”
”
dollar based upon the price index of commodities, in place of a
“metals” dollar fluctuating with the supply of bullion. The plan
is presented with elaborate simplicity and persuasiveness, and an
exhaustive discussion of technical details, alternative plans, and
precedents clears the way for a critical decision on Professor
Fisher's proposal.


THE THEATRE
I
T is an unusual experience to hear the name of God pronounced on
stage in New York. In moments of high velocity any charac-
ter in any piece may call upon the sacred name to give emphasis to a
vow or to a curse, but our playmakers and our producers all seem
to feel that to speak of God seriously is a shade in bad taste. It
remained for the Theatre Guild to bring forth The Power of
DARKNESS and to allow Father Akim to speak of God fervently and
passionately and in his fumbling utterance to restate the sublime
platitude of a righteous life. The event has more than one circum-
stance of dignity, and not the least of them is that a very modern
group of people has presented to an over-sophisticated audience a
play which is profoundly and honestly religious.
I think that the whole bearing of The Power Of Darkness can
be felt by comparing it with such a piece as The Servant IN THE
House. In that piece the man of God became a drainman; in this,
the cleaner of cesspools becomes the man of God. The one is modern;
but whatever the play may be, the theme which Tolstoi worked out
in such a welter of corruption, is eternal. It is possible that both
atheists and believers will be offended by the dogmatic assurance
with which the will of God is mentioned by Father Akim; that is
outside the limits of a play-review. Dramatically the event remains
important because, although a generation of playgoers know the
piece abroad, The Power of Darkness has not been done before
in this country, and, being done with some success, is a hopeful thing.
Neither Tolstoi nor his present producers expounded fully the
things which make The Power of DARKNESS so moving. I take it
that nothing is so important as the struggle between God and the
Devil for Nikita's soul. His father is the authentic representative of
the Heavenly Power; virtually every one else is there as an instru-
ment or advocate of the Devil. Obviously the whole conflict is "off
stage,” because it is in the play of unspoken thoughts and of emo-
tions which hardly arrive at action. There is a moment, toward
the end of the play, when Nikita is alone, hunted by his conscience,
when the sense that the persons of the play are only insubstantial
shadows becomes the dominant emotion of the play.


406
THE THEATRE
In spite of Tolstoi, I fancy. For at certain moments of his highest
creative being Tolstoi was so bitterly unreconciled to life, so hateful
of humanity, that the common sights and sounds of men and women
became offensive to him and he peopled his stage with horrors. The
version of The Power of DARKNESS now produced is mercifully
gentle; in its full brutality, with its mordant emphasis on every
physical detail of cruelty, lust, and crime, the play is unbearable.
Even in this version I find that the average human being's resent-
ment is justified because the spiritual conflict and the spiritual vic-
tory are submerged in the tawdry plans and gruesome adventures of
his people. The play must justify those hesitant speeches of Akim:
“It is your soul that God wants,” and, at the very end (the sense of
the
cry, if not the precise words), “Here a man is confessing his soul,
and you speak of drawing up an indictment.” It was not an easy
thing to do and Mr. Emanuel Reicher and the others of the Guild
came near to success; but at times the purely dramatic values of the
play, its physical power, quite overcame them. Especially this is
true of Ida Rauh and Helen Westley and Arthur Hohl; least, of
Frank Reicher. There is an appropriate word of praise for every
member of the cast; it is not necessary to speak it here. In the way
of permanent things Frank Reicher stands secure; and far more
certain than any acting, the enduring beauty of Mr. Lee Simonson's
scenery. The practitioners of the new art of stage settings are some-
times given to demand absolute praise or blame and to belittle the
spectator's appreciation of the set in relation to the play. But per-
haps Mr. Simonson will understand that it is meant as the highest
praise and not as evasion to say of his sets that, surpassingly lovely
as they were in themselves, they were finest because they helped to
create the play as one of profound issues and not as a hot drama of
the crime passionnel. Their simplicity, their depths, their clean per-
spectives, and their robust vigor, the rafters and the lights and the
immeasurable health and fruitfulness of the grain are not technical
devices or items in a decorative scheme; they are creative powers in
the play, and here, as in The FAITHFUL, Mr. Simonson's achieve-
ment has gone far beyond the work of his comrades.
a
The negative events of the season have been the absence of a review
a
by Irving Berlin and of a play by and with George M. Cohan. Fail-
ing that, the truest piece of American work is Booth Tarkington's


GILBERT SELDES
407
Clarence; it holds on while a far wittier, far more intelligent piece
like Too Many HUSBANDS comes badly off, because Clarence is
native and unpretentious and simply amusing. The moments when
the humour strikes too near home are few, but the play remains real,
while an equally agreeable farce, My Lady Friends, is always su-
perficially clever.
The writers of plays are still hesitant about humour; WEDDING
Bells, The Gold Diggers, and the whole upholstered repertoire
of Mr. Al Woods testify to the superior stage qualities of rough wit
and incessant action, leaving Potash and Clarence virtually alone in
the projection of human character. But I would gratefully record
that going to the theatre has been very easy this year.
.
The theatre is not a social institution; it is only adventitiously a
part of the communal life. It is intensely a personal thing at which
we are either interested or bored, moved to laughter and to tears,
or not. In a world where such specious examples as The Jest,
DÉCLASSÉE, and APHRODITE are considered artistic successes, there
can be little room for discussing the art of the theatre. In a season
where social criticism from the stage is limited to woolly little plays
about the nationalization of women, the community function of the
theatre can hardly be said to exist.
a
The fact sticks, magnificently, that the proportion of plays which
have interested and charmed and moved the intelligent is high, and
if the theatre is decadent not a few of us will cheerfully stand by it
in its decay. It would be easier for us if the acting were a bit better;
perhaps before the month is out one superlative piece of work will
occur to give point to a discussion of the rest.
GILBERT SELDES


COMMENT
THE
HE editors of The Dial wish to set on record their gratitude
those readers who have taken the trouble to write letters of
criticism to them, and to the far greater number who have silently
supported them by plunging for the whole year after the first and
second monthly numbers were issued. In the excitement of putting
the issues through the press there has been little time for self-
analysis; but we are conscious of a certain happiness.
The nicest thing has been the repeated assurance that The Dial :
is not wholly superfluous in a world which has magazines for collec-
tors of stamps, manufacturers of embalming fluid, and propagandists
for more intimate trade relations with Peru. All of these are praise-
worthy objects of human endeavour, none of them alien to the in-
quisitive spirit, but it has not seemed to the editors that others tilled
the last far corners of the field of literature and art, and the Ameri-
can weeklies and monthlies have, with a few exceptions, defined the
limits of the garden they propose to cultivate.
If a magazine isn't to be simply a waste of good white paper
it
ought to print, with some regularity, either such work as would
otherwise have to wait years for publication, or such as would not be
acceptable elsewhere. The inevitable and the "impossible” pieces of
work give the special tone to a magazine which must, in the interest
of completeness, publish a number of other things which are, in any
case, predestined for publication. So we thank our critics for the re-
buke that "you are printing things no other magazine would print”
as well as for the words of praise that "you are bringing into the
light work any publication would be proud of.” The Dial hopes
always to deserve both comments. It hopes also to deserve the faith
of its friends who know that the first three numbers do not represent
everything which the editors hope eventually to give in its pages.
“The enlarged programme of the American Library Association
points to a time when books will be freely accessible to every man,
woman, and child in America.” This may not be the moment for
adding burdens to the excellent organization which reports that in
thirty states, less than half of the population has a library service;


COMMENT
409
but the words "freely accessible” move us to a febrile remonstrance.
In two states of the Union the restrictions on publications in foreign
languages are virtually prohibitive and in one it is illegal to buy or
sell any book in any foreign tongue. Not Le Livre de Mon Ami, not
Heine, not Don Quixote, not Tolstoi or Omar, not even a textbook
in astronomy. This is "learning" the foreigner with a vengeance;
and we sincerely hope the movement will be kept up. Because it is
the essence of America that no foreign thing or person has ever taken
root here, that the American tradition has rejected all the corrup-
tions of Europe and, alone of all nations, has developed its life in
magnificent isolation. The hated foreigner will presently learn that
if he wants to write masterpieces-not to speak of reading them—he
must write them in American.
Mr. Henry Mencken would approve more heartily of the preced-
ing sentence than of the spelling adopted by The Dial, because he
has devoted a gay and provocative book to The American Language
(Knopf). The rightest thing in the book is Mr. Mencken's under-
.
standing of America; he is one of the few men who understand its
national character, because he has none of the absurd Anglo-Saxon
prejudices and knows quite well that a goodly number of those who
are creating our language and our character are several thousand
miles removed from the Atlantic seaboard. We are the conservators
of language and of morals, and the creators as well. Mr. Mencken,
with his freely-running prejudice against the English, counts every
change, even if it is a corruption, as a blow for freedom. There are
moments when he seems to care less for the language than for a rap
at the British Empire; and he hates the pedants so much that one
fancies him reading Walter Pater in the grammar of Ring Lardner.
His prejudices are more apparent than his principles; but he has
done a good work of scholarship and he has shown that one can care
for letters without being dull.
IN 1829, Mr. Mencken notes, one Samuel L. Knapp published his
Lectures on American Literature, and challenging England to
produce a "tuneful sister” surpassing Mrs. Sigourney, proclaimed
his belief that the poetry of America would in time rival that of
Greece and Rome. Perhaps it has already surpassed them. But when
it is joined to music the poetry of America fails to inspire its com-


410
COMMENT
posers and the grand opera of our time is a melancholy affair.
Heaven knows there are excuses enough without Mr. Cecil Forsythe's
illuminating theory that an expanding, outward-looking, and im-
perialist nation does not produce great music. But it seems to us that
all of our composers (except those who are making light opera) are
making desperate efforts to write Italian, German, or Russian grand
opera, accepting all of the traditions even when their material is as
indigenous as an Indian legend or Rip Van Winkle. It does not
occur to them that Italian grand opera was as artificially imposed on
England centuries ago as it is on us to-day, and that its traditions
have nothing to do with our lives. It is as reasonable for an Ameri-
can to write a Tristan as for Wagner to have done a Parsifal. But
Parsifal is a comparatively German opera, and Verdi's Falstaff is
magnificently Italian. Crimes of passion and the absurdities of
operatic recitative are foreign, and until we reform them and all the
things they represent, we may not have an opera worth listening to.
Until now—unless we have missed something—no grand opera by
Americans has given us half the musical and emotional satisfaction
of Mr. Irving Berlin's Stop! Look! Listen! If that be treason, let
Mr. Gatti make the most of it.
"My name is John Wellington Wells, a dealer in magic and
spells. ..." The other sorcerer, H. G. of the same name, after
.
casting a spell on half the young novelists of England, is embarking
on another adventure, a rather bouncy affair as usual, but with splen-
did proportions. It is, we take it, a history of civilization, and Mr.
Wells is being checked by scientists of distinction while his effer-
vescent mind seethes with ideas about the world. One cannot help
being a bit staggered by the thought of this undertaking, even at
half-a-crown per month. Mr. Wells is the last man whose history
we would unreservedly accept; he is, none the less, the only man
whose history of the world we feel confident of reading without
"skipping the descriptions." What we cannot understand is that
he should trouble to supply illustrations.






CLAIR DE LUNE.
BY PAUL CÉZANNE



THE IN VU
VI
DIAL
OISTO
APRIL 1920
THE BOSS
BY JAMES STEPHENS
HE
E got the position which he had coveted so long, worked for so
long, and so well deserved: but, the position obtained, he was
born again, a different blood began to course through his veins, and
another brain began to function in his head.
He was converted from being a person liable to dismissal into
being a person having power to dismiss: as wonderful a change,
perhaps, as the spiritual one which turns a sinner into something we
call a saint, or sends a man flying away from the public house to-
wards which he used to fly.
He had performed all the deeds of kindness and meanness which
the average man commits. He had aided and been jolly with his
• equals and inferiors, he had been obliging and flattering to his more
distant superiors: but against his immediate superior in every grade
he had conducted a bitter unceasing war of subterranean strategy,
tale-bearing, and worse, which ceased only when he occupied the
position which the other had occupied, and turned his mind to the
destruction of the person who was now his direct officer.
What saps he had digged and with what care he had laid the
mine! What explosions had accompanied his advance, and what a
number of men had by his machinery been blown as completely out
of their jobs as if they had been thrown through a roof or a window !
Speaking generally the man who loses his employment loses all
that was contemporary with it, including his spirit, including the
right to wish to get even with his supplanter, for the centuries of
wage receiving and business ethics have moulded the human being
to their own convention. The movement of wages, the insecurity


412
THE BOSS
1
a
of work, the privileges accorded to a business necessity, these have
attained a character as impersonal and detached as the vagaries and
tumults of the elements, and as unquestioned as the rights of a thun-
derbolt to explode into whoever's roof it chooses. Therefore, and
because an enemy'cannot be fashioned out of a wage-slave, he had
made no enemies during his victorious advance; he eliminated the
people who were in his way, and they, accepting, and, by continuity,
obeying, the rules of the game, acquiesced in their own elimination
when the time came and the rule was against them.
One often states a thing roundly in order that it may then be
denied by amplification. Saving in the rarest and strangest of cir-
cumstances no conversion is sudden; no man ceases to be “this” and
becomes “that” in the twinkling of an eye, for we are evolving con-
tinually and by imperceptible gradations from what we were into
what we will be. But the moment arrives when heed is taken of the
work done, the separated deeds rush together, the individual values
are added by the subconscious master within us, and we are dramati-
cally presented with a total and a new rate of vibration. That mo-
ment of consciousness is conversion and change of heart, and it is
by this growth and conclusion of a thought that all men are changed,
and it was in this manner that he had changed. His mind had been
preparing itself for years to be the mind of a manager and a tyrant,
and as soon as he became the one he had power to be the other,
and was both. He sat in the vast managerial office which once he
would have entered on tiptoe or glided from with a deferential back,
and so well was he prepared for the change that he never even
thought of those other days, or remembered that other attitude: he
recommenced with a clean slate, a clean year, a clean heart: he was
born again.
To his desk in the secluded managerial room the entire vast busi-
ness of his company flowed in departmental reports or suggestions,
and only that could occur which had been authorized by his hasty
initial. He knew all that was happening whether near at hand or
far away: he knew the stocks they held, and the stocks they had got
rid of: those which were on order and those which were condemned:
he knew why this department paid and why that other languished,
or just paid for its keep; why such an official should get an imme-
diate increase in his salary and much personal affability; and why
another should be treated with brevity or reserve. All the machin-
a


JAMES STEPHENS
413
1
ery of the great organization was under his hands; he touched it at
any point he pleased, and there was no part of it obscure or unim-
portant to his mind.
The business was prosperous when he took command, but it was
his intention that it should be marvellous, and that when the name
of the place was uttered it should impact upon the mind of the
hearer swiftly, monstrously, like a winged mountain, like an earth-
quake on wheels.
He required help for all this, but he would not have admitted a
requirement in that term, for his predecessors in the caste had purged
that kindly word from their vocabulary, and had translated it clev-
erly, atrociously, into the word "tools.”
There is but one disposable material in the universe—it is life,
and for man, when he has evolved beyond rudimentary abilities,
there is but one tool to be found—and it is man. To his mind man
had become as common as mud, as useful as coal, as unvoiced and
anonymous as either. He would have preferred a true machine
under his hand, for he had no vendetta against his kind, but every
machine is harnessed to a man, and a man is the motor, the crank,
and the brake, however otherwise we distribute the names.
Here is a man who is good-for-nothing where he is, he must
be put somewhere where his value can be extracted. Here is one
from whom all value has been taken, he must be thrown out. Thank
heaven that he is a legged, mobile affair, and will not remain where
he is thrown as a tongued eyesore, a perpetual exasperation; and
thank heaven for the police who keep the rubbish heaps moving on.
The statement that the meek shall inherit the earth was pro-
foundly uttered, for we come inevitably to the possession of that
which we do not care to enjoy; but those who are capable of such
careless surrender are not meek; their values are different, and they
cannot be bribed with earths for which they have no need, nor be
disturbed by any impact of circumstance. Circumstance falls from
them as water falls from a cliff, and the world they move in, or that
to which they are bound, is not visible to the eye of a manager. He
may come to their ears as the buzzing of a fly comes, but in all rela-
tions they are free. Yet there are meek people, poor people, cow-
ards; and they are meek and poor and cowardly because they want
urgently something which is scarcely worth getting. The man who
has a desire is condemned to be a slave, and he will have outgrown
.


414
THE BOSS
а
his desire before he attains it. But like breeds like, and he will get
a new desire in time to prevent him losing the old fetter. He is
obedient, and he is the backbone and prop of all tyrannies and sys-
tems of tyranny: on thy belly shalt thou go, and, God help us! our
heads are full of bellies.
Sometimes he had the trouble which he understood, and looked
for and circumvented; for humanity is flawed; but in almost all
cases the oil of dismissal could smooth any troubled water; and
after it there would remain no ripple or wimple on the surface of
the business. He smoothed and smoothed and smoothed endlessly;
that is he discharged ruthlessly every man who did not absolutely
suit him; but all clockwork and interchangeable parts get tired and
get rusty and stick, and there is no let to one's supervision. Thus in
keeping the machine in order he became a tyrant not of cruelty but
of efficiency; and was himself as much a slave to the system as any
timid underling in the lower office; and was the veriest tool of the
circumstances which he seemed to control. The donkeyman tending
his engine does not know that he is the engine; and he, overlooking,
planning, combining, in an endless wakefulness of energy and readi-
ness and sacrifice, overlooked all and was obedient as a dog because
he was known to himself, and was called by others, the Manager.
If he had known that he was enslaved would he have been more
efficient or not efficient at all? It is a question of whether he had or
had not a character; that is, a moral basis to his nature and an intel-
lectual consciousness of his own being apart from his acts. He had
a will, but it swirled into one narrow, habitual passage and there
swept everything before it: he had a culture, that is, an immediate
perception, for other things are knowledge, but this instancy is cul-
ture; so he saw a thing mentally; and on the very point and tipping
of vision he saw business or no business, and proclaimed infallibly
that it was or it was not "worth while."
But there are an hundred cultures, and we have to learn all of
them before we can dream of measuring our bulk against the meek
who inherit the earth. We have to be tried searchingly, rigorously,
and no man has been tried until he has attained to eminence and has
gone back again into obscurity.
Every man who is something more than a mineral deposit or a
bog gets an instalment towards conversion almost as often as he gets
a cold in the head. If we had the knowledge we could say at what


JAMES STEPHENS
415
/
fraction of a second and by what precise conjunctions the latter
occurred, and if we had the knowledge we might trace the conversion
of some Paul ten years backwards to a kick that he got from a mule.
This is true, that everything must have a beginning; but a beginning
and an end may be so incongruous that, without a long, logical cata-
logue of the banalities which unite them, we should laugh ourselves
out of hope of anything, even of heaven. So he had to undergo the
first experience which would, years afterwards, retire him as a man-
ager, and advance him a little as a human being.
There was a man, the head of a department, and he, the
manager,
had his knife in this man. The man knew the knife was in, the
whole office knew it, and he, the man, and the office, were waiting
for the moment to arrive when the knife would get the twist they
expected and the man would disappear.
Many of the staff were sorry in the inert way a staff is sorry.
Yet, the state of expectancy being a state of exasperation, they were
anxious that whatever was to happen should happen and be done
with. The man was a good man, in the sense of a tool, but he was
not good enough. He put into the business all that he had, but he
had not enough, and while his department was profitable it was not
profitable in the figures which the manager demanded from it.
So this sub-manager was one who was treated first with decent
reserve and then with the indecent brevity which is a business ad-
vertisement to the subject that if he is a tactful person he will
resign; and the cumulative effect of which forces almost any man
to resign.
There is a business etiquette, and while the lower castes are dis-
charged openly and casually the higher ones are allowed to retain
their personal dignity and are permitted to discharge themselves.
But this man did not resign!
The manager gave the adept twist to the knife which he had seen
practised so often and which he had practised so often himself; but
the man did not resign, and the manager was nonplussed.
Here was a thing which, in his experience, had not happened
before, and he pondered it. He not only twisted the knife, but, as
the business saying is, he put the screw on. He might as fruitfully
have put his hat on, for the man did not resign, and the manager saw
himself confronted not alone with disobedience but with that terri-
fying form of it which consists in a denial of the rules of the game.


416
THE BOSS
It is a rule of the game that the other person's pride must do one
fair half of the evil which you meditate against him; and if he will
not do his share of the dirty business how can you be expected to do
yours, or be reasonably compelled to shoulder the lot?
The manager looked at the man, not in person but in space: he
surveyed him from the seclusion of his vast offices; against that man
his mind turned in an anger which steadily became a hate.
When they had to meet he contrived that their meeting should be
public, and if his remarks were scanty they were intentionally loud,
and his departure was calculatedly abrupt.
When, not having special reason to meet the man, he did meet
him, this also he arranged should be in public, but on these meetings
he did not see the man; he overlooked him or looked through him as
though he were woven of empty air and was not visible.
The former of such meetings was taken as the twist of the knife;
the second was understood as the putting on of the screw, and neither
of them worked, for the man grew affable as he grew distant, and
would present an unexpressive, unconscious back to the eye which
had arranged to look at him and through him and beyond him as
though he were a ghost or a plate glass window.
Yet if a thing had to be done the manager was not one to shrink
from it. He had obeyed the rule and had given his man the equi-
table opportunity of saving his dignity which the rule prescribed, but
if a person had no dignity to save or no desire to save it!
He determined to dismiss the department manager, and he knew
that it would be a pleasure to look into that face as he uttered the
formulae which he was carefully meditating.
It would be brief, the formulae, but it would be as expressive as
a thunderclap or the snarl of a dog. There would be no obscurity
in the bullet of a sentence he intended to fire, for, he considered it
almost with terror, if the meaning were not adequately and irrevo-
cably conveyed, that man would have it in him to return to his work
and to overlook the dismissal.
He thought for a moment of discharging him in public, and he
would have done so willingly but that it would be bad for the staff
morale, and might seem, that which business affairs must never ap-
pear, personal. It was personal, however, for between the pair there
existed a relation which, although it was formed entirely of dislike,
was real and palpitatingly so.


JAMES STEPHENS
417
The knowledge that the manager has a personal side must not
emerge in business, for while a business will court advertisement
with all its heart it will avoid notoriety with all its soul, and the
great, domestic asset of a manager, a general, a professor, is his im-
personality. That must be preserved or anything may result; any-
thing, unless we are prepared to make the largest possible assumption
and declare that a great man is in occupation of the position.
The reason he did not write to him, with the dismissal instant in
black and white and immortalized by copying into a letter book,
was that he wished to look into the man's face and deliver himself
into that face like a thrust sword.
He determined to see the man and to dismiss him by word of
mouth, and he determined to write to him also in such chosen and
cogent terms that even he could find no back-door to them.
He touched a bell and told the messenger to inform the manager
department C that The Manager wished to speak to him. He stood
for a moment looking about the room, then he moved two chairs
which were near his desk to the side of the room, and he manipulated
a third chair into a position which he carefully chose. Then a cer-
tain remainder of youthfulness impelled him to arrange his desk for
the interview until an intimation of maturity, of power,
invited him
to desist.
The man knocked at the door, entered, and was invited by
the manager's expressive hand to the not too distant but very de-
tached chair referred to. The distance between this chair and the
manager's desk permitted conversation, but it prohibited familiarity;
and it had the effect of isolating the individual who sat on it not
only from the manager's desk but almost from the room: he was
marooned on it and segregated and indicated as a stranger. The
person who occupies a seat thus cleverly arranged feels, though it be
insensibly, that he has lost all contacts, that he is "in the air,” and
his disadvantages become so immediately evident to himself that
the equilibrium of his mind is disturbed and an automatic idea of
inferiority awakens in him, with its logical sentiment of humility
and obedience.
But the manager had misread his man, or had, from a feeling of
antagonism and hate, and egotism, neglected to read him or accord
him the personal mental interest which had already been emotion-
ally incurred.


418
THE BOSS
a
a
The man had come in silently; he sat down silently, grimly, pos-
ing with slow care across his knees an immaculate hat, and a long,
flexible whalebone which could be described as a walking-stick. He
was not distressed by the isolated chair: he was too self-centred, self-
contained, self-conscious for any such tricky distresses to reach him.
He looked on the manager very calmly, very coldly, with a certain
weight of regard as though his whole head was bent upon him and
not his eyes alone, and at him the manager looked with no weight
but with eagle directness.
If one may compare essentially different things, and small things
to great, there was the difference between their gaze that there is
between a block of granite and a flash of lightning. The one could
topple smashingly, the other plunge as disastrously, and from both,
in both, there were tranquillity and power. Two minds were made
up, and they were immovable. Each mind, as they looked, felt the
other, and each knew that here were strength and carelessness and
determination.
The manager spoke:
“The condition of your department is not satisfactory.”
The man nodded the large head which was directed as an eye
upon the manager.
"And,” the latter continued, “I have invited you here in order
that you may tender me your resignation.”
“I will not resign,” said the man's immovable head.
“You will place me under an awkward, unpleasant necessity.”
"It is neither awkward nor unpleasant,” said the man.
He rose from his chair, a powerful bulk of movement, and strode
to the door. There was a bolt inside the door and he shot this. He
returned to his chair and bent his head profoundly on the manager.
“Let us understand each other," said he.
The manager rose from his chair.
“Open that door!” he commanded.
"In a moment," said the immovable man, "when I have said
what I came to say.”
He lifted his chair out of isolation, placed it nearer to the man-
ager's desk, and sat upon it: then he put on his hat; not imperti-
nently, but to leave his hands free. The manager sank back into his
own chair, and regarded his finger nails.
“Nothing that you can say,” said he, “can alter
you can say,” said he, “can alter my determination.”


JAMES STEPHENS
419
"I am aware of that,” replied the man, "but I also am determined
to say what I have come to say: you have not all the determination
of the world.”
The manager nodded.
Said the other:
“I am in this fortunate position, that I do not depend on my
employment for
my
livelihood.”
The manager raised and lowered his brows in the manner of one
who ticks off items which he fears will be lengthy but will of neces-
sity have some conclusion.
His companion continued:
"I am thus so free that I can afford to resent ill-will, and chastise
a personal antagonist.'
The manager wearily checked this statement and permitted it to
disappear.
“Between you, the six months' manager of this house, and me, who
have held an important position here for ten years, there has arisen
a personal ill-will, and you are the aggressor. You have determined
to place on me a public affront, I have determined to resent it and
to punish it."
The manager nodded another item away.
“In what way,” said he, "am I to be punished ?”
“You have called me here to discharge me; I,"touching his whale-
bone, "have brought this here to beat you."
“You understand,” said the manager, "what will happen after
you have beaten me ?”
''
“I will pay the fine or do the three months: it is a matter of in-
difference to me.”
"In that case,” said the manager, "I take this opportunity of
informing you that this establishment has not any further need of
your services.”
The two men looked with cold excitement, with cold rage, at each
other. The man eased the whalebone in his hand, rose to his feet
and strode to the desk.
“I think I can manage to do you three months' damage before
they break the door open,” said he.
He reached a hand to the manager's shoulder, and the latter's
hand stretched automatically forward and hovered over the bell
upon his table: thus they halted for two seconds staring fixedly at


420
THE BOSS
a
each other: then, with a disdainful movement of the lips, the man-
ager removed his hand without having touched the bell, and at once
the man took his hand from the manager's shoulder.
As instant as had been their movements so quickly had all anger
evaporated from the discharged man's mind, and where rage had
been there remained pride. He was not proud of himself, nor was
he proud of the manager; in a curious but satisfactory way he was
proud of man, and he was extraordinarily happy.
“You did not ring the bell,” said he with a smile, and by that
smile the manager's mind was emptied of hate or disdain as if some-
thing magical had come and these had not dared to await it.
"No," he replied, “this seemed rather a personal matter.”
The man turned to the door.
“Well, I must be off.”
"I am to take it,” said the
manager, "that
your resig-
nation?”
“Pooh!” said the man, "you sacked me a minute ago, good-bye.
“Good-bye,” said the manager, and the door closed between them.
He sat down, and for a time was shaken by little spasms of
laughter; but the remainder of the day passed for him in a stubborn
lassitude which he could account for, but could not shake off.
In a week the matter was remembered only as a curious episode,
and in a month it was forgotten, and he had sacked two other men.
Yet when six months had elapsed he had not discharged any one else,
and thereafter he rarely discharged any; but ten years passed before
he resigned from a business in which he could take no further, real
interest, and in which, he considered, he was leading the life of a
donkey.
you tender
6


TWO POEMS
BY MARIANNE MOORE
PICKING AND CHOOSING
Literature is a phase of life: if
one is afraid of it, the situation is irremediable; if
one approaches it familiarly,
what one says of it is worthless. Words are constructive
when they are true; the opaque allusion—the simulated flight
upward-accomplishes nothing. Why cloud the fact
that Shaw is self-conscious in the field of sentiment but is
otherwise re-
warding? that James is all that has been
said of him but is not profound? It is not Hardy
the distinguished novelist and Hardy the poet, but one man
"interpreting life through the medium of the
emotions.” If he must give an opinion, it is permissible that the
critic should know what he likes. Gordon
Craig with his “this is I” and “this is mine," with his three
wise men, his "sad French greens” and his Chinese cherries-
Gordon Craig, so
inclinational and unashamed-has carried
the precept of being a good critic, to the last extreme. And
Burke is a
psychologist-of acute, raccoon-
like curiosity. Summa diligentia;
to the humbug whose name is so amusing-very young and ve-
ry rushed, Caesar crossed the Alps on the "top of a
diligence.” We are not daft about the meaning but this
familiarity


422
TWO POEMS
with wrong meanings puzzles one. Humming-
bug, the candles are not wired for electricity.
Small dog, going over the lawn, nipping the linen and saying
that you have a badger-remember Xenophon;
only the most rudimentary sort of behaviour is necessary
to put us on the scent; a "right good
salvo of barks,” a few "strong wrinkles” puckering the
skin between the ears, are all we ask.
ENGLAND
i
with its baby rivers and little towns, each with its abbey or its
cathedral;
with voices—one voice perhaps, echoing through the
transept—the.
criterion of suitability and convenience; and Italy with its equal
shores—contriving an epicureanism from which the grossness
has been
extracted: and Greece with its goats and its gourds, the nest of
modified illusions:
and France, the “chrysalis of the nocturnal butterfly” in
whose products, mystery of construction diverts one from what was
originally one's
object-substance at the core: and the East with its snails, its
emotional
shorthand and jade cockroaches, its rock crystal and its
imperturbability,
all of museum quality: and America where there
is the little old ramshackle victoria in the south, where cigars are
smoked on the
street in the north; where there are no proof-readers, no silk-
worms, no digressions;
the wild man's land; grass-less, links-less, language-less country-
in which letters are written
not in Spanish, not in Greek, not in Latin, not in shorthand


MARIANNE MOORE
423
but in plain American which cats and dogs can read! The letter “a”
in psalm and.calm when
pronounced with the sound of “a” in candle, is very
noticeable
but
why should continents of misapprehension have to be accounted for
by the
fact? Does it follow that because there are poisonous toadstools
which resemble mushrooms, both are dangerous? In the case of
mettlesomeness which may be
mistaken for appetite, of heat which may appear to be haste,
no con-
clusions
may
be drawn. To have misapprehended the matter, is to
have confessed
that one has not looked far enough. The sublimated wisdom
of China, Egyptian discernment, the cataclysmic torrent of emotion
compressed
in the verbs of the Hebrew language, the books of the man who
is able
to say, “ 'I envy nobody but him and him only, who catches more
fish than
I do,'”—the flower and fruit of all that noted superi-
ority—should one not have stumbled upon it in America, must one
imagine
that it is not there? It has never been confined to one locality.


