st of the intelligent acting in New York, and has the sense
of a produced play; the singers of Gilbert and Sullivan have noth-
ing except an intense desire to present their masterpieces neatly and
with satisfaction. I do not see any occasion to become excited about
the virtues of either. What right have they to be less than they are?
GILBERT SELDES


COMMENT
IN
N a country that places art before all other considerations, sug-
gestions for turning artistic enthusiasm to practical account
should not be out of place. The Dial does not propose to upset
the picture market, which is after all the goose that lays the golden
egg, nor to compete with publications which report picture sales and
dealers' tips. It merely intends to state a few general principles
drawn from a study of the financial history of modern art.
For this month we shall confine ourselves to a consideration of
the individual who has only a little money to risk, but who is willing
to wait twenty-five years for his returns. Let us say boldly that
any one of this description can make a considerable fortune by using
the proper system. “Provided only,” you suggest, “he has also a
little taste." On the contrary: it is not a matter of taste at all.
The chances are all against you if you use your taste. By taste we
mean,
I suppose, a proper appreciation of the proper old masters,
,
the ability to tell by looking at a picture whether to praise it with-
out first hunting for the signature, perhaps even the ability to tell
by looking at a picture in the morning what it is going to sell for in
the afternoon. This sort of taste is obviously not worth anything
when you are trying to decide in the morning what a picture is going
to sell for in twenty-five years. And what we have said about your
own taste applies equally to competent advice which is after all
only somebody else's taste. Probably only ten men in a genera-
tion have a line on what the next generation is going to think it
likes, and the chances are all against your meeting one of them.
You might not get along with the queer
fish if
you
did.
The winning system is this: whenever you see a picture which you
see nothing in, and nobody of taste sees anything in, acquire it as
cheaply as you can and put it away where it will not annoy you.
The fact that you see nothing in it simply means that you
have not
seen anything like it before. Conversely, when you see a picture
and at once something inside you says, “This picture appears to me
to be a cuckoo,” and every one agrees with you: keep away from that
picture; or if you do buy it, remember that it is only a luxury. You
may, it is true, make fifty per cent. on it in a few years, but the really
,


COMMENT
545
handsome ten thousand per cent. profits we are speaking of will
escape you. For a painter who is popular now will be out of date
in twenty-five years—unless he happens to be one of those exces-
sively rare creatures who know how to bait more than one hook. It
is the unpopular man who is your best gamble by all odds—besides,
his pictures are so much cheaper. Indeed you can persuade any num-
ber of young artists to part with their work for nothing. Then after
twenty-five years you sell ten of the lot at ten thousand apiece and
buy something you really want.
There is a publishing house in the East which, in addition to its
good name as one of those whose imprint never lay upon an im-
moral book, has the reputation of allowing more errors to slip
into the printed page than any other firm. The two things, we pre-
sume, do not necessarily go together, and we are not at all inclined
to believe that a high moral purpose is sufficient excuse for bad
paper, slipshod binding, careless type arrangements and typograph-
ical errors.
Pianists in their recitals often play what they call
"false notes” and audiences forgive them on the ground that ex-
cessive emotion condones the lack of technique. But book-making
is a more leisurely and, perhaps, a more dignified profession; there
are no false words, only wrong ones, and a good printer would know
of nothing more immoral than a Prayer Book with ill-assorted type
faces. All of which makes it the more alarming to find that the
great majority of books printed in America have nothing to com-
mend them as books and that the printer's art has developed into
something of a cult, worshipped in secret and by a few, never
brought into the bright light of day. If it is true that the inven-
tion of printing—it was fairly good printing then
put an end to
the Dark Ages, what are we in for now, when printing has virtually
ceased to exist and mere publication has taken its place?
If our commercial publishers fancy that their bad printing is a
necessary evil, it may be well to remind them that the magazine with
the largest circulation in America, The Saturday Evening Post, uses
an ordinary type, has excellently drawn capitals for its titles, and
is almost impeccable in its proof-reading. New type faces are still
being made in America, and it costs no more to print from them
than from bad ones. And finally, we have noticed that the better a


546
COMMENT
book, the better its format and typography is likely to be, although
one would have thought that only the books which sold in half-
millions would justify careful printing. Perhaps, in another sense,
they are the only ones which do not and their publishers are smil-
ing cheerfully at those who buy shoddy.
The plaint against modernity has the consoling virtue of being at
least as old as antiquity itself, but we cannot help repeating it.
Imagine reading
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure dome decree
and, turning from the romance and magic of those lines, discovering
that in Jamalpur, Bengal, the thirty thousand employees of the
Tata Steel Works have gone out on strike. There is a new and
separate cruelty about modern society. It informs us of so many
things we are helpless to change and of which we would rather
remain ignorant. What corruption has come over Jamalpur that it
must have steel works, and having steel works, why cannot things
be so arranged that we, at least, know nothing of them?
MR. LOGAN PEARSALL Smith has collected specimens of English
prose writing from the time of Chaucer to our own day and his book,
A Treasury of English Prose (Houghton Mifflin), gives us, in the
smart English style of speaking, furiously to think. His excerpts
from the novelists are few, giving an overbalance to the ancients
because in the last century the English novel has by its own dignity
and decency absorbed almost all of the creative talent to which prose
was the natural medium. Chaucer stands on the first page and San-
tayana on the last, and one wonders whether we haven't well lost
the sonority of the old manner for the style which can with grace
and a consummate rightness convey every subtlety of the modern
mind. The pages of Walter Pater have a flowering and living
beauty no more hard and gem-like than the textures of Henry James.
It is well that Mr. Smith included a few of the fakers with these
honest creators of the beauty of the written word. Otherwise we
might be even too deeply moved by the magnificence of our language
and never use it again without shame for our fumbling.






Courtesy of the Society of Independent Artists
THE FALSE GOD. BY MORRIS KANTOR



THE INDIAL
IX
OXXII
MAY 1920
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
An Appreciation and Some Personal Memories
BY DOUGLAS GOLDRING
OF
F the many young poets who died or were killed during the
European war, none perhaps has proved a greater loss to
English letters than James Elroy Flecker. By his death in Switzer-
land of consumption at the age of thirty England was deprived of
a poet who loved her passionately, whose work will endure long into
the days of peace, whose reputation is likely to go on increasing
rather than to wane. At present his poetry is still, I think, not so
generally familiar as it deserves to be, though the number of his
admirers is steadily growing both in England and in America.
Flecker was never the idol of any particular set during his life-
time, and since his death very little has been written about his per-
sonality as it appeared to those who knew him, beyond Mr. Squire's
valuable introduction to the Collected Poems. My first clear recol-
lection of James Flecker centres on an evening spent with him in a
Bloomsbury lodging house, in the early summer of 1907. He had
come down from Oxford that year, and had recently, I think, been
schoolmastering in Hampstead.
The house, which was in Torrington Square, on the left-hand side
as you walk towards the Irvingite Church, seemed dark and half-
deserted on my arrival, and its cavernous hall was illuminated only
by one flickering gas-jet, half-way up the stairs. Flecker's sitting-
room was at the back, on the second floor, and on the night of my
visit it was in an extraordinary state of chaos, reminding one of noth-
ing so much as the inner parlour of a second-hand book-seller's shop.
a


548
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
-
Books and papers lay about everywhere, heaped together in hope-
less confusion. A wave of paper-covered books seemed to have
broken over the table and spent itself on the floor. More piles of
books stood in all the corners and on the chimney-piece; the book-
cases overflowed. Pictures were stacked against the skirting-board
or lay face downwards on the carpet. A typewriter somewhere dis-
entangled itself from amidst piles of manuscript. And jumbled up
with French, Spanish, or Italian novels, foreign illustrated papers,
and sumptuous editions of the Greek and Latin poets, were liqueur
bottles, glasses, copies of L’Assiette au Beurre, packets of caporal
cigarettes. A withering glare of unshaded incandescent gas poured
down on this confusion, in the midst of which—tall and lean, with
black hair and heavy eyebrows—stalked the unforgettable figure.
The details of what took place that evening remain with peculiar
distinctiveness in my memory, though it was not, of course, my first
meeting with Flecker. This must have been in a drawing-room in
Chelsea, for I did not know him at Oxford except by repute. His
fame at Oxford for the kind of brilliance then in vogue was astonish-
ing. His "japes” were repeated everywhere; and long before I met
him I had heard so much about his genius that I was filled with
suspicions, determined at all costs not to be unduly impressed! (In
those days I had my own gods and was prepared to find other
people's inferior.)
Any prejudices with which I may have arrived at Flecker's rooms
were however very soon dispersed. Never shall I forget the way he
talked! The window of the room was wide open at the bottom,
framing a square of dark blue night; and through it, as an undertone
to his conversation, came the faint, thrilling roar of London. He
was tremendously excited, in an extraordinary mood of elation. He
was excited about his first book of poems which was shortly to be
published by Mr. Elkin Mathews, excited about his novel The King
of Alsander, of which the opening chapters had just been typed;
and, above all, excited (so it seemed) by the sheer joy of being alive,
of having the world in front of him. I remember that he read me
the two poems Ideal and The Town without a Market, which I
fancy he had just completed; and I can hear him now repeating the
lines-
“When all my gentle friends had gone
I wandered in the night alone:


DOUGLAS GOLDRING
549
Beneath the green electric glare
I saw men pass with hearts of stone.
Yet still I heard them everywhere,
Those golden voices of the air:
Friend, we will go to hell with thee. ..."
-in his gentle, rather high-pitched, enthusiastic voice, with its
latent suggestion of melancholy. And after this he read me the first
two chapters of The King of Alsander, and never before, I thought,
had work of such epoch-making brilliance been written! (Alas,
when I read the poor old King in his entirety, seven years later, it
was a blow to find how Time had robbed him of his glamour.) Then
he talked of his approaching visit to France, with a friend in the
Foreign Office. They were off to plunge into some kind of rising
among the vignerons of the Bordeaux district, where at that time
Catholicism was in conflict with the Republic. Flecker produced
the rigolo which he was taking with him; its barrel glinted in the
gaslight. Somehow he made the adventure of being young almost
unimaginably thrilling. At that time I was an ardent Francophile,
and Flecker seemed to have done all the things which I (at twenty)
was pining to do myself. It appeared that he knew Paris almost as
well as London; had been to all the cabarets of Montmartre and
the Latin Quarter; was familiar with Steinlen's work (not so hack-
neyed in those far-off days) of which he had many reproductions;
and could hum all the songs of Bruant, Lucien Boyer, or Marinier.
Flecker was essentially of the fine flower of the English public-
school and university system.
He was entirely absorbed in his art and in the loveliness of a
world seen through the eyes of a scholar and a poet. Never before
or since have I encountered any one with such a rapturous, with
such an intoxicating joy of living. Our talk soon came back to
poetry, to his own poems; and as I listened, to be a poet seemed the
most wonderful thing in a world full of the maddest, most delicious
possibilities. .
That was one aspect of Flecker; there was another. Behind his
delight in life could be detected, even then, an under-note of sad-
ness. When he wrote of himself as "the lean and swarthy poet of
despair” it was probably a joke—it was still the fashion to be
despairing, in those days—but like all jokes worth making, there
i
a
a


550
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
was a flavour of truth in it. It is difficult to avoid the thought that
some of the extraordinary rapture with which he looked on the world
was due in part to a premonition that he was not long to inhabit it,
that his time for enjoyment was too short to allow him a moment to
waste. Traces of this under-note are to be found perhaps in the
poem called No Coward's Song: and again in the lines called Prayer
which were written, I.think, in 1907.
“Let me not know, except from printed page,
The pain of bitter love, of baffled pride,
Or sickness shadowing with a long presage.
Let me not know, since happy some have died
Quickly in youth or quietly in age,
How faint, how loud the bravest hearts have cried.”
Flecker and I met very frequently, after the evening in Torring-
ton Square, in the flat of a friend in South London. On these
occasions he was nearly always surrounded by people who knew him
better than I did, and my impressions are now a little blurred. But
I retain a glimpse of him sitting at the piano dressed up in a Jap-
anese kimono, smiling his pleasant rather sardonic smile and thump-
ing out the tune of La Branche de Lilas or Navaho, while the rest of
us shouted the choruses. And I remember many amusing contests
of wit, in almost all of which Flecker came off best. Not quite in
all, however, for I was present at his Waterloo. The cult of the
Suburban Music-Hall was just beginning in those days, in “interior"
circles, and it was a little Cockney dancer called Gertie who, on an
historic evening-our hostess shamelessly abetting her—succeeded
in worsting him. Gertie had learnt her back-chat in the New Cut,
or else had taken lessons from a bus-conductor. Never before have
I listened to such a torrent of droll invective as she poured out on
the poet's (for once) defenceless head! Flecker's wit on that occa-
sion was certainly no match for Gertie's humour; though I think
this was the only time I ever knew him to be verbally at a disad-
vantage.
The incident which really formed the beginning of my more inti-
mate acquaintance with Flecker is one which reveals him so clearly
that I must relate it, though it be at my own expense. When his


DOUGLAS GOLDRING
551
first volume of poems, The Bridge of Fire, was published, I expected
something prodigious, and got Lord Alfred Douglas to let me have it
to review for The Academy. Alas, the book did not at all come up
to the expectations I had formed, and in my disappointment I felt
constrained to administer a sincere if rather jejune "slating.” One
took oneself with tremendous solemnity in those days, and all our
little circle was scandalized. Every one, indeed, was extremely
angry with me—except Flecker. For all I know he may have been
amused and interested to hear one note of criticism, however inept,
amid a chorus of equally inept praise. In any case he contented
himself with addressing a rejoinder to The Academy, which was
published the week after my notice—a rejoinder of much skill and
the most perfect good temper. And when, some time later, I myself
commenced author with a pamphlet of youthful verses, he heaped
coals of fire on my head by taking the trouble to review it in a Cam-
bridge paper in terms of the greatest generosity.
Our connection of author and publisher, which was to last until
his death, began in 1910 when I started a monthly magazine of
earnest literary aspirations. In the first number of this periodical
Flecker's most intimate Oxford friend had let me print a poem
called The Visit, and Flecker himself became a fairly frequent con-
tributor. The poems called In Memoriam, Pillage, and The War
Song of the Saracens first appeared in its pages, and one or two
others which I think have not been reprinted. About this time I
got the firm which owned the magazine to issue a volume of Flecker's
verses, to which he gave the title Thirty-six Poems. But the concern
having unfortunately more good intent than capital, or business
management, the volume did not prosper; and on the demise of the
magazine, after a year's unavailing struggle for existence, the sheets
of Flecker's book were transferred to Messrs. J. M. Dent & Co., Ltd.
Messrs. Dent reissued the book in 1911 with six additional poems,
under the more familiar name of Forty-two Poems.
During the next two years I heard but little of Flecker. He left
England to take up a consular appointment and was stationed first
at Constantinople, then at Smyrna and finally at Beirut. In 1911
- he travelled in Greece, and it was at Athens that he married the
Greek lady, Mlle. Hellé Skiadaressi, who was to prove to him so
true a companion and friend and whose devotion did so much to pro-
long his life.


