of the Sexual Interest and Knowledge of
Young Women, by F. I. Davenport (12mo, 62 pages; Archives of
Psychology No. 66: Copyright by the author). This book records "a first
attempt to apply objective methods to the field of sexual interests of
women.” The author, after a justifiable introductory sneer at the mystery
which has been made of the “inner life" of the adolescent girl, describes
his own simple source of information. “The data consisted of 880 spon-
taneous questions asked in writing by a group of 160 young women
students (from 17 to 23 years old) prior to a course in sex instruction
for which the students had made personal request.” These 880 questions
are classified and “organized,” and the author draws therefrom rather
shocking though not wholly unexpected conclusions. Briefly, they are that
girls have little interest in hygiene, personal or social, or in prospective
motherhood, but an intense curiosity regarding sexual physiology, about
which they are very ignorant and entertain extraordinary superstitions.


COMMENT
COLU
TOLUMBIA, in addition to being The Gem of Old Ocean,
sports upon the five digits of one patriotically mottled hand
five readable magazines. The other go-getting instrument goes,
anyhow since the passing of that somewhat rural, and yet always
essentially cultivated, Freeman, disconcertingly bare. The in-
habitants of the North American Continent never were much on
book-larnin': formerly they inclined rather to the collecting of
glass beads (pink and pistachio preferred); in our day they turn,
quite as naturally, to the vari-beaded advertisements of The
Atlantic Monthly and The Saturday Evening Post and other
like reliable concerns. [I speak here of the normal healthy in-
habitant. Just as there existed of old time a sick-stomached
minority which could not digest even the most appetizingly tinted
beads, so to-day there subsists, beneath The Illuminated Stream of
Progress, a whitish mollusc sort, which, lacking at once the stom-
ach to digest the brash and clanging strung pans and pots of Our
Great National Advertisers and the intelligence to decipher the
intelligible—absorbs (intussusceptively is, I believe, the word) the
non-alcohol, non-caffeine, non-bones, non-everything personally pre-
sterilized and pre-peptonized nutriment provided and dished up in
their All Sunned Mush Middle Pages by those recognized Chefs for
Invalids, Mr Ellery Sedgwick of Boston and Mr Cyrus Hermann
Kotzschmar Curtis of Philadelphia.]
Knowing how few and how isolated we gaily continue (we who
enjoy neither the nature of molluscs nor that of goats, we who num-
ber among us neither William Lyon Phelps nor Matthew Machinery
Josephson) we find it much cause for patriotic satisfaction that at
least five Columbian digits should gleam adorned. Piety to our
original editress, the later Marchioness Ossoli, compels us, with a not
unbecoming old-rose blush, to attribute The DIAL, Lambent, to
Columbia's index-finger. The Nation and The New Republic are,
1 The Editor of The Dial would be the last to disparage such readable
journals as The Arts, The Forum, The North American Review, and the
estimable host of other such choice undertakings which, however, do not
yet so publicly illuminate as to be with propriety spoken of as occupying
the same ocean-going fingers.


470
COMMENT
as usual, in the relatively safe middle. The Yale Review occupies,
thickly, the thumb. [New Haven Boys are taught not to point
with the thumb: that is why The Yale Review never points.] On
the little finger, of all human digits certainly the most disarming,
buds the silk pearl, Vanity Fair. To be sure, not always quite be-
yond marring suspicion of Teclaism, yet, the most Senatorial of
us must allow, always prettily set-up.
The Historical Development of the Soul of Vanity Fair falls,
largely speaking, in two epochs. In the beginning there was the
Great Rabindranath Tagore and the perhaps more boyish, yet surely
not for that any the less Great, Mrs Vernon Castle. These pursued
through the heavens, divergent courses; these met, upon earth, in
Vanity Fair. Each in his own rhythmical sphere the acknowledged
master, each yet performed, in her own very different way, le geste
bostonnais. Each in his turn ennobled the springy parquet of the
Copley-Plaza Hotel; each in her turn adorned the springy pages of
Vanity Fair. This epoch we may term, for assortment purposes, the
Heroic.
It is not possible, with our present imperfect data upon the
inward life of The Editor from Boston, to determine with any ap-
proach to scientific finality the absolute month in which this epoch
terminated. Yet terminate it indubitably did. We inhabit a gen-
eration of smaller men, of (and our new psychological apparati
demonstrate this ironly) lesser and more mercurial faiths. As the
Keltic bard aforetime observed, “The noble ones are with us no
longer; the large-footed ones—with Jumbo—have passed.”
Mr Gilbert Vivian Shaw-Seldes, known amongst the interna-
tionally penetrating as le critique new-yorkais, and Mr Clive Bell,
known to all people everywhere as The Great English Critic who
has-Gravid Decade upon Gravid Decade—been wrestling—both
at Home and Abroad, both in Talk and in Book-with that
Ultimate Problem in Aesthetics "Whether, after all,” Pierre Bon-
nard “May not be Our Greatest Living Painter"—these twin gilded
bantams now rule Mr Crowninshield's roost. They are, in Mr
Frank Crowninshield's All-White Minstrel Show, the always em-
phatically end-men. I am second to no rustic in open-mouthed
admiration for the always bouncing small-talk and always Brer
1 The Latin is psychological.


COMMENT
471
Rabbit stage-business of these Paris - London - New York white-
gloved, white-eyed, white-chrysanthemumed, and princely-salaried
flâneurs de luxe, africaine. But I am embarrassed by a memory
and by a heart. I recall the Epoch Elephantine. I regret that Mr
Primrose Crowninshield, Onetime Exhibitor of the Largest-Footed
of God's Minstrels, should have been, with the degeneracy of an
Epoch Jitney, pared down to what remain-though they come to
us bearing carbuncles in their foreheads—geologically speaking,
Smaller Fry.
Here is not the spot to advertise the wit and wisdom of Mr
Gilbert Vivian Shaw-Seldes, Sga.: Seven Lively Arts,' on Seven
Hundred Deadly Stages, yodel them.
But his lively pendant, Mr Bell, in Vanity Fair for April courts
attention. Writing of the Dial folio by and large, as is his way,
Mr Bell regrets my failure to include nine more Parisian artists-
all of whom, as well as the more important Georges Braque (whom,
I take it, Mr Bell forgot) making an even ten, I could easily have
included by merely raising the price to one hundred dollars and
selling dog-carts to go with the folio. Mr Bell would have slightly
facilitated these generous and sweeping inclusions by the expulsion
of one German-Italian, one Scandinavian, one Englishman, and
two Americans. This international folio of contemporary art would
then have been, aristocratically, 72% Paris Pure: in fact it registers,
apologetically, only 46% Parisian.
One wonders why Mr Bell sticks on in London. Artistically
speaking, it remains, as Mr Bell would be the first to recognize,
the always intriguingly provincial capital of a sometimes somewhat
tryingly suburban empire. Bedded betwixt the economical cold-
mutton of British Cookery and the extravagant cold-mutton of
Augustus John, Mr Clive Bell must, pretty steadily, dream dreams.
It is to his international credit that he rests not; that (if I may
be
permitted to misquote Mistress Pistol) 'a babbles of Bonnard.
London, whatsoever its aesthetic tang, remains, for naval
reasons, conspicuous. Being unwilling to break the heart of the
British Empire, I included three (3) London artists in Living
Art. To check them up with Paris is not in order here. Two of
them flourish in the sunlight of Mr Bell's own admonitory gusto:
1 The Seven Lively Arts, by Gilbert Seldes (8vo, 448 pages; Harper : $4).


472
COMMENT
Mr Clive Bell, who has thrown overboard so much of England, yet
retains, in a finely notable degree, the eminently British virtue
of loyalty to friends: Duncan Grant and Frank Dobson are pro-
vided for, richly.
Cliques were ever the appointed scourges of small-town life.
Contemporary London rejoices in this pester. The sewing-circle
of Mr Ezra Pound was never the sewing-circle of Mr Clive Bell:
they differ, among other things, in their pronunciation of the word
“Bonnard.” Now Mr Wyndham Lewis has for his sins (and those
familiar with his paintings know how unambiguous these can be)
been bumbled about, been advertised about, been vorticized about,
by the late, the gesticulatingly late, Mr Ezra Pound. So Mr Bell,
objecting to Mr Lewis' company in Living Art, patly and neatly
expostulates, he goes “by another train.” So he does. By another
train than Mr Bell's The London Group. This Wyndham Lewis,
about whom Mr Ezra Pound has talked more bunk than even Mr
Ezra Pound has talked upon any other sub- or trans-lunary sub-
ject, remains, for all that, the one really distinguished draughtsman
that England has, since Aubrey Beardsley, owned. He possesses
a violent integrity of line which is not English. Decidedly, he goes
by another train.
As to our own Alfeo Faggi, Mr Bell supposes “there must be
scores of better sculptors in America.” As a friend of Alfeo Faggi,
as a sincere admirer of his art, I at first resented this aspersion.
Later, as a Patriot, I welcomed it. For even the hyperbolical Mr
Clive Bell could never assert that there are in England "scores of
better sculptors than Frank Dobson.”
Since Mr Bell excludes Boardman Robinson and Ernesto de
Fiori quite sans phrase, it does not appear appropriate to laud here
men of whom the reproductions of their work in the Dial folio are,
after that work itself, the adequate defence. But “if he felt that
some Scandinavian artist should be included, why prefer Edvard
Munch to the incomparably superior Per Krohg?” Here it is
apposite to point out that Edvard Munch lives and works the year
round in Norway, and that Per Krohg winters in Paris, and that
Mr Clive Bell cherishes the ennobling custom of Handley-Pageing
across La Manche to déjeuner on the rive droite, and that this in.
spiring British firm has not yet opened up Scandinavia for déjeuner
and critics. Clive Bell is a man of very real aesthetic perception: if


COMMENT
473
he had the ghost of a notion what he is here saying, he simply
couldn't
say it. If he had seen more than one first-rate thing by
Edvard Munch he must have acquired some inkling of this to him
foreign idiom. He must have perceived that while Per Krohg is a
painter not to be sneezed at, Edvard Munch is, shortly, a Master.
This is not a subject for aesthetic controversy; this is a case for
Thomas Cook.
On second thought, I fancy Mr Clive Bell would rather leave
Cook Tours to The President of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
We must, I fear, await that perhaps not too distant August day
when one of Mr Bell's host of yachting friends (preferably at
Cowes) will invite him to hop aboard, pop across, and twig the
Norowegian Fjords. Mr Bell will glide recalling that although
neither Monsieur Pierre Bonnard nor Lady Diana Manners Duff
Cooper has yet taken up Fjords, yet Childe Harold also voyaged.
Discursive in a putty-coloured wicker-chair upon the Oregon-pine
quarter-deck of the soft-coal Yacht Daphne, he will read, to a
small circle, Scotch and Syphon to hand, Manfred. Having made
their perpendicular port, the brassy satin-wood-mounted cannon-
ette having à la King Charles's Spaniel barked, and the all-Brum-
magem anchor-chain having, in a forthright noisy Britannia-rules-
the-iron-deposits sort of way, brawled out, Mr Bell, tracking Childe
Harold, will, in the duck-upholstered, pneumatic-cushioned yacht-
dinghy, be mahoganily rowed and set ashore. He will, wading dis-
consolately upon un-Gallic beaches, happen upon an indigène paint-
ing. He will make one of those rare discoveries which are the
chief joys and perquisites of an open-hearted amateur's many-joyed
existence.
Although not Mr Bell's regular publishers, we are thus in a
position to announce that this author's next volume will be en-
titled "Significant Munch.”


1
THE THEATRE
OME of the events for which a dramatic critic pines long in
a
chronicle. It had always been hoped by friendly observers that a
play by Miss Zoë Akins would be produced which wouldn't have
a leg to stand on; and this has happened. The direction was
excellent, and the two chief rôles were obviously played with full
sympathy for the author's emotions and ideas. I am told that The
Moon-Flower is still packing them in—well, at least paying its
way. But that Miss Akins' appeal is to the least intelligent, to
those of the thinnest blood, the feeblest grasp on life, is finally
established. Naturally there has been some talk of the lady's in-
tentions in the matter; was she, for the purposes of a Sunday review,
being ironical about these dukes and courtesans and idiot-boys?
I've read them all. I am convinced that whatever else she possesses,
she has not the creative gift; she hasn't even the constructive gift;
and her wit is without pungency or tone. The creative gift is
visible in Fata Morgana, a play entirely of the second order,
where emotion and irony are mixed neatly and successfully. The
difference is that in the second play the dramatist has created his
little life in the framework of the theatre; improbabilities occur;
consider it calmly, and you doubt whether the boy as played by
Morgan Farley would be attracted by the woman as played by
Emily Stevens. The author has passed beyond our woulds to
saying, with authority, that it did happen. And this feeling, that
it happened, Miss Akins cannot give us.
Fata MORGANA is, by the way, a rather tormenting play, and
one does wish Miss Stevens had understood her obligations better.
But it has life and interest; and the play in which Miss Elsie Fer-
guson and Mr Sidney Blackmer do some of the least interesting
acting in years, has no life, not even artifical life, whatever.
The other longed-for event is in The OUTSIDER. In it, I say,
because The Outsider itself is neither a fine nor a great play; it
is rather simply affecting, like emotional melodrama. But it took
Miss Katherine Cornell out of a play which required her talents,


GILBERT SELDES
475
yet was never worthy of them (THE WAY THINGS HAPPEN) and
put her in one making no demands whatever, one which seems to
look gratefully into her eyes at the first sign of acting. And in
this play Miss Cornell acts superbly. The play is about an un-
authorized practitioner, one who has invented a machine to cure
hip disease. Spurned as an outsider by the Fellows of the Royal
Medical Society, he wins his way by persuading the crippled
daughter of the greatest of them to try his rack; and after dis-
heartening trials, succeeds. Miss Cornell plays this daughter.
That she gives the character richness of texture, embodies it, in the
true sense of the word, can be assumed. Her delicacy and lightness
of touch, too. It impressed me that Miss Cornell acted as Chaliapin
acts, seeming to derive her strength not from what she did to the
audience, but from her effect upon the other players; she seemed
to create moods about her, and these moods, coming thus at second-
hand upon the audience, were doubly potent. It means that Miss
Cornell's art springs from something alive, that there is something
ardent at the core. Her intelligence and her grace were needed
here, too; grace to invest a small thing with all the beauty it could
bear, and intelligence not to despise it for being small.
SPRING CLEANING is a play of last year, omitted in the crush of
other matters at the time. It still flourishes, because it has a kind
of wit which seems to be the author's own property at this mo-
ment. Frederick Lonsdale is his name and he is, I hear, English;
the play is rather continental. The expedient of bringing a harlot
to a dinner party in order to show a frivolous wife the depravity
of her companions is dubious as logic and as drama, one would say;
but it serves. And before this "big" act and after, Mr Lonsdale's
wit plays fiery rings around his characters. The conversation is
much more outspoken than most one hears either here or abroad,
and it is not particularly the use of an occasionally ugly name that
gives one a start. It is the direct and witty expression of turns of
mind, deviations from the polite into the drastic and actual.
Having visited a number of theatres without pleasure, I returned
to Poppy. Mr Fields is grand.
GILBERT SELDES


MODERN ART
As one of
community takes in the Sargent exhibition, which is still
charming dollars from pockets unaccustomed to paying dollars for
art exhibitions, it lies in a pleased surprise at the good appearance
we make. We are, or we were in the ’nineties, better form than
we suspected. At the present day form, as far as I can make out,
is not much of a preoccupation with any people—the war seems to
have dissolved form—yet even in the hilarity of our new prosperity
it is apparent that the tradition of "quality" is not quite so dead
but that surviving members of the former cult may réchauffer
themselves at such embers of it as Mr Sargent's art provides.
We have all, of course, with great readiness, accustomed our-
selves to the rôles that fate has recently thrust upon us. We not
only submit to, but enjoy, being grandees; and, recalling some of
our experiences of a dozen years ago, rather think we have im-
proved upon the model then extant in the way of world leaders.
We seldom betray impatience at the importunate princes and lesser
nobles that now besiege our doors; and as a rule we are uncritically
willing to know and to feed them. In the rush of accommodation
to the new life, there is little chance to indulge in our old vice of
introspection; but occasionally at odd moments we do recall the
time when any European had it in him to make us feel second-class.
Between the Daisy Miller who had the "tournure of a princess” and
was so pitiably unable to cope with a hotel courier, and the New-
port ladies in The International Episode who so unaccountably
crumbled in the presence of a duchess, there is not now, we recollect
with astonishment, so very much to choose. Indeed the average
citizen of to-day is altogether likely to agree with Mr Howells in
thinking Daisy Miller a "supreme effect of the American attitude
towards womanhood” and in considering the Newport ladies cheap.
Their failure certainly was a less bearable kind than Daisy Miller's.
Some of the stain left by this and all of Henry James' later ac-
cusations against us is what the current exhibition dissipates.
I don't suppose the gratification is a deep one-how could it be
in the intoxication that sweeps New York at present?—but it


HENRY McBRIDE
477
nevertheless soothes in the midst of so many new distractions to
discover that even a generation ago we were not so bad. It is as
though a parvenu were to be unexpectedly blessed with a grand-
father. In this case one should say grandmother, since it is the
elderly women in the show who do us proud. The men, with
the single exception of Mr Joseph Pulitzer, all go to pieces as
human beings, but several of the old ladies are to be seen spiritually
intact, and, as though that were not enough, nicely costumed. The
Victorian and Second Empire dowagers really had nothing on Mr
Sargent's examples whatsoever; and seeing this, it is all the more
surprising that the daughters, several of whom are prettily in-
dicated by the artist, should have undergone the European abase-
ments that Henry James said they did. It is as a sort of social
register that Mr Sargent succeeds. His sensitiveness to scale is
amusingly illustrated in his portrait of dear Ada Rehan, who it
now appears, was not—how shall I say it?—not quite a lady-
and not being a lady therefore not interesting, or at least, not to Mr
Sargent. He scarcely considered her worth drawing properly, and
the less said about the arms that hold the immense fan the better.
A social register, however, is a not unuseful achievement. It has
been remarked that the historians who accuse Horace Walpole of
light-mindedness quote more steadily from him than from any
other Englishman of his time. Without pretending that Mr
Sargent spoke for his ’nineties with the authority of a Walpole-
for Horace occasionally looked below the surface and plumbed
depths-nevertheless the record he accomplished makes a vivacious
accompaniment to the histories of the two decades—the 'eighties
and ’nineties—that are now being rounded out by the recent
critics into an appreciable period.
It is not deep work. It is not finished work. In one technical
feature, and in only one, it is first-rate. The "values" everywhere
are unerring and superb. The colour used in the interiors is
acceptable but undistinguished. The colour in the outdoor things
is commonplace; in fact Mr Sargent's whole point of view towards
landscape is commonplace in the extreme. And finally, the draw-
ing is uncertain. Everywhere in the New York exhibition we see
arms that are awkwardly attached to torsos, and torsos that lack
the support of legs. Even the Higginson ears lapse out of con-
struction! In a loftier form of arm, errors of hand can easily be


478
MODERN ART
overlooked; but here where everything is passionless and superficial,
the very great brush dexterity that is held out to us as a recom-
pense is not enough. Not enough at least to enchain permanent
interest.
I ought to add, I suppose, for those who like concrete state-
ments, that I infinitely prefer Sargent to Sir Thomas Lawrence,
but that I rate him well below Manet, Cézanne, Reynolds, and
Gainsborough.
For the sake of the record I must mention immediately an artist
to whom I permit any use or misuse of the medium he wishes.
When an artist has so much spirit as Charles Burchfield, he is
immune from criticism. Mr Burchfield, it will be remembered,
is the young man who lived in Salem, Ohio, and hated it. His
water-colours interpreting his feeling in regard to that place made a
veritable sensation when shown here some years ago—they were
so very vehement. The rules for the polite usage of water-colours
had been absolutely ignored by the artist. He used gouache in a
manner that was positively indecent, and expanded his sizes until
Mr Brangwyn himself would have been revolted; but no one that
I have heard of seemed to mind. On the contrary the lustiness
of the new artist's arraignments of Salem, Ohio, so enchanted
everyone that there was only one fear—that success might soften
Mr Burchfield's heart and subsequently his style. But the new
collection of his drawings in the Montross Galleries shows that
we were unduly alarmed. Mr Burchfield is as savagely satiric as
ever, and his art has grown in sureness and compactness. It seems
likely that much must be written of this man, but already we may
delightedly enscroll him upon our small list of hundred-percenters.
HENRY MCBRIDE


MUSICAL CHRONICLE
TRAWINSKY cuts in hardest stone. Like sculptural blocks
the volumes flow through time. No music is more honest, less
tricky and deceptive with emotional wave lengths, effective clever-
ness, subjective churning. His is brute rather, forthright, frank,
bold. In the biting acrobatic line, no evasive something. Soft-
ness seems to have disappeared with the subordinated violins. In
the mass of sound no smoky thickness. Le Sacre, the Symphonies,
lie in sunlight positive of edge and hard of surface, each trait of
reed, each jerk of rhythm certain and nude. The hand can grasp
them.
This is no member of Milhaud and Company, or any intel-
lectualizing group, full of the moral will to be hard, brutal,
realistic, tough, precise; loudly scornful of all soaring and violin
music; swanking with realism, radios, advertisements, jazz. A
sharp emotional clarity has driven Strawinsky's medium. He
merely is what he is very completely; lives it undiluted by conflicts
and timidities in unreserved fulness. The vision and the man are
one, and the man shares in the living elements of his time: first,
its primitivity: as H. Seligmann puts it, “mumbo-jumbo savages
on Fifth Avenue wearing dead animals and birds just as savages
would”; man in terror of the uncontrollable forces this time not
out in nature, but in his own psyche; machine-like movements of the
poor individual driven by indifferent herd-powers; reversion back-
ward en masse to the beating of war-drums; neurotics transporting
about with them dark pieces of the savage mind. Irony; primitive
coachman legs; being Indian and terribly chez soi, gave him
Petrouchka. Animality; joyous playfulness; a certain childish
cruelty, Renard. Spiritual négligé again, gaminerie and wit,
L'Histoire du Soldat. Emotional exhibition never came into the
matter, nor decorative exaltation, hieratic gesture, atmosphere of
Bayreuth. The man feels realistically, unsentimentally. The
ideas subconsciously synthesized, for everything in the artist be-
comes aesthetic, flew hot off the bat of life, weighty like dread-
naughts of solid steel, graceless as street-boys their fingers ever at
their nose's tip, powerful, pungent, and snotty all at once. No


480
MUSICAL CHRONICLE
rationalizing mind introduced and spoilt their freshness, in-
formality. Electric sight singled out precisely what it wanted of
its medium; realized its intentions relentlessly to the full; held each
instrument, singly or in groups, each chord or phrase, exactly to
the character demanded of it; and permitted the whole to stand
without excuse for what it is. Strawinsky called Le Sacre an act
of faith. He brings the image of the great classic artisan into the
world among us.
The first section of Le Sacre gives him at his perfectest. There
the many ideas, so penetrating, savage, and powerful, are welded
by a profound inner thrust into a unity long and sustained, one
feels, like the span of a cantilever bridge. In the other composi-
tions the cohesion is never as completely established. The second
section of the Sacre, astounding and packed with strange blood-
knowledge as it is, falls slightly more into separate ideas. The
want of an inner unifying principle is plainly noticeable in
Le Chant du Rossignol. And the Symphonies, for all their ma-
chine-perfectness and refinement, suffer slightly from the same
absence. These concordances for wind instruments, the last of
the Russian's work to reach us, give with cruel precision a naturalis-
tic picture of a state of grief and deprivation. For restrained
poignancy the last dirge-like march of the brass is to be compared
only with certain pages of Moussorgsky. Nevertheless the form
appears a little too intellectually generated; one gropes for an
inevitable inner logic. It seems there is some last intensity that
does not come readily to Strawinsky, clear as his passions are.
Great form is the product of that last lower level of consciousness
where expression is merely stammering and clumsy gesture. In
the first
part of Le Sacre Strawinsky achieved the basic adamantine
form of the thing which seems always to have been here. The mu-
sic sets a standard by which most orchestral compositions seem
lacking or small. But it set a standard also for Strawinsky; he
can do the ultimate thing when he is not too busy talking.
PAUL ROSENFELD






ifade in Germany
From Living Art
SCÈNE VILLAGEOISE. BY PIERRE BONNARD



THE
TV
х
VI
VI
DIAL
OXXIII
JUNE 1924
REMINISCENCES OF LEONID ANDREYEV
BY MAXIM GORKI
Translated From the Russian by S. S. Koteliansky and
Katherine Mansfield
IN
N the spring of 1898 I read in the Moscow Courier a story
called Bergamot and Garaska, an Easter story of the usual
type, written to appeal to the heart of the holiday reader. It
reminded the world once again that man, at certain moments and
in certain special circumstances, is still capable of generosity, and
that occasionally enemies become friends, even if it doesn't last
longer than a day.
Since Gogol's The Overcoat, Russian writers must have written
hundreds or even thousands of such deliberately pathetic stories;
they are, so to speak, the dandelions scattered among the superb
flowers of genuine Russian literature, and are meant to brighten
the beggarly life of the sick and rigid Russian soul.
But out of that story came the strong evidence of a talent
which reminded me somewhat of Pomialovsky; also one glimpsed
a roguish little smile on the author's face, a smile of mistrust of
facts he chose to conceal; which little smile easily reconciled me to
the inevitable, forced sentimentalism of Easter-tide and Christmas-
season literature.
I wrote Andreyev a few lines about his story, and received an
amusing answer; he wrote funny unusual phrases in a singular
handwriting, with half-printed letters. I remember particularly
one naïve and sceptical aphorism: "A well-fed man finds about
1 Probably these are not the thoughts that came to me in those days, but no
matter.


