RS
We are accepted, accepted!
PERSEPHONE
Gentle tendrils, twine you along my arms;
these single blossoms, hide not wholly my small breasts;
about my brow, these cool leaves as well.
THE FLOWERS
Persephone, now we may whisper you our sole secret:
we are but the writing of your name, your name;
for only so does the dumb earth speak.
PERSEPHONE
My name? O lovely, innumerable syllables!
Brow, arms, breast, and girdle are filled:
still there are others, and yet clusters of others!
-But what is this one, most exuberant above the pool ?
Tremendous plant with a thousand blossoms,
in your quivering, all heaven and earth has its laughter!


460
PERSEPHONE IN EDEN
-Oh, sudden silence !-
I am awed before your secluded power.
The sharpness of your spikes has split the stones.
I will part your strong shoots and gaze
into your many elaborate suns
-Mother!-Was that my face ?
my eyes—among the innumerable blossoms-
(She swoons; a shower of meteors falls like an autumnal rush of
leaves into the ocean. The roar increases; the earth breaks beneath
the plant; and the aged form of Dis issues cowering from the cleft.)
Dis
Again the heavens, sagging low with poised stars,
each suspended, waiting, ready to leap on the outcast,
circling slowly, like the spears of the fishers over the pool.
(He threatens the heavens with his bident.)
My curse! the blackest, reiterated curse that this rusty throat
can hurl upward through the heavy air against you-
you!—tyrant! comfortable tyrant! coward of the star-bolt!
I am bitter of stealing out by night, in strange disguises!
Behold me, me! my feet planted firm on the roof of hell.
And some night shall you wake suddenly, to hear my armies
storming the airy ways, conquering the constellations,
once more to reassert the grandeur of my word.
Then shall I thrust you in turn under the floating stars
and reassume the throne that was mine before the dawn.
Can you hear me?
Contemptuous silence! They bide their time.
O
ars
Was it just, was it kind, O thunderer, to cut clear from your
realm
each fear, each ache of pain, each throttling thirst,
and crushing them into a ball, to toss them carelessly away
that they might struggle together, interlocked as a globe,
drifting alone, faring across the frigid void?
So this earth whirls on through space, exuding its anguish.
The terrible cold has crusted it into a semblance of calm.


S. FOSTER DAMON
461
But though cut from the fire without, it is scorched by fire
within:
the writhing vapour, frozen on the surface, crystallizes
into bright patterns which delight your distant eye;
the smoke of the torment is subtilized across the empty spaces
to a rare incense, sweet within your nostrils.
Thus is the whole of pleasure, the delight, selfishly yours;
mine the unendurable desires—those many guests are my
court.
And I myself! I once Titan! Eldest of gods! What am
I now?
Bleached by the darkness; pithed-pithed by the bolt;
only the shell of my ancient, enormous splendour;
myself dethroned in my own skull;
I, the Central Sun, all my rays ripped from me;
a black, still flame, trembling with mute anguish,
beaten back, walled up,
through ages indefinite with slow blur of years.
O despair, utter despair !
How long have I brooded, speechless, on the dim throne,
wearily ordering the unorderable:
the despairs, the fears, the insatiable hungers-
crazy hordes of flaming ghosts—
my many subjects, each mad with his own nature!
Now the flames spring fernlike on the rocky walls;
now a huge geyser of fire spouts through the solid pavement,
then suddenly vanishes in the midst of its roar;
now a dull glow drifts by—mere dust of fire in the air.
These things I order, I order; but when, by tremendous effort,
the darkness is filled with precise ranks of the flames,
and I hold them tight in the power of my will,
suddenly they dissolve, sifting like sand
through the fingers of my determination.
I impose my will, yet they guess nothing of me,
and all begins again.
(He sees Persephone, who has risen slowly from her swoon, and
is staring at him, fascinated.)


462
PERSEPHONE IN EDEN
() despair, despair increased!
Are you a form sent to taunt me with exquisiteness?
to torture me with want? ...
Flower-robed goddess, content to behold perfection in a mirror,
I do not know your name;
should you turn your light toward me, then I would know it.
-Turn not your eyes upon my hideousness,
but go, go-!
PERSEPHONE
You have called me by name, O marvellous youth with fiery
hair.
How terribly you lean upon your bow!
I dare not come at your command: is your warmth kindly?
Yet my feet come. Be merciful!
Dis
Divinity with blazing hair that rages to your feet,
the night is blackest behind you:
it surrounds you with a great halo of dark light.
Out of that depth have you come to me
complete and yet incomplete.
The revelation tempts my profoundest need;
for man who beholds divinity must possess it
or become beast. Have pity upon my darkness!
PERSEPHONE
The dim trees are silent, piled thunder;
glimmering among their boughs are the seeds of lightning.
But you, winged youth-through the blackness
you open a pavilion of fire for me:
the gate of the sun, my father's own palace
The air shudders round you with a million thrilling rays,
which are hardly visible, yet the night boils with them.
Beneath those searching rays, the bud within my breast
breaks open, splits itself to the very centre.
Have pity upon me: lend me a little warmth!
Dis
Lend me a little light! Ah, should you come


S. FOSTER DAMON
463
bringing your loveliness into my underworld
-your rays undimmed, unmixed in my domain-
we would have splendour which the heavens do not hold.
Have mercy, radiant one, upon my strength,
and tempt it not to the death that must surely follow!
PERSEPHONE
Your glorious notes shake me with utter promise.
Have mercy, radiant one, upon my weakness!
Dis
My choked words are unworthy of your ears.
Darkness is loneliness. Dare you light my darkness?
PERSEPHONE
How would you speak, should you ever cease your singing!
Why honour me from among my many sisters?
They stand around me; I am ugly among them.
My feet are caught like white roots in the deep turf;
their nervous veins pulse with sweet moisture;
my knees are tense; my whole body
sways in the wind of your rays;
my hands lift slowly as leaves;
and my breast is glowing, a hard-opened blossom-
the petals strain backward to reveal the exuberant heart.
I bend my head over it, I try to shadow it with my hair,
but the hot sweetness, the terrible shaking of the air,
renders me powerless, will let me conceal nothing.
Take me take me, before the petals unhinge and
flutter apart to the dust-take me, or I shall
be shattered with my own fragility
when you look away.
Lay your hand upon me; gather me-
break me from the past-now-your strength-
relief-even though you drop me beneath
your feet, I shall kiss the terrible tread! -
në
na
(Slowly they have drawn together. Dis puts out a trembling
hand, almost as if to urge her back. At his touch, the spell is
broken. Attendants dash from the cloven rock with a chariot, to


464
PERSEPHONE IN EDEN
which he bears her. She sees his real form, and tries to escape;
but he holds her too firmly. The horses are lashed furiously;
they disappear into the earth; and the cleft closes.)
PERSEPHONE's Voice (dying into distance)
Mother! Mother! Mother!
DEMETER (rushing out into the night)
Persephone! Persephone!—The fatal trail of flowers!
Daughter! Daughter! Daughter!
Oh, that now I could think of her as nothing dearer or stranger
than a shadow which always had clung by my side
now suddenly broken loose into flight, disappearing among
the dunes!
Grief! grief! grief: that the sorrow should balance its joy;
that every moment of happiness through years
should return as bitterness, all in one moment!
If there is justice to be found
above the clouds or beneath the graves,
then will I seek it out and demand it.
Now shall my feet tread all
the bitter ridges of the world
to reach the most remote gates,
which I shall weary with my knocking,
-pleading for news of her
who I know is lost for too long.
Not till the sea is reaped
of its centuries of harvest-
not till the ocean tombs
at last release their dead,
shall my daughter again cling beneath my arm.
My sandals and my staff!
What is the way through the dark
to the palace of the sun ?
(She stumbles out.)



DANCERS. BY E. E. CUMMINGS





A LETTER FROM MADAME EMILIE TESTE
BY PAUL VALERY
Translated From the French by Lewis Galantière
N EAR Sir and Friend: I thank you for your parcel and for
U the letter you wrote to M Teste. I believe that the pine-
apple and the jam were not unwelcome; I am sure that the cigars
brought pleasure. As for the letter, I should be telling an untruth
if I said anything at all about it. I read it to my husband, and
I scarcely understood it. Nevertheless, I confess that it delighted
me. It does not bore me to hear things abstract or too lofty for
me; I find in them an almost musical enchantment. There is a
beautiful part of the soul which is able to enjoy without under-
standing, and that part is great in me.
As I say, I read your letter aloud to M Teste. He listened to
it without showing what he thought, or that he might have been
thinking at all. You know that he reads almost nothing with
his eyes, putting them to strange, as it were internal, use. That
is not what I mean. I mean individual use. But that is not it at
all. I do not know how to express myself. Let us say a use at
once internal, individual, and universal. His eyes are very beauti-
ful. I love them for being a little greater than all that is visible.
One never knows if anything whatever escapes them; or if, on
the contrary, the world is not for them a simple detail in what
they see, a fying insect which can obsess one, but which does not
exist. From the time I married your friend, I have been unable
to be certain of his gaze. The very object it fixes is perhaps the
object which his mind desires to reduce to nothingness.
Our life continues as you saw it: mine insignificant and useful,
his composed of habits and absences. This is not to say that he
does not awake and reappear, when it suits him, terribly alive.
I like him very much this way. Of a sudden he is great and dread-
ful. The machinery of his monotonous acts bursts, his face sparkles,
he says things which often I only half comprehend, but which


466 A LETTER FROM MADAME EMILIE TESTE
Te
are never thereafter effaced from my memory. But I want to
hide nothing from you, or nearly nothing: sometimes he is very
hard. I do not believe anybody can be as hard as he. He breaks
your spirit with a word, and I seem to myself a spoiled vase dis-
carded by the potter. He is as hard as an angel. He has no idea
of his strength. He speaks unexpected words which are too true,
which annihilate people, wake them out of complete stupidity
face to face with themselves, caught at being what they are, at
living silliness. We live at our ease, each in his absurdity like
fish in water, and we never perceive except by accident all the
stupidities contained in the system of life of a reasonable person.
We never think that what we think hides from us what we are.
I hope, Sir, that we are worth more than all our thoughts, and
that our greatest merit before God will be to have tried to stop
at something more solid than the babblings (even admirable) of
our mind with itself.
As a matter of fact, M Teste does not need to speak in order to
bring those about him back to humility and to an almost animal
simplicity. His existence seems to cripple all others, and even his
manias stimulate reflection.
But do not imagine him to be always difficult or overwhelming.
If you but knew how different he can be! Of course, he is hard
occasionally; but at other times he is graced by an exquisite and
surprising sweetness that seems to descend from the skies. His
smile is a mysterious and irresistible offering, and his rare tender-
ness is a winter rose. At the same time, it is impossible to foretell
either his gentleness or his violence. It is futile to look for rigour
or favour from him. By his profound distraction and by the
impenetrable progression of his thoughts, he eludes those ordinary
calculations which human beings make about the character of their
kind. My forethought, my deference, my thoughtlessness, my dis-
crepancies—I never know what they will draw from M Teste.
But I confess to you that nothing attaches me more to him than this
uncertainty of his moods. After all, I am very happy not to
understand him too well, not to foresee each day, each night,
each coming moment of my passage on earth. My soul has more
thirst for astonishment than for all else. Expectation, risk, a little
doubt, exalt it and vivify it much more than the posssession of
certainty might do. I am afraid this is not right, but, though I
reproach myself, this is the way I am. I have confessed more than


PAUL VALERY
467
as
once that I thought I preferred believing in God to seeing Him in
all His glory, and I have been reprimanded. My confessor tells
me this is foolishness rather than sin.
Forgive me for writing to you about my poor self when you
wish only to have news of him who interests you so vitally. But
I am a little more than the witness to his life; I am part of
it, one of its organs, though not essential. Husband and wife
as we are, marriage has harmonized our actions, and our temporal
necessities are fairly well adjusted, despite the immense and inde-
finable difference of our minds. I am therefore obliged to speak
incidentally of her who speaks to you of him. Is it not perhaps
difficult for you to imagine my situation with M Teste, and how
I contrive to pass my days in the intimacy of a man so original,
at once so close to and so far from him?
Women of my age, my real or apparent friends, are greatly
surprised to see me, who seem so fitted for an existence like their
own—(and a rather pleasing woman, not unworthy of a simple
and comprehensible lot)-accept a position which they cannot in
the least imagine in the life of a man whose reputation for queer-
ness shocks and scandalizes them. They do not know that the
slightest softening of my spouse is a thousand times more precious
than all the caresses of theirs. What is this love of theirs which
is all sameness and repetition, which has long since lost all quality
of the unexpected, the unknown, the impossible; all those things
which charge with meaning, with danger, with power, the slightest
glance or stroke; which make of the substance of a voice the
unique food of the soul; and which, finally, cause all things to
be more beautiful, more significant, more luminous or more sinister,
more futile or more remarkable, according to our presentiment of
what is taking place in a changeable being who has become mys-
teriously essential to us?
You see, Sir, only those who do not know bliss desire it apart
from anxiety. However naïve I may be, I am well aware of the
loss entailed by pleasures which are tamed and broken in to
domestic habits. The encounter of abandon and possession gains
much, I believe, by a preparation of ignorance of its approach.
This supreme certainty ought to spring out of a supreme uncer-
tainty, and declare itself like the climax of a play whose move-
ment and development, from tranquillity to the final threat of the
event, we should find it difficult to trace.


468 A LETTER FROM MADAME EMILIE TESTE
CONSCIO
ea
V
VS
Happily—or otherwise I am for my part never certain of
M Teste's feelings; and such certainty is of less importance to
me than you would believe. Strangely married as I am, I am so
consciously. I knew that great souls got married only by accident
-or in order to have a warm nest where whatever pertains to
woman in their system of life might be available, and always
locked in. The sudden tender burst of a white shoulder between
two thoughts is not a detestable sight! Men are like that; even
profound ones.
I do not mean this for M Teste. He is so strange! In truth,
one cannot say anything about him which will not be inexact at
the moment of speech! ... I think there is too much continuity
in his ideas. He bewilders you at every step in a web which he
alone knows how to weave, to break, to take up again. He pro-
longs within himself threads so fragile that they refrain from
snapping only with the help and contrivance of all his vital power.
He draws them across I know not what personal gulfs, and he
dares to stray, no doubt, far out of ordinary time in some abyss
of difficulty. I wonder what happens to him there? It is clear
that one is no longer oneself under such constraint. Our humanity
cannot follow us toward lights so far removed. Doubtless his soul
becomes a singular plant whose roots—though not its leaves-
grow contrary to nature toward the light!
Is not this to reach out of the world? Will he find life or
death at the end of his attentive will? Will it be God, or some
frightful sensation of encountering at the deepest depth of thought
only the pale glimmer of his own and miserable matter?
One must have seen him in these excesses of absence in order
to appreciate them! At such times, his physiognomy alters ...
disappears! A little more of this absorption and I am sure that
he would render himself invisible. ....
But when he returns to me out of the depths! ... He seems
to be discovering me like a new earth! I appear before him un-
known, new, essential. He seizes me blindly in his arms as if I
were a rock of life and of real substance which this great incom-
municable genius encountered, touched, clung to suddenly, after
so many inhuman searchings, after what measureless recessions
and what monstrous silences! He falls back upon me as if I were
the earth itself. He awakes in me; he finds himself again in me.
What happiness! His head is heavy on my face, and of all the
Or
1 SUU


PAUL VALERY
469
strength of his nerves I am the prey. His hands grow vigorous
and frighteningly alive. I feel myself in the grip of a sculptor,
a doctor, an assassin, under their precise and brutal actions; and
I have the terrified sense of having fallen into the talons of an
intellectual eagle. ... Do you know what I really think? I
imagine that he does not know exactly what he is doing, what he
is kneading. ...
All his being, which was concentrated upon a certain place at
the frontiers of his consciousness, has just lost its ideal object,
that object which exists and does not exist, for it depends only
upon a little more or a little less intensity. All the energy of an
entire great body was not too much to employ in order to hold up
before the mind that diamond-like instant which is at once the
idea, the thing, and the threshold and the end. . . . And so, when
this extraordinary husband captures and in a way masters me,
and imprints his strength upon me, I have an impression of being
substituted for the object of his will that he has just lost. I am
by way of being the plaything of a muscular knowledge. I tell you
this as well as I am able. The truth he looked forward to has
taken my form and my living resistance; and by an altogether
ineffable transpositon, his internal will passes and is discharged
into his hard and determined hands. These are very difficult
moments. But what am I to do? I take refuge in my heart,
where I love him in the way I please.
As for his feelings about me, as for the opinion he may have of
me, these are things about which I am ignorant, even as I am
ignorant of every thing about him which is not visible or audible.
A moment ago I told you my suppositions; but I do not really
know in what thoughts or combinations he passes so many hours.
For myself, I remain on the surface of life; I abandon myself to
the thread of the days. I tell myself that I am the servant of
that incomprehensible instant in which my marriage was almost
automatically decided. A divine instant perhaps or a supernatural
one?
I cannot say that I am loved. You should know that this word
love, so uncertain in its ordinary sense, shifting between so many
images, is entirely worthless when applied to the relations of my
husband's heart and my person. His head is a sealed treasure,
and I do not know if he has a heart. Do I ever know whether he
recognizes me, loves me, or studies me? Or whether he studies


470 A LETTER FROM MADAME EMILIE TESTE
mm
ne:
nan
im-
himself through me? You will understand that I do not labour
this point. To sum up, I feel myself to be in his hands, in his
thoughts, like an object that is for him now the most familiar
and now the strangest in the world, according to which of his
variable gazes adapts itself to me.
If I dared communicate to you my frequent impression, such
as I have voiced it to myself and often confided it to the Abbé
Mosson, I should say to you figuratively that I feel myself to be
living and moving in a cage into which the superior mind by its
very existence has enclosed me. His mind contains my own just
as the mind of man envelops that of the child or the dog. Under-
stand me clearly. At times I move about our house; I go, I come:
the idea of singing seizes me and rises; I fly, dancing with im-
provised gaiety and unexhausted youth from one room to another.
But however lively my dancing I never cease to feel the empire
of this powerful absent man who is there in some armchair, dream-
ing, smoking, examining his hand, putting slowly into play all its
joints. I never feel my soul to be limitless. But environed round.
Enclosed. Heavens, but it is difficult to explain! ... I do not
mean captive. . . . I am free, but I am classified.
The thing in us which is most our own, most precious, is veiled
from us as you know. It seems to me I should lose my being if I
knew myself entirely. Well, for one person I am transparent;
I am seen and foreseen just as I am, without mystery, without
shadows, without possible recourse to my own unknown, to my own
ignorance of myself!
I am a fly buzzing and living precariously in the universe of
a steadfast gaze; sometimes seen, sometimes unseen, but never
out of sight. I know at every moment that I exist in an attentive-
ness always vaster and more general than all my vigilance, always
more prompt than my most sudden and promptest ideas. The
greatest movements of my soul are little, insignificant events to
him. And nevertheless, I have my infinity ... which I feel.
I cannot but recognize that it is contained in his own, and I cannot
consent that this be so. It is an inexpressible thing, that I am
able to think and act absolutely as I please without ever, ever a
thought or a desire which is unexpected, important, or new to
M Teste! ... I assure you that so constant and so strange a
sensation gives rise to very profound ideas. ... I can say that
my life displays to me at every hour a sensitive model of the


PAUL VALERY
471
existence of man in divine thought. I have the personal experi-
ence of being in the sphere of a being as all souls are in the Being.
But alas, this same sensation of a presence from which one can-
not escape and of a divination so intimate is not without inducing,
at times, vile thoughts in me. I am tempted. I say to myself
that this man is perhaps condemned, that I am greatly exposed in
his vicinity, and that I live under the leaves of an evil tree. ...
But I perceive almost immediately that these specious reflections
dissemble in themselves the peril against which they counsel me
to be on my guard. I divine in their coils a clever suggestion to
dream of another more pleasurable life, of other men. . . . And
I am horrified at myself. I contemplate my destiny; I feel that
it is as it should be; I say to myself that I desire my destiny, that
I choose it anew at every moment; I hear internally the voice of
M Teste, so clear and so deep, calling to me. ... But if you
knew by what names!
There is no woman on earth called by my names. You know
what ridiculous names lovers exchange; what dog and parrot
names are the natural fruits of carnal intimacies. The words of
the heart are childish. The voices of the flesh are elementary.
Indeed, M Teste considers that love consists in being able to be
beasts together. A licence for silliness and bestiality! Therefore,
he names me after his own fashion. Almost always, the name is
related to what he wishes of me. His name of itself tells me in a
word what I am to expect, or to do. When he desires nothing in
particular he calls me Being, or Thing. And sometimes he calls
me Oasis which pleases me greatly. But he never tells me I am
stupid—which touches me deeply.
The Abbé, who has a great and charitable curiosity about my
husband, and a sort of pitying sympathy for a mind so isolated,
tells me frankly that M Teste inspires in him feelings very difficult
to reconcile among themselves. He said to me the other day:
“Your husband's faces are innumerable!”
He thinks him "a monster of isolation and of singular knowl-
edge," and he explains this regretfully by a pride of those prides
which cut you off from the living, and not only the present living,
but the eternal living;—a pride which would be abominable and
nearly satanic if this pride were not, in this too active soul, turned
so sharply against itself, and did not know itself so exactly that
the evil in it was as if withered at its origin.


