the same faculty. Out of
the truth of countless isolated phenomena there arises the truth of
the relationships existing among them: in this way a world is pro-
duced. As with Goethe, I feel myself in a sure relationship to the
whole. There is here an imperceptible system of co-ordinates by
which I can orient myself. Whatever I read, one of the great novels,
one of the short stories, one of the fantastic-philosophic rhapsodies,
whether I dip into the secrets of a soul, into a digression on politics,
into the description of an office or a shop, I never fail to find this
relationship. I feel : around me there is an organized world. It is a
great mystery that this tight, encompassing world, this second, more
restricted and more insistent reality, does not oppress us like a bur-
den, does not strangle us like a nightmare. It does not have that
effect; it does not halt us and stiffen us, but the sight of it puts fire
into our veins. For it itself does not halt, but is in motion. Every-
thing is Aux. Here, behind these books, which in their sum total
form the greatest epic conception besides Don Quixote of the mod-
mon world, the idea of the epic art-form seems to be awakening. To
en


HUGO VON HOFMANNSTHAL 365
describe men who blossom and vanish like Aowers of the soil!
Homer does precisely this. Dante's world is rigid. The things
themselves do not go by, but in his wandering he passes them. We
do not see Balzac; but we see with his eye how everything moves.
The rich become poor, and the poor become rich. César Birotteau
gets ahead and the Baron Hulot falls behind. Rubempré's soul was
an untouched fruit; it is transformed before our eyes, and we see
him seize the rope and make an end of his tarnished life. Séraphita
struggles until she is free, and soars to Heaven. Everyone is what
he was not, and will become what he is not. Here we are as close
to the roots of the epic attitude as we are in Shakespeare to the roots
of the dramatic. Everything flows, everything is in transition.
Money is only the felicitously discovered symbol and the vehicle
for this continual and varied movement. Money brings out the
potentialities of a thing. And it is in the nature of this world, when
viewed in this broad and epic manner, that everything should ex-
press its full potentialities. There are fluctuations everywhere, and
nothing but fluctuations, in the world of ethics as well as in the
world of manners. The fluctuations between vice and virtue—two
mythical concepts which no one knows exactly how to encompass
are graded with the same delicacy of modulation as the fluctuations
between rich and poor. Things removed farthest from one another
and the most emphatically opposed, possess certain affinities
whereby everything hangs together. Between a concierge in a base-
ment apartment and Napoleon at St Cloud some mysterious mo-
mentary affinity can flash up; and it is infinitely more than a mere
bit of grotesquerie. In the world everything quite plainly acts on
everything else; how could this profound interdependence be other-
wise? Everything flows; nowhere is there a solid block, neither in
the spiritual nor in the external. Love and hate seem far apart and
sufficiently circumscribed; and I know this or that character of
Balzac in whose breast one of these feelings flows into the other
with the imperceptible gradations of the colours of glowing iron.
Does Philomène hate Albert Savarus, or does she love him? She
loved him at the beginning, but at the end she seems to hate him;
she acts under an obsession which is perhaps hate and love at once,
and if one might ask her she would not be able to say from which
of these emotions she was suffering. Here an abyss separates us from
the world of the eighteenth century, with such concepts as it had of


366
HONORE DE BALZAC
virtue, which are hard, round, dogmatic, and well adapted to
replacing the rigid concepts of theology. Here every mythology
is thrown overboard, even that of words. And nowhere are we
closer to Goethe. Quite near, indeed even in the same channel, the
deep stream of Goethe's philosophy is roaring. But it was a
fundamental part of his temper that he should turn to the opposite
shore. The Auctuating powers of his nature were so mighty that
they threatened to overwhelm him. He had to oppose them with
the rigidity of nature, laws, ideas. He turns his mind's eye on the
permanent aspects of the changing. So we see his face; and it is
the mask of the reflecting Magus. We do not see Balzac's face
rising above his works like an Olympian mask. Except that
within his works we feel that we have seen it emerge at times; it
is that of a visionary, and is heaved up out of chaotic darkness; out
of swirling masses. But we are not able to fix it. Every genera-
tion will see it differently; will see it as a titanic face, and in this
way convert it into a symbol of ineffable interior processes. We
marvel that we do not possess it painted by the hand which created
the Massacre de Chios and La Barque du Dante. He would have
painted Balzac at thirty as the Titan that he was, as the demon of
life; or he would have treated the face as a battlefield. It is an
astonishing lacuna that the mask of Balzac at fifty has not been
handed down to us by Daumier. His wonderful pencil and his
equally wonderful brush would have brought out the magnificent
faunlike quality of the man, and would have ennobled it with the
savage loneliness of genius. But perhaps these generations were
too near him, and the distance which separates us from him was
requisite before something like Rodin's work could be created:
this superhuman, thoroughly symbolic face in which a frightful
weightiness of the material is joined with something dull, heavy,
and demoniac which is not of this world. A face in which the
synthesis of entirely different worlds is fulfilled; it is reminiscent
of a fallen angel, and also of the boundless dull sorrow of primi-
tive-Greek earth and sea demons.
Each generation which, through its intimacy with Balzac's work,
produces a vision of this face, will resolve it into a similar synthesis
combining the entire burden of life with the deepest urge towards
the overcoming of this burden, towards redemption, towards tri-
umph. The kinship to the dull oppressive mass of life which con-
tinually fructifies itself, and at the same time the desire to break


HUGO VON HOFMANNSTHAL 367
away from this, the deepest yearning of spirit for spirit: such is the
signature of this great tragic face which does not seem to be peering
beyond us into the eternal as with the mask of Goethe, but to be
penetrating us, to be looking straight into the burden of life.
This seeming materialist is a passionate seer, an ecstatic. The
essence of his characters is aspiration. All powers of suffering and
of love, excitations of the artist, monomanias, these titanic energies,
the great motors of his world—these are aspirations. They all aim
at something supreme, unnamable. Vautrin the genius as criminal,
and Stenbock the genius as artist, Goriot the father, Eugénie Gran-
det the spinster, Frenhofer the creator—they are all adjusted to an
absolute which is on the point of revelation, just as ships tossed
about by a storm in the night are adjusted to the existence of a
polar star even though it is concealed in blackness. In the depths
of their cynicism, in the maelstroms of their tortures, in the abysses
of renunciation, they seek and find their God, whether they call him
by name or not.
Here is a world swarming with characters. There is not one
among them so powerfully conceived, so complete in itself, that it
might be taken out of its background and exist alone in the im-
mortal perfection of its gestures, as with Don Quixote, or King
Lear, or Odysseus. The material is more fragile. The vision is not
of such radiant clarity that characters could stand out from it; it is
not modelled in the purest and strongest light, as the Homeric
Achilles, as Nausicaa, nor in the most delicate half-light, as Mignon
and Ottilie. Everything forms a whole; every part is conditioned
by its other parts. It is as impossible to take a section out of the
whole as is the case in a painting by Rembrandt or by Delacroix.
In both cases the sublime is situate in a stupendous wealth of tone
values which form an unbroken scale, infinitis modis, as with nature
itself. The other type of character seems like a liberated, marching
god; it is an impenetrable mystery how such figures may have
arisen. Balzac's are the individual notes of a titanic symphony.
Their origin seems more comprehensible to us; we believe that we
carry in our blood the elements out of which their gloomy hearts
are constructed, and we feel that we draw these elements out of
the air of the great cities. But here too there is something ultimate,
something beyond. The scale from dark to light in a Rembrandt
resembles earthly light and earthly darkness purely by the fact that
it is unbroken, convincing, and absolutely accurate; but above and


368
WINTER TWILIGHT
beyond this there is the activity of something nameless, the func-
tioning of a great soul which surrenders itself in these visions to a
higher nature. In the same way, in the myriad minute strokes with
which Balzac depicts a swarming world, there vibrates something
ultimate which it would be hard to name. The plastic of this world
approaches the oppressively heavy; its darkness borders on nihilism,
its urbanity of treatment on cynicism. But the colours in which
this is painted are pure. A choir of angels by Fra Angelico is not
painted with a purer brush than the characters in La Cousine Bette.
These colours, the really fundamental elements of the spiritual,
have no vestiges of drabness, of sickliness, of blasphemy, of base-
ness. They are incorruptible, and immune to all contagion. An
absolute gaiety vibrates in them, untouched by the ominousness of
the theme, just as the divine gaiety of the tones in a Beethoven
symphony can never be distorted for a moment by the formidable-
ness of the musical expression.
WINTER TWILIGHT
BY MABEL SIMPSON
Now is the Earth so still no breath
Can pierce her slumber, deep as death.
Her eyelids droop, and deaf is she
To brook and meadow, bird and tree.
The whispering branches cannot move
Her heart with little words of love,
Nor can the small hare's sore distress
Awake in her a piteousness.
Her wondering children gathered near
Murmur and tremble, sick with fear,
She sleeps, she sleeps, and does not hear.


24
delect Lavandon
LE VOYAGEUR DANS LES GLACES. BY JEAN COCTEAU





LES GRENOUILLES ET LES TAUREAUX SE PRENNENT AVEC DU ROUGE.
BY JEAN COCTEAU





3151
portas
LE POETE ET SA MUSE. BY JEAN COCTEAU





THE OLD LADY
BY EVELYN SCOTT
THE old lady was often to be seen walking on the beaches
overlooked by the hotels. She had been tall, but was now
stooped, and always advanced slowly, and with the help of a cane.
In spite of the expensive soberness of her dress, of fine stuffs not
quite in the fashion, yet much discussed by the maids in her hotel
who expected generous remuneration for their services to her, the
old lady had not that aloof confidence in herself and her position
which is the usual endowment of wealth. She smiled too fre-
quently into the faces of those who looked at her, and her exces-
sive benevolence was like a subtle self-apology.
Her thoughts could not be read, and that was fortunate. When
she awakened in the morning in a stately bed, from which, against
an opposite wall of her large room, she saw an armoire flanked with
mirrors give back her image, she always, when possible, avoided
the contemplation of this reflection; or, compelled to confront a
revelation which caused her pain, remarked inwardly, "Can it
be I ?" and tried vainly to recall another almost-obliterated im-
pression of her own features. Queer that, remembering so dis-
tinctly the most minute incidents of a past that had been filled
with dramatic interest, able to visualize with exactitude the ap-
pearances of each of her friends, to-day dead or separated from
her by years and oceans, she had so much difficulty in piecing
together from fragments retained from the lost years, even the
vaguest representation of her own countenance as it had been
caught in looking-glasses long ago. People who had been dear to
her, and even the people she had once disliked, had not aged, nor
had they died, in that they existed continually in her thoughts in
every moment of the time. Only her own personality, in its once-
youthful aspect, had disappeared in the nothingness of a feeble
present. She sighed, and said to herself, “Well, I never was
pretty." Yet without being pretty she had commanded affection
and even very strong feeling.
It frightened her a little that she had become someone whom


370
THE OLD LADY
she did not know, someone whom she could not look at with clear
eyes.
For all the sadness which pervaded her meditations, she did
not, with truth, call herself unhappy. She slept badly, dreaming
often of her married daughter whom she had not seen for many
months, and of a dead son; but always, after noting the thinning
of the darkness by a dawn yet scarcely visible and feeling, upon
her dry cheeks and in her scanty hair, the still wind which rushed
in a tide of freshness from the suddenly audible sea, she would
turn upon her side, and, as if some sentinel duty of the night had
been accomplished, find that she could rest easily. Then, from
this hour into the morning, she would sleep like a child and awaken
when the sun was shining rosily upon the gilt-flowered bedroom
walls, while the lace curtains between the window-hangings of
brown-and-cream brocade seemed to expand as with an ecstatic
delicacy, and, in the gilded foliage of the dark plane tree beyond
them, birds sang.
Her maid, entering the chamber, and bringing the morning
coffee in an immaculate service, received a cheery “Bon jour,"
but, offering to assist the old lady at her toilet, was invariably
sent away with a refusal couched in the same terms. “Not yet,
Françoise. The time for that has not yet come.” And the old
lady dressed herself. She waited for something miraculous to
occur. Every morning approached her with an adventure which,
finally, in the heat of noontime, had not revealed itself.
She felt that Françoise was a "good girl," who should be treated
generously, and the maid, stout, handsome, and slyly officious,
with the characteristics of a peasant initiate in the ways of the
rich, adopted in her manner toward her prosperous mistress, the
attitude of a mother. The old lady was not deceived as to the
motives which prompted this consideration, yet, in the passiveness
of temperament engendered by old age, did not condemn. "Well,
poor girl. I must try and do something for her. I'll leave her
something in my will.” And the old lady felt drawn to the girl
by the very exposure of self-interest which, it seemed, should have
been repelling. To know that someone depended on you, if only
for money, made you feel that your presence in the world was
yet of importance. Generous pity relieved the heart of the old
lady from the oppression of exhausted but persistent emotions
meo


EVELYN SCOTT
371
which had no outlet. There was no one to whom the old lady
could express herself.
Yes, she was lonely, though had she been asked if, in this lone-
liness, she wished to depart to an oblivion in which loneliness is
not felt, she would have said, “No,” sincerely and emphatically.
Trifles which had once been of no account to her, objects and
incidents which, in her youth, had failed to interest her, now
compelled her whole attention and were infinitely precious. She
loved her careful walks through the French town. She loved the
hardy appearance of the cabbages planted in small gardens behind
low fences covered with creepers. A neglected bush of marigolds,
jutting ruddy-coloured blossoms beyond a wall, excited in her a
tenderness for growing things. She watched the dark swallows
in their bat-flights above a puddle in the road, and their shrill
bleats, coming vaguely to her deaf ears, made her think of them
innocently as lambs. Strong sunlight, stagnant upon the plaster
façade of a dwelling, enchanted her. When, with a final exertion
of her ever-waning strength, she climbed slowly, among heaps of
refuse, to the summit of a crooked street which terminated on a
hillside, and could gaze below her, between ancient roofs which
interceded in the view, at the countryside—the still avalanches of
the mountains, the small villages crushed under the red roofs that
surmounted the houses, the acres of vines, tremblingly outspread
in the soaring light of morning and resembling still lakes of green
silk-the immense silence which lay beyond the town in which she
was visiting seemed to her to enwrap her benevolently, and the
whole world, dissension and struggle obliterated, was a friendly
place.
It was only at noontime, in the heat of the day, when, after
taking her luncheon in the table d'hôte downstairs and, with nod-
ding head, listening for half an hour to some Spanish singers who,
on a terrace ornamented with palms and young trees in pots and
covered over by a pergola on which roses twined, were entertaining
the guests of the hotel, she rested in her bedroom, that she felt
depressed. The sunshine filled the street below her window, but
the stillness it made, as the heat arrested the play of children and
hushed their voices, and footsteps became so occasional that they
echoed on the cobbles as footsteps echo in the night—this stillness
was terrible and oppressive.


372
THE OLD LADY
She lowered the Venetian blinds upon her balconies, and, in a
semi-glow, in which the unchanging aspect of objects in her room
became pronounced, she lay on her bed again, her eyes closed, and
tried to sleep. Sleep was impossible. Her cheeks, pale and with-
ered and covered by a scarcely-perceptible down of white, were hot
and parched. With no relief from the violence of the light, that,
even through drawn curtains could be discerned in the stolid bril-
liance of a stucco building opposite the hotel, she moistened her
lips, several times adjusted the pillow beneath her head, and,
without being conscious of the sounds she uttered, moaned slightly.
Her health was bad. At any moment she might have a recur-
rence of the heart-trouble from which she suffered, a malady from
which she would, at last, most certainly die. But it was not of
death that she thought. Indeed she refused to think of death.
It pleased her better to imagine that she would live a long time
a long, long, long time. And when, in her promenades, her steps
turned inadvertently toward the cemetery, with its crumbling
mausoleums making little intimate avenues for the dead below the
black-green lines of conical cypress trees, she experienced, in her
first glimpse of the tombs, decorated as for a perpetual holiday
with wreaths of coloured beads, black, violet, pale-blue, and white,
and with bouquets of artificial flowers, a sudden shock of fright, of
amazement—of some emotion which she did not attempt to de-
scribe—and turned back.
Why was she travelling like this, going all over Europe, from
one hotel to another, rarely encountering an acquaintance and
certainly not amusing herself in the ways habitual with tourists?
In her young days she had been too much occupied with personal
affairs to give much of her energy to travel. There was a great
deal of the world that she had never seen. Now that her daughter
was married, absorbed by interests in which the old lady had but
slight part, and her son was dead, she, the old lady, had uninter-
rupted opportunity to see odd corners of the globe that had always
intrigued her-even the names of the towns she visited were those
that had, years ago, seemed to her remarkable. Besides she had
a terror, continual if not dwelt upon, of being unwanted, and so,
rather than remain as a tolerated outsider in her daughter's home,
she had prefered the company of strangers who were not obliged
to show her any attentions that were not quite spontaneous.
PC


EVELYN SCOTT
373
On the terrace of the hotel, under the pergola covered with
roses and with foliage which had turned blue and artificial in the
glow of the electric lamps, the old lady sat in the evenings, watch-
ing those who came and went from the dancing in the saloon,
while she tried to make herself unobtrusive. If a young couple,
approaching her, ignored her, and it could be seen that they were
covertly making love to one another, the old lady moved further
away into the shadows and out of hearing. There she was able,
when lifting her gaze, to discern the stars which, at one instant,
appeared to her quite brilliant, while the next minute she saw
only darkness, and could hear, distant under the rotating melody
of a waltz played by an orchestra, a rushing sound in her ears
which might be the sea and might only be the beating of her own
heart. She always preferred to think the sound was the sea, and
then she would rise and walk about, still clinging to the shadows
and, because she was forgotten, feeling her own person as the
person of another whom she also desired to forget.
No, the day was happier than the night. She loved children.
In her black dress and bonnet, she often walked, with her stick,
along the beaches. There she encountered children. She recalled
the delights of her own childhood and longed to be able, in some
manner, to indicate to the children, in some way which would
convince them, that she had been a child, and that childhood was
not foreign to her, as they supposed. And she was humiliated by
something grotesque in this longing, as if she had convicted herself
of a jealousy of youth.
The children paid no heed to her, and, screaming as they ran,
they brushed past her blowing skirts, brushed past her and ran
down to the sea. Feeling a pain which was so ignoble that she
refused to recognize it, she thought, “They are so young. They
don't understand.” And she prayed to be able always to love chil-
dren as she did now, and to wish for them, with her whole being,
saturate with gratitude for a happy past, a continuance of their
light-heartedness.
After such an experience, returning to the hotel, she wrote let-
ters, to keep herself from growing "stale," as she smilingly called
it, letters to her daughter, letters to old acquaintances—some of
them had almost ceased to take account of her existence—and the
reward for this insistent attention to those who were far away,


374
THE OLD LADY
perhaps for ever, was an interest in the coming of the postman,
so keen that it embarrassed her. Often the mails brought her
nothing at all, or there came a letter from some old friend who,
burdened with age, expressed herself entirely in the utterance of
complaints. “Poor Jane, poor Sally, poor Louisa,” the old lady
would say, and try to evade the fact that she had anticipated a
letter of a different kind, a letter containing something stimulating,
something of especial interest, or something complimentary to her-
self. It seemed to her that her own troubles would have been
quite bearable if only her dear old friends could find, as she did,
the philosophical compensations of maturity. Occasionally, in
her travels, she encountered a woman like herself, old, isolate,
seeking, in new sights and scenes, a substitute for the personal
drama which was finished. “Poor woman,” the old lady would
say of the other old woman, then, suddenly, realizing that the
one she pitied was like herself, and alarmed by the sense of an
intolerable identity, she would conjure up cheerful thoughts and,
from that time forward, gently avoid the new acquaintance, and
this without any intention of being cruel, but simply to preserve
something necessary to her.
"We must all live our own lives. We old people have no right
to prey upon our children,” she often said. And it was this con-
viction which made her, secretly, a little afraid of her grand-
children of whom her daughter sent her photographs—the daugh-
ter who, with the dead son, had been for many years the one
absorption of the old lady's life. When she meditated upon the
joys of maternity and the intimate relations of a family, the old
lady became confused. In some manner, in spite of her devotion,
her attitude toward her children had been an error, but an error
which she would never be able to localize within her or describe
to herself accurately. She only felt that such error, or its equiv-
alent, must be common to all the world, and, in apologizing so
constantly for herself, she apologized for others, too, and found
that any emotion which was not pity had become incomprehensible
to her. The most frightening thing of all was that pity itself
required a defence, and her very desire to confess for herself and
admit for others inadequacy, without condemning it, was the
basis of her real apartness from her former life. She wanted to
state all this intelligibly, but she had never been able to do so.
с