482
REMINISCENCES OF LEONID ANDREYEV
as much satisfaction in being generous as he does in drinking his
after-dinner coffee.”
So began my acquaintance with Leonid Nicolayevitch Andreyev.
In the summer I read some more of his stories and sketches,
written under the name of James Lynch, which pseudonym he
used for journalistic work. I noticed how quickly and boldly
the individual talent of the new writer was developing.
In the autumn, on my way to the Crimea, at the Kursk railway
station in Moscow, someone introduced us to each other. Dressed
in an oldish overcoat, with a shaggy sheepskin hat tilted to one
side, he looked like a young actor in an Ukrainian theatrical com-
pany. His handsome face seemed to me not very mobile, but in
the fixed glance of his dark eyes gleamed the smile which so pleas-
antly irradiated his stories and sketches. I don't remember his
words, but they were unusual, and unusual also was the construc-
tion of his agitated speech. He spoke hurriedly, with a dullish,
booming voice, with a little crisp cough, his words slightly choking
him, while he waved his hands monotonously as though he were
conducting an orchestra. He appeared to me a healthy, elfish,
amusing man capable of supporting with a laugh the woes of
this world. His excitement was pleasant.
"Let us be friends!” he said pressing my hand.
I too was joyfully excited.
In the winter, on my way from the Crimea to Nijni, I stopped
in Moscow, and there our relations rapidly assumed the character
of a close friendship.
Seeing how little in touch he was with reality, how little he
cared about it, even, I was the more surprised by the power of
his intuition, by the fertility of his imagination, by the grip of
his fantasy. A single phrase, at times a single pointed word, was
enough to start him off; and then, seizing the insignificant thing
given him, he would instantly develop a scene, an anecdote, a
character, or a story.
“Who is S?” he asked about a certain author fairly popular
at that time.
"A tiger out of a furrier's shop.”
He laughed, and lowering his voice as though communicating
a secret, said hurriedly:


MAXIM GORKI
483
“You know, I must describe a man who has convinced himself
that he is a hero, a tremendous destroyer of everything in the
world, till he has become frightful even to himself—what! Every-
body believes him; so well has he deceived himself. But away
in his own corner, in real life, he is a mere miserable nonentity,
afraid of his wife or even of his cat."
So, winding one word after another round the spindle of his
flexible thought, he was always easily, gaily creating something
unexpected and singular.
The palm of one of his hands had been pierced by a bullet, his
fingers were crooked. I asked him how that happened.
“An equivoque of youthful romanticism,” he replied. “You see,
a man who has not attempted to kill himself doesn't amount to
much.”
Thereupon he sat down on the sofa beside me, and in superb
fashion related how once, when a youth, he had thrown himself
under a freight train, but fortunately had fallen alongside the
rails, so that the train rushed over him and merely stunned him.
There was something vague, unreal in the story, but he embel-
lished it with an astonishingly vivid description of the sensations
of a man over whom hundreds of ton-loads are moving with an
iron rumble. These sensations were familiar to me too: as a
lad of about ten I used to lie down under a ballast train, competing
in audacity with my playmates, one of whom, the pointsman's
son, played the game with particular cool-headedness. It is an
almost safe amusement, provided the furnace of the locomotive
is raised high enough, and the train is moving uphill, not down-
hill, so that the brake-chains of the cars are tightly stretched, and
can't hit you, or catch you and fling you on to the sleepers. For
a few seconds you experience an eerie sensation, you try to press
as flat and close to the ground as possible; and with the exertion
of your whole will you fight against the passionate desire to stir,
to raise your head. You feel that the stream of iron and timber,
rushing over you, tears you off the ground and wants to drag you
off somewhere; and the rumble and grinding of the iron resounds
as it were in your bones. Then, when the train has passed, you
still lie motionless for a minute or more, powerless to rise, seeming
to swim along after the train; and it is as if your body stretched
out endlessly, growing longer and longer, becoming light, and


484 REMINISCENCES OF LEONID ANDREYEV
melting into air, so that in another moment you will be flying
above the earth. It is very pleasant to feel all this.
"What fascinated you in such an absurd game ?” asked
Andreyev.
I said that, perhaps, we were testing the power of our will, by
opposing to the mechanical motion of huge masses, the conscious
immobility of our puny little bodies.
“No,” he replied, "that is too good; no child could think that.”
Reminding him of how children love to "tread the cradle”.
that is, to swing on the supple ice of a new-frozen pond or of a
shallow river-bank-I said that boys generally liked dangerous
games.
“No, it can't be that, altogether. Nearly all children are afraid
of the dark. As the poet said:
‘There is delight in battle,
And on the edge of a dark abyss,'
but that is merely 'fine words,' nothing more. I have a different
idea, but I can't quite get at it.”
And suddenly he started up, as though seared by an inner fire.
“I must write a story about a man who all his life long, suffer-
ing madly, sought the truth. And, behold, truth appeared to him,
but he shut his eyes, stopped his ears, and said: 'I don't want thee,
however fair thou mayst be; for my life, my torments have kindled
in my soul a hatred of thee.' What do you think?”
I did not like the theme. He said, with a sigh:
“Yes, one must first decide where lies the truth—within man
or outside him? According to you—it is within man ?”
And he burst out into laughter:
“Then it is very bad, a very paltry affair.”
There was scarcely a single fact, scarcely a single problem
which Leonid Andreyev and I regarded in the same light; yet
innumerable differences did not prevent us—for years—from feel-
ing for one another an intense interest and a regard which is seldom
felt even after a long-standing friendship. We were indefatigable
in our discussions; I remember we once sat uninterruptedly for
over twenty hours and drank several samovars of tea. Leonid
swallowed an incredible quantity of tea.


MAXIM GORKI
485
He was a wonderfully interesting talker, inexhaustible and
witty. Although his mind always manifested a stubborn tend-
ency to peer into the darkest corners of the soul, nevertheless his
thought was so alert, so capriciously individual, that it readily
took grotesque and humorous forms.
In conversation among
friends he could use his sense of humour flexibly and beautifully;
in his stories he unfortunately lost this capacity, which is so rare
in a Russian.
But although he possessed a lively and sensitive imagination, he
was lazy; he was much fonder of talking about literature than of
creating it. The delight of martyr-like work, at night in stillness
and solitude seated before a white, clean sheet of paper, was
almost impossible to him, he valued but little the joy of covering
that sheet with the pattern of words.
"I write with difficulty,” he would confess. “The pens seem
to me inconvenient, the process of writing, too slow and even de-
grading. My thoughts fly about like jackdaws in a fire; I soon tire
of catching them and arranging them in proper order. Often this
is what happens: I have written a word, and suddenly I am
caught in a web; for no reason, I begin to think of geometry,
algebra, and the teacher at my old school at Oriol, a very stupid
man, indeed. He often quoted the words of some philosopher:
‘True wisdom is calm.' But I know that the best men on earth
suffer torments of agitation. Curse calm wisdom! But what is
there instead of it? Beauty? Vivat! However, although I have
not seen Venus in the original, she seems to me from her photo-
graphs a rather silly female. As a rule, pretty things are rather
stupid. Take for instance, a peacock, a greyhound, a woman.”
Indifferent to facts of actuality, sceptic in his attitude to the
mind and will of man, it would seem that the idea of laying down
the law, of playing the teacher, ought not to have attracted him.
That is a rôle destined to a man who is familiar, much too familiar,
with reality. But our very first conversation clearly indicated that,
whilst possessing all the qualities of a superb artist, he wished to
assume the pose of a thinker and of a philosopher as well. This
seemed to me dangerous, almost hopeless, chiefly because his stock
of knowledge was oddly poor. And one always felt as though
he sensed the nearness of an invisible enemy, that he was arguing
intensely with someone, and wanted to subdue him.


486
REMINISCENCES OF LEONID ANDREYEV
Leonid was not fond of reading; and though himself the maker
of books, the creator of miracles, he looked upon old literature dis-
trustfully and heedlessly.
“A book to you is like a fetish to a savage,” he would say.
“That is because you have not rubbed holes in your breeches on
the benches of a public school, because you have not come into
contact with university learning. But to me the Iliad, Poushkin,
and all the rest are beslavered by teachers, are prostituted by
hemorrhoidal officials. Sorrow Through Intelligence [a Russian
play, by Griboyedov] is as boring to me as Knight and Hall's
Arithmetic. I am as sick of The Captain's Daughter as I am of
the little lady from the Tverskoy Boulevard.”
I had too often heard these repeated sayings about the influence
of the public school on a man's attitude to literature, and they
had long since become unconvincing to me, for I felt in them the
prejudice begotten by Russian laziness. Much more originally
did L. Andreyev describe how the reviews and critical articles
in the papers squeeze and maim books, treating them in the style
of reports of street accidents.
“They are mills, they grind Shakespeare, the Bible, anything you
like, into the dust of banality. I once read in a paper a critical
article on Don Quixote, and I suddenly saw with horror that Don
Quixote was an old man of my acquaintance, a director of the
Court of Exchequer; he had a chronic cold in the nose and a
mistress, a girl from a confectionery shop, whom he called by the
grand name of Millie, but in actual life, on the boulevards, she
was known as Sonka Bladder."
Yet although he held knowledge and books lightly, regarding
them superficially, and at times with hostility, he was always
keenly interested in what I was reading. On one occasion, seeing
in my room at the Moscow Hotel Alexey Ostroumov's book on
Sinesius, the Bishop of Ptolemais, he asked wonderingly:
"What do you want this for?”
I told him about the queer half-pagan Bishop, and read a few
lines from his work, In Praise of Baldness. "What," asks Sinesius,
"can be more divine, yet what is balder, than the sphere ?"
This pathetic exclamation of the descendant of Hercules sent
Leonid into a fit of laughter; but immediately, wiping the tears
from his eyes and still laughing, he said:


MAXIM GORKI
487
"You know, it is a superb subject for a story about an un-
believer who, wishing to test the stupidity of believers, assumes
a mask of saintliness, lives the life of a martyr, preaches a new
doctrine of God-a very stupid doctrine—and so attains the love
and admiration of thousands. Then he says to his disciples and
followers: 'All this is rubbish.' But they need a faith, and so
they kill him.”
I was struck by his words. The point was that Sinesius had
expressed the same idea:
"If I were told that a Bishop must share the opinions of the
people, I would reveal to all who I am. For what can there be
in common between the rabble and philosophy? Divine truth must
be hidden; the people need something quite different.”
But I had not told Andreyev of that idea, nor had I had an
opportunity of telling him about the unusual position of the
unbaptized pagan-philosopher who found himself playing the
rôle of Bishop in the Christian Church. When eventually I did
so, he exclaimed triumphantly and laughing:
"There you see—one does not need to be always reading in
order to know and to understand."
Leonid was talented by nature, organically talented; his intui-
tion was astonishingly keen. In all that touched on the dark side
of life, the contradictions in the human soul, the rumblings in the
domain of the instincts, he had eerie powers of divination. The
instance of Bishop Sinesius is not the only one; I could quote a
score of such cases.
Thus, talking with him about various seekers after an unshak-
able belief, I related to him the contents of the MS. Confession,
by the priest Apollonov—a work by one of the unknown martyrs
of thought which had called forth Leo Tolstoy's Confession. I
told him what I had observed personally of men of dogmatic be-
liefs: they often appear voluntary prisoners of a blind, unyielding
faith, and the more they actively defend its validity the more
despairingly they doubt it.
Andreyev mused for a while, slowly stirring his glass of tea;
then he said, smiling:
“It is strange to me that you understand this; you speak like
an atheist, but you think as a believer. If you die before me I


488
REMINISCENCES OF LEONID ANDREYEV
will inscribe on your gravestone: “Crying to others to worship
reason, he himself secretly mocked at its impotence.' ”
And in a couple of minutes, leaning on my shoulder, glancing
into my eyes with the dilated pupils of his dark eyes, he said in
an undertone:
“I shall write about a parson, you will see! This, my dear
fellow, I shall do well!”
And threatening someone with his finger, vigorously rubbing
his temples, he smiled:
“To-morrow I am going home and shall begin it! I have even
got the opening sentence: 'Among people he was lonely, for he
had a glimpse of a great mystery.'
Next day he went away to Moscow, and in a week's time-
not more-he wrote to me that he was working on the parson,
and that his work was going smoothly "as on snow-shoes.” Thus
he always caught on the wing anything that answered the needs
of his spirit, that was in labour with the most acute and tormenting
mysteries of life.
The noisy success of his first book filled him to overflowing
with youthful joy. He came to me at Nijni—happy, in a brand
new suit of tobacco colour; the front of his stiffly starched shirt
was adorned with a rakishly bright tie, and on his feet he had
yellow boots.
“I tried to find straw-coloured gloves, but a lady in the shop
at Kuznetsky warned me that straw-colour was no longer the
fashion. I suspect that she told a fib. The truth was she valued
the freedom of her heart too much to risk becoming convinced
of my irresistible attractiveness in straw-coloured gloves. But,
between ourselves, I can tell you that all this magnificence is un-
comfortable; a blouse is much better."
And suddenly, hugging my shoulders, he said:
“I want to write a hymn, you know. I don't yet see, to whom
or to what; but a hymn it must be! Something Schillerian, eh?
Something grand, sonorous—boom-m!"
I chaffed him about it.
"Well!” he exclaimed merrily. "Is not Ecclesiastes right when
‘Even a rotten life is better than a good death'?
Although he puts it rather differently, something about a lion and
a dog: For domestic purposes a bad dog is more useful than a
he says:


MAXIM GORKI
489
nice lion. Well, what do you think: could Job have read the
book of Ecclesiastes ?”
Intoxicated with the wine of joy, he dreamt of a journey on
the Volga in a good boat, of walking to the Crimea.
"I'll drag you off too. Otherwise you will build yourself in
among these old bricks,” he said, pointing to the books.
His happiness resembled the lively and comfortable state of
a baby which has been hungry too long and now thinks it has
eaten enough to last for ever.
We sat on a wide divan, in a little room, and drank red wine;
Andreyev took down from the shelf a note-book of poems.
“May I?” he asked, and began reading aloud:
Columns of coppery firs,
The monotonous sound of the sea.'
“It is the Crimea ? Now I can't write poems, and I have no
desire to. I like ballads best. As a rule:
'I love all that is new,
Romantic, nonsensical,
Like the poet
Of olden times.'
“I believe that is a song in the musical comedy, The Green
Island:
‘And the trees are moaning
Like verses unrhymed.'
“That I like. But—tell me—why do you write poems? It does
not suit you at all. After all, whatever you may think, verse is
an artificial business."
Then we composed parodies of Skitalez:
"I'll grasp a huge log
In my mighty hand,
And all of you—-unto the seventh generation-
I will knock down flat!


490
REMINISCENCES OF LEONID ANDREYEV
Moreover I will stupefy you—
Hurrah! Tr-r-remble! I am glad-
I'll dash Kasbeck on your heads,
I'll bring down Ararat upon you!"
He laughed as he went on composing verse after verse of de
lightful, amusing parodies. But suddenly bending towards me,
with a glass of wine in his hand, he began in a low voice and
gravely:
"I read recently an amusing anecdote. In a certain English
town there stands a memorial to Robert Burns, the poet. But
there is no inscription on the memorial to inform you to whom
it is erected. At the foot of it a boy was selling newspapers. A
certain author came up to him and said: 'I'll buy a paper from
you if you'll tell me whose statue this is.''Robert Burns's,' the
boy replied. 'Splendid!' said the author. Now I'll buy all your
papers if you'll tell me why this memorial was erected to Robert
Burns.' The boy replied: "Because he is dead.' How do you
like it?"
I did not much like it; I was always seriously perturbed by
Leonid's sharp and sudden fluctuations of mood.
Fame to him was not merely "a bright patch on the bard's old
rags”-he wanted a great deal of it, he wanted it greedily, and
he made no secret of his desires. He said:
"When I was only fourteen I said to myself: I shall be famous
or life won't be worth living. I am not afraid of telling you
that all that has been done before my time seems to me no better
than what I myself can do. If you take that for conceit, you are
wrong. Yes! Don't you see that this must be the basic convic-
tion of any one who does not want to place himself in the imper-
sonal ranks of the millions of others? Indeed, the conviction of
one's uniqueness must—and can—serve as the source of creative
power. First let us say to ourselves: We are not like all the
others; and already we are on the way to prove this to all the rest
as well.”
“In a word you are a baby which does not want to feed at its
nurse's breast."
“Just so! I want the milk of my soul only. Man needs love
and attention, or that people should fear him. This even peasants


MAXIM GORKI
491
realize, when they put on the mask of a sorcerer. Happiest of
all are those who are loved with fear, as Napoleon was.”
"Have you read his Memoirs ?"
"No. I don't need to."
He winked at me, smiling:
"I too keep a diary and I know how it is done. Memoirs, con-
fessions, and such-like are the excrements of the soul that is
poisoned by bad food.”
He loved such sayings, and when they were successful he was
sincerely delighted. Despite his gravitation towards pessimism
there was in him something ineradicably childish; for instance
his childishly naïve boasting about his verbal agility, of which
he made much better use in conversation than on paper.
Once I told him about a woman who prided herself to such
a degree on her "honest” life, and took so much trouble to con-
vince all and sundry of her inaccessibility, that those who sur-
rounded her gasped from weariness, and either rushed headlong
away from this model of virtue, or hated her to a pitch of frenzy.
Andreyev listened, smiled, and suddenly said:
"I am an honest woman, I am. I have no need to clean my
nails, eh?”
In these words with almost perfect exactness he defined the
character and even the habits of the creature of whom I was speak-
ing—the woman was careless in her person. I told him this. He
was delighted, and with childish sincerity began to boast:
“My dear fellow, I am myself surprised at times to find how
cleverly and pointedly I can in two or three words seize the very
essence of a fact or of a character."
And he delivered a long speech in praise of himself; but-
sensible man that he was-he realized that this was a trifle ridicu-
lous, and he ended his tirade with a touch of buffoonery.
“In time I shall develop my capacity as a genius to such an
extent that I shall be able to define in a single word the meaning
of the whole life of a man, of a nation, of an epoch.”
Yet the critical attitude towards himself was not particularly
strongly developed in him; and this at times greatly spoiled his
work and his life.
In every one of us, to my thinking, live and struggle embryos
of several personalities. These strive among themselves, until in


492
REMINISCENCES OF LEONID ANDREYEV
the struggle there is developed the embryo which is the strongest
and most capable of adapting itself to the various impressional
reactions which form the final spiritual character of a man, and
thus is established a more or less complete psychical individuality.
Strangely and to his own torment Leonid split into two: in
one and the same week he could sing Hosannah to the world,
and pronounce Anathema against it.
This was not an external contradiction between the bases of
his character and the habits or demands of his profession; no, in
both cases he felt equally sincerely. And, the more loudly he
proclaimed Hosannah, the more powerfully resounded the echo:
Anathema !
He said:
"I hate individuals who refuse to walk on the sunny side of the
street for fear that their faces may be burnt or their jackets faded;
I hate all those who for dogmatic motives hamper the free, capri-
cious play of their inner ego."
Once he wrote a rather caustic article on the people of the
shady side, and immediately after this
on the occasion of Emile
Zola's death from gas fumes-engaged in a vigorous attack on
the barbarous asceticism, at that time fairly popular, of the
intelligentsia. But talking to me about that attack, he declared
suddenly:
“And yet, you know, my opponent is more consistent than I am:
a writer ought to live like a homeless tramp. Maupassant's
yacht is an absurdity!"
He was not joking. We had an argument. I maintained that
the more varied the needs of man, and the more eager he is for
the joys of life, however paltry, the quicker develops the culture
of the body and of the spirit. He retorted: “No, Tolstoy is
right, culture is rubbish, it only maims the free growth of the
soul."
To be continued


{ 해
​Courtesy of the Galerie Paul Rosenberg, Paris
PENCIL DRAWING. BY PABLO PICASSO





slo
Courtesy of the Galerie Paul Rosenberg, Paris
BY PABLO PICASSO
PENCIL DRAWING.





