must daily listen to in a wretched world.
NOCTURNE
BY ROBERT HILLYER
If the deep wood is haunted, it is I
Who am the ghost; not the tall trees
Nor the white moonlight slanting down like rain
Filling the hollows with bright pools of silver.
A long train whistle serpentines around the hill
Now shrill, now far away.
Tell me, from what dark smoky terminal,
What train sets out for yesterday?
Or, since our spirits take off and resume
Their flesh as travellers their cloaks, O tell me where,
In what age and what country you will come
That I may meet you there.



Courtesy of the Daniel Gallery
BOY STEILING FORBIDDEN FRUIT.
BY YASIYO KUNIYOSHI





THE DEFINITION OF COMEDY
BY HERBERT READ
THE
HE appearance of this first complete edition of Congreve,'
edited with animation and masterly erudition by Mr Montague
Summers, is an event of some importance. Congreve has, if not a
message, at least an attitude of much significance for us, for reasons
not altogether unconnected with our present state of consciousness.
Once a name has become established in a literary tradition, as
Shakespeare's and Congreve's have in ours, they act as reflectors of
consciousness, and even become more interesting as such than in
themselves. We may say that this is a very reprehensible state of
affairs—that the critic should see all things sub specie aeternitatis
and so try to estimate even Shakespeare on grounds that will be
good for all time. It would be a very pretentious critic that at-
tempted the task, for no one can escape from all the influences of
his environment and set up for an absolute intelligence. Nor is it
really desirable that any one should: the modern consciousness
is the only thing that is real and therefore the only thing that mat-
ters, and to explain this consciousness either historically, by showing
its evolution from traditional forms, or prophetically, by showing
the implications of its trend, is the proper duty of the critic.
Rather more than a hundred years ago Hazlitt, in his Lectures
on the English Comic Writers, first used the word "artificial” in
speaking of Congreve. Charles Lamb immediately afterwards gave
the word, in the same connexion, a currency of charm and fashion.
From that day to this—the day of Mr Gosse and the reviewers
who slavishly follow where he misleads—the word "artificial” has
sufficed to explain Congreve and the school of comedy which he
brought to perfection. It should be noted straightaway that the
word is used in a commendatory or at least an apologetic sense.
Hazlitt thought the character of Millamant "better adapted for
the stage” (than that of Imogen or Rosalind) because “it is more
artificial, more theatrical, more meretricious.” Lamb, developing
· The Complete Works of William Congreve. 4 volumes. 4to. 987 pages.
The Nonesuch Press, London. 4 guincas.


258 THE DEFINITION OF COMEDY
this suggestion, excused what he really thought an indulgence "be-
yond the diocese of the strict conscience” by ascribing to the come-
dies of Wycherley and Congreve (in an essay by very name on the
Artificial Comedy) an imaginary “land of cuckoldry—the Utopia of
gallantry, where pleasure is duty, and the manners perfect freedom.”
Comedy thus became for him an inverse sort of idealism, in which
actions and sentiments had their being on a plane quite removed
from actuality, and therefore quite remote in influence.
Hazlitt and Lamb were in a real dilemma. They had boundless
admiration for the wit and artistry of these comedies, but they could
not reconcile them with the moral consciousness of their own age.
Or, if this seems to put too much stress on moral consciousness, very
much the same difficulty was involved by the romantic consciousness
then equally rife. The moral code would balk at the profligacy of
Wycherley's and Congreve's characters: the romantic code, in mute
conspiracy, would shy at the cynical realism with which these au-
thors treated the passion of love, or the feminine mind. Therefore
a process known to the psychologist as "rationalization” supervened
and the theory of artificial comedy was elaborated. It was a plausi-
ble idea and the dilemma was effectively shelved in the subcon-
scious mind.
By 1841 the moral consciousness had stiffened. The Victorian
age was in full vigour, and Macaulay, writing in that year, was
able to dismiss Lamb's theory of artificial comedy as "altogether
sophistical”-not because he thought such a theory derogatory to
the literary merits of the plays in question, but because he felt it to
be a lame defence of a literature inherently perverse and corrupted.
"In the name of art, as well as in the name of virtue, we protest
against the principle that the world of pure comedy is one into which
no moral enters. If comedy be an imitation, under whatever con-
ventions, of real life, how is it possible that it can have no reference
to the great rule which directs life, and to feelings which are called
forth by every incident of life? . . . But it is not the fact that
the world of these dramatists is a world into which no moral enters.
Morality constantly enters into that world, a sound morality, and
an unsound morality; the sound morality to be insulted, derided,
associated with everything mean and hateful; the unsound morality
to be set off to every advantage, and inculcated by all methods,
direct and indirect."