552
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
It was not until early in 1913 that I got into touch with him
again. I had at that time become associated with the firm of Max
Goschen, which had just started business. (This firm, owing to the
regretted death of its proprietor, who was killed in France, no
longer exists.) Flecker wrote to me from Beirut in February, 1913,
mentioning that he had a new book of verse nearly ready and
lamenting the poor sales of his Forty-two Poems.
By this time—and indeed ever since the days of The Academy
review—my belief in Flecker was unshakable, and I knew that
sooner or later he was bound to come into his own. I was delighted
when he accepted our offer for his new book, which was made before
we had seen any of the manuscript, and I wrote to promise that I
personally would do all I possibly could to push the sales. It was to
this end, with a view to “stirring up the pond” and goading the
reviewers into animation, that I urged him to write the now famous
Preface, and to make it fiercely controversial.
The first of the letters from Flecker which I have been able to
find among my papers is dated May 10th, from Beirut.
Already his illness was upon him, and there is no doubt that the
task of getting The Golden Journey to Samarkand into its final
shape (after very heavy and painstaking alterations) exhausted all
his strength.
1
“I am very ill again,” he writes, “and probably shall come to
England. Can't work at much and hardly at this letter. The Pre-
face was an awful strain.”
>
He did not, of course, return to England (which he was never to
see again), but went instead to Switzerland. His next letter, dated
June 5th, came from Leysin-sur-Aigle.
“Thank the Lord this place is curing me. The journey nearly
killed me.
There is nothing terribly wrong—but I shall take a
month or two to recover and always have to live with precaution.
Meantime many
thanks for
your
kind letter. Herewith I have sent
the proofs complete. Please look over the revise—or Taoping in
its new version will come out in a hash.
Left out first page of Preface as being rather babyish. You might
let me know what you think of the book—and especially of my
a


DOUGLAS GOLDRING
553
alterations to Gates of Damascus and Taoping. I am immensely
proud of it. I've turfed out all the rot. It seems to me—and to
the few critics who have seen it—to be miles ahead of the Forty-two.
If the publisher wants to puff me he can safely say that the Oriental
Poems are unique in English.
I do wish one could have a few de luxe copies (as they do in
France) on fine paper with fine binding.
I have, alas, lost a good deal more than £10 in not having time to
get all the poems into mags. In particular Oak and Olive was being
kept by the Fortnightly, and they sent it back because they had no
time to publish it by June. But never mind, let's out with the book
at once!
I have some glorious translations from Paul Fort and other
modern Frenchmen, but I preferred to keep the Golden Journey
original from beginning to end. ...
I heard again from him a week later, still from Leysin-a long
and very lucid business letter, chiefly about The King of Alsander
and the behaviour of another publisher who, after accepting the
book and getting Flecker to alter it two or three times, eventually
refused to bring it out on the ground that he had “lost interest.
There can be no point in recalling such a controversy now; and it is
only fair to the publisher in question to assume that there were two
sides to the dispute. Flecker continues thus about the book:
>>
“The novel, originally a very poor production, is now a very jolly
and fantastic work. Whether it will sell or not I don't believe a
publisher in the world could say. It may take or it mayn't. I'll
send it to you if you like. But
(a) Messrs. Goschen may well fight shy of a book which an-
.
other publisher has broken his contract to evade publishing.
(b) It might be better to get compensation before I get another
publisher. Yet it might again be better the other way.”
"Messrs. Goschen,” needless to say, were quite prepared to pub-
'
lish anything which Flecker chose to send them. I must, however,
confess that when the manuscript of The King of Alsander reached
me my heart sank a little, in spite of all the pleasant memories which
the opening chapter revived. I did not think that the book had much


554
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
chance of selling, or indeed that it particularly deserved to sell, and
I wrote to Flecker explaining my reasons for this opinion.
His reply is dated June 21st.
-:
“My dear Goldring,
Thanks so much for writing promptly and at such length. The
novel is a most patchy affair—I quite agree with you. I am not a
novelist because I don't really think novels worth writing—at the
bottom of my heart. Yet I did not burn the old King of Alsander-
it is by God seven years since I lost the first three chapters of it on
the way to Paris with and of
your acquaintance-be-
cause it has, with all its faults, some passages which I think rather
jolly, and because even if a bit laboured in parts, it is such a joyously
silly performance.
I have written to Goschens accepting their offer.
A drama is a thing, now, that is worth writing. I have had most
encouraging letters about my work in that direction from —;
but I hope that Granville Barker and no other will take up Hassan,
my Oriental play. It may interest you to know that Yasmin is out
of my play-was written for it—and also The Golden Journey to
Samarkand is nothing but the final scene. I admit a little verse into
my play here and there.
Read the poem called The Golden Journey and consider the Pil-
grim with the beautiful voice to be Hassan, the hero of a whole
drama, and think what it would sound like actually on the stage,
with Granville Barker scenery-moonlight.
More alive to-day. I hope the novel may succeed after all. It is
pleasant of you to be so prompt. The misery of literary people!
The Spectator and The Nation will return or accept pretty quick.
The — is hopeless, utterly. are, I think, mad. Good God,
if one ran the rottenest of little Vice Consulates in the way the
is run, there'd be a row in a month!
Ever yours thankfully,
J. E. FLECKER.
P.S.
(1) Should much like to read your novel; didn't know
you'd written one.
(2) What do you think? If by any chance the Golden
Journey gets known-of having the Oriental Poems


DOUGLAS GOLDRING
555
(plus Saracens and Ballad of Iskander from 42) illus-
trated by Syme for a Xmas volume.
(3) Shan't anthologise after what you told me. Thanks.”
a
I had one more letter from him from Leysin (dated June 30th)
in which the following interesting passage occurs :
"In Phaeacia (the rottenest poem in the book) should appear in
Everyman and Taoping in the Spectator (eh, what: the citadel of
respectability stormed!) this week. Did you see Solomon Eagle's
extremely amusing gibe at me in the New Statesman? Who is he?
Am getting fatter and stronger. I hope to be in England producing
my play this autumn. Why does no one translate great French
books like Jules Renard's Lanterne Sourde or Claude Farrère's mar-
vellous Bataille.”
The Golden Journey to Samarkand was issued in the early part
of July, 1913, and was a success almost from the first. About this
time Flecker moved from Leysin to Montana, and the next letter
from him I have unearthed came from there, dated August 31st:
“I have been a most shameful time answering your delightful and
enthusiastic letter of congratulation, for which I thank you most
heartily. The reviews-especially the Times and the Morning Post
-have been good enough for Shakespeare: I do hope they will
even be enough to sell a few copies of the book: I should hate
Goschens to be badly had by the transaction.
I have been bothered lately trying to find a new place to live in
and only got here after a frightful lot of bother. I am pretty sick
of life. I've finished my play, but I don't suppose it will ever be
played.
.
.
This letter also contained one of the suggestions for books, in
which he was so fertile.,
6
“I shall write a book one day,” he says, “on how to spend money
in a jolly way, for men of moderate income (£500-£1,500 a year).
Tell the ——'s they ought to travel. The book will sell by the
hundred thousand million on the railway bookstalls."


556
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
In another letter he gives us a glimpse of his life at Montana:
“There is perpetual sunshine here and perpetual leisure. Other-
wise there's no particular reason for my continued existence. I get
neither better nor worse and wait all day for news of Hassan.”
From this time onwards, perhaps inspired by the magnificent suc-
cess of The Golden Journey to Samarkand, he sent me a stream of
projects for books, none of which he was destined ever to carry out.
The only one which he seems seriously to have started, is a transla-
tion of Virgil's Aeneid VI, of which he writes as follows:
“My next book is half written. It is, I'm afraid, rather horrify-
ing. This is the title:
AN INTERPRETATION
in blank verse
of
VIRGIL AENEID VI,
based on the poetic Value of the Sounds
together with the Latin text
and ten prefaces
by
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
Wide margins.
Paper, 3/6? Ready in February.
120 PP.
Seriously this is exactly the title I intend to give the book with which
I am well advanced already. The book is simply an attempt to do
a translation of Virgil as satisfactory as Fitzgerald's Omar-a trans-
lation which will utterly eclipse the very numerous and very feeble
attempts hitherto existing.
The ten Prefaces will be as combative as Bernard Shaw's and
occupy some forty pages. They will be on the translation of sound,
on Blank Verse, on Hell literature, on preceding translations of
Virgil, on modern Scholarship, on the Modern Spirit, etc., etc., and
should irritate every one as effectually as my preface to Samarkand.”
Here is yet another project, contained in an undated letter:


DOUGLAS GOLDRING
557
1
"I have long had a scheme for bringing out an Anthology of
French verse. Poets of To-day and Yesterday—from after Hugo
and Musset and not including them, to the present day. Each poet
would be preceded by a short notice.
In the idea of the short notice and in the period traversed the
book would thus resemble Walch's great three volume work—but
in no other way.
(1) There would be a larger and very different choice of the
more important people and none of the pages of dreary rot by the
great unknown.
(2) The criticisms at the beginning would be original and not
borrowed.
(3) The whole book would not be more than one volume.”
And here is a third suggested volume, some materials for which
may perhaps have been found among the papers which he left:
а
“I have, it is true, a vague scheme for a book. I have quaint
ideas on most things—literature of course, but also current politics-
and a million other things. I find that exile makes it useless trying
to work those ideas up into articles and also that if I do turn them
into articles all my dear ideas become heavy and dull. I don't for
instance a bit want to write a long review on H. G. Wells. But I
do want to say and state my opinion for posterity that his latest
work is pompous drivel and that Mr. Polly is one of the best things
ever written in any language.
I might call the book Poet's Porridge and should write it very
quickly. Under headings Literature, Politics, etc., it would consist
of little brief paragraphs of rather pithy comment. You may not
know that I am a violent Philhellene: that will come in also. (I am
writing a magnificent coronation ode for King Constantine.)
Just mention the idea to Goschens will you. Then if they'd like
to see a bit, I'll scrape together a few pages and send them as a
specimen. There is something novel about a Poet damning round
.
on current events: only, of course, I ought to be better known than
I am to get a hearing.”
His last letter to me from Montana is undated like the others,
but since it appears to have been written after the issue of The King
of Alsander, it was probably sent early in 1914.