FOUR POEMS
BY WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
[Author's Note: I wrote Leda and the Swan because the editor
of a political review asked me for a poem. I thought, “After the
individualist, demagogic movement, founded by Hobbes and popu-
larized by the Encyclopaedists and the French Revolution, we have
a soil so exhausted that it cannot grow that crop again for
centuries.” Then I thought, “Nothing is now possible but some
movement from above preceded by some violent annunciation.”
My fancy began to play with Leda and the Swan for metaphor,
and I began this poem; but as I wrote, bird and lady took such
possession of the scene that all politics went out of it, and my
friend tells me that his “conservative readers would misunder-
stand the poem.”
The poem, The Gift of Harun-al-Rashid, is founded on the
following passage in a letter of Owen Aherne’s, which I am publish-
ing in A Vision:
“After the murder for an unknown reason of Jaffer, head of the
family of the Barmecides, Harun-al-Rashid seemed as though a
great weight had fallen from him, and in the rejoicing of the mo-
ment, a rejoicing that seemed to Jaffer's friends a disguise for his
remorse, he brought a new bride into the house. Wishing to con-
fer an equal happiness upon his friend, he chose a young bride for
Kusta-ben-Luka. According to one tradition of the desert, she had,
to the great surprise of her friends, fallen in love with the elderly
philosopher, but according to another, Harun bought her from a
passing merchant. Kusta, a Christian like the Caliph's own physi-
cian, had planned, one version of the story says, to end his days
in a monastery at Nisibis, while another story has it that he was
deep in a violent love-affair that he had arranged for himself. The
only thing upon which there is general agreement is that he was
warned by a dream to accept the gift of the Caliph, and that his
wife, a few days after the marriage, began to talk in her sleep, and


494
FOUR POEMS
that she told him all those things which he had searched for vainly
all his life in the great library of the Caliph, and in the conversa-
tion of wise men. One curious detail has come down to us in
Bedouin tradition. When awake she was a merry girl with no more
interest in matters of the kind than other girls of her age, and
Kusta, the apple of whose eye she had become, fearing that it
would make her think his love but self-interest, never told her that
she talked to him in her sleep. Michael Robartes frequently heard
Bedouins quoting this as proof of Kusta-ben-Luka's extraordinary
wisdom. ... Even in the other world Kusta's bride is supposed
to remain in ignorance of her share in founding the religion of the
Judwalis, and for this reason young girls who think themselves
wise are ordered by their fathers and mothers to wear little amulets
on which her name has been written. All these contradictory stories
seem to be a confused recollection of the contents of a little old
book, lost many years ago with Kusta-ben-Luka's larger book in
the desert battle which I have already described. This little book
was discovered, according to tradition, by some Judwali scholar or
saint between the pages of a Greek book which had once been in
the Caliph's library. The story of the discovery may however be
the invention of a much later age, to justify some doctrine or
development of old doctrines that it may have contained.”
In my poem I have greatly elaborated this bare narrative, but
I do not think it too great a poetical licence to describe Kusta as
hesitating between the Poems of Sappho and the Treatise of
Parmenides as hiding places. Gibbon says the poems of Sappho
were extant in the twelfth century, and it does not seem impossible
that a great philosophical work, of which we possess only fragments,
may have found its way into an Arab library of the eighth century.
Certainly there are passages of Parmenides, that for instance num-
bered 130 by Burkitt, and still more in his immediate predecessors,
which Kusta would have recognized as his own thought. This
from Heraclitus for instance: "Mortals are Immortals and Im-
mortals are Mortals, the one living the others' death and dying the
others' life.”]


WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
495
LEDA AND THE SWAN
A rush, a sudden wheel, and hovering still
The bird descends, and her frail thighs are pressed
By the webbed toes, and that all-powerful bill
Has laid her helpless face upon his breast. .
How can those terrified vague fingers push
The feathered glory from her loosening thighs!
All the stretched body's laid on the white rush
And feels the strange heart beating where it lies;
A shudder in the loins engenders there
The broken wall, the burning roof and tower
And Agamemnon dead.
Being so caught up,
So mastered by the brute blood of the air,
Did she put on his knowledge with his power
Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?
THE GIFT OF HARUN-AL-RASHID
Kusta-ben-Luka is my name, I write
To Abd-al-Rabban; fellow roisterer once,
Now the good Caliph's learned Treasurer,
And for no ear but his.
Carry this letter
Through the great gallery of the Treasure House
Where banners of the Caliphs' hang, night-coloured
But brilliant as the night's embroidery,
And wait war's music; pass the little gallery;
Pass books of learning from Byzantium
Written in gold upon a purple stain,
And pause at last, I was about to say,
At the great book of Sappho's song; but no
For should you leave my letter there, a boy's
Love-lorn, indifferent hands might come upon it
And let it fall unnoticed to the floor.
1 The banners of the Abbasid Caliphs were black as an act of mourning
for those who had fallen in battle at the establishment of the dynasty.


496
FOUR POEMS
Pause at the Treatise of Parmenides
And hide it there, for Caliphs to world's end
Must keep that perfect, as they keep her song
So great its fame.
When fitting time has passed
The parchment will disclose to some learned man
A mystery that else had found no chronicler
But the wild Bedouin. Though I approve
Those wanderers that welcomed in their tents
What great Harun-al-Rashid, occupied
With Persian wars or Greek ambassadors
Or those who need his bounty or his law,
Must needs neglect; I cannot hide the truth
That wandering in a desert, featureless
As air under a wing, can give bird's wit.
In after time they will speak much of me
And speak but fantasy. Recall the year
When our beloved Caliph put to death
His Vizier Jaffer for an unknown reason;
“If but the shirt upon my body knew it
I'd tear it off and throw it in the fire."
That speech was all that the town knew, but he
Seemed for a while to have grown young again;
Seemed so on purpose, muttered Jaffer's friends,
That none might know that he was conscience-struck,
But that's a traitor's thought. Enough for me
That in the early summer of the year
The mightiest of the princes of the world
Came to the least considered of his courtiers;
Sat down upon the fountain's marble edge
One hand amid the goldfish in the pool;
And thereupon a colloquy took place
That I commend to all the chroniclers
To show how violent great hearts can lose
Their bitterness and find the honeycomb.
“I have brought a slender bride into the house;
You know the saying 'change the bride with Spring'
And she and I, being sunk in happiness,
Cannot endure to think you tread these paths,


WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
497
When evening stirs the jasmine, and yet
Are brideless.”
“I am falling into years."
“But such as you and I do not seem old
Like men who live by habit. Every day
I ride with falcon to the river's edge
Or carry the ringed mail upon my back,
Or court a woman; neither enemy,
Game-bird, nor woman does the same thing twice;
And so a hunter carries in the eye
A mimicry of youth. Can poet's thought
That springs from body and in body falls
Like this pure jet now lost amid blue sky
Now bathing lily leaf and fishes' scale
Be mimicry?"
"What matter if our souls
Are nearer to the surface of the body
Than souls that start no game and turn no rhyme !
The soul's own youth and not the body's youth
Shows through our lineaments. My candle's bright,
My lantern is too loyal not to show
That it was made in your great father's reign.
And yet the jasmine season warms our blood."
“Great prince, forgive the freedom of my speech;
You think that love has seasons, and you think
That if the spring bear off what the spring gave
The heart need suffer no defeat; but I
Who have accepted the Byzantine faith,
That seems unnatural to Arabian minds,
Think when I choose a bride I choose for ever;
And if her eye should not grow bright for mine
Or brighten only for some younger eye,
My heart could never turn from daily ruin,
Nor find a remedy.”
“But what if I


498
FOUR POEMS
Have lit upon a woman, who so shares
Your thirst for those old crabbed mysteries
So strains to look beyond our life, an eye
That never knew that strain would scarce seem bright,
And yet herself can seem youth's very fountain,
Being all brimmed with life.”
"Were it but true
I would have found the best that life can give,
Companionship in those mysterious things
That make a man's soul or a woman's soul
Itself and not some other soul.”
“That love
Must needs be in this life and in what follows
Unchanging and at peace, and it is right
Every philosopher should praise that love.
But I being none can praise its opposite.
It makes my passion stronger but to think
Like passion stirs the peacock and his mate
The wild stag and the doe; that mouth to mouth
Is a man's mockery of the changeless soul.”
And thereupon his bounty gave what now
Can shake more blossom from autumnal chill
Than all my bursting springtime knew. A girl
Perched in some window of her mother's house
Had watched my daily passage to and fro;
Had heard impossible history of my past;
Imagined some impossible history
Lived at my side; thought Time's disfiguring touch
Gave but more reason for a woman's care.
Yet was it love of me, or was it love
Of the stark mystery that has dazed my sight
Perplexed her fantasy and planned her care?
Or did the torch-light of that mystery
Pick out my features in such light and shade
Two contemplating passions chose one theme
Through sheer bewilderment? She had not paced
The garden paths, nor counted up the rooms,


WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
499
Before she had spread a book upon her knees
And asked about the pictures or the text;
And often those first days I saw her stare
On old dry writing in a learned tongue,
On old dry faggots that could never please
The extravagance of spring; or move a hand
As if that writing or the figured page
Were some dear cheek.
Upon a moonless night
I sat where I could watch her sleeping form,
And wrote by candle-light; but her form moved,
And fearing that my light disturbed her sleep
I rose that I might screen it with a cloth.
I heard her voice. "Turn that I may expound
What's bowed your shoulder and made pale your cheek”;
And saw her sitting upright on the bed;
Or was it she that spoke or some great Jinn?
I say that a Jinn spoke. A live-long hour
She seemed the learned man and I the child;
Truths without father came, truths that no book
Of all the uncounted books that I have read,
Nor thought out of her mind or mine begot,
Self-born, high-born, and solitary truths,
Those terrible implacable straight lines
Drawn through the wandering vegetative dream,
Even those truths that when my bones are dust
Must drive the Arabian host.
The voice grew still,
And she lay down upon her bed and slept,
But woke at the first gleam of day, rose up
And swept the house and sang about her work
In childish ignorance of all that passed.
A dozen nights of natural sleep, and then
When the full moon swam to its greatest height
She rose, and with her eyes shut fast in sleep
Walked through the house. Unnoticed and unfelt
I wrapped her in a heavy hooded cloak, and she,


500
FOUR POEMS
Half running, dropped at the first ridge of the desert
And there marked out those emblems on the sand
That day by day I study and marvel at,
With her white finger. I led her home asleep
And once again she rose and swept the house
In childish ignorance of all that passed.
Even to-day, after some seven years,
When maybe thrice in every moon her mouth
Murmured the wisdom of the desert Jinns,
She keeps that ignorance, nor has she now
That first unnatural interest in my books.
It seems enough that I am there; and yet
Old fellow-student, whose most patient ear
Heard all the anxiety of my passionate youth,
It seems I must buy knowledge with my peace.
What if she lose her ignorance, and so
Dream that I love her only for the voice,
That every gift and every word of praise
Is but a payment for that midnight voice
That is to age what milk is to a child!
Were she to lose her love, because she had lost
Her confidence in mine, or even lose
Its first simplicity, love, voice, and all,
All my fine feathers would be plucked away
And I left shivering. The voice has drawn
A quality of wisdom from her love's
Particular quality. The signs and shapes;
All those abstractions that you fancied were
From the great Treatise of Parmenides;
All, all those gyres and cubes and midnight things'
Are but a new expression of her body
Drunk with the bitter sweetness of her youth.
And now my utmost mystery is out.
A woman's beauty is a storm-tossed banner;
Under it wisdom stands, and I alone-
Out of ten thousand winters, I alone
Nor dazzled by the embroidery, nor lost
1 This refers to the geometrical forms which Robartes describes the Judwali
Arabs as making upon the sand for the instruction of their young people,
and which, according to tradition, were drawn as described in sleep by the
wife of Kusta-ben-Luka.


WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
501
In the confusion of its night-dark folds
Can hear the armed man speak.
THE LOVER SPEAKS
A strange thing surely that my heart when love had come unsought
Upon the northern upland or in that poplar shade,
Should find no burden but itself and yet should be worn out.
It could not bear that burden and therefore it went mad.
The south wind brought it longing, and the east brought in despair,
The west wind made it pitiful and the north wind afraid;
It feared to give its love a hurt with all the tempest there;
It feared the hurt that she could give and therefore it went mad.
I can exchange opinion with any neighbouring mind,
I have as healthy flesh and blood as any rhymer's had,
But oh my heart could bear no more when the upland caught the
wind;
I ran, I ran from my love's side because my heart went mad.
THE HEART REPLIES
The Heart behind its rib laughed out, “You have called me mad,”
it said,
"Because I made you turn away and run from that young child;
How could she mate with fifty years that was so wildly bred?
Let the cage bird and the cage bird mate and the wild bird mate
in the wild.”
"You but imagine lies all day, O murderer,” I replied,
"And all those lies have but one end poor wretches to betray;
I did not find in any cage the woman at my side.
O but her heart would break to learn my thoughts are far
away.”
"Speak all your mind,” my heart sang out; "speak all your mind,
who cares
Now that your tongue cannot persuade the child till she mistake
Her childish gratitude for love and match your fifty years,
O let her choose a young man now and all for his wild sake.”


MR EPSTEIN'S SCULPTURE
BY ROGER FRY
OF
all the forms of boredom which afflict civilized man, there
are probably few more acute or more unvarying than that
which results from having, on occasions, to contemplate ordinary
works of sculpture. Indeed, so evident is this that it would doubt-
less be universally recognized, and the habit of erecting sculptures
would cease altogether were it not that the bulk, durability, and
expense of sculptured stone and cast bronze make them peculiarly
suitable for memorials and monuments. But fortunately these
objects perform their function without troubling us much—except
just the moment after the Royal person has unveiled the object,
we are not called upon to give it much attention. It is safe upon
its pedestal for the rest of time, and can only exhale a faint exhor-
tation to conventional public spirit which flatters the good citizen
and only slightly irritates the bad, who looks upon the work as a
symbol which he and his fellow revolutionists may look forward
to the fun of destroying at some future date.
Such then being the main uses of sculpture, most of us naturally
look upon it as entirely remote from any personal emotion or
interest other than that general all-pervading feeling of boredom
with which it is so thoroughly imbued. We are brought up to a
pious belief that sculpture is an altogether noble and reputable
affair. We know the names of the great sculptors of all ages, and
yet sculpture has always bored us—till now. And now comes Mr
Epstein, and as we passed round the Leicester Gallery where his
work has been on exhibition, each bronze head gave us a new and
distinct sensation, a thrill of wonder, surprise, recognition, and,
as a result of so pleasant a shock, admiration and gratitude. What
miraculous gift was this which could make bronze reveal to us
definite, singular, vivid human beings—human beings more definite,
more emphatically personal, more incisive in the accent of their
individuality, more invasive, at a first glance, of our own conscious-
ness than the individuals of actual life?
Mr Epstein started from the first with remarkable gifts, but in


ROGER FRY
503
his early work he was an experimentalist in styles. He ingeniously
constructed a kind of archaistic decorative simplification with rude
accents suggestive of actuality. Then at one moment with his
insatiable technical acquisitiveness he learned to treat each sitter
according to what he felt to be a style corresponding to his or her
character—we had the strangest mixture, a single series of busts,
of Chinese bronzes, early Greek marbles, Aztec, and Rodin. Now
at last he has found himself; he has developed a method and a
manner of seeing which look as though they were definitive. One
imagines that he can go on indefinitely along these lines, increasing
the intimacy of his reading of character, the psychological intensity
of the mood, the incisiveness and brio of the execution. He is
surely to be congratulated on having found his own indisputably
original and unique artistic personality. There is no doubt about
it; it sticks out authentically from all the works, however varied
the subjects may be. However completely he seems to abandon
himself to the personality he is interpreting, it is Epstein's person-
ality that really startles, interests, and intrigues us. That is the
way of the great masters, or at least of most of them; and indeed,
when we realize the astonishing assurance, the indisputable com-
pleteness and efficacy of these works, the brilliant resourcefulness
and certainty of the technique, we must call Epstein a master.
His technical resourcefulness is extraordinary. By frankly ac-
cepting the nature of clay modelling, he gets a strangely vivid and
exhilarating surface quality. That is to say, he accepts the fact
that the head is built up by adding small pellets of clay one after
another. He never tries to cover up his traces: one sees how the
head has grown centrifugally, how the prominences have gradually
pushed outwards to receive the light. Whether we realize this
growth from within or not, we feel that the way these pleasingly
broken surfaces take the light when once the clay has been trans-
lated into bronze is eminently evocative and allows of the utmost
accent with the greatest breadth. Were the surfaces which take
the light smoothed down, they would lack the glittering variety of
light and shade and the sense of mass and resistance that go with
that. Now that he has found his style, we can recognize certain
definite mannerisms. It would be easy to parody an Epstein. But
the mannerisms are not idle or irrelevant affections; they are
inevitable steps toward the end he pursues. Since it is the per-


504
MR EPSTEIN'S SCULPTURË
sonality presented as drama that he envisages, he seizes on those
aspects of the head which reveal it most sharply. Generally the
head is tilted back so that the chin protrudes and the planes of
the forehead, eyelids, nose, and upper lip are turned to receive the
fullest light. All these planes are enlarged, and their lower limits
either deeply undercut or at least marked by a sharp edge. In
general the features are amplified so as to occupy the whole of the
mask, and the mask in turn is pulled out, as it were, at the edges,
receding frequently to an anatomically impossible hollow above
the ears so as to give all possible expression to the receding ridge
of the cheek bone.
In general Mr Epstein follows the tradition of dramatic sculpture
by working with ridges and bosses rather than by the architecture
of planes. For this dramatic sculpture is no new thing, though
it has boasted few great masters. Where Mr Epstein is perhaps
peculiar is in the vehement notation of actuality in the individual
head, but even here those who knew Guido Mazzoni's Pietà at
Modena will recognize that at least one artist of the Renaissance
had anticipated a result which seems surprising when we thus meet
it afresh and with all the marks of modernity. Indeed, Mr Ep-
stein's Weeping Woman is singularly like one of the mourners in
that group who kneels with hands clasped and mouth awry. Mr
Epstein's distortions then are not caprices; they are not made to
show how modern he is; they come inevitably out of his aim; they
are necessary to his full expression. Decidedly Mr Epstein is a
master.
But a master of what? murmurs a still small voice within me
which all the turbulence and impressiveness of these works does
not entirely silence. A master of what? Of the craft of sculpture,
undoubtedly; of vigorous characterization, certainly after a fashion,
but even here I should have to make reservations. Even if we are
to regard sculpture as a peculiarly effective form of representation-
more than making up for the lack of colour by the palpability of
its form-even so, one can imagine a finer, more penetrating, less
clamant kind of interpretation of character. One might tire, per-
haps, of the element not only of caricature-since all interpretation
of character partakes of the nature of caricature—but of its
direction. One might soon long for something which, even at the
cost of being less immediately impressive, wooed one to a gentler,


ROGER FRY
505
more intimate contemplation-something in which the finer shades
were not so immediately blotted out by the big sweep of the most
striking, first-seen peculiarities. One would prefer to live with
something less vehement in its attack, rather more persuasive.
But this is a question of taste and perhaps of individual tem-
perament, and there can be no doubt that if we are to regard
sculpture in this light it is better to have such strong, broad, racy,
even brutal characterization than the merely toned-down, the in-
sipid, the genteel of fashionable portraiture. This at least is alive;
it stirs and moves some corresponding fibres in our nature. This
has at least a genuine dramatic appeal, even though, like some
greatly admired actors, it seems a little too much preoccupied with
getting its effects over the footlights and right to the back of the pit.
But this digression has not stopped the inner voice. It persists:
Is he a master of sculpture? And, alas! I am bound to say to
the best of my belief, No. If I examine my own sensations and
emotions, I am bound to confess that they seem to be of quite a
different nature when I look at good sculpture from what I feel in
front of Mr Epstein's bronzes. There is an undoubted pleasure
in seeing any work accomplished with such confidence and assur-
ance, such certainty and precision of touch; there is a powerful
stimulus in the presence of such vividly dramatized personalities,
but the peculiar emotions which great sculpture gives seem to me
quite different. They come from the recognition of inevitable
harmonic sequences of planes of a complete equilibrium established
through the interplay of diverse movements and a perfect subordi-
nation of surface and handling to the full apprehension of these
and similar qualities. It may be, of course, that I am so carried
away, so disturbed if you like, by all those other qualities of drama
and actuality which Mr Epstein's work displays that I cannot feel
this purely formal stimulus to the imagination which is what I seek
for in sculpture. But there is the fact as I see it. These busts are
for me brilliant but rather crude representations in the round. If
these are sculpture, then I want another word for what M Maillol
and Mr Dobson practise, let alone Luca della Robbia and the
Sumerians.
Fortunately for Mr Epstein, there are a great many people whose
imaginations are excited by really capable dramatic representation,
and there are very few people who happen to like sculpture in my


506
MR EPSTEIN'S SCULPTURE
sense.
The majority are quite right to acclaim him as a master,
since the gift necessary for such work is a very rare one and he has
used it and developed it pertinaciously, and since it does give
genuine pleasure. Such work as this is infinitely better than the
stylistic, decorative arrangements with which Mr Epstein started,
and in which some of his most celebrated foreign rivals still persist.
It is a triumphant expression of genuine feelings about people's
character as expressed in their features, and if it does not evince
any peculiar and exhilarating sense of formal harmony, so much
the worse for the few people who happen to have a passion of such
an odd kind.



