of Florentine
goldwork—”
It has been said that should all records of Greek civilization by
some future glacial period be erased, from the significance of one
Athenian coin could some Cuvier of the humanities reconstruct
the Hellenic world. So from this refined torque of words who
could not reconstruct “the fractional magnificence” of that
Etruscan culture and civilization of which the refinement of
Florence was but the most subtle epigone? And how inevitably
the astute, the careful-tempered and careful-eyed, goldsmith of
Etruria had, not grudgingly, evinced his professional approbation
for the achieved balance of Miss Moore's exhibit!
"and the fractional magnificence of Florentine"


COMMENT
179
V
The subtly-incised excellence of these aligned consonants and
vowels, the simple and orderly progression from "and the frac"
(how fortunate is the short “a” preceding the hard “c”) through
the mitigated expansion of "tional magnificence [this word miti-
gated by the short "l's”] of Florentine” to that word which hangs
so carefully by itself, so pear-shaped and concave, so packed and
pounded of solid weight, that word which hangs like a pear-
shaped pendant of solid, hammered gold:
"goldwork—”
I recommend further, for the discolouration of drab nights, the
following tried solidities: chunks that are neither logs nor blocks,
chunks many-cornered, chunks awkward to get a hold on, and
yet more awkward to lift and place, chunks that I have said to be
of what is called, not wholly fortunately, "drift-wood”—chunks
of brine and iron: A Grave; England; Picking and Choosing;
When I Buy Pictures; and the whole of Peter; and of that mastery
of New York harbor from which I have already carved out a
considerable segment, but which had better have been enflamed
entireDock Rats.
And here is another which is not a chunk of drift-wood at all.
It appears to be of a substance to which I find in Nature no
parallel. Not even in that Nature which has undergone enrich-
ment by the savingly salt and savingly sterile sea. It is of stone,
and it is premeditatedly molten and moulded. As neither fint
nor rock-crystal, as neither basalt nor jasper, as neither chrysoprase
nor jade, can in fire be molten and moulded. And yet it is of
harder stone than these.
“Under a splintered mast,
Torn from the ship and cast
Near her hull,
A stumbling shepherd found
Embedded in the ground,
A seagull
Of lapislazuli,


180
COMMENT
A scarab of the sea,
With wings spread-
Curling its coral feet,
Parting its beak to greet
Men long dead.”
One is aware that, for a considerable period, this poem, itself
“a scarab of the sea,” will come cropping up, will come knocking
up, (oddly, to be sure, for what is so mineral, so otherwise than
flowerlike) in anthologies. It will greet us "long dead.”
Reading a poem like this, reading the poetry of Miss Moore in
general, one realizes that also mineral is an organic growth. For
this Talisman is indubitably mineral, like a Japanese dwarf-pine.
Rooted in, and nourished from, the primal rock, this impersonality
exhibits the tortuous precision of an object arithmetically prime.






MADAME ELIZABETH FREAKE WITH BABY MARY
EARLY AMERICAN



THE OXX II
V
TIT
VA
DIAL
MARCH 1925
ON SELF-GOVERNMENT
A Dialogue in Limbo
BY G. SANTAYANA
wa
THE SHADE OF Socrates: Whom do I see approaching with down-
cast looks? My friend The Stranger? Have you come to-day to
remain with us for good, or is this but another brief excursion into
the realm of sanity, from which you hope to return presently to
your crazy world?
THE SPIRIT OF A STRANGER STILL LIVING ON EARTH: I can
hardly hope, Socrates, to dwell in your distinguished company
after I am dead. Therefore I take every opportunity to visit you
now while I can.
SOCRATES: 'Tis at rare intervals. Probably you think you are
better employed in the sunlight, or can see better in it. My own
eyes are more like the owl's than like the eagle's, and I can see
farther in this twilight than ever in the glare of the Athenian day.
I was always an ignorant man, depending on my disciples for sure
first principles and for irrefragable facts, knowledge of which
they seemed to possess by nature, although my dulness, or some
divine impediment, had prevented me from discovering all those
certain truths when I was of their age. That old blindness of
mine is now redoubled in respect to the living world; for whereas
liberation from the body has opened to me a large prospect to-
wards the past and the future, it has cut off my old channels of
dubious communication with material things; and it is only the
truth of them before they arise or after they perish that lies
spread out before me for direct inspection. In their transit
jas


182
ON SELF-GOVERNMENT
through existence they are eclipsed in these heavens, and I can
know them only by report of travellers such as you from the
antipodes. My information about your affairs is accordingly most
incomplete, and worst of all is brought to me by unphilosoph-
ical messengers; for only whimsical and ill-bred spirits now
seem to reach this place. I have heard, for instance, of an obscure
oracle which you may be able to interpret for me. The god must
have delivered it in some barbarous tongue, and perhaps in verse,
which has been ill translated: but the monumental inscription
which my informant had seen seems to have read as follows:
Right GOVERNMENT
Rests On The Will
OF THE GOVERNED
THE STRANGER: We need no god and no oracle to tell us that.
It is a commonplace, and the foundation of all our politics.
Socrates: I rejoice to hear it; for if the maxim is always on your
lips, you will probably be able to tell me what it means. Does
right government, I pray, mean good government? And does
the will of the governed mean their wishes for the moment, or
their habitual ruling passion, or their true and ultimate good?
THE STRANGER: I am hardly able, Socrates, to answer all these
questions at once; and even if you put them to me singly, I am
afraid I should not be ready with glib replies, unless it were
half in jest, without expecting that they would bear inspection.
Nowadays I place less reliance than ever upon exact words and
(although you will rebuke me for it) I feel that there is a
current in things that carries all our thoughts away: not only
that oracle, as you call it, about right government, but also
any wiser maxims that we might substitute for it. In my youth
my ears were deafened by a variety of shrill cries, Liberty,
Progress, Science, Culture; but time, and especially this last revo-
lution in our affairs, has taught me how little it mattered what
we thought the cries meant, since events in the long run will
falsify any policy, and render obsolete any conviction; and
the only significance I can still attach to those watchwords is
no definable significance, but only a vague association of each
of them with some shift in our manners or politics or indus-


G. SANTAYANA
183
e
mo
e
trial arts. But why should I trouble you in your immortal
serenity with these squabbles and delusions of living men? It
was not to talk about them that I came into your presence, but
rather to escape from them into your surer wisdom.
Socrates: You will not escape them, my friend, unless you
learn to understand them. You know well that my wisdom
lies only in asking questions. What you come to take refuge
in is not my philosophy, but yours, which you think I may help
you to discover and to put into words; and if this occurs, it
will not be wonderful that you should approve the answers
to my questions, since it is you who will give them. But to-
day you may be disappointed, for there is evidently something
new on your conscience, and you may not know your own mind.
Formerly, if I inquired of you concerning the affairs of your
provisional world, you stinted your answers, and changed the
subject, as if you hardly followed the events of your own day
more closely than we can follow them here by report, as if they
were things long past; and you seemed to feel an indifference
(premature on your part) to mortal things, and an early im-
munity from care. But now the wasp of actuality seems to
have stung you, and you bring with you a heavier scent of
earth and of new-shed blood. I am not surprised at your dis-
tress. Under the blue sky society is like Zeus, who is lord over
it; it expresses its will less by law-giving than by nods and
thunder-bolts. Strange that in the light of day there should
be so much blindness, and here where Pluto in comparative
darkness rules over far vaster multitudes there should be never
a murmur nor a rumble, but a just estimation of all things, and
a place for all. Let us not miss the opportunity, then, while we
are together, I to hear your tragedy, and you to ponder its
moral.
THE STRANGER: Our tragedy is an old one, of which you drew
the moral long ago: it is the tragedy of those who do as they
wish, but do not get what they want. It is the tragedy of self-
government.
SOCRATES: It would be a terrible tragedy indeed if such an ex-
cellent thing as self-government came to a bad end. But I can-
not credit the report, because a people who had learned self-gov-
ernment would be a race of philosophers, each governing himself


ON SELF-GOVERNMENT
NGI
and himself only, and inwardly safe from any real misfortune.
I rejoice that the republic of the living, contrary to expectation,
should have become in my absence so similar to this happy com-
monwealth of immortals, where no spirit molests any other, or
needs another's support.
THE STRANGER: Irony, Socrates, cannot shame the facts, which
have an irony of their own. Of course by self-government we
do not mean the government of self. We mean that people col-
lectively issue the orders which they must obey individually.
Socrates: How surprising! Am I to understand that under
self-government, as you practise it, no man governs himself in
anything, but that each is governed in everything by all the
others?
The STRANGER: It would come to that, if our system were
perfect.
SOCRATES: Then your democracy, which I suppose intends to ex-
press the autonomy of the individual, in effect entirely abolishes
that autonomy?
The STRANGER: Yes, but without violence. There is an un-
written and plastic law in the modern world which we call fash-
ion; and the more thoroughly we conform to it the freer and the
finer we think ourselves. Fashion without magistrates rules by
the will of the governed:it is pleasant to go where everybody goes,
to think what everybody thinks, and to dance as everybody dances.
In fashion I might find an answer to that nestful of questions
which you were putting just now: for the will of the governed,
by which fashion rules, on the surface is a passing caprice; but
this caprice is grafted upon a habitual passion, namely on a rooted
instinct to lead, to follow, or somehow to lose oneself in a com-
mon enjoyment of life with one's fellow-men, especially those
of one's age and class; and finally this ruling passion leads to the
ultimate good, as the followers of fashion conceive it; for they
think the ultimate good is life itself, in its pervasive immediacy,
made as intense and vigorous as possible by continual novelty
and emulation, not for the sake of any prize or result, but just
for the running's sake. Thus fashion governs us with our hearty
consent, not only in our manners and appointments, but in our
religion and science, and above all in our politics. There is
nothing that recommends any opinion or custom to us more than


G. SANTAYANA
185
to hear that it is the latest thing, that everybody is adopting it,
and that it is universal nowadays in the leading circles. Even
our philosophers have their ear to the ground, and tell us with
unction how the world is marching. Their conscience would
reproach them, and they would wish to hang themselves, if they
were not on the winning side. The event, they say, is always
the judgement of God.
SOCRATES: Long ago Heraclitus said so; but the sentence which
divine justice passes on each new birth is severe: it is always
death.
The STRANGER: Yes, but a natural death, followed by some nat-
ural resurrection. Why be afraid of revolution?
SOCRATES: Why indeed, if you mean the revolution of the
heavens or of the seasons or the descent of each generation in its
turn to the grave? That which I fear-no longer for myself,
but for you—is that you should not govern yourselves well while
you live, and should thereby condemn yourselves here to an
eternal bitterness. Are all fashions equally good? Are all
transitions equally happy? Are youth and age, in their ap-
pointed round, always beautiful and perfect? Have you learned
how to live? Do you know how to die? If you neglected these
questions your self-government would not be an art, but a
blind experiment. Art, which is action guided by knowledge, is
the principle of benefit, and without art the freer a man is the
more miserable he must become.
The STRANGER: Government among us is certainly not an art,
but a fatality. In so far as it is not a matter of mere tradition
and routine, it results from contrary purposes and parties pulling
against each other in a tug-of-war, for the sake of office or of
some immediate reform or relief. Whether the effects of gov-
ernment are beneficent in the end nobody can tell, because no-
body can foresee the infinite radiations of those effects in the
future; nor even in the present have we any clear or authorita-
tive notion of the uses of government, or any criterion by which
to measure the various goods that various people might regard
as ultimate, such as health, friendship, knowledge, laughter, or
heaven. And so far is government among us from regarding any
ultimate good, that many are inclined to look in other directions
for true guidance in their allegiances, and for the means to hap-


186
ON SELF-GOVERNMENT
piness; and they regard politics with aversion, and politicians
with contempt, thinking that government, at best, is a nuisance.
SOCRATES: And is that, pray, your own opinion?
THE STRANGER: I will not venture to make it mine before you
have examined it. I remember the fate of all those innocents
who have fallen into your hands and have had to eat their own
words.
SOCRATES: Very well; let me ask you this other question instead:
if government is not an art, how can you or your friends ever
determine what measures to approve or what magistrates to
raise to office?
THE STRANGER: Nothing easier. We support such as express
our ideas or share our desires.
SOCRATES: And your ideas and desires are formed on what prin-
ciple?
THE STRANGER: On none, of course. They come to us gaily,
like song to the lark. If we had to find a reason for liking what
we like, we should never be able to like anything.
Socrates: Your politics is a matter of taste?
The Stranger: Certainly; but taste is sometimes modified by
indigestion.
SOCRATEs: I see: you simply obey your whim or inclination, until
perhaps you sicken and are in danger of death. Your rulers are
physicians summoned in your extremity: you have no trainers
in your youth. We Greeks held our trainers and legislators in
greater honour than our physicians: for no doctor could save us
from death, but a trainer might render us fit for an Olympian
victory. Perhaps your doctors promise to make you immortal;
which I should not think a benefit if you were never to be well.
Art cannot be improvised under pressure. The man with a hole
in his shoe is not forthwith a cobbler; much less does a landsman
become a pilot whenever he is seasick. Imagine yourself (who
I suspect are no sailor) appointed to command a trireme in a
storm or in a fog or in the thick of the battle of Salamis, not
knowing the draught of your vessel, or the position of the rocks,
or the tactics of the enemy, or even the words of command, or
with which hand to steer, but asking yourself what death to
expect, while all hands waited on you for direction: and I think
your anxiety and suspense in such a nightmare, and the confusion


G. SANTAYANA
187
am
and agony with which you would implore every god, or the most
humble fellow-creature, to relieve you of that task, though the
fate of only one trireme was at stake, would be as nothing to the
anguish which must assail the heart of an ignorant man voting
in a moment of danger upon the government of his country.
THE STRANGER: No ignorant man among us, where the leaders
are often ignorant, feels the least compunction in such a case,
but only irritation and ill-will towards every other land-lubber
who, in equal ignorance, insists on giving different orders; and
each attributes the general confusion to the fact that his own
voice was not heeded in time. Nevertheless we exist; and life
among us is in many ways safer, freer, more comfortable, and
more entertaining than it was in your model cities, with their
divine founders and law-givers. There is an automatism in
nature, Socrates, more fruitful than reason. Human beings,
in all their dynamic relations, are bodies, although when they
talk to themselves they may think they are minds. All their
vital organs are unconscious and hereditary, and by instinct and
imitation, without understanding, they learn to eat, to breed, to
talk, and to govern. Every sturdy race stews its homemade
dishes, to which its stomach is hardened and which it fondly
relishes as incomparably the best. Few cooks anywhere are in-
ventivema fact which saves many lives; and our traditional
government, like our home religion, though there is no science
in it, is not too poisonous. The sun rises in spite of it, and our
children have red cheeks.
SOCRATES: The wild beasts, too, thrive on that principle. Nature
has supplied them with all sorts of curious and complicated
organs which mature in their season and insist on performing
their unintended functions. Your institutions seem to be organs
of that sort, for in following fashion or in trying private experi-
ments you apparently obey some spontaneous instinct, or some
balance of secret forces, and leave the issue to fortune. But the
privilege of human reason, where reason exists, is to turn us into
philosophers by teaching us to survey our destiny and to institute,
within its bounds, the pursuit of perfection.
THE STRANGER: Perhaps the spirit in us, like that of some half-
tamed beast, is not quite reconciled with its humanity. We pre-
fer not to know our destiny and not to have any perfection set
ANG


188
ON SELF-GOVERNMENT
before us which we are not free to elude. Beneath what may
seem to you our blind expedients in government—that we count
heads as if we paid out money by weight, without asking whether
it was gold or silver—I think there is a profound instinct of
freedom. Society itself is an accident to the spirit, and if society
in any of its forms is to be justified morally it must be justified
at the bar of the individual conscience. In putting everything
to a vote we are not so much supposing that the majority must
be right as we are acknowledging, even at the risk of material
disaster, the indefeasible right of each soul to determine its
allegiances.
SOCRATES: Eloquence, by venting the feelings, sometimes clears
the mind. Would you now be able, I wonder, to answer a simple
question which I asked you at the beginning? Does right gov-
ernment mean good government?
THE STRANGER: No: I see now that there is a difference. Legiti-
macy in a government depends on the origin of its authority:
excellence depends on its fruits.
SOCRATES: Then right government, resting, as your oracle has it,
on the will of the governed, may be bad government?
The STRANGER: Of course; nothing is commoner, especially
when passions run high and nations or individuals attempt the
impossible.
SOCRATES: You mean, for instance, that if an assembly with a
great shout voted that every citizen should receive a large dole
from the public treasury, that measure would accurately express
their living desires, and the free choice of every bosom; yet it
might bring no good, if at that moment the treasury was empty.
THE STRANGER: Evidently; but in that case at least the illusion
would be short-lived. The bubbles we pursue in love or ambition
often take longer to burst.
SOCRATES: And would you say that these bubbles, even when
they lead you so long astray, are the right principles of action,
and that you ought to follow them?
THE STRANGER: I am at a loss how to reply. If I say no, I con-
demn all life; if I say yes, I sanction every folly.
SOCRATES: Life, my good friend, is hard for you to understand
because you are still living. Here we understand it. Not every
passion pursues a bubble; not every treasury is empty. But
ANGE
IST
S
sues
ISUT


G. SANTAYANA
189
living impulse, borne as it needs must be on its own wings, can-
not distinguish; it cannot foresee the end, so as to push on where
success is promised, and halt in time where it is denied. Experi-
ence arrives too late for each of us, and the young, though more
or less fortunate in disposition, are never born any wiser. But
by instruction experience may be transmitted; a father may train
his son; the gods too are merciful and send down precepts and
inspirations; and the legislator, if we live in a civilized state,
has instituted games and festivals and exercises by which youth
can be moulded and turned towards such ambitions as may be
satisfied with innocence. Life to this extent becomes an art
and wisdom a tradition. The living cannot live well unless the
dead govern them. Ah, if the Athenians, after dismissing me
from their midst in a manner which, whether a benefit to them
or not, was certainly a great advantage to me, had wisely decided
to disenfranchise themselves in a body and, at every election,
to ask the Shade of Socrates alone to decide and had counted
only my single vote, Athens, I say, would still be standing, more
beautiful in her simplicity than Pericles ever made her with
his brand new marbles, and richer in true poets and true philoso-
phers than she ever was in sophists and comedians. But the
living, twittering on the green bough, despise the wisdom of
the dead which might insinuate something immortal into them
and keep them from wholly dying.
THE STRANGER: Immortality, Socrates, although people often de-
claim about it, is a thing for which the truly living do not care.
They wish, indeed, to go on living, because they are wound up to
go, and any accident which threatens to stop them short is odious
to them; but that all their habits and thoughts should lapse suc-
cessively and yield to something new, or to a timely silence
which, being absolute, will never be perceived, does not disturb
them; such, they know by instinct, is the nature of existence.
For this reason they allow only living desires to count in action,
however frivolous or fatal those desires may be; they wish to live
and not merely not to die. Your Shade in its wisdom, annulling
their wills and stopping their bawling mouths, would have
seemed to them the most horrible of ghostly tyrants, and worse
than the laws of the Medes and Persians or an infallible pope;
and you would have preserved your austere Athens to no pur-
ANG


190
ON SELF-GOVERNMENT
pose by your eternal decrees, because the living would have fled
from it and left it empty. It is not right to impose old loves on
a young soul or ancient justice on a new society. No tyranny
is worse than that of a belated or fanatical conscience, oppressing
a world it does not understand in the name of another world
which is non-existent.
SOCRATES: How often have I heard speeches like that from the
clever men who filled the living Athens—or, since living and
dying seem to be identical—the dying Athens of my day! A
small question, however, troubled me in the midst of your elo-
quence. Imagine, as a mere hypothesis, that the Great King or
my Shade interrupted the orgies or the star-gazing in which (as
they say) we are habitually plunged, and that we commanded a
useful bridge to be built, or unjust tax-gatherers to be punished,
or temples and groves to be renewed and beautified, or that by
resisting the desire of the people for largesses in their holiday
moods, we were actually able to distribute doles to them in some
year of famine, or by our foresight in fostering agriculture had
prevented their distress, would all these acts of ours have been
wrong and tyrannical because done on our own initiative, and
not at the people's bidding?
THE STRANGER: I confess that practically it would make little
difference who exercised the right of legislation, if in any case the
laws and the spirit of the government were to be the same; but
experience has taught us that the Great King and the assembled
people would not pass the same laws or govern in the same in-
terests.
SOCRATES: Your prejudice against the Great King or against my
Shade as perpetual archon is then not absolute. You might
consent to be governed by us if you thought us likely to govern
well, but you fear that our thoughts might be too kingly or too
ghostly, and might divert your energies to royal or fantastic ends,
despising your homely needs ?
THE STRANGER: Yes, that is what we fear.
Socrates: In such measure, however, as we actually governed
well, would you not think us tyrants or our government illegiti-
mate?
THE STRANGER: No doubt in that case you would be accepted
without credentials; in fact, if your government was half decent,