HERBERT READ
259
And so on. With Macaulay's main contention we agree. The
world of our comic dramatists is real, and is meant to be real.
Lamb's argument is altogether sophistical. But Macaulay's is some-
thing worse. It is heterodox criticism of the most subversive type.
It is the utter confusion of morality and art. “The question,” says
Macaulay, "is simply this, whether a man of genius who constantly
and systematically endeavours to make this sort of character at-
tractive, by uniting it with beauty, grace, dignity, spirit, a high social
position, popularity, literature, wit, taste, knowledge of the world,
brilliant success in every undertaking, does or does not make an ill
use of his powers. We own that we are unable to understand how
this question can be answered in any way but one.” But this, as
applied to Congreve, and even to Wycherley, is a misstatement of
the position and a misunderstanding of the men. But before we
can answer Macaulay's question, in a way he would be unable to
understand, we must be clear as to what we intend by the function
of comedy.
The distinction between wit and humour, which is the first essen-
tial of the matter, has often been attempted, but, except in a few
sharp phrases of Meredith's, with no very satisfactory results.
Hazlitt's antitheses are merely descriptive, and in the manner of
such criticism, end insignificantly.
“Humour is the describing the ludicrous as it is in itself; wit is
the exposing it, by comparing it or contrasting it with something
else. Humour is, as it were, the growth of nature and accident;
wit is the product of art and fancy. Humour, as it is shewn in
books, is an imitation of the natural or acquired absurdities of man-
kind, or of the ludicrous in accident, situation and character; wit
is the illustrating and heightening the sense of that absurdity by
some sudden and unexpected likeness or opposition of one thing to
another, which sets off the quality we laugh at or despise in a still
more contemptible or striking point of view. . Wit hovers
round the borders of the light and trifling, whether in matters of
pleasure or pain. . . . Wit is, in fact, the eloquence of indif-
ference.
Hazlitt also makes use of Congreve's own conception of humour
as “a singular and unavoidable manner of doing or saying anything,
Peculiar and Natural to one Man only; by which his Speech and


260
THE DEFINITION OF COMEDY
Actions are distinguished from those of other Men” (Letter to Mr
Dennis concerning Humour in Comedy). But this is using “hu-
mour" in the rather special sense given to it by Ben Jonson, and
does not really touch the distinction between humour and wit. Such
a "humour” is rather the object on which humour in the general
sense may be exercised. We must adopt some more precise
distinction.
I would suggest one that may be readily used: humour differs
from wit in the degree of action implied; or, to express the same
idea psychologically, in the degree of introversion or extroversion
expressed. The more the comic spirit resorts to activity or accident
to gain its point, the more it tends to humour; and, in the contrary
direction, the more the comic spirit seeks to achieve its effect in
abstract or intellectual play, the better it merits the term wit. This
distinction implies a no-man's-land where the categories overlap;
and as a matter of fact it is in such a no-man's-land that some of the
best English comedies, such as Wycherley's Country Wife, and
Plain Dealer, have their peculiar existence.
This pragmatical distinction conforms to the guiding idea of
Meredith's Essay on Comedy—the idea of comedy as the humour
of the mind.
“The comic poet is in the narrow field, or enclosed square of the
society he depicts; and he addresses the still narrower enclosure of
men's intellects, with reference to the operation of the social world
upon their characters. (And again :) The Comic, which is the
perceptive, is the governing spirit, awakening and giving aim to the
powers of laughter, but it is not to be confounded with them: it
enfolds a thinner form of them, differing from satire, in not sharply
driving into the quivering sensibilities, and from humour, in not
comforting them and tucking them up. ..
But it is time to return to Macaulay--and then to Congreve.
Macaulay's moral outburst will now be seen to involve a miscon-
ception of comedy and indeed of all art. It is also based on a mis-
statement of fact: The "morality" of Congreve's plays is far from
being that of "low town-rakes” and “dashing Cyprians.” One
could search in vain, even in the sort of literature approved by
Macaulay, for characters more agreeable than Valentine and


HERBERT READ
261
Angelica, or indeed, for a play more generally salutary in its theme
than Love for Love. In The Double Dealer the true lovers, Melle-
font and Cynthia, are perfect exemplars of virtue, vigorously con-
trasted against the villainy of Maskwell and Lady Touchwood.
The conventional propriety of the Mourning Bride has never been
questioned, except by Jeremy Collier, who descends to the lowest
level of his crassness in the attempt. Voltaire's astonishment at
the “cleanness” of Congreve is well known. But this kind of jus-
tification, though possible, is otiose. Art is a general activity, and
any limitations to its scope are meaningless and arbitrary. It
includes in its field of vision the immoral as well as the moral-
and all other qualities of the human mind. The question of values
is relative and only concerns the artist in a formative sense; and such
values are the general values of culture, among which the moral
values have no special precedence. They are part of that perceptive
sense which is the fund of character; and it is the quality of the
artist's mind, as Henry James said, that determines the deepest
quality of his art. But to require, in the manner of Macaulay, that
the artist's moral conscience should sit in judgement as his char-
acters take shape in his imagination, is a stupidity of the most ele-
mentary kind, showing a complete misunderstanding of the function
of art and of the psychology of the artist. It was the same stupidity
that caused Macaulay to heap ridiculous praise on Collier's Short
View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage.
'. .. whose hysterical screaming and scoldings,” writes Mr Sum-
mers in a characteristic passage, "were to some degree perpetuated
by being condensed in the vapid and lack-lustre philippics of one
who was both pedant and prig, Thomas Babington Macaulay.”
There is every evidence that Congreve was no mere genius of the
instinctive order, but a critical writer fully conscious of the nature
of his powers. I have already quoted from the Letter to Dennis;
there are more passages of the same nature to be culled. In his
reply to Collier's attack Congreve fell back on the Aristotelian
definition of comedy as "an Imitation of the worst sort of People
in respect to their Manners.” Again, in the Dedication of the
Double Dealer he had replied to the accusation that he represented
some Women as vicious and affected in these words:
"How can I help it? It is the business of a Comick poet to paint