DOLORES.
BY JACOB EPSTEIN






MIRIAM.
BY JACOB EPSTEIN






KATHLEEN.
BY JACOB EPSTEIN





THE GODS
BY ELIE FAURE
Translated From the French by Walter Pach
I
this way.
HAVE said enough to show that I do not absolutely accept the
saying of Nietzsche: “Art raises its head when religion loses
ground,” unless he meant that art often exists before religion and
survives it and replaces it when it deserts the hearts of men, and
assumes the role of a religion in certain cases, often magnifying
this rôle when the heart beats in the breast of a hero. Idolatry,
fortunately, survives the idol, because it leads mind to mind
across appearances, and because it is the only thing that leads in
Outside of idolatry—and science is at present the
predominant form of idolatry, the most unanimously and can-
didly accepted, the most cherished, and therefore the cruelest-
outside the matter of the world which men interrogate in order
to discover what gives it form and movement, there is no longer
anything but arid abstraction, the play of the unstable, a circle
leading to death.
The idol as a fetish everywhere precedes ritualized religion.
It is everywhere reborn, when religion declines. It is everywhere
loved and studied, even outside the religion. It is not true that
it is born by grace of the religion alone and as a matter of re-
ligion. Totemism is not the origin, but one of the origins, of
There is also—and doubtless it comes first—utility, which
creates ceramics, the weapon, the garment, and the tool. There
is the obscure sense of rhythm and the need to express it, which
create music and the dance-one sees this clearly with the child.
There is love, which creates tatooing, adornment, the dressing
of the hair, and the jewel. There are hunting and fishing, which
call forth recital and description, recital and description which gain
from being illustrated. There is the need for shelter, from which
there came forth architecture. The immense solicitation of
forms, colours, and movements awakens anxious curiosity in primi-
tive man, and he cannot deliver himself of it save by imagining an
art.


508
THE GODS
approximate equivalent which shall prove to him his power of
re-creating, for his joy and also in his interest, a universe endowed
with forms, colours, and movements.
Neither the pure cult of the spirit nor objective knowledge de-
stroys idolatry. They change its place or renew it, and that is all.
We saw this clearly in the case of the iconoclastic Jewish idea,
which reached the heart of the Occident only by means of the
cathedral with its wealth of form. We saw it in the case of
Eastern Christianity when it decorated the Panathenaic proces-
sions with new names, and when it called Orpheus David in
order to maintain the lyre among us. We see it in the bosom of
Islam itself which cannot prevent the Persian illuminator from
replacing the religious idols with the most charming painting
of the city and of the world that exists. We saw it in the Italian
Renaissance laying its nude Venus in the bed that is still warm
from the presence of Mary when she gave birth to the god. We
saw it in the sonorous idol that was being born in the heart of
the musicians, where puritan prohibitions had trampled down
the images. The symbol changes, to be sure, and therefore the
idol, so that the pure cult of the spirit or objective knowledge
may find a mooring not yet filled up by an illusion which had
existed for too long. It is by renewing the idol that man regains
his footing on solid ground, whether that idol is called Isis or
Brahma, Osiris or Buddha, Athene or the Virgin Mother, Aph-
rodite or Huitzilopoctli, Dionysus or Jesus. Each is separated
from the other by abysses of blood. And yet, when one of
them falls into the abyss, the succeeding one, which caused it to
fall, gathers to itself the love of mankind. The greatest moments
of the spirit are those of idolatry, because from each we get one
of the aspects of the definitive idol which we shall never carve.
For this aspect, which the spirit created by eagerly studying the
object and its own relationships with that object, comes to be
neglected by the spirit, little by little, as soon as the latter has
moved completely around the aspect, has traversed it in all direc-
tions, and found out that, now, the aspect has become an empty one.
Thereupon the spirit seeks elsewhere, it reaches some spot where
there is no longer any visible form, and finally adores itself in its
immaterial essence until the day when, turning to emptiness,
consumed by its passion, it seizes from the hot ashes of itself
certain hard nuclei, veined with fire, in which it gradually per-


ELIE FAURE
509
ceives new appearances. The soul of mankind does not increase
itself, or at least does not find itself again, unless the matter of
mankind transmit to it, through the contact of the senses with the
matter of the universe, the soul of that matter, in which man's
soul recognizes itself. What man adores in the idol is in no wise
outside himself, neither is it in any wise outside the world of the
senses, which is so made as to reveal to him his own sensibility.
It incarnates his spiritual life in its ever-fleeting form. In it he
seizes his power of renewing his qualities.
The invisible idol of the Jews, of the Puritans, of the Arabs,
and of the Rationalism of the scientists has not been able to impose
itself upon the multitudes by any means other than that of a grand
literature or music, of an architecture storing up coolness, repose,
and shadow at the limit of the waterless deserts where the flaming
sun makes life impossible, or by means of a utilitarian system
capable, at least provisionally, of satisfying the needs for well-
being of the body and for conquest by the mind-idols which are
no less deceptive, in the long run, than the visible idol;
and they are less honest ones, I fear, since they promise definitive
moral solutions which they cannot give. What incredible poverty
on the part of the moralistic abstractors who, for centuries, im-
pose by the sword the verbal idol of the Bible or the Koran to the
exclusion of the others, and imagine themselves the possessors of
the spirit in its purity! Iconoclasm reveals its strange misunder-
standing of the conditions and of the means and even of the essence
of the higher cult of the spirit. It annihilates a language whose
letter alone strikes it, and which it does not understand. It is
ignorant of the fact that form is an instrument from which are
drawn spiritual harmonies as pure as those that one asks of the
lyre, of the printed book, of the silence of a great soul, or of the
liberating activity of a hero. And perhaps indeed it thus betrays its
hatred of consciousness, as if it had an intuition that the idol
which, as soon as it is really formed, represents the highest human
peak of religious sentiment, is also, because it situates and describes
that peak, the very point where consciousness (which is the first
dawn of an idol in formation) will start its flight. The spirit,
in order to increase and communicate its strength, has everywhere
sought for material symbols wherewith to render it more accessible
to the senses. When it has bound them one to another, and its new
symbolic language is absolutely organized, this very language


510
THE GODS
brings the revelation of a universe of phenomena which wrests
the spirit from its solitude. Iconoclasm, in this sense, is perhaps
necessary, since it attempts to protect for the longest time possible
the tabernacle of the spirit from contacts with the senses which
first enervate it and dissolve it. But iconoclasm does not know
that the spirit has been created by the idol and that the idol alone
can re-create it. It is when the idol ceases to be beautiful that it
may fittingly be broken.
An Aymara legend—the most beautiful of legends—has it that
the creator peopled the world with statues and animated them in
order to civilize the world. Is it really a legend? Being carried
everywhere, from city to city, from shore to shore, across mountains
and deserts, the idol everywhere introduced the spirit. It is civiliza-
tion itself. It is the most universal and the most veracious of
languages. Into an immediately concrete form, living, existent,
insistent, and having a reality of its own, independent of the con-
ventions which preside over articulate language, it translates the
abstractions and the relationships which reveal the solidarity of
things among themselves and of these things with us. A fetishism,
continuing even to our days, was perhaps the one which fertilized
Egypt and thereby the whole human race of the later time. The
idol of the negroes entered, with the caravans, into the upper valley
of the Nile, the rough idol, crudely carved from wood, sensual,
terrible, daubed with red and blue and showing the attributes of
sex, the ingenuous and bestial idol whose profiles were to become
calm, whose planes were to become firm, whose surfaces would be
made to undulate like limpid water, and which was to spring up in
the thought of a charming race like a flower in the morning. If
Egypt, now a withered branch, really issued from this, and, through
Egypt, Greece and India, Asia and Europe, what do we not owe to
it? What should we not have owed some day to its Polynesian
sister, advancing from island to island on the prow of the painted
canoes, peopling Easter Island with solitary colossi, and awaking
America doubtless, if the Spanish idol, colliding with the Toltec
idol, had not crushed the new world to dust and compelled it to
accept the Occident? There are idols which die, certainly, and
for ever. But sooner or later they are dug up, and sooner or later,
in some civilization centuries old, they are the determining cause
of a more or less deep-seated disturbance whose echoes are heard in
the most distant future.


ELIE FAURE
511
Observe now the course that is followed by those which en-
countered virgin races which were ingenuously awaiting love. See
the Phoenician mariner landing on all the sandy shores of Africa
and of Asia, at all the rocky coves of Europe, and displaying his
gewgaws at the water's edge. See the circle, at first hostile or
timid, of natives armed with flint, naked or dressed in skins of
beasts, and approaching step by step, beguiled by the smile of the
fat, curly-bearded face that is lit up by the red lips and the white
teeth of the strange man dressed in purple whose arm, encircled
with golden bracelets, turns this way and that a little figurine
painted with ochre, vermilion, and azure. There are women in
that circle, as you must not forget, who caress and beg, and also
some exceptional beings, less noisy than the others, who wonder
how that robe could have been dyed, that statuette could have been
coloured, and that jewel melted and carved. Follow the Ionian
fisherman also, prudently advancing in his little bark from island
to island toward the shores of the Peloponnesus where the blond
invader has burned and razed the cities, slaughtered the men,
carried off the women, and smashed the old idols, and who is now
astonished by this little dark man who had made him laugh at
first and who now captivates him by reciting wonderful fables
which agree with those which his shepherds bring back from the
mountains and which are illustrated by painted images carved in
olive wood, by potteries on which tentacles are twisted, where girls
begin their dance and musicians begin to play. Give attention
to the growth of their harmony as it reaches out to the temples
covered with statues and with frescos, where the philosophers, bit
by bit, surprise permanent relationships and equilibriums, the
gliding of the spirit from surface to surface, and the articulation
from form to form of logic and of calculation. Follow the pedlar
who crosses the Apennines and descends into Etruria to display,
to tribes enervated by a mysticism which does not nourish them,
vases on whose background of flaming red there is the quick move-
ment of black forms; see how the tribes bury those vases in their
funerary vaults, after having silhouetted on their walls the shadows
of those forms. Accompany the architect or the statue-maker
from Attica when he is seized by some centurion who takes him
by the collar and throws him into the military trireme, with his
plans and his models which will thereafter furnish him his task
of explaining them to the Roman engineer and marble-worker.


512
THE GODS
Install yourself behind the Macedonian phalanx, in the chariots
which transport, with the baggage of the army, admirable women
of tinted marble whose hair is of a reddish colour and whose
nipples are brown, going to the bank of the Indus where multitudes,
possessing no art, but intoxicated by sensual legends, await them
in order to make them fecund, and with their children people
the immense peninsula, and spread their genius, by the Buddhistic
missionaries who think they are bringing nothing but their gentle-
ness and their god, into Indo-China where gigantic temples will
arise, into China where the cavern will take on movement, and even
to the islands of Japan, where their trace will remain visible for
centuries after the time of Jesus. Follow their course upon the
other slope of the world, first to Byzantium, where they conceive
the idea of clothing themselves in order to become more troubling,
as they concentrate their terrible sexuality, mingled and kneaded
with mind, in their fathomless eyes, their pallor, their painted
mouths, and the jewels which clank on their arms and glow in their
hair. You will see them reaching out thus to the two shores of
the Adriatic, and around Florence and Siena, encountering and
ardently embracing other images descended from the Gauls, and
bearing in the folds of their robes, in their ingenuous smiles, in
their direct and human gestures, and their discreet colours, a re-
flection of the stained glass left in the cathedral, so that they might
there replace the carpets of which men had caught a glimpse at the
time of the Crusades, the far away carpets of Iran on which the
flowers of Persia and the gems of India are crushed together in the
depths of the weave. After that, you will see them confronting
their thin colours and their ripe forms with the thin forms stamped
on strips of paper which are sold for a few coppers to the Patricians
of Venice by German soldiers of fortune who are coming down
from the Alps every day; and their colours are confronted with
the ripe colours spread out on little canvases which Florentine
bankers order in Bruges or in Ghent. I should never come to an
end in following their Odyssey. To-day, through the sudden inva-
sion of the immemorial idols of Africa, of Asia, and of America,
the spiritual skeleton which the Helleno-Latin ancestor had be-
queathed to us almost intact becomes broken or dislocated in order
to permit all the rivers of the spirit to deposit their alluvia in our
weakening energies.


ELIE FAURE
513
Thus the idol pursues its march, always reborn, always integral,
silent moreover, and affirming nothing but itself, among those
contradictory or even antagonistic systems which die, one after
the other, in their explicit claim to be the holders of the Truth.
One religion is iconolatrous, another iconoclastic; this one is mate-
rialistic or realistic, that one is idealistic or devoted to the spirit;
here is one that is sensual or indeed bestial, here is one that is
moral or indeed ascetic; now love is exalted by one, now flouted
by another; they condemn or glorify war, and are eager for the
blood of victims or rebel at the shedding of blood. But all, at
their great moment, even when they break an image, do so upon
the authority of another image, verbal or musical, or plastic, most
often, and by means of this image they plunge into the heart of
men the definitive form in which History recognizes them. The
idol is not alone the vehicle—it is also the governing test of the
myth. What am I saying? The idol is, in reality, what creates
the myth, or at least what renders it living and enthusiastic in
our hearts. In the case of one of these myths (and doubtless the
most human one) those very followers who were responsible for
its most beautiful moments of energy and tenderness could not be
convinced that their god was merely spirit until they had been
transformed into accomplished idolaters. The birth of music,
taking possession of the torrent of dull images which were cir-
culating deep down in men's hearts, and spreading that torrent
forth in all the directions of its rebounding waves, re-created
Asiatic pantheism in the North. Mediterranean polytheism re-
appeared in Italy by impressing wonderful visages upon all the
morose passions whose mystic exploitation had smashed the ancient
world. At the half-way point, in the French cathedral, the two
met to encircle Christianity with such a murmur of life that its
idols, which thought to lock up religion in the temple, plunged it
back into the universe.
There, indeed, is the key to the mystery. Only the polytheistic
or pantheistic religions create the idols and are created by the
idols in a passionate and continuing exchange of ideas, of sensa-
tions, and of sentiments. The monotheistic religions, on the con-
trary, being hostile to the idol, either triumph with the help of the
idol or else die where they have grown up, unable to renew them-
selves. For monotheism cuts the world into two irreconcilable


514
THE GODS
forms, thus ending in a terrible duality which, in the oscillations
of the spirit in search of its sources, can lift it up for an hour and
prevent it from perishing through the exercise over it of a kind of
dictatorship, but which is quite incapable of achieving by itself the
creation of one of those poetic edifices through which man, becom-
ing conscious of his harmony with the world, is consoled. When
God remains outside the forms, he is perforce the born enemy
of
the forms, which ceaselessly baffle his activity and which he tends to
annihilate. To be sure, there exist everywhere, or at least there
seem to exist everywhere, two essential forms facing each other
which are called, according to the times and according to the places,
according to the circumstances or the needs, god and nature, spirit
and matter, body and soul, good and evil, reason and passion, in-
telligence and instinct, movement and form, male and female, or
life and style. But dualism has always attempted to wrest them
one from the other and to subordinate them one to the other for
eternity. Whereas art, and that activity which is the art of living,
conceive both of them as all-powerful and make them genuinely
divine at the exceptional moments when, in the heart of the poet,
of the hero, or sometimes of the crowd itself, the state of love
multiplies them one by the other in a miraculous agreement. It is
precisely the ethical religions (spoken of as so essential, so pro-
found because they condemn appearances) that live according to
the appearances of two antagonistic forces, whereas art, through
appearances, which it loves, goes straight to unity.
Since this very unity is the highest and also the most consoling
form of the religious sentiment, it is art, therefore and definitively,
which gives to religion its most moving aspect. Religion is only the
frame and the pretext for the creative energy of man as it reaches
its summit and as it lends to him the enthusiasm which it draws
up from the consciousness of itself. There is no "religious art."
Any art is religious in its essence; and, with love doubtless of
which it is the spiritual flower-it is the sole creator and also the
sole reliable evidence of that grand intoxication which moves
mountains and which is called religion. It affirms the eternity of
that religious spirit which precedes, includes, and buries the forms
which it assumes in the sects, and it shows that they are masks
placed upon its true countenance by the temporary needs of the
instincts to be developed and the directions to be taken. Art plays


WALTER DE LA MARE
515
with the religions, tenderly, but with fury. It plays with the
religions like that divine monster, the only one beloved, the only
one knowing how to love, who sees in all women nothing but suc-
cessive incarnations of love, and who leaves each one of them
broken, bruised, and sometimes dead, but carried by his mere em-
brace to the summit of her true power, during the time that she
belonged to him. Art, like that monster, is immoral, being in-
divisible and realizing in itself, by the mere fact that it is living,
the cruel unity of life. It is the impassive idol which persists upon
the desert and upon the tombs because it did not place the arid idea
of moral perfection at the threshhold of the knowledge of form;
and, residing at the centre of the passions, of the antagonistic sys-
tems, and of the pathetic drama of action and of movement, it has
sought its food within those struggling forces and shaped its bronze
or its stone from their accepted contrasts.
The End
EPITAPH
BY WALTER DE LA MARE
This lad, when but a child of six,
Had learned how earth and heaven may mix-
At this so innocent an age
He, as light Ariel, trod the Stage;
So nimble-tongued, and silver-fleet,
Air, fire, did in one body meet.
Ay, had he hied to where the bones
Of Shakespeare sleep, 'neath Stratford's stones,
And whispered: “Master William!”—So.
One would have answered, Prospero.


IN A THICKET
BY GLENWAY WESCOTT
Thin
HE mist thinned and broke like a cobweb in the May sun-
shine. A young girl opened her eyes; through the window
beside her bed they rested on a cloud of plum-trees in flower.
The little house where she lived with her grandfather stood in a
thicket of trees, blackberries, and vines. She saw the vapours
gather as dew upon some cabbages and lettuce in the garden, and
the black crooked trunks sustaining a weight of flowers.
She was troubled by a memory of the night in incomprehensible
fragments. She had been aroused suddenly by sounds which her
mind, confused with sleep, could not estimate. The moon, sub-
merged in mist, had swept the cottage with a whirling and opaque
atmosphere. She had lain still, her heart beating fast and loud.
Then, another movement, some footsteps on the porch. Seem-
ingly padded, they were separated from one another by silence.
Was it an animal ? Too heavy for a cat, too elastic for a dog.
Were there wilder beasts in the thicket? The door between her
bedroom and the room opening upon the porch stood open. Her
speculations died down with her breath. Something pressed upon
the wire screen of the window. It brushed against the screen
door, and seemed to shake it by the latch. It paced back and
forth, a soft persistent prowl.
She trembled with curiosity and fear. An instinct warned her
that it was not an ordinary thief. She would have liked to rise,
to see, to know; her limbs would not respond. The night, both
grey and dense, unnerved her.
Subdued noises and movements persisted irregularly for what
must have been an hour. Once she heard them sweep across the
grass to the backdoor, also hooked from within, and return. But
her vigilance relaxed; waves of unconsciousness blotted out whole
sounds and moments of hush; and suddenly she was awake in the
tranquil sunshine.
In the kitchen her grandfather was moving in a pleasant odour
of eggs and butter. For three years the orphan, now fifteen, had
1
F


GLENWAY WESCOTT
517
lived with the old man-a schoolmaster whose needs had been so
simple that he had saved, from the miserable salaries of many
years, enough to provide for his old age and more. She found
him on the porch, last autumn's wild cucumber vines flecking his
face with shadows, his hands in his lap.
“Good morning, Lily,” he said, in his sweet high voice.
“Good morning, gran’pa.” She kissed his cheek where it was
cool and like paper above the white beard, and crouched on the
steps.
What little they had to do was as simple and solitary as a
movement brought about by the sunlight, which dropped deli-
cately upon fresh leaves, vegetables, the strawberry bed, grass,
birds, and petals. They were shut off from the road, from noise
and passers-by, from the sight of other houses, by the grove, which
opened on one side only, on a wheat-field bounded by trees.
For two years Lily had not gone to the district school because
of the age and remote dwelling of her grandfather, who taught
her, easily and informally, at home, where she turned the pages
of his library broodingly, with vague disappointment: books of
history, letters, and particularly of natural history, such as the
note-books of Audubon and Agassiz. Meanwhile he wandered in
the grove or on the lawn, or farther afield. His hands clasped
behind his back, he hummed and whistled. In the early twilight
they worked together in the garden, upon the products of which,
with those of the hen-coop and wild nuts and berries in season,
they lived. His existence had shrunk into the circle of trees, and
he was content with their noncommittal beauty, their concentra-
tion. But the girl's eyes sometimes ran darkly upon the horizon.
"Are you ready for breakfast, child ?” the old man asked.
When they had eaten, he polished his silver spectacles on a corner
of the blue table-cloth, arose, and took down a Bible from a small
shelf of its own. Slow and firm, he read a chapter of Revelations.
If there had ever been an interruption of this morning worship,
Lily would have dreaded its return. To-day her emotion revealed
itself more clearly, as if a carving in low relief had moved out-
ward and detached itself from the stone. The tumult of coarse
emotion and unknown crime which agitated the old text disturbed,
even offended her. She remembered the night and the intruder.
Her grandfather knelt by his chair, she by hers.


518
IN A THICKET
"Oh, dear heavenly Father," he prayed, "mould us to do thy
will. Let our feet ever walk by the light which thou hast given
us. Do not let them stray into temptation, or be stained by sin.
Dear Father, we come to thee humbly, knowing we have been
evil-covetous, quick to anger, lusting for power, licentious. Do
not punish us according to our deeds, but forgive us according to
the sacrifice of thy dearly beloved Son."
The girl's thoughts wandered, excited by the solemn beauty of
his voice, by the obscurity of the words. What was it which had
wakened her? What did it want? Where was it now? Should
she ever see it, ever know?
“And bring us at last into thy heavenly house, to abide with
thee for ever. Amen."
As Lily washed the few dishes and placed them on the lace-
papered shelves, she heard voices on the piazza; and found her
grandfather talking to Mrs Biggs, a woman who sometimes came
to do their cleaning.
"And what had the man done ?” he said.
With a cunning look at the girl, the woman ignored his ques-
tion. Having stopped on her way to another farm-house to bring
a piece of news, she felt obliged by the presence of this young
sober creature to omit its details. She squinted at the sun, red
hands upon her hips, and outlined the exciting but commonplace
story.
A negro had escaped from the penitentiary. The state prison
brooded over this countryside, a hideous fortress of red brick made
more hideous by a row of trees planted against the walls. From
tower to tower upon these walls guards walked, night and day;
separated from the building by a bare courtyard in which every
shadow was immediately visible. At night one of the towers
upheld like a lighthouse a gigantic lamp, which twinkled into
many bedroom windows, a reminder of something mysterious and
submerged, over the forests, marshes, farms, and melancholy black
dense hemp-fields.
Lily blanched and withdrew cautiously through the door.
The negro, imprisoned some years ago for a crime of violence,
had seemed, in the prison, so subdued, so contented, that he had
promptly become a privileged trusty. He drove the superintend-
ent's car, and sometimes went about the town alone upon errands.