558
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
way off
“You know my play Hassan is going to be played in London
this autumn if all goes well; I've got an excellent collaborator.
Goschens shall print it—but only after it's played and that's a long
yet.
Otherwise I try to revise another older play of mine and when
not sufficiently inspired for that I do the Virgil, which Gilbert
Murray has pronounced to be the best translation of him in English.
I can't work much, and haven't at present any original ideas in
my head. I'm only just now managing to get up to lunch after
three months' illness. Hope to go to Locarno soon—will send you
address if I move. As for poems I've only written four since Samar-
kand and they be small ones.
I owe you many thanks for having introduced me to Goschens.
They are certainly advertising excellently. I shall be not only dis-
appointed but astonished if the King of Alsander don't move.
That Poetry and Drama do irritate me (I don't refer to your
excellent review) with its childish anti-God rubbish (We're about
two hundred years ahead of these asses on the Continent, in the
middle of a Catholic reaction, and leave that sort of vulgarity to
the plebs) and its ridiculous abuse of Tennyson and other Victorians.
Do they really imagine writes as well as Tennyson or Kipling?
It's astonishing!
Do write again. Do you ever see —? If so remember me
fondly.”
9
The last three of his letters which I have preserved were sent from
Davos Platz and make unutterably sad reading. In the first of them
he writes: "I am so damned ill I'm almost in despair,” and speaks
of his disappointment at having lost the Polignac prize-recording
the fact that Professor Gilbert Murray and Mr. W. B. Yeats voted
for him. The second is dated June 1st.
“My dear Goldring,
(1) Do send me any news there is going.
(2) No, my dear fellow, don't ask me if I can write a book
about Greece-descriptive tour. I can only preserve the rotten rem-
nants of
my life by lying in bed here for years—in the ugliest hole
God ever created.
(3) But I do intend to publish my great ode to Greece sepa-


DOUGLAS GOLDRING
559
rately with a 40 page preface of a most violent kind, full of abuse
and invective of Pro-Turks, Pro-Bulgars, the Liberal Press, with
history of the Eastern Question. I should much value an assurance
that Goschens would take this; it might create a bit of a stir.
a
(4) I'm still waiting to hear from Oxford about my Virgil and
haven't done a line more to it or indeed to anything for months.
I want to write a play on Judith and I ought to revise my
Don
Juan, and I've got to work Hassan with my Collaborator. And day
after day I do nothing.
Ever yours,
JAMES ELROY FLECKER.
I'd give all my poems to be a healthy navvy.”
a
The last letter is dated October 12th, 1914.
“My dear Goldring,
I should much like to hear from you. We've got a flat and
I amuse myself by lying in bed all day. I can write only a very
little in the morning; have pupped a War poem and some prose.
Could we send a dozen of our novels to the navy; the officers, it
seems, have only too much time for reading. Do give me news of
you. Why don't you send me your novel.”
He died on January 3rd, 1915.
It was fortunate for Flecker that the kind of poetry which by
temperament, by intellectual equipment, and by the circumstances
of his birth and upbringing he was most capable of writing seems
to have been just the kind which he most wanted to write. In this
respect his career, short as it was, was singularly happy. He fol-
lowed no literary wild-goose chase. He was not, apparently, dissat-
isfied with his manner, only with his workmanship—which never
satisfied him. At least a part of his genius seems to have lain in a
realization of his exact capacities. He seldom gropes after things
which are too high for him. I think it can nowhere be said of him
that he "wrought better than he knew"; and, to judge from his con-
stant emendations, he seems to have had an almost exaggerated dis-
trust of what Mr. Arthur Symons has somewhere called “the plenary


560
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
a
inspiration of first thoughts.” In some ways he was more typically
a French than an English poet and his description of the Parnas-
sians in the Preface to The Golden Journey to Samarkand applies
to himself almost exactly. Like them he loathed romantic egoism
and aimed at "a beauty somewhat statuesque”; like them he had a
fine sense of language, using words and epithets with the nicest
scholarship and taste; and again like them he derived his inspiration
from the Classics, from History, from Mythology, from beautiful
names, from places and indeed from anything rather than from life.
It was hardly ever life-either in its “ordinariness” or in its strange-
ness—which Flecker succeeded in transmuting into poetry. His work
is an escape from life rather than an interpretation of it. And here
and there, at his less-inspired moments, one feels that it is only its
technical brilliance which saves it from having too limiting a flavour
of “Oxford College." His poetry is usually rather cold, and it
,
cannot be claimed for Flecker that he was remarkable for originality
of thought; his emotional range is limited and his greatest strength
lies in his power to create pictures compact, clear in outline, and rich
in colour; and in the haunting music of which he had the secret.
Emaux et Camées would not have made a bad alternative title for
his collected work; and there are times when he strikes one as being
an artificer with imagination, or rather when his art seems to re-
semble that of the jeweller or worker in precious metals. His poems
although limited in their range and seldom rising to the highest
imaginative level are yet hammered and worked till they attain a
hard, indestructible perfection. It is difficult to believe that work
of such a kind will be quickly forgotten, for it seems to possess all
the qualities which make for permanence.
Flecker's poetry depends on nothing transitory for its interest; it
contains no "message” to grow stale; and the extraordinary amount
of work put into his verses gives them an impressive solidity. It
must always be remembered of Flecker that in an age of anarchy in
verse he took the trouble to become a master of technique; in an age
of formlessness he upheld the finest traditions of form. What was
beautiful two thousand years ago is beautiful still; and, as Flecker
has told us himself, it was with the single object of creating beauty
that his poems were written. Who can read them and imagine for a
moment that he failed in his object? One cannot think that the
glowing visions which his poems bring before the mind will prove


DOUGLAS GOLDRING
561
any less enchanting to readers in the centuries to come than they are,
to-day. One cannot believe that his lines To a Poet a Thousand
Years Hence will fail to carry their message through the ages to
some craftsman as conscientious as himself:
“O friend unseen, unborn, unknown,
Student of our sweet English tongue,
Read out my words at night, alone:
I was a poet,
I was young
Since I can never see your face,
And never shake you by the hand,
I send my soul through time and space,
To greet you. You will understand.”


MEN AND WOMEN
BY MAXWELL BODENHEIM
FOR
NOR centuries, men and women have reiterated an offensive and
defensive surface, and this reiteration has given variety and a
dramatic interest to a monotonous and undramatic sameness. No
actual need has ever compelled man to be the hunter and master of
woman, or woman to be the ruler of man, but the monotone of their
sexual contact demanded an important masquerade: a triumphant
hallucination since each could not be content with his eager, unob-
structed taking: imaginary obstacles were needed to give zest to the
process. By determinedly setting aside one woman and throwing
the halo of their need around her, men could struggle with other men
for her possession and lend drama and interest to their monotonous
sexual desires and their duplicate in women. The success of this de-
parture, of course, hinged upon their creating a sincere, workman-
like delusion. The average man used the drama of physical move-
ment to erase the monotone of sexual magnetism and the submissive
ardency of sexual contact. This concealing physical drama assumed
many forms: the abduction of the woman; the slaying of rivals, if
necessary, an alert sword defending the imaginary radiance which
gave special value to one woman; the suicide of the man or his mur-
der of the woman, in order to provide the drama with a plausible
climax, etc. The average man, lacking a highly developed imagi-
nation, needed this physical, concrete turmoil to preserve the sin-
cerity of his dominant delusion. Having given the woman her halo,
he could not stand and idly survey it. He lacked that imagination
which could have, without assistance, preserved the halo's lustre.
The exceptional man guarded his goddess in a painting or poem;
protected her memory by becoming a brooding hermit; or used his
imagination to lend colour and an enticing variety to his prolonged
pursuit or possession of the woman wearing the halo of his need.
When the exceptional man used violence, at rare intervals, it was
only to defend that grief which had expanded, in his imagination,
to an overwhelming size.
Through centuries of reiteration, this desperate drama saturated


MAXWELL BODENHEIM
563
man into a posture of well-oiled acceptance. The philosopher, logi-
cian, and artist often felt and sometimes expressed the fundamental
resemblance between men and women, but these particular men were
as much a product of centuries of emotional self-hypnosis as were
the men who lacked their accompanying vision. They could not
overcome their daily need for sexual variety and imaginative sexual
pursuit, and at best they could only attain a complete sexual re-
pression which was, in itself, merely an artificial retreat and not a
repudiation.
Women were also forced to flee from the monotone of matter-of-
fact sexual yielding. By singling out one man and meeting him
with an ecstasy of prostration, they made him an all-conquering god
whose lustre they indirectly shared. Average women, because of
their physical limitations, lacked the ability to imitate the force with
which men guarded their delusion, and were compelled to adopt
more indirect and insidious methods, such as jealousies, coquetries,
retreats, cruelties, and slavish attitudes. These produced an inner
turmoil which fanned the ardency of the man's pursuit and pre-
vented his godship from listlessly and nakedly revealing how much
it resembled the plain, sexual depths of the woman. If the man did
sink to this dully naked acceptance, in spite of the woman's devices,
another man was always conveniently at hand to fill the pause in the
drama. Average women did not contain an imaginative restlessness
which would have forced them to doubt the shining superiority of
one idol and seek a fresh image. Their dull eyes found no fault
with the figure made by their need and abandoned it only because
of the departure or indifference of the man himself. But exceptional
women were often led from one man to another because of their dis-
contented imaginations. After their imaginations had divested one
man of his golden garments, it would have permanently spoiled the
pretending drama if the woman had not singled out another man
for determined worship and compelled her imagination to reiterate
its destructive efforts. In the case of a man and woman who pos-
sessed equally fervent imaginations, Greek met Greek, and the delu-
sion of each one was permanently protected and exhilarated!
Among exceptional men, where the man's intellectual directness
forced him to admit to himself the one-coloured resemblance between
himself and the woman, if the woman could and did join in his ac-
tive recognition, their sexual relations resolved into a matter-of-


564
MEN AND WOMEN
a
fact indulgence, at intervals, or a deliberate plaything. But this
recognition was scarcely ever active on both sides, and one person
usually submitted to the confident delusion of the other, realizing
the futility of his attempt to discover a clear-eyed mate.
Now, what is the inference lurking behind this protective, cen-
tury-long turmoil perpetuated by men and women who felt a need
for escaping from their monotonous, unadorned, sexual resem-
blances? This longing for escape could not have been generated
and insistently developed if it had not sprung from a fundamental
element having no connection with sexual impulse. His sexual de-
sires could never have been gripped by a longing for evasion and
ornamentation if they had formed the whole of him. In that case
they would have felt no discontent with their nude reiteration : the
questions of hiding and gilding would never have occurred to them,
and several incidents in history would never have happened. Man
contains another element- Freudians to the contrary-the fire ring-
ing the mud, which has persistently goaded him into efforts at tran-
scending his flesh and its subtle, diluted branches. This element
found itself powerless to slay its enemy-the flesh was equally insis-
tent—and was forced to veil and decorate this enemy into the en-
durable counterfeit of an unattainable victory. The drama in which
man cajoled, threatened, and gilded his sexual impulses occurred be-
cause a realization of their monotonous dominance was unpleasant
to his taste. Pleasant to the palate of his sex, but unpleasant to his
unformed longings for mental and aesthetic variety. Man contains
scarcely touched world which has, for ages, driven his sexual long-
ings into endless evasions, brutalities, and imaginary godships. The
psycho-analyst does not recognize this contradictory situation and
has merely reclassified the obstructing physical surface of man's
action and motives. He is simply the shrewd forerunner of a wider
and more penetrating explanation.


RUSSIAN MEMORIES
BY LOUISE BRYANT
I
1
Across my dream
Snow falls
And old bells chime.
One with a high white hat
Rides by.
My heart sways
To the motion of his horse. ...
- II
We have seen life together,
We have seen death
And the thread of our love
Is unbroken.
Now the seas lie between us
And more than the seas.
III
Is it Spring where you are, darling,
Spring with the music of melting snow?
Spring on the Russian Steppes
And Spring in your heart?
Last night I heard you
In my dream
Whistling a melody
From Prince Igor.


566
RUSSIAN MEMORIES
IV
When I think of seeing you again
It is as if I saw the snow in Moscow
For the first time .
Or heard a skylark
Singing to the sun.
V
Three ikons
And your photograph
Hang on the wall.
You've been there so long, dear,
With the same expression
On your face
That you've become an ikon
With the rest.
Ikon, ikon,
I can think of only one prayer.
One more time before I die
I want to see you.



Courtesy of the Daniel Gallery
DISTANT VIEW, MOUNT DESERT. BY JOHN MARIN






Courtesy of the Daniel Gallery
MOUNTAIN, MEADOW, AND TREES. BY JOHN MARIN





1
THĘ DOOR OF THE TRAP
BY SHERWOOD ANDERSON
WEN
INIFRED WALKER understood some things clearly
enough. She understood that when a man is put behind iron
bars he is in prison. Marriage was marriage to her.
It was that to her husband Hugh Walker, too, as he found out.
Still he didn't understand. It might have been better had he under-
stood. Then he might at least have found himself. He didn't.
After his marriage five or six years passed like shadows of wind-
blown trees playing on a wall. He was in a drugged, silent state.
In the morning and evening every day he saw his wife. Occasion-
ally something happened within him and he kissed her. Three chil-
dren were born. He taught mathematics in the little college at
Union Valley, Illinois, and waited.
For what? He began to ask himself that question. It came to
him at first faintly like an echo. Then it became an insistent ques-
tion. “I want answering," the question seemed to say. "Stop fool-
ing along. Give your attention to me.”
Hugh walked through the streets of the Illinois town. “Well,
I'm married. I have children,” he muttered.
He went home to his own house. He did not have to live within
his income from the little college and so the house was rather large
and comfortably furnished. There was a negro woman who took
care of his children and another who cooked and did housework.
One of the women was in the habit of crooning low soft negro songs.
Sometimes Hugh stopped at the house door and listened. He could
see through the glass in the door into the room where his family
was gathered. Two children played with blocks on the floor. His
wife sat sewing. The old negress sat in a rocking chair with his
youngest child, a baby, in her arms. The whole room seemed under
the spell of the crooning voice. Hugh fell under the spell. He
waited in silence. The voice carried him far away somewhere, into
forests, along the edges of swamps. There was nothing very defi-
nite about his thinking. He would have given a good deal to be
able to be definite.