472 A LETTER FROM MADAME EMILIE TESTE
ΓΙΟ
"He holds himself frightfully aloof from good,” said the Abbé
to me, “but he holds himself fortunately aloof from evil. ...
There is in him I know not what frightening purity, some incon-
testable detachment, force, and light. I have never observed such
an absence of restlessness and doubt in a very deeply plumbed
intelligence. He is terribly calm! No uneasiness of soul, no
internal shadows, are attributable to him—and nothing, indeed,
which derives from the instincts of fear or covetousness. ...
But nothing oriented toward Charity.
"His heart is a desert island. All the breadth, all the energy
of his mind surround and defend it against the truth. He flatters
himself that he is entirely alone. ... Patience, dear lady. Per-
haps he will find one day a footprint in the sand. What happy
and saintly terror, what salutary horror, when he learns, through
this pure vestige of grace, that his island is mysteriously in-
habited!”
Then I told the Abbé that my husband made me think very
often of a Godless mystic. ...
"What light!” said the Abbé. "What light do women draw at
times from the simplicity of their impressions and the uncertainty
of their language." But immediately after, and to himself, he
replied: “A Godless mystic! Luminous nonsense. Too easily
said! False clarity. ... A Godless mystic, Madame; but there
is no conceivable movement without a direction and a meaning,
without an end somewhere. ... A Godless mystic! ... Why
not a hippogriff, a centaur!”
“Why not a sphinx, Abbé ?”
He is, in fact, christianly grateful to M Teste for the freedom
which permits me to practise my faith and to give myself up to
my piety. I have every licence to love God and to serve Him,
and I can share myself happily between my Lord and my dear
spouse. Sometimes M Teste asks me to tell him of my orisons,
to explain to him as precisely as I can how I go about it, how I
apply myself and sustain myself, and he wants to know if I lose
myself in them as truly as I believe I do. But scarcely have I
commenced to hunt for words in my memory when he outstrips
me, interrogates himself, and, putting himself prodigiously in my
place, tells me such things about my prayer, gives me such details,
that they clarify it and seem to unite with it at its secret altitude;


PAUL VALERY
473
-and communicate to me the frame of mind and the desire for it!
There is in his language I know not what power of making visible
and audible that which is most deeply hidden in us. And yet, his
words are human words, nothing else than human; they are only
the very intimate forms of faith reconstituted by artifice, and mar-
vellously articulated by a mind incomparable for daring and pro-
fundity. One would say he had dispassionately explored the
fervent soul. But from this recomposition of my burning heart
and of its faith, the essence, hope, is terribly absent. There is not
a grain of hope in all the substance of M Teste; and this is why
I feel a certain uneasiness in the exercise of his power.
I have not much more to tell you to-day. I offer no excuse for
having written at such length, since you asked me to do it saying
that you were insatiably avid for all the facts and gestures of
your friend. Still, I must end this. The hour of our daily walk
has come. I shall put on my hat. We will go quietly through
the narrow, twisted, cobble-stoned little streets of this ancient town
that you know slightly. We shall arrive finally where you would
love to go if you were here, at that antique garden where all those
who reflect, who have cares, who soliloquize, descend toward
evening, as the water flows to the river, and of necessity meet.
There are the learned, the lovers, the old men, the disabused, and
the priests, all the possible absent beings of all kinds. One would
say they were hunting their mutual recessions. They must love
to look at each other without knowing each other, and their sepa-
rate bitternesses are accustomed to meet, each ruminating about
the others! One drags his illness, another is hurried by his anguish;
these are shadows which fly from each other, but there is no other
place to fly from others than this, to which the same idea of
solitude draws invincibly each of these absorbed beings. We shall
soon reach a place worthy of the dead. It is a sort of botanical
ruin. We will be there a little before twilight. See us walking
with short steps, given over to the sun, the cypress trees, the bird
cries. The wind is cold in the sun; the sky, too beautiful, grips
my heart at times. The hidden cathedral sounds. Here and there
are round, elevated fountains which come up to my waist. They
are filled to the brink with a black, impenetrable water on which
float the enormous leaves of the Nymphea Nelumbo; and the drops
which stray on these leaves roll and gleam like mercury. M Teste
lets himself be distracted by these great, living drops, or he moves
lerc


474
A SONNET
slowly between the flower-beds with their green labels in which
the specimens of the vegetable kingdom are more or less cultivated.
He enjoys this rather ridiculous trimness and amuses himself by
spelling out the baroque names:
Antirrhinum Siculum
Solanum Warscewiezii!!!
And this Sisymbriifolium, what a jargon! ... And the Vul-
gare, and the Asper, and the Palustris, and the Sinuata, and the
Flexuosum, and the Praealtum!!!
"It is a garden of epithets,” he said the other day; "a dictionary
and cemetery garden. ..." And after a moment he said to him-
self: "Learnedly to die. ... Transiit classificando.”
Believe me, Sir, with all our thanks and good wishes,
EMILIE TESTE
A SONNET
BY CUTHBERT WRIGHT
Dear boy of the untroubled, dream-like face,
Soft hued and evanescent as a cloud,
The lovely livery of a virgin grace
You bear unspotted thro' the brawling crowd.
I think in coming years if I could know
What starry love your innocence endowed,
Not half so sadly would I watch you go,
A moonbeam thro' the concourse, dark and loud.
Now I will never see you more or know;
Only a few white stars are left in heaven;
Under their shining immortality
Like darkling ships our separate souls are driven.
Yet as you passed, a fragrance came to me
Of happy fields where wistful flowers blow.



Courtesy of Scott and Fowles
ACROBAT.
BY ELIE NADELMAN






Courtesy of Scott and Fowles
PIANIST. BY ELIE NADELMAN






Courtesy of Scott and Fowles
TANGO. BY ELIE NADELMAN





JOHN KEATS
BY CONRAD AIKEN
lec
IT is perhaps idle to ask whether there is sufficient warrant for
1 another life of Keats. One may question whether even for
Sir Sidney Colvin's Life there was much necessity—his excellent
monograph in the English Men of Letters series would be, if
brought up to date in certain minor particulars, all that one needs.
Miss Lowell pleads, of course, for her John Keats, the excuse of
new material. But this new material amounts, quantitatively and
qualitatively, to very little. One is glad to have the rest of
the Dawlish poem for the further faint light it sheds on the
"bawdy” side of Keats; one is glad of the Gripus fragment, which
very slightly extends one's knowledge of his dramatic gifts; and
the letter to Woodhouse is important in its bearing on the Hyperion
problem, though in a sense opposite to that which Miss Lowell
intends. The other things—the other few fragments of verse,
the Brawne and Taylor letters—are useful, certainly, but I cannot
think they excuse a biography of thirteen hundred pages. A
pamphlet might have been made of them, with perhaps an essay;
it would have been enough. For the fact is that in the letters of
Keats—in many respects the most vivid and living of letters—we
possess a portrait which no biographer, writing after the event,
can match. In those letters is far the greater part of our knowl-
edge of him—a biographer must, with embarrassing frequency,
either paraphrase them or quote them. He cannot possibly create
a substitute for them. At most, he can hope to supplement them
with a collection of other contemporary material.
This much Miss Lowell has done with enormous industry and
patience; and for this reason her life of Keats must be at any
rate until this collateral material has been put to better use
indispensable. She covers the ground of Keats's brief life extraor-
dinarily. No scrap of information is considered too uninteresting
for introduction, or too trivial as a basis for speculation; she at-
tempts to accompany Keats like the ticking of a clock; to know
John Keats, by Amy Lowell (illus., 8vo, 1160 pages ; Houghton Miffin :
$10).
VE


476
JOHN KEATS
of his whereabouts and preoccupations at every second. If Miss
Lowell had a genius for biography the result might have justified
this. But she is as far from having such a genius as she is—and
this perhaps is worse—from being a good critic. Her biography
becomes, therefore, a triumph of engineering, a miracle of dimen-
sions; like the Great Wall of China, or the largest potato at the
Fair. It contains a stupefying mass of information more or less
co-ordinated; but the order thus given is mechanical rather than
aesthetic.
To be summary, I think Miss Lowell signally fails in what
might be called the "finer” departments (as against the mere
collating of facts) of biography. She has little tact; her taste
is uncertain; her sense of proportion is uncertain; her psychological
perceptions are imprecise; her imagination is forced and hectic,
not instinctively apposite. There are many admirable and graphic
pages in her John Keats. She makes also many admirable points.
But on the whole the effect is one of provincialism, a pervading
unripeness which no amount of cocksureness and bluster can cover.
Miss Lowell is unfortunate (to begin with) in her prose. If her
Tendencies in Modern American Poetry appeared to be written by
a popular lecturer to women's clubs-breezy, careless, and super-
ficial--her John Keats is in this regard little better. Her style is
abominable-- it is scarcely a style at all. It is dishevelled and
inaccurate it is monotonous and awkward. It has energy, but
its energy is given little direction, little beauty of rhythm or colour.
It is a prose so uniformly undistinguished and so frequently
amateurish as to put grievously in question the quality of the mind
it expresses and the use to which that mind has been put. Let
me quote a few examples, which will show in various ways what
I mean,
ds
"But give Keats half a chance and he could not help learning,
he learnt so fast that he outlearnt his teacher in a short time, but
that is only to say that Keats was a genius and Hunt was not."
"Keats was writing on September twenty-first, nine weeks before,
on July eighteenth, Jane Austen had died at Winchester."
"Indeed, the moment, whether through accident or design, was
fortuitous, for the moon lacked but twenty-four hours of being
at the full.”


CONRAD AIKEN
477
“But Brown was unaccustomed to considering his own health,
which never wanted consideration, and probably, also, he believed
Keats's statement that his throat was ‘in a fair way of getting well,'
this he told Tom next day, but such indeed was not the case.”
“The lover's words are not what they should be, any one can
see that; but Endymion suddenly finding his empty uplifted arms
clasped about a naked waist is a beautiful flight of imagination,
astringently absorbingly expressed.”
“The poem will not be denied, to refuse to write it would be a
greater torture. It tears its way out of the brain, splintering and
breaking its passage, and leaves that organ in the state of a jelly-
fish when the task is done.”
What, one is moved to ask, is the state of a jelly-fish when the
task is done? And how seriously can one take a writer who
twice uses “fortuitous” when she means fortunate and "jejune"
when she means young? This inaccuracy of speech parallels Miss
Lowell's inaccuracy of thought. She has a passion for glib generali-
zation. Her book is “exhaustive" in the sense that it marshals
vividly all the available facts, but it is not exhaustive in the
sense of being a judicious study of them. Her judgement is highly
capricious: as a guide and interpreter she takes many unwarrantable
liberties with the probabilities. Her book is full of ingenuous
speculation and naïve argument: argument with scant premise
and speculation with little aim. She cannot be trusted-she must
be watched. She is dangerous, too, because, though unreliable,
she is positive, and carries herself with such bravado.
It would be difficult to write an uninteresting life of Keats,
and in this, in spite of her stupendous prolixity, Miss Lowell has
not succeeded. Even when stretched to thirteen hundred pages,
Keats's brief and tragic story remains the most moving, the most
harrowing of literary histories. No other poet has given to pos-
terity so brilliant and living a self-portrait as Keats left in his
letters. From his “I will be as punctual as the bee to the clover"
in 1816 to his “I always made an awkward bow" in 1820mthe
four years of adolescent maturity which were all the life he had


478
JOHN KEATS
—we see his entrance, his agony, and his exit, with a vividness
that is terrifying. This is not only because his correspondence was
voluminous others in this have surpassed him-nor only because
his genius went as much into his letters as into his poetry. His
genius did go into his letters, and in certain particulars a part of it
(his speculative freedom, his critical sureness, his extravagance
of humour, and his sharp sense of character) which never found
much place in his poetry. But more important than this is the
fact that Keats was the possessor of a devouring self-consciousness,
a passionate and exquisite absorption in his own relation to things.
Many of the problems—we must remember—which have occupied
Keats's critics and biographers could never have arisen if the
letters had never been published: for if the Keats of the letters
is more "interesting” than the Keats of the poems, he is also more
vulnerable. Arnold's essay is largely devoted to proving that
Keats is not so entirely "unmanly" as the Brawne letters indicate;
Swinburne complained of them that “even a manly sort of boy
will not howl and snivel after this fashion”; Mr William Watson
reiterated the charge of Cockneyism and vulgarity, "Apollo with
an unmistakable dash of ’Arry.” Miss Lowell, more idolatrous
or less critical, denies flatly both the unmanliness and the vulgarity.
The vulgarity, she maintains (except for one phrase in Isabella)
does not exist: and the unmanliness was not intrinsic, but a weak-
ness due to ill health and misfortune.
This generosity does credit to Miss Lowell's heart, but as criti-
cism (whether of life or letters) it is, I think, valueless. The vul-
garity and unmanliness are not characteristics to be shuddered at
or concealed, or excused: they are highly significant features of
Keats's genius, and ought to be studied with every care. To begin
with, it has not been pointed out that the “vulgarity” and “un-
manliness” are essentially the same thing. The vulgarities of
Endymion, and of Isabella (“slippery blisses," "darling essence,"
"dainties made to still an infant's cries," "moist kisses," "creamy
breast," et cetera) exactly parallel the unmanlinesses of the letters
to Fanny Brawne (i. e., the extravagances of feeling). The fault,
in both cases, is the fault of excess—the "fine excess" without the
fineness; in both cases, the excess is erotic. Superficially, we may
say this is due to Keats’s habit of passionate and conscious abandon-
ment to sensation. This habit we can attribute partly to the
inheritance of an unusually vivid sexual nature from his mother,
nes


CONRAD AIKEN
479
and partly (I think we are safe in assuming this) to an unusually
intense erotic relationship between the mother and son. It has
been suggested that Mrs Keats was a nymphomaniac. Allowing
for exaggeration, there is sufficient evidence, on the one hand, that
she was sensual, if not immoral, and on the other that John Keats
was her favourite child, and was "spoiled” by her. The char-
acteristics of the maturing Keats are precisely those we should
expect of a passionate and sensitive boy who had been, in early
childhood, too much fondled and excited and indulged: he is volup-
tuous, vain, and self-willed; he has an inordinate craving for
admiration and love; his sensibility is exceptional; he expects the
world to give him his way and worship him; and when thwarted,
he disproportionately and uncontrolledly suffers. In conflict with
a deeply-rooted habit of sensuous self-indulgence was Keats's first-
rate intelligence, with its growing scepticism; and, also, a very
acute sense of having taken a step upward, socially, from his
parents, and a desire to square his behaviour with more "refined"
standards. He undoubtedly felt that his past, his origins, must
be "lived down"—it is worth noting that nowhere, in all his let-
ters, is there any mention of his childhood, and only one slight
reference to his mother. That he disliked any one whom he felt
to be socially superior (Shelley, for example) was noted by Hay-
don. That he suffered from references to his livery-stable origin
was noted by Hunt. But living down his past meant also living
down his mother; and in the hidden conflict over this point (and
in his mother's alternating attraction and repulsion for him-it
must be remembered that he was intensely loyal) I think we can
detect one source of much that is weakest in him. Emotionally,
he remained after Mrs Keats's death dependent on her-he was
never destined to escape. It was her influence (more than Hunt's)
that led to the excesses of Endymion; and it was Fanny Brawne's
inadequacy as a substitute for her that led to the abject implorings
and yearnings of the love-letters.
That Keats had sought an escape from this situation in sexual
promiscuity is clear. He contracted syphilis, and this aspect of
his life Miss Lowell discusses with candour and good sense. As
regards his promiscuity, however, she is not so honest. She re-
marks with characteristic assurance: “We may say, with some-
thing like certainty, that we know everything he did; for which
reason, it is safe to assume that what we do not know of, he did


480
JOHN KEATS
an
not do.” To this she adds that although fond of "broad speaking,”
he was not personally addicted to the “making of mud-pies.” The
assertion that we “know everything he did” is, of course, meaning-
less. Up to the end of his twenty-first year, we know practically
nothing either of his daily life or of his preoccupations. From
that time till his death—four years—we have his letters, and the
notes of his friends; but there are many gaps; and, as Miss Lowell
herself says elsewhere, there is good reason to suppose that many
letters were lost. We know a little, in other words, of the last
four years of Keats's life, but it would be folly to assume that we
know all. As regards his sexual adventures, it is scarcely likely
that he would have mentioned them in letters, or, if he had, that
the letters would have been preserved unexpurgated. In the letters
extant, however, there is enough evidence, for one who can read
between the lines, that Keats and his companions were normally
and joyously, even coarsely, promiscuous. In the case of Keats
himself, it may indeed have been something more than this—I am
inclined to think that it was an obsession. He remarked, on one
occasion, that his feeling for women was not “healthy." He dis-
liked and scorned them, when encountered merely socially, but
nevertheless "every bit of riband" interested him. He was restless,
incapable of finding happiness with any one woman, but never-
theless under a compulsion to seek it; and his extraordinary be-
haviour to Fanny Brawne suggests the alternation of hate and
desire we should expect, and also that, once having possessed her,
he might have found her repellent. Further, if Keats was secre-
tive in his letters about his love for Fanny Brawne, he was
presumably secretive about other episodes as well. This, of course,
is "negative” evidence. On the positive side, there are the two
calm references to what was unquestionably syphilis in letters to
Bailey and Dilke, a year apart. (This must have added greatly
to the tragic conflict of his feelings for Fanny Brawne, and may
have had a bearing on his concealment of his engagement from
his brother George and on the delay of the marriage.) Aside from
this, we have the two or three "bawdy" poems (it is suggestive
that the Dawlish poem has been suppressed hitherto ?) and specific
1 I suggest that Keats's literary remains may have been more "edited”
than we have supposed. Why, for example, has the complete memoir
by Brown never been published ?


CONRAD AIKEN
481
reference to an affair at Hastings, the very phrasing of which is
illuminating; he "warmed with her” and “kissed her.” He goes
on to remark that this mysterious lady of Hastings, and Georgiana
(his sister-in-law, to whom he is writing!) are the only women
for whom he has "no libidinous thought." This is not the lan-
guage of an ascetic. It is the language of the John Keats whose
early poetry was full of toyings, of gentle squeezes, of the "tasting”
of faces, of "Pleasure's nipple” and “milky sovereignties.” It is
the language of the Keats who enjoyed jokes about "More feet
for little stockings,” "Amo amas I loved a lass,” and the frankly
(and delightfully) bawdy poem of Dawlish. In short, there is
no escape from the fact that Keats was highly sensual, and that
he probably lived quite as uncontrolledly in this regard as in
others. Haydon reports that he was once drunk for six weeks.
Miss Lowell chooses to disbelieve this, but admits that at one
time he was in the habit of taking laudanum. The general picture
is incontrovertibly that of a young man who was at the mercy
of his appetites, and who lived up to his plea of “O for a life
of sensations rather than thoughts!"
It may be considered that I am stressing too much these psycho-
logical and physiological factors. I think, however, it is only by
keeping them very clearly in mind that we can arrive at anything
like an adequate understanding of Keats. Miss Lowell follows
previous biographers in attempting to attribute the "unmanliness"
and allied weaknesses of Keats to "external" factors. Going
further than Arnold, who merely exonerated him, she declares
him to have been strong, to have had great decision of character;
and his breakdown, she argues, was simply the result of an un-
paralleled series of misfortunes. Briefly, these misfortunes were:
the death of his mother in 1810, when he was fifteen; the emigra-
tion of his brother George to America, and the death of his brother
Tom, in 1818; the indifference of the public to his first book
Poems in 1817, and the hostility of the critics to Endymion in
1818; financial difficulties owing to the trusteeship of his inherit-
ance; and finally, his breakdown with consumption, and death,
while in love with Fanny Brawne, in 1821. These misfortunes,
it will be noticed, were distributed over a period of ten years.
They are misfortunes, certainly, but on the whole not such as the
normal young man cannot and does not meet with stoicism-it


482
JOHN KEATS
is worth remembering that Keats's sister Fanny and brother
George faced similar difficulties, and apparently with equanimity.
The truth is, these misfortunes are not very far from the normal
human lot; and the so-called "tragedy” of Keats has been exag-
gerated, and indeed became a tragedy, largely because Keats him-
self helplessly exaggerated it. The departure of his brother
George to America was the sort of thing which any brother expects
-families do not remain together for ever. The financial diffi-
culties did not greatly disturb Keats, or disturb him for very long
at a time. He was young and confident; borrowed as cheerfully
as he lent, and his publishers were extremely generous to him with
advances. Moreover, there is another side to the picture. It must
not be lost sight of that Keats had in many respects a phenomenally
rapid and lucky rise from social darkness to a secure position among
the leading men of his time. Even before he had reached his
majority, he found himself surrounded by a group of admirers,
all of them mature and brilliant men. Through Leigh Hunt and
Cowden Clarke he was in a position to meet practically anybody
whom he cared to. At the very outset of his career he encountered,
on more or less equal terms, though himself much younger, Shelley,
Wordsworth, Lamb, Hazlitt, and Coleridge. Furthermore, in
Reynolds, Clarke, Haydon, Dilke, Woodhouse, Bailey, and Charles
Brown (not to mention Hunt, whom he partially dropped) he
possessed a circle of outspoken and enthusiastic admirers who were
all intelligent men, who perceived his genius, and who helped him
in every possible way. They copied his poems, handed his books
about, mixed excellent advice with their praise, lent him money,
and evidently (seeing him to be his own worst enemy) conspired
to make him and keep him happy. There is scarcely another poet
in the history of English literature who can have been so swiftly
recognized and placed, or so handsomely encouraged by those whose
help was in itself a clear validation of his genius.
III
nc
n
.
In the presence of these facts, I think any ascription of Keats's
"unmanlinesses” to external misfortune breaks down. Is it not
impossible to find, in the events of his life (unfortunate in some
respects as it was) any "objective correlative” for his extraor-


CONRAD AIKEN
483
dinary emotional instability, his loss of self-control, his abject
self-pity and despair? The situation is analogous to that of
Hamlet: we see him peculiarly unbalanced, unbalanced to the point
of insanity; but we do not see on the surface any wholly adequate
cause. We can, and should, add to the list of his misfortunes the
fact that he acquired syphilis (a fact not usually stressed) for
this may have contributed much to the poisoning of his relation-
ship with Fanny Brawne. But even so, the "disturbance” remains
so obviously disproportionate to apparent causes that we must seek
the real reasons not in external but in internal factors. In short,
we must say that these external factors were only able to undo
him because he was weak. A Keats with great strength of will,
great decision of character, such as Miss Lowell posits for him,
will not "work.” If we assume this, we are left with an enormous
quantity of “behaviour" (and the poetry may here be included)
which can only be regarded as "over-determined.” Everywhere,
in the smaller issues of Keats's life, we see that assumption belied.
The instability of the Keats in the letters is striking. He is an
emotional weathercock. He never knows his own mind or feel-
ings for more than a day at a time. We do not need the word
of Haydon for this—he tells us so himself. He is marvellously
adept at self-analysis, but it is always of the moment—that is,
in a particular state of feeling; and his passion for all its sensuous
circumstance (heightening the description to the point at which
it will be a direct and palpable sensation, or immediate expe-
rience, for his reader) inevitably led him to exaggerate. “I carry
all matters"-he says apologizing to Bailey for a letter which
had disturbed him—"to an extreme-so that when I have any
little vexation it grows in five minutes into a theme for
Sophocles.” This is the Keats who at school was subject to
paroxysms of weeping rage; who constantly gave way to fits of
luxurious and indolent melancholy; who wrote insufferably
patronizing letters to Taylor, his publisher, demanding money,
and then followed with letters of a beautiful humility; who could
frame a savagely conceited dedication for Endymion, and then
substitute for it another, penetratingly self-censorious. This is
also the Keats who could, and did, so repeatedly cry from one
extreme to the other in his relations with his mistress. He
imagined and desired her with a voluptuous obsession so con-
20L