G. SANTAYANA
191
ANGER:
people would soon overflow with loyalty to you, and would
build statues or altars in your honour.
SOCRATES: Then good government is always right government?
The STRANGER: That seems to follow from your argument, but
I am not convinced. Compulsion is degrading in itself, and there
is an intrinsic dignity in freedom.
SOCRATES: Is there an intrinsic dignity in the freedom of a blind
man when the degrading restraint exercised by the dog or the
child leading him is removed, and he walks over a precipice?
THE STRANGER: Yes, if he is weary of being blind and of being
led, and prefers to commit suicide.
Socrates: The dignity which you attribute to suicide would dis-
appear, I suppose, if the moment the man felt himself falling
through the void, he repented and gave a shriek of terror and
despair?
THE STRANGER: I assume, of course, that he knows his own mind.
SOCRATES: Ah, that is an important condition, a most important
condition. And there are other things that perhaps he would
need to know, if the dignity of his freedom was to be preserved.
Suppose that at the very time of his suicide, Asclepius or some
other healer of men was approaching with a salve which applied
to the eyes would have restored them to sight: in killing himself
just then would he not be a victim of tragic ignorance, acting
contrary to his true desires ?
THE STRANGER: How can you expect any one to adjust his action
to what lies beyond his ken?
SOCRATES: How indeed? What freedom can there be in the help-
less solitude of ignorance? What autonomy in being driven this
way and that by wishes without self-knowledge? It is knowledge
and knowledge only that may rule by divine right, no matter who
possesses that knowledge and, possessing it, gives the word of
command. Without knowledge there is no authority in the will,
either over itself or over others, but only violence and madness.
And this knowledge, necessary to virtue and to the right to will,
looks in two directions: first into the soul, to disentangle her true
nature and discern the pursuits in which her innate powers might
be liberated and developed; and then again into the world, to dis-
cover the opportunities, the aids, and the dangers which the soul
must count upon in the exercise of her freedom. And with this,


192
ON SELF-GOVERNMENT
c
.
in consequence of your patient explanations, I think I may ven-
ture to interpret that oracle which at first seemed so obscure.
If the god had spoken in prose, without wishing to be oracu-
lar, he would have said that there is no right government
except good government; that good government is that which
benefits the governed; that the good of the governed is deter-
mined not by their topmost wishes or their ruling passions, but
by their hidden nature and their real opportunities; and that
only knowledge, discovering this hidden nature and these real
opportunities, and speaking in their name, has a right to rule
in the state or in the private conscience.
I will not ask you to-day whether you agree with these conclu-
sions, for I perceive that your mind is agitated, and you may
prefer to reserve your decision. Another day we will renew the
argument.
To be concluded


THE HOLLOW MEN
BY T. S. ELIOT
A penny for the Old Guy.
We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats' feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar
Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;
Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death's other kingdom
Remember us—if at all—not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.
Eyes I dare not meet in dreams
In death's dream kingdom
These do not appear:
There, the eyes are
Sunlight on a broken column
There, is a tree swinging


194
THE HOLLOW MEN
And voices are
In the wind's singing
More distant and more solemn
Than a fading star.
Let me be no nearer
In death's dream kingdom
Let me also wear
Such deliberate disguises
Rat's coat, crowskin, crossed staves
In a field
Behaving as the wind behaves
No nearer-
Not that final meeting
In the twilight kingdom
With eyes I dare not meet in dreams.
III
The eyes are not here
There are no eyes here
In this valley of dying stars
In this hollow valley
This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms
In this last of meeting places
We grope together
And avoid speech
Gathered on this beach of the tumid river
Sightless, unless
The eyes reappear
As the perpetual star
Multifoliate rose
Of death's twilight kingdom
The hope only
Of empty men.



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Courtesy of the Montross Gallery
PRUFROCK. BY PEGGY BACON





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WHILE THE TRUE CHURCH CAN NEVER FAIL. BY PEGGY BACON






Since
ANAS
AC
AMONG THE SAINTS HE SHALL BE SEEN. BY PEGGY BACON





STRANGE MOONLIGHT
BY CONRAD AIKEN
10U
IT had been a tremendous week-colossal. Its reverberations
1 around him hardly yet slept-his slightest motion or thought
made a vast symphony of them, like a breeze in a forest of bells.
In the first place, he had filched a volume of Poe's tales from his
mother's bookcase, and had had in consequence a delirious night
in inferno. Down, down he had gone, with heavy clangs about
him, coiling spouts of fire licking drily at an iron sky, and a strange
companion, of Protean shape and size, walking and talking beside
him. For the most part, this companion seemed to be nothing but
a voice and a wing-an enormous jagged black wing, soft and
drooping like a bat's; he had noticed veins in it. As for the voice,
it had been singularly gentle. If it was mysterious, that was no
doubt because he himself was stupid. Certainly it had sounded
placid and reasonable-exactly, in fact, like his father's, explain-
ing a problem in mathematics; but, though he noticed the orderly
and logical structure, and felt the inevitable approach towards
a vast and beautiful or terrible conclusion, the nature and mean-
ing of the conclusion itself always escaped him. It was as if,
always, he had come just too late. When, for example, he had
come at last to the black wall that enclosed the infernal city, and
saw the arched gate, the voice had certainly said that if he hurried
he would see, through the arch, a far low landscape of extraordinary
wonder. He had hurried, but it had been in vain. He had reached
the gate, and for the tiniest fraction of an instant he had even
glimpsed the wide green of fields and trees, a winding blue ribbon
of water, and a gleam of intense light touching to brilliance some
far object. But then, before he had been able to notice more than
that every detail in this fairy landscape seemed to lead towards
a single shining solution, a dazzling significance, suddenly the in-
fernal rain, streaked fire and rolling smoke, had swept it away.
Then the voice had seemed to become ironic. He had failed, and
he felt like crying.
He had still, the next morning, felt that he might, if the op-
.


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STRANGE MOONLIGHT
portunity offered, see that vision. It was always just round the
corner, just at the head of the stairs, just over the next page. But
other adventures had intervened. Prize-day, at school, had come
upon him as suddenly as a thunder-storm—the ominous hushed
gathering of the entire school into one large room, the tense air of
expectancy, the solemn speeches, all had reduced him to a state
of acute terror. There was something unintelligible and sinister
about it. He had, from first to last, a peculiar physical sensation
that something threatened him, and here and there, in the inter-
minable vague speeches, a word seemed to have eyes and to stare
at him. His prescience had been correct-abruptly his name
had been called, he had walked unsteadily amid applause to the
teacher's desk, had received a small black pasteboard box; and
then had cowered in his chair again, with the blood in his temples
beating like gongs. When it was over, he had literally run away-
he didn't stop till he reached the park. There, among the tomb-
stones (the park had once been a graveyard) and trumpet-vines,
he sat on the grass and opened the box. He was dazzled. The
medal was of gold, and rested on a tiny blue satin cushion. His
name was engraved on it, yes, actually cut into the gold; he felt
the incisions with his finger-nail. It was an experience not wholly
to be comprehended. He put the box down in the grass and
detached himself from it; lay full length, resting his chin on his
wrist, and stared first at a tombstone and then at the small gold
object, as if to discover the relation between them. Humming-
birds, tombstones, trumpet-vines, and a gold medal. Amazing.
He unpinned the medal from its cushion, put the box in his pocket,
and walked slowly homeward, carrying the small live gleaming
thing between finger and thumb as if it were a bee. This was an
experience to be carefully concealed from mother and father.
Possibly he would tell Mary and John. ... Unfortunately, he
met his father as he was going in at the door, and was thereafter
drowned, for a day, in a glory without significance. He felt
ashamed, and put the medal away in a drawer, sternly forbidding
Mary and John to look at it. Even so, he was horribly conscious
of it—its presence there burned him unceasingly. Nothing afforded
escape from it, not even sitting under the peach-tree and whittling
a boat.


CONRAD AIKEN
197
II
101
re
The oddest thing was the way these and other adventures of the
week all seemed to unite, as if they were merely aspects of the same
thing. Everywhere lurked that extraordinary hint of the enigma
and its shining solution. On Tuesday morning, when it was pour-
ing with rain, and he and Mary and John were conducting gigantic
military operations in the back hall, with hundreds of paper
soldiers; tents, cannon, battleships, and forts; suddenly through the
tall open window, a goldfinch flew in from the rain, beat wildly
against a pane of glass, darted several times to and fro above their
heads, and, finally, finding the open window, flashed out. It flew
to the peach-tree, rested there a moment, and then over the out-
houses and away. He saw it rising and falling in the rain. This
was beautiful-it was like the vision of the infernal city, like the
medal in the grass. He found it impossible to go on with the Battle
of Gettysburg, and abandoned it to Mary and John, who instantly
started to quarrel. Escape was necessary, and he went into his
own room, shut the door, lay on his bed, and began thinking about
Caroline Lee.
John Lee had taken him there to see his new air-gun and a box
of BB shot. The strange house was dim and exciting. A long
winding dark staircase went up from near the front door; a clock
was striking in a far room; a small beautiful statue of a lady,
slightly pinkish, and looking as if it had been dug out of the earth,
stood on a table. The wall-paper beside the staircase was rough
and hairy. Upstairs, in the play-room, they found Caroline, sitting
on the floor with a picture-book. She was learning to read, point-
ing at the words with her finger. He was struck by the fact that,
although she was extraordinarily strange and beautiful, John Lee
did not seem to be aware of it and treated her as if she were quite
an ordinary sort of person. This gave him courage, and after the
air-gun had been examined, and the bag of BB shot emptied of its
gleaming heavy contents and then luxuriously refilled, he told her
some of the words she couldn't make out. “And what's this?”
she had said he could still hear her say it, quite clearly. She
was thin, smaller than himself, with dark hair and large pale eyes,
and her forehead and hands looked curiously transparent. He par-
ticularly noticed her hands when she brought her five-dollar gold-
piece to show him, opening a little jewel-box which had in it also


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STRANGE MOONLIGHT
a necklace of yellow beads from Egypt and a pink shell from Tybee
Beach. She gave him the gold-piece to look at, and while he was
looking at it, put the beads round her neck. "Now I'm an
Egyptian!” she said, and laughed shyly, running her fingers to and
fro over the smooth beads. A fearful temptation came upon him.
He coveted the gold-piece, and thought that it would be easy to
steal it. He shut his hand over it and it was gone. If it had been
John's, he might have done so, but, as it was, he opened his hand
again and put the gold-piece back in the box. Afterwards, he stayed
for a long while, talking with John and Caroline. The house was
mysterious and rich, and he hadn't at all wanted to go out of it,
or back to his own humdrum existence. Besides, he liked to hear
Caroline talking.
But although he had afterwards for many days wanted to go
back to that house, to explore further its dim rich mysteriousness,
and had thought about it a great deal, John Lee hadn't again sug-
gested a visit; and he himself had felt a curious reluctance about
raising the subject. It had been, apparently, a vision that was not
to be repeated, an incursion into a world so beautiful and strange
that one was permitted of it only the briefest of glimpses. He had,
almost, to reassure himself that the house was really there, and for
that reason he made rather a point of walking home from school
with John Lee. Yes, the house was there—he saw John climb the
stone steps and open the huge green door. There was never a
sign of Caroline, however, nor any mention of her: until one day
he heard from another boy that she was ill with scarlet fever, and
observed that John had stayed away from school. The news did
not startle or frighten him. On the contrary, it seemed just the
sort of romantic privilege in which such fortunate people would
indulge. He felt a certain delicacy about approaching the house,
however, to see if the red quarantine sign had been affixed by the
door, and carefully avoided Gordon Square on his way home from
school. Should he write her a letter? Or send her a present of
marbles ? For neither action did there seem to be sufficient warrant.
But he found it impossible to do nothing, and later in the afternoon,
by a very circuitous route which took him past the county jail-
where he was thrilled by actually seeing a prisoner looking out be-
tween the grey iron bars—he slowly made his way to Gordon
Square, and from a safe distance, more or less hiding himself be-


CONRAD AIKEN
199
hind a palmetto tree, looked for a long while at the wonderful
house, and saw, sure enough, the red sign.
Three days later, he heard that Caroline Lee was dead. The
news stunned him. Surely it could not be possible? He felt stifled,
frightened, and incredulous. In a way, it was just what one would
expect of Caroline, but none the less he felt outraged. How was
it possible for any one, whom one actually knew, to die? Par-
ticularly any one so vividly and beautifully remembered! The
indignity, the horror of death obsessed him. Had she actually
died? He went again to Gordon Square, not knowing precisely
what it was that he expected to find, and saw something white
hanging by the green door. But if, as it appeared, it was true that
Caroline Lee, somewhere inside the house, lay dead, lay motion-
less; how did it happen that he, who was so profoundly concerned,
had not at all been consulted, had not been invited to come and
talk with her, and now found himself so utterly and hopelessly and
for ever excluded from the house, as from her? This was a
thing which he could not understand. As he walked home, ponder-
ing, he thought of the five-dollar gold-piece. What would become
of it? Probably John Lee would get it, and if so, he would steal
it from him. ... All the same, he was glad he hadn't taken it.
To this reflection he came back many times, as now once more
with the Battle of Gettysburg raging in the next room. If he had
actually taken it, what a horror it would have been! As it was,
the fact that he had resisted the temptation, restored the gold-piece
to its box, seemed to have been a tribute to Caroline's beauty and
strangeness. Yes, for nobody else would he have made the re-
fusal—nobody on earth. But, for her, it had been quite simple,
a momentary pang quickly lost in the pleasure of hearing her voice,
watching her pale hands twisting the yellow beads, and helping
her with her reading. “And what's this?” she had said, and, “Now
I'm an Egyptian!" ... What was death, that could put an end
to a clear voice saying such things? ... Mystery was once more
about him, the same mystery that had shone in the vision of the
infernal city. There was something beautiful which he could not
understand. He had felt it while he was lying in the grass among
the tombstones, looking at the medal; he had felt it when the gold-
finch darted in from the rain and then out again. All these things
seemed in some curious way to fit together.
01


200
STRANGE MOONLIGHT
III
The same night, after he had gone to bed, this feeling of aware-
ness and complicated mystery came upon him again with oppres-
sive weight. He lay still, looking from his pillow through the
tall window at the moonlight on the white outhouse wall, and again
it seemed to him that the explanation for everything was extra-
ordinarily near at hand if he could only find it. The mystery was
like the finest of films, like the moonlight on the white wall. Surely,
beneath it, there was something solid and simple. He heard some-
one walk across the yard, with steps that seemed astoundingly far
apart and slow. The steps ceased, a door creaked. Then there
was a cough. It was old Selena, the negro cook, going out for wood.
He heard the sticks being piled up, then the creak of the door
again, and again the slow steps on the hard baked ground of the
yard, aeons apart. How did the peach-tree look in the moonlight?
Would its leaves be dark, or shiny? And the chinaberry tree? He
thought of the two trees standing there motionless in the moon-
light, and at last felt that he must get out of bed and look at
them. But when he had reached the hall, he heard his mother's
voice from downstairs, and he went and lay on the old sofa in the
hall, listening. Could he have heard aright? His mother had just
called his father "boy”! Amazing!
“But two parties a week, Tom—surely that's not excessive ?”
"It's two parties every week, and sometimes three or four, that's
excessive. You know it is.”
“Darling, I must have some recreation !"
His father laughed in a peculiar angry way that he had never
heard before-as strange, indeed, as his mother's tone had been.
“Recreation's all right,” he said, “but you're neglecting your
family. If it goes on, I'll have another child, that's all."
He got off the sofa and went softly down the stairs to the turn
of the railing. He peered over the banisters with infinite caution,
and what he saw filled him with horror. His mother was sitting
on his father's knee, with her arms about his neck. She was kissing
him. How awful! ... He couldn't look at it. What on earth,
he wondered, as he climbed back into bed, was it all about? There
was something curious in the way they were talking, something
not at all like fathers and mothers, but more like children, though
he couldn't in the least understand it. Still, it was offensive.


CONRAD AIKEN
201
He began to make up a conversation with Caroline Lee. She
was sitting under the peach-tree with him, reading her book. What
beautiful hands she had! They were transparent, somehow, like
her forehead, and her dark hair and large pale eyes delighted him.
Perhaps she was an Egyptian!
“It must be nice to live in your house,” he said.
“Yes, it's very nice. And you haven't seen half of it, either."
“No, I haven't. I'd like to see it all. I liked the hairy wall-
paper and the pink statue of the lady on the table. Are there any
others like it?"
“Oh, yes, lots and lots! In the secret room downstairs, where
you heard the silver clock striking, there are fifty other statues, all
more beautiful than that one, and a collection of clocks of every
kind.”
"Is your father very rich ?”
“Yes, he's richer than anybody. He has a special carved ivory
box to keep his collars in."
“What does it feel like to die—were you sorry?"
“Very sorry! But it's really quite easy—you just hold your
breath and shut your eyes.”
“Oh!"
"And when you're lying there, after you've died, you're really
just pretending. You keep very still, and you have your eyes,
almost shut, but really you know everything! You watch the
people and listen to them.”
"But don't you want to talk to them, or get out of bed, or out of
your coffin ?"
“Well, yes, at first you do—but it's nicer than being alive.”
"Why?"
“Oh, I don't know! You understand everything so easily!"
“How nice that must be!"
"It is.”
“But after they've shut you up in a coffin and sung songs over
you and carried you to Bonaventure and buried you in the ground,
and you're down there in the dark with all that earth above you,
isn't that horrible?”
"Oh, no! ... As soon as nobody is looking, when they've all
gone home to tea, and the shovels are scraped and put in the tool-
house, you just get up and walk away. You climb out of the
earth just as easily as you'd climb out of bed.”


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STRANGE MOONLIGHT
“That's how you're here now, I suppose."
"Of course!"
"Well, it's very nice."
"It's lovely. . . . Don't I look just as well as ever?”
"Yes, you do.”
There was a pause, and then Caroline said:
“I knew you wanted to steal my gold-piece-I was awfully glad
when you put it back. If you had asked me for it, I'd have given
it to you."
“I like you very much, Caroline. Can I come to Bonaventure
and play with you?”
"I'm afraid not. You'd have to come in the dark.”
“But I could bring a lantern."
“Yes, you could do that.”
... It seemed to him that they were no longer sitting under the
peach-tree, but walking along the white shell-road to Bonaven-
ture. He held the lantern up beside a chinquapin tree, and Caro-
line reached up with her pale small hands and picked two chinqua-
pins. Then they crossed the little bridge, walking carefully be-
tween the rails on the sleepers. Mossy trees were all about them;
the moss, in long festoons, hung lower and lower and thicker and
thicker, and the wind made a soft seething sound as it sought a
way through the grey ancient forest.
IV
It had been his intention to explore, the next morning, the vault
under the mulberry-tree in the park-his friend Harry had men-
tioned that it was open, and that one could go down very dusty
steps and see, on the dark floor, a few rotted boards and a bone or
two. At breakfast he enlisted Mary and John for the expedition;
but then there were unexpected developments. His father and
mother had abruptly decided that the whole family would spend
the day at Tybee Beach. This was festive and magnificent be-
yond belief. The kitchen became a turmoil. Selena ran to and
fro with sugar-sandwiches, pots of devilled ham, cookies, hard-
boiled eggs, and a hundred other things; piles of beautiful sand-
wiches were exquisitely folded up in shining clean napkins, and the
wicker basket was elaborately packed. John and Mary decided to
take their pails with them, and stamped up and down stairs bang.