568
THE DOOR OF THE TRAP
He went inside the house. “Well, here I am,” his mind seemed
to say, “here I am. This is my house, these are my children.”
He looked at his wife Winifred. She had grown a little plump
since their marriage. “Perhaps it is the mother in her coming out,
she has had three children," he thought.
The crooning old negro woman went away, taking the youngest
child with her. He and Winifred held a fragmentary conversation.
"Have you been well to-day, dear?" she asked. “Yes,” he an-
swered.
If the two older children were intent on their play his chain of
thought was not broken. His wife never broke it as the children
did when they came running to pull and tear at him. Throughout
the early evening, after the children went to bed, the surface of the
shell of him was not broken at all. A brother college professor and
his wife came in or he and Winifred went to a neighbour's house.
There was talk. Even when he and Winifred were alone together
in the house there was talk. “The shutters are becoming loose,” she
said. The house was an old one and was furnished with green shut-
ters. They were continually coming loose and at night blew back
and forth on their hinges making a loud banging noise.
Hugh made some remark. He said he would see a carpenter
about the shutters. Then his mind began playing away out of his
wife's presence, out of the house, in another sphere. “I am a house
and my shutters are loose,” his mind said. He thought of himself
as a living thing inside a shell, trying to break out. To avoid dis-
tracting conversation he got a book and pretended to read. When
his wife had also begun to read he watched her closely, intently.
Her nose was so and so and her eyes so and so. She had a little
habit with her hands. When she became lost in the pages of a book
the hand crept up to her cheek, touched it and then was put down
again. Her hair was not in very good order. Since her marriage
and the coming of the children she had not taken good care of her
body. When she read her body slumped down in the chair. It
became bag-like. She was one whose race has been run.
Hugh's mind played all about the figure of his wife but did not
really approach the woman who sat before him. It was so with his
children. Sometimes, just for a moment, they were living things to
him, things as alive as his own body. Then for long periods they
seemed to go far away like the crooning voice of the negress.
a
a


SHERWOOD ANDERSON
569
It was odd that the negress was always real enough. He felt an
understanding existed between himself and the negress. She was
outside his life. He could look at her as at a tree. Sometimes in
the evening when she had been putting the children to bed in the
upper part of the house and when he sat with a book in his hand
pretending to read, the old black woman came softly through the
room, going toward the kitchen. She did not look at Winifred, but
,
at Hugh. He thought there was a strange, soft light in her old
eyes. “I understand you, my son,” her eyes seemed to say.
Hugh was determined to get his life cleaned up if he could man-
age it. “All right, then,” he said, as though speaking to a third
person in the room. He was quite sure there was a third person
there and that the third person was within himself, inside his body.
He addressed the third person.
"Well, there is this woman, this person I married, she has the
air of something accomplished,” he said, as though speaking aloud.
Sometimes it almost seemed to him he had spoken aloud and he
looked quickly and sharply at his wife. She continued reading, lost
in her book. “That may be it,” he went on. "She has had these
children. They are accomplished facts to her. They came out of
her body, not out of mine. Her body has done something. Now it
rests. If she is becoming a little bag-like, that's all right.”
He got up and making some trivial excuse got out of the room
and out of the house. In his youth and young manhood the long
periods of walking straight ahead through the country, that had
come upon him like visitations of some recurring disease, had helped.
Walking solved nothing. It only tired his body, but when his body
was tired he could sleep. After many days of walking and sleeping
something occurred. The reality of life was in some queer way re-
established in his mind. Some little thing happened. A man walk-
ing in the road before him threw a stone at a dog that ran barking
out of a farm-house. It was evening perhaps, and he walked in a
country of low hills. Suddenly he came out upon the top of one
of the hills. Before him the road dipped down into darkness but
to the west, across fields, there was a farm-house. The sun had
gone down, but a faint glow lit the western horizon. A woman
came out of the farm-house and went toward a barn. He could not
see her figure distinctly. She seemed to be carrying something, no
doubt a milk pail; she was going to a barn to milk a cow.


570
THE DOOR OF THE TRAP
his eyes.
The man in the road who had thrown the stone at the farm dog
had turned and seen Hugh in the road behind him. He was a little
ashamed of having been afraid of the dog. For a moment he
seemed about to wait and speak to Hugh and then was overcome
with confusion and hurried away. He was a middle-aged man, but
quite suddenly and unexpectedly he looked like a boy.
As for the farm woman, dimly seen going toward a distant barn,
she also stopped and looked toward him. It was impossible she
should have seen him. She was dressed in white and he could see
her but dimly against the blackish green of the trees of an orchard
behind her. Still she stood looking and seemed to look directly into
He had a queer sensation of her having been lifted by an
unseen hand and brought to him. It seemed to him he knew all
about her life, all about the life of the man who had thrown the
stone at the dog.
In his youth when life had stepped out of his grasp Hugh had
walked and walked until several such things had occurred and then
suddenly he was all right again and could again work and live
among men.
After his marriage and after such an evening as the one here
described he started walking rapidly as soon as he left the house.
As quickly as possible he got out of town and struck out along a
road that led over the rolling prairie.' "Well, I can't walk for days
and days as I did once,” he thought. “There are certain facts in life
and I must face facts. Winifred, my wife, is a fact, and my chil-
dren are facts. I must get my fingers on facts. I must live by them
and with them. It is the way lives are lived.”
Hugh got out of town and on to a road that ran between corn-
fields: He was an athletic-looking man and wore loose-fitting
clothes. He went along distraught and puzzled. In a way he felt
like a man capable of taking a man's place in life and in another
way he didn't at all.
The country spread out, wide, in all directions. It was always
night when he walked thus and he could not see, but the realization
of distances was always with him. “Everything goes on and on but
I stand still,” he thought. He had been a professor in the little
college for six years. Young men and women had come into a room
and he had taught them. It was nothing. Words and figures had
been played with. An effort had been made to arouse minds.
a


SHERWOOD ANDERSON
571
For what?
There was the old question, always coming back, always wanting
answering as a little animal wants food. Hugh gave up trying to
answer. He walked rapidly, trying to grow physically tired. He
made his mind attend to little things in the effort to forget dis-
tances. One night he got out of the road and walked completely
around a cornfield. He counted the stalks in each hill of corn and
computed the number of stalks in a whole field, “It should yield
twelve hundred bushels of corn, that field,” he said to himself
dumbly, as though it mattered to him. He pulled a little handful
of cornsilk out of the top of an ear of corn and played with it. He
tried to fashion himself a yellow moustache. “I'd be quite a fellow
a
with a trim yellow moustache,” he thought.
One day in his class-room Hugh suddenly began to look with
new interest at his pupils. A young girl attracted his attention. She
sat beside the son of a Union Valley merchant and the young man
was writing something on the back of a book. She looked at it and
then turned her head away. The young man waited.
It was winter and the merchant's son had asked the girl to go
with him to a skating party. Hugh, however, did not know that.
He felt suddenly old. When he asked the girl a question she was
confused. Her voicé trembled.
When the class was dismissed an amazing thing happened. He
asked the merchant's son to stay for a moment and when the two
were alone together in the room he grew suddenly and furiously
angry. His voice was, however, cold and steady. "Young man,"
he said, "you do not come into this room to write on the back of
a book and waste your time. If I see anything of the kind again.
I'll do something you don't expect. I'll throw you out through a
window, that's what I'll do."
Hugh made a gesture and the young man went away, white and
silent. Hugh felt miserable. For several days he thought about
the girl who had quite accidentally attracted his attention. “I'll
get acquainted with her. I'll find out about her," he thought.
It was not an unusual thing for professors in the college at Union
Valley to take students home to their houses. Hugh decided he
would take the girl to his home. He thought about it several days
and late one afternoon saw her going down the college hill ahead
of him.


572
THE DOOR OF THE TRAP
1
The girl's name was Mary Cochran and she had come to the
school but a few months before from a place called Huntersburg,
Illinois, no doubt just such another place as Union Valley. He
knew nothing of her except that her father was dead, her mother
too, perhaps. He walked rapidly down the hill to overtake her.
“Miss Cochran,” he called, and was surprised to find that his voice
trembled a little. "What am I so eager about,” he asked himself.
A new life began in Hugh Walker's house. It was good for the
man to have some one there who did not belong to him and Winifred
Walker, and the children accepted the presence of the girl. Wini-
fred urged her to come again. She did come several times a week.
To Mary Cochran it was comforting to be in the presence of a
family of children. On winter afternoons she took Hugh's two sons
and a sled and went to a small hill near the house. Shouts arose.
Mary Cochran pulled the sled up the hill and the children followed.
Then they all came tearing down together.
The girl, developing rapidly into womanhood, looked upon Hugh
Walker as something that stood completely outside her own life. She
and the man who had become suddenly and intensely interested in
her had little to say to each other and Winifred Walker seemed to
have accepted her without question as an addition to the household.
Often in the afternoon when the two negro women were busy she
went away leaving the two older children in Mary's charge.
That was in the late afternoon and perhaps Hugh had walked
home with Mary from the college. In the spring he worked in the
neglected garden. It had been plowed and planted, but he took a
hoe and rake and puttered about. The children played about the
house with the college girl. Hugh did not look at them but at her.
“She is one of the world of people with whom I live and with
whom I am supposed to work here,” he thought. “Unlike Winifred
and these children she does not belong to me. I could go to her now,
touch her fingers, look at her and then go away and never see her
again."
That thought was a comfort to the distraught man. In the even-
ing when he went out to walk the sense of distance that lay all
about him did not tempt him to walk and walk, going half insanely
forward for hours, trying to break through an intangible wall.
He thought about Mary Cochran. She was a girl from a country


SHERWOOD ANDERSON
573
town. She must be like millions of American girls. He wondered
what went on in her mind as she sat in his class-room, as she walked
beside him along the streets of Union Valley, as she played with
the children in the yard beside his house.
In the winter, when in the growing darkness of a late afternoon
Mary and the children built a snow man in the yard, he went up-
stairs and stood in the darkness to look out a window. The tall
straight figure of the girl, dimly seen, moved quickly about. '“Well,
nothing has happened to her. She may be anything or nothing.
Her figure is like a young tree that has not borne fruit,” he thought.
He went away to his own room and sat for a long time in the dark-
ness. That night when he left the house for his evening's walk he
did not stay long but hurried home and went to his own room. He
locked the door. Unconsciously he did not want Winifred to come
to the door and disturb his thoughts. Sometimes she did that.
All the time she read novels. She read the novels of Robert
Louis Stevenson. When she had read them all she began again.
Sometimes she came upstairs and stood talking by his door. She
told some tale, repeated some wise saying that had fallen unex-
pectedly from the lips of the children. Occasionally she came into
the room and turned out the light. There was a couch by a win-
dow. She went to sit on the edge of the couch. Something hap-
pened. It was as it had been before their marriage. New life came
into her figure. He also went to sit on the couch and she put up
her hand and touched his face.
Hugh did not want that to happen now. He stood within the
room for a moment and then unlocked the door and went to the
head of the stairs. “Be quiet when you come up, Winifred. I have
a headache and am going to try to sleep,” he lied.
When he had got back in his own room and locked the door again
he felt safe. He did not undress but threw himself on the couch
and turned out the light.
He thought about Mary Cochran, the school girl, but was sure
he thought about her in a quite impersonal way. She was like the
woman going to milk cows he had seen across hills when he was a
young
fellow and walked far and wide over the country to cure the
restlessness in himself. In his life she was like the man who threw
the stone at the dog.
“Well, she is unformed; she is like a young tree,” he told him-


574
THE DOOR OF THE TRAP
self again. “People are like that. They just grow up suddenly out
of childhood. It will happen to my own children. My little Wini-
fred that cannot yet say any words will suddenly be like this girl.
I have not selected her to think about for any particular reason.
For some reason I have drawn away from life and she has brought
me back. It might have happened when I saw a child playing in
the street or an old man going up a stairway into a house. She does
not belong to me. She will go away out of my sight. Winifred
and the children will stay on and on here and I will stay on and on.
We are imprisoned by the fact that we belong to each other. She is
free, or at least she is free as far as this prison is concerned. No
doubt she will after a while make a prison of her own and live in it,
but I will have nothing to do with the matter.”
By the time Mary Cochran was in her third year in the college
at Union Valley she had become a kind of fixture in the Walker
household. Still she did not know Hugh. She knew the children
better than he did, perhaps better than their mother. In the fall
she and the two boys went to the woods to gather nuts. In the
winter they went skating on a little pond near the house.
Winifred accepted her as she accepted everything, the service of
the two negroes, the coming of the children, the habitual silence of
her husband.
And then quite suddenly and unexpectedly Hugh's silence, that
had lasted all through his married life, was broken up. He walked
homeward with a German who had the chair of modern languages
in the school and got into a violent quarrel. He stopped to speak
a
to men on the street. When he went to putter about in the garden
he whistled and sang.
One afternoon in the fall he came home and found the whole fam-
ily assembled in the living room of the house. The children were
playing on the floor and the negress sat in the chair by the window
with his youngest child in her arms crooning one of the negro songs.
Mary Cochran was there. She sat reading a book.
Hugh walked directly toward her and looked over her shoulder.
At that moment Winifred came into the room. He reached for-
ward and snatched the book out of the girl's hands. She looked up
startled. With an oath he threw it into the fire that burned in an
open grate at the side of the room. A flood of words ran from him.
He cursed books and people and schools. “Damn it all,” he said.


