Y
SOME UNKNOWN DRAWINGS OF AUBREY BEARDSLEY.
Collected and Annotated by R. A. Walker. 8vo. 71
pages. R. A. Walker. London. 25 shillings.
Isteri
his Modern Art Meier-Graefe rightly acclaimed Aubrey Beard-
sley as being one of the "few indispensable artists,” adding that
“it is necessary to see every one of his fragments.”
As the years go on, the verdict of the most intelligent contem-
porary critics of France, Germany, England, and America is becom-
ing universally accepted, namely that Beardsley was a profound
and original genius. Beardsley's fame is constantly growing, and
one must go as far back as Ingres and Daumier to discover a
draughtsman whose drawings are as eagerly sought after. In addi-
tion to private collectors, the Berlin National Gallery, the Luxem-
bourg Museum, the Metropolitan Museum, the Fogg Museum, the
British Museum, the National Gallery of British Art, and the South
Kensington Museum have been acquiring Beardsley's designs.
The opening of two important exhibitions of Beardsley's work last
autumn, the publication of a volume dealing with his drawings, and
the announcement of another, are indications of the great interest in
Beardsley's work. Significant too were the prices which two of his
drawings fetched at Sotheby's on December eleventh, The Birthday
of Madame Cigale, an early drawing, and Isolde, each bringing one
hundred and fifty pounds.
A loan exhibition of Beardsley's drawings was inaugurated at
the Tate Gallery in London on the first of November, and another
at the Brooklyn Museum nineteen days later. The London exhibi-
tion included the only paintings in oil which Beardsley executed,
two in number, and bought a few months ago by the nation. From
the admirable catalogue of this exhibition, with its valuable annota-
tions, we learn that less than half of the fifty drawings displayed
were line drawings, the others being in wash, chalk, charcoal, pencil
,
and line combined with either water-colour or Chinese white.
Several portraits of Beardsley were also among the exhibits, as well
as a caricature by “Max.”


A. E. GALLATIN
281
At the Brooklyn Museum, which every once in a while shatters
all institutional traditions by being adventurous, a very large ex-
hibition of Beardsley drawings was opened to the public. Although
relegated to a screen in the hall, where they were crowded together
in a haphazard fashion, this assemblage of Beardsleys was the
important feature of a most miscellaneous collection of water-
colours, drawings, pastels, and sculpture by both European and
American practitioners of these arts. With the exception of a few
drawings which he reserved for the London exhibition, all of Mr
John Lane's large collection was there, as well as loans from a
number of American collections. The alleged catalogue of these
Beardsleys does not even indicate the number of drawings which
were shown, but I am informed that a real catalogue is being
prepared.
The material which Mr R. A. Walker publishes in his Some
Unknown Drawings of Aubrey Beardsley was originally gathered
for the Beardsley catalogue and bibliography which he has been on
the point of publishing for a number of years. Owing to the fact
that data for this book continues to pour in, and for other reasons,
which he sets forth in the preface to his book, Mr Walker decided
to publish this preliminary study, which is to be followed later on
by his exhaustive volume treating of Beardsley and Beardsleyana.
In the meantime, the Beardsley enthusiast will be very grateful for
this book of Some Unknown Drawings, which contains much matter
of
great interest and importance. Another book which the Beard-
sley collector is eagerly awaiting is the Third Book of Fifty Draw-
ings by Aubrey Beardsley which Mr John Lane has announced. I
have seen most of the material which is to go into this book, and
there are several new items which the collector will be glad to
possess.
The first illustration in Mr Walker's book is a colour plate of
Beardsley's painting entitled A Caprice, which he discovered. This
is a curiously interesting picture, painted under the influence of
Conder, Sickert, Nicholson, and Whistler, but withal possessing
something of the Beardsley flavour. The composition is his own,
being very similar to one of the Yellow Book drawings. Mr
Walker is in error in stating that this is the only painting that
Beardsley is known to have executed; this was a curious slip on his
part, as of course he knows the painting entitled Woman Regarding


282
AUBREY BEARDSLEY
a Dead Mouse, painted on the back of A Caprice. Mr Walker
reproduces a number of quite important drawings which are now
published for the first time, including the original cover design for
Le Morte d'Arthur, Echo of Venice, Head of a Man, and a carica-
ture of Whistler. Of the unpublished drawings, however, that
entitled Apollo Pursuing Daphne is by far the most important.
Indeed, this is one of Beardsley's very finest drawings, the purity
of its outline at once calling to mind a masterpiece of such of the
Greek vase painters as Brygos. The author of this volume has also
included several portraits of Beardsley, by Conder, Rothenstein,
Blanche, and others. The painting by Blanche, it is interesting to
note, has recently been purchased by the National Portrait Gallery.
Drawings caricaturing Beardsley's technique which originally ap-
peared in Punch have been reprinted, and photographic views of
various houses inhabited by Beardsley, one of his grave at Mentone,
and autograph letters reproduced in facsimile have also been in-
cluded. In addition, we are glad to have good reproductions of
several drawings which hitherto have only been known to us by
very much reduced or poor engravings.
Mr Walker's volume is very well printed. The reproductions,
which are in colour, in photogravure, in collotype, line, and half-
tone, are notably good and reproduce the originals very faithfully.
Interesting bibliographical and critical information is contained in
the notes which accompany each reproduction.
A. E. GALLATIN


THE LADY STUFFED WITH PISTACHIO NUTS
.
302
JENNIFER LORN. By Elinor Wylie. 12mo.
pages. George H. Doran Company. $2.50.
A
CERTAIN difficulty arises in connexion with writing about a
book to which one awards an unreserved enthusiasm, an agree-
able difficulty, no doubt, but none the less a difficulty. This un-
natural situation was the cause of a good deal of perplexity on my
part after reading Jennifer Lorn; determining, therefore, to discover
some small flaw, some rift in artistry, some hesitation in the creator's
precision, I went straight through the book again; in vain, I may
add, so far as the purposes of my pursuit were concerned. My
enthusiasm mounted rather than ebbed. I rose, indeed, from this
second perusal, confirmed in my belief that Jennifer Lorn is the
only successfully sustained satire in English with which I am
acquainted.
A satire of what? may be asked at this point, and the rather
vague reply I must give to the question is another proof to my mind
of the authentic quality of the book, for, unlike most satirists,
Elinor Wylie has not aimed her subtle shafts consistently at one
target. On the contrary, she has apparently a delightfully per-
verse profusion of aims, lifting Jennifer, thereby, out of the class
of pastiches into a position in literature quite its own. That there are
certain resemblances to the work of Philip Thicknesse and others of
the elegant Eighteenth Century autobiographers is a recognizeable
part
of the charm of this fine novel; that it suggests now and again
the heightened absurdities of Zuleika Dobson, the oriental pageantry
of Vathek, and the vivid narrative sense of the authors of the One
Thousand and One Nights is unarguable. The essential fact, how-
ever, is that Elinor Wylie has risen superior to her models, and
that Jennifer Lorn in the process of creation has become something
rich and strange.
There is, indeed, inherent in the book a curious fusion of diverse
elements, a fusion which justifies itself by its success. We find
ourselves completely, no doubt, in the Eighteenth Century, so com-
pletely that, frequently, we are obsessed by the credibility of the en-


284 THE LADY STUFFED WITH PISTACHIO NUTS
chanting tale. Elinor Wylie, it would seem, has achieved this effect
by a meagre use of incident in the first hundred pages, and by a
multiplication of fascinating detail which is staggering in its im-
plication of the lady's knowledge of her selected milieu and period.
At no time during her ironic recital, however, will the intelligent
reader be too sure that the author has entirely forgotten that mar-
riage is a tradition which persists even into our own day, or that
Jennifer's rather absurd relations with Gerald may be repeated,
shorn, certainly, of their decorative adjuncts, in any Ritz Hotel.
But Elinor Wylie, as I have already stated, aims her satire at no
one target; her own characters, her own impeccable style, do not
escape the barbs from her bow; there is, indeed, a delicately sardonic
smile in every line. And this smile she has mystically sustained
over a range of three hundred pages by an instinctive reliance on
her own capacity to entertain, and by a certain apparently careless
grace, abetted no end by the loveliness of her well-chosen back-
grounds, by the beauty that hovers constantly behind and above the
wit, the descriptions of foods, jewels, dresses, and objets d'art, and
by a style which I have already set down-surely this is ineluctable
in relation to this narrative—as impeccable. Elinor Wylie's power,
perchance, lies in her ability to regard life as simultaneously amus-
ing and picturesque.
There are, naturally, high spots in the story; the chapter entitled
The Basket of White Roses is a notable case in point, in which is
related with great spirit Jennifer Lorn's incredibly diverting adven-
ture with a young man in the conservatory at the British Ambas-
sador's in Paris. Another noteworthy example is the melancholy
charm, softly suffused with a sedate humour, of the final scene, in
which Gerald rapes the Byzantine image of the Madonna from
the languid fingers of the Persian Prince, dying of love on Jenni-
fer's grave. But these are only more memorable pictures in a tapes-
try whose weave displays no knottings. Elinor Wylie, indeed, con-
stantly manipulates charm and humour and beauty in the way that
an expert electrician employs lights in the theatre; now one will be
the predominant colour in a scene; now another; now all three
expertly fused in a radiant conjunction. It is, quite possibly, a mat-
ter of instinct, but it is also a matter of extraordinary taste: the
result, whatever the means, is superb art. Aside from the title,
which is not, I understand, the author's choice, Jennifer Lorn may
boast perfection.


CARL VAN VECHTEN
285
It is the perfection of the artist who realizes her intention, the
only perfection, perhaps, with which the critic should concern him-
self; although there is another approximate perfection which causes
a book to arouse feelings in the critic or reader of which the author
himself was never aware. It is also perfection on a small scale,
like the perfection of the red jasper bowl which Gerald loved so
much that he could not bring himself to bestow it on Jennifer. But
this condition should be sufficiently obvious, that perfect works of
art are always conceived in miniature. Moby Dick and Hamlet
have their greatnesses; they also have their faults.
It is impossible to write at any length about this romance with-
out making more than a passing reference to the characters; to, to
begin with, the frail and swooning Jennifer, with her pale but blind-
ing beauty, her aureole of golden hair, and her chaste and wifely
demeanour under the most bewilderingly trying circumstances. I
like her best, perhaps, when it seems fitting to her to sing old Scotch
ditties in Shah Jehan's Hall of Private Audience at Delhi:
Jennifer Lorn standing in the exact centre of the miracu-
lous pavilion of white marble and lifting her mournful little voice
to cry, 'I've heard them liltin' at our ewe-milkin'. . . . 'The flowers
of the forest are all wede away.' Around her upon every hand were
flowers innumerable of serpentine, lapis lazuli, and red and purple
porphyry; they formed a delicate design upon the arches and pat-
terned the silver ceiling above her head.”
But Jennifer is pleasing to behold in all prospects and never
fails to act according to the coeval code of morality and conduct,
even when eloping with her Persian Prince, when conversing with
Saint Amond in the gardens of Calcutta, or when in the toils of
the evil procuress Banou.
But, to brush aside a myriad of fascinating minor figures, I bow
lowest to Gerald, that "fine flower of English gentlemen,” of whom
Jennifer, believing him dead, remarked:
"My dear husband was a superb horseman; his knowledge of
history was amazing, and his fund of anecdote inexhaustible. As a
travelling companion, and indeed in every other relation of life'-
she explained with a loyal little sob—'he was the most superior per-
son whom it has ever been my privilege to know.'


286 THE LADY STUFFED WITH PISTACHIO NUTS
Gerald, with his air of passive and polite contempt, his amiable
and cold composure, thieving in India, the seat of his enormous
fortune; Gerald, reading Candide and drinking brandy to relieve
the tedium of an ocean voyage; Gerald, bartering for the jasper
bowl, choosing a wife, entertaining that wife, during the honey-
moon, with long anecdotes which for the most part concerned her
own family history; Gerald, crushing the white roses, dispatched to
Jennifer by her youthful admirer, under his heel in the courtyard
of the Paris hotel; Gerald astride an elephant on the road to Delhi,
“straight as a lance and stiff as a poker, accommodating himself in
some uncanny fashion to the swinging pace of the monstrous animal;
his face as immobile as a carven Buddha beneath the
green
umbrella
which he habitually carried,” an umbrella which he made “as awful
as a sceptre and as ornamental as a lotus-flower”; Gerald beset by
bandits, coolly firing until his ammunition is exhausted, hurling
then his pistols at the heads of his assailants, and, finally, fencing
with his cane; Gerald, overpowered by numbers, apparently staked
through the heart and buried under stones, saved by his slenderness
(the stake had penetrated his cloak alone); above all, Gerald, the
magnificent, appearing to Jennifer and her Prince before the ruins
of Persepolis, bearing himself "with such an air of elegance and
pride that the very column lowering over his mortality seemed
somewhat dwarfed by the perfection of his poise,” quoting Marlowe,
with a slight satirical smile; and, in the conclusion, Gerald in the
garden of cypresses of the Khan's palace at Shiraz, extracting the
miniature from the limp fingers of the expiring Prince.
“ 'I believe this to be a Byzantine carving of great antiquity,'
said Gerald to himself complacently as he stepped from the cypress
grove into the comparative brightness of the rose-garden. "The
face bears a distinct resemblance to my late dear wife; this alone
would render it valuable to me, but it is, quite apart from this
consideration, an exquisite work of art. I am most fortunate to have
procured it at the cost of so little expense or pain.'
Gerald, in fact, is incomparable; any author who had created him
might safely permit his future reputation to rest on that accomplish-
ment alone. In this instance, however, the character is happily set
in what can scarcely fail to be regarded as a permanent masterpiece.
CARL VAN VECHTEN


BRIEFER MENTION
RICEYMAN STEPs, by Arnold Bennett (12mo, 386 pages; Doran: $2). If
the effect of vulgarity in Mr Bennett's work were not combined with
unusual merits, the author of fifty-four books, including Pocket Philoso-
phies, would have ceased long ago to come to the attention of a serious
critic. His massive novels have a certain curious dignity, though it is
threatened on every page by sly innuendoes, by self-conscious crudity, by
mingled echoes of cynicism and sentimentality. The world of this dis-
illusioned, business-like Dickens resembles reality; if his characters are not
symbols, they are certainly types. Mr Bennett moves up and down the
social ladder, now rather mechanically, the voluble spokesman of one
class to another. Riceyman Steps portrays the life and character of a
charwoman, and conveys the life of the poor, in its most obvious aspects,
to the well-to-do.
Le VITRIOL DE LUNE, by Henry Béraud (16mo, 254 pages; Albin Michel :
Paris) concerns the torture of Damiens and the conjectured poisoning of
Louis XV: a story of hate and brutal love and brutality told without
genius, but rapidly and well, somewhat in the manner of Anatole France.
It is the better of the two novels by the same author which were crowned
this year with the Prix Goncourt. Its author is a liberal in politics and
quite as fat as Balzac; the award in other respects was totally unsensa.
tional. Briefly, Le Vitriol de Lune is the sort of book which wins a
prize in France: no better and no worse than a prize-winning novel in
America, but vastly different.
THE MIDDLE PASSAGE, by Daniel Chase (12mo, 273 pages; Macmillan: $2)
has its moments of authentic flavour-glimpses of a New England seaport
in the days of clipper ships-which are rendered with colour and with
pictorial definiteness; it has, in addition, such a free-handed allotment of
villainy as to destroy most of the flavour. Mr Chase is not content with
rascality on either land or sea; he requires it in both. Before one has
finished, one suspects that he wrote with one eye on the “movies.”
A WEEK, by Iury Libedinsky, translated by Arthur Ransome (12mo, 247
pages; Huebsch: $1.50). There is nothing revolutionary in this book,
written by a young peasant whom the Russian Revolution woke to the
deceptive release of words. The gropings, dilemmas, and martyrdoms of
a community of human beings trapped by hunger and the ruthless delusions
of a new faith, and drawing themselves mechanically across the drama of
the upheaval, are transcribed with the guileless realism of an apostle's
diary. This novel, free of literary sophistication and moving with the
opaque and barren economy of peasant speech, is written with the im-
pressive artlessness of the traditional Russians, who reveal themselves
through an intensely calm disposal of souls whose histories become the
allegories of a broad and primitive creative sadness.


288
BRIEFER MENTION
THE Herr, by V. Sackville-West (12mo, 250 pages; Doran: $2) is a
collection of stories in which theme and treatment are mutually exacting;
they have been handled with delicacy and artistic indirection. People are
sketched with swift and sympathetic strokes; there is not a blurred or
wavering line from cover to cover. In conception and technique, these
tales stand at a refreshing distance from the market-place of popular
fiction.
THE MIDLANDER, by Booth Tarkington (12mo, 493 pages; Doubleday Page:
$2) is somewhat epic in intention, but slightly commonplace in execution.
Mr Tarkington, when he turns from his genre studies of adolescence,
is inclined to adopt facile classifications; not all Westerners are noble and
not all Easterners are vapid. The romance of the old generation being
supplanted by the new is here retold skilfully, but not memorably; it
stems too patently from Meredith Nicholson.
THE CATHEDRAL FOLK, by Nicolai Lyeskov (12mo, 439 pages; Knopf:
$2.50) is rich in human values which appear—in the smooth, crisp
translation of Isabel F. Hapgood to have lost little of their savour. The
author builds up his winding narrative around three priests—inhabitants
of the Stary Gorod Cathedral's ecclesiastical quarters; he makes a truly
Russian distinction at the start by stipulating that his novel is to deal not
so much with people's lives as with their “manner of life.” A story of
deep penetration, picturesque in setting and leisurely in development.
Marcel Proust: an English Tribute, collected by C. K. Scott Moncrieff
(12mo, 148 pages; Seltzer : $1.75). The degree in which Proust extended
the boundaries of the novelist's art is interestingly reflected in these papers.
An adventurer in that art himself, he has set the critics to grubbing at
its roots, to re-examining its origins and its growth and its possibilities.
Besides an introduction by the editor and a character sketch by Stephen
Hudson, the volume includes appraisals by such men as Conrad, Saints-
bury, Bennett, Alec Waugh, Arthur Symons, A. B. Walkley, and Francis
Birrell—the last named having appeared originally in The DIAL.
This FINE-PRETTY World, by Percy MacKaye (12mo, 197 pages; Mac-
millan: $1.50) is a comedy of the Kentucky mountain fastnesses. The
action is gayly extravagant, but never, except during the redundant half
of the third act, is it a strain to watch. Mr MacKaye's attempt creatively
to conserve the speech of the mountaineers is a triumph. The depressing
strangeness of deciphering a mummified dialect or following the intricacies
of a localized form of speech is completely absent. This is our language:
not restricted and overworked by the unimaginative use of a public
marshalled into literacy; but immanent and racy, constantly freshened by
contact with individual minds closely attentive to differentiations in their
environment and their own emotions, and unfettered by any standardiza-
tion of expression. The effect on spectator and reader alike is one of
vitality, at times of abandonment, of a buoyancy and beauty that should,
if this were possible, be appropriated by the dully American speaking
population of cities.


BRIEFER MENTION
289
MASQUERADE, by Ben Ray Redman (12mo, 53 pages; McBride: $1.50)
contains Men, Women, and Words, perhaps the wittiest of the poems
written in emulation of the Sweeney cycle, and the most brilliant, certainly,
of the rhymed character sketches which compose the first part of Mr Red-
man's volume. All of them make pleasant reading. They describe
familiar people, amusingly, with an irony not too profound, and unsubtle
melodies, and are much more successful than the ambitious lyrics with
which the volume closes.
COME HITHER, a collection of verse made by Walter de la Mare (8vo,
694 pages; Knopf: $6) bears the promise seldom offered by anthologies
of a selection based upon a rare poet's response to his own especial
"genre" in poetry. The compiler has already become a legendary figure,
the embodiment of certain childlike and romantic traditions, and here he
tries to inveigle into practical harness the dark turf-cropping steeds of
his enchanted stable. But the reader feels disappointed when he finds
that in a fit of Quixotic humility the editor has wilfully omitted from his
selection every one of his own compositions! Yet he includes Sassoon and
Frost and Drinkwater and Gibson and Elinor Wylie; all of whom, though
good enough poets in their own line, offend us when found in this draught
of ancient sorcery, as if they were wasps in a honey-pot or acorns in a
cup of curds and whey. If we are not to carp at the premeditated
fantasticalness of the preface we have a right to protest when this nosegay
rosemary and rue turns out to include such alien gatherings.
of
THE POEMS OF CHARLES COTTON, edited by John Beresford (8vo, 420
pages; Boni & Liveright: $4). Poetic afflatus which results in transport
rather than induced hyperbole, is not found in these poems. We have
in them as Coleridge says, “the milder muse”—even the mindless muse.
An age of brilliance ought not to be commemorated in four hundred and
twenty pages of conventional love, bucolic conviviality, and elaborate idle-
ness. Nevertheless one considers with serious respect, the translator of
Montaigne and the author with Izaak Walton of The Compleat Angler
and it would be unfair to forget an occasional perfection.
Body of This DEATH, by Louise Bogan (12mo, 30 pages; McBride: $1.50).
Louise Bogan gives the impression of being an inexpert craftsman striving
fitfully and inchoately to express that which defies expression. Her words
are like the rough marble before the sculptor has applied his chisel; they
are crudely hewn, jagged, and often only obscurely significant; the author
appears to be grappling with substantial but formless conceptions which she
cannot mould either because she has not the power, because she is in-
sufficiently practiced, or because she lacks the patience of the skilled artist.
In Exile, by John Cournos (12mo, 66 pages; Boni & Liveright: $1.50)
is a volume whose charm is to be simple and barren of decoration. The
poet, in direct words and metres more bald than rugged, attacks the con-
ventions or sings of exile and love betrayed. There are platitudes of
revolt more profoundly dull than the platitudes of convention, and Mr
Cournos, as poet, approaches them too often.