262
THE DEFINITION OF COMEDY
the Vices and Follies of Humane kind; and there are but two sexes
that I know, viz. Men and Women, which have a Title to Hu-
manity: And if I leave one half of them out, the work will be
imperfect. I should be very glad of an opportunity to make my
Complement to those Ladies who are offended; but they can no
more expect it in a Comedy than to be Tickled by a Surgeon when
he's letting 'em blood. They who are Virtuous or Discreet should
not be offended, for such Characters as these distinguish them, and
make their Beauties more shining and observ’d: And they who are
of the other kind, may nevertheless pass for such, by seeming not
to be displeased or touched with the Satyr of this Comedy."
This is very like Meredith's spirit of Comedy. The weakness, if
weakness there is, lies in the word satire—not that it is used by
Congreve with any special deliberation. But it marks a certain
lack of perception, least noticeable in Congreve among all his con-
temporaries, but still present. “Our English school,” writes Mere-
dith, "has not clearly imagined society; and of the mind hovering
above congregated men and women, it has imagined nothing." Fur-
ther on in the same Essay, Meredith quotes Landor: “'Genuine
humour and true wit require a sound and capacious mind, which is
always a grave one,'” and he then remarks: “Congreve had a cer-
tain soundness of mind; of capacity, in the sense intended by
Landor, he had little.” This charge is well placed and skilfully
supported by chapter and verse; and must for the present be recorded
as the final word on Congreve. Of Congreve's character we derive
from his letters and from contemporary accounts a fairly real con-
ception; it lives best in Swift's epithet "unreproachful.” But it
adds nothing to the critical question. Of his mind we know less.
From such writings as the Amendments to Mr Collier's False and
Imperfect Citations and the Discourse on the Pindarique Ode we
can judge it to have been learned and even a little pedantic. His
lack of capacity would seem to have been rather in the nature of a
defect of vision. But vision is an idle word which we must try to
make a little more precise.
The comic spirit, in Meredith's sense, is subject to three declen-
sions or diminutions of effect. It can become, as Satire, angry and
acidulated-an instrument of invective and not of persuasion. It
can become, as Irony, indirect and uncertain. And as Humour it


HERBERT READ
263
can identify itself with its object, revelling in the situation rather
than offering any solution of it. Congreve is alert enough not to
stray into any of these by-ways of the comic spirit; but it cannot be
said that his conceptions are always "purely comic, addressed to the
intellect.” The epithet that fits them best is cynical: it is not the
calm curious eye of Meredith's spirit, but the calm incurious eye
appropriate to another attitude.
Of cynicism one can say little but that it is the spirit of comedy
without gravity, without profundity. When we pass from Con-
greve to Molière, or even to Meredith himself, we have left an arid
for a rich amusement. Perhaps there are epochs in history, as cer-
tainly there are periods in life, when no attitude but cynicism is
possible, because despair is too inevitable. And perhaps the end
of the Seventeenth Century was such an epoch, as our own day seems
to be another. In any case, such a supposition would go far to
explain the only defect of Congreve's comedy, and whilst explaining
it, make it forgiveable.
But in the process of explanation we must never forget the real
achievement. Congreve's quality at its best, in The Way of the
World, is of a texture, undeniably intellectual, that baffles the
would-be analyst. To begin with, it is impossible to trace it down
to a passage or a phrase. It lives in the characters, who are created
by suggestion rather than by description. It becomes more a mat-
ter of localized fact in the extremely efficient and finely rhythmed
style. This one might illustrate at random from any of the four
comedies. A soliloquy of Mirabell's from The Way of the World
will serve (Millamant has just left him with a "when you have done
thinking of that, think of me"):
“Mira. I have something more-Gone—Think of you! To think
of a Whirlwind, tho' 'twere in a Whirlwind, were a Case of
more steady Contemplation; a very tranquility of Mind and
Mansion. A Fellow that lives in a Whirlwind, has not a more
whimsical Dwelling than the Heart of a Man that is lodg'd
in a Woman. There is no Point of the Compass to which they
cannot turn, and by which they are not turn'd; and by one
as well as by another; for Motion not Method is their Occu-
pation. To know this, and yet continue to be in Love, is to be
made wise from the Dictates of Reason, and yet persevere to


264
VISION
play the Fool by the force of Instinct.—0 here come my pair
of Turtles—What, billing so sweetly! Is not Valentine's
Day over with you yet?"
I have selected this passage for the perfect management of tran-
sitions, for the mastery of phrase, and for the perfect use of rhythm
and alliteration; but I doubt if I could find a better one to illustrate
the real basis of thought, or, as we should perhaps say nowadays, of
psychological observation, that after all sets Congreve's comedies
apart from those of his contemporaries, not excepting even Wy.
cherley. The oppositions of Motion and Method, of Reason and
Instinct, though embodied in comic play, are not there by chance;
and for their date they strike a strangely modern note, a note that
sounds again and again as we read through these plays, making
Congreve significant to our own generation in a sense only shared
by Donne among the English writers of the Seventeenth Century.
VISION
BY MABEL SIMPSON
1
It was a day in winter
When quiet hours go,
That I saw the Saviour
Walking in the snow.
His feet left no footprints,
His steps fell as light
As leaves in the autumn,
As dew in the night.
And when He went passing
The Sun took His hand,
And light filled the valley
And spread through the land.