EVELYN SCOTT
375
Her thoughts became lost again in the past, when her eyes filled
with tears and the grief she had felt at her husband's death came
back to her—not the grief she had experienced at the time, to
which her health had succumbed while her reason was threatened,
but another despair which was without any quality of protest
and which she vainly attempted to unify with the emotions of
twenty years before. She even tried to grieve more, but without
success.
It was her present incapacity for strong passion which drove
her, in her phantomlike existence, to dependence on routine, and
the concrete regularity of meal hours had become as important
to her as any critical event. In the vast dining-saloon with its
glass front overlooking the water, she was punctual at one o'clock
and at half-past seven, and, though her appetite was variable, she
was always one of the last to leave the table. What nice young
people those two in the corner were, the ones who were newly
married, and what an excellent mamma was the stout woman of
thirty with the little daughter. The old lady usually had some
pleasant remark for the waiter who, good-humoured and polite,
was ready to serve her immediately upon her entrance into the room,
though he was somewhat perfunctory and reserved his most refined
solicitude for persons who, not poorer than she was, were more
difficult to please. She liked hot coffee that burned her withered
lips, and Michel was careful to bring coffee steaming and per-
fumed, and she drank it on the terrace. Yet she bored him.
There was nothing beyond her guessed-at fortune to supply ma-
terial for scandals or invite interest.
She did not resent living alone, but she was often conscious of
her lonely appearance and of what it might suggest to others.
She wished, on that account, to exhibit an occupation. When
she went to the writing-room or sat on the beach, she carried a
book with her, turned over the pages carefully, and appreciated,
perhaps, a paragraph of what she read, but many of the lines she
perused might have been inscribed in some strange language as
remote as a language of the Orient. Refusing to confront this
incapacity to receive, mentally, the new impression, the secret of
the universe was, to her, as if buried inscrutably in her own soul,
and to be divulged—if ever—in a reconstructed understanding of
what had happened to her, an understanding which included even


376
THE OLD LADY
the most trivial incidents of former days. To have lived, loved,
borne children, and grown old was to have known everything.
Why could she find no words to make this meaning of intimate
things intelligible to her fellow men? Because she could not
speak and make herself heard, it was often as though, in living
so fully, she had never lived. Her heart beat in a troubled way.
Her hands, on the leaves of her book, trembled, and she resisted
being sorry for herself. She tried to take comfort in a religion
in which her faith was no longer orthodox, and ended, finally,
with this great pity for the world which did not ask to be pitied
and despised pity—pity which was—she sometimes doubtfully
conjectured it—the reflection of her own weakness. Then the
only recourse from these vague and half-comprehended thoughts
was to consider a change to a new scene, a journey which would
tax her strength, in which, in speaking to Françoise, the old lady
would ridicule weakness and make light of it. Or she would rise
from her deck-chair and walk in the sunshine along the beach.
The blue waters, angry and violent in the wind that flapped
her skirts, suggested to her a darkness of night in which green
fields are visible. The poetry of the comparison pleased her, as
the image appeared unpremeditatedly from her mind, and was
like a memory of youth. As she watched that steady onward
movement of waters upon the land, she experienced what was to
her, in this day, a rare moment, a moment of positive happiness.
Beyond the pier, where she walked, leaning on her stick, the
sea surrounded the dripping rocks of a headland. The rocks were
bronze-coloured and porous, like gutted and petrified combs of
honey, left there by bees of a giant size. Above them, in jagged
curtains of white foam, in the glow of the sun, the surf towered.
For an instant the suspended curtain hung twinkling in the light,
to descend, with the transcience of dew and the indolence of a
floating veil, upon the agitation of waves which had conveyed it.
The surface of glass which was the ocean, voluminous and rocking,
like the sun-inflamed canopy of a glass tent, washed up and down
magnificently, somnolently, as a cradle gently rocked, and the
enormous tents of water, built up one after another, were covered
all over with globules of sunshine, round and crystal, trembling
like the drops that fall hesitatingly from metal which, made over-
warm, has begun to cool again.


EVELYN SCOTT
377
Once more the foam concentrated in seething currents, rushing
together with subterranean hisses. The foam concentrated, lifted,
and made a glittering edifice of snow, harsh, exquisite, and momen-
tary, like the Gothic traceries of frost. The tower of marble, of a
lacy substance, of the purity of linen left long to bleach, but with
che adamant glitter of diamonds, sank easily, waned in prismatic
reflections, and was no more than a pale breath, breathed on the
distance of the intense sky and evaporating like mist. Little
water-spouts, such as pour from the gargoyle-mouths of old foun-
tains, ran steadily downward from crevices in the stones. The
tide rattled among the boulders. The sea had subsided, only to
come forward as before, but with a more implacable ease. A glass
tube, transparent on the length of the shore, showed, in a bottle-
blue wall, ribbon-tangles of reddish seaweed, designed in the clear
substance with the design of objects caught in amber. The swell,
with its mounting undulations, resolved in long blades of crystal,
run high in the air in a concave symmetry in which sank massive
and transparent shadows that were the reflections of the waves
themselves, carving the beaches.
The old lady's bonnet-strings whipped out under her chin, her
wide black dress was full like a banner and beat her legs, yet,
though she steadied herself against the onslaught of winds, felt
salt vapours upon her face, and was obliged to squint and lower
her wrinkled lids against the glare, she saw everything vividly.
The foam, curdling the sands, sticky amber and smooth as mirrors,
was a flat scallop, like a rufiile of soap-suds, and the scallops ran
down corruscations and runnels that were the imprints of wavy
hair, faintly golden. A cold smell of rotted fish and kelp came
to the old lady on the same breeze that wafted to her the screams
of the children, of the little boys in their striped bathing costumes
who were wading in the shallows. And little girls in white, little
girls, barefoot, with sandbuckets and shovels, their short skirts
tilted behind their flying legs, were heard shrieking happily as they
swooped, like a flock of small gulls, straight down to the water's
edge. More obscurely, as from a more vast distance, the old lady
heard the voices of the grown-up bathers, who, swimming far out
into the breakers, were carried, with heads bobbing, to an immense
height, lifted, by the indifferent sapphire waters, as upon the flash-
ing shoulders of armoured giants.
mou


378
THE OLD LADY
0
sun amer ra
Then she turned toward the sultry horizon, where the brilliance
of the day succumbed to the overshadowing of clouds, and to
something less visible perhaps an emanation from the light itself
-which was like unseen smoke. Beyond the cobalt welter of sun
and waves, incessantly flaked as with white flowers, a boat bal-
anced quietly under one sail, stood, upon the emptiness, like a
swan upon a still lake, its head under its wing.
The old lady was fatigued by this unforeseen intensity of visual
appreciation. She had come to the end of the pier, and, turning
reluctantly, began to retrace her footsteps to the hotel. On the
shore she noted the rosy and dusked loftiness of the retreating
mountains, their peaks sombre under the fogs of a summer rain
storm, while on the rusted slopes the deep green of the trees sug.
gested a relief of velvet on an old brocade, the crushed foliage of
the pines and cork oaks hinting at the tactile qualities of vari-
egated mosses. The fashionable hotels along the waterfront, built
in stucco and somewhat in the Spanish style, ancient houses in
the town with walls of plaster or rubble, all showed in a violent
radiance of sinking sun in which the pallor of white surfaces and
the redness of far-off roofs received a remote emphasis on objects
which seemed the minute dwellings of dolls.
And the old lady was suddenly overcome by an emotion which
she afterwards preferred to forget. What she felt, as she turned
from her promenade, the sea-wind stinging her flaccid cheeks, was
an immanence of death, which came to her from nowhere out of
nothing—from the cries of the children, from the boat, the breeze,
from the vast water that flowed after her. Yes, most of all from
the sea, the sea flashing in the sunshine, the great sea, monotonous,
voracious, untouched, and merciless. “I shall die," she thought,
"but they will die, too.” In “they” she included the people in
the village, the bathers in the surf, and the ladies in their organdie
frocks and flowered hats, with the gentlemen in flannels, gentle-
men dressed so precisely, if carelessly, in imitations of the English
style—the old lady, as she approached the termination of her
walk, could now see them all. And the quiet gale that swept
past her from some space infinitely distant, beyond even the clouds
of the coming rainstorm, was the breath of a holocaust. “They"
were all dead, all the people who covered the security of the land,
people the old lady loved and had loved, indeed people who were
me


EVELYN SCOTT
379
sca
o
e
dead already. That the sea was, had been, and always would be
long, long after these, the young, the happy, the oblivious, had
ceased to live—this sea, of which she herself was afraid, so that
she had never undertaken an ocean voyage without a tremor, the
sea comforted her with an immense and terrible comfort, so that,
for an instant, her spirit flamed coldly and intensely. All was
light, sunshine, happiness, and moving waters, and all was death,
for ever and ever death-though she scarcely called it so exactly,
or by that name.
Then her eyes grew dim. The peculiar accuracy with which,
the moment before, she had viewed and absorbed the details of
her surroundings, faded in her habitual hesitance and vagueness.
She began to think of saving her strength, of getting back to the
hotel in time for her tea when she would eat some nice little
brioches, of buying Françoise a new dress. Entering the hotel
lobby at just a quarter to five o'clock, weak and at peace as after
some exhausting victory, she gave to her heart the shadowy
acknowledgement of its new strength, and, in spite of her cheerful
resolutions, was conscious of a faint, austere bitterness.


AS ONE INVULNERABLE
BY JESSICA NELSON NORTH
I knew a man who met to-morrow
With hard, indifferent repose-
Buttoned his coat about his sorrow
And walked unarmed among his foes.
(For foes he has and foes a-plenty
Who will not lay his wound apart,
And show the world for five and twenty
The crucifixion of his heart.)
He stood at his deserted window
And would not set a candle there;
With dagger-pointed innuendo
The cheated public paused to stare,
Or boldly thrusting, fled affrighted
Lest they do battle with a shade,
When through his sinews, unrequited,
Whistled the sharp, offensive blade.


G

UE
Permission of Alfred Stieglitz
THE FLAGPOLE (FIRST PAINTING). BY GEORGIA O'KEEFFE






9
Collection of Sir Joseph Duveen
THE FLAGPOLE (SECOND PAINTING). BY GEORGIA O'KEEFFE





THE LIVES OF THE OBSCURE
BY VIRGINIA WOOLF
TITTLE is now known of Laetitia Pilkington, and not all that
U is known is certainly true. Moreover, if one looks along the
shelves upon which her three small volumes stand—The Memoirs
of Mrs Laetitia Pilkington, wife to the Rev. Mr Matt. Pilking-
ton, written by herself, Dublin M.DCC.LXX.VI.—there are
other books of much greater importance than hers without going
beyond the letter P—Pope, Peacock, possibly Pindar, to seek no
further. Yet what a debt of gratitude we owe to her and her
sort !-Not for what they did or for what they said, but for being
themselves; for persisting, in spite of their invincible mediocrity, in
writing their memoirs; for providing precisely that background,
atmosphere, and standing of common earth which nourish people of
greater importance and prevent them from shrivelling to dry sticks
or congealing to splendid pinnacles of inaccessible ice. For
imagine a literature composed entirely of good books; imagine
having nothing to read but the plays of Shakespeare, the
poems of Milton, the essays of Bacon, the letters of Madame de
Sévigné, and the biography of Johnson. Starvation would soon
ensue. No one would read at all. The difficult art, practised by
a few heroic spirits whose singular genius withdrew them more and
more into learned societies and the backwaters of college life,
would become extinct; and writing would follow suit.
The great literatures of Greece and Rome, so much admired, but
so seldom read, prove how difficult it is for good books to survive
unless they are liberally supported by bad ones. The isolation is
too great. There is nothing handy and personal to pull oneself up
by. There are no gradations of merit, but we are faced directly
by the sublime and precipitous—by Aeschylus, Sophocles,
Lucretius, Plato, Virgil, Aristotle. There is no W. E. Norris; no
Creevey; no Indiscretions of a Countess; no Mrs Pilkington. But
such trivial ephemeral books do not merely break the ascent and
encourage us to mightier efforts. They have a more important
office. They are the dressing-rooms, the workshops, the wings,
Don
MO
SO
Iye


382
THE LIVES OF THE OBSCURE
nev
Ice
the sculleries, the bubbling cauldrons, where life seethes and steams
and is for ever on the boil. By sousing ourselves in memoirs we
keep our minds supple, and so when at last we tackle the finished
product—Hamlet for examplewe bring to the understanding of
him fertile minds imbued with ideas, at once creative and receptive.
So we can never approach Ajax and Electra; and in consequence
they are never taken into the depths of our beings, but remain
always a little craggy, a little indissoluble, an inch or two beyond
our grasp. For literature did undoubtedly once lie down with life,
and all her progeny, being the result of that misalliance, are more
or less impure. To understand them we must live. And then,
since we are seeking excuses, who can say where life ends and
literature begins? And then who can guide us? And then how
delicious to ramble and explore!
One likes romantically to feel oneself a deliverer advancing with
lights across the waste of years to the rescue of some stranded
ghost-a Mrs Pilkington, a Rev. Henry Elman, a Miss Ann Gil-
bert—who has been waiting, appealing, forgotten in the growing
gloom. Possibly they hear one coming. They shuffle; they preen;
they bridle. Old secrets well up to the lips. The divine relief
of communication will soon again be theirs. The dust shifts and
Mrs Gilbert—but the contact with life is instantly salutary.
Whatever Mrs Gilbert may be doing she is not thinking about us.
Far from it. Colchester about the year 1800 was for the young
Taylors as Kensington had been for their mother "a very Elysium.”
There were the Strutts, the Hills, the Stapletons; there was poetry,
philosophy, engraving. For the young Taylors were brought up to
work hard, and if, after a long day's toil upon their father's
pictures, they slipped round to dine with the Strutts, they had a
right to their pleasure. Already they had won prizes in Darton
and Harvey's pocket-book. One of the Strutts knew James Mont-
gomery, and there was talk at those gay parties with the Moorish
decorations and all the cats, for old Ben Strutt was a bit of a
character, did not communicate, would not let his daughters eat
butchers' meat, so no wonder they died of consumption—there was
talk of printing a joint volume to be called The Associate Minstrels
to which James, if not Robert himself, might contribute. The
Stapletons were poetical too. Moira and Bithia would wander
over the old town wall at Balkerne Hill reading poetry by moon-


VIRGINIA WOOLF
383
light. Perhaps there was a little too much poetry in Colchester in
1800. Looking back in the middle of a prosperous and vigorous
life Ann had to lament many broken careers, much unfulfilled
promise. The Stapletons died young, perverted, miserable; Jacob,
with his "dark scorn-speaking countenance” who had vowed that
he would spend the night looking for Ann's lost bracelet in the
street, disappeared “and I last heard of him vegetating among the
ruins of Rome—himself too much a ruin”; as for the Hills their
fate was worst of all. To submit to public baptism was flighty;
but to marry Captain M.! Anybody could have warned pretty
Fanny Hill against Captain M. Yet off she drove with him in his
fine phaeton. For years nothing more was heard of her. Then one
night when the Taylors had moved to Ongar and old Mr and Mrs
Taylor were sitting over the fire thinking how, as it was nine
o'clock and the moon was full, they ought, according to their
promise, to look at it and think of their absent children, there came
a knock at the door. Mrs Taylor went down to open it. But who
was this sad, shabby-looking woman outside? “Oh, don't you
remember the Strutts and the Stapletons and how you warned me
against Captain M. ?” cried Fanny Hill, for it was Fanny Hill-
poor Fanny Hill, dressed like a servant, all worn and sunk, poor
Fanny Hill, that used to be so sprightly. She was living in a lone
house not far from the Taylors, forced to drudge for her husband's
mistress, for Captain M. had wasted all her fortune, ruined all her
life.
Ann married Mr G. of course of course. The words toll
persistently through these obscure volumes. For in the vast world
to which the memoir writers admit us there is a solemn sense
of something unescapable, of a wave gathering beneath the frail
flotilla and carrying it on. One thinks of Colchester in 1800.
Scribbling verses, reading Montgomery—so they begin; the Hills,
the Stapletons, the Strutts disperse and disappear as one knew
they would; but here, after long years, is Ann still scribbling, and
at last here is the poet Montgomery himself in her very house,
and she begging him to consecrate her child to poetry by just hold-
ing him in his arms, and he refusing (for he is a bachelor) but
taking her for a walk, and they hear the thunder, and she thinks
it the artillery, and he says in a voice which she will never, never
forget, “Yes! The artillery of Heaven!” Perhaps that is one of


384
THE LIVES OF THE OBSCURE
Te
n
the attractions of the unknown; their multitude, their vastness.
For instead of keeping their identity separate, as remarkable people
do, they seem to merge into one another, their very boards and
title pages and frontispieces dissolving, and their innumerable pages
melting into continuous years so that we can lie back and look up
into the fine mist-like substance of countless lives and pass
unhindered from century to century, from life to life. Scenes
detach themselves. We watch groups. Here is young Mr Elman
talking to Miss Biffen at Brighton. She has neither arms nor legs;
a footman carries her in and out. She teaches miniature painting
to his sister. Then he is in the stage-coach on the road to Oxford
with Newman. Newman says nothing. Elman nevertheless
reflects that he has “known all the great men of his time.” And
so back and so forwards he paces eternally the fields of Sussex,
until, grown to an extreme old age, there he sits in his Rectory
thinking of Newman, thinking of Miss Biffen, and making-it
is his great consolation-string bags for missionaries. And then?
Go on looking. Nothing much happens. But the dim light is
exquisitely refreshing to the eyes. Let us watch little Miss Frend
trotting along the Strand with her father. They meet a man with
very bright eyes. “Mr Blake,” says Mr Frend. It is Mrs Dyer
who pours out tea for them in Cliffords Inn. Mr Charles Lamb has
just left the room; but there is a peculiar feeling about rooms which
Charles Lamb has just left. Mrs Dyer says she married George
because his washerwoman cheated him so. "What do you think
George paid for his shirts ?" she asks. Gently, beautifully, like
the cloud of a balmy evening, obscurity once more traverses the sky,
an obscurity which is not empty, but thick with the star dust of
innumerable lives. And suddenly there is a rift in it, and we see
a wretched little packet boat pitching off the Irish coast, in the
middle of the nineteenth century. For there is an unmistakable air
of 1840 about the tarpaulins and the hairy monsters in sou’westers
lurching and spitting over the sloping decks yet treating the solitary
young woman who stands in shawl and poke bonnet, gazing,
gazing, not without kindness. No, no, no! She will not leave
the deck. She will stand there till it is quite dark thank you!
"Her great love of the sea ... drew this exemplary wife and
mother every now and then irresistibly away from home. No
one but her husband knew where she had gone, and her children
learnt only later in life that on these occasions, when suddenly
a
V


VIRGINIA WOOLF
385
she disappeared for a few days, she was taking a short sea voyage”
... a crime which she expiated by months of hard work among
the midland poor. Then the craving would come upon her, would
be confessed in private to her husband, and off she stole again-
the mother of Sir George Newnes.
One would conclude that human beings were happy; endowed
with such blindness to fate, so indefatigable an interest in their
own activities, were it not for those sudden and astonishing
apparitions staring in at us, all taut and pale in their determination
never to be forgotten, men who have just missed fame, men who
have passionately desired redress—men like Haydon and Mark
Pattison and the Rev. Blanco White. And in the whole world
there is probably but one person who looks up for a moment and
tries to interpret the menacing face, the furious beckoning fist
before, in the multitude of human affairs, fragments of faces,
echoes of voices, flying coat tails, and bonnet strings disappearing
down shrubbery walks, his attention is distracted for ever. What
is that enormous wheel, for example, careering downhill, in
Berkshire, in the eighteenth century? It runs faster and faster;
suddenly a youth jumps out from within; next moment it leaps
over the edge of a chalk pit and is dashed to smithereens. This is
Edgeworth's doing; Richard Lovell Edgeworth, we mean, the
portentous bore.
For that is the way he has come down to us, Byron's bore,
Day's friend, Maria's father, the man who almost invented the
telegraph, and did, in fact, invent machines for cutting turnips,
climbing walls, contracting on narrow bridges, and lifting their
wheels over obstacles—a man meritorious, industrious, advanced,
but still, as we investigate his memoirs, mainly a bore. Nature
endowed him with irrepressible energy. The blood coursed through
his veins at least twenty times faster than the normal rate. His
face was red, round, vivacious. His brain raced. His tongue
never stopped talking. He had married four wives and had
nineteen children including the novelist Maria. Moreover he had
known everyone and done everything. His energy burst open the
most secret doors and penetrated the most private apartments.
His wife's grandmother, for instance, disappeared mysteriously
every day. Edgeworth blundered in upon her and found her with
her white locks flowing and her eyes streaming in prayer before a
crucifix. She was a Roman Catholic then, but why a penitent?
S.