484
JOHN KEATS
as
suming that he must go away from London in order to work;
having gone away to work, he wrote her that his work had
absorbed him, that he was hard-hearted, that work left no room
in his mind for her, and that if he came to town he would not
see her. He passed from an insanity of jealousy, gloatingly
sensual in the extreme, to an abject humility of trust. During
his illness, he constantly refused to see her, in order that he
might not have to part from her. When he was in Italy, dying,
he never once wrote to her—he could not bear to; his own feelings
came first. As regards his work, his judgement was just as capri-
cious and immoderate. It was seldom so much a judgement as
a feeling. “Here lies one whose name was writ in water,” he
suggested for his epitaph; but he also said, not long before, “I
think I shall be among the English poets after my death."
All of this, we see, is in one picture—the picture of one be-
wildered "by what is false within.” It was a hierarchy of pro-
found psychic schisms which ruled him, and it is scarcely to be
wondered at, in the circumstances, that his fine mind was so
seldom permitted to work uninterrupted, and that he regarded
the poet as a “chameleon,” without identity. In this psychotic
instability the half-hate half-love of his mother was the dominant
feature. He wanted still, and inordinately, to be loved. Society,
taking her place, was to receive him with open arms—he was to
be its darling, its god. It would cherish him and fondle him.
When, however, society did no such thing, or when his friends
betrayed in their admiration the least ambiguity, or when his
mistress (who bore the same name as his mother, and who per-
haps represented, for Keats, the negative pole of his mother's
character-cold, hard, and chaste) Airted harmlessly with Brown,
his sense of isolation and betrayal was morbid. He had, like the
spoiled child, his secret tantrum; and then, with a grimness and
tragic courage as excessive as the grief from which it was the
reaction, he set himself to prove how cruelly he had been under-
estimated. Taylor said of him: "He does not bear the ill opinion
of the world calmly." His own letters are full of an over-
weening pride, an assumption of greatness, which, in a character
less lovable than Keats, would be repellent. The note of entire
humbleness alternates with this, and completes our impression of
a divided personality. A morbid feeling of inferiority fed, and
e
de


CONRAD AIKEN
485
fought with, his burning ambition and self-confidence. Mr Watson
is, therefore, right-without the “dash of ’Arry" Keats would not
have been so much the “Apollo.” The livery stable played its
part, as did his mother's immorality. The fact that his mother
married beneath her (his father was an ostler) was important also.
... It is extraordinarily interesting to note that of his two “epics”
one deals with the love of a goddess for a mortal, and the other
with the dethronement of the “father," Saturn. In an earlier
hint of the Diana-Endymion theme, having described the nuptials
of the unequal lovers, he asks “Was there a poet born?”—and
Hyperion ends with the casting of Apollo into a celestial frenzy
which will make him a god; it is Mnemosyne, the goddess of
memory, who arouses him to this paroxysm.
IV
The Keats whose life was a feverish search for luxury as a re-
placement of his mother was also, of course, the Keats whose
poetry is the most completely and consciously sensuous ever written.
The erotic difficulty which rendered his life unstable, unhappy, and
of a febrile intensity, made of his poetry the remarkable worship of
sensuous delight (and linguistic substitute for it) which has been
so often discussed. I have already noted the fact that the so-called
vulgarities of Keats's poetry are almost invariably sexual in char-
acter. Perhaps, as this was the focal point of the disturbance, it
is only what we should expect; it is natural that over these, his
strongest feelings, the victory of poetic “taste" should have been
longest deferred. This becomes all the more reasonable an assump-
tion when we recall that the primary aim of Keats, in all his
poetry (as indeed in his letters) was to embody a sensation so
completely, with so richly organized a tactilism, as to make the
poetry approximate the vividness of a direct experience. This
method, at the outset, might result only in a harmless and cloying
prolixity, when it dealt with the natural luxuries of a summer's
day: but it led, when applied to erotic themes, to "slippery blisses”
and “milky sovereignties.” In his maturer poetry (it was never
to be wholly mature) these obsessions were still manifest enough,
but the excitement they occasioned was better controlled, his taste
improved; though even at the height of his powers, in St Agnes
was


486
JOHN KEATS
Eve and Lamia, he was subject to serious lapses. Perhaps in time
he would have learned to control this perfectly, for his taste de-
veloped with extraordinary rapidity. We see in his letters that it
was joined to a critical faculty, and a sense of values, exceptionally
keen. Keats might have become, among other things, a great
critic.
The Keats who could think, however, and the Keats who could
feel, remained peculiarly separate, and it is a point of great im-
portance that the “growth” of Keats as a poet was not a growth
in emotional power, or thought, or in any widening of view and
sympathies, but a growth in taste. His genius being primarily for
luxury (the finding of a verbal and prosodic equivalent for luxury
of feeling) it became a question of discovering the right pitch of
selection and control to give most richly the effect as of immediate
sensation. In Endymion, this was prevented by the riot of rich
images, and by excess in the image itself—he was undone by his
"nectarous camel-draughts." The improvement in his later work
is almost entirely due to a surer sense of effect. In the Ode to a
Nightingale, he managed miraculously to present a rich constella-
tion of sensations and feelings, only just stopping short of surfeit
It was not that his capacity to organize had particularly improved
—though perhaps it had done so very slightly; it was rather that
he was more jealously selective of his crowding intensities. It is
possible, also, that he was helped by the fact that in his later
work the top of his energy was gone, so that he lacked the super-
fluous gusto for his characteristic “chain of sensations.” As re-
gards his theme, or “thought,” however, it must be remarked that
the later work shows strikingly little development. There is
scarcely an idea or attitude in Hyperion, or the Odes, which had
not already been clearly developed in Endymion or the Poems.
The ideas, indeed, are extraordinarily few—the thought is almost
nil. In so far as thought is present, it is a thought apprehensible
through the senses, or employed only for its value in enhancing the
life of the senses. If we can believe Keats, a queer vague pseudo-
philosophical scheme of "soul-making" (outlined in letters to
Taylor and to his brother George) moves dimly and sluggishly
under the flowery surface of Endymion: but it reduces itself to
the idea that a hierarchy of sensations (with love at the top) edu.
cates the soul.


CONRAD AIKEN
487
Perhaps the revised Hyperion would have been an attempt to
define, in such a scheme, the office of the poet. But in this, and
in the Odes, if we have any development at all it is simply in
Keats's slightly sharper sense of the material he was dealing with,
material essentially unchanged. It is still "O for a life of sen-
sations rather than thoughts”; “A thing of beauty is a joy for ever”;
“Beauty is truth.” Of the Odes it has been said that they most
fully develop Keats's “idealism of beauty.” In this connexion
there are two peculiar things to be noted. The first is that the
Odes all deal (unless we except Autumn) with one theme, the
antinomy of beauty and death. The Ode on Melancholy states
this theme succinctly; the Ode to a Nightingale seeks escape (from
the melancholy thus induced in the thought that natural beauty
is immortal; the Ode on a Grecian Urn seeks escape from it in the
thought that beauty may be immortal in art; the Ode to Psyche
seeks escape from it in the thought that beauty may be immortal
in the consciousness of the witness—"in some untrodden region
of the mind.” The second point to be noted is that the so-called
idealism so restlessly sought, and in these successive forms, is not
at all a convinced idealism, but, on the contrary, a profound pes-
simism. In every case-even in The Grecian Urn—the affective
burden—the melancholy of the overtone-far outweighs the logi-
cal burden in which Keats pretends to discover peace. A great
part of the extraordinary beauty of the Odes (“the perfect sim-
plicity of their simple perfection") results precisely from this un-
conscious conflict. They are all, to paraphrase and invert Words-
worth's dictum, tranquillity remembered in melancholy. And
although Keats pretends to believe that he has transcended the
senses, or found a refuge from their transience in a kind of "prin-
ciple of beauty,” nevertheless we must remark that this ideal is a
sensual ideal, it is apprehensible only through the senses, and only
desirable in proportion as it is so apprehensible. It is not essen-
tially, therefore, an ideal that concerns and obsesses him, but a
permanent. He does not really want to escape from the world of
the senses, but to escape death. This is complicated, and greatly
enriched emotionally, by a peculiar obsession of Keats, traceable,
I should imagine, to his central difficulty, the mother-fixation; the
curious obsession with death. Death and love, death and beauty,
negative and positive, are a sort of bi-polar basis seldom absent
se


488
JOHN KEATS
yer II
from his poetry. But the curious thing is the degree in which
these terms, for Keats, were interchangeable. Death, for him, had
a profoundly erotic significance it became a symbol for consum-
mation; and love, just as significantly, meant death. Into the
precise mechanism of this it is not necessary to go. It forms the
most pronounced single symptom of his disequilibration, and re-
lates clearly enough to his love-hatred of Fanny Brawne and his
mother his desire for love and his conviction that it would kill
him-and his consequent morbid instability of behaviour in that
regard. It also relates to the fact that everywhere in his poetry
the ideas of love and death are ambivalent. His lovers are per-
petually swooning; love is death; and death is both terrible and
desirable. In the Nightingale, it is "rich to die.” Endymion,
whenever he encounters Cynthia, faints. Porphyro melts into the
dream of Madeline. The victims of La Belle Dame Sans Merci
are kissed into unconsciousness. In a letter to Fanny Brawne,
Keats is explicit about this obsession. "I have two luxuries to
brood over in my walks," he says; “your loveliness, and the hour
of my death. O that I could have possession of them both in
the same minute.”
The intellectual accompaniment to all this is pessimism. In his
letters of the same period as the Odes we see Keats quite definitely
standing on the verge of a gloomy mechanistic view. He sees
nature red in tooth and claw, and man, like the hawk, pursuing
an undeviating and instinctive way. He sees the rose in blossom,
imagines it to have sensation, and then sees it deflowered by frost.
He is disheartened: "The point at which man may arrive is as
far as the parallel point in inanimate nature, and no farther";
man will never escape pain and death. Would this point of view
have been fruitful for Keats--would his poetry have taken it over?
It is possible that out of this "horrid morbidity" he would have
cultivated a wisdom. But his poetry, at the time of his death,
had taken, not this thought to which he had so rapidly reached,
but the emotion that accompanied it, the excess of torture which it
had occasioned. It is possible that his love-death obsession would
never have allowed him more freedom, either in poetry or in specu-
lation, than he had already found. In the Odes, his maturest
work, the emotional side of Keats quite definitely funked the
prospect. This might, or might not, have been a temporary escape-
adjustment which he would quickly have outgrown.


CONRAD AIKEN
489
V
Miss Lowell touches little on these psychological features of
Keats's genius, and that must be my excuse for perhaps dwelling
on them too much. Of the "literary" influences on his work, Miss
Lowell gives an exhaustive account, not always very convincing.
To Endymion she allots too much space, and goes a good deal
too far afield in her search for influences. Diodorus Siculus, for
example, is invoked to explain the Triumph of Bacchus, but even
he is not enough: for Keats's Bacchus is plump. A fearful diffi-
culty! from which however the escape is triumphant. Rabelais
has a Bacchus who, inferentially at any rate, is plump; so it is all
satisfactory. But has Miss Lowell never encountered "plumpy
Bacchus with pink eyne"? ... There is too much of this sort
of loose analogy in her John Keats. She strains at a gnat-when
it is a rival who supplies it--but swallows her own camels very
easily. With immense gusto she purports to prove that the frag-
mentary Fall of Hyperion antedates the longer Hyperion. The
Woodhouse letter sufficiently disposes of that speculation. If
more evidence is necessary, it is perhaps worth pointing out that
in a letter to Woodhouse on October 27, 1818 (i.e., about the
time he is supposed to have begun the poem in one form or the
other) Keats mentions “cogitating on the characters of Saturn and
Ops.” As Ops does not appear in the Fall, and does appear in
Hyperion, one may assume that Hyperion was the first written.
Again, Miss Lowell attaches tremendous importance to a blue
mantle, embroidered with stars, which Cynthia wears in Endymion.
This points conclusively to Drayton's Endymion and Phoebe, she
argues—although the book is so rare that only one copy could
have been even speculatively accessible to Keats. Keats could
quite as well, however, have got the mantle from Jonson. In the
King James's Entertainment occurs: (1) "Agrypina, in yellow, a
sable mantle, seeded with waking eyes, and silver fringe”; and
(2) “Irene, her attire white, semined with stars.” Or he could
have got it from Marston, who influenced Keats in more ways
than one. In his Entertainment, “Cynthia was discovered ryding;
her habit was blewe satten, fairely embroidered with starres and
cloudes.” Keats learnt much from Marston, as a careful scrutiny
of this particular poem, and the dedications, will show.
But this sort of influence must be studied with extreme care,


490
JOHN KEATS
wide reading, and unerring fastidiousness of taste, and in these
regards Miss Lowell is inclined to be headlong. She touches least
on an influence which for Keats was of great importance—the
influence of Chatterton. Chatterton, it is possible, influenced him
not only in his work (the mediaevalism especially) but also in his
life. The tragedy of Chatterton's life was then comparatively
recent. It parallels in so many particulars Keats's own life that
one speculates—idly perhaps-on the extent to which Keats, in
his adolescence, may actually have been warped by it. His death-
obsession found in Chatterton's early death a ready symbol; the
temptation to romanticize that unfortunate career must have been
great; and it was then only a step to the morbid assumption
(peculiarly easy for Keats) that genius is ipso facto doomed to
obloquy and premature death. Love, fame, and death were Keats's
three graces. The death of a young poet—this was almost the
most tragic (and attractive!) thing he could imagine. The death
of a young poet, while in love, however, was a turn of the screw
which, if he had conceived, he had certainly not discounted. When
he realized that this was to be his destiny, his imagination gave it
fullest value, and he died as passionately and uncontrolledly and
consciously as he had lived. He grasped death hard with all his
senses and went under the earth alive.



SINCLAIR LEWIS. BY BOARDMAN ROBINSON





PAUL VALERY
BY EDMUND WILSON
M RT. S. ELIOT'S preface to Mr Wardle’s translation of
M Paul Valéry's Le Serpent," though distinguished and expert,
is perhaps rather less satisfactory than his essays usually are.
Presented as an introduction of Valéry to English readers who
presumably cannot read French—since it is a question of trans-
lation—Mr Eliot is content to describe Valéry in terms of refer-
ences which such readers would be very unlikely to understand.
He says admirably that "what Valéry represents, and for which
he is honoured and admired in France, is the reintegration of
the symbolist movement into the great tradition”; but he does
not provide a word of explanation of the characteristics of either
the symbolist movement or the great tradition. “To Rimbaud,
to Verlaine, and to Gerard de Nerval,” he writes of a certain
poem of Valéry, "the relationship is evident,” and “Valéry's
kinship with Mallarmé is too evident to need mention”-forgetting
that, if a reader had read Rimbaud, Verlaine, Mallarmé, and
Gerard de Nerval, he would probably have read Valéry, too, and
that if he were in a position to perceive their relationships as
evident, he would require something more than a simple statement
of that fact—that, in any case, he would probably not stand in
need of an English translation. One feels in fact that Mr Eliot,
on the whole, has failed either to describe his subject quite vividly,
or to explain it quite carefully, enough to stimulate the ordinary
reader, at the same time that he has not gone into it sufficiently
deeply to interest the person who already knows something about it.
When Mr Eliot discusses the poet's "metaphysics,” however, in
connexion with M Thibaudet's book on Valéry,” he is very much
to the point. M Thibaudet is a literary critic who seems chiefly
1 Le Serpent. By Paul Valéry. With a translation into English by Mark
Wardle and an introduction by T. S. Eliot. 51 pages. Published for
The Criterion by R. Cobden-Sanderson. 103. 6d.
2 Paul Valéry. By Albert Thibaudet. 183 pages. Les Cahiers Verts :
Bernard Grasset. 6 fr.


492
PAUL VALERY
n
COV
interested in philosophy—especially in that of Bergson, upon whom
he has written a book and with whose ideas, illustrations, vocabu-
lary, and style he has become entirely saturated: there are, in-
deed, whole passages in Thibaudet which might be mistaken for
passages from Bergson. Now it appears from M Valéry's prose
writings that he has undergone a number of extra-poetic influences
-notably that of modern physics—but, on M Thibaudet's own
admission, he has never read a word of Bergson. M Thibaudet's
declared purpose then is to trace parallel tendencies in Bergson's
philosophy and Valéry's poetry. He finds, for example, that the
"metaphysical meditation of Le Cimetière Marin resembles a Berg-
sonian meditation: luckily for M Thibaudet, in this case, both
Valéry and Bergson make conspicuous use of Zeno's arrow-the
well-known paradox according to which, if a moving arrow be
imagined as at rest at each instant of its flight, it will never be
able to get from one position to another and so will never move
at all. But surely the arrow is used in very different connexions by
Valéry and by Bergson: for Bergson, it is an illustration of the
errors one can fall into by attempting to discuss change in terms
of a succession of fixed states, whereas for Valéry it is simply a
figure for the feeling of death, of arrested movement, of the void,
which comes upon him in the cemetery; if there is any appropriate-
ness at all in comparing their ideas, it is plain that Bergson, with
his mystical conception of "becoming” is concerned with proving
the artificiality of ideas of fixity, whereas Valéry, here as elsewhere,
is fascinated by the idea of immobility and drawn toward it as if
it represented an absolute reality in whose "great diamond” our
lives are but a "flaw”-
OV
“Tête complète et parfait diadème,
Je suis en toi le secret changement."
M Thibaudet even goes so far as to expound literary theory in
terms of Bergsonian metaphysics. It is one of the characteristics of
symbolism to write metaphors rather than similes and to pass with-
out warning from one metaphor to another: M Thibaudet explains
this as the supreme triumph of the Bergsonian realization that the
universe is all of a piece and that our conception of it as consisting
of different things is merely a fiction we have adopted for con-


EDMUND WILSON
493
venience: thus, whereas the old-fashioned poet would liken a
woman's hair to falling water, for the symbolist, “the hair and
the water have become a single reality and that is why, when,
with romanticism, pure poetry becomes fully self-conscious, it re-
fuses to disassociate them and rejects whenever it pleases the ases
and the likes. . . . Mallarmé and Valéry have carried this as far
as it can go.” Much of the time, however, M Thibaudet is not
so much distorting Valéry's ideas in order to make them coincide
with Bergson's as translating the metaphors of Valéry into Berg-
sonian metaphors: he thus becomes engaged in the unprofitable
occupation of interpreting one metaphysical poet in terms of
another.
For all this, when M Thibaudet begins to write literary criti-
cism, as he does toward the end of his book, he is interesting:
“Mallarmé and Valéry have pushed to their limits and united those
two apparent contradictions: the innermost and most intuitive
essence of poetry and the severest technical rigor of form.” Even
here, however, the King Charles' head of Bergson cannot be kept
out of the discussion: in the next sentence he adds in a parenthesis:
“Should I be wrong in mentioning slyly here the name and the
analogous philosophical effort of M Bergson ?" One should note
also the striking passage quoted by Mr Eliot in his preface: “All
Mallarmé consists in this: a disinterested experiment on the con-
fines of poetry, at a limit where other lungs would find the air
unbreathable. Valéry has taken note of that experiment, watched
it carefully, tested out its theory, and his own contribution has
consisted in laying the foundation for its establishment as an
institution.”
M Thibaudet's mistake is to attempt to disengage from Valéry's
poems the metaphysical ideas which they suggest and to state them
as if they were the main subjects of interest; it is for this that Mr
Eliot reproaches him. M Thibaudet does realize, to be sure, that
he is making these ideas more explicit than the poet intended and
he offers the following apologia: “This metaphysical element, it is
I, it is the critic who introduces it, or rather who plays the midwife
to it, who reduces, through dissociation and disarticulation, the
concrete to the abstract, and who obeys that inevitable necessity
of the métier: like Faguet, to wait for the poet in the woods and
bid him hand over his ideas.” It is plain, however, that this is


494
PAUL VALERY
not the habit of mind of a critic deeply interested in the art of
poetry. As Mr Eliot says, Valéry's poems should be read as works
of art and not as speculations: M Thibaudet conveys a misleading
impression of them. Valéry's achievement, in Le Cimetière Marin,
for example, has been to make a poem of one of those moments
when we are visited by ideas of the void—the void of death, the
void of space—but, instead of offering general reflections on this
subject, he puts the emotions, the ideas, in their setting—the ceme-
tery, the sea, the noon-day sun, the cricket's chirp, the black
wreaths, the doves. He has availed himself of the inventions of
the symbolists—so expert at rendering complex sensations, at mak-
ing the stabilities of the external world answer to the individual's
varying apprehension of them—to present the emotion merged
with the idea and both bound up with the scene which provokes
them in such a way that all three seem inextricably identified
with one another. He is not didactic, he does not want to convince
you of anything; he is not emotional, he has a rigorously objective
ideal; he is not content with the poetry of sensations, the music -
the music without words of Mallarmé. As a rule, he sets a
definite stage, as Mallarmé rarely does, but then puts on a drama
in which it becomes difficult to tell whether the action is passing
between real characters or between the ideas in the poet's head or
the feelings in his heart. As M Thibaudet says, his poetry "stands
as if at the cross-roads of three poetic movements: the classic, the
Parnassian and the symbolist—and combines them in one common
essence.” It is thus possible for him to recall Alfred de Vigny, by
his moral ideas and his marmoreal effects, and Mallarmé, by his
subtleties, both at the same time.
The kind of ideas which preoccupy Valéry are well illustrated
by Le Cimetière Marin. He is fascinated, as I have suggested,
by the absolute. It is not a system of thought which he is recom-
mending, but an order of emotions which he is expressing and,
in his poems, it takes many forms. As the man in Le Cimetière
Marin seems only the secret change in the completeness and perfec-
tion of the noon-day sun, so in Le Serpent the universe is only a
blemish in the purity of nothingness. He would suspend even
satisfaction and enjoy it only in a timeless imminence: that for
him is the true satisfaction. In Les Pas, he begs the being who is
approaching him-human or divine, it is difficult to tell which-
not to hasten, as he enjoys awaiting her as much as her kiss; and


EDMUND WILSON
495
the Serpent addresses Eve in the following terms on the subject of
tasting the fruit of the tree-
"Que si ta bouche fait un rêve,
Cette soif qui songe à la sève,
Ce délice à demi futur,
C'est l'éternité fondante, Eve!”
He seems to admire his mistress most when she appears to him in
this timeless aspect—that is, when she is asleep: in Dormeuse, he
sees her form as a pure abstraction, from which her personality
has, as it were, departed, and, in La Fausse Morte, he reflects that
sleep is a kind of death "plus précieuse que la vie.” Thus other
human beings, when they appear in Valéry's poems, are usually
either asleep or dead-or, like the woman in Intérieur, are merely
insubstantial presences which pass before the eyes of the mind like
glass before the sun. (Almost such a presence M Teste, in the
letter printed in this month's Dial, makes Mme Teste feel.) As
a rule, he prefers marble columns or stately trees. His imaginary
characters, though they have their tragedy, their humour, and their
sensuous beauty, are always abstract. And like the Narcissus who
is the hero of one of his finest poems, he seems interested primarily
in himself, or rather in the mind by itself. Paul Valéry is the poet
of the mind alone—the mind moved by the contradiction between
the change with which life confronts it and in which it feels itself
involved and the changeless abstraction to which it turns instinc-
tively as to a native element
Such a temperament has found a technique and a colour appro-
priate to it. Valéry's success with his difficult material—which
does so little toward carrying the poet part way by interesting the
ordinary reader on its own account—is one of the most impressive
achievements in contemporary literature. His passion for dur-
ability has led him to work in a supremely accurate and compact
language moulded to exacting regular forms; his poems are solid,
they are constructed in a way that Mallarmé's are not. In his
volume of essays, Variété, Valéry is evidently speaking for himself
apropos of La Fontaine:
eva
"It was never a lazy man's game, to extract a little grace, a lit-
tle clarity, a little permanence, from the mobility of the things of


496
PAUL VALERY
the mind; and to transform that which passes into that which
endures. And the more restless and elusive one's prey, the more
attention and determination are needed to render it eternally pres-
ent in its attitude eternally fleeing. ... Rhymes, fixed forms,
obligatory metres, all these arbitrary rules, once for all adopted by
us and opposed to ourselves, have a sort of philosophic beauty of
their own. Chains which are pulled tight at each movement of
our genius remind us instantly of all the scorn which we should
feel toward that familiar chaos which the vulgar call thought and
as to which they do not realize that its natural conditions are no
less fortuitous, no less futile, than the conditions of a charade.”
Valéry's texture and colour are chiefly determined by this taste
for the unstained, the absolute: his favourite adjective is “pur."
A poet of considerable virtuosity—“Où tant de marbre est trem-
blant sur tant d'ombres,” and “L'insecte net gratte la sécheresse,"
are lines in the same poem-he runs by preference to effects of the
crystalline, the silvery, and the translucent, in which he excels.
The pool of Narcissus, for example, offers him an ideal subject :
it is evening in the forest—"Une tendre lueur d'heure ambiguë
existe”—the water is as smooth as a mirror—"onde déserte, et
digne, Sur son lustre, du lisse effacement d'un cygne"-when Nar-
cissus speaks to his image in the pool—“Le bruit Du souffle que
j'enseigne à tes lèvres, mon double, Sur la limpide lame a fait
courir un trouble!” His human figures are like fine statues which
have yet a vibrancy and a soft envelopment. So he describes Eve
in Le Serpent:
“Calme, claire, de charmes lourde,
Je dominais furtivement,
L'oeil dans l’or ardent de ta laine,
Ta nuque énigmatique et pleine
Des secrets de ton mouvement!”
Later, when she is tempted:
“Le marbre aspire, l’or se cambre!
Ces blondes bases d'ombre et d'ambre
Tremblent au bord du mouvement!”