MKB

HEAD
NEW ARRIVALS AT THE FAIR.
BY JACK B. YEATS






WEATS
THE OLD HARNESS CART.
BY JACK B. YEATS


青
​


PARIS LETTER
December, 1923
C Newrite a Paris
, Leten
AN I write a Paris Letter here in this commandeered hotel, this
interallied mausoleum?
We are never closer to what we love than when we are far away.
And besides I am not going to write about Paris, for to-night I am
at Düsseldorf, in the Rhineland. Passing before me are stenog-
raphers whose eyes are invitations to a dance, French soldiers,
Rhinelanders with their delicate faces; women look at sausages in
the shopwindows as their sisters in the rue de la Paix look at Cartier;
swans are asleep in the canal. Triumphant autumn reigns here and
a sort of modest voluptuousness, quite in keeping with the country's
flavour. I recognize a crystalline noise, the prettiest in the world,
heard before in Barcelona and Dublin: it is the big shopwindows
being shattered in the food-riots of the unemployed.
To-night I am to meet my friend the Rhenish painter, Hugo von
R-
- He has arranged to meet me at the railway station. Per-
haps he is taking a train? I wait for him, the moon comes up, the
streets grow empty. It is the curfew hour. He comes wearing his
summer overcoat, with a violet comforter, under an 1840 sky.
"I am meeting you here,” he says, “because the station-buffet is
the swellest night restaurant in Düsseldorf. It is the poor man's
Abbaye. You can try their quite possible French pinard, tax free
at two francs a litre.”
We step over the sleeping blue forms of soldiers on leave. Hugo
raises his glass and invokes Rimbaud:
“Les Bacchantes des banlieues sanglotent et la lune brûle et hurle.”
"I can't work any more,” he tells me. “My mornings go in
standing in line at the bank to buy some money; then a fresh strug-
gle to buy something to eat. When that's over night has come and
I haven't a cent for light. So I roll myself up in old newspapers
and stay in my studio, without sleeping. There's nothing to buy
here now except liquor. (You'll always find that.) I feel that I
am going mad, like everyone else, like our government with four or
five wars on its hands. Your mistake is in treating us as if we were
!


266
PARIS LETTER
normal human beings when we are really in the last stages of
nervous prostration. Visit the shady gambling dens, the blind bars,
the houses of prostitution: when the dawn comes you will see all
those night wanderers in the lowest depths of human misery; they
cry, they grind their teeth, they kiss each other. The paint runs
down the cheeks of the men and women. What can you expect?
You can't always find shelter in theosophy or cocaine or speculation.
Debauchery is a sure refuge only for the French who know enough
not to abuse it."
An accordion had begun to play. Two German girls wearing
soldier's caps danced together; in the waiting room the Jewish
Black Bourse kept on changing marks all night—the almshouse of
defeated currencies, of wounded exchanges, an invisible mont de
Piété.
I think of the admirable pages on Germany at the end of Girau-
doux's Siegfried et le Limousin': "Pauvre grande nation qui n'est
plus que chair, que poumons et digestion à jour et sans douce
peau.
Hugo von R-raises a starved hand with mys-
terious gems on the thumb:
'Obligé pour gagner le ciel d'invoquer la pharmacie et la sor-
cellerie,' Baudelaire dixit."
Hugo introduces me to a Polish girl with puffed cheeks and
porcelain breasts; she is a jockey and rode last June in the Great
Red Derby at Moscow. I ask her to dance; we both rise. But a
fabulous iron roar bursts upon us, a thick smoke blots out the whole
room: it is the Essen train coming into the station; driven by an
engineer from the Midi, with eyes of coal, the red-robed locomotive
traverses our dance-hall and cuts our first fox-trot into a thousand
pieces.
The scene is in London, a great mansion in Carlton House Ter-
race. Who spoke of unemployment? The guests hurry over the
Chinese rugs, smash the Chippendale settees, and in the antecham-
ber a Longhi ballet is danced by candle-light. Percy Shis
monocle in his eye, is driven by his Irish-American humour to pursue
the beautiful Russian refugees and murmur sadistically, “I've just
come from Moscow. The old world is all gone. Nothing is left,
nothing, I assure you.”
1 Admirably translated by Louise Collier Willcox under the title, My Friend
From Limousin. Harper and Brothers, 1923.


PAUL MORAND
267
I am greeted with cries by Miss -, a kind of charmingly
affectionate American Zeppelin, inflated with fashion and pleasure.
"You've come from Paris ?" she cries. “Tell me about Barbette.”
Of course. Is there room for anything but Barbette in Paris since
Autumn ? What, you don't know, you haven't heard, you haven't
seen Barbette? You date frightfully. At the Casino de Paris, in
a darkened auditorium, a charming young woman, slender, blond,
with delicate gestures, dressed in black tulle with a green bow, rises
on the trapeze. At once she flies out in a semi-circle. Her white
legs are like the hands of an enormous clock, she touches the
chandelier, disappears into the flies, returns, slackens her hold on
the ropes and is falling into the boxes. ... No, at the last possible
moment Barbette catches on by one leg—no, by one foot—by one
toe, and in the midst of our shouts comes down to bow, takes off her
wig—and before us stands a young American boy with glossy black
hair. He is a mania with Paris; there are Barbette frocks, Barbette
waltzes, princesses give Barbette teas, Cocteau is writing a Barbette
ballet. Without that magic word you can know nothing of Paris
in the early winter of 1923. I think of Swinburne: "To what
strange end hath some strange god made fair .
I meet Constance C— who was yesterday a commercial travel-
ler in revolutions and to-day a collector of tyrants. She tells me of
her sentimental interview with Mussolini: "What a man! I've
still black and blue marks on my arms.” Like the crowd, she is the
victim of the man of the day, and she is right. Where are the men
of yesterday? Here the room is full of princes willing to recount
the assassination of Rasputin; the Crown Prince returns to Ger-
many and would gladly go to prison if only people would talk
about him: it is vain. They are the victims of yesterday; they come
too late, like Proust's letters of condolence which used to reach wid-
ows after they had remarried—they never forgave him.
Poor Proust! On an icy morning last November we met again,
some of us, in the church of St Pierre de Chaillot where a year ago
our grief had brought us together. From a distance I caught sight
of Doctor Proust, his brother, and had fleetingly the impression of
seeing Marcel Proust himself: the same black hair parted in the
middle, the same magnificent Oriental eyes, the same way of bow-
ing, very low and all of a piece, his head sunk between his shoulders;
but closer at hand individual differences assert themselves and the