CONRAD AIKEN
203
ing the pails with tin shovels. He himself was a little uncertain
what to take. He stood by his desk wondering. He would like
to take Poe's tales, but that was out of the question, for he wasn't
supposed to have the book at all. Marbles, also, were dismissed
as unsuitable. He finally took his gold medal out of its drawer
and put it in his pocket. He would keep it a secret, of course.
All the way to the station he was conscious of the medal burn-
ing in his pocket. He closed his fingers over it, and again felt it
to be a live thing, as if it were buzzing, beating invisible wings.
Would his fingers have a waxy smell, as they did after they'd been
holding a June-bug, or tying a thread to one of its legs? ...
Father carried the basket, Mary and John clanked their pails,
everybody was talking and laughing. They climbed into the funny
undignified little train, which almost immediately was lurching
over the wide green marshes, rattling over red iron bridges enor-
mously complicated with girders and trusses. Great excitement when
they passed the grey stone fort. Fort Pulaski. They'd seen it once
from the river, when they were on the steamer going to the cotton
islands. His father leaned down beside Mary to tell her about
Fort Pulaski, just as a cloud-shadow, crossing it, made it sombre.
How nice his father's smile was! He had never noticed it before.
It made him feel warm and shy. He looked out at the interminable
green marshes, the flying clouds of rice-birds, the channels of red
water lined with red mud, and listened intently to the strange com-
plex rhythm of the wheels on the rails and the prolonged melan-
choly wail of the whistle. How curious it all was! His mother
was sitting opposite him, very quiet, her grey eyes turned absently
toward the window. She wasn't looking at things; she was think-
ing. If she had been looking at things her eyes would have wavered
to and fro, as Mary's were doing.
"Mother," he said, "did you bring the bathing-suits ?”
“Yes, dear."
The train was rounding a curve and slowing down. They had
suddenly left the marshes and were among low sand-dunes cov-
ered with tall grass. He saw a man, very red-faced, just stagger-
ing over the top of one of the dunes and waving a stick. ...
It was hot. They filed slowly off the train, and one by one jumped
down into the burning sand. How strange it was to walk in! They
laughed and shrieked, feeling themselves helpless, ran and jumped,
straddled up the steep root-laced sides of dunes, and slid down


204
STRANGE MOONLIGHT
again in slow warm avalanches of lazy sand. Mother and father,
picking their way between the dunes, walked slowly ahead, carry-
ing the basket between them—his father pointed at something. The
sunlight came down heavily like sheets of solid brass, and they
could feel the heat of the sand on their cheeks. Then at last they
came out onto the immense white dazzling beach with its millions
of shells, its black and white striped lighthouse, and the long, long
sea, indolently blue, spreading out slow soft lines of foam, and
making an interminable rushing murmur like trees in a wind.
He felt instantly a desire, in all this space and light, to run for
miles and miles. His mother and father sat under a striped
parasol. Mary and John, now barefooted, had begun laborious
and intense operations in the sand at the water's edge, making
occasional sallies into the sliding water. He began walking away
along the beach close to the waves, keeping his eye out for any
particularly beautiful shell, and taking great care not to step on
jelly-fish. Suppose a school of flying-fish, such as he had seen
from the ship, should swim in close to the beach and then, by
mistake, fly straight up onto the sand? How delightful that
would be! It would be almost as exciting as finding buried
treasure, a rotten chest full of gold-pieces and seaweed and sand.
He had often dreamt of thrusting his hand into such a sea-chest
and feeling the small hard beautiful coins mixed with sand and
weed. Some people said that Captain Kidd had buried treasure
on Tybee Beach. Perhaps he'd better walk a little closer to the
dunes, where it was certainly more likely that treasure would
have been hidden. ... He climbed a hot dune, taking hold of
the feathery grass, scraping his bare legs on the coarse leaves,
and filling his shoes with warm sand. The dune was scooped at
the top like a volcano, the hollow all ringed with tall whistling
grass, a natural hiding-place, snug and secret. He lay down,
made exquisitely smooth a hand's breadth of sand, then took the
medal out of his pocket and placed it there. It blazed beauti-
fully. Was it as nice as the five-dollar gold-piece would have
been? He liked especially the tiny links of the little gold chains
by which the shield hung from the pin-bar. If only Caroline
could see it! Perhaps, if he stayed here, hidden from the family,
and waited till they had gone home, Caroline would somehow
know where he was and come to him as soon as it was dark. He
wasn't quite sure what would be the shortest way from Bona-


CONRAD AIKEN
205
venture, but Caroline would know-certainly. Then they would
spend the night here, talking. He would exchange his medal for
the five-dollar gold-piece, and perhaps she would bring, folded
in a square of silk, the little pink statue. ... Thus equipped,
their house would be perfect. ... He would tell her about the
goldfinch interrupting the Battle of Gettysburg.
SIL
The chief event of the afternoon was the burial of his father,
who had on his bathing-suit. He and Mary and John all
excitedly laboured at this. When they had got one leg covered,
the other would suddenly burst hairily out, or an arm would
shatter its mould, and father would laugh uproariously. Finally
they had him wholly buried, all except his head, in a beautiful
smooth mound. On top of this they put the two pails, a lot of
pink shells in a row, like the buttons of a coat, and a collection
of sea-weeds. Mother, lying under her parasol, laughed lazily,
deliciously. For the first time during the day she seemed to be
really happy. She began pelting small shells at father, laughing
in an odd, delightful, teasing way, as if she were a girl, and father
pretended to be furious. How exactly like a new grave he looked!
It was singularly as Caroline had described it, for there he was all
alive in it, and talking, and able to get up whenever he liked.
Mary and John, seeing mother throw shells, and hearing her
teasing laughter and father's comic rage, became suddenly excited.
They began throwing things wildly—shells, handfuls of sea-
weed, and at last sand. At this, father suddenly leapt out of
his tomb, terrifying them, scattered his grave-clothes in every
direction, and galloped gloriously down the beach into the sea.
The upturned brown soles of his feet followed him casually into
a long curling green wave, and then his head came up shaking
like a dog's and blowing water, and his strong white arms flashed
slowly over and over in the sunlight as he swam far out. How
magnificent! ... He would like to be able to do that, to swim
out and out and out, with a sea-gull flying close behind him,
talking.
Later, when they had changed into their clothes again in the
salt-smelling wooden bath-house, they had supper on the verandah
of the huge hotel. A band played, the coloured waiters bowed and
ne


206
STRANGE MOONLIGHT
grinned. The sky turned pink and began to dim; the sea darkened,
making a far sorrowful sound; and twilight deepened slowly,
slowly into night. The moon, which had looked like a white thin
shell in the afternoon, turned now to the brightest silver; and
he thought, as they walked silently toward the train, of which
they could see the long row of yellow windows, that the beach
and dunes looked more beautiful by moonlight than by sunlight.
... How mysterious the flooded marshes looked, too, with the
cold moon above them! They reminded him of something, he
couldn't remember what.... Mary and John fell asleep in the
train, his father and mother were silent. Someone in the car
ahead was playing a concertina, and the plaintive sound mingled
curiously with the clacking of the rails, the rattle of bridges, the
long lugubrious cry of the whistle. H00-0! H00-o! Where was
it they were going—was it to anything as simple as home, the
familiar house, the two familiar trees, or were they, rather, speed-
ing like a fiery comet toward the world's edge, to plunge out into
the unknown and fall down and down for ever?
No, certainly it was not to the familiar. ... Everything was
changed and ghostly. The long street, in the moonlight, was like
a deep river, at the bottom of which they walked, making scat-
tered thin sounds on the stones, and listening intently to the
whisperings of elms and palmettos. And their house, when at
last they stopped before it, how strange it was! The moonlight,
falling through the two tall swaying oaks, cast a moving pattern of
shadow and light all over its face. Slow swirls and spirals of
black and silver, dizzy gallops, quiet pools of light abruptly shat-
tered, all silently followed the swishing of leaves against the moon.
It was like a vine of moonlight, which suddenly grew all over
the house, smothering everything with its multitudinous leaves and
tendrils of pale silver, and then as suddenly faded out. He
stared up at this while his father fitted the key into the lock, feel-
ing the ghostly vine grow strangely over his face and hands. Was
it in this, at last, that he would find the explanation of all that
bewildered him? Caroline, no doubt, could understand it. She
was a sort of moonlight herself. He went slowly up the stairs.
But as he took the medal and a small pink shell out of his pocket,
and put them on his desk, he realized at last that Caroline was
dead.



Courtesy of the Daniel Galleries
PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST. BY YASUO KUNIYOSHI


ーーーーーーーーーーーーー
​


JANUARY GARDEN
BY MELVILLE CANE
Insidious, elemental cold
Foglike steals
Over garden-mold
And seals
The flower-border like a grave.
Lower, deeper,
Inch on inch,
It spreads its iron hold.
Pores through which the rain and sunlight flowed
Now, instead,
Are stopped with icy lead.
Take a sharp pick,
Break the harsh thick
Wintry metal:
Once you might have found
Springing through the ground
What goes to shape a petal.
Once from here did issue
Palpitating tissue
Of larkspur,
And the earthy mesh
Warmed the velvet flesh
Of pansies.
Once from here did stream
Odor, like a dream-
That which, more than form or color, makes a rose a rose.
Beauty's womb
Is now a tomb
For frozen worms.


RENEWAL
BY CLARKSON CRANE
N ARL felt angry with her for coming this way: why couldn't
she leave him alone? Tall, sombre, expectant, he stood with
hands in pockets looking from his apartment window at the foliage
outside so clear-cut and motionless in the dense air of this Septem-
ber hot spell. She had written that she would come about two-
thirty. A car from San Francisco had passed along College Avenue
and stopped beneath him on the corner of Haste Street about
two twenty-five: Mabel Richards had not been on it. He awaited
the hard ring of the bell, thinking he might not have seen her when
she got off. But five or ten minutes went by, and he remembered
how she had often kept him waiting in the room in Paris, nearly
an hour before she would appear. “The fool!” he muttered, "the
fool!” If he should go now, and pretend when he saw her (if he
ever saw her again) that her letter had not arrived in Berkeley until
two days later, he would at least avoid this meeting, and she might
perceive (he knew she would not) that he did not want to see her
any more. With head down and hands behind his back, he walked
slowly into the other room, around the dining table, then back into
the front room, thinking that he might be studying (he knew
simultaneously in a corner of his mind that he would not) and
what nerve Mabel Richards had to write to the university for his
address as soon as she returned to San Francisco. Then he heard a
light rapping on the apartment door.
“Come in,” he called, as gruffly as he knew how.
She came in slowly, closed the door behind her, and walked toward
him, smiling in her melancholy way, her head, which was covered
by a low round hat, held slightly to one side.
"She has grown fatter,” Carl thought, as he said: "hello, Mabel.”
"I didn't see your name on one of the mail boxes outside and I
came right in. I asked a man with a beard down stairs where Mr
Werner lived. He told me on the third floor.”
She held her bag in joined hands before her and lowered her
eyes.


CLARKSON CRANE
209
“That's the landlord,” Carl answered. He thought: "She wants
me to kiss her. She acts as if she were sixteen. She must be at
least thirty-five.” He was saying aloud: “Sit down, Mabel. Yeah,
over there."
She sat down on the sofa, having placed her gloves and purse in
a small crumpled heap on his desk, took the cigarette he offered,
accepted a light, leaned back among the cushions, and said, after
contemplating him for a moment:
“You're looking well, Carl. Still brushing your hair in the same
way. So stiff and black sticking up above your forehead. I've
often thought of it.”
He replied, “Um," then went on, "have a good trip out? Aw-
fully hot, I'll bet.”
"No. Not until we reached Sacramento. It was quite warm
in New York the day I left, but Chicago was beautiful and cool.”
Reclining there, smiling now and then in that rapid manner of
hers and dabbing her cigarette frequently against the ash-tray, she
told him of a day in Chicago with Amy Carter, whom she had
known for years, of the delay near Omaha behind a wrecked freight
train, of the first autumn colours in Michigan, which she adored,
of the poor food in the dining car. “I'll go Santa Fe next time,"
she said, "I love the Harvey System. And then the Indians you
see are so picturesque. How did you come out ?”
"Troop train," answered Carl. He had been wondering, as she
talked, where she got the money to dress so well. Of course, she
received alimony from that fellow Richards, but not very much
after all, considering the way she always lived. He had an un-
pleasant feeling at the thought that someone had been keeping her,
some rich man in New York whom she had met after leaving the
Red Cross. She had written him only once since they separated
in Paris.
She asked: "Are you all right now, Carl?”
He shook his head. “Only fair. Same trouble I had in the army.
Mostly my stomach, I guess. I'm trying to get compensation from
the government. If I do, I'll go on studying here."
"Oh,” she said, a shadow in her eyes, “I'm sorry. I thought
you'd be all right.” For a moment she was silent. Then, all at
once, she popped forward, spilling cigarette ashes onto the couch
cover, took his hand, squeezed it, exclaimed: "Poor old Carl, he's


210
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a nice boy, but he's so gloomy!” and then relapsed into her former
position, with that short little laugh, and drew her skirt away from
the ashes strewn beside her. "On your nice couch cover,” she added,
glancing up at him from under her low hat.
They sat in the warm room with the cars droning by occasionally
along College Avenue below, and the sunlight, as the afternoon
advanced, streaming more and more through the windows which
faced the west; and Mabel talked on about the good times they
had had together in Paris during the winter following the armistice,
of the little restaurants they had found in narrow streets after Carl
had finished his work in the headquarters office, of Sunday excur-
sions to St Cloud and Versailles, of the Grand Trianon silent, tinted,
and melancholy in damp, grey air. He listened without enthusiasm,
and noticed that her skin was no longer so faultless as it had been,
or as he had believed it to be: her complexion seemed almost pasty
now, with one or two pimples on her right cheek; and her voice had
a disagreeable hoarse quality. He tried to imagine what she had
been like more than six months ago in the plain Red Cross uniform.
“Give me a cigarette, Carl dear,” she exclaimed suddenly. Offering
his open case, he remembered the charm her voice always had for
him in these same words, and how he had wished to preserve on
paper some indication of the way she went down the scale and then
half way up, ending on a note plaintive and drawn out; and he
examined her now more closely, almost expecting to see her as he
believed that she had been. But it was as if the quality of voice and
mannerism of accent had come from somewhere else to emerge only
for a moment from this person who resembled the one he had once
loved. “I guess I never loved her very much," he thought, and
then said aloud, nearly to his own surprise: "Take off your hat,
Mabel.” When she removed it quickly, as
a cap, and laid it beside her on the sofa, he could not understand
how he had ever been attracted to this woman who sat now before
him. She was not even dark as were most of the girls who had
drawn him hitherto; there was no real colour to her hair; one could
merely say that she was blonde; and then her nose and cheeks had a
certain fleshiness, which even repelled him.
"What are you thinking about, Carl ?" she asked.
A line of Verlaine came into his mind: “Deux formes ont tout
à l'heure passé”; and he tried to recall the rest of the poem, but it
em


CLARKSON CRANE
211
211
was gone somewhere. He answered: “A poem of Verlaine. I can't
remember it.”
"Oh, say it, please. I adore Verlaine !"
"I can't remember it,” he repeated.
Mabel went on: "Carl, do they still want you to go into the
store? Your father and brothers ?”
He nodded.
"But you're not going to, are you?”
“I should say not.”
She was looking at him earnestly, her eyes blinking now and then.
Finally, as if after profound reflection, she said: “No, I think it's
best you didn't.”
"Why should I go into the store ?" he exclaimed, preoccupied now
with his own affairs. “There's something more in the world than
business. A fellow has a right to lead his own life. I ..." He
paused, half-conscious of the stupidity of his words. Mabel was
looking at him calmly, holding the cigarette in her left hand, her
legs straight out before her with ankles crossed. What the devil
was she thinking? Clearing his throat, he continued: “I want to
study for a while, psychology mostly, and then have leisure to read.”
He considered it not worth while to go into details before her vague
little mind. As a concession, he added: "I'm reading Dostoevsky."
"Mmm,” she replied, her eyes lighting up.
“As if it were something to eat,” he thought. “Little fool.”
"What does your mother think?" Mabel asked.
“Oh, she's for me. That is she agrees with Father. But-
ah ” he spoke slowly, "she feels sure that I'll come around to
their way of thinking, and is perfectly willing for me to go on at
the university. Of course," he paused thoughtfully for a moment,
“of course, they don't understand me at all.”
"Poor boy,” said Mabel.
Carl looked toward her. She went on:
“But don't you think that most of the men who were in the war
have a hard time adjusting themselves to ordinary life? I know
a young man in New York who doesn't know what to do. He wants
to go back to Europe as soon as he can. I mean-oh, well, everyone
seems so restless."
Serious, she awaited his opinion. He answered finally: “Yes,
maybe that's so," rather pleased at being victim of an epoch.


212
RENEWAL
"Child of the century,” he thought, and repeated: “Yes, maybe
that's so."
"In the meantime,” she said, glancing around the room, "you're
comfortable here, aren't you? It looks like a nice place.” She slid
from the sofa, went to a closet, and drew aside the curtain covering
the doorway. “What's in here? Oh, the telephone. What a lot
of shoes you have! And all so well arranged. I never knew you
were so neat, Carl.”
He replied: "Um."
"You sleep in the other room ?” She peered through the door.
“Do you sleep in there, Carl ?”
"No. Out on the little porch. It opens off that room.”
"Oh, yes, and you eat there.” She walked in. Carl heard her
moving about. Finally, she reappeared, laughing. “I never saw
such a vile kitchen. Come on, we'll wash the dishes.” She was
removing her coat.
"Oh, no," Carl said. "Not now."
Why did she have to trouble about such things? They had been
sitting there, talking of important matters, and suddenly she had to
leap up and wash dishes. “Not now," he repeated, but he followed
her into the small kitchen where soiled dishes lay in piles in the sink,
and caught the towel she tossed at him.
She rolled up her sleeves; hot water from the faucet rushed drum-
ming into the pan: one by one she held toward him moist plates
that steamed slightly.
"It seems to me,” she began, “that enough of your family are in
the store. Three brothers. What is Henry doing?”
“Writing advertisements at McCann's.”
"I went into the store the other day, Carl.”
“Did you?”
“Yes. I was on Market Street and all at once I saw Werner's'
written across a huge building. I wondered if it could be your
father's place, and I went in and asked for some ribbon. I looked
all around for men that looked like your brothers. I think I should
have recognized them from what you told me. I thought I might
get your address from one of them.”
Carl let the towel drop away for a moment from the dish and
raised his head, wondering if she had been hanging around the store
asking for him. She caught his eye and laughed.


CLARKSON CRANE
213
er
“No, I didn't ask any one there. I got it from the recorder's
office, just as I said.” She laughed again. "Poor old Carl.” Then:
"Are they all married ?!
“Hugo and Henry. Hugo has a kid.”
"Oh, really?"
"He's about five years old. Billy his name is.”
“And you're an uncle. I don't know why that sounds so funny.
Uncle Carl.”
He smiled. "It does, doesn't it?”
"Here, be careful of these glasses. Look out, they're hot.” She
remained for a moment idle, dish mop in hand, watching him.
Then she took a greasy platter from the table and slid it under
bluish water. “Does Henry like writing advertisements ?'
Carl nodded. "He always wanted to be a writer,” he answered,
"and this is the next best thing to it. He kids himself along that
he's doing creative work. Wait a minute, Mabel, I want to light
a cigarette.”
"Oh, you'll get ashes all over everything!"
“No, I won't. You see,” he went on, shaking out the match,
"Father thinks Henry is going to the dogs too. He doesn't like
his wife."
"What's she like?”
"All right. Paints fairly well and she's a good cook. You see,
Henry has known her for a long time. Met her several years before
he went into the army."
"You and he get on well together, don't you?”
"Oh, yes. I'm over there a lot.”
She asked slowly: "Does he understand you?”
“Oh,” he said, "I guess so." They glanced at each other and
laughed.
Most of the dishes were washed now. As he dried them, Carl
had been putting them one by one on the shelf in the cupboard;
and when they were all there, and only a few round puddles of
water remained on the table, Mabel wrung out the mop, and re-
moving the dish towel from Carl's hands, spread it out along the
wire near the window. Then she wiped off the table with a rag
found beneath the sink.
"Aren't you glad now we did that?” She stood rolling down
her sleeves.