SHERWOOD ANDERSON
575
"What makes you want to read about life? What makes people
want to think about life? Why don't they live? Why don't they
leave books and thoughts and schools alone ?”
He turned to look at his wife who had grown pale and stared
at him with a queer fixed uncertain stare. The old negro woman got
up and went quickly away. The two older children began to cry.
Hugh was miserable. He looked at the startled girl in the chair who
also had tears in her eyes, and at his wife. His fingers pulled ner-
vously at his own coat. To the two women he looked like a boy
who had been caught stealing food in a pantry. “I am having one
of my silly irritable spells,” he said looking at his wife but in re-
ality addressing the girl. “You see I am more serious than I pre-
tend to be. I was not irritated by your book but by something else.
I see so much that can be done in life and I do so little.”
He went upstairs to his own room wondering why he had lied
to the two women, why he continually lied to himself.
Did he lie to himself ? He tried to answer the question but
couldn't. He was like one who walks in the darkness of the hall-
way of a house and comes to a blank wall. The old desire to run
away from life, to wear himself out physically, came back upon him
like a madness.
For a long time he stood in the darkness inside his own room.
The children stopped crying and the house became quiet again. He
could hear his wife's voice speaking softly and presently the back
door of the house banged and he knew the schoolgirl had gone away.
Life in the house began again. Nothing happened. Hugh ate
his dinner in silence and went for a long walk. For two weeks Mary
Cochran did not come to his house and then one day he saw her on
the college grounds. She was no longer one of his pupils. “Please
do not desert us because of my rudeness,” he said. The girl blushed
and said nothing. When he got home that evening she was in the
yard beside the house playing with the children. He went at once
to his own room. A hard smile came and went on his face. “She
isn't like a young tree any more. She is almost like Winifred. She
is almost like a person who belongs here, who belongs to me and my
life," he thought.
Mary Cochran's visits to the Walker household came to an end
very abruptly. One evening when Hugh was in his room she came


576
THE DOOR OF THE TRAP
up the stairway with the two boys. She had dined with the family
and was putting the two boys into their beds. It was a privilege she
claimed when she dined with the Walkers.
Hugh had hurried upstairs immediately after dining. He knew
where his wife was. She was downstairs, sitting under a lamp, read-
a
ing one of the books of Robert Louis Stevenson.
For a long time Hugh could hear the voices of his children on the
floor above. Then the thing happened.
Mary Cochran came down the stairway that led past the door of
his room. She stopped, turned back and climbed the stairs again to
the room above. Hugh arose and stepped into the hallway. The
schoolgirl had returned to the children's room because she had been
suddenly overtaken with a hunger to kiss Hugh's oldest boy, now a
lad of nine. She crept into the room and stood for a long time look-
ing at the two boys, who unaware of her presence had gone to sleep.
Then she stole forward and kissed the boy lightly. When she went
out of the room Hugh stood in the darkness waiting for her. He
took hold of her hand and led her down the stairs to his own room.
She was terribly afraid and her fright in an odd way pleased
him. “Well,” he whispered, “you can't understand now what is
going to happen here but some day you will. I'm going to kiss you
and then I am going to ask you to go out of this house and never
come back.”
He held the girl against his body and kissed her upon the cheeks
and lips. When he led her to the door she was so weak with fright
and with new, strange, trembling desires that she could with diffi-
culty make her way down the stairs and into his wife's presence.
“She will lie now,” he thought, and heard her voice coming up the
stairs like an echo to his thoughts. “I have a terrible headache.
I must hurry home," he heard her voice saying. The voice was dull
and heavy. It was not the voice of a young girl.
"She is no longer like a young tree,” he thought. He was glad
and proud of what he had done. When he heard the door at the
back of the house close softly his heart jumped. A strange quiver-
ing light came into his eyes. “She will be imprisoned but I will
have nothing to do with it. She will never belong to me. My
hands will never build a prison for her,” he thought with grim
pleasure.


1
.
FIVE POEMS
BY E. E. CUMMINGS
I
into the strenuous briefness
Life:
handorgans and April
darkness, friends
i charge laughing
Into the hair-thin tints
of yellow dawn,
into the women-coloured twilight
i smilingly
glide. I
into the big vermilion departure
swim, sayingly;
(Do you think?) the
i do, world
is probably made
of roses & hello:
(of solongs and, ashes)


578
FIVE POEMS
II
O sweet spontaneous
earth how often have
the
doting
fingers of
prurient philosophies pinched
and
poked
thee
has the naughty thumb
of science prodded
thy
beauty
how
often have religions taken
thee upon their scraggy
knees squeezing and
buffeting thee that thou mightest conceive
gods
but
true
to the incomparable
couch of death thy
rhythmic
lover
thou answerest
them only with
spring


E. E. CUMMINGS
579
III
but the other
day i was passing a certain
gate rain
fell as it will
in spring
ropes
of silver gliding from sunny
thunder into freshness
as if god's flowers were
pulling upon bells of
gold i looked
up
and
thought to myself death
and will You with
elaborate fingers possibly touch
the pink hollyhock existence whose
pansy eyes look from morning till
night into the street
unchangingly the always
old lady sitting in her
gentle window like
a reminiscence
partaken
softly at whose gate smile
always the chosen
flowers of reminding


580
FIVE POEMS
IV
in Just-
spring when the world is mud-
luscious the little
lame baloonman
whistles
far
and wee
and eddyandbill come
running from marbles and
piracies and it's
spring
when the world is puddle-wonderful
the queer
old baloonman whistles
far and
wee
and bettyandisbel come dancing
from hop-scotch and jump-rope and
1
it's
spring
and
the
goat-footed
whistles
baloon Man
far
and
wee


E. E. CUMMINGS
581
V
spring omnipotent goddess Thou
dost stuff parks
with overgrown pimply
chevaliers and gumchewing giggly
damosels Thou dost
persuade to serenade
his lady the musical tom-cat
Thou dost inveigle
into crossing sidewalks the
unwary june-bug and the frivolous
angleworm
Thou dost hang canary birds in parlour windows
Spring slattern of seasons
you have soggy legs
and a muddy petticoat
drowsy
is your
hair
your
eyes are sticky with
dream and you have a
sloppy body from
being brought to bed of crocuses
when you sing in your whisky voice
the grass rises on the head of the earth
and all the trees are put on edge
A
spring
of the excellent jostle of
thy hips
and the superior


582
FIVE POEMS
slobber of your breasts i
am so very fond that my
soul inside of me hollers
for thou comest
and your hands are the snow and thy
fingers are the rain
and your
feet O
your
feet
freakish
feet feet incorrigible
ragging the world



Courtesy of the Bourgeois Galleries
COSTUME DESIGN FOR NIJINSKY AS TIL EULENSPIEGEL.
BY ROBERT EDMOND JONES






RA
Courtesy of the Chicago Opera Company
A WOMAN GARDENER IN THE BIRTHDAY OF THE INFANTA.
BY ROBERT EDMOND JONES






Courtesy of the Bourgeois Galleries
SCENE FROM THE SONG OF ROLAND. BY ROBERT EDMOND JONES





THE SOUR COMMENTARY OF
RIDEO GENOVESE
BY B. J. STOLPER
UPCA
PON the Sixth Day there was a difference made between
heaven and earth, that there might lie no envy as of one
toward the other. Therefore there was taken earth from the earth,
and a soul from among the angels of heaven, and of the two a man
was shaped
Now the beasts that roamed to and fro: lions and leopards,
tigers, apes, and divers others: eyed the man how he stood erect
and alone. He seemed perfect, complete. There was none like
him. So they made to worship him as a god. Thereupon woman
was created, and their regard fell away from him; for they saw
he varied no whit from the beasts of the field.
For in the beginning, beast, bird, and reptile, as well as the great
monsters that plow the deep seas, had each his mate. But for man
there was not found a help meet for him. As who should say: he
could nowhere behold a female of any species worthy to be a wife
unto him. But when he impended to become a god, then this thing
was thrust on him, that should yet detract from him. First he was
cast into profound sleep. Then, as he lay lax and helpless, came
One and took a rib from his body, and made therefrom a wife
unto him.
Therefore he was made to sleep, that he might not grow nauseate
of her, his wife, that she was issue of his very body. Since when,
whenso a man is impious, he getteth a wife that shall be loving
and helpful unto him. Whenso, however, he is virtuous and
worthy, One sendeth him a wife which is as his body is: she maketh
him to lose both this world and any world that is to come: she is
worse, verily, than bitter death itself. A wife bendeth her husband
from his native humour, always, as is to be read in the legend of
the devotee: He, it is related, had to wife one that was a woman
most pious; nonetheless they had no children and he put her from
him with divorce. Presently she took to husband a great rogue
and made a saint of him. He, per contra, took to wife a shrew:
a


584 SOUR COMMENTARY OF RIDEO GENOVESE
who wrought an arrant rascal of him that had erst been but an
unwarned dolt!
As to wherefore the rib, Astyanax of Olbia saith on behalf of
Euphor: The creator pondered and pored upon the human limbs,
musing which should become the source of woman.
"I will not create her,” he debated, “from the head of Adam
Primus, for that she would be haughty: she would toss and bridle
her head. If I create her of the eye, she will desire, inquisitive, to
stare on all things curiously. Of the ear, she will lust after all
manner of rumour. Of the mouth, she will chatter without stint.
Of the heart, she will gnaw with envy of all folk. Of the hand,
she will thrust forth to feel with finger-tips, testing and snatching.
Of the feet, she will wax a gad-about. Therefore I will create her
of a member which is hidden, that is to say, a rib. Which is not
to be seen when the very person is naked.
“But all that availed me nothing! I did not create her of the
head, yet she bridles and tosses the head; as is written: They
minced with necks out-thrust. I did not create her of the eye, yet
she peeps, inquisitive, at every thing; as is written: Their bright
eyes stare and ogle always. I did not create her of the ear, yet she
eavesdrops continually. I did not create her of the heart, yet she
gnaws with envy of any folk. I did not create her of the hand, yet
she delights to accept any thing. I did not create her of the feet, yet
she gads about, restless, nor does weariness weigh her down!"
Astyanax of Olbia inquireth further: Why doth the child, when
it is brought to world of its mother, conduct in the following: the
male child lieth face downward; but the female -face upward?
Rideo Genovese answered: Man was shaped of the dust, and humbly
turns his face thereto; but woman was shaped of man, since when
she rears her crest proudly for cause. And again Astyanax of Olbia
asketh: Why must a woman prink out her body with perfumes and
fine garments more than a man? Rideo answered: Man was shaped
of earth which is clean beyond corruption; but woman was shaped
of the bone of a rib. And any flesh soever neither spiced nor brined,
falleth into taint. Therefore women the rather turn to unguents,
silks, and linens. Therefore, also, women's voices echo and sound:
for their source is a hollow bone; which, being beaten one on the
other, give forth a great noise, pleasant though empty. But beat
earth upon earth, clod upon clod, and no noise, or but dull, will
1


B. J. STOLPER
585
result: for earth hath weightier functions than mere entertainment.
Therefore, also, a woman angered is hardlier appeased: for woman
was shaped of a bone. Pour oil or cooling water upon bone and it
will no way dissolve; but do the like upon earth and it will soften
and dissipate. How runs the text?—Compassionate as a father
to his children.
Which seeks in marriage? The man seeks in marriage. For
the woman is but the rib of the man; and having lost, he must ever
hunt till he replaces and completes what is missing in him.
But when death touches the curtains of any house, the women are
first who come to wail and lament, and not the men. For indeed,
woman first brought death into the world.
.


THE LICHEN
BY EDNA WAHLERT McCOURT
I
WE
E must get to church early,” Mrs. Mirjanich said. “I want
to talk to the Sunday school teacher about Esther's dress for
the June theatricals. Besides, they say the new minister gets angry
if people straggle in.”
"I'll hitch the horses."
Esther's mother, imparting loving advice about the coming festi-
val in which the child was to take conspicuous part, dressed her.
Theirs was conversation as between familiars. Esther even led.
Yet she had never been master in the sense that she wished any
vagary or will of her own obeyed or followed. Hers was the leader-
ship of the man as a couple dances, no matter in what concord.
She resembled the lichen, which is never an individual but a firm
of two living together so intimately as to appear a single plant.
The subtle predominance that always characterizes one of a team
of horses even though he has never pulled alone was hers. Without
complement she was not herself. She and her mother were intimate
and together, but the attitude of each towards that intimacy was
different as themselves. The mother adored, had faith, accom-
panied. The child was accompanied, and therefore at peace.
Yet if Esther had been asked—if she had been asked casually-
what was her greatest need, she would have answered without a
catch of hesitation, Play-Acting.
But she was not asked casually, that Sunday morning.
Years later when this day visited her she knew there had been
nothing casual about it as well. It had not "felt like” Sunday. The
basswood trees that towered twice as high as the farm-house had not
held their branches with easy Sunday-listlessness. The shiftless
white road that crawled along the hills had possessed dignity, bump-
ing the spring wagon far less than usual. The crude steeple of the
white box which was the county church had pointed its finger mo-
mentously.


EDNA WAHLERT McCOURT
587
Mrs. Mirjanich talked with the Sunday school teacher about her
daughter's curls ...
... how the silver stars were to be sewn around
the hem of the garment, where the gold one was to be on her fore-
head. Esther listened, chained ... and then dreamed of herself,
who was Titania.
Until she noticed the new minister.
She was consciously surprised that she noticed him. Ministers
had been ministers before. Their voices and dresses and expressions
were beyond differentiation. She had thought she knew all that was
to be known about ministers. There was something about this
minister which was new. He was tall, but thick like one who can
lift a weight. His forehead was large and his thin hair curled.
His skin was dusky as though it had opposed strong winds, and his
lips were full as sacks overfilled with their stuff. His large nostrils
distended as he preached with a sort of sniffling restlessness as
though he needed to but dared not waste energies in using a hand-
kerchief. He did not read a droning sermon. He talked thunder.
“And he is talking to me!” Esther was panic-stricken.
The voice filled the building as a storm fills a tree. It hit the
girl's ears as though boxing them. And she quivered from the
shock, the vibration of her body sensitized to the man's will.
He despised her. That was simple and plain. He called the
heart she brought to church “despicable.” He knew she came only
because of the theatricals. He spat out the word! He knew she
cared only for them, that they, not God, trumpeted. He knew she
never thought of God, that she prayed only with her lips.
“For all you profess,” he bellowed, "for all that you swagger
here to His house, I tell you you are a liar at heart! You have
never spoken with God! You have never told Him the truth! I
you, you have never prayed. What are a man's lips ?—shadow
of the substance. And you have prayed only with shadows! You
have never prayed with your heart!"
He flung a finger at Esther. It was large and hairy. Its nail was
broken, its tip was black.
“But now you are going to pray! Search your soul with a flam-
ing taper and speak with God! Tell Him the truth! I charge you,
-pray!” The roar subsided to the stentorian stillness called
”
Silent Prayer.
Esther's hands folded. Then they shivered, as she did, and flung
>
tell


588
THE LICHEN
.
apart. Not even the conventional pose dared she assume under this
man. Her fingers found the back of the pew before her, clutched.
Her eyes caught the altar. Women had brought red rambler
roses.
Red rambler roses! The child's being soared.
"God,” she said, “I want to be a great actress. More than any-
thing else in the world I want to be a great actress. I will starve
or steal to be a great actress. I don't want anything else. I'm sorry
I've so often said Give us this day our daily bread and If I should
die before I wake I pray You my soul to take. I won't ask You
any more things like that. I honestly don't want anything but to
be a great actress. I'll never lie to You again."
Her prayer became pictures.
She saw her father's father. He had been a strolling player in
Bohemia-his gay sash and turban were in the attic now, and his
tambourine. He had become acclimated to the American plow and
overalls but Esther could not visualize him as a farmer, just as she
could not picture her father as anything else. They had buried
him, but for all her fickle ten years he persisted alive and real, an
actor! So did the fairy tales he told her live, and the strange lines
of fire he had dramatically orated in a flaming tongue she did not
understand. And he had encouraged her play-acting! She saw
him persuading her, to his audience, into heroines of nursery rhymes,
into the proud princesses of legends. She saw him teaching her seri-
ous pieces too, couched in splendid accurate words of sorrow and
love and death. She had lingered overlong with the sad ones, for
the sadder the pieces were the more the heroines seemed herself, and
now she saw the old grandfather clutch his gnarled stick with his
gnarled hands, beat time with his square lumbering boot, and cry
with vibrant toothless gums, . "Enough of that now, Liebchen!
Enough of tears! Dance, Liebchen! O why do you hesitate?
Why do your eyes look uncertain? Dance! Alone, of course!
Why can't you dance alone Liebchen?” She saw his watery eyes, ,
dazzling like the prong of a pitchfork in the sun. But she never
had discovered the joy of dancing alone.
The red rambler roses the women had brought wiped the picture.
They were on the new minister's altar and demanded words.
“More than anything else I want to be a great actress!”
But then the flowers stirred. So did Esther's grey-green eyes.