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PARIS LETTER
first impression disappears. I thought of the pleasant evenings we
had spent together until the hour when the streets are dead. Where
is the white wooden box from which Proust would pull out yellowed
photographs of Princess Mathilde, of young Montesquiou in an
English suit of 1880 with big checks; of Maupassant on a bicycle
in white canvas shoes; of Lucien Daudet as a child; of Prince
Edmond de Polignac and his friend M Haas, comrade of the Prince
of Wales and model in a large measure for Swann; of the Princess
of Monaco wearing leg-of-mutton sleeves (Proust remarks “This
one is Luynes; he seems to be saying what he said of the G—'s:
'How can one receive those people. They had absolutely no stand-
ing in the year one thousand.' "); and of Maurice Rostand whose
perfumes, even through closed doors, gave Proust spasms of
asthma. . . . How annoyed with myself I am now for having
always broken up our conversations to go home, for having slept,
for not having noted down, the next day, the admirable discourses
of Proust, every word of which should have been preserved. “Now
that you have disturbed me I shan't be able to work to-night, my
dear Paul, so do stay. . . . Céleste can prepare us some fried
potatoes. Take a little champagne. ..." I could not drink as
much as a glass of that warm sweetened champagne which stood
beside his café au lait. Where is it now? Where is that admirable
friend?
The memory of another of the departed has been revived this
year by the burning eulogy of his friends: Apollinaire. Five years
ago he succumbed to Spanish influenza in the course of that autumn
which he had sung with such emotion:
"Mon automne éternelle, ô ma saison mentale
les mains des amantes d'antan jonchent ton sol
une épouse me suit, c'est mon ombre fatale
les colombes ce soir prennent leur dernier vol."
The memory of Apollinaire has remained very vivid; his friends
complain that he has been betrayed and exploited, which is one way
of not being forgotten. His admirers find his influence in the poetry,
painting, ballet, and farce of after the war. That is correct, up to a
certain point. I think I can speak impartially of Apollinaire; I was
not associated with him. I am equally removed from those who


PAUL MORAND
269
.
say, "We owe him everything," and those who say, "He made the
atmosphere of art unbreathable.” The marvelous intelligence of
Apollinaire was the first to feel, to grasp, and to utilize certain
phenomena which had been in gestation since 1910; but it must be
said that these phenomena had their origin in causes far more gen-
eral than the will of a single man-I mean what we call “the new
spirit,” cubism, futurism, African art, Russian music, the primitives,
Jarry and Ubu-Roi, Rousseau, the post-Cézannians, and so on. .
All of these were not confined to the single framework of the
Soirées de Paris (1912-14) however interesting that review may
have been with Apollinaire and his collaborators, Max Jacob, Dys-
sord, Dalize, Salmon, Billy, Alan Seeger, Harrison Reeves, and
others. Can we not find the profounder causes for all this?
Apollinaire was a marvelous liaison officer between artists, a car-
rier of germs, rather than the creator of the new world of forms
and ideas which we call ours. But we are none the less grateful to
him. He was a delicious, not a great, poet, in the order of Baude-
laire-in spite of what André Billy says in his recent book, Apol-
linaire Vivant. Bad taste in literature, imposture in art, the various
mystifications whose advent has been so thoroughly heralded even
to-day when all this is becoming a fashion—these were already
finding expression in Picasso or Max Jacob, “the kabbalist and the
star-gazer”; the calligramme was honoured among us in the Six-
teenth Century, the rhymed letter and the little play for special
occasions in which the poets of Louis XIII reached perfection before
those of the Eighteenth Century, were revived about 1880 by
Mallarmée and it would not be hard to discover in Rimbaud the
earliest form of the "conversation-poems” which are the basis of
cubist poetry. Apollinaire, who was of Polish descent-his real
name was Kostrowitzky—played with our art in all its forms,
assimilating them immediately like so many new conquests. The
case is not rare of a foreigner thus giving to national literary forms
a new aspect by treating them from the outside, so to speak (Conrad,
another Pole, is an example in English literature); in my opinion
what is more significant and what will keep alive the name of
Appollinaire' is his rehabilitation of joy in poetry, of good humour
in letters. It is really in him that this new spirit, dominant to-day,
has its source.
1 A review by Henry McBride of Guillaume Apollinaire's The Poet As-
sassinated (Broom Publishing Company) will appear in 'The Dial shortly.
1


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PARIS LETTER
Never has Paris been so crowded. The number of foreigners has
doubled in two years: there are now nearly half a million, and so
much the better. Cities are beautiful only when they are over-
populated. If you require solitude, take the train. The streets
groan, the boulevards crack. It is Carthage, Byzantium, Bagdad.
Here are Ménilmontant and its Italian streets, Chinese restaurants
in the Latin Quarter, Old-Turkish exiles in Passy, in Auteuil Greek
refugees from Smyrna still smelling of the fire, Scandinavians in
Montparnasse, Dutch diamond cutters in the rue de la Gaieté, Mid-
European Jews in the old Fifteenth Century courtyards near the
Hôtel de Ville and Levantine Jews eating their honeycakes behind
the Bastille, Hungarian tailors in the Temple, Roumanians on the
terrace of the Café de la Paix, Armenians in the rue Jean-Goujon,
Swiss in their inns of the rue St Roch, Americans on the quays.
The Russians are everywhere. Months ago they departed from
Berlin, too expensive; from Constantinople, too Turkish; from Bel-
grade, too melancholy; and they are here. Montmartre at night is
all Russian. I look forward with pleasure to a tableau of Foreigners
in Paris and to the walks I shall take this winter, as a curious
botanist of this new flora, in the company of the artist Pascin with
his diabolical talent.
Of the new ballets in the repertoire of the Swedish organization
I shall mention only the Création du Monde, as this work by Darius
Milhaud, with décors by Léger and text by Cendrars, was not, I
understand, given in New York. Except in the prelude Milhaud's
music is perhaps less striking than his l'Homme et Son Désir, but it
is none the less of capital importance because it is the result of
laborious and conscientious efforts to adapt jazz to the orchestra-
the same effort, with totally different results, is to be heard in
Strawinsky. I believe however that in the course of his travels in
Brazil and the United States Milhaud has grasped the essence of
jazz more perfectly than any other composer.
I
Georges Auric that it is in orchestra that the music of this ballet
will take on the importance it deserves. Milhaud is hewing his
path in accordance with his temperament which is southern and
romantic. We are grateful to him because he remains always sin-
cerely himself. The experiments of a Strawinsky are of a quite
different order. We talked to-day about Derain in whom Strawin-
sky admires profoundly the constant bitter struggle with himself,
regardless of any superficial unity in his work; success has obediently
agree wich