MARK TWAIN'S SATIRE
BY VAN WYCK BROOKS
"No real gentleman will tell the naked truth in the presence of ladies.”
-A Double Barrelled Detective Story.
"I
AM persuaded that the future historian of America will find
your
political tracts of Voltaire.” In these words, which he addressed
to Mark Twain himself, Bernard Shaw suggested what was un-
doubtedly the dominant intention of Mark Twain's genius, the rôle
which he was, if one may say so, pledged by nature to fulfil. "He
will be remembered,” says Mr. Howells, "with the great humorists
of all time, with Cervantes, with Swift, or with any others worthy
of his company.” Voltaire, Cervantes, Swift! It was as a satirist,
we perceive, as a spiritual emancipator, that those of his con-
temporaries who most generously realized him thought of Mark
Twain. Did they not, under the spell of that extraordinary per-
sonal presence of his, in the magnetism, the radiance of what might
be called his temperamental will-to-satire, mistake the wish for
the deed?
What is a satirist? A satirist, if I am not mistaken, is one who
holds
up to the measure of some more or less permanently admirable
ideal the inadequacies and the deformities of the society in which he
lives. It is Rabelais holding up to the measure of healthy-minded-
ness the obscurantism of the Middle Ages; it is Molière holding up
to the measure of an excellent sociality everything that is eccentric,
inelastic, intemperate; it is Voltaire holding up to the measure of
the intelligence the forces of darkness and superstition: it is a criti-
cism of the spirit of one's age, and of the facts in so far as the
spirit is embodied in them, dictated by some powerful, personal, and
supremely conscious reaction against that spirit. If this is true,
Mark Twain cannot be called a satirist. Certain of the facts of
American life he did undoubtedly satirize. “The state of American
society and government his stories and articles present,” says Miss
Edith Wyatt, "is, broadly speaking, truthfully characteristic of the


VAN WYCK BROOKS
425
state of society and government we find now in Chicago, the most
murderous and lawless civil community in the world. What is ex-
ceptional in our great humorist's view of our national life is not the
ruffianism of the existence he describes for us on the Mississippi and
elsewhere in the United States, but the fact that he writes the truth
about it.” Who will deny that this is so? Mark Twain satirizes the
facts, or some of the facts, of our social life, he satirizes them
vehemently. But when it comes to the spirit of our social life, that
is quite another matter. Let us take his own humorous testimony:
“The silent colossal National Lie that is the support and confederate
of all the tyrannies and shams and inequalities and unfairnesses that
afflict the peoples—that is the one to throw bricks and sermons at.
But let us be judicious and let somebody else begin.'
Many people have said that Mark Twain "lost his nerve.” It
ought to be sufficiently clear by this time, however, that he did not
lose his nerve, simply because, in reality, he had never found it.
He had never, despite Mr. Howells, “come into his intellectual con-
sciousness” at all, he had never come into the consciousness of any
ideal that could stand for him as a measure of the society about him.
Moreover, he had so involved himself in the whole popular com-
plex of his age that he could not strike out in any direction with-
out wounding his wife or his friends, without contravening some
loyalty that had become sacred to him, without destroying the very
basis of his happiness. He had never risen to the conception of
literature as a great impersonal social instrument. An irresponsible
child himself, he could not even feel that he had a right to exercise
a will-to-satire that violated the wishes of those to whom he had
subjected himself. Consequently, instead of satirizing the spirit of
his age, he outwardly acquiesced in it and even flattered it.
If anything is certain, however, it is that Mark Twain was in-
tended to be a sort of American Rabelais who would have done, as
regards the puritanical commercialism of the "Gilded Age," as he
called it, very much what the author of Pantagruel did as regards
the obsolescent mediaevalism of sixteenth-century France. Reading
his books and his life one seems to divine his proper character and
career embedded in the life of his generation as the bones of a dino-
saur are embedded in a prehistoric clay-bank: many of the vertebrae
are missing, other parts have crumbled away, we cannot with final
certainty identify the portentous creature. But the dimensions help
a


426
MARK TWAIN'S SATIRE
و
us, the skull, the thigh, the major members are beyond dispute; we
feel that we are justified from the evidence in assuming what sort
of being we have before us, and our imagination fills out in detail
what its appearance must, or rather would have been.
When we consider how many of Mark Twain's yarns and anec-
dotes, the small change as it were of his literary life, had for their
butt the petty aspects of the tribal morality of America—Sabbath-
breaking, the taboos of the Sunday School, the saws of Poor Rich-
ard's Almanac, we can see that his birthright was of our age rather
than of his own. Hear what he says of “the late Benjamin Frank-
lin”: “His maxims were full of animosity toward boys. Nowadays
a boy cannot follow out a single natural instinct without tumbling
over some of those everlasting aphorisms and hearing from Franklin
on the spot. If he buys two cents' worth of peanuts, his father says,
‘Remember what Franklin has said, my son, -"A groat a day's a
penny a year," ' and the comfort is all gone out of those peanuts.”
He delights in turning the inherited wisdom of the pioneers into
such forms as this: "Never put off till to-morrow what you can do
day after to-morrow, just as well.” Here we have the note of
Huckleberry Finn, who is not so much at war with the tribal moral-
ity as impervious to it, as impervious as a child of another epoch.
He visits a certain house at night and describes the books he finds
piled on the parlour table: “One was Pilgrim's Progress, about a
man that left his family, it didn't say why. I read considerable in it
now and then. The statements was interesting, but tough.” And
again, speaking of a family dinner: “Uncle Silas he asked a pretty
long blessing over it, but it was worth it; and it didn't cool it a bit,
neither, the way I've seen them kind of interruptions do lots of
times.” One may say that a man in whom the continuity of racial
experience is cut as sharply as these passages indicate it was cut in
Mark Twain is headed straight for an inferior cynicism; but what
is almost destiny for the ordinary man is the satirist's opportunity:
if he can recover himself quickly, if he can substitute a new and
personal ideal for the racial ideal he has abandoned, that solution
of continuity is the making of him. For Mark Twain this was im-
possible. Every one can remember instances of his instinctive revolt
against the spirit of his time, moral, religious, political, economic.
"My idea of our civilization,” he said, freely, in private, “is that it
is a shabby, poor thing and full of cruelties, vanities, arrogancies,


VAN WYCK BROOKS
427
meannesses and hypocrisies. As for the word, I hate the sound of
it, for it conveys a lie; and as for the thing itself, I wish it was in
hell, where it belongs.” And consider this grave conclusion in one
of his later letters: “Well, the 19th century made progress-the
first progress in ‘ages and ages —colossal progress. In what? Ma-
terialities. Prodigious acquisitions were made in things which add
to the comfort of many and make life harder for as many more.
But the addition to righteousness? Is that discoverable? I think
not. The materialities were not invented in the interest of righteous-
ness; that there is more righteousness in the world because of them
than there was before, is hardly demonstrable, I think. In Europe
and America there is a vast change (due to them) in ideals—do you
admire it? All Europe and all America are feverishly scrambling
for money. Money is the supreme ideal—all others take tenth place
with the great bulk of the nations named. Money-lust has always
existed, but not in the history of the world was it ever a craze, a
madness, until your time and mine. This lust has rotted these
nations; it has made them hard, sordid, ungentle, dishonest, oppres-
sive.” Who can fail to see that the whole tendency of Mark Twain's
spirit ran precisely counter to the spirit of his age, that he belonged
as naturally in the Opposition as all the great European writers of
his time? Can we not also see, accordingly, that in stultifying him,
in keeping him a child, his wife and his friends were the unconscious
agents of the business regime, bent upon deflecting and restraining
a force which, if it had matured, would have seriously interfered
with the enterprise of industrial pioneering?
Far from having any stimulus to satire, therefore, Mark Twain
was perpetually driven back by the innumerable obligations he had
assumed into the rôle that gave him, as he said, comfort and peace.
And to what did he not have to submit? “We shall have bloody
work in this country some of these days when the lazy canaille get
organized. They are the spawn of Santerre and Fouquier-Tinville,”
we find Thomas Bailey Aldrich writing to Professor Woodberry in
1894. There was the attitude of Mark Twain's intimates toward
social and economic questions: the literary confraternity of the gen-
eration was almost a solid block behind the financial confraternity.
In the moral and religious departments the path of the candidate
for gentility was no less strait and narrow. “It took a brave man
before the Civil War,” says Mr. Paine, "to confess he had read


428
MARK TWAIN'S SATIRE
The Age of Reason": Mark Twain observed once that he had read
it as a cub pilot “with fear and hesitation.” A man whose life had
been staked on the pursuit of prestige, in short, could take no chances
in those days! The most fearful warnings followed Mark Twain
to the end. In 1880 or thereabouts he saw his brother Orion, in the
Middle West, excommunicated, after a series of infidel lectures,
and “condemned to eternal flames” by his own Church, the Pres-
byterian Church. Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer were con-
stantly being suppressed as immoral by the public libraries, and not
in rural districts merely but in great centres: in Denver and Omaha
in 1903, in godly Brooklyn as late as 1906. If the morals of those
boys were considered heretical, what would have been thought of
Mark Twain's other opinions? Even the title he suggested for his
first important book—The New Pilgrim's Progress—was regarded
in Hartford as a sacrilege. The trustees of the American Publishing
Company flatly refused to have anything to do with it, and it was
only when the money-charmer Bliss threatened to resign if he was
not allowed to publish the book that these pious gentlemen, who
abhorred heresy, but loved money more than they abhorred heresy,
gave in. It was these same gentlemen who later became Mark
Twain's neighbours and daily associates: it was with them he shared
that happy Hartford society upon whose "community of interests”
and "unity of ideals” the loyal Mr. Paine is obliged to dwell in his
biography. Was Mark Twain to be expected to attack them?
His spirit was indeed quiescent during the middle years of his
life: it is only in his early work, and only in his minor work, his
Sketches, that we find, smuggled in as it were among so many other
notes, the frank note of the satirist. One recalls the promise he had
made, as a sort of oblique acknowledgment of his father-in-law's
loan, to the readers of his Buffalo paper: “I only want to assure
parties having a friendly interest in the prosperity of the journal
that I am not going to hurt the paper deliberately and intentionally
at any time. I am not going to introduce any startling reforms, nor
in any way attempt to make trouble.” He, that "rough Western
miner” on probation, knew that he could not be too circumspect.
And yet among those early Sketches a risky note now and then in-
trudes itself: A Mysterious Visit, for example, that very telling
animadversion upon a society in which “thousands of the richest
and proudest, the most respected, honored and courted men” lie


VAN WYCK BROOKS
429
about their incomes to the tax-collector “every year.” Is it not the
case, however, that as time went on he got into the habit of some-
how not noticing these little spots on the American sun?
In The Gilded Age, it is true, his first and only novel, he seems
frank enough. One remembers the preface of that book: “It will
be seen that it deals with an entirely ideal state of society; and the
chief embarrassment of the writers in this realm of the imagination
has been the want of illustration. In a state where there is no fever
of speculation, no inflamed desire for sudden wealth, where the poor
are all simple-minded and contented, and the rich are all honest and
generous, where society is in a condition of primitive purity, and
politics is the occupation of only the capable and the patriotic,
there are necessarily no materials for such a history as we have con-
structed out of an ideal commonwealth.” That is fairly explicit
and fairly animated, even if it is only a paragraph from a preface;
and in fact the whole background of the story, from the capital city,
that "grand old benevolent national asylum for the Helpless,"
down, with its devastating irony about every American institution
save family life-Congress, the law, trial by jury, journalism, busi-
ness, education, and the Church, East and West alike, almost pre-
pares us for Mark Twain's final verdict regarding the “Blessings-of-
Civilization Trust.” And yet the total effect of the book is idyllic;
the mirage of the American myth lies over it like a rosy veil. Mark
Twain might permit himself a certain number of acid glances at the
actual face of reality; but he had to redeem himself, he wished to
redeem himself for doing so—for the story was written to meet the
challenge of certain ladies in Hartford-by making the main thread
the happy domestic tale of a well brought up young man who finds
in this very stubbly field the amplest and the softest straw for the
cozy family nest he builds in the end. Would he, for that matter,
have presumed to say his say at all if he had not had the moral sup-
port of the collaboration of Charles Dudley Warner? “Clemens,”
we are told, "had the beginning of a story in his mind, but had been
unwilling to undertake an extended work of fiction alone. He wel-
comed only too eagerly, therefore, the proposition of joint author-
ship.” Mark Twain, the darling of the masses, brought Warner a
return in money such as he probably never experienced again in his
life; Warner, the respected Connecticut man of letters, gave Mark
Twain the sanction of his name. An admirable combination! A


430
MARK TWAIN'S SATIRE
.
model indeed, one might have thought it, for all New Englanders
in their dealings with the West.
Am I exaggerating the significance of what might be taken for
an accident? In any case, it was not until that latter period when
he was too old and too secure in his seat to fear public opinion quite
in this earlier way that he had his revenge in The Man That Cor-
rupted Hadleyburg—not till then, and then only in a measure, did
he ever again, openly, and on a large scale, attack the spiritual in-
tegrity of industrial America. Occasionally, in some little sketch
like The Great Revolution in Pitcairn, where the Presbyterian
Yankee is described as "a doubtful acquisition,” he ventures a pin-
prick in the dark; and we know that he sent his 1601 anonymously
to a magazine editor who had once remarked, “O that we had a
Rabelais!”: “I judged,” said Mark Twain, “that I could furnish
him one.” But he had had his fingers burnt too often: he had no in-
tention of persisting. It is notable, therefore, that having begun with
contemporary society in The Gilded Age, he travels backward into
the past for his subsequent pseudo-satirical themes: he feels free to
express his social indignation only in terms of the seventh century
England of the Connecticut Yankee, the fifteenth century England
of The Prince and the Pauper, the fourteenth century France of
Joan of Arc, the sixteenth century Austria of The Mysterious
Stranger. Never again America, one observes, and never again the
present, for the first of these books alone contains anything like a
contemporary social implication and that, the implication of the
Connecticut Yankee, is a flattering one. But I am exaggerating.
Mark Twain does attack the present in the persons of the Czar and
King Leopold, whom all good Americans abhorred. As for his
attacks on corruption in domestic politics, on the missionaries in
China, was he not, when he at last "spoke out,” supported by the
leading citizens who are always ready to back the right sort of pro-
phet? Turn to Mr. Paine’s biography: you will find Mr. Carnegie,
whom he called Saint Andrew, begging Saint Mark for permission
to print and distribute in proper form that “sacred message” about
the missionaries. Mark Twain knew how to estimate the sanctity of
his own moral courage. "Do right,” he notes, in his private memo-
randa, “—do right and you will be conspicuous.”
Let us take one more instance, the supreme instance, of Mark
Twain's intention and failure in his predestined rôle, the Con-


VAN WYCK BROOKS
431
necticut Yankee itself. This was his largest canvas, his greatest
creative effort, the most ambitious and in certain respects the most
powerful of his works. Nothing could be more illuminating than a
glance at his motives in writing it.
What, in the first place, was his ostensible motive? “The book,”
he says, in a letter to his English publisher, "was not written for
America; it was written for England. So many Englishmen have
done their sincerest best to teach us something for our betterment
that it seems to me high time that some of us should substantially
recognize the good intent by trying to pry up the English nation to
a little higher level of manhood in turn."
No doubt, if Mark Twain had read this over in cold blood he
would have blushed for his own momentary priggishness; it was
not characteristic of him to talk about "higher levels of manhood.”
But he was in a pet. Matthew Arnold had been wandering among
us, with many deprecating gestures of those superangelic hands of
his. Matthew Arnold must always have been slightly irritating-
he was irritating even at home, and how much more irritating when,
having visited this country, he chose to dwell upon the rudimentary
language of General Grant! Mark Twain saw red. An animadver-
sion upon General Grant's grammar was an attack upon General
Grant, an attack upon General Grant was an attack upon America,
an attack upon America and upon General Grant was an attack upon
Mark Twain, upon his heart as a friend of General Grant, upon his
,
pocket-book as the publisher of General Grant, upon his amour-
propre as the countryman of General Grant. The pioneer in him
rose to the assault like a bull-buffalo in defence of the herd. Mark
Twain relapsed into a typical Huck Finn attitude: he doubled his
fists and said, “You're another!”—just as he did a few years later
in his reply to Paul Bourget. Then, longing for “a pen warmed
up in hell,” he set to work to put those red-coats, Matthew Arnold,
King George III, General Cornwallis and all the rest of them, for
by this time he was in the full furore of the myth of the American
Revolution, in their place. He even began a frantic defence of
American newspapers, which at other times he could not revile
enough, and filled his note-books with red-hot absurdities like this:
"Show me a lord and I will show you a man whom you couldn't
tell from a journeyman shoemaker if he were stripped, and who, in
all that is worth being, is the shoemaker's inferior.” In short, he
a
a


432
MARK TWAIN'S SATIRE
covered both shoulders with chips and defied any and every English-
man, the whole English race, indeed, to come and knock them off.
Now here, I say, is the crucial instance of Mark Twain's failure
as a satirist. In the moment of crisis the individual in him loses
itself in the herd; the intellect is submerged in a blind emotion that
leads him, unconsciously, into a sort of bouleversement of all his
actual personal intentions. Against his instinct, against his purpose
he finds himself doing, not the thing he really desires to do, that is,
to pry up thé American nation, if the phrase must be used, “to a
little higher level of manhood,” which is the true office of an Ameri-
can satirist, but to flatter the American nation and lull its con-
science to sleep. In short, instead of doing the unpopular thing,
which he really wanted to do, he does the most popular thing of
all: he glorifies the Yankee mechanic, already, in his own country,
surfeited with glory, and pours ridicule upon the two things that
least needed ridicule for the good of the Yankee mechanic's soul, if
only because in his eyes they were sufficiently ridiculous already—
England and the Middle Ages.
Could we have a better illustration of the betrayal of Mark
Twain's genius? If any country ever needed satire it is, and was,
America. Did not Mark Twain feel this himself in those rare mo-
ments of his middle years when he saw things truly with his own
eyes? Let us take from his letters a comment on American society
that proves it. He writes in 1873:
“There was absolutely nothing in the morning papers, you can
see for yourself what the telegraphic headings were: By teleGRAPH
-A Father Killed by His Son, A Bloody Fight in Kentucky, An
Eight-Year-Old Murderer, A Town in a State of General Riot, A
Court House Fired and Three Negroes Therein Shot While Escap-
ing, A Louisiana Massacre, Two to Three Hundred Men Roasted
Alive, A Lively Skirmish in Indiana (and thirty other similar head-
ings). The items under those headings all bear date yesterday, Apl.
16 (refer to your own paper)—and I give you my word of honour
that that string of commonplace stuff was everything there was in
the telegraphic columns that a body could call news. Well, said I
to myself, this is getting pretty dull; this is getting pretty dry; there
don't appear to be anything going on anywhere; has this progressive
nation gone to sleep?”


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a
/
Knowing as we do the significance of Mark Twain's humour, we di-
vine from the tone of these final comments that he already considers it
none of his business, that as a writer he proposes to do nothing about
it. But his eye is exceedingly wide open to those things! Would not
any one say, therefore, that there is something rather singular in the
spectacle of a human being living alertly in a land where such inci-
dents were the staple of news and yet being possessed with an ex-
clusive public passion to "pry the English nation up to a little higher
level of manhood”? Isn't it strange to see the inhabitant of a coun-
try where negroes were being lynched at an average rate of one
every four days filled with "a holy fire of righteous wrath,” as Mr.
Paine says, because people were unjustly hanged in the seventh cen-
tury? Mark Twain was sincerely angry, there is no doubt about
that. But isn't it curious how automatically his anger was deflected
from all its natural and immediate objects, from all those objects
it might have altered, and turned like an aircraft-gun upon the
vacuity of space itself? “Perhaps,” he says, in What is Man?,
defining what he calls the master passion, the hunger for self-
approval, “perhaps there is something that (man) loves more than
he loves peace the approval of his neighbours and the public. And
perhaps there is something which he dreads more than he dreads
pain—the disapproval of his neighbours and the public.” Mark
Twain ate his cake and had it too. He avoided the disapproval of
his neighbours by. not attacking America; he won their approval
by attacking England. Then, as we can see from his famous letter
to Andrew Lang, he tried to win the approval of England also by
deprecating the opinion of cultivated readers and saying that he
only wanted to be taken as a popular entertainer! "I have never
tried, in even one single little instance, to help cultivate the cul-
tivated classes. And I never had any ambition in that direc-
tion, but always hunted for bigger game—the masses. I have seldom
deliberately tried to instruct them, but I have done my best to
entertain them, for they can get instruction elsewhere.” That was
what became of his noble purpose to "pry up the English nation”
when the English nation manifested its objection to being pried up
by virtually boycotting the book. The wiles of simple folk! They
are the most successful of all.
The ironical part of this story—for it is worth pursuing—is that
Mark Twain, the sober individual, had for England an exaggerated
.
.
>


434
MARK TWAIN'S SATIRE
affection and admiration. His “first hour in England was an hour
of delight,” he records, "of rapture and ecstasy.” “I would a good
deal rather live here if I could get the rest of you over,” he writes
frankly in 1872; and Mr. Paine adds that “taking the snug island
as a whole, its people, its institutions”-its institutions, observe-
“its fair rural aspects, he had found in it only delight.” That was
true to the end of his days; against a powerful instinct he defended
even the Boer war because he so admired the genius of English
administration. He had personal reasons for this, indeed, in the
affection with which England always welcomed him. “On no occa-
sion in his own country,” we are told, of his first English lecture
tour, “had he won such a complete triumph”; and how many of
those triumphs there were! “As a rule,” says Mr. Paine, “English
readers of culture, critical readers, rose to an understanding of Mark
Twain's literary value with greater promptness than did the same
class of readers at home.” “Indeed,” says Mr. Howells, “it was in
England that Mark Twain was first made to feel that he had come
into his rightful heritage.” Did his feeling for England spring from
this? Who can say? But certainly it was intense and profound.
Early in his life he planned a book on England and up
be-
cause he was afraid its inevitable humour would "offend those who
had taken him into their hearts and homes.” Why, then, safely
enthroned in America, did he, merely because he was annoyed with
Matthew Arnold, so passionately desire to "pry” the English nation
up? One key to this question we have already found, but it requires
a deeper explanation; and the incident of this earlier book suggests
it. Mark Twain's literary motives, and it was this that made him
the typical pioneer, were purely personal. Emerson wrote his Eng-
lish Traits before the Civil War: in reporting his conversation with
Walter Savage Landor, he made a remark that could not fail to
hurt the feelings of Robert Southey. What was his reason, what
was his excuse? That Southey and Landor were public figures and
that their values were values of public importance. Emerson, in
short, instinctively regarded his function, his loyalties, and his re-
sponsibilities as those of the man of letters, the servant of humanity.
Mark Twain, no less typical of his own half-century, took with him
to England the pioneer system of values in which everything was
measured by the ideal of neighbourliness. If he couldn't write with-
out hurting people's feelings, he wouldn't write at all, for always,
gave it
1


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а
like the good Westerner, he thought of his audience as the group
of
people immediately surrounding him. In America, on the other
hand, the situation was precisely reversed. What would please his
Hartford neighbours, who had taken him into their hearts and
homes ?—that was the point now; and they, or the less cultivated
majority of them, could not see England, through the eyes of a
Connecticut Yankee, damned enough! Something, Mark Twain
knew, he wanted to satirize—he was boiling with satirical emotion;
and while the artist in him wished to satirize not England but
America, the pioneer in him wished to satirize not America but
England. And as usual the pioneer won.
Another motive corroborated this decision. "He had published,"
Mr. Paine tells us, "nothing since the Huck Finn story, and his
company was badly in need of a new book by an author of distinc-
tion. Also, it was highly desirable to earn money for himself.”
Elsewhere we read that the Connecticut Yankee "was a book badly
needed by his publishing business with which to maintain its pres-
tige and profit.” Mark Twain the author, we see, had to serve the
prestige and profit of Mark Twain the publisher; he was obliged, in
short, to write something that would be popular with the American
masses. How happy that publisher must have been for the provoca-
tion Matthew Arnold offered him! Mark Twain, on the top-wave
of his own capitalistic undertakings, was simply expressing the
exuberance of his own character not as an artist but as an industrial
pioneer in the person of that East Hartford Yankee who sets out to
make King Arthur's England a "going concern.” Who can mistake
this animus? “Look at the opportunities here for a man of knowl-
edge, brains, pluck, and enterprise to sail in and grow up with the
country. The grandest field that ever was; and all my own, not a
competitor.” Prying up the English nation ends, as we see, with a
decided general effect of patting the American nation on the back.
The satirist has joined forces with the great popular flood of his
generation; he has become that flood; he asks neither the why nor
the whither of his going; he knows only that he wants to be in the
swim. If, at that moment, the artist in Mark Twain had had only
the tail of one eye awake, he would have laughed at the spectacle of
himself drawing in dollars in proportion to the magnificence of his
noble and patriotic defence of what everybody else, less nobly per-
haps but no less patriotically, was defending also.


436
MARK TWAIN'S SATIRE
“Frankness is a jewel,” said Mark Twain; "only the young can
afford it.” Precisely at the moment when he was writing to Robert
Ingersoll that remarkable letter which displays a thirst for crude
atheism comparable only to the thirst for crude alcohol of a man
who has been too long deprived of his normal ration of simple beer,
he was at work on Tom Sawyer. “It is not a boys' book, at all,”
he says. “It will only be read by adults. It is only written for
adults.” Six months later we find him adding: “I finally concluded
to cut the Sunday School speech down to the first two sentences,
leaving no suggestion of satire, since the book is to be for boys and
girls.” Tell the truth or trump—but get the trick!
Almost incredible, in fact, to any one who is familiar with the
normal processes of the literary mind, was Mark Twain's fear of
public opinion, that fear which was the complement of his pre-
vailing desire for success and prestige. In later life it was his regular
habit to write two letters, one of which he suppressed, when he
was addressing any one who was not an intimate friend upon any
subject about which his instinctive feelings clashed with the popu-
lar view. These unmailed letters, in which, as Mr. Paine says, “he
had let himself go merely to relieve his feelings and to restore his
spiritual balance,” accumulated in such a remarkable way that
finally, as if he were about to publish them, Mark Twain for his
own amusement wrote an introduction to the collection. "Will any-
body contend,” he says, “that a man can say to such masterful anger
as that, Go, and be obeyed? ... He is not to mail this letter; he
understands that, and so he can turn on the whole volume of his
wrath; there is no harm. He is only writing it to get the bile out.
So to speak, he is a volcano; imagining himself erupting does no
good; he must open up his crater’and pour out in reality his in-
tolerable charge of lava if he would get relief. ... Sometimes the
load is so hot and so great that one writes as many as three letters
before he gets down to a mailable one; a very angry one, a less
angry one, and an argumentative one with hot embers in it here
and there.”
Tragic Mark Twain! Irresponsible child that he is, he does not
even ask himself whether he is doing right or wrong, so unquestion-
ingly has he accepted the code of his wife and his friends. The price-
less passion of the satirist is wasted, like the accumulated steam from
an engine whose machinery has broken down and cannot employ it.