214
RENEWAL
ne
“Yeah, thanks, Mabel.”
When they were going into the other room, after a few more
dishes and pans had been set in order, Carl began to tell Mabel of
a good little restaurant he had found in San Francisco, where one
could get wine without paying too much, and where the food was
well cooked. Discovering “good little restaurants” had been a con-
stant occupation during their friendship in Paris. Carl would
meet her and announce, more or less with joy, that he had learned
of a place where one could eat well for only half as much as it had
cost the night before. As Mabel sat down again on the sofa in
the front room, Carl said: “It reminds me of that place in the Rue
Jacob. You remember it, don't you?”
"Of course I do. The little American with the nostrils was in
there."
"And that tall woman, La Tour Eiffel. I wonder what's become
of her.”
“Oh, yes, and the room behind the partition. We never could
find out who the people were that went in there."
“Oh, by the way,” said Carl, “Steffins is in Berkeley."
“Oh, really? He was a funny person. With that awful laugh.
Do you remember how he was always talking about the péniches?”
Carl nodded.
“You were too,” Mabel continued. “One day you told me
that you'd like nothing better than spending a summer on one of
them.” After an instant she asked: “Do you still want to go to
sea ?”
"Sometimes. The other day I went aboard the F. W. Wilkens.
That's the windjammer I made the trip to Honolulu on several
years ago. Have a cigarette, Mabel.”
He noticed, as he held a lighted match toward her, that her
cheeks had more colour, and that she still had the habit of beginning
a series of rapid and futile puffs before the flame touched the
end of her cigarette. The room was cooler now, though the late
afternoon sunlight blurred the framed pictures on the walls. As
he sat down in an arm-chair near the desk, she picked up a book
that lay beside her on the couch and said, opening it:
"You're not studying too hard are you, Carl ?”
He laughed and answered: "No." Then it occurred to him
all at once that he had asked her nothing about what she had


CLARKSON CRANE
215
been doing since her return to America. For a moment he hesitated,
fearing to seem over-anxious, but finally he began, gradually:
“Uh—how have you been, Mabel ? Like New York ?''
“Oh-yes. It's been all right. I've been terribly busy. With my
course.”
“Your course?”
“Yes. In short-story writing at Columbia.”
“Oh, I see.”
“'I thought I might go on with my work here. Do they have
courses in short-story writing at California? That was one of
the things I wanted to ask you.”
Carl was silent. "I guess so," he replied at length. Oh, well,
suppose she did live near him in Berkeley. After all, she wasn't so
bad. “I'll find out for you,” he added. That curious feeling of
displeasure at her coming to see him was fading now, and he
wondered why it had been so strong. Mabel observed a clock on
the desk.
"Carl," she asked, "what time can I get a car for San Francisco ?”
"In about ten minutes," he answered. Suddenly, instinctively,
he said: “Why don't you stay over for dinner?”.
She shook her head.
"I must go back. I have an engagement in the city.”
For a moment he felt relieved. Then, as he sat watching her
there on the sofa, slowly, imperiously, brutally, a desire grew in
him to possess her. Why not? She had been his often enough.
What else had she come for? His face was becoming hot: he looked
at her.
“Well,” she exclaimed, taking her hat and rising quickly, “I
must go.”
While gathering up her gloves and purse she kept her eyes
averted.
"Don't," Carl said.
“Yes, I must.”
Her voice was higher than usual. The moment passed.
"Well," Carl said, “all right. I'll ring you up one of these
days. I think I can find out all about the short-story course. A
friend of mine over in the fraternity house is majoring in English
and he knows all about things like that. I suppose you want one
of the advanced courses. I've noticed some of that kind in the


216
RENEWAL
catalogue. I'm sure you will be able to find just what you want.”
They had passed through the door into the hallway which was
darker, and, one after the other, they began to walk down the stairs.
Carl went on talking in a loud voice. "I've tried a little writing
myself, but not very much. I met a fellow last week down where
I was bowling who writes for some of the college papers—” They
were on the ground floor, and the door was open.
“Good-bye, Carl,” Mabel said, turning and thrusting forth her
hand, “Call me up some time.”
"I certainly will.”
He stood on the threshold while she went down the front steps
and crossed College Avenue to the corner where the car that ran
to the ferry would stop, and he thought that he was glad he had
not started anything; for he did not want to get entangled with a
woman just at this time, when he had so little money and was begin-
ning to work. And yet Mabel was not so bad after all. He was
glad she had not asked at the store for his address: it would never
do for Hugo to know of such things as this. Standing in the door-
way, he looked at her over there on the corner, slender, darkly clad,
against the yellowish wooden house with white steps; and he
waved his hand in answer to her smile and nod. Then the long
car, passing before her, groaned to a halt, and when it started again,
he saw her on the rear platform, opening her bag.
II
He had seen her for an instant only, as there were other people
surrounding her. Having received her change, she walked through
the car into the forward compartment, holding the ferry ticket in
her gloved hand, and sat down between two men who were smok-
ing cigars. She could no longer see Carl. Poor Carl. He was a
nice boy, but a little—she looked down at the spittle and cigar
ashes along the corrugated floor-just a little stupid. Yet there
was something awfully nice about him, in spite of his ill-temper and
awkward ways, a certain—she did not know what, perhaps youth-
fulness, which made her want to do things for him. She wondered
now, as she thought of him in the untidy apartment, whether she
might not darn his socks or do mending of some kind. The car
was drumming along at high speed. She was rather glad, after


CLARKSON CRANE
217
all, that she had visited this boy whom she had decided, on reach-
ing San Francisco, never to see again (she drove down once more
the thought that she had come all the way from New York merely
to see him); and sat watching the wooden and stucco houses of
Berkeley go by, thinking quite suddenly that she might in no time
have washed out the dish towel. She remembered Carl's expres-
sion of fear when he believed that she had asked for his address in
the store. It was always that way, seeing herself in his eyes, or
seeing there what he considered her. Even in Paris it had been
the same. But not so much: Paris and the war and the armistice:
all that was different. When the car stopped for the last time
where she had to change onto an electric train, she arose and
followed the men with cigars to the front platform. Stepping
down, she saw her face for an instant in the mirror which the
motorman uses to see behind him, and she thought that she must
seem old to Carl who was only twenty-four. She found a seat in
the train.
Carl would probably end up in his father's store with the rest
of his brothers: he would never be happy if he were not making
money, and the best way to do that was in the store. He had
often been so gay in Paris. She had had a feeling of surprise, al-
most of repulsion, on first seeing him in the apartment. Did he
really look like that? For a while she looked sadly at the brown-
ish hills behind Oakland. Then, as the train glided out along the
mole, she saw the dark oily mud-flats, tinted here and there with
grey and blue, glossy black often. All this had once been so
familiar to her. Other memories dimmed Carl in her mind.
She was on the ferry-boat at last, crossing the bay. Yes, she
was glad she had gone to see Carl: he was a nice boy, and she might
not see him again. Of course he was not a person to think about
as she had thought about him in New York. That had been
foolish (she walked over to the rail when they passed Goat Island);
but he had some good qualities, and then what else was there in
her life? There must be someone. She felt sad. Her life! She
smiled. A nice mess it was. Jim Richards, then the French officer,
and now Carl. Slowly, she paced to and fro on the deck.
When the ferry-boat thudded its way into the slip, and the crowds
moved about her, she thought: "Good heavens! How silly I am!”
It was only six-thirty. The fog had not come in and the air


218
RENEWAL
was warm; and Mabel decided to walk up to her hotel which was on
Geary Street, not far from Union Square. Why was she troubling
herself about that idiot Carl? She would never see him again.
Crowds were on Market Street; the great cars pounded by; a few
early lights were appearing. In a few days, she would go down
to Los Angeles to visit her sister, and she would remain there all
winter in the little white bungalow with the row of fat-bodied
palms along the street outside. She felt like laughing at Carl
now, sitting there gloomy in that ridiculous apartment. How could
she have cared for him? Those heavy eyes rimmed with dark
shadows. Really, he was unhealthy and she had pictured him as
being so fresh and young. She walked faster along the sidewalk;
people went by; there were more lights. She was free, free! All
at once hatred rushed through her for this stolid and dark-faced
young man with the awful bristly hair over his forehead. “The
fool!” she muttered, "the fool!” Love that! She nearly laughed
aloud.
She walked more slowly after she had turned off onto Geary
Street. There would be time to lie down in her room before dinner,
and then she would eat in the hotel and go to bed early. The grey
mass of the St Francis rose above Union Square. Thinking of her
sister and her brother-in-law (he was in the oil business in Los
Angeles) she walked on to her hotel, and through the revolving
door into the narrow lobby with the red carpet, brass cuspidors,
and imitation marble pillars. And when the clerk handed her the
key to her room, as she was moving away, he added:
“A gentleman just called you up, Mrs Richards."
“Yes ?” she said, turning back.
“He left his name. Mr Werner. He said he would call again.”
Mabel said: “Oh, yes, thank you.” She walked over to the
elevator and stepped into the car. Then all at once she felt happy
and wanted to cry out: “He's coming! He's coming!"
But she only stood there smiling, while the elevator climbed
swiftly to her floor.



233
RSS
THE YACHTS. BY CHARLES SHEELER





TWO POEMS
BY BERENICE K. VAN SLYKE
SKETCH
Wolf-head pointed on heavy tawny paws,
He sleeps.
Under his nose
A moist spot on the floor
Widens from his quick breath;
Tail of curved wire,
Hind legs of steel,
Lie soft as wax.
A whimper from his hunting dream
Curls his unconscious lip.
Were I to speak,
The ring of quiet formed around this dog
Would break to noise,
To ripples of sound riding the air like foam.
I will not even whisper his name,
I shall let him drift like a yellow leaf
Over the waters of his brief, wild sleep.
SEA-CHANGE
Before a young lark sings,
For many an hour
He sits as mute and still
As bud of a flower.
Small head upraised to sun
He drinks the air,
The tranquil solitude
About him there.


220
TWO POEMS
He flicks his tail indeed
But his calm eye
Ignores his feathered reach
Were he to fly.
Yet if to him a bird
Begins to sing
He straightway answers back
And lifts his wing.
And he is born again
In double flight
Of song and pinion loosed
On seas of light.
The voice that called to him
Was cause of this,
That silence after joy
Should beat with bliss.
joy
Later the bird may sway,
Mute flower on bough,
But he has sung: his heart
Remembers how.



Courtesy of the Rehn Galleries
INTRODUCING JOHN L. SULLIVAN. BY GEORGE W. BELLOWS


ーーーーーーーーーーーーーーーーーーーー
​



Courtesy of the Rehn Galleries
DEMPSEY-FIRPO. GEORGE W. BELLOWS





PARIS LETTER
February, 1925
TN the New York World of October fifth last appears the fol-
Ilowing:
“Readers of the Dial must have often wondered why that
strenuously cosmopolitan review has hitherto neglected to provide
itself with a Spanish correspondent. In the October issue, I ob-
serve, this lacuna has been filled in the person of Don Jose Ortega
y Gasset, the editor of La Revista de Occidente and professor of
metaphysics at the University of Madrid. Ortega y Gasset is
one of the most distinguished men of letters in Spain. His Medi-
tation on Don Quixote' and his literary and political essays have
given him a place beside Unamuno in the hierarchy of Spanish
letters. No more admirable correspondent could be found to
represent for American readers the intellectual life of Spain to-day.
But what, one naturally asks, has he to do with the Dial or the
Dial with him? If one is capable of seeing European literature
in perspective, it is impossible to conceive of a public getting its
ideas of French literature from Paul Morand and its ideas of
Spanish from Ortega y Gasset, et cetera.”
The writer of this little article seems to me to know but very
imperfectly whereof he speaks. Ortega y Gasset has nothing about
him of the bearded philosopher of a Rembrandt painting. His
is one of the most open and modern spirits of Western Europe,
and his knowledge of the latest literary movements is certainly
greater than that of many a journalist; the pages he has devoted
to Proust in La Nouvelle Revue Française are clear enough proof .
of that. My conversations with him in Paris in 1921 (and I
should add that there was nothing incongruous at that time in the
juxtaposition of our opinions) and the young writers whom he
then expressed a desire to meet, would supply me with many
another proof. I can say that he will be the first to serve the
young Spanish writers, and that his labours will be in the spirit


222
PARIS LETTER
of The Dial—that very liberal spirit, hospitable to every talent
of the globe.
I shall profit by the occasion offered me here to say that, in my
Paris correspondence, I take pains to give The Dial a view as
unbiased as possible of the contemporary literary movement in
France, with special care not to alter the perspective for my
foreign readers. I have the advantage of being considered a dada
by the New York World and a frightful reactionary by the
Sovietist republics of Montparnasse. Long years spent abroad
have given me the habit of forming objective judgements of my
country, while they have kept me free from coteries and literary
friendships. If I give the younger generations the position they
deserve, it is because it is high time to show the rest of the world
that one can no longer speak of the “characteristically provincial
immobility of French art,” as did G. B. Shaw recently, in the
course of an inquiry into French literature. (Shaw is like all the
great writers of the past; he knows nothing of what has followed
him. His opinions of French literature—he has never got beyond
Maupassant-are childish.)
Amidst official pomp, Anatole France has been buried. His
funeral was the occasion of a political manifestation, and atten-
tion was diverted from the catafalque to M Caillaux, who was
making his re-entry into Paris. Men of letters were rare. On the
bank of the Seine which he had loved so much, at the foot of
Voltaire's statue, surrounded, like his own work, by booksellers'
stalls, Anatole France was solemnized. If he was not a great
writer, he was at least a great man of letters. His perfection of
form, his moral scepticism tempered by general and generous ideas,
his aridity of heart, his critical sense, his irreligion, his smiling
culture that at times rose to erudition, and his taste for women,
make him an almost perfect representative of the generation
sprung from Renan, which is about to die out in France, although
its slow pace and its horror of emotions enable it to last longer
than one might expect.
Paul Valéry, whose prose is as rare and precious as his verse,
has published, through the N. R. F., a series of essays under the
title of Variété, of which the first, La Crise de l'Esprit is without
doubt the most important essay which has appeared in Europe
since the war. (The London Athenæum published it in April and
as


PAUL MORAND
223
May, 1919.) It contains also a preface to La Fontaine's Adonis
which is one of the most perfect literary bits one could read.
The researches of psychoanalysis and the descent into the abysses
of the subconscious continue to dominate an important-and the
most interesting-part of the literary production of the younger
generation. Origins are investigated, and there has appeared a
new edition of Les Lauriers Sont Coupés, by Edouard Dujardin,
who, according to Joyce's own words, is the real father of the
“interior monologue.” The remarkable preface by Valéry Lar-
baud definitely settles this question of history. Elsewhere, under
the name of surréalisme, there is growing a crusade for the sub-
conscious, which affirms that the dream is the keystone of life.
Centuries of reasoning and of spiritual criticism have driven back
our French subconsciousness to unbelievable depths. In conse-
quence, the necessary delving must be on a colossal scale. André
Breton's Manifeste du Surréalisme is a useful thing to read, and
a sharp instrument. At the moment it is having a great success.
Now Tristan Tzara has collected in a volume his 7 Manifestes
Dada, of historic fame.
Among the recent works of criticism which give an accurate
idea of the new French literary values, I will mention Le XXe
Siècle, by Benjamin Crémieux (N.R.F.) who since 1918 has made
for himself a place in the first rank of criticism; the two series,
Une Heure Avec ..., by Frédéric Lefèvre, which
reader will find a fruitful source of information on the currents of
ideas in the past two years; Impertinences, by Maurice Martin du
Gard, editor of Les Nouvelles Littéraires, who has succeeded in
France with this happy idea of a weekly literary journal; and
Quatre Hommes Entre Vingt, by Pierre Dominique, one of the
winners of the 1924 Grand Prix Balzac.
The death of Anatole France has revived interest in the re-issue
of Les Plaisirs et les Jours, Proust's first book, which contains an
excellent preface by the creator of Monsieur Bergeret. This book,
which was almost unobtainable, contains the germ of much of the
later work of Proust, and must take its place at the head of his
works in the library of every Proustian amateur. Je Vous ai
Desirée un Soir is the charming title of a very pleasant novel by
René Boylesve. Georges Girard's Les Vainqueurs is a war story
which presents faithfully that mingling of heroism and stupidity


224
PARIS LETTER
which characterized the first months of the campaign of 1914.
Drieu la Rochelle's Plaintes Contre Inconnu is a book of short
stories through which there pass flabby, grouchy, stupid people,
portraits at which the author excels, treated with a sober art and a
sincerity which merit our esteem. Delteil, whose somewhat scan-
dalous success, as well as his very genuine talent, are well known,
gives us Les Cinq Sens, a novel of anticipation—a modern Defoe-
a picture of great migrations of people fleeing to the poles before
the plague, full of colour and exaggeration. I wish also to call
attention to Philippe Soupault's new novel, Les Frères Durandeau,
which shows a curious evolution of this fertile writer.
Among art publications, we have a new review of Asiatic art
named Artibus Asiae, written in French, German, and English,
with all the European specialists in Far-Eastern art for contrib-
utors. On the same subject, A. Lévy has published Les Animaux
dans l’Art Chinois and Les Laques de Coromandel. The N.R.F.
has issued an interesting monograph on the sculptor Bourdelle.
Paul MORAND


BOOK REVIEWS
HISTRIONIC SECLUSION
CONVERSATIONS IN EBURY STREET. By George Moore.
8vo. 315 pages. Boni and Liveright. $2.50.
IN Mr Moore's Conversations in Ebury Street, are to be found
T a criticism of Balzac, the already published lecture in French
on Balzac and Shakespeare, a discussion with an American, and
a number of "portraits”-notably that of Dujardin : in these dis-
cussions of novels, of the theatre, of painting, and of poetry, the
honour of "prodigious memory" and much wit being shared with
John Freeman, Walter de la Mare, Cunninghame-Graham,
Edmund Gosse, and Granville-Barker. Reminding us by its tempo
and method, of Avowals, this volume presents certain of Mr
Moore's sensitively cruel, aesthetically flawless foibles: that inten-
tional distorting of judgement, that pleased contemplation of the
resolving of a promised climax into contradiction, that ever en-
livening ingenuity and formal virtue. Certain characteristic
crotchets present themselves with new vigour: the mischievousness
of journalism: the unhelpfulness of "all the many Sirs” who have
written about Shakespeare; as Mr Moore says, “Il y a un proverbe
français qui dit que les arbres nous empêchent de voir la forêt":
he reiterates, “Of French literature I know but a corner, and
of the French language not much more”: he reminds us that
"education is of no help to anybody except teachers”: alludes to
"a quiet corner and a grave”: and by emphasis upon “the simple
reality" of certain chicken, and “the boycott of bass” which may
“oblige” him "to organize a Bass Club,” we are reminded of "thať
animality which is” to him, “our better part.”
There are depths of colour in these imaginings and there are
flaws. As a verbal virtuoso, Mr Moore is sometimes disappointing,
presenting the paradox of a naturalness as oral as Bunyan's; and
a naturalness so studied as to annihilate itself. There are inhar-
monious echoes of the Bible and of the English prayer-book, and
a
n


226
HISTRIONIC SECLUSION
an intentional impertinence that on occasion becomes insult; one
feels the lack of aesthetic tone in Mr Moore's displeasure with
Hardy.
If, however, Mr Moore seems to succeed in his intention not
to be sound, certain of his imaginary sentiments are most amusing,
as when he says of true love: “It is nothing to inspire it, the
difficulty is to feel it," and our admiration is engaged by his cat's
play with painting-his exposition of a method untrammelled by
the necessity for drawing or values—“the tap, tap, tap method"
by which the pupil is enabled "to escape from a quality not easily
distinguishable from linoleum.”
The actuality of the eliciting principle as employed in these
conversations, recalls Plato's dialogues, The Life and Death of
Mr Badman, some of Jacob Abbott's most dramatically lifelike
colloquies, and Landor; Mr Moore far surpassing the Imaginary
Conversations one feels, in the circumstantial quality of parry and
thrust. The disciplined celerity of the story-teller as we have
it in the instantaneous evoking of a scene, moreover, arrests and
takes possession of one as development succeeds development;
studious economy of exposition being in no respect more con-
spicuous than his precision of epithet, as when he denominates Ann
Brontë, “a sort of literary Cinderella” and is apprehensive of
Wyndham Lewis as “the new Beelzebub.” This positive pre-
cision, exemplified in his attitude to the work of others, appears in
his reflecting that Balzac
"did not write; he registered his ideas, and his ideas are always
so interesting that you read without noticing the ruts of verbal
expression he slips into ... until we come to translate or to
read very, very attentively, the page appears to us to be not only
well but splendidly written”;
as in a flank attack upon journalism, his saying:
"At certain seasons locusts fall upon a country and devour it
leaf by leaf, and in the same way French words have within the
last few years fallen upon the English language and are eating
up English words.”