EDMUND WILSON
497
The description of the sleeping woman in the sonnet, Dormeuse,
contains what is surely one of his most miraculous lines:
"Ta forme au ventre pur qu'un bras fluide drape."
Mr Eliot has compared Valéry to Yeats by virtue of the position
of importance which he occupies: he resembles Yeats, also, in
the remarkable extent to which he has kept his consciousness un-
cluttered and untarnished at a time when it seems peculiarly
difficult for the poet to strike a vein of genuine feeling and to
maintain a taste sufficiently true to express it in verse of fine
quality. His description of the average French book of the period
before the war, in his essay La Crise de l’Esprit, is interesting in
this connexion :
"In almost any book of that time—and not merely in the in-
ferior ones—you can easily find an influence from the Russian
Ballet, a little of the sombre style of Pascal, much impressionism of
the Goncourt type, something of Nietzsche, something of Rimbaud,
certain effects due to association with painters, and occasionally the
tone of scientific writings—the whole perfumed with an English
flavour difficult to analyze."
1a
Valéry, like Yeats, has maintained a chastity and a dignity un-
disturbed by the surrounding medley. But, whereas Yeats with-
drew completely—and quite consciously, as it appears from his
autobiographical writings—from a world spoiled for him as much
by science as by democratic society, taking refuge in the more
congenial, if obsolete, researches of astrology and magic; Valéry
has found at least one phase of contemporary intellectual activity
pure and noble enough for his taste and has nourished his appetite
for abstraction with the abstractions of modern mathematics and
physics. Indeed, he sometimes seems almost the poet of that part
of the mind which occupies itself with these things. Is not
M Teste, after all, something of a scientific hero?


TWO POEMS
BY MABEL SIMPSON
SONG
O Earth, how lonely you would be
Without the Wind, without the Sea.
We come and go, we live and die,
At last within your breast we lie.
And all the lovely words we say,
And all the lovely prayers we pray,
Are put away, are put away.
Only the Winds and Waters stay.
HERE ONCE THE ROSE
Here once the rose
In splendour laid
Her slender beauty, yellow sprayed.
Here once the dew
In morning fell
Upon the hidden lily bell.
And here the thrush
With silver throat
Did loosen every Spring his note,
And the bright robin showed his coat.
No more, no more,
Shall rose and thrush
Make sweet with sight and sound the bush,
Nor robins break
The endless hush.


i
THE THINKER. BY ADOLF DEHN





PARIS LETTER
May, 1925
M HE death of Bakst saddens even those who do not thereby
I lose a friend: for with Bakst there passes a whole section
of their youth, too soon and too fast. 1909. The first Russian
Ballets: Sadko, with its submarine depths; the enchantment of
that great hanging Smyrna rug which was the setting of Schehera-
zade: there is no doubt that to the end of our lives, long as they
may be, we shall retain intact the image of these richnesses.
Cleopatra, Saint Sebastian, Helen of Sparta—that draft upon
all forms, that conjunction of all epochs, unified by a new tech-
nique of decoration-few centuries have seen its like. It is true
that his art is too often vulgar, barbaric, effective only as a
blow between the eyes; but such as it is, it has now become an
historical phenomenon with its fifteen years of influence upon
manners, the theatre, the city, books, and music. M Reynaud's
book on Bakst, which appeared only a few days before his death,
testifies to that. It has been said that his was a Jewish art, with
its emphasis upon raw tones, its passion for gold and precious
metals, its dearth of line, its nomadic origins, its Oriental sen-
suality, its contempt for architectural construction. Bakst was,
in fact, a Jew; and it was great Israelite audiences that estab-
lished the success of the Russian Ballet, that first great inter-
national success, marked by the boldness of the audience's dress,
its immodesties, extravagant coiffures, depilated bodies, cosmetics;
by that mixture of all modes to the point where one could not
always distinguish between the house and the stage. Whatever
it was, it is certain that the historians of the future shall be
obliged to recognize in the coming of the Russian Ballet to Paris
the first sign, before the great war, the first announcement to
the West of the Russo-Asiatic movement which has to-day awak-
ened half the globe.
The efforts of the Russian Ballet since the war, though they
manifest an extraordinary intelligence and vitality with their
se


500
PARIS LETTER
utilization of cubism, their stylization of futurism, their appeals
to the composers of the younger schools, have accomplished no
more than to prolong a dolorous agony. Strawinsky contributed
the aid of his rising glory with Petrouchka and the Rossignol ;
but already in his Sacre du Printemps and later in his Noces
he was turning to a pure music which transcends theatrical min-
istrations. All scenic embellishments seem to-day unnecessary
to this composer. The hour of the Russian Ballet is past.
In Léon Bakst we lose a charming companion; a simple and
kindly man, who revolutionized an era without losing his naïveté.
His absence will be regretted as deeply in Europe as in America,
where he found a warm welcome which greatly comforted the
last months of his life.
Peu
The death of Anatole France brings to me the reflection that
sceptics who become dessicated in life keep admirably, thanks
to the embalming they have been careful to accomplish during
their lifetime. The tears of the crowd are for romancers and
poets, for those who have made it weep. Whatever respect he
may hold for Anatole France, an impartial observer living in
Paris at this moment must admit that the official ceremonies were
scarcely terminated before everyone ceased to weep for the master.
The book of his former secretary, J.-J. Brousson, Anatole France
en Pantoufles,' shocked a few, but greatly diverted the many.
Fifty thousand copies sold in the first month bear witness to that.
France appears in it in the crude, implacable lines of a passport
photograph: a sort of monstrous bourgeois idol, a veritable Père
Ubu of literature, egotistical, intolerant, false, hypocritical, and
heartless. He is an aristocrat and anti-plebeian; a Jacobin, but
a collector of ecclesiastical objects; a revolutionary locked in the
past; speaking of nothing but love, but contenting himself with
the sexual diversions of a Parisian labourer on a Saturday night.
Another book, Anatole France à la Béchellerie (his country estate
in Touraine) by M le Goff, speaks chiefly of France after 1914.
The great writer appears to be treated here with greater respect
than in the other book, but in fact he is treated more cruelly.
One sees in it a very old France, drowsy, a superficial pacifist,
an apostle without faith, without friends, and without illusions.
1 To be published in translation by J. B. Lippincott and Company.


PAUL MORAND
501
OU
M Brousson's book affords this explanation:
"Why did I go over to Socialism?” said France. "It is better
to be led than to be driven.”
And this opinion of his work:
“My finest books? Those which have had no success: l'Histoire
Comique, Jeanne d'Arc. My poorest books? Those that the
whole world has praised: Thaïs, Le Lys Rouge."
At the opposite extreme to Anatole France's cloistered art and
the style of the bookworm stand the stories of modern adventure,
such as that of Pelletier d'Oisy, who flew from Paris to Tokio.
To me these tales of flight through the air are never wearying,
and I get a dizzy thrill from them. These continents traversed
in a day; luncheon in India, tea in Siam, dinner in Indo-China,
or almost that; countries traversed as though they were the quar-
ters of a single city-these are pleasures which will presently bore
our descendants, or perhaps even ourselves, but for the moment
they enchant me. That method of travel is an excellent one.
The more I travel the greater joy speed gives to me. One should
spend two hours in a town, or ten years. The first contact, the
first shock of a new scene upon our unconscious is too often
effaced in the weeks of the sojourn which follow, by conscious-
ness, when we admit such utterly noxious things as guides, docu-
ments, visits, and anecdotes. The universe ought not to be a fat
encyclopaedia, but a pocket manual, a hand-book. Our aim must
not be to try to lose ourselves in it, but to find ourselves readily.
I have essayed various methods, and I confess that I experience
incomparable delights in trips at lightning speed, in which that
which has been seen remains in the mind in its broad outlines,
its balanced masses, helping to develop a true sense of realities, of
the proportions between spirits and objects, which after all is the
aim of all disinterested travel.
I have read with great pleasure the Manet which J.-E. Blanche
has just published through Rieder, and which follows the mediocre
Cézanne of M Klingsor. Who has said that Blanche admires
nothing? He is an old enthusiast, like Hokusai. J.-E. Blanche
knew Manet in his youth, and all his life he has followed and
admired this artist who remains the greatest of modern painters.
He speaks of him with flavour and abundance, as writer and as
painter, providing an agreeable contrast to those criticisms of art
CIUS


502
PARIS LETTER
written in an incredible jargon from which it is impossible to
receive the slightest profit and of which one can never remember
a single line.
E. Champion has published a remarkable book entitled Les
Langues du Monde, by a group of eminent linguists, including
Professor Meillet, Cohen, Vendryès, and others. In this book
all known languages are classified by families.
A new periodical, La Revue Juive, published at Geneva and
Paris under the auspices of the Nouvelle Revue Française and
the direction of A. Cohen, has just appeared. It is the first publi-
cation of its kind. Rieder, the publisher, is also to issue a series
of books under the general title Judaïsme, edited by MM. Fleg
and Couchard. I have spoken above of the Russian Ballet as
the forerunner of a Jewish art. There is now in France—and
we must observe it without prejudice-a much larger Jewish
public than existed here before the war. The success of Histoires
Juives, a collection of pleasant tales, and of the Silbermann of
J. de Lacretelle, published by the N. R. F., of this same Revue
Juive, and the present triumph of Honegger's Le Roi David are
manifest proof. L'Enquête sur les Juifs de France, announced
for publication by Benjamin Crémieux, should be an interesting
document in this connexion.
we
ni
ma
PAUL MORAND
i Silbermann, by Jaques De Lacretelle, translated by Brian Lunn (12mo,
191 pages; Boni & Liveright: $2).


BOOK REVIEWS
POEMS IN PASTEL
One Way of Love. By Cuthbert Wright. 12mo.
71 pages. Elkin Mathews.
COME time past, as we were philanthropically engaged in
boxing up books for the Merchant Marine, we had occasion
to comb over our acquisitions of the past ten years. Pride of
possession vanished in a welter of half-forgotten volumes of verse,
each with its first fly leaf duly inscribed with our own name (and
sometimes, we remember modestly, with someone's else) and a
date we once had reason to believe would be significant. Turning
over hundreds of leaves, we found infallible evidence of careful
perusal: bright stanzas bracketed, lively figures underlined,
asterisks placed over against such verses as we had thought dis-
tinctly good, possibly because they reminded us of something bet-
ter. Here had been industry decidedly aesthetic, and all to no
purpose, apparently, for try as hard as we could (once we had
nailed up our boxes of volumes for the high seas) only wide
breakers of Spenser, and Shelley, and Swinburne came rolling in
from our historic past. Bob as bob would the rickety skiff of our
memory, it was always to such surf as surges across the footlights
at Corneille, for instance. We smiled to think what pain and
embarrassment this acknowledgement would once have cost us.
As some men choose friends we choose causes: for the enemies
they have made. So it is that the poetical stir of the last ten
years has left us glowing with an ardent admiration for the grand
manner: for prose and verse in buskins. No fashion of well-
informed futility can alter our perversity: our corruption is per-
sonal and hopeless. What pets men keep involve vexed questions
of character, for pet poems are like pet cats: sooner or later they
come back unbidden; night and morning one is apt to find them
on the stoop of the brain, friendly, even familiar. Sometimes,
gazing at the gorgeous angoras of our neighbours, we feel ashamed


504
POEMS IN PASTEL
ommon
0
of common cats like “Comus,” “Adonais,” and “Hero and
Leander."
Yet these are good cats. Calculation would convince us if form
failed, for all back-fence serenading to the contrary, the birthrate
in verse has not been what we should have expected. Litters of
lyrics are becoming so perishable, or infrequent, that poetry, like
modern society, bids fair to wither away at the top. So it was,
rummaging among the remnants of our first editions, we were not
altogether shocked to find how generous we had been with our
sailors. If there was anything to be ashamed of about the few
books we had kept for sale at our decease, ownership, we reflected,
was scarcely the word. As we glanced over these reminiscently,
we found ourself gazing into pools, peeping at reflections—not
our own exactly, rather composite images, vague and colourless,
very much like that sort of photograph one will wire, some day,
to dear friends. Narcissus, we seemed to remember, perished in
youth; how was it that poets were almost invariably long-lived?
Thus it was, we argued, that the older they grew the more bitterly
they smirked at their first ventures.
Only mock modesty, however, could make the author of One
Way of Love coy of his parenthood-at so early a date. Candour
compels us to confess that these poems are of unequal merit: at
least two of Mr Wright's efforts are quite as bad as the worst of
the best of poets. Yet two short lapses, together with a few dis-
tinctly unfortunate passages, is surely no very large allowance
for the generous, if rotund, passions of youth. And one other lyric,
for its severe grace and inevitable simplicity is unforgettable: no
mean praise in these busy days when the bulk of rememberable
poems could be wadded in a walnut shell. The colours of this
book are pastel, sometimes plain grey; these poems are some of
them boyish, literary, even grandiose. For us, the most ambitious,
Ballad of a Factory Town, is unhappily stained with a persistent
memory of teas and tempests of ten years ago. Precisely in this
poem-by far the most worldly successful of them all—does the
finest quality of Mr Wright's verse, felicitous simplicity, become
a trifle arch. A certain demureness of method here falters into sly
speech and prim effects. Obviously (we contend that this platitude
has become a troubled creed) the most deadly solvent for what-
ever magic verse may own, is even a faint suspicion of insincerity
no
me.


STEWART MITCHELL
505
or pose. Mr Wright goes down fighting on the nobler side, for
splurge it is that most frequently becomes ridiculous, not economy.
From a Study by Flandrin holds the essence of spare poetry, win-
ning us, if ever, with the power of austere expression-winning
us completely in this instance.
One Way of Love belongs to days when musicians, for instance,
were not ashamed of a resolution of chords. Within the last ten
years writers of all varieties have spread the fashion of working
with hints, winks, and jokes, paring down their words to the last
refinement of the ineffable. Because affection for self-expression
is a barren love, poets grow wise by growing weary of themselves.
Thereupon they fall desperately in love with life (beyond or above
them, however they may choose to phrase their sainthood) and
come back to their youth, with a difference. Swinburne is a case
in point: rarely has man been so thorough a dupe of words as he.
Against all forms of the belly worship of holy India stands for
ever the verbal balance of great style.
Nine years ago Mr Wright was hardly ready for a conversion
to mature expression, being quite naturally concerned with how
he looked against the unalterable background of the world. Yet
bits of these poems, stray verses flooded with the long level light
of autumn afternoons, suggest the inevitable evidence of success
with words: a sensation of recoil toward rest. What tricks he has
are innocent, because they are never shrewd enough to hide his
failures. Even before the secondary sentiments of reflection the
storm and stress of egotistic contrariness vanish. Some poets are
so happy as occasionally to speak quickly and exactly; unlucky
ones never succeed without tinsel and bunting. Unwillingly as
we should advise Mr Wright to go on exactly as he began, seri-
ously as we hesitate to say anything that might augment the
current downpour of verse, we suggest that according to the faith
of poetry, the sin against the holy ghost is silence.
STEWART MITCHELL


MR OSBERT SITWELL'S FICTION
Triple Fugue. By Osbert Sitwell. 12m0. 311
pages. George H. Doran Company. $2.50.
unwelco
THE productions of Mr Sitwell and his gifted brother and
sister have been considered less as normal books than as a
series of vaudeville turns of rare virtuosity. Each production
has provoked the chorus of rather mechanical “Ohs” and “Ahs”
which follows a well-advertised set-piece on an evening of fire-
works, and those who have not been amused have thought it suffi-
cient to explain that they disliked fireworks. The fondness of all
three for the figures of commedia dell'arte may have encouraged
their critics to regard them as exempt from ordinary criticism, as
their favourite clowns would have been exempt; but this indul-
gence is scarcely flattering, and must be extremely unwelcome to
such brilliant and disillusioned poets.
But it is possible that the Sitwells themselves have sometimes
been confused by the literary Mardi Gras with which it has become
traditional to associate their names. The elder Mr Sitwell's pres-
ent collection of six naturalistic short stories ought, by its concep-
tion, to be quite distinct from the specialties of the family troupe.
He writes of two odd spinsters in a sea-side town who lose their
inheritance, and one of whom commits suicide (Low Tide); two
women admirers of a man of letters who weary of him because he
will not commit suicide as his friend has done (Friendship’s Due);
a mysterious murder and the return of the victim (The Greeting);
the miserable marriage of a professional Don Juan (His Ship
Comes Home). Mr Sitwell is in magnificent possession of all
these pathetic situations, magnificently aware of their pathos with-
out any tenderness at all, and his observation is so tirelessly pre-
cise that it very nearly amounts to narrative genius.
But it is a serious business to write seriously, and he seems too
often to remember his reputation and to delight in his own virtu-
osity. There is a certain debris of the eternal Mardi Gras-
paper noses, trick landscapes, and the mechanical moon—scarcely
appropriate to these drab themes. There are too many adjectives,
IN


GLENWAY WESCOTT
507
too many recapitulations, too many startling combinations of
"there reigned” and “our hero" and "in fact, the whole had an
indefinable atmosphere” with the most startling novelties of
imagery, too many generous circumlocutions of a rather German
syntax, too many vivacious digressions, too many cumbersome short-
cuts. The result is a style very difficult to read: the light touch
become encyclopaedic, a Petit Trianon loaded with gargoyles.
This method seems designed less for the sake of the six subjects
than to reflect Mr Sitwell's temperament. Desiring to display all
his capacities at once, he has not been willing to suppress the verbal
painter while the disillusioned man of the world delivers his mono-
logue in the tone of a sepulchral drawing-room, or to silence that
rather pompous, acrid voice while the painter depicts a bright and
crooked world. The six tales grow confused, seem to be at last
but six divisions of a long performance. And Mr Sitwell is con-
tinually on the stage, dressed in rapid succession in all the aspects
of his mind, in a lounge-suit of his petulance or the full-dress of
his wit.
The Author's Preface, in which Mr Sitwell threatens to prose-
cute for libel any character attempting to recognize himself in the
book, can only serve to provoke the attempts at identification which
it forbids; it is either an ill-judged frivolity or a lamentable
allurement. Indiscreet fiction appears to be in vogue at the
moment. Certain authors have become extremely popular by
taking the calling-cards of private life out of their top-hats and
turning them into the monstrous heroes and heroines of fiction.
It is a libertine art: portraiture executed chiefly for the pleasure
of those who never saw the original, portraiture consequently some-
what lacking in sobriety or even in politeness. Mr Sitwell seems
to be scrupulously polite; but there is in the title story of his book
an unpleasant suggestion of revenge by caricature and the weari-
some profusion of a transcript from the life.
S
GLENWAY WESCOTT