PAUL MORAND
271
followed him, but he has not followed up his successes as Picasso
has done. Strawinsky with his large crystal-blue eyes full of
genius spoke like a great classic master:
“A work does not have to be good or bad; it must be organic and
identified with the artist. You must never present anything that
isn't perfect. I have never given the public my experiments, my
sketches. Each of my works represents something I tried to do the
best I could, with all my strength. A piece is finished for me when
I can go no farther. I stop at the edge of the abyss. .. The
farther I go, the less I shall work on the surface, the more insig-
nificant, almost mediocre, the outside will be: everything will be
within. That is what I came to with Mavra. Nothing disconcerts
the public and the critics so much. They would rather take colossal
pains to hear the Sacre, which demands an enormous tension and
nervous effort.”
I told him that his Octuor which had just been played in Paris
was a sufficient indication of how this most noble struggle in the
conscience of an artist was to end. “The piano concerto I am
writing now,” Strawinsky went on, “will restore to the piano, a
magnificent instrument, all the importance it lost in the effort to
equal and imitate the human voice. We forget that the piano is
only an instrument of percussion; we are going to return to the
clavichord, the old Erard.” I reminded him that his studies for
the pianola had already indicated this intention, and he agreed.
The admirable honesty of the greatest composer of our time
makes him kin to Bach and Beethoven and Gounod. Far from
allowing his processes to harden, from succumbing to the arterio-
sclerosis of success, Strawinsky works always from the centre and
that is why with each new work we are seized and captivated by so
much novelty, be it a Ragtime or Renard or Mavra.
To return to the Création du Monde, Léger's décors constitute
for me the most complete success in theatrical decoration since
Bakst. The sobriety of the effects, the tonal solidity, the ingenuity
of the designs and their varying combinations, the harmonious union
of powerfully painted canvases and a new and skilful architecture,
their suitability to the theme-nothing is lacking. The other new
ballet, Within the Quota, was presented in New York; the music
by Cole Porter is charming and the whole ballet with its mythical
American characters is lively and amusing.
The entire summer passed almost without books, but now the


272
PARIS LETTER
flood is on us. I want to mention an extraordinary historical syn-
thesis edited by Henri Berr, in which each volume has been entrusted
to a great French specialist. It is issued under the imprint of La
Renaissance du Livre and is having a merited success with the gen-
eral public. Chiefly to be noted are la Terre avant l'Histoire by
Edmond Perrier, Humanité Préhistorique by Morgan, Vendryes'
admirable book on Language, Des Clans aux Empires by Moret and
Davy, and the most recent volume, La Civilisation Egéenne by
Glotz.
For the novelists Jean Cocteau opened fire with Thomas l'Impos-
teur. This is Cocteau's first work with la Nouvelle Revue Française,
and the auguries are happy. Certainly the group of authors in the
N.R.F. will give Cocteau prestige, but he will bring them no less
worthy nuptial gifts—the full possession of his talent as a story
teller, his growing renown in France and abroad, and his poetic
grace. Thomas l'Imposteur is the story of a sympathetic young
adventurer who passes for what he is not during the war and
deceives the whole world, Paris, the front, himself, but who does
not succeed in deceiving death. Rising above the simple story of a
credible character, Cocteau arrives in the midst of unforgettable
descriptions, comic or touching, at a rare psychological study of pure
imposture considered as one of the fine arts. This wholly success-
ful book is to be read.
Jules Supervielle is an exquisite French poet born in South
America; in the past his verses have brought us the perfumes of the
great Spanish-American plains. He has now published a first
novel, l'Homme de la Pampa, a fantastic story about an amateur
of artificial volcanoes. It is Chesterton and Voltaire ... and dada
at times, bearing the mark of our generation which is simplicity and
good humour. I note also l'Equipage by Kessel, a novel of wartime
aviation from the pen of a young writer whose first work, a volume
of Russian stories, La Steppe Rouge, was much remarked a year
ago. Mireille Havet, the youngest and prettiest of our women
novelists, began during the war with a story, La Maison dans l'Oeil
du Chat, which made her famous; to-day she offers her first novel,
Carnaval, full of a Parisian grace which is perhaps closer to reason
than to love. Les Enfants Perdus by Georges Gabory is also the
first prose work of a charming young poet. All these authors are
twenty and some years old; they are our promises.