GLENWAY WESCOTT
519
From time to time he displayed an internal excitement taken to be
religious or even penitential, since it was indicated by a greater
degree of gentle sadness and by low fitful singing of spirituals.
It had been thought best to restrict his movement during these
emotional fits; but the warden had sent him carelessly to the post
office the day before. He had left the car less than a mile from
the prison and disappeared.
Almost immediately the bewildered authorities swarmed over the
country, expecting to take him by nightfall. But they were
disappointed; the felon was still at large. He had been wander-
ing around all night. He was loose now.
Lily was in a storm of excitement. It made nothing more
clear; the relation of the news to her experience seemed insub-
stantial and incomplete; but she felt that the obscurities which
had troubled her, the unknown, the difficult, the hypnotic, were
to be revealed in a flash of light, emanating from Mrs Biggs.
She shrank into a chair.
Mrs Biggs repeated each fact several times, panting with eager-
ness. She lowered her voice and rolled her eyes. But at last she
reached the end of her information, and paused, discouraged.
The silent moments prolonged themselves in a twitter of birds
and fowls. The old man sighed and stroked his beard. "Well,
poor man,” he said, "I suppose they'll catch him.”
Mrs Biggs asked loudly, "Aren't you at all afraid?" For the
second time the girl felt a surreptitious glance upon her.
“Oh, no,” he returned mildly. “We are simple people, poor
people. We have no money. We haven't anything he'd want.'
Then, with something like timidity, she asked, “Do you like
to live here in the thicket, so far back from the road? I've always
wondered why you did it.”
"Well, I don't know,” was his absent reply. "I'm used to it.
I've been here a long time. We don't get any noise and dust from
automobiles, and the birds come here.”
He descended slowly the verandah steps. Mrs Biggs hurried
off with her burden of alarm; her shawl caught upon weeds and
bushes. In the sunlight his beard glimmered beneath the honey
locusts.
In the silence of the house Lily went about her interrupted
tasks.


522
IN A THICKET
not in themselves, but as a surface burnished. Only a film of
colour clung to his lips. He rested his chin within hands almost
white across the palms, and turned his great white eyes toward
her. The damp curled upward around her bare body.
Midnight passed. The two poised there side by side. Con-
sciousness was suspended in the air; but it did not establish the
contact which would have altered their relation. The moon
slipped through the sky. Sometimes his sighs were clear; he seemed
to breathe forth a single mysterious vowel.
She brushed against a pillow, which fell and settled heavily on
the floor. Surely he would hear and come. The blood rushed to
her head in a loud flood.
But he did not. His desires, the tentacles thrust outward toward
something in that house, had been withdrawn; and gathered, in
a knot almost visible, about some inner crisis. He rose abruptly,
stretched himself, and strode away, over the grass.
The dew
plashed on his canvas shoes.
Before her grandfather came down stairs, she arose into a day
lurid and insecure. Some robins worked upon the flagrant bright
green sod. Everywhere were clots of colour and vortices of move-
ment she had never seen. A superb thunderhead palpitated in
the sky like a tree with black blossoms.
As she regarded it, a smaller sight arrested her: upon the screen
door a gash three inches long, made by a wedge or chisel before
she woke. She stared at the opening, from which the soft wire
bent back neatly.
The old man, whistling like a boy, found her there. He did
not see the trace upon the door.



被
​Courtesy of the Weyhe Gallery
SALT AIR WANDERERS. BY ARTHUR B. DAVIES





IRISH LETTER
May, 1924
O
UR dramatist, Colum, from whom we expected great things,
has become an American; our critic, Boyd, has become an
American; and to be an American is at least as difficult an occu-
pation as those they hurried from in Dublin. And now, for woe
falls on woe, Yeats is a senator, Russell is an editor, Moore is a
Londoner, Gogarty is a demi-absentee, and Magee a foreigner.
Once more Ireland is exporting her saints and scholars, and is but
ill-comforted in retaining her senators, her editors, her republicans
and sinners—her kittle cattle. The arena is being left to the
young folk, and some of them are writing verse that one must be
even younger to read. Five years hence, or even next year under
the stimulus of O'Casey, our new dramatist (about whom more
next month) they may be less tenuous.
As an interlude in hectic adventures Oliver Gogarty has pro-
duced a book of verse, An Offering of Swans, with a foreword by
Mr Yeats (the Guala Press, Merrion Square, Dublin). Mr
Yeats uses words delicately but definitely. He considers that Dr
Gogarty's adventures and enforced absences in London have
brought to him "a new sense of English lyric tradition, and changed
a wit into a poet.” Or, that Dr Gogarty's muse is more distinctly
English than Irish. When he continues, that “Oliver Gogarty
has discovered the rhythm of Herrick and of Fletcher, something
different from himself and yet akin to himself,” he emphasizes
the first statement, and indicates in the "something different” a
thought that he has not had space, or has not cared, to pursue.
Mr Yeats ends with the statement:
"Here are a few pages that a few months have made, and there
are careless lines now and again, traces of the old confused exuber-
He never stops long at his best, but how beautiful that
best is, how noble, how joyous.'
ance.
Used by Mr Yeats, such a sentence is more memorable, more to


524
IRISH LETTER
be cherished by an author than many a column of flattery in a
magazine. Mr Yeats names in special commendation three poems
of this little collection: Non Dolet, Begone Sweet Ghost, and Good
Luck. Only an amateur of bad luck or one who forges his own
unhappiness will disagree in poetry with Mr Yeats, and yet there
are poems in this book which I prefer to those he has chosen. In
Irish verse the native critic looks for a singing quality inside the
words used. This is a subtle vowel quality which is rarely found
in English poetry. English poetry sings in the line, Irish sings in
the word. Ferguson's
“Away in milky wanderings of neck and ankle bare”
is Irish. So too is Yeats's
“O Colleens, kneeling at your altar rails, long hence,”
or:
“I cried when the moon was murmuring to the birds,”
or:
“The honey-pale moon lay low on the sleepy hill,”
or George Russell's
"Where the Greyhound River windeth through a loneliness
so deep,”
or:
“Fades the eve in dreamy fire."
When this quality of easy melody is not found in verse, the
native critic is inclined to give the poetry to England. In the case
of Dr Gogarty this seems to be both right and wrong. His poetry
is not breathed in the Irish manner. It is more carved than flowing.
but his master is Catullus rather than Herrick. I prefer his Per-


JAMES STEPHENS
525
fection to any of the poems already named. In it his Latinity is
fairly evident:
“By Perfection fooled too long
I will dream of that no longer!
Venus, you have done me wrong
By your unattainable beauty,
Till it seemed to be my duty
To belittle all the throng.
I have found attraction stronger;
I have found a lady younger
Who can make a hard heart stir:
Like an athlete, tall and slender,
With no more than human splendour;
Yet, for all the faults of her,
Than Perfection perfecter.
Though she guards it, grace breaks through
Every blithe and careless movement;
What shall I compare her to?
-When she takes the ball left-handed,
Speed and sweetness are so blended
Nothing awkward she can do,
She whose faults are an improvement!
-If she only knew what Love meant
I would not be seeking now
To describe the curved perfection
Of all loveliness in action-
Perfect she would be, I vow
With the mole above the brow."
In lines like
“But far off on the margin of the West
A sea-grey house whereby the blackbird sings”
the Celt in Dr Gogarty is already promising that if he can forget
his scholarship he will remember his ancestors, and sing like a lark
instead of like a musician.


526
IRISH LETTER
His work in this small volume only fails when, as in Dunsany
Castle, he remembers Wordsworth, or, on page ten, he remembers
Milton, or when, as in Amor he shadows two beautiful verses by
remembering that he is a wit in the third. Wit becomes a scholar,
but it is a mark of ill-breeding in a poet; and the poet who can
write
.. timeless like a shrine
Upon the margin of a Grecian town
Where there is calm"
need not condescend to sparkle.
Dr Gogarty is still a little the slave of his vast memory
of
Latin verse, English lyric, and Scotch ballad, and a little more he
is the sport of a desire to assert his scholarship by remembering it.
When he forgets these small matters he writes Golden Stockings,
and writes himself into every anthology of poetry that is to come:
“Golden stockings you had on
In the meadow where you ran;
And your little knees together
Bobbed like pippins in the weather
When the breezes rush and fight
For those dimples of delight;
And they dance from the pursuit,
And the leaf looks like the fruit.
I have many a sight in mind
That would last if I were blind;
Many verses I could write
That would bring me many a sight:
Now I only see but one,
See you running in the sun;
And the gold-dust coming up
From the trampled butter-cup.”
He is the stoniest in form and the tenderest in heart of our
poets.


JAMES STEPHENS
527
Mr F. R. Higgins has published Salt Air (The Irish Bookshop:
Dawson Street, Dublin). This young poet has still to strain from
his ancestors or his contemporaries the poetry that is his, and which
he undoubtedly has. The best poem in his tiny booklet is the one
that is authentically his own—Connemara:
“The soft rain is falling
Round bushy isles.
Veiling the waters
Over wet miles
And hushing the grasses
Where plovers call,
While soft clouds are falling
Over all.
I pulled my new curragh
Through the clear sea
And left the brown sailings
Far behind me,
For who would not hurry
Down to the isle,
Where Una has lured me
With a smile.
She moves through her sheiling
Under the haws,
Her movements are softer
Than kittens' paws;
And shiny blackberries
Sweeten the rain,
Where I haunt her beaded
Window-pane
I would she were heeding-
Keeping my tryst-
That soft moon of amber
Blurred in the mist,
And rising the plovers


528
IRISH LETTER
Where salleys fall,
Till slumbers come hushing
One and all.”
His other poems must be taken as very interesting experiments
of his muse, and as promise of good poetry to come. It is not so
much that this singer is a disciple of any one, but that he is dwelling
in moods of languor and wistfulness that are out-moded. But
the poet who can write
"... cold men herding swine
By wasted seas,
Was captured in his singing-
But where's Beauty's joy,
While Beauty's dust is clinging
To a lonely cairn in Connacht
And a burning wind from Troy"
can learn to discover himself, and can learn to leave Helen and
Troy where they belong, to the studio, that is.
JAMES STEPHENS


VIENNA LETTER
May, 1924
THE
HE most notable event which has taken place in the field of art
here since my last letter to The Dial, and the one most worth
announcing in the West, is undoubtedly the appearance of a new
lyric poet, Richard Billinger. His distinction lies in the fact that
he is the son of an Austrian peasant and that his poems confine
themselves to feelings and ideas characteristic of this class, while
displaying in their treatment of the subject such great strength and
powerful originality that they must be considered as positively
“high art.” But perhaps I should try in a few words to explain
what an Austrian peasant is. The cinema, which mediates between
such diverse parts of the world and unites them in some mysterious
feeling of contemporaneity, has shown the Russian moujik to the
American farmer, and the American farmer to the Russian moujik.
The peasant who inhabits the hills and mountains of the Austrian
Alps—which is to say, upper and lower Austria, the Salzburg
crownland, the Tyrol, Steiermark, and Carinthia—is now about
equally removed from both the farmer and the moujik. He is
more like the farmer in so far as he is completely abreast of the
times, with a consciousness of modern problems which has been
greatly extended by the war: in so far as he is well aware of his
political and cultural importance, and knows how to utilize the
machinery of legislation with full security. Yet he is much more
closely allied to the moujik through the simplicity and the tradi-
tionalism in his manner of living, and through the important cir-
cumstance that his relation to the soil, to his own piece of ground,
is far more religious and mystic than a merely commercial or indus-
trial one. The utensils which he lives among, and even his tools
and the furniture of his house, have hardly changed their form for
half a millenium. The marriage bed, the fireplace, stand on the
same spot as the plan of the house has assigned to them since the
Middle Ages. The scythes and axes are still hanging where they
hung in the times of the Hohenstaufen and the earlier Hapsburgs;
the prayer-book lies in the same place as it has lain since the dis-


530
VIENNA LETTER
covery of printing; in an ancient closet, or perhaps in an ancient
chest, the holiday clothes are still lying and hanging, and in cut
and colour they are the same as those in which their forefathers
celebrated the liberation of the country from the Turkish menace
or from the great plague of the year 1677. The word "conserva-
tive” as applied to such lives has a quite different connotation from
the stupid, shallow one which we associate with it in political
phraseology.
It is only natural that this class should have produced many
artists from generation to generation. For the phenomenon of art
arises precisely at that point when, from a long line of descendants
in whose closed existences the symbols for everything of importance
have become hard and fast, an individual steps forth into the free
atmosphere of the world and with a conscious freedom makes use
of these symbols stored up within him. In this generation also,
two of the three important artists whom Austria has added to the
guild of Europe's painters are of this peasant origin: Anton
Faistauer and Franz Wiegel. And only one, Kokoschka (who
for the time being is the most famous of them all) is a Viennese.
If the gift for art which is stored up in all these lonely valleys seizes
on the mysterious inner meaning of things—instead of unburdening
itself through the hand, by the brush or the woodcutter's knife
then a poet results, while his talent usually remains in the sphere
of dialect, which is close to the soil and is, we might say, still
accessible to its nightly resuscitation, its dew. For with us
Europeans dialect is by no means the speech of the upper classes
in a state of shoddy and unbeautiful corruption, but it is the code
of primitive natural sounds whence the speech of the intellectuals
is continually drawing new life. But in this case, in the case of
this young and astonishing peasant poet, Richard Billinger, it is
written German, the high language of literature, in which, with
the sureness of genius, things are spoken and images evoked that
belong completely to these relatively childish peasant subjects.
The language itself, whose treatment is the very alpha and omega
of poetic art, attains thereby a naïve luminous freshness, and on
occasions a sinister and almost brutal hardness which is unparal-
leled. I am disturbed at the realization of how futile it is to
attempt giving a report of lyric poetry. One of Billinger's two
thin volumes of verse lies before me; I open to one poem and see
that it defies any attempt of mine to explain its beauty, and would


HUGO VON HOFMANNSTHAL
531
equally defy any attempt at translation. The poem is called Der
Mondsüchtige (The Moon-struck). It has precisely that medium
length which is most suited to a strong lyric inspiration—the
length preferred by Poe, who knew the secrets of lyric beauty as
few others. It has eight rhymed strophes of four lines each. The
rhythm, the play of rise and fall, is without technical peculiarity:
naïve and almost monotonous. But even this naïve monotony has
an incomparable power to depict those strange eerie things he
wishes to depict here: the trance of a peasant child who rises from
his bed in the night of the full moon, walks in his night-shirt, and
roams around on the shingled roof. But the real virtue of the
poem lies in its vision of the world as seen through these childish
eyes staring in their trance. It is a double vision: first the view
of the cramped house groaning in the night wind, where every-
thing is ominous and uncanny (uncannily the oven crouches with
its dying glow; the dining-table stands there ghostlike, and begins
to set itself for a meal in the silence of the night: a broken plate,
a jagged knife, bent forks, a mouldy loaf of bread—and no hand
to bring these things; the table itself does this) and then the view
out in the open as seen from the roof bathed in light, the splendid
uncanny vision of the moonlight night (the softly cooing dove;
the complaining owl; the mist slipping across the fields; the almost
singing green of the meadows—for under the fullest moon the
grass is not black, but green again—and the cross on the church
tower, reaching up towards heaven in a fervour of prayer)-
finally the neighbour down below, who stares up anxiously at the
sleep-walking child, then runs and gets the ladder; and most of
all, the child, elusive, running and hopping on the shingles, which
kiss his feet and bear up under him like the floor of God's paradise.
Since my last letter, Reinhardt has been in America and has
displayed one aspect of his many-sided nature. He is by no
means a person of one experiment, by no means the man to let
caprice or accident play any part in his artistic development;
rather, he is deliberate, and is patient in his thoughts and actions.
As a consequence, America will undoubtedly see him oftener from
now on, and will become acquainted with other facets of his
personality. But in the meantime he will return here again, and
will continue an enterprise which he is about to inaugurate: the
theatre in the Josephstadt (Josephstadt is a part of Vienna, and
the theatre situated there is an intimate theatre for about eight


532
VIENNA LETTER
hundred people, built approximately a hundred years ago and
open without interruption ever since)-or, to designate it by
the exact title which he himself has chosen for it, The Theatre
of the Actors of the Josephstadt, under the direction of Max
Reinhardt. While America has seen him first as a producer in the
grand style, as the stage-director of crowds, as the rhythmist of
space and light, here he will function first in a capacity which
is no less important, and is perhaps more significant and effective
for the theatre of his own country: as the discoverer and trainer
of new actors. In these last twenty years a whole generation of
actors has issued from his hands. Some of these also he has en-
gaged, and they will appear here in succession: Werner Kraus
as well as Moissi, Pallenberg as well as Eugen Klöpfer. Undoubt.
edly he will put new problems up to them, and will discover in
them and bring to light possibilities which they themselves had
never been quite conscious of. He was the first to draw from the
most powerful comedian of the Central-European stage, from
Pallenberg, those accents which do not merely touch on the tragic,
but extend deep within it. And I know that he is waiting im-
patiently to give Alexander Moissi, the strongest Hamlet and
Oedipus Rex of the modern stage, a part belonging entirely in the
realm of comedy; although it will be high comedy, of course, and
penetrated by a tragic irony. I refer to the figure of Hjalmar Ekdal
in Ibsen's Wild Duck. But if I know him rightly, there is one
task which will attract him still more than that of striking new
sparks of a hitherto unknown colour from previously forged steel.
This is the awakening and the formation of new talents, the
gathering of young men and women from all possible walks of
life, to make actors of them or to throw into relief—to their own
astonishment—the actor which, unknown to them, is latent within
them. He cannot stop after the two tentatives which seem to
have succeeded so astonishingly well with him in The Miracle
(in the case of Lady Diana Manners and the young American,
Miss Pinchot). And if the good fortune which every productive
man must command to a degree in his sphere of work does not
desert him, then the little house in the Josephstadt will bear a
new generation of remarkable actors whose names will be famous
in ten years. It is a good place for such an experiment, this
little house; it is built like the casing of a violin, and capable of
giving a full resonance to every slight nuance of a good actor,


HUGO VON HOFMANNSTHAL
533
every smile or delicate emotional shading of the voice. And
much good drama has been given in this theatre since those days
more than a hundred years ago when Beethoven wrote and per-
sonally directed his overture, Die Weihe des Hauses, at the formal
opening of this very playhouse. Richard Strauss, who has been
in close artistic alliance with Max Reinhardt for many years,
will now stand on the same conductor's rostrum. And it was
planned at first that he should give this same overture for the
second time after a hundred years. But perhaps in place of the
Beethoven, a light and cheerful Mozart symphony will be chosen
in order to be perfectly in keeping with the light and cheerful
comedy which has been chosen for the opening evening: Goldoni's
farce, A Servant of Two Masters, with the Venetian maschere
of the eighteenth century, Truffaldino, Pantalone, Smeraldine, and
so on. By opening his season with a comedy of this sort, where
the play is almost nothing and the actor really everything, Rein-
hardt repeats in a still more unmistakable manner the indication
which he has already given in the title to his new theatrical enter-
prise, that he wants to found a kind of “Associates' Theatre," and
not at all the theatre of one great egoistic director. This lively
type of comedy (in English it is called "formal comedy”) has
been deeply rooted in Vienna for the last five generations; but
while it will have an important place in his repertoire, it will by
no means predominate. This first evening will be followed by
three others; and all four together will represent the four cardinal
directions in which the theatre will extend. On the second eve-
ning Kabale und Liebe will be given; it is one of Schiller's early
dramas, and thus is in the style of the older high pathos. The
third evening he will stage a comedy by me, which is to represent
the line of modern society drama. On the fourth, the Dream
Play of Strindberg, as a representative of the modern fantastic
piece. He will exclude from this theatre all plays whose scope
and dynamics are in opposition to an intimate house, such as
Julius Caesar, or King Lear, or miracle plays like The Great World
Theatre. He has shown me the list of pieces he proposes for the
next eighteen months, and I can say that it is a list of wide sym-
pathies. It contains things by Galsworthy, Sutton Vane, and A. A.
Milne; also, Paul Géraldy's Aimer, and the Maître de Son Coeur
by that interesting author Paul Raynal whose Tombeau Sous l'Arc
de Triomphe has provoked so much contention in Paris; several


534
VIENNA LETTER
Russians, with Chekhov among them, of course; Anna Christie by
Eugene O'Neill—these by living authors, not to mention works
of the past from Shakespeare to Strindberg. Besides several works
of my own I see only one other piece included by a living writer
in the German language: Das Apostelspiel by the young Austrian
poet Max Mell. In this play everything is strange and peculiar,
and I predict that it will have a very great success.
Reinhardt has naturally discussed with his friends here whether
he should arrange for a kind of official announcement on the first
evening to explain the serious ambitions which are determining
the establishment of his Vienna theatre and which demand a reper-
toire at once restricted and aspiring, a very subtle and intimate
style of drama divorced from Berlin realism. And at his request I
had already begun writing a kind of scenic prologue. I wanted to
take one character from each of the four plays which I have
enumerated above and which represent four different genres; these
four characters were to give something like a statement of prin-
ciples and at the same time convey a sense of this important
moment in the history of the theatre. For it certainly is an impor-
tant moment when Reinhardt returns to Austria whence his entire
art derives (during all his twenty-three years of stage-directing
he has always appeared in Vienna simply as a guest; and now for
the first time he comes before the Viennese in his own house as a
Viennese director). But a prologue of this sort would naturally
have had to pronounce matters of theory with a certain gravity
and a certain solemnity; so that it did not seem to us suitable for
the light atmosphere of the commedia dell' arte to which his first
evening is devoted. So we renounced the idea of unfolding a
highly serious programme expressis verbis and of making promises;
and we agreed on a light scenic prelude, a mere "Greeting Before
the Curtain," which will have the same note of improvisation as
everything in the comedy itself. Also, this form permits me to
point out in a modest manner the distinctive features of the situa-
tion: namely, the opening (in an old building in this old theatrical
city) of a new theatre with ambitions which are pretentious, but
along theatrical rather than literary lines.
HUGO VON HOFMANNSTHAL


BOOK REVIEWS
DISINTEGRATION IN MODERN POETRY
BIRDS, BEASTS AND FLOWERS. By D. H. Lawrence.
8vo. 180 pages. Thomas Seltzer. $2.50.
O
NE cannot be indifferent to a book by Mr Lawrence. He is
very much alive in his own very peculiar way. If he is reck-
lessly unequal, uncontrolled, one must add that even at his worst
he is interesting; and at his best, in prose, he is decidedly the most
living and “possible” of contemporary writers of English fiction.
One does not guess where he will go. His novels are never wholly
satisfactory—they are not good works of art. Almost uniformly
they show a tendency to break in two, their construction is faulty,
incredibilities are indulged in, and at some vital point in each the
credulity of the reader is for ever lost. It has long been apparent
that Mr Lawrence is a man obsessed, unable to conceal his obses-
sion; sex-crucifixion is his iterated theme; and he displays in all
his work, verse and prose, the sensitive fierceness, the sadistic aware-
ness, which almost invariably accompanies this type of obsession.
He is an Erisichthon: tears wolfishly not only at his own flesh, but
also at the world which, inevitably, he has created in his own image.
In his novels, at the dictation of this fever, he sublimates his char-
acters into types; and one watches him, over and over, luxuriating
in the last pang of ecstasy at his subjugation, so richly arranged
and so intensely pitched, of the cold tall blond “Arctic” type (which
has a predilection for Alps) by the swart furry animal “Mediter-
ranean” type (which has a predilection for underworlds and dark-
ness). Latterly, also, one observes a somewhat disquietingly in-
creased effort towards a rationalization of this obsessive "world"-
a rationalization irrational and clumsy, a muddy psychoanalytic
mysticism, full of meaningless jargon and highly "affective” logic.
One sympathizes with Mr Lawrence, and hopes that he will find
his way out, solve his problem, discover peace; but one is bored


536
DISINTEGRATION OF MODERN POETRY
and incredulous; and one prefers his solution when it is in narrative
form, a parable.
One sums up one's feeling, in all this, by simply saying that
Mr Lawrence is a man of genius, but of that sort which lacks suffi-
cient self-control and self-awareness. This fact has been as mani-
fest in his verse as in his prose, perhaps more so; and his latest
excursion into verse, in which one sees him quite perceptibly de-
flected by Whitman, is no exception. Birds, Beasts and Flowers
is not a wholly successful book. Taken simply as description, some
of Mr Lawrence's birds, beasts, flowers, and prophets are, as one
would expect, intensely vivid. The baby tortoise, seen as a “Tiny,
fragile, half-animate bean,” “Rather like a baby working its limbs”;
the mother tortoise “Taking bread in her curved, gaping, toothless
mouth"; the father tortoise, “tupping like a jerking leap, and oh!
opening its clenched face from his (sic) outstretched neck and giv-
ing that fragile yell, that scream, super-audible from his pink, cleft,
old-man's mouth, giving up the ghost, or screaming in Pentecost,
receiving the ghost"; the mountain lioness with “her bright striped
frost-face"; the snake who "sipped with his straight mouth, softly
drank through his straight gums, into his slack long body, silently”;
the cyclamens, “Like delicate very young greyhound bitches, half-
yawning folding back their soundless petalled ears”; and the
"weird fig-trees, made of thick smooth silver, made of sweet un-
tarnished silver in the sea-southern air-I say untarnished, but I
mean opaque”; all these are excellent bits of descriptive prose, sharp
and exact, and one could cite a good many others. But their excel-
lence, it must be insisted, is a prose excellence, level, cumulative,
explanatory; only infrequently in his book does Mr Lawrence sub-
stitute for this method the method of poetry, with its sharp brief
suggestion, its "vox et praeterea nihil,” and its total elimination of
the personal presence-everywhere else so manifest-of Mr
Lawrence; Mr Lawrence in an old suit of clothes, affable, informa-
tive, speculative, a little inclined to be facetious, now and then some-
what cheap, and often dull.
And it is of this relaxed personal presence that one is, after all,
most tiresomely aware in Mr Lawrence's book. In general these
poems are verbose; a piling up of descriptive epithets, a stringing
together, in opposition, of words curiously strained and forced,
images strained and conscious. This prolixity, now and then brin.
.