EDNA WAHLERT McCOURT
589
a
“Search your
>
.
They found a stern finger crowned with black piercing her. She
screamed, almost aloud. The whole church had suddenly become
stentorian with: Why can't you dance alone, Liebchen!
She cried, “It's a lie!—what I've been praying. Wait a minute,
God.”
your soul with a flaming taper,” he had said. . . . And
then the truth rose out of her like wild birds from a marsh. It
darkened her dream of becoming an actress exactly as a flock does
the sky. And the truth became her new prayer. A prayer of pic-
tures, too. Pictures ... of her mother telling how, when she was
the smallest of babies, she had screamed and sobbed if left alone in
a room. Of herself barely able to toddle, yet crawling about after
her mother or father or grandfather or the hired girl-after any-
body so as not to be alone. Of her play-acting with her grandfather,
now with her mother. She remembered she could not sleep in a room
alone. That word “alone” was a vulture picking her corpse clean.
Speech came. “More than anything else in the world I want
some one to be with me. I don't ever want to be left alone. God,
I want some one to be with me, always. Amen.”
The man they said was a minister uttered the last word, too.
.
II
When she was seventeen her mother died, and within a year
Esther eloped with an actor. Thibaudier he called himself, which
was like him.
There had been a wall between her and her father, though after
his wife died he began to feel it his duty to notice his daughter.
He did so silently, or carping. When she kissed him tragically—she
meant it, even though she was acting he grunted, “Actress.” His
eyes were plainly ashamed of the dresses she contriver'' vuuse they
soft enough to float or cling to her thin limbs and because their
colours every other farmer's daughter shunned. He thought her a
fool for wearing one earring. Why could he not understand that
two earrings made her long white face look too long?—that one
ovalled it? When he scolded that she was too young for pearls she
knew he could never be dear to her. No one could be precious who
did not realize too that they made her red lips redder and empha-
sized the grey-green of her lichen-coloured eyes. She needed pearls.
were


590
THE LICHEN
The people of the stodgy middle-West village were not her people.
She could not keep step with them. She glided. They thumped.
The older folks were her father's echo. Girls stopped whispering
when she joined them. Boys looked at her as a cat watches a bird.
a
She burned incense in her room: all the farm-houses smelled of
bread-baking
Of course when plays were given whoever was manager fawned.
But since her mother's death no person in all the county had acted
with Esther. So her dearly beloved plays spread no joy. Besides,
the villagers kept producing inane light comedies, silly kittenish
moral things she had outgrown at twelve.
She went with Thibaudier for escape, but being a poor actor on
the stage he was an excellent one off it. And he indulged in moods,
extravagances, fine words, and attentions that fed Esther's yearn-
ing of the theatrical.
His manager gave the girl one look and made her member of his
troupe. He saw possibilities in that single earring.
Esther stared at this man. Something about him drew and held
her. She wondered what was in his eyes other than the instant
comprehension of her as an actress. Not the infatuation scrawled
in Thibaudier's lit them. Nor the country boys' expression of a cat
watching a bird. But then she had it! His was the look of a dog
watching a bird.
The company was kind to her. And now that her husband was
always with her she was happy to be with “real” actors and actresses.
She slaved over the minor parts assigned her and every most in-
significant pose. The troupe travelled constantly. She was seeing
the world.
One morning she dreamed of her good fortune above a soiled
table-cloth in a small hotel's dining room. The manager came be-
side her. Her sight returned and she realized she had been alone.
At one window Thibaudier stood with his leading lady, a full-blown
pink peony whose lashes curled. Esther's were straight and long,
like an animal's. “Like a fawn's,” Thibaudier had said. The other
members of the company were grouped companionably about an-
other window.
Costello asked, "Why alone, Mrs. Tibby? Do you like to be ?”
”
“Like to be alone? I can't bear to be alone."
The confidence pleased him smugly. His hand, adding the ashes
a


EDNA WAHLERT McCOURT
591
from his cigar to the muddied dregs of her coffee-cup, touched and
quieted her thin fingers.
“You won't ever have to be alone, Esther, if you don't want to
be. I could have assured you that the first time I saw you."
She chose to misinterpret. “I had only been married a day,
then."
He did not pretend to be fooled. “You can depend upon me, ”.
he said steadily.
Her lichen-coloured grey-green eyes flinched. She didn't want to
depend on Costello! She wanted to depend on Tibby! She loved
Tibby. He had sworn he loved her, too. Not now so much as
formerly, but he had sworn it. Besides they were married. That
meant he would never leave her alone. She didn't want to depend
on Costello. He had been a darling to take her on and promise her
real parts, but it was Tibby she wanted with her. He was so suave,
so the hero of her dreams.
She kept her voice calm. “You're awfully good to me. But I
hope I won't have to bother you
much.”
But there was uncertainty in her tone, and so Costello looked
as if he had found a lost key. He was square, and his finger nails
were. So were his palms and his chin. She glanced toward her
husband, long, vivid, the popular conception of a matinée idol to
his teeth. And Costello caught the comparison.
“Tibby is a handsome dog, and I don't blame you for being crazy
about him. He's kind, too, after his fashion, and generous.
Esther's disturbed eyes turned happy. “But buxom pink-cheeked
English women seem to be his type.” Then he added so as not to
antagonize her, “That's probably why he fell for you so hard."
She clutched at the inconsistency with gratitude. Tibby had
told her just that. “Your frail white triangle face is a kiss on
both my eyes. You're a little star among clouds.” He had fingered
her. “Your beautiful, wonderful bones, Child. Why have I run
after plump women ?” But that had been months before.
"You can depend on me if I say so, Esther,” Costello repeated.
She did not answer.
He tipped comfortably in his uncomfortable dining-room chair.
“Once,” he announced, “there was a woman who meant everything
she said. Of course, she was accused of having no imagination, but
that has nothing to do with the story. If she had made a bargain
a


592
THE LICHEN
with Satan she would have stuck to it though the good Lord himself
stretched her a hand. When she reached the proper age her teeth
went back on her and she decided to get a set of false ones. She
went to a dentist and said, 'I want a set of new teeth, Doctor, but
I won't take them until I've paid for them. When he finished
making the plates he naturally told her to wear them, but she would
not because they weren't paid for. 'I said I wouldn't take them
until they were paid for and I won't,' she declared. She was a poor
old lady, but kept on bringing in money for those teeth, in very
small amounts. The dentist kept urging her to wear her plates,
assuring her they were perfectly useless to him, but she would only
shake her Scotch head and say, Not until I've paid for them.'
By the time she had, six or eight months after they were made,
they didn't fit her any more. The shape of her mouth had changed.
‘I'll make you a new set,' the dentist sighed, but for pity's sake
don't try to pay for it before you take it.' 'I most certainly shall,'
she insisted, ‘and I won't wear it until I do.' Once more she pro-
ceeded to bring in her straggling pennies, but by the time she had
the second set paid for her gums had again sagged and—the pro-
cedure began all over again. The old lady died before she got any
false teeth, but she hadn't gone back on her word.”
Esther smiled now. But her smile was of hope and not amuse-
ment. Yes, Costello's eyes were like a dog's.
“That old lady was my grandmother,” he concluded. “We're
supposed to be as like as two beer bottles.
>>
III
When Thibaudier deserted her, Esther's theatrical friends did.
Except James Costello.
All through the girl's first astonished grief he sat with her as a
mother with a sick child, sympathizing or denouncing according to
her mood. He barely left her before her pangs of actual and antici-
pated loneliness ceased. When she woke weeping in the night his
sure square fingers quieted hers. Sometimes he fed her with a spoon.
Then with acceptance of the inevitable she descended into a leth-
argy of despair. She did nothing. She wanted to do nothing. She
was afraid of life: she could not live alone. Costello assured her
he never would leave her, and paid all her bills.
a


EDNA WAHLERT McCOURT
593
But he did not play a single tune. He had knowledge of her
character which was real. He knew the door of her true being was
to be opened with a double key. He knew that through her art
also he must arouse and win her. He wooed her with delicate flat-
tery, subtle encouragement. He painted pictures of herself on a
throne and the world at salaam.
“You have a wonderful future before you, dear,” he reiterated
constantly. “You're going to become a great actress. You must
live for that. You can't afford to waste more months of energy
because Tibby is gone. You honestly aren't going to be alone.
Haven't I promised you? You must throw off this lethargy. You
must make up your mind to be a great actress. You must get to
work. I am going to help you make a name for yourself.” He
composed endless variations of his theme. And after a while she
began to pat his arm.
He accepted a position as assistant to a third-rate New York
manager. “I'll be able to keep in touch with the big guns if I'm
there. I'll find something worth while for you. All you've got to
do is to improve your technique. You've got it in you to put it over.
There isn't any doubt about it. And when the big chance comes,
I'll be your manager."
So finally he got her back on the road.
“But, remember,” he said at parting, "whatever happens, you can
depend on me. If you need me or want me I can come to you even
if you're stranded in Frisco. Money goes over the wire as easy as
words. So don't worry. And I'll keep writing.”
Those years
Ten years passed before Esther's “chance” came.
held her work and a faithful companion. In so far she was content.
She toured until she believed she knew every landmark of every
transcontinental line. She played in vaudeville and melodrama and
stock. She was everything from juvenile to lead, even ingénue and
withered old woman. She acted before burlesque audiences, before
the foolish kindly folk that demand melodrama, before vaudeville
houses from the rank to the tolerable. Her stock experience was
usually with fair companies, before stodgy crowds. Sometimes her
salary defrayed her expenses. When it did not James did.
Yet though she loved her work and had this man with her she
sought friends. At least she sincerely believed it was friendship she


594
THE LICHEN
was seeking although she was aloof, undemocratic, even unsociable
in every human relationship. Not that Costello had failed her.
He satisfied the primary need of her nature, but her nature was not
simple and so there were other needs. "He is a dear. If it weren't
a
for him I couldn't bear to live,” she said countless times, the while
her eyes searched for what she called friendship.
She turned first to men. And she did meet some few who felt
genuine friendship for her, but her demands upon them were un-
reasonably excessive and frightened them off. She yielded them no
solitude. She asked for her own friendship and charm that con-
stancy they could not pay. All others sooner or later came to look
at her as the cat watches the bird, which chilled. She consciously
announced she did not want love, she was incapable just then of
passion. She had had her little idyl, her art indulged her emotional
nature. What should she want of love?
Then she tried women. She experienced the satisfaction of
rooming with them. She liked to hear breathing in the night. She
liked to discuss in minute detail the fine shadings of dress and hair
and lip rouge. She liked some one to experiment with her in new
styles. She liked some one there to bring hot water bottles or head-
ache powder to her. ... . Yet each woman left Esther in what
seemed a desert, and for some man. James always found her then,
and led her to an oasis.
They spent their vacations together. His attentions had ceased
.
being subtle, but she did not mind. He was with her and she was
grateful. She was even proud of inspiring so faithful a passion.
Very earnestly she tried to return it. “If I could wake up some
morning and discover I loved him," she often thought, “I would
be the happiest woman in the world. I try to. And he isn't un-
happy. I even think he's satisfied. He doesn't really know I don't
love him and he does know he's all I've got. But I can't love him,
it seems.”
And then she met the man she could.
He was the great metropolitan producer, Hamel. James had
worked like an ant to introduce Esther to him, for he was certain
she had passed through school and graduated equipped to rank with
the first of her profession. He knew she was worthy of being put
on by a big manager but he knew just as well that hers was no
popular talent nor the sort the average producer dares back. Her