BESITZ UND GEMEINGUT
WOLFGANG GOETHE. By Georg Brandes. Translated
from the Danish by Allen W. Porterfield. Two vol-
umes. 12mo. 991 pages. Nicholas L. Brown. $10.
D R BRANDES has in this biography remembered what Goethe
U counsels the biographer not to forget—that succeeding gen-
erations have a flimsy idea of preceding periods; that nothing is
to be assumed, everything is to be related. We should, however,
welcome a consideration of Dichtung und Wahrheit, fuller than
the slender chapter which Dr Brandes vouchsafes us, and are de-
frauded in the absence of any but cursory allusions to Goethe's
letters, essays, and reviews. Furthermore, one feels Dr Brandes
to be a more “trusting student" of Goethe than one is oneself
when he says that “by the mere touch of his spiritual personality,
Goethe had initiated Carlyle into life and literature”; that in
"publishing under his own name, the most beautiful poems Mari-
anne von Willemer ever produced,” he “conferred honor when he
took.” Dr Brandes gift of epithet is manifest in his alluding to
Bettina's “burrlike hanging on" and "youthful boldness,” to Schil-
ler's "noble and striving nature,” in his characterizing of Frau von
Klettenberg as “a Protestant nun,” and Goethe as “a fortress, not
an open town”; his military preempting of judgement, however,
would scarcely convert one to his admiration for Goethe if one
did not already share it. A certain infelicity of speech is height-
ened, one suspects, by the translation in which, nothwithstanding
the translator's confessed loyalty to the text, his idea of idiom
seems a false one, resulting as it does in such phrases as "quite a
few," "quite a while," "measured up," "forever and a day," "apt
to be full of," and "time out of mind.”
That of which one is above all, and always delightfully con-
scious, throughout this truly fervent work, is Goethe's lyric power.
One especially values what is said of his "musical skill" and "tonal
depth”—of his “magnificent technique" as a result of which, greater
effects have "never been produced by fewer words and simpler
means." Although certain poems quoted by Dr Brandes do not


MARIANNE MOORE
509
seem to us “immortal masterpieces,” we feel "the fire," "the
manly seriousness," "the tenderness,” “the real humor," "the great
glamor,” the "inner richness of Goethe's being which makes it
impossible for even a short stanza to be empty.”
We are especially indebted to Dr Brandes for his paragraphs
upon Goethe as counsel for the defence in certain legal cases and
for his comment upon Goethe's discoveries in anatomy, geology,
and botany, for which he says “we feel a respect nearly deeper
than that evoked by his purely poetic creations."
"Casting off works in the process of self creation," describing
his life as “the incessant turning and lifting of a stone that had
to be turned and lifted once more," Goethe is himself, as Dr
Brandes implies, his greatest work of art. This man who "never
rode on a railway train, never sailed on a steamship, who read
by a tallow lamp and wrote with a goosequill,” who “never saw
Paris, never saw London, never saw St. Petersburg, never saw
Vienna, and caught but a fleeting glimpse of Berlin," "was within
himself, a whole and complete civilization." "He was among
minds," as Dr Brandes says, “what the Pacific Ocean is among
the waters of the earth. In reality only a small part of it is
pacific.” We see an evolving enthusiasm such that the preference
for Gothic is "wheeled about” to a preference for the art of ancient
Greece, "somewhat as one would turn a fiery charger.” Aloof from
politics, yet as a passionate economist, he appears in the person
of the singular Uncle in Wilhelm Meister's Wanderjahre whose
watchword, Besitz und Gemeingut, was inscribed round about on
his various buildings somewhat as the Oriental peoples adorn the
walls of their houses with excerpts from the Koran.” We see his
spiritual independence, his love of liberty as "the opposite of
coercion, but not the opposite of a voluntary subjection to such
coercion as that of moral discipline, or that of metrics, or social
forms, or reasonable law”-a concept embodied in his saying,
“Und das Gesetz nur kann uns Freiheit geben.” We recall with
Croce, his "opposing that in French literature which was intellec-
tualistic and ironical, aged and correct like an old lady" as against
his reviling “those Germans who were wont to justify every un-
seemliness they wrote by saying that they had 'lived it.'” We
see his unconquerably social nature as evinced by his many friends;
a distrust of his age, on the other hand, such that "when finally


510
BESITZ UND GEMEINGUT
as a result of extraordinary exertion, he had finished the second
part of Faust, he sealed the manuscript with seven seals, and laid
it aside for posterity, convinced that his contemporaries would
simply misunderstand it.” By this “development of the soul in
accord with its inborn ability,” we are reminded of “that mani-
foldness in simplicity of mountains," which Goethe himself
admired.
MARIANNE MOORE


TWO VIEWS OF BYRON
BYRON: THE LAST JOURNEY. By Harold Nicolson,
12mo. 288 pages. Houghton Mifflin Company. $4.
THE POLITICAL CAREER OF LORD BYRON. By Dora
Neill Raymond. 12m0. 363 pages. Henry Holt
and Company.
M ISS RAYMOND has written an interesting book on Byron's
political career from the conventional point of view of the
admiring biographer. For her, all of Byron's parliamentary
speeches, political lampoons, and revolutionary activities in Italy
and Greece were the result of wise and well considered opinions.
For her, his motives are invariably generous, disinterested, and
honest. The question of his unsteady and complex character does
not arise for her at all. To take a single example, in discussing
Byron's hatred of the radicals, she describes the squib he wrote
upon his friend Hobhouse's relations with them as "a rollicking
and somewhat sarcastic ballad”—whereas it is perhaps more likely
to seem to a reader of the ballad in question and of Byron's letters
dealing with this period that he had merely given vent to his own
irritation at the aimlessness of his life in Italy and his envy at his
friend's achievements in England by an outburst less rollicking
and sarcastic than jeering and ill-natured. Furthermore, it seems
clear that Byron's hatred of oppression and ready sympathy with
the unfortunate was somehow bound up with what would be called
nowadays a sort of “inferiority complex”; but Miss Raymond
takes his exalted position and virtue on trust and fails to under-
stand his real social and personal situation.
Mr Harold Nicolson, on the other hand, understands these mat-
ters only too well. Mr Nicolson is a pupil of the school of
Strachey and has learned the whole technique of hounding down
the idiosyncrasies and personal imperfections which fix the shape of
spectacular public careers. This enables him, if not to reproduce
the successes of the Master, at least to write such a passage as the
following, which comes nearer to arriving at the truth about Byron
than a biography in Miss Raymond's vein can do:
no


512
TWO VIEWS OF BYRON
"It must be realized that the life of Byron is not, as has often
been imagined, a series of wasted opportunities; rather is it a cata-
logue of false positions. His brain was male, his character was
feminine. He had genius, but it was misunderstood and mis-
directed; he had beauty, but it was branded by deformity; he had
rank, but no position; fortune, but it came too late; fame, but it
blazed for him too early. From his childhood the foreground of
his life had been out of focus with the background; throughout his
career this error of focus marred the sincerity, the completeness,
and even the meaning of the whole.”
Yet the Strachey formula has come to have its penalties as well
as its rewards: one of these is the use or the excessive use of irony
where it is not really appropriate. There is a point in Strachey's
own irony: as Mr Clive Bell has pointed out, Strachey's ironic
treatment of the Victorian age implies a comparative study of the
whole history of society. He does not write about Madame du
Deffand or Racine in the same vein as Florence Nightingale or
Dr Arnold. Even in Eminent Victorians, where he is most cruel
and perhaps most unfair, his efforts are directed toward compelling
us to accept a certain definite point of view. Now the chief danger
of his disciples has been in adopting his tone without understanding
his point of view: Mr Philip Guedalla has become perhaps the
worst offender in this regard. Mr Guedalla is full of ironic inflec-
tions and invidious details which, upon being closely examined,
turn out to have no significance. And Mr Nicolson, in writing
of Byron, is not entirely free from the same vice. “ 'Our visit was
a long one,' records Lady Blessington. It was. They sat in the
large, cool room, et cetera.” Now what is there ridiculous about
the fact that Lady Blessington's visit to Byron should have been
long? Why does Mr Nicolson write “It was” in such a sly knowing
fashion? For no other reason on earth than that he has caught
the tone from Mr Strachey. There is some room for irony, to be
sure, in any biography of a hero whose reputation has been
swollen by so much romantic nonsense as Byron's has; yet I am
inclined to believe that, except in his preface, Mr Nicolson has
bent a little too far over backwards in his endeavour to avoid the
legend. For after all, the legend was a reality as much as Byron's
effeminate voice, which Mr Nicolson is so unwilling to have us
forget.


EDMUND WILSON
513
“That in this sudden ferment of unexpected adulation Byron
should have been manoeuvred into adopting the postures which
were expected of him was perhaps inevitable.... [The pro-
voking spectre of Childe Harold] thrust upon him the exacting
function of being a very dangerous and enterprising man. His
slightest civility was interpreted as a seduction; his chance en-
counters became assignations. They persisted, all of them, in
taking him at his word. For a man who, although kindly and
sentimental, was only adequately sexed, all this became extremely
exhausting."
Yet Byron himself had created Childe Harold and his postures
and more than half believed in them: he believed in them and
made others believe in them and they thus became actual values,
which Mr Nicolson should have brought on the stage. “Kindly
and sentimental” is a quite inadequate description of Byron in his
relations with women: on the contrary, he seems always to have
been ready to fare, if only momentarily, into a romantic devotion,
and to have been able to inject into even the most unpromising of
his love affairs a mood or two of passionate conviction. Even from
his half-humorous daily bulletins to Lady Melbourne, it is plain
that he pursued his mistresses with an anxiety and an energy con-
siderably more than “kindly and sentimental” and one can scarcely
doubt that he availed himself of the grand manner for even those
who pursued him. Mr Nicolson, in writing about Byron with
Childe Harold left out, has illustrated the un-humanistic point of
view to which Stracheyism is likely to lead. If a critic be too wary
of taking the figures of history and the heroes of literature at their
own valuation and that of their contemporaries, he is likely to miss
the point altogether. Every age has its complacent failures of
intelligence and we have learned to laugh at the “reasonable"
point of view of the eighteenth century and the moral one of the
nineteenth, but it looks as if this new sort of ironic belittlement
were likely to become characteristic of our own. What should be
most interesting at any time is to find out to what reality of human
history Childe Harold corresponded.
For the rest, Miss Raymond's book is an agreeable and useful
one and Mr Nicolson's an extremely vivid and amusing one, which
has far more of his own in it than his preceding biography of Ten-
nyson, in which, as if for a literary exercise, he paraphrased the


514
TWO VIEWS OF BYRON
whole last page of Queen Victoria. Confining itself, as it does, to
the last year of Byron's life, it necessarily falls short of being
satisfactory as a full-length portrait of Byron and indeed simply
presupposes on the part of the reader a knowledge of most of what
has gone before; but of that last year he makes an excellent nar-
rative, especially satisfactory for its use of unpublished documents
and for its first-hand knowledge of Greece. Both books are of
a sort particularly valuable in connexion with Byron. For Byron
presents a peculiar case in literature: he was not a great literary
artist and we can appreciate his real merits and understand why
it was possible for Arnold to speak in one breath of "Goethe's sage
mind and Byron's force” only when we have familiarized ourselves
with both his works and his life. What we realize then and what
both Miss Raymond's and Mr Nicolson's book help us to realize is
the knowledge of Europe and of the world, the consciousness of
the stage upon which he was playing, that make him remarkable
among modern Englishmen; the generous impulses and ideas which
compensated his errors and his shortcomings; and the indefatigable
capacity for experience so satisfactory in contrast to the race of
literary men who have succeeded him and who have diverted the
security and regularity of their existences by turning out so many
novels and poems.
EDMUND Wilson
MUND
LSON


AN INTERPRETER OF AMERICAN LIFE
ARROWSmith. By Sinclair Lewis. 12m0. 448 pages.
Harcourt, Brace and Company. $2.50.
m
.
M R SINCLAIR LEWIS, like Mr H. L. Mencken, is a paradox
W in the United States of to-day. A leading trait of the
American people is a youthful self-consciousness amounting to an
inferiority complex, which makes us impatient of all criticism.
Everything which we have done is right because we did it. All
our wars were just; all our statesmen are pure; all our business is
honest. Ours is the land of liberty, of tolerance, of opportunity,
of righteousness. Our favourite prophets are the sayers of smooth
things in Zion, those who speak comfortably to Jerusalem of her
ideals and performances—Wilson, Harding, Coolidge. And yet by
some sort of saving grace, in the midst of this complacency appear
Mr Lewis and Mr Mencken, to tear the hoods and sheets off our
moral and civic Ku Klux Klan, to show the cringing forms and
the false, cowardly, cruel faces beneath the mask—and Mr
Mencken and Mr Lewis as critic and novelist are, in this day and
generation, the most read and considered interpreters of American
life. They are constantly telling truths about their country for
which less fortunate devils are being hounded out of pulpits and
college chairs, losing business and social standing, and occasionally
suffering physical punishment at the hands of court or clan, and
yet they flourish like two green bay trees.
One explanation of this phenomenon is to be found in the fact
that both Mr Mencken and Mr Lewis write the American language.
It is a natural impulse when one hears one's own tongue in the
midst of foreign speech-and most of his literature is foreign to
the ordinary sensual American-to turn and listen, even if the
meaning is unpleasant. And a second explanation lies in the fact
that both Mr Mencken and Mr Lewis are good-natured and
affable. They find the spectacle one tending to amusement rather
than indignation. Humour is the form in which the American takes
his cathartic—the Biglow Papers, Josh Billings, Artemus Ward,
and Mark Twain, for examples. Even so there is still an unex-


516 AN INTERPRETER OF AMERICAN LIFE
plainable residuum, especially in the case of Mr Lewis who is
undoubtedly long and, in the opinion of many readers whose devo-
tion is the more remarkable, dull. If Mr Lewis attracts his great
audience by the sense of reality which his pages convey, and the
careless humour of his approach, he holds it by a sense of the
importance of what he has to say.
In Main Street Mr Lewis employed the inclusive formula of
the naturalists, setting down as much of the visual and audible
stuff of life in Gopher Prairie as his vehicle could carry, the motive
power being furnished by the ambitions of Carol Kennicott, wife
of the local physician. In Babbitt he adopted a much more rapid
and impressionistic method. The life of Zenith is merely the back-
ground for the hero, who in his egregious vulgarity and pitiful
self-conceit, is accepted everywhere along with General Dawes as
the typical American business man, booster, and patrioteer. If
Main Street looks back to Zola, Babbitt is in the more humorous,
highly coloured, exaggerated manner of Daudet. George F. Bab-
bitt is an American Tartarin. In Arrowsmith, Mr Lewis returns
to his earlier method. There is much of life as it is lived in a
Mid-Western university town, a Dakota village, an Iowa city,
and finally in New York; but the background is chiefly occupa-
tional as in the classics of the Rougon-Macquart series. Martin
Arrowsmith is a physician and a medical scientist, and the expe-
rience of his disillusionment with that high calling is the core of
the book. We first meet Arrowsmith as a medical student at the
University of Winnemac; he gives up his scientific passion for a
wife and general practice in the village of Wheatsylvania; he is
stirred by the pretentious programme of public health, and becomes
assistant and finally successor to Dr Pickerbaugh, Director of
Public Health of Nautilus, Iowa. Driven forth by a citizenry
justly indignant at his interference with business as usual, he turns
to the McGurk Institute for medical research in New York. After
fighting the bubonic plague in one of the lesser Antilles where his
wife, Leora, dies, he returns to find the disinterested pursuit of
truth as remote to the patrons and directors of McGurk as to the
politicians of Nautilus, and takes refuge in a sort of hermitage of
research among the Vermont hills.
In all this there is something of the conscientious thoroughness
of Zola. Mr Lewis is determined to leave no stone of the medical


ROBERT MORSS LOVETT
517
edifice unturned, and under each he finds human nature in reptilian
form. Indeed, to reach the fraud of the commercial drug firm he
is obliged to cut loose from the hero and follow the story of his
teacher, Professor Gottlieb, on his way from Winnemac to McGurk.
Undoubtedly in this occupational interest we miss something of
the regional unity of Main Street and Babbitt. We do not know
Mohalis, Wheatsylvania, and Nautilus as we do Gopher Prairie
and Zenith. Toward the end of the book the social background
of New York is hardly realized at all, and this is the chief reason
why its entrance into Arrowsmith's life with his second marriage
seems mere fiction. The essential truth of Arrowsmith's experience
as medical student, country doctor, and director of public health,
no physician will question. Even the preposterous Pickerbaugh,
Director of Public Health of Nautilus, Iowa, is plausible enough
to readers in New York and Chicago. Pickerbaugh revives the
exuberant caricature of Babbitt. Besides his titular office he is
“founder of the first Rotary Club in Iowa; superintendent of the
Jonathan Edwards Congregational Sunday School of Nautilus;
president of the Moccasin Ski and Hiking Club, of the West Side
Bowling Club, and the 1912 Bull Moose and Roosevelt Club;
organizer and cheer-leader of a Joint Picnic of the Woodmen,
Moose, Elks, Masons, Oddfellows, Turnverein, Knights of Colum-
bus, B'nai B'rith, and the Y. M. C. A.; and winner of the prizes
both for reciting the largest number of biblical texts and for
dancing the best Irish jig at the Harvest Moon Soirée of the
Jonathan Edwards Bible Class for the Grown-ups," and author of
such rhyming roads to health as
"Boil the milk bottles, or by gum
You better buy your ticket to Kingdom Come.”
All this is in Mr Lewis's best vein. When he conducts Arrow-
smith to the McGurk laboratory we feel that he is on less firm
ground. Here he is indebted to Dr Paul H. DeKruif for the
inside stuff. The bacteriological detail is, of course, sound. Never
before in fiction has the psychology of the scientist, the passion for
research, been rendered with such penetration and justice. When,
however, Arrowsmith in fighting the plague in St Hubert is bidden
by his scientific conscience to divide the population into two parts,


518
AN INTERPRETER OF AMERICAN LIFE
one half to be inoculated with his phage, the other half to be re-
fused in order absolutely to control the results of the experiment,
we have either an example of scientific fanaticism or a piece of
pure fiction. The phenomena of the plague have been sufficiently
observed to make it practically certain that, if all who were in-
oculated under favourable circumstances survived, the remedy had
been found—and probably half the population would have re-
sisted inoculation anyway. This air of unreality hangs over the
latter part of the book as Mr Lewis becomes more absorbed in his
purpose. Leora's death, from smoking in the laboratory a half
finished cigarette on which a maid had spilt a test-tube of germs,
at the time when Martin is caressing another woman, is necessary
to Mr Lewis's programme. This other woman, Joyce Lanyon, the
symbol of the intrusion of the social world into the privacies of
science, would be obnoxious were she not quite inconceivable. We
suspect her, along with Capitola McGurk, Rippleton Holabird, and
other inmates of the McGurk Institute, of being aimed at the
people who have been annoying Dr DeKruif. As such they do not
reach their mark.
Arrowsmith is an important step in the campaign to de-bamboozle
the American public and relieve its institutions of bunk. Mr Lewis
has attacked this old enemy in one of its highest places. In all
phases of medicine-education, private and public practice, and
finally research—he has revealed its pretensions and exposed its
perpetrators. If he has sacrificed the reality of fiction, it is in the
interest of the reality of a public cause which gives largeness of
view and significance to Arrowsmith.
ROBERT Morss LOVETT


BRIEFER MENTION
BLACK LAUGHTER, by Llewelyn Powys (12mo, 216 pages, Harcourt, Brace:
$2.50). Among myriads of recently published books here is one that
bears the authentic stamp of experience, a book that will live. Africa
emerges vividly from it, with all its horrors, splendours, and smells. For
the first time that land has been seen by an artist, and the amazing
growths, both animal and vegetable, take terrifying proportions for which
the previous reports of valorous explorers had not in the least prepared
us. Mr Powys himself makes no pretence to valour. On the contrary,
he sounds the note of fear on the very first page and repeats it incessantly,
like the war-gong in Emperor Jones, and with due hypnotism upon the
reader. An wholly extraordinary effect is produced by the juxtaposition of
a civilized, sensitive modern with the barbarities of the ferocious tropics;
and the style of the writing nobly matches the author's profoundly dis-
turbing enquiries into the mysteries of life. It is in the best English
tradition.
The Quaint COMPANIONS, by Leonard Merrick (12mo, 299 pages; Dutton:
$1.90) approaches the tragedy of racial miscegenation on the velvet
paws of the story-teller; it has neither the artistic detachment of God's
Stepchildren nor the intensity of O'Neill. The antagonism which arises
from his study of a mixed marriage is so largely one of temperament
that the fact of a clash in colour is crowded into the background, and
Mr Merrick is once again immersed in the problem of the sensitive soul
denied its free expression. This is a theme which the author never tires
of, and the race complication becomes merely an accessory before the fact.
ARNOLD WATERLOO, by May Sinclair (12mo, 446 pages; Macmillan: $2.50)
is sound psychology, as is usual in May Sinclair's novels, but though
her characters are living men and women they move in a world and a
society singularly free from the mores that confine and mould most
human conduct. It is a little beneath the art and intelligence of so gifted
an author, to untangle a triangle by killing her heroine with a convenient
attack of pneumonia. Having brought her hero to an impasse it is unfair
to help him out; he was man enough to do it without Divine or Editorial
assistance.
THE BOY IN THE Bush, by D. H. Lawrence and M. L. Skinner (12mo, 388
pages, Thomas Seltzer: $2.50). Raw material roughly handled. Life
on the west coast of Australia forty years ago was doubtless crude enough,
but it acquires no polish from the Lawrence touch. Numbers of the
author's fideles dropped away from him with Kangaroo and the new book,
though better, is not enough to win them back. There are flashes, perhaps
one Aash in each chapter, but occasional lucky phrases do not offset the
vast reaches of careless writing.


520
BRIEFER MENTION
The Best SHORT STORIES OF 1924, edited by Edward J. O'Brien (12mo,
367 pages; Small, Maynard : $2.50) rounds out a decade of these valuable
yearbooks, and leaves their editor with a sense of their predominant sad-
ness—the fruit of the American fear of nonconformity. "Stop humiliating
the immigrant and the artist,” he says, “and with their aid we may begin
to discover America.” In the meantime, he garners the best of what
there is—from youths like Roger Sergel and Glenway Wescott, from the
middle ranks of Zona Gale and Floyd Dell, and from such veterans as
Rupert Hughes and Gouverneur Morris. Most of them have substance,
and a very few—among them notably Mr Wescott's In a Thicket which
appeared in The DIAL—have style. Perhaps the sadness which Mr
O'Brien discerns is not so much due to the presence of fear as to the
absence of joy.
Hughes and Gou them notably Mr. Wess the sadness wh
it is chief interes lies in its collaborat
The Nature OF A Crime, by Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford (12mo,
108 pages; Doubleday, Page: $2.50). The chief interest of this little
volume is not the story. The story cannot be said to add much to the
reputation of Mr Madox Ford and if it does not detract from the repu.
tation of Conrad it is only because of the equivocal frankness in the
Conrad preface. The chief interest of the book, putting aside the sar.
donic malice of the fourth chapter, lies in its value as a literary document
throwing light upon the whole problem of collaboration in fiction. For
those among us who still retain a tender if rather naïve penchant for the
story named Romance it is suggestive to learn from this volume that
Conrad “eliminated almost every word of action and eighty per cent of the
conversations” by his collaborator.
Three Flights Up, by Sidney Howard (12mo, 286 pages; Scribner : $2)
clicks into place as the better sort of fiction of the better sort of magazine
-short stories of more than average competence and discernment. A
Likeness of Elizabeth takes a fresh swing at the art-versus-dollars antago-
nism of New York life; genius confronted with the claims of affection
and domestic adjustment makes its compromise. Transatlantic, which is
an attempt to catch the rhythm of ocean life with its threads of super-
ficial drama crossed in six-day intimacy, lacks a central point of interest
and its effect is desultory. In Mrs Vietch: A Segment of Biography, the
touch is sure; here is Mr Howard's narrative skill at its best. The God
They Left Behind Them has elements of the sinister and the spectacular;
the rest is machinery.
This MAD IDEAL, by Floyd Dell (12mo, 246 pages; Knopf: $2) reveals
the young generation shadow-boxing with the old. The older generation
isn't even in the ring, but Mr Dell—who referees the match—counts it
out just the same. Judith Valentine is one of those straight-limbed
young idealists going about with a chip of freedom on her shoulder,
daring the conventions to knock it off. She sees an enemy in every house-
broken gesture; the mere mention of marriage causes her to lift her head
like a startled deer. The author is lost in admiration of her, but in the
end, the reader still has his compass. Judith emerges untamed, but-
untested.