CONRAD AIKEN
537
dled with vividness or mere idiosyncrasy (verbal or affective) finally
makes one wonder whether it is the display of a kind of literary
vanity. Mr Lawrence appears to believe that all that is necessary
for him is to "spill” his consciousness. If there is any
selection or
arrangement at work at all, it is not enough in any poem here printed
to make of it a work of art. It remains simply a kind of amusing
chatty comment, under which one perceives that Mr Lawrence's
aim is simply the assertion of his personality. Perhaps he caught
this from Whitman? At all events it is a common form of aesthetic
error at present, and worth examination.
It is customary, in discussions of art, to use the terms objective
and subjective. Strictly speaking the distinction is indefensible,
for no work of art, however "objective” in appearance, can be any-
thing but the artist's self-portrait. But the distinction can have a
clear validity if we define it: and we must define it as meaning that
the ideal "objective” artist is one who, in the production of his self-
portrait, employs affective terms—symbolisms of theme and form-
which are universally significant and intelligible; whereas the ideal
“subjective” artist is one who in the production of his self-portrait
employs affective terms (of theme and form) significant and intel-
ligible only to himself. Of course, the ideal objective artist is an
impossibility—the ideal subjective artist a lunatic. Or one may
put it in another way: that the objective artist's psychosis corre-
sponds at a maximum number of points with the "average” psy-
chosis of mankind, whereas the subjective artist's psychosis is
peculiar to himself. Again: the objective artist, in whom a sense
of reality is relatively mature, is aware of and understands the
psychotic needs of mankind, and endeavours to be as useful to his
audience as to himself; but the subjective artist, in whom the sense
of reality remains infantile, disregards and scorns his audience, and
considers himself a god, the only true source of wisdom, the only
true centre of awareness. With these relative distinctions in mind,
it is easy to see that in what we are accustomed to call the “disin-
tegration” of the arts during the last decade we witness a very
marked movement away from the objective (in our sense) and
towards the subjective. In Cubism, Vorticism, Expressionism, and
Dadaism, the emphatic common factor is the marked increase in the
solipsism of the artist, accompanied as we should expect, by a more
or less complete breaking up of established forms and symbols, and


538 DISINTEGRATION OF MODERN POETRY
a conscious contempt for manifest intelligibility. We are assured
by psychologists that this breaking up, accompanied as it curiously
is by a distinct historical regression, or return to the primitive, is a
good thing, and is necessary periodically if art is to remain "healthy”
and to “develop.” But we are also assured that the actual work
produced at the moment of regression-poetry, for example, in
which the holophrastic method is reverted to; sculpture which is
pre-cultural or negroid; or, in general, the reversion to a primitive
ritualism-is, naturally, infantile; and is only of use as the starting.
point for a renewal of growth, which would perhaps take the form
of a gradual selection and refinement of valid symbols from amid
the mass of the invalid. At its lowest, there can be no distinction
between this art and the art of the definitely insane. It is hardly
a step from the compulsive iterations of religious mania to the
stammerings of Miss Gertrude Stein, or Mr Pound's "Spring
Too long ... Gongula”; and even so fine a poem as Mr Eliot's
Waste Land is not untainted. That the “latent” meaning may be,
for the artist himself, tremendously rich, dazzlingly illuminating,
and highly organized, makes no difference, if this meaning is not
successfully conveyed. Dr Pfister, in his Expressionism in Art,
observes :
... there is no doubt that the expressionist often chooses his
colours not on account of their character as felt by men in general
,
but . .. on the strength of repressed experiences and fancies of
which other men cannot have any idea.”
He also cites the analogous case of a youth, suffering from
cryptolalia, who
“felt himself compelled ... to fill up ... whole volumes with
written characters that resembled shorthand, the Morse code, or
exotic scripts. An incredible number of perfectly elaborated sys-
tems were at his disposal, but not one was intelligible. Only on
closer investigation it became evident that there really existed a
system full of meaning . . . a regular artificial language, but inex-
plicable to consciousness."
If now we keep some such reflections or speculations as these in


CONRAD AIKEN
539
mind; and if we keep in mind also the fact that we have no right
to attribute any “absolute” badness to the ideal subjective work of
art, or absolute goodness to the objective; if we reflect further that
the practical test of “successful communication” compels us to ac-
cept Sir Hall Caine, Mr Harold Bell Wright, and Mr Robert Serv-
ice as the greatest living artists; and if we add to this the often
demonstrated fact that (representing subjective as a and objective
as b) a work of art may be in its own generation a-2, but, five or
ten generations later, b-2; then we are in a position to contemplate
with some freedom any such particular specimens of the contem-
porary disintegration, or reintegration, of poetry as these poems by
Mr Lawrence. It is clear that we must put Mr Lawrence pretty
far towards the subjective end of the scale. We have already seen,
and taken as our point of departure for speculation, the fact that
the “relaxed personal presence” is one of the most striking features
of these poems; a fact which clearly corresponds with the common
expressionist view that unexplained confession, direct or in sym-
bolism, is sufficient. But we can now object to this that if the
mere presentation of his own personality is to satisfy us, we must
insist that the personality should (1) be one of genius; (2) with a
decided gift for communication; and (3) unconscious partly or
wholly of the extent to which it merely communicates itself. The
latter point is important. We enjoy, in a work of art, the overtone
or aroma of personality; but the deliberate exploitation of person-
ality, as Whitman exploited it, is apt to be otiose, if not repellent.
The real "ghost" is lost in the process of elaborate dishevelment,
and all that remains is a parade of irritating superficialities, and
perhaps a considerable vanity. In Mr Lawrence's case, we find this
result conspicuous. And, in addition, we find him a little tiresomely
idiosyncratic in a way we suggested earlier: i.e. sex-crucifixion. In
this regard, too, he is well along towards the subjective maximum.
He sees the world exclusively in terms of a personality which is an
obsessed one, and which has in some respects remained infantile.
Figs, tortoises, goats, dogs, flowers—all, to Mr Lawrence, writhe in
sex-martyrdom. Even the harmless, necessary moon is adjured in
rising to burst the membrane of the stars, and
"Maculate
The red macula."


540
DISINTEGRATION OF MODERN POETRY
Finally, as regards form, it remains to be observed that Mr
Lawrence has carried disintegration a long way back, and has only
in a few instances taken a new step forward from the point of rest.
For the most part his structure is casual, slipshod, and rhythmless,
or, as said earlier, a prose structure. In this, too, it is to be feared
that he speaks too idiosyncratic a language—his “formal” symbols
are not likely to be found either widely or intensely valid, now or
later. Or so, at any rate, one dares to guess.
CONRAD AIKEN


A POPULAR NOVEL
The Rover. By Joseph Conrad. 12mo. 286 pages.
Doubleday, Page and Company. $2.
BY
Y this time the popularity of Joseph Conrad is a phenomenon
more interesting than the particular novel which has so
strikingly given proof of it. The Rover was launched in a favour-
able wind; it swept along, and the number of copies sold is large,
surprisingly large for an author who only a few years ago was the
property of the few. The book was warmly received by book-
reviewers; a few daring and thoughtless ones put it
among
Conrad's
finest novels; there was also an undercurrent of dissatisfaction.
The method was not that of Youth, the happy ending was not in
keeping with the author's custom, the book lacked the glowing
fire of even The Rescue. Mr Conrad is supposed to have taken
to heart the public which has earnestly tried to like him; and at
the same time embracing by a clever stroke the critics who
deplored the indirect method of narrative he used to use, he is
supposed to have become a better artist and a popular novelist.
In itself this is not an impossibility, and if an artist can so
compact with his double conscience, not an impropriety. I am
not, however, sure that it all happened so simply. The happy
ending is less happy than that of Chance; the sacrifice and death
of Peyrol corresponds precisely to the tragic end of Lord Jim.
The fact that Réal, a shadowy character of no great personal
interest, marries Arlette, constitutes no concession to the popular
taste; it is the logical fulfilment of Peyrol's intention when he
sails his tartan into the hands of the English. There is further
to be noted the severity of the style of The Rover. One recalls
the opening pages of Victory, and nearly all of The Secret Agent-
where Mr Conrad's irony expressed itself not in the movements
of human creatures against the background of their destiny, but
in verbal felicities which are trivial and forced. None of these
occur in the austerity of The Rover. Had the author had
popu-
larity in mind when he wrote it, he would have made it more enter-
taining to read. The direct narration of events is an experiment


542
A POPULAR NOVEL
Conrad has tried before; I do not recall any great success in it,
nor is The Rover one. It is one of the few novels by him in which
I was never able to take a passionate interest. The outer frame-
work may be clear and neat; internally it is muddled. The back-
ground of Escampobar on which the passions of the French Revo-
lution should appear, is all confusion to me, giving no contours to
the simple legend of the rover himself. And even that legend
proceeding steadily and certainly, has not the assured and impas-
sioned freedom of gait which the great novels of Conrad possess.
The popularity of The Rover is, therefore, all the more inter-
esting because it seems not deliberately designed by the author.
There is, necessarily, the element of skilful promotion; since the
days of Victory it has been clear that Conrad could be made a
popular author; The Shadow Line and The Arrow of Gold aided
little, The Rescue more. The appearance of a novel praised by
the press, yet presenting few of the author's idiosyncrasies and
difficulties, was destined to end doubt and make assurance sure.
One might say that it is a pity for Conrad to become popular with
a novel of his second order. But there is another circumstance.
It is certain that in the past ten years the whole of his work has
been read, widely; and in it many who for years were ignorant of
it discovered a great novelist. They discovered also a novelist
distant in spirit from our direct contemporaries. He is a
romancer, not a satirist, and his preoccupation is a moral, not a
social, one. The two things go seldom together; where the frame-
work is melodrama the moral tone is usually high, but the moral
interest lacks intensity. In Conrad the drama moves magnificently;
deep within it there is almost always a case of conscience. You
find it in such narratives as The Duel, and Typhoon; and when-
ever the moral predicament has no great gravity, as in The Rover,
the result is weak. For it is only when Conrad is engaged in a
dilemma that he has the power of creation which for him as for
many others means the power to create a separate world in which
events and characters have life, almost without reference to the
logic of our events and the limitations of our characters. He has
used the device of the narrator, as James that of the ideal spec-
tator, to remove his world by one step, to set himself at once free
of the ground. It has mattered very little in the end that the


GILBERT SELDES
543
device existed; the main thing was that he always had the impulse
to create, and the power.
And I think that that is why he has eventually become a popular
writer; that the root of the matter is in him, that he knows what a
novel is, what the creative imagination is, and knows it “by works.”
The creative capacity, in whatever degree it exists nowadays, tends
to belittle itself, to attach itself to ideas, to criticize or satirize,
to do anything in short but make the effort to soar. It was Conrad's
good fortune to have made the effort many years ago; it would be
impossible for him to do anything else now. And the duration
and ease of his flight, however they vary from one book to another,
are secondary considerations. He is still an eagle, and not a beast
of burden.
GILBERT SELDES


PORT OF NEW YORK
Port of New York, Essays on Fourteen American
Moderns. By Paul Rosenfeld. 12mo. 311 pages.
Harcourt, Brace and Company. $3.
Patum
AUL ROSENFELD is a fortunate gift to American critical
literature. Into our boneyard of erudition and theoretical
writing he pours the excitement of music and paint, of sounds
and colours and words joyfully apprehended. These are his life.
Unlike the people who wander through exhibitions making
memoranda, he has bought and lived with paintings; as he has
lived with his piano and music. No writer among us has given
works of art such opportunity to fire him to enthusiasm and
perception.
We have had two books from him reflecting in terms of music
the life of our day. His new book, Port of New York, shows
how diverse were his friendships and responses among the arts,
how broad the scope which made the earlier books so vivid,
untechnical, and poetic. Painters and writers, photographers,
educators, poets as well as musicians, are the beings to whom
Paul Rosenfeld has been friend, finding in their lives and work
a validation of our land; himself the most variously cultivated
among all our critics.
Fourteen spirits have made him rejoice in America. For him
they bridge the void that had existed between European mellow-
ness and the crass scramble of American Business. “Through
words, lights, colors, the new world has been reached at last. We
have to thank a few people—for the gift that is likest the gift
of life.” His fourteen people he makes no pretence to singling
out as all, or the only, artists in America. But they gave him at
various times, "the happy sense of a new spirit dawning in
American life, and awakened a sense of wealth, of confidence, and
of power which was not there before.'
What the quality of that new spirit is, the essays tell. Albert
H. Ryder, Paul Rosenfeld finds the first expression of America
in paint. Ryder it was who gave form to the vague restlessness
of the American pioneer soul, the evading desire and Flying


HERBERT J. SELIGMANN
545
Dutchman aspect of existence. With Ryder, we are told, this
aspect of the American journey ends. We are landed. Then
there is Van Wyck Brooks, our "stiff little colonel of letters,”
who fought with a moralist's exaltation, against our dreary waste-
fulness, for the right of young expression—though of late he has
been neglecting the young expressers. In Carl Sandburg is the
lover of life, helping us to accept even the crass ugliness of the
mid-West. “What Synge did with the language of the Gaelic
peasantry, this lean, slouching, stogy-smoking newspaperman is
commencing to do with that of the American townspeople”;
though much of Sandburg's work is incomplete and he sometimes
lets himself down easy. New England gives us Marsden Hartley,
master of a strange, a mysterious elegance; an Alexandrian in our
midst. The drab greys of life find acidulous acceptance in Wil-
liam Carlos Williams, as poet, and in the sober painting of
Kenneth Hayes Miller. John Marin is triumphant realization
of the Yankee, brother under the skin to the Chinese masters of
wash; Arthur G. Dove gives us a native lyricism of the soil. And
Georgia O'Keeffe is the truth of woman, a liberating force in
colour music. The ironic musical cultivation of Roger H. Sessions
represents musical values; and Margaret Naumburg's sensitive
appreciation of children's growth, education. In letters there is
the gay, lost leader, Randolph Bourne, a victim of war spirit;
and Sherwood Anderson, maker of our sagas.
The last essay
interprets the American photographer and burning spiritual force,
Alfred Stieglitz; the epilogue being given to the port of New
York, warmly viewed and newly accepted for the presence on the
continent of these fourteen people.
Paul Rosenfeld endeavoured mainly, it seems, to infuse his
characterization with the flavour of his delight, and the pungency
of his experience of people. The painters, Hartley and Marin
and O'Keeffe, are caught in moments of word portraiture so
breathlessly fine that for those who have known their work it
seems echoed in another medium. How large and round the con-
ception of John Marin, Yankee and Puck and Ionian seer in one,
who “feels a cosmos composed of sand and fire, air and water,
fire drawing water into floating mist, water returning to earth
again in warm rain, endless mystic glittering cycles of life and
death”; this man who, like an apple tree toughly rooted in
American soil, strews about him "his explosions of tart water


546
PORT OF NEW YORK
color; slithering suns and racing seas of the coast of Maine; wet,
fishy poems of headlands and pine-pinnacles.” What a masterly
portrait of Sherwood Anderson, voice of our Middle West strug.
gling for selfhood, transfiguring the common words of American
streets, "the man who looks like a racing tout and a divine poet,
like a movie-actor and a young priest, like a bartender, a business-
man, a hayseed, a mama's boy, a satyr, and an old sit-by-the-
stove.”
Not only have we no other American writer who could have
come so close to these intensely diverse persons; no one else wields
such insidious colours and flavours and odours, sensuous entities
evoked in words, as Paul Rosenfeld. The defects of his writing
are a product of its merits: the gift of himself entire, and his
enthusiasm. In search for verbal equivalents for what he has
experienced, he offends, wilfully, the proprieties. So, he uses
"palp” as a verb in various tenses, for touch. Sometimes his
enthusiasm is not entirely mastered. In the effort to describe
Albert Ryder's painting, he begins a sentence with “Dullest gold
of night-cloud edge ." and ends it with the aureate brown of
embossed leathers.” It is followed by an inchoate moment: “The
utmost reaches in vibrance in the gorgeous, fissured rectangles are
rose-violets of the ultimate agony of day in the west, and rims
of light pale as the greening skies of the afterglow.” The essay
on Ryder too is burdened with the words "hushfulness” and
“clashfulness,” fraternizing uncomfortably in one sentence with
the word "dreamful.” Such passages, and others, of verbal paste,
of prose dulled by reiteration and by the effort to evoke utter
ecstasies not fully supported by the architecture of English, clog his
fine pages.
In some of its painter values, too, the book lacks sureness. It
was careless to write of the exquisite Marsden Hartley that his
restlessness suggested Van Gogh, for no two painters could be
named less related in any sense. Also, the theory that a canvas
symbolizes a woman's body—incompletion of foreground forms
implying sexual fear-might well have been offered with less
insistence; especially as Paul Rosenfeld stretches it to justify the
work of a minor painter, Hayes Miller, whose "forms surge directly
from the lower edges," et cetera.
But these and other faults of the book are far outweighed by


HERBERT J. SELIGMANN
547
the brilliant achievement which it represents. It is a new and
richer sort of critical writing than that of the older men, Brooks
for example—the essay on Brooks being in itself a firm and ade-
quate placement of this figure. Port of New York adds evidence
of contemporary realities to those accumulated by Waldo Frank
in Our America. Men and women and their work are justifying
us all. Paul Rosenfeld, fully and intimately sensing their achieve-
ment in the spirit of to-day, gives us his picture of it. His resource
is adequate not only to elevation, but caricature; of Arthur B.
Davies in the Essay on Miller; of Brooks, standing before America,
"admonishing her like a modern Hamlet his guilty mother; accus-
ing her of having been privy to the murder of the creative impulse.”
Through the loosest writing of the essay on Ryder, pierces such
a vivid characterizing phrase as: "He must have been a blinded
man in the noon.'
No other American writing to-day could well have attempted
the difficult problems Paul Rosenfeld set himself. He has cap-
tured not alone something of the flavour of painting, music, poems,
and persons; he has set down sharp pictures that are part of
American cultural history. The later essays, rich in observation
and craftsmanlike writing, are documents of a living spirit, one
relating all the fourteen people, and thus other Americans living
and working, in a communion. Paul Rosenfeld's book, amidst
the timid, tepid, and ill-informed writing known among us as
criticism, is a warm and generous gift of himself, delineating our
realities with something of the fervour and richness they deserve.
Together with those of whom he writes he is discoverer and creator
of America.
The book's interest is enhanced by illustrations; among them one
from a Paul Strand photograph of Alfred Stieglitz; and five from
Stieglitz portraits, of John Marin, Arthur G. Dove, Sherwood
Anderson, Marsden Hartley, and Georgia O'Keeffe. Although the
sensitive prints suffer in reproduction, they are handsome additions
to this important record of living America.
HERBERT J. SELIGMANN


IN A FOG
12mo.
STREETS OF Night. By John Dos Passos.
311 pages. George H. Doran Company. $2.
THCS
HIS book was suppressed in Boston, and the first idea that
occurs to one in reading it is, Oh, how very right Boston was
to suppress it! ...
I suppose it is unnecessary to add that I am speaking from Bos-
ton's point of view. As I see it, Mr Dos Passos desired to inject
through the medium of his highly nervous and sensitized style the
peculiar savour of Boston which, happily, is like nothing else in
God's good world, its touch and feel and smell, its unpleasantly
physical exterior, and behind that, its dessicated soul. The result
of his endeavour is that Boston's quintessence oozes through nearly
every one of Mr Dos Passos' pages like one of its famous fogs cling-
ing like a damp hand, a tangible presence, to everything it has
touched.
Reader, do you know Boston? I do not mean, have you alighted
at the South Station, stopped over at the Touraine, or merely gone
to Harvard? Have you experienced Boston with the soul as an
almost corporal presence? It is not wholly idle to speak of cities
as having corporal presences; the reaction to cities is a matter of
association like everything else, but it may be none the less poignant
for being (like everything else again) relative. Paris certainly has
a soul, and Florence, and New York, and any number of other
places, externally unremarkable, may impinge on the emotions in
that way because they are the accidental landscapes of some suffi-
ciently felt experience, whether of love or hatred. It is only the
places where one is bored that are empty, and not all the museums
and all the campanili in the world will fill them to a point that
touches the mind. Consequently we feel that no thoughtful roman.
tic will be disposed to deny a soul to Boston any more than one
would refuse his due to the devil, both Satan and Boston being
notable enemies and slayers of the soul in others. When Mr Dos
Passos elected to write about three people—two young men and a


CUTHBERT WRIGHT
549
girl—who were a little too sensitive in the matter of "soul”; “afraid
to live” says with great illumination the caption on the jacket, it
was inevitable that he should choose the Athens of the West as the
most appropriate landscape for his figurines.
"We don't fit here,” says one of the figurines, speaking of Amer-
ica. “We are like people floating down a stream in a barge out of
a Canaletto carnival, gilt and dull vermillion, beautiful lean-faced
people of the Renaissance lost in a marsh, in a stagnant canal over-
hung by black walls and towering steel girders. .
It is a remarkable fact in these people that they never see or
experience anything that strikes their eyes or touches their emotions
in the endless walks they are always taking together without being
reminded of something in literature or the arts. It is a remarkable
fact, but not an isolated one. Nan and Wenny and Fanshaw are
the children of culture, even as you and I, and thus they never see
or experience anything simply and directly like the happy and
heroic Tom, Dick, or Harry in the house next door. Their souls
are in part native; in part derived from the wet-nursery of a drug-
ging literary romanticism, and it is the painful conflict between
what is natural in them and what is bookish and romantic which
makes their tragedy, and forms, as I see it, the poignant thesis of
Mr Dos Passos' story, if it has a thesis. Thus America reminds
them of “a great snarling waste” in which they float like beautiful
people of the Renaissance in a vermilion barge; an old man dozing
in a railroad shack near the Charles reminds them of "some shadowy
Rembrandt”; they are always longing, in their hearts, to go to
Europe and join the mob of other culture-lovers who feed the doves
in the Piazza or go poking through the Louvre ... "I don't think
the fault's with us," one of them says, “I think we're great people
. . It's just this fearful environment.” Surely they are great
people like those of the Renaissance, like Hamlet ... it's all the
fault of the pursy times. At this point in one of the dismal but
extraordinarily interesting conversations which consume so much
of the book, someone suggests that it is time for tea and they all
take a street-car (they are always taking street-cars) marked:
“This Way for Harvard Square."