VAN WYCK BROOKS
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Turn to one of these occasions when the charge of lava boiled up
in Mark Twain, compare the two unsent messages he wrote and the
message he finally sent to Colonel George Harvey when the latter
invited him to dine with the Russian emissaries to the Portsmouth
Conference in 1905. To understand them we must recall Mark
Twain's opinion that the premature end of the Russo-Japanese
War was “entitled to rank as the most conspicuous disaster in po-
litical history.” Feeling, as he did, that if the war had lasted a
month longer the Russian autocracy would have fallen, he was
bitterly opposed to the conference that had been arranged by Roose-
velt. Here are the two telegrams he did not send:
-
“To Colonel Harvey,-I am still a cripple, otherwise I should be
more than glad of this opportunity to meet those illustrious magi-
cians who with the pen have annulled, obliterated and abolished
every high achievement of the Japanese sword and turned the
tragedy of a tremendous war into a gay and blithesome comedy.
If I may, let me in all respect and honor salute them as my
fellow-humorists, I taking third place, as becomes one who was
not born to modesty, but by diligence and hard work is acquiring
it. Mark.”
“Dear Colonel,—No, this is a love-feast; when you call a lodge
;
of sorrow send for me. Mark.”
And this is the telegram he sent, which pleased Count Witte
so much that he announced he was going to show it to the Czar:
“To Colonel Harvey,—I am still a cripple, otherwise I should be
more than glad of this opportunity to meet the illustrious magicians
who came here equipped with nothing but a pen, and with it have
divided the honors of the war with the sword. It is fair to presume
that in thirty centuries history will not get done admiring these men
who attempted what the world regarded as impossible and achieved
it. Mark Twain.”
Another example. In 1905 he wrote a “War Prayer,” a bitterly
powerful fragment of concentrated satire. Hear what Mr. Paine
says about it:


438
MARK TWAIN'S SATIRE
“To Dan Beard, who dropped in to see him, Clemens read
the War Prayer,' stating that he had read it to his daughter
Jean, and others, who had told him he must not print it, for it
would be regarded as sacrilege. "Still you are going to publish it,
are you not ? Clemens, pacing up and down the room in his
dressing-gown and slippers, shook his head. No,' he said. “I have
"'
told the whole truth in that, and only dead men can tell the truth
in this world. It can be published after I am dead.' He did not
care,” adds Mr. Paine, “to invite the public verdict that he was a
lunatic, or even a fanatic with a mission to destroy the illusions and
traditions and conclusions of mankind.”
a
The conclusions of mankind! And Mark Twain was a contem-
porary of William James! There was nothing in this prayer that
any European writer would have hesitated for a moment to print.
Well, “I have a family to support,” wrote this incorrigible playboy,
who was always ready to blow thirty or forty thousand dollars up
the chimney of some new mechanical invention. "I have a family
to support, and I can't afford this kind of dissipation.”
Finally, there was the famous episode of the Gorky dinner.
Mark Twain was always solicitous for the Russian people; he wrote
stinging rebukes to the Czar, rebukes in the Swinburnian manner but
informed with a far more genuine passion; he dreamed of a great
revolution in Russia; he was always ready to work for it. When,
therefore, Maxim Gorky came to America to collect funds for this
purpose, Mark Twain gladly offered his aid. Presently, however,
it became known that Gorky had brought with him a woman who
was not his wife: hotel after hotel, with all the pious wrath that is
so admirably characteristic of Broadway, turned them into the
street. Did Mark Twain hesitate even for a moment? Did any-
thing stir in his conscience? Did it occur to him that great fame
and position carry with them a certain obligation, that it is the
business of leaders to prevent great public issues from being
swamped in petty, personal ones? Apparently not. The authors'
dinner, organized in Gorky's honour, was hastily, and with Mark
Twain's consent, abandoned. “An army of reporters,” says Mr.
Paine, “was chasing Clemens and Howells,” who appear on that
page for all the world like a pair of terrified children. “The Rus-
sian revolution was entirely forgotten in this more lively, more in-


VAN WYCK BROOKS
439
.
timate domestic interest.” What was Mark Twain's own comment
on the affair? "Laws,” he wrote, in a private memorandum, “can
be evaded and punishment escaped, but an openly transgressed cus-
tom brings sure punishment. The penalty may be unfair, un-
righteous, illogical, and a cruelty; no matter, it will be inflicted just
the same.
The efforts which have been made in Gorky's justi-
fication are entitled to all respect because of the magnanimity of
the motive back of them, but I think that the ink was wasted. Cus-
tom is custom; it is built of brass, boiler-iron, granite; facts,
reasonings, arguments have no more effect upon it than the idle
winds have upon Gibraltar.” What would Emerson or Thoreau
have said, fifty years before, of such an argument, such an asser-
tion of the futility of the individual reason in the face of mob-
emotion? It is perhaps the most pitifully abject confession ever
written by a famous writer.
This is what became of the great American satirist, the Voltaire,
the Swift, the Rabelais of the Gilded Age. If the real prophet is he
who attacks the stultifying illusions of mankind, nothing, on the
other hand, makes one so popular as to be the moral denouncer of
what everybody else denounces. Of the real and difficult evils of
society Mark Twain, to be sure, knew little. He attacked monarchy,
yes; but monarchy was already an obsolescent evil, and in any case
this man who took such delight in "walking with kings,” as the ad-
vertisements say, in actual life, never attacked the one monarch who
really was, as it appeared, secure in his seat, the Kaiser. He at-
tacked monarchy because, as he said, it was an eternal denial of the
numerical mass of the nation.” He had become, in fact, the incar-
nation of that numerical mass, the majority, which, in the face of all
his personal impulses, he could not consider as anything but in-
variably right. He could not be the spokesman of the immensities
and the eternities, as Carlyle had been, for he knew them not; he
could not be, like Anatole France, the spokesman of justice, for
indeed he had no ideal. His only criterion was personal, and that
was determined by his friends. “On the whole," as Mr. Paine says,
“Clemens wrote his strictures more for relief than to print,” and
when he printed them it was because he had public opinion behind
him. Revolt as he might, and he never ceased to revolt, he was the
same man who, at the psychological moment, in The Innocents
Abroad, by disparaging Europe and its art and its glamourous past,
>


440
MARK TWAIN'S SATIRE
a
by disparaging, in short, the history of the human spirit, had flat-
tered the expanding impulse of industrial America. In the face of
his own genius, in the face of his own essential desire, he had pam-
pered for a whole generation that national self-complacency which
Matthew Arnold quite accurately described as vulgar, and not only
vulgar but retarding.
Glance at those last melancholy satirical fragments he wrote in
his old age, those fragments which he never published, which he
never even cared to finish, but a few paragraphs of which appear
in
Mr. Paine's biography. We note in them all the gestures of the
great unfulfilled satirist he was meant to be; but they are empty
gestures; only an impotent anger informs them: Mark Twain's
preoccupations are those merely of a bitter and disillusioned child.
He wishes to take vengeance upon the Jehovah of the Presbyterians
to whom his wife has obliged him to pay homage; but the Jehovah
of the Presbyterians, alas! no longer interests humanity. He is
beset by all the theological obsessions of his childhood in Missouri;
he has never even read Literature and Dogma; he does not know
that the morbid fears of that old Western village of his have ceased
to trouble the moral conscience of the world; he imagines that he can
still horrify us with his antiquated blasphemies. He has lived com-
pletely insulated from all the real currents of thought in his genera-
tion. "The human being,” he says, in one of his notes, “needs to
revise his ideas again about God. Most of the scientists have done
it already, but most of them don't dare to say so." He imagines,
we see, that all the scientists have, like himself, lived in Hartford
and Elmira and married ladies like Mrs. Clemens; and as, accord-
ing to Mr. Paine, nobody ever dared to contradict him or tell him
anything, he never, dazzled as he was by his own fame, discovered
his mistake. “The religious folly you were born in you will die
in,” he wrote once: he meant that he had never himself faced any-
thing out. Was he, or was he not, a Presbyterian? He really never
knew. If he had matured, those theological preoccupations, con-
stantly imaged in his jokes and anecdotes about heaven, hell, and
St. Peter, would have simply dropped away from his mind: his in-
ability to express them had fixed them there and his environment
kept him constantly reacting against them to the end. Think of
those chapters in his Autobiography which he said were "going to
make people's hair curl.” Several of them, at least, we are told,
6


VAN WYCK BROOKS
441
dealt with infant.damnation; but whose hair, in this twentieth cen-
tury, is going to curl over infant damnation? How little he had
observed the real changes in public opinion, this man who lived,
instinctively, all his life long, in the atmosphere of the Western
Sunday School! "To-morrow,” he tells Mr. Paine, in 1906, “I
mean to dictate a chapter which will get my heirs and assigns burnt
alive if they venture to print it this side of A. D. 2006—which I
judge they won't"; and what he dictated was an indictment of the
orthodox God. He often spoke of “the edition of A. D. 2006,”
"
saying that it would "make a stir when it comes out,” and even
went so far as to negotiate for the publication of his memoirs one
hundred years after his death. He might have spared himself the
trepidation. It is probable that by 1975 those memoirs will seem to
the publishing world a very doubtful commercial risk.
Mark Twain's view of man, in short, was quite rudimentary.
He considered life a mistake and the human animal the contempt-
ible machine he had found him: that argues the profundity of his
own temperament, the depth and magnitude of his own tragedy,
but it argues little else. The absurdity of man consisted, in Mark
Twain's eyes, in his ridiculous conception of heaven and his conceit
in believing himself the Creator's pet. But surely those are not the
significant absurdities. “His heaven is like himself: strange, inter-
esting, astonishing, grotesque,” he wrote in one of those pseudo-
Swiftian Letters from the Earth which he dictated with such fer-
vour to Mr. Paine.
a
.
.
“I give you my word it has not a single feature in it that he
actually values. It consists—utterly and entirely—of diversions
which he cares next to nothing about here in the earth, yet he is
quite sure he will like in heaven. Most men do not sing,
most men cannot sing, most men will not stay where others are
singing if it be continued more than two hours. Note that. Only
about two men in a hundred can play upon a musical instrument,
and not four in a hundred have any wish to learn how. Set that
down. Many men pray, not many of them like to do it. . . . All
people, sane or insane, like to have variety in their lives. Monotony
quickly wearies them. Now, then, you have the facts. You know
what men don't enjoy. Well, they have invented a heaven, out of
their own heads, all by themselves; guess what it is like ?"


442
MARK TWAIN'S SATIRE
a
How far does that satirical gesture carry us? It is too rustically
simple in its animus, and its presuppositions about the tastes of hu-
manity are quite erroneous: to sing, to play and to pray, in some
fashion or other, are universal, admirable and permanent impulses
in man.
What is the moral even of that marvellous Odyssey of
Huckleberry Finn? That all civilization is inevitably a hateful
error, something that stands in the way of life and thwarts it as the
civilization of the Gilded Age had thwarted Mark Twain. But that
is the illusion, or the disillusion, of a man who has never known what
civilization is, who, in The Stolen White Elephant, like H. G. Wells
in his early tales, delights in the spectacle of a general smash-up of a
world which he cannot imagine as worth saving because he has
seen it only as a fool's paradise. What is the philosophy of The
Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg? “That every man is strong,” as
Mr. Paine says, “until his price is named.” But that is not true, to
the discriminating sense, at all. It is an army of fifty-two boys
that the Connecticut Yankee collects in order to start the English
republic: in childhood, and childhood alone, in short, had Mark
Twain ever perceived the vaunted nobility of the race. The victim
of an arrested development, the victim of a social order which had
given him no general sense of the facts of life and no sense what-
ever of its possibilities, he poured vitriol promiscuously over the
whole human scene. But that is not satire: that is pathology.
Mark Twain's imagination was gigantesque: his eye, in later life,
,
was always looking through the small end or the large end of a
telescope; he oscillated between the posture of Gulliver in Lilliput
and the posture of Gulliver in Brobdingnag. That natural tendency
toward a magnification or a minification of things human is one of
the ear-marks of the satirist. In order to be effectual, however, it
requires a measure, an ideal norm, which Mark Twain, with his
rudimentary sense of proportion, never attained. It was not fear
alone, then, but an artistic sense also that led him to suppress, and
indeed to leave incomplete, most of the works in which this ten-
dency manifested itself. One recalls his 3000 Years Among the
Microbes, passages of which have been published by Mr. Paine.
Glance at another example. “I have imagined,” he said once, “a
man three thousand miles high picking up a ball like the earth and
looking at it and holding it in his hand. It would be about like a
billiard-ball to him, and he would turn it over in his hand and rub
a


VAN WYCK BROOKS
و
it with his thumb, and where he rubbed over the mountain rang
he might say, 'There seems to be some slight roughness here, but
I can't detect it with my eye; it seems perfectly smooth to look
at.'” There we have the Swiftian, the Rabelaisian note, the Rabe-
.
laisian frame for the picture that fails to emerge. The fancy exists
in his mind, but he is able to do nothing with it: all he can do is to
express a simple contempt, to rule human life as it were out of
court. Mark Twain never completed these fancies precisely, one
can only suppose, because they invariably led into this cul-de-sac.
If life is really futile, then writing is futile also. The true satirist,
however futile he may make life seem, never really believes it
futile: his interest in its futility is itself a desperate registration
of some instinctive belief that it might be, that it could be, full of
significance, that, in fact, it is full of significance: to him what
makes things petty is an ever-present sense of their latent grandeur.
That sense Mark Twain had never attained: in consequence, his
satirical gestures remained mere passes in the air.


TWO POEMS
BY DJUNA BARNES
TO THE DEAD FAVOURITE OF LIU CH'E
The sound of rustling silk is stilled,
With solemn dust the court is filled,
No footfalls echo on the floor;
A thousand leaves stop up her door,
Her little golden drink is spilled.
Her painted fan no more shall rise
Before her black barbaric eyes-
The scattered tea goes with the leaves.
And simply crossed her yellow sleeves;
And every day a sunset dies.
Her birds no longer coo and call,
The cherry blossoms fade and fall,
Nor ever does her shadow stir
But stares forever back at her,
And through her runs no sound at all.
And bending low, my falling tears
Drop fast against her little ears,
And yet no sound comes back, and I
Who used to play her tenderly
Have touched her not a thousand years.


DJUNA BARNES
445
PASTORAL
A frog leaps softly out across the lawn,
And crouches there—all heavy and alone,
And like a blossom, pale and over-blown
Once more the moon turns dim against the dawn.
Crawling across the straggling panoply
Of little roses, only half in bloom,
It strides within that beamed and lofty room
Where an ebon stallion looms upon the hay.
The stillness moves, and seems to grow immense,
A shud'ring dog starts, dragging at its chain,
Thin, dusty rats slink down within the grain,
And in the vale the first far bells commence.
Here in the dawn, with mournful doomed eyes
A cow uprises, moving out to bear
A soft-lipped calf with swarthy birth-swirled hair,
And wide wet mouth, and droll uncertainties.
The
grey fowls fight for places in the sun,
The mushrooms flare, and pass like painted fans:
All the world is patient in its plans-
The seasons move for ever, one on one.
Small birds lie sprawling vaguely in the heat,
And wanly pluck at shadows on their breasts,
And where the heavy grape-vine leans and rests,
White butterflies lift up their furry feet.
The wheat grows querulous with unseen cats;
A fox strides out in anger through the corn,
Bidding each acre wake and rise to mourn
Beneath its sharps and through its throaty flats.


446
TWO POEMS
And so it is, and will be year on year,
Time in and out of date; and still on time
A billion grapes plunge bleeding into wine
And bursting, fall like music on the ear.
The snail that marks the girth of night with slime,
The lonely adder hissing in the fern,
The lizard with its ochre
aburn-
Each is before, and each behind its time.
eyes



soren
1919
A STUDY.
BY KAHLIL GIBRAN






logia
MOUNTAIN AND CLOUD, BY KAHLIL GIBRAN





A SHEEPMAN'S DIARY
BY LLEWELYN POWYS
May 28th. The long looked for notice about my passage home came
this morning, and I have been allotted a berth on the S.S. Rufus
Castle, sailing on the third of June. I leave Gilgil for Mombasa at
four o'clock to-morrow morning.
At last, then, these years are over, I shall escape, and shall be able
to live again in the gracious cities and villages of Christendom. This
is a most soulless and terrible country: the blazing sun—the fatal
Gorgon's head of Africa—turns all hearts to stone. An incident,
significant enough, occurred yesterday. Coming down through the
forest I caught sight of an aged native hiding a sheepskin in some
undergrowth: I at once took it for granted that he was implicated
in the theft of the five sheep taken from the yards a week ago, and
in a blind fury at being overreached so many times I rode him down
cutting at him with my whip; when he was on the ground, I got off
my pony, and kicked him, just as I would any dog, any dog without
teeth-
At luncheon time my houseboy told me that this particular old
man, Kekwa by name, had bought a skin yesterday from those put
aside by me for selling to natives.
May 29th. It was dark as I rode up to the station this morning. At
the top of the hill I let the pony wait a moment and by the light of
the waning moon looked back at the dark, sinister, and well known
outlines of the Rift Valley. How it all came back to me!—the
October lambings—the shearing time—the perennial dipping—the
places where I had buried natives, where I had trapped lions.
I could see the Eburu mountains away to the left, and I remem-
bered the many days I had spent riding out to the far away camp at
Nagum; remembered them almost with nostalgia, now that I knew
they were over: days in the dry weather, when all was dust and
drought, and the sheep stood panting in any shade they could find,
and attempted to graze only towards the evening: days in the wet


448
A SHEEPMAN'S DIARY
.
a
.
season, when a drifting rain would drench down hour after hour,
and the fifteen miles back to my house would seem so very long.
The train was punctual. It began to grow light at Naivasha. The
line from here to Nairobi has always seemed to me depressing. The
wretched station of Kijabe, where they provide breakfast, and mis-
erable ill-tasting figs—the Uplands Bacon factory obtruding its
modern presence and modern pork butchers—the dreary wattle plan-
tations, so suggestive of our exploitation of the country—the sandy,
washed away roads of the reserve—the groups of naked children and
over-burdened women-old Wardell's house at Kikuyu station-
how unutterably devastating to one's spirits it all is.
Two tradesmen got into my carriage at Nairobi. An old Scots-
man—a storekeeper—bringing with him innumerable packages for
his shop in Magadi, so as to avoid the freight on them, and a bald-
headed, Aushed, middle-aged man; drunken, sweaty-faced, and
stinking of whiskey.
From Nairobi to Mombasa the line was all new to me. I had
not travelled on it since I first came up country, ten years ago. I sat
looking out of the window. Suddenly towards evening I became
aware of the presence of Kilimanjaro—silent, dominating, dramatic.
I should think it was fifty miles away, across vast plains of wav-
ing feathery red grass, but in spite of the distance I could see its
high glacial slopes quite clearly. The sun was going down and its
sinking rays gave to the scene that particular wistful look which cer-
tain vast unchanging manifestations of nature take to themselves
when illumined thus, at the last brief moments of a fading day. One
could not help thinking of this mountain—here from the beginning
—so aloof, so indifferent to the passing of the peoples in the plain
lands below, to the passing of the primitive negroes, to the passing
of the Masai with their spears and buffalo shields and tossing
plumes, to the passing of us Anglo-Saxons with our commercial
instincts, our whiskey, and vulgar, unseemly conversations.
a
May 30th. Arrived at Mombasa at nine in the morning. No room
in any of the Hotels. At last I procured a sleeping place at the top
of a tall Arab house in the native quarter, and made arrangements to
have meals in the Savoy Hotel—a second rate place kept by a Greek.
After lunch to the sea; surely only English people could convert
the finest part of their African coast into a suburban golf course.


LLEWELYN POWYS
449
Escaped from it, and climbed down to the shore behind an old Por-
tuguese fort. They cannot, after all, render the sea vulgar and pro-
vincial—the sound of it, the taste of it, the look of it—always
the same: the same as when Columbus, standing at the mouth of the
Tagus, scanned its horizons—the same as when Ulysses, battling
against Mediterranean waves, felt its salt spray in his beard.
At twilight an Arab came on to the roof opposite and cried to the
sun as it went down over Africa. I was thrilled. I had no idea the
house opposite was a mosque, and this calling to the sinking sun
seemed to coincide so exactly with my obsession as to the impor-
tance, the almost sacred significance, of each separate day. From
where I stood I could see spread out before me the white roofs of
the old town, with here and there a palm tree, grown up out of some
far away delicious shady court; I could see the fine coloured tropical
sky, cut and cut again by swift gliding sister swallows; and over
and above all was the voice of this priest, resonant as a bell, pas-
sionately registering the passing of each consecrated hour.
May 31st. In the morning to the Union Cable offices only to learn
that the Rufus Castle is not sailing till June nineteenth. After-
wards to the fruit market which I found to be an excellent place; I
have seldom seen so bright and gay a scene: Indian, Somali, Swahili,
and Goanese traders, jostling each other; and Arab boys, attrac-
tive and precocious, darting about as basket carriers. I had bought
a basket and filling it with fruit of every kind set out for the sea. I
shall never persuade myself to eat lunch at the Savoy Hotel.
June 1st. In the evening coming back to my attic after dinner, I
was accosted by a native pandar. I followed him between innu-
merable native houses. He asked me in Swahili if I wanted a wo-
man—a Swahili woman, or a Somali woman, or a woman from the
Christian Mission. He led me to houses not far from
my attic; evi-
dently I live in the centre of the Mombasa brothels. We knocked
at door after door; sometimes they would be standing outside and
I would strike matches to look at their faces; most of them wore nose
rings and were painted under their eyes; they were seldom pretty,
and the streets and houses and they themselves were heavy with a
strange smell of spice, mingled with the curious unmistakable smell
of black human flesh.


450
A SHEEPMAN'S DIARY
Presently assuring my pandar that he had showed me nothing of
any interest, I wished him to the devil, and made my way back to
my attic.
June 2nd. I am now sitting under a tree away on the mainland. I
got up early this morning, bought fruit, and crossed over to Free
Town.
The path up the hill from the ferry almost like an English lane,
-tall grasses and overhanging creepers. The sun very hot. I passed
a village with native huts and Indian shops, and then along a
straight, white dusty road between cocoa-nut plantations, very gay
and bright, chequered with cool shadows.
Presently I left the road and walked until I came to this shady
place, where I shall stay reading the whole day. I nearly stepped
on a long green snake coming here, and this put me in mind of
mortality.
June 3rd. Home yesterday just in time to hear my Mahometan per-
form his offices. I shall always make a point of being back at this
hour. I come to like Mombasa-except for the few scurvy clerks
at the Savoy Hotel, I see no Europeans at all. I derive peculiar
pleasure from finding myself every evening, at exactly the same
time, walking along the shore under the town, and
up
the rock-hewn
steps, and along the narrow streets, past the fish market, to my attic.
In the tropics it is the hour before the setting of the sun which
is always the most enchanted.
June 4th. All day on the mainland. Found P— at dinner on my
return. His conversation very refreshing after the chatter of these
townsmen; we talked of country matters of the afterbirths of
cows, of scab, and of the cure for foot rot. I think, if I had looked,
I should have found dung from the cattle boma on his boots.
June 5th. Every morning when I go to the fruit market to buy my
luncheon I walk through the old part of the town: continually, I
come upon ancient stone wells, very deep and beautifully con-
structed, and during the dusty overheated hours of mid-day sug-
gesting delightful reservoirs of coolness. One meets far too many
Indians in the streets; pallid, shifty people wearing tight, thin frock


LLEWELYN POWYS
451
coats, followed by their degenerate children, with round, red plush
caps on their heads.
After dinner to the public library and take out Dante's Inferno
and sit and read amongst Goanese folk—all very quiet. I dare say
these people are really far more cultured than most of us English
with our clubs and golf courses. I discovered a splendid edition of
Rabelais.
June 6th. Across to the mainland and away to the right; passing
.
stone quarries and vast sisal plantations, I made in the direction of
the coast, and at last there before me was the sea; wide, and shim-
mering, in the sunshine. Cocoa-nut trees growing close down to the
beach-growing out of silver white sand: it was under these trees
that I left my fruit basket, and emerging from their shadow, stepped
down to the very water's edge.
June 7th. To the mainland and home along the shore. There is a
sick Greek living somewhere in my house, I think on the second
floor-I believe he is suffering from syphilis.
If I knew of another attic I would desert this one. I passed him
to-day sitting on one of the platforms of the staircase (the staircase
is built outside the house); he looked horrible; I longed to crush him
as I would a mutilated and unpleasant insect.
a
June 8th: Evening. Explored the island: wandered down innumer-
able tiny paths with arrowroot cultivated on both sides and every-
where high slim-trunked cocoa-nut trees. I grew tired and hot and
coming upon a native hut, I knocked at the door and asked for food,
just as a traveller in a fairy story would do, lost in a forest.
Two old natives came out and placing me under a tree hurried
away to fetch cocoa-nuts; they climbed the trees themselves, and I
noticed for the first time that every tree had steps cut in the trunk,
so that they could be scaled without difficulty. The cocoa-nuts were
excellent: they also brought me a gourd filled with cocoa-nut wine,
but I saw too many ticks in the neck of the gourd really to enjoy it.
They would accept no money. I found the Hotel a mile further on,
a very pleasant place, and managed to engage a room there.
a
June 9th. Motored with all my belongings to this Hotel. There are


452
A SHEEPMAN'S DIARY
several huts outside which are used as bedrooms: I have chosen one
of these; their roofs are thatched with palm leaves, and I notice
white ants keep dropping down, so I must keep an eye on my things.
June roth. Bathed last night with the husband of the Italian girl
I noticed yesterday..
A lovely place for bathing and they say there are no sharks. We
swam far out. "Do you notice,” he said casually, “how the current
.
has carried us below our landing place ?"
With panic strokes I made for the shore, chuckling afterwards,
to remember how eager I had been to reach land.
I like to look at the wooded creeks opposite: one longs to explore
them all; the colours this morning amazing—I have never seen such
blues and greens, such painted scenery. The seashore covered with
tiny crabs that dash about and sink into their holes, their eyes high
above them after the manner of periscopes, and their shells and
claws a wonderful red colour. Everywhere the roots of water bushes
sticking out of the sand like countless slippery stalagmites. I talked
with the Italian this evening. She also has suffered from the
country.
June 11th. A walk in the morning with the Italian along winding
paths—rested under the shade of a mango tree, the sun glancing
down between the broad polished leaves.
June 16th. To Mombasa to blow the organ for the Italian while
she practises in the English cathedral.
I was there before her, and wandered about in its cool interior:
read the memorial tablets and noticed how many young men had
died, scarce any over forty. It was interesting being in a church
again after all these years: I opened a dog-eared hymn book, but
what sentiment it contained! After she had finished her playing she
wished to find her priest, so that she could obtain leave from him
always to practise in these heretical Anglican surroundings. We
went to the Catholic church-a tiny building.
A black coffin lying before the high altar made me feel how much
more real a thing was their religion. We were led by a nun to the
priest's house. I waited amongst the roses in the garden while she
spoke to the priest at the porch of his house.


LLEWELYN POWYS
453
June 17th. Last night my cabin box was taken out of my room by
native robbers. It was a fine night and I had dragged my bed out-
side and was sleeping by the door: my passport and note of credit
I luckily had under my pillow; the box was taken into the bushes
two hundred yards away and broken open there and rifled. The
rascals had covered the ground round my bed with bottles so that
my first movements would be impeded if, by chance, I happened to
waken. This kind of thing makes one very bitter; certainly in my
case, as I leave Africa to-morrow, the last retort was theirs.
I remember G. C.'s wise saws, “You will find no virtue under a
black hide.” “Fear rules the world-Fear-Fear.”
June 18th. Paid my bill and away to the steamer—a hospital ship
-everything under the military. Large wards for passengers, some
with as many as ninety berths.
June 19th. Precisely at half past four in the afternoon the S.S.
Rufus Castle set sail from Kilindini harbour; her siren made the
whole boat tremble, as slowly, silently she got under way.
A fine rain was falling, it was growing dark; white horses were
upon the open sea, and it looked grey and ominous and desolately
unfrequented. I did not forget my good fortune as standing by my-
self I watched the coast recede.
June 26th. Arrived at Durban this morning. Walked with L. to
the sea front and was made aware of the fact that I had not yet
escaped. I never have seen such faces, without a trace of refine-
ment, without a trace of sensibility, without a trace of distinction,
of individuality, sharp, predatory, colonial, commonplace, no dif-
ference whatever; all exactly the same.
Small wonder the true
values of life have been forgotten and that an energetic preoccupa-
tion with the material world is their only real interest. It will
require generations before these parochial, acquisitive minds can be-
come even partially civilized. The very position of the chairs on
their famous front proclaim their essential philistinism; rows upon
rows of them with their backs to the sea.
June 27th. To the Zoo with L.; far the best place we have yet
found. We saw a wonderful monkey; its rainbow-coloured, lewd,


454
A SHEEPMAN'S DIARY
bizarre appearance filled L. with horror; he declared that if he could,
he would obliterate such creatures from the face of the earth; but I
liked to see it—the more extravagant the creation, the more in
keeping with this brave fantastical Universe. Drank tea on the
lawn outside, all very harmonious.
June 28th. Sitting this evening on deck suddenly we hear a roar of
fog-horns, sirens, and hooters. We knew at once Peace had been
signed. “I am glad they have been done down,” said L.; "they really
were a frightful menace to civilization.” We remained silent. I
could not get out of my mind the thought of thousands and thou-
sands of skulls, in Asia, in Africa, in Europe, with the clay of the
earth too tight in their ears for them to catch even an echo of all this
—though the sirens bray never so loudly.
a
June 29th. By tram as far as I could go and then home by the side
of a river which reaches the sea to the north of Durban. Lay on the
sand dunes. Went to see some whales just brought in; the largest
monsters I have ever set eyes on, larger than elephants—the surface
of their vast skins shiny and smooth to the touch-like a wide sur-
face of seaweed.
July 2nd. I never saw so gloomy a prospect as the sea provided in
the late evening before it grew quite dark. The sky and sea merged
in a heavy grey: in the cold desolation a single bird flying—flying
as though it was lost upon a forgotten ocean, which had never before
known even the wings of a bird to distract the sad unconsciousness
of its humming waters.
July 3rd. I take great pleasure in sleeping on deck these nights;
lying in a sheepskin sleeping sack, covered by a leopard skin, and in
such a position that I can look up at the masts and rigging as they
sway to and fro against the sky.
July 6th. We reached Cape Town last evening and sailed at noon
to-day. Dined last night in the town, a far more attractive place
than Durban; its narrow streets much older and the mountain giv-
ing the place some character of its own. A cheap but admirable
dinner at The Silver Grill.


LLEWELYN POWYS
455
July gth. I see much of Father Plunkett—an excellent old Irish
priest-combining in his presence the culture of the Celt and the
culture of Catholicism, very admirable, very gracious and consoling
like old red wine.
He talks to me about “inordinate desires,” about "the soul of the
church,” about "her offices,” and he also instructs me that the last
sacrament is efficacious even an hour after death: the spirit, so it is
believed, loitering near the body before taking its final flight. His
berth is near to mine and I love to see him lying asleep "in grace,
his little priest's hands crossed on his breast. He evidently very
much dislikes the publicity of the ward; he is up and occupying him-
self with his toilet long before anybody else is awake, moving about
with the furtive shyness of some bird, of a little tree creeper perhaps.
In his pocket he carries an old stained Horace and we read much
poetry together.
July 25th. Teneriffe sighted.
July 26th. Madeira at nightfall. Lights on the hillside impres-
sive: the sides of the ship scaled by countless Portuguese with bas-
kets and chairs and trinkets.
a
July 27th. Madeira not an attractive place; too much in the gen-
eral track of tourists, too many villas. I liked much better a smaller
island that we passed this afternoon: an island with green lovely
uplands, and a sunny secluded bay. From my deck chair I could see
quite clearly delicate white crested waves breaking upon its minia-
ture beach.
July 31st. Woke to find we were surrounded by many French fish-
ing boats. There was a freshness in the summer air which made me
know I was in health-giving northern waters "Freshen’d by plung-
ing tides, by showers !"
The sea quite still in the early sunshine of this last day of July.
I could make out the tiny figures of the fishermen moving under their
sails.
August 2nd. Was up early and away to the prow of the ship where
only the sailors and firemen go. Place myself on the deck here,


456
A SHEEPMAN'S DIARY
looking out across the sea, for the first glimpse of England. Gradu-
ally a faint white cloud line separates itself, takes shape and form,
and after a few hours becomes the familiar outline of the Dorset
Coast from St. Alban's Head to the Island of Portland. As I lay
there on the sun-warmed deck, while these simple homely cliffs be-
came more and more clear, between the anchor and the ship's scrupu-
lously white bulwark, I experienced, and I knew it, some of the
most happy and most thrilling moments of my life. The sun was
so hot that the very pitch in the interstices of the deck began to
soften and melt.
We reached Southampton at 4.30 P.M.
I was at Montacute before it was dark. How delightful, and
yet how inexpressibly pathetic are our homecomings, when one re-
members that, for all our tremulous joy at these reunions, death
tracks the wayfaring of each one of us, to separate us, so soon, for
ever. As of old, my bed was prepared for me in the garden: but I I
could not sleep: how could I hope to sleep? Under that summer
moon the beauty of the village seemed a thing so palpable, so posi-
tive, so importunate.
After all these years to be once more "where bells have knolled to
church!”
I left
my bed and walked about. I stood by the broad ivied wall
which separates the terrace from the abbey fields—the tall tower of
St. Katharine's Church, the mullioned moonlit walls of the abbey,
the fish pond, the monk's dove-cot, the cattle moving slowly across
the dew-drenched meadows—the trees known from childhood with
shapes hardly altered—all were there, all were the same, un-
changed, unspoilt. It almost seemed as though I had been permit-
ted, by some fairy intervention, to look far back upon that older
world of one's imagination, when Christianity was really true, when
peace year after year was upon these country places, and when the
,
simple manner of life, its true aim and purport, had not as yet been
put aside.