386
THE LIVES OF THE OBSCURE
S UOCOD
mm
ves
vas
I
.
He found out somehow that her husband had been killed in a duel
and she had married the man who killed him. “The consolations
of religion are fully equal to its terrors,” Dick Edgeworth reflected
as he stumbled out again. Then there was the beautiful young
woman in the castle among the forests of Dauphiny. Half
paralysed, unable to speak above a whisper, there she lay when
Edgeworth broke in and found her, reading. Tapestries flapped
on the castle walls; fifty thousand bats—"odious animals whose
stench is uncommonly noisome”-hung in clusters in the caves
beneath. None of the inhabitants understood a word she said.
But to the Englishman she talked, for hour after hour, about books
and politics and religion. He listened; no doubt he talked. He
sat dumbfounded. But what could one do for her? Alas, one
must leave her lying among the tusks and the old men and the
crossbows, reading, reading, reading. For Edgeworth was em-
ployed in turning the Rhone from its course. He must get back to
his job. One reflection he would make. “I determined on steadily
persevering in the cultivation of my understanding."
He was impervious to the romance of the situations in which
he found himself. Every experience served only to fortify his
character. He reflected, he observed, he improved himself daily.
You can improve, Mr Edgeworth used to tell his children, every
day of your life. "He used to say that with this power of im-
proving they might in time be anything, and without it they
would be nothing.” Imperturbable, indefatigable, daily increasing
in sturdy self-assurance, he has the gift of the egoist. He brings
out, as he bustles and bangs on his way, the diffident shrinking
figures who would otherwise be drowned in darkness. The aged
lady whose private penance he disturbed is only one of a series of
figures who start up on either side of his progress, mute, astonished,
showing us in a way that is even now unmistakable their amaze-
ment at this well-meaning man who bursts in upon them at their
studies and interrupts their prayers. We see him through their
eyes; we see him as he does not dream of being seen. What a
tyrant he was to his first wife! How intolerably she suffered! But
she never utters a word. It is Dick Edgeworth who tells her story
in complete ignorance that he is doing anything of the kind. “It
was a singular trait of character in my wife," he observes, "who
had never shown any uneasiness at my intimacy with Sir Francis
Delaval that she should take a strong dislike to Mr Day. A more


VIRGINIA WOOLF
387
dangerous and seductive companion than the one, or a more moral
and improving companion than the other could not be found in
England.” It was indeed, very singular.
For the first Mrs Edgeworth was a penniless girl, the daughter
of a ruined country gentleman who sat over his fire picking cinders
from the hearth and throwing them into the grate while from
time to time he ejaculated Hein! Hein! as yet another scheme
for making his fortune came into his head. She had had no educa-
tion. An itinerant writing master had taught her to form a few
words. When Dick Edgeworth was an undergraduate and rode
over from Oxford, she fell in love with him and married him in
order to escape the poverty and the mystery and the dirt and to
have a husband and children like other women. But with what
result? Gigantic wheels ran downhill with the bricklayer's son
inside them. Sailing carriages took flight and almost wrecked four
stage-coaches. Machines did cut turnips, but not very efficiently.
Her little boy was allowed to roam the country like a poor man's
son, bare-legged, untaught. And Mr Day coming to breakfast
and staying to dinner argued incessantly about scientific principles
and the laws of nature. Here however we encounter one of the
pitfalls of this nocturnal rambling among forgotten worthies. It
is so difficult to keep, as we must with highly authenticated people,
strictly to the facts. It is so difficult to refrain from making scenes
which, if the past could be recalled, might perhaps be found lack-
ing in accuracy. With a character like Thomas Day, in particular,
whose history surpasses the bounds of the credible, we find ourselves
oozing amazement like a sponge which has absorbed so much that
it can retain no more, but fairly drips. Certain scenes have the
fascination which belongs rather to the abundance of fiction than
to the sobriety of fact. For instance we conjure up all the drama
of poor Mrs Edgeworth's daily life; her bewilderment; her
loneliness; her despair; how she must have wondered whether any
one really wanted machines to climb walls; and assured the gentle-
men that turnips were better cut simply with a knife; and so
blundered and foundered and been snubbed that she dreaded the
almost daily arrival of the tall young man with his pompous
melancholy face, marked by the smallpox, his profusion of
uncombed black hair, and his finical cleanliness of hands and
person. He talked fast, fluently, incessantly, for hours at a time
about philosophy and nature and M Rousseau. Yet it was her


388
THE LIVES OF THE OBSCURE
house; she had to see to his meals, and, though he ate as though he
were half asleep, his appetite was enormous. But it was no use
complaining to her husband. Edgeworth said, "She lamented about
trifles.” He went on to say, “The lamenting of a female with
whom we live does not render home delightful.” And then, with
his obtuse open-mindedness, he asked her what had she to complain
of. Did he ever leave her long? In the five or six years of their
married life he had slept from home not more than five or six
times. Mr Day could corroborate that. Mr Day corroborated
everything that Mr Edgeworth said. He egged him on with his
experiments. He told him to leave his son without education.
He cared not a rap what people said. In short, he was at the
bottom of all the absurdities and extravagances which made Mrs
Edgeworth's life a burden to her.
Yet let us choose another scene—one of the last that poor Mrs
Edgeworth was to behold. She was returning from Lyons, and
Mr Day was her escort. A more singular figure as he stood on the
deck of the packet which took them to Dover, very tall, very
upright, one finger in the breast of his coat, letting the wind blow
his hair out, dressed absurdly, though in the height of the fashion,
wild, romantic, yet at the same time authoritative and pompous,
could scarcely be imagined; and this strange creature, who loathed
women, was in charge of a lady who was about to become a mother;
had adopted two orphan girls; and had set himself to win the
hand of Miss Elizabeth Sneyd by standing between boards for
six hours daily in order to learn to dance. Now he pointed his
toe with rigid precision; then, waking from the congenial dream
into which the dark clouds, the flying waters, and the shadow of
England upon the horizon had thrown him, he rapped out an order
in the smart, affected tones of a man of the world. The sailors
stared, but they obeyed. There was something sincere about him,
something proudly indifferent to what you thought, yes, some-
thing comforting and humane too, so that Mrs Edgeworth for her
part was determined never to laugh at him again. But men were
strange; life was difficult, and with a sigh of bewilderment, per-
haps of relief, poor Mrs Edgeworth landed at Dover, was brought
to bed of a daughter, and died.
Day meanwhile proceeded to Lichfield. Elizabeth Sneyd of
'course refused him-gave a great cry, people said, exclaimed that
she had loved Day the blackguard, but hated Day the gentle


VIRGINIA WOOLF
389
man, and rushed from the room. And then, they said, a terrible
thing happened. Mr Day in his rage bethought him of the orphan,
Sabrina Sydney, whom he had bred to be his wife; visited her at
Sutton Coldfield; flew into a passion at the sight of her; fired a
pistol at her skirts, poured melted sealing wax over her arms, and
boxed her ears. “No, I could never have done that,” Mr Edge-
worth used to say when people described the scene. And when-
ever, to the end of his life, he thought of Thomas Day, he fell
silent. So great, so passionate, so inconsistent-his life had been a
tragedy, and in thinking of his friend, the best friend he had ever
had, Richard Edgeworth fell silent.
It is almost the only occasion upon which silence is recorded of
him. To muse, to repent, to contemplate were foreign to his
nature. His wife and friends and children are silhouetted with
extreme vividness upon a broad disc of interminable chatter. Upon
no other background could we realize so clearly the sharp fragment
of his first wife, or the shades and depths which make up the
character, at once humane and brutal, advanced and hide-bound, of
the inconsistent philosopher, Thomas Day. But his power is not
limited to people; landscapes, groups, societies seem, even as he
describes them, to split off from him, to be projected away, so that
we are able to run just ahead of him and anticipate his coming.
They are brought out all the more vividly by the extreme incon-
gruity which so often marks his comment and stamps his presence;
they live with a peculiar beauty, fantastic, solemn, mysterious, in
contrast with Edgeworth, who is none of these things. In par-
ticular he brings before us a garden in Cheshire, the garden of a
parsonage, an ancient but commodious parsonage.
One pushed through a white gate and found oneself in a grass
court, small but well kept, with roses growing in the hedges and
grapes hanging from the walls. But what in the name of wonder
were those objects in the middle of the grass plot? Through the
dusk of an autumn evening there shone out an enormous white
globe. Round it at various distances were others of different
sizes—the planets, and their satellites, it seemed. But who could
have placed them there, and why? The house was silent; the win-
dows shut; nobody was stirring. Then, furtively peeping from
behind a curtain, appeared for a second the face of an elderly man,
handsome, dishevelled, distraught. It vanished.
In some mysterious way human beings inflict their own vagaries


390
THE LIVES OF THE OBSCURE
upon nature. Moths and birds must have fitted more silently
through that little garden; the roses must have hung their heads
in silence. Then, booted and spurred, red-faced, goggle-eyed,
garrulous, inquisitive, in burst Richard Lovell Edgeworth.
He looked at the globes; he satisfied himself that they were of
"accurate design and workmanlike construction.” He knocked at
the parsonage door. He knocked and knocked. No one came. At
length, as his impatience was overcoming him, slowly the latch
was undone, gradually the door was opened; a clergyman,
neglected, unkempt, but still a gentleman stood before him. Edge
worth named himself, and they retired to a parlour littered with
books and papers and valuable furniture now fallen to decay. At
last, unable to control his curiosity any longer, Edgeworth asked
what were the globes in the garden? Instantly the clergyman dis-
played extreme agitation. It was his son who had made them, he
exclaimed, a boy of genius, a boy of the greatest industry, and of
virtue and acquirements far beyond his age. But he had died.
His wife had died. Edgeworth tried to turn the conversation, but
in vain. The poor man rushed on, passionately, incoherently,
about his son, his genius, his death. “It struck me that his grief
had injured his understanding,” said Edgeworth, and he was becom-
ing more and more uncomfortable when the door opened and a girl
of fourteen or fifteen entered with a tea tray in her hand and
suddenly changed the course of his host's conversation. Indeed,
she was beautiful; dressed in white, her nose a shade too promi-
nent, perhaps—but no, her proportions were exquisitely right.
“She is a scholar and an artist!" the clergyman exclaimed as she
left the room. But why did she leave the room? If she was his
daughter why did she not preside at the tea table? Was she his
mistress? Who was she? And why was the house in this state of
litter and decay? Why was the front door locked? Why was the
clergyman apparently a prisoner and what was his secret story?
Questions began to crowd into Edgeworth's head as he sat drink-
ing his tea; but he could only shake his head and make one last
reflection, “I feared that something was not right,” as he shut the
white wicket gate behind him, and left alone for ever in the untidy
house among the planets and their satellites the mad clergyman
and the lovely girl.


QUEEN GORMLAI
BY PADRAIC COLUM
.
Unseemly is the rag
That's for my back to-day;
Patched and double-patched,
The hodden on the grey.
Not fingers that e'er felt
Fine things within their hold,
Drew needles in and through,
And smoothed out the fold.
Here, here I am begrudged
Even the candle's light,
To put it on, the garb
That leaves me misbedight.
O skinflint woman, Mor,
Who knows that I speak true-
I had women once,
A queen's retinue!
Light of hand and apt,
And companionable:
Seven score women, Mor,
I had at my call.
A blue Norse hood had I
Watching the hardy turns,
And feats of Clann O'Neill
We quaffed from goblet-horns.
A crimson cloak I wore,
When, with Niall the King,
I watched the horses race
At Limerick in the spring.


392
QUEEN GORMLAI
In Tara of King Niall
The gold was round the wine,
And I was given the cup-
A furze-bright dress was mine.
Now this old clout to wear
With root-like stitches through-
Not hands that worked for queens,
Nor fine things felt made you!
The bramble is no friend,
It pulls at me and drags;
This thorny ground is mine,
Where briars tear my rags.


MARIANNE MOORE
BY WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS
We
IN
THE best work is always neglected and there is no critic among
I the older men who has cared to champion the newer names
from outside the battle. The established critic will not read.
So it is that the present writers must turn interpreters of their
own work. Even those who enjoy modern work are not always
intelligent, but often seem at a loss to know the white marks
from the black. But modernism is distressing to many who would
at least tolerate it if they knew how. These individuals who can-
not bear the necessary appearance of disorder in all immediacy,
could be led to appreciation through critical study.
If one come with Miss Moore's work to some wary friend and
say, “Everything is worthless but the best and this is the best,”
adding, “_only with difficulty discerned,” will he see anything,
if he be at all well read, but destruction? From my experience
he will be shocked and bewildered. He will perceive absolutely
nothing except that his whole preconceived scheme of values has
been ruined. And this is exactly what he should see, a break
through all preconceptions of poetic form and mood and pace,
a flaw, a crack in the bowl. It is this that one means when
he says destruction and creation are simultaneous. But this is
not easy to accept. Miss Moore, using the same material as all
others before her, comes at it so effectively at a new angle as to
throw out of fashion the classical-conventional poetry to which
one is used and puts her own and that about her in its place.
The old stops are discarded. This must antagonize many. Fur-
thermore there is a multiplication, a quickening, a burrowing
through, a blasting aside, a dynamization, a flight over—it is
modern, but the critic must show that this is only to reveal an
essential poetry through the mass, as always, and with superlative
effect in this case.
A course in mathematics would not be wasted on a poet, or a
Note: Observations. By Marianne Moore. 12mo. 120 pages. Lincoln
MacVeagh. The Dial Press. $2.


394
MARIANNE MOORE
P
reader of poetry, if he remembered no more from it than the
geometric principle of the intersection of loci: from all angles
lines converging and crossing establish points. He might carry
it further and say in his imagination, that apprehension perforates,
at places, through to understanding—as white is at the intersec-
tion of blue and green and yellow and red. It is this white light
that is the background of all good work. Aware of this one may
read the Greeks or the Elizabethans or Sidney Lanier, even
Robert Bridges, and preserve interest, poise, and enjoyment. He
may visit Virginia or China, and when friends, eager to please,
playfully lead him about for pockets of local colour-he may go.
Local colour is not, as the parodists, the localists believe, an
object of art. It is merely a variant serving to locate some point
of white penetration. The intensification of desire toward this
purity is the modern variant. It is that which interests me most
and seems most solid among the qualities I witness in my contem-
poraries; it is a quality present in much or even all that Miss
Moore does.
Poems, like paintings, can be interesting because of the subject
with which they deal. The baby glove of a Pharaoh can be so pre-
sented as to bring tears to the eyes. And it need not be bad work
because it has to do with a favourite cat dead. Poetry, rare and
never willingly recognized, only its accidental colours make it
tolerable to most. If it be of a red colouration those who like
red will follow and be led restfully astray. So it is with hymns,
battle songs, love ditties, elegies. Humanity sees itself in them,
sees with delight this, that, and the other quality with which
it is familiar, the good placed attractively and the bad thrown
into a counter light. This is inevitable. But in any anthology
it will be found that men have been hard put to it at all times
to tell which is poetry and which the impost. This is hard. The
difficult thing to realize is that the thrust must go through to
the white, at least somewhere.
Good modern work, far from being the fragmentary, neurotic
thing its disunderstanders think it, is nothing more than work
compelled by these conditions. It is a multiplication of impulses
that by their several flights, crossing at all eccentric angles, might
enlighten. As a phase, in its slightest beginning, it is not yet
nearly complete. And it is not rising as an arc; it is more a disc
pierced here and there by light; it is really distressingly broken


WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS
395
up. But so does any attack seem at the moment of engagement,
multiple units crazy except when viewed as a whole.
Surely there is no poetry so active as that of to-day, so unbound,
so dangerous to the mass of mediocrity, if one should understand
it, so fleet, hard to capture, so delightful to pursue. It is clari-
fying in its movements as a wild animal whose walk corrects that
of men. Who shall separate the good Whitman from the bad,
the dreadful New England maunderers from the others, put air
under and around the living and leave the dead to fall dead?
Who? None but poems, such as Miss Moore's, their cleanliness,
lack of cement, clarity, gentleness. It grows impossible for the
eye to rest long upon the object of the drawing. Here is an
escape from the old dilemma. The unessential is put rapidly
aside as the eye searches between for illumination. Miss Moore
undertakes in her work to separate the poetry from the subject
entirely-like all the moderns. In this she has been rarely success-
ful and this is important.
Unlike the painters the poet has not resorted to distortions or
the abstract in form. Miss Moore accomplishes a like result by
rapidity of movement. A poem such as Marriage is an anthology
of transit. It is a pleasure that can be held firm only by moving
rapidly from one thing to the next. It gives the impression of a
passage through. There is a distaste for lingering, as in Emily
Dickinson. As in Emily Dickinson there is too a fastidious preci-
sion of thought where unrhymes fill the purpose better than rhymes.
There is a swiftness impaling beauty, but no impatience as in so
much present-day trouble with verse. It is a rapidity too swift for
touch, a seraphic quality, one might have said yesterday. There
is, however, no breast that warms the bars of heaven; it is at most
a swiftness that passes without repugnance from thing to thing.
The only help I ever got from Miss Moore toward the under-
standing of her verse was that she despised connectives. Any
other assistance would have been an impoliteness, since she has
always been sure of herself if not of others. The complete poem
is there waiting: all the wit, the colour, the constructive ability
(not a particularly strong point that however). . And the quality
of satisfaction gathered from reading her is that one may seek
long in those exciting mazes sure of coming out at the right door
in the end. There is nothing missing but the connectives.
The thought is compact, accurate, and accurately planted. In


396
MARIANNE MOORE
fact the garden, since it is a garden more than a statue, is found
to be curiously of porcelain. It is the mythical, indestructible
garden of pleasure, perhaps greatly pressed for space to-day, but
there and intact, nevertheless.
I don't know where, except in modern poetry, this quality of
the brittle, highly set off porcelain garden exists and nowhere in
modern work better than with Miss Moore. It is this chief beauty
of to-day, this hard crest to nature, that makes the best present
work with its “unnatural” appearance seem so thoroughly gratu-
itous, so difficult to explain, and so doubly a treasure of seclusion.
It is the white of a clarity beyond the facts.
There is in the newer work a perfectly definite handling of the
materials with a given intention to relate them in a certain way—
a handling that is intensely, intentionally selective. There is a
definite place where the matters of the day may meet if they choose
or not, but if they assemble it must be there. There is no com-
promise. Miss Moore never falls from the place inhabited by
poems. It is hard to give an illustration of this from her work
because it is everywhere. One must be careful, though, not to
understand this as a mystical support, a danger we are skirting
safely, I hope, in our time.
Poe in his most read first essay quotes Nathaniel Willis' poem,
The Two Women, admiringly and in full and one senses at once
the reason: there is a quality to the feeling there that affected Poe
tremendously. This mystical quality that endeared Poe to Father
Tabb the poet-priest, still seems to many the essence of poetry
itself. It would be idle to name many who have been happily
mystical and remained good poets: Poe, Blake, Francis Thompson,
et cetera.
But what I wish to point is that there need be no stilled and
archaic heaven, no ducking under religiosities to have poetry and
to have it stand in its place beyond "nature.” Poems have a
separate existence uncompelled by nature or the supernatural.
There is a “special” place which poems, as all works of art, must
occupy, but it is quite definitely the same as that where bricks or
coloured threads are handled.
In painting, Ingres realized the essentiality of drawing and
each perfect part seemed to float free from his work, by itself.
There is much in this that applies beautifully to Miss Moore. It


MARIANNE MOORE.
BY MARGUERITE ZORACH





WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS 397
is perfect drawing that attains to a separate existence which might,
if it please, be called mystical, but is in fact no more than the
practicability of design.
To Miss Moore an apple remains an apple whether it be in
Eden or the fruit bowl where it curls. But that would be hard
to prove-
“dazzled by the apple.”
The apple is left there, suspended. One is not made to feel that
as an apple it has anything particularly to do with poetry or that
as such it needs special treatment; one goes on. Because of this
the direct object does seem unaffected. It seems as free from the
smears of mystery, as pliant, as "natural" as Venus on the wave.
Because of this her work is never indecorous as where nature is
itself concerned. These are great virtues.
Without effort Miss Moore encounters the affairs which concern
her as one would naturally in reading or upon a walk outdoors.
She is not a Swinburne stumbling to music, but one always finds
her moving forward ably, in thought, unimpeded by a rhythm.
Her own rhythm is particularly revealing. It does not interfere
with her progress; it is the movement of the animal, it does not
put itself first and ask the other to follow.
Nor is “thought the thing that she contends with. Miss Moore
uses the thought most interestingly and wonderfully to my mind.
I don't know but that this technical excellence is one of the
greatest pleasures I get from her. She occupies the thought to its
end, and goes on—without connectives. To me this is thrilling.
The essence is not broken, nothing is injured. It is a kind hand
to a merciless mind at home in the thought as in the cruder image.
In the best modern verse room has been made for the best of
modern thought and Miss Moore thinks straight.
Only the most modern work has attempted to do without ex
machina props of all sorts, without rhyme, assonance, the feudal
master beat, the excuse of “nature," of the spirit, mysticism, reli-
giosity, "love," "humour," "death.” Work such as Miss Moore's
holds its bloom to-day not by using slang, not by its moral abandon
or puritanical steadfastness, but by the aesthetic pleasure engen-
dered where pure craftsmanship joins hard surfaces skilfully.