BRIEFER MENTION
521
PROFILES From Home, by Eunice Tietjens (12mo, 110 pages; Knopf:
$1.50). Turning over the casual word-vignettes of this small volume,
cameo-pictures traced in no very polished clay, one cannot but feel that,
given more time and more dramatic concentration, there is good sound
grist for a bold unscrupulous poetic mill in the kindly and caustic sensi-
bility that underlies these prose-poems. They make no arresting dint
upon the reader's mind; but they take their place in the great uneven
discordant chorus of voices such as are at least doing something to give
an intelligible significance to the titanic litter and debris of the American
scene.
VICTORIAN POETRY, by John Drinkwater (12mo, 236 pages; Doran : $1.25).
"There is now no new verse form to be discovered in English poetry.
Vers libre, polyphonic prose and what not lack that charm which is
peculiar to the infinity of recognized forms. No considerable poet ever
found it irksome to work within these limitations, and nowadays only
one who limits himself to inventing attractive little devices in the smaller
things of technique, shall rank as a considerable poet. Whitman must be
ignored. Though his poetry is new, it is not so good as it would be were
it less new. He is not English, but American.” Such is Mr Drinkwater's
critical foundation; a false foundation. His discussion stands without it.
It is not a complete discussion, for it neglects the nonsense verse of the
period. But nothing could represent more completely all that James
Harvey Robinson calls "open minded,” and all that the editors of the
series call "fresh appraisal.”
LIFE AND Art, by Thomas Hardy (8vo, 140 pages ; Greenberg: $3.50).
The scattered essays and fragments from Thomas Hardy's pen, collected
and edited by Ernest Brennecke, Jr., are of a kind unexpectedly interest-
ing. The article entitled The Dorsetshire Labourer, especially that por.
tion of it describing the Candlemas hiring-season, when the carters and
shepherds change their masters, has that tough, sly, weather-wise, prac-
tical astuteness, which in the great man's later and more metaphysical work
has been often over-laid. The same cautious and tenacious life-craft can
be enjoyed in the essay entitled The Profitable Reading of Fiction, a piece
of sound, racy, unadorned common-sense, more germane to the heart
of this great matter than many much more pretentious disquisitions. It
is in the patient, laconic wisdom of these less dramatic lucubrations rather
than in the "digs” at Maeterlinck and Nietzsche that this collection
pleases us.
THE POETRY OF ARCHITECTURE, by Frank Rutter (12mo, 236 pages;
Doran: $1.25). St Mark's, Mr Rutter says, “is not strictly speaking a
great work of art for it does not enshrine one generous, unselfish feeling
or attain unity in the expression of a single noble idea." His book is an
amusing illustration of the Anglo-Saxon mania for judging works of art
by the criteria of ethics. Frequently, as in his search for the "secret
origin” of the obelisk—which he finally interprets as “an expression of
the yearning to attain height”-he is impeded by ignorance or prudery.
He has made a Sunday school lesson of the history of an art.


522
BRIEFER MENTION
MY DEAR CORNELIA, by Stuart P. Sherman (12mo, 281 pages; Atlantic
Monthly Press: $2.50). The only portion of this tedious and insipid
book which could possibly arrest the attention of the most moderate intelli-
gence is the portion entitled The Idea of Chastity; and that is only arrest-
ing as an example of how not to attack one's literary enemies and how not
to betray the limitations of one's mind under the urge of the longing to
be jocosely spiteful. "In reading," says Stuart P. Sherman, “the novels
of Ben Hecht, Maxwell Bodenheim, Sherwood Anderson, Evelyn Scott,
Waldo Frank and James Joyce," the italics are ours as we ponder upon
this method of grouping names, “one's first impression is frequently of
wonder as to what motive can prompt an author to perpetuate a record of
experience so humiliatingly painful and a vision of souls so atrociously
ugly.” It must be at any rate a pleasant revenge for the writers thus
indiscriminately lumped together to feel how completely clear that "motive”
would be to Dante or to Swift; and how it will be destined to remain
for ever obscure to Stuart P. Sherman.
Red, by Carl Van Vechten (12mo, 205 pages; Knopf: $2.50) is made up of
three parts of the ruddier juices of previous volumes and one part fresh
wine squeezed from the musical grapes; it celebrates Mr Van Vechten's
retirement from the vineyard. It deals with musical sound and critical
fury—signifying modernity; Strawinsky should write music for the
movies; Ornstein should play with his piano perched on a pushcart on
Manhattan Bridge; Brahms should be listened to in a beer garden, and
a song recitalist not at all. Jazz is, at present, the "only hope” of
American music, but the author does not indicate whether it is a white
hope—or a red.
-$5) is the biographe abiding passion.cory, and Mr Seit
Joseph Pulitzer, by Don C. Seitz (illus., 8vo, 478 pages; Simon &
Schuster : $5) is the biography of a great journalist for whom "not
property but politics” was the abiding passion. The success and the
stunts of the New York World make a good story, and Mr Seitz has
told it in an agreeable way; he does better with the better story of Pulitzer
himself and his blindman's vigil over the paper and the principles he
loved. Those who are interested in Americana of the past fifty years
will find additional fascinations in the picture of old Saint Louis and
recent New York.
THE RHYMING DICTIONARY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE, by John Walker,
revised and enlarged, with preface and introduction to index of allowable
rhymes, by Lawrence H. Dawson (12mo, 549 pages; Dutton: $3.50).
With Mr Dawson's expository preface, an appended index to rhymes
introduced by sagely careful comment, with cautionary asterisks, cross
references, and Table of Divisions, The Critical Pronouncing Dictionary
published by John Walker in 1775, comes to us enlarged and rewritten
throughout. For these 54,000 words grouped as originally, in accordance
with the reversed spelling of the word, not only “songsters," Sunday paper
acrostic enthusiasts, and "schoolmasters" in search of derivatives, but
fanatics of cadence, may well accord with Lord Byron and The New
York Public Library, in offering the authors fervent thanks.


BRIEFER MENTION
523
MASTERS OF MODERN Art: CÉZANNE, by Tristan L. Klingsor; Renoir, by
François Fosca ; Monet, by Camille Mauclair; GAUGUIN, by Robert Rey
(12mo, Dodd, Mead: $1.75 each volume). To the layman befuddled by
the intricacies of modernist painting, this new series of monographs should
bring intelligent guidance and encouragement. The texts are descriptive
rather than aesthetic, but each of the four critics has written an enter-
taining and authoritative biography, and has incorporated into the life of
his hero a simple exposition of technical methods, and a good deal of
appreciation that is unassailable as far as it goes. The translators have
done their work faithfully, and the collotype reproductions are of unusual
beauty.
A HISTORY OF FRENCH ETCHING, by F. L. Leipnik (4to, 214 pages; 106
plates; Dodd, Mead: $12.50). An Englishman of infinite leisure and
great love for "the artists' art" has investigated the lives and processes
of every French etcher from Callot to Marie Laurencin, and has assembled
his detailed results in a book that is more distinguished physically than
critically. A survey of the reproductions discloses that France has not
been particularly rich in etchers, that most of the plates are symptomatic
of good taste rather than originality, and that Charles Meryon is the out-
standing genius in this finical medium.
ES
EUROPEAN LITERATURE IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY, by Benedetto Croce,
translated by Douglas Ainslie (8vo, 373 pages; Knopf: $6). While this
work, the digest of an enormous amount of reading, might serve very
well as a manual of reference on the twenty-five writers it discusses (indi-
cating as it does the salient quality of each author dealt with) it is
much more important by reason of the unprejudiced curiosity which
Signor Croce brings to his subject. Here we are spared the minor
flatteries of either iconoclasm or traditionalism, and given instead the
more stable enjoyment of an independent generalizing mind corrected by
much native taste.
Ethics, ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT, by Prince Kropotkin, translated by
Louis S. Friedland and Joseph R. Piroshnikoff (8vo, 349 pages; Lincoln
MacVeagh, Dial Press: $4). A survey of ethical systems in the light
of the author's own contribution to the subject. His basic contention is
that man has a social instinct which is even more pronounced than his
egotistic one, and that this leads to a sense of justice, which in turn
becomes a positive moral drive. This amounts practically to the assump-
tion of a moral sense (a concept common to present-day anthropology,
and reached inductively) over against the deductive philosophic proce-
dure (eudemonism) of seeing morality as an outgrowth of enlightened
egotism. Yet Kropotkin himself admits that such a moral sense, when
gratified, gives pleasure to the individual, so that his theories might be
considered as another angle of approach to the inevitable eudemonism.
Kropotkin was prevented by death from writing the dialectic aspects of
his theories, but this preparatory volume states his issues adequately,
while the vivid recapitulation of previous moral teachings gives the work
a high documentary value.


THE THEATRE
T is seldom that events move so swiftly to justify a critic as
I they did immediately after my cold-blooded plea for a jazz
ballet (instead of a jazz symphony as in PROCESSIONAL or a jazz
opera as in the newspapers). SOONER AND LATER, produced at
The Neighborhood Playhouse, is so close to my specifications, and
so successful artistically, that I feel a warm glow of personal
pride in it.
It is a "dance satire” on a scenario by Irene Lewisohn, with
music by Emerson Whithorne, directed by the writer of the scenario
and with settings and costumes by Donald Mitchell Oenslager.
Of the three acts I found the tribal scene "with its vital rhythms
and elemental human emotion” so close to the Sacre in choreog-
raphy that I began snooping about for Strawinsky in the score and
of course found him, although I would not now swear that he is
there, nor would I say it is important either way. For in the second
act the whole event moved forward with a tremendous stride and
Mr Whithorne moved to the top of the class among those who
are writing American music. The setting of this was fantastic, a
traffic tower leaning dizzily backward, a platform which was a
subway train, a news-stand with its magazine covers illuminated so
erratically that the rhythm of the flashes was jazz. American
workmen did American jobs, nervously. Then they went to an
elaborate burlesque of American entertainment, with Mr Ziegfeld's
cold ladies and Mr Anderson's Spanish dancers, and a lot of jazz
babies. Some of this burlesque was a little long, but all of it was
pointed, and all the more pointed by the contrast, in music and
choreography, with the earlier part of the scene. The third act
was in the future, crystalline and geometric, with a glance from
the future back to our present in a trivial melodrama without
actors. It was all strange and interesting and intelligent. The
middle act, and especially the first half of it, was the real thing
in jazz ballet; not the only thing, but one form of the genuine.
It proved a handful of theses, not the least of which is that in
jazz America can find an artistic expression of a little of itself.
I am not sure that this was intended to be, even in part, a jazz
ballet; to make the name clear let me say that it could not have


GILBERT SELDES
525
been constructed if America were other than it is, and that the
music could not have been written by one who had not listened,
intelligently, to the American music of the past fifteen years.
The opening of the new Guild Theatre was, naturally, much
more of an event than the Theatre Guild's production of CAESAR
AND CLEOPATRA. The performance I saw was a dress rehearsal,
and one of the few of that name which, under the aegis of the
Guild, needed the apology. I cannot, therefore, criticize it entire;
but from the reports of later performances I gather that some things
persisted, among them the choked utterance of Lionel Atwill, Helen
Hayes's occasional indulgence in the wrong kind of coyness, and
Helen Westley's sinister Ftatateeta, well played in general, but
unfortunately looking too much like Fannie Brice with the Chief
after her. CAESAR AND CLEOPATRA is one of Shaw's noble plays;
you cannot in reading it miss the intellectual exaltation and the
poetic feeling any more than you can miss the satire and rapid
mental play. It seems to call for the swiftest action, the merest
suggestion of the sumptuous, and to allow, in such conditions, for
changes of pace into the languor of Egypt, the rush of violence,
and a few flights of “the slow arrow of beauty.” Mr Moeller's
ideas were different and might have been proved right if he had
overcome the physical obstacles, if his players and his scene-
shifters had both been able to work more promptly. He had,
after all, a new prologue (which I disliked because it was super-
fluous) to give him the keynote; the prologue had a false front of
nobility and a clever wit, and proves, as the St Joan epilogue
proved, that Shaw is a great dramatist, but an indifferent preacher.
The prologue diminished nobility, in the approved Shavian man-
ner; but one mustn't take a playwright's analyses of his own
characters too seriously. Shaw's Caesar is a greater human being
than Shakespeare's; it's no use pretending he isn't great because he
has a bald head.
The theatre itself is the Guild's outward symbol of achievement,
and it is superb. It is a beautiful, and not arty, place of entertain-
ment; it is not a temple of the drama, it is a theatre. And as it
arises after some seven years, it naturally calls for a summary
of the Guild's work in that time. I have myself accused the Guild
of various things, but its sentimentality about the theatre, which
annoyed me, has not been in evidence for the past two years, and


526
THE THEATRE
if the directors of the Guild want to grow sentimental about their
new building, I will not blame them. The glory of the new house in
an odd way makes clearer the Guild's intentions. It was never,
except for a few private performances, an experimental theatre;
it held all along that a play should be produced for a comparatively
large number of playgoers; it required of itself to be self-support-
ing. Those who wished the Guild to be the Provincetown Players
(of yesterday or to-day) were simply confusing their own desires
with the Guild's manifest destiny which was to produce intelligent
plays in an intelligent manner.
The half dozen theatrical managers in New York who now
live on the audiences which the Guild created are the best testi-
mony of the Guild's success, better proof even than the Guild's
ability to keep PROCESSIONAL alive for weeks beyond its assumed
power of resistance. Nearly everything possible in the commercial
theatre this year and impossible a decade ago, is due to the Guild.
And because of that service the Guild is the one producer which
should be held unsparingly to account for every deviation from
its own artistic integrity. It not only can bear the harshest criti-
cism; it is entitled to it.
An exquisite production of Congreve's LOVE FOR LOVE has been
turned into a box-office success, I am told, by the ravings of one
or two critics concerning its obscenity. (I do not allude to Mr
Broun who knows that the play is bawdy and likes it.) Mr
Belasco, with his fine taste in titles will no doubt soon present
'Tis a Pity She's a WHORE; but I shall persist in believing that
Robert Edmond Jones cared for the play and for the wit of
the play and had a profound feeling for its style, and so
produced the work. It is a gratification to listen to English as
Congreve wrote it, to hear the delicate grating of sword on sword
in each riposte of the conversation. As you read Congreve (with-
out any technique of the stage to guide you) the characters seem
often "in the air,” even as in reading the Elizabethans whole sub-
plots seem disengaged from the matter of the play. It was the
director's work to enmesh the conversation delicately into the
drama, chiefly by pointing the relations between the characters.
Mr Jones has succeeded superbly. Everything shone in a bright
artificial light and everything threw off a shimmer.
GILBERT Seldes
em


MODERN ART
ems
THERE has been very little comment in The Dial upon the
I activities of the National Academy of Design and no evidence
upon the part of the readers of The Dial that this sin of omission
has been greatly deplored. In fact the interest in the Academy is
not intense. There has been a tendency to regard the aged officers
of the aged institution as harmless, and they have been permitted
to amuse themselves after their fashion without interference. One
of their latest moves, however, does constitute a danger to society
at large, and Mr Forbes Watson of The Arts is to be congratulated
upon the force and courage with which he combats it. It seems
that in honour of its one hundredth birthday the Academy has
decided upon a "drive” for $6,000,000, with which to make itself
more important than it has hitherto been. Since the war, and
because of the war tradition, all "drives" have been immune from
criticism, and however unsympathetic our citizens may be to the
particular cause that is being pushed, they all prepare, each time,
to contribute "until it hurts.” In view of this Mr Watson deserves
all the more credit for nailing this new assault upon the public
innocence. The principal points Mr Watson makes, and it seems
to me they cannot be too widely published and considered, are
these:
“For a long time the National Academy has been losing ground.
Its position in the art world is the position of an institution
which wishes to censor the art of a free people, that, let us hope,
does not want to have its art censored. Of course, the avowed
purpose of the censorship which the Academy exercised as long
as it could, is educational, but the real purpose, if we penetrate
below all the high-sounding words about educational expansion, is
to increase the market for Academic work, to control, as far as
possible, the education of art students in order to bring them up in
the Academic way, to control as far as possible the exhibition
system throughout the country, a system already pretty well con-
trolled by the National Academy, and to attempt, by an appear-
ance of disinterest and a self-righteous statement, to put itself


528
MODERN ART
forward as a national institution with no other object in view than
to encourage American art.
"When the National Academy speaks of its ‘responsibility as
a 'national institution, of course it infers that it is actually a
national institution, that there is something officially national
about it, whereas it is simply a private institution, which works
primarily for the benefit of its members and incidentally to gain
power. When it speaks of the demands made upon it ‘for greater
service to the public' it ignores the fact that the present galleries
in New York where the National Academy holds its semi-annual
exhibitions, are too large. For the Academy no longer attracts
many first-rate works. To fill the galleries it is compelled to accept
a mediocre collection of pictures and sculpture. The censoring
habits of the Academy have long since taught the men of individual
force, except two or three of the older men, not to send their
work to the Academy exhibitions. The best painters in America
to-day, under forty, have no affiliations with the Academy, and
do not exhibit in the Academy exhibitions."
When one thinks for a minute of the immense impetus that
could be given American life by merely spending the income of
$6,000,000 in the purchase of contemporary American art, the
absurdity becomes apparent of handing such a sum of money over
to a set of fossils who cannot recognize art when they see it; and
who would probably blow most of it in on needless buildings and
paraphernalia.
The Elie Nadelman sculptures in the Scott and Fowles Galleries
might have aroused more excitement in another age than this.
They seemed to point two ways at once, backward and forward,
and when opposing points of view are endorsed with equal enthu-
siasm by a clever artist the public is apt to rebel at the enforced
thinking that is necessary in order to come to a choice. There
was no rebellion in this instance. We refused to stir from the
apathy into which we have fallen of late, and did not think at all.
We calmly divided into two ranks, the one half of us liking Mr
Nadelman's return to classicism and the other half preferring the
caricatures in wood of modern society. The two factions ignored
each other quite, and did not come into collision, which was a pity,


HENRY MCBRIDE
529
for a clash of ideas, any ideas, might have wakened us up a bit.
Neither side accused the artist of having off moments, or being
partly woozy. There is, in reality, no ground for supposing Mr
Nadelman to be baiting his public. Both divisions of his art
have been tormenting him for years, and both, apparently, must
have expression. He was recognized from the first as being enor-
mously proficient, and the necessity to carry his workmanship fur-
ther and further has got him at last to the point where the glitter-
ing method absolutely distracts one from any thought of the
theme. Even the marbles are carried beyond the sense of being
marble, and as far as the eye can see, these figures might just as
well be glossy porcelains. That may be the precise reason why
those who loved them did so, for there are many who never relish
porcelains, for instance, until a potter learns how to give them a
semblance of linen; or ironwork unless it resembles silk; but be
that as it may, the moneyed success of the show, I'm told, was with
these shiny statues of far-away Greek goddesses. For my part,
I preferred the caricatures in wood. As far as sheer cleverness
is concerned they topped anything shown this winter. They were
so astonishingly skilful that an up-to-date sceptic who refuses to
believe there is anything super-human save a machine had a mo-
ment's wild suspicion that some new kind of machinery must have
carved out their perfections. But industrious investigation has
not been rewarded as yet with a hint of the process, so at this
writing, we must continue to assume that Mr Nadelman relied
upon knives and sandpaper for his jokes upon New York humanity.
A few hardy collectors bought some of these carvings, which is
greatly to our credit, though it would have been still more credit-
able, had all of them been hastily snatched up. I thought these
effigies of plump hostesses and dancers and pianists—Mr Nadel-
man seems to think us all plump without exception—could be
immensely decorative in the right hands.
HENRY MCBRIDE


MUSICAL CHRONICLE
F course, one knew it bound to happen, that on a day what
came from Europe would not longer reward, and what was
produced by American hands would interest chiefly. But the date
always had mystical futurity. Twenty-five years hence; fifty
years hence. In moments of despond, and placing the term of
one's life at an hundred, it was the hour before Abraham's bosom.
Yet here, during the last few months, has dawned the morning
of Der Tag: Europe pretty well under the eastern horizon, and, all
about, in broadest light, American work. It simply gives nothing,
what they send, or, better, we import. Not because one wills it so.
But go yourself, and hear and see, and say whether you are not
bored. Take Hindemith, Germany's all-Aryan musical wonder,
he of whom Strauss enquired, “But since you have talent, why
do you write atonally?" (One took the blow, and yet, and yet—).
Men saw across 'cello-strings, blow flutes, sound triangles. Forms
come which resemble the parts of the older music. Nonetheless,
say that it is music, if you can, a necessary moving thing! Say
whether it is not poor Max Reger all over again, made and not
begotten! Then, Malipiero: Sette Canzoni. Assuredly, a great
refinement over Maestro Giacomo Puccini dei Riccordi. Venetian
in its sumptuosity. But had you not heard it, would you have been
much the poorer for an experience? And it is not alone their music
that is stale. Their literature too. Here comes Cocteau with his
Secret Professionnel, latest distillation of the elixir of art. Most
of that was said by Picabia at 291 ten years ago: calling not
Bouguereau and Saint-Saëns, but Cézanne, Mallarmé, and Rim-
baud the pompiers of to-day. And then as if Cocteau hadn't his
pompiers à lui: Picasso, Strawinsky, Satie, and others.
In the theatre, the same. Michael Auclair, better called Choco-
late Eclaire, is introduced as a sublimation of French wine, cookery,
and loving, and bless us if it is not our own little Pollyanna!
Then turn to the American experimenters. There you will
find the daring, the sureness of feeling the Europeans en masse no
longer show. No European is using the abstract properties of
paint as absolutely as Arthur Dove. And during years the Euro-
UC On