2go
BRIEFER MENTION
Port Latios, by Harold Wright (12mo, 180 pages; Harcourt, Brace: $1.25)
is a sun.marizing of population problems by an economist who, despite his
efforts at a dispassionate survey of all attitudes, is driven by his own
facts to hold that the Malthusian threat is upon us, and that already
the crowding of the earth manifests itself in poorer living conditions
and a lower birth rate. This is a quietly persuasive book, and incidentally
one which indicates that through the growth of industrialism the demands
for an adequate social structure have become so vital and exacting that
human virtue and ingenuity may be driven to the breaking point.
His RELIGION AND HERS, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (12mo, 300 pages;
Century: $1.75). Mrs Gilman having spent a good part of her life in
bustling women out of the home is now nervously shocked—thoroughly
aroused, indeed—to find that a new generation of unmarried girls have
homes of their own where the duties of motherhood and “race responsi-
bility" are not the most discussed topics of their lives. Mrs Gilman
reiterates her old beliefs lucidly, sometimes convincingly, yet the old
urbanity has now turned a trifle sour, the old cloquence a trifle shrill.
One remembers one's debt to her however, and forgives.
THE STORY OF MAN AND WOMAN, by David P. Jackson, M. D. (12mo,
252 pages; Dorrance: $2). There are in every age either anxious or
embittered gentlemen who make it their especial province in life to point
out that the devotion of womanhood toward the male of the species should
for the good of all concerned be kept at its highest point of efficiency and
disinterestedness through every hour of the livelong day from birth unto
death. Dr Jackson goes even further and carries it beyond death. He
sees in wifehood "a permanent rôle for women which will continue to fill
in a life without end in Paradise Restored.” In the present age when
women seem so rapidly to be getting out of control we can hardly blame
such unworldly and dependent people as Dr Jackson for feeling slightly
on tenter-hooks. We can but hope that if there are any little girls in his
own family the excellent doctor may be spared the distress of seeing them
reach that dangerous age when they begin to steal secretly away from
his sentimental and age-old admonishments into an adventurous world
which he has never permitted himself to contemplate.
The DOMINANT Sex, by Mathilde and Mathias Vaerting, translated from
the German by Eden and Cedar Paul (12mo, 289 pages; Doran: $3) is
the initial volume of a series of studies in which the authors propose a
"refounding" of the comparative psychology of the sexes. In it the
thesis is upheld that the difference in capacity and conduct existing between
men and women is a difference depending solely upon which sex happens
to be in the ascendant. From the custems of various ancient tribes and
races the Vaertings erect a cunning editice of data. If here and there a
beam is missing the structure may still be said to remain firm against the
attacks of irate anti-feminists. Whether it will continue to do so in the
face of later research one cannot say, but it is at least safe to assert that
this book will remain for a long time an interesting and suggestive study
of the sociological factor of sex differentiation.


COMMENT
MISS
ISS ELIZABETH LUTHER CARY is the art critic of an
exotic sheet which I myself do not come across so often as I
should wish. I believe it goes by the name of “The New York
Times." I am further informed that for a good many years now
Miss Elizabeth Luther Cary has there been breaking silence—and
always in a dignified manner-weekly.
Under the caption Modern Art of One Kind and Another Miss
Cary, upon January twenty-seventh, stepped intelligently about the
Dial folio, Living Art. She was generous in the space she allotted.
She gave us a full page. This, together with the delicate matter
of her sex, has been called to my attention as a reason for not
mentioning her in this place. But, after all, her paper allots like-
wise a page (in accordance, I am told, with the contemporary
custom of journals of this daily sort) to advertising the virtues of
Messrs Hiram & Irving Bloomingdale's "Women's silk full-
fashioned lace clocked hose" and "High grade refrigerators.” And
in these days ladies are all about us.
Since, some years back, that gifted Terpsichorean, Mr Willie
Howard, distinguished me with a rhymed poem, I have read
nothing with so much relish as these gentle and balanced paragraphs
from the more refined—and scarcely less illustrious—Miss Cary.
Miss Cary begins by paraphrasing my preface to the folio. By
the very delicate "planting” (I employ the word in the sense in
which it generally does service in the journal in question) of such
phrases as "considered so supremely and fundamentally important
that their work, albeit in oil,” Miss Cary contrives to assimilate
myself to her own agreeably flattering conception of me.
This process of assimilation of a new idea to something already
familiar, and by that familiarity (and sometimes for other good
reasons) dear to the unconscious, is a process common to us all.
Yet Miss Cary does, three columns farther on, give us a most un-
commonly nice example of the same delicate indecorum.
Now Miss Cary, like the late Mr Comstock, is naturally more
familiar with the very modern oil-painting entitled September
Morn than with things French in general. September Morn has
occupied an honoured place in the show-windows of our great


292
COMMENT
metropolitan and cosmopolitan department and drug stores. She
who rode might read.
Hence Miss Cary's little assimilation: “A pen-and-ink drawing
of a Spring morning (why . . . should a proofreader have balked
at the spelling of so simple a word as ‘morn') the artist André
Dunoyer de Segonzac, the picture, little slim trees shaken with
merriment like giggling girls," et cetera, et cetera. Miss Cary read
the title of this picture, The Morin in Spring. Not being familiar
with the chief rivers of France, and apparently not being furnished
by this journal, The Times, with a map of that country, and
harbouring in her unconscious a potent and indelible image of that
masterpiece, September Morn, and being, after all, but a poor
human woman, she brightly and automatically assimilated “Morin"
to “morn.” September Morn represented a river-scene too, and
the girl in it, no doubt, was the supple springboard to Miss Cary's
poetical likening of Segonzac's “slim trees” to “giggling girls.
Though, for my part, I do not remember the young woman in
September Morn as particularly giggling. Perhaps that came after
she saw Mr Comstock.
Further (to somewhat change the subject) in writing about the
Russian sculptor, Alexander Archipenko, Miss Cary jauntily intuits
that this gentleman "feels” that he "expresses” the people's "de-
mand for quantity production.” The most aristocratic of contem-
porary sculptors can learn from Miss Cary a lot.
Upon the page following her “criticism” of Living Art and
immediately before her “criticism" of Alexander Archipenko, Miss
Cary skims a “dauntless . . . Pentelican marble," a "captivating
creature" by Gaston Lachaise. Miss Cary, just by the by (always
skimmingly, as is her beautiful wont) further attributes to this
artist hounds. M Lachaise from reading her informative page
learned for the first time (tardily, it would seem) of this, his
agreeable paternity.
Since Miss Cary continues to receive good money from The New
York Times, it is, quite obviously, possible to be of two minds
as to her artistic taste. And as to her possession of the old-fash-
ioned virtue of accuracy, it is no longer possible to remain in doubt.
The Dial is taking up a modest collection for the benefit of The
New York Times. It is our desire to enable this ambitious con-
temporary to purchase an atlas of France.


THE THEATRE
T would be an unforgivable perversity to refuse to write about
THE MIRACLE in this chronicle of the theatre. For the sake of
my standing as a citizen I wish that I had received from that
spectacle even the smallest item of the spirituality which it is
popularly supposed to convey and which alone could justify it.
The magnificence and the beauty of Norman-Bel Geddes' investi-
ture are a monument to the possibilities of the stage when worked
upon by a rich imagination prospered by generosity and intelli-
gence. I would not for a moment detract from the glory of Messrs
Reinhardt and Gest and Kahn. But I counsel them to look at the
book of drawings and models published by the Theatre Arts and
discover there whether the Dante spectacle imagined by Mr Geddes
be not better material for their interest. The Maeterlinck-Voll-
moeller-Humperdinck Miracle is tawdry in spots and unbearably
uninteresting in whole sections; it is good spectacle intermittently
and has superb dramatic moments; the whole hasn't the possibility
of giving exaltation. Werner Kraus did most to give it intensity
and Lady Diana Manners had a moment of rare loveliness—in the
resumption of the statue. Reinhardt's own work was superbly
done, with a lavish imagination and an unequalled skill in detail.
But for me everything fine in The MIRACLE is something to think
about, not to feel; and the reason is in the paradox that The
MIRACLE itself, the original stuff, will hardly bear thinking of.
The other spiritual play of the moment is Outward Bound.
Here the elaboration consisted only in procuring a faultless cast,
in combining the separate excellences of Beryl Mercer, Margolo
Gillmore, Alfred Lunt, J. M. Kerrigan, Dudley Digges, and Leslie
Howard under the direction of Robert Milton, and allowing them
to play with smoothness and skill a play which is pure theatre.
Were it anything else, a real drama of the soul, the melodramatic
discovery that the Channel steamer is really Charon's Ferry would
be hideously out of place. Everything is in place because Mr Sut-
ton Vane apparently knew exactly where he was going from be-
ginning to end, because he recognized completely the value of his
stunt idea, and because he omitted almost all the cant and nonsense


294
THE THEATRE
about Death which one usually expects in plays of this sort. It
was not required of him to add anything new; the major require-
ment of an interesting play he fulfilled.
Mister Pitt did little to restore the balance so heavily against
American plays. The material is superb, the handling deplorable.
Miss Zona Gale made the dramatization out of her own novel,
Birth, and in doing so fairly boxed the compass, for the play runs
in every direction except the one which its early scenes demand-
the direction of a comedy of character. The impression of un-
certainty was heightened by lackadaisical management on the open-
ing night and by the definite excellence of Walter Huston in the
gentle and appealing comedy of the beginning, an excellence which
deserved further scope and which was not nearly so marked in the
melodrama and psychological wanderings of the later acts. Mr
Brock Pemberton's simultaneous production of THE LIVING Mask
(Pirandello's HENRY IV) was far better and Arnold Korff's acting
was extraordinarily fine in all the shiftings and variations required
by an interesting play. Like most of Pirandello, it is a bit bookish.
One of the finest ideas in it is not implicated in action at all;
it is the idea that one lives in absolute independence by the creation
of another, even if it be a lunatic, world as a background. A flood
of speech is on all the characters of the first act, and most of what
they say remains irrelevant to the bitter end. But forgiving that,
you have before you a play of actual intensity and of good drama.
André Charlot's Revue is having a chic success which it deserves.
The Chaplinesque Miss Lillie and Gertrude Lawrence, as ingénue,
are full of delight, and British rowdiness and irreverence are always
acceptable. It is interesting to note that a first rate British revue
has about the same faults as a first rate American one, and that its
level of sophistication on the literary side is so much greater; on
the side of music, dance, and production the level is far lower than
ours. Bearing in mind the pomposities of production which so
nearly ruin many of Mr Berlin's numbers at the Music Box, I
hesitate to say that Limehouse Blues would be better done by our-
selves, but I think we would have released the music more easily.
On the other hand, none of us could have done better with March
With Me.
GILBERT SELDES


MODERN ART
ALTE
LTHOUGH not so wholly satisfactory as might be wished
nevertheless the status of American art abroad is not so bad.
In fact it is looking up. We have had three exhibitions over there
and may have more before the season ends. The Mrs Whitney
group has already returned, elated, apparently, to be still living
after the experience; and now George Biddle and Max Weber are
showing Paris. The formidable French critics were most kind
to our "group.” They said that each of these Americans was one
hundred per cent French and that, of course, was intended as a
compliment. Waldemar George, in L'Amour de l'Art, even went
so far as to suspect that the first symptoms of Americanism in art
could be detected in the work of these “peintres new-yorkais,” but
did not further particularize. The Max Weber reviews have not
yet come to hand, but doubtless Max will fare better than these
others. For one thing he is better known in Paris, his discipleship
to Henri Rousseau having affiched him considerably in the old
days; and then too he is a slashing painter. As to his Americanism,
that's as it may be. His art is very Jewish. That's its strength.
They will probably decide that it “derives from the French”—as
it undoubtedly does—but if they discover that it breaks new ground
they will discover more than Mr Weber's friends here have done.
He paints in a masterly fashion, most of us think, but well within
the formulas so well advertised by Matisse, Picasso, and Rousseau.
On the whole this yearned for Americanism is hard to locate,
even here on the spot. Of those who have been showing here lately,
and whom we own, Yasuo Kuniyoshi is the most likely to strike our
French friends as a definite person. Yet, of course, they'd have
to be told he is American. That he should not succeed in Paris
is incredible, but even if he did not we should not mind.
to ourselves, comfortably, “Paris doesn't know," and raise the
prices of Kuniyoshis among ourselves as we did the Winslow
Homers. But the first sets of drawings that Kuniyoshi showed here
must have succeeded in a land that produced a Redon. They are
not Redon, but pure Kuniyoshi, yet they have the same crisp vision
and the short shading off of velvet blacks into shiny whites that
We'd say


296
MODERN ART
marks the work of the French visionary and which seems to hint
that both artists read nature by flashes of lightning. As a visionary
Kuniyoshi has not quite mounted the cliffs to Redonesque heights-
he is too young, happy, and unconcerned about death for that,
but he certainly sings the songs of inexperience with heaven-
endowed accents. In the exhibition of this winter trouble for those
who had not seen the first exhibition developed. It began to appear
that one must learn the first Kuniyoshi lesson before taking up
the second. He goes on now to a more direct inquiry into the
domestic manners of the Americans and his researches into
the particulars of Maine summer life bore unexpected results.
Kuniyoshi is still a seer and the young lady art students arising
from the waves that beat upon that rock-bound coast are nymphs,
sirens, or even pre-Greeks to him; with the snub noses and nasal
voices of to-day connecting up with the sparkle of eye and fresh-
ness of movement that life in any era has; Kuniyoshi being one
who generalizes, as Emerson counsels, from the single example.
Then there are the startling babies that have replaced the cows of
Kuniyoshi's early affection, that have a vim, an authority, a size,
and even a vulgarity—that may well frighten Europeans—dis-
posed to be frightened of us anyhow-particularly when informed
that these babies are authentic and horribly like the real thing. In
short, robustness as these hints imply, seems to have crept into
Kuniyoshi's new work. It is as compact, as completely realized
as ever his work was, but just because it is noisier it is the more
disconcerting to him who meets it for the first time this year. Those
who were already won, it must be stated, stayed won; the chorus
among the believers was enthusiastically to the effect that Kuni-
yoshi has become one of our most considerable personages and an
artist in whose work the discerning could take inexhaustible delight.
The two Europeans who gave us most recent pleasure were
Hermine David and Max Jacob—both of the improved-amateur
type. Mme David, who came to this country on the outbreak of
war, painted a few water-colours in the south, presumably to be-
guile the tedium of a stay in a foreign land. These—it is vastly to
our credit—were promptly purchased by certain amateurs “just
because they liked them” and without thought of pecuniary gain.
Lately Mme David has been heard of, as exhibiting from time to
time in the France to which she returned when peace was declared,


HENRY MCBRIDE
297
but few among us were prepared for so large a show as she gave in
the Brummer Galleries nor for such a satisfactory one. She still
guards the spontaneity with which she began as an artist, but
amateurishness is scarcely the word for an art that arrives at its
effects with such precision. I created some confusion in certain
quarters, I find, by expatiating at length upon the Paris note as
sounded by Mme David-a note that some of my friends have
failed to identify. I must insist that Mme David is a genius loci
although she does not give all the facts, but only a few. It is
enough for me to see a single balcony in a drawing by Mme David
to feel that I am again in Paris. She sees the real ones, those with
twisted rails and uncertain platforms that hang from almost any
building in Montmartre or Montparnasse. A balcony, a glimpse
of a garden or a corner café, and I have all I need in the way of a
Parisian outlook—the others may have their Madeleines and their
Notre Dames as they like.
Max Jacob is quite as Paris, too, though in a different way.
He registers a long and unwavering devotion to the street acrobats
and to the less familiar cirques and many who share in this cult
suddenly found themselves liking the drawings of Max Jacob
without in the least being aware that the author of them already
enjoyed a considerable reputation as a writer. That New York
should have been ignorant of Max Jacob is curious.
HENRY MCBRIDE


MUSICAL CHRONICLE
FTER the concert, the streets were full of Varèse's music. The
taxi squeaking to a halt at the crossroad gave a theme of it.
Timbres and motifs were sounded by police whistles, motor-horns
barking and moaning, sea-cows mooing from the river, steam-
drills chattering in the garish night-light of fifty foot excava-
tions. But one heard the familiar blasts and threats from a thou-
sand mechanical beasts with new sharpness, new humour, new ob-
jectivity. Inside the Vanderbilt theatre, overtones of sirens and
noises had flown molten in the clear hard stream of a music. They
had been lifted from out of their natural separateness and made
integral portions of a homogeneous organism of tone, a strange
powerful symphony of new sounds, new stridencies, new abrupt
accents, new acrid richnesses of harmony.
Wagner used to perceive in his imagination people making ges-
tures and saying words; and when he had finished recording the
gestures, and giving the words as he heard them, a musical score
had come into being, and the gestures and the people and the words
had disappeared from his mind. A process similar to Wagner's
seems to enable the most newly come of creative musicians to fuse
the elements which nature throws up about him into the body of
musical art. Edgar Varèse's compositions appear to begin in him
as an idea, a feeling, usually a sense of tempo. He has always had
an intense susceptibility to acute, high, strident noises. As a small
boy, while reading some of the Leatherstocking stories, the feeling
of the prairies began to be associated in his mind with the sound
of a very shrill, bitter-high whistle. This image has persisted in
his imagination, although he has never heard its actual replica any-
where in nature. Besides, his father was a mechanical engineer,
and it is probable that for this reason the world of technique, of
engines and of steel, has ever had a peculiar wonder for him. Here,
in New York, it is West Street, with its tootings and rumblings,
its iron sheds and high ship sides and steel plates and monster
cranes, that excites him most. The impressions of mechanical
sounds are received part consciously, part quite unconsciously: in
Hyperprism, one of Varèse's compositions, there is a re-iterated very


PAUL ROSENFELD
299
shrill high c-sharp, and during the performance of the work, it
brought convulsive laughter out of the audience; but when the
composer returned to his home in Eighth Street that evening, and
sat awake working, he heard from over the city somewhere a very
familiar sound, a siren, and suddenly realized that he had been
hearing it for many nights, over six months, during the time he
composed Hyperprism, and that the tone was exactly a very shrill
high c-sharp. And, when he comes to flesh the excited feeling of
tempo, the subjective impression or dream, the natural sounds of
which the tempo and the impressions are to some extent the off-
spring reappear under his hand in the web of a musical design,
floated and integrated on the tide of a single informing principle.
Hence, Varèse has already succeeded in achieving what Marinetti
and his Italian group set out to do, and failed. The Italians were
hindered in expressing themselves through the sounds of the modern
landscapes by the limitation of the instruments which they had
made for themselves. Their noise-makers are so excessively circum-
scribed in range and in timbre that scarcely anything more than
crude imitations of nature can be produced on them. But a work of
art is always pure idea as well as simulacrum; and the idea can be
bodied forth only through a series of more or less complex relation-
ships of a sort in which the bruiteurs cannot be made to participate.
Even when they are played in attempted combination with some
of the older instruments, their sounds remain in a sort of mean-
ingless separateness. But Varèse, moving out from an idea, has
discovered means of compelling the older instruments in certain
combinations with instruments of the battery to give the new sen-
sations heard by him, and of holding them in the grasp of an
organism. Octandre, the composition played at the Vanderbilt
Theatre the evening of January thirteenth, with all its wealth of
new sounds and accents, its intense stridency and acerbity, never-
theless was perfectly co-ordinated and impelled by inward neces-
sity. It merely pushed music along the road of certain tendencies
marked out in Strawinsky, Ornstein, and Schoenberg. The past
was solidly behind it. “Verliess er uns're Gleise, Schritt er doch
fest und unbeirrt."
The three small movements were hard of surface and machine-
sharp of edge, deeply colourful at moments and beautiful with
intense economicality and concentratedness. The themes were


300
MUSICAL CHRONICLE
stated in cablegram style, and the idea developed itself continually.
There was no doubling of parts; the eight instruments: Aute
alternating with piccolo, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, French horn,
trumpet, trombone, string doublebass, played with great inde-
pendence. What general scheme the movements follow could not
be gathered from the two hearings even though it was apparent
that the work moved through a counterplay of tonal thicknesses
of various degrees, and that the instruments played in very terse
and concentrated counterpoint. The three parts stood solid as ob-
jects of brass. Apparent slight reminiscences of Wagner (the “soli-
tude” of Tristan Act III in the opening recitative, the re-iterated
e-flat which commences the scene between Wotan and Siegfried in
the close of the second movement with its stammering clarinet) dis-
appeared during the second performance.
Edgar Varèse was born in Paris December 22, 1885. His father
was Italian, his mother of Burgundian stock. Varèse studied to be
an engineer until he was seventeen, working in mathematics and the
physical sciences. Gannaye was his first master in composition.
From 1904 to 1905 he worked at the Schola Cantorum, studying
composition with d’Indy and counterpoint and fugue with Albert
Roussel. The next year, he took Widor's master course in com-
position at the Conservatoire. He has also had consultations with
Debussy, Muck, and Strauss. His symphonic poem Bourgoyne
was played by Stransky in Berlin in 1910. Varèse came to America
in 1916, and conducted, under immense difficulties in the spring of
1917, a memorable performance of Berlioz' Requiem at the Hip-
podrome. He has lived in America ever since. Deux Offrandes
for voice and small orchestra and percussion was performed in
1921; Hyperprism in 1922. Other compositions are La Chanson
Des Jeunes Hommes (1905); La Rhapsodie Romane (1906);
Prelude a la Fin d'un Jour (1908); Mehr Licht (1911); Le Cycle
du Nord (1912); Amèriques (1922).
Last month, in this very space, we demanded to know who was
the man destined to lead the art of music onward from Strawinsky's
into fresh virgin realms of sound.
One answer has come very quickly.
PAUL ROSENFELD





L
1
7
Collection Mendelssohn
ENFANT AU CHEVAL. BY PABLO PICASSO



THE EN DIAL
OXXIII
до
APRIL 1924
EMILY DICKINSON
BY CONRAD AIKEN
EMILI
MILY DICKINSON was born in Amherst, Massachusetts,
on December 10th, 1830. She died there, after a life per-
fectly devoid of outward event, in 1886. She was thus an exact
contemporary of Christina Rossetti, who was born five days earlier
than she, and outlived her by eight years. Of her life we know
little. Her father, Edward Dickinson, was a lawyer, and the Treas-
urer of Amherst College; and it is clear that what social or in-
tellectual life was in that bleak era available, was available for
her. That she did not choose to avail herself of it, except in very
slight degree, is also clear; and that this choice, which was gradually
to make of her life an almost inviolable solitude, was made early,
is evident from her Letters. In a letter dated 1853, when she was
twenty-three years old, she remarked, “I do not go from home."
By the time she was thirty, the habit of sequestration had become
distinct, a subject on which she was explicit and emphatic in her
letters to T. W. Higginson-editor of the Atlantic Monthly at
that time. She made it clear that if there was to be any question
of a meeting between them, he would have to come to Amherst-
she would not go to Boston. Higginson, as a matter of fact, saw
her twice, and his record of the encounter is practically the only
record we have of her from any "literary" personage of her lifetime.
Even this is meagre—Higginson saw her superficially, as was in-
evitable. Brave soldier, courtly gentleman, able editor, he was
too much of the old school not to be a little puzzled by her poetry;
and if he was fine enough to guess the fineness, he was not quite
fine enough wholly to understand it. The brief correspondence be-