EDNA WAHLERT McCOURT
595
beauty was gaunt and rare and she shone only in that rather fatalis-
tic tense and yet listless tragedy which is never a favourite with
the box office. Costello knew the only man in the country who
could both recognize Esther's talent and dare back her was Hamel.
And the producer was interested. Esther fascinated him both as
possibility and woman. Conversely he attracted her as he might
have her body had he drawn her to him. She had never warmed
toward any but handsome men, and she thought Hamel a symphonic
study in black and white. When she caught in his eyes the look of
the cat watching the bird, she was glad and her laugh was very
sweet. Her buoyancy did not deceive her, and she let Hamel catch
the high polish on her eyes.
Their dinner sailed through midnight. Secure in his ten-year
sovereignty James observed no by-play. He was rubbing his hands.
"Hamel understands her. I knew he would. Broadway will be
lapping her
up with a spoon if he puts her on.”
Next day Esther went to Providence to play Hedda in a stock
company which imported principals from the metropolis. Within
the week James persuaded Hamel to run up with him for a per-
formance.
"She has more than personality,” he assured the manager. "She
knows how to move. Her pantomime is sheer magnetism. She can
raise one of her thin shoulders so that your ears hear a shriek.
There's the difference between her voice and other women's that
there is between a Stradivarius and a factory-made fiddle.”
Without coaxing Hamel went. But he sat through the per-
formance like a sphinx. Neither afterwards nor next morning did
he mention Esther, and James was too wise to press discussion.
For several weeks silence.
But when Esther returned a telegram waited in her state-room.
.
a
“I think I can put you on. We will show Broadway. Come to
me as soon as you arrive in New York. HAMEL.”
She flew to James. “At last! I've got my chance! O how can
I thank you? He's going to see me! He's going to put me on!”
"
As always he met her mood. He helped over an effective toilette.
He ran errands. He criticized her silhouette. He drank wine to
her. He prophesied to the stars. Then he put on his best frock-


596
THE LICHEN
coat as befitting the confidant and manager of an actress about to
become olympian. Together they entered Hamel's office.
He had arisen at announcement of Esther's arrival, his eyes now
a cat's watching a bird on the ground. But at sight of Costello that
expression changed to cool anger. Deliberately turning his back on
the man he led Esther to an alcove.
And for her James had suddenly become extinct, non-existent.
She was drunk with Hamel. And yet, too, her mind was clearer
than it had ever been in her life. It was a window, washed. For
the first time she consciously and with amusement analyzed her
idyl with Thibaudier: the play-acting every young girl drowns her-
self in. She knew her yearning toward this man was real. He was
of her species and only such can mate. She greedily consumed his
poise, grace, personality, and his long length. She knew them
manifestation of character rather than structural whim. Hamel
understood the finest shade of her interpretation of Hedda.
She never saw the firmer set of Costello's square jaws.
Next day Hamel's note came in a forest of red roses. “Let us
waste no time. Broadway is waiting. When will you come to talk
over the contract? I mean, of course, when will you come alone?"
She began to sing
James said, “You're not going to call on Hamel."
That discord stopped her melody. She stared.
"You're not going to call on Hamel," James repeated.
Then Esther's grey-green lichen-coloured eyes showed amuse-
ment. An eyebrow questioned.
"You're not going to him. Because if you do you'll never see
me again.” Costello's meaning was certain, like the tick of a clock.
“As sure as you've been able to depend upon me these ten years, so
surely will you never see me again if you go to Hamel. I want you
myself. Of course, you can go if you like. I'll make no fuss. You
.
know I'm not that kind. But you'll have to pay if
you
do. He's
as inconstant as they make 'em. He'll throw you over before you
say Jack Robinson. And then you'll have only your art.”
“I don't believe you. You're cruel. You're jealous.” But
Esther shivered.
“Never mind what I am. I'm just putting yourself up to you. If
you go to Hamel you'll get a little love and a big name. If
you
stay with me you'll have me always—” he caught the derision she


EDNA WAHLERT McCOURT
597
وو
felt, and added, "and a big name, too.” He blustered, "I got you
this chance, didn't I? I'll get you another.”
But she knew he never could. She knew no other producer could
use her, peculiarities. She saw herself doomed to the drab drudgery
of the past ten years. She revolted.
"You're trying to scare me. She played with her nervous fin-
gers. “I don't care if you can get me another chance. I don't care
if you get me a hundred. Besides, I know you couldn't even get me
one more. But even if you could, I want Hamel to put me on! He
won't throw me over. I'm sure he won't."
“How many other women do you suppose have said that, too?
See here, Esther, you're no baby. Not that I mean to influence you.
But I know you better than you know yourself, and I think enough
of you to try to make you understand what you're doing.”
And then, coldly as a surgeon carving into a man to draw out a
cancer, he brought forth visualized every period of her life when she
had been alone. The year after her mother's death. The year after
her husband deserted her. Every detail of agony she had suffered
as each friend had vanished. His words rustled in her ear like the
flutter of the wings of a hawk. His motif was as terrible as per-
sistent—"You'll go through all that again, if you turn me down.
And without me on the horizon. Do you think you could stand
it?”
And yet it was only her body Costello was racking with these
truths. Her soul was under the spell of Hamel's roses.
“I don't care what you say." Yet her teeth were chattering.
“I'm going to him. I want to be a great actress! I don't want
anything else in the world! I'm going!”
Her decision lifted her. "I'm going to Hamel! I can trust his
flowers. I want to be a great actress!"
Yet with that cry the roses stirred.
Costello was emphasizing his argument with a forefinger. “All
right. Go if you will. But mark my words, you'll be sorry.
I
know you're complex through to your spine, but I'm also pretty
certain about the foundation you were built on. Look into your
soul, Esther. You'll see there what you really want."
His finger flung at her. . . . The echo of her cry, "I want to
,
be a great actress !"
The red roses
And then suddenly pitted against any glory there was the essence


598
SPRING
of herself. Her knees rocked her. She was herself twenty years
before. She was a little girl in a country church. A terrible voice
was bidding her search her soul with a flaming taper. A finger
was piercing her crowned with black. The truth was standing
before her like a wall.
She did not even answer Hamel's note.
IV
Life was a black hole with nothing in it. And she was stifling at
its edge.
But Costello was beside her, holding her hand.
SPRING
BY ALTER BRODY
A bare young birch
Innocent of its loveliness,
Shivers in the sunshine like a little naked girl
Waiting to be dressed in leaves.
Under its outspread querulous branches
An old gardener bends over a rake,
Levelling the heaped manure around its slim trunk
Painstakingly:
His fingers clutch the smooth handle of the rake
Like dead roots.



JESUS DEL MONTE (HAVANA). BY JULES PASCIN






VIN
A HAVANA SUBURB. BY JULES PASCIN


1
1


A PORTRAIT OF RENOIR AT CAGNES
BY RENÉ GIMPEL
Translated by Gerald Kelly
1
A
ranean.
FRIEND had said to me, “Since you are going South, when
at Cannes, why not push on 'toward Cagnes, some fifteen
kilometres away, and try to see Renoir. I am not sufficiently inti-
mate with him to give you a card of introduction, but take your
chance."
I took it. Cagnes is an old hillside village facing the Mediter-
Its fisher-folk had defended it against the invasion of
Corsairs during the Middle Ages, thanks to the picturesque and
vertiginous slope upon which it is reared. Sea-rovers came from
afar to view the place-its outlook is magnificent. From its
heights one's eyes sweep the horizon.
Would Monsieur Renoir receive me?
He had not slept during the night, a servant informed me, "but,"
said she, “if
you will give me your card, I'll ask if he can see you.'
I waited in the yard—or rather neglected kitchen garden. The
glazed brick house, of the Louis XVI type, had the air of one of
those jerry-built villas, thrown together from season to season at
watering places, their speculative builders being notorious for their
lack of taste.
Presently the servant returned. "If you will be kind enough to
enter the dining-room,” she said, "we will lower Monsieur.”
Lower him—what did she mean? I wondered.
Renoir had been a widower some three years. One felt it about
the place; remnants of the old order had not been swept aside. In
a corner by the window, a table contained some brushes, a box of
water-colours; some little pottery tiles decorated with flowers, child-
,
ish drawings of boats and trees, and several plates with Renoir's
typical nude, one knee crossing the other. I recognized the colour
and treatment of the master. Did Renoir work in ceramics, then?
But at that moment I perceived through the partly opened door
two women descending the stairs, carrying the aged painter in a sort


600
A PORTRAIT OF RENOIR AT CAGNES
1
of litter. My friend in Paris had warned me that he was almost
senile, but I was not prepared for this, and it occurred to me to ask
myself what business I had there! Before me was the remnant of
a man. The women moved his chair about and revealed him, hold-
ing him securely by the shoulders to prevent his collapse. His
crossed legs never lost their terrible rigidity. He seemed to be all
.
acute angles and of a solid piece, like a heavily armoured knight,
unhorsed in combat. He rested on one foot, the other was swathed
in bandages. The attendants settled him in his chair to prevent him
from toppling forward.
Seated before me, he was a fearsome spectacle. With elbows
pressed against his body and forearms raised, he moved two for-
bidding stumps of hands, bound with cords and narrow tapes; the
fingers were almost shorn of flesh and their bones seemed to protrude
through the thin integument. His poor hands, withered like claws.
But I had not yet seen his head, which was sunk into his bent
shoulders like that of a hunchback. He wore a large English
travelling cap, beneath which his face showed pale and hollow-
cheeked. His beard was bristly and white and flattened to one side,
like gorse laid low by the wind. How had it taken that crease, I
wondered? And then I was conscious of his eyes, and a doubt seized
me. Did he still possess a spark of the vital thing?
My thought was soon to be answered, for, since it was necessary
to break the silence, I risked saying: “As an admirer of your work I I
have come to pay homage to its creator– I greet you, Master.”
He motioned me to come nearer and signalled the servant to give
him a cigarette, which she put into his mouth and lighted.
Then Renoir said, "I have all the vices like that of painting.”
I breathed freely again. That sally, uttered with a clearness
and vibrancy of tone, reassured me. I laughed and the Master
smiled at me. His indistinct eyes suddenly became animated.
“I noticed over in the corner some ceramics wherein I recognize
a
>
9
your hand.”
He caught the note of inquiry in my
remark.
“Yes,” he replied, that was my first medium. I am now teaching
the art to my god-son, a lad of sixteen who lives with me. It is
necessary that every one have a métier and this seems to be agreeable
to him. It is yery difficult, however, since the same colour applied
by different hands will create a conflict of tones.”


RENÉ GIMPEL
601
6
>
He then explained that it was necessary to prepare colours so as
to obviate as much as possible this eventual change.
“But have I accomplished that end?” he queried. “It is some
sixty years since I first saw Troyon's great canvas, The Return of
the Cattle, which is in the Louvre. When I viewed the painting
again, several years ago, the vapour rising from the muzzles of the
animals and the hazy sunlight which bathed the scene, had quite
disappeared. It is for that very reason one must study the action
of pigment without cease.”
I asked him if he especially liked landscape.
"Well, naturally," he replied, “I like it very much, but I find it
difficult. I am known as a figure painter, and with reason. My
landscape is but an accessory, and I aim always to blend it with my
figures, an expression which the Old Masters never attempted.”
“But what of Giorgione?” I protested.
Renoir did not reply, and feeling that he did not approve of my
question, I spoke of Corot, of whom he said:
“That was the great genius of the century, the greatest land-
scapist ever known. He has been called a poet. That alone does
not explain him. He was a naturalist. I have studied him without
ever attaining to his art. I could never approach him, yet I have
placed myself in the very spots where he painted, certain corners of
Venice and La Rochelle, and oh, those excursions of mine about
La Rochelle only made me miserable, because of Corot. I wanted
to imitate him, but he had given colour to the very stones of the
place that I could never emulate.”
He threw his cigarette into a bowl at his feet and made a sign
to his attendant for another. He then continued: “Landscape is the
stumbling-block of the painter. He will think a certain scene grey
perhaps, but how much colour one finds in a grey landscape! If
you only knew, Monsieur, how difficult it is to penetrate the foliage
of trees with brushes."
"It is extraordinary,” I said, “that you and a few friends are
of an epoch that produced several masters. When the School of
1830 was at its apogee, when no hint of decadence had made its
appearance among
that
group, in spite of
your
admiration for these
men you were able to create a school not only rivalling theirs but
actually opposing it.”
“That was the effect of chance," he answered. “There was at
>


602
A PORTRAIT OF RENOIR AT CAGNES
that time in Paris a painter named Gleyre, a Swiss who had a course
of instruction in drawing for about six francs a month. It was very
cheap, I had not a sou, and it was to his atelier that I was directed.
There, I met Sisley, Monet, and Bazile. It was our mutual poverty
which created a union, and it was the effect of those gatherings of
ours which brought to notice the Impressionist School. Individ-
ually, we had neither the force nor the courage to promote the idea.
The school had as its foundation our friendships, discussions, and
poverty. And we struggled to uphold one another.
In 1872,
Berthe Moret joined our group, securing some funds wherewith we
arranged a sale of our work at the Hotel Drouot. It created a
a
furore. An old habitué of the famous auction rooms helped us im-
measurably by his condemnation. He was one of those daily fre-
quenters of the place who revelled in the kind of atmosphere one
finds only in a sales-room. He entered our salon and, calling to a
crony who was passing through the lobby, said: 'Come and see the
horrors.' The other entered and remarked protestingly, 'But they
.'
are not so bad.' The old fellow was indignant; 'They are disgust-
ing,' and he hastened to gather sympathizers to his side. Two
camps were formed and a veritable fracas ensued, joined from time
to time by the passers-by. Attendants were summoned to restore
order and they were obliged to close the doors just about the time
that peace was restored. The sale of our work took place next
day, and our canvases sold for an average of twenty-five francs
apiece. Yes, but from that day on we had our supporters.
The evocation of these youthful and turbulent memories kindled
the
eyes of Renoir, which shone brilliantly with the retrospection.
In spite of his stricken limbs he seemed no longer infirm in his chair.
That aspect of him faded from me before the animation of his eyes.
What vivacity they gave off, what intelligence he still possessed!
I then asked to see some of his paintings and he instructed his
servant to accompany me. She led the way to a bedroom, in one
corner of which the walls contained two rows of canvases without
stretchers. Others were laid upon the eider-down cover of the bed.
Often the same canvas contained three or four different studies, and
sometimes a fragment had been cut from a corner. These paintings,
worth of twenty, thirty, and forty thousand francs, were left hang-
ing there like washing out to dry. Among them there were many
portraits.