2
MY GRANDMOTHER'S LOVE LETTERS
BY HART CRANE
There are no stars to-night
But those of memory.
Yet how much room for memory there is
In the loose girdle of soft rain.
There is even room enough
For the letters of my mother's mother,
Elizabeth,
That have been pressed so long
Into a corner of the roof,
That they are brown and soft,
And liable to melt as snow.
Over the greatness of such space
Steps must be gentle.
It is all hung by an invisible white hair.
It trembles as birch limbs webbing the air.
And I ask myself :-
"Are your fingers long enough to play
Old keys that are but echoes;
Is the silence strong enough
To carry back the music to its source
And back to you again,
As though to her?”
Yet I would lead my grandmother by the hand
Through much of what she would not understand;
And so I stumble, and the rain continues on the roof
With such a sound of gently pitying laughter.
a


A PEOPLE'S THEATRE
A LETTER TO LADY GREGORY
I
MY DEAR LADY GREGORY:
Of recent years you have done all that is anxious and laborious
in the supervision of the Abbey Theatre and left me free to follow
my own thoughts. It is therefore right that I address to you this
letter, wherein I shall explain, half for your ears, half for other
ears, certain thoughts that have made me believe that the Abbey
Theatre can never do all we had hoped. We set out to make a
“People's Theatre” and in that we have succeeded. But I did not
know until very lately that there are certain things, dear to both
our hearts, which no “People's Theatre” can accomplish.
II
All exploitation of the life of the wealthy, for the eye and the
ear of the poor and half poor, in plays, in popular novels, in musical
comedies, in fashion papers, at the cinema, in Daily Mirror photo-
graphs, is a travesty of the life of the rich; and if it were not would
all but justify some red terror; and it impoverishes and vulgarizes
the imagination, seeming to hold up for envy and to command a a
life where all is display and hurry, passion without emotion, emo-
tion without intellect, and where there is nothing stern and solitary.
The plays and novels are the least mischievous, for they still have
old-fashioned romanticism—their threepenny bit, if worn, is silver
yet—but they are without intensity and intellect and cannot, in
those they would represent, convey the charm of either. All this
exploitation is a rankness that has grown up recently among us and
has come out of an historical necessity that has made the furniture
and the clothes and the brains of all but the leisured or the lettered,
copies and travesties.
Shakespeare set upon the stage Kings and Queens, great historical
or legendary persons about whom all was reality, except the circum-
stance of their lives which remain vague and summary because, his


W. B. YEATS
459
a
mind and the mind of his audience being interested in emotion and
intellect at their moment of union and at their greatest intensity, he
could only write his best when he wrote of those who controlled the
mechanism of life. Had they been controlled by it, intellect and
emotion entangled by intricacy and detail could never have mounted
to that union which, as Swedenborg said of the marriage of the
angels, is a conflagration of the whole being. But since great crowds,
changed by popular education with its eye always on some objective
task, have begun to find reality in mechanism alone, our popular
commercial art has substituted for Lear and Cordelia the real mil-
lionaire and the real peeress, and seeks to make them charming by
insisting perpetually that they have all that wealth can buy, or
rather all that average men and women would buy if they had
wealth. Shakespeare's groundlings watched the stage in terrified
sympathy, while the British workingman looks perhaps at the photo-
graphs of those lords and ladies, whom he admires beyond measure,
with the pleasant feeling that they will all be robbed and murdered
before he dies.
III
Then, too, that turning into ridicule of peasant and citizen and
lesser men in general could but increase our delight when the great
personified spiritual power, but seems unnatural when the great are
but the rich. During an illness lately I read two popular novels
which I had borrowed from the servants. They were good stories
and half consoled me for the sleep I could not get, but it was a long
time before I saw clearly why everybody with less than a thousand a
year was a theme of comedy and everybody with less than five hun-
dred a theme of farce. Even Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, cour-
tiers and doubtless great men in their world, could be but foils for
Hamlet because Shakespeare had nothing to do with objective truth,
but we who have nothing to do with anything else, in so far as we
are of our epoch, must not allow a greater style to corrupt us.
An artisan or a small shopkeeper feels, I think, when he sees
upon our Abbey stage men of his own trade, that they are repre-
sented as he himself would represent them if he had the gift of
expression. I do not mean that he sees his own life expounded there
without exaggeration, for exaggeration is selection and the more


460
A PEOPLE'S THEATRE
passionate the art the more marked is the selection, but he does not
feel that he has strayed into some other man's seat. If it is comedy
he will laugh at ridiculous people, people in whose character there
is some contortion, but their station of life will not seem ridiculous.
The best stories I have listened to outside the Theatre have been
told me by farmers or sailors when I was a boy, one or two by
fellow-trayellers in railway carriages, and most had some quality
of romance, romance of a class and its particular capacity for ad-
venture; and our Theatre is a people's theatre in a sense which no
;
mere educational theatre can be because its plays are to some extent
a part of that popular imagination. It is very seldom that a man or
woman bred up among the propertied or professional classes knows
any
class but his own and that class which is much the same all over
the world, and already written of by so many dramatists that it is
nearly impossible to see its dramatic situations with our own eyes;
and those dramatic situations are perhaps exhausted, as Nietzsche
thought the whole universe would be some day, and there is nothing
left but to repeat the same combinations over again.
When the Abbey Manager sends us a play for our opinion and
it is my turn to read it, if the handwriting of the MS. or of the
author's accompanying letter suggests a leisured life I start prej-
udiced. There will be no fresh observation of character I think,
no sense of dialogue, all will be literary, second-hand, at best what
Rossetti called "The Soulless Self-Reflections of Man's Skill.” On
the other hand, until the Abbey plays began themselves to be
copied, a handwriting learned in a national school always made me
expect dialogue, written out by some man who had admired good
dialogue before he had seen it upon paper. The construction would
probably be bad, for there the student of plays has the better luck,
but plays made impossible by rambling and redundance have often
contained some character or some dialogue that has stayed in my
memory
for years. At first there was often vulgarity, and there still
is in those comic love scenes which we invariably reject and there
is often propaganda with all its distortion, but these weigh light
when set against life seen as if but newly created. At first in face
of your mockery, I used to recommend some reading of Ibsen or
Galsworthy, but no one has benefited by that reading or by any-
thing but the Abbey audience and our own rejection of all gross
propaganda and gross imitation of the comic column in the news-


W. B. YEATS
461
papers-Puritans we have not been. Our dramatists, and I am not
speaking of your work or Synge's but of those to whom you and
Synge and I gave an opportunity, have been excellent just in so
far as they have become all eye and ear, their minds not smoking
lamps, as at times they would have wished, but clear mirrors.
Our players, too, have been vivid and exciting because they have
copied a life personally known to them, and df recent years since
our Manager has had to select from the ordinary stage-struck young
men and women who have seen many players and perhaps no life
but that of the professional class, it has been much harder, though
players have matured more rapidly, to get the old, exciting, vivid
playing. I have never recovered the good opinion of one recent
Manager because I urged him to choose instead some young man or
woman from some little shop who had never given his or her
thoughts to the theatre. Put all the names into a hat, I think I
said, and pick the first that comes. One of our early players was
exceedingly fine in the old woman in Riders to the Sea. “She
has never been to Aran, she knows nothing but Dublin, surely in
that part she is not objective, surely she creates from imagination,”
I thought; but when I asked her she said, “I copied my old grand-
mother.” Certainly it is this objectivity, this making of all from
sympathy, from observation, never from passion, from lonely
dreaming, that has made our players, at their best, great comedians,
for comedy is passionless.
We have been the first to create a true people's theatre and we
have succeeded because it is not an exploitation of local colour, or
of a limited form of drama possessing a temporary novelty, but the
first doing of something for which the world is ripe, something that
will be done all over the world and done more and more perfectly:
the making articulate of all the dumb classes, each with its own
knowledge of the world, its own dignity, but all objective with the
objectivity of the office and the workshop, of the newspaper and the
street, of mechanism and of politics.
a
IV
Yet we did not set out to create this sort of theatre and its success
has been to me a discouragement and a defeat. Dante in that pas-
sage in the Convito which is I think the first passage of poignant


462
A PEOPLE'S THEATRE
C
autobiography in literary history, for there is nothing in St. Augustine
not formal and abstract beside it, in describing his poverty and his
exile counts as his chief misfortune that he has had to show himself
to all Italy and so publish his human frailties that men who hon-
oured him unknown honour him no more. Lacking means he had
lacked seclusion, and he explains that men such as he should have
but few and intimate friends. His study was unity of being, the
subordination of all the parts to the whole as in a perfectly propor-
tioned human body-his own definition of beauty—and not, as
with those I have described, the unity of things in the world; and
like all subjectives he shrank, because of what he was, because of
what others were, from contact with many men. Had he written
plays he would have written from his own thought and passion,
observing little, and using little, if at all, the conversation of his
time; and whether he wrote in verse or in prose his style would have
been distant, musical, metaphorical, moulded by antiquity. We
stand on the margin between wilderness and wilderness, that which
we observe through our senses and that which we can experience
only, and our art is always the description of one or the other. If
our art is mainly from experience we have need of learned speech,
of agreed symbols, because all those things whose names renew
experience, have accompanied that experience already many times. .
A personage in one of Turgenev's novels is reminded by the odour
of, I think, heliotrope, of some sweetheart that had worn it, and
poetry is any flower that brings a memory of emotion, while an
unmemoried flower is prose, and a flower pressed and named and
numbered science; but our poetical heliotrope need bring to mind
no sweetheart of ours, for it suffices that it crowned the bride of
Paris, or Pelius' bride. Neither poetry nor any subjective art can
exist but for those who do in some measure share its traditional
knowledge, a knowledge learned in leisure and contemplation.
Even Burns, except in those popular verses which are as lacking in
tradition, as modern, as topical, as Longfellow, was, as Henley
said, not the Founder but the last of a dynasty.
Once such men could draw the crowd because the circumstance of
life changed slowly and there was little to disturb contemplation
and so men repeated old verses and old stories, and learned and
simple had come to share in common much allusion and symbol.
Where the simple were ignorant they were ready to learn and so
>


W. B. YEATS
463
1
a
became receptive or perhaps even pretended knowledge, like the
clowns in the mediaeval poem that describes the arrival of Chau-
cer's Pilgrims at Canterbury, who that they may seem gentlemen
pretend to know the legends in the stained-glass windows. Shake-
speare, more objective than Dante-for, alas, the world must move
—was still predominantly subjective and he wrote during the latest
crisis of history that made possible a Theatre of his kind. There
were still among the common people many traditional songs and
stories, while court and university, which were much more impor-
tant to him than the common people, had an interest Chaucer never
shared in great dramatic persons, in those men and women of
Plutarch who made their death a ritual of passion; for what is pas-
sion but the straining of man's being against some obstacle that
obstructs its unity?
You and I and Synge, not understanding the clock, set out to
bring again the Theatre of Shakespeare or rather perhaps of Sopho-
cles. I had told you how at Young Ireland Societies and the like,
young men when I was twenty had read papers to one another about
Irish legend and history, and you yourself soon discovered the
Gaelic League, then but a new weak thing, and taught yourself
Irish. At Spiddal or near it an innkeeper had sung us Gaelic songs,
all new village work that though not literature had naivety and
sincerity. The writers, caring nothing for cleverness, had tried to
express emotion, tragic or humorous, and great masterpieces, The
Grief of a Girl's Heart, for instance, had been written in the same
speech and manner and were still sung. We know that the songs
of the Thames boatmen, to name but these, in the age of Queen
Elizabeth had the same relation to great masterpieces. These
Gaelic songs were as unlike as those to the songs of the Music Hall
with their clever ear-catching rhythm, the work of some mind as
objective as that of an inventor or of a newspaper reporter. We
thought we could bring the old folk-life to Dublin, patriotic feeling
to aid us, and with the folk-life all the life of the heart, using the
word "heart” as Dante used it to define the most interior being;
but the modern world is more powerful than any propaganda or
even than any special circumstance, and our success has been that
we have made a Theatre of the head, and persuaded Dublin play-
goers to think about their own trade or profession or class and their
life within it, so long as the stage curtain is up, in relation to
a


464
A PEOPLE'S THEATRE
Ireland as a whole. For certain hours of an evening they have
objective modern eyes.
V
The objective nature and the subjective are mixed in different
proportion as are the shadowed and the bright parts in the lunar
phases. In Dante there was little shadow, in Shakespeare a larger
portion, while you and Synge it may be who have constant humour,
and humour is of the shadowed part, much observation, and a
speech founded upon that of real life, resemble the moon when
it has just passed its third quarter. You will always hold our
audience, but you have used so constantly whatever you have of that
lunar light, you have so elaborated your style, there is so much ºf
your own emotion, of your own way of seeing, that you will never,
till classics are taught in school, find a perfect welcome.
The outcry against The Playboy was an outcry against its style,
against its way of seeing; and when the audience called Synge
“decadent”-a favourite reproach from the objective everywhere-
it was but troubled by the stench of its own burnt cakes. How
could they that dreaded solitude love that which solitude had
made? And never have I heard any, that laugh the loudest at your
comedies, praise that musical and delicate style that makes them
always a fit accompaniment for verse and sets them at times among
the world's great comedies. Indeed, the louder they laugh the
readier are they to rate them with the hundred ephemeral farces
they have laughed at and forgotten. Synge they have at least
hated. When you and Synge find such an uneasy footing, what
shall I do there who have never observed anything, or listened with
an attentive ear, but value all I have seen or heard because of the
emotions they call up or because of something they remind me of
that exists, as I believe, beyond the world? Oh yes, I am listened
to—am I not a founder and is not our audience polite?—and here
and there scattered solitaries delight in what I have made and re-
turn to hear it again; but some young Corkman, all eyes and ears,
whose first rambling play we have just pulled together or half to-
gether, can do more than that. He will be played by players who
have spoken dialogue like his every night for years, and sentences
that it had been a bore to read will so delight the whole house that


W. B. YEATS
465
to keep my hands from clapping I shall have to remind myself that
I was in part his chooser.
VI
I want to create for myself an unpopular theatre and an audience
like a secret society where admission is by favour and never to
many. Perhaps I shall never create it, for you and I and Synge
have had to dig the stone for our statue and I am aghast at the sight
of a new quarry, and besides I want so much—an audience of fifty,
a room worthy of it (some great dining room or sitting room), half.
a dozen young men and women who can dance and speak verse or
play drum and fute and zither, and all the while instead of a pro-
fession I but offer them "an accomplishment.” However, there are
my Four Plays for Dancers as a beginning, some masks by Mr.
Dulac, music by Mr. Dulac and by Mr. Rummell. In most towns
one can find fifty people for whom one need not build all on obser-
vation and sympathy, because they read poetry for their pleasure
and understand the traditional language of passion. I desire a mys-
terious art, always reminding and half-reminding those who under-
stand it of dearly loved things, doing its work by suggestion, not
by direct statement, a complexity of rhythm, colour, gesture, not
space pervading like the intellect but a memory and a prophecy; a
mode of drama Shelley and Keats could have used without ceasing
to be themselves and for which even Blake in the mood of The
Book of Thell might not have been too obscure. Instead of adver-
tisements in the press I need a hostess, and even the most accom-
plished hostess must choose with more than usual care, for I have
noticed that city-living cultivated people, those whose names would
first occur to her, set great value on painting, which is a form of
property, and on music, which is a part of the organization of life,
while the lovers of literature, those who read a book many times,
are either young men with little means or live far away from big
towns.
What alarms me most is how a new art needing so elaborate a
technique can make its first experiments before those who, as
Molière said of the courtiers of his day, have seen so much. How
shall our singers and dancers be welcomed by those who have heard
Chaliapin in all his parts and who know all the dances of the Rus-.


466
A PEOPLE'S THEATRE
sians? Yet where can I find Mr. Dulac and Mr. Rummell, or any
to match them, but in London or in Paris, and who but the leisured
will welcome an elaborate art or pay for its first experiments? In
one thing the luck might be upon our side. A man who loves verse
and the visible arts has, in a work such as I imagine, the advantage
of the professional player. The professional player becomes the
amateur, the other has been preparing all his life, and certainly I
shall not soon forget the rehearsal of The Hawk's Well, when
Mr. Ezra Pound, whº had never acted on any stage, in the absence
of our chief player rehearsed for half-an-hour. Even the forms of
subjective acting that were natural to the professional stage have
ceased. Where all now is sympathy and observation no Irving
can carry himself with intellectual pride, nor any Salvini in half-
animal nobility, both wrapped in solitude.
I know that you consider Ireland alone our business and in that
we do not differ, except that I care very little where a play of mine
is first played so that it find some natural audience and good
players. My rooks may sleep abroad in the fields for a while, but
when the winter is come they will remember the way home to the
rookery trees. Indeed, I have Ireland especially in mind, for I want
to make, or to help some man some day to make, a feeling of exclu-
siveness, a bond among chosen spirits, a mystery almost, for leisured
and lettered people. Ireland has suffered more than England from
democracy, for since the Wild Geese fled, who might have grown to
be leaders in manners and in taste, she has had but political leaders.
As a painted figure is defined by its outline and taste by its rejec-
tions, I too must reject, and draw a clear outline about the thing I
seek; and say that I seek, not a theatre but the theatre's anti-self, an
art that can appease all within us that becomes uneasy as the curtain
falls and the house breaks into applause.
a
a
VII
Meanwhile the People's Theatre grows always more objective;
more and more a reflection of the general mind; more and more a
discovery of the simple emotions that make all men kin, clearing
itself the while of sentimentality, the wreckage of an obsolete popu-
lar culture, seeking always not to feel and to imagine but to under-
stand and to see. Let those who are all personality, who can only


W. B. YEATS
467
feel and imagine, leave it, before their presence become a corruption
and turn it from its honesty. The rhetoric of d'Annunzio, the melo-
drama and spectacle of the later Maeterlinck, are the insincerities
of subjectives, who being very able men have learned to hold an
audience that is not their natural audience. To be intelligible they
are compelled to harden, to externalize and deform. The Popular
Theatre left to itself will not lack vicissitude and development, for
it will pass, though more slowly than the novel which need not
carry with it so great a crowd, from the physical objectivity of
Fielding and Defoe to the spiritual objectivity of Tolstoi and
Dostoevsky, for beyond the whole we reach by unbiassed intellect
there is another whole reached by resignation and the denial of self.
VIII
The two great energies of the world that in Shakespeare's day
penetrated each other have fallen apart as speech and music fell
apart at the Renaissance, and that has brought each to greater free-
dom, and we have to prepare a stage for the whole wealth of modern
lyricism, for an art that is close to pure music, for those energies
that would free the arts from imitation, that would ally acting to
decoration and to the dance. We are not yet conscious, for as yet we
have no philosophy while the opposite energy is conscious. All
visible history, the discoveries of science, the discussions of politics,
are with it; but as I read the world, the sudden changes, or rather
the sudden revelation of future changes, are not from visible history
but from its anti-self. Blake says somewhere in a Prophetic Book
that things must complete themselves before they pass away, and
every new logical development of the objective energy intensifies in
an exact correspondence a counter-energy, or rather adds to an
always deepening unanalysable longing. That counter longing,
having no visible past, can only become a conscious energy suddenly,
in those moments of revelation which are as a flash of lightning.
Are we approaching a supreme moment of self-consciousness, the
two halves of the soul separate and standing face to face? A certain
friend of mine has written upon this subject a couple of intricate
poems called The Phases of the Moon and The Double Vision re-
spectively, which are my continual study, and I must refer the reader
to these poems for the necessary mathematical calculations. Were
a


)
A PEOPLE'S THEATRE
468
it not for that other gyre turning inward in exact measure with the
outward whirl of its fellow, we would fall in a generation or so
under some tyranny thạt would cease at last to be a tyranny, so
perfect our acquiescence.
“Constrained, arraigned, baffled, bent and unbent
By these wire-jointed jaws and limbs of wood,
Themselves obedient,
Knowing not evil and good.
Obedient to some hidden magical breath,
They do not even feel, so abstract are they,
So dead beyond our death,
Triumph that we obey.”
W. B. YEATS
1


1
SOME REVIEWS OF JOB
BY EDMUND WILSON, JR.
I
H. L. MENCKEN
.
.. Miss Peggy of Gramercy Park, by Chrystabel Winter-
bourne, soft, soft stuff; Unseen Voices, by Herbert Moberley
Wales, a farrago of New Thought and downright idiocy, Mary
Baker Eddy on the Chautauqua, Gerald Stanley Lee in astrologer's
robes, Dr. Frank Crane as Maeterlinck. ... Job, by an anony-
mous maestro, contains some sounder stuff. Here we are made
privy to the spiritual angoisse and soul-searchings of a once well-to-
do farmer fallen on hard times. In a prologue Satan is represented
as laying a wager with the Lord God that the piety of a certain pros-
perous lándowner is due merely to God's special favours to him and
that the moment the favours are withdrawn Job will shut off his de-
votions and begin to have at the Almighty like any other sinner.
God accepts the bet and proceeds to afflict Job. First, his sheep and
cattle are stolen, then his children are killed in a cyclone, then, as a
final blow, his skin breaks out in malignant boils and we get a
melancholy picture of him scratching these furunculi with a piece
of broken crockery.
As soon as his neighbours hear of this, they of course come to gloat
over his discomfiture. They, too, are right-thinking citizens and
pious adorers of the Almighty; on Thursday nights, we have no
doubt, they attend the dark junketings of the Odd Fellows; they
believe that if one walks under a ladder one is sure to eat bad sweet-
breads and die of ptomaine poisoning the next week and that the
Lord God can be propitiated by penitence and prayer. In brief,
good Christians, sound democrats, prohibitionists, vice-crusaders.
They at once proceed to assail poor Job with the portentous rumble-
bumble of such uplift as has found its way among the remoter peas-
antry. Gurgling and sniffling and beating their breasts, they beg
him to confess his sins and Job angrily retorts that he has none to


470
SOME REVIEWS OF JOB
confess. They, however, Puritans to the core, remembering their
own clandestine philanderings with the Devil, conclude at once that
he is lying and suspect him of furtive tippling or of șurreptitious
visits to the local bagnio. But Job is really innocent; he has swal-
lowed the sacred hokum entire and has actually lived up to its im-
possible precepts. He charges God with breaking His contract and
demands an explanation.
So far so good. But what comes next? The innate native thirst
for quick solutions to insoluble problems is too much for the author
and, instead of leaving Job with tragic irony as the jest of God, he
must needs make God reply with a tirade of evasive answers so in-
credibly beside the point that one cannot imagine any sane human
being listening to it for two minutes.
"You don't understand why I treat you like this,” says God. “Is
there anything you do understand?” And then goes on to point out
that in a universe encumbered with such obviously useless and un-
desirable phenomena as the hippopotamus and the crocodile, he can
hardly begin to complain because he is puzzled by such a relatively
small matter as his own misfortunes. He doesn't even understand
the mechanism of the solar system; the accouchements of the com-
mon capra hircus are a mystery to him. And Job is represented as
completely flabbergasted by these prodigious absurdities. Instead
of calmly replying that, on God's own showing, the universe is an
even worse mess than he had thought, the bemused yokel only falls
flat on his face and sets up a howl of repentance. The opus con-
cludes with an idiotic happy ending in which Job is restored to his
former affluence and blessed with more cows, sheep, and children
than ever. It is not reported that his wife was taken from him in the
course of his afflictions, the Almighty, one supposes, having resolved
to do His work thoroughly. Now, this theme might have been made
into a tolerable story, if Job had been presented as a zany, but, in
point of fact, we are actually called upon to admire him as a patient
and God-fearing man. With the highest respect, Faugh! A stupid
nincompoop, a grovelling peasant, a first-class exhibit of the slav-
moral, already all too well exhibited. The author has spoiled a
good idea. Let him scrap his pious consolations. Let him spend a
summer or two in Munich or Paris or even in Vienna or Rome.
And then let him try a novel with the uplift left out.
I pass
on.


EDMUND WILSON, JR.
471
II
JAMES HUNEKER
а
"Oh, Satan, take pity on my long misery!” cried Charles Baude-
laire in a perverse litany. And other poets, more orthodox, have
apostrophized God in a similar strain. The whole of Huysmans's
Durtal series, from Là-Bas to L'Oblat, is an agonized appeal to the
Deity, done in bronzed enamel. (The De profundis clamavi ad te,
Domine, of the Psalmist, of which Oscar Wilde bleats an
anaemic echo.) But Huysmans was too much the dyspeptic for an
Augustinian renascence; the gastric juice shackled him to earth.
Verlaine pendulummed back and forth from adoration to debauch.
In Lamennais and Hello we hear more resonant tones and an
orotund ecstasy.
The author of Job (he suppresses his name) has assaulted Heaven
with the pyrotechnics of an organ-lunged scepticism. He is not the
first to doubt; Pascal had his abyss; Renan left St. Sulpice and never
came back. Job is surrounded by smug Philistines whose drawing
Daumier or George Bellows might have envied. They deluge the
poor man with the turgid outpourings of their ignoble souls (Flau-
bert's façon basse, de sentir). In the end, the thunderous voice
of Jehovah silences both comforters and comfortee.
The style is a rich amalgam of purple sonorities; the speeches rise
like stately gerbs studded with blue-green peacock’s-tail eyes. One
recalls the orchestrated cathedral windows of Huysmans's Chartres.
The bitterness is that of a more mellifluous Swift. Less acrid than
the splenetic Irishman, he is emotionally more dynamic and achieves
the grandiose sweep of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony and Strauss's
Tod und Verklärung. There is nothing here of the Erik Satie of the
Pièces Froides and the Morceaux en Forme de Poire or even of the
Satie of the Gymnopédies and the Gnossiennes—Satie that latest
changeling in the Wagnerian cradle. But, after all, as Heraclitus
says, "everything changes”!
1
a


472
SOME REVIEWS OF JOB
III
THE NATION
a
The literature of sceptical revolt, already sufficiently nourished
by the superficial atheism of the eighteenth century and the romantic
poses of the nineteenth, and now brought to the fine flower of its
perfection by the Wellses and Shaws, receives a fresh contribution
in Job, a novel by an anonymous author, and one which is found
wanting in neither the assurance nor the bold assumptions of its
school. The protagonist is represented as the victim of a succes-
sion of afflictions and calamities which provoke him, in his sudden
chagrin, to cry out against God. His neighbours (ridiculed by the
author as stupid and shallow) come to him and attempt to console
him for these distressing misfortunes, but, instead of listening to
their advice to make his peace with God, or at least thanking them
for their kindness in offering it, he lifts a wail of imprecation against
the Deity, who is finally made to take up the bizarre position of at
once refusing to explain His acts to the impatient sufferer and of
nevertheless approving his complaint.
The extent to which we can enjoy Job’s saeva indignatio must
necessarily depend on the amount of gratification we are capable
of deriving from the expression of emotions of this order, and it is
perhaps unavoidable that we should be obliged to qualify our ac-
ceptance of so naive a doubt. It is made evident throughout that
we are expected to feel sympathy for the arraigner of Divine Jus-
tice and at the same time to take a contemptuous view of the beliefs
of the comforters; but, for all the plausibility of the author in his
less gaudily rhetorical passages, we cannot but question the sound-
ness of a judgement which holds up to derision all we have been
taught to esteem as fine and honourable and which, with an easy
casualness that seems not far removed from flippancy, assumes a
trivial and capricious character on the part of the Deity.


POEMS AND TRANSLATIONS
BY WITTER BYNNER
WHEN YOU TOLD ME OF AN EAGLE
When
you
told me of an eagle, caged,
Sitting on his dead tree
And facing motionless
That opening toward mountains
And that air for wings,
You turned your head like an eagle caged.
And when you told me of a leopard
Pacing his bare floor,
Your hand curved back and forth
Like the motion of a leopard.
.
And, beyond the iron of imagination,
Crept toward the desert hills.
CASTLE IN SPAIN
.
I have an endless garden—and I don't know where it is,
For I found and lost the title in a castle in Cadiz.
There are many little garden-gates, creaking like gulls,
And a sea full of ships there, with gold on their hulls .
But why so many ships there and why so many gates,
Only my lost title-deed in Cadiz relates.
I have the tallest tower there that ever touched the blue,
But since I don't know where it is, I don't know what to do ...
For I went there in a dream once—a wild wayfaring
Glad and magnificent beyond all caring
And I wish I had the reason now that then I had
For being so magnificent and being so glad.
But who knows the measure of the distance to fare?
a
.
.