302
EMILY DICKINSON
tween these two is an extraordinary document of unconscious irony
—the urbanely academic editor reproaching his wayward pupil for
her literary insubordination, her false quantities, and reckless liber-
ties with rhyme; the wayward pupil replying with a humility, beau-
tiful and pathetic, but remaining singularly, with unmalleable
obstinacy, herself. “I saw her,” wrote Higginson, “but twice, face
to face, and brought away the impression of something as unique
and remote as Undine or Mignon or Thekla.” When, thirty years
after the acquaintance had begun, and four after Emily Dick-
inson's death, he was called upon to edit a selection from her poetry,
practically none of which had been published during her lifetime,
his scruples were less severe, and he spoke of her with generosity and
insight. “After all,” he then wrote, “when a thought takes one's
breath away, a lesson on grammar seems an impertinence.” Again,
“In many cases these verses will seem to the reader like poetry torn
up by the roots.” And again, "a quality more suggestive of the
poetry of Blake than of anything to be elsewhere found-flashes of
wholly original and profound insight into nature and life.”
Thus began and ended Emily Dickinson's only important con-
nexion with the literary life of her time. She knew, it is true, Helen
Hunt Jackson, a poetess, for whose anthology, A Masque of Poets,
she gave the poem Success, one of the few poems she allowed pub-
lication during her life. And she knew the Bowles family, owners
and editors of The Springfield Republican, at that time the Man-
chester Guardian of New England—which, as she put it mis-
chievously, was one of "such papers ... as have nothing carnal in
them.” But these she seldom saw; and aside from these she had few
intimates outside of her family; the circle of her world grew steadily
smaller. This is a point of cardinal importance, but unfortunately
no light has been thrown upon it. It is apparent that Miss Dickin-
son became a hermit by deliberate and conscious choice. "A re-
cluse,” wrote Higginson, "by temperament and habit, literally
spending years without setting her foot beyond the doorstep, and
many more years during which her walks were strictly limited to
her father's grounds, she habitually concealed her mind, like her
person, from all but a very few friends; and it was with great
difficulty that she was persuaded to print, during her lifetime, three
or four poems.” One of the co-editors of Poems: Second Series
assures us that this voluntary hermitage was not due to any “love-


CONRAD AIKEN
303
disappointment,” and that she was "not an invalid." "She had
tried society and the world, and had found them lacking.” But this,
of course, tells us nothing. Her Letters show us convincingly that
her girlhood was a normally "social" one-she was active, high-
spirited, and endowed with a considerable gift for extravagant
humour. As a young woman she had, so Mrs Bianchi, a niece, in-
forms us in the preface to The Single Hound, several love-affairs.
But we have no right, without other testimony, to assume here any
ground for the singular psychological change that came over her.
The only other clue we have, of any sort, is the hint from one of
her girlhood friends, that perhaps, “she was longing for poetic
sympathy.” Perhaps! But we must hope that her relatives and
literary executives will eventually see fit to publish all her literary
remains, verse and prose, and to give us thus, perhaps, a good deal
more light on the nature of her life. Anecdotes relating to her
mischievousness, her wit, her waywardness, are not enough. It is
amusing, if horrifying, to know that once, being anxious to dispose
of some kittens, she put them on a shovel, carried them into the
cellar, and dropped them into the nearest jar—which, subsequently,
on the occasion of the visit of a distinguished judge, turned out to
have been the pickle-jar. We like to know too, that even when her
solitude was most remote she was in the habit of lowering from her
window, by a string, small baskets of fruit or confectionery for
children. But there are other things we should like to know much
more.
There seems, however, little likelihood of our being told, by her
family, anything more; and if we seek for the causes of the psychic
injury which so sharply turned her in upon herself, we can only
speculate. Her letters, in this regard, give little light, only showing
us again and again that the injury was deep. Of the fact that she
suffered acutely from intellectual drought, there is evidence enough.
One sees her vividly here—but one sees her, as it were, perpetually
in retreat; always discovering anew, with dismay, the intellectual
limitations of her correspondents; she is discreet, pathetic, baffled,
a little humbled, and draws in her horns; takes sometimes a perverse
pleasure in indulging more than ever, on the occasion of such a dis-
appointment, in her love of a cryptic stylema delicate bombard-
ment of parable and whim which she perfectly knows will stagger;
and then again retreats to the safe ground of the superficial. It


304
EMILY DICKINSON
son.
is perhaps for this reason that the letters give us so remarkably lit-
tle information about her literary interests. The meagreness of
literary allusion is astounding. The Brontës and the Brownings
are referred to—she thought Alexander Smith “not very coherent”
-Joaquin Miller she “could not care about.” Of her own work she
speaks only in the brief unsatisfactory correspondence with Higgin-
To him she wrote in 1863, “I wrote no verse, but one or
two, until this winter.” Otherwise, no scrap of her own literary
history: she appears to have existed in a vacuum. Of the literary
events, tremendous for America, which were taking place during
her most impressionable years, there is hardly a mention. Emer-
son was at the height of his career, and living only sixty miles
away: his poems came out when she was seventeen. When she
was twenty, Hawthorne published The Scarlet Letter; and The
House of Seven Gables the year after. The same year, 1851,
brought out Melville's Moby Dick. The death of Poe took place
in 1849—in 1850 was published the first collected edition of his
poems. When she was twenty-four, Thoreau's Walden appeared;
when she was twenty-five, Leaves of Grass. One can say
with
justice that she came to full “consciousness” at the very moment
when American literature came to flower. That she knew this, there
cannot be any question; nor that she was stimulated and influenced
by it. One must assume that she found in her immediate environ-
ment no one of her own stature, with whom she could admit or
discuss such things; that she lacked the energy or effrontery to
voyage out into the unknown in search of such companionship;
and that lacking this courage, and wanting this help, she became
easily a prey to the then current Emersonian doctrine of mystical
Individualism. In this connexion it is permissible to suggest that
her extreme self-seclusion and secrecy was both a protest and a dis-
play—a kind of vanity masquerading as modesty. She became in-
creasingly precious, of her person as of her thought. Vanity is in
her letters—at the last an unhealthy vanity. She believes that
anything she says, however brief, will be of importance; however
cryptic, will be deciphered. She enjoys being something of a
mystery, and she sometimes deliberately and awkwardly exag.
gerates it. Even in notes of condolence for which she had a
morbid passion-she is vain enough to indulge in sententiousness:
as when she wrote, to a friend whose father had died on her wed-


CONRAD AIKEN
305
ding-day, "Few daughters have the immortality of a father for a
bridal gift."
When we come to Emily Dickinson's poetry, we find the Emer-
sonian individualism clear enough, but perfectly Miss Dickinson's.
Henry James observed of Emerson:
"The doctrine of the supremacy of the individual to himself,
of his originality and, as regards his own character, unique quality,
must have had a great charm for people living in a society in which
introspection, thanks to the want of other entertainment, played
almost the part of a social resource.
There was
much
relish for the utterances of a writer who would help one to take
a picturesque view of one's internal possibilities, and to find in the
landscape of the soul all sorts of fine sunrise and moonlight effects."
.
.
This sums up admirably the social "case" of Miss Dickinson-
it gives us a shrewd picture of the causes of her singular introversion,
and it suggests that we are perhaps justified in considering her
the most perfect flower of New England Transcendentalism. In
her mode of life she carried the doctrine of self-sufficient individ.
ualism farther than Thoreau carried it, or the naïve zealots of
Brook Farm. In her poetry she carried it, with its complement
of passionate moral mysticism, farther than Emerson: which is
to say that as a poet she had more genius than he. Like Emerson,
whose essays must greatly have influenced her, and whose poetry, es-
pecially his gnomic poems, only a little less, she was from the
outset, and remained all her life, a singular mixture of Puritan and
freethinker. The problems of good and evil, of life and death,
obsessed her; the nature and destiny of the human soul; and
Emerson's theory of compensation. Towards God, as one of her
earliest critics is reported to have said, "she exhibited an Emer-
sonian self-possession.” Indeed, she did not, and could not, accept
the Puritan God at all. She was frankly irreverent, on occasion,
a fact which seems to have made her editors a little uneasy-one
hopes that it has not resulted in the suppression of any of her
work. What she was irreverent to, of course, was the Puritan con-
ception of God, the Puritan attitude toward him.
"Heavenly father, take to thee


306
EMILY DICKINSON
The supreme iniquity,
Fashioned by thy candid hand
In a moment contraband.
Though to trust us seems to us
More respectful, -we are dust.
We apologize to thee
For thine own Duplicity.”
This, it must be repeated, is Emily Dickinson's opinion of the
traditional and anthropomorphic “God,” who was still, in her day,
a portentous Victorian gentleman. Her real reverence, the rever-
ence that made her a mystic poet of the finest sort, was reserved
for Nature, which seemed to her a more manifest and more beauti-
ful evidence of Divine Will than creeds and churches. This she
saw, observed, loved, with a burning simplicity and passion which
nevertheless did not exclude her very agile sense of humour. Her
Nature poems, however, are not the most secretly revelatory or
dramatically compulsive of her poems, nor, on the whole, the best.
They are often of extraordinary delicacy-nearly always give us,
with deft brevity, the exact in terms of the quaint. But, also, they
are often superficial, a mere affectionate playing with the smaller
things that give her delight; and to see her at her best and most
characteristic and most profound, one must turn to the remarkable
range of metaphysical speculation and ironic introspection which is
displayed in those sections of her posthumous books which her
editors have captioned Life, and Time and Eternity. In the
former sections are the greater number of her set "meditations” on
the nature of things. For some critics they will always appear too
bare, bleak, and fragmentary. They have no trappings, only here
and there a shred of purple. It is as if Miss Dickinson who, in one
of her letters uttered her contempt for the "obtrusive body," had
wanted to make them, as nearly as possible, disembodied thought.
The thought is there, at all events, hard, bright, and clear; and
her symbols, her metaphors, of which she could be prodigal, have
an analogous clarity and translucency. What is also there is a
downright homeliness which is a perpetual surprise and delight.
Emerson's gnomic style she tunes up to the epigrammatic-the
epigrammatic she often carries to the point of the cryptic; she be-
comes what one might call an epigrammatic symbolist.


CONRAD AIKEN
307
"Lay this laurel on the one
Too intrinsic for renown.
Laurel ! veil your deathless tree,
Him
you chasten, that is he!"
This, from Poems: Second Series, verges perilously on the riddle.
And it often happens that her passionate devotion to concise state-
ment in terms of metaphor left for her readers a small rich emblem
of which the colours tease, the thought entices, but the meaning
escapes. Against this, however, should be set her capacity, when
occasion came, for a granite simplicity, any parallel to which one
must seek in the Seventeenth Century. This, for example, called
Parting.
“My life closed twice before its close;
It yet remains to see
If Immortality unveil
A third event to me,
So huge, so hopeless to conceive,
As these that twice befell.
Parting is all we know of heaven
And all we need of hell.”
Or this, from The Single Hound:
"Not any sunny tone
From any fervent zone
Finds entrance there.
Better a grave of Balm
Toward human nature's home,
And Robins near,
Than a stupendous Tomb
Proclaiming to the gloom
How dead we are."
Both these poems, it will be noted, deal with death; and it
must be observed that the number of poems by Miss Dickinson on
this subject is one of the most remarkable things about her. Death,
and the problem of life after death, obsessed her. She seems to


308
EMILY DICKINSON
have thought of it constantly—she died all her life, she probed
death daily. “That bareheaded life under grass worries one like
a wasp,” she wrote. Ultimately, the obsession became morbid,
and her eagerness for details, after the death of a friend-the
hungry desire to know how she died—became almost vulture-like.
But the preoccupation, with its horrible uncertainties—its doubts
about immortality, its hatred of the flesh, and its many reversals
of both positions-gave us her sharpest work. The theme was
inexhaustible for her. If her poetry seldom became "lyrical,"
seldom departed from the colourless sobriety of its bare iambics
and toneless assonance, it did so most of all when the subject was
death. Death profoundly and cruelly invited her. It was most
of all when she tried “to touch the smile,” and dipped her "fingers
in the frost,” that she took full possession of her genius.
Her genius was, it remains to say, as erratic as it was brilliant.
Her disregard for accepted forms or for regularities was incorrigible.
Grammar, rhyme, metre—anything went by the board if it stood
in the way of thought or freedom of utterance. Sometimes this
arrogance was justified; sometimes not. She did not care in the
least for variety of effect-of her six hundred-odd poems practically
all are in octosyllabic quatrains or couplets, sometimes with rhyme,
sometimes with assonance, sometimes with neither. Everywhere,
when one first comes to these poems, one seems to see nothing but
a colourless dry monotony. How deceptive a monotony, concealing
what reserves of depth and splendour; what subtleties of mood
and tone! Once adjust oneself to the spinsterly angularity of
the mode, its lack of eloquence or rhetorical speed, its naive and
often prosaic directness, one discovers felicities of thought and
phrase on every page. The magic is terse and sure. And ultimately
one simply sighs at Miss Dickinson's singular perversity, her lapses
and tyrannies, and accepts them as an inevitable part of the strange
and original genius she was. The lapses and tyrannies become a
positive charm one even suspects they were deliberate. They
satisfied her—therefore they satisfy us. This marks, of course,
our complete surrender to her highly individual gift, and to the
singular sharp beauty, present everywhere, of her personality. The
two things cannot be separated; and together, one must suppose,
they suffice to put her among the finest poets in the language.



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BLIND WOMAN AND BOY.
BY HENRY J. GLINTEN KAMP






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TWO MEXICANS FROM XOCHIMILCO.
BY HENRY J. GLINTEN KAMP






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WOMAN AND MAN.
BY HENRY J. GLINTENKAMP





THE IDIOT
BY F. V. BRANFORD
Eighty years beside Loch Goil,
Hewing timber, turning soil,
Time had done him ease in toil.
Vast seasons rolling grandly by
Had stamped him with Eternity.
Man and mountain stood star-high.
He walked a slow deliberate pace,
And, like the world that walks in space,
Seemed less a being than a place.
The man was moulded from the hill,
A portion of that moveless Will
That labouring, is for ever still.
==!1m12!?!" !!!!
His mien, his gait, his mindless gaze
Held all the soul of me in haze,
As fox and serpent hold their prey's.
***
I spoke. Abruptly he began
A murmuring trail of words that ran
In ruin through the heart of Man.-
(Such words the wise dread Spirit spake
In the desert, saying, "Make,
Son of Man, bread for Man's sake.")
-A rhythmic, low, unbroken sound,
Nearly wordless, like profound
Music breaking from the ground.
Nature here herself had not



310
THE IDIOT
Coined in the common ore of thought:
She had with rarer metal wrought.
For he spoke not as one weak-
Witted, but not as men speak
Whose wit is bolted under Greek
Concepts. In a waste of mind,
Lesser and greater than the blind
Bat of intellect can find,
Something moved:-the primal hoarse
Voice of Matter that the Norse
Gleemen heard in tarns and tors.
And still the Idiot speaks. And still
His dark wild wings of language thrill
Across my sight against my will.



Property of Mrs Payne Whitney
BY JOHN SINGER SARGENT
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.





DEATH IN VENICE
BY THOMAS MANN
Translated From the German by Kenneth Burke
III (continued)
#
Three
HE weather did not improve any the following day. A land
breeze was blowing. Under a cloudy ashen sky, the sea lay in
dull peacefulness; it seemed shrivelled up, with a close dreary hori-
zon, and it had retreated from the beach, baring the long ribs of
several sandbanks. As Aschenbach opened his window he thought
that he could detect the foul smell of the lagoon.
He felt depressed. He thought already of leaving. Once, years
ago, after several weeks of spring here, this same weather had
afflicted him, and impaired his health so seriously that he had to
abandon Venice like a fugitive. Was not this old feverish unrest
again setting in, the pressure in the temples, the heaviness of the
eyelids? It would be annoying to change his residence still another
time; but if the wind did not turn, he could not stay here. To
be safe, he did not unpack completely. He breakfasted at nine
in the buffet-room provided for this purpose between the lobby
and the dining-room.
That formal silence reigned here which is the ambition of large
hotels. The waiters who were serving walked about on soft soles.
Nothing was audible but the tinkling of the tea-things, a word
half-whispered. In one corner, obliquely across from the door,
and two tables removed from his own, Aschenbach observed the
Polish girls with their governess. Erect and red-eyed, their ash-
blond hair freshly smoothed down, dressed in stiff blue linen with
little white cuffs and turned-down collars—they were sitting there,
handing around a glass of marmalade. They had almost finished
their breakfast. The boy was missing.
Aschenbach smiled. "Well, little Phaeacian!" he thought.
"You seem to be enjoying the pleasant privilege of having your
sleep out.” And suddenly exhilarated, he recited to himself the
line: "A frequent change of dress; warm baths, and rest.”



312
DEATH IN VENICE
He breakfasted without haste. From the porter, who entered
the hall holding his braided cap in his hand, he received some for.
warded mail; and while he smoked a cigarette he opened a few
letters. In this way it happened that he was present at the
entrance of the late sleeper who was being waited for over yonder.
He came through the glass door and crossed the room in silence
to his sisters' table. His approach—the way he held the upper
part of his body, and bent his knees, the movement of his white-
shod feet—had an extraordinary charm; he walked very lightly,
at once timid and proud, and this became still more lovely through
the childish embarrassment with which, twice as he proceeded, he
turned his face towards the centre of the room, raising and lowering
his eyes. Smiling, with something half-muttered in his soft vague
tongue, he took his place; and now, as he turned his full profile
to the observer, Aschenbach was again astonished, terrified even,
by the really godlike beauty of this human child. To-day the
boy was wearing a light blouse of blue and white striped cotton
goods, with a red silk tie in front, and closed at the neck by a plain
white high collar. This collar lacked the distinctiveness of the
blouse, but above it the flowering head was poised with an incom-
parable seductiveness—the head of an Eros, in blended yellows of
Parian marble, with fine serious brows, the temples and ears cov-
ered softly by the abrupt encroachment of his curls.
"Good, good!” Aschenbach thought, with that deliberate expert
appraisal which artists sometimes employ as a subterfuge when
they have been carried away with delight before a masterwork.
And he thought further: “Really, if the sea and the beach weren't
waiting for me, I should stay here as long as you stayed.” But
he went then, passed through the lobby under the inspection of the
servants, down the wide terrace, and straight across the boardwalk
to the section of the beach reserved for the hotel guests. The
barefoot old man in dungarees and straw hat who was functioning
here as bathing master assigned him to the bath house he had
rented; a table and a seat were placed on the sandy board plat-
form, and he made himself comfortable in the lounge chair which
he had drawn closer to the sea, out into the waxen yellow sand.
More than ever before he was entertained and amused by the
sights on the beach, this spectacle of carefree, civilized people
getting sensuous enjoyment at the very edge of the elements. The


THOMAS MANN
313
grey flat sea was already alive with wading children, swimmers,
a motley of figures lying on the sandbanks with arms bent behind
their heads. Others were rowing about in little red and blue
striped boats without keels; they were continually upsetting, amid
laughter. Before the long stretches of bathing houses, where people
were sitting on the platforms as though on small verandahs, there
was a play of movement against the line of rest and inertness
behind-visits and chatter, fastidious morning elegance alongside
the nakedness which, boldly at ease, was enjoying the freedom
which the place afforded. Further in front, on the damp firm sand,
people were parading about in white bathing cloaks, in ample,
brilliantly coloured wrappers. An elaborate sand pile to the right,
erected by children, had flags in the colours of all nations planted
around it. Venders of shells, cakes, and fruit spread out their
wares, kneeling. To the left, before one of the bathing houses
which stood at right angles to the others and to the sea, a Russian
family was encamped: men with beards and large teeth, slow
delicate women, a Baltic girl sitting by an easel and painting the
sea amidst exclamations of despair, two ugly good-natured children,
an old maid-servant who wore a kerchief on her head and had the
alert scraping manners of a slave. Delighted and appreciative,
they were living there, patiently calling the names of the two
rowdy disobedient children, using their scanty Italian to joke with
the humorous old man from whom they were buying candy, kissing
one another on the cheek, and not in the least concerned with any
one who might be observing their community.
"Yes, I shall stay,” Aschenbach thought. “Where would things
be better?" And his hands folded in his lap, he let his eyes lose
themselves in the expanses of the sea, his gaze gliding, swimming,
and failing in the monotone mist of the wilderness of space. He
loved the ocean for deep-seated reasons: because of that yearning
for
rest, when the hard-pressed artist hungers to shut out the exact-
ing multiplicities of experience and hide himself on the breast of
the simple, the vast; and because of a forbidden hankering-
seductive, by virtue of its being directly opposed to his obligations
-after the incommunicable, the incommensurate, the eternal, the
non-existent. To be at rest in the face of perfection is the hunger of
everyone who is aiming at excellence; and what is the non-existent
but a form of perfection? But now, just as his dreams were so
22



314
DEATH IN VENICE
far out in vacancy, suddenly the horizontal fringe of the sea was
broken by a human figure; and as he brought his eyes back from the
unbounded, and focussed them, it was the lovely boy who was
there, coming from the left and passing him on the sand. He was
barefooted, ready for wading, his slender legs exposed above the
knees; he walked slowly, but as lightly and proudly as though it
were the customary thing for him to move about without shoes;
and he was looking around him towards the line of bathing houses
opposite. But as soon as he had noticed the Russian family, Occu-
pied with their own harmony and contentment, a cloud of scorn and
detestation passed over his face. His brow darkened, his mouth was
compressed, he gave his lips an embittered twist to one side so that
the cheek was distorted, and the forehead became so heavily fur-
rowed that the eyes seemed sunken beneath its pressure: malicious
and glowering, they spoke the language of hate. He looked down,
looked back once more threateningly, then with his shoulder made
an abrupt gesture of disdain and dismissal, and left the enemy
behind him.
A kind of pudency or confusion, something like respect and
shyness, caused Aschenbach to turn away as though he had seen
nothing. For the earnest-minded who have been casual observers
of some passion, struggle against making use, even to themselves,
of what they have seen. But he was both cheered and unstrung-
which is to say, he was happy. This childish fanaticism, directed
against the most good-natured possible aspect of life—it brought
the divinely arbitrary into human relationships; it made a delight-
ful natural picture which had appealed only to the eye now seem
worthy of a deeper sympathy; and it gave the figure of this half-
grown boy, who had already been important enough by his sheer
beauty, something to offset him still further, and to make one take
him more seriously than his years justified. Still looking away,
Aschenbach could hear the boy's voice, the shrill, somewhat weak
voice with which, in the distance now, he was trying to call hello
to his playfellows busied around the sand pile. They answered
him, shouting back his name, or some affectionate nickname;
and Aschenbach listened with a certain curiosity, without being
able to catch anything more definite than two melodic syllables
like "Adgio,” or still more frequently “Adgiu,” with a ringing
u-sound prolonged at the end. He was pleased with the resonance