MARIANNE MOORE
227
In that verbal dovetailing which is his passion, and that trouble-
taking propensity in matters in which it pleases him to take trouble,
we note the clearness obtained by repetition, item being added to
item with an almost violent exactness; and in the following sen-
tences, his sincere if somewhat ostentatious insistence that mech-
anism and literary effect are indivisible:
“During the first fifty pages of The Brook Kerith I tried to stint
myself to the miserable you, which is not a word but a letter of
the alphabet, at least in sound; but to weed out the yous means
something more than grammatical changes; every sentence has
to be recast; the rearrangement of the verbs is difficult sometimes,
but of very nearly the same disciplinary advantage as the 'use
of metre.”
This attentiveness of the writer to the business of writing has
resulted in Mr Moore's case, in some of the most accurate correct
speaking known to one as when he says: "In reading the Eliza-
bethans we are in salt water always; the verse is buoyant,” and
thus deprecates a metropolitan theatre: "Mean streets and a tangle
of tramways from which we have to run for our lives like cats
before pavement skaters, shatter our dreams."
"A book must go to a tune,” he says, and plainly in his own
writing, “the composition is balanced within and without.” Just
as one is alive to the more easy euphony of such phrases as “the
epistle of an apostle," a "taxi, who took us in tow,” “Augustus
being among the gone,” one is alive to more difficult harmonies-
to the neat machinery, the grace, the impetuosity, the finality,
of this writing which is, one ventures to feel, perfectly a counter-
part to “a good play”-a definition of which is attributed by
Mr Moore to Mr Granville-Barker:
"By a good play I do not mean a play that will run as long
as a public house, but one that will encourage and enrapture those
who seek pleasure in thought."
MARIANNE Moore


AFTER-DINNER PHILOSOPHY
THE GENIUS OF STYLE. By IV'. C. Brownell. 12mo.
226 pages. Charles Scribner's Sons. $2.
IN his newest book Mr Brownell has written a series of glosses
I to Buffon's statement that "Style is nothing other than the
order and movement we put into our thoughts.” His programme,
he says, is not that of “defining the indefinable”; he will be con-
tent, rather, to "confine it within a compass narrow enough for
contemplating comfortably.” The result is a work displaying
none of the gauntness caused by the lean and hungry pursuit of
concatenated thought; and while filled with much sharp detail,
the book has a clarity from line to line which it does not possess
as a whole, so that it will, I believe, be more easily understood
at a first reading than a third.
Mr Brownell employs puns, not for decoration, but as the back-
bone of his thoughts. His most vital distinctions are less defini-
tions than jingles, although as jingles they are always charming.
He speaks, for instance, with his undaunted mother-wit, of the
contemporary tendency to wear less clothes than formerly, and
suggests that it is "intrinsically egoistical rather than social ...
originating, perhaps, in a desire to experience a sensation by pro-
ducing one.” Or he complains of modern art:
"Portraying invisible transition, though securing rhythm by
falsifying rhyme and reason, destroys the integrity of the dancing
lady dislocated for the purpose. She is indeed fatally rhythmic;
dance she must since, ceasing, and lacking the wherewithal, she
would be unable to sit down.”
It is safe to suppose that no more engaging book has ever been
written on this “subject of philosophical discussion.” Unfor-
tunately, the author takes a positively Puckish glee in digression,
not a "that reminds me” type of digression, but the digression of
gratuitous distinctions which, while brilliantly lighting up some
passing phase of the subject, often remind us that this phase did


KENNETH BURKE
229
not, for the purpose at hand, need lighting. We might say that
Mr Brownell follows the course of his arguments like a terrier
out for a walk with its master: he covers five times as much ground
as necessary, but is on the highway only long enough to cross it.
The Genius of Style is primarily a plea for "aesthetic prose,”
prose which does not merely possess the more homely and service-
able virtues of clarity and precision, but also makes its appeal to
our emotions as well as to our intellects. Mr Brownell does not
mean that pure communication should be candied up with “aes-
thetic” qualities; what he is really concerned with is a plea for the
use of prose in other functions than pure communication. He
does not want prose considered as the opposite to poetry, one as a
vehicle for the intellect and the other for the emotions. The issue
involves merely shifting a centre of gravity. If the purpose of a
novel, for instance, is to tell its plot, style becomes dalliance in
direct ratio to the acquisition of qualities beyond clarity and pre-
cision. But if the tone of the novel is taken as its primum mobile,
and the plot is considered merely as one of the many potentials for
conveying this tone, then clarity and precision are hardly more
than a basic framework, and the more "written” aspects of speech
come into prominence.
In terms of authority, Mr Brownell can readily enough estab-
lish his issue, by simply recalling the outstanding English authors
who have written aesthetic prose. It is in his dialectical justifica-
tion that he becomes confusing, and I believe this confusion to
result from his unconscious use of the word "style" in two senses.
He speaks of “the quality of style, that is, of an ensemble of
structure and rhythm.” Style occurs when the "whole composi-
tion is modelled by the details functioning as forces.” Style is
“the organic factor in art of any kind, the factor in virtue of
which every part of any whole becomes at once a means and an
end.” The genius of style, "which remembers and anticipates in
the act of expression.” All these statements seem to mean by style
that growth and consistency of the art-work which is usually
designated as form. Yet we also find “style” used for "pomp,"
or “ceremony," as when he regrets that the Brooklyn Bridge was
not given an architectural finish, "something comparable to the
Karlsbrücke towers." Obviously, the Brooklyn Bridge does have
style in the sense of consistency, appropriate detail. A piece of
СС


230
AFTER-DINNER PHILOSOPHY
engineering, to stand, must have. And if Mr Brownell wants it
to have "more style,” he wants it more decorative, more ceremo
nious. Thus he could praise the style of Newman because it
"seems to celebrate the subject rather than expound it, as a song
does its words.” Mr Brownell's chapter on style as a chastening
influence on our social habits is built entirely on this second
meaning of "style,” for obviously it is not consistency, but cere-
mony, which could produce such results.
At other times "style” seems to mean simply "theme" or "mes-
sage," as when he speaks of "style touched with emotion.” And
when he quotes as an example of style Arnold's “He is, he is with
Shakespeare,” he does not seem to mean style as major form, as
the relation of detail to some larger unit, as "remembering and
anticipation,” (otherwise, how could he quote the sentence as an
example of style without explaining its exact position and func-
tion in its context?); but he is pointing out as style a sentence
which has a formal peculiarity of its own. The sentence is a
kind of broken repetition, comparable to Yeats's “I will arise and
go now, and go to Innisfree”; and its appeal lies in the fact that
it is really a rhetorical device not yet abstracted into a formula.
The Bible, translated under the close suggestion of the original
tongues, frequently has beautiful varieties of non-English in which
the stylistic value is, similarly, that of a latent formula. But
these other senses of "style” are less confusing, and the major
confusion of style as consistency with style as ceremony is all we
need consider here.
The basis of Mr Brownell's plea is that style is a "not-ourselves
ideal,” and utilizes certain laws of perfection which are outside the
individual. (“Not-ourselves” is a misnomer, since if such laws
exist, they are not “not-ourselves,” but “not exclusively ourselves" :
we sense them as individuals, and in common with the rest of
mankind.) In opposition to this "not-ourselves” ideal of style
(and here surely is meant style as form, as growth) Mr
Brownell speaks of manner, which is the expression of the per-
sonality. Although the author gives no specific examples of man-
ner, he does quote Sainte-Beuve to the effect that manner
is dictated by the nature of the author's talent. "Manner"
seems to signify one specific equipment, readily traceable to the
personality, one limiting mould into which the author pours his
rsona
пе


KENNETH BURKE
231
manner
subject. Waldo Frank's staccato treatment of every subject, for
instance, would be thus a manner. And perhaps there is also
manner in Sherwood Anderson's gesture of the half-articulate
prophet.
In this sense "manner" is to be differentiated from form, while
ceremony (hitherto masking under "style” as a “not-ourselves
ideal”) would reveal itself as the expression of the personality,
thus being one kind of manner. With such a revision of Mr
Brownell's terms, he could counsel form, the "not-ourselves," as
that element which makes for a work's perfection within its kind.
It would be a technical, or non-moral attribute, and as readily
accessible to the pornographic and the diseased work of art as any
other. But he could ask that authors employ a ceremonious, or
dignified, or appealing manner, which necessitates the uplift of
the personality, and is thus a moral attribute. But Mr Brownell's
avoidance of this dissociation looks like a bit of unconscious
Jesuitry, giving as it does the impression that a man must have
a noble soul to have a good technique, disguising for a technical
age moral values as concerns of craftsmanship, attempting to
insinuate ethics into those who have little religion beyond art.
I believe that Thomas Mann's discovery of moral values as deeply
emotional, and as thus making for the richer art, is a less tortuous
and more convincing method of arriving at the same conclusion.
But Mr Brownell's book, with its hale and balanced prose, is
an excellent one, and rides beautifully above what to me seem
like inconsistencies in its reasoning. Furthermore, its central
purpose is so obviously less the elucidation of its subject than the
expression of a sprightly and keen-witted personality (less con-
sistency than ceremony) that it seems almost mal apropos to stress
its argumentative aspect. The Genius of Style is not a discourse
on style, but an after-dinner speech on style, tricked out with the
most entertaining compliments, anecdotes, and asides. And if, on
finishing it, we understand style the less, we may congratulate
ourselves upon having seen Mr Brownell the more, and having
enjoyed his jibes at some mythical body of thought which, so
far as the mute and inglorious oncoming generations are con-
cerned, might in some vague way be H. L. Mencken, or non-
existent, or both.
KENNETH BURKE
Сете
urse


BAZALGETTE AND THOREAU
Henry THOREA, Bachelor of Nature. By Léon
Bazalgette. Translated by Van Wyck Brooks. 8vo.
357 pages. Harcourt, Brace and Company. $3.
eᏙᏟ
Ore 1
CINCE Bernardin de Saint-Pierre French literature has come
variously to America for materials and forms wherewith to
recreate itself. The greatest instance is still perhaps that of
Chateaubriand whose impossible Indians may outlast the too pos-
sible Frenchmen of Flaubert. The sustenance which Stendhal won
from contemplation of our scene for the aesthetic of his novel of
the modern will is less widely recognized. We are aware how-
ever of how the symbolists transfigured Poe; and more recently
of the enthusiastic creation by the Dadaists of a romantic America
of cowboys, skyscrapers, and jazz. Romantic movements in
classicist France are ever forages for nurture rather than voyages
of discovery. Like Greece, France is omnivorous and egocentric.
In every period of influences her writers are like a family con-
suming beefsteak. That beefsteak will become, let us say, part
of a lanky father, a fat mother, a bad pagan boy, and a noble
Christian sister. At this moment, we may behold America turn
into Louis Aragon, Valéry Larbaud, and Bazalgette. ...
Bazalgette's translation and biography of Whitman had a
dynamic share in the slow stirring of French letters, away from
the Narcissus mood which led to the masterworks of Claudel,
Valéry, Proust, and Gide, toward a new gesture of spiritual excur-
sion whence a good range of fresh romantic stuffs will accrue for the
young classicists to work on. His Whitman was a biography that
held fairly close to the narrative form, save that a lyrism illumined
it and made it speak with emphasis and fervour to the imagina-
tion of the French. In Henry Thoreau, however, Bazalgette
stands revealed more clearly: a poet himself, and a prophet, he
employs a certain spiritual experience made manifest in America
because less assimilated here than the experience of Rousseau and
of Tolstoy in their lands; and he makes of it his own spiritual
Word for France. This technical analogy between Bazalgette
ne


WALDO FRANK
233
la
in sophisticated Paris writing of Thoreau, and Chateaubriand in
rationalist Paris dreaming of our virgin forests must not be
strained too far. Bazalgette is less a poet than Napoleon's noble
hater, but he is more historian and critic. His book has the lilt
and passage and effect of a packed personal paean; and yet it is
perhaps the best of all pictures of our great New England. There
is no phenomenal relation between Chateaubriand's America—or
that of the Dadaists—and ourselves. Their work is therefore not
negotiable beyond their immediate needs. But clad in the fine
English of Mr Brooks, Bazalgette's Thoreau responds to our
experience. It becomes an American classic as surely as it is a
French one.
The method is not narrative: it is a composite of allusiveness,
colloquy, lyrical projection, and dramatic scening. A hard method
to follow unflagging through three hundred pages; and at first the
frail figure of Thoreau seems insufficient for it. The author has
sustained his tone with ruthless logic that at times may pall. One
would occasionally welcome passages in a more direct, conventional
prose. But the consequence of the author's lack of mercy is an
aesthetic form the more remarkable when one considers the after
all comparative slightness of Thoreau's stuff and the frustrate
colours of his milieu. At the end, one realizes that this unsparing
method was the inevitable right one for the subject. Thoreau's
greatness did not loom like Whitman's. It was the consequence
of impacts on a small living nucleus, of the organic yet reactive
growth of that nucleus within an inchoate social envelope. When
he created his Whitman, Bazalgette had but to follow Whitman.
Hence his use of narrative was correct. Even the Civil War fell
into place as a sort of objective scene for the hero's progress.
Creating Thoreau, Bazalgette creates primarily the New England
town, and the woods and the rivers and the birds, creates the
astringent air of Emerson and Alcott, creates Mr Greeley and his
Tribune, John Brown and his raiders, Lyceum audiences and
village ne'er-do-wells. A superb massivity of America bounding
Thoreau gives him his dimensions by indirection and by the
dynamism of the man's responses. It was a subtle task, and Ba-
zalgette has done it. It required a complete mastery of the Amer-
ican scene; and the extent to which this Frenchman who has never
visited our land knows it-its past, its present, and its future-is


234
BAZALGETTE AND THOREAU
1
uncanny. Where did he learn what a New England village feels
like, what winter is, in a Canadian wood? How did he catch
this scent of the Emersonian family, this shuttling rhythm of
Broadway, this dark deluvial stain in the Judge's house in Staten
Island? No mere thorough scholarship can explain it. Chateau-
briand's Indians, Baudelaire's Poe are alien and exotic. Bazalgette
possesses a true intuition of America. Strange as it may seem,
he loves us—loves our promise, our struggle to evolve it. But his
love is clairvoyant: his mind has stratified his vision of us with
analytic understanding. He knows the heartbreaking husk of
social and psychic life in which our promise stifles. Bazalgette is
a Roussinean romanticist in that he chooses to bring to Paris our
Thoreau as a reality for it, from the New England town. But he
is no romanticiser of the town. Nor of Thoreau who emerges
from the book as a true hero almost by a process of survival.
Thoreau is a hero of his age, we gather, because his age was other-
wise unheroic.
The book is a new type of novel, if you please, rather than
biography in the strict French sense. There is a new novel form-
the Proustian-in which the hero is literally "I”. An example of
it in our language is Mr Anderson's Story Teller's Story. Here
is another kind of novel—a sort of Crocean history-in which a
real personage is drawn ruthlessly as regards the facts and yet
with dionysian freedom in spiritual emphasis and in aesthetic.
A work like this dares to contain anything: and there is to be
found here a bit of literary criticism so original in form that it
must be mentioned. Thoreau and Whitman meet. Their talk
is a failure. Walt is distrustful of this highbrow Yankee who
has so consciously turned away from Harvard. Bazalgette records
the futile dialogue and adds to it, by way of antistrophe, an
imagined dialogue consisting of responses gleaned from the two
men's work. The effect is powerful and convincing: a con-
trapuntal fugue that does more to prove the nuclear energy
of the American mind and its unity, in variety, of direction, than a
score of essays.
Mr Brooks's translation has a tendency toward "toning down."
The original title, as an instance, reads "Henry Thoreau, Sauvage.”
This might be faithfully englished as Henry Thoreau, the Un-
tamed. Mr Brooks has preferred to substitute Emerson's "bachelor


WALDO FRANK
235
of Nature.” Perhaps he shares somewhat Emerson's Apollonian
attitude toward this nature-drunk, nature-sweet, neo-primitive
neighbour. But the translation is very far indeed from a betrayal.
It is the process whereby Bazalgette's book becomes indigenous
and takes its place in our American literature between the old and
the new. Thoreau stands with Whitman and with Melville for
the creative transitional gesture between that new America, in-
heritor of Old World forms, and our old America, creator of a
new world. Of this hazardous long birth-hour in whose travail
we persist, there is no lovelier expression than the prose of Van
Wyck Brooks.
WALDO FRANK


PSYCHOLOGY WITHOUT COMPROMISE
The PRACTICE AND THEORY OF INDIVIDUAL Psychol-
OGY. By Alfred Adler. Translated by P. Radin.
8vo. 352 pages. Harcourt, Brace and Co. $6.50.
N OWADAYS, when people talk of the “new psychology,"
N they mean prevailingly the ideas about the human mind
deriving from the work of Freud and his associates. Although
the custom is to lump this work in a single, solid, homogeneous
mass, it is, in fact, still nebular, with three definite heads dis-
tinguishable in it. At the centre is the system of human nature
constructed and stated, more or less architecturally, by Freud him-
self and accepted as the incontrovertible orthodoxy by the congre-
gation of the faithful. To the right and to the left are the
heterodoxies of Jung, the Swiss, and Adler, the Austrian. Both
heterodoxies consist primarily in a rejection or deprecation of the
cardinal orthodox dogma regarding the supreme rôle of sexuality
in the life of man from birth to death. Jung absorbs this sex-
uality in a prior and wider stream of activity which turns his
speculations regarding human nature into a metaphysical senti-
mentalism of the type of Eucken or Bergson. Adler subordinates
this sexuality to a prior and wider "will-to-power” which allies his
speculations concerning human nature with a metaphysical vol-
untarism of the type of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Vaihinger.
Both philosophers of mind differ from their metaphysical relatives
in that they generate their speculative dogmas out of the material
provided by means of the technique of psychoanalysis, of which
both are practitioners. This technique is the common denom-
inator of the three sects. The rest may be considered what Adler
would call "arrangements” of the material drawn out by the
technique.
Individual Psychology is a redundant compilation of Adlerian
“arrangements.” It consists of a collection of twenty-eight occa-
sional pieces, the earliest dating from 1911. Their sequence has
been made, as nearly as it could be, logical rather than temporal,
and the themes mount in technicality and range as the essays pro-
0


H. M. KALLEN
237
ceed. There are subjects as varied as the psychic treatment of
trigeminal neuralgia and Dostoevsky; myelodysplasia and the
individual-psychology of prostitution. Nevertheless, the essays do
not avoid being boresomely repetitious. Dr Radin, in his work
of translation, seems not to have succeeded so well as he might have
in reducing the unnecessarily technical, involved, and pontificating
style of the originals to a direct and readable English. Those who
are familiar with Dr Adler's German will, however, not too greatly
blame him. They will remember how much worse that is than
even the bad German most of the German-speaking psychoanalysts
seem to have fallen into.
Adler calls his system of human nature the system of “indi-
vidual psychology.” He intends by this phrase that the psyche
of each man is always to be considered an organic and indissoluble
unity. It is a whole, as the Hegelians used to say, with a capital
W. In every single act or aspect of a life, no matter how con-
tradictory any may be to any other, this whole is present as the
effective agent. Its essence is to be a goal, generating the means
of its attainment by its reactions upon its environment; its quality
is of drive or will aiming at power, at superiority over its settings.
The specific conditions it reacts to will provide the instruments
with which it establishes its superiority in feeling, and the moulds
of character in terms of which this superiority is pursued and main-
tained. The process begins in earliest infancy. Indeed, the first
cry of the new-born is a sign of felt insecurity; an insecurity
extended and intensified by its manifold relations to the adult
world on which it depends. The child early begins to feel inferior,
often because of some sensed or perceived inferiority of organ in
itself. The whole of its life soon becomes a persistent effort to
overcome this feeling of inferiority, and to replace it by a feeling.
of superiority and security. Such a feeling need not, and hardly
ever does, register a real superiority and security. It is not a
recognition of reality and an adjustment thereto; it is an aversion
from reality, an evasion of it, a compensation for it. The feeling
of superiority is attained by means of autogenous fictions and in the
pursuit of a “fictitious goal.” Sometimes it is created by bullying,
aggression, self-assertion; sometimes by submission, weakness, all
the frailties and perversions, many sorts of disease. Sexuality
and sex-relations are often its instruments, and merely instruments.
nes


238
PSYCHOLOGY WITHOUT COMPROMISE
The feeling of superiority, centred in the fictitious goal, is
striven for universally. Everybody is doing it, but doing it
without knowing, hiddenly. Everybody has a "secret life-plan”
that dominates and directs every phase of his conduct and evinces
itself in his carriage, his postures, his fantasies, his dreams, his
dogmatisms, his intolerances, his envies, his pleasure in the mis-
fortunes of others, and so on. These are all substitutes for the
struggle with reality, short-cuts to security; as a rule their in-
tensity exceeds the requirements of self-preservation in the struggle.
All the relationships they designate are reducible to the basic one
of superior-inferior and this is especially symbolized in terms of
the relationships of the sexes. The superior is always masculine,
the inferior always feminine; Adler designates the demand for
superiority as “the masculine protest.” It stands out in neurotics.
The urge to superiority is not, however, the all of the Adlerian
system of human nature. Over against the will-to-power is set
"the eternal, real, physiologically-rooted community feeling."
This Adler signalizes as the source of tenderness, love of neighbour,
friendship, and love. His system of psychology, in fact, is de-
scribed as seeking to make the "community-feeling” dominant-
"to gain a reinforced sense of reality, the development of a feeling
of mutual goodwill, all of which can be gained only by the con-
scious evolution of a feeling of the common weal and the conscious
destruction of the will-to-power."
ldn
Tm00ne
Well. ...
In the matter of systems of psychology, you can pay your money
and take your choice. The limen at which observation drops out
and speculation sweeps in is very low. The body of observed
and verifiable data is not too large and is neutral to the infer-
ential systems which abut upon it. It will set at the same time
with equal indifference and equal ease into the mutually con-
tradictory elaborations of Freud, of Jung, of Adler, of the be-
haviourists, and all the other schools. Its neutrality carries a warn-
ing for those observers to whom correctness is more important than
systematization, and accuracy more desirable than cure or reform.
For my taste, Dr Adler is too ardent. He says in the preface:
"Individual psychology is now a definite science with a limited


H. M. KALLEN
239
subject-matter and no compromise can be admitted. This in-
transigence arises . . . from the inexorable logic of a treatment of
phenomena as mutually related. We shall never agree to change
the fundamentals of human psychology which it has established
and to adopt others in their stead. And we shall also never be
under the necessity of undertaking a special enquiry into sexual
factors long after the other aspects of psychic life have been inves-
tigated. Individual psychology covers the whole range of psychol-
ogy in one survey, and as a result it is able to mirror the indivisible
unity of the personality.”
Maybe so. Unhappily the history of science, and of psychology
no less, is a history of compromises. “Fundamentals” change very
often in it, and "never" is a word not written in its painful lexicon.
Verb, sap.
H. M. KALLEN


DAUMIER AND THE NEW SPIRIT
DAUMIER, PEINTRE ET LITHOGRAPHE. By Raymond
Escholier. 4to. 275 pages. H. Floury, Paris. $7.50.
e
IT is by no means an accident that a new and exhaustive book
T on Daumier should appear at this time. M Raymond Escho-
lier's study is in harmony with the new spirit—with the rising
tendency among critics and artists alike to reconsider the ques-
tion of subject-matter in its relation to aesthetic accomplishment.
For almost a score of years the vast bulk of influential specula-
tion has been concerned primarily with the hopeless effort to
separate sentimental, social, and moral activities from what is
erroneously labelled pure aesthetics. Except for an occasional
philosopher like Havelock Ellis, who, with tremendous persuasion
and a remarkably flexible imagination, has broken down the rigid
limitations imposed upon the theoretic spirit by Croce, and has
considered art in terms of universals, the aim of recent criticism
has been, consciously or unconsciously, to place the artist in a
world of his own, and to give him, by legislation, one might say,
the unique individuality which all of us in our vainglorious
moments would secretly attain. From Oscar Wilde's The Critic
as Artist, to the flood of muddled interpretations of present-day
psychology in which the one who appreciates—the amateur, the
collector, and the critic—is regarded as important as the creator,
the assumption has been that one has only to comprehend a work of
art in order to win a seat among the privileged coterie. Current
speculation, as a consequence, has developed a double objective,
and the artist, on reaching his high and unique position, has found
to his astonishment, that his supporters have tagged enviously after
him. This is only natural: defenders of an aristocracy have always
esteemed themselves as aristocrats, and it is equally reasonable to
conclude that writers and talkers who have lifted an artist to the
heights should expect to participate in his superiority.
This critical attitude has sprung from two bases, the scien-
tific (psycho-physiological) and the emotional (spiritualistic or
soul-cultural) but the machinery involved in both cases is iden-
M01