474
POEMS AND TRANSLATIONS
I hurried back to Cadiz. The castle wasn't there.
They told me that a mist had come and arrows of rain
And then a gust of darkness. And every window-pane
And doorway of the castle had vanished in Cadiz
And what can you do with property, when you don't know
where it is?
.
AN INN
(From the French of Charles Vildrac)
There's an inn,
At the cross-roads of Chétives-Maisons,
In the country that's always cold.
Two wide bare roads intersecting
Which have never seen harvests return
And which stretch to the
very
horizon
Make the cross-roads of Chétives-Maisons.
Three houses are there,
Squatting in a corner, all three,
And two of them no longer lived in.
And the third is this inn of the sad heart!
They give you black bread there and bitter cider,
The fire, wet with snow, weeps there, and the innkeeper
Is a forlorn woman with a wan smile.
It is only because you are thirsty that you enter to drink there,
It is because you feel yourself dropping that you go there to sit down,
You never find two or three others there
And you never have to tell your story there.
He who enters there with chattering teeth,
Seats himself quietly on the edge of the bench,
Holds his chin slightly forward
And places his hands flat on the table.


WITTER BYNNER
475
You would not believe there could be flesh
In his stiff and heavy goloshes;
His sleeves are short and show his wrists
Where the bone makes a red knob,
And he looks the way a whipped beast looks,
Fixedly into space.
He eats his bread slowly
Because his teeth are worn down
And it hurts him to drink
Because sorrow is choking him.
When he has finished,
He hesitates, then timidly
Goes and seats himself for a little
On one side of the fire.
His chapped hands clasp
The hard ridges of his knees.
His head bends and pulls at his neck,
And his eyes are afraid of space.
And his woe sets him dreaming, dreaming,
Weighing at the nape of his neck and weighing on his brow, ,
Making lines one by one on his face,
While there comes from the fire, small, distinct,
A sound like the crying of a new-born child far-off.
a
And then a little girl whom he has not seen
Slips from a corner where she was sitting,
A delicate and pretty little girl.
She has the eyes of a woman,
Eyes which suddenly enlarge with tears.
And see how softly she comes
And leans against his hand
The young flesh of her lips
And then lifts to him her eyes full of tears


476
POEMS AND TRANSLATIONS
And gives him with all her frail body
A poor little winter-flower she has. .
And see how he sobs and sobs
Taking in his hands, clumsily,
The flower and the little girl's hands:
The forlorn woman with the wan smile,
Who has watched all this in silence,
Begins to speak now as though dreaming,
Her
eyes
wide
open,
she begins to speak:
.
•
.
“There came to us a man here who was not one of us
He was not old, as we are, with woes and sufferings,
He bore himself as do no doubt the sons of kings,
And yet how much he had the ways of being one of us!
No one has ever spoken to me as he spoke to me,
Just asking if he might sit down and drink;
There he was leaning, half across the table,
And I watched him all the time that he stayed there;
O
And when he had risen, making me weep
Because he was so like one I knew when I was sixteen.
He opened the door
To return into the wind-
But when he learned why
My tears came,
He closed the door again.
And all that evening, and all that night,
His eyes and his voice fondled me,
And the tangles of my pain he smoothed out.
And in spite of his youth and in spite of my cold bed,
In spite of my empty breasts and my hollow shoulders,
He stayed a whole day to make love to me, he made love to me ...
And then that little girl was born
Of the love that he pitied me with .


WITTER BYNNER
477
TO BE A MAN
a
(From the French of Charles Vildrac)
Watch a kitten at play,
A running fountain,
' A man splitting wood;
Watch, when you like, with the children
Lean on the bridge-rail,
Watch with the loafers
The little feverish tug
Leading its helpless line of long barges,
Desperately pulling at its leash and dragging
Its row of blind beggars.
If there's a small child in your path
Finding his fun in the mud,
Dirtying his hands and his cheeks
And talking baby talk,
Don't turn aside and murmur:
“Let's leave him to the women,
But pick the child up without making him cry
And know how to talk to him like a story-teller and gently,
As though you were a good old grandfather-
While you wipe his little face and his hands.
And if you happen, at night in a dark street,
On a poor old drunken man
Whom a huge policeman stands against a wall
For the beastly need
Of badgering with blows,
O don't say, as your fear would have you:
"Let's leave him to his kind!" —
Strike out with your fists!
If you chance to be going the same way
With a man from the lumber-yards
And
you chat as you walk side by side,


478
POEMS AND TRANSLATIONS
To put him at ease
You must know how to speak gnarled words,
You must be able to show roughened hands,
And to walk with a noise of your heels,
Rolling your body and bending your knees,
As though your boots were as heavy as his ..
a
And if some day you go to see people with money
Who hold back their heads
To be viewing the earth from a bit higher up,
If you go to see those men and those women who are able
With expressionless voices to order what is served them,
See that they honour you as their equal-
Stare them down.
And don't be ashamed to let show in you
The young girl and the mother that your mother has been,
The child that you were and shall always continue to be,
And all those who are mingled within you,
And all those others, too, on whom in passing
You have bent your eyes
To take and to hold their imprint.
You must not give up any of your faces,
You must learn many faces more,
,
You must be able to be
many
To be the better and more totally a man:
sorts of
men
A man whose life shines large and far,
Who turns away from no one and from nothing
And who breathes at his ease in every one's house.



Courtesy of the Kevorkian Galleries
SPRING LIGHT. BY CHARLES BURCHFIELD






C SURCHFIELD ISIS
Courtesy of the Kevorkian Galleries
WIND OVER THE HILL. BY CHARLES BURCHFIELD






IM M
3
BURCHFIELD TIS
Courtesy of the Kevorkian Galleries
HAUNTED EVENING. BY CHARLES BURCHFIELD


i
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BURCSELO
Courtesy of the Kevorkian Galleries
GOING HOME BY CHARLES BURCHFIELD






DIDA
TE
C.BURCHFIELD
1918.
Courtesy of the Kevorkian Galleries
THE CORNER STORE. BY CHARLES BURCHFIELD


1
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LEO ORNSTEIN
BY WINTHROP PARKHURST
Those men of genius who cannot be surpassed may be
equalled. How? By being different. Victor Hugo.
IT o
platitudes of to-morrow. Less frequently has it been observed
that the heresies of the hour are usually the conventions of the day
before yesterday. Neglect of this latter truth has led the disciples
of revolutionary art into many amusing and tragic blunders. A
decade ago it led the free-verse enthusiasts into announcing the
triumphant liberation of poetic technique; whereas poetry had been
freed from its conventional shackles by the French decadents
twenty years earlier, and had been freed two thousand years before
that by several of the Greek dramatists. Two decades ago it led
the Debussy devotees into hymning the esoteric Frenchman as a
Galileo of the so-called whole-tone scale; whereas Eric Satie and
Modest Moussorgsky-not to mention the Chinese, the Japanese,
and the Hindoos—had bagged the discovery from twenty to five
hundred years before him, and Claude Achille Debussy was merely
a man who turned his ears toward a discovered star and transposed
the music of that sphere into the key of his own temperament. Lat-
terly it has begotten a similar error; for it has misled the exponents
of what might be termed free-music into hailing Leo Ornstein as the
original arch-anarch of tonal art. Leo Ornstein is unquestionably
a musical anarchist, both as a pianist and a composer. There are
only twelve tones in the present chromatic scale, otherwise he
would probably commit more than twelve musical sins simulta-
neously; there are only eighty-eight notes on the modern keyboard,
else he would very likely play on eighty-nine of them at once. But
anarchist though he is, in the monarchic government of Bach, in
the oligarchic governments of Beethoven and Brahms, and in the
tentatively socialistic governments of Ravel and Debussy, he is
neither the discoverer nor the actual creator of modern musical
anarchy. On the contrary, his system of harmonic and contra-


482
LEO ORNSTEIN
Whereupon Ornstein replies, savagely:
Such violence, to the untutored and unprotected ear, is frankly
appalling. There is small wonder that the author of it, getting the
public by the ear-drums as he was bound to do, has been called a
maniac by the conservatives and a colossal rebel by the radicals.
Nevertheless, as I have pointed out in as much space as existed for
the gesture, the composer of The Wild Men's Dance is by no means
an originator of the somewhat startling innovation of playing in
three or four keys at once. If you will examine the scores of his
predecessors—Scriabine’s especially—you will find authoritative
prophecy there of this whole neo-futurist inquisition which the
younger man at present conducts. Ornstein, in truth, and in spite
of considerable popular acclaim to the contrary, appears merely to
be executing the orders of his superiors. Scriabine, though dead, is
in chief command. Leo Ornstein is his myrmidon.
What, then, is the importance of the fellow? Is he really trying
to say anything? Or is he perhaps, meanwhile laughing grotesquely
up his sleeve, trying to say nothing—and succeeding? If he merely
parodies the discoveries of his predecessors, wherein lies his claim
to an original hearing? And if attempting to push along his har-
monic inquiries unaided, is he doing so at the expense of all sin-


WINTHROP PARKHURST
483
cerity, hoping by sitting down frequently on a Knabe keyboard, to
elicit therefrom an accidental, if bizarre, beauty?
The charge of insincerity, at least, may be quickly disposed of.
There is a possibility, of course, that Ornstein, the priest at the
Eucharist of formal harmony, is the chief mocker at the ceremony
of its suffering and death. A spectator to the astounding success of
the cubist-vorticist movement several years ago, he may indeed have
put his brain in his cheek, concluding that apparent madness was
the best public policy. That possibility is only a possibility. Pi-
casso and Matisse may have been charlatans; their work, however,
if designed to scoff, has remained unwittingly to make men pray.
They are judged, and justly judged, by their paintings and not by
any undiscoverable, in petto attitudes. And Ornstein, like all other
men under aesthetic suspicion, deserves an equal benefit of the
doubt.
But the other charge—that he apes if elaborates the anarchies
of Schoenberg and Scriabine-opens up a legitimate examination
not only of the defects of the defendant but of the tendencies and
limitations of all post-impressionistic music. That Ornstein stands
in the middle rather than at the beginning of the path of contem-
porary harmonic licence has already been stated. And Scriabine
was more than his pioneer in mere daring: in inspiration he was
emphatically his superior. Ornstein neither has composed, nor
seems likely to compose, anything in imaginative magnitude equal
to the Russian Alexander's Ninth Piano Sonata or his Poëme
d'Extase. Ornstein's diabolism is indisputable; his divinity is seri-
ously to be questioned. On his own confession he never alters a
note after it is down on paper; and while such methods of composi-
tion might interest Herr Freud, they are scarcely conducive to the
development of artistic genius. Under such circumstances it is
hardly surprising that if he has outstripped the feet of his forerun-
ners he has, so far, failed to catch up with their brains or their souls.
Then why waste more time on him? Simply because he repre-
sents, for the moment, a distinct movement in musical art which,
starting some twenty years ago and still on its way, may ultimately
reach gigantic ends. Ornstein himself is unlikely to come even
within hearing of so Brobdingnagian a country as that which Mous-
sorgsky vaguely imagined and toward which Scriabine, more re-
cently, seemed to be stretching appetent but unsolaced hands. It


484
LEO ORNSTEIN
is probable, indeed, that no man living will hear the symphonies
and sonatas of that Gargantuan land. But toward it modern musi-
cal composition is ineluctably headed; and a nervous, slender,
youthful, black-haired pianist is standing at the helm. Without
waxing technical it is difficult to define even the elements of such a
mysterious art. Roughly and untechnically, however, it may be
categorically captured by calling it music founded on no scale be-
cause founded on a multitude of scales; music with no discords
because, in the old-fashioned sense, completely and perpetually dis-
cordant.
Ferrucio Busoni, in 1911, hinted at such an astounding possibil-
ity. In a small brochure entitled A New Esthetic Of Music he
confessed to a belief in the gradual disappearance, through elabora-
tion, of the classical modes, and incidentally propounded the in-
quisitive theory that between C and C-sharp there would ultimately
be recognized numerous authentic tones. The adoption of this
latter heresy is obviously a long way off. Certain Indian tribes,
it is true, are known to make use of a twenty-tone scale. But the
modern, occidental ear, though capable of a great deal, is still pow-
erless to conscript such subtle distinctions of sound with any success.
C is C, and C-sharp is C-sharp; and any one who tries to step in
between them is accused of thinking out of tune. The other idea
which Busoni suggested, however, is not only a step toward the
greater anarchy: it is a step that is in the actual course of being
taken. Three hundred years ago the unprepared seventh chord
was a suspect and a criminal. To-day it is as dignified and harm-
less as the National Anthem. To-day, in fact, such a chord as this:
0 0 0 0


WINTHROP PARKHURST
485
is as nearly a commonplace in the post-impressionist curriculum as
the alphabet is in that of a college professor. Bach, in other words,
had his Beethoven no less certainly than Cézanne had his Matisse.
And if Matisse, in turn, had his Duchamp, and Beethoven his Schu-
mann, his Scriabine, and finally his Ornstein, who will care to deny
that others will again succeed these latter men, or that such super-
revolutionists, leaving behind them the monarchies, the oligarchies,
and the anarchies of their pictorial and musical forerunners, will
vote for a complete and earth-shaking nihilism?
And, if it comes, this post-futurist music will not, as the conven-
tional may fear, crowd out the classic. Rivalry is for merchants,
not for artists. The aim of the moderns is not to quarrel with the
ancients but simply to depart from them. Music like Leo Orn-
stein's is so intricate, modally, that its composer not only leaves off
the customary key-signature altogether, but warns you beforehand
that an accidental affects merely the note before which it is imme-
diately placed. This, to formalists like Richter and Sechter, would
look like rank treason. But it is not treason: it is merely loyalty to
a new government; it is fealty to another empire in the same world.
Schumann will still live, and Haendel and Beethoven and Mozart.
They will live, because they expressed ecstatically the vision
of beauty that was theirs. And other men, if they are sincere, will
live by their own vision of that same beauty, though seen through
different techniques and under different skies. For there is neither
growth in art, nor decay: there is only change.


LONDON LETTER
March, 1920
IT
a
T is now nearly a year since I last wrote a letter from England to
The Dial, and in that time a great many things have happened,
alarms and excursions, wars and peaces, strikes, and crises, and a
reasonable number of new books. I wish I could make a concise
summary of the events of 1919, it would be amusing. But I am
afraid it is more than I could compass within ordinary limits of
space. The most I can do is to set down a few impressions of ten-
dencies as seen against that background of "talk” which is so im-
portant, so inescapable an element of the literary life.
"Talk” is a mysterious thing. It rises like the wind, no one
knows how, blows here and there gently or gustily, falls without
apparent reason and rises again in another quarter. And literary
London is, in more senses than one, an exceedingly windy place.
There is said to be a certain town at the Antipodes whose inhabi-
tants can be recognized infallibly all over the world by their trick
of putting their hands to their hats, even on the calmest day, when-
ever they approach a street-corner. Gales are swift and sudden in
that town. So, in London, people guard their reputations and
their susceptibilities. You never know quite what is going to
happen to them. A. is furious at B.'s review of his new novel and
C. thinks that an allusion in it is aimed at him and is the prelude
to a full-dress attack. D. has most deplorably issued yet another
volume of verse and the talk turns to whispering: because D., apart
from the fact that every one likes him, is a man of genius in any
kind of composition but that. E. is shortly going to have his throat
cut by F.'s gang, on account of his reckless championship of G.,
whom F. dislikes. And so on and on. Ninety-nine per cent. of it
means nothing, but it monotonously continues.
Just recently there has been an enormous amount of talk about
the "boom" and the "slump” in poetry. We have grown so ac-
customed to rapid movement that, when any one talks about a
boom, some one else automatically gets up and begins talking about
a slump. A little while ago I read in an American journal, which I


EDWARD SHANKS
487
will not name, an article by an English critic, whose pseudonymous
modesty I will not unveil. (I might do so, however, without re-
proach, since in another issue of the same journal he revealed the
secret of a pseudonym which I used myself in England, and did the
same for one of my friends—an outrageous offence against literary
good manners, had it not been committed with so discerning an air
of amiability and benevolence.) To resume—this critic remarked
that the slump in poetry here was very noticeable, and he added that
“the poets still hurry each evening to the Café Royal, but ..
I forget precisely in how pitiable a state of neglect he had seen
them.
When I read this touch of picturesque detail, I own that I was
somewhat comforted. There has been a boom in poetry, which, so I
believe, continues and looks like continuing for some time to come.
But, whatever may have happened to it and whether it be a good
or an evil thing, the poets who have participated in it do not fre-
quent the Café Royal. This place, though it still holds literary
memories of twenty years ago, is now filled partly by painters and
their models from Chelsea and, more largely, by quite ordinary per-
sons, chiefly of the Latin races, about whom no one would trouble
to write to an American paper. About half of our poets live in the
country. The rest would do the same if they could but are instead
hard-working men with no time for dalliance in cafés, even if they
cared for it, as in nine cases out of ten they do not. Nothing was
ever quite so dead as is Bohemianism with us to-day: I fancy that
army discipline stamped out its last dully glowing embers. Strong
poets have been known to blench on being accused of this vice, and
their enemies more often complain of their extremely bourgeois
habits. They wear short hair and clean linen, dress tidily and be-
long to good clubs, when their means allow. I remember that when
M. Paul Fort was chosen to be Prince des Poètes in France, an op-
position paper deplored the choice, alleging with bitterness that he
had a wife and a family of daughters. But, added the malcontent,
desiring to be fair, il est bon buveur. I fear that not even so much
can be said of the English poets of this generation. They drink
miserably, if at all; and it is time that most of them were married
and some had children.
It may reasonably be urged, however, that a man's obvious igno-
rance of the subject he discusses does not prove the contrary of his
a
a


488
LONDON LETTER
assertions. This gentleman may have been right in his conclusion,
though the evidence on which he bases it is amusingly unsound.
But I think there is evidence against him. Georgian Poetry, the
success of which, as long ago as 1912, was the first symptom of the
boom, has been more popular this year, in spite of an almost uni-
formly hostile press, than ever before. Poets, even new and ob-
scure poets, continue to get their books published without cost to
themselves—an extremely rare occurrence before the war. Pub-
lishers go looking for young poets and ask them out to lunch in the
hope of getting books from them—which, five years ago, would
have caused a sensation. Poets, to conclude, are mentioned famil-
iarly by name in the "chatter” columns of frivolous papers with
large circulations.
I note these facts in support of my contention that the boom con-
tinues. They are true only of the poets who can be said to have
shared to a greater or lesser degree in the boom; and they have noth-
ing whatever to do with the value of the poetry which is being pro-
duced by these poets or by others. To this difficult question I shall
not at present refer, so far as poetry is concerned, since it is inad-
visable to confuse issues. But when we look in another direction to
survey different forms of literature, criticism must be allowed a cer-
tain place in the argument. One strong impression that the past
year has left in my mind is that with the younger generation the
novel is receding in importance. The flow of novels is, of course,
as full as ever; but it is not so inevitable as it was that the marked
young men whom discerning opinion selects for brilliant careers
should pour their talents into that stream. Before the war, the gen-
eration of Mr. Conrad, Mr. Wells, and Mr. Bennett rose to a plane
at least beyond casual questioning. Behind them came a varied
band, Mr. Compton Mackenzie, Mr. Hugh Walpole, Mr. Gilbert
Cannan, Mr. F. M. Hueffer, Mr. Frank Swinnerton, Mr. V. D.
Beresford, Mr. Francis Brett Young, and others.
writers of differing merits and they have had differing fortunes;
but five years ago they seemed like a fleet coming up over the hori-
zon of literature and filling most of it. Now we ask who is to suc-
ceed them in their own department? Even quite recently it was
impossible to see past them into the gap that followed; but during
1919 that gap has become increasingly apparent. The distin-
guished young man beginning his career does not do so with a novel
These are
a
a


EDWARD SHANKS
489
in his pocket. He may have a book of poems or of essays or of
biographical studies—you do not know what he
may
have.
Isolated writers are certainly to be discovered in the gap, such as
Miss Romer Wilson, whose Martin Schüler was one of the most re-
markable books of 1918. But the book she published last year,
If
All These Young Men, was a considerable disappointment; and
one hesitates before prophesying the author's future with any great
emphasis. The first book, however, was so exceedingly good and
original, and the second contained so much that was reminiscent
of the qualities of the first, that it will be most disappointing if
Miss Wilson comes to nothing. Another novel which attracted at-
tention and which seemed to me to be a most admirable piece of
work was The Mask by Mr. John Cournos, who describes in it with
exquisite simplicity the experiences of a Jewish boy in Russia and
America.
But this book has all over it the stamp of autobiography and per-
haps ought to be associated with two others which reveal no tenden-
cies and will have no consequences and which might have been pub-
lished at any time. I mean The Journal of a Disappointed Man
by "W. N. P. Barbellion” and Impressions that Remained by Dr. /
Ethel Smyth. Now “Barbellion” (his real name was Frederick
Bruce Cummings) died in October last year; and Dr. Smyth is by
vocation not a writer but a composer of music, who, having written
her one book, declines to be persuaded to write any more. These
two works, both of them, I dare prophesy, destined to become
classics, offer us nothing in the way of prospects. Great diarists
and great autobiographers crop up unaccountably at irregular
intervals, and the books to which these, each in its class, may be
likened, would not take long to count.
But, to sum up, the truth is that we are still a long way from
being able to judge of the effect the war has had upon our litera-
ture. The absolutely calculable damage it has done is less than
might have been expected; that is to say, the number of writers who
had done enough for us to predict a certain future for them and
who were killed was relatively small. How much potential and
unrevealed genius was destroyed we shall, of course, never know.
But one effect of the war is painfully obvious. Five years' crop of
young men, in all stages of development and at all levels of abil-
ity, is missing. Men who would have been coming down from the


490
LONDON LETTER
Universities to begin their careers are going up there now. Other
men who would have had five years' practice in literature are begin-
ning their apprenticeship. The result is chaos and confusion, which
will not vanish for some time. I think three years more must elapse
before we can with any certainty reckon how we stand and bewail
our poverty, or rejoice in our wealth, of good writers. And not be-
fore that time can we say what the young generation is going to do.
Prophecies on this point are by no means infrequent. The young
generation, it is proclaimed by both young men and old men, in
varying accents of delight and terror, is going to kick over the
traces, revolt against all authority, spit on grammar and drag down
the
grey hairs of metre in ignominy to the grave. In a word, litera-
ture is "going red.” But there are so many ways of looking at these
things. Mr. Jones, a respectable and learned critic, aged sixty-four,
sees in front of him young Smith, who likes experimenting in new
metres, and young Robinson, who begins his poems with such lines
as “Vriji-boum-boum-iiiii.” Smith thinks Robinson a sensa-
tional idiot and Robinson, outraged by the fact that Smith's newly
invented stanzas both scan and rhyme, denounces him as an aca-
demic imbecile. Mr. Jones drops a tear over the pair of them and
deplores the revolutionary tendencies of the young. Both Smith
and Robinson take refuge in historical analogy and tell themselves
and the world that the old have always opposed innovation, that
Romanticism triumphed over the effete Augustans and so forth and
so on. But it would be curious if justifiable innovations had a
monopoly of the opposition of the old. The world is full of fools
and some of these fools, it must be allowed, will sometimes attempt
such reforms in art and literature as are consonant with their
natures. It is a distressing and perplexing business; and even pos-
terity, apart from the fact that we shall not live to see it, generally
delivers an obscure and uncertain verdict. As Rupert Brooke said
to the man who demanded a fixed canon of merit in art—"What
we want, of course, is a volume of initial essays by God.”
EDWARD SHANKS


SKEPTICISM AS ILLUMINATION
Scepticisms: Notes on Contemporary Poetry. By Conrad
Aiken. r2mo. 305 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. New York.
MR:
(R. AIKEN seems particularly aware, in the general exuber-
ance of present poetry, of a want of perspective; he would
appear to be committed to the very present belief that former tradi-
tions of poetry and principles of criticism are outworn. He well rec-
ognizes that if the old are outworn, there are then none, since there
can be no new-mistakes not having been proved against their
makers, or certainties signalized by duration. He is more conscious
than his contemporaries in criticism,he is perhaps hyperconscious
of the risks that the estimator of new scores and singing in a new age
undertakes. This produces in him the attitude one might naturally
expect; he is neither timid nor, in particular statements, indistinct;
but he is contained, both in his censures and his enthusiasms. His
candour is his other trait of mark. If he distils devastation on Mr.
Braithwaite, he at the same time points to himself as another exam-
ple of fallibility; if he denounces the too partisan commitments of
Mr. Untermeyer, he also proclaims himself "as parti-pris in one
direction as Mr. Untermeyer is in another.”. He is a frank skeptic.
a
Mr. Aiken sets confines to the lengths he will permit himself and
the kinds of judgement he will undertake. His own description of
his intention is that he will "single out for a careful casualness of
illumination, among so many and such varied aspects, only those
facets of the poetic tendencies of the day which are, for one reason
or another, suggestive.” There is in this declaration a definite stop-
ping down of eloquence; and one eventually finds that there is im-
plied in it also a preconceived dryness, an anterior inclination to be
disillusioned, a pro-uncertainty respecting the authority of most of
his contemporaries (and himself) which runs in nearly every paper
in the book and in some swells into a sort of ground tone. One has
no doubt as to the sincerity of this attitude; and in the uproar over
repudiations of former accepted conventions, amid the aggrandize-
ment of mere effort in new directions of thought, it is a natural and
massively defensible attitude. The reader may be excused some
doubt, however, as to its fruitfulness; and Mr. Aiken in carrying it
a
a


492
SKEPTICISM AS ILLUMINATION
>
out does not entirely lay such rising doubt. One of Mr. Aiken's
most marked virtues is his aversion for the authoritarian and the
official. Never is he guilty of the parade of judgement. “Where
all is relative,” he plainly implies, "let him who dares be pontifical.”
How negative a virtue such an aversion can become is seen only
when the attempt is made to construct a book of it.
The defect of his attitude does not lie in a lack of positive par-
ticularization. Few more definite, rational, and in the better sense
sophisticated characterizations of individuals than Mr. Aiken's are
to be found in contemporary discussion of poetry. However he may
confess fallibility and involuntary prejudice for those poets most
like himself, and negate his judgements in consequence, when it is
the consideration of properties and merits in a poem or a book of
poems, he exhibits—perhaps derivative from being a poet—a quick,
sensitive, expert discrimination and right understanding that are
the rare fortune of a critic. On such matters his convictions want no
emphasis of statement. He expresses a view, for instance, as to the
essential sterility of Ezra Pound's Pavannes and Divisions which is
less suave than definite; his belief in the inferiority of the Chinese
Nightingale and other later poems of Vachel Lindsay is such that
he forsakes relativity once and couches his statement as an epitaph;
and there is no lack of directness in his characterization of parts
of
the second Others anthology as “proudly absurd and naïvely pre-
posterous.” The terms of his individual descriptions are sharp and
certain. The defect of his attitude is its lack of affirmative
completeness.
It is rarely that he will undertake that step from consideration
of the properties of works to conclusion as to the qualities of
workers, which completes judgement. One finds that he really
attempts no more in his book of Scepticisms than a sheaf of rather
extemporaneously collated feuilletons, which are on the whole
rather better considered than many, perhaps most, of their con-
geners. The summary characteristic of his work in this volume
might be placed at disillusioned straight competence. He is true to
his title in being gratifyingly anti-idolatrous; yet he is rarely unjust
or inimical, notwithstanding provocation. His inquisition is rapid
and skilful and his evaluation of merits and defects in particular
works is conducted with an assurance derived surely not from mere
revolutionary zest but from thorough possession of modernly repu-
1
a


CHARLES K. TRUEBLOOD
493
(
diated but long and well known certainties, sharply and utterly clear
to him. His dexterity of thinking is such as to establish extempore
more or less rational bases for all his impressions, and to enable him
in spite of the complexities of his material to arrive quickly at unity
of apprehension. Yet his apprehensions do not appear too easily
arrived at, except in a few cases, such as his discussion of Miss
Lowell as a critic, which in approximately a thousand rather
pointed words disposes of her somewhat offhandedly as amateurish.
Though he has still a busy hand and is quick with black and white,
he is more considered when the matter is her Can Grande's Castle,
and his censures carry with more conviction.
It is difficult to determine how much share Mr. Aiken's qualities
as a practitioner have in his points of competence and incompetence
as a critic.
In characteristic consonance with his pan-skepti-
cal attitude he apparently regards such qualities as having little
beyond a vitiating effect on his impartiality; one comes to the feel-
ing that he uses more space than is needed in lamenting his falli-
bility. But there can certainly be no doubt as to his being more
aware of present poetry and with far more edge in his attention
than the somewhat fluffy Mr. Braithwaite, whom one does not recall
as a practitioner. Perhaps some of Mr. Aiken's rapidity of treat-
ment, some of his prized casualness is possible through his technical
familiarity, on which he builds no pretensions, by the way, with the
work of his fellows. His awards and condemnations do not carry
the impression of having been long o'erwatched, yet as far as their
author will permit them, they carry conviction. His method and
terms of expression are intellectual, on the whole, rather than poetic;
his prose is primarily articulate. As there is in his thinking, while
it is thoroughly skilful and sophisticated, nothing sinuous or elusive
(except as to total point of view), there is in his sentences chiefly'a
nervous, quick, candid, and economical effectiveness sometimes com-
plicated but never blighted with qualification. His writing has the
colloquially rapid beat and the small variety of middle tones which
are ordinarily used for rational discussion. His phrases are distinct
and show command of the sources of expression, but he displays none
of the elaborated phrasal craft, the attempt at profound expressive-
ness which a poet with so many volumes of poetry to his credit as
Mr. Aiken might try in his prose, were he not too clever. One comes
to feel that Mr. Aiken's poetic experience, on its positive side, is a


494
SKEPTICISM AS ILLUMINATION
rich background, a something excellent carefully offstage, a fund of
prompting, a hidden source of admirable sententiae. On its nega-
tive side it may be the secret of his incompleteness, its deficiencies
the source of the gap of darkness in his illumination. Perhaps he is
too keenly aware of the ephemeral parts of a poet.
a
Mr. Aiken's faiths seem in a sense as much the product of disillu-
sionment as his skepticisms. He is peculiarly intrigued, and his
papers are sometimes impeded by divagations into Freudian psy-
chology and preoccupations with psychoanalysis, in the immediate
application of which to poetic discussion he appears to have more
confidence than their present achievements would justify. I quote
as an example this disillusioned paragraph from page 132:
"Shall we never learn that there is nothing mysterious or super-
natural about poetry; that it is a natural, organic product, with dis-
coverable functions, clearly open to analysis? It would be a pity if
our critics and poets were to leave this to the scientists instead of
doing it themselves."
There might be debate as to whether describing poetry as the prod-
uct of a subconscious complex any more abolishes its mystery than
to describe it as the product of the divine afflatus. Mr. Aiken, how-
ever, devotes a fairly robust chapter with plentiful quotation from
the psychologist, Kostyleff, to the mechanism of poetic in-
spiration. And he further transfers deftly some of the principles
and data of Kostyleff, Freud, Pavlov to his own field, and secures
considerable extension of illumination from their application to the
cases, for instance, of John Gould Fletcher and Edgar Lee Masters.
He is convinced that further work in this direction would reduce to
notation the entire poetic process, and indicates that such is, in his
view, the fruitful direction for criticism to follow. And no doubt
were he to do so, his powers of description and particularization
would be still further enriched and extended—as much again as they
now are by his present holdings in Freudian data. But that it would
bring him any nearer to the rounding out of his essential incom-
pleteness is doubtful. Criticism does not end with description.
One's quarrel with Mr. Aiken will be with his limits, not with his
accomplishment within his limits. What in most instances he sets
out to do, namely, to particularize (he says illuminate) with a