THOMAS MANN
315
es
of this; he found it adequate to the subject. He repeated it
silently and, satisfied, turned to his letters and manuscripts.
His small portable writing-desk on his knees he began writing
with his fountain pen an answer to this or that bit of corre-
spondence. But after the first fifteen minutes he found it a pity
to abandon the situation—the most enjoyable he could think of -
in this manner and waste it in activities which did not interest
him. He tossed the writing materials to one side, and he faced the
ocean again; soon afterwards, diverted by the childish voices
around the sand heap, he revolved his head comfortably along the
back of the chair towards the right, to discover where that excellent
little Adgio might be and what he was doing.
He was found at a glance; the red tie on his breast was not to
be overlooked. Busied with the others in laying an old plank
across the damp moat of the sand castle, he was nodding, and
shouting instructions for this work. There were about ten com-
panions with him, boys and girls of his age, and a few younger
ones who were chattering with one another in Polish, French, and
in several Balkan tongues. But it was his name which rang out
most often. He was openly in demand, sought after, admired.
One boy especially, like him a Pole, a stocky fellow who was called
something like "Jaschu,” with sleek black hair and a belted linen
coat, seemed to be his closest vassal and friend. When the work
on the sand structure was finished for the time being, they walked
arm in arm along the beach, and the boy who was called "Jaschu”
kissed the beauty.
Aschenbach was half minded to raise a warning finger. “I
advise you, Cristobulus," he thought, smiling, "to travel for a
year! For you need that much time at least to get over it.” And
then he breakfasted on large ripe strawberries which he got from a
peddler. It had become very warm, although the sun could no
longer penetrate the blanket of mist in the sky. Laziness clogged
his brain, even while his senses delighted in the numbing, drugging
distractions of the ocean's stillness. To guess, to puzzle out just
what name it was that sounded something like "Adgio," seemed
to the sober man an appropriate ambition, a thoroughly compre-
hensive pursuit. And with the aid of a few scrappy recollections
of Polish he decided that they must mean Tadzio, the shortened
form of Tadeusz, and sounding like Tadziu when it is called.
1
15


316
DEATH IN VENICE
Tadzio was bathing. Aschenbach, who had lost sight of him, ,
spied his head and the arm with which he was propelling himself,
far out in the water; for the sea must have been smooth for a long
distance out.
But already people seemed worried about him;
women's voices were calling after him from the bathing houses,
uttering this name again and again. It almost dominated the
beach like a battle-cry, and with its soft consonants, its long drawn
u-note at the end, it had something at once sweet and wild about it:
"Tadziu! Tadziu!” He turned back; beating the resistent
water into a foam with his legs he hurried, his head bent down over
the waves. And to see how this living figure, graceful and clean-
cut in its advance, with dripping curls, and lovely as some frail
god, came up out of the depths of sky and sea, rose and separated
from the elements—this spectacle aroused a sense of myth, it was
like some poet's recovery of time at its beginning, of the origin of
forms and the birth of gods. Aschenbach listened with closed eyes
to this song ringing within him, and he thought again that it was
pleasant here, and that he would like to remain.
Later Tadzio was resting from his bath; he lay in the sand,
wrapped in his white robe, which was drawn under the right
shoulder, his head supported on his bare arm. And even when
Aschenbach was not observing him, but was reading a few pages
in his book, he hardly ever forgot that this boy was lying there
and that it would cost him only a slight turn of his head to the
right to behold the mystery. It seemed that he was sitting here
just to keep watch over his repose-busied with his own concerns,
and yet constantly aware of this noble picture at his right, not far
in the distance. And he was stirred by a paternal affection, the
profound leaning which those who have devoted their thoughts
to the creation of beauty feel towards those who possess beauty
itself.
A little past noon he left the beach, returned to the hotel, and
was taken up to his room. He stayed there for some time in front
of the mirror, looking at his grey hair, his tired sharp features. At
this moment he thought of his reputation, and of the fact that he
was often recognized on the streets and observed with respect,
thanks to the sure aim and the appealing finish of his words. He
called up all the exterior successes of his talent which he could


THOMAS MANN
317
a group
think of, remembering also his elevation to the knighthood. Then
he went down to the dining-hall for lunch, and ate at his little
table. As he was riding up in the lift, after the meal was ended,
of
young people just coming from breakfast pressed into
the swaying cage after him, and Tadzio entered too. He stood
quite near to Aschenbach, for the first time so near that Aschenbach
could see him, not with the aloofness of a picture, but in minute
detail, in all his human particularities. The boy was addressed
by someone or other, and as he was answering with an indescribably
agreeable smile he stepped out again, on the second floor, walking
backwards, and with his eyes lowered. “Beauty makes modest,”
Aschenbach thought, and he tried insistently to explain why this
was so. But he had noticed that Tadzio's teeth were not all they
should be; they were somewhat jagged and pale. The enamel did
not look healthy; it had a peculiar brittleness and transparency,
as is often the case with anaemics. "He is very frail, he is sickly,
Aschenbach thought. "In all probability he will not grow old.”
And he refused to reckon with the feeling of gratification or reas-
surance which accompanied this notion.
He
spent two hours in his room, and in the afternoon he rode
in the vaporetto across the foul-smelling lagoon to Venice. He got
off at San Marco, took tea on the Piazza, and then, in accord with
his schedule for the day, he went for a walk through the streets.
Yet it was this walk which produced a complete reversal in his
attitudes and his plans.
An offensive sultriness lay over the streets. The air was so
heavy that the smells pouring out of homes, stores, and eating
houses became mixed with oil, vapours, clouds of perfume, and
still other odours and these would not blow away, but hung
in layers. Cigarette smoke remained suspended, disappearing very
slowly. The crush of people along the narrow streets irritated
rather than entertained the walker. The farther he went, the more
he was depressed by the repulsive condition resulting from the com-
bination of sea air and sirocco, which was at the same time both
stimulating and enervating. He broke into an uncomfortable
sweat. His eyes failed him, his chest became tight, he had a fever,
the blood was pounding in his head. He fled from the crowded
business streets across a bridge into the walks of the poor. On a


318
DEATH IN VENICE
quiet square, one of those forgotten and enchanting places which
lie in the interior of Venice, he rested at the brink of a well, dried
his forehead, and realized that he would have to leave here.
For the second and last time it had been demonstrated that this
city in this kind of weather was decidedly unhealthy for him. It
seemed foolish to attempt a stubborn resistance, while the prospects
for a change of wind were completely uncertain. A quick decision
was called for. It was not possible to go home this soon. Neither
summer nor winter quarters were prepared to receive him. But
this was not the only place where there were sea and beach; and
elsewhere these could be found without the lagoon and its malarial
mists. He remembered a little watering place not far from Trieste
which had been praised to him. Why not there? And without
delay, so that this new change of location would still have time to
do him some good. He pronounced this as good as settled, and
stood up. At the next gondola station he took a boat back to San
Marco, and was led through the dreary labyrinth of canals, under
fancy marble balconies flanked with lions, around the corners of
smooth walls, past the sorrowing façades of palaces which mirrored
large dilapidated business-signs in the pulsing water. He had
trouble arriving there, for the gondolier, who was in league with
lace-makers and glass-blowers, was always trying to land him for
inspections and purchases; and just as the bizarre trip through
Venice would begin to cast its spell, the greedy business sense of
the sunken Queen did all it could to destroy the illusion.
When he had returned to the hotel he announced at the office
before dinner that unforeseen developments necessitated his depar-
ture the following morning. He was assured of their regrets. He
settled his accounts. He dined, and spent the warm evening
reading the newspapers in a rocking-chair on the rear terrace. Before
going to bed he got his luggage all ready for departure.
He did not sleep so well as he might, since the impending
break-up made him restless. When he opened the window in the
morning the sky was as overcast as ever, but the air seemed fresher,
and he was already beginning to repent. Hadn't his decision been
somewhat hasty and uncalled for, the result of a passing diffidence
and indisposition? If he had delayed a little, if, instead of sur-
rendering so easily, he had made some attempt to adjust himself
to the air of Venice or to wait for an improvement in the weather,


THOMAS MANN
319
he would not be so rushed and inconvenienced, but could anticipate
another forenoon on the beach like yesterday's. Too late. Now
he would have to go on wanting what he had wanted yesterday.
He dressed, and at about eight o'clock rode down to the ground floor
for breakfast.
As he entered, the buffet-room was still empty of guests. A few
came in while he sat waiting for his order. With his tea cup to his
lips, he saw the Polish girls and their governess appear: rigid,
with morning freshness, their eyes still red, they walked across to
their table in the corner by the window. Immediately afterwards,
the porter approached him, cap in hand, and warned him that it
was time to go. The automobile is ready to take him and the
other passengers to the Hotel Excelsior, and from here the motor-
boat will bring the ladies and gentlemen to the station through
the company's private canal. Time is pressing.--Aschenbach
found that it was doing nothing of the sort. It was still over an
hour before his train left. He was irritated by this hotel custom
of hustling departing guests out of the house, and indicated to the
porter that he wished to finish his breakfast in peace. The man
retired hesitatingly, to appear again five minutes later. It is im-
possible for the car to wait any longer. Then he would take a cab,
and carry his trunk with him, Aschenbach replied in anger. He
would use the public steamboat at the proper time, and he requested
that it be left to him personally to worry about his departure.
The employee bowed himself away. Pleased with the way he had
warded off these importunate warnings, Aschenbach finished his
meal at leisure; in fact, he even let the waiter bring him a news-
paper. The time had become quite short when he finally arose.
It was fitting that at the same moment Tadzio should come through
the glass door.
On the way to his table he walked in the opposite direction to
Aschenbach, lowering his eyes modestly before the man with the
grey hair and high forehead, only to raise them again, in his
delicious manner, soft and full upon him—and he had passed.
“Good-bye, Tadzio!” Aschenbach thought. “I did not see much
of you.” He did what was unusual with him, really formed the
words on his lips and spoke them to himself; then he added, “God
bless you !"-After this he left, distributed tips, was ushered out
by the small gentle manager in the French frock coat, and made


320
DEATH IN VENICE
off from the hotel on foot, as he had come, going along the white
blossoming avenue which crossed the island to the steamer bridge,
accompanied by the house servant carrying his hand luggage. He
arrived, took his place—and then followed a painful journey
through all the depths of regret.
It was the familiar trip across the lagoon, past San Marco, up
the Grand Canal. Aschenbach sat on the circular bench at the
bow, his arm supported against the railing, shading his eyes with
his hand. The public gardens were left behind, the Piazzetta
opened up once more in princely splendour and was gone, then
came the great flock of palaces, and as the channel made a turn
the magnificently slung marble arch of the Rialto came into view.
The traveller was watching; his emotions were in conflict. The
atmosphere of the city, this slightly foul smell of sea and swamp
which he had been so anxious to avoid-he breathed it now in
deep, exquisitely painful draughts. Was it possible that he had
not known, had not considered, just how much he was attached to
all this? What had been a partial misgiving this morning, a faint
doubt as to the advisability of his move, now became a distress,
a positive misery, a spiritual hunger, and so bitter that it frequently
brought tears to his eyes, while he told himself that he could not
possibly have foreseen it. Hardest of all to bear, at times com-
pletely insufferable, was the thought that he would never see Venice
again, that this was a leave-taking for ever. Since it had been
shown for the second time that the city affected his health, since
he was compelled for the second time to get away in all haste,
from now on he would have to consider it a place impossible and
forbidden to him, a place which he was not equal to, and which it
would be foolish for him to visit again. Yes, he felt that if he
left now, he would be shamefaced and defiant enough never to
see again the beloved city which had twice caused him a physical
break-down. And of a sudden this struggle between his desires and
his physical strength seemed to the aging man so grave and impor-
tant, his physical defeat seemed so dishonourable, so much a
challenge to hold out at any cost, that he could not understand
the ready submissiveness of the day before, when he had decided
to give in without attempting any serious resistance.
Meanwhile the steamboat was nearing the station; pain and
perplexity increased, he became distracted. In his affliction, he


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felt that it was impossible to leave, and just as impossible to turn
back. The conflict was intense as he entered the station. It was
very late; there was not a moment to lose if he was to catch the
train. He wanted to, and he did not want to. But time was
pressing ; it drove him on. He hurried to get his ticket, and looked
about in the tumult of the hall for the officer on duty here from
the hotel. The man appeared and announced that the large trunk
had been transferred. Transferred already? Yes, thank you-
to Como. To Como? And in the midst of hasty running back
and forth, angry questions and confused answers, it came to light
that the trunk had already been sent with other foreign baggage
from the express office of the Hotel Excelsior in a completely wrong
direction.
Aschenbach had difficulty in preserving the expression which was
required under these circumstances. He was almost convulsed
with an adventurous delight, an unbelievable hilarity. The em-
ployee rushed off to see if it were still possible to stop the trunk,
and as was to be expected he returned with nothing accomplished.
Aschenbach declared that he did not want to travel without his
trunk, but had decided to go back and wait at the beach hotel for
its return. Was the company's motorboat still at the station?
The man assured him that it was lying at the door. With Italian
volubility he persuaded the clerk at the ticket window to redeem
the cancelled ticket, he swore that they would act speedily, that
no time or money would be spared in recovering the trunk promptly,
and-so the strange thing happened that, twenty minutes after
his arrival at the station, the traveller found himself again on the
Grand Canal, returning to the Lido.
Here was an adventure, wonderful, abashing, and comically
dreamlike beyond belief: places which he had just bid farewell
to for ever in the most abject misery-yet he had been turned and
driven back by fate, and was seeing them again in the same hour!
The
spray from the bow, washing between gondolas and steamers
with an absurd agility, shot the speedy little craft ahead to its
goal, while the one passenger was hiding the nervousness and ebul-
lience of a truant boy under the mask of resigned anger. From
time to time he shook with laughter at this mishap which, as he
told himself, could not have turned out better for a child of destiny.
There were explanations to be given, expressions of astonishment
+
11


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DEATH IN VENICE
to be faced—and then, he told himself, everything would be all
right; then a misfortune would be avoided, a grave error rectified.
And all that he had thought he was leaving behind him would be
open to him again, there at his disposal. And to cap it all,
was the rapidity of the ride deceiving him, or was the wind really
coming from the sea ?
The waves beat against the walls of the narrow canal which
runs through the island to the Hotel Excelsior. An automobile
omnibus was awaiting his return there, and took him above the
rippling sea straight to the beach hotel. The little manager with
moustache and long-tailed frock coat came down the stairs to
meet him.
He ingratiatingly regretted the episode, spoke of it as highly
painful to him and the establishment, but firmly approved of
Aschenbach's decision to wait here for the baggage. Of course his
room had been given up, but there was another one, just as good,
which he could occupy immediately. "Pas de chance, Monsieur,"
the Swiss elevator boy smiled as they were ascending. And so the
fugitive was established again, in a room almost identical to the
other in its location and furnishings.
Tired out by the confusion of this strange forenoon, he distrib-
uted the contents of his hand-bag about the room and dropped
into an arm-chair by the open window. The sea had become a pale
green, the air seemed thinner and purer; the beach, with its cabins
and boats, seemed to have colour, although the sky was still grey.
Aschenbach looked out, his hands folded in his lap; he was content
to be back, but shook his head disapprovingly at his irresolution,
his failure to know his own mind. He sat here for the better part
of an hour, resting and dreaming vaguely. About noon he saw
Tadzio in a striped linen suit with a red tie, coming back from the
sea across the private beach and along the boardwalk to the hotel.
Aschenbach recognized him from this altitude before he had actually
set eyes on him; he was about to think some such words as "Well,
Tadzio, there you are again!" but at the same moment he felt this
careless greeting go dumb before the truth in his heart. He felt
the exhilaration of his blood, a conflict of pain and pleasure, and
he realized that it was Tadzio who had made it so difficult for him
to leave.
He sat very still, entirely unobserved from this height, and


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looked within himself. His features were alert, his eyebrows raised,
and an attentive, keenly inquisitive smile distended his mouth.
Then he raised his head; lifted both hands, which had hung relaxed
over the arms of the chair, and in a slow twisting movement turned
the palms downward—as though to suggest an opening and spread-
ing outward of his arms. It was a spontaneous act of welcome, of
calm acceptance.
IV
Day after day now the naked god with the hot cheeks drove his
fire-breathing quadriga across the expanses of the sky, and his
yellow locks fluttered in the assault of the east wind. A white
silk sheen stretched over the slowly simmering Ponto. The sand
glowed. Beneath the quaking silver blue of the ether rust-
coloured canvasses were spread in front of the beach bathing houses,
and the afternoons were spent in the sharply demarcated spots of
shade which they cast. But it was also delightful in the evening,
when the vegetation in the park had the smell of balsam, and the
stars were working through their courses above, and the soft per-
sistent murmur of the sea came up enchantingly through the night.
Such evenings contained the cheering promise that more sunny days
of casual idleness would follow, dotted with countless closely inter-
spersed possibilities of well-timed accidents.
The guest who was detained here by such an accommodating
mishap did not consider the return of his property as sufficient
grounds for another departure. He suffered some inconvenience
for two days, and had to appear for meals in the large dining-room
in his travelling clothes. When the strayed luggage was finally
deposited in his room again, he unpacked completely and filled the
closet and drawers with his belongings; he had decided to remain
here indefinitely, content now that he could pass the hours on the
beach in a silk suit and appear for dinner at his little table again
in appropriate evening dress.
The comfortable rhythm of this life had already cast its spell
over him; he was soon enticed by the ease, the mild splendour, of
his
programme. Indeed, what a place to be in, when the usual
allurement of living in watering places on southern shores was
coupled with the immediate nearness of the most wonderful of all


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cities! Aschenbach was not a lover of pleasure. Whenever there
was some call for him to take a holiday, to indulge himself, to
have a good time—and this was especially true at an earlier age-
restlessness and repugnance soon drove him back to his rigorous
toil, the faithful sober efforts of his daily routine. Except that this
place was bewitching him, relaxing his will, making him happy.
In the mornings, under the shelter of his bathing house, letting his
eyes roam dreamily in the blue of the southern sea; or on a warm
night as he leaned back against the cushions of the gondola carry.
ing him under the broad starry sky home to the Lido from the
Piazza di San Marco after long hours of idleness—and the brilliant
lights, the melting notes of the serenade were being left behind-
he often recalled his place in the mountains, the scene of his battles
in the summer, where the clouds blew low across his garden, and
terrifying storms put out the lamps at night, and the crows which
he fed were swinging in the tops of the pine trees. Then everything
seemed just right to him, as though he were lifted into the Elysian
fields, on the borders of the earth, where man enjoys the easiest life,
where there is no snow or winter, nor storms and pouring rains, but
where Oceanus continually sends forth gentle cooling breezes, and
the days pass in a blessed inactivity, without work, without effort,
devoted wholly to the sun and to the feast days of the sun.
Aschenbach saw the boy Tadzio frequently, almost constantly.
Owing to the limited range of territory and the regularity of their
lives, the beauty was near him at short intervals throughout the day.
He saw him, met him, everywhere: in the lower rooms of the
hotel, on the cooling water trips to the city and back, in the arcades
of the square, and at times when he was especially lucky ran
across him on the streets. But principally, and with the most
gratifying regularity, the forenoon on the beach allowed him to
admire and study this rare spectacle at his leisure. Yes, it was
this guaranty of happiness, this daily recurrence of good fortune,
which made his stay here so precious, and gave him such pleasure
in the constant procession of sunny days.
He was up as early as he used to be when under the driving
pressure of work, and was on the beach before most people, when
the sun was still mild and the sea lay blinding white in the dreami.
ness of morning. He spoke amiably to the guard of the private
beach, and also spoke familiarly to the barefoot, white-bearded old


THOMAS MANN
325
man who had prepared his place for him, stretching the brown
canopy and bringing the furniture of the cabin out on the platform.
Then he took his seat. There would now be three or four hours in
which the sun mounted and gained terrific strength, the sea a
deeper and deeper blue, and he might look at Tadzio.
He saw him approaching from the left, along the edge of the
sea; he saw him as he stepped out backwards from among the
cabins; or he would suddenly find, with a shock of pleasure, that
he had missed his coming, that he was already here in the blue
and white bathing suit which was his only garment now while on
the beach, that he had already commenced his usual activities in
the sun and the sand—a pleasantly trilling, idle, and unstable
manner of living, a mixture of rest and play. Tadzio would
saunter about, wade, dig, catch things, lie down, go for a swim,
all the while being kept under surveillance by the women on the
platform who made his name ring out in their falsetto voices:
"Tadziu! Tadziu!" Then he would come running to them with
a look of eagerness, to tell them what he had seen, what he had
experienced, or to show them what he had found or caught: mussels,
sea-horses, jelly-fish, and crabs that ran sideways. Aschenbach
did not understand a word he said, and though it might have been
the most ordinary thing in the world, it was a vague harmony in
his ear. So the foreignness of the boy's speech turned it into music,
a wanton sun poured its prodigal splendour down over him, and
his figure was always set off against the background of an intense
sea-blue.
This piquant body was so freely exhibited that his eyes soon
knew every line and posture. He was continually rediscovering
with new pleasure all this familiar beauty, and his astonishment
at its delicate appeal to his senses was unending. The boy was
called to greet a guest who was paying his respects to the ladies at
the bathing house. He came running, running wet perhaps out
of the water, tossed back his curls, and as he held out his hand,
resting on one leg and raising his other foot on the toes, the set of
his body was delightful; it had a charming expectancy about it,
a well-meaning shyness, a winsomeness which showed his aristo-
cratic training.
He lay stretched full length, his bath towel
slung across his shoulders, his delicately chiselled arm supported
in the sand, his chin in his palm; the boy called Jaschu was squat-
.