THOMAS CRAVEN
241
na
tical—it consists simply in restricting the range of the significant
factors in art production and appreciation. By limiting the factors
to those whose understanding rests upon special training or unusual
experience, the number of the elect is considerably lessened, and
the prestige of the chosen few is correspondingly enhanced. That
part of aesthetic creativeness which is exempt from ordinary human
conflicts, or which can be made to appear so, becomes the very
marrow of significant values. Technique, essentially a matter for
artists or a handful of dilettantes with plenty of time for inves-
tigation, is accordingly a field already prepared, and this field,
when judiciously fenced in, is soon completely isolated from vulgar
understanding. It only remains then for the aristocrats to drag
into their exclusive little province the values belonging to the
whole of art, and to present them as attributes of a minor tech-
nical issue. Furthermore, any technical factor, when disguised
in terms of physiological mechanics or psychology, can be mag-
nified to an extraordinary degree. “The purification of art” was
the fine name given to this process of dehumanization; and the
great majority of those interested in painting made an effort,
irrespective of the true nature of their beliefs, to advance the
idea. It was a captivating fallacy, and to be looked upon as “in
the know,” one was forced to subscribe to the pompous chatter
about abstraction, empathy, dynamic colour, significant form, and
what not.
I doubt if there has ever been a more striking example of the
suppression of individual intelligence by group pressure, and I
could name a dozen exceptional artists who submitted for the time
to the petty tyranny of cocksure aesthetes and the devotees of
popular cults. The reason is not far to seek. Talent is a mystery,
and the technique through which talent manifests itself is equally
mysterious to the uninitiate. The young artist, innocent of the
mechanical principles of his craft, and the unenlightened layman
are therefore eager to seize upon any explanation offering a solu-
tion of the mystery, and to welcome the leadership of the specious
dialectician. When we take into account the common tendency
toward self-aggrandizement, we shall the more readily understand
why the most acceptable explanation would be one which magnifies
the difficulties of appreciation. The young artist and the lay-
man are alike in their desire for prestige, and are inclined to adopt


242 DAUMIER AND THE NEW SPIRIT
exalted theories, especially if these theories make no demands on
hard sense, and may be paraded as evidence of superiority. The
various cults founded on the technique of line and colour organi-
zation raised mediocre ability to a glorious eminence, and provided
the possessor—and the appreciator as well—with imposing argu-
ments for personal distinction. To be "highly sensitive" in an
esoteric and extravagant sense was the supreme honour, and any
painter ingenious enough to erect a precious mythology round a
few lines, or daubs of colour, was assured of an enviable position.
Thus the artist experienced the pleasure of triumphing over his
confrères, and the appreciator gained the reputation for rare judge-
ment and acumen. There is no need to go further into details—
all of us, I think, are now familiar with the machinery of talent-
sublimation, and most painters of intelligence have at last per-
ceived that foolish exploitation inevitably leads to a disastrous
impasse. The business of reading cosmic values into inconse-
quential performances is not dead—it has fallen like a blessing
on the photographers, and it is the mainstay of certain types of
modernist collectors—but it is no longer a menace to progress.
The separation of technique from meaning, that is to say, of
the material elements from the imaginative content of form, was
the outcome of an abnormal development of one of the universal
characteristics of art. Abstraction, together with the elaboration
of experiences, has been truly referred to as "the very soul of
artistic struggle”; it contains the characteristics of all constructive
processes-once we admit that art is not mechanical imitation-
and the steps from experience to expression are not fundamentally
different from those in other departments of mental activity. Nor-
mally the result of abstraction and its attendant spiritual synthesis
is something objectively valuable. That is its biological func-
tion—it is merely a means to an end. Art divorced from teleology
is comparable to any one of those distortions of normal processes
which make for insanity. When the means, for instance, of sexual
satisfaction are removed from actual experience, the mind of the
victim begins to wander into a world of fantasy, and the result is
an ineffectual vision which, instead of attaining an objective and
valuable end, curses the afflicted individual with an endless array
of extravagant subjectivities. The parallel in art is the separation
of the technical procedure of abstraction and elaboration from


THOMAS CRAVEN
243
experience on the one hand, and from intelligible meaning on the
other. Valuations, at once purely arbitrary and subjective, over-
whelm all effort, and finally terminate in the complete negation of
objective achievement. This curious perversion of talent is also
accompanied by a steady decrease of creative energy, and we find
to-day that many of those artists who so recently championed the
cause of abstraction and ridiculed the idea of objective meaning in
aesthetics, have passed off the stage, carrying with them for con-
solation a shallow baggage of cynicism. Many, however, have
come to grips with the subjective fetish, and have returned to earth
again—wiser, perhaps, for their experience. To those the future.
Daumier brought his great work to its conclusion before the
mania for technical speculation had alienated art from humanity.
He had told his story completely, definitely, and with gigantic
incision, before the difficulties of Cézanne's message had been con-
verted into a philosophy. One has only to examine the beautiful
reproductions in M Escholier's volume to see how Daumier's
drawing and painting reflect the virility and thoroughly healthy
nature of his mind. In his art there is not the slightest evidence
of any cult of special meanings or transcendental theories. Such
abstractions as “organization for its own sake,” with its con-
sequent train of rationalizations, were as foreign to his genius as
they were to the image-making brain of his aesthetic antithesis,
William Blake.
Blake and Daumier, diametrically opposed in their emotional
attitudes, have at least one noteworthy resemblance: neither artist
sets up a barrier of technique between himself and his world. With
both of these men the implements of presentation are never per-
mitted to obscure the underlying intention, and means become an
end in only a most temporary fashion. No painter, of course, can
afford to be negligent of his processes, but the true artist recognizes
that technique is only an intermediary between his experiences,
his subjects—and his creative end.
In Daumier I find a lesson that bears directly on the confusions
of modernist tendencies. This lesson is twofold. In the first place,
he exposes the futility of technical subjectivities. An analysis of
his art from a purely structural point of view reveals the fact
that his organizations in plane and line are superior, as such, to
practically the whole of that great mass of subsequent work which


244
DAUMIER AND THE NEW SPIRIT
PPY
has been done with the sole purpose of proving how interesting
the abstraction can really be made. The conclusions to be drawn
from this comparison cannot be developed in detail in a brief
essay, and for the present a general observation will have to suffice.
The abstractions of the Cubists and other recent schools are, at
bottom, founded upon abstractions, and being separated from
experience by a double degree, are not so stimulating, even in a
technical sense, as the primary symbols employed in representative
delineation.
Second, Daumier's work is living testimony to the profound im-
portance of subject-matter, and to the great benefits derived by
the artist who attaches himself to well-grounded interests and
convictions, and adheres to the character of his early impressions.
The French painter's straightforward narrowness of response to his
environment has always seemed to me to be decidedly advantageous
to individual expression. Artists from all quarters of the globe
flock to Paris, and struggle sedulously to acquire the "cosmopolitan
touch”; the Frenchman, perfectly satisfied with his own country,
smiles at his foreign imitators, paints pictures which have the un-
mistakable stamp of his own soil, and thus perpetuates the spirit
of art. The Frenchman is proud of his provincialism, and affixes
the Gallic seal to everything he touches. If you remind him that
his amazing fertility in abstract painting has its origin in certain
tendencies of the Italian Renaissance, he will reply that he has
given this expression the flavour of his own land—and that is
enough.
From this I venture to add a corollary for the benefit of painters
on this side of the Atlantic. Is the young American ambitious to
become an artist, or is he content to sink himself in a poverty-
stricken dilettantism? Is he to hang his reputation on the latest
fads from Paris, or is he to profit by the profound example of
the greater Frenchmen such as Daumier, and develop the mean-
ings of his own land and kind? If the young American feels
within his heart that he must go to France, then I advise him, by
all means to go, but to spend most of his time in the Louvre. Let
him study the masters both of the old art and the new, but if he
desires to function as a creator, let him return to the life into
which he can enter emotionally, and let him forget the existence


THOMAS CRAVEN
245
of the French capital, and the quarter where every conceivable
romanticism is professionally nourished.
The time has come when the intelligent layman can no longer
be persuaded that art is a bodiless abstraction, a shadowy affair
twice removed from experience and composed of Parisian technique
and metaphysical sophistries. The idea that there is a centre of
culture which automatically exudes the flavour of art is a delusion
and a snare. Art, on the contrary, is not produced by culture-
it is the child of new evaluations of common things, and is beyond
the reach of those who are slaves to the impulses of others.
THOMAS CRAVEN


BRIEFER MENTION
Mark ONLY, by T. F. Powys (12mo, 268 pages; Knopf: $2.50). The
disturbed, troubled, equivocal after-taste left by this formidable story
creates a sort of feverish craving for more dark strange meat from the
same homely spit. The blending of cruel insight with chuckling Puck.
like merriment, the blending of subterranean mysticism with vignettes of
clayish realism worthy of Bewick, produce in retrospect that sort of
uneasy furtive digestion that one may imagine some fish-eating creature
to feel who has tasted flesh for the first time. There is something so
novel, so completely unanticipated and unprepared for, in the style of this
writer, that one feels that nothing outside the circle of his own genius
offers any assistance to an analysis of the appetite he provokes and satisfies.
the blending nding of cruel insick strange meat file story
When The Bough Breaks, by Naomi Mitchison (12mo, 318 pages;
Houghton Mifflin : $2.50). Mrs Mitchison so uses her creative imagina-
tion and her ability to tell a story that these short narratives evoke the
Rome of Vercingetorix or of Attalus with extraordinary vividness. Her
Goths and Nordics and Italians are much like the shrewd savages of
the twentieth century, and the spice of strangeness in the setting adds
to the comfort of recognition in the characters. There is a faint tendency
toward bathos. Yet these tales glow with a personality which shines
clear and bright in the charming Note on Some Books which concludes
the volume.
MY LIFE, As Told By The Peasant Anissia to T. A. Kouzminskaya, Revised
and Corrected by Leo Tolstoy, translated with notes and a preface by
Charles Salomon (12mo, 136 pages; Duffield: $1.50) is a tale represent-
ative of the miserable existence of an oppressed people. Not only are
characters clearly drawn by their actions in this unadorned narrative:
customs are epitomized. The story is morally beautiful because, full of
sorrow, it is yet without bitterness.
ON BOARD THE “MORNING STAR,” by Pierre MacOrlan, translated by
Malcolm Cowley (illus., 12mo, 120 pages; Albert & Charles Boni: $2).
A suave translation of a suave pirate story, written not for children, but
for "sophisticated people who are capable of enjoying grotesque, cruel
and supernatural adventures." MacOrlan is a literary man. His effects
are hot-house and technical. His sadism, debauchery, perversions, and
outbursts of lyric are not meant to carry as such beyond the page; even
his plagues and murders are purely decorative. The illustrations by
Daragnès have precisely the same faculty of glibness and invention. This
book, chapters of which originally appeared in Broom, places charm
before reality, and attains thereby a quality of appeal which remains in
the mind long after the details have focussed, as they tend to do, into
a spot.
his planes have pree which oriereby a quali


BRIEFER MENTION
247
An Island CHRONICLE, by William Cummings (12mo, 302 pages; Knopf:
$2.50) has as setting a Portuguese community on an island off the New
England coast. This is in every respect an unusual book, a story told
with the sure economy that best gives form to an original and fine sub-
stance, and that is possible only to mastery.
Black BABYLON, by Dorothy Dow (12mo, 90 pages; Boni & Liveright:
$1.75) takes its title from a poem in which the black race is apotheosized.
This poem is Lindsayish in a coarsely imitative fashion; but it has a
vague vigour, at least when the black race speaks for itself in interspersed,
genuine blues. What is more wonderful than anything in the book is
how a poetess who has remembered a line of that fierce poetry can fill
the rest of her book with feebly piping expostulations about the least
distinguishable of her private emotions.
SPRING THUNDER AND OTHER Poems, by Mark Van Doren (12mo, 69 pages;
Seltzer: $1.50). Although the author temerariously thwarts the current
of rhetorical emphasis, failing sometimes to create a tune of the kind
which pertains to either prose or verse; although he assumes large licence
in making the adjective a noun, and at other times, a verb; in making
nouns, verbs; and transitive verbs, intransitive; although he not infre-
quently couples with the "why and where," "far and high” manner of
writing, a "midwife cat,” “the mountain is me” vernacular, he neverthe-
less presents enticingly, the world of the weasel, the crow, and the chip-
munk; depicts “the lantern on the snow," "behind each clod, a mouse's
ear"; and in bringing to us eagerly the atmosphere of a loved place, the
attitude of a loved human being, modifies our consciousness of a some-
times faulty taste in subject and in treatment.
AN OUTLAND PIPER, by Donald Davidson (12mo, 82 pages; Houghton
Mifflin : $1.25). When Mr Davidson is not too obviously straining for
the bizarre, he occasionally rises to poetry of dignity, beauty, and orig-
inality. Traces of various of the Modernists—of men so far apart as
Vachel Lindsay and Carl Sandburg—are to be observed in his work; yet
he lifts a voice which, while limited in range and scope, is unmistakably
his own and at its best expresses an appealingly imaginative interpreta-
tion of life.
Our Dead Selves, by Paul Eldridge (12mo, 68 pages; Boullion-Biggs :
$1.50) is a series of epitaphs, commentaries, and afterthoughts of bird,
beast, and flower, an Anthology of the Lowly as the author chooses to
call his poems. Mr Eldridge is evidently wedded to the bitter muse,
but by sheer reiteration of ironic gesture conviction is reduced to attitude
and the moral laboured. To call Hope the gurgle of Death's laughter
is a trifle unsatisfying. Technically the verses are executed with a poetic
distinction seldom found where content so easily invites the merely clever
and the meretricious. Mr Eldridge's rhythms and cadences are sensitive
and finished. He inclines too much, however, toward the ready-made
image and the threadbare adjective.


248
BRIEFER MENTION
Costa's DAUGHTER, by Konrad Bercovici (12mo, 127 pages; Pascal Covici:
$2). Even the wild, wild people conform quickly to standard. Marga
the heroine spits, tames bears, and sighs openly for the swain virile
enough to conquer her own proud spirit. He finally arrives, and after a
few taunts, throws Marga face downward upon the stage and with a
sharp knife, shears off her long tresses (the big scene). After that, of
course, there is nothing for Marga to do but to marry the man. It might,
as they say, "go great” on Broadway, which is not overly particular, but
the sophisticated reader is suspicious of the too-familiar pattern of this
piece.
PUNCHINELLO, A Ballet, by James N. Rosenberg (12mo, 92 pages; Ken-
nerly: $2). A little play not meant to be read, the author says, but “to
be danced, pranced," et cetera, with “titillating music," et cetera, and
“scenes to bewitch the eye.” The arts of the theatre often make unlikely
dialogues acceptable and possibly something can be done for this one,
though it is only too true, it cannot be read.
Plays: Fourth Series, by Jacinto Benavente, translated with an introduction
by John Garrett Underhill (12mo, 224 pages; Scribner: $2.50). It is only
the final play in this collection which to any degree justifies the trans-
lator's windy enthusiasm. Field of Ermine has its moments of drama,
and if its characters are types, they sometimes behave in a typically
human way. The three remaining plays are of slight if varying merit,
and make tiresome reading.
ning plays attimes behaverents of dri
ECHO DE Paris, by Laurence Housman (12mo, 72 pages; Appleton: $1)
reconstructs, with delicate imaginativeness, the author's last meeting with
Oscar Wilde. Its painstaking but never superficial paradox and wit
grown wistful are conceived with so tactful an apprehension of the
protagonist's conversational quality that although they are well within
the perhaps dubious Wilde legend they have the glamour of reassuring
authenticity. There is a touch of symbolic drama at the end, sufficiently
minor to be commensurate with so slight a sketch. It is unfortunate that
the foot-note with its polemic disturbs the sympathetic tonality of the
book; for the “dialogue” has aesthetic truth.
The East Window, and The Car Window, by Bert Leston Taylor, with
decorations by C. B. Falls (12mo, 225 pages; Knopf: $2.50) reveals the
popular purveyor of gay ephemera as a master of the miniature essay.
Expertly gauged not to tire, but to stimulate, a mixed and hurried audience,
these small papers yet show a thoughtful and unstinted care made eloquent
in limpid prose.
The LONDON ADVENTURE, by Arthur Machen (12mo, 170 pages; Knopf:
$2). The author virtually confesses he was hounded into the writing
of this book. Like all skilled writers, once fairly upon the task, he
forgets at times his fatigue; but unfortunately the sympathetic reader
never forgets it. Mr Machen should rest until he finds a subject that
writes itself.


BRIEFER MENTION
249
PREJUDICES, FOURTH SERIES, by H. L. Mencken (12mo, 301 pages; Knopf:
$2.50). The best article in this entertaining collection is the first, where
the author bestows upon the Anglo-Saxon race, as they have manifested
their breed both in England and in America, the soundest drubbing they
have ever received from a cudgel not held in Irish hands. It is more
difficult to derive any intelligent pleasure from such quaint jests as that
Dante intended his Divine Comedy to be “a flaming satire upon the whole
Christian hocus-pocus.” To appreciate Mr Mencken's Prejudices at their
wittiest and gayest, one must read the Meditations in the Desert in this
volume. Chesterton himself, with all his penchant for hocus-pocus, could
not be more eloquent in defence of Beer than Mr Mencken in defence
of Blutwurst, Pumpernickel, and all the parquetry of the abolished
Saloon.
The SHORT STORY'S MUTATIONS, by Frances Newman (12mo, 332 pages;
Huebsch: $2.50). A well-chosen collection of sixteen stories, with intro-
ductory comments to each by the compiler and (when the authors are
not English) translator. The guiding principle of selection seems to have
been one of worldliness, even Hans Andersen's contribution not conflict-
ing with Petronius, Boccaccio, or Morand. The thesis that species arise
by sudden mutations, instead of by gradual evolution, is not remotely
proved in the author's comments; but in recompense her (despite much
baggage) running style makes many sprightly leaps across the centuries,
soaring over as many as twenty authors on one page, and dropping ideas
everywhere as it goes. Her translations are graceful. Her original prose
uses a kind of breezy tautology, as when, instead of “not standard short
stories,” she writes, “not yet Short-stories according to any definition
that would be accepted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for a
degree.”
Troubled s But would rathe bite whiled reviews he ne dare expecole M
Points of View, by Stuart P. Sherman (12mo, 363 pages ; Scribner: $2).
Troubled by vicious contemporary hounds, Mr Sherman would not have
them shot, but would rather extract their teeth, probably hoping thereby
to obviate the danger of the bite while retaining the vitality of the bark.
In the present collection of essays and reviews he is entertainingly and
reassuringly sane, but seldom brilliantly so. One dare expect even
moderation to be counselled with more creative fire. On the whole Mr
Sherman is not a critic, but a pedagogue; and like all pedagogues he is
a vulgarizer, carrying the torch not onwards, but down. His greatest
value is his desire to mellow, rather than counteract, the cultural values
of the day. His greatest weakness is his proneness to believe that if we
write “Man is dignified” we thereby produce before his very eyes the
dignity of man.
MODERN EssayS: SECOND SERIES, selected by Christopher Morley (12mo,
457 pages ; Harcourt, Brace: $2). There are in this volume, a number
of illuminated, signally great essays, “generous qualities of mind and
temperament” being evinced by preface and biographical notes. However,
an anthologist's “tenderness” so “cordial” as not to be literary is shown
in the inclusion of certain minor, badly wrought essays.