PAUL MORAND
273
In literary criticism it is fitting to note M Thibaudet's study of
Paul Valéry. There is a remarkable book by him on Mallarmée
which has unfortunately been out of print for years and which the
N.R.F. owes it to itself to republish. The present work is the most
penetrating study of Valéry, that philosophical poet whose power is
so unearthly, whose crystal clarity is so hermetical. Marcel Coulon
has given us Le Problème de Rimbaud, a very remarkable analysis
which unjustly rejects without discussion the Claudelian explana-
tion of Rimbaud's genius and then arrives at very similar conclu-
sions. The new editions of Gobineau are inexhaustible: after Trois
Ans en Asie and a special number of the review, Europe, devoted to
him, we now have Fleur d'Or, a collection of notes serving to explain
his Renaissance, those dramatic tableaux which contain such a
powerful synthesis of the Italian Sixteenth Century. In philosophy
there has just appeared the first volume of Professor Georges
Dumas' Traité de Psychologie, to be followed immediately by the
second, final volume, and constituting the most exact summing up
of the researches and achievements of French psychology since Ribot
and Janet. Finally, a remarkable and useful Anthologie Juive, by
Edmond Fleg, in two volumes, from the beginning to the Middle
Ages, and from the Middle Ages to our day. It will happily make
for the backwardness of France, compared with other nations, in
Jewish studies. I must also note Elie Faure's Derain, and l’Age
de Raison by Lucien Daudet in which a most sensitive spirit retraces
the life of Champresay, the ageing Alphonse Daudet, his son Léon
as a medical student, and Edmond de Goncourt.
up
Paul MORAND


BOOK REVIEWS
HORSES AND MEN
HORSES AND Men. By Sherwood Anderson. 12mo.
346 pages. B. W. Huebsch. $2.
O^
NE of the fundamental problems of serious fiction is that of
the relation of theme and material, of the idea or generaliza-
tion or philosophic attitude, whatever it may be, which gives fiction
its meaning, and the human stuff through which it is projected into
reality. It will be found, I think, that writers of fiction fall into
two schools according as they tend to emphasize one or the other
of these elements, and this emphasis determines their procedure.
Either by reflection they choose a theme as a point of departure,
and make their chief effort to find material with which to clothe
it dramatically; or by observation they seize upon certain features
of life and in the course of the portrayal of them disengage the
idea which gives them meaning.
The distinction is not one between realists and idealists. Some
of the most convinced realists—one need only think of Zola-have
written fiction according to programme. English fiction, with its
racially didactic and moralistic character, naturally furnishes many
examples of the same sort, one of the best being the most advanced
realist of her day-George Eliot. She speaks in a letter to Frederic
Harrison of “the severe effort of trying to make certain ideas
thoroughly incarnate, as if they had revealed themselves to me
first in the flesh, and not in the spirit.” In America the older
realists, Frank Norris, Robert Herrick, Theodore Dreiser, have
been on the whole, novelists à thèse. Obviously, in the construc-
tion of a long novel a predetermined theme, which may become a
thesis, is an advantage not to be lightly set aside. For the best
examples of the second mode of procedure we must turn to the
short story, especially the short story practised by the Russians,
by Chekhov. No other writer has given so striking a demonstra-


ROBERT MORSS LOVETT
275
tion of the results of starting from a point determined merely by
some fortuitous concurrence of characters or forces and drifting
with the human stream, impartially and disinterestedly, until at
least the direction in which the current is flowing becomes clear.
Readers of Chekhov's letters will remember how steadily he as-
serted the obligation of an artist to his material, even holding that
he should refrain from falsifying it by conscious selection and ar-
rangement.
Of this surrender to the current of reality, this letting nature
have its way, Sherwood Anderson in his short stories has given
the most distinct and outstanding examples in American fiction.
This fact makes his case perennially and recurrently interesting, in
spite of the unevenness of his work in detail, and the ambitious
failures of his novels. The latter illustrate the difficulty of con-
struction of a long work without the guidance of a predetermined
theme, and, to some extent, Mr Anderson's own surrender to a
method not his own. But in them, as in his short stories, it is clear
that his chief effort is a quest for meaning through that objective
reality of which his senses and his human contacts bring him so
vivid an account. With the lavishness of material which his
method permits and encourages he can afford failures. And after
each novel he clears his intention and his art by a return to his
true medium, the short story. After Windy McPherson's Son, came
Winesburg, Ohio; after Poor White, The Triumph of the Egg;
after Many Marriages, Horses and Men.
After each of Mr Anderson's collections critics have declared
with enthusiastic hyperbole that one or another of the tales was
the best short story ever written. I have seen this statement with
reference to two of the present volume-I'm a Fool, and The Man
Who Became a Woman. The reason for this is clear. A story
comes so close to the critic's own perception of reality, reproduces
so intimately his own experience, and so finds him out in the secret
places of his soul that he is for the moment overwhelmed by it.
The other stories he must judge externally; some of them will
doubtless seem to the most devoted of Mr Anderson's readers mere
waste land; but it is the hope, the expectation, of coming upon
something so absolutely right that his sense of reality is completely
satisfied that buoys up the reader, as it supports the author in his
quest. And when that complete presentment of reality is achieved,