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DEATH IN VENICE
ting near him and making up to him—and nothing could be more
enchanting than the smile of his eyes and lips when the leader
glanced up at his inferior, his servant. . . . He stood on the edge
of the sea, alone, apart from his people, quite near to Aschenbach-
erect, his hands locked across the back of his neck, he swayed slowly
on the balls of his feet, looked dreamily into the blueness of sea
and sky, while tiny waves rolled up and bathed his feet. His
honey-coloured hair clung in rings about his neck and temples.
The sun made the down on his back glitter; the fine etching of the
ribs, the symmetry of the chest, were emphasized by the tightness
of the suit across the buttocks. His arm-pits were still as smooth
as those of a statue; the hollows of his knees glistened, and their
bluish veins made his body seem built of some clearer stuff. What
rigour, what precision of thought, were expressed in this erect,
youthfully perfect body! Yet the pure and strenuous will which,
darkly at work, could bring such godlike sculpture to the light-
was not he, the artist, familiar with this? Did it not operate in
him too when he, under the press of frugal passions, would free
from the marble mass of speech some slender form which he had
seen in the mind and which he put before his fellows as a statue
and a mirror of intellectual beauty?
Statue and mirror! His eyes took in the noble form there bor-
dered with blue; and with a rush of enthusiasm he felt that in this
spectacle he was catching the beautiful itself, form as the thought
of God, the one pure perfection which lives in the mind, and which,
in this symbol and likeness, had been placed here quietly and
simply as an object of devotion. That was drunkenness; and
eagerly, without thinking, the aging artist welcomed it. His mind
was in travail; all that he had learned, dropped back into flux;
his understanding threw up age-old thoughts which he had inherited
with youth though they had never before lived with their own fire.
Is it not written that the sun diverts our attention from intellectual
to sensual things ? Reason and understanding, it is said, become
so numbed and enchanted that the soul forgets everything out of
delight with its immediate circumstances, and in astonishment
becomes attached to the most beautiful object shined on by the sun;
indeed, only with the aid of a body is it capable then of raising
itself to higher considerations. To be sure, Amor did as the in-
structors of mathematics who show backward children tangible


THOMAS MANN
327
representations of the pure forms—similarly the god, in order to
make the spiritual visible for us, readily utilized the form and
colour of man's youth, and as a reminder he adorned these with the
reflected splendour of beauty which, when we behold it, makes us
flare up in pain and hope.
His enthusiasm suggested these things, put him in the mood for
them. And from the noise of the sea and the lustre of the sun he
wove himself a charming picture. Here was the old plane-tree,
not far from the walls of Athens—a holy, shadowy place filled
with the smell of agnus castus blossoms and decorated with orna-
ments and images sacred to Achelous and the Nymphs. Clear and
pure, the brook at the foot of the spreading tree fell across the
smooth pebbles; the cicadas were fiddling. But on the grass,
which was like a pillow gently sloping to the head, two people
were stretched out, in hiding from the heat of the day: an older
man and a youth, one ugly and one beautiful, wisdom next to
loveliness. And amid gallantries and skilfully engaging banter,
Socrates was instructing Phaedrus in matters of desire and virtue.
He spoke to him of the hot terror which the initiate suffer when
their
eyes light on an image of the eternal beauty; spoke of the
greed of the impious and the wicked who cannot think beauty when
they see its likeness, and who are incapable of reverence; spoke of
the holy distress which befalls the noble-minded when a godlike
countenance, a perfect body, appears before them; they tremble
and grow distracted, and hardly dare to raise their eyes, and they
honour the man who possesses this beauty, yes, if they were not
afraid of being thought downright madmen they would sacrifice
to the beloved as to the image of a god. For beauty, my Phaedrus,
beauty alone is both lovely and visible at once; it is, mark me,
the only form of the spiritual which we can receive through the
senses. Else what would become of us if the divine, if reason and
virtue and truth, should appear to us through the senses? Should
we not perish and be consumed with love, as Semele once was with
Zeus? Thus, beauty is the sensitive man's access to the spirit-
but only a road, a means simply, little Phaedrus. . . . And then
this crafty suitor made the neatest remark of all; it was this, that
the lover is more divine than the beloved, since the god is in the
one, but not in the other-perhaps the most delicate, the most
derisive thought which has ever been framed, and the one from


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DEATH IN VENICE
which spring all the cunning and the profoundest pleasures of
desire.
Writers are happiest with an idea which can become all emotion,
and an emotion all idea. Just such a pulsating idea, such a precise
emotion, belonged to the lonely man at this moment, was at his
call. Nature, it ran, shivers with ecstasy when the spirit bows in
homage before beauty. Suddenly he wanted to write. Eros loves
idleness, they say, and he is suited only to idleness. But at this
point in the crisis the affliction became a stimulus towards
productivity. The incentive hardly mattered. A request, an
agitation for an open statement on a certain large burning issue of
culture and taste, was going about the intellectual world, and had
finally caught up with the traveller here. He was familiar with
the subject, it had touched his own experience; and suddenly he
felt an irresistible desire to display it in the light of his own version.
And he even went so far as to prefer working in Tadzio's presence,
taking the scope of the boy as a standard for his writing, making
his style follow the lines of this body which seemed godlike to
him, and carrying his beauty over into the spiritual just as the
eagle once carried the Trojan stag up into the ether. Never had
his joy in words been more sweet. He had never been so aware
that Eros is in the word as during those perilously precious hours
when, at his crude table under the canopy, facing the idol and
listening to the music of his voice, he followed Tadzio's beauty
in the forming of his little tract, a page and a half of choice prose
which was soon to excite the admiration of many through its
clarity, its poise, and the vigorous curve of its emotion. Certainly
it is better for people to know only the beautiful product as finished,
and not in its conception, its conditions of origin. For knowledge
of the sources from which the artist derives his inspiration would
often confuse and alienate, and in this way detract from the effects
of his mastery. Strange hours! Strangely enervating efforts!
Rare creative intercourse between the spirit and a body! When
Aschenbach put away his work and started back from the beach he
felt exhausted, or in dispersion even; and it was as though his
conscience were complaining after some transgression.
The following morning, as he was about to leave the hotel, he
looked off from the steps and noticed that Tadzio, who was alone
and was already on his way towards the sea, was just approaching


THOMAS MANN
329
the private beach. He was half tempted by the simple notion of
seizing this opportunity to strike up a casual friendly acquaintance-
ship with the boy who had been the unconscious source of so much
agitation and upheaval; he wanted to address him, and enjoy the
answering look in his eyes. The boy was sauntering along, he
could be overtaken; and Aschenbach quickened his pace. He
reached him on the boardwalk behind the bathing houses; was about
to lay a hand on his head and shoulders; and some word or other, an
amiable phrase in French, was on the tip of his tongue. But he
felt that his heart, due also perhaps to his rapid stride, was beating
like a hammer; and he was so short of breath that his voice would
have been tight and trembling. He hesitated, he tried to get
himself under control. Suddenly he became afraid that he had
been walking too long so close behind the boy. He was afraid of
arousing curiosity and causing him to look back questioningly.
He made one more spurt, failed, surrendered, and passed with
bowed head.
“Too late!” he thought immediately. Too late! Yet was it too
late? This step which he had just been on the verge of taking
would very possibly have put things on a sound, free and easy
basis, and would have restored him to wholesome soberness. But
the fact was that Aschenbach did not want soberness: his intoxica-
tion was too precious. Who can explain the stamp and the nature
of the artist! Who can understand this deep instinctive welding
of discipline and licence ? For to be unable to want wholesome
soberness, is licence.
is licence. Aschenbach was no longer given to self-
criticism. His tastes, the mental caliber of his years, his self-
respect, ripeness, and a belated simplicity made him unwilling to
dismember his motives and to debate whether his impulses were the
result of conscientiousness or of dissolution and weakness. He was
embarrassed, as he feared that someone or other, if only the guard
on the beach, must have observed his pursuit and defeat. He was
very much afraid of the ridiculous. Further, he joked with himself
about his comically pious distress. "Downed,” he thought,
"downed like a rooster, with his wings hanging miserably in the
battle. It really is a god who can, at one sight of his loveliness,
break our courage this way and force down our pride so thor-
oughly. ...” He toyed and skirmished with his emotions, and
was far too haughty to be afraid of them.
1


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DEATH IN VENICE
He had already ceased thinking about the time when the vacation
period which he had fixed for himself would expire; the thought
of going home never even suggested itself. He had sent for an
ample supply of money. His only concern was with the possible
departure of the Polish family; by a casual questioning of the
hotel barber he had contrived to learn that these people had come
here only a short time before his own arrival. The sun browned
his face and hands, the invigorating salt breezes made him feel
fresher. Once he had been in the habit of expending on his work
every bit of nourishment which food, sleep, or nature could provide
him; and similarly now he was generous and uneconomical, letting
pass off as elation and emotion all the daily strengthening derived
from sun, idleness, and sea air.
His sleep was fitful; the preciously uniform days were sepa-
rated by short nights of happy unrest. He did retire early, for at
nine o'clock, when Tadzio had disappeared from the scene, the
day seemed over. But at the first grey of dawn he was awakened
by a gently insistent shock; he suddenly remembered his adventure,
he could no longer remain in bed; he arose, and clad lightly against
the chill of morning, he sat down by the open window to await the
rising of the sun. Revived by his sleep, he watched this miraculous
event with reverence. Sky, earth, and sea still lay in glassy, ghost-
like twilight; a dying star still floated in the emptiness of space.
.
But a breeze started up, a winged message from habitations beyond
reach, telling that Eros was rising from beside her husband. And
that first sweet reddening in the farthest stretches of sky and sea
took place by which the sentiency of creation is announced. The
goddess was approaching, the seductress of youth who stole Cleitus
and Cephalus, and despite the envy of all the Olympians enjoyed
the love of handsome Orion. A strewing of roses began there on
the edge of the world, an unutterably pure glowing and blooming.
Childish clouds, lighted and shined through, floated like busy little
Cupids in the rosy, bluish mist. Purple fell upon the sea, which
seemed to be simmering, and washing the colour towards him.
Golden spears shot up into the sky from behind. The splendour
caught fire, silently, and with godlike power an intense flame of
licking tongues broke out—and with rattling hoofs the brother's
sacred chargers mounted the horizon. Lighted by the god's bril-


THOMAS MANN
331
liance, he sat there, keeping watch alone. He closed his eyes,
letting this glory play against the lids. Past emotions, precious
early afflictions and yearnings which had been stifled by his rigorous
programme of living, were now returning in such strange new
forms. With an embarrassed, astonished smile, he recognized them.
He was thinking, dreaming; slowly his lips formed a name. And
still smiling, with his face turned upwards, hands folded in his lap,
he fell asleep again in his chair.
But the day which began with such fiery solemnity underwent
a strange mythical transformation. Where did the breeze originate
which suddenly began playing so gently and insinuatingly, like
some whispered suggestion, about his ears and temples? Little
white choppy clouds stood in the sky in scattered clumps, like the
pasturing herds of the gods. A stronger wind arose, and the steeds
of Poseidon came prancing up, and along with them the steers
which belonged to the blue-locked god, bellowing and lowering
their horns as they ran. Yet among the detritus of the more distant
beach waves were hopping forward like agile goats. He was
caught in the enchantment of a sacredly distorted world full of
Panic life-and he dreamed delicate legends. Often, when the sun
was sinking behind Venice, he would sit on a bench in the park
observing Tadzio who was dressed in a white suit with a coloured
sash and was playing ball on the smooth gravel—and it was
Hyacinth that he seemed to be watching, Hyacinth who was to
die because two gods loved him. Yes, he felt Zephyr's aching
jealousy of the rival who forgot the oracle, the bow, and the lyre,
in order to play for ever with this beauty. He saw the discus,
guided by a pitiless envy, strike the lovely head; he too, growing
pale, caught the drooping body—and the flower, sprung from this
sweet blood, bore the inscription of his unending grief.
Nothing is more unusual and strained than the relationship be-
tween people who know each other only with their eyes, who meet
daily, even hourly, and yet are compelled, by force of custom or
their own caprices, to say no word or make no move of acknowledge-
ment, but to maintain the appearance of an aloof unconcern.
There is a restlessness and a surcharged curiosity existing between
them, the hysteria of an unsatisfied, unnaturally repressed desire
for acquaintanceship and intercourse; and especially there is a


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DEATH IN VENICE
kind of tense respect. For one person loves and honours another
so long as he cannot judge him, and desire is an evidence of incom-
plete knowledge.
Some kind of familiarity had necessarily to form itself between
Aschenbach and young Tadzio; and it gave the elderly man keen
pleasure to see that his sympathies and interests were not left
completely unanswered. For example, when the boy appeared on
the beach in the morning and was going towards his family's bath-
ing house, what had induced him never to use the boardwalk on the
far side of it any more, but to stroll along the front path, through
the sand, past Aschenbach's habitual place, and often unnecessarily
close to him, almost touching his table, or his chair even? Did
the attraction, the fascination of an overpowering emotion have
such an effect upon the frail unthinking object of it? Aschenbach
watched daily for Tadzio to approach; and sometimes he acted
as though he were occupied when this event was taking place, and
he let the boy pass unobserved. But at other times he would look
up, and their glances met. They were both in deep earnest when
this occurred. Nothing in the elderly man's cultivated and digni-
fied expression betrayed any inner movement; but there was a
searching look in Tadzio's eyes, a thoughtful questioning—he began
to falter, looked down, then looked up again charmingly, and
when he had passed something in his bearing seemed to indicate
that it was only his breeding which kept him from turning around.
Once, however, one evening, things turned out differently. The
Polish children and their governess had been missing at dinner in
the large hall; Aschenbach had noted this uneasily. After the
meal, disturbed by their absence, Aschenbach was walking in
evening dress and straw hat in front of the hotel at the foot of
the terrace, when suddenly he saw the nunlike sisters
appear
in
the light of the arc-lamp, accompanied by their governess and with
Tadzio a few steps behind. Evidently they were coming from
the steamer pier after having dined for some reason in the city.
It must have been cool on the water; Tadzio was wearing a dark
blue sailor overcoat with gold buttons, and on his head he had a
cap to match. The sun and sea air had not browned him; his skin
still had the same yellow marble colour as at first. It even seemed
paler to-day than usual, whether from the coolness or from the
blanching moonlight of the lamps. His regular eyebrows showed


THOMAS MANN
333
up more sharply, the darkness of his eyes was deeper. It is hard
to say how beautiful he was; and Aschenbach was distressed, as
he had often been before, by the thought that words can only
evaluate sensuous beauty, but not re-give it.
He had not been prepared for this rich spectacle; it came
unhoped for. He had no time to entrench himself behind an expres-
sion of repose and dignity. Pleasure, surprise, admiration must
have shown on his face as his eyes met those of the boy—and at
this moment it happened that Tadzio smiled, smiled to him,
eloquently, familiarly, charmingly, without concealment; and
during the smile his lips slowly opened. It was the smile of Nar-
cissus bent over the reflecting water, that deep, fascinated, magnetic
smile with which he stretches out his arms to the image of his own
beauty—a smile distorted ever so little, distorted at the hopelessness
of his efforts to kiss the pure lips of the shadow. It was coquet-
tish, inquisitive, and slightly tortured. It was infatuated, and
infatuating.
He had received this smile, and he hurried away as though he
carried a fatal gift. He was so broken up that he was compelled
to escape the light of the terrace and the front garden; he hastily
hunted out the darkness of the park in the rear. Strangely indig-
nant and tender admonitions wrung themselves out of him: “You
dare not smile like that! Listen, no one dare smile like that to
another!” He threw himself down on a bench; in a frenzy he
breathed the night smell of the vegetation. And leaning back, his
arms loose, overwhelmed, with frequent chills running through
him, he whispered the fixed formula of desire-impossible in this
case, absurd, abject, ridiculous, and yet holy, even in this case
venerable: "I love you!"
To be concluded


AN ARRANGEMENT FOR AN INQUIRING
OBOE OF PHILOSOPHIC BENT
BY R. ELLSWORTH LARSSON
"Sing
now
the facile song of death”
-Salome lies
remotely dead
under the weight
of livid-shadowed spears
-Salome lies
remotely dead
and the thin rind
of her smile
hallows nothing
innate
among the looming rocks
her smile belied
among the looming rocks
shadows among shadows
compose themselves
in staggering procession
let the livid shadows
of spears moulder her smile
with suave denials
- let the shadow of spears
pin her body to earth
let the shadows of rocks
and of spears
crush her to earth


R. ELLSWORTH LARSSON
335
(a smile
cannot corrupt
the darkened rocks
nor soften the shapes of spears
nor the shade of bloody spears)
Thrust your hands
into the shadows of rocks
into the shadows of thin smiles
nor cringe at what
you
find. ...
1
let the shadows
cloud the depths of her eyes
strangle her
with omnipotent nays
Throw the body
to the dogs
there are drums for dancers
and wine for those who would laugh
(Thrust your hands
into the shadows of rocks
into the shadows of thin smiles
nor cringe at what you find)


A NOTE ON HAWAIIAN POETRY
BY PADRAIC COLUM
AWAIIAN poetry—and this is probably true of Polynesian
poetry generally—comes from a root that is different from
the root that our poetry comes from. In our poetry, the primary
intention is to communicate some personal emotion; in their poetry
the primary intention, I believe, is to make an incantation, to cast
a spell. Hear Hawaiian mele chanted with all of their prolonged
vowel-sounds, and you will be made to feel that what is behind
the mele is not a poet but a magician. I can think of only one or
two poems in English that are in their intention, in their evocative
sound, anything like Hawaiian mele. One is the incantation that
A.E. has put into his Deirdre, the incantation that bespells Naisi
and his brothers. In the play as it was first given A.E. himself
used to chant the spell with the very intonations of the surviving
Hawaiian chanters:
“Let the Faed Fia fall,
Mananaun MacLir:
Take back the day
Amid days unremembered.
Over the warring mind
Let thy Faed Fia fall,
Mananaun MacLir.
Let thy waves rise,
Mananaun MacLir,
Let the earth fail
Beneath their feet,
Let thy waves flow over them,
Mananaun,
Lord of Ocean!"
The Open Polynesian syllables, with their vowels arbitrarily
lingered on, naturally give more of the effect of an incantation


PADRAIC COLUM
337
than even lines that have sounds as evocative as "Mananaun, Lord
of Ocean.” Another poem that I can imagine being chanted in the
Hawaiian way, and producing the same effect of incantation, is
Blake's:
"Hear the voice of the Bard!
Who present, past, and future sees;
Whose ears have heard
The Holy Word
That walked amongst the ancient trees,
Calling the lapsed soul
And weeping in the evening dew,
That might control
The starry pole,
And fallen, fallen light renew."
But if Hawaiian poetry had in it only this evocative sound it
would be of little interest to us who have been trained to appreciate
other qualities in poetry. It has a personal and human appeal too.
And the Hawaiian poet has anticipated effects that the cultivated
poets of our tradition have been striving for: he is, for instance,
more esoteric than Mallarmé and more imagistic than Amy Lowell.
Every Hawaiian poem has at least four meanings: (1) the osten-
sible meaning of the words; (2) a vulgar double-meaning; (3) a
mythological-historical-topographical import; and (4) the mauna
or deeply-hidden meaning. I have sat gasping while, in a poem
of twelve or twenty lines, meaning under meaning was revealed to
me by some scholar, Hawaiian or Haole, who knew something of
the esoteric Hawaiian tradition.
But the main thing that Hawaiian poetry has to offer an out-
sider is the clear and flashing images that it is in its power to pro-
duce. The languages of the Pacific, it should be noted first, have
no abstract terms. If an Hawaiian wants to refer to my ignorance
he speaks of me as having the entrails of night; if he wants to speak
of someone's blindness he will bring in eyes of night. Abstractions
become images in the Polynesian language. The people themselves
have an extraordinary sense of the visible things in their world:
they have, for instance, a dozen words to tell of the shades of dif-


338
A NOTE ON HAWAIIAN POETRY
ference in the sea as it spreads between them and the horizon. And
their language forces them to an imagistic expression. Their poetry
then, when it is at all descriptive, is full of clear and definite images.
I open Nathaniel Emerson's Unwritten Literature of Hawaii, a
book upon the hula that is also a great anthology of Hawaiian
poetry, and I find:
“Heaven-magic, fetch a Hilo pour from heaven!
Morn's cloud-buds, look! they swell in the East.
The rain-cloud parts, Hilo is deluged with rain,
The Hilo of King Hana-kahi.
Surf breaks, stirs the mire of Pii-lani;
The bones of Hilo are broken
By the blows of the rain.
Ghostly the rain-scud of Hilo in heaven.
The cloud-forms of Pua-lani grow and thicken.
The rain-priest bestirs him now to go forth,
Forth to observe the stab and thrust of the rain,
The rain that clings to the roof of Hilo.”
I know one poem in English that in its clear and flashing imagery
resembles the passages that we must regard as the best of Hawaiian
poetry: that poem is Meredith's Nuptials of Attila. No Hawaiian
poet has been able to tell a story, no Hawaiian poet has been able
to give an organization to a poem that is at all like Meredith's, but
all this is like Hawaiian poetry:
“Flat as to an eagle's eye
Earth hung under Attila. ...
On his people stood a frost.
Like a charger cut in stone,
Rearing stiff, the warrior host,
Which had life from him alone,
Craved the trumpet's eager note
As the bridled earth the Spring.”