PAUL ROSENFELD
531
pean pioneersmen were playing with bits of common material,
striving to turn them plastic, and never getting free; then Dove
comes along with a few sticks, dead leaves, shells, and forms
them into an aspiringly lyric thing.
Should you require further assurance of the fact that we have
become intellectually self-sufficient, that we are drawing ahead
on our own road of expression, and that for the present Europe
has nothing more to give us, pray look at the incomprehension
European critics have for us. Only give a British man of letters
A Story-Teller's Story for review: then mark the good fellow's
incapacity to appreciate the story and the manner. That is the
way men have always behaved before experiences beyond them;
and that is the situation of the Europeans before what the Amer-
icans are doing to-day.
Quite comprehensible our old friends should have fallen a
little behind! And no blame to them for recovering no sooner.
But it cannot be avoided that what has happened is this: the
Europeans in their exhaustion have taken to striving to create art.
They have classicism, cubism, unanimism, and other dogmas ever
before them, guiding them by their charming lights. But the
American workers begin with what they know of the truth, and
subordinate all else to that. The American painters, for example,
have no use for the word cubism. For the reason that their
abstractions and their representations are identical. We have in
mind especially Georgia O'Keeffe. Hence the efforts to graft Euro-
pean conceptions onto the American workers-mysticism, intellec-
tualism, aestheticism-and to give the American effort a conscious
tendency, has proven so abortive. Its apparent indirection, experi-
mentalism, Auidity is the strength of the American psyche. Gods,
fifty more years of such wandering! Meanwhile, it is important
that all of us should realize immediately what the situation is,
and misapply no more of our too-slender resources.
PAUL ROSENFELD


ANNOUNCEMENT
WITH this issue for June 1925 we complete the eleventh
volume of the monthly Dial. When at the close of the
year 1919 Dr Watson and I assumed the liabilities and the direc-
tion of what had hitherto been a fortnightly journal, we did so
with the joint intention of establishing in America a monthly
magazine which should be devoted exclusively, and in the most
general sense, to art and letters. Not only did we have in mind
no literary or artistic propaganda, no desire to urge, for example,
the advantages of free verse as opposed to regular (or of regular
as opposed to free), but also we depended upon no aesthetic system
either of our own or of another to guide us in selecting what
should be the contents of The DIAL. We did not, and do not,
deem that it is feasible, in aesthetic matters, to judge by reference
to any detailed theoretic code.
The fact is, in taking over The Dialwe set out together from
the mere recognition, shared by both, of the absence hereabouts of
any regular publication much interested in bringing out the sort
of writing we liked to read and the sort of pictures we liked to see.
I doubt whether it is ever speculatively possible to convince a
temperament radically different from one's own of any real inferi-
ority in the taste of that temperament. On the other hand, it is
easy speculatively (and practically) to believe in one's own supe-
riority. Confronted with Mr Munsey and The Century Magazine
we were not convinced that our inability to take satisfaction in the
periodical provender so abundantly tendered us was due to any
shortcoming in ourselves. So it seemed worth while to set up a
journal where we and others of our way of feeling and of think-
ing could sit at ease; and might, when the stars should be auspi-
cious, perhaps encounter moments of delight. And then, of course,
we knew people whose work was not getting published and whose
work we thought the public should at least have a chance at.
And then, as an obvious corollary thereto, we thought these people
entitled to at least the little support we could give them.
All this, in different words, and in editorial comment as well as
in Dial advertisements, I have already written. I resume it here


ANNOUNCEMENT
533
because the resumption of an innocent ambition must always be,
in this world, novel. And because a change (although indeed I
believe it to be in this instance an inessential change) is, begin-
ning with the next issue of The Dial, to take place in the direction
of this paper.
The fact that Dr Watson and I were possessed of no fast
aesthetic dogma made the personality of those members of the
DIAL staff who were to pass upon manuscript and pictures the
decisive factor in the contents and, indeed, in the whole life of the
magazine. Since I have always shared with Dr Watson the
responsibility of examining and of choosing manuscripts and pic-
tures for The Dial, and since I am now withdrawing from this
most central part of the editorial work, I take this occasion to give
the record of this aspect of the direction of The Dial. For most
of the five and a half years of our joint control, Dr Watson, as
Publisher, and I, as Editor, have alone been responsible for the
contents of our pages. But Mr Stewart Mitchell, during the time
in which he was, so happily for us, our Managing Editor, shared
with us in this work. And Miss Alyse Gregory, who for the past
year and a half has so eminently filled the same difficult position,
has likewise shared this crucial work. Mr Gilbert Seldes, the other
of our three Managing Editors, did not share, except as good
counsellor, in this onerous duty. His remarkable talents were
quite sufficiently employed in his double task of meeting the daily
crises of managing-editorship and the monthly crises of dramatic
criticism.
Miss Gregory now resigns, much to our regret, the office of
Managing Editor. She accompanies her husband to live in Eng-
land. And I myself am also leaving America, and for an indefinite
period. And I desire to take advantage of this fact to seek out a
little leisure to try to write for that journal of which I am, after
all, the Editor. So, although I retain my editorial office and shall
be consulted on all points of general policy, I and Dr Watson
have now found it necessary to appoint, for the time of my absence,
what we have decided to call an Acting Editor. This Acting
Editor will then include among her duties, in addition to those of
Managing Editor, many of those hitherto belonging to the Editor
himself. In particular, she will be associated with Dr Watson in
determining the contents of the magazine.
COU


· 534
ANNOUNCEMENT
· We consider ourselves extremely fortunate in having persuaded
Miss Marianne Moore to be, beginning with the next issue of The
Dial, our Acting Editor. And it is because I feel so much sym-
pathy with the work and with the point-of-view of Miss Marianne
Moore that I do not regard this change in the direction of The
DIAL, howsoever at the core, as requiring the use of the word
'essential.'
Perhaps I should add that I intend to retain control (with Dr
Watson) for the rest of this calendar year of the pictures in The
Dial. Afterward Miss Moore will assume the lead in this matter
also. But the choice of the coloured frontispieces, as well as the
determination of the Dial Award, and indeed any appointment
to regular collaboration in The Dial (as, for example, that which
I am now able to announce, that of Maxim Gorki to be our Rus-
sian Correspondent), will, like many other such less detailed mat-
ters, continue to be referred to Dr Watson and myself.


Index





INDEX
VOLUME LXXVIII
195
318
228
PAGE
.
.
AIKEN, CONRAD .
.
107
. .
.
“ It is in Truth a Pretty Toy”
.
.
11 is in I TUIN & Itely 107
John Keats
The Last Visit (Fiction) . . . 285
Strange Moonlight (Fiction) . .
ANDERSON, SHERWOOD . . . . . A Meeting South (Fiction) . . .
Bell, Clive . . . . . . . .
Dr Freud on Art . . . . . . 280
BLUM, W. C. . . . . . . .
Improbable Purity . . . . .
BURKE, KENNETH . . . . . .
After-Dinner Philosophy . . .
BURKE, KENNETH, translator . . . The Downfall of Western Civilization 9
Honoré de Balzac · · · · · 357
COLUM, PADRAIC . . . . . .
The Possessed .
142
COWLEY, MALCOLM . . . . . .
Festoons of Fishes . . . . . 326
CRANE, CLARKSON . . . . . . Renewal (Fiction) . . . . . 208
Craven, THOMAS . . . . . .
Architecture and Civilization .... 153
Art and Adventure . . . . . 324
Daumier and the New Spirit . . 240
Drake, William A., translator .. Notes on Tolstoy and Other Recollec-
tions . . . . . . . .
FRANK, WALDO . . . . . . .
Bazalgette and Thoreau . . . . 232
GALANTIÈRE, Lewis . . . . . The Problem of Rimbaud ,
GALANTIÈRE, Lewis, translator . . A Letter from Madame Emilie Teste
GILCHRIST, Helen Ives . . . .
The Hero Legend . . . . .
GORKI, MAXIM . . . . . ..
· Notes on Tolstoy and Other Recollec-
tions . . . . . . . . 96
HANDMAN, Max Sylvius . . . . Industry and Prophecy . . . . 333
KalLEN, H. M. . . . . . . ..
Psychology Without Compromise · 236
LOVETT, Robert MORSS . . . . An Interpreter of American Life - 515
Statesman and Sportsman . . . 145
MITCHELL, STEWART . . . Poems in Pastel . . . . . . 503
MOORE, MARIANNE . . . . . . Besitz und Gemeingut . . . . 508
Histrionic Seclusion . . . . . 225
MORAND, PAUL . . . . . . .
A Notable Collection . . . . . 51
Paris Letter . . . . 139, 221, 499
MORTIMER, RAYMOND . . . . .
London Letter
:
.
: · · · 405
MUMFORD, LEWIS . . . . .
Beyond Musical Criticism . . . 411
MUNSON, GORHAM B. . . . . .
Van Wyck Brooks . . . . . 28
O'FLAHERTY, LIAM . . . . . .
The Conger Eel (Fiction) . . ..
The Foolish Butterfly (Fiction) . . 402
Piccoli, RAFFAELLO . . . . . Italian Letter . . . . . . . 43
· ·
·
·
·
· · · ·


IV
INDEX
PAGE
.
PHET
cs
Powys, LLEWELYN . . . . . . Half Truths . . . . . . .
Milk of Dandelion . . . . .
A Struggle for Life . . .
Powys, T. F. . . . . . . . . The Painted Wagon (Fiction) . .
RosenFELD, PAUL . . . . . . Johannes V. Jensen . . . . 60
Russell, BERTRAND · · · · · Life in
Life in the Middle Ages . . . . 295
SANTAYANA, G. . . . . . . On Self-Government . . . . 181, 302
SCOTT, EVELYN . . . . . . . The Old Lady (Fiction) . . . . 369
Smith, Logan PEARSALL
Michael Field . . . . . . 115
SPENGLER, Oswald . . . . . . The Downfall of Western Civilization 9
Dublin Letter . . . . . . . 315
STETSKY, Max, translator . . . . Notes on Tolstoy and Other Recollec-
tions . . . . . . . . 96
TEAD, ORDWAY . . . . . . . . The Ordeal of Stanley Hall . . . 414
Valéry, Paul . . . . . . . A Letter from Madame Emilie Teste
VON HOFMANNSTHAL, HUGO . . . Honoré de Balzac
: : : 357
WESCOTT, GLENWAY . . . . . Concerning Miss Moore's Observa-
tions . . . . . . .
A Historian of Conquests . . . 417
Mr Osbert Sitwell's Fiction . . . 506
WILLIAMS, WILLIAM CARLOS . . . Marianne Moore . . . . .
Wilson, EDMUND . . . . . .
Catullus and Horace . . .
Paul Valéry . . . . . .
Two Views of Byron . . . ..
WOOLF, VIRGINIA . . . . . . The Lives Oj ine (USCUT
The Lives of the Obscure . .
WRIGHT, CUTHBERT . . . . . . Eros . . . . . . . . 420
511


INDEX
VERSE
207
O
300
299
300
PAGE
CANE, MELVILLE . . . . . . January Garden . . . . . .
COLUM, PADRAIC . . . . . . Queen Gormlai . . . . . . 391
DAMON, S. FOSTER . . . . . . Persephone in Eden . . . . . 445
Eliot, T. S..
The Hollow Men . . . . . .
193
KREYMBORG, ALFRED . . . . . Caligraphy . . . . . . .
Diminuendo . . . . .
Paradox . . . . . .
Ritardando . . . . . . . 300
MOORE, MARIANNE . . . .
The Monkey Puzzler . .
8
MUIR, EDWIN . . . . . . ..
The Lost Land . . . . . 123
NORTH, Jessica Nelson . . . . As One Invulnerable . . . . . 380
Sassoon, SIEGFRIED . . . . . .
Evensong in Westminster Abbey 313
SIMPSON, MABEL . . . . . .
Body . . . . . . . ..
Here Once the Rose . . . . . 498
Song . . . . . . . . 498
William Blake . .
27
Winter Twilight . . . . . . 368
TAGGARD, GENEVIEVE . . . . .
Storm Centre . .
284
TEASDALE, SARA . . . . . . . Fontainebleau . . . . . . 138
VAN SLYKE, BERENICE K... Sea-Change . . .
Sketch . . . . . . . . 219
WrYNN, ANTHONY . . . . . Salon . . . . . . . . . 294
•
27
·
·
219
·


VI
INDEX
ART
Bacon, Peggy · · · · · · ·
Among the Saints He Shall Be Seen March
Prufrock . . . . . . . March
While the True Church Can Never
Fail . . . . . . . March
Bellows, GEORGE W. . . . . . Dempsey-Firpo . . . . . March
Introducing John L. Sullivan - March
COCTEAU, JEAN . . . . . . . L'Expressioniste . . . . . . May
Les Grenouilles et les Taureaux se
Prennent Avec du Rouge . . . May
Le Poète et sa Muse . . . . . May
Le Voyageur Dans les Glaces . . May
CUMMINGS, E. E. . . . . . . Dancers . . . . . . . . June
Dehn, ADOLF . . . . . . . Lovers . . . . . . . . . June
The Thinker . . . . . . . June
Two Drawings . . . . February
EARLY AMERICAN . . . . . .
Madame Freake with Baby Mary March
FIENE, ERNEST . . . . . . .
A Drawing . . . . . . April
GREENMAN, FRANCES CRANMER . . Gertrude and Her Flowers . . January
Hartley, MARSDEN . . . . . New Mexico . . . . . .
April
KENT, ROCKWELL . . . . . .
Absolution . . . . . . April
Little Child . . . . .
April
Nightmare . ..
April
KUNIYOSHI, Yasuo . . . . . .
Portrait of the Artist. . March
McMILLEN, MILDRED . . . . .
Ship and Shells . . . . . January
Matisse, Henri . . . . . . . A Head . . . . .
· January
Landscape . . . . . . January
Still Life . . . . . . February
MESTROVIC, IVAN . . . . . . Girl Playing Guitar . . . . January
Madame Ruza Mestrovic . January
Madonna and Child . . . . January
Munch, EDVARD
Landscape . . . . . . January
NADELMAN, Elie . . . . . . Acrobat . . . . . . . June
Pianist . . . . . . . . June
Tango . . . . . . . June
O'KEEFFE, GEORGIA . . . . . The Flagpole (First Painting) . . May
The Flagpole (Second Painting) . May
Picasso, PABLO . . . . . . .
Le Bain des Chevaux . . . . June
A Drawing . . . . . February
ROBINSON, BOARDMAN . . . . . Sinclair Lewis . . . . . · June
Rodin, AUGUSTE . . . . . .
Balzac
. . . May
SHEELER, CHARLES . . . . . .
The Yachts . . . . . March
TOULOUSE-LAUTREC, HENRI DE . . Le Cirque . . . . . . April
Weber, Max . . . . . .
Head . . . . . . . . . April
Gesture . . .
. . April
ZAK, EUGEN . . . . . . . . In the Wine Cellar . . . February
Landscape . . . . .
February
The Miller . . . . . February
The Young Acrobat . . . February
ZORACH, MARGUERITE . . . . . Marianne Moore . . . . . . May


INDEX
VII
BOOKS REVIEWED
PAGE
523
4.28
.
.
.
.
.
246
429
Authors and Titles
ADLER, ALFRED. P. Radin, translator. The Practice and Theory of Individual Psy-
chology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 236
Ainslie, Douglas, translator. European Literature in the Nineteenth Century, by
BENEDETTO CROCE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
ALDINGTON, RICHARD. Literary Studies and Reviews . . .
79
ALLISON, WILLIAM. Memories of Men and Horses . . . . . . . . . . 76
ANDERSON, SHERWOOD. A Story Teller's Story . . . . . . . . . . . 330
ANDREWS, William, and Elsie M. LANG. Old English Towns. . . . .
ANISSIA, THE PEASANT. T. A. KOUZMINSKAYA, amanuensis. Leo Tolstoy, editor.
Translation, notes, and preface by CHARLES SALOMON. My Life, As Told by The
Peasant Anissia . . . . . . . . . . . . .
ANONYMOUS. The Chapbook: A Miscellany, 1924, with “Apology".
ANONYMOUS. The Freeman Book, Typical Editorials, Essays, Critiques, and Other
Selections from the Eight Volumes of The Freeman . . . .
339
ANONYMOUS. Stories from The Dial .
· · · · · · · · · · · · · · 51
ARLEN, MICHAEL. These Charming People . . . . . . . . . . . . . 157
ARMSTRONG, MARTIN. The Bazaar and Other Stories . . . . . . . . . . 158
Austin, Mary. The Land of Journeys' Ending ..
BARING, MAURICE C. . . .
. .,' ;
. .
: : . . . . . 157
.
Barker, J. Ellis. Cancer: How It Is Caused; How li Can Be Prevented
evented . . . 340
BARRINGTON, E. The Gallants . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 338
Bateman, H. M. A Mixture . . .
Bax, Mrs CLIFFORD, and F. W. BROWNE, reminiscences by. Prefaces by Charles
Marriott and George Ives. Notes by Havelock Ellis. Stories and Essays, by
MRS Havelock ELLIS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 427
BAZALGETTE, LÉOn. Van Wyck BROOKS, translator. Henry Thoreau, Bachelor of
Nature . . . .
. . . . 232
Benavente, JACINTO. Translation and introduction by John GARRETT UNDERHILL.
Plays: Fourth Series . . .
. . . . .
.
. 248
Bennett, ARNOLD. Elsie and the Child . . . . . .
Bercovici, KONRAD. Costa's Daughter . . . . . . .
BIERCE, AMBROSe. In the Midst of Life . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75
Blake, RODNEY. Random Rhythms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77
Boswell, YOUNG. People You Know . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 250
BOYD, Ernest. Portraits, Real and Imaginary . . . .
BOYD, NANCY. Distressing Dialogues . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 427
BRADFORD, GAMALIEL. The Soul of Samuel Pepys . . . .
Bradley, William Aspenwall, translator. Contemporary French Literature, by
BRAGDON, CLAUDE, foreword by. The Autobiography of an idea, by Louis H. Sul: ***
LIVAN . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
BRANDES, GEORG. Allen W. Porterfield, translator. Wolfgang Goethe... 508
BROOKS, CHARLES S. A Thread of English Road . . . . . . . . . . 159
BROOKS, Van Wyck. The Ordeal of Mark Twain . .
415
Brooks, Van Wyck, translator. Henry Thoreau, Bachelor of Nature, by Léon BA-
ZALGETTE. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 232
BROWNE, F. W., and Mrs CLIFFORD Bax, reminiscences by. Prefaces by CHARLES
MARRIOTT and George Ives. Notes by HaveLOCK Ellis. Stories and Essays,
by Mrs HaveLOCK ELLIS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 427
BROWNELL, W. C. The Genius of Style . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 228
BRYAN, P. W., and Rodwell JONES. North America . . . . . . . . . . 339
BULLETT, GERALD. The Innocence of G. K. Chesterton . . . . . . . . . 161
426
248
339
28


VIN
INDEX
PAGE
10
:
338
•
77
BURKE, KENNETH, translator. Death in Venice, by Thomas MANN . . . . . 420
BURRARD, COLONEL DUTTON, translator. Princesses, Ladies and Adventurers of the
Reign of Louis XIV, by THERESÉ Louis LATOUR
Louis AI', DY INEKESE LOUIS LATOUR . . . . . . .
. .
CABELL, James BRANCH. Straws and Prayer-Books . . . . . . . . . . 79
CHARNWOOD, LORD. Theodore Roosevelt . . . . . . . . . . . . .
ChateR, A. G., translator. The Long Journey, by Johannes V. JENSEN . . .
CLARK, BARRETT H., and Marie ZAKREVSKY, translators. The Judge, by MAXIM
GORKI . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Colum, Padraic. Wilfred Jones, illustrator. The Island of the Mighty . . .
Conrad, JOSEPH, and Ford Madox Ford. The Nature of a Crime . . . . .
Coulon, Marcel. Le Problème de Rimbaud, Poète Maudit
. . . 54
Cowley, Malcolm, translator. On Board the “Morning Star," by Pierre Mac-
ORLAN . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
CRESSWELL, Nicholas. The Journal of Nicholas Cresswell. . . .
Croce, BenedeTTO. Arthur Livingston, translator. The Conduct of Life...
Croce, BENEDETTO. DOUGLAS Ainslie, translator. European Literature in the Nine-
teenth Century . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
CUMMINGS, William. An Island Chronicle. .
CUNNINGHAME Graham, R. B. Hernando de Soto, Together with an Account of one
of his Captains, Goncola Silvestre . . . . . . . . . . . . . 417
CUNNINGHAME Graham, R. B. A Vanished Arcadia ...
Dane, CLEMENCE. Wandering Stars, Together with The Lover . . . . . . .
D'ANGERVILLE, MOUFFLE. ALBERT MEYRAC, editor. H. S. MINGARD, translator.
The Private Life of Louis XV . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78
DAVIDSON, Donald. An Outland Piper . . . . . . . . . . . . 247
Davies, W. H. Secrets .
Dawson, Lawrence H., revised and enlarged, with preface and introduction to index
of allowable rhymes, by. The Rhyming Dictionary of the English Language, by
JOHN WALKER . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
522
Dell, Floyd. This Mad Ideal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Dewey, John. Experience and Nature . .
. . . . . . . 429
Dixon, Royal, and FRANKLYN E. Fitch. Personality of Plants . . . . . . 162
Dow, DOROTHY. Black Babylon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 247
DRINKWATER, John. Victorian Poetry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 521
Eldridge, Paul. Our Dead Selves..
• 247
Eliot, T. S., introduction by. Mark Wardle, translator. Le Serpent, by Paul
VALÉRY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 491
Ellis, Havelock. Casanova, An Appreciation, with Selections from the Mémoires 78
ELLIS, HavelOCK, notes by. Prefaces by CHARLES MARRIOTT and GEORGE Ives.
Reminiscences by Mrs CliFFORD Bax and F. W. BROWNE. Stories and Essays,
by Mrs HaveLOCK ELLIS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 427
Ellis, Mrs HaveLOCK. Stories and Essays, with prefaces by Charles MARRIOTT
and GEORGE Ives. Reminiscences by Mrs CLIFFORD Bax and F. W. BROWNE.
Notes by HAVELOCK ELLIS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 427
Escholier, RAYMOND. Daumier, Peintre et Lithographe .
240
Falls, C. B., decorations by. The East Window, and The Car Window, by Bert
LESTON TAYLOR . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Farrar, John, editor. The Literary Spotlight . . . . . . . . . . . . 428
FINGER, CHARLES J. In Lawless Lands . .
. . . . . . . . . 157
FIREBAUGH, W. C. The Inns of the Middle Ages . .
. . . . . . . . 159
Fitch, FRANKLYN E., and Royal Dixon. Personality of Plants . ..
Ford, Ford Madox. Joseph Conrad, A Personal Remembrance . .
Ford, Ford Madox, and Joseph CONRAD. The Nature of a Crime . ..
520
Fosca, François. Renoir . .
. . . . 527
FRANCE, ANATOLE. WILFRED S. JACKSON, translator. The Latin Genius
160
FRIEDLAND, LOUIS S., and JOSEPH R. PiroshNIKOFF, translators. Ethics, Origin and
Development, by Prince KROPOTKIN
. . . . . . . . . . . . . 523
Fry, Roger. The Artist and Psycho-Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . 318
520
liccl
Okapne .
.
.
.
.
.
.
.