276
HORSES AND MEN
there is no need to have the result defined in syllogistic form, with
the conclusion marked Q. E. D. or hic fabula docet. The inter-
pretation is one with the record; the reader knows.
The present volume, like Winesburg, Ohio, has a certain unity.
In Winesburg that unity was one of time and place; through the
stories of a dozen people the author penetrated to the core of the
social being of the little town and gave us a character sketch of it.
In Horses and Men the unity is one of method. Each of the stories
is the experience of another person into whom the author has
entered so far as the barriers of isolation may be pierced. They
are for the most part dramatic in the sense in which Browning so
often used the term, dramatic realities instead of dramatic
romances, parleyings with people of no importance. The least
successful of the group, it seems to me, is the longest-Unused,
in which the author is most remote from his material.
There is, of course, a danger in this method which all critics of
Browning have pointed out—that of assimilating the expression
of the characters to the author's own type, so that his mannerisms
dominate the stage, and drama becomes monologue. In all cases
Mr Anderson has chosen simple, primitive types for his avatars.
This is the significance of the association, Horses and Men. The
men are like Ed in Milk Bottles, who had “a rather sensitive, finely
balanced nature, and it had got mussed up." All the protagonists
are mussed up, and share in Whitman's aspiration to the clearness
and simplicity of animals. With these primitive types in their
blind, groping search, Mr Anderson associates himself.
To some this will seem merely a pose. But it is really an ex-
pression of his fundamental belief in the futility of conscious art
or any other form of intelligence to achieve the deepest truth. To
him Meredith's assertion: “Never was earth misread by brain” is
foolishness. Earth is to be known, not read, by the senses, by the
intuitions, by the unconscious. This makes it natural for him to
renounce the usual emphasis of fiction. His stories are in a literal
sense raw material. It is for the reader to complete the process of
bringing them into the function and service which is the reason
of art.
ROBERT Morss Lovett


MRS WHARTON'S AGE OF FAITH
A SON AT THE FRONT. By Edith Wharton. 12mo.
426 pages. Charles Scribner's Sons. $2.
MRI
RS WHARTON'S A Son at the Front, though of very little
literary importance, is by no means so bad a novel as it
seems to have got the reputation of being. It is a great deal better,
for example, than Glimpses of the Moon. The truth is, of
course, I feel, that Mrs Wharton may never do another really im-
portant book for the reason that she has come to accept life, whereas
the strength of her earlier work lay in the violence of her reaction
against it.
Mrs Wharton's great feat has been writing the tragedy of the
civilization of eastern America during the last decades of the last
century and the first decade of this. The Age of Innocence pre-
sented the suffocation of an intelligent and imaginative man in the
provincial New York society of the 'seventies; The House of Mirth
the destruction of a young woman with the instinct, but without
the moral courage, to take life with an honourable seriousness at the
hands of the aimless, extravagant, bridge-playing, rich people of the
early nineteen hundreds; Ethan Frome the starvation of the pas-
sions against the poverty of the New England hills; and The Cus-
tom of the Country the almost apocalyptic swallowing up not only
of the last respectable remnants of the native cultural tradition,
but also of the old American integrity and geniality of the pioneer
period and perhaps even of European civilization itself by the brassy
and unteachable vulgarity of the hideous Undine Spragg. It is the
intensely rendered tragedy of a world in which the life of the mind
and the heart is pitilessly lopped down to the measure of narrow
conventional values and in which the obverse of a life of poverty
without any of the amenities of civilization is a life of overpowering
affluence more blighting to the soul than want.
When Mrs Wharton was speaking her resentment against those
things she wrote some of the most moving and vivid of American
novels: she dignified the society of an intellectually undignified
period by proving the acuteness of the suffering it could produce


278
MRS WHARTON'S AGE OF FAITH
and at her best she carried her vision so far as to reveal in the local
disaster the universal breaking of man on the wheel of his own
limitations. But of late this almost feverish resentment has com-
menced to clear away. Mrs Wharton has come finally to adjust
herself to a closer harmony with life. She has learned benevolence
and faith (always, of course, implicit in her hatreds and scepticisms,
but rarely till now positively expressed). Glimpses of the
Moon was like The House of Mirth rewritten with a happy ending
and with a surprising confidence, for Mrs Wharton, in the panacea
provided by the married state; New Year's Day (lately published
in a magazine) was the history of an heroic sacrifice performed by
the wife for an invalid husband and probably unique among Mrs
Wharton's sacrifices in not turning out to be in vain; and now in
A Son at the Front she writes the diary of the unfolding of a de-
voted romantic faith in the cause of the late Allies. But her gain,
one is sorry to feel, is, on the whole, our loss. She has learned
benevolence and faith too late to make them effective as literary
motive forces; the engine has already withstood too much wear and
tear from the explosions of the old indignation.
Yet A Son at the Front is not merely a sentimental war story
which anybody might have written. It has at least the dramatic
and technical virtues of all her full-length novels—the mastery of
complicated material, the entraînement in setting it in motion and
the illusion of actual personal and social values in continually
changing interaction. And the minor characters at their best are
quite worthy of her more ruthless period. Her enthusiasm for the
war can by no means reconcile her to all its supporters, and we have
such sketches as that of the rich Mr Mayhew with the horn-rimmed
glasses, from Utica, who displays such fierce apostolic fury in
espousing the cause of the Allies because he had been detained by
the Germans for eight days in a Belgian hotel. Furthermore, as a
study of the middle-aged civilian mind in reaction to the war—and
it does not pretend to be anything else—A Son at the Front is prob-
ably accurate and intelligent. It is a sort of American Mr Britling
without Wells' bogus evangelism. Finally, the relation between
the elderly American artist and the dry, precise, inarticulate banker
who has married the artist's divorced wife and thereby taken over
his son, is rendered with great delicacy and truth. In the mingled
sense of a worldly inferiority on the part of the artist toward the


EDMUND WILSON
279
man who can give his son the benefit of money which the artist has
foresworn ever trying to make, and of a scornful superiority of the
intelligent man engaged in doing something which he thinks im-
portant, toward the tasteless inflexible creature who has spent his
whole life in a bank, with the bitter and unjust antagonism en-
gendered by the combination, Mrs Wharton has added another
significant notation to her history of the American soul.
EDMUND WILSON


AUBREY BEARDSLE