PADRAIC COLUM
339
It is in an attempt to reproduce something of this clear and flashing
imagery that I have made the three pieces that are in the present
issue of The Dial, and the piece that was published in a previous
issue, The Lehua Trees.
Pigeons on the Beach is an attempt to make a poem in the spirit
of the Hawaiian, and The Lehua Trees has the same to be said of
it. There are no originals for these. There is an original for the
Hawaiian Evening Song, and for the piece that I call The Surf
Rider; the first is based on the Hawaiian of John Ie; the original
and a translation is given in the Memoirs of the Bernice Pauhi
Bishop Museum, Volume 6, Number 2, and the second is given in
Nathaniel Emerson's Unwritten Literature of Hawaii, published by
the Smithsonian Institute. I have both condensed and expanded
the Evening Song, and I have changed the character of the poem
that I give the title of The Surf Rider to by changing it from a
mele-inoa, a name-song, into a descriptive piece.
There are several words in these pieces that have to be explained:
"Tapu” is the word that was written "taboo” by the mariners who
first came into touch with Polynesian civilization. The word means
more than “forbidden"; it means “belonging to the gods,” and the
Hawaiian poet who describes night as being "tapu” is drawing on
the same sort of associations as Homer drew on when he spoke of
“the sacred night.” I have imagined that some sign has been set
up to show that "tapu” has been declared, but that is not in the
original. Ku, Lono, and Kane are the great Polynesian divinities.
In Pigeons on the Beach, the word "tapa” means the bark-cloth
of the Polynesians: white tapa, wrapped around a king's staff was
a sign of "tapu.” In both The Surf Rider and the Evening Song,
I have made "Kahiki” into “Tahiti.” “Kahiki” is “Tahiti,” but
“Kahiki” is also a mythical land in the remote ocean: the tapu that
extends to Kahiki extends to the furthest place. The wave that
comes from Kahiki comes from the furthest place. And the wave
has been coming from the time of Wakea: Wakea is the name that
comes first in the Polynesian genealogies; the wave, then, has been
coming from the furthest place for the longest time conceivable.
1
VITIS? t =


THREE HAWAIIAN POEMS
BY PADRAIC COLUM
THE PIGEONS ON THE BEACH
White like tapa, like the tapa that goes on the staffs of Kings is
the beach beside the two-hued Pacific.
Pigeons come down to the beach; they run along taking grains
of the coral sand into their crop. They rise up; they fly, they hang
above the reef that the surf foams across.
And beyond is the Ocean. They sway a little way above it.
Then they come back across the reef that takes the foam. They
run along the beach taking sands into their crops, pigeons that have
come down from the dove-cotes behind the orchards.
A wave-break startles them where they run. They rise up. And
now they see the dove-cotes beyond the orchards and they are
gathered to them.
But in the dove-cotes all night they will hear the surf breaking,
and they will dream of strong mates and craggy breeding-places
and powerful flights that will win to them.
And at daybreak they will go to the beach; they will run along
taking sands into their crops; they will rise up and they will fly;
they will hang above where the reef gathers the foam.
A little while only they will hang above it; a little way only
they will sway beyond it; they will come back and take sand into
their crops. And as they run along the beach they will not know
that the plover and the sand-piper have departed, flying through
brightness and through darkness until they find for themselves the
atolls and the craggy islets around which ranges the eight-finned
shark.
Pigeons that have come down to the beach beside the two-hued
Pacific!


PADRAIC COLUM
341
THE SURF RIDER
From afar it has come, that long rolling wave; from Tahiti it has
come; long has it been coming, that wide-sweeping wave; since
the time of Wakea it has been on the way.
Now it plumes, now it ruffles itself. Stand upon your surf-board
with the sun to lead you on! Stand! Gird
on! Stand! Gird your loin-cloth! The
wave rolls and swells higher; the wave that will not break bears
you along
From afar it has come, that long rolling wave; long it has been
coming, that wide-sweeping wave. And now it bears you towards
us, upright upon your board.
The wave-ridden waves dash upon the island; the deep-sea coral
is swept inshore; the long rolling wave, the wide-sweeping wave
comes on.
Glossy is your skin and undrenched; the wave-feathers fan the
triumphing surf rider; with the speed of the white tropic-bird you
come to us.
We have seen the surf at Puna; we have seen a triumphing surf
rider: Na-i-he is his name.
MELE AHIAHI
(Hawaiian Evening Song)
1
The sign is given; mighty the sign: Tapu!
All murmurs now, speech, voice
Subdue: inviolable let evening be.
Inviolable and consecrate:
Edgeways and staggering descends
The sun; rain vanishes;
A bonus of bright light comes back.
Hawaii keeps the ordinance: Tapu!
Even far Tahiti now is still, perhaps.
The Island's shelter-giving houses stand;
The Chief withdraws, the sacred cup
is his;


342
THREE HAWAIIAN POEMS
The mothers call on Kuhe as they give
Their child to sleep. O early slumber
Of the heavenly company thou art indeed!
O Ku, O Lono, O Kane, they are yours
The evening hours (subdue
All murmurs now, speech, voice
Inviolate let evening be).
It is evening; it is hallowed for being that:
Let tumult die within us all: Tapu!
The spies of heaven, the stars return: Tapu!
And peaceful heaven covers peaceful earth.



Photograph by Druet
FEMME DEBOUT. BY ARISTIDE MAILLOL






Photograph by Druet
FEMME A GENOUX.
BY ARISTIDE MAILLOL






>
Photograph by Druet
FEMME ASSISE.
BY ARISTIDE MAILLOL


|


SIR FRANCIS BACON
BY MARIANNE MOORE
Nhis Studies of Extraordinary Prose, Lafcadio Hearn makes the
I Statement that you cannot appeared the maig dele possibile e audie
ence with a scholarly style.” One feels this to be true, also that in
expressions of deep conviction in the writings of all ages, there is
remarkable consanguinity. The "exact diligence” of Sir Francis
Bacon would seem to have anticipated not only the mind of close
successors, but of our own age. “There is no excellent beauty that
hath not strangeness in the proportion” recalls Burke's statement in
his essay On the Sublime and the Beautiful, that beauty is striking
as deformity is striking—in its novelty; there is coincidence with
Ruskin's summary of beauty as beauty
of beauty as beauty of behaviour, in the state-
ment: “No youth can be comely but by pardon and considering the
youth,” and when Bacon says of masques that the eye must be re-
lieved “before it be full of the same object” since it is a great
pleasure to desire to see that it cannot perfectly discern,” one is
reminded of Santayana's observation that "nothing absorbs the
consciousness so much as what is not quite given.”
We are aware of a renovating quality in the work of early writers
as in that so-called “broken speech" in which we have the idiom of
one language in the words of another. Lord Bacon has this raciness
in a high degree as when he says, “I have marvelled sometimes at
Spain how they clasp and contain so large dominions with so few
natural Spaniards,” and defines moss as “a rudiment between putre-
faction and an herb,” the vigour of the writer's nature being of
course, the key to his “efficacy,” as when he
says
of
anger, “To seek
to extinguish anger utterely is but a bravery of the Stoics. We
have better oracles” and what of the ghastliness—the ineradicable
ruthlessness of, “A civil war is like the heat of a fever but a foreign
war is like the heat of exercise ?” In Sir Francis Bacon, a conclu-
siveness and contempt for tact are always at variance with the
known necessity for caution, the desire for efficiency pertaining even
to death: "I would out of a care to do the best business well, ever
keep a guard, and stand upon keeping faith and a good conscience.


344
SIR FRANCIS BACON
And I would die together, and not my mind often, and my body
once."
In his insight into human psychology, one is conscious of a similar
address of a personal flavour of wit and repartee, recalling
Machiavelli. He says apropos of laying bait for a question, “I
knew one that when he wrote a letter, he would put that which was
most material in the postscript, as if it had been a bye matter”; of
boldness, “It doth fascinate and bind hand and foot those that are
shallow in judgment or weak in courage, and prevaileth with wise
men at weak times.” Of one's imperviousness to one's defects, he
remarks that there is a confidence "like as we shall see it commonly
in poets, that if they show their verses and you except to any, they
will say that that line cost them more labour than all the rest. As
for pulling down the ambitious, he says, “The only way is, the inter-
change continually of favors and disgraces, whereby they may not
know what to expect and be as it were in a wood.” “As for jest,
there be certain things which ought to be privileged from it,” he
says. “Men ought to find the difference between saltness and
bitterness. Certainly, he that hath a satirical vein, as he maketh
others afraid of his wit, so need he be afraid of others' memory.”
The explicit technical view which Sir Francis Bacon takes of
writing, at once denotes the expert: his admiration for Machiavelli's
suiting of form to matter, his interest in letters as being an "even
more particular representation of business” than "chronicles or
lives”; and those who have read Caesar's commentaries subsequent
to a first compulsory reading, will perhaps agree with him that in
"Caesar's history, entitled only a commentary,” there are "solid
weight of matter, real passages, and lively images of actions and
persons, expressed in the greatest propriety of words and perspicuity
of narration that ever was.” Moreover, his differentiation of poetry
from
prose is an experienced one. Poetry, he says, has “more rare-
ness, more unexpected and alternative variation” as “deceiving ex-
pectation,” a form of expression which, “being not tied to the laws
of nature, may at pleasure join that which nature has severed and
sever that which nature hath joined.”
A student of human nature and of words ought to be able to tell
a story, and the gift of close reasoning-of winding quickly into the
heart of an episode-asserts itself throughout Bacon's writing: in
The New Atlantis which is a tale out and out; in the essays as when


MARIANNE MOORE
345
he says, “It is sport to see when a bold fellow is out of countenance,
at a stay like a stale at chess"; and in The Advancement of Learn-
ing, alive with such incidents as the account of Xenophon's prowess
and Falinus' scepticism: “ 'If I be not deceived, young gentleman,
you are an Athenian and I believe you study philosophy and it is
pretty that you say, but you are much abused if you think your
virtue can withstand the king's power.' Here was the scorn,” says
Bacon. “The wonder followed.” The Wisdom of the Ancients,
apparently an exposition of mythology, is a collection of stories—
sirens of ingenuity—upon which Bacon's best wit seems to be
focussed, as it is too upon the history of Henry Seventh, in which
a special energy, cohesiveness, and flash of metal are so combined
as to make it perhaps the most entertaining of his works; the feel-
ing for the beautiful being throughout the more conspicuous for
being subordinated to shrewdness and statesmanlike reserve. The
circumstantial manner of a novel appears repeatedly as when the
queen’s coronation is likened to a christening that has been put off
until the child is old enough to walk to the altar; and exact without
being laboured, it is recorded of the king that:
"He was a comely personage, a little above just stature, well and
straight limbed but slender. His countenance was reverend, and a
little like a churchman. But it was to the disadvantage of the
painter for it was best when he spake,”
and surely nothing could be more chiselled or poised with greater
certainty than the closing sentences of this history:
"He was born at Pembroke Castle, and lieth buried at West-
minster, in one of the stateliest and daintiest monuments of Europe,
both for the chapel and the sepulcre. So that he dwelleth more
richly dead, in the monument of his tomb, than he did alive in
Richmond or any of his palaces.”
Bacon's essays have perhaps absorbed interest which belongs to
his other writings and have stood as a polite barrier to the litheness
and daring of the other. Aphorisms and allusions to antiquity have
the effect of being a mechanical interplay of phrases; the quoted
wisdom of Greek, Roman, Hebrew, and Italian sages, dissipates


346
NOT ALWAYS
concentration and despite flawless logic and construction, one turns
from it as from a handbook of anecdotes or consecutive pages of
bons mots. Bacon's philosophical writings like an author's diary
read in connexion with his novels, indeed seem the essence of the
man and perhaps overshadow the “minor” works. The history of
Henry Seventh, however, in its celerity and shrewdness as a tale
and as a personal expression, is unique; The Wisdom of the
Ancients seems to epitomize Bacon's nature of poet and logician,
and one feels that in shapeliness, cumulative power, and intellectual
attractiveness, in flavour of strangeness and power, The Advance-
ment of Learning has no rival. "Even in divinity,” its author says,
"some writings have more of the eagle than others.” There is in
The Advancement of Learning conspicuously much of the eagle.
One does not wonder that Bacon should have said of it, "If the first
reading will make an objection, the second will make an answer.”
NOT ALWAYS
BY EDWIN ARLINGTON ROBINSON
In surety and obscurity twice mailed,
And first achieving with initial rout
A riddance of weak fear and weaker doubt,
He strove alone. But when too long assailed
By nothing, even a stronger might have quailed
As he did, and so might have gazed about
Where he could see the last light going out,
Almost as if the fire of God had failed.
And so it was till out of silence crept
Invisible avengers of a name
Unknown, like jungle-hidden jaguars.
But there were others coming who had kept
Their watch and word; and out of silence came
A song somewhat as of the morning stars.


IRISH LETTER
Dublin
March, 1924
E can say, almost with certainty, that a given picture must
have been painted at Siena, and such another at Florence or
Venice or Perugia, and when the reasons for these distributions are
given it is quite evident that the several pictures came from these
and could not have been painted in any other localities. But in
the craft of writing our literary senses have not been so minutely
trained in critical examination. The authors of all considerable
stories, poems, and essays are well known, and the Mother of
Invention has had no necessity for exploring, and no market to
reward her curious diligence. But locality does not only influence
one's accent: it subtly shades all our perspectives and preoccupa-
tions: it should be found in every book, so that, after a few lines
of any author, one should exclaim—a Dublin book, a Connemara
book, as one says, at a taste or a smell—a Cheshire cheese, a
Limerick ham, a Dublin Bay herring. When a criticism of origins
becomes as remunerative, or as fashionable, in literature as it is
in painting the timely critic will not only be ready for his obol, he
will be clamant.
Wherever it may be published, or wherever he may live, a book
by Mr George Moore is an Irish literary event. His prose is
English, for it is written in English, but it is all the more Irish
for that. One who knows the West of Ireland and what better
knowledge is there! should recognize, if he heard it in his sleep, that
this is Connaught prose; and, than the County of sweet-tongued
Raftery, there is no place upon the earth so lovely, as there is no
prose being written by any one but Mr Moore so limpid, so modest,
so certain to be overlooked by the vulgar, the hasty—by those who
do not know the West of Ireland.
Ireland burned down Moore Hall, the residence of
Mr Moore's ancestors (he has lived there so rarely that it cannot
properly be called his residence). But in return Ireland (not Eng.
land nor France) has presented him with a prose style that is lovelier
than any mansion he could forget to live in, or that even the County
Two years ago


348
IRISH LETTER
Mayo could sacrifice to the gods. This is to be said, Mr Moore's
present style is not English or Continental: it is not Catholiche
would sleep ill if one found it to be so: it is not Protestant-he
should never sleep at all if that were hinted: it is West of Ireland,
and, so, classical in the finest sense; which is to say, that it can
best be enjoyed by a gentleman who has not entirely neglected to
be somewhat of a scholar also. Irish saints are exported chiefly
from Dublin, but her scholars are drawn mainly from Kerry and
Mayo.
The matter of this book is in the form of Conversations, but by
a feat of legerdemain which nobody but this author could contrive,
they are really stories, and the book is actually a new kind of novel.
In the Mummer's Wife and Esther Waters Mr Moore brought a
new element into English literature. In his remarkable three-
volume book, Hail and Farewell, he created a new form for the
novel, and in this book he has again gone adventuring in form.
After a few pages the reader can forget that the Moore of this book
is a real person who can be rung up on a real telephone; and that
one could criticize, and give his hat to, and shake the hands of, the
pictures, the maids, and the visitors, that one reads of.
It is an achievement which only real skill and knowledge could
save from degenerating into a feat. Skill can often astonish and
distress one, but knowledge is as satisfying as bread. There are
violinists we do not care to listen to—their technique is too good,
and there are passages in any man's writings where the virtuoso per-
forms his natural function of astonishing without convincing.
Criticism, dealing with this or this other book, may sometime query
whether Mr Moore is mostly a writer or mainly a literary man, but
when his total work is considered it will be found that he was doing
his job much oftener than only talking about it.
In these Conversations Mr Moore introduces us to a selection of
his visitors at Ebury Street. There are painters, such as, Tonks,
Sickert, Steer, Harrison. His poets are Messrs Freeman and Walter
de la Mare, and we must frown on this stint of the best that genius
can attract. His literary men include Messrs Gosse, Cunningham
Graham, and St Paul.
He has been really interested in making all of these gentlemen
talk, but it is mainly as a means of eliciting, not so much his own
ideas on the various subjects raised, but his own personality and


JAMES STEPHENS
349
reactions. These subjects are of great variety, and Mr Moore's
ideas do not triumph over those of his friends—he is much too
courteous, too accomplished for that: but they are vastly more in-
teresting to him, and to us, than are those of his various vis-à-vis.
Readers of THE DIAL are familiar with some of these Con-
versations.
Mr Moore's literary interests lie mainly in the immediate past.
He has not given us his opinion on Messrs Wells, Bennett, Shaw
(I cannot recollect any other present-day authors myself). He
would surely have opinions on these great men, but while they may
be ready they might not be fit for utterance. Alas! we can only
talk with enthusiasm about a very young writer or a quite dead one:
for, except Mr Moore, the writer who does not die on attaining
the age of forty-five lives doggedly on but to bore his unwilling
contemporaries.
Mr Moore issues a magnificence of praise to Balzac that he
accords to no one else. It would be interesting to find, or to search
for, the reason why we may only praise in fiction by the spoon
where we laud in poetry by the bucket. Mr Moore could do this
for us masterfully, and he has wooed so many enmities already
that an odd dozen more could not inconvenience him. I should
like (for I have remembered a name) I should like Mr Moore to
make a bet that he could praise Mr Conrad for twenty minutes
without stopping for rest or refreshment, and I should like to
secrete a dictaphone in the studio of 121 Ebury Street while he
was doing it.
A criticism of English fiction, and of English praise generally
might be made on the following lines: There are authors who
surrender themselves totally to their subjects—they are, usually,
not very good writers. There are others to whom the subject totally
surrenders itself—these are the rare powerful artists: the Balzacs,
Tolstoys, Dostoevskys. These great writers have engraved them-
selves into their works as into mountains. In England, and in
poetry, Shakespeare and Shelley are continuous with and inseparable
from their matter. It is generally true that the bulk of English
verse responds to Whitman's line—"Who touches this book touches
a man,” and it escapes anonymity by sheer individual vigour.
It is peculiar that the race which could in so decided and mas-
culine a manner conquer poetry should have so submitted and sur-


350
IRISH LETTER
rendered to prose. There can be no style in prose unless prose be
loved as verse has been loved, and be hammered as verse has been
hammered. But, excepting a few names (and leaving the ideas
aside) any ten English novels might have been written by any of
the hundred and ten authors that did not write them. The vice of
English fiction is not that it is romantic or sentimental, but that it
is ill-informed. It has never grown up. It is written on the play-
ing grounds of Eton. It is eternally a boy's tale, and the authors
of it are naturally ashamed and anonymous.
Prose must be as mature, or as immature, as is the story it tells,
for the subject controls the style, and the English novelist's evasion
of the purple is justified by his inability to carry it. In another
branch of the art—the vice of English criticism is not that it is
ill-informed, it is that it will be clever, and it is clever as a means
of avoiding the writing of good prose. Let the reader beware when
he sees an epigram: 'tis the last refuge of an inferiority complex.
One could write a book on Mr Moore's book and that proves its
soundness, for the book that cannot have children has been serialized
in vain. There are, too, the books that won't have children—the
Tempests, the Prometheuses Bound and Unbound. These gestate
in geologic periods, or they leave a world not lusty enough to
remain in, and come back to it no more. Mr Moore has always done
better than his best, and kept always a little ahead of his record,
but a great author is a champion and one lusts to match him with
another, and to dare him be greater still. If he has a real weakness
it is that he likes difficult tasks—it is the great artist's way to do so:
but the great writer has always hated difficult tasks as a saint hates
sin. The great writer does not write artistically, he does not need
to—he writes gaudily and trails his purple. One cannot help be-
seeching the canary to be a crow, or the classical writer to have a
try at romance.
A number of the most entertaining of these Conversations are
with painters whom Mr Moore has long striven to love. Does he
love these gentlemen as he once loved Yeats and Russell and
Martyn? And, can a literary man love a painter ? Can any one?
I do not think that Mr Moore has ever been frightened of a literary
man—he knows them too well. But he seems actually terrified of
painters, and he treads among that ill sect as warily as his own cat
would tread among tin tacks, while in the company of literary


JAMES STEPHENS
351
men and story-telling matters he is brazen and murderous and
unabashable.
Mr Moore does not perceive that painters are unfriendly people
--they are the strayed cats of art as musicians are the strayed dogs,
and architects the missing links, and the most excellent prose is as
wasted on them as kindness would be.
To the poets he extends an instinctive hospitality and mistrust.
He is not hostile to them: they live in his attic with the pigeons or
in his outhouse with the mushrooms: he gives them place and
freedom, and he can delight in and doubt their testimony on any
subject. It may be that his adoration of prose prevents him from
giving more than a margin of his mind to verse: and, if a questioner,
a painter, advanced it, he might agree that verse was merely prose
mishandled and, perhaps, devitalized. Literature to Mr Moore is
narrative first and prose afterwards. Were one (none but a painter
could ask it) to demand what fiction was he might reply, that it is
people and the things they do. He would conceal from a painter
that there is the third, unknown quality to be added, which has
made of him a great artist. The painter would try to see this, as
every other statement, as a landscape, and would lose it, where he
loses everything else, in the middle-distance.
Mr Moore loves ideas that transcribe into action. He might be
a more sympathetic, attentive listener to the village shrew with a
load of gossip than to another Plato with an up-to-date Absolute.
Freud in love would fetch a giggle from him that Freud on love
could never unloosen. We are all citizens of the realm of humour,
and Mr Moore is a veritable man-of-the-world there. It is the
quality most to be dreaded of the literary man, and Mr Moore has
mastered it as thoroughly as all his other material.
But, however expert we may be, or become, every man preserves,
usually as a secret, his private joke. Love is Mr Moore's joke. He
sees it as an exquisite idiocy that is peculiarly visible in painters,
and as peculiarly rare among poets. He cherishes the poets be-
cause they are the only normal beings he has ever met—they do not
fall in love: they visit there. He frequents painters, whom he
loathes from the soul out, because they give him copy, and the copy
he has gathered here is excellent. But what trash painters talk!
All about pictures and Exhibitions!
He does not believe that writers fall in love. He knows that


352
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they pretend to: he sees the literary cause behind the enormous pre-
tence, and believes in it only as he believes in comedy.
He has won success in every branch of prose, and has valiantly
ill-treated poetry in two languages, but, for this scribe at least,
his most remarkable achievement lies in the domain of Comedy.
Comedy is the human art, the folk art, the household art: for, if
Mr Moore is an aristocrat by birth, he is a humorist by nature, and
a wit by education. When his wit is as dusty as his aristocracy
his humour will still be alive, and will embalm him a memory as
lasting as we need hope for in these hasty days.
There are still Conversations with Mr de la Mare, Mr Gosse,
Mr Granville Barker, all men who hate painters, and space
forbids
to tell how good these are.
Every criticism that has been written on a book by Mr Moore
has degenerated after ten lines into a discussion of the author him-
self. It has happend also in these pages. He is even more inter-
esting than his books. It is the harshest thing that will ever be
said of him.
JAMES STEPHENS
C
11
1
H
to
be
sh
2