398
MARIANNE MOORE
Poetry has taken many disguises which by cross reading or
intense penetration it is possible to go through to the core. Through
intersection of loci their multiplicity may become revelatory. The
significance of much reading being that this "thing" grow clearer,
remain fresh, be more present to the mind. To read more thor-
oughly than this is idleness: a common classroom absurdity.
One may agree tentatively with Glenway Wescott, that there
is a division taking place in America between a proletarian art,
full of sincerities, on the one side and an aristocratic and ritualistic
art on the other. One may agree, but it is necessary to scrutinize
such a statement carefully.
There cannot be two arts of poetry really. There is weight and
there is disencumberedness. There can be no schism, except that
which has always existed between art and its approaches. There
cannot be a proletarian art—even among savages. There is a
proletarian taste. To have achieved an organization even of that
is to have escaped it.
And to organize into a pattern is also, true enough, to "approach
the conditions of ritual.” But here I would again go slow. I see
only escape from the conditions of ritual in Miss Moore's work:
a rush through wind if not toward some patent "end" at least
away from pursuit, a pursuit perhaps by ritual. If from such a
flight a ritual results it is more the care of those who follow than
of the one who leads. “Ritual,” too often to suit my ear, con-
notes a stereotyped mode of procedure from which pleasure has
passed, whereas the poetry, to which my attention clings, if it
ever knew those conditions, is distinguished only as it leaves them
behind.
It is at least amusing, in this connexion, to quote from Others,
Volume 1, Number 5, November 1915—quoted in turn from J. B.
Kerfoot in Life: "Perhaps you are unfamiliar with this ‘new
poetry' that is called 'revolutionary.' ... It is the expression of a
democracy of feeling rebelling against an aristocracy of form."
I
"As if a death mask ever could replace
Life's faulty excellence!"
There are two elements essential to Miss Moore's scheme of
composition: the hard and unaffected concept of the apple itself
as an idea, then its edge to edge contact with the things which


WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS
399
surround it—the coil of a snake, leaves at various depths, or as
it may be; and without connectives unless it be poetry, the inevi-
table connective, if you will.
Marriage, through which thought does not penetrate, appeared
to Miss Moore a legitimate object for art, an art that would not
halt from using thought about it, however, as it might want to.
Against marriage, “this institution, perhaps one should say enter-
prise—” Miss Moore launched her thought not to have it appear
arsenaled as in a text book on psychology, but to stay among
apples and giraffes in a poem. The interstices for the light and
not the interstitial web of the thought concerned her, or so it
seems to me. Thus the material is as the handling: the thought,
the word, the rhythm—all in the style. The effect is in the pene-
tration of the light itself, how much, how little; the appearance of
the luminous background.
Of marriage there is no solution in the poem and no attempt
at a solution; nor is there an attempt to shirk thought about it,
to make marriage beautiful or otherwise by "poetic” treatment.
There is beauty and it is thoughtless, as marriage or a cave in-
habited by the sounds and colours of waves, as in the time of
prismatic colour, as England with its baby rivers, as G. B. Shaw,
or chanticleer, or a fish, or an elephant with its strictly practical ap-
pendages. All these things are inescapably caught in the beauty of
Miss Moore's passage through them; they all have at least edges.
This too is a quality that greatly pleases me: definite objects
which give a clear contour to her force. Is it a flight, a symphony,
a ghost, a mathematic? The usual evasion is to call them poems.
Miss Moore gets great pleasure from wiping soiled words or
cutting them clean out, removing the aureoles that have been
pasted about them or taking them bodily from greasy contexts.
For the compositions which Miss Moore intends, each word should
first stand crystal clear with no attachments; not even an aroma.
As a cross light upon this Miss Moore's personal dislike for flowers
that have both a satisfying appearance and an odour of perfume is
worth noticing.
With Miss Moore a word is a word most when it is separated
out by science, treated with acid to remove the smudges, washed,
dried, and placed right side up on a clean surface. Now one
may say that this is a word. Now it may be used, and how?
It may be used not to smear it again with thinking (the attach-


400
MARIANNE MOORE
ments of thought) but in such a way that it will remain scrupu-
lously itself, clean, perfect, unnicked beside other words in parade.
There must be edges. This casts some light I think on the sim-
plicity of design in much of Miss Moore's work. There must be
recognizable edges against the ground which cannot, as she might
desire it, be left entirely white. Prose would be all black, a com-
plete block, painted or etched over, but solid.
There is almost no overlaying at all. The effect is of every
object sufficiently uncovered to be easily recognizable. This sim-
plicity, with the light coming through from between the perfectly
plain masses, is however extremely bewildering to one who has
been accustomed to look at the usual “poem,” the commonplace
opaque board covered with vain curlicues. They forget, those
who would read Miss Moore aright, that white circular discs
grouped closely edge to edge upon a dark table make black six-
pointed stars.
The “useful result" is an accuracy to which this simplicity of
design greatly adds. The effect is for the effect to remain "true";
nothing loses its identity because of the composition, but the parts
in their assembly remain quite as "natural" as before they were
gathered. There is no "sentiment”; the softening effect of word
upon word is nil; everything is in the style. To make this ten
times evident is Miss Moore's constant care. There seems to be
almost too great a wish to be transparent and it is here if any-
where that Miss Moore's later work will show a change, I think.
The general effect is of a rise through the humanities, the
sciences, without evading "thought,” through anything (if not
everything) of the best of modern life; taking whatever there is
as it comes, using it and leaving it drained of its pleasure, but
otherwise undamaged. Miss Moore does not compromise science
with poetry. In this again she is ably modern.
And from this clarity, this acid cleansing, this unblinking
willingness, her poems result, a true modern crystallization, the
fine essence of to-day which I have spoken of as the porcelain
garden.
Or one will think a little of primitive masonry, the units un-
glued and as in the greatest early constructions unstandardized.
In such work as Critics and Connoisseurs, and Poetry, Miss
Moore succeeds in having the "thing” which is her concern move


WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS
401
freely, unencumbered by the images or the difficulties of thought.
In such work there is no "suggestiveness," no tiresome "subtlety”
of trend to be heavily followed, no painstaking refinement of
sentiment. There is surely a choice evident in all her work, a
very definite quality of choice in her material, a thinness perhaps,
but a very welcome and no little surprising absence of moral
tone. The choice being entirely natural and completely arbitrary
is not in the least offensive, in fact it has been turned curiously
to advantage throughout.
From what I have read it was in Critics and Connoisseurs that
the successful method used later began first to appear: If a thought
presents itself the force moves through it easily and completely:
so the thought also has revealed the "thing"—that is all. The
thought is used exactly as the apple, it is the same insoluble
block. In Miss Moore's work the purely stated idea has an edge
exactly like a fruit or a tree or a serpent.
To use anything: rhyme, thought, colour, apple, verb—so as to
illumine it, is the modern prerogative; a stintless inclusion. It
is Miss Moore's success.
The diction, the phrase construction, is unaffected. To use a
"poetic” inversion of language, or even such a special posture of
speech, still discernible in Miss Moore's earlier work, is to confess
an inability to have penetrated with poetry some crevice of under-
standing; that special things and special places are reserved for
art, that it is unable, that it requires fostering. This is unbearable.
Poetry is not limited in that way. It need not say either
Bound without.
Boundless within.
It has as little to do with the soul as with ermine robes or grave-
yards. It is not noble, sad, funny. It is poetry. It is free. It is
escapeless. It goes where it will. It is in danger; escapes if it
can.
This is new! The quality is not new, but the freedom is new,
the unbridled leap.
The dangers are thereby multiplied—but the clarity is increased.
Nothing but the perfect and the clear.


THE FOOLISH BUTTERFLY
By LIAM O'FLAHERTY
T IFE came to the butterfly when the sun was a golden ball in
U the East. It crawled on moist unsteady legs from the
chrysalis on to the stem of the twig. It stood there, slightly
swaying, while the sun and wind dried its body. The sun's rays
came to it over the sea, bearing a cool heat that was scented with
the fresh morning breeze. The light caresses of the breeze pol-
ished the butterfly's long trunk and loosened the large wings that
were folded like a fan. The sun's heat dried and warmed it and
caused it to swell out and pulsate with the joy of newborn life.
Scarcely had it completed the act of birth when its wings un-
folded and spread themselves on the air, giddily rocking at first
from side to side to find their balance and then falling grace-
fully outwards and downwards into position. They were so large
and resplendent that the trunk was hidden beneath their awning.
They were all decked with colour too, so that it was hard to see
what part of them was white and what part was covered with
black rings that seemed to multiply before the eyes rapidly. Yet
all of the two wings looked white in some strange manner. It
stood there on the twig, with its wings spread, full-grown and
beautiful at birth, without a sound, either of joy or of pain, to
disturb the silent beauty of its mysterious creation. A godly
thing.
It rose without effort from the twig, daintily stepping on to
the invisible support of the air without a single sound. Not a
cry, not a whisper of wings broke the amazing silence of its exist-
ence. Its wings spread on the breeze and flapped innumerable
times gracefully, up and down, in leaps and bounds, as if they
were playing on some instrument, jumping from key to key in an
abandoned way. Gambolling like a thing tossed in a whirlwind,
it rose high into the air and then fell away into the valley.
The valley was small and round and opened on a pebbly shore,
with the sea stretching beyond. On the other sides there were
low but sheer cliffs, their slopes covered with long grass and
VI


LIAM O'FLAHERTY
403
W
bushes, gorse and bracken. Everywhere there were little tiny
flowers. Birds fitted about, little ones among the bushes and great
seagulls soaring in the empty blue sky. Innumerable forms of
life roamed in the grass and the accumulated sounds of their
existence rose in a sleepy hum on the air. And round about,
everywhere, futtering and bobbing and curvetting, the butterfly
beheld thousands of other butterflies like itself, all differing in
colour or size, but all silent and beautiful and skipping about
without rest. It joined the hurrying throng of butterflies, passing
from flower to flower, drinking their sap. It rested now and again
under the brilliant heat of the sun. It played with other butter-
flies. But above all, it liked to fly and flutter in the beautiful
empty air, ever moving its glittering wings in throbbing flight,
up, up into the wind with a sudden leap, down to the earth in
zigzag course, and away again sideways, in and out, as if it fol-
lowed an interminable maze of alleyways through the firmament
A little after noon the butterfly wandered down to the edge
of the strand, where there was a cluster of scarlet pimpernels
growing. It hovered about the flowers a little and then rested
among them. The sun was very hot. It beat down on the hot
pebbles and on the great expanse of the calm sea, that shone
white under its rays. Then suddenly a fresh wind started up
from the direction of the land. It was a soft fresh wind and it
blew in long slow rushes. It made the heads of the scarlet flowers,
on one of which the butterfly rested, lean far over, like children
bowing low all together. It excited the butterfly. It rose im-
mediately into the air. It took three long zigzag leaps upward,
high into the heavens and then it let itself be carried with the
wind, revelling in the delicious pressure of the wind against its
trunk and wings. Soon it soared out over the sea leaving the
land behind. It soared a long way, flapping its wings gently
and gliding before the generous impulse of the ever constant long
sweeping rushes of the winds. It glided away, almost asleep
with the pleasure of facile and rapid movement. Then with a
sudden rapid and intricate series of wing movements, it drew
itself downwards out of the course of the wind, to earth as it
thought.
But there was no earth beneath it. Instead it beheld an amazing
level plain, moving continually, with innumerable little waves on


404
THE FOOLISH BUTTERFLY
On
its surface, with their crests silvered by the light of the sun and
their sides deep blue. While here and there were black patches
and light green patches, and again little flecks of froth that
sparkled. The butterfly thought these sparkling things were
flowers and it darted down towards one of them, but when it
hovered near, it did not detect the smell of flower sap, but a strong
pungent smell that was unknown to it and repulsive. Then a
drop of water thrown up by the concussion of two wavelets struck
it in the trunk and it rose quickly, terrified. It rose far up from
the sea and flew again into the wind, letting itself be carried
speedily away from the strange place that was repulsive to it.
Rejoicing once more in the wind and the heat and light of the
sun it forgot its terror.
All trace of land had now disappeared. The sea was encircled
by the sky on all sides, the sea a level blue plain, the sky a painted
cup lying mouth downwards on the sea. And the little white
butterfly, a solitary prisoner beneath that boundless cup, flew on
before the wind, fitting gaily on its resplendent wings.
In a kind of languorous ecstasy it flew until the wind suddenly
went down and a great calm enveloped the back of the sea and
the empty air above it. The butterfly's wings grew weak and
it fluttered downwards suddenly, again seeking a resting place and
the refreshing sap of some flower to invigorate it.
But again that moving plain with its pungent odour and its
continual murmur repelled the butterfly. It rose, once more, ter-
rified. But now it did not rise far. Its strength was waning.
It was drawn downwards again. Again it skimmed the surface of
the sea with the curved end of its trunk. Again it rose. It per-
formed a frenzied series of little jumps, tossing itself restlessly
on the heated air, exhausting the last reserves of its strength in
a mad flutter of its beautiful white wings. Then it sank slowly
in spite of fierce flapping. The wings drooped, swaying as they
had done at the moment of birth when they had come from the
chrysalis. The trunk touched the crest of the sea. It sank into
the water. The wings fluttered once and then the sea-water filtered
through them, like ink through blotting-paper.
There were a few little movements of the round head. Then
the butterfly lay still.


LONDON LETTER
April, 1925
W E begin life by taking every gosling for a swan, and end
it by taking every cygnet for a goose: the last state is
worse than the first. Somehow things seem rather stagnant here.
New geniuses no longer keep popping up from the Obscure Pool,
and the persons we talk about now are the same that we were
talking about—more enthusiastically-five years ago. But it is
not, I think, merely that I am five years older. The results of the
war are beginning to be noticeable. Half a generation died, and
the poems, the pictures, and the plays that I ought to be fanatically
signalling to you were most of them aborted. Forced fruit, the
work of the survivors, kept for a while the losses out of sight. Now
the gap yawns. And it is rumoured that the awarders of the
Hawthornden Prize (for which only writers under forty can
qualify) had to juggle a little with the last winner's birth-certifi-
cate. Mr T. F. Powys, whom I consider the last interesting
novelist to appear, is not a young man, and with the exception of
Mr Sacheverell Sitwell, whose last book of poems, The Thirteenth
Caesar, reveals an ear of quite remarkable delicacy, I can think of
no English writer worth mentioning who is under thirty. In
poetry, by the way, the influence of Mr T. S. Eliot is becoming
very marked. Richard Aldington's The Fool i' the Forest and
Nancy Cunard's Parallax, both frankly affected by The Waste
Land, are the two recent poems which have given me the greatest
pleasure. The second in particular is most moving, and I find
myself increasingly inclined to value a poem above all by its power
to move, a power which little contemporary poetry except Mr
Eliot's seems to me to possess.
It is especially in comparison with Paris—now only three hours
away—that London seems so stagnant. There literary and artistic
movements generally are perpetually bubbling. The young writers
form groups, found papers, give themselves fine names, break up
in dissension and start again da capo with untiring energy and
arrogance. Here we are content to piétiner sur place, each


406
LONDON LETTER
kennelled in his separate writing-room. Viewed from Paris, Lon-
don still slumbers in a Victorian complacency, and with our new
Conservative Government, a Home Secretary who is an earnest
Evangelical, and a Prime Minister who is cousin to Kipling and
nephew to Burne-Jones, the possibility of Government en-
couragement to the Arts seems definitely gone. Which is, I be-
lieve, all to the good. Mr MacDonald went so far as to open an
exhibition of contemporary French painting, and made an ex-
tremely intelligent speech, but what he thought of the Picassos
and Braques remains obscure. In the Socialist scheme art, like
every other activity evidently, must admit State encouragement-
and control. A Labour Government might even provide us with
a National Theatre: for which there is always a certain agitation,
especially among those who have never been to France and seen
such an institution at work. In some countries, it is true, good
State-run theatres do exist. But in England the taste of public
bodies is infallibly bad. A theatre for producing plays by Sir
James Barrie does not need State encouragement; and if we had
a National Theatre which gave intelligent productions of inter-
esting plays, the blood of every taxpayer would not unnaturally
boil. We are nothing if not democratic.
If any one really does want to understand England, I think
no more enlightening book can be found than a short work recently
published, A Nineteenth Century Childhood, by Mary Mac-
Carthy. The reaction against the Nineteenth Century is at pres-
ent very strong. It seems an anomalous, incomprehensible period,
a time of material progress and spiritual reaction, during which
the most intelligent deserted reason and submitted to taboos
against which even the Middle Ages would have revolted. We
should be infinitely more at home, we feel, with Gibbon than with
Macaulay, with Dryden or Reynolds than with Tennyson or Hol-
man Hunt. But all except the youngest of us are children of the
Nineteenth Century: and an understanding of it is made all the
more important by the peculiar acuteness of the difference between
this generation and the one that preceded ita difference, I sus-
pect, which each generation in turn has thought to be peculiarly
acute. In the still unwritten history of taste, the Nineteenth
Century will probably be divided into three periods, of which only
1 Published in this country by Doubleday, Page and Company. $2.


RAYMOND MORTIMER
407
TOU
the second, extending roughly from the 'forties to the 'eighties
will be called Victorian. Contemporary sensibility and taste are
being formed by persons born during the third period, a period
marked in the arts by the leaders of the Aesthetic and Decadent
Movements, in fashion by the raffish baccarat-players and profes-
sional beauties with whom our modern Prince Hal surrounded
himself. But though these now seem the characteristic figures of
the ’nineties, the true Victorian atmosphere persisted in most circles:
for that matter, it can still be discovered in remote rectories, old-
fashioned country-houses, and some Masters' Lodges in the Uni-
versity of Oxford. Nowhere has this atmosphere been so beauti-
fully caught as in these reminiscences of Mrs MacCarthy's. She
writes with the delicacy so impalpable a subject demands, and
with a sort of disingenuous detachment which I enormously admire.
A daughter of the Vice-provost of Eton and his wife-a lady
whose sweetly unrepressed personality has already become legen-
dary—Miss Mary Warre-Cornish was brought up in a highly
cultivated home. Good scholarship and good manners were prop-
erly esteemed, a magnolia-tree climbed up the yellow brick walls
of the many-bedroomed house, and the dumpy dignified old Queen
was to be seen driving through her park at Windsor a mile or so
away. Distinguished visitors came and went, the daughters of the
house sang Lieder, and their mother, in the intervals of her sur-
prising conversation, read aloud from Ronsard, Sainte-Beuve, and
Browning. (It is quite a mistake to think that the children of the
’nineties learnt their letters in The Yellow Book.) Sunday was
observed with unbigoted carefulness, and calceolarias alternated
with geraniums in the borders of the garden-beds. Many beliefs
were taken for granted, certain questions could not be thought of,
much less asked, and the decencies were instinctively preserved.
With the Queen's funeral, Mrs MacCarthy closes her book. Could
she be persuaded to continue it, how different the moral climate
she describes would become. It is her contemporaries, coming for
the most part from just such nice, comfortable, and cultured
homes, who have called everything in question; who have required
of the arts new forms; who have rejected the ethic that the great
Victorian destroyers of doctrine left untouched; and who have
refused to call anything good till they have found a good reason-
or rationalization—for it.