INDEX
IX
336
336
.........
. .
521
. .
. .
161
PAGE
FUNK AND WAGNALLS, publisher. National Health Series . . . . . . . . 340
GALSWORTHY, JOHN. The Forest . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 158
GALSWORTHY, JOHN. The White Monkey . . . . . .
GALSWORTHY, John, foreword by. Alex Matson, translator. The White Ship: Es-
tonian Tales, by Aino KALLAS . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75
GARNETT, DAVID. Woodcuts by R. A. GARNETT. A Man in the Zoo . . . . . 336
Garnett, R. A., woodcuts by. A Man in the Zoo, by David GARNETT . . .
GEER, Walter. Napoleon and Josephine . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78
GOLDING, Louis. Seacoast of Bohemia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 157
GORKI, MAXIM. MARIE ZAKREVSKY and BARRETT H. CLARK, translators. The Judge 157
GORKI, Maxim, editor. A. G. PASCHKOFF, translator. The Enchanted Wanderer, by
Nicolai LYESKOV . .
.
. 427
Goss, John, music editor. Vera Mendel and Francis Meynell, general editors.
The Week-End Book, A Sociable Anthology . . . . . . . . . . . . 338
Gosse, EDMUND. Life of William Congreve . . . . . . . . . .
250
HAGEDORN, HERMANN. Roosevelt, Prophet of Unity . . . . . . . . . . 250
Hall, G. STANLEY. Life and Confessions of a Psychologist . . . . . . . . 415
HARDY, THOMAS. Life and Art.
HARRINGTON, Karl POMEROY. Catullus and His Influence . . . .
149
HARWOOD, H. C. Judgment Eve . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 158
HOUDINI. A Magician Among the Spirits . . . . . . . . . .
251
HOUSMAN, Laurence. Echo de Paris . . . . .
248
HOWARD, SIDNEY. Three Flights Up ..
.: : . 520
Howard, Velma SWANSTON, translator. Marbacka, by Selma Lagerlöf
427
Howe, M. A. De Wolfe. Barrett Wendell and His Letters ...
Hoyt, Helen. Apples Here in My Basket . . . . . . . . . . .
HUIZINGA, Johan. The Waning of the Middle Ages . . . . . . . . . . 296
Hulme, T. E. Speculations . . . . . . . . . . .
Ives, George, and Charles Marriott, prefaces by. Reminiscences by Mrs Clif-
FORD Bax and F. W. Browne. Notes by Havelock Ellis. Stories and Essays,
by Mrs HaveLOCK ELLIS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Jackson, Wilfred S., translator. The Latin Genius, by Anatole France . .
JENSEN, JOHANNES V. A. G. CHATER, translator. The Long Journey . . . . . 60
JONES, Rodwell, and P. W. Bryan. North America .
Jones, WILFRED, illustrator. The Island of the Mighty, by Padraic COLUM . . . 336
Kallas, Aino. Alex Matson, translator. Foreword by John Galsworthy. The
White Ship: Estonian Tales . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75
Kent, Rockwell. Voyaging Southward from the Strait of Magellan ..
: : : : : 324
KIRCHWEY, FREDA. Our Changing Morality, A Symposium . . . . . . . .
KLINGSOR, Tristan L. Cézanne.
· 523
KOUZMINSKAYA, T. A., amanuensis. Leo Tolstoy, editor. Translation, notes, and
preface by CHARLES SALOMON. My Life, As Told by The Peasant Anissia . . . 246
KREYMBORG, ALFRED. Less Lonely. . .
KROPOTKIN, Prince. Louis S. Friedland and Joseph R. PIROSHNIKOFF, translators.
Ethics, Origin and Development . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 523
LAGERLÖF, Selma. Velma Swanston HOWARD, translator. Marbacka . .
Lalou, René. William AsPENWALL Bradley, translator. Contemporary French
Literature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
LANG, Elsie M., and William Andrews. Old English Towns .... . . . 428
Latour, Theresé Louis. COLONEL Dutton BURRARD, translator. Princesses, La-
dies and Adventurers of the Reign of Louis XIV . . . . . . . . . .
LAWRENCE, D. H., and M. L. Skinner. The Boy in the Bush.
LAZARILLO OF Tormes. Mariano J. Lorente, translator. Lazarillo of Tormes, His
Life, Fortunes, Misadventures . .
;. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75
LEIPNIK, F. L. A History of French Etching . . . . . . . . . . . . 523
Lewis, SINCLAIR. Arrowsmith . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 515
LEWISOHN, Ludwig. The Creative Life . .
min, . . . . . . . 79
LIVINGSTON, ARTHUR, translator. The Conduct of Life, by BENEDETTO Croce . . 80
19


INDEX
:.:
159
PAGE
Lodge, Sir Oliver. Making of Man .
. . . . 251
LORENTE, MARIANO J., translator. Lazarillo of Tormes, His Life, Fortunes, Misad-
ventures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75
Lowell, Amy. John Keats . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 475
Lowie, ROBERT H. Primitive Religion . . . . .
80
Lyeskov, Nicolai. A. G. PASCHKOFF, translator. Edited with introduction by
Maxim GorkI. The Enchanted Wanderer . . . . . .
MacCarthy, Mrs Mary. A Nineteenth Century Childhood
000
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
. . . . 406
MacDonald, J. Ramsay. Margaret Ethel MacDonald ..
. . . . . . . . 161
MACHEN, ARTHUR. VinceNT STARRETT, editor. The Glorious Mystery . . . . 161
Machen, ARTHUR. The London Adventure . . . . . . . . . . . .
MacKaye, Percy. The Skippers of Nancy Gloucester . . . . . .
Mackenzie, COMPTON. The Heavenly Ladder . . . . . . . . . . . . 337
Mackenzie, Jean Kenyon. African Clearings . ..
MacOrlan, Pierre. Malcolm Cowley, translator. On Board the "Morning Star" 246
Mandell, M. S., translator. The Plays of Ivan S. Turgenev
. . . . . . 77
Mann, Thomas. Kenneth Burke, translator. Death in Venice . . . . . .
Mansfield, KATHARINE. The Little Girl, and Other Stories
MARRIOTT, CHARLES, and GEORGE Ives, prefaces by. Reminiscences by Mrs Clif-
FORD Bax and F. W. BROWNE. Notes by HaveLOCK ELLIS. Stories and Essays,
by Mrs HaveLOCK ELLIS . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
427
MASTERS, EDGAR Lee. The New Spoon River . . .
158
Matson, Alex, translator. Foreword by John GalsWORTHY. The White Ship: Es-
tonian Tales, by Arno KALLAS . . . . . . . .
75
MAUCLAIR, CAMILLE. Monet . . . . . . . . .
523
MAXWELL, GORDON S. LUCILLE MAXWELL, illustrator. The Authors' Thames. . 428
Maxwell, Lucille, illustrator. The Authors' Thames, by GORDON S. MaxwELL . 428
Mencken, H. L. Prejudices, Fourth Series .
Mendel, Vera, and Francis Meynell, general editors. John Goss, music editor.
The Week-End Book, A Sociable Anthology. . . . . . . . . . . . 338
MERRICK, LEONARD. The Quaint Companions . . .
MEYNELL, Francis, and Vera Mendel, general editors. John Goss, music editor.
The Week-End Book, A Sociable Anthology. .
Meyrac, Albert, editor. H. S. MINGARD, translator. The Private Life of Louis XV,
by MOUFFLE D'ANGERVILLE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Millay, Edna St Vincent. The Harp-Weaver and Other Poems ...
Mingard, H. S., translator. ALBERT MEYRAC, editor. The Private Life of Louis XV,
by MOUFFLE D'ANGERVILLE .
. . . . . . . . .
. . . . 78
Mitchison, Naomi. When the Bow Breaks .
. . . . . . . . . . . 246
Moore, George. Conversations in Ebury Street . . . . . . .
MOORE, Marianne. Observations.
. :.: : . . . . . . . . 1, 393
MORLEY, CHRISTOPHER. Modern Essays: Second Series ..
. . . . 249
Muir, Edwin. Latitudes . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. .
.
. 159
MUMFORD, LEWIS. Sticks and Stones . . . . . . . . . .
NEWMAN, Frances. The Short Story's Mutations
S Mutations
.
. .
. .
.
,
. . . . . . . 249
Nicolson, Harold. Byron: The Last Journey . ..
. . 511
Noyes, George WalliNGFORD, compiler and editor. Religious Experience of John
Humphrey Noyes . . . . . . . .
O'Brien, EDWARD J., editor. The Best Short Stories of 1924 . ..,
O'Flaherty, Liam. The Black Soul . . .
O'Higgins, Harvey, and Dr E. H. Reede. The American Mind in Action . . .
ORENBURGSKY, SERGEY Gussiev. Nina N. Selivanova, translator. The Land of the
Fathers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
OssenDOWSKI, FERDINAND. Beasts, Men and Gods . . . . . . . . . . .
Ostenso, Martha. A Far Land . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 337
Parks, LEIGHTON. What Is Modernism? . . .
PASCHKOFF, A. G., translator. Edited with introduction by Maxim Gorki. The En-
chanted Wanderer, by NICOLAI LYESKOV . . . . . . . . . . . .
139


INDEX
XI
426
.
246
. .
.
337
.
145
. .
. .
. .
. .
. .
78
.
PAGE
Phelps, William Lyon. Howells, James, Bryant and Other Essays ..
78
PIROSHNIKOFF, Joseph R., and Louis S. Friedland, translators. Ethics, Origin and
Development, by Prince KROPOTKIN
523
PORTERFIELD, ALLEN W., translator. Wolfgang Goethe, by Georg BRANDES . . . 508
Power, EILEEN. Medieval People . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 295
Powys, John CowPER. Ducdame . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Powys, LLEWELYN. Black Laughter . . . . . . . . . . . . . 519
Powys, T. F. Black Bryony . . .
142
Powys, T. F. Mark Only . . . . . . .
Radin, P., translator. The Practice and Theory of Individual Psyc logy . . . 236
Ransom, John CROWE. Chills and Fever.
RAYMOND, Dora Neill: The Political Career of Lord Byron . . . . . . 511
RAYMOND, E. T. The Life of Lord Rosebery .
Reede, Dr E. H., and Harvey O'Higgins. The American Mind in Action
251
REY, ROBERT. Gauguin . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
523
REYMONT, LADISLAS. The Peasants.-Autumn.-Winter . . . . . .
Rick WORD, EDGELL. Rimbaud, the Boy and the Poet . . . . . . . . .
Rivers, W. H. R. Medicine, Magic and Religion . . . . .
ROBINS, J. J., translator. My Life in Art, by CONSTANTIN STANISLAVSKY . . . 77
ROSENBERG, JAMES N. Punchinello, A Ballet . . . . . . . . . .
. 248
ROSENFELD, Paul. Musical Chronicle (1917–1923) . . . . . . . 411
Russell, BERTRAND and Dora. The Prospects of Industrial Civilization. . 333
RUTTER, FRANK. The Poetry of Architecture . . . . . . . . . . . . 521
SAURAT, DENIS. Blake and Milton . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
ScheffauER, HERMAN G. The New Vision in the German Arts . .
80
SchwoB, MARCEL. Imaginary Lives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 160
Sackville, LADY MARGARET. Poems . . . . . . . . .
337
SALOMON, CHARLES, translator. T. A. KOUZMINSKAYA, amanuensis. Leo Tolstoy,
editor. My Life, As Told by The Peasant Anissia . . . . . . . . . . 246
Seitz, Don C. Joseph Pulitzer..
522
Selivanova, Nina N., translator. The Land of the Fathers, by Sergey Gussiev
ORENBURGSKY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 330
SHEPARD, ODELL. Bliss Carman . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
250
SHERMAN, STUART P. My Dear Cornelia . .
522
SHERMAN, STUART P. Points of View . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 249
SHOWERMAN, GRANT. Horace and His Influence . . . . . . . . . . . 149
SINCLAIR, May. Arnold Waterloo . . . . . . .
519
SITWELL, EDITH. The Sleeping Beauty . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77
SITWELL, Osbert. Triple Fugue. .
Skinner, M. L., and D. H. Lawrence. The Boy in the Bush..
Solon, Leon V. Polychromy . . . . . .
STANISLAVSKY, CONSTANTIN. J. J. Robins, translator. My Life in Art . . .
Starrett, VINCENT, editor. The Glorious Mystery, by Arthur Machen . . . .
STRONG, Anna Louise. The First Time in History
SULLIVAN, Louis H. Foreword by Claude BRAGDON. The Autobiography of an Idea
Taylor, Bert Leston. Decorations by C. B. Falls. The East Window, and The
Car Window . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
: : 248
Teasdale, Sara. Love Songs.-Flame and Shadow.–Rivers to the Sea ..
THIBAUDET, ALBERT. Paul Valéry . . . . . . . . . .
. . . 491
TietjENS, EUNICE. Profiles from Home . . . . . . .
. . . . . . 521
Tolstoy, Leo, editor. T. A. KOUZMINSKAYA, amanuensis. Translation, notes, and
preface by CHARLES Salomon. My Life, As Told by The Peasant Anissia ....
TORMES, LAZARILLO OF. See LAZARILLO OF TORMES.
TURGENEV, Ivan S. M. S. Mandell, translator. The Plays of Ivan S. Turgenev . 77
UNDERHILL, John Garrett, translation and introduction by. Plays: Fourth Series,
by John GARRETT UNDERHILL . .
. . . . 248
Valéry, Paul. Mark Wardle, translator. Introduction by T. S. Eliot. Le Serpent 491
Van Doren, Mark. Spring Thunder and Other Poems . . . . . . . . 247
.
.
· ·
. .
· ·
.
506
.
· ·
107
246


XII
INDEX
PAGE
Van Vechten, Carl. Red
CHTEN, CARL. Red
..
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 522
Van VECHTEN, Carl. The Tattooed Countess . . . . . . . . . . . . 76
Van VECHTEN, Carl. The Tiger in the House . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . 76
WAITE, ARTHUR Edward. Lamps of Western Mysticism . . . . . .
Walker, John. The Rhyming Dictionary of the English Language, revised and en-
larged, with preface and introduction to index of allowable terms by LAWRENCE H.
Dawson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Wardle, Mark, translator. Introduction by T. S. Eliot. Le Serpent, by Paul V'ALÉRY
Watson, FORBES. William Glackens . . . . . . . . . . . . . ..
Wells, H. G. The Dream
WITTELS, Fritz. Sigmund Freud, His Personality, His Teaching, and His School . 340
Wright, Cuthbert. One Way of Love . .
. . . 503
ZAKREVSKY, Marie, and Barrett H. Clark, translators. The Judge, by Maxim Gorki 157
522
491
426
COMMENT
Announcement: The Dial Award . . .
Editorial Management, Changes in . .
ohansen, John Christen . . . . .
Marianne Moore and Sir Francis Bacon.
Marianne Moore, The Foot-notes of . .
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
. . 89
. . 532
. . 440
. . 174
. 265, 354
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
THE THEATRE
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
. 432
. 165
. 81
. 253
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
525
. 106, 252
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
166
82
253
432
254
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
Abie's Irish Rose . . . .
Amoureuse
Artists and Models . . . .
Big Boy
....... . . .
Bourgeois Gentilhomme, Le .
Caesar and Cleopatra : .
Candida . . . .
.
. .
.
.
.
Cherry Lane Players, The .
Close Harmony. . .
Dark Angel, The . . .
Desire Under the Elms . . .
Eames, Clare . . . . .
Fall Guy, The . . . . .
Firebrand, The . . . . .
Grand Street Follies, The
Guild Theatre, The New
Jolson, Al . . . . . . .
Last Laugh, The . . . .
Lawson, John Howard . .
L'Homme et Ses Fantômes . .
Love for Love . . . . .
Morris, Mary . . . . .
Mrs Partridge Presents . . .
Paolo and Francesca . .
Parisienne, La . . . .
Pierrot the Prodigal . . . .
Processional . . . . . .
Puppets . . . . . .
Puzzles of 1925 . . . .
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
. 525
. 253
. 344
. 341
81, 163
. 526
. 82
. 252
. 166
. 165
.
.
.
.
. .
. .
. .
. .
. .
. .
. .
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
. . 341, 524
. 433
. . . 344


INDEX
XIII
PAGE
81
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
254
344
165
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
. .
. .
. .
. .
. .
. .
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
Scandals, George White's . . .
Schildkraut, Joseph . . . . .
She Wanted to Know . ..
Simone, Madame . . .
Sky-High . . . . . . .
Sooner and Later . . . .
Starlight . .
, :
.
:
. .
Taming of the Shrew, The . .
They Knew What They Wanted
Way of the World, The . . . .
Whithorne, Emerson . . . .
Wild Duck, The . . . . . .
Youngest, The . . . . .
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
...
.
433
524
524
.
.
433
81
82
81
. .
. .
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
. 524
. 430
. 252
.
.
.
.
MODERN ART
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
......
.
.
.
. . 250
. . 83
: . 436
255
257
. 83, 434
. 83
: . 255
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
W
ESI
C
, IV
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
Bluemmer, Oscar . . . . .
Hallowell, Robert . . . . .
Hartley, Marsden . . . . .
Karfiol, Bernard . . . . . .
Kuniyoshi, Yasuo . . . . .
Matisse, Henri . . . . . .
Mestrovic, Ivan ...
Miller, Kenneth Hayes . . . .
Nadelman, Elie . . . . . .
National Academy of Design ..
Pennell, Joseph . . . . . .
Picasso, Pablo . . . . . .
Seurat, Georges . . . . . .
Stieglitz Group : : : : : :
Weber, Max . . . . . . .
.
..............
.
.
.
.
.
........
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
527
347
434
167
435
346
.
.
.
·
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
MUSICAL CHRONICLE
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
. . 530
. . 351
. 87, 258
·
. . 351
·
352
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
· ·
.
.
.
. 437
·
.
..
87
·
Art and Letters in New York . . . . . .
Bartok, Bela . . . . . . . . .
.
.
.
Copland, Aaron . . . . . . . . . .
Cotapos, Acario · · · · · ·
well, Henry . . . . . . . . . .
Honegger, Arthur . . .
International Composers' Guild, Final Concert of
League of Composers . . . . . . ..
Ornstein, Leo . . . . . . . . . .
Ruggles, Carl . . . . . . . . .
Salzedo, Carlos . . .
Schoenberg, Arnold . . . . . . . . .
Still, William Grant . . . .
Stokowski, Leopold . . . .
Strawinsky, Igor . . . . . . . . . .
Szymanowski, Karol . . . . . . . .
Varèse, Edgar . . . . . . . . . .
Zanotti-Bianco, Massimo . . . .
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
352
171
·
350
.
.
.
.
·
· ·
.
........
·
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
· ·
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
437
. : 352
. . 353
. 259, 349
.
. 170
172, 350, 437
. . . 352
.
.
.
.
· ·


XIV
INDEX
MISCELLANEOUS
PAGE
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
·
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
. 435
409
. 499
. 499
. 491
. 140
. SOI
. 51
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
·
.
.
.
.
.
· ·
· ·
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
· ·
Anderson, Sherwood . . . . . . . .
Architecture of London ...
Bakst, Léon - . . . . . . . . . .
Ballet, Russian . . . . . . . . . .
Bergson, Henri.
. . . . . . . .
Bibesco, Princess. Le Perroquet Vert . . .
Blanche, J.-E. . . . . .
. .
Bunin, Ivan . . . . . . . . . . .
Cézanne, Paul . . . . .
Conrad, Joseph . . . . . . . . . .
Day, Thomas . . . . . .
d'Oisy, Pelletier.
Edgeworth, Richard Lovell
..
.
. . . . .
Fabre-Luce, Alfred. La Victoire . . . . .
Feuilles Libres, Les ... . . . . . . .
France, Anatole . . . . . . . . .
Freud, Sigmund . . . .
Geographical Distribution of Talent . . . .
Gide, André . .
.... . . . . . . . .
Giraudoux, Jean. Juliette au Pays des Hommes
Idealism, Italian . . . . . . . . . .
Joyce, James . . . . . . . . . . .
Komroff, Manuel . . .
.
. .
. .
.
.
.
.
. .
.
Mann, Thomas . . . . . . . .
Maschera e il Volto, La . . .
Nineteenth Century, Reaction Against . . .
Ortega y Gasset, José . . . . . .
Pilkington, Laetitia . . . . . . . . .
Pirandello, Luigi . . . . .
Perse, S. J. . . . . .
rcel · · · · · · · · · ·
Revue Juive, La . . . .
Schnitzler, Arthur . . .
Stephens, James . . . . . . . . . .
Surréalisme . . . . . ..
Synthetic Theatre, The .. .
. .
Valéry, Paul . . . . . . .
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
. . 139
. . 381
. 501
. . 381
. . 141
. . 141
. 222, 500
. . 280
. . 315
. . 139
. . 140
. 49
. . 4
. . 51
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
..
.
..
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
.
406
221
381
44
.
.
.
.
..
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
4
502
...........
.
51
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
. .
. .
51
223
.
.
..
.
.
.
.
44
222
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
DEPARTMENTS
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
Briefer Mention.
Comment , ,
. .
Dublin Letter .
Italian Letter
.
.
London Letter .
Modern Art. .
Musical Chronicle
Paris Letter . .
Theatre, The . .
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
75, 157, 246, 336, 426, 519
89, 174, 265, 354, 440, 532
. . . . . . . 315
. . . . . . . 43
. . . . 405
83, 167, 255, 346, 434, 527
86, 170, 258, 349, 437, 530
. . . . 139, 221, 499
81, 163, 252, 341, 430, 524
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
. .
. .
.
. .
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.