BOOK REVIEWS
DOES ETHICS INFLUENCE
LIFE?
CIVILIZATION AND Ethics. (The Philosophy of
Civilization, Part II.) By Albert Schweitzer. Trans-
lated by John Naish. (Black. 10s. 6d.)
D
R SCHWEITZER’S book is of considerable importance, and
deserves to be read with care. The translator tells us that
the lectures at Mansfield College, on which the book is based, were
delivered in French, while the MS. was in German. The explana-
tion is that Dr Schweitzer is an Alsatian; and this no doubt has
given him a certain impartiality in the conflicts of our age.
Dr Schweitzer traces our misfortunes to a curious source: the
mistaken belief that our views on ethics must be dependent upon
our views as to the nature of the world. He greatly admires the
Eighteenth Century, because of its enlightenment and optimism.
But machinery and Darwinism and other modern improvements de-
stroyed optimism about the nature of the world, and therefore (be-
cause of the above erroneous belief) also destroyed men's ethical
optimism, though the outward form of optimism was preserved by
degrading ethical valuations to the level of what were thought
to be facts about the actual world. Hence our profound immorality,
with all its attendant ruin.
Dr Schweitzer's own position is agnostic as to the real world.
He is more or less Kantian both in this matter and in the belief
that ethics can stand without any support from metaphysics. But
he does not follow the Critique of Practical Reason in using ethics
to establish metaphysical conclusions. His ethics consists of a
single principle, which he calls “reverence for life.” This principle
he carries almost as far as the Buddhists. He says that if you work
with a lamp on a hot summer night you should keep your windows
shut for fear of hurting moths; that if, on a wet day, you find
a worm on the pavement you should pick it up and put it on
damp earth; and so on. Nevertheless, he does not enjoin vege-


354
DOES ETHICS INFLUENCE LIFE?
tarianism or condemn vivisection, though on the latter subject he
has qualms. It is not clear whether he is an out-and-out pacifist,
though he commends the Quakers as the only religious body which
throughout the war remained faithful to the teaching of Christ.
He holds, as against the Socialists, that private property and in-
heritance are sacred rights, which cannot be taken away without
infringing his principle of reverence for life; though, of course,
he goes on to say that it is our moral duty to use our property for
the benefit of the community.
These positive conclusions are contained in the last few chapters;
the bulk of the book is concerned in discussing European philoso-
phers from Socrates to Count Kayserling, and affirming their in-
feriority to the philosophers of India and China, whom he does not
discuss. One must suppose that these critical chapters appear to
the author, and will appear to many readers, to afford a solid
argumentative foundation for his own opinions. This, however, is
not and cannot be the case: his criticisms all assume his own point
of view, and are only valid if that is granted. For my part, I share
his opinions to a very great extent; but I should not attempt to
give a basis for an ethical opinion by criticism of the stock phil-
osophers. The argument that what ought to be cannot be deduced
from what is, seems to me valid, and sufficient to condemn almost
all European ethics and metaphysics, which have attained their
"profundity" by confusing the good with the true. But it follows
that when a man tells us "such-and-such is good in itself” he cannot
advance
any
valid argument for his position, nor can we advance
any valid argument against it. What passes for argument, on such
questions, is really exhortation or rhetoric; and, for my part, I
should prefer not to disguise this fact by an apparatus of irrelevant
erudition.
There are two matters of importance on which I find myself
in disagreement with Dr Schweitzer. One concerns his ethical
criterion of reverence for life, and the possibility of using it to
decide practical difficulties; the other concerns the causal impor-
tance of ethical opinions in relation to public events.
Life, in itself, seems to be neither good nor bad, and it is difficult
to see why we should reverence it. We do not know how far the
lower forms of life are associated with sentience; and, apart from
sentience, living matter is ethically indistinguishable from dead


BERTRAND RUSSELL
355
matter. There are passages which suggest that Dr Schweitzer
believes in hylozoism; he speaks of destroying an ice crystal in
the same way in which he speaks of destroying a flower or a moth.
But, if so, he falls into the error which he is chiefly concerned to
attack, namely, that of founding his ethic upon a highly disputable
metaphysic. He certainly conceives "life" in some more or less
mystical way: he defends mysticism, and urges that ethics should
be "cosmic.” It is difficult to understand what he means by this,
since human actions can only affect events on or near the surface
of the earth. Physics is "cosmic” because it applies to the whole
known universe; but ethics seems as terrestrial as geography, unless
we assume some such view of the world as Dr Schweitzer rightly
declares to be ethically irrelevant.
Passing by these difficulties, and confining ourselves to the higher
forms of life, we find that they contain not only all that is good in
the known universe, but also all that is bad. If reverence for life
is the good, a tiger must be bad. If we assign to the tiger the
same importance as to each of the animals that it kills, we shall kill
it in order to maximize life. We are thus committed to a calculus
of causes and effects, just as the utilitarians were. All the usual
justifications of war, slavery, and so on, become theoretically admis-
sible, and must be examined on their merits, not dismissed à priori.
This is not what Dr Schweitzer intends. He wishes us to decide each
moral problem in some intuitionist way which is not clearly defined.
He says: "Only the reverence of my
will-to-live for
will-to-live is genuinely ethical. Whenever I sacrifice or injure life
in any way I am not ethical, but rather am I guilty, whether it be
egoistically guilty for the sake of maintaining my own existence
or wellbeing, or unegoistically guilty with a view to maintaining
those of a majority.” It follows that a man who kills a tiger is
"guilty"; and yet Dr Schweitzer would not say that we ought to
abstain from killing tigers. On this point he seems to have failed
to think out his ethic, as also on the different degrees of intrinsic
value attaching to different forms of life.
Finally, it is difficult to agree with Dr Schweitzer in the im-
portance which he attaches to ethical opinions as a cause. If all
the professors of ethics in all the universities of the world had
taught his ethical system throughout the last one hundred years,
I doubt whether one line of the Versailles Treaty would have been
every other


356
DOES ETHICS INFLUENCE LIFE?
different from what it is. It is true that the ethical opinions of
the average man have altered during the last century, but they
have altered as a result of machinery, not of academic theory, and
they have altered so as to justify what the average man was going
to do in any case. Speaking causally, our ethics are an effect of our
actions, not vice versa; instead of practising what we preach, we
find it more convenient to preach what we practise. When our
practice leads us to disaster we tend to alter it, and at the same time
to alter our ethics; but the alteration of our ethics is not the cause
of the alteration of our practice. Experience of pain affects the
behaviour of animals and infants, although they have no morals;
it affects the behaviour of adult human beings in the same way,
but the change is accompanied by ethical reflections which we
falsely imagine to be its cause. Dr Schweitzer's book is an example
of such reflections. But neither it nor its academic predecessors
seem to the present reviewer to have that importance in moulding
events which the author attributes to them.
BERTRAND RUSSELL
*


MAKING MODERNISM DIFFICULT
WESTERN ART AND THE New Era. By Katherine S.
Dreier. 8vo. 139 pages. Brentano. $7.
WHIS book purports to help the public to a clearer understand-
ing of the idiom of modern expression, to give aid and comfort
to the curious and sceptical layman, and “to make the present
generation realize that art is not dead.” I can think of no worthier
ambition; for the meaning of contemporary art-forms has been so
persistently misrepresented by incompetent critics, and so flagrantly
obscured by painters with a weakness for writing, that the time is at
hand for a sane and lucid explication of the subject. But the intel-
ligent and inquiring outsider who hopes to discover in Miss Dreier's
book some tangible means for grappling with the thorny issues of
modernism will be disappointed; in fact, he will turn away from her
opinions with the inescapable conclusion that if the art of to-day is
a matter of cryptic abstractions and outlandish psychology, it is
nothing more than a freakish pastime which had better be left to the
caprices of a few deluded zealots. I do not, of course, object to the
author's convictions positive opinions and prejudices are born of
strong feelings, and in the case of art are certainly justifiable human
traits-it is because these beliefs are connected with pretentious
erudition and psychological nonsense that I find them meaningless
and absurd.
At first glance the book is impressive. It is well printed, at-
tractively bound, and illustrated with exceptional taste; it contains
an occasional truth-old truth, but not less valid on that account-
but after a few pages the reader's hopes for enlightenment are
quickly frustrated. The writing is bad; the sentences are loose and
inexpressive (on page thirty-eight the author says of Leonardo:
“It was the beauty of the way he filled his space, his line, and depth
which should be studied, for they are the fundamentals of art, and
place him where he stands"); proper names are mis-spelt; and recent
scientific theories relating to space, time, and colour are applied to
the creative art of painting in a manner that is simply ridiculous.
Sincerity and enthusiasm, however, are manifest on every page, and


358
MAKING MODERNISM DIFFICULT
6
a genuine love for painting is apparent both in the text and the
choice of illustrations; and it is to be regretted that these qualities
should have been wasted on theories which, if correctly presented,
would only add to the general confusion.
Miss Dreier's thesis, as a whole, is a plea for abstract art. Like
many other writers, she regards this decorative phase of modern
painting as an evolutional process which at last has triumphed over
all the forms of realism. By combining an arbitrary symbolism
with psychological fragments which bear the same relation to ac-
curate thinking as do the utterances of Mary Baker Eddy to the
religious experience of William James, she attempts to identify
colour and line with certain states of the soul. To support her con-
tention she reproduces two portraits of Marcel Duchamp, one a
charming and nicely drawn head by Joseph Stella, the other an
"abstraction” painted by herself. “Thus through the balance of
curves, angles and squares, through broken or straight lines, or
harmoniously flowing ones, through colour harmony or discord,
through vibrant or subdued tones, cold or warm, there arises a repre-
sentation of the character which suggests clearly the person
in
ques-
tion, and brings more pleasure to those who understand than would
an ordinary portrait representing only the figure and the face.”
Synaesthetic imagery is all very well for studio play; and it is
not a new idea to associate colours with different varieties of tem-
perament—we remember that Achilles "got green with envy—but
these irrelevancies, interesting as they undoubtedly are, have no
place in the field of creative activity. For years experimental
psychology has been busy with colour-reactions, and the results show
that not even the most abnormal victims of synaesthesia are capable
of such ranges of associations as are demanded by Miss Dreier for
a comprehension of modern art. In the appreciation of a picture
,
the observer is often misled by secondary characteristics. Colour
nuances, in particular, affect our moods and feelings; and it is not
difficult, on this account, for the sensitive soul to believe in the
primacy of tonal combinations, and going a step farther, to make
mere pigment expressive of the deepest emotions. But investiga-
tion has proved that these sensational aspects are too fluctuating to
be of any great importance: not only are the moods provoked by
given colour-schemes shadowy and uncertain, but the actual posi-
tions of these schemes in space, that is, in deep space, are never


THOMAS CRAVEN
359
positive; and it is worth emphasizing again that the finest colourists
invariably bind their visions of sensuous beauty to clear designs.
Colour has no definite meaning. It possesses charm and the prop-
erty of establishing a general "feeling-tone”; but all efforts to
rationalize and codify its values must always be arbitrary. It is
through colour that we enter into painting. An attractive harmony
will heighten our pleasure in a beautiful design; but on the other
hand, a judicious placement of colours will enhance, for the mo-
ment, the appeal of a second-rate picture, and it is only after the
initial sensation has faded that we are able to gauge the temporary
worth of pigment for its own sake.
Miss Dreier's claim that representation is not an artistic necessity
is perfectly tenable. The conventionalization of forms in pure
design logically tends to destroy the individual stamp which nature
has given to objects. Some of the most enduring examples of
aesthetic expression occur in the decoration of pottery and fabrics.
Here design (the organization of shapes and lines) with its colour
accompaniment, is the total content of the work. If Miss Dreier
had contented herself with a simple exposition of design, instead
of elaborating a fantastic symbolism, she would have opened the
door to the abstract development of modernist art.
I might point out, for instance, that in the art of the Mayas,
Aztecs, Peruvians, and North American Indians, as well as in the
more suave and sophisticated decorations of the South Asiatics, the
symmetry which most occidentals consider indispensable to non-
representative form was entirely ignored, and a remarkable under-
standing of proportional arrangements brought forth designs quite
as effective in pattern as anything of a symmetrical nature, and
much more stimulating. The variety afforded by proportional
design, as contrasted with the other style, is enormous: it has, in
fact, no end. The repeating pattern, while undeniably pleasing,
is stiff and mechanical—no matter how ingeniously it may be com-
plicated, it remains static. The free, or proportional pattern, which
relies upon feeling and aesthetic sense to hold in equilibrium the
mass, line, and colour of a design, is altogether as stable as the
mathematically balanced arrangement, and much closer to real ex-
perience in its rhythm.
The rhythm of our bodily functions is repetitive like the ticking
of a clock, or the accents occurring periodically in symmetrical de-


360
MAKING MODERNISM DIFFICULT
can
be iden
sign. Our life, however, is not measured with any such exactitude
-we are completely unconscious of the interminable and steady
flow of our inner experience—and we build up our world from the
sharper contrasts outside where repetition is unknown. In this
sense the free, or proportional design, has more in common with the
world which actually has a meaning; its variety resembles the
variety of conscious experience. But symbolism can go no farber
and remain sensible. The idea that parts of a design
tified with specific factors in our psychic life has no basis in expe
rience. A triangle is a triangle—when it is the carrier of meanings
the emblem of metaphysical spasms, or a part of the portrait of
Marcel Duchamp, it is an aberration. It is only in the general way
outlined above that pure design can symbolize life. Once repte
sentation is introduced, the design loses its purity, and differs from
other representations in its technique and the tone of its content
.
The abstract forms of modernist art are decorative expressions in
the proportional style; they have, in many cases, taste, tact
, and
acute feeling for the organization of sensuous elements
, but like
the designs of other periods, they contain no meaning and no vitality
unless they stand for something. In that event they require no
special interpretation—the key to their significance lies within the
work itself.
To the layman I can only say that the strangeness of modernism
will vanish with experience. At first all new forms are strange
whether representative or non-representative, decorative or realistic
and there is no explanation, no dogma, and no psychology that can
be substituted for experience. Miss Dreier has erected a barrier of
difficulties round a subject that is, in its own right, direct and
simple.
AN
w
THOMAS CRAVEN
1


THE BEST BUTTER?
The High Place. By James Branch Cabell. 12mo.
312 pages. Robert McBride and Company. $2.50.
JURGEN. By James Branch Cabell. 12mo. 368
pages. Robert McBride and Company. New Edi-
tion. $2.
IME has more than one form of revenge, and among them is
the deferred appreciation. In the days when Mr Cabell
was not so well known as he is now, he compiled a little manual
of unfavourable criticisms which was printed at the back of each
of his books. The intention was evidently malicious; the implica-
tion must have been, “Here am I a poet and a producer of beautiful
things even as Shelley, and this is what the fools say of me: 'Ante
porcos margueritae.' Has Mr Cabell ever reflected that a second
manual no less instructive than the first might be gleaned from the
opinions of many contemporary admirers ? As for example:
Mr Joseph Hergesheimer: “Jurgen is a very strange and very
beautiful book; it is courageous, truer than truth” (how true is
that?) “and made, to a marvelous extent, from the man's innate
being."
Mr Hugh Walpole: "Cabell is a writer with style as individual
and alive as Anatole France's. If Americans are looking for a book
to show to Europe, here it is.”
Mr Burton Rascoe: “I am convinced that this is one of the
finest products of creative imagination known to our literature.
There is no book that I know of in any language that is quite like
it. It is filled with witty conceits and passages of sublime pathos.
George Moore in collaboration with Remy de Gourmont, Anatole
France and” (imagine who?) “Pierre Louys might achieve a novel
similar to it ... if they applied themselves and worked very
hard.”


362
THE BEST BUTTER?
Having begun with a superlative, it only remained for Mr
Rascoe to compare Jurgen with the King James Version or with
Rabelais, but the New York Tribune saved him the trouble.
“... Full of quaint conceits, marvelous adventures and great
bursts of Rabelaisian laughter."
1
.
I am far from wishing to make any of these great men feel a
little foolish in regarding these encomia in cold print. Perhaps
Mr Burton Rascoe has never read Lord Macaulay's expressive
paragraphs on the puffing of second-rate authors. Perhaps Mr
Cabell himself winced a little at hearing himself compared to
Rabelais and (twice) to Anatole France.
Of course this kind of criticism by shrugs and implication sounds
not merely snotty, but actually dishonest. If a writer is thought
overrated, the case against him ought to be stated with some degree
of decent clarity. Reasons should be given and instances displayed.
In short, all the old paraphernalia which make book-reviewing such
a bore to read, and especially to write, must be creakily brought
forward. Very well; here goes.
The only quaint conceit I can recall in Jurgen, and the one which
earned it, I believe, the attentions of Mr Sumner, is the facetious
symbolism of the Sword, the Lance, and the Staff. Sometimes it is
one, and again the other, but it doesn't really matter; any school-
girl, to vary Macaulay, can tell you what it actually does mean.
The author, in fact, has been at some pains to make himself under
stood. Despite the passionate asseverations of Mr Rascoe and others
who will have it that Mr Cabell is simply the most occult and
titillatingly mysterious little wag imaginable, there is nothing very
obscure in it. Mr Rascoe is more than right in his contention;
George Moore, in collaboration with a whole battalion of Milesian
writers, could not have achieved the passages in which this sym-
bolism is utilized. They suggest rather the collaboration of a
tired undergraduate and a librettist from Times Square. The
juvenile leer is a little obvious. The phenomenon involved may
conceivably be a subject on which to embroider quaint conceits;
it is certainly quaint in the Book of Gargantua as it is supremely
comic in the Satyricon, but I submit that it is neither quaint nor
comic repeated for the fourth or fifth time in the same volume as
f


CUTHBERT WRIGHT
363
it is in Jurgen. Even the fairest things must pall. “Something
too much of this,” one murmurs, and the trouble with Mr Cabell
is that one is for ever saying that after a prolonged exhibition of
one of the half-a-dozen tricks in his romantic but limited reper-
toire. One even says it of The High Place which is a much better
achievement than the strident smartness of Jurgen. Something
too much of the blebs and the tawny eale and the bright red
manticora; of the Cabellian monsters and gimcrack fiends; of the
faked folklore and the faked Magic; of a naughty-naughtiness
which is certainly sophomoric and a sentimentality which suggests
that of an aging Barrie; of the soliloquies in the operatic prose;
of that desolating whimsicality and that harrowing “charm.”
And now that I have said the worst I know of Mr Cabell, it is
a pure pleasure to repeat a passage which indicates how tranquil
and lovely may be his style when he is not reproducing one of the
mannerisms suggested above:
"While Anaïtis talked the sky grew dark, as though the sun were
ashamed and veiled his shame with clouds: and they went forward
in a gray twilight which deepened steadily over a tranquil sea. So
they passed the lights of Sargyll, most remote of the Red Islands,
while Anaïtis talked of Procris and King Minos and Pasiphäe.
As color went out of the air new colors entered the sea, which now
assumed the varied gleams of water that has long been stagnant.
And a silence brooded over the sea, so that there was no noise any-
where except the sound of the voice of Anaïtis saying, 'All men
who live have but a little while to live, and none knows his fate
hereafter. So that a man possesses nothing certainly save a brief
loan of his own body; and yet the body of man is capable of much
curious pleasure.”
Evidently it does not suggest a collaboration of Rabelais and
Anatole France, but it is none the less very pretty. After all, one's
only quarrel with the critics whose immoderation I have suggested
is that most of the devices which they find subtle and sublime are,
in my opinion, simply unsuccessful. “I didn't say there was noth-
ing better,” remarked the White King in words which are a lesson
to reviewers, “I said there was nothing like it.”—“Which Alice did
not venture to deny."
CUTHBERT WRIGHT


THE ART OF APOLOGY
THE GENESIS OF THE WAR. By Herbert Henry
Asquith. 8vo. 405 pages. George H. Doran Com-
pany. $6.
THE WORLD Crisis. By the Rt. Hon. Winston
Churchill. Two Volumes. 8vo. 984 pages. Charles
Scribner's Sons. $6.50 each volume.
IT.
T is difficult to imagine two books more different than these
two apologies which have recently issued from the press, and
which, until Mr Lloyd George has found somebody to write his
memoirs for him, may be considered the two most important efforts
in this particular “genre."
But of all the points of contrast which these two books present,
the most essential is certainly the fact that Mr Churchill's book is
noteworthy for what it contains, Mr Asquith's for what it omits.
It is truly remarkable that a man who has been associated so
intimately with such great events could write a book so blameless
in its maiden chastity as The Genesis of the War.
It has been termed an admirable piece of précis-writing. Cer-
tainly readers of Mr Asquith must search for no signs of spiritual
doubt, for no agony of the soul, no hurry of the spirit. The stream
of his narrative is at once slow and shallow. Never did he make
a mistake, never did he doubt what course he was to take, never
has he lived to regret a decision once made. He accuses himself
of being a faultless, colourless statesman. Such is the picture he
gives of himself in his book, and such did he appear to his country:
men, always calm amid the gathering storm, unruffled and unin-
terested, till eventually a hysterical society turned on the modern
Aristides and tore him in pieces. Much will be forgiven to those
who loved much. But Mr Asquith seems to have neither loved
nor hated, and he met the fate of the Laodiceans. The Genesis
of the War is thus, for all its lack of human interest, instructive,
because it gives us the key to his so greatly undeserved failure.
He was not an incompetent war minister. Compared with his


FRANCIS BIRRELL
365
volatile dishonourable successor he was a positive Themistocles.
Ludendorff has borne witness to the bad condition of Germany at
the end of 1916 (the date of Mr Asquith's retirement) and to the
high state of German morale in midsummer 1917, when Mr George
was beginning to get into his stride. Mr Asquith has the right to
a large part of the credit for the first state of affairs, and Mr George
to nearly all the blame for the second. But Mr George shared
the passions of the English at war; he hated with them and loved
with them; his reactions were as theirs; they found him sym-
pathetic. In the hour of darkness Cleon was nearer to his people
than Aristides. Thus it was that despite his conspicuous abilities,
integrity, and personal charm, Mr Asquith was bound, as the moral
currency grew progressively degraded, eventually to collapse.
Such were the reasons for Mr Asquith's failure. They were in
a way moral not intellectual, and they are revealed in the book.
Further they are the only things that are revealed. Except for
the light thrown on the author the book is disappointing. But
little fresh light is cast on the terrible events with which the Prime
Minister was so intimately associated. Even when Mr Asquith
is making a controversial statement he makes it with such unim-
passioned dignity that it appears a platitude. Mr Asquith must
know quite well that his pre-war diplomacy has been the subject
of bitter controversy. An important colleague, his Lord Chan-
cellor Lord Loreburn, resigned because of it, and published a
formidable indictment called How the War Came. He pushed
further than ever before the system known as the Inner Cabinet,
that is to say a Cabinet within the Cabinet, which arrogated to
itself full control over all Foreign Policy and Imperial Defence,
reducing the rest of the Cabinet to impotence and ignorance where
all questions of supreme importance were concerned. In fact it
was only by this method that Mr Asquith kept his incongruous
Cabinet together. The mystery that hung round the earlier days of
the Entente, our military commitments to France and our naval
convention with Russia are the weak points in Mr Asquith's record.
Let us look at him skating calmly over the thin ice:
"Important questions of Foreign Policy were always laid before
the Cabinet where they were open to the fullest investigation and
discussion before final and binding decisions were taken. In par-