408
LONDON LETTER
To the success of the eminent Edwardians, Mr Wells, for in-
stance, and Mr Arnold Bennett, their little Latin and less Greek
greatly contributed. They produced not only telling pictures of
life among the lower-middle classes, but brought widely open
eyes to characteristics of the old culture to which those bred in it
were blind. With most of the prominent figures of the succeeding
generation, the case is different. (Mr Lawrence is the most
obvious exception.) Their interest in experiment comes from
their being so much, instead of so little, saturated in traditional
art. And the result is sophisticated work the fineness of which is
apt to be paid for by a certain lack of punch. Mrs Woolf, Mr
Duncan Grant, and Mr Lytton Strachey, each of them in my
opinion the best exponent in England of the art he or she prac-
tises, are all examples of this. Having myself enjoyed a Uni-
versity education—and I enjoyed it immensely—I am entirely in
sympathy with their condition, and when faced, say, with Mr
Lawrence's farouche imaginings, I dislike even while I admire.
The contest between the two conditions and their resulting atti-
tudes is becoming marked, even in the newspapers. On the one
hand we have The Nation and The Athenæum, with Mr Leonard
Woolf as its literary editor, Mr Maynard Keynes as its economist,
Mr Francis Birrell as its dramatic critic, and Mr Roger Fry, Mr
Clive Bell, and Mr Richard Aldington among its contributors.
On the other, The Adelphi, with Mr Middleton Murry as its
editor, and Mr Lawrence as its most important writer. The
conflict is between good sense and mysticism, between sceptics and
the would-be founders of a new religion, between the tradition of
Voltaire and that of Dostoevsky. The Adelphi, I may add, does
not appear to be very successful. But it began most prosperously,
and no one knows on which side of the fence the new generation
will mostly fall.
For very soon the existence of a new generation must make
itself felt. There is a gulf fixed between those who were of
military age during the War, and those who had not left school at
its conclusion. The latter generation, without the abnormal cir-
cumstances to force it to precocity, has not yet expressed itself.
It is conceivable, that when it does, it will react violently against
the disabused, appreciative, intellectualist temper which distin-
guishes so many of those, who like myself, were born between
en


RAYMOND MORTIMER
409
1880 and 1895. A belief in violence may appear in those who
have not known in person its devastating effects; a persuasion
that art should satisfy the crowd, in those who have not seen the
crowd let loose by panic; and a prejudice in favour of Victorian
ethics in those who have not suffered from the results of their
irrationality. The newspapers are full of the insecure condition
of St Paul's Cathedral and Waterloo Bridge, in my opinion the
two most entirely satisfactory works of architecture in London.
The first will be saved if money can save it. As a symbol of
religion or of London's dignity, it appeals to those whom aesthetic
value leaves indifferent. Waterloo Bridge, being merely beautiful,
is in graver danger, and will probably be destroyed. Even if the
new buildings which since the War have been changing the appear-
ance of the West End were as good as those they have replaced,
our loss would be great. But almost always they are horrible.
We live in an age of some interesting music and much intelligent
literature, of great painting and utterly debased architecture. In
Northern Europe exist some tolerable buildings which are also
contemporary: and New York, as I can see from photographs,
possesses what you, Mr Editor, once described to me as "a distin-
guished profile.” But though I do not doubt that your architects
are on the whole better than ours (the best modern building in
London, Bush House, is the work of an American) they incline,
I understand, to spoil their good designs by intruding upon them
detail, now meaningless, imitated from the past. The tower-like
buildings, for which, I suspect, your physical conditions rather
than the genius of your architects, are responsible, make probably
the nearest approach to great architecture that the present age
knows. Here we are not allowed them, and the decadence of the
art is desperately apparent. Our architects speak in a dead lan-
guage, and the rare occasions when they cease to imitate only
serve to expose their incompetence. The younger generation of
them have better taste than their predecessors: they perceive that
Georgian is a better style to crib from than Gothic: but at best
they only produce pretty and scholarly pastiche. Apart from cer-
tain factories, the beauties of which are chiefly accidental, I know
of no work by a living English architect which could conceivably
command the enthusiasm of posterity. Mr Wyndham Lewis in
his excellent pamphlet, The Caliph's Design, asked “Architects,
WS
re


410
LONDON LETTER
wa
wa
where is your Vortex?” I have forgotten exactly what a Vortex
was supposed to be, but in any case the question was rhetorical.
Our architects have either no impulse to express the better sensi-
bility of the age in which they live, or else no idea how to set
about doing so. “Art,” said Gilbert to Sullivan's accompaniment,
“Art stopped short, At the cultivated court, Of the Empress
Josephine.” Of the art of architecture—and of the kindred art of
furniture designing-alone is this true. For a hundred years there
has been nothing. To explain the fact it is not enough to urge
that architecture mirrors more closely and entirely than the other
arts the general, as opposed to an educated, taste. The trouble,
I believe, is that there has not appeared for a century an architect
of genius. Architecture has not had a Cézanne or a Wagner,
much less a Picasso or a Strawinsky. And the greatest contribu-
tion England could make to aesthetic civilization would be to
produce not so much a new Shakespeare as a new Christopher
Wren.
RAYMOND MORTIMER


BOOK REVIEWS
BEYOND MUSICAL CRITICISM
MUSICAL CHRONICLE (1917-1923). By Paul Rosenfeld.
12m0. 314 pages. Harcourt, Brace and Company. $3.
MUSICAL critic would probably approach Mr Paul Rosen-
A feld's Musical Chronicle as if it were a rehearsal for The
Day of Judgement; and he would no doubt find himself writing
another book, to express his exact shades of agreement and dissent.
No wonder Musical Chronicle has waited a whole year for a
review in The DIAL, where many of these papers appeared; and
no wonder, either, that it falls into the hands of a writer who,
whatever his talents, has only a sparrow's competence in music.
This would perhaps be a loss were it not for the fact that music,
more fortunate than literature, has special schools and periodicals
in which technical questions of musical composition can be
threshed out by mature practitioners. Mr Rosenfeld brings to
the criticism of music something more than the sensual ear: and
it would be a stupid business to consider his essays as if they were
related, in any dim degree, to those arid little interpretations that
are written for symphony programmes.
In reading Mr Rosenfeld's Musical Chronicle, the main point
of interest is not the piece of music itself: what concerns one is
the juncture of the music with a complete and humane personality.
Lacking fineness of understanding, lacking sensibility, lacking
technical insight, impressionist criticism is often a mess of caprice;
but when it possesses these things it is as near to rational judge-
ment as we are able to go. In contrast, "objective” criticism too
often confuses technical fulfilment with spiritual satisfaction:
it tends to put the firm, well-centred movement of Webster's
tragedies or Massinger's comedies above the splendid human
sprawl of Shakespeare, and in attempting to rule out the critic's
personality it really gives sanction to a less complete and less
fruitful kind of personality. Mr Rosenfeld has the qualities that
ballast impressionist criticism and bring it bravely to port: his
eras


412
BEYOND MUSICAL CRITICISM
sympathies, his aversions, his enthusiasms, even his occasional petu-
lances are worth knowing, and in the presence of music they assume
a consistent shape. It follows that the Musical Chronicle is in good
part a spiritual history of our period, and, like the brief and
abstract chronicles of hackneyed quotation, it shows in miniature
the tumultuous whole.
He would be a deaf sparrow, indeed, who did not find within
the range of Mr Rosenfeld's discourse on d'Indy and Bloch and
Strawinsky and Bruckner the dawning of an aesthetic apprecia-
tion; and similarly, he would be a dull thrush or nightingale
who did not enjoy, over and above Mr Rosenfeld's musical inter-
pretation, something of the jolly wisdom Mr Rosenfeld brings
to Life. The essays on Rolland and on a Patriotic Concert call
back bitter tawdry memories of the days of glory; the discussion
of Palestrina on Twenty-second Street carries the mind towards
that anomalous episode in our history when it seemed as
if the arts were moving spontaneously back to the people, not
in canned and dehydrated forms, but in some organic stirring,
as deep as priapic jazz itself. And how much more than Bach
goes into Mr Rosenfeld's description of the Bethlehem Festival!
One is tempted to quote whole passages, to show how deftly Mr
Rosenfeld rounds out his own sensations and emotions, so that the
reader listens to him, not as a disembodied spirit hearing the music
of the spheres, but as a person with a medical history, a neighbour,
a latchkey, a secret, in short, with all the impedimenta of our
civilization. This description of a Strawinsky recital sounds a
note Mr Rosenfeld knows how to elaborate:
em
IC
"Certainly, the ugly infinitely significant music of a concer-
tino is of a piece with the lives of the folk who listened to it that
evening in Aeolian Hall. The place was more a unit during the
performance of Strawinsky than it has almost ever been, at any
other concert. Audience, performers, composition, the tasteless
and vulgar decorations of the hall itself, were interwoven, inter-
playing, doing much the identical thing. ... The drabness, the
weariness, the joylessness of the music seemed to proceed out of
the hundreds packed, as they are packed evening after evening into
the rows of seats.”
With our eagerness to see the outlines of a culture established


LEWIS MUMFORD
413
in America, the critic of music, literature, or painting is frequently
in danger of losing his wits in praise of what is half-baked or
almost authentic, or not too hopelessly derivative. It is so easy
to prove that mediocre American artists are just as good as medi-
ocre French, German, or Russian artists—and it is quite true! Mr
Rosenfeld, for all his eagerness and warmth, is not afraid to say:
not yet, not quite! There is, of course, a sense in which the most
insignificant work of art is as great a miracle as the cat's kittens;
nevertheless, the critic, instead of marvelling at nature's strange
gifts, is often compelled to deny their relevance and to consign
the work, like the kittens, to some hole of friendly oblivion. To
be captious in this fashion is merely to demand maturity; and to
be less than captious is a cruel form of humanitarianism. I cannot
conceive of a composer or musician relaxing under the warm
blanket of Mr Rosenfeld's criticism; and if he did, he would have
occasion to regret it!
Mr Rosenfeld's style has so often irritated his critics that, before
leaving the Musical Chronicle, I must affirm how good, and how
(in the best sense) individual it is. I see no occasion to be irritated
by his desire always to use the infinitive with its preposition, or
by his sudden adjectives, his newly compounded nouns, or in the
failure of his prose to duplicate the plodding beat of those grey
syllables that drop in an even pall over our thoughts. When Mr
Rosenfeld remints words it is often with a great gain in colour
and clearness. He can put a figure before one in a flash: “There
is something in Mr Bodansky's long black frock-coat that resembles
a concept." The test of a good style is in the closeness of its con-
formity with the thought and passion behind it; and Mr Rosen-
feld's style, it seems to me, meets all his varying moods and
perceptions—the ironic, the savage, the gracious, the exuberant,
the bubbles of humour that rise to the surface, and the profundity
that lurks turbidly below. His skill in extracting effects from
the minutiae of experience sometimes tempts him to strain a
point, or to bungle his major themes by unessential preliminaries:
and occasionally one feels that the results might be happier if he
would cut out some of the little things that please him most.
But to imply that one reads Mr Rosenfeld despite the obstacles
of his manner is mere anaemia of taste: if he offends by his vitality,
it is only because he walks among the sick.
Lewis MUMFORD


THE ORDEAL OF STANLEY HALL
LIFE AND CONFESSIONS OF A PsychoLOGIST. By G.
Stanley Hall. 8vo. 622 pages. D. Appleton and
Company. $5.
TS
CTANLEY HALL was representative of so much that was con-
tributory to the life of the latter part of the nineteenth cen-
tury that his life story has an appeal at once intellectual and general
In addition to being president of a New England college which
achieved for itself a unique distinction, and in addition to writing
freshly and penetratingly in a variety of fields where psychology
and pedagogy overlap, he lived a mental life of constant activity
in remarkably close touch with the changing atmosphere and
inood of the times. It is his endeavour in the Life to reflect the
changes seen in a career which began in a hill town in western
Massachusetts about 1840. And it affords a singularly interesting
panorama view of a period which American novels have never
immortalized so vividly as have the English writers the same years
in their own country. There is, indeed, that genuinely narrative
quality here which is close to the biographical novel in form and
interest—including even the excursions into philosophizing and
the sex interest which the Wellsian novels have made familiar.
Indeed, another comparison comes to mind which is suggestive,
if not absolutely parallel. It is a comparison with Mark Twain's
life-especially as discussed by Van Wyck Brooks’ after Albert
Bigelow Paine. Hall is a more integrated spirit, more effectual
in a chosen direction. Yet over both lives spreads the heavy
hand of a generation which restrains. Both tug at a leash-
dumbly yet as vigorously as their respectable standing will allow.
Both are indigenous characters, representative of American qualities
common to their age. Stanley Hall has had his Ordeal also.
The early chapters of his Life seem like the viewing of an
album of daguerreotype portraits. There is the prime solidity,
the firm sense of character, and sturdy pioneer integrity which we
1 The Ordeal of Mark Twain. By Van Wyck Brooks. 8vo. 267 pages.
E. P. Dutton and Company. $3.
en


ORDWAY TEAD
415
have learned to associate with an earlier New England. The feel-
ing is well conveyed that a certain never-to-be-defined vigour of
personality was achieved in that period which at least in retrospect
seems admirable in many features. But honesty of perception and
record is Mr Hall's aim; and he is not reluctant to point out the
restrictive, repressive influences of his early environment and
schooling. In fact, although it is hardly fair to the well consid-
ered proportion of his story to state it flatly, it does nevertheless
seem true that his self-consciousness in the field of sex is one of
the strains to be noted as most insistent throughout the account, and
most interestingly indicative of the cramping quality of the life
he forced himself to live. His testimony regarding psychoanalysis
while not exactly naïve is yet not the utterance one would expect
from the modern psychologist.
It will be remembered to his great credit in this connexion that
Mr Hall was responsible as early as 1909 for bringing to these
shores Professors Freud, Jung, and Ferenzi, for a notable conven-
tion of psychologists at Worcester. And as founder and editor
of the Journal of Applied Psychology he gave hospitable recep-
tion to discussions in the field of psychoanalysis long before other
learned journals mentioned the topic. Nor will the student of
psychoanalysis miss the significance of the fact that at one time
Mr Hall was President of the New England Watch and Ward
Society—the New England counterpart of the similar organiza-
tion over which Mr John Sumner presides so effectively in New
York! His interest in sex was constant, and one gathers that the
period of satisfying his interest by organized efforts to suppress
immoral conduct of all sorts gave way to a more detached view.
The author is more frank than most in his generation would
have been; he is more courageous in facing the insistence of sex
facts and phenomena; he is reluctant that convention cannot be
overridden flatly enough by scientific detachment to allow him to
offer to the world his fuller experiences and conclusions. All this
is a perfect mirror of the state of mind from 1870 to 1914. As a
social document his achievement is therefore notable.
Emphatically, however, this is only one item in his life history,
and in the totality a subordinate phase among many interests
which engaged Mr Hall's attention. But upon Mr Hall's enthu-
siasm, wide activity, and sweeping accomplishment as a professional
SOC


416
THE ORDEAL OF STANLEY HALL
as
psychologist and educator it is less necessary to enlarge, because
of the already wide public acknowledgement of his contribution.
The very unconventionality of his approach to his favourite subjects
has given his scientific writings a fresh human suggestiveness not
equalled save by William James.
In the world of educational method, Mr Hall's contribution is
notable. He was of those scholars who are eclectic and synthetic
in method and vision rather than highly intensive in some isolated
field. By virtue of the stimulus of this trait, much needed in
American scholarship, he built up a graduate school, the influence
of which in the fields of psychology and pedagogy will for a long
time be felt in colleges the world over. His reputation is not as
a scientist of the plodding type, but rather as the common sense
Yankee kind of thinker and worker in research who found comfort
in “the good old Aristotelian dictum to the effect that it was only
affectation to treat any subject by more exact methods than the
subject matter required.”
One occasionally senses the garrulity of an old man creeping in,
occasionally the disposition to offer opinions about matters quite
remote from the field of the writer's scientific study. But in general
there is the scientist's conscientious effort to state facts-facts
observed in varied fields through many years by an avid, inquisitive
mind. The effort to understand—to understand himself-is pur-
sued eagerly, but without any disagreeable sense of introspective-
ness over-indulged. The sense of detachment is remarkable. One
leaves the book rather with the feeling that this scientist struggled
to understand in areas of human experience where he was not in
his day appreciated. He wanted more of life and wisdom than he
could get-especially with his antecedents so fully in view. He
wanted to tear away coverings and disguises in an era when this
was offensive. He discloses, in short, a human being—a struggling
soul, a keen honest mind, a spirit remarkably humble, brave-and
timid. He pictures himself in vivid fashion, walking through a
generation whose whispered mention of matters of the flesh was
in the wholly decorous term, vita sexualis!
ORDWAY TEAD
CdS


A HISTORIAN OF CONQUESTS
HERNANDO DE Soto, Together with an Account of
one of his Captains, Gonçalo Silvestre. By R. B.
Cunninghame Graham. 12mo. 277 pages. Lincoln
MacVeagh. The Dial Press. $2.50.
TIKE his friends Conrad and Hudson, Mr Cunninghame Graham
U is in a certain sense a writer of memoirs; like them he directed
his youthful energies, in remote and barbaric lands, to other ends
than literature; and his creative life, like theirs, has been an
uninterrupted intercourse with the shades which inhabit those
distant years. “All that we write is but a bringing forth of some-
thing we have seen or heard about”; and his memory goes back-
by right of his Spanish blood, and by virtue of the wildernesses, the
bivouacs, the howling tribes, the little gallant parti-coloured
horses, the hunger and thirst, of his youth in South America-
to the conquest by Spain of the Western hemisphere. “Just as a
wild goose with a broken wing will start in Spring to walk towards
the pole, so do we set out, impelled by a sort of racial instinct
that sends us filibustering”; the age of filibustering, which has
lasted more than four centuries, may now be drawing to a close,
for the resistance of primitive peoples appears to have been broken;
and the conquest by which a dreary but profitable imitation of
Europe is being spread over the earth may be completed without
much more of the bitter warfare in which that curious mingling
of stoicism and cruelty, cant and religious faith, which Mr Cun-
ninghame Graham describes, was brought out in the characters
of those who conquered. In writing of the first assault of Europe
on the non-European world, he has characterized by implication
all the later conquests, particularly those in which England played
Spain's part; and thus he has brought the beginning and the end
of a historic cycle under the same impartially tragic scrutiny.
In a number of volumes, he has written the histories of Cortez
in Mexico, of the conquests of Colombia and the Argentine, of the
Jesuit colony in Paraguay; and the book which The Dial Press
has just reissued is an account of the life of de Soto. This intrepid


418
A HISTORIAN OF CONQUESTS
man, with his "close, wavy crop of hair, a pointed beard, mous-
taches rather long and drooping, and, on the whole, more like a
poet than a warrior,” first took part with Pizarro in the sack of
Peru. He went as ambassador to the Inca Atahualpa, in whose
gardens were “trees and other small plants and herbs, animals and
other vermin, imitated to the life in gold and silver.” The scene
in which this prince, “borne in a golden litter high on his follow-
ers' shoulders, his cortège shining in the sun with gold, their drums
all beating and their whistles blowing, slowly drew nigh to his
doom,” in which he discusses with a priest the mysteries of faith,
and finally is attacked-his Arcadian subjects "suffering them-
selves to be slain like sheep," and he himself dragged “from the
litter by his long plaited hair”-is no less terrible than strange.
Later de Soto returned with his booty to Spain, and in 1538 set
out once more to subdue Florida, where “thick and sweet-smelling
pine-woods drooped their branches in the waves," and there were
"flowers, flowers, and still more flowers, with scented grasses, and
metallic-looking foliage, and feathery canes ..." But that expe-
dition, on which they discovered the Mississippi, but no gold, was
a dreadful affair-an interminable floundering in swamps, deeds
of useless heroism and insane brutality, starvation, and death
pursuing them like a cloud of insects; and at last de Soto died,
and his men, placing his body in a hollowed oak, launched it upon
his river, where it "floated for a minute in the swift yellow flood,
and then, settling down deeper, vanished from sight."
Mr Cunninghame Graham writes with a rough magnificence-
image and aphorism intermingled, subtle and deliberate rhetoric
arrested by a man of action's blunt statements; as a whole, some-
what more capricious than arranged, more rich than economical.
But even his redundancies have a marked expressive value, and the
style, though not suave, has nevertheless a stately music.
He has not forgotten that the chroniclers on whom later histori-
ans depend were bigotted, partial men, usually men who, in the
fever of events, fought on one side or the other. So he has made
them also characters in the drama, revealing themselves and con-
tradicting each other, as if on a little platform before the stage.
Obviously a more opinionated historian would be easier to follow;
for in a true account, truth is a will-o'-the-wisp, hardly to be
identified.
OA


GLENWAY WESCOTT
419
In reviewing the lives of these conquerors, a question is sure to
form in one's mind, scarcely worth asking and never to be an-
swered: were they good or evil? The last implication of Mr
Cunninghame Graham's account is that life has always two faces;
if one be heroism, the other is brutality; where there is zeal, there
will be persecution; and when savages are to be civilized, some-
thing of this sort is the price: “Whole villages were found hang-
ing dead to trees, having preferred to die by their own hand rather
than perish in the mines or by the lash. “It was,' says Garcilasso,
'the greatest pity upon earth to see them hanging from the trees,
like starlings when men set out snares.'”
There is no indulgence in the work of this sad Scotch and Spanish
writer. His knife-like mind is set against all fraudulent romances,
all fat after-dinner complacencies, all partisan praise or blame.
On every page there is an implied address to the reader; and if he
be hypocritical or optimistic, he may wish he had never opened
the book, for a fierce scorn is his reward. And the proud man of
letters must accept as a compliment the fact that he has rarely
received from the public at which he mocks any very loud or
unanimous applause, if he prefers to say with Yeats,
“There is not a fool can call me friend,
And I may dine at journey's end
With Landor and with Donne.”
GLENWAY WESCOTT


EROS
DEATH IN VENICE. By Thomas Mann. Translated
from the German by Kenneth Burke. 12mo. 284
pages. Alfred A. Knopf. $2.50.
I AM glad not to be a habitual reviewer of books. There are,
1 conceivably, several more painful ways of making a living, but
none, I think, more disastrous to self-esteem. In the ordinary case,
the critic, as the poor fellow is called, is in duty bound to read
so many volumes that are utterly and irredeemably bad that either
he loses all power of discrimination, or else, against this incessant
manifestation of total depravity, he withdraws into a sort of
pontifical superiority, a state of mind often observed among those
modern arbiters of elegance, the conductors of columns for news-
papers. Quite other, but equally tragic in its effect, is the profes-
sional perusal of masterpieces. Far be it from me to suggest that
one masterpiece per week is the average drop of cool water accorded
to the critic in his torment; one masterpiece a year would be nearer
the truth, and even this estimate implies an excessively open-
minded attitude toward contemporary literature. But the effect
of such fair, if occasional rewards, upon the hungry recipient who
himself writes is often far from healthy. It appears to stimulate
that sleeping monster which Freudians, with their happy gift for
nomenclature, have designated the inferiority-complex. Once, say
every ten years, the creature abruptly awakes and tears its unhappy
possessor almost asunder. Of course he recovers, but in the interim
he has a bad time. The nightly prayer of innumerable Snodgrasses
and Gigadibs might well be: "O God, send us fewer and lesser
inasterpieces! Better that everything in contemporary literature
be abject and sick even as in me! Better far that this troubling
work of art had never been born to torture me across the immense
gulf fixed between myself and it!
“And among that million, minus one
Might have chanced to be
Shakespeare, another Newton, a new Donne-
But the One was Me.”