250
BRIEFER MENTION
Bliss Carman, by Odell Shepard (12mo, 184 pages; McClelland & Stewart,
Toronto: $2). Like all Americans, Bliss Carman is of good family,
being descended from one of Emerson's great grandfathers. Yet his
stock is Loyalist. His poetry, likewise, is unwarped by any break with
the English past. As Mr Shepherd puts it, “He seems to be playing on
a penny whistle until one hears the tune.” Carman calls the tune “Uni-
trinianism.” It is really Celtic, less Celtic however than Greek. Greek
against Canadian maple. Perhaps less Greek than Romany. Carman
almost seems to have Gipsy stock, at least in October. Odell Shepherd
in revealing him as a poet of at least third rank, edifies the public who
remember his hero only as one who flashed the 'nineties into dazzled
Bostonese eyes.
Lire of William CONGREVE, by Edmund Gosse, with prefatory note by the
biographer (12mo, 181 pages; Scribner: $2.25). With a discovering and
elegant adroitness as different from the sometimes dulness of biography
as "a crystal is from a jelly-fish,” Mr Gosse has given us in this revised
and enlarged edition of the memoir published in 1888, a corrected insight
into Congreve's work, an enticing impression of his "friendliness," a
vivid presentation of the Collier controversy, and a knowledge of early
eighteenth century drama and theatrical production. He has pondered as
a light upon his plays, Congreve's work as a novelist and as a poet, and
has rescued from oblivion much that ought to have been preserved two
hundred years ago. Admitting that Congreve "made a helot of himself
by producing the worst specimen of the false ode on record,” yet reviving
in us, "the wild satiric garden of his drama” the consummate flower of
which comedy is “not to be turned over but to be re-read until the psycho-
logical subtlety of the sentiment, the perfume of the delicately chosen
phrases, the music of the sentences, have produced the full effect upon the
nerves,” Mr Gosse has truly in this most complete life of "the greatest
of our comic dramatists,” been “patient to finish as well as spirited to
sketch.”
Roosevelt, PROPHET OF UNITY, by Hermann Hagedorn (8vo, 142 pages ;
Scribner: $1) is an attempt to appraise the late Theodore Roosevelt's
dimensions as a leader and a statesman. In order to place him, the author
says, “there must be a bold sweeping aside of incidentals in order that
the essentials may appear unobstructed.” It is a question whether inci-
dentals can, at this period, be distinguished from essentials. At least
Mr Hagedorn has proved one of his most important points—that Roose-
velt did great service in inspiring men about him to believe in their
work, and in seeing with a national rather than a political eye the issues
which presented themselves during his presidency.
People You Know, by Young Boswell (8vo, 341 pages; Boni & Liveright:
$2.50). Very New Yorky; hasty, something of everything, and absolutely
no standard. Short interviews originally published in the New York
Tribune with all the people mentioned in the journalistic “Who's Who."
In the newspaper these little sketches seemed cleverer than the surrounding
matter, but in book-form the absence of values is disconcerting.


BRIEFER MENTION
251
THE AMERICAN MIND IN Action, by Harvey O'Higgins and Dr E. H.
Reede (12mo, 336 pages; Harper: $3). In action and distr-action is
really what Mr O'Higgins is talking about. He takes a number of prom-
inent American men and women and shows how Puritanism warped their
presumably normal development. He then traces the compensatory activ-
ities which were sought in the effort to find mental stability and happi-
ness. This is a valuable book. But one may suspect it a little because
it works its hypothesis so hard. Yet it does seem to show that so much
of what Americans do to occupy them in action is an effort really at dis-
traction, since current manners and customs require a rigorous subordina-
tion of much that is insistent and primitive in human nature.
WHAT IS MODERNISM? by Leighton Parks (12mo, 154 pages ; Scribner: $1).
Dr Parks does not want to convince any one of anything. That is vulgar.
He wants to have it recognized that the fundamentalist points are not
fundamental, and that Modernism is not modern. He himself is quite
through with the concerns of the nineteenth century, and though some-
times he plays chess with the words "natural law” in the eighteenth cen-
tury way, at other times he is really modern. That is to say, he talks
about unconscious psychical phenomena. In years to come other liberals
will declare these catchwords in turn outmoded, while devising other
substitutes “just as good as” a theology which is not to their taste. So
long as dialectic is dismissed as vulgar, aesthetics might be used in its
place against the liberals, were not bad taste as invulnerable as unreason.
But it is as invulnerable.
ere has becervice to the mosphere of le. fingered, febrated
A MAGICIAN AMONG THE SPirits, by Houdini (illus., 8vo, 294 pages;
Harper : $4). There has been so much wild spook-talk of late that
Houdini has rendered a real service to the world by producing a volume
which goes so far towards clearing the atmosphere of ghosts. There is,
indeed, something amusing in the spectacle of this nimble-fingered, feather-
heeled magician investigating the supernatural claims of each celebrated
medium in turn. Houdini, quite obviously, is one for the truth, the whole
truth, and nothing but the truth.
vards cleari spectacle of this Jaims of each cehe whole
MAKING OF MAN, by Sir Oliver Lodge (12mo, 170 pages; Doran: $2).
In so far as any optimistic voice in to-day's blind alley of positivism is
pleasing, Sir Oliver Lodge's enthusiasm for that "far-off, divine event"
for which humanity supposedly is scheduled is possibly a definite good.
But Sir Oliver has not, as he supposes, broken with positivism; he has
merely failed to keep up with it, to face its own logical conclusion, that
the universe is a unity, either all mind or all matter. To prophesy of
mystery in the dualistic terms of mind and matter is merely added
confusion. Indeed, how are we to take a philosopher who would speak
of The Way and can yet, in this year of grace after Kant, utter the
profundity that "we are beginning to wonder what our own relation is
to these two abstractions (Space and Time)" { A philosopher who quotes
St Paul and tells us "everything is in process of becoming"? Where is
Sankara and where is Lao-Tze? But Sir Oliver Lodge, being a true
evolutionist, can look ahead only with the poetry of F. W. H. Myers.


THE THEATRE
| VOYAGE South and West does not encourage any belief in
H the appetite for the theatre. It is not merely the New
Yorkist habit of sneering at plays two years after they have left
Broadway which makes the outside theatre so ridiculous. It is
its thinness, its insignificance in the eyes of the locals—it is their
quite remarkable capacity to live without the theatre. Milwaukee
at the moment of writing awaits The Goose Hangs High;
Atlanta has a theatre; in Cleveland the bunco game was played
with The MIRACLE with such success that the very guarantors of
the "venture” have cashed in and will donate nobly to artistic
endeavours. From a billboard I gathered that "cloister seats” to
that production sold at four dollars. Chicago has a considerable
number of plays. My luck that ouside of No! No! NANETTE!
nothing seemed exciting. The Show OFF is the only other attrac-
tive work, and is said to be even better done than in New York.
To Chicago the theatre has importance. To the rest, the movies
(they at least do not vary their casts) and the radio and the cross-
word puzzle.
ете
Well, if they don't care for it, to tell the truth I don't think
much of it myself; New York is not an arid waste only because a
few good pieces stay long and because the mere multitude of bad
and indifferent makes it appear flourishing. An easy bracket of
two plays is The Youngest and Mrs PARTRIDGE PRESENTS.
They are both likable and pleasant, and the second one, by the less
experienced dramatists, seems to grow out of a conflict of character.
It does dubious things to the people involved, but who cares?
THE YOUNGEST has what has become an obligatory scene since
the success of Dulcy and To The Ladies—a rather wild and
funny Fourth of July oration. But the motives in the play, which
could have been associated with the characters, are reduced to the
pathetic limits of a young woman who virtually says "Watch me
create a big scene in act two!”
The surprise success is CANDIDA.
It sprang out of special


GILBERT SELDES
253
men
ire
matinees and has the honour of snatching Miss Katherine Cornell
out of the fell clutch of Belasco, and without an aesthetic bruise
on her to show the extent of her servitude. Miss Clare Eames is
droll and makes Prossie's scene with Marchbanks a little less dis-
quieting than it is to read, by the excellence of her farce. In five
years she will be doing all of Miss Westley's parts perfectly. With
both the men a little insufferable, Candida herself becomes obscure
and Miss Cornell ought to be crowned alternately with ivy and
bricks for what she has done with the part. It is extraordinarily
moving; certain gestures, certain inflections make your heart grow
soft. But what is there in CANDIDA to justify our tears? Read it,
or see Irene Rooke play it—and nothing of that emotion transpires.
Candida is wise and sane, but neither her wisdom nor her sanity is
thrilling; she has no nerves in the text. Miss Cornell gave her a
throbbing sensibility, and did it miraculously. Had I ever liked
the play much, I should have found her performance miraculous;
as it is, I found it only magnificent, and a little misplaced.
Al Jolson is back. At one moment he was reported ill, but he had
his great day and he has recovered to enjoy it fully. The Winter
Garden is gilded and not gay, but Big Boy is all there. I can't
believe it's the best show Jolson ever had, but there were moments
in it when all my memories of Gus and Inbad the Porter vanished
before the present wonder. Hardly anything is new, yet every-
thing is fresh, and there is no letting down of the dynamo which
drives him on. I cannot recall Jolson ever better in his text; his
stories and his quips are excellent, and his long report of his
adventure with Pola Negri is wild and superbly impudent and up-
roarious. It was interesting to note that Jolson's dancing seems
to have nothing to do with the music, as his gestures in general
have nothing to do with the words he sings. They are, that is,
counterparts, not illustrations, and are a thousand times more
exciting than the usual thing which comes to revue from the
gestures of the concert hall.
But all this is merely making notes on the margin of Jolson. A
thousand such notes leave us still blundering around the central
fact. I have suspected that he is possessed, but that only pushes the
mystery a step farther back, because I cannot identify the spirit
that possesses him. It doesn't matter. It does matter that he
10
ems


254
THE THEATRE
gives himself over utterly to his audience, that there are no re-
serves, that his cry is a song and his leap is still a dance, and that
nothing has spoiled him, as apparently nothing can stale or wither
him. He was absolutely triumphant on his return; the sceptics
and the followers of strange gods fell over themselves recounting
his glories. Some of us never doubted at all.
e
THE FIREBRAND I saw late, and by that time the process of farc-
ing on the part of Mr Schildkraut had become notable, and served
chiefly to indicate how legitimate was the comedy of Ralph Mor-
gan as the Duke. Mr Schildkraut may have a claim to comic
honours, but his performance now is dangerous. He claims (in a
news story) to think of Benvenuto first as an artist; I can't say
what Mr Mayer had in mind when he wrote the play, but as it
stands, Benvenuto is first of all a man about town and a good one-
that is, one who knows exactly what a wench is worth and what
exactly she can give in delight in comparison with the delight of
making a beautiful salt-cellar or casting a Perseus. Mr Schild-
kraut, however, plays him as a very bad artist; one who minces
with his tools and has neither the intelligence of a craftsman nor
the ardour of an artist. He plays him, in short, as if Benvenuto
were as an artist on the same level as Mr Schildkraut is as an actor.
It happens that Cellini was a boaster and a fool, and sought cheap
applause at times; but these were the excesses of an abundant
spirit, not the weaknesses of a puny man.
It goes without saying by this time that The FIREBRAND is good
intelligent entertainment. The iron hand of the producer ought
to be laid on it again for a moment, that is all.
GILBERT SELDES


MODERN ART
THAT sternly-inquiring foreign gentleman whose severe eyes
1 fix upon me always as I write for The Dial must have long
since remarked the exclusively foreign flavour of my chronicles so
far this winter. “Matisse?'' he must have remarked, “Yes, very
good. And Seurat and Mestrovic! We know all about them.
But what about you? Do you have no art of your own, you
Americans ?" And doubtless he thinks I have been holding some-
thing back. I have been holding nothing back. The season holds
itself back. It becomes more and more the fad to postpone every-
thing in the way of a challenge until the winter is half over; and
every artist apparently hates to be the first to break the ice.
Now at last things begin; not clamorously, not authoritatively,
but, enfin, they begin. Kenneth Hayes Miller and Bernard
Karfiol have dared to be poetical, Yasuo Kuniyoshi has dared to
be himself, and Oscar Bluemmer, alone of this quartet, has dared
to be more than himself. All these, in spite of the names, are
Americans. Such as they are they represent us. Therefore they
go upon the record. No one of the four is a sensation; but one
must begin somewhere.
Mr Miller and Mr Karfiol attest the difficulties of poetry in this
land. No one dares claim they scale the heights with anything
resembling security. They attempt to soar. They get under way
-and then something goes wrong with the machinery. They nose-
dip to earth again, apropos of nothing. Air-pockets, I suppose.
Mr Miller, in particular, comes terrifying croppers. Wrists dis-
located, thighs stretched to unheard-of lengths, and injuries that
the sensitive scarcely dare look upon. The casualties this year, I
think, are slightly under his usual. Therefore there must be an
improvement. It is so slight that I am not sure, and so, in spite
of Mr Munson and the editor of The Dial who say that Ameri-
can critics are too soft, I prefer to err, at least in such a dull season
as this, upon the side of kindness. I even dare to mention him to
the sternly-inquiring foreign gentleman already spoken of, who,
unless he be of those who hold there is no such thing as a minor
poet, may rejoice to know that we have one, in fact, two, trying


256
MODERN ART
CII
SO
for the ideal. Of these two Mr Karfiol pleases me the better.
Several of his canvases I could relish living with. Even less than
Mr Miller's does his poetry depend upon a theme. Indeed, he
never aspires to a theme. The mere act of wielding a brush,
apparently, puts him into a softened state, and this auto-intoxica-
tion appears to be all he asks for. I don't know enough of the
teachings of Freud to accuse definitely such a procedure, but even
a kind critic in a dull season must hold such a use for a paint-
brush to be at least-suspicious. However, Mr Karfiol is young
and ideas may crystallize in him. Already one of his pictures, that
of a young boy day-dreaming at a window, seems to stand for
something to some people and it is upon that work they build their
hopes for the artist's future.
It may be that Oscar Bluemmer, too, is to be rated with the
poets. In that case he's an odd one. But then, oddity in a poet
is no crime. He began life, I'm told, as a socialist. He lived
over in New Jersey, in Paterson, Passaic, or some such place, and
conceived a horror of factories. He painted pictures in which the
factories were lividly vermilion, the grass plots, when there
chanced to be any, undiluted chrome-green, and smoke was indi-
cated solidly in Vandyck brown. Some people said such things
couldn't be and others said they could be. But there was not
much dispute about them and very little demand for such factories
upon the part of collectors. Consequently Bluemmer saw some
hard times, for he insisted upon painting. Lately in some mys-
terious fashion, circumstances eased for him and he put in a peace-
ful period painting in New England. The exhibition at Neu-
mann's was the result, and although the town did not fall en masse
for the collection, I, personally, fell for the collection en masse. I
liked practically every one of the little water-colours. Here there
was none of the mental fumbling of our other poets, but every-
thing straight as a die. The old ferocity was not entirely gone,
but something gentle played on all the surfaces. It was as though
Bluemmer had lived two lives and one of his experiences excused
or mocked the other. In effect, something Chinese happened;
though of course when it comes to super-imposed experiences any
American to any Chinaman is a mere babe. But enough of the
water-colours sold, in spite of the high prices—why must new
artists put such high prices between themselves and their admirers
WO.
WC S
W Some
Urse


HENRY MCBRIDE
257
and incidentally, between themselves and fame?—to insure an-
other season of repose to Bluemmer. Both he and Karfiol qualify
for further attention here.
And now, unless the foreign gentleman be already fast asleep,
I must ask him to specially note Kuniyoshi, the most significant
of the four, and one of the rare few in America to achieve a stroke
of his own. One of his works was included in the American show
in Paris last summer and, I'm told, none of the Frenchmen looked
at it. That's not in the least surprising. Kuniyoshi is one of
those you have to grow used to. He is like the first olive—some-
what queer, but as undoubtedly nourishing once you get past the
first taste. He was educated here and lives in the thick of a young
art colony that goes in for all the new things just as soon as they
turn up, but Kuniyoshi is scarcely affected externally by their
enthusiasms. There is a bit of the early-American-decorative in
some of his arrangements of swimming maidens, but he has a
solidity of form and compactness in design that the early settlers
never dreamed of, and besides, a rich texture to his paint. His
best, this year, happens to be a self-portrait. The artist shows
himself at a window equipped for snapping the landscape with a
kodak and hooded with black. It is not so much in the way of a
literal likeness, but it seems to recall all the people who ever
wore hoods in Japanese art. You remember those people just
sauntering out into the snow in Japanese prints? Put in generally
for the sake of the rich, black spots the hoods made? Those are
the relatives Kuniyoshi now unconsciously admits. It is as neat an
instance of atavism as one could wish.
Henry McBRIDE
som
a


MUSICAL CHRONICLE
ARON COPLAND has been spending the last three years
studying with Mlle Nadia Boulanger in Paris. And Mlle
Boulanger brought honour both to herself and her sensitive pupil
by performing his Symphony for Organ and Orchestra with the
Damrosch band January the eleventh. The composition strongly
corroborates the witness of an individual musical determination
borne earlier in the season by Copland's piano passacaglia and his
Cat and Mouse. The large three-part work exhibits in fulness
two original lyric forms shadowed forth by the briefer pieces: the
one a sensitive, contemplative, pastoral vein, whimsical and tran-
quil in turn, a musical ideological early April with tender gurglings
from the ponds, chirps of a single bird, cool shadows, and, by poetic
licence, the fiddling of a grasshopper; the other a bold feeling for
strident, breathless, obsessive rhythm, for jerky precipitous motion
as advanced as anything in Strawinsky. The first of these veins
is evident in the symphony's introductory movement, and in the
middle section of the Scherzo; the second in the Scherzo-proper,
with its wildly hiccoughing brass, and in passages of the Finale.
Both are developed thanks to the guidance of an aristocratic sense
of form. Mr Copland knows with extraordinary clarity the bal-
ance between subjectivity and objectivity; between that which
unfurls according to his inner wish, and that which unfurls in
accordance with a necessity without himself. The first two move-
ments at least are stripped to essential sinewyness, and do not
touch ground, once they are begun, until they terminate. Par-
ticularly adroitly managed is the unexpected recapitulation of the
slightly modified first section of the Scherzo; and the counterpoint
of rhythms, three-four against four-four, in the last movement.
Besides, at all times Mr Copland's music has a thingness. One
remembers with special delight the first entrance of the organ
through the shimmering sounds of the harp; the flute, in the mid-
dle register, and the clarinet at the close of the Prelude; the
clarinet and bassoon in the middle section of the Scherzo; and
the moment in the Finale when the strings commence an ascending
figure of their own above the basso ostinato.


PAUL ROSENFELD
259
Occasionally, Mr Copland works a little too steadily in a few
tints—grey, whitey-grey, and greyish-green, and this is one of the
limitations of his art. For the cloistral, scholastic tone is his least
authentic, just as the machine hysteria of the Scherzo is perhaps
his most native contribution. Nor does the Finale satisfy us as
thoroughly as the earlier movements. More ambitious than the
others, it attempts to gather the various strains of the symphony
and bring them through to resolution; and although much of the
material is interesting, and the bitter and ferocious climaxes full
of power, the rounding does not seem to take place. The conclu-
sion, with its juxtaposition of themes in the style of d'Indy, has an
arbitrary feeling. But these are flyspecks. No American not yet
twenty-five years of age, not Glenway Wescott even, has won
artistic spurs more honourably and certainly than young Aaron
Copland of Brooklyn. He already stands with the earth-sprung
talents to which the civilized community can look for sustenance.
Strawinsky was a good thirty minutes late for rehearsal. The
handful of musicians assembled for Renard and Ragtime sat or
strolled languidly about on the atticky bare stage of Carnegie Hall.
The horn-player amused himself by blowing the cantilene from
Der Trompeter von Seckingen with fearful emphasis into the
cavernous dark auditorium, while a humorous someone at irregular
intervals struck loud banal accompanying chords on the piano.
There would be no opportunity of speaking with Strawinsky before
the rehearsal, I saw, and regretted the time I would have to wait
in order to get my interview. Then Strawinsky came rapidly onto
the stage from the wings, all swathed in hat, spectacles, muffler,
overcoat, spats, and walking-stick, and accompanied by three or
four secretarial and managerial personages. The man was a
shock of electricity-abrupt, impatient, energetic. In a minute
business was upon the entire assemblage. There was a sound of
peremptory orders; the group on the platform was in its chairs
underneath the conductor's stand; a little personage who looked
like someone in a Moscow Art Theatre performance rushed forward
to the composer and started stripping him of his coats and helping
him into a pink sweater-vest; Carlos Salzedo appeared at the key-
board of the piano; and Strawinsky, resembling a concentration of
Gustav Mahler and a member of the Russian Ballet, began re-


260
MUSICAL CHRONICLE
CO
zas
hearsing. If he had been late by half an hour, there was no lag.
gardliness at all in his mind, it appeared. Never a doubt as to
exactly what it was he wanted, and the means to arrive at his end.
He himself might not be able to play all the instruments assem-
bled before him; but he could tell the musicians how they could
get the effects wanted. The bassoonist had some difficulty with the
high notes. Strawinsky told him how he could reach them. At
the moment when the bass-drum enters, Strawinsky stopped the
orchestra. “Deeper," he said in German. The drummer struck
again. “No,” said Strawinsky. “It must sound the way it does
in the circus. You will need a heavier drumstick.” In passages
of complicated rhythm, he stopped the orchestra, sang the rhythm
very quietly, and then left the musicians to play it after him. Once
there was a dispute. He stuck his nose into the score, read a few
bars carefully, then said to the instrumentalist “You must make
it this way" and sang the notes. Most of his talking was done in
German, but he spoke French with Salzedo, Russian with one of
the men, and indicated the passages by numbers given in very
correct English. By the time ten minutes were elapsed I was
thoroughly enjoying the spectacle and sat careless of the delay.
The man was abrupt, impatient, energetic, no doubt, but never
ironic either of himself or of his interlocutors, and friendly in his
relations with the players. It was apparent they were working out
a little problem together, and Strawinsky had some suggestions
which might enable them all to solve it. A kind of interest
radiated out from him to the musicians, who began entering into
the spirit of the animal-comedy, and kindling Strawinsky in turn.
He commenced singing the words in Russian, even danced a little
up on the conductor's stand in his pink sweater. Certainly, at
the more startling dramatic entrances his two feet leaped off the
ground together. At all times his arms mimed the rhythmic starts
and jerks, till one could actually perceive where his music came
from. Renard the Fox, there was no doubt, was himself, grinning
from behind his glasses in ferocious joy, and plucking a feather out
of the silly vain old cock with every accent of the drunken score.
When the rehearsal was over, I followed to the stand Salzedo,
who is quite as admirable a friend as a musician, if that is pos-
sible, and was presented. The little Stanislawsky type was help-
ing on with coats and hat, and I found myself before an oval,
olive, excessively sensitive face from out some fine old Chinese