366
THE ART OF APOLOGY
ticular the various written agreements and "formulae” which ...
were from time to time exchanged between ourselves and other
powers were the subject of close debate and almost meticulous scru-
tiny. . . . It is sufficient to say that, until our final decision to
go to war in August 1914, no Cabinet minister resigned his office
upon any question of Foreign Policy. . .'
For all their lapidary calm these sentences, to put it mildly, beg
the question. Putting aside the resignation of Lord Loreburn,
which was nominally due to ill-health, the fact remains that in
August 1914, when the Inner Cabinet first put frankly before their
colleagues their commitments of honour to France and Russia,
half the Cabinet, headed by Mr George, were in revolt: though
when Belgian neutrality was violated all the ministers but two
withdrew their resignations. There were no earlier resignations
on Foreign Policy, because Ministers did not know clearly what
that Foreign Policy was. No doubt they could have found out,
if they had threatened resignation and a split in the party. It
is perhaps discreditable to them that they did not make the effort.
But that is not the same as saying that they were fully informed.
Turning from Mr Asquith to Mr Churchill is leaving the
estuary for the ocean. We are immediately tossed and buffeted
by every storm and passion. Our ears are stunned with the roar
of cannon, our nerves exasperated by the buzz of wireless. For
Mr Churchill lives passionately, and puts it all down with dis-
arming frankness. He is as ingenuous as a child, and is always
opening his watch to show us the works.
His book must be divided into two parts, the part leading up
to the war, and the part dealing with the war itself. The first
part of the book is positively childish. Mr Churchill has evidently
never had time to reflect on any of the ultimate causes of the war,
or on the fabric of modern states. He is more like a paladin at the
court of Charlemagne, than an inhabitant of the modern world.
He is incurably romantic and in a particularly dangerous way.
The picture he draws of himself surrounded by his Admirals and
absorbed in his preposterous schemes of naval strategy, is like a
Royal Academy painting in its absurd remoteness. Further, like
so many great men of action, he is insufferably verbose and his
pages are full of the dingiest rhetoric. What for instance may
be made of this piece of fustian:


FRANCIS BIRRELL
367
“Open the sea-cocks (of the British navy] and let them sink
beneath the surface as another fleet was one day to do in another
British harbour far to the north and in a few minutes-half an
hour at the most—the whole outlook of the world would be changed.
The British Empire would dissolve: each isolated community
struggling forward by itself: the central power of union broken:
mighty provinces, whole empires in themselves, drifting hopelessly
out of control and falling a prey to others: and Europe, after one
sudden convulsion, passing into the iron grip of the Teuton and
of all that the Teutonic system meant. There would only be left,
far across the Atlantic, unarmed, unready, and as yet uninstructed
America, to maintain single-handed law and freedom among men.
"Guard them well, Admirals and Captains, hardy tars and tall
marines, guard them well and guide them true.”
On another occasion, when staying with some friends, Mr
Churchill began idly turning over the leaves of the Bible. His
eye chanced on a passage in Deuteronomy which seemed to him
“full of reassurance," and adown it goes in black Gothic type.
Many readers will probably feel quite sick by the time they
reach page one hundred in volume one, but the moment we get to
the war, for which Mr Churchill with his blundering romanticism
must indubitably, as a member of the Cabinet, bear his share of
responsibility, the writing improves enormously. He is now quite
at home in the helter-skelter of events. For all his impetuosity he
is one of those provident persons who keep copies of all their
papers, and endeavor to get their colleagues to initial memoranda.
No one knows what the future has in store and one day they may
come in useful. Hence Mr Churchill's book is admirably docu-
mented and excellently arranged. On all serious points his apologia
is overwhelming.
Though the British navy finally triumphed completely, its record
in the World War was admittedly disappointing. The spectacle
of the most powerful fleet the world has ever seen with its "hardy
tars and tall marines,” shivering behind its defences in Skapa Flow,
and allowing German cruisers to sweep the North Sea was hardly
exhilarating. Mr Churchill is able to prove conclusively that our
naval stagnation was not his fault. He also puts up a good defence
for himself about the Antwerp expedition, our failure to advance
along the Belgian coast, in co-operation with the fleet, and destroy


368
THE ART OF APOLOGY
the German submarine nest at Zeebrugge, and on many other
minor points.
But the pièce de résistance of the book is necessarily his defence
of the Dardanelles expedition, and his defence is here, humanly
speaking, perfect. Mr Churchill looked forward to the war with
as much pleasure as anybody, and by means of suggesting that it
was inevitable, helped to create the atmosphere in which it became
so. But to do him justice, when once it did come, he wished it to
be conducted intelligently. Both his humane and intellectual
qualities were sickened by the spectacle of the senseless butchery
on the Western front, by the endless line of trenches, by the hideous
frontal attacks, by the horrible machine which was beyond the
control of those who should conduct it. The Dardanelles campaign
was the only intelligent attempt ever made to turn the enemy's
left flank. Above all Mr Churchill must not be held responsible
for the holocausts on the Gallipoli peninsular.
Both the land and sea operations can be divided into two parts.
At sea the Admiralty first wished to try to force the straits, and
the Admiral on the spot refused to continue the operations. Later,
when Mr Churchill had gone, the new Admiral on the spot was
anxious to make a fresh attempt, and the Admiralty refused to
countenance the project.
Similarly with the land operations. In the early days Lord
Kitchener refused to send to an undefended Gallipoli the single
29th Division to assist the fleet. Later, when the Gallipoli defences
had been thoroughly renovated, whole armies were despatched to
the massacre, while the fleet looked idly on. Thus Mr Churchill
was let down twice.
The entire subject is too long and technical to be discussed
within the limits of a review. But, to put it briefly, if it was
impossible to prevent the French higher command continuing its
disastrous offensives in the west, it would perhaps have been wiser
to bow to the inevitable and abandon the Dardanelles project. If
again Lord Kitchener and Lord Fisher were half-hearted about the
scheme, it would perhaps have been better not to try to override
them. Mr Churchill was never a dictator; and a politician, unlike
a commander-in-chief or a soldier-emperor, has to deal by pero
suasion and also to take into consideration the psychology and
capacity of colleagues he has not chosen. A statesman must be


FRANCIS BIRRELL
369
judged by his performances, and Mr Churchill will always carry
with him a maimed reputation, ultimately because he failed in an
enterprise magnificent in its conception, but which he could not
carry through with the collaborators at his disposal.
One general conclusion will, I think, be borne away by any
unbiassed reader. Mr Churchill showed more energy, intelligence,
and imagination than all the general staffs put together. On all
important points he was right and they were wrong. One further
general reflection may perhaps be permitted. What is the fate
deserved by a nation which encourages Mr Churchill in times of
peace and dispenses with his services in the years of war?
FRANCIS BIRRELL


BE
BRIEFER MENTION
1
FANTASTICA, by Robert Nichols (12mo, 375 pages; Macmillan: $2.50).
In his somewhat allegorical manner of writing Mr Nichols manifests
more than enough inventiveness and fury. But unfortunately all three
of these stories are marred by vagueness in the use of his symbols, and
by a fertility which runs into the circumlocutionally garrulous. He does
manage to get moments of swift melodrama, and nearly always attains
that valuable though undistinguished literary virtue of being "food for
thought." Perhaps the fragmentary aesthetics given in his preface is
the soundest feature of the volume, if we can forget that the accompanying
fiction is designed to show this aesthetics in action.
TEMPER, by Lawrence H. Conrad (12mo, 305 pages; Dodd, Mead: $2)
valiantly seeks to squeeze the blood of reality out of the turnips of
industrialism. In its outlines, it suggests the Dartmoor novels of Phill-
potts, wherein character is projected against a background of looms and
paper mills. Here the setting is a modern automobile factory—a rather
more difficult skylight through which to observe the workings of human
beings. On the descriptive side, Mr Conrad has written graphically; his
successes in the more vital elements of the narrative are only approximate
.
The Joyous ADVENTURER, by Ada Barnett (12mo, 497 pages; Putnam: $2)
is a narrative of what might happen should a "God bless my soul" professor
stumble upon an abandoned baby, and—in a mood between compassion
and philosophic absent-mindedness—adopt it. One need not burrow very
far within these covers to deduce that the progress of the tale will be gentle
,
fanned by zephyrs of sympathy, and accomplished without unseemly
haste. These qualities it has, and in addition, a note of fantasy which is
freshly conceived and not overdone.
V'INDICATION, by Stephen McKenna (12mo, 392 pages; Little, Brown: $2).
This is another book about England's winding-sheet, the fashionable sub-
ject. Mr McKenna's uses as a satirist are impaired by his lack of a
reasonable standard of conduct; his virtue is as unintelligent as his vice;
if one is cynical, the other is obtuse. Here are the usual manikins: the
hero is a nobleman, dull, blond, and idealistic; the heroine is the daughter
of an aristocratic rake and an opera-singer, a sentimental climber, who
appears nevertheless to charm the author; a rotter or two, some
a country-house or two full of supernumeraries. Mr McKenna's method
is the opposite of artificial; he seems to be both industrious and languid;
his style is like a respectable, badly fitting coat. Vaguely and wearily
one gathers the sense, through paragraphs as unsatisfactory as the win-
dows of coloured glass once admired in German and American houses. Mr
McKenna and a group of novelists, of which he is a very reputable ex-
ample, portray the immoral in behaviour; they represent the immoral in
writing.
profiteers
,


BRIEFER MENTION
371
ARLIE GELSTON, by Roger L. Sergel (12mo, 420 pages; Huebsch; $2).
Browning geranium plants sat on the window sill, and the oil-cloth on
the table held the eggy remains of a meal. . With this as a setting,
the author sticks persistently to the type, and gives us a set of lives which
it requires almost as much sufferance to read about as it would to live
through. Yet Mr Sergel seems to have discovered realism for himself:
while his novel does not have a single sentence of any intrinsic value,
it does reproduce the soiled tragedy, at times even the beauty perhaps, of
the mediocre. Where Sherwood Anderson aims at the lyric distillation of
Middle-Western drudgery, Roger L. Sergel returns to the plain documents.
SOULS IN Hell, by John O'Neill (12mo, 383 pages; Brown: $2.50) may
be described as a labour-as distinguished from a work-of imagination.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is quoted as saying that "it took up two days of
my time, but it was worth it”—which is stronger testimony concerning Sir
Arthur's available leisure than it is in regard to the merits of the novel.
Mr O'Neill manifestly shares the aspiration of one of his characters, who
"resolved that his stories should not only interest his readers, but, in future,
should bear a moral lesson of some kind.”
SALMA, by L. Cranmer-Byng (16mo, 110 pages ; Dutton : $1.50) is a play
in three acts about a Moorish Wali and a Persian minstrel and the beauti-
ful ingénue of a troupe of strolling players. It follows the romantic form-
ula, tends to preciosity, is in general a flower from the literary greenhouse.
As such it fulfils what it promises. The hesitating purchaser should cata-
logue his reactions to the word “lute” and let that make up his mind for him.
THE COMPLETE POEMS OF Robert Louis STEVENSON (8mo, 613 pages;
Scribner : $4) is a volume that will doubtless be appreciated by the num-
crous semi-literary people who for so long have upheld the R.L.S. cult.
One cannot however permit austerer standards of value to be disarmed
in the presence of this innocent sentiment. More than a hundred hitherto
unpublished examples of Stevenson's verse are included at the end of this
book and these will only help still more to set critical readers marvelling
at the thinness of the genius they display. For after all in how slim a
volume could all the poems of real value written by this mock-Bohemian
be preserved.
TROBAR Clus, by Ramon Guthrie (8mo, 100 pages; Norman Fitts : $2)
has more value and interest as a psychological document throwing light on
the fashionable fevers of our age than as an original work of art. Drawing
its impetus and method from the works of Laforgue and Corbière, or rather
from the work of these masters seen through the scholastic mind of an Ezra
Pound, this particular cult aims at substituting shock for entrancement,
impudence for revolt, epigrammatic smartness for imaginative condensation,
and a general saappy hell-for-leatherism for the more sincere and more
patient protests of an authentically indignant disillusionment. The tone
of the volume carries with it that peculiarly hollow resonance of mock-
mediævalism into which the weaker, less philosophic strains of James
Branch Cabell's prose lapse and fall.


372
BRIEFER MENTION
Poems, by Katherine Mansfield (12mo, 112 pages; Knopf: $2.50). It is
a matter for regret that Mr John Middleton Murry should have insisted
upon publishing this book. One cannot help suspecting that many of the
verses it contains were never intended by their author to see the light. We
may be willing to concede that Katherine Mansfield was capable of writing
distinguished short stories, but her literary reputation can only be damaged
by having her weaker work put so indiscriminately, so shamelessly before
us. In this small and unimportant volume we are once more reminded of
the presence of a certain self-conscious cleverness in Katherine Mansfield,
a self-conscious cleverness capable of invading and spoiling all but the
highest moments of her inspiration.
The Wise Men Come to Town, and other poems, by William Jeffrey
(16mo, 84 pages; Gowans and Gray, London: 3/6) is a collection of
poems many of which have already appeared in Scotland. Mr Willliam
Jeffrey is a poet the temper of whose mind is inclined towards mystical con-
ceptions. He is able to write good poetry, but there are times when his
inspiration seems heavy, when it seems to lack that indefinable quality
born of an intellectual or emotional experience which has been deeply felt.
In his shorter poems like those entitled Only a Moon, Merlin, and The
Old Man he often succeeds perhaps because these subjects more nearly
coincide with moods natural to him.
1
Wild CHERRY, by Lizette Woodworth Reese (16mo, 68 pages; Norman
Remington: $1.50) is a collection of old-fashioned poems which possesses
a certain mild quality of its own. Miss Reese's reactions are for the most
part ordinary, but now and again one comes upon very charming lines which
seem to carry with them an authentic personal note. We like for example
her appreciation of the yarrow flower, of its strange pungent smell and its
white appearance after rain. These poems would seem to suggest that a
free delicate spirit had been cabined in some way; an assumption that
might account for Miss Reese's continual use of the lovely word "wild" as
though its mere mention had a restorative and liberating influence.
Goethe, by Benedetto Croce, translated by Emily Anderson, with an intro-
duction by Douglas Ainslie (12mo, 204 pages; Knopf: $2.75) sets the
limits and proportions of aesthetic truth about Goethe in the Crocean
schemata. To the initiate in this philosophy it offers still another formal
exercise in appraising the "pure intuition" of a man of the greatest genius.
To the cultivated mind with a naive philosophy the essay is generous with
revaluations that may be taken piecemeal. Werther is seen as "a vacin-
nation fever rather than a real malady"; Faust II, "not as deep philosophy
but as a poetical libretto, somewhat in the manner of Metastasio"; Wagner,
the famulus is patronized for "his sincere and boundless faith in knowl.
edge.” From these three views it appears that the pedant thrives better than
the romantic or the religionary within the carefully surveyed limits of the
Crocean aesthetic. If Goethe was a romantic in his youth and dealt with
ultimates in a religious fashion in his old age, romanticism was with him
simply an innoculation fever and religious faith expressed allegorically,
“a crackling of sparks when a great fire dies out."


BRIEFER MENTION
373
CHANGES AND CHANCEs, by H. W. Nevinson (illus., 8vo, 360 pages; Har-
court, Brace: $4.50) is a beautifully written and a stimulating book-a
fusion of criticism with autobiography in which the fruits of an active
mind and an active life have been gathered. It should be an effective
answer to the plaint of those who, in the author's phrase, regard journalism
"with mingled curiosity and contempt.” Not since Percy Lubbock's Earl-
ham has there been so rounded and sympathetic a picture of childhood
impressions of English life; the later chapters give one a swift and intel-
ligent panorama of men and affairs. Mr Nevinson has the art of recreating
the scenes to which he has been witness; his life has been rich in contacts
and solid in satisfactions.
THE OUTLINE OF LITERATURE, Volume I, edited by John Drinkwater
(4to, 295 pages; Putnam: $4.50). In an introduction the editor explains
that this three-volumed series is designed to give a summary of literature
and to place it "in historical perspective." The outstanding works, themes,
and names of the world's literary past are given in a sequence of Briefer
Mentions more or less clearly chronological in order. As a result of its
painfully, almost insultingly simple method, those who can read the
Oucline could not stomach the literature, and those who can read the
literature could not stomach the Outline. The necessary thinness of
treatment leaves one with only the A B C's of works whose virtues
begin where the A B C's end, while the complete absence of underlying
philosophical attitudes robs the book of any compensatory interpretive
value. This is the sort of culture that comes over the radio. However,
the bibliographies at the end of each chapter are genuinely valuable and
can guide readers of the Outline to reference books elsewhere which were
written with less professional piety and more authentic fervour.
The MANCROFT Essays, by Arthur Michael Samuel (8vo, 287 pages; Har-
court, Brace: $3) embodies the literary diversions of an M. P.; they are
decidedly antiquarian in trend, and slightly encyclopædic in compilation.
One may derive the author's prepossessions from his themes—shawls, fans,
cameos, clocks, wigs, and weathercocks. Considerable research must have
gone into the preparation of these papers; their graces are unassuming and
their documentation thorough. They have been garnered from the pages
of The Saturday Review.
THE MALADY OF EUROPE, by M. E. Ravage (12mo, 250 pages: Macmillan :
$2) beats the dead horse of defeated liberalism with a vigour which might
well have been employed on some more practicable venture. Any book
in which are recapitulated America's motives in entering the World War
and the reasons for the defeat of her liberal aims in Allied victory appears
slightly gratuitous, no matter how highly spiced with journalistic salt and
pepper. Yet, it is as a recapitulation that Mr Ravage's volume should
be read by chose too impatient to struggle through discouragingly fat
source books. The simplicity and crispness of his summaries of complex
international relationships are qualities rare enough in discussions of this
character. Mr Ravage is a journalist not without the effective appearance
of knowledge.


COMMENT
O
NE has respected the Yale Review. While there has been a
remarkable absence of vitality in its contents as in its editing
(so that one has sometimes wondered how, or rather why, it got
itself born) one has respected the obvious purity of its direction.
One has not felt as in the case of almost every other monthly or
quarterly magazine published in this country (among intelligent
people we may lump The Century with Hearst's) that the sole
efficient motive (in Mr Hearst's case no doubt more conscious than
in that of Mr Shuster) in its continual publication is the com-
mon and not for that reason any the less fundamentally vulgar
desire to make the most money in the least time, coûte que coûte.
Mr Shuster and his employees are, to be sure, engaged in working a
different public from that so masterfully dredged by the more allur-
ingly gilded minions of William Randolph Hearst. The very
wealthy son of Mrs Phoebe A. Hearst knows what he is after; and
he picks men to help run his shows who are of his own wise kind.
One suspects that neither Mr W. Morgan Shuster nor Mr Glenn
Frank nor Mr Carl Van Doren is equally informed: in their un-
pleasant imitation of the less commercially suicidal aspects of The
Dial, one does not imagine laudable cunning. Although consciously
and confessedly refusing publication to young American artists
whose genius God has been so oddly generous as to permit them to
recognize, on the ground that “the public is not ready," these
individuals remain gentlemen all, gentlemen, I believe, quite un-
conscious of the fact, patent to all men with eyes to see, that their
high-toned pages reflect a procession not honourable—a procession
winding glumly down the time-clocked months and years, wherein
the standard of monetary value in these United States, punctiliously
creased, gloved, and oiled, leads all such piteous men and piteous
women as Destiny has apportioned to the dark and obscure end of
appearing in The Century Magazine, heads through knees by the
nose. I have no quarrel with The Century in particular: only two
sets of people could, stripped of their mock leather, their mock art,
and their Neapolitan ice-cream de luxe bindings, distinguish be-
tween those three illustrated sisters, The Century, Harper's, and
Scribner's Magazines— I refer to the men who edit them, and to the


COMMENT
375
advertising concerns of whom these are the satisfactorily proven
vehicles. But I did not here set out to write of what in the trade
are known as the Quality Group'; any more than of those other
more conscious, more éveillé undertakings, those of Mr Hearst and
Mr McClure and Mr Munsey, which, not indeed in the trade, but
surely in the intelligent head, do definitely group with that more
genteel, with that less exteriorly sexed sisterhood.
I write of The Yale Review. Here one has been aware of the
honourable attempt to produce a quarterly magazine wherein the
intellect may function, a journal wherein may live, to translate the
legend it shares with Yale University, Light and Truth. One has
been glad of The Yale Review. One has rejoiced at those frequent
charts and bulletins with which it has favoured a trepidated con-
tinent—those charts and bulletins wherein zigzags upward financial
success. One has been glad that Light and Truth, also in America,
can pay their way.
If one has had reservations as to the contents of The Yale Review,
these reservations have been upon points about which it is possible
to argue intelligently, not, as in the case of the High-Toned Sister-
hood, upon points which, for right-minded men gifted also with
sight, are too obvious to admit of debate. These reservations have
been upon points of aesthetic perception. Most of those living
American writers whose art pleases us as significant are not taken up
by The Yale Review. And many of those writers most often met
with (in person or by proxy) in its pages appear to us either mere-
tricious (as, for example, all of Mr J. B. Cabell and certainly
anyhow all the later work of Mr Joseph Hergesheimer) or merely,
and perfectly honourably, dead (as, for example, all of Mr
But no! De mortuis ... ). We have held our peace. We have
been aware that even the most powerful of quarterlies cannot make
the dead live. We have not shared the appalling terror of Oscar
Wilde's and Richard Strauss's King Herod: we have not felt im-
pelled, as did that over-written and over-instrumentated monarch,
to agitate for the enactment of a law Tetrarchically to forbid the
raising of the dead. For the dead that shall be raised are the dead
that have one time lived. And the dead that walk in The Yale
Review fall not in this category.
As for the meretricious, them it is indeed amongst the offices of a
? Between the writing and the publication of this Comment The Century
Magazine has, provokingly, withdrawn from the Quality Group.


376
COMMENT
journal of art and letters justly to puncture. But not, generally
speaking, in all their quarterly bubblings. Such soapy iridescences
have been allowed to drift their moment. We have contented our-
selves with reviewing the more knowledgeable of their published
books. And to consider intelligently has in these cases been to
pierce.
As for "those living American writers whose art pleases us”—for
them we have done and s