CHARLES K. TRUEBLOOD
495
careful casualness, he certainly does well. He is careful, more care-
ful and rational in his individual descriptions and characterizations
than, for example, Mr. Untermeyer. He is casual, amid the general
acclaim, to the point of dryness; it would appear that he has made
a study of it, for it is a fact with many aspects. His censure is
forthright but as nearly without malice as one can find at present;
he is collected, in the mêlée of new pretensions, very little overlook-
ing real, or being imposed on by sham merit. He almost alone
maintains no particular pose and has room, or makes room, for
every inconsistency which his view of the truth impels him to utter.
There are no instances in the book in which one feels that the author
is abstaining from saying what he thinks for consistency's sake.
It is because he has done so much carefully that dissatisfaction
arises at the incomplete significance of the whole work. The fact is
that this book, full of care and sense, lacks the momentum which
carries the author of the New Era in American Poetry, for instance,
with so much nonchalance over such doubtful going and often un-
certain judgements. One arrives by degrees at the conclusion that
skepticism as a point of view comes near being a failure for lack of
centrality and completeness. Mr. Aiken speaks of having been
accused of chameleonism. It is true that those who recognize no
obligations to consistency are elusive in the extreme; and he recog-
nizes few, though he is definite and coherent in his specific state-
ments. His general point of view is anything but coherent and illu-
minated and his book of skepticisms is a series of short, well handled
drives, not a coördinated campaign; it is an accumulation, not a
construction. Completeness could have been fairly readily secured
by merely an evolution into its details of the natural and de-
fensible point of view which he must surely have, but which cannot
be found for relativity. Mr. Aiken, however, perhaps to satisfy his
sense of contrast, has been so intent upon the exclusion of the official
accent from his pages that he has unnecessarily dissipated the right-
ful authority of his just opinions.
It is probably a question of what you want; and there is little
doubt that Mr. Aiken knows what he wants and what he does not
want. He evidently does not want to be positive and consistent if
that means rigidity; he would repudiate generality lest it lead him
into too rigid commitments. The consequent series of skepticisms
are searching—illuminating, but not an illumination.
CHARLES K. TRUEBLOOD


AXIOMATICS
The Mask. By John Cournos. 12mo. 320 pages.
George H. Doran Company. New York.
1
1
1
a
WHERE are dreadful people I have met who think that to be
of any value, a work of art must have magnitude. They ap-
praise art by its bulk and its momentum if hurled, while a symphony
for eighty pieces would, in their scheme of judgements, be eighty
times as important as a sonata. To have concocted Big Moments,
to have dealt in everybody's heart-throbs, to have approached some
sort of exaltation, is to have merited their ultimate benediction.
They have waded through Dreiser, wallowed in English trilogies,
and gulped great waves of 1850 Russian epilepticism. But it never
occurs to them that a horn tooting away for dear life might be
ridiculous. . . . Over against their almost universal trombonism,
if one is to plead that the world still has taste, can be mentioned a
scraggly number of tinkerers with the harpsichord. The harpsichord
was a frail instrument, somewhat glib, although not more so than
the Moralités Légendaires of Laforgue, or some of de Gourmont's
excursions. We are in sad need of a trombone here in America to
toot the value of the harpsichordists.
But the harpsichordists do not belong in a discussion of The
Mask. I mention them simply because Up induces the thought of
Down, and systole is accompanied by diastole; because I couldn't
read Cannan without remembering Les Chevaux de Diomède. Mr.
Cournos, that is to say, plays the trombone; and for a comparative
beginner, he plays it well.
Mr. Cournos is very seriously immersed in the floods of life. In
a novel that is evidently the redoing of a vivid personal experience
-d'Aurevilly said that we all had two or three of such plots in our
sack-he writes with all the fervour of a Dostoevsky. For like
Dostoevsky, he is manipulating the throbbing realities. Life is a
struggle for adjustment, a painful attempt to resolve things. These
efforts begin when the new-born sees blurred movings with un-
focused eyes, and end, I suppose, with death. All of which is a
,
banal outlook on life, and has produced masterpieces.


KENNETH BURKE
497
The objection to misery and struggle as an impetus to art is that
it takes the caution out of a man. The violent surge of things to
be said pushes one recklessly on, so that he has no time for question-
ing his aesthetics. Standards have to be taken for granted; if the
house is to be erected hastily, we must grab the hammer and nails
nearest at hand. By this I do not necessarily mean that the book is
dashed off at top speed. Samuel Butler spent years with his Way
of All Flesh, and yet whenever he came to it, he came not as an
artist but as one of the immersed-in-lifers. He may have talked
technique from night till morning, but his book was always bigger
than he was, like life itself. There is not a single trial of skill in
the whole volume. Earnest things were to be expressed adequately,
and he expressed them as adequately as his earnestness could enable
him. The same might be said of the author of The Mask.
The fault with this earnest adequateness shows most noticeably
in the disturbing breaks of the narrative, frequent in both books.
The reader is lugged ten or twenty years ahead of the story for a
few pages, and then just as suddenly dumped back again. Auto-
biographical associations have proved stronger than the demands of
the medium, so that for the sake of a full truth the author will
snatch at anything. This makes it impossible to develop con-
comitantly with the hero of the novel. A reader's receptivity is a
very frailly built mechanism which is always disrupted by such
rough handling. If the opening sentence of a book prognosticates
one kind of story, the reader unconsciously adapts himself to what-
ever kind it promises to be. But if the story does not abide by the
laws of its kind, it cannot be entirely satisfactory, even though we
theoretically approve of its transgressions. There are many sorts
of writing in which any kind of a break is possible—I can think of
no happier example of this than Gide's Nourritures Terrestres—but
if one is setting out at this late date to do something compelling,
something drastically true to life, something vibrant with human
interest, he must recognize that the medium is already pretty thor-
oughly established for that sort of thing; and that if he is after
verisimilitude with heart and soul, he must have a better reason
than mere convenience for breaking the steady march of his.
narrative.
The embarrassing predicament of The Mask is that it is a rea-
sonably good book. Now a reasonably good book is peculiarly


498
AXIOMATICS
a
elusive. One cannot tumble all over himself with praise of it, nor
can he object to it without a futile qualification of every statement.
Mr. Cournos, like so many of our present-day writers, goes about his
work with intelligence, an impeccable keenness of vision, and some
thoroughly arrived attitudes. It is safe to suppose that he has read
Freud, a couple of essays on zoology, and a weekly with some shade
of radical politics. Consequently, one cannot get at him. He is
impregnably aware. Such people are skilled in the art of giving
just as much as can be endured, and no more. John Gombarov's
stepfather Suffers in Silence for so many pages, but is always dis-
cretely muddied with some domestic detail as he is on the verge of
becoming a hero. Occasionally a pompous train of oratory is
organized, only to be rained on at the last moment. Whereas in
the old code comedy was introduced to keep us from suffering too
strongly, it is wisely inserted here to forestall our protests. And
as I say, the enraging thing is that such subterfuges are successful.
Writers of reasonably good books are pre-eminently slippery; they
are not to be walked on with comfort. When their book is com-
pleted, they can lie back and observe us moving nervously along on
ice-creepers.
Heaven alone knows what is to become of the novel. As early
as 1884 Huysmans was sick of it, and began his series of compila-
tions with A Rebours. But on the whole, although it is so short-
lived, it has become astonishingly autocratic. Keen minds have
accepted it as naïvely as the infallibility of a pope. In spite of the
hemorrhage of verse that is splattering about the earth, I suppose
there is still one novel published for every poem. Huysmans, Gide,
de Gourmont, Joyce, Lewis—I can think of no others who have
showed any interest in even stretching the novel, unless Romains
be added for safety's sake. The French Academy goes on with its
sterile coronations, and across the Channel ten (10) established
reputations still heave their annual mountain. Yet if perfection
can kill a thing, the novel should have died at the end of the cen-
tury, since Mann had already written his Buddenbrooks. However,
most people have easily avoided this dilemma by not knowing
Mann.
The novel is too rigid a form to express an age like the present.
We need something that admits easily of interruption, digression,


KENNETH BURKE
499
and the mounting of hippogriffs. Perhaps we shall develop a form,
or a formlessness, after the fashion of Petronius' escapades. Indeed,
our kinship with late Latin is continually becoming more evident.
We are squarely in one of the Dark Ages, a period of transition and
uncertainty, or perhaps better, a period of marked transition, since
Goethe says we are always in transition: der Uebergang, der Ueber-
gang zum Uebergang, des Uebergangs Uebergang zum Uebergang,
und des Uebergangs Uebergang zu des Uebergangs Uebergang. We,
like them, are essentially Orphic rather than Olympic. Without
their Christianity, we have their Christian retreatism. We have their
love of the catalogue, their joy in vituperation, their interest in
broad, ugly words. Some of the most notable writers of the last
decades have drawn from late Latin. Of all these, perhaps the most
representative is Léon Bloy, with his polysyllabic spew, his tetanic
disgust, and his crushing in of the heads of the bourgeois.
Practically all of these men, of course, are French. This is to
be expected, for although we northern barbarians have been assum-
ing for three hundred years that we are quite in the flow of things,
the fact is that Rome has only now reached as far as Paris. In
all probability this Romanization will continue; let us trust that
Latin is still more permanent than correspondence courses. And
in the meantime, if a Russian temperament chooses to write under
English influences, we can expect interesting books, intelligently and
honestly written, with perhaps such pearls of style as this:
“And, having caught with all this a sense of inevitable fatality
which attends upon those born to incur the steady displeasure of
the gods, he felt that now he could go on with the tragi-comic play
with keen interest, even amusement, that indeed, to some degree he
could assist, if need be supplant, the demoniac prompter."
KENNETH BURKE


A GOOD TEACHER
PAINTING AND THE Personal Equation. By Charles H.
Woodbury, N.A. 8vo. 196 pages. Houghton Mifflin
Company. Boston.
IN
N art's eternal warfare there are many champions, from the
pedant who never looks at pictures to the preacher who cries out
in the name of immutable beauty. In the case before us it is Mr.
Charles H. Woodbury, eminent among Academicians, eloquent be-
fore amateurs, whose book, despite its sincerity and its obvious
axiomatic truths, adds nothing to critical literature, and at best is
but a record of unsystematic utterance. The professional teacher of
painting is capable of anything—he cultivates the aphorism and
startles by precept; his position demands that he awe and impress
the neophyte. Talking continually, it is not surprising, since art
in its primacy postulates the universal, that he should, at times,
light upon statements acceptable to reflective thought; nor is it won-
derful, being accustomed to the reverence of his auditors, that he
should develop confidence and specious address. But he cannot, in
this instance, by his dignified dismissal of the new movements, and
by his discreet avoidance of combative adjectives, conceal his illiber-
alities and his pride in the old-fashioned school of marine painters
which he certainly adorns.
It is evident that Mr. Woodbury has lectured with joy and hon-
esty; he has conducted a class of young people into the open country
?
and has revelled in natural beauties which he has been able to sum-
mon by the flourish of his hand, and his zeal has been transcribed
into a volume. He is undoubtedly a good man for beginners, for
whom he has valuable advice, especially in his ardency for nature
upon which the new student's experiments must invariably be
founded; but what he offers is not content for a book-rather is it
material for creating enthusiasm in the class room. His discourses
are wanting in any discoverable thesis—they are not profound
enough to attract the mature artist.
As an example of his loose, predicatory remarks let us take his
definition of painting, "A picture is a thought or a feeling ex-


THOMAS JEWELL CRAVEN
501
pressed in terms of Nature.” Terms are implements of communi-
cation made by man; nature, as such, can have no terms. Thoughts
or feelings can have no expression except through mentation-na-
ture impresses, man constructs terms and expresses. There is but
one intelligible inference to be drawn from the author's definition:
thoughts or feelings may suggest in memory certain natural shapes,
and the representation of these may stand as symbols of the mental
image, but this is very unsubstantial language and of small use to
the serious student. No one is likely to deny that there is a sort of
emotive correspondence between feelings and aspects of nature, but
this admission is not a warrantable basis for criticism.
In another passage quite in contradiction with his dictum on feel-
ings Mr. Woodbury says, "What we wish is only to create a sensa-
tion.” If that were true, painting would not be nearly so effectual
as the blacksmith's hammer and anvil; something better than paint-
ing would be within the reach of every child.
He emphasizes exuberantly the fact that painting is not reproduc-
tion, that details of actuality have no place in good art; and
yet
he
is equally insistent that the painter render accurately the general
tone of what he sees. “A good sketch,” he writes, “will be the record
of some special time and condition.” Again: "When the colour of
your rocks is at ten-thirty o'clock and the colour of your sky at nine-
thirty, your colour scheme is inconsistent.” There is no qualitative
difference between imitating detail and imitating general effect-
the difference is merely how much one shall imitate. Mr. Wood-
bury, in his conception of consistency, fails to include the funda-
mental question of creation.
The relation of art to nature is the most baffling problem in aes-
thetics; it is nothing less than the problem of form and content, and
even the approach to its solution requires much greater knowledge
than is evidenced in these rambling lectures. Consistency in paint-
ing does not lie in the concordance of natural effects—of time and
atmospheric condition—but in the spatial co-relation of the ele-
ments selected and used as the means of expression. It may be
urged that this statement does not embody the interdependence of
subject and object, but the moment these latter terms are brought
up, criticism of any one of the arts must be set aside and entrance
made into aesthetic proper. In art, certainly in poetry, painting,
and music, the subject, that is, the genetic cause of the expression, is


502
A GOOD TEACHER
transformed and lives a new life in the object from which it is
impossible of dissociation. Precisely speaking, the two are insepa-
rable. There is the motif, that which, becoming objectified in con-
sciousness, seeks an outlet; and there is the expression, which is the
mental objectification in a concrete and communicable form. When
the motif, say in this case, a simple sense impression, enters the
brain it loses instantaneously its original purity as sensation and is
subconsciously charged with the general mental content, forming
the complex of an image or thought. This image or thought, which
persists after the initiative factor has disappeared, may be the sub-
ject of the picture; it would be more accurate to say that it is an
elaboration of the motif, and after undergoing further changes in
the material for expression it ends finally, in so far as it is com-
municable and of value to humanity, as the expression or object
itself. The fact that the motif may be subjectivistic does not change
its quality or the manner of its progression toward incorporation into
the object. Leonardo's The Last Supper may by association call up
a definite group at table, but it might without the necessary his-
torical or religious key be any supper, or for that matter, breakfast
or dinner.
Consistency in art is not to be discovered in fidelity to natural
or historical truth. A painting may be a coloured anachronism, a
sociological paradox, an anatomical impossibility, and still be art.
Whatever is possible in the imagination is material for pictorial
truth of some sort. In painting, of course, that which shapes itself
in the workshop of the brain must have had origin in visual expe-
rience; but a canvas may be a masterpiece and yet exhibit a mid-
night sky, and rocks illumined by the light of morning.
Mr. Woodbury devotes little space to what has generally come to
be designated as Modernism. His attitude is one of light, fastidious
reluctance, and those scattered psychological observations which
indicate only the tepid circumspection of the superficial student
should have awakened him to the realization of the tremendous im-
port of this movement. While an appreciation of collective psycho-
logical manifestations presupposes a knowledge of particular char-
acteristics, it does not necessarily follow from that knowledge—it
certainly does not with Mr. Woodbury. An interest in the expres-
sive activities of society as a whole and sufficient curiosity to search
for the sources and to pursue the ramifications of such activities is


THOMAS JEWELL CRAVEN
503
a
indispensable to the clear apprehension of the so-called "new move-
ment.” As the idiosyncrasies of an individual may be found to
grow logically from reactions not qualitatively different from those
of his fellows, so in groups the factor which determines character is
not to be explained by any new phenomena but by the presence of
old and very common phenomena in a highly sensitized condition.·
It should not be necessary to remind the author that the history of
society is not so much the record of the contrivance of new things
as the history of freshly extended interests in old things; that the
general content of the human mind has suffered little alteration.
The division of the development of painting from the Barbizon
school to Modernism into a series of distinct and separate manifes-
tation (representation, interpretation, suggestion-page 25) is an
arbitrary dismemberment which even Mr. Woodbury is not likely
to justify on reflection. It is a hasty generalization arrived at from
the scrutiny of a few particularities of technique and instigated by
the imperative need of saying something. In the study of expressive
movements one must first understand that the ideas of representa-
tion, interpretation, and suggestion are equally involved, and that
no transitory differentiation of tendency can eliminate any one of
them; they accompany all the concomitants of objectification and
can no more be extracted from the product of expression than can
the Hedonistic element. Whatever issues from the mind in com-
municable form represents, interprets, and suggests. One must delve
deeper into collective psychology to fathom movements.
Concerning modern painting two theories are current: one of
them, the mechanical, regards it as the expansion and intensification
of means; the other, the sentimental, posits the weak man's revolt
against the intricacies of a civilization which is too much for him.
The first cries, "More science!” The second screams, "Back to the
primitive!” To account for a vast and plastic uprising by me-
chanical formulations, or by moral weakness is palpably absurd.
The Rousseau who weeps over civilization and is tortured by the
physical necessity of returning to the simple and the pastoral is not
Rousseau, the constructor, the maker of books, the creator. He who
fashions objects is, in the heated access of composition, strong and
mighty; if he weeps it is with joy, and the dissonances of life become
one with all his needs. Sociology, in spite of Taine, does not ac-
count for art.


504
A A GOOD TEACHER
Representation, interpretation, and suggestion are closely allied
with all expression; they are, in truth, characteristics of the ma-
terials selected for the expressive act. That the Rousseau is not in
harmony with his environment affects indisputably his choice of
materials, but their translation from the mental into the concrete
object is possible only by a vigorous affirmation which kills all moral
weakness and whining disapprobation. The artist, as such, is not
hampered by moral conditions.
As to the mechanical theory, the Renoir who is engaged in the pig-
mental experiments of Impressionism, who is interested in means,
is not the Renoir that will live. A means, of course, is requisite to
the handling of the selected material, but in so far as the manipu-
lation and not its purpose is dominant no final expression can be
attained. To discover an instrument does not imply the power to
use it, or that power granted, that the results will be fundamentally
different from what has been accomplished with other instruments.
One may behold nature through red glasses; one may be transported
into a new world—but the objects remain unchanged. The artist, as
such, is not analytic and is not controlled by scientific conditions.
The truth about a movement is not to be gathered from its scien-
tific or moral accidents but from something decidedly more simple
and human; and the interpreter of a movement must analyse such a
state in a manner similar to the psychologist of the individual. In
the individual a singular way of acting or speaking may be traced to
tendencies in his nature to react strongly to particular stimuli—not
differently from his coevals but more vehemently. Aggregate ex-
pression may likewise be traced to a generic tendency to react more
strongly to certain stimuli, and this predisposition itself will be seen
to have exhibited its greatest force in some individual. The analysis
of a group consists, first, in grasping the main tendency, then in
running it down to that unit in the movement in which it is most
strikingly exemplified. Thence it can be identified with the expres-
sive object, which, when all is said about aesthetics, is the only thing
humanity really cares about when it is sincerely interested in art.
The aimless and argumentative intellectual is always with us, but
one can never believe in the type as a lover of art, or as a lover of
man with whom art is a voice.
Once reduced to the individual, the distinguishing features of a
movement will be found to repose in the selection of materials. One


THOMAS JEWELL CRAVEN
505
man will be profoundly moved by colour; another strongly actuated
by peculiar convolutions of form-in both will be a concept of rela-
tionship which bespeaks translation into the concrete. A painter's
choice of materials is largely temperamental; it is governed by his
personal responses in his contact with life.
The moral side of art accompanies, without fail, the artistic fact;
means and tools are synonymous; but the fact stands alone testify-
ing to some powerful attribute of humanity and bearing with it
everything included in that attributer-means, relativity to environ-
ment, and so on.
Movements are engendered by the discovery of kinships. A num-
ber of men suddenly find themselves affiliated with a man who has
been classed as an eccentric; they embrace his materials, his means, ,
and sometimes even try to affect his morality; other artists are en-
listed and a confraternity is established in which the greatest intel-
lect dominates. It frequently happens that a man appears who
transcends the discoverer, as, for example, Renoir, who seized the
instruments of the Impressionists and made a wonderful art out of
what was up to his time only interesting. In the end the strongest
member will be the voice of the movement and will make the aes-
thetic history of his day.
Mr. Woodbury says that Modernism is suggestion. So it is
but how much more! Let him remember that among the many
blessings which it has bestowed upon art one is conspicuously note-
worthy—it has disenthroned the old champions of yellow mud and
sea water, of stagnant realism and servile adherence to chromatic
photography
THOMAS JEWELL CRAVEN
а


SAUL AMONG THE PROPHETS
Our America. By Waldo Frank. 12mo. 232 pages.
Boni & Liveright. New York.
NEA
EARLY a century ago Carlyle, in his essay on Characteristics,
,
protested against the self-consciousness of his age. “Never
since the beginning of time was there, that we hear or read of, so
intensely self-conscious a society. Our whole relations to our
fellow-men have become an Inquiry, a Doubt.” And, needless to
say, to Carlyle such self-consciousness was a sign of unhealth. “The
healthy know not of their health, but only the sick." "So long as
the Commonwealth continues rightly athletic it cares not to dabble
in anatomy.” “That Intellect do march, if possible at double quick
time, is very desirable; nevertheless why should she turn round at
every step and cry: See you what a stride I have taken !" But
Carlyle admits that this self-consciousness has in it the promise of
healing. It is not the disease itself; it is “the symptom merely; nay,
it is also the attempt towards cure.”
It is in this light that Carlyle would have looked at Mr. Waldo
Frank's Our America. It is a thoroughly self-conscious appraisal
of the forces in American life-self-conscious from the very title.
Mr. Frank implicates himself in the material of his study. He sees
America as the result of the pioneering force of the Puritan, supple-
mented by the aggressive impact of the Jew—two human types
which, set in motion by the ardour of faith in the unseen, have in
consequence stripped themselves for action, laid aside the garments
of prescribed culture, and have then abandoned their initial faith
for a lust of material possession which has carried them across the
continent in a wave of conquest like the onrush of the horde of
Tamburlaine-only to fall back refluent in a weary trough of dis-
illusionment and groping despair. The Pacific has set to American
pioneering its limit. The continental genius looks not beyond the
sea to the Orient. Rather as the wave recedes it threatens if it
gathers head again to spill southward into Mexico. But Mr. Frank
is concerned not with a future resurgence of conquering energy, only
with the stagnant trough into which the waters have subsided. He


ROBERT MORSS LOVETT
507
is himself of the depths and out of them he cries with the bitter
eloquence of the prophets. Upon the pitiful deposit left by the
stupendous effort of continental conquest he heaps his scorn-upon
the works of man, his barren culture, his feeble, imitative art, his
cities—New York, Chicago, Los Angeles. Here is his imprecation
upon Los Angeles, the final deposit of the pioneer wave on the
shore where it died:
“All cities speak. Some roar, some shrill, some whisper. Los
Angeles has no voice. Its vast expanse of pretty houses and wide
gutters and inept palms suggests the smile of an empty face. Los
Angeles is not a city. It is a country town that has outgrown its
rural voice and found no other. ... Los Angeles somehow has
no direction. One feels that its crowded central streets are not a
head but a stomach. One understands that its inhabitants are rows
of naughts made valid by no integer of purpose.”
This is not the voice of Jeremiah. Mr. Frank does not write
with the sustained and rolling cadence of Hebrew poetry. His
sentences are swift and staccato like the flash of a whip, sudden
and shrill like newspaper headlines. And yet Mr. Frank is of the
school of the prophets of his race. Other witnesses have arisen
against us, W. T. Stead, M. Paul Bourget, Mr. H. G. Wells, Mr.
Arnold Bennett. These, however, have spoken in their separation
from us, and, excepting the first, with the tolerant cynicism of de-
tachment. What gives force to Mr. Frank's prophecy is that he is
of us, as Jeremiah was of Jerusalem. It is of Our America, not
Your America, that he speaks.
To Mr. Frank's historical analysis of America it is only natural
that exception may be taken. His initial formula has something
immediately compelling about it: Puritan and Jew, both believing
themselves the chosen people, both looking "for a city which hath
foundations, whose builder and maker is God,” both led by con-
science and schooled in righteousness, disciplined by persecution,
exercised in adversity, made strong by suffering, stripped and hard-
ened for the battle of life; both finding their training in asceticism
the means of a will-to-power born of self-conscious, self-confident
faith; both disobedient to the heavenly vision, seduced by the lure
of worldly possession, turning, the Jew to recreancy and the Puri-


508
SAUL AMONG THE PROPHETS
tan to hypocrisy, and making the land of their promise a brothel of
material lust. But Mr. Frank overworks his formula in the interest
of simplicity. He overestimates Puritan and Jew, both in them-
selves and in their influence on other races. The history of the Jew
in America is short, at most three generations of degeneration, upon
the psychology of which Mr. Frank may be presumed to speak with
authority.
O
1
“There is a Jewish paradox, and this paradox is perhaps the equa-
tion of the Jew's survival, of his immense success. Always, he has
been moved by these seemingly antagonistic motives: the will-to-
power, the need of mystical abnegation. The channeling of
his mind upon the problem of practical dominion was an old channel
to the Jew. Enormous incentives, these, in the American lands.
He also poured outward: he also became spiritually poor: he also
stripped for action. When the mystical Jew dies, the Jew is dead.
The mystical Jew survived. But he slept. While the acquisitive
Jew, the power-lusting Jew, the comfort-seeking Jew, at last un-
barred from centuries of oppression and restraint, flooded upon a
world that thirsted for his gifts.”
The decadence of the Puritan was longer-and it is a fault in Mr.
Frank's method that it does not permit him to see in perspective.
His statement of the Puritan character is laconic. “The will-to-
“
power, intensified by the need of compensation for an adverse place
in the world, was at its heart.” He fails to take account of the ·
other-worldliness which is as strong in the Puritan as mysticism in
the Jew. “The Puritan movement was simply a chapter in the
long history of religious decadence. And in this function it stands
revealed. It was essentially an irreligious force: it was in practice
a component of pioneering.” This account serves the
purpose
of
Mr. Frank's thesis. It ignores such salient Puritan types as Milton
and Bunyan, as Sewall, Wheelock, and Jonathan Edwards.
Mr. Frank is doubtless right, following Professor Beard, in his
economic interpretation of the Revolution.
“The Revolutionary fathers first freed themselves from English
creditors, and then bound down as their own debtors an increasing
mass of the American population. The Constitution, which by


ROBERT MORSS LOVETT
509
a
brilliant means they thrust upon the people, secured the commercial
oligarchy which persists to-day. ... Having found that a loose Con-
federation meant loss to their investments and laxity to their con-
trol, they chose to band together to protect those interests and to
ensure their power: and this was what they meant by Union.”
Since then the stride of America was fatefully economic."
Here again Mr. Frank fails to make room for the political idealism
which was a factor in the constructive thought of the time, how-
ever later betrayed by material temptation.
This tendency to read the past in the terms of his theory is still
more apparent in Mr. Frank's rough treatment of American litera-
ture. He cuts down the forest with ruthless axe in order that his
favourite trees may stand alone. That Thoreau may appear as the
great affirmative figure of the Puritan tradition, he disposes sum-
marily of Emerson. He not only decries the force of Emerson's
protest against the materialism of the young republic; he makes him
its unwitting accomplice.
“An ironic tragedy, indeed. Emerson, who abhorreď American
affairs and was so repugned by reality that he could only with re-
luctance declare himself in favor of freeing slaves, was delivered up
into the patronage of the material world he hated: and did his
share of feeding it, easing it, giving it strength.”
It is true, Mr. Frank confesses, there is social criticism in Emer-
son's writings, but he rightly insists that "the effect of a man's
message depends on the density and temperament of his work.”
In assessing the force of Emerson's blows on the side of the angels,
then, one must set against The Oversoul and The Transcendentalist
such forthright, realistic protests as The Conservative, The Young
American, The Future of the Republic, and the Address to the
graduating class of the Harvard Divinity School. It is of the essays
presumably that Mr. Frank is thinking when he speaks of Emer-
son's aloof absorption, but the Essays in frequent rewriting have
lost their original character as lectures, and much of their con-
temporary quality. In contradiction to Mr. Frank's statement that
Emerson abhorred American affairs there come to mind the innu-
merable occasions of national commemoration or crisis on which


510
+
SAUL AMONG THE PROPHETS
!
Emerson was the voice of his fellow-townsmen in Concord, "sing-
ing great songs unto a little clan.” His hesitation in joining the
Abolitionists, if it deserves to be noted, was the result of a realistic
distrust of their idealism. Again and again in reading Mr. Frank's
excoriation of the pioneer one is reminded that Emerson laid his
finger on the same place. “Literature,” complains Mr. Frank, "to
the pioneer conviction, must not enhance experience, but must
counteract it.” One remembers Emerson's criticism of a sermon by
one of his contemporaries. "He had no word intimating that he
had laughed or wept, was married or in love, had been commended,
or cheated, or chagrined. If he had ever lived and acted we were
none the wiser for it.” Against the domination of English culture
Mr. Frank protests as “an apt means to the suppression of a nascent,
non-Anglo-Saxon culture of our own.” Emerson was beforehand
with him. The dead hand of New England on the national for-
tune Mr. Frank laments. Hear Emerson: "The nervous, rocky
West is intruding a new and continental element into the national
mind, and we shall yet have an American genius.” And finally the
whole monstrous American mythology which Mr. Frank batters so
roundly, is not its operation summed up by Emerson?
}
1
1
“They detect the falsehood of the preaching, but when they say
so all good citizens cry Hush, do not weaken the State, do not
,
take off the strait jacket from the dangerous persons. Every honest
fellow must keep up the hoax the best he can; must patronize
Providence and piety, and whenever he sees anything that will keep
men amused, schools or churches or poetry or picture galleries or
music or what not, he must cry 'Hist-a-boy' and urge
the
game on.”
Mr. Frank is right, however, in holding that literature is an un-
important expression of the American past as compared with politics.
It is true that a change has come—that "the drama of American life
has shifted: has become the struggle for the assertion of life itself.”
It is less certain that the immediate significant expression of America
will be through art. Nevertheless, Mr. Frank's buoyant faith that
it is so gives to his appraisal of the literature of the present a start-
ling and vivid appeal. The principle of selection on which he
makes up his orchestra is obvious. Such classic pretenders as
Howells and James he rejects joyously—such victims of popular


ROBERT MORSS LOVETT
511
.
a
debauchery as Jack London and Mark Twain, sorrowfully. His
concert master is Whitman, and his violins are Edgar Masters,
James Oppenheim, Carl Sandburg, and Robert Frost. Amy Lowell
handles the viola, Sherwood Anderson, the 'cello, and Theodore
Dreiser, the double bass. The brasses are Henry Mencken, Van
Wyck Brooks, and Paul Rosenfeld; the editors of the New Republic
assist with the wood-winds, and James Huneker is allowed the in-
struments of percussion. Altogether it is a noble band and Mr.
Frank makes us see the structure of the symphony which they play.
He is acute in his perception of their various virtuosities, and gen-
erous in praise. Of The Spoon River Anthology he says: “It is
not great poetry. It has no wings. It is eyeless. But it is a great
book precisely because it is so noble an expression of the wingless-
ness and eyelessness of him who wrote it: and of the generation
whose voice it is.” Of Dreiser's novels: "His books have the crude
form of simple massiveness. Some elemental force like Gravity
holds them together and propels them. . . . His books move. But
they move like herds. They have a rhythm, huge, partaking
of the whole, like the rhythm of a glacier. The rhythm of inchoate,
undifferentiated life. It is in this virtue that they are most like the
American world.”
Mr. Frank integrates this movement of the American mind, and
gives it a certain impressiveness. This fact makes the positive char-
acter of his book. Whether his criticism is really constructive,
whether the phenomena he notes are a real promise of the future,
depends on whether they are a vital expression of the American
spirit. Mr. Frank is confident. “Quite as naturally as the leaders
of a yesterday given up to physical discovery and exploitation were
politicians, the leaders of a to-morrow forced to spiritual discovery
are men of letters.” In this connection one naturally recalls a book
written a decade ago, Mr. Croly's Promise of American Life, of
which the correctness of analysis has been so amply proved by re-
cent events. Mr. Croly finds his promise in collective action, and
its fulfilment still largely dependent on progress in politics. “The
nation, like the individual, must go to school. ... Its schooling
consists chiefly in experimental collective action aimed at the realiza-
tion of the collective purpose. .
The individual American will
never obtain a sufficiently complete chance of self-expression until
the American nation has earnestly undertaken and measurably
.