PAUL ROSENFELD
261
mar
Was
ce
егу
print, and a man who was at once nervous, intelligent, and master
of himself. I heard myself saying in French that I had some
questions which I wanted to ask him, and that I regretted I spoke
French and German equally badly; and was relieved to hear
Strawinsky answering quietly that we would converse in the
language we both spoke. Several Steinway piano-movers having
taken possession of the stage, we retreated with Salzedo to the
first rows of the parterre, and across the backs of the chairs I
began explaining to him that I had heard he had said he was
striving to keep all personal emotion out of his music, that I was
puzzled by the expression, and wanted to know more of what he
meant.
He measured me a moment, then said suddenly, “We are going
to exchange rôles. It is I who am going to interview you. I want
you to begin by telling me exactly what it is you mean by 'personal
emotion.”
I laughed. “But Mr Strawinsky, I am not a genius. That is
too much.”
"Neither am I,” he retorted. Then after a moment, “Suppose
you went out and narrowly escaped being run over by a trolley-
car. Would you have an emotion ?”
“I should hope so, Mr Strawinsky."
"So should I. But if I went out and narrowly escaped being
run over by a trolley-car, I would not immediately rush for some
music paper and try to make something out of the emotion I had
just felt. You understand.”
“Yes, of course. One has other things to do. But do you im-
pose any intellectual theory of emotion or non-emotion upon your-
self when you compose ?"
"Intellectual theory," he cried, as if I had wished to accuse him
of cretinism, "certainly not! I don't think I go to work twice in
the same fashion. Besides, what is this all about personal emotion?
All emotion goes back to the personal equation. What is emo-
tional for one man is not emotional for another. But there are
certain artists who go out before the world and commence crying,"
and here he raised his arms with a look of disgust in his face,
“Oh, I am such a great artist, such a great artist! I have all these
wonderful feelings and these wonderful experiences. I see God
and Heaven knows what else.'"
“That's just impotence," I answered. “But what I am trying


262
MUSICAL CHRONICLE
to find out, Mr Strawinsky, is whether you have any kind of idea
that certain things which we call feeling, or the heart, or the
soul, are passing out of life? You know, there are certain people
who are trying to strike the scientific attitude in living, and working
without pity, without sympathy, without desire, even—"
“That's utterly absurd,” he interrupted, "the very thing which
you are afraid of, and try to repress—that's the very thing which
is going to seize you in the end. Anyway, the form of the re-
pression is equivalent to the form of the expression. But of course
there is romanticism, and perhaps that is going out of life. But
in their very effort to escape from romanticism, people are com-
mitting the most grotesque errors. Take Schoenberg for example.
Schoenberg is really a romantic at heart who would like to get
away from romanticism, and what does he do? He takes to ad-
miring Aubrey Beardsley! Just think—he considers Aubrey Beard-
sley wonderful! It's unbelievable, isn't it? But even the ro-
mantic composers aren't as 'romantic' as people have tried to make
them. Schumann, for instance. I know I could play Schumann
for people so that he wouldn't have that particular sort of senti-
mentalism which we don't admire to-day. But then people would
say it wasn't Schumann.”
As he finished the speech, I became aware of another voice,
redolent of richest Avenue A, being poured into my ear, and heard
“Say young feller you got to get out of here if you don't want to
get run over,” and found several Steinway blues bearing down
upon me with a grand piano. By the time I had taken refuge
over the backs of the seats and gotten into Strawinsky's row, the
train of the conversation had been interrupted, and I had to com-
mence over again. This time I asked him whether he told himself
stories or saw pictures while he composed.
He looked at me a little maliciously for a moment, and shot
out "Is this a confession you are demanding of me?"
"Oh, Mr Strawinsky, I'm very bald, I see-"
"Well, if it is a confession you are demanding, here is the an-
swer, No! No! A thousand times, no!"
“But when you compose, is there not something which guides
you? A feeling of form? A sense of rhythm? Aren't you seek-
ing to draw a line about something which you feel has an existence
prior to your effort of composition ?"


PAUL ROSENFELD
263
rOWS
10TO
“I see what you mean," he said. “These are questions about
which the whole world is thinking. What interests me most of
all is construction. What gives me pleasure is to see how much
of my material I can get into line. I want to see what is coming.
I am interested first in the melody, and the volumes, and the instru-
mental sounds, and the rhythm. It is like this. It is like making
love to a woman.” Here he glanced about, perceived Mrs Salzedo
sitting a few rows back, apologized humorously for the Gallic
salt, and then resumed, “You find yourself you don't know how
in possession of, say, four bars of music. Well, the real musician
is the one who knows what there is to be done with these four bars,
knows what he can make out of them. Composition really comes
from the gift of being able to see what your material is capable of."
"But suppose, Mr Strawinsky, I hear one of your compositions,
and certain images of the street, or of buildings, come into my
mind. Do you feel that I am reading something into your creations
which does not exist there?”
"But my dear sir, who is the interpreter here? It is you. That
is for you, and not for me, to say."
"You see, the first time I ever heard the Sacre, I saw machinery
and industrial landscapes—”.
He interrupted. “Who conducted it the first time you ever
heard it?"
"Monteux."
He nodded his head, satisfied. "Monteux does it very well,
very well. Monteux has the right idea of the Sacre."
"Then let me ask you one more question, Mr Strawinsky. Do
you think any work, any work of to-day, I mean, which is
genuinely living, can fail to interpret to us elements of the daily
life, say our relationships with people?”.
He sat reflectively a moment. "Perhaps not,” he said. “I don't
know. We don't know what the creative moment is made up of.
You see, I myself have not the same feeling against what is purely
anecdotal as against what is either picturesque or literary. I feel
there is a difference, and I am perfectly willing to acknowledge that
certain bits of the Sacre have an anecdotal interest. But not pic-
turesque. And in the main, the interest is architectural. That is
all. When people hear my octuor and especially my piano con-
certo, they are sure to talk about 'Back to Bach.' But that is not


264
MUSICAL CHRONICLE
what I mean. The material of Bach's day was, let us say, the
size of this hall. The material of our day," and here he lifted
the crook'd head of his cane, “is about the size of this. But I feel
we in our day are working with our material in the spirit of Bach,
the constructive spirit, and I feel that what we give, though it is
perhaps smaller in comparison, is in its concentration and economy
an equivalent for the immense structures of Bach.”
Many conversations come to rest with the name of the cantor of
the Thomas School, and this was one of them. As we turned to go
out through the door into the passageway, and while Salzedo was
talking to Strawinsky about the music of Varèse, a young fellow
who had been listening to the conversation from a little distance
rushed up to the composer, declared he admired his music, and
begged to be allowed to shake his hand. There was a half-em-
barrassed moment, Strawinsky bowing like an oriental potentate,
and doubtlessly enjoying, for the thousandth time, the sweetest of
all homages, the homage of young people.
Paul ROSENFELD


COMMENT
I have not seen it myself except in a picture.
Herodotus.
CY
U AVING purposed that these pages might again serve merely
11 by way of a back-stoop éloge upon the literary activities of
the recipient of our Annual Award, it is with considerable pain
that I note the high office laid upon me, that of Dialis Fidei De-
fensor, does exact, even upon this occasion of public welcome and
rejoicing, from me a modicum of censure also. Our young au-
thoress, in her ultimate Observation, that upon Sea Unicorns and
Land Unicorns, entertains and gives renewed circulation, and thus,
I fear, renewed credence also, to that very modern fable or notion
in accordance with which the unicorn, “ 'impossible to take alive,'”
may be “tamed only by a lady inoffensive? like itself,” and will,
upon the lap of such, its “ ‘mild wild head'” lay. And Miss Moore
goes on to state what, while word for word undoubtedly true, will
certainly give the unwary, the too often undocumented reader a
wholly false and misleading conception of the still quite
tentative phase of the most reliable scientific thought upon this
interesting, if unwholesome, point:
ma
“Upon the printed page,
also by word of mouth,
we have a record of it all.”
Now nowhere, neither in this Observation itself, nor in those often
very scholarly and rewarding Notes with which, discreetly at the
back, Miss Moore has embellished her in so many respects very
laudable volume, do I find reference to the in this instance surely
pertinent fact (already brought to the attention of the scientific
world several centuries ago by the able Topsell) that “concerning
1 The use of this negative expression for the very affirmative virtue of
Chastity appears to me questionable.
2 The History of Four-footed Beasts and Serpents: Describing at Large
Their True and Lively Figure, their several Names, Conditions, Kinds,


266
COMMENT
a
MO
this opinion (he has reference to the same hitherto unsupported
fable or notion in regard to the manner in which one must go
about it to take a unicorn, to this unpleasing shift in accordance
with which human female virginity is degraded to the status of a
mere vulgar decoyl we have no elder authority than Tzetzes,
who did not live above five hundred years ago.” Topsell goes on
to state, in my opinion rightly, “And therefore I leave the reader
to the freedom of his own judgement to believe or refuse this rela-
tion.” Now why could not Miss Moore have retained, upon this
point, as open a mind? And why could she not have put her
readers in possession, as honourably, of the whole truth? She
gives us, in her rather extensive Notes, many another point of
information which we had, if I may say it without impropriety, far
more easily spared. . . . And inasmuch as Modern Science, which
in so many important fields has made such very notable progress,
has in the study of the Unicorn, its Habits, and its Chace, hitherto
made no material advance (anyhow no advance meriting citation
here), the otiose fact that sundry further not over-enlightened cen-
turies have, since the passing of the able Topsell, since that astrin-
gent intellect last battled with this nutty problem, added their
very measurable periods to the purely temporal standing of this
quite unauthenticated "relation,”—this otiose fact (this imperti-
nent, and therefore indecisive, secular addition) is logically no
justification at all for this, I regret to find myself, in the bitter
end, ineluctably constrained to state, in my eyes extremely repre-
Virtues (both Natural and Medicinal) Countries of their Breed, their
Love and Hatred to Mankind, and the wonderful work of God in their
Creation, Preservation, and Destruction. Interwoven with curious variety
of Historical Narrations out of Scriptures, Fathers, Philosophers, Phy-
sicians, and Poets: Illustrated with divers Hieroglyphicks and Emblems, &c.
both pleasant and profitable for Students in all Faculties and Professions,
Collected out of the Writings of Conradus Gesner and other Authors,
By Edward Topsel (sic). Whereunto is now Added, The Theater of In-
sects; or, Lesser living Creatures: As Bees, Flies, Caterpillars, Spiders,
Worms, &c. A most Elaborate Work: By T. Muffet, Dr. of Physick.
The whole Revised, Corrected, and Inlarged with the Addition of Two
useful Physical Tables, by J. R. M. D. [The title-page is here embel-
lished by the figure of a recumbent weasel. London: Printed by E.
Cotes, for G. Sawbridge at the Bible on Ludgate-hill, T. Williams at
the Bible in Little Britain, and T. Johnson, at the Key in Pauls Church-
yard, MDCLVIII. (2nd ed. (which I have used).]
1 Tzetzes, John, Byzantine poet and grammarian, flourished at Constanti-
nople in the 12th Century.
of 'Wien, Preservation, Lankind, and the Countries of the


COMMENT
267
hensible fashion in which our otherwise, I believe, quite dependable
Observer, here risks misleading a public which is, I fear, in such
matters as thoughtless as herself.
One wonders how a writer of Miss Moore's habitual discretion
could here have so unwarrantedly let herself go: the "relation”
itself appears upon the face of it so extremely dubious. Did Miss
Moore perhaps lean too heavily upon the authority of a, in this
case, as we have now revealed, wholly fanciful antiquity? But
surely a student of The Great Verulam himself might rather have
demanded factual demonstration,' might rather have procured, at
whatsoever expense in time or pains, at once a Unicorn and a
Virgin; and might have had the thing out once for all. We must
remember, Miss Moore, it is only by just such laborious and time-
consuming methods as this that Modern Science, obedient alike to
the precept and to the example of the important Bacon, has ad-
vanced from truth to truth. Was Miss Moore's natural Sloth ?
too powerful to admit of such inductive activity upon her part?
Surely this cannot have defended her otherwise "natural prompt-
ness” to formulate that question which fairly jumps in one's face:
"Why, if the taking of a unicorn be indeed so simple a thing,
why then do we find relatively so few examples of this interesting
species in captivity ?”
One would be gratified to know (I speak without irony ') whether
our young authoress would attribute the sad lacuna in, for example,
our Bronx, to some natural reticence in the shapely beast itself,
to a reticence which should remove it, as by a compulsion of its
own inward nature, from all female society, from a society pos-
1 Cf. "Atque in eo sunt omnia, siquis oculos mentis a rebus ipsis nunquam
dejiciens, earum imagines plane ut sunt excipiat. Neque enim hoc siverit
Deus, ut phantasiae nostrae somnium pro exemplari mundi edamus: sed
potius benigne faveat, ut apocalypsim ac veram visionem vestigiorum et
sigillorum creatoris super creaturas scribamus.” Francisci de Verulamio:
Instauratio Magna, Pars II., Novum Organum, sive Indicia vera de
Interpretatione Naturae. Londini, Apud Joannem Billium, Typograph-
ium Regium, Anno 1620.
2 "Sadness in the face of some spiritual good which one has to achieve :"
St Thomas of Aquin.
3 Cf. Letter I to Leo Stein. The Dial, August, 1924.


268
COMMENT
m
sessed of an attribute which, from the point of view of the wild
creature itself, must often appear, in the event, in the highest
degree funeste? Or would our young modern refer this fact, more
cynically (and, it does seem to me, much less acceptably), to a
standing paucity in virgins? Until we hear from Miss Moore
herself upon this thought-provoking point, the matter must, I
believe, rest in abeyance.
I find this particular lapse, at once in scholarship and in decent
regard for the building up of a solid public opinion, in Miss
Marianne Moore peculiarly reprehensible. For Miss Moore is
herself, among contemporary writers, by way of being no little of
a unicorn (sharing indeed, as she is at pains to point out it is a
property of the unicorn to share, with the notorious sea-serpent in
the ambiguous faculty of disquieting common folk); and we await
from a young woman of her unusual parts a more lively sense of
moral solidarity, a more proper understanding of what is, in com-
mon justice owing her own kith and kin. Did the unicorn desire,
in general, advertisement of itself, did the unicorn desiderate, in
particular, such thoughtless and promiscuous promulgation of
what, I must again remind the reader, remains a to date quite
ludicrously unsubstantiated faiblesse, —were such the case, we may
rest in the assurance so intelligent and widely distributed an ani-
mal had found some appropriate means to render us cognizant of
the true natural-historical facts having bearing upon a phenomenon
which will no doubt appear, when the requisite evidence shall at
length be in hand, in no sense either dishonourable or, to the
larger vision, unnatural.
But I do not desire to belabour an anyhow rather over obvious
point. And apart from this unfortunate lapsus, a lapsus in a poet
—and especially in a poet of Miss Moore's youth and sex-most
readily to be condoned, I find in these scholarly Notes, as indeed
in the entire exiguous volume, a faithful erudition which will
merit from all thoughtful readers, even in this age of hard try-
ing,” considerable praise.
tar






Courtesy of Paul Rosenberg, Paris
LE CIRQUE. BY TIENRI DE TOULOUSE-LAUTREC


THE OXXIII
Sko
Dla
DIAL

APRIL 1925
A MEETING SOUTH
BY SHERWOOD ANDERSON
L E told me the story of his ill fortune with a very gentle-
I l manly little smile on his very sensitive lips. Such things
happened. He might well have been speaking of another. I
liked his tone, liked him.
This happened in New Orleans, where I had gone to live.
When he came, Fred, for whom he was looking, had gone away,
but immediately I felt a strong desire to know him better and so
suggested we spend the evening together. When we went down
the stairs I noticed that he was a cripple. The slight limp, the
look of pain that occasionally drifted across his face, the little
laugh that was intended to be jolly, but did not quite achieve
its purpose, all these things began at once to tell me the story
I have now set myself down to write.
"I shall take him to see Aunt Sally," I thought. One does not
take every chance caller to Aunt Sally. However when she is in
fine feather, when she has taken a fancy to her visitor, there is
no one like her. Although she has lived in New Orleans for
thirty years, Aunt Sally is Middle-Western, born and bred.
However I am plunging a bit too abruptly into my story.
First of all I must speak more of my guest and for convenience's
sake I shall call him David. I felt at once that he would be want-
ing a drink and such things can be managed. We achieved several
and my own head became somewhat shaky, but I could see that
what we had taken had not affected him. Evening was coming,
the abrupt waning of the day and the quick smoky soft-footed
coming of night characteristic of our semi-tropic city, when he
COI


270
A MEETING SOUTH
produced a bottle from his hip pocket. It was so large that I was
amazed. How had it happened that the carrying of so large a
bottle had not made him look deformed? His body was very
small and delicately built. "Perhaps, like the kangaroo, his body
has developed some kind of a natural pouch for taking care of
supplies," I thought. Really he walked as one might fancy a
kangaroo would walk when out for a quiet evening stroll. I went
along thinking of Darwin and the marvels of prohibition. “We
are a wonderful people, we Americans," I thought. We were
both in a fine humour, had begun to like each other immensely.
He explained the bottle. The stuff, he said, was made by a
nigger on his father's plantation somewhere over in Alabama.
We sat on the steps of a vacant house deep down in the old French
Quarter of New Orleans—the Vieux Carre-while he explained
that his father had no intention of breaking the law-that is to
say in so far as the law remained reasonable. “Our nigger just
makes whisky for us,” he said. “We keep him for that purpose.
He doesn't have anything else to do, just makes the family
whisky, that's all. If he went selling any we'd raise hell with
him. I dare say Dad would shoot him if he caught him up to
any such unlawful trick, and you bet Jim, our nigger I'm telling
you of, knows it too."
"He's a good whisky maker though, don't you think ?” David
added. He talked of Jim in a warm friendly way. "Lord he's
been with us always, was born with us. His wife cooks for us
and Jim makes our whisky. It's a race to see which is best at
their job, but I think Jim will win. He's getting a little better all
the time and all of our family, well I guess we just like and need
our whisky more than we do our food.”
Do you know New Orleans? Have you lived there in the
summer when it is hot, in the winter when it rains, and through
the glorious late falls? Its own people scorn it now. In New
Orleans there is a sense of shame because the City is not more like
Chicago or Pittsburgh.
It however suited David and me. We walked, slowly, on
account of his bad leg, through many streets of the old Town,
negro women laughing all around us in the dusk, shadows playing
over old buildings, children with their shrill cries dodging in and
out of old hallways. The old city was once almost altogether


SHERWOOD ANDERSON
271
French, but now it is becoming more and more Italian. It how-
ever remains Latin. People live out of doors. Families were
sitting down to dinner within full sight of the street-all doors
and windows open. A man and his wife quarrelled in Italian.
In a patio back of an old building a negress sang a French song.
We came out of the narrow little streets and had a drink in
front of the dark cathedral and another in a little square in front.
There is a statue of General Jackson, always taking off his hat
to Northern tourists who in the winter come down to see the city.
At his horse's feet an inscription-"The union must and will be
preserved.” We drank solemnly to that declaration and the gen-
eral seemed to bow a bit lower. “He was sure a proud man,”
David said as we went over toward the docks to sit in the darkness
and look at the Mississippi. All good New Orleansians go to look
at the Mississippi at least once a day. At night it is like creeping
into a dark bedroom to look at a sleeping child-something of that
sort-gives you the same warm nice feeling I mean. David is a
poet and so in the darkness by the river we spoke of Keats and
Shelley, the two English poets all good Southern men love.
All of this, you are to understand, was before I took him to see
Aunt Sally,
Both Aunt Sally and myself are Middle-Westerners. We are
but guests down here, but perhaps we shall both stay here until
we die. Something of the sort is in the wind. I don't quite know
how it has happened.
A great many Northern men and women come down our way
and when they go back North write things about the South. The
trick is to write nigger stories. The North likes them. They
are so amusing. One of the best known writers of nigger stories
was down here recently and a man I know, a Southern man, went
to call on him. The writer seemed a bit nervous. "I don't know
much about the South or Southerners," he said. “But you have
your reputation,” my friend said. The writer had a notion he was
being made sport of. “Now look here," he said, “I don't claim
to be no highbrow. I'm a business man myself. At home, up
North, I associate mostly with business men and when I am not
at work I go out to the country club. I want you to understand
I am not setting myself up.” My friend said he appeared angry.
"About what now, do you fancy ?” he asked innocently.


272
A MEETING SOUTH
W
However I am not thinking of the Northern writer of negro
stories. I am thinking of the Southern poet, with the bottle clasped
firmly in his hands sitting in the darkness beside me on the docks
facing the Mississippi.
He spoke at some length of his gift for drinking. “I didn't
always have it. It is a thing built up,” he said. The story