CUTHBERT WRIGHT
421
n
But one, I repeat, gets over it. After that moment of pro-
found dejection, of noble despair, the reviewer pulls himself to-
gether, and remembers that state of life to which it has pleased
God to call him. It is very nice to feel the hopeless beauty of
the wan seas and roses framing the Venus Anodomyne, but better
still, perhaps, to get down to a really intelligent discussion of
Botticelli's colour-values. Has not Pater told us that criticism
itself may be an art? Snodgrass, albeit not himself a maker of
masterpieces either in flesh or word, can yet write graceful and
discerning phrases about the masterpieces of others. So slowly
and creakingly he gets down the old and dusty impedimenta-
his critical vocabulary, his method. Nearsightedly he adjusts the
telescope, and examining the pure and perfect thing across the
gulf, discovers to his relief that it is not nearly so perfect after
all. Splendid! There are one or two visible flaws in the statue.
The thighs are perhaps a trifle too coarsely moulded; the teeth,
alas, are a little jagged and pale. The monster closes one eye
appeased, and presently dozes off into quiescence. Then armed
cap-à-pie with the armour of effrontery, and having on his head
the helmet of platitude, and on his breast (if he will assail a
Thomas Mann) the buckler of self-righteousness, Snodgrass de-
scends to the painful encounter. A few moments and all is over;
the pure and perfect thing is definitely stalked, and its trophy in
the form of a cheque is snug in the pocket of Snodgrass.
In re-reading Thomas Mann's Death in Venice, I have expe-
rienced the same feeling of impotence and humility which I have
somewhat irritably ascribed to the gens reviewer. And I have
further demanded why it should be necessary to break the sacred
terror; or to smelt down the gold and ivory of this work of art
into a medium appropriate to the laboratory-table. Domine, non
sum dignus, say I, and am tempted to let it go at that. I have
never seen a notice of Death in Venice in English, and I should
be extremely curious to see one, if only to observe how the stout
lads of the literary press, sans peur et sans reproche, get away with
it. How is it possible to write of such a book without employing
some impertinent jargon reeking of lamp oil, to say nothing of
come more clinical media ? Merely to uncover up to a certain
point its bare outline involves one in a sort of shame.
Briefly, it is the story of the last days in the life of an artist.
Gustav von Aschenbach is not an ordinary writer. Equally re-
rien


422
EROS
CU
DISP
moved from the commonplace and, above all, from the abnormal,
he is one who has gained the confidence of the public and the
admiration of critical spirits by a long and patient process of self-
discipline which stamps its classic image on every page of his
work. At the age of fifty, he is at the height of his fame and self-
confidence and ... he is also inclined to take a brief rest. The
well earned moment for a certain relaxation has arrived, and the
steamer bears him to Venice in midsummer.
When the novel was first translated in The Dial I recall
someone saying to me: “It is astonishing with what art the author
introduces details and episodes which heighten in the reader a
cumulative sense of excitement, disquiet, almost of terror, the
preparation for some ultimate spiritual disaster which the artist
never completely reveals even to the last sentence of the book.”
This is true. One recalls the meeting with the strange traveller
on the steps of the Funeral Hall at Munich in the setting sun;
the episode of the aging and painted fop gesticulating on the quay;
and the sinister voyage in the gondola, shaped like a coffin, headed
unaccountably for the open sea. The symbolism is so delicately
implicit that in comparison the symbolism of Ibsen himself seems
artificial and obtrusive, dragged in by all its hairs.
In the lounge of his hotel on the Lido, while waiting dinner,
Aschenbach remarks a family-group of Polish children, three nun-
like girls, and a boy about fifteen. As a somewhat abstract lover
of classic forms, he is struck and even “terrified” by the child's
really godlike beauty. “He feels that he has never met with
anything equally felicitous in nature or the plastic arts.” The
joyous image of this boy imperceptibly penetrates and stamps
itself upon the hyperaesthetic but well-disciplined mind of the
great writer as, unobserved, he observes him everywhere, in the
lounge, on the beach, in the sunny languid airs of the island city;
and it is no fault of Mann's if even the most amorphous and
Puritanical reader does not feel a little this troubling beauty also.
In this connexion, it is permissible to quote a few lines which are
also a tribute to the felicity of the translator.
"And to see how this living figure, graceful and cleancut in
its advance, with dripping hair and lovely as some frail god, came
up from the depths of sky and sea, rose and separated from the


CUTHBERT WRIGHT
423
elements,—this spectacle aroused a sense of myth. It was like
some poet's recovery of time at its beginning, of the origin of
forms, of the birth of gods."
Som
are
There is no occasion for villains in art, said Meredith, we are
betrayed by what is false within. It is just as true to say that we
are sometimes betrayed by what is best and most immaculate
within. It is through the lust, wholly of the eyes, or better yet,
through the purest contemplation, that the artist is betrayed in
Mann's story ... "His eyes took in the noble form there bor-
dered by blue; and with a rush of enthusiasm he felt that in this
spectacle he was catching the beautiful itself, form in the thought
of God, the one pure perfection which lives in the mind." He
even decides to write a little book about his discovery, and there
on the windless beach, his eyes continually drawn to the marvellous
body playing on the sands or swimming before him in the surf,
he composes his Art and the Spirit, half consciously taking the
boy as his standard, modelling his lines on those of this body
which seems to him so godlike ... "When he put away his work
he felt exhausted, or, as it were, in dispersion; it was as though his
conscience were complaining after some transgression.”
It is unnecessary to go further in this second-hand delineation
of Mann's material, of his protagonist and his symbol; here, as
Dryden said, is "a God's plenty" of ... what the reader will.
It has often been pointed out that the greatest works of art some-
times contain two significances, an external one for him who reads
alone for the story, and an inner or sacramental one for him who
has ears to hear. An excellent example of this dual value, cited
by Arthur Machen, is Hardy's Two on a Tower. The two are
the lady and the unsuitable peasant, but how utterly the thought
of "society” and congruity disappears as you advance and find
that the theme is really Love.
Wed
“Even the accidents [I am quoting Machen] even the acci-
dents are glorified and are made of the essence of the book. The
old tower, standing in the midst of lonely red ploughlands far
from the highway, is at first only the place where the young peasant
studies astronomy; but as you read you feel the change coming;
the tower is transmuted, glorified, every stone of it is aglow with


424
EROS
mystic light; it is made the abode of the Lover and the Beloved,
it is seen to be a symbol of Love, of an ecstasy, remote, and pas-
sionate, and eternal, dwelling far from the ways of men.”
an
It is notorious that a man who feels an emotion, which he is
unwilling or unable to express, is often driven to describe it in
terms of something else. Dante, for example, in his neo-Platonist
aspect, being struck dumb by the presence of Beatrice, could only
recover his speech by representing Beatrice as divine Theology.
The sunny classic honesty of Mann, enough in itself to reveal him
as the countryman of Goethe, has saved him from so absolute a
defeat. His motive for writing such a story, like the emotion of
his hero, may have been nameless or irreducible to language; never-
theless the artist has intensely felt something, and partly by his
intensity, partly by his persuasive art, has so transmitted it that
the reader dimly feels it also. Only it was amusing and perhaps
essential to transform the primary emotion into the stuff of a
purely intellectual problem, an adventure in fiction; to invent, in
short, a secondary value, a device repeated any number of times in
great literature, and familiar to us, in a highly ingenious and
perverse form, in Henry James's Turn of the Screw. The factual
elements of Death in Venice are so simple as to be what the French
call simplistes. An aging artist in need of a vacation comes upon
a little boy at a watering-place. In the presence of the child he
experiences a sense of happiness and well-being, so intense that he
feels his tired energies stirring in a last and perfect manifestation,
and composes a book which is classically linear and beautiful like
the boy himself. So far a comprehensible and innocent idyll.
Then the deus ex machina emerges in the form of the cholera; the
authorities are silent fearing for their trade; the boy and his fam-
ily, unwarned, stay on in the plague-stricken city; and the great
writer, knowing the danger, oblivious of his reputation and noble
past, stays on also, refrains from warning them, and braves death
and disgrace for the sake of his obsession, for a daily sight of the
beauty, the idol, he has never even spoken to. “I am drunk wit
madness all pure," says a writer of the Anthology, “I am arme
with madness for a long voyage.” The catastrophe is all prepared
and the illustrious man of fifty, the national mirror of disciplin
and dignity, is shaken by an abnormal emotion so intense that }
commits what is substantially a crime.


CUTHBERT WRIGHT
425
So much for the actual story. It is a little simpliste, I have
said, but it is very beautifully wrought, and is the sort of thing
that might have occurred to a German, especially since the war.
As for the latent story, "the inner and spiritual grace," as says
the Prayer Book, it is unnecessary, and indeed impossible, to fol-
low it in a notice merely intended to praise a delicate achievement
on the part of a distinguished writer. To be inarticulate under
certain conditions is after all to be in the best of company. Even
to the great Peter Bells of male Hellas a primrose by the river's
brim was not always, alas, merely this and nothing more, and to
that specious multiplication of values we owe the greatest of
Platonic dialogues. They too, the most heroic of peoples, “sub-
limated” and theologized, unable to articulate, or even to endure,
the intolerable beauty which apparently dominated them. “The
idol is of little stature, and yet the numerous priests, who breath-
lessly drag it, attest by their weariness that they are yoked to the
car of a God.”
CUTHBERT WRIGHT


BRIEFER MENTION
DUCDAME, by John Cowper Powys (12mo, 458 pages; Doubleday, Page:
$2). In this novel we may study the exaltation of physical consciousness
as we have it in Rook Ashover for whose love three women simultaneously
contend. Estranged from him by his detachment_by "an irresistible
attraction” on his part “to the feminine body and mind with an absolute
lack of emotional passion,” which finds expression in the phenomenon
of lovemaking rather than in the blasting power of love—we are not
moved by the tragedy of his murder, even dramatically timed as it is to
coincide with the birth of his son. By the precision of certain similes,
by the black magic—the static flicker-of a proud and prompt imagination,
by the author's passion for the “mysterious, inviolable” beauty of nature,
we are genuinely moved.
The Black Soul, by Liam O'Flaherty (12mo, 253 pages ; Boni & Liveright:
$2.50). Mr O'Flaherty's instinctive affiliation with every living form
of elemental nature, scaled, furred, feathered, leafed, soft-skinned, or
rough-skinned, is stirred in this exciting story to a kind of Spring-ecstasy
of splendid and morose abandonment. The dark peat, the yellow sea-
weed, the white sea-gulls, the furious waves and winds, the deep swift
ploughing and sowing, make a memorable background for the almost
mythological and Hesiodic loves and hates of his beautiful and savage
people. No touch of preciousness spoils the taste of these pages, smacking
of ploughed-up earth, salt-bitter wind, and rain-dark air.
The Dream, by H. G. Wells (12mo, 318 pages; Macmillan : $2.50). Mr
Wells again employs the device of viewing the present from a period
several thousand years hence. His personages of the future hear all about
the sex life of a dull young man of to-day and seem mildly surprised
at our fuss over infidelities. Evidently the English, two thousand years
hence, are just reaching the point the French got to one hundred
years ago.
ELSIE AND THE CHILD, by Arnold Bennett (12mo, 344 pages; Doran :
$2.50). Mr Bennett's latest book of short stories shows all his accustomed
competence in handling atmosphere and situation, all his wise grasp on
concrete details. It is not lacking in psychological insight, either. And
yet not one tale in the baker's dozen offered but lets the reader down at
the end. Possibly because an 0. Henry twist is out of character for
Mr Bennett. Possibly because any one of these short stories could be
expanded into a novel. Possibly because Mr Bennett's gift is for the
detailed patient structure which a novel means, rather than for the analytic
elaboration of the mere anecdote. In any event, these smooth, pleasant.
sound little stories affect one like a banquet exquisitely prepared and
served, but stopping at the hors d'oeuvres.


BRIEFER MENTION
427
DISTRESSING DIALOGUES, by Nancy Boyd (8vo, 290 pages; Harpers: $2).
This book is a collection of papers which have appeared from time to time
in Vanity Fair. Mildly amusing, fairly witty, they are distressing only
to one who scans the horizon for a rapier wit and an immortal brilliance.
That their author is an acknowledged leader in another field, may add
slightly to the distress, but who will deny, even to poets, their frivolous
moments, especially if indulged under a nom-de-plume? The book does
not pretend to hold a mirror up to Nature, merely a comic mask.
THE ENCHANTED WANDERER, by Nicolai Lyeskov, authorized translation
by A. G. Paschkoff, edited with an introduction by Maxim Gorki (8vo,
265 pages; McBride: $2.50). This story, while marred by an organic
defect in the underlying conception, as well as by the irrelevancies and
inconclusiveness common to Lyeskov's work, is still rich in entertaining
adventures and meaty bits of description. Lyeskov writes of horses, for
example, with the voluptuousness of a Marcel Proust and the liveliness
of a Thomas Burke.
MARBACKA, by Selma Lagerlöf, translated from the Swedish by Velma
Swanston Howard (12mo, 281 pages; Doubleday, Page: $2.50) is not so
much autobiographical as reminiscential, and agreeable companions as
the author's family and their friends prove to be, one misses Selma
Lagerlöf herself. Each chapter of the book has its own special quality;
taken together, they form a series of genre pictures, full of the homely
charm of a Dutch interior, where a door a-jar or a bright window magi-
cally offers light and mystery at once.
The Peasants, by Ladislas Reymont: AUTUMN (8vo, 261 pages; Knopf:
$2.50); and WINTER (8vo, 284 pages ; Knopf: $2.50). The first volume
of this large novel has the breadth, the detail, and a touch of the drama
that one finds in huge Russian historical paintings of the nineteenth
century. The persons of the story, though numerous, are nearly all well
realized, and the routine of village life is carefully presented. Unfor-
tunately, however, the tedium that characterizes much of the peasants' day
infects these leisurely pages. Though the second volume has a good deal
more action than the first, it sacrifices for the most part intensity to
liveliness. The translation is weak, noticeably in the dialogue.
STORIES and Essays, by Mrs Havelock Ellis, with prefaces by Charles
Marriott and George Ives, reminiscences by Mrs Clifford Bax and F. W.
Stella Browne, notes by Havelock Ellis (illus., 12mo, 88 and 87 pages,
respectively; Free Spirit Press: $3.20 each volume). It is clear that
Mrs Havelock Ellis had the capacity for ardent friendships and a con-
tagious enthusiasm for reforming modern society. As an artist, however,
her words were not winged and it is doubtful if they will avail much
now that the personality of the author has passed on. The two little
volumes make precious souvenirs, no doubt, for the many friends, but
will scarcely impress outsiders.


428
BRIEFER MENTION
THE LITERARY SPOTLIGHT, edited by John Farrar (8vo, 356 pages; Doran:
$2.50). This book is compiled on the cross-word puzzle plan. The
editor in the preface, finger to lip, invites us all to guess who wrote it.
The articles are unsigned and perhaps for that reason are quite frank in
their criticism of the fashionable intelligentsia with which they deal.
Bits of gossip abound and one steps out of the gallery knowing the taste
in neckties of Hergesheimer or Heywood Broun, but feeling a bit hazy
about their literary standards or critical rating.
CONTEMPORARY French LITERATURE, by René Lalou, translated by William
Aspenwall Bradley (8vo, 402 pages; Knopf: $2.50). Beginning with
Literary Influences in 1871, this volume gives an amply detailed and well
arranged account of French literature up to the present hour. Biography
is minimized, almost eliminated, the predominant concern being with the
themes, methods, and interrelationships of the writers under discussion.
There are some reversals (as in the discounting of Laforgue) but M Lalou
usually approaches his subjects without resistance, dwelling preferably on
their claims to distinction. Here is the spectacle of a tremendous literary
activity, each writer with his reputable share of intelligence, originality,
and energy, and each contributing, by perhaps too personal a note, to
the variety of the sum total. And de Gourmont is, by such evidence,
staunchly supported in his thesis that, if this is decadence, then decadence
does not mean lack of creative vitality.
THE AUTHORS' THAMES, by Gordon S. Maxwell, illustrated by Lucille
Maxwell (8vo, 324 pages; Brentano: $4.50). Provided with a chrono-
logical list of authors and painters, with a general and a topographical
index, this book “about the Thames Valley lying between London and
Windsor,” enchants the errant bookworm with resplendent fragments of
poetry, of humour, and of biography, culled from nineteen centuries of
literary history. Although the crispness of the recital is sometimes lost
in gratuitous climax and mild exposition, one is transported by the vera-
cious presence of Elias Ashmole, Gay, Fuller, Pope, Walpole, Dr John-
son, Fanny Burney, R. D. Blackmore, and a host of other literary
luminaries.
OLD ENGLISH Towns, by William Andrews and Elsie M. Lang (illus.,
8vo, 438 pages; T. Werner Laurie, London). Enriched by photographs,
drawings, and by most alluring early engravings, by curious epitaphs,
and manifold engaging items transcribed from civic monuments, taxation
rolls, parish registers, from the Domesday Book, from Leland the anti-
quarian, from John Aubrey, and from The Venerable Bede, these his-
torical accounts of the rise of forty-three English towns provide a wealth
of information concerning customs and stirring episodes of old-time social
life. Although the rhetoric of the recital-particularly that of Mr An-
drews—is a courageously unpanoplied accompaniment to the glittering
pageantry of the matter recorded, the reader has not the hardihood to be
ungrateful to authors whose research has provided from history and legend
so much that is rewarding.


BRIEFER MENTION
429
pages;
the romantiesthere is listive book
A VANISHED ARCADIA, by R. B. Cunninghame Graham (8vo, 288 pages;
Lincoln MacVeagh; Dial Press : $3). This suggestive book is really
a pessimistic tract for the times. Though there is little in the style of
it to whet that appetite for the romantic and the aristocratic associated
with the personality of its picturesque author, the book is certainly a
vigorous defence of a life of civilized leisure and happiness as opposed
to the vulgarity of Progress. The amiable Machiavellism of these excellent
Jesuits is pictured as defending their Paraguay Indians from both com-
mercialism and competition, and, incidentally, from slavery. This benev-
olent despotism, with human happiness full of leisure and gaiety as its
purpose, leaves us with a vision of an order of society at once religious,
communistic, and hedonistic; an order of things gracious and beguiling,
but so different from everything, either capitalistic or proletarian, as we
know it to-day, that its atmosphere is that of a sadly remote fairy-story.
etition, and, opiness full of society
William GLACKENS, by Forbes Watson (illus., 4to, 23 pages; Duffield: $2)
is a monograph. As an illustrator, Glackens possesses a graphic pro-
ficiency that is frequently charming; as a painter, he has nothing important
to say. He is living proof of the fact that Renoir is not, as Fuseli said
of Blake, “a damned good man to steal from.” For the most part the
disciples of Renoir have come to a bad end, and Glackens is no exception.
He has in common with the Frenchman a certain sensuous approach to
life, but his vision lacks penetration, and his pictures, aesthetically con-
sidered, are only pleasing statements of sentimentalized laziness. Art,
great or small, is born of stern convictions—Glackens seems to paint for
the fun of it and not for any expressive purpose.
A MIXTURE, by H. M. Bateman (4to, 104 pages, Lincoln MacVeagh, Dial
Press: $4.50). A book of drawings by one of the finest “comics” in the
world. It includes Mr Bateman's masterpiece, The One-Note Man,
which achieved instant fame upon its appearance in Punch; but there are
many other squibs that the discreet will not quickly tire of. It was an
excellent idea to give these drawings a permanent dress.
EXPERIENCE AND NATURE, by John Dewey (8vo, 443 pages; Open Court:
$3). Pragmatism, in its programme of reasoning only by what can be
“denoted,” might be seen as the extension of Descartes' project for advanc-
ing on the basis of what cannot reasonably be doubted. It is also, how-
ever, a recognition of what cannot (read, need not) be attained by such a
method-a compromise which philosophy has not heretofore been willing
to accept and which is probably acceptable now only because the present
wealth of empirical research makes such a scheme less disastrous to the
business of philosophizing than it would have been to the older meta-
physical system-builders. Thus, pragmatism frankly admits that it has
no subject-matter exclusively its own, and makes a genuine attempt to
become the scientia scientiarum, a common tongue in which the specialized
dialects mediate, "a critical method of developing methods of criticism.”
Professor Dewey is both ingenious and thorough at carrying out the
implications and ramifications of a philosophy which might be written
in a paragraph or a library.