512
SAUL AMONG THE PROPHETS
achieved the realization of its collective purpose. Mr. Croly
anticipates Mr. Frank in pointing out that "It is the economic in-
dividualism of our existing national system which inflicts the most
serious damage on American individuality.” But to Mr. Croly the
beginning of wisdom is in education of the collective mind, and such
education is the immediate fruitful opportunity of the individual.
Whether the brilliant iconoclasts whom Mr. Frank designates and
groups so aptly are in the way of accomplishing this education, or
whether they are a premature flowering of a genius which the na-
tional soil is still too weak to support, remains to be seen. That,
unlike the Transcendentalists, they have roots in the life and ex-
perience of the people is incontestable. Doubtless what is needed
at present is not a question or a cavil, but a vigorous profession of
faith such as Mr. Frank gives us. His book is a sign of that self-
consciousness which, as Carlyle points out, is not merely a symptom
but an attempt at cure. It is a valiant attempt to complete the
vacuous features of Our America with an expression. Than the
body of a giant moved by the mind of a child, to use Mr. Frank's
figure, there is nothing more horrible. Our America has always
evaded judgement on the ground of adolescence. Mr. Frank's book
is a plea, the more emphatic because of the eager haste with which
it is submitted, lest Our America be condemned to sterility as a
moron.
Robert Morss Lovett


COLAS BREUGNON
COLAS BREUGNON: BURGUNDIAN. By Romain Rolland.
8vo. 302 pages. Henry Holt. New York.
AT
FTER the many-volumed seriousness of Jean-Christophe, it was
time to relax, thought its author. Accordingly he tossed off
a short novel, much in the same way that Goethe would write a
lyric in the intervals of his labour on Faust; or Mallarmé an epi-
gram as relief from the intricate perfection of a sonnet. Rolland
is a monumental architect, however; not an intaglio worker or even
a sculptor. He feels a sense of limitation in three hundred pages,
and splashes through them a little awkwardly, like an elephant in
a bathtub.
It is in somewhat the same fashion that his gawky Burgundian
hero goes sloshing through the sixteenth century. A delightful fel-
low to meet after that testy demigod, Christophe. He eats too
much, drinks too much, squabbles with his wife; one feels that he
is a tricky hand at a bargain and is inclined to resent him as dam-
nably and eternally vulgar. In his youth he must have been a
charming rustic devil; fifty and philosophy leave him still very much
the uproarious youngster. Altogether a fitting companion to Panta-
gruel, Gil Blas, and the Abbé Jérôme Coignard.
Colas is like that as long as he remains Colas. "But when one
follows his adventures further, one finds to one's disappointment
that Rolland's inevitable paranoia is breaking through. First the
discovery that Colas is a sculptor seems infinitely disappointing; you
had hoped for one hero at least not sicklied over with the pale cast
of art. His misfortunes begin; he undergoes fire, famine, pestilence;
his wife dies and he himself is bedridden. "Ah,” you exclaim, "here
is another character whose history is a symbolic pilgrimage; another
hero who is not a man but Man." And at the end when he reckons
up all his misfortunes and discovers that really he is a gainer by
them; when he decides that "Man is a wonderful creature and all
is grist that comes to his mill,” you begin to suspect him not as a man
but as Pollyanna.
Even he has his message. The import of the whole volume is


514
COLAS BREUGNON
summed up in the words with which Colas consoles himself for the
destruction of his statues :
“These will last, the souls of these children on which I have
wrought my impress; wood and stone may be destroyed, but this joy
no man can take from me."
a
But to reduce the book to this Lesson (which already has been used
as motto for a spawn of little Colases) is a little unjust to Rolland.
He is an utterer of sententious maxims, but also he is an artist, and
for that, much is forgiven him.
Another author would shrink from commonplaces such as this.
Indeed literature since Verlaine seems often to be dominated by a
morbid fear of the platitude. Truism, cliché, commonplace, bro-
mide, banality: the synonyms flock and tumble in the vocabularies
of recent critics. Writers have a tendency to reverse the eighteenth
century; to shun the general and confine themselves to individuali-
ties. No longer does colour exist; there are only shades and nuances;
tones merge into overtones, and all definite metres are lost in the
theoretical existence of Rhythm. One obvious drawback exists to
such a theory. About the important matters of life: about birth,
time, love, death, there is little to be said that does not verge on the
banal—even this. Authors of the species described must confine
themselves to smaller themes when they wish to be satisfyingly orig-
inal. Colas was written on another principle.
Romain Rolland is one of the great platitudes of literature.
“Vergil, Shakespeare, Goethe,” I suppose he tells himself, “did not
disdain to treat fundamental situations in a homely, sententious
fashion; neither shall I. Goethe and Shakespeare did not shộink
from the great passions of man; I shall be bold as they.” If he suc-
ceeds in this attempt to return to fundamentals, he is among the
somewhat-less-than-forty immortals; if he fails, he is Dr. Frank
Crane. But when you ask whether he has attained art or banality,
one can only answer, Both. Two or three of the ten books of Jean-
Christophe, isolated chapters from his other writings, one episode
out of Colas: these are masterly. But they do not stand alone;
shoddy as are some of its products, there is something awesome about
the very hugeness of Rolland's mind.
Even at his worst moments, he devises ways to spice his common-
places. They sound quite appropriate, for example, in the mouth


MALCOLM COWLEY
515
a
of Colas; one expects such aphorisms from a sixteenth-century Bur-
gundian with a philosophical turn. The language in which he utters
them is vulgar and forceful, moreover; altogether a part of his
character. But the work of the translator goes a long way towards
reducing the whole thing to inanity.
She goes about her labour of destruction in a thorough way.
Every time Colas uses a specific word she substitutes a general word.
If the diction doesn't suit her, she alters it; modern slang and that
of the sixteenth century are ambivalent in her eyes. There are times
when Colas becomes too frank; on such occasions she excises a pas-
sage without even apologetic dots. One remembers a particularly
amusing story that Colas told his sweetheart; Belette laughed up-
roariously. In Miss Miller's translation the story is omitted, but Be-
lette is left there, laughing tempestuously at you wonder just what.
Colas is physical and direct even in the times of his greatest emo-
tion. This effect is lost completely in translation. When his wife
is on her deathbed, Miss Miller makes him say:
“It was all very well to say that I did not love her, and that we
had been constantly rubbing one another up the wrong way for the
last thirty years; she had lain by my side in the narrow bed, and
from her had sprung the seed I planted; and now that the pale
shadow was near her, I felt a cold hand laid on my heart.”
a
Compare this with the poignant vulgarity of Colas' own words:
"Voyez-vous, on a beau ne pas aimer sa veille, s'être fait enrager
l'un l'autre, jour et nuit, durant vingt-cinq années, à l'heure ou la
camarde est venue la chercher, celle qui, collée a vous dans le lit trop
étroit, a mêlé si longtemps sa sueur à la vôtre, et qui dans ses flancs
maigres fit lever la semence de la race que vous avez plantée, on sent
là quelque chose qui vous étreint le gosier."
Such mistranslation at the worst is blundering; there is one sen-
tence in the introduction, however, which comes near being crimi-
nal. Rolland had spoken incidentally of his desire for free Gallic
gaiety, "going even to irreverence.” This did not satisfy the trans-
lator. "I felt an absolute need for something gay,” she makes him
remark, "in the true Gallic spirit-even perhaps verging on impro-


516
COLAS BREUGNON
priety.” And so that this suggestion of the true yellow-backed
naughtiness should not fail of its effect, the sentence was wrenched
from its place and set definitively at the end of the first paragraph.
Even out of the inanities of translation, certain qualities stand
forth clearly. You can hardly fail to enjoy the gusto of Colas; his
naïve delight in the five senses. Always he seems surrounded by the
essentials of a joyous life, namely by smoked tongues, saveloys,
gudgeons, hams, chines, roast pig, and andouilles. In times of fam-
ine when everything else fails he retires with his friends to hidden
cellars where they bouse at open bottles of Chablis, Pouilly, Irancy;
he speaks of these associates as having bellies like great soup-pots.
Colas likes equally a girl's face, a spring morning, and the clean
smell of fresh-sawed wood. He possesses, in other words, something
that whole generations have lacked conspicuously; a sense of the
realities; a love not for the thing-in-itself, but just for things.
One expects such a fellow to wander on tangents through a whole
series of amours. Colas had only one; it is the single perfect epi-
sode of the book. He was about twenty at the time; apprenticed to
maître Médard Lagneau. In the neighbouring garden worked Be-
lette, a strapping girl with eyes wide apart and a wide mouth like
a
a weasel's. It was love and hate between them; landerida, lanlaire,
lanterlu, Belette sang. If she finally decided that Colas had ceased
to love her and revenged herself with the miller; if she was forced
to marry the other when his hat was found hanging on an apple tree
outside her window—and he inside:all this didn't matter much.
The years were still sweet; Colas came sometimes to talk over old
times, and on the branch outside of her window, the cuckoo (coucou,
cocu, coucou) sang instead of the nightingale.
I suppose that stories of the kind have been told a thousand times
in every language of Europe. Occasionally one of them, related
with absolute naturalness, stripped to the bones of description, at-
tains greatness as if by chance. The story of Belette is such; it is
;
the triumph of Rolland's method. Through the rest of his work are
scattered episodes of similar beauty, and any final judgement of the
man must rest on these. As for the remainder, one finds a character
here and there to admire; the tubercular vigour of the style is re-
freshing to a tired world; above all one respects the huge boldness
of the conception. His work as a whole, however, hardly merits the
place in permanent literature to which Rolland so plainly aspires.
Malcolm COWLEY
1
a


THE OLD ORDER
The Economic CONSEQUENCES of the Peace.
By John Maynard Keynes, C.B. 8vo. 298 pages.
Harcourt, Brace and Howe. New York.
Tin
a
a
HERE are moments when facts cease to be either important or
interesting. When a book has become a sensation and has been
variously described as a subtle bit of British propaganda, an equally
subtle bit of pro-Germanism, and the most important event since the
Armistice, the mere details about it may well be summed up in the
italic description given above. But since the successive printings of
Mr. Keynes' analysis of the Peace Treaty have failed to meet the
created demand—are we all pro-British or pro-German, then ?-I
shall note the main lines of the work and then ask the reader to en-
gage with me in the attractive childhood game of “Let's pretend.”
The facts, therefore, will contribute to creative activity.
An English economist, for fourteen years in the British Civil Ser-
vice, unhung for treason during the war, allowed, in fact, to take
charge of all the delicate negotiations between the British Treasury
and the financial chiefs of the Allied Powers and of the United
States, went to the Peace Conference as the chief representative of
his country's Treasury and was a member of the Supreme Economic
Council. Although he was (as far as any one knew) a loyal Briton,
he had accepted with the utmost seriousness those terms of agree-
ment which President Wilson laid down in the Fourteen Points.
When those points were (with reservations) accepted as the basis
of peace by both sides, in the hysterical days preceding the Armistice,
this calculating economist took pains to draw up certain specific
peace terms which would be in keeping with the Fourteen Points
and would still give the victors something to bring home, with
honour. These conditions were summarily rejected. Since the imag-
inative portion of this review must come later, we omit all descrip-
tion of the economist's chagrin and mortification. They must have
been great. Yet he survived the rebuff and remained at Paris, fight-
ing for his ideas and trying to get some of them into the Treaty.
When he understood finally that this was impossible, he resigned


518
THE OLD ORDER
1
>
and wrote the book which he called with some irony, “The Eco-
nomic Consequences of the Peace.” Not, you see, "The Economic
Consequences of the War.”
"
The argument of the book is that the Peace was made by three
men, Clémenceau, Lloyd George, and Wilson, shut off from the cur-
rents of life, pursuing separate purposes, fighting for their own,
tricking each other and composing such a treaty as must presently
become a danger to civilization. After analyzing the economic struc-
ture of Europe before the war and describing, in memorable and
malicious words, the meetings of the masters of the world, Mr.
Keynes takes up the Treaty. Thus:
"Two rival schemes for the future polity of the world took the
field,—the Fourteen Points of the President, and the Carthaginian
Peace of M. Clémenceau. Yet only one of these was entitled to take
the field; for the enemy had not surrendered unconditionally, but
on agreed terms as to the general character of the Peace.”
This is the accusation, clear and neat and amply justified: that
Germany asked for an armistice and for peace negotiations on the
basis of the Fourteen Points and that, with two reservations, the
Allies and Associated Powers entered upon negotiations on this
basis, the whole Peace Conference being described in advance as an
effort to apply the Fourteen Points. Mr. Keynes unblushingly
asserts that Germany was betrayed, for after she had been rendered
harmless by the Armistice, the Fourteen Points were abandoned and
their only further appearance was when phrases were injected into
Carthaginian terms to deceive Mr. Wilson. Mr. Keynes believes
that this was an act of perfidy, comparable to the violation of Bel-
gium at the beginning of the war.
The Treaty impoverishes Germany and compels her to pay an
enormous sum to the Allies under the general head of Reparations.
Mr. Keynes makes two points in this, the longest section of his book.
The first is that the addition of separation allowances and war pen-
sions to the burden which Germany must pay to the Allies is unjust
because it violates Mr. Wilson's point for "no punitive damages, no
contributions,” and because the Allies' specific reservation on this
point held Germany responsible for damage to civilians due to Ger-
man “aggression by land, by sea, and from the air." His second


SGANARELLE
519
a
point is that Germany cannot pay. The amount due is undeter-
mined; some fifteen billion dollars are definitely to be paid; the rest,
which Mr. Keynes estimates at twenty-five billion more, depends on
the mercies of the Reparations Commission. All this is apart from
the contributions in coal, part of which is to atone for the destruction
of French mines in the occupied area, from the surrender of ships,
from cessions of land, and from expropriation of German property,
state and private, in various places. Mr. Keynes insists that Ger-
many has been rendered incapable of increasing her production to
such a point as would enable her to pay more than ten billion dollars.
Finally Mr. Keynes describes the present condition of Europe, a
terrifying picture of desolation, demoralization and fear. He adds
his remedies; obviously they are changes in the Peace Treaty which
he had proposed at Paris long ago. The most important of these
are: modifications in favour of Germany, permitting her greater in-
dustrial development; cancellation by Great Britain and by the
United States of inter-Ally indebtedness; the floating of an inter-
national loan; the creation of a Free Trade Union in Europe; peace
with Russia.
Such is the book and I have intentionally left out one thing, the
author's motive. For that, let's pretend. Let us imagine ourselves
first as financiers, hard-headed, practical men; nothing can be put
over on us and we know what propaganda is. We will say then that
the motive is to get America to cancel her ten-billion-dollar loan to
the Allies. True, the author insists that before Britain can ask this
she must give up her own five billion. Still, five billion to the good
is good business. Or, being subtle, we will say that the motive is
to frighten American investors in Europe, so that they will lend, if
at all, through Great Britain, and that country will retain her enor-
mous political influence on the Continent.
Or perhaps we are patriots. Then our task is easy. We will say
that the gentleman is a pro-German. We will point out that he is
unduly sensitive to the hardships inflicted upon that faithless and
treacherous country; that his whole concern seems to be to put her
on her feet again, even at the expense of Italy and France. His
Free Trade Union is a mild version of Naumann's Mittel-Europa.
Besides, he agrees with Mr. Wilson, and Mr. Wilson was always
supposed to be soft to "the German people.”
Again, let us pretend to be reactionaries. Then this book is a


520
THE OLD ORDER
work of radical propaganda. It asserts that even revolution is help-
less now to aid Europe, but it has no harsh words for Bolshevism
and its description of the Paris Conference as a combination of
thieves and cutthroats is munition for reds. It is very easy to show
that some, at least, of Mr. Keynes' figures are faulty and that his
proposed indemnity of ten billion dollars does not amount to very
much if you allow Germany to spread it over thirty years. His his-
torical background is weak and we can catch him in some rather
sweeping assertions. We, too, will remember that he is pro-German.
Or, let us be Clémenceauists. We will recall to Mr. Keynes that
we were not half so keen about the indemnity as was our minister
of finance, M. Klotz. He needed an indemnity so that our taxes
should not be excessive, that our people might not revolt. We our-
selves wanted to prevent Germany from becoming a great industrial
power again very soon, because history has shown us that with them,
military power follows all too fast upon prosperity.
Or Lloyd-Georgians. Does Mr. Keynes imagine that our hands
were free? Did not our Geddeses demand indemnities to the utter-
ance? Did we win the war and were we to be defeated by weasel-
worded Liberals because we didn't dare to speak roundly about
hanging the Kaiser? Is Mr. Keynes so unconscious of politics as he
seems?
Or Wilsonians? The Wilsonian answer, thank goodness, is writ-
ten. The Treaty does bear out the Fourteen Points as far as im-
perfect practise can fulfil impeccable and infallible theory. Mr.
Keynes, to be brief, lies in his throat.
The game always did get tiresome when we were children, and
just as we approached the state of exhaustion we always tried the
greatest pretend of all. Let us pretend that we are radicals (we
called it Kings and Queens in those unregenerate days). Then shall
we not say that this book is written by a member of the old order in
a last desperate attempt to save it from its own folly? Does he any-
where express one word of hope for a new orientation of society?
Does he, apart from a reference to the League of Nations, envisage
a world in which nations can live well together? Does he care for
labour as much as he does for capital ? Read his description of this
iniquitous system and say whether he does not at heart believe that
the capitalist cake, which is never eaten, but of which the few
get
all
the icing, isn't the best of all possible cakes? Isn't this whole book


SGANARELLE
521
1
pretence is
a
a plea, such as any Frenchman might have made before the Revolu-
tion, to the established order to open its eyes, not to be too greedy
for the momentary good, and to save the civilization which the
capitalist system enjoys? And being good radicals, could we not
recall that no word of Mr. Keynes approaches in bitterness the con-
tempt expressed for the Treaty by, say, Senator Lodge, whom we
have never reckoned as precisely one of us?
Not all of these are imaginary attitudes; several versions of Mr.
Keynes' motives have been widely canvassed, in words similar to
those I have used. But one has yet to discover, except in private
letters from England and in casual conversations, the attitude which
is essentially that of the author himself. The
game
of
over, unless we have to pretend to care for civilization. If men and
women exist who do not wish to see the entire structure fall, carrying
with it every hope of humanity, they will read this book with a little
more attention to its thesis and a little less suspicion of its motives.
In spite of his felicity of style Mr. Keynes expresses himself badly.
His theme is that at Paris the economic consequences of the war,
dreadful in themselves, were indescribably perverted and made
worse, made an active danger to society, by the interposition of
political necessities. It is vastly amusing to find the London Times
defending the Treaty on just this ground: that political considera-
tions influenced the economic sections of the instrument. What a pity
that the history of European diplomacy since the Congress of Vienna
was not a living thing in Mr. Keynes' mind when he wrote this
book; with Vienna and Berlin as a background he would not have
felt so out of place in the stifling atmosphere of the “French Saloons
of State.” Obviously he expected that the ruin of Europe would
be averted by the application of sound economic principles, the first
of which must be that in the unit known as Continental Europe there
can be neither peace nor prosperity so long as a vast portion of the
population starves and riots for food. Heaven knows he has no
tenderness for revolution; he is one of the few who see clearly that
whether it succeeds or fails, it will tear down every fine thing in the
fabric of our civilization. The very thing we have fought to pre-
serve has been put in jeopardy by those who led us into battle. No
order has taken the place of the old order; no new ideal has called
forth those devotions on which a culture can rest; no discipline has
superseded the old discipline of authority. The world may save
a
.


522
THE OLD ORDER
itself, in agony and tears; but what will be left of it then for the
sons of earth to enjoy?
Perhaps our civilization is not worth ten billion dollars. Perhaps
the integrity of one man must be challenged to save the illusions of
many men; perhaps all the disillusion of generous-minded people
after the war is a special mockery, the last and broadest smile on the
ironic countenance of Fate. Those of us who take our heritage of
the ages lightly, with some criticism and not a little gratitude, are
bound to protest, even without much hope, against this insufferable
threat to what we possess. It is possible that our defiance is a
theatrical gesture, absurdly misplaced, because the curtain is rising,
not falling, on our civilization. I do not know. But I do know that
nearly every word of hope for the world has been spoken, since the
Peace, by those who were opposed to its provisions; and I know that
I would rather be a pro-German with Mr. Keynes and save the
world than dwell in the tents of the covenanters.
SGANARELLE


LEGEND
LEGEND. By Clemence Dane. 12mo. 199 pages. The
Macmillan Company. New York.
LEG
EGEND, says the Oxford Dictionary, means a collection of the
lives of saints, a traditional story popularly regarded as his-
torical, or a myth, all of which definitions confirm Clemence Dane's
choice of a title for her latest book. She might have called it
“Madala Grey, Genius,” but for the fact that the emphasis is less
upon the heroine than upon the group which is busy with building
a legend about her. It is a study in genius, one that leaves you a
little surprised that so many geniuses have made themselves heard.
Mute, inglorious Miltons may be too happy to care whether glory
waits them or not. Like Madala they may prefer to live master-
pieces rather than take to the cold process of writing them. Fortu-
nately, Madala's struggles began early, and she had already written
three books before the art of living absorbed her entirely.
The
story is told by Jenny Summer, cousin and secretary to Anita
Serle, a critic. It is not easy to avoid sounding like stage directions in
speaking of Legend, for the book conforms absolutely to the laws
of the drama. It is really a one-act comedy of conversation with a
few brilliant stage directions written through it and its effects height-
ened by something of a Greek chorus consisting of Anita's old
mother who “chuckles, pokes, and mutters” in her corner, Jenny,
and Kent Rehan, an artist who had loved Madala. There is a pro-
logue in which Jenny enlists our sympathies for Madala, gives us
a swift glimpse of the Baxter girl with her cobweb stockings, her
colored combs and her sprawl, and prejudices us completely against
Anita Serle. The stage is set and the curtain rises on the drawing
room of Anita's London home. The literary group which Madala
had held together, gathers for its monthly meeting, and the talk is
all of the missing member. Such cats they are around that fire!
Cats all, except one to a book, Clemence Dale's women have been so
far. Clever vicious cats like Claire Hartill of A Regiment of Wo-
men share the stage with soft purring cats moved now and then to
sharpen their claws as Miss Howe must hers, and lean, predatory


524
LEGEND
cats like Anita, who make geniuses their mice. The types are never
confused; that little group done in raw colour is unforgettable.
The Baxter girl alone, a study in clever crudity, is a masterpiece.
Mr. Flood of the quartz eyes and the saturnine pose, his enchantress
with greenish-golden hair and round black eyes, and thin-lipped
Anita Serle in gray chiffon—they are all convincing as Jenny paints
us the picture.
They miss Madala; the evenings are not the same, and they vent
their anger on the man 'who took her away from them. Why on
earth had she married him, a churchwarden, a man who thought
socialism meant proper drainage? Perhaps she had written herself
out and had made marriage an exit. Perhaps—and here Kent Rehan
enters to announce that Madala has given birth to a son and is dead.
Her death is not the significant fact in the story, as Louise
Denny's was not in Miss Dane's earlier book. It is a necessary bit
of the construction, a stone fitted into its place in the soundly built
house that holds the group. Miss Dane is as easy a master of con-
struction as any Renaissance builder, so sure of herself that she can
legitimately experiment in literary architecture. She can give the
ending of her story on the first page as she does here; she can insist
on the classic unities—the whole comedy takes place in one evening
around Anita's fire. She can omit chapter divisions; she can unite
a Greek chorus and an apparition in a modern love story, develop
satire, tragedy, and love side by side without shifting the emphasis
for an instant from character.
The shock of Kent's announcement only gives fresh incentive to
the dissection around the fire. The cord that held the group is cut
and they straightway become self-assertive entities, each contribut-
ing his little bit to the legend of Madala Grey. Each brings his
unwilling tribute to her vivid charm. They do not mean to speak
well of her. Her every act and word are made to pass through the
warped labyrinth of their interpretation, yet the impression of her
purity and charm emerges side by side with the ugly legend they will
perpetuate about her. She had written of a fallen woman; how did
she know? She had given them a story of all-absorbing love and
had carelessly let an unsent letter fall into Anita's hands; a letter
to whom? She had married an obscure country doctor fifteen years
her senior; why? Out of their own mouths the gentle reader could
answer them, but they must interpret.