550
IN A FOG
“a pero
This sort of existence lived through literary media would be all
right if it made them any happier, or made them happy at all. The
girl studies music presumably with passion, but at night at her
window somewhere in the Back Bay she dreams of the shoulders
and thighs of young workmen in the street below. She lives in a
street of brick and brownstone houses near Symphony Hall which
any one who knows at all the Symphony Hall aspect of Boston will
recognize with a shudder of absolute reminiscence .
petual sound of scales taken with tenors, sopranos, contraltos,
tinkled on pianos, scraped on cellos and toodled on flutes, to say
nothing of the English horn.” One effect of this atmosphere is that
when a splendid set of shoulders and thighs is presented her in the
person of her little comrade Wenny she refuses them, afraid of the
adventure of marriage; "afraid of life.” Like many people, like
most of us, she does not love her music enough; or enough the shoul-
ders and thighs. Wenny, the most sympathetic, if not the most com-
prehensible, of Mr Dos Passos' trio, has an obscure, unhappy love of
life, the mere living. The inescapable nostalgia that assails the
others for Caneletto barges and the Grand Canal excites him with
an aching desire to merge his own self-hating ego with even the
casual waifs he picks up in the street . . . with any one rather than
himself. He is rude and a little boring, but he is the only one of
the three with a shade of the right dope on himself. To his friends
who affirm that the fault is not in themselves, and that after all
"they are surrounding themselves with beautiful things,” he retorts
savagely: “Culture you mean. God, I'd rather rot in a dairy lunch.
Culture's mummifying the corpse.” He is picked up on a park-
bench by a young bum named Whitey who excites his envious ego
tremendously with talk of unknown savannahs of experience ...
Tallahassee and South Bend and Havana in short, with all
the advantages of not being a child of light. "Silly, all this blah
about the Renaissance,” he says. “Better be like Whitey.” Ac-
cordingly when his girl turns him down, he attempts to go
with
prostitute, just as countless Whiteys (as well as children of light)
would have done. Then occurs one of those inexplicable scenes
which take place I venture to say only in a novel by Mr Dos Passos.
.
.
a
“They stopped at a red brick house with a sign Furnished Rooms.
Dim gaslight in the hall.


CUTHBERT WRIGHT
551
.
"Whitey had said: 'O they don't bother me. I get it now and
then, but I don't miss it. I'll be like that to-morrow.'
“She was sitting naked on the bed under the gasjet. In his
head was a ghastly sniggering. He was out the door.
“No, you don't, you — etc... ..
“He piled crumpled greenbacks in her hands . . . rushed down
the stairs out into the icy glare of the arclight in the street.
It would be interesting to analyse the reason why not merely
Mr Dos Passos' weaklings, but all his heroes make the Great Refusal
at such moments. If I have seemed to over-emphasize a single ele-
ment in his composition, it is only because the author over-empha-
sizes it also.
After this episode which I have ventured to call obscure, occurs
Wenny's suicide which is no less obscure, and it is a tribute to the
peculiar quality of Mr Dos Passos' art that he has made this suicide,
if not comprehensible, at any rate plausible.
But the third figure of the trio, Fanshaw, is really a successful
creation, perhaps because Mr Dos Passos knows him so well that he
had, after all, only to make a composite portrait of nearly all his
friends. Fanshaw will outlive us all, as, on the basis of the survival
of the fittest, he is the last real survivor of the novel. Briefly he may
be described as the Man of Tea; life without Tea would be insup-
portable and indeed unthinkable. Tea is responsible for the
longevity of the deeply civilized Chinese, and perhaps for his own.
Discreetly and faultlessly attired, he stands before a really good
chimney, the Primavera over the mantel, his eyes lovingly surveying
the gold lettering of his books in which the authors most akin to him
in spirit have had the energy to register their experience of the good
life, Pater, Santayana, Vernon Lee. . . Fanshaw is the happiest
just as he is the most successful of Mr Dos Passos' creations. A
man is always happy in proportion to the satisfaction of his desires,
and when one lives from five o'clock to five o'clock he has the com-
pensation appropriate to his deserts.
This is not intended as a critical appraisal of Mr Dos Passos'
novel. Personally I am off that theory of criticism which insists
that a work of fiction should be noted down point by point like a
horse or a prize vegetable. I suppose that it is unnecessary to re-
mind people that Mr Dos Passos is one of the few—the very few-


552
IN A FOG
writers of fiction in this country whose fiction is really of impor-
tance. It will be said that the three characters in Streets of Night
are negligible creations because they are boring as well as being
perpetually bored. As a realist Mr Dos Passos has only to retort:
De te fabula. The worst thing about these desolating dolls is
that they are not fictitious.
CUTHBERT WRIGHT


JOURNALIST CRITICS
CRITICISM IN AMERICA, Its Function and Status. Es-
says by Irving Babbitt, Van Wyck Brooks, W. C.
Brownell, Ernest Boyd, T. S. Eliot, H. L. Mencken,
Stuart P. Sherman, J. E. Spingarn, and George E.
Woodberry.
330 pages. Harcourt, Brace
and Company. $2.50.
12mo.
O
F the contributions to this volume all but three are seriously
damaged by vices which it is easiest to call journalistic.
Not, of course, in the good sense. The style of the newspapers is
well adapted to the superficial description of modest events, and
hordes of people can manage it nicely. But it is when this style
or frame of mind is brought to bear on subjects which are not
news that we get the really unpleasant effects of journalism. For
news is something which presumably interests everybody, and the
news writer who tackles a special subject will make more effort to
interest everybody than he will to inform his special audience. Thus
one sees articles in sporting magazines about a new smokeless pow-
der, in which the writer has tried so hard to interest fishermen
and auto campers that the powder is nowhere. To treat ideas as
news is to lose the ideas; and when you get through you have not
even conveyed news. The journalist critic goes all the way to meet
you merely to say how do you do. Thus if our newspaper writing
since 1850 has been getting better and better, our criticism has been
getting worse and worse, and in a way for the same daily reason.
However it is very likely proper that most of the chapters in a
volume called Criticism in America should be journalistic. For
this is what we call criticism in America.
The three non-journalistic essays were not written for magazines,
and most of the others were. We must not blame their authors
for having written magazine articles when that was their task.
Yet even a magazine article may be made respectable. I should
like briefly to take up these articles one by one with an eye par-
ticularly to their journalistic faults. Perhaps I ought to try, since
the articles are mainly controversial, to distinguish main streams


554
JOURNALIST CRITICS
>
and tendencies of thought; but really, journalistic controversy is so
haphazard, with so many appeals to popular prejudice, and so
many misunderstandings, intentional and unintentional and al-
ways stupid, that I hardly think it would be fair to talk in this
connexion about thought at all.
Professor J. E. Spingarn contributes two papers, one written in
1910 and one in 1923. In his second paper he observes that at the
time of writing his first "it seemed necessary to emphasize the side
of criticism which was then in danger, the side that is closest to the
art of the creator,” whereas “it is necessary now to insist on the
discipline and illumination of knowledge and thought ...
Such timely pleading is less journalistic than professorial; it is
certainly not the way one writes for one's equals. There is some-
thing nice, however, about Mr Spingarn reading to the critics of
America from the Aesthetic of Croce like a man reading the
sermon on the mount to a directors' meeting. Only Croce's
Aesthetic is not the sermon on the mount, and its paradoxes sound
unusually preposterous in Mr Spingarn's journalistic paraphrase,
removed from their context, and without any explanation of
Croce's profound idealistic prejudice."
His second paper recommends “the cleansing and stimulating
power of an intellectual bath. Only the drenching discipline that
comes from mastery of the problems of aesthetic thought can train
us for the duty of interpreting the American literature of the
future.” And apparently the only aesthetic is Croce's, toward which
American writers have been groping since Thomas Jefferson. Mr
Spingarn, in an appendix to this volume, offers ten pages of
quo-
tation from Americans on the subject of art as expression, includ-
ing Emerson and John Macy. One is grateful to Mr Spingarn for
his appendix, and for his admiration of Poe as a critic—Poe
used so harshly by W. C. Brownell and Van Wyck Brooks. One
is sneakingly grateful to him for failing to speak ill of the Amer-
ican literature of our great period.
“And how does it happen,” writes Mr Brooks in his paper on
The Critics and Young America, “that we, whose minds are open-
1 "Those who affirm the existence of two forms of intuition ... attain with-
out doubt to the distinctions and oppositions of the vulgar (or dualistic)
consciousness, but their Aesthetic is vulgar." (Appendix to Croce's
Aesthetic.)


WALTER CORNELIUS BLUM
555
ing to so many living influences of the past, feel as it were the chill
of the grave as we look back upon the spiritual history of our own
race?” This question, I take it, is the starting point of Mr Brooks's
whole theory about America, the most persistent and consistent one,
no doubt, that any American has had. I do not propose to try re-
capitulating this theory, which Mr Brooks has so patiently ex-
panded in at least one large volume and four or five little ones;
I wish only to point out how in this particular expression of it, a
journalistic attitude has come close to making it silly. Not content
with letting his ideas do their own work, he has tried very hard
here to make them as practical as possible, to apply them in the
same way that Pasteur applied his knowledge of yeasts to wine
making. Criticism must be dragged in, and dragged in it is by
Matthew Arnold's heels. “In a famous essay," writes Mr Brooks,
“Matthew Arnold said that ‘it is the business of the critical power
to see the object as in itself it really is’; for by doing so 'it tends to
make an intellectual situation of which the creative power can
profitably avail itself."" Now this may be quite true. But Mr
Brooks, in this paper, is interested only in the last half of the propo-
sition, i. e., in results. He has observed our nineteenth century
with interest and profit, but when he comes to the twentieth cen-
tury, finding nothing that interests him, he ceases to observe any
object at all, and allows himself to be carried away by the
speciously practical spirit of the journalist reformer. He wants
our critics to develop a "spiritual technique,” a “complicated
scheme of ideal objectives,” a “programme for the conservation
of our spiritual energies.”
One accustomed to political language, accustomed that is to
believe in its significance, will at first perhaps not be shocked at
what Mr Brooks has written. But consider for a moment to what
Mr Brooks is applying, however apologetically, this vocabulary and
these “ideals.” The person who said that the wind blows where it
pleases would not have believed that a Christian could some day so
patronize the spirit. Consider Mr Brooks's analogy about America
and Russia: Russia lacked the technique of practical reform and
therefore her well-intentioned young men became Hamlets; young
Americans become Hamlets because America lacks the spiritual
technique, something corresponding in the world of the spirit to re-
form leagues. But even accepting for the analogy's sake this hair-


556
JOURNALIST CRITICS
raising dualism, does anything so correspond? One suspects Mr
Brooks not of a stubborn attempt to reason about the unreasonable,
but of having rather lazily entertained a vicious analogy, and
applied a favourite vocabularly to something with which it has
nothing to do.
In August 1914 the Paris taxis were commandeered and used
for carrying soldiers to and from the front. In a sense, no doubt,
they remained taxis, and in the same sense, throughout this article,
Mr Brooks remains a critic.
The flow and texture of Mr Mencken's product is very even.
That coarse, galloping rhythm, as though heart and mind had be-
come involved in an old-fashioned waltz and could not reverse;
those phrases like “rubber stamp,” “Wiener Blut," "for a profes-
sor must have theories as a dog has fleas”; those triads of in-
congruities; they are all always right there where one hopes not
to find them. But thought is not, or should not appear to be, au-
tomatic; and one prefers Mr Mencken bearing information, how-
ever libelous, to Mr Mencken theorizing, however truly. We are
told that Mr T. S. Eliot has for Mr Mencken an unrequited ad-
miration. Mr Eliot is not journalist enough; it takes a thief to
catch a thief.
Professor Irving Babbitt obligingly acts the moral ogre for the
pleasure of the outfit. He draws upon his vast store of obscure
texts in Comparative Literature and caps every silly remark of a
modern critic with an almost identical silly remark of some seven-
teenth or eighteenth century nonentity. But his controversy is
careless, in that he picks out for indiscriminate contempt things in
the modern movement which have nothing in common (e. g. Theo-
dore Dreiser and the Armoury Show). He does not analyse; and
he writes platitudes like “it is easy to be an unchained tempera-
ment” which have not even the virtue of being true. And when
he leaves his guerilla warfare for a moment to look after his stan-
dard, he raises one so inoffensive that I doubt whether any of his
adversaries would object to it: “in creation of the first order ...
imagination does not wander aimlessly, but is at work in the service
of a supersensuous truth that it is not given to man to seize di-
rectly.”
Mr Ernest Boyd's article, Ku Klux Kriticism, ably cancels Pro-
fessor Sherman's unusually Atlantic-hearted paper on The Na-


WALTER CORNELIUS BLUM
557
tional Genius. Mr Boyd is a knight-errant of another Round
Table who has come to these shores to strike a blow for freedom and
for the accurate translation of German. There is nothing half-
way about him; even as a pedant he is all journalist.
The three non-journalistic writers of this collection are Professor
George E. Woodberry, Professor W. C. Brownell, and Mr T. S.
Eliot. Professor Woodberry, in an expansive and affectionate
mood which is perhaps constant with him, has written a not at all
negligible or vulgar little sermon about what art does or may do
to the ordinary individual. Mr Woodberry is guilty of one of the
opinions which in Mr Spingarn so much annoyed Professor Bab-
bitt: "Each of us has the artist-soul.” Addressing a person who
has enjoyed reading a poem, Mr Woodberry remarks: “It is not
that you have acquired knowledge; you have acquired heart.” Well, ,
if this is the very worst that the professor so despised by Mr
Mencken can do, we are disappointed in Mr Mencken. Yet if we
are to believe Mr Brooks, it is just this gentle tolerance, this love
without bowels of the best, which is responsible in a great degree
for the poverty in which our spirit finds itself.
Professor W. C. Brownell, undoubtedly the most mature and ex-
perienced writer of the lot, sets himself the task which in comparison
with the pretensions of some of his confrères must appear modest,
of detaching criticism from book reviewing, and of describing the
critical method which he has found to be the most effective, namely
portraiture. The two parts of his argument here printed are en-
titled Field and Function, and Method, and are the first and last
chapters of his book, Criticism.
Mr T. S. Eliot even more than Mr Brownell insists on defining
and delimiting the term critic, how drastically his remark on Sainte-
Beuve will show: "If he was a critic, there is no doubt that he
was a very good one; but we may conclude that he earned some
other name.” In this respect Mr Eliot is very modern (the chief
ignis fatuus of modernism being the quintessential essence) but
to read his work you would never think that he wanted you to
think so. These two essays from The Sacred Wood, The Perfect
Critic, and Tradition and the Individual Talent, while not his
very
best critical work, are typically elegant. I must say this manner
of his is very pleasing after all the bluff, big-hearted, frank, slack-
mouthed vulgarity we have been treated to. The basic criteria of


558
JOURNALIST CRITICS
these essays are very broad and simple; Mr Eliot begins and ends
with Matthew Arnold, the Arnold who reintroduced Aristotle's
high seriousness, and who, when he wanted to show that Chaucer is
not serious, quoted from La Belle Héaulmaire. Mr Eliot too quotes
from Villon and from Dante. Introducing some notions from de
Gourmont, he carries forward Arnold's analysis of the causes of
bad taste and he attempts, with the help of de Gourmont and of
“the aesthetic emotion,” an analysis of the artistic activity, some-
thing which Arnold, himself a poet, never attempted. Such con-
siderations may seem very remote in comparison with Mr Brooks's
programmes, but actually they are not remote at all; they concern
everybody who is not blind and deaf. And I believe that for many
his propositions could, temporarily at least, rearrange much con-
fused material in the mind, in the same surprising way as do for
example Freud's theories on sex in childhood. This introspective
confirmation is perhaps the only one anyway of which aesthetic
theories are capable.
Furthermore Mr Eliot manages to place these matters in an
atmosphere so rigorously moral that our moralistic critics would
enjoy, while reading him, the unaccustomed pleasure of thinking
of somebody else as a prig and of themselves as libertines, which
intellectually at least most of them are. A few quotations will
suffice to show how he makes every failure in practice appear a
failure not only in intelligence, but in motive, a moral failure.
“He [the scientist] may use art, in fact, as the outlet for the
egotism which is suppressed in his own specialty.”
“The dogmatic critic, who lays down a rule, who affirms a value,
has left his labour incomplete.”
“The bad criticism ... is that which is nothing but an ex-
pression of emotion.”
“The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a con-
tinual extinction of personality.”
Walter CORNELIUS BLUM


BRIEFER MENTION
PRANCING NIGGER, by Ronald Firbank, Introduction by Carl Van Vechten
(12mo, 126 pages; Brentano: $2). We hope that no devoted subscriber
to The Saturday Evening Post will mistake this novel for a companion
to the works of Mr Octavius Ray Cohen or any other would-be humorous
exploiter of our coloured brethren. It is merely Mr Firbank's latest and,
for us, his most exquisite impropriety in prose. Readers of Mr Firbank's
former novels will vouch that the curious country of his mind has no rela-
tion to any known terrestrial region ruled by a presumably moral Provi-
dence; it is rather a floating island adrift this time in the cobalt waters of
the Caribbean and beset by seas that are anything but forlorn. We hope
that the author of Valmouth will continue to write stories as delectable as
this one, if only to convince the people who reproach him with being trivial
that he has never attempted to be anything else. We greatly need in this
country novels that will be more trivial in their tone and less trivial in
their art. When such a novel appears, it is always knocked off by our
serious-minded critics as a relic of the frivolous Nineties; nothing could
be more mistaken. The men of the Nineties, however scarlet were their
little predilections, were intensely Victorian in their attitude toward con-
duct; "sin” appears to have been a reality to them even when they
embraced it. But in Mr Firbank's pages the words “sin” and “goodness”
would be anomalies because those pages are deliberately and delightfully
unreal. The faintly sexual fooling, the bare suggestion of delicate
depravity we find here, bear the same relation to reality as a rosy reflection
in deep water bears to the body of a swimmer.
The Overcoat, by Nikolay Gogol (12mo, 262 pages; Knopf: $2) is the
third volume of the complete translation which Mrs Garnett has promised.
Between 1831 and 1836, when these stories were written, the Russian
romantic school was dissolving either into satanism or the naturalism of
later writers. This volume is a mixture of the two, suggesting Zola,
Petrus Borel, and at times Bill Nye. It contains nothing that will add
greatly to Gogol's American reputation, but much that has influenced the
development of Russian literature. Kropotkin once said that every Rus-
sian writer of his day had rewritten The Overcoat.
The Parson's PROGRESS, by Compton Mackenzie (12mo, 330 pages ; Doran:
$2.50) is an exercise in dialectics that would much better have been pub-
lished as a manifesto of the Anglo-Catholic party of the English Church
than as a novel purporting to reveal the strife of faith and doubt in a
young priest's soul. The problem has dramatic, psychological, and
symbolical possibilities; but these are allowed to dissolve into a vapour
of restlessness further clouding already opaque discussions of form and
ceremony. The passage of time is not vitalized by character development,
nor the progression of the theme unified by a crisis. The book represents
the untimely desiccation of a writer once happily animated.