THE THEATRE
I HAVEN'T the slightest inclination to be perverse this month
1 and with pleasure I follow the leaders and declare that the
Actors' Theatre production of The Wild Duck is the most satis-
factory play of the month and, probably, of the season. Certainly
that feeling of well-being which comes of seeing something
interesting in itself interestingly presented has been rare this year,
and The Wild Duck affords that pleasure in the highest degree.
It must be a fine play to read—which I did not suspect when
I read it many years ago. The performance given by Alla Nazi-
mova and Lionel Atwill did not send me hurrying back to the
text because I was turned against Ibsen then; and the present
production is so rounded and complete that the text is superfluous.
That is, the producers (Miss Clare Eames and Mr Dudley Digges)
have rediscovered Ibsen as a dramatist, and have put into his proper
place Ibsen the moralist, the social philosopher, the student of
neurotic human beings.
I should be as boring as young Ekdal with his borrowed en-
thusiasm for the claim of the ideal if I insisted eternally in these
pages on the aesthetic side of the drama. But just as PROCES-
SIONAL indicated clearly the significance of method—the very
capacity of a proper method to say something more important
than the subject it conveyed—so the current Wild Duck sug-
gests that if you recognize the character of a work of art and
produce it so that that character or quality is shown, all other
things will fall into place. Miss Nazimova subdued the play to
her purpose, to histrionism, that is, instead of drama, and covered
histrionics with a mantle of morbid psychology. The play could
not be tragi-comedy then, and the psychology seemed warped and
far-fetched. Played correctly The Wild Duck leads us easily to
believe that Ibsen knew what our later psychoanalysts have taught
us—that the people we call normal are also possessed of com-
plicated neuroses. And as he was a supremely skilful dramatist
he pointed the complexes of the normal people by showing similar
tangles in those whom life had thrown a little off their courses
young Ekdal is old Ekdal over again and the idealist Werle is as
mad as the demoniac drunkard downstairs.
SIONAL
In
seen


GILBERT SELDES
431
The quarrel with Ibsen, and with the idol set up by Bernard
Shaw in the Quintessence of Ibsenism, comes to life again. It is
my guess that the Quintessence was written before Shaw had seen
many of the plays on the stage; he certainly couldn't have seen
them rendered for all their dramatic worth and continued without
some reservations his propaganda for Ibsen the moralist. Yet
Ibsen justified Shaw again and again, and never more absurdly
than in the end of The Wild Duck. The suicide of Hedvig,
which even Ibsen could not manage to make real or necessary and
which he muddled with the rejected suspicion of an accident, is a
violent fit of morality, and dramatically it has almost no relation
to the characters implicated. Werle has barely managed to per-
suade the girl to kill the duck; dramatically the child's consent
is insufficiently motivated. Ekdal has been hardly more unbear-
able than he had been before. Nothing accounts for suicide-
except the opening scenes of the play, the burning hatred Gregers
Werle has for his father.
There you have a motive as unsuspected as the motives com-
mentators ascribe to Hamlet. It is no pursuit of the ideal—it is
a furious effort to destroy whatever his father has created—that
drives Gregers Werle to attack the house of Ekdal. Oedipus
Complex is Exhibit A in the affair; and the conscious hatred of
his father leads Gregers to an unconscious desire to do away with
his father's presumptive child. I put this forward not as an
explanation of the play, but as a possible emotional texture, a
continuity of motive which may not be true, but even as myth it
makes The Wild Duck far more intelligible than it is as it now
stands.
The catch in such an explanation is obvious. Ibsen knew un-
conscious motives and used them; as a dramatist he brought them
to the surface. And the motives I have suggested are not in The
Wild Duck. Perhaps because he was preoccupied with the intel-
lectual problem of the idealist, Ibsen in this case scamped his treat-
ment of the emotions and left us with inadequate clues to explain
the mystery of Hedvig's suicide. Unless we are to explain it by
the dreary supposition that, being a gloomy Nordic, Ibsen had to
have a killing at the end to bring his lesson home.
The battle between father and son is the springboard of the
whole action, even as the play is presented to us. But as the son
is a fool, tragedy is not necessarily involved. Ekdal, too, is a fool.


432
THE THEATRE
It was the most obvious thing in the world, and at the same time
the most illuminating, that he was the forerunner and remains the
inner truth of our own Show-OFF. I am aware that fools can
precipitate tragedies; but I feel that the moral lessons learned
from such tragedies are uninteresting, and that the comedy of fools
is sufficiently “larmoyante.”
If Ibsen wrote a comedy in spite of himself, as the Actors'
Theatre believed, their production was right in every major respect.
How the text can be twisted to make Ekdal an intelligent person
and, consequently, Werle a tragic hero, I cannot see. There are
humorous passages which are farcical and even grotesquely ob-
vious and there is a constant comedy of situation. The human
attractiveness of all the characters transpires as soon as the comedy
is brought forth—and a richness and wisdom which even the
ending cannot destroy.
V
CC
As the representative of the only confessedly highbrow journal
in America I waited until the twelve-hundredth performance to
see Abie's Irish Rose and I was disappointed. Primarily because
the humour of it is not at all racial humour, either for the Irish
or for the Jewish. It is stage-Irish and stage-Jewish humour.
And I was grieved to note that it was not, as I had been led to
expect, a sympathetic treatment of both peoples. The play deals
with exceedingly snobbish antagonisms which are unresolved ex-
cept in the persons of the rabbi and the priest; Abie and his Rose
are both rather mean about religious differences and racial customs,
and as there is no imaginative touch making any one a real person,
Irish or Jew, the play is slightly disagreeable to think about. I
had hoped for entertainment and did not go in the spirit of those
who want to discover how such a play can attract the millions (in
spectators and in dollars) it does. I like unintellectual plays
and can take pleasure in the awkwardness of bad acting. Abie's
Irish Rose let me down terribly. Mr Alexander Woollcott who
reads, but does not get the sense of, English words, is hereby
invited to make the most of this.
Unlike my fellow-critics, I am not expert in the language of the
illiterate. How they know that every word, every pronunciation,
and every phrase of The Fall Guy is correct, I wonder. To me


GILBERT SELDES
433
accuracy is not so important; consistency, the general effect, is.
And this quality the language of The Fall Guy has. I have
heard people say “erl” and “mersture” and I suppose they say
“oinist bird,” but a playwright may get all of these words wrong
and still present the American language if his ear for rhythm and
cadence is good. Messrs Gleason and Abbott seem to have done
very well and Ernest Truex and Ralph Sipperly speak the
speech as truck drivers and drug clerks pronounced it to them.
The plot is not unattractive; but I am tired of the laugh which
arises at the spectacle of common people eating and putting too
much butter on their bread. (The same touch again in THE WILD
Duck, by the way.)
Further notes: PIERROT THE PRODIGAL is attractive, but not
utter; Sky-High has a chorus stretching from pillar to post and
six extra dippers who dance well and Willie Howard frequently,
but not always, funny; STARLIGHT is hokum and Miss Keane
either does or doesn't know it, depending on what she can get
out of the part; PUPPETS is a melodrama which sags and is sup-
ported by a marionette show; The Dark ANGEL is nothing mar-
velous, but if Mr Michael Arlen did, as is reported, have a hand
in it, he has learned delicacy a little; the producers of DESIRE
UNDER THE Elms quote Mr John Farrar as saying that the play
is “obviously cleanly,” suggesting a new form of the catharsis of
pity and terror.
GILBERT SELDES
C


MODERN ART
LI
AS critic I have no desire to push individuals or movements.
1 I shouldn't in the least care to implant ideas in artists' minds
and see them work out my theories. My theories are all ex facto.
I am a stand-off. I record merely. I feel this so strongly that I
have conjured one or two painters I am fond of never to read
what I say of them or their work. I should take no pleasure in
their productions if I thought myself in any way responsible for
them. Feeling this I suppose I should confine myself to writing
about dead men, and would, were it not that contemporary life
is the real garden in which I dig, and living artists are the roses
that indicate the richness of poverty, as it occurs, of mes terrains.
I solve my own problem then by writing of the quick as others
write of the dead; that is, with the same detachment.
I say this to nullify my failure to discover anything new in
cubism lately. This winter, as last, there are no new names upon
my calendar; and no developments save, perhaps, in the way of
amelioration. Matisse and Picasso go on into new graces, but
not into cubistic graces. The theme with them is more decipher-
able than it was and this not because we have grown more adept
in reading, but because they are more succinct. Matisse's earlier
studies were aimed at suppleness, both in thought and in presen-
tation, and have marvellously succeeded, but in the newer works
the schemes focus upon passages so emphatically pure, as paint
and value, that Manet himself, could he see, would be the first
to appreciate them. The cold, aloof, thoroughly conscious com-
positions of Picasso, on the other hand, while in line with all our
mocking acceptations of untutored, but always decorative art, say
nothing as painting. His reputation which pauses awhile with us
centres upon the forcefully abstract things he has now abandoned,
which, as far as we are concerned, are already classic. The
pause may be only apparent, but the pace in production had been
so furious, up to this, that it must be remarked. However, I have
not come to bury Caesar nor to minimize the achievements of a
dead Caesar. In certain circles I am supposed to be so exclusively
wrapped up in cubism that even to note a cessation in the excite-


HENRY MCBRIDE
435
ments of the movement may be confounded with preparations for
the obsequies; which is absurdly premature. “The king is dead”
and “Long live the king” are shouted with one breath. The
curiously prolonged domination of cubism is due as much as any-
thing to the fact that menacing interlopers fail to appear. The
plotting candidates for the throne, if they exist, keep as yet to
their cellars, and cubism, when it does die, for all we know at
present, must die respectably in bed of old age. Which is all odd
enough. Are there to be no more "movements”?
The above entries in my records were made before the openings
of the Stieglitz and Independent exhibitions, but after seeing them
I have no obligation to change my tune, though both shows hinge
upon cubism. The fact is, the fate of abstract art is not deeply
dependent upon anything that American artists have done. A
few have become interesting, due to the new liberal tendencies,
who might not otherwise have had notice, but the post-office address
of the giants has always been Paris. So the circumstance that the
American progressives remain much as they were, is not especially
significant. The really diverting point in regard to the Stieglitz
Group is that it has made some new friends in literary circles. I
have always bewailed the indifference of our poets and novel-
writers to art and cited it as one other of the handicaps our men
labour under. But this injustice is to pass, it seems. No less a
personage than Mr Sherwood Anderson has fallen in love with the
Stieglitz Group en masse. He celebrates his attachment in the
following poem which figures as preface to the catalogue:
"SEVEN ALIVE
"The city is very tired.
The men and women of the city are very tired.
When you have been a long time away from simple, elemental
things, from wind, clouds, rain, fire, the sea—these things become
a little terrible.
What frightened children we are!
But always there is something happening.
Men constantly die, but men are also born again.
Here are seven artists bringing to you city-dwellers their
moments of life.
STOIC.


436
MODERN ART
u are
esses
vn
They also are tired as you are tired; life presses down upon
them as it presses down upon you.
See them here in their moments of life—when life, pumped
through their bodies, crept down into their fingers.
When they were alive and conscious of all-everything-
When they were conscious of canvas, of color, of textures-
When they were conscious of clouds, horses, fields, winds and
water.
This show is for me the distillation of the clean, emotional life
of seven real American artists."
mor
Mr Anderson, in his poem, sounds, you will observe, the note
of fatigue; and I fear this motif was suggested to him by Mr
Marsden Hartley's pictures. Mr Hartley is excessively old-
world and old-souled, and gets a curious un-lived quality into
his works that disconcerts, especially on the walls where shown
at present. I have seen autumn leaves pressed in old books of
poems that have seemed completely detached from any known
form of existence and Mr Hartley's works are equally apart. I
found myself recalling Miss Havisham and the dusty wax image
of Charles II in Westminster Abbey. At the same time there are
possibilities in them for more elegance than Miss Havisham or
that wax image ever achieved; and the right kind of a decorator
might accomplish wonders with them on the right kind of a wall.
It is within the grounds of possibility that a future age will decide
that these weary pictures express admirably the world-exhaustion
of after the war, though it makes Mr Hartley's own friends, of
whom I am one, gasp at the notion that he, Atlas-like, sustains
the whole burden.
The Independent Society used to hang its pictures alphabetically
and with a resultant confusion that was held by some to be jazz-
like. It goes back this year to the group system and the first
result is that the cubists, such as they are, predominate. Their
section has more life, colour, and general gaiety than any other.
The exhibition as a whole is the dullest to date; due chiefly to
the scarcity of the wildly-comic pictures, but the new system, if
persisted in, may make the institution more valuable as a vehicle
for ideas. Grouped, they will count.
Henry McBRIDE


MUSICAL CHRONICLE
M HEY played Europe and the New World off against each
I other at the final concert of the International Composers'
Guild. Schoenberg's Serenade began the programme; Varèse's In-
tégrales ended it; and the opposition called up the full breadth
of the Atlantic. Each composition beat briefly the rhythm of life
upon its proper shore. It was delicate lacework sound against
brute shrilling jagged music. It was the latest ghostly flowering
of the romantic tradition against a polyphony not of lines, but of
metallic cubical volumes. It was, essentially, the thinking intro-
verted solitary against mass-movement in which the individual goes
lost; for the reason either form did its author uncommon justice.
Few works of Schoenberg traverse less writing for the eye than
this new one, and breathe more thoroughly. The March which
leads on the piece and then leads it off again may belong very
largely to the company of Schoenberg's dry paper-musics. But
the rest of the little movements, the minuet, the variations, and
the setting of Petrarch's sonnet Number 217, the dance scene and
the song without words, flow lightly, and bring within their small
compass and in the familiar character of the serenade a very per-
sonal quality of sound. The mood is serener perhaps than it was
in Pierrot Lunaire, and the movement less languorous and less
explosive. Nonetheless, the music's quality is similarly half-pain-
ful, half-dreamy; the tone eerie and sotto-voce; the structure sub-
mitted to intense concentration. The nervous excited strumming of
the mandoline and guitar called for by the score has correspondences
throughout the form. And like so much of Schoenberg, the Serenade
is fundamentally Brahmsian in feeling. The conservatism of the
structure, the frequency of rhythmic repetitions, the symmetrical
formation of motifs, themes, and entire sections, has been marked
by the German aestheticians. Perfectly apparent to the layman
is the brooding romanticism of the melos, particularly in the song
without words, and the spook-romanticism of the loose-jointed
periods of the minuet and dance-scene. The characteristic un-
dulant movement, the lyrical upheavals of the line, true, have
been compressed by this ultramodern into minute spaces. They


438
MUSICAL CHRONICLE
have been immeasurably tightened, curtailed, and broken up. But
they exist in Schoenberg as essentially as in Schumann, Wagner,
and Brahms. That is the German, apparently; and the European
in touch with his own fertile background. Schoenberg is the
carrier-on, the continuator of his predecessors' patient search for
truth. Like theirs, his interest is the struggle for greater “sub-
jective” truth and naturalness, and his problem the shaping of
means toward the incorporation of his inherited way of feeling.
The values raised by the dead great give a certain ardour and
restlessness to his search; one knows he is not easily to be satis-
fied, and that he drives his medium relentlessly to greater sup-
pleness and precision. His frontage upon life is merely narrower
than theirs was. He is the man of his hour, and that hour is a
difficult and tortured one, less communicable than its forerunners,
isolating its members in moody loneliness and semi-mystical ad-
venture. Schoenberg's music sounds as exquisite, shadowy, and
remote as Paul Klee's painting looks. Brahms shudders like a
ghost. But precisely this utter faithfulness is traditional.
Passing from the Serenade to Intégrales is like passing from
the I-ness to the it-ness of things, from a hypersensitive unworldly
feeling to a sense of strident material power, and from a tradi-
tional expression to one which, in all its independence, roots as
largely in jazz as in Berlioz and Strawinsky. Varèse stems from
the fat European soil quite as directly as Schoenberg does. It is
the serious approach, the scientific curiosity, of what of the nine-
teenth century remained on the Continent, that has strengthened
and sent him outward. But his experience has been the New
World, in dream and in contact. He has felt it directly, imagina-
tively, and through music bridged a way to greater apprehension.
Varèse never has imitated the sounds of the city, as he is frequently
supposed to do, or supposed to have been said to do by critical
writers. His work is much more the penetration. He has come
into relationship with elements of American life, and found corre-
sponding rhythms within himself set free. Because of this spark
of creativeness, it has been given him to hear the symphony of
New York as it has been heard by practically none before him.
If you ask him he will tell you how different it is from that
of Paris; for Paris' symphony is noisier, a succession of shrill,
brittle, hissing sounds, and New York's quieter, merely because


PAUL ROSENFELD
439
it is incessant, tidal, enveloping one's existence as the rivers the
island of Manhattan. At those moments Varèse finds himself
striving to give form to his feelings about life, the sensations re-
ceived from the thick current of natural sound push out from the
storehouse of the brain as organic portions of an idea. And in
Intégrales Varèse has found a form richer and more intense than
any he has given us to hear. He has grown: the new piece is
superior in composition and force to Hyperprism, and larger and
more complicated than Octandre. In quality of sound it is entirely
Varèse; the piercing golden screams, sudden stops, extremely rapid
crescendi and diminuendi are his own. But for the first time in
modern music, more fully even than in the first section of the
Sacre, one found an equivalent for Wotan's spear. Intégrales is
informed with a genuine feeling of power. It sounds through the
resistance of the grandly moving volumes, through the majesty of
the chords, the gorgeousness of the ruddy sonorities, the mastered
ferocity of the outbursts. The piece resembles nothing more than
shining cubes of freshest brass and steel set into abrupt pulsating
swing. The cubism is actually in the construction. Varèse's po-
lyphony is very different from the fundamentally linear polyphony
of Strawinsky. This music is built more vertically, moves more in
solid masses of sound, and is held very rigorously in them. Even
the climaxes do not break the cubism of the form. The most
powerful pronouncements merely force sound with sudden violence
into the air, thrust it upward like the masses of two impenetrable
bodies in collision. And the hardness of edge and impersonality of
material are further established by the balance of woodwind, brass,
and percussion. The whole brought an amazing feeling of weighty
power, much as though the overwhelming bulks of the over-
organization, institutionalization, herd-repression, unkultur which
crush the American individual beneath them suddenly started swing.
ing in obedience to a strength greater than theirs, and began glowing
with wonderful new life. Without the juxtaposition of the Schoen-
berg, Intégrales would have brought us a moment of exquisite
selfhood. Set by the fragile voice of an old world, it made resume
once again the coming-of-age party which composes our best days.
Paul Rosenfeld


COMMENT
The Dial is an intellectual sewer.
John Christen Johansen.
AMONG the industrial centres of the State of Massachusetts
m there is one well-known as Worcester. In this wholesome
and brimming receptacle of legitimate activity a morning news-
paper, entitled The Worcester Telegram, remains (since the death
of the late G. Stanley Hall] the outstanding intellectual effort.
Myself having had the fortune to be born in the City of Wor-
cester, I am naturally sensitive to the good opinion of her towns-
men. I was therefore appreciably let down at reading in The
Worcester Telegram:
“The Dial is an intellectual sewer.”
Mr John Christen Johansen, to whom the generously-typed
heading of the six-column illustrated interview alludes as
FAMOUS AMERICAN ARTIST
and of whom his intervieweſ writes:
“He studied with Vanderpoel, Duveneck, Whistler, Freer, Lawrens
[sic]—but why mention his masters? He is Johansen!"
m
this distinguished gentleman has been painting a portrait of the
President of what in Worcester, Massachusetts, is alluded to as
“An Institution of the Higher Learning”; to wit, Clark University.
It was therefore wholly natural that he should be interviewed at
length by The Worcester Telegram, and wholly natural he should
express himself in a straightforward fashion upon the present state
of that art which he practises. And there is no reason under heaven
why he should not say his word upon those workers, contemporary
with himself, whom he regards as at once misled and misleading.


COMMENT
441
And I wholly agree with Mr Johansen (and with Pablo Picasso
as well ") that, as Mr Johansen briefly puts it,
“There is no such thing as the modern,' or 'the new' in art.
There is good, or bad.”
I regret only that Mr Johansen is so misinformed as to believe:
“They ['modern artists] are not willing to spend any time on
craft, in learning how to do things well.”
Failing personal acquaintance with any serious ‘modern' artist, a
reading of The Dial (did Mr Johansen not take his moral excep-
tion to it) as, for example, of the article by Hans Purrmann on
Henri Matisse, might have disabused Mr Johansen of this wholly
ungrounded if, among the vulgar, wide-spread illusion.
But why narrate this anecdote?
"Several years later I saw that ‘modern' painter again, with
some other pictures he had recently made to hang in his own home.
They were nothing at all like the horrors we had seen before.
They were real art.
“ What has become of your enthusiasm over the futuristic
school? I asked.
“ 'Oh,' he replied, 'I am painting for my own pleasure and not
for the public.'”
ome
n
Surely Mr Johansen is not unaware that the canvases of Picasso,
? Cf. the interview with Picasso printed in The Arts for May, 1921:
“Cubism is no different from any other school of painting. The same
principles and the same elements are common to all.” And passim.
Purrmann, writing as a student in Matisse's "workshop,” reports: "Ma-
tisse's efforts were directed to the establishment of a rigid discipline in
his studio. He proclaimed the value of caution, he led painters back to
the solid foundation of study, to a long and patient observation.” And
he quotes Matisse as follows: “ 'You are not committing suicide if you
lean more on nature and strive for an exact reproduction. You must first
subject yourself to nature, recapture it, then motivate it and perhaps even
heighten its beauty! But you must be able to walk well on the ground
before you get on the tight-rope.'”