HELEN IVES GILCHRIST
525
a
It is a satire on interpretation, a criticism of the critical method,
delicious in its swift details. Madala's husband had stormed at
her once because she had taken his razor to cut the cord around
some packages, and he had ceased to rage only when Madala, still
unrealizing, broke in to ask, “Darling, have you begun 'Eden Walls'
yet ?" To Anita Serle, the incident formed one more link in her
theory that Madala must have had more compelling motives than
love for marrying the brute. The group half-assents to Anita's
interpretation. They all question her ability to write a life of
Madala as she intends, but meanwhile, drawing her out is fun, and
the probing continues. At last, the chorus, Jenny, Kent Rehan, and
great-aunt Serle, protest. There is a bitter clash in which the chorus
is routed. Great-aunt Serle is sent to bed; Kent and Jenny to
Coventry. The room is cut into two distinct parts, the closed circle
and the two outside, drawn together by their common revulsion
from it.
Then comes relief from the strained atmosphere which has en-
dured to the breaking point. Indeed it would be a decided detri-
ment to the book if the relief from it were not so well-timed and so
entirely adequate. It sheds a clear light through all the fog the
group has raised, and, never dispelling the legend, still keeps Jenny
and Kent and the reader from being seriously disturbed by it.
At this point we are reminded a little of William McFee's lumi-
nous vision of life, for some part of it has fallen to Clemence Dane's
share and with it she leavens her lump. William McFee has put
his vision into the thoughts of Hanny Gooderich when the news of
his son's birth comes to him as he lies dying. Miss Dane, in accord-
ance with England's present absorption in spirit investigation, brings
back a mother from the dead to hand on her torch to Kent and
Jenny.
Miss Dane's characters would not have recognized Hanny Goode-
rich. Neither would the majority of the people in English fiction
have been willing to notice them. They are of a different stripe
from Galsworthy's Patricians, and just as far from H. G. Wells'
kindly, upper middle class families as from his amazing clerks.
Mr. Britling would have wanted to feel their bumps. They are
cruder, less sure of place, and an Englishman not sure of place has
no certainties! They try so hard to be among the fit who survive
that the struggle brings out claws and venom. After all, the dragon


526
LEGEND
and the sabre-tooth tiger did die out. No doubt they passed away
rebellious, insisting with the last spurt that the ark held but a tame
crew.
a
It is easy for so passionately earnest a writer to overemphasize,
and just here a flaw is apparent in Legend. The malice that rises
like a poisonous vapoúr from that group around the fire is overdone.
The people never lose reality but they do forfeit the right to great
consideration. Miss Dane has learned, since she wrote A Regiment
of Women, to produce her effects in less time. She has given each
of the group exactly sufficient rope for his own hanging, even the
Baxter girl who would be kind if she dared. The effect is clear but
a little too harshly handled. Oddly enough, the apparition is in-
troduced to lend a touch of reality and relief, to give the clanging
dissonance a pleasanter note to end on.
It is rather to be regretted though, that apparition. There will
be many such in the post-war fiction of England which so carefully
refrains from all mention of the great struggle and so clearly re-
flects it in its bitterness, half-
made adaptations and a groping for
comfort after loss.
Since all new things are only the old with a difference, Miss
Dane's method in Legend may be called new. Thackeray let his
inimitable blackguard Barry Lyndon convict himself in his own
defence and Kipling once dabbled in a ghost that came back to
correct a mistaken impression about the manner of its taking
off, but Miss Dane has given us revelation in the third person and
with double purpose. The group reviles a genius, thereby, with the
help of sympathetic Jenny's chorus, laying bare their own iniquity
and revealing Madala Grey as one of the most charming heroines
of the modern novel.
HELEN Ives GILCHRIST


"SWEETNESS AND LIGHT”
12mo.
THE COAT WITHOUT A SEAM. By Helen Gray Cone.
12m0. 100 pages. E.P.Dutton & Company. New York.
Hail, Man! By Angela Morgan. 12mo. 107 pages.
John Lane Company. New York.
EUROPE: A Book FOR AMERICA. By Samuel Roth.
12mo. 107 pages. Boni & Liveright. New York.
SONGS OF ADORATION. By Gustav Davidson. 16mo.
37 pages. The Madrigal.
Youth Riding. By Mary Carolyn Davies.
179 pages. The Macmillan Company. New York.
BLUE SMOKE. By Karle Wilson Baker. 12mo. 116
pages. Yale University Press.
The COBBLER IN Willow Street. By George O'Neil.
12mo. 135 pages. Boni & Liveright. New York.
RAPIDS AND STILL WATER. By Rutgers Remsen Coles.
12m0. 40 pages. The Stratford Company. Boston, Mass.
Poems. By Gladys Cromwell. 12m0. 120 pages. The
Macmillan Company. New York.
A Woman of Thirty. By Marjorie Allen Seiffert.
12mo. 127 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. New York.
THI
a
a
THE remarkable thing about minor poetry is the fact that it is
contrary, it may
be
said that a minor poet is one who writes almost exclusively on major
themes. Life, Death, Romance, Faith, Wisdom, Sorrow, Time,
Eternity, the Hereafter, and a host of capitalized generalities are
the stock properties of those singers and sonneteers for whom a de-
tail is too difficult. Yet even here they fail. For it is in the very
treatment of these hallowed themes that the minor poet reveals
himself. The polite recorder of polite sentiment, any emotional
extreme is too much for him. Instead of attempting to sound
strange depths in these familiar waters, he is content to accept an-
other's discoveries; his own chart is a composite record of what is
generally approved. When, as sometimes happens, his frail craft is


528
“SWEETNESS AND LIGHT”
upset in the grip of an elemental disturbance, he is terribly at sea,
floundering among fierce tides, distressing waves. He wishes he
were out of the welter, longs for the certain shore, the well-trod
ground. Just as he is about to go under, his subconsciousness flings
him a life-preserver in the form of some standard thought, a routine
expression, an “immemorial” phrase—and he is saved!
This, it seems to me, explains the popularity of the platitude; it
is something that is comforting, safe, serviceable. It appeals to the
average reader for precisely the same reasons as it captivates the
average writer. The cliché is a refuge not so much of the lazy
craftsman as the timorous soul; its use betrays an unholy veneration
for what originally was the experiment of an adventurous mind.
The result, therefore, of a mildly poetic nature trying to summon
an intense mood is never a genuine evocation; it achieves nothing
but pale reflections of it; stereotypes of emotion. The attempt to
make stale phrases take the place of fresh figures, the reliance on
time-tested patterns, the complacent retreat into vague "wonder”
and the shelter of "the eternal verities"—this is the true minor note,
whether it languishes in a privately printed pamphlet or shouts its
triumphant truisms through extra limp-leather editions for the
library table.
This, in brief, is the case for the prosecution. We shall prove,
beyond the probable, possible shadow of doubt, that ... But let
us turn to the evidence.
Miss Cone's well-meaning volume is Exhibit A. The first thing
that arrests one, after the rhetorical title-poem, is Sonnets of the
Great Peace. The initial poem begins:
“What boon is this, this fresh and crystal thing,
Perfect as snow, dropped from the deep of the sky,
This healing, shed as from the soft swift wing
Of some great mystical bird low-sweeping by?''
Let us pass, without comment, to the section that occupies two-
thirds of the book, the section entitled "Moods of War.” Here
we are in the very heart of what happens to the minor poet con-
fronted by a major passion. Individuality abdicates; the impulse
to probe or discover is repressed; thought, emotion and even the
phrase-making instinct run smoothly along worn grooves with pre-


LOUIS UNTERMEYER
529
cise conformity. All the mob reactions (so fiery in the journals of
1917 and so feeble two years later) are epitomized in ready shib-
boleths like "Flag of my Soul's Desire,” “To fill the World with
Light,” “O Mother, the Right is Right!," "O plume of Europe,
proud and delicate France.” ... Time was, and not long since,
these counters had a brave ring; now, without the mixture and
fusion of noble metals, the poor alloy predominates. Even the shrill
notes sound fat. The last third of Miss Cone's volume contains
poems about Death, Romance, Faith, "the golden sea of Devon,”
"the love of bonny Scotland,” Gloucester Moors and John-a-Dreams.
Miss Morgan is more sweeping, more strepitant. Her note is
ecstasy con fuoco; her exaltation is unremittingly fortissimo. Often
on the point of a crashing success she fails because of this very
too-determined vigour. She shouts platitudes in one's ear with the
gusto of a revivalist; her exhortations, which begin with a down-
right conviction, end by becoming deafening. The combined titles
of three of her exclamatory volumes reveal her quality in one simple
imperative sentence: “Hail, Man! The Hour Has Struck! For-
ward March!"
The first of these has this confident opening
“This flesh is but the symbol and the shrine
Of an immense and unimagined beauty,
Not mortal, but divine;
Structure behind our structure,
Lightning within the brain,
Soul of the singing nerve and throbbing vein,
A giant blaze that scorches through our dust,
Fanning our futile ‘might be' with its Must';
Bearing upon its breast our eager span-
Beyond, above, and yet the Self of man!"
Miss Morgan can and has done far better than this. It is rare,
however, that she cuts and prunes till her lines achieve the firmness
of Common Things, Minstrels, Days. Gifted with an ease and
fluency, she lets her rippling sentences run on till they become a
mere babble of words. But the reader is forewarned. No one will
expect the life-blood of realism in a book that blazons on its first
page: “Dedicated to Reality.”


530
"SWEETNESS AND LIGHT”
Mr. Roth is another who tries too hard. His sincerity is evident;
his fervour does him credit. But he too dispenses truisms at the
top of his tenor voice. Mr. Roth's book attempts to be the double
record of a soul and an age in ferment. But, apart from the dubious
a
poetic quality of these zymotic paragraphs, the chief impression
obtained from Europe: A Book for America is that of an honest,
unflinching and almost inspired triteness. The author, intrepidly
joining the majority, disapproves of the Peace Treaty; he is out-
raged at the Jewish massacres in Poland and Roumania; he despairs
of Europe; he believes in America—even to the extent of such a
dithyramb as:
“There is a light wherever you go,
Woodrow Wilson, President of the United States.
There is a light over your collected speeches to Congress
And a light over your dense history of these states.
You are really an awkward fellow,
But the light in your path is sure as the light in the pathways of
old Æneas.
The next future of the world will be in America!"
.
>
In spite of his treble acclamations and basso denunciations, Mr.
Roth's rhapsodies do not resound. They are too routine; too full
of the stereotyped formulas which make this writer continue to
see Italy as “the minstrel, the romantic,” England as the adroit
merchant, France as the golden wanton, “lovelier than ever Babylon
was, and more licentious,” and so on. ... “Europe” may possibly
be "a book for America.” It never can be one for Europeans.
Mr. Davidson's tiny volume deserves one's almost unqualified
admiration—if only for its typography, paper, and composition.
Unfortunately, these eighteen Songs of Adoration scarcely merit
their exquisite cover; they are as full of echoes as any of the more
commercial looking collections although the cliché in this case
happens to be a biblical one. It takes a greater (and less civilized)
a
poet than Mr. Davidson to use the idiom and verbal mechanics of
the anonymous Hebrew who composed The Song of Songs. Even


LOUIS UNTERMEYER
531
I
the most orientally coloured of Mr. Davidson's prose poems attest
their failure. An example:
“Thou failest not in remembrance of me. Thou keepest in mind my
constant need. Thou givest thought to my alone-being. Thou
dost not forsake me.
Thy goodness endureth in the end. Thy loving kindness floweth in
an unceasing stream. There is no last to thy fair-bestowing.
O, thou makest me to exult. Thou makest me to give praises in
song. Thou makest me to utter thy name in many languages,
to sound it on many strings.”
Miss Davies, like Miss Morgan, suffers from her own facility.
Much of Youth Riding (a title that should delight the Freudian
Mr. Mordell) is composed of a too-fluent wonder, an ever-ready
wistfulness. This lyricist has almost caught the trick with which
Sara Teasdale tightens up her songs—she manages artlessness and
the catch-in-the-throat in poems like The Day before April, The
Apple Tree Said—but where Miss Teasdale summons passion, Miss
Davies commands little beyond pleasantness. A characteristic lyric:
“We cannot die, for loveliness
Is an eternal thing.
If God, his dim old eyes to bless,
Brings back the Spring,
Shall he not bring again your grace,
Your laughter, your warm hair?
And how can he destroy my
face
Your kiss made fair ?"
When Miss Davies turns from the precise little eight-line stanza
form, she is much nearer success. In fact when she discards rhyme
entirely she often achieves it. The most individual notes in her
collection are in poems like Marriage, The Proposal, and her early
Songs of a Girl. Glancing again at the rest of her volume with its
preponderance of easily-traced patterns and obvious sweetness, there
seems to be a strange significance in the fact that Miss Davies was
once one of the rebellious Others.
a


532
"SWEETNESS AND LIGHT”
Mrs. Baker's gracefully issued verses are more trepid—I almost
wrote tepid—than the hot and assertive glorification of most new-
comers. Hers is a gentle gracefulness, a light timidity that succeeds
most when it is least emphasized. The keynote of the volume is
sounded by her titular inscription:
“The flame of my life burns low
Under the cluttered days,
Like a fire of leaves.
But always a little blue, sweet-smelling smoke
Goes up to God.”
a
And the last poem in the book, swelling the strain of a rose-water
mysticism, returns, after a series of not too involved modulations,
to the insistently minor theme:
“I am the pearl of the earth,
The soul of the grime,
I am the delicate, visible mirth
Of the sorrow and slime.
I am the light in the sinner,
The wings in the clod,
I am the beautiful breath of The Brute
Praising God.”
Mr. O'Neil's volume is lighter though not sweeter. In fact the
book, instead of being named after its uncharacteristic and imitative
title-poem, should have taken its title from the italicized fly-leaf
poem, On the Light Reeds. Lightness is this poet's charm, his
appeal and—unless he changes his points of contact—his limita-
tion. Already there are evidences in this volume that this youth
of twenty depends too much on his delicacy; he is sometimes too
conscious of a naivete that may easily develop into preciosity on the
one hand or mere prettiness on the other. This, from one of the
most winsome of Mr. O'Neil's verses, illustrates the tendency:
" "Can you feel the haunt in the air? ?
I am afraid my roses are growing wan;


LOUIS UNTERMEYER
533
But more magical as summer fades.
The love of dead June seems to cling to them.
I do not touch them now,
For once-
Shall I tell you?
Once I kissed the reddest rose in my garden,
And in the morning
I found all its petals strewn in the path.
1
April brings her violets-
Introspective little things that hide in leaves;
And nuns,—do you ever think of violets as nuns ?”
Gracefulness is likely to be this poet's undoing. He already has
the trick of it well-almost too well-in hand. But he has more
than the trick. It is his spontaneous lyricism, saving him from
banalities, that revivifies the old figures in his brief songs. And in
the semi-epigrammatic quatrain that is rich in suggestion, he has a
nice command of his instrument. I quote two of these :
“Stepping into the closing forest, here,
A sudden silence seemed to seize each bird,
As I stopped breathlessly to overhear
The secret of a last excited word ..
а
"These swords that gleam in broken rows,
Plunged upward through the earth's full veins,
Drip still with scarlet blood although
They have been washed by summer rains.”
Mr. Coles' volume contains a number of sonnets which, if the
paper jacket can be trusted, “Mr. Coles spent some years in perfect-
ing.” “They contain,” according to the Foreword written by Hor-
ace E. Henderson, A.B., Head Master of English at Pawling
School, “no strained attempts to catch the fancy by bizarre expres-
sions, no endeavours to surprise the reader into admiration of
audacity.” Both statements are incorrect. Mr. Coles' audacity is
proved by rhyming "dawn” with “forewarn”; his expressions that


534
"SWEETNESS AND LIGHT”
catch the fancy (expressions like "If betrayed like rusted grain, in
crimson passion dies” and “A falchion's blade to beard a monarch's
pique") are more than bizarre; and the “perfecting” of his son-
nets, which took Mr. Coles some years, is best apprehended after
reading the various erudite apostrophes To Mother, Semper Idem !,
War’s Apocalypse, and Metathmalion. This is the surprising (in
spite of the Foreword) sestet of the last-named:
"Alas, we fear-and grim fear, like a knife,
Sunders our bonds so jealousy creeps in-
Mutually hidden—a protested sin.
Like the huge boulder, whose gigantic life,
Is rent asunder by a crack so thin-
Thus bursts the monument of man and wife.”
a
The
poems of the unfortunate Gladys Cromwell betray the hid-
den thing that wrecked her career. One sees, in practically all of her
poems, a fear of this life that is a kaleidoscope of beauty, belliger-
ence, and bestiality. The inability to adjust herself to an insecure
and chaotic world is manifested even in her earlier poems which
contain some of her finest lyrics. As Gladys Cromwell began to
mature, her work took on a more conscious intellectuality, her
fancies became more studied, more introspective and even inverted.
Many of her best verses, compounded of light and darkness, tremble
on the verge of greatness. In poems like The Mould, Definition,
Dominion, and Choice she seems a tentative and somewhat frailer
Emily Dickinson, with a less incisive and more indirect idiom.
THE MOULD
“No doubt this active will,
So bravely steeped in sun,
This will has vanquished Death
And foiled oblivion.
But this indifferent clay,
This fine, experienced hand
So quiet, and these thoughts
That all unfinished stand,


LOUIS UNTERMEYER
535 .
Feel death as though it were
A shadowy caress;
And win and wear a frail
Archaic wistfulness."
Mrs. Seiffert and her alter ego “Elijah Hay" unequally divide
A Woman of Thirty. The concluding section reveals the least,
known of the Spectrists in some of his (her) most awkward postures.
“Once night was a lion,
No, years ago, night was a python
Weaving designs against space
With undulations of his being-
Night was a siren once.
O sodden, middle-aged night!"
Or, more succinctly, this
>
EPITAPH
“Courage is a sword,
Honour, but a shield ...
Here lies a turtle.”
a
The accents of "Elijah Hay” are unfortunately not confined to
the last fourteen poems. They disturb even when they do not dom-
ináte Mrs. Seiffert's more natural and genuinely imaginative verses.
The trouble with A Woman of Thirty is its lack of synthesis.
Colour and a free movement, subtleties of thought and rhythm
are here, but they have not been integrated; they ravel out into
many unconnected loose ends. Love lyrics, studies for decora-
tions, designs from Japanese prints, impeccable nature poems, in-
trospective analyses, originality blurred by moth-eaten phrases and
adjectives as outworn as “alien”—Mrs. Seiffert's volume is a curious
mixture but not a blend of new tendencies and old echoes. One
waits to hear more. Hers, at least, is a bitter-sweetness and her
light touch does not pretend to reveal the Light.
-
Louis UNTERMEYER


1
BRIEFER MENTION
En Route, by J.-K. Huysmans, translated from the French with
a prefatory note by C. Kegan Paul (12mo, 463 pages; Dutton),
illustrates, by the very fact that a new American edition is called
for, the longevity of books, however beautifully composed, which
have sincerity and passion for their foundations. The passage of
Durtal to his faith, after the evil days of La-Bas, is a profoundly
interesting and moving journey. The translation is excellent.
The JUDGMENT OF Peace, by Andreas Latzko (12mo, 280 pages;
Boni & Liveright), will disappoint the readers of his volume of
powerful stories, Men in War. A full novel, it is devoted to the
reactions of a musician whose disillusion with patriotism takes the
a
form of an acute resentment at war's invasion of art and of the
normal privileges of artists; but his story fails as art because it
is forever running into bald propaganda, as propaganda because
its grounds are emotions instead of thoughts.
OUTLAND, by Mary Austin (12mo, 306 pages; Boni & Liveright),
is a utopian interlude between two contrasting love affairs of the
same couple. The owlishly academic lovers are sent not so much
back to nature as to a never-never-land, where only man is vile.
Upon closer acquaintance the Outlanders prove to have a psychol-
ogy so close to the human that it helps the lovers find themselves.
The book is generously supplied with atmosphere and adventure.
a
THE STRANGERS' Banquet, by Donn Byrne (12mo, 352 pages;
Harper). Here the case Capital v. Labor, the romance of ship-
building, the love story of a “good” woman, and the cunning
ambitions of a "bad” one are juggled with all the exaggerated in-
tentness of purpose of a vaudevillist. The stunt is marked by
a
no genuine interest in the problems it exploits, but by a prurient
pleasure in what the author so likes to call “the putrid," by self-
righteous sentimentalism, and by snobbery. Donn Byrne made
literature once, and a few unrewarded literary echoes still attend
his steep descent to the House of Mirth.
a


3
537
BRIEFER MENTION
a
THE FORTUNE: A Romance of Friendship, by Douglas Goldring
(12mo, 376 pages; Scott & Seltzer), is recommended by Romain
Rolland. An indolent Irish rebel, a conscientious objector, and a
thoughtless volunteer are the chief figures in a very well told
story;
but there is a sense of confusion because the author has not
correctly distributed his centres of interest. A free spirit, as M.
А
great talent, probably. One looks forward to
his next with more than usual interest.
1
Rolland says.
Peter KINDRED, by Robert Nathan (12mo, 362 pages; Duffield),
is a first novel. Of prep school, college, adolescence, sex, first
love, and economic theories it is regrettably true that you must
forget them before you can remember them—and use them as
materials for fiction. Mr. Nathan has forgotten nothing; it is all
here, and it is vastly unimportant.
The House Of BALTAZAR, by William J. Locke (12mo, 312
pages; Lane), a goodly tale in the true Lockian style, sets roman-
tic middle age disporting genially in a unique plot.
The Mystery OF THE BLUE VILLA, by Melville Davisson Post
(12mo, 360 pages; Appleton), contains seventeen stories that
exemplify Mr. Post's readability. He guarantees diversion to
the T. B. M.—or to the tired college professor, for that matter.
He writes to be read, not worried about.
Black BRANCHES, by Orrick Johns (12mo, 92 pages; Pagan Pub-
lishing Company, New York), is in part curiously original—the
product of a spirit tormented by the nostalgia of the immaculate
conception and obsessed with a passion to compose etudes on rec-
ondite words. The rest is overburdened with imitations of Al-
fred Kreymborg and T. S. Eliot.
The Singing CARAVAN, by Robert Vansittart (12mo, 168 pages;
Doran), hammers mysticism into clean, efficient verse, which in
its ease and correctness, displays the immense technical equipment
of the recent English poets; but his subject matter shows the
lack of freshness and homeliness that handicaps the Georgian
Poets as a group in comparison with their American rivals.


538
BRIEFER MENTION
A MISCELLANY OF British PoetRY: 1919, edited by W. Kean Sey-
mour (decorations, 8vo, 145 pages; Harcourt, Brace & Howe),
collects the more innocuous of the Georgian Poets, whose love is
for birds and trees and myths. The omission of D. H. Lawrence,
J. C. Squire, and Siegfried Sassoon-the more robust members of
that group—is a little hard to explain, as is also the inclusion of
Edith Sitwell, whose modernity seems a bit intrusive-like an
aeroplane at a tea-party.
The CRAFT OF THE TORTOISE: A Play in Four Acts, by Algernon
Tassin (12mo, 157 pages; Boni & Liveright), is really four
pseudo-historical variations on one theme—woman (the tor-
toise), though hobbled by the hare, beats him to it by the exercise
of her tricksy slave wits. A preface hopes she will relinquish the
dishonest privileges of the slave when she has learned to exercise
the rights of the freewoman. The plays hover between satire and
burlesque, and contain much that is arbitrary, didactic, and as
inept as the figurative title; but they contrive to be both enter-
taining and provocative.
Essays on Art, by A. Clutton-Brock (12mo, 144 pages; Scribner),
are united by the author's well expounded “belief that art, like
other human activities, is subject to the will of man.” He desires
to provide a public, since he cannot create genius, and asks how
we can so provide when our professors cannot furnish their own
houses or our colleges build good buildings. These essays, re-
printed from the London Times Literary Supplement, are vigor-
ous, informative, and often, as in the Leonardo, very well written.
Fogg Art MUSEUM, HARVARD UNIVERSITY: Collection of Mediae-
val and Renaissance Paintings (illustrated, 4to, 380 pages;
Harvard University Press, Cambridge) “undertakes to fulfil the
functions of a handbook” both for Harvard students of the Fine
Arts and for visitors. It is in fact not only a most convenient
and instructive catalogue to a very important collection, but also
a scholarly treatise on the periods. The inevitable slips in dates
and such matters will be corrected in due course; the sound critical
material will for a long time make the Fogg the envy of much
older and larger institutions.


BRIEFER MENTION
539
FAMOUS.MORGANATIC. MARRIAGES, by Charles Kingston (12mo,
284 pages; Brentano), is the sedate orchestration of a score of
royal romances. The theme is occasionally elaborated by the
wood winds of fancy, to make room for snatches of dialogue, but
there is no radical departure from the accepted rules for this type
of narrative. Such volumes provide a sort of dual baptism-a
sprinkling of history in an immersion of text.
My Memoirs, by Grand Admiral von Tirpitz (2 vols., 12mo,
805 pages; Dodd, Mead), is one of those elaborate vindications
which carry the authentic conviction of guilt. The earlier part
of the work contains surprisingly generous praise of England's
maritime tradition: the latter part is devoted to showing that the
blundering of Bethmann-Hollweg gave Germany's enemies the
opportunity to attack her without bearing the onus of aggression.
Occasionally in Von Tirpitz acute perceptions of men and ideas
combine with a complete moral imbecility and a stale reverence
for the household gods of Preusstum. If Germany was really, as
the Grand Admiral estimates, a sheep in wolf's clothing, a few
more memoirs like this will leave no regret about her fate.
LUDENDORFF's Own Story, by Erich von Ludendorff (2 vols.,
8vo, 950 pages; Harper), gives a G. H. Q. view of the war from
August 1914 to November 1918. It has a certain quality of
forthrightness which makes its fallacies and mistakes apparent
to the reader even when they escape the author. Ludendorff's
thesis is that the war was lost because the army at home had not
another Ludendorff to direct it-hence unrest, disaffection, slack-
ness, and ultimate disaster. With his Fatherland prostrate, only
Ludendorff's self-complacency remains erect among the ruins.
Whilst his country writhes in defeat his code and outlook stand
stiffly in their pre-war attitude of “Attention.”
The YANKEE IN The British ZONE, by Ewen Cameron MacVeagh
and Lee D. Brown (illustrated, 12mo, 418 pages; Putnam), is a
cheerful and amusing account of a rather neglected portion of
America's participation on the Western Front. It is good-hu-
moured, accurate, full of incident, and a bit "hurrah.” That is,
the authors are still writing in 1918.
a


540
BRIEFER MENTION
LEONARD Wood: Conservator of Americanism, by Eric Fisher ·
Wood (12mo, 351 pages; Doran), discloses a pedigree which
could not help ennobling the Presidency were the elective quali-
fication for office removed—for the sake of 100% American-
ism-in favor of hereditary title. . A descendant of the May-
flower, an athlete, an Episcopalian, an opponent of Bolshevists,
pacifists, pro-Germans, and their like, General Wood is, accord-
ing to his biographer, a flawless candidate.
THE ENEMY WITHIN: Hitherto Unpublished Details of the Great
Conspiracy to Corrupt and Destroy France, by Severance John-
son (12mo, 297 pages; McCann, New York), bears strong inter-
nal evidence of having been put together in order to foment incar-
nadine spook-hunting in America and shows a mind searching in
its own turbid depths for American parallels to Bolo and Cail-
laux. It suffers from a spiritual epilepsy which must pain the
sensitive spectator almost as much as it tortures its victim.
NATIONAL EVOLUTION, by George R. Davies (16mo, 159 pages;
McClurg, Chicago), surveys the development of human societies
in the past and endeavours to chart the drift in present-day affairs.
In the attention Dr. Davies pays to geographic and economic
backgrounds his little work is in line with the best contemporary
sociological research. National Evolution is a distinct contribu-
tion to the National Social Science Series, whose last three vol-
umes-of which this is one-have raised its standards to a level
where the scholar can share the interest of the “busy man" for
whom it has been planned.
OUTSPOKEN Essays, by William Ralph Inge (12mo, 281 pages;
Longmans, Green), gives the Dean of Saint Paul's an oppor-
tunity to speak with devout animosity about Our Present Dis-
contents in religion and society. His tone is that of the acerbic
Hilaire Belloc, but on the subjects of Patriotism, the Birth Rate,
and The Future of the English Race probably no two minds
could be farther apart. There is so much excellent modern ra-
tionalism in Dean Inge's commerce with facts and tendencies that
one cannot well forgive him for living emotionally in the dingy
atmosphere of the century-old Malthus.


BRIEFER MENTION
541
FREE TRADE, The TariFF, AND RECIPROCITY, by F. W. Taussig
(12mo, 219 pages; Macmillan), needs no introduction to any
student of economics or commercial policy. Chairman of the
United States Tariff Commission, Dr. Taussig's authority, which
rests alike upon research and watchful, even-tempered criticism,
is preeminent. Many of the essays are popular enough in char-
acter to have appeared in the Atlantic, and they have therefore
almost equal appeal to the lay and the learned. This book should
commend itself to editorial writers who are not wilfully com-
mitted to writing fallaciously about international trade.
The Scientific SPIRIT and Social Work, by Arthur James
Todd (12mo, 212 pages; Macmillan), discusses the grounds for
including social work among those occupations which, by becom-
ing permeated with the scientific spirit, have achieved the rank
of professions. Without undervaluing the human contacts
which must remain the chief media of social work, the author
clears the field of sentimental underbrush, and points the way to
a comprehensive training in applied sociology which will enable
workers to keep an open mind toward modern social tendencies
and to exert an intelligent influence upon them.
The FAMILY AND the New DEMOCRACY, by Anna M. Galbraith
(12mo, 387 pages; W. B. Saunders Co., New York), finds
grounds for belief that the effect on woman of the wider range
of interests opened to her by the war will be the gradual elimi-
nation of the “kept” type and the re-establishment of the family
as a cooperative enterprise. This to be signalized by a revision
of the marriage contract. However sound that prediction, the
chapters on the need for uniform marriage and divorce laws, and
for sex education to combat the spread of venereal disease, are
much to the point.
The Labor Market, by Don D. Lescohier (12mo, 338 pages;
Macmillan), treats of labour supply, occupational idleness, the
reduction of labour turnover, and the development of public em-
ployment systems. A workmanlike book, with an exhaustive
British-American bibliography, that fills a gap in economic litera-
ture.


THE THEATRE
a
T:
HE gentle hope expressed a month ago has not been fulfilled.
There is no pretext for discussing acting this month; there was
none last month, and the boards flourish, so I have no reason to be-
lieve that any sudden change in the contemporary theatre will bring
anything like acting to the stage next month.
In The Theatre Advancing (which is published by Little,
Brown & Co.) Gordon Craig has chosen to illuminate the things of
the stage by flashes of lightning and because Mr. Craig understands
and loves the theatre I have turned to him for some guidance on this
subject. What do we want of our actors? The truth? A danger-
ous quality, which we may not recognize and which, if it happens
to be a small truth, will give us very little satisfaction. Nature?
But we already have the Belasco tradition. Interest? But the
good mind is capable of interesting itself in such a variety of useless
things.
We want beauty and we want ecstasy, and we are not getting
much of either. “I ask only for the liberation of the actor,” says
Mr. Craig, "that he may develop his own powers, and cease from
being the marionette of the playwright.” Perhaps our actors and
actresses are getting the kind of plays they deserve; but the chance
is that a few of them could create where they now imitate, could give
us passion instead of emotion, and character instead of the little
play of characteristics which makes up the acting of the contem-
porary stage.
а
Miss Elsie Ferguson is playing in SACRED AND Profane Love,
the play which Arnold Bennett made badly out of The Book of Car-
lotta. (The book and the play are both, published, by Doran, in
this
country, and the reader who wishes to understand how passion
) degenerates into emotion on the stage may well compare the two.)
For an act Miss Ferguson presents the high qualities of beauty and
of creative intelligence, and her virtuosity of voice and posture and
movement has almost the power of magic to hold the audience in a
spell. Thereafter Miss Ferguson, being skilfully led by her play-
wright to everything ordinary and tawdry in the drama, very prop-


GILBERT SELDES
543
erly leaves off her inspiration and, instead of magic, plays with
after-dinner tricks in hypnotism. I mean, simply, that however
cheap the play, Miss Ferguson remains almost intolerably attractive
to the eye and ear, and evokes the lingering hope that she may again
break through the bonds of Bennett and become an artist. That
hope, too, is vain.
Perhaps the most complete collection of the faults of acting is in
Eugene O'Neill's Beyond the Horizon. That Mr. O'Neill is
struggling to express himself with passion and does not fall into
violence is perhaps the best thing to be said for a play which fails
lamentably to be a great American drama. He has liberated his
performers a little; and the result is that they have returned to their
previous condition of servitude, to the least inspired and the most
pretentious style of acting each of them has known in the past.
All that goes before has been written with the feeling that the
theatre can give something more than a momentary pleasure, and
that intelligence is not totally out of place in its productions.
Dropping the lofty attitude one becomes ever so much better pleased
with the theatre, with shows rather than plays and people rather
than players. Mr. William Collier, talking mad nonsense for an
entire evening, is what is known as a capital performance; Mr. Col-
lier, like most of our comic actors, keeps faith with his admirers,
because he promises to amuse without unnecessary vulgarity and
he does precisely that. Mr. Leo Ditrichstein, walking through a
part which does not even give scope to his talents, is at least honest
and competent in The Purple Mask.
The two permanent organizations in New York, the American
Singers Opera Company and the Theatre Guild, are, if either will
pardon the juxtaposition of names, equally competent. The Guild
has mo