560
BRIEFER MENTION
A CURE OF Souls, by May Sinclair (12mo, 324 pages; Macmillan : $2.50).
Miss Sinclair, who has tried all things in her time, essays in her latest
novel a social comedy. Comedy, however, is not the long suit of this sincere
and rather too serious-minded artist, and before long the reader is forced
to abandon the trimmed walks and decorous garden, and plunges with the
author into an obscure wood of tragic implications. There is something at
once amorous and a trifle macabre in the way in which Miss Sinclair
tackles the dissection of any character, male or female, she has set her
heart on; and her portrait of a sensual clergyman, with his face of a
Roman Caesar in the Decadence, and his passion for peaches and golden
omelettes and a really good bed, would be difficult to surpass. As might be
expected, though, the book rather falls between two unharmonized moods;
the comedy is not quite rich enough, and the tragedy has a pinchbeck ele-
ment about it which makes the novel appear, on the part of so authentic
an artist as Miss Sinclair, a rather trivial performance. She is an excellent
example of a really good writer whose very brilliant facility causes her on
more than one occasion to write too much and hence to write herself down.
The Best SHORT STORIES OF 1923, edited by Edward J. O'Brien. (12mo,
544 pages; Small, Maynard: $2) is, as heretofore, the most intelligent
of the annual collections, the only one which an American not wholly
crass might show to a civilized European. It is against the machine-made
short story, and although a good piece of machine stuff occasionally gets
into the volume, the majority of the stories are on the side of art. As
is usual in these cases, the stories are interesting—they can be read without
tears of boredom by the intelligent adult. Year after year Mr O'Brien
makes this collection, one hardly dares to think of the tedious labour
involved; year after year more bad stories, more dull stories are published.
But he is to be congratulated, for he has done more than keep the flag
flying. He has won for it a royal salute, and often from hostile guns.
A King's DAUGHTER, by John Masefield (12mo, 170 pages; Macmillan:
$1.75) is a tragedy of Jezebel, Queen of Samaria, told in astonishingly
pedestrian blank verse. For the last two years Mr Masefield has been
influenced by Racine. He began by translating Bérénice; he "adapted"
Esther; now finally he strikes for himself into Racinian tragedy, to measure
his idealized Jezebel, this creature of romantic verse, against the real and
terrible Athalie; and betrays thereby how sentimental and prolix he is.
He shows to advantage only in the choruses. There he forgets Racine, and
relates the story of Helen of Troy with the easy charm which is always
in his grasp
SAMSON IN CHAINS, by Leonid Andreyev, translated by Herman Bernstein
(12mo, 207 pages; Brentano: $1.50). In this play Andreyev enlarges on
the theme of Samson and Delilah. It is a partial symptom of weakness
that a writer should turn to the depiction of purely quantitative strength,
but Andreyev developes along with this the sense of Samson's partnership
with God, and does give occasional glimpses of this essentially tragic
property. Yet the plot shifts rather than marches, so that its culminating
moments never have a fully accumulated movement to feed upon.


BRIEFER MENTION
561
KATERINA, by Leonid Andreyev, translated by Herman Bernstein (12mo,
181 pages; Brentano: $1.50) a modern problem play, furthers the traditions
of Ibsen's feminism, even to the unresolved ending which is calculated to
provoke discussion and judgements among the public. However, it pos-
sesses nothing of Ibsen's close-knit technique, and its tricks for arresting
attention are often bluntly stagy. As is typical of so much contemporary
writing, Andreyev succeeds much better in convincing us of his heroine's
dissolution than of her high-spiritedness before the dissolution began;
which is especially objectionable here as the dramatic richness of her “fall”
depends upon her having had a great deal to fall from.
Each In His Own WAY, AND Two OTHER Plays, by Luigi Pirandello
(8vo, 258 pages; Dutton : $3.50). The fine Italian hand of Signor
Pirandello is quicker than the eye of the reader; these plays need visual
representation to bring out their full values. In the swift and subtle
interplay of emotions and relationships by which the dramatist carries
forward his theme, Pirandello's dramas resemble blackboard demonstra-
tions in psychology; the manner is so intricate that some of the shifts
and fine shadings are practically dependent upon the stage for their appre-
hensions. Those long intervals of eloquent silence with which he endows
certain characters cannot be stamped on the printed page. Of this collec-
tion, Each In His Own Way follows the fascinating method of the now
familiar Six Characters in Search of an Author; it is drama of fine
penetration and rich values. The Pleasure of Honesty is deft comedy
driven home by delicious irony, while Naked, aside from being somewhat
repetitious and talky, is typically in the Pirandello mood.
I.ETTERS FROM A DISTANCE, by Gilbert Cannan (12mo, 169 pages; Seltzer:
$2.50) gives one a full-length portrait of a novelist with one finger on
the pulse of a post-war world and the other on his own. One finds Mr
Cannan recording his own reactions, and at the same time testing them
against the observed attitude of those with whom he comes in contact in
many parts of the world. These papers form a stimulating series of
pictures, being the literary fruits of a pilgrimage of readjustment.
Parson's PLEASURE, by Christopher Morley (12mo, 137 pages; Doran:
$1.75). To speak of the "cider-colored eyes" and "naily paws" of one's
dog and of maple seeds as "coat-hangers for a fairy's closet,” is poetic.
For one pestered by friends “to whom you daren't be rude,” to befriend the
convict, the foreigner, the literary lion-cub, is noble; but what
Brobdinagian ingenuousness or daring could lead this good man-a lover
of “experienced proud words," whose library would make one love him
for its sake alone—to proffer in verbiage such as “extuition," "hugeous,"
"enticive," "dolorobiliously," "inerasably," "pluperfectly,” “inscrutables,”
"indignants and blasés,"—under the patron spirits of George Herbert,
Thomas Fuller, Sir Thomas Browne, Oxford University, the Phi Beta
Kappa Society of Harvard University, these addenda to Shakespeare in
lame gosling prose, these "grams," and "taphs," these luckless jingles
which are like nothing so much as those attempts at verse-making cour-
ageously extemporized in a game of forfeits ?


562
BRIEFER MENTION
THE REAL SARAH BERNHARDT Whom HER AUDIENCES Never Knew, by
Mme Pierre Berton, translated by Basil Woon (illus., 8vo, 361 pages;
Boni & Liveright: $3.50). An absorbing tale from the underworld. The
style is cheaply journalistic, but the facts recounted are thrilling enough.
Mme Berton says that the list of Sarah Bernhardt's lovers reads like a
“Biographical index of the great Frenchmen of the nineteenth century."
She loved wisely, according to Mme Berton, for glory or the affections,
but never for mere cash. Upon the whole a good woman, Mme Berton
thinks. A great to-do is made over the revelation that Bernhardt was the
illegitimate child of a German Jewess by a French father, but little dra-
matic use is made of the illegitimate son of the actress, Maurice. The
first "useful" lover was Berton, who got Mme Bernhardt into the Odéon
where the first success was made; and a later "useful” lover was Sarcey
the critic, whose vitriolic pen was never silenced until finally Sarah went
away with him into the night. Once embarked in the reading of such a
book as this, one goes on to the bitter end, loathing oneself for having
bathed in such muddy waters. It is amazing how Mme Berton, herself an
actress, could have written so much of her friend and so little of her
friend's art. The success is understood, but not the greatness.
THE OUTLAWS OF CAVE-IN-Rock, by Otto. A. Rothert (8vo, 364 pages;
Clark) contains enough thrilling material to fill many reels of movie
films. It is an account taken largely from old court records, newspapers,
and magazine articles dealing with the highwaymen and river pirates of
the Mississippi basin at the beginning of the nineteenth century. With a
cavern on the north bank of the lower Ohio river as headquarters, bands
of robbers carried on their raids for many years, holding up river boats,
and extending their land traffic on both banks of the river in Illinois and
Kentucky. There were whole families of outlaws, the women taking,
sometimes, as active a part in the thefts and murders as their men folks
did. The last of the outlaws, Sturdevant, was a counterfeiter, a man of
talent and address, a fine engraver, and so well liked that "he could, at
any time, by the blowing of a horn, summon some fifty to a hundred men
to his defense.”
CRITICAL EPOCHS IN HISTORY, Studies in Statesmanship, by D. C. Somervell
(illus., 8vo, 427 pages; Harcourt: $5). This book is a scholarly attempt
to focus attention on a succession of problems which met their respective
solutions at the hands of statesmen of genius. It is an interesting method
of writing history, this taking the accidental and the strictly human ele-
ments into account. Pericles, for instance, is chosen as the central figure
in an account of the supremacy of Greece, Julius Caesar's effect upon
Europe is well analysed, and Charlemagne's dominance illustrates the
general character of mediaeval culture. The great age of the papacy is
studied through the life of Innocent III. Then a chapter on changing
creeds bridges the way to a consideration of Richelieu's influence in the
seventeenth century. Washington and Alexander Hamilton are grouped
in an exposition of new ideas of human progress, while the final chapters
on Bismarck and Gladstone complete the worthwhile demonstration of the
evolution of modern political ideas and institutions.


THE THEATRE
TH
THE merciless return of the season warns me that now, if ever,
is the time for self-justification. Next month I shall be a
vacuum; before my annihilation I feel the need of a small apology.
Not, to be sure, for the quality of the pleasures I have recorded, but
for the possible lack of the power to communicate that pleasure.
My chief fault has been my interest in production. Now and
again I have tried to make my readers aware of the great beating
heart of humanity as it is revealed on our stages, and to analyse
a few of the revolutionary ideas triumphantly projected there.
But in the main I have felt that the theatre is an art, and that as
an art its secondary interest—the only one I consider worth think-
ing about—is in its aesthetic qualities. It is hard to be indifferent
to the passion of Heartbreak House or untouched by the humours
of Meet The Wife; but it has for long seemed to me that if you
isolate these things from the way of their presentation, you make
the theatre a dull and ignoble place.
Currently three pieces engage attention. Mr Stark Young is
an aesthetician of the theatre, generally an acute and sensitive
one. Coming to put his ideas into action in Georges Dandin he
seemed to me to fail, more or less honourably, because he did not
reckon with the material facts of his situation, did not master his
physical problems as Molière did. For it was impossible on the
small stage of the Provincetown Playhouse to develop either lines
or planes of movement. True, one has seen that stage boundless-
but Molière remains French, however universal you may take him
to be, and boundlessness is inappropriate. The result was precious,
which again Molière is not; it was broad and obvious, and not
acrid. It hadn't tone.
To my surprise the O'Neill arrangement of The Ancient
MARINER was moving in beauty. There were some dozen details
which seemed wrong—notably the toy albatross and the uneasy
movement which accompanied the divinely easy line "like lead
into the sea.” Mr O'Neill angered me by omitting the physical
climax, from “The silly buckets on the deck to "And when
I woke it rained!” The crux of the production lies in its timing,
.
O


564
THE THEATRE
for if the development of light and movement follows the spoken
verses, these seem like stage directions; but if the verses even by a
fraction of a second come after the events, they give all the magical
effect that the events are living in the Mariner's memory, vividly
seen by him, emotion, in short, recollected in tranquillity. On the
night I saw the production, the timing was sometimes right and
sometimes wrong—the margin is so slight that one performance
may be a thousand times better than another. I have reason to
believe that the intention of the producer agreed with my analysis.
I call as witness to the success of the experiment something more
than the thrill it evoked in me. For the first time since my ac-
quaintance with the poem began, I was able to share in the emotion
of those final stanzas which, we have been told, have been tagged
on as a moral ending to a narrative which is better without them.
I have a hundred quarrels with Robert Edmond Jones; but here,
at all but the end of his first season's work, I give him best. He
is what he wants to be, an artist of the theatre; his destiny is
unfulfilled, but he has not departed from his road.
Lee Simonson's first essay as director seemed to me not a success.
I agree with nearly all of the critics in finding the material second-
rate. MAN AND THE Masses rises once to an emotion, when the
Woman curses God, and then through the sheer power of the
thought itself. It would have risen to quite as high a level without
the vast construction which preceded it. For the rest Toller seems
not so neat a master of expressionism as Kaiser, with less of interest
to communicate.
Mr Simonson's direction was, I do not doubt, in the spirit of
the play. One had these direct, hard, brutal impressions; one had
the sense of swiftness, of clash, of irreconcilable elements. But
the mechanism eventually became more interesting than the spirit
which animated it. When Mr Simonson showed us the crowd
disintegrating, forming itself again, and absorbing in it the woman
who had stood outside, the movements were simple and accurate;
when he tried to make the same crowd reassemble after the fight in
the streets, the movements were so wilfully mechanized that the
way the picture was being composed quite destroyed any interest
in the composition when it was completed.
GILBERT SELDES


MODERN ART
HEORETICALLY the Independent Exhibition ought to be
there test the darlingest fruits of his experience. In practice it
works out otherwise. Or perhaps you'll say it doesn't. It depends
upon how you define "ideas.” Or perhaps ideas in art are extinct.
At any rate the wished for evolution of technique has not occurred
quite as it had been expected. New manners of painting or hitherto
forbidden subjects have not only not founded schools, but they have
not sprung to notice. On the other hand the long repressed emo-
tions of the uninstructed populace that bubbled to the surface in
the very first Independent and that amused us so much then
have gone on bubbling until now they spout geyser-like to the
skies and form the only significant phenomena of the American
art season. From being freak specimens in chance corners of the
show, they have multiplied until they now dominate the event.
Artists, especially perhaps the young artists, laugh with, instead
of at, these new-comers. “Isn't it a scream?" in loving accents,
is meant as the highest praise. What the sincere author of the
work that evokes this encomium might think of it, if he chanced to
hear it, is a question; but the answer to the question, doubtless, is
that the painter who cannot stand a little laugh can't stand much;
is not, in fact, robustly in love with his work.
Spreading from the Independents the contagion of naïveté has
extended to the other galleries, even to the galleries of commerce.
The New Gallery, the Dudensing Gallery, and the Whitney Studio
Club have arranged to exhibit works chosen from the display on
the Waldorf Roof, and the only one so far seen, that arranged
by Mr John Sloan for the Whitney Studio Club, certainly put a
premium upon eloquence untaught. The amateurish note has
appeared in many of the uptown shows, but nowhere has it been so
emphasized as at the Whitney Studio Club. Here the late Mr E.
L. Henry has been revived and featured side by side with a Miss
Clarke-discovered last year by Mr Brook at the Independents-
and who paints not from nature, but from photographs, and who
gets into her appealing and decorative canvases something the
photograph has not. Later on in the same gallery, a group of


566
MODERN ART
paintings by Mr John Mauro made a sensation, dazzling, among
others, Mr Marsden Hartley, who had just arrived from Paris
where he had seen nothing, he said, so superbly straight from the
shoulder. Mr Mauro is a cabinet-maker of Paterson, N. J., and
has painted symbolical religious pictures for years, apparently be-
cause an inner urge compelled him to. He assuredly is not one to
be deterred by a little laugh. The pictures now shown are large,
the Crucifixion extending from floor to ceiling, and the two Adam
and Eves being almost as big. The Crucifixion had to be carried
from the frame-maker's to the gallery, and it made a veritable
sensation in the streets. Its powers in that respect suggest a use that
might immediately be made of it if a priest with courage could be
found. As a banner in a sacred procession it could not be surpassed.
In several other ways, too, it cannot be surpassed. It has a heart-
searching, early Italian frankness. Never have I seen an Adam so
accused of guilt. It may have been Eve's idea, but the sin was
Adam's as well! And all who saw these astonishingly free paint-
ings conceded that they were handsomely decorative.
And on top of this came the Louis Eilshemius exhibition at the
Société Anonyme. Mr Eilshemius is well known in New York
as a writer to the daily press of letters that have a peculiar, auto-
intoxicated quality, but it remained for M Marcel Duchamp to
discover him as an artist in the very first Independent show. The
malicious said that what really attracted M Duchamp was the price-
label of $10,000 upon a picture that everybody laughed at. The
public continued to laugh at Mr Eilshemius' prices and the prices
continued to grow until the neat valuation of $50,100 was ap-
pended to the contribution to this year's Independent. This hocus-
pocus, however, cannot be blamed for the public's former scorn of
Mr Eilshemius' art, since he is no longer a young man and for years
had besieged the dealers and the official societies for recognition.
In the Société Anonyme exhibition the fantastic price-labels have
dropped away and the hocus-pocus. Mr Eilshemius stands revealed
as an artist of genuine poetic powers. The collection is a pleasure
from beginning to end, and there is enough in it to found a reputa-
tion upon. He does not soar, apparently, to the heights of Albert
Ryder, nor squeeze the palette for enamels as that master did, but
he belongs to the same brotherhood; he is a poet.
To group him with the naïve artists now being rescued


HENRY MCBRIDE
567
from the Independents' ocean is to give in one way a false im-
pression, but on the other hand there is nothing in Mr Eilshemius'
modest, uninflated style ever to win approval from an orthodox
academician; and the present acceptation, in which I am not alone,
must be largely due to the increased openness of mind now prevalent
and aided by the Independents. This openness of mind, as it now
manifests itself in New York, gains significance from the fact that
it seems to be something in the air and not wholly confined to the
painters. The old-fashioned rugs, distinctly “screams” in their
way, are now the most fashionable of possible possessions, and the
painted furniture and coloured lithographs of our forefathers are
not curios, but fit neatly into the modern aesthetic. If democracy
be at last safe, as the Dawes Committee insists it is, then this un-
instructed "art of the people” I have been speaking of, opportunely
heralds the new era.
New York from the first has been sceptical of Jacob Epstein's
London exploits, and the present exhibition of the sculptor's work
in the Scott and Fowles Galleries does nothing to dispel the doubt.
Mr Epstein proves himself a clever man of the world, but that is
all. It was clever of him to leave New York-a bad town for
sculptors—and to choose London. London is excessively easy for
artists, and swallows anything in the way of a pose with avidity;
and in addition has a wonderful press, if "press” be understood
to include the undergraduate school of best-selling, satirical
romances each issue of which insists upon mirroring the Café Royal
and its noisiest clients.
Mr Epstein is apt enough as a workman, but nothing he shows
here indicates that he desires to be more than sensational. His
cheeky portraits of duchesses and archaistic Christs do not shock
nor interest us. The one exception that suggests that Mr Epstein
might have arrived somewhere in a more exacting community is
his portrait of Mr Muirhead Bone. This is not only straightfor-
ward, but relentless modelling. Every inch yields its quota of char-
acter. But in the midst of so much bombast and bluff, I am en-
tirely inclined to put all the credit for this portrait up to Bone
himself. In the presence of this singularly honest artist, the prince
of charlatans must have been tamed.
HENRY MCBRIDE


COMMENT
OLI
LD subscribers to The New Republic, when they get to-
gether of a spring night, are wont to exchange the usual
lovers' confidences. They recall, with a tenderness surely not mis-
placed, the antique moral oratory of the Roman Lippmann, and
the higher passional moments in the theatre-sonneteering of the
Keatsian Young, and (For where does true love pause more
cherishingly than upon the very awkwardnesses of the loved
being?) most often, those awninged editorials, those great lumber-
ing four-wheelers, of the Dutch Reformation Croly. Yet, when
we take down from their sagging shelves our imposing bound
volumes of the back numbers of Mr Croly's journal, the pious hand
turns most easily and most reverently not to any of these, golden
though they be, text pages. This hand turns most easily to the
imposing advertising section, and there, trembling, smoothes out
before our filling eyes the page advertising The New Republic
itself. There, as Dean Swift remarked (to be sure, in another
connexion) speaks genius. There foam the high seas of adven-
turous prose, there rides all storms the ethical galleon of Right
Opinion, there Rome and Keats and, ay, even the Dutch Re-
formation, are overtopped and, upon their own sailing courses, out-
pointed. As to the text and policy of The New Republic, even the
Faithful are permitted occasionally to harbour reservations; as to
the advertisements of The New Republic, he who does not swallow
(and avidly) hook, line, and sinker is no virtuous man.
"(This—all this—was in the olden
Time long ago.)”
These marine pages, these pages which, like the conch-shell found
upon our Atlantic seaboard and preserved upon our bird's-eye maple
bookcase, give out what we must again resort to a poet to properly
depict-
“The surge and thunder of the Odyssey”


COMMENT
569
—these so essentially marine pages have suffered an earth change.
No longer, though we hold them ever closer to our ear, do we catch
the solemn and melodious breathing of Old Ocean. They might as
well have been bought in the Five and Ten Cent Store.
When The New Republic next announces, as it shortly will,
“Bound volumes for the six months just past are now ready. In
applying for same please state whether you desire the advertising
pages to be bound in or not.”—When this notice appears, I shall
break a venerable tradition, a tradition I had never thought to
question: I shall order my bound volume for these months to in-
clude no advertisements.
After the lordly music of the open main, who would permit
upon his shelf such tootings as these:
“Our task' and the task The Freeman was engaged upon are
very much the same. It is first of all to arouse discussion, but to
accomplish this it must awaken in that small fraction of Americans
a consciousness of responsibility for the survival of a free and un-
fettered journalism in America, now seriously threatened. Unless
that responsibility is felt and unless there is to emerge in America
a sufficient public which actively prefers intelligent unbiased
journalism, how can it too long continue ?"
What on earth does this last sentence mean anyhow?
Let me quote the following consecutive sentences:
"The New Republic it is true has enjoyed a hopeful measure of
success. Its revenues have exceeded those of
any
similar magazine.
It has received the enthusiastic and constant support of thousands
of readers. Its financial results have not, however, been such as
to arouse emulation."
Is it then “financial results” which our little cenoby is seeking?
Is it then "financial results” that we, the Faithful, are to “emu-
late”? Surely we had dreamt otherwise. Surely The Lady Bounti-
ful had not for this given of her earthly substance! Surely to no
such terrene end had Brother Herbert raised his weekly voice and
led the vocal cenoby!
1. I quote the first paragraph of an advertisement entire.


570
COMMENT
IN The New Republic for April twenty-third, Mr Leo Stein, of
whom we learn that he “has made a life study of painting,”
writes at some length upon Picasso. This is not the place to con-
sider his argument as a whole. I desire merely to quote the last half
of one paragraph:
“As for his intellectuality, that is rubbish. His intellectual
baggage is of the slightest, and the total output of intellect in his
work is negligible. Picasso is thoroughly intelligent in the ordinary
human way, and is ingenious to the last turn, but he is in no serious
sense a thinker."
I recall Mr Stein's anecdote of how another critic sent Auguste
Renoir the numbers of a certain journal containing a series of
articles by that critic upon Renoir, and of how these journals were
later discovered, uncut, serving to prop the model's stand; and I
recall how Mr Stein drew from these data the logical conclusion
that Renoir was not a man of intellect—"in no serious sense a
thinker.”
It seems to some of us that Mr Stein has not yet discovered the
direction in which his own talents lie. Why sulk in Florence ?
Why not quit a continent which, according to Mr Stein himself,
has, since the Renaissance, produced no artist of intellect? Why
not return to America, which is, after all, the Land of Opportunity?
And—a thought strikes us—why not try that most intellectual
of modern fields, Advertising? Why not enquire at The New Re-
public? Surely The Editors of The New Republic have always
gone in passionately for “intellectual baggage”: I have even heard
it whispered, The Editors of The New Republic go to bed with
wardrobe trunks, “just to sleep on them.”
Of course Mr Stein's advertisements will not be attractive to
the eye (for that one must have aesthetic sense) but at least they
should be logical, to the point, and not ignoble.


44 - its #yyl