442
COMMENT
when he was yet painting in a relatively realistic manner, were
quite regularly bringing decent figures? And that his public pretty
generally refused to stomach and to buy his cubistic work? And
that there are scores of such ‘modern' artists now working through-
out Europe and America, men who must carry on their daily in-
dustry in the teeth of the matter-of-fact knowledge that there exists
in this world no market for their product? And that these men
might, if they would but paint as they learned to paint in the
schools, and as they there demonstrated they well can paint,—that
these men might then earn what is vulgarly called 'a gentlemanly
living'? And that, after all, it is Mr J. C. Johansen and not either
Pablo Picasso or Miss Georgia O'Keeffe who is in the anyhow finan-
cially enviable habit of being invited to paint a life-sized portrait
of President Wallace Walter Atwood of Clark University?
And why in discussing 'Modern Art' pose this question?
"Why try to force the beliefs and ideas of Eastern Europe on
us? We are not the type of people for it. It is our ambition to
be clean, wholesome, decent."
Is not Mr Johansen aware that the tendency in art against
which he inveighs originated in France? And that its leaders,
with the exception of Picasso, who is a Spaniard, have been
Frenchmen? Is France (or is Spain, for that matter) in Eastern
Europe? Is it the ambition of the French "type of people” to be
unclean, unwholesome, indecent?
And surely one who, like Mr Johansen, would appear to prefer
that artists should paint for their "own pleasure and not for the
public" ? cannot be correctly reported as having said:
"I remember that a woman who had no taste asked my advice
about buying pictures. Any academic mind can discover what is
really best in paintings or pictures. I told her to buy a $5 one,
and live with it a while, then to buy a $10 picture, and live with
it, and when she felt like it to buy another, a $15 picture, and
when she had three, she would begin to have a basis for comparison
of values, and would begin to learn!"
1 Certain German buyers were an exception.
? See the previous page.


COMMENT
443
Not only, one guesses, must his word have been 'unacademic' but
also this counsel to buy pictures at different prices must be an ema-
nation of a less idealistic mind than that of Mr J. C. Johansen.
Buy three pictures; live with them; compare their values as pic-
tures,—by all means! But what has their commercial value, their
value for the picture-buying public, to do with this affair at all?
The intelligence that Mr Johansen already “has painted Hague
[sic], Joffre, Diaz, and many military heroes whose portraits are
hung in the National Museum of Art, Washington, D. C.” and
that "his next portrait will be that of President Coolidge” (also,
one gathers, for the same august asylum) brings, at this juncture,
to the American Citizenry very general relief. Citizens have read
how their Chief Executive, as also his good wife, the First Lady
of Our Land, have recently been rendered upon canvas (and with
natural éclat) by Mr Howard Chandler Christy; and of how these
two in many ways very considerable canvases now enliven the
interior of Washington's Historic Whited House. Some of us have
indeed been so privileged as to glimpse, in the elegant photogravure
reproductions, these domestic Van Dykes. It is therefore, just
now, particularly reassuring to know that despite this recent
aesthetic enrichment of the Executive Mansion the balance of
aesthetic power, at our seat of government, need not be disturbed.
The National Museum of Art, Washington, D. C. can, The DIAL
is now confident, continue to keep up its august end.
From this illuminating interview I further quote two consecutive
paragraphs, these latter merely for their documentary value as
bearing upon Contemporary American Civilization
"And it is because Mr Johansen is intellectual, and critical, that
he likes to paint college professors and presidents, men identified
with science, literature, economic and educational questions.
"Few women have been included among his portraits. Perhaps
one reason is that he paints people as they are upon the stage. If
they are too refined, the effect is lost.”
We herefrom may deduce:—Primum, that, as in that England
1 The interview with Mr Johansen was obtained by Margaret Brandenburg,
the wife of the Professor of Economics at Clark University.


444
COMMENT
from which the original American settlers emigrated, so in America
to-day, women are not "upon the stage.” Secundum, that refine-
ment is in America, by and large, an appurtenance of the female
sex. Tertium, that in America “college professors and presidents”
are not "too refined.” ... Upon this third point we had indeed,
from the same Worcesterian source, been adequately documentés.
One recalls that a nationally known American economist was in-
vited, with the consent of the President, to address a group of
students in Clark University; and that because this guest's eco-
nomic opinions, despite signally measured utterance, did none the
less occasion in the learned President of that University an acute
disorder, this guest was not permitted to complete his address,-
that the learned President in person mounted the platform and
commanded the janitor to put out the lights. ...
One recalls that The Worcester Telegram then published this
pertinent paragraph:
m
“Preston E. James of Dr. Atwood's geography department said
yesterday that Harvard University, by retaining Dr. Laski, a
so-called Liberal professor, had lost $1,000,000 in endowments.
He said that if such speakers as Nearing were allowed, Clark
would suffer similar consequences.”
га
And that the same esteemed contemporary journal, after regretting,
upon the part of the student body of Clark University, misplaced
interest in Freedom of Speech, adventured the following pertinent
editorial observation:
"Perhaps it is unfortunate Clark college boys do not indulge
themselves more extensively in baseball, football and other matters
of such critical importance in the lives of ordinary collegians.”
That the natural interest of young manhood in athletic games and
competition should in America be so hypertrophied as quite to
expunge all moral, political, and intellectual interests from Amer-
ican university undergraduate life would appear to be not wholly
insusceptible of explanation.






» Living Art
LE BAIN DES CHEVAUX. BY PABLO PICASSO



NI
V
THE DIAL
VALI
ox X::ІПо
JUNE 1925
PERSEPHONE IN EDEN
BY S. FOSTER DAMON
(Scene: Spring hills descending to the sea.)
(Enter DEMETER and PERSEPHONE.)
DEMETER
Beloved daughter, now that the sun's fire
is most mightily upon us,
let us endure his love beneath
the kind arms of this pine-tree,
and let me answer a little
your questions yet unfolded,
since already you can walk
apart from my shadow,
and I know that soon you shall wander
far from my voice's ache.
Listen, while I repeat
words which you may remember,
for here is the place of truth
half drowsy upon the pure needles,
and now is the time, now that the sun's fire
is most mightily upon us.
For it was on such a noon
half singing, half sleeping,
that once I lay naked
bathing in the high tide of light,
when a ray, bursting through the sun,
like a serpent lapped and encircled me,


446
PERSEPHONE IN EDEN
till the love—then centred within me-
coiled warm within my heart.
Then all my members fed it
abundantly with their forces,
and all my soul fed it
with yet dearer abundance.
For what had been without
now was my own, within;
what had been universal
was now given me, mine.
Great thought of joy at first,
grown greater, even to terror,
till here on the hills just above the ocean,
you unfolded from me,
split from my heart in anguish
—the exquisite form given
to that ancient act of joy.
PERSEPHONE
These are new words: have patience, O my mother.
Why should we ever wander from this pine-tree?
DEMETER
Dear child, look forth and tell me what you see.
PERSEPHONE
Among the level branches glares the sun.
He alone hurts the eyes. Should I fear him?
DEMETER
He is your father; yet his gifts are dangerous.
PERSEPHONE
And below his face steadily march the clouds.
DEMETER
Trust them; but fear all voices from the air.
PERSEPHONE
How far they are walking over the immense sea!


S. FOSTER DAMON
-.447
DEMETER
Beware the sea; beware the sea, my daughter.
We are not of it; it is alien to us.
Many a youth, wearying of happiness,
has leapt to the monsters of that lower world;
many a maiden, wandering by the seaside,
has cried once, and vanished, leaving but a trail
of flowers to show the hidden way she has passed.
PERSEPHONE
Easily from the sea the earth surges
into hills and peaks now faint in the hot hour.
I lie upon it; here within my reach,
beneath my outstretched hand, lean many flowers.
DEMETER
You will not heed—yet thrice, thrice beware the flowers!
The sun, the sea, the air: these things are large,
and when they strike, strike boldly; but the flowers
seem without guile, seem made wholly of love.
And they are love, and they are yours. For all is yours.
But among them lurk flowers of no different hue
which distil pain from thorns delicate as hair,
which hide keen poison in their open hearts.
These are the tenderest things, which strike most deeply.
Yet they are very few; the most are harmless,
being but little joys made visible.
Enjoy them; but learn to spare them, for should you break
a single stem, thinking to possess
the flower wholly, then you lose the flower
and lose yourself—even so much of yourself.
Be ruled, and leave the flowers their own lives.
PERSEPHONE
I shall obey, although I do not understand.
DEMETER
There is more that I might tell you,
but you could not understand;
there is more that I cannot tell you,


448
PERSEPHONE IN EDEN
since there are no words for these things.
If I say that the sun is your father, I am not wrong;
and if I say he is not your father, I am right.
But of such matters you need not question,
for my answers are not answers to you.
(I myself—how can I know whether stars
clustered and became a rose,
or whether the rose gave birth
to a stream of stars?)
It is enough that the once happy girl
who owned all, with no thought of owning,
became a woman lost within her own labyrinth.
I am that lonely woman, who has found peace.
It is enough that I have escaped
from the walls of my flesh
by projecting you forth. Yet I am not content;
for you (although you cannot know it) are not myself,
and I am not sure that I have opened
the right gates for you.
The land is strange; you yourself must explore it.
Do you understand in part? If so, I may sleep.
PERSEPHONE
These flowers—how should I understand ?-
They spring from the earth, which is our fixed abode.
DEMETER
The earth has subterranean fires which may burst forth.
PERSEPHONE
Mother! Is nothing sure in all this world?
DEMETER
Even the stars may fall and become lightnings;
such do not ever return to the old order.
PERSEPHONE
Are theirs the dangerous voices in the air?


S. FOSTER DAMON
449
DEMETER
At times I think it; but all that we can know
is that some people hear a voice which calls them
by name; and then they vanish, not to return.
Our lives and deaths are written in our names.
PERSEPHONE
But why should we change? You have not changed,
except as you have gathered strength and knowledge.
I am like you in every way but that.
The same light streams from my hands as from yours.
DEMETER
Ask me no more; the sacred hour is passing.
Not that again may I know the embrace,
for it was not here, but in another land.
Not that again ever may I bathe
in full waves and cross-currents of fire.
And now I must either wake or sleep,
must speak or else keep silent;
moreover, I know that my words
change themselves in your ear.
Ask me no more: I am impatient of questions.
This is the hour of commemoration,
when I rest in my cave from the ecstasy
wrapped round with ancient dream.
Ask me no more; hinder me no longer.
Go ask of the locusts whirring in yonder laurel.
Look in the eyes of the air; overcome his timidity.
Henceforth such voices shall be clearer than mine.
Ah, daughter! I can give shoes to these tender feet;
I cannot make paths to unroll before them.
That is one sorrow which follows after joy.
Ask me no more: I am weary of the world.
n
W
(Demeter departs.)
PERSEPHONE
Now she is gone; I am alone with the world.
el


450
PERSEPHONE IN EDEN
All is mine-how can it ever change!
The sun has moved a space across the sky;
and of his bright love, from my feet is born
a little huddle of shapeless shadow
that clings to my skirts like a tiny child;
but as my father descends,
so will my shadow grow large and shapely.
It is hot; let me lie by this pool
and cool my wrists in the pure water.
My shadow has lain down beside me;
he sets his lips where I set mine.
Ah! shadow! Do you admire the other companion
whose haloed head regards me from another world?
She is I!
How many of me are there?
My mother, my shadow, my reflection-
I radiate myself in all directions!
I can grasp my mother, can touch
my shadow, can but see my reflection
(for I cannot part the veils of water).
Where else am I?
Do you suppose that in the ocean
there is another nymph, my double,
who will always swim beside me?
SW
How many of me are there
too subtle even for sight?
(Mermaids rise from the ocean.)
MERMAIDS
From the cool depth to the warm height,
Up-up-we soar to the light,
And open our arms where the sun burns white.
While we float high in his pure pyre,
There runs from our hair and our hair's attire
The liquid crystal intense with fire,


S. FOSTER DAMON
451
451
On our arms full of the sea-laurel
With oozy petals, and huge auroral
Pearls, and the vein-like purple coral.
In the swift lace of a foam-kirtle
She rises through waters strangely fertile
With the flickering green of the leaves of the myrtle.
Now the long lines of the ripples bear her
Toward the pines of the shore, near and nearer;
Or is she drawn by the face in her mirror?
And the shell grounds on the firm land
With a curved wash spreading over the sand.
She stirs at the silence and drops her hand.
APHRODITE
These billows of the shore, frozen, caught
in white hills and hanging curves crested with green
are not the blue, moving waves crowned with white;
yet I may step without fear from world to world
for I am sovereign, and all worlds are the same.
(She steps from her shell and lifts the mirror again.)
But I will behold only myself, for none other is worth
beholding.
The sun, in love with his own beauty, created the ocean for
his glass;
now I, their child, surpass the parents.
You nymphs and dryads, poor copies of myself,
gaze not at me, glowing from the dangerous salt.
You shall not look, I say!
See, I cover myself with this long hair,
the radiation of my beauty;
I hide my face behind my mirror.
Yet why should I be foolish, as though from shame?
I will not be coy; there is none here to admire sufficiently.
Slaves! fulfil my commands, and in your turn


452
PERSEPHONE IN EDEN
you shall enslave all, from warrior to smith.
I will not be coy: you brothers, the winds,
never done playfully wrestling in each other's arms,
you shall admire, till you stop your play in wonder.
See: I hide no longer in the banner of my beauty.
Gaze into the double violets of my eyes,
breathe deeply the light wild-roses of my breasts;
-yet I shall not tell all—no, not for you!
There is another flower—the rarest—that none may know,
which blooms only at twilight in secret places;
its very name shall be hidden.
One alone may gather it. He is not here.
Where is he? oh, where is he?
Guiding his dappled horse with his knees,
brandishing the dangerous, broad-headed spear,
thrusting it fiercely into the underbrush
down at the wallowing boar.
Foolish boy! oh, foolish boy!
You do not know what the notes of your horn
are summoning toward you through the forest.
I come with the echo, down the long, dim glades,
a star gliding toward you, past green clouds of leaves.
Tragic boy! oh, tragic boy!
He thinks to hunt the boar; but he hunts me.
I am the one cut through by the keen steel;
I die in his arms as he plucks it out by the hilt,
and desperate, tries to staunch the bitter blood.
Ha, ha! How I shall baffle him!
For as he whines over the empty body,
already I shall have come again, in another form,
drying the tears of his heart.
Then I will be a little kind
and lay my hand for a moment
upon the shoulders heaving with anguish.
O cool hand! Poor boy, look up: it is I.
I have brought you a little water in my palm.
Be rested; do not stir; I am with you.


S. FOSTER DAMON
453
-But I will not stay, for he must not possess me then,
me the rare, the terrible!
Where is he? oh, where is he?
He shall come instantly! I will not be so defied!
I hear his horn: not yet has he found the boar.
Out of the way! Let none follow me!
But gather each a flower from my footprints
in memory of this honour,
for you may never behold me again.
A DRYAD
Strange goddess, there is no path through the forest.
The slender feet will be defiled and cut.
These buskins, then, girded with silver to the knee;
this tunic to protect the delicate flanks from briar-spikes.
APHRODITE
Be it so; though you disguise me
as that odd sister of mine, Artemis,
who is already staring at us, round-faced and red
across the dunes. But he shall be the more delighted
when he knows how I have baffled him!
-And you? Are you a dryad, girl, staring with eyes
wide as the nostrils of a poised doe?
If you wish to be of my train, I may not forbid it.
PERSEPHONE
I only wondered to see you play so with flowers
and give them as gifts, when some may be dangerous.
APHRODITE
Now by my mother the sea! I am minded, girl, to curse you
for this insolence! this contempt of my liberal gifts!
Ha! why, the girl is a fool! She shall never follow me!
Listen, girl, do you see any of the train turn yellow or blue?
Have they wrinkles, do they groan, do they fall to the ground
and die?
Your eyes are big enough to see with!


454
PERSEPHONE IN EDEN
Am I one to give dangerous gifts?
Now I determine henceforth to wear nothing but flowers,
to weave them into elaborate robes, fresh each dawn.
Why, girl, have you never listened to what they whisper?
Can such children be dangerous ?
-Come, I waste the hour!
Into the forest! Let them follow who will!
(Aphrodite and the others de part.)
PERSEPHONE
Like a breeze, she has vanished among the glades with those
who met her.
The others have plunged to their homes under the sea.
Only a few circles remain on the water;
huge blossoms vibrating in the sunset.
There are armfuls of flowers trodden into the sand.
The west itself is a sultry flower of scarlet;
the east is an enormous blue blossom with white stamens.
And as the cool tide of the night rises round me
I see the light from my hands grow clearer.
I touch this tree—terror!-beneath the bark
a thrill runs through it; the tree blossoms.
How can I escape flowers springing at my touch?
Land and sea-sky and sky-
I am caught up between petals!
The universe blooms.
ses I
Surely my mother was wrong. If flowers poison,
who could be happy when under our very tread
rise roses, crocuses, violets curled in the deep grass,
lilies, hyacinths, the frail-spiring larkspur?
The sea itself is a living meadow of blue
where, all day long, white flowers climbed the rocks.
My mother has forgotten; else she herself
would wear them, and discard those dry
ears of wheat which she binds upon her temples.
Yet I shall obey her, shall not gather one,
but I will lie down here upon this bank


S. FOSTER DAMON
455
and listen to hear them whispering in the dusk.
Ah! sisters! sisters! how soft are your bosoms!
Your little faces look over into my eyes
and press light kisses all along my arms.
Voices of FLOWERS
Why should we not love you,
you who are our dream?
PERSEPHONE
You have thought of me already? How is this?
THE FLOWERS
For long the earth has slumbered
In the blue cave of space;
And we are the thoughts unnumbered
Wherewith her slumbers teem;
But as we pore upon your face
We see the dreams' dream.
For you are our perfection;
We gaze with all our eyes
Upon our resurrection;
Nothing can be above you
In fire, earth, seas, or skies.
Ah, how should we not love you?
PERSEPHONE
Your song is sweet in my lips.
It drowses me with perfume.
I could lie here for ever
in this tiny forest of twilight colour,
hearing the breezes sway
the tall grasses above me.
SS
A SINGLE Voice (dimly)
The perfume is a dream.
PERSEPHONE
Perfume drifts across the low moon.


456
PERSEPHONE IN EDEN
The Voice (from the air)
The dream shall speak-
PERSEPHONE
The moon reflects the red of the dead sun.
The Voice (yet more clearly)
-words you would not hear,-
PERSEPHONE
The moon is blurred.
The Voice
-yet shall hear unresisting.
The FLOWERS (in a soft chord)
Persephone, Persephone!
Lie closer to our bosoms
and you shall be the eternal
singing of the blossoms.
The Voice (a youth's)
The song clings.
PERSEPHONE
Who is there?
Drowsily I hear
a clear voice ringing
within the air.
THE VOICE
I am yourself,
your voice radiated and returned
that you may learn of your own beauty.
PERSEPHONE
My voice never caused so deep an echo.
The Voice (caressingly)
Persephone! Persephone! O syllables of love!


S. FOSTER DAMON
457
PERSEPHONE
Who are you, calling upon me so gently?
THE VOICE
I am one who walks among flowers
in the cool of dusk,
for this is my garden.
PERSEPHONE
A third time: who are you?
The Voice (fading away)
I have told you twice.
I know your name, Persephone,
but as yet you have not learned mine.
PERSEPHONE
Hark: it was the languid trees, stirring their arms heavy with
leaves;
they have sighed in the heat, yet without breaking the shrill
trill of the crickets.
A richer air is poured round me. I am uneasy.
Till now, everything seemed final with itself,
the sufficient, perfect expression of its essence;
but now I do not understand these things no longer mine.
Are they masks, through which voices speak?
doors that open and shut, letting gusts of music through?
There is a humming beneath the hush of the sea, the throb of
the crickets,
as though harps, long playing, have come nearer.
I have strayed upon a festival, and do not know the tongue;
all things speak to each other, but ignore me.
I am too small now, for them to fear,
and they are concerned with preparation for the tremendous
dance
outside the translucent walls of the world that bar me in.
I have forgotten what I have been.
Oh, I can hear the music, and the laughter drifting above it!


458
PERSEPHONE IN EDEN
Shall I, too, not adorn myself for the festival ?
The guest is not yet arrived; I still have time
Ah, the heat! the drums! I shiver. Was it here that I lay
upon flowers?
The Flowers
Still we guard the print of your body,
Persephone, elder sister!
PERSEPHONE
I have not harmed you, then?
Crushed not one back to death?
No drop of hate in a single chalice?
THE FLOWERS
Poison, when we have kissed her?
O breath of the palace of night!
How we adore you, adore you!
Take us: we are your delight;
Tear us, petal from intricate petal,
For what are we before you?
PERSEPHONE
Is it true, then? Do you really love me so
that I may break you from the lucid stem
and place your little cages of light and sweetness
at my breast, in my hair?
THE FLOWERS
Do we not offer ourselves?
Are we complete
If vainly we cast ourselves
Before your feet?
PERSEPHONE
What are you, that you run after me everywhere?
The FlowERS
We burst the seed as the bird breaks through the shell;
then timidly at first, scarcely believing the bliss,


S. FOSTER DAMON
459
we uncoil our delight upward toward the sun,
climbing, building, erecting
unfurling green wings to bear us higher-
t draughts of the pure light-
until at the climax of our flight, we explode into colours,
and impressing fiery kisses upon the air, we die.
Take us, Persephone; now is the moment!
Our sweetness is made complete, gathered to your sweetness.
You will lift us nearer the heavens than our highest spires;
calmly upon your brow we dare face divinity.
es
PERSEPHONE
They throw themselves before me—they cling to my knees
from the banks they hold up their hands full of beauty,
a starry vine drops from a tree, to tangle its fingers in my
hair-
they tease like children to be caught up into my lap.
I laugh at the innocent snare !—This one, then;
and this one, and this-
THE FLOWE