RENÉ GIMPEL
603
In the light of the noonday sun his last works had not that bricky
quality of colour often so disagreeable, a mannerism which he had
affected for several years. His heads, too, seemed more distin-
guished. This curious collection of pictures gave me the impression
of a heap of precious stones.
I asked the servant how Renoir painted then.
“I place the brushes between his fingers,” she said, "and tie them
with the cords and ribbons which you saw. Sometimes they will
fall and I have to replace them, but what is most surprising about
Monsieur Renoir is the sharpness of his eyes. I have known him
to call upon me to remove a bristle from his brush which had dis-
engaged itself in the paint. I look over the canvas carefully but
without success, and it is always Monsieur who points it out to me.”
This good woman had been in his service for thirteen years and
was desolated not to be able to discuss art with the Master for his
distraction, merely acting as his nurse. She later conducted me to a
little isolated studio in a corner of the garden, and there showed me
the canvas upon which Renoir was working at the time: his famous
nude woman, a well-studied back pose. The stretcher on the easel,
in lieu of being held in place by a block, was supported by a
counter-poise, which allowed Renoir to raise or lower his canvas
with the utmost ease.
I returned presently to the old painter and said: "What marvel-
lous pictures. The number of canvases you have produced is
incredible.”
“During my life,” he said, “I have sold more than three thousand
canvases.
“It must be a great joy for you to realize how strong the influ-
your school has been throughout the world. Its impress on
the artistic mind has been so positive that it did not give people of
other nations a chance to develop in a national way. This is felt in
America, Canada, Sweden, Norway, and Germany. Everywhere
the spirit of the French school is felt. Everywhere, even in Ger-
many, a country where everything remains Gothic, exactly as in the
Middle Ages. Its architecture still dates from that period.”
Then we spoke of Degas and he said: “What a beast that Degas
was! Violent and bitter-tongued. All his friends grew to shun
him in time. I was one of the last to remain by him, but even I
.
did not hold out until the end. It is incomprehensible that Manet,
ence of
a
a


604
A PORTRAIT OF RENOIR AT CAGNES
kind and gentle, was always disputed, while Degas, acrid and dis-
agreeable, intractable to a degree, was hailed by every one from the
very first—by the general public, the revolutionaries, and the
Institute."
“They feared him!”
“Yes, that was it. I kept his friendship for a long time, turning
myself inside out to please him. One day he said to me, 'Renoir, I
have an implacable enemy, one not to be vanquished.' Who is he?'
I asked. If you must know,' the old beast replied, thumping his
.
breast, 'this enemy is myself.'”
I asked Renoir if he would let me have one of his canvases; but
he was most reluctant, saying, “For the present I am accumulat-
ing them. I have not enough to leave my children. In a year per-
haps it will be different. Perhaps then, but I will not sell them
cheaply, because of the dealers in Modern Art. I will not hinder
their commerce, and, furthermore, I have an old debt of gratitude
toward Durand-Ruel, who was the only one to come to my rescue
when I was hungry.”
I spoke to him of a canvas I had remarked particularly: some
washer-women beside a stream. “That canvas,” I said, “is surely
the country-side between St. Raphaele and Monte Carlo. I admire
with what truth you have painted the soil about the olive tree, the
trunk of which is raised so curiously from the little hillock of earth."
“That olive tree,” replied Renoir, "was beastly. If you only
knew how it harassed me. A tree full of colour, not at all grey.
Its little leaves made me sweat. A sudden gust of wind came, and
my tree changed all its tonalities. The colour was not on the leaves,
but in the open spaces. I know I am not a painter of Nature, but to
come to grips with her amuses me. Yet a painter is not great until
he knows Nature. Landscapist! that was at one time a term of con-
tempt, especially in the Eighteenth Century. Yet that period which
I adore produced the greatest landscapists. I am a painter of the
Eighteenth Century. I consider myself not only a descendant of
I
Watteau, Fragonard, and Hubert Robert in my art, but actually of
that group. Watteau! Raphael! Giants cut off in the very flower
of their youth and genius. I tell you, Monsieur, those who die
young are gifted with an intelligence that doubles their efforts.”
9


DUBLIN LETTER
April, 1920
TEN
EN years ago in Dublin it was 'safe to say that every young
writer had the manuscript of a peasant play in his pocket,
unless by happy chance the document lay in the archives of the
Abbey Theatre, or was undergoing the erratic scrutiny of the Abbey
Reading Committee. Since August, 1914, there has been a marked
change in the trend of literary activity. First came the spell of
political writing inspired by the sharpening of the conflict between
Ireland and England. Jail journals and the narratives of Sinn
Fein prisoners of war, followed by political and economic studies,
engaged the energies of the press Censor, whose blue pencil hacked
its way through pages of manuscript with the Schrecklichkeit
inseparable from such undertakings. Since the armistice, that
functionary has gone, abandoning us to the irresponsible efforts
of the "competent” military authorities, who have suppressed, by
dismantling the machinery, every daily and weekly paper guilty of
the heresy of nationalism. We have to wait for the English papers
to read matter which has been bayonetted out of the Irish press,
for the raids on newspaper offices are always carried out by several
carloads of soldiers in full trench equipment. Even a collection
of speeches made by the Carsons, F. E. Smiths, and the like, in
their Ulster rebellion campaign, has been seized, although bearing
the imprimatur of the late Censor. The authorities believed that
these incitements to armed revolt by Cabinet ministers should not
be allowed to encourage the growth of similar sentiments amongst
the mere Irish outside Ulster. An English edition of the booklet,
entitled The Grammar of Anarchy, which has never been passed
by any censor, is sold without any interference from the au-
thorities, who are careful to limit their intimidation to Irish editors
and publishers.
Whether as a result of these conditions or not, there has been a
noticeable tendency to use the novel, rather than the political essay,
as a means of expressing the struggles, hopes, and aspirations of
modern Ireland. The dramatic possibilities of the Easter Rising
#


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have irresistibly drawn the novelists to the thought of the fine
story that could be written around it. So far none has succeeded in
the attempt to bring that dynamic and tragic experience into liter-
ature, but, in addition to some conventional fiction, the stirring
of the national being by Sinn Fein has provided us with two
novels of great documentary interest: The Clanking of Chains,
by Brinsley MacNamara, and The Gael, by Edward E. Lysaght,
both published by Messrs. Maunsel of Dublin. Mr. Lysaght was
a sort of unofficial Sinn Fein representative at the Plunkett Con-
vention, when Mr. Lloyd George decided to keep the Irish talking
until America had come into the war. He was the first to leave
it, being followed shortly afterwards by A. E., when these two
sincere believers in the scheme discovered that the whole affair
was a hoax. He is the author of Irish Eclogues, an original book-
let of verse, and has reversed all the traditions and conventions
of the class to which he belongs by becoming a practical and success-
ful farmer and a strong nationalist, in spite of his having gone
through the devitalizing mill of the "best" English school and
university education. His personality has survived the cult of
"good form,” that thoroughly British substitute for good brains.
In spite of its title, The Gael has nothing to do with that ultra-
of stage Irishman who comes to Dublin from one or
other of the old English universities and, with saffron kilt (and
Cockney accent), upholds the traditions of the Gaelic State. If
Mr. Lysaght's Con O'Hickie had been one of that species, he would
probably have spent most of his time in town, discussing grafted
copies of current Irish publications, and pronouncing them worth-
less because they were not written in Gaelic. At times he would
have sallied forth into some Irish-speaking district, where his bare
knees would shock the pruderies of the unsophisticated, and would
have bullied native Irish speakers into using that language. In-
stead of that Con O'Hickie decides to work rather than talk for
Ireland. He had been educated at an English school and an Irish
imitation of an English university; he possessed a small private
income, and was ripe for any form of useless employment. But,
having worked as a farm labourer, he has developed a love for
the life of the soil, and thinks of emigrating. It is then that Mr.
Lysaght discovers him, just as it occurs to him that he might as
well give his labours to his own country as to Canada.
modern type


ERNEST BOYD
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>
1
Once Con O'Hickie has bought the estate at Rathcarrig, the
author enters into the heart of his theme. Mr. Lysaght describes
with unaffected simplicity and great charm the life he knows best,
life as it is lived on the land. He is not just a literary gent
resting his tangled locks on the “bosom of Nature.” The savour
of earth and air, the ardour of intense, creative labour are in his
pages—what he calls in Irish Eclogues the "joy of permanence.”
But as the good work of building up a rural community develops it
does not proceed unhindered. There are many more than technical
difficulties to be overcome, and the portrayal of local types, the
delineation of political and social manners make the book a real
microcosm of modern Ireland. Pressure of events slowly brings
Con O’Hickie to the point where he stumbles against the obstacles,
gross and subtle, which alien administration and government have
contrived in Ireland for the thwarting and, if necessary, the de-
struction of all creative effort. With the sagacity of long ex-
perience the British government recognizes in Con O'Hickie a force
which is utterly incompatible with the safety of the realm, that is,
the preservation of England's economic domination in Ireland.
Neglecting the opportunity for patriotic heroics, Mr. Lysaght con-
fines himself to a careful, well-authenticated analysis of the gradual
process whereby this practical idealist is turned into that now
familiar bogey, a Sinn Feiner. An atrocious sentence upon one
of his men leaves Con O'Hickie with "a blind rage in his heart,”
and a row of dots marks the breaking off of this page of life. In
a sort of epilogue the author explains that the threat of conscrip-
tion was the culminating point in O'Hickie's orientation, the
deviation of the constructive impulse into the unavoidable political
effort. He becomes the leader of "contingent rebellion,” but, being
a nationalist, he does not reach the British cabinet, like Carson,
but finds himself in jail. His work is undone, the continuity of
his effort is effectively broken. The reiterated and destructive
negative of the English system in Ireland once more attains its
end. The constructors are baffled, impeded, and, if needs be, de-
stroyed. Mr. Lysaght has told the story of what Sinn Fein is
doing, and he has revealed how Sinn Feiners are made. As his
book appeared the Irish public learned that it was seditious to pub-
lish in Ireland the evidence now being given by various experts
before a commission which is holding an inquiry into the industrial


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resources of the country. A most illuminating commentary upon
the thesis of The Gael.
Nearly two years ago Mr. Brinsley MacNamara published his
first novel, which I discussed in this place. The Valley of the
Squinting Windows has since reached the American public, and
no doubt his new book, The Clanking of Chains, will follow. Hav-
ing been stoned by the villagers of the place described in that earlier
volume, the author must have been prepared for another violent
repudiation. Mr. MacNamara continues to show us the reverse
of the medal; the epigraph of this new novel is Mr. Yeats' lines:
“Romantic Ireland's dead and gone,
'Tis with O'Leary in the grave.”
The Clanking of Chains is the curious complement of The Gael ;
it shows the seamy side of Irish nationalism. That is not to say,
as perhaps the British propagandists would hope, that he has writ-
ten a melodramatic tale of Sinn Fein gunmen, murdering police-
men, and plotting sinister schemes in conjunction with Bolshevists
and Hohenzollerns. What he has done is to challenge the com-
fortable and comforting convention which Ireland likes to think
is her likeness. Every nation has a popular conception of itself,
and the writer who upsets the current idealization risks un-
popularity, if not a definite charge of consorting with the hosts
of darkness. Yet, so far no public manifestation of anger has
greeted the successor to The Valley of the Squinting Windows.
The Ballycullen of The Clanking of Chains is a remorseless ex-
posure of the worst side of political and social life in our country
towns. In this community of opportunist and verbal patriots lives
a rather futile idealist, Michael Dempsey, who dreams of heroic
deeds, but is reduced to despair by the brutal tragi-comedy of life.
When it is safe and easy and profitable, Ballycullen is on the side
of the angels, but while men and women are fighting and dying
and suffering, the crowd is content to belittle the effort, and to
sneer at its supporters. Mr. MacNamara shows how the new move-
- ment in Irish nationalism is reacted upon by these people, how
they can touch nothing that they do not disfigure and destroy.
The theme is the eternal theme which Ibsen handled in An
Enemy of the People—the malevolent hostility of the crowd


ERNEST BOYD
609
towards the individual, the incurable loutishness of the average
undeveloped human being. If he has chosen to illustrate a
universal subject by its particular application to Ireland, it
is because the peculiar conditions of this country are singularly
propitious to the existence of such creatures as clank their chains
in his novel. So many fine and romantic figures have been thrown
into bold relief by the secular war of Ireland for her national
existence that the braggarts, the opportunists, and the mean ex-
ploiters have been provided with an impenetrable smoke-screen
against all criticism. The war has shown us everywhere how easy it
is for the worst individuals to flourish under cover of the universal
preoccupation with an outside enemy. Those who are inclined to
accuse Irish people of being morbidly susceptible to criticism of
national faults should remember that, ever since the loss of her
independence, Ireland has been in a state of war with England, and
consequently indisposed to admit anything which seemed to play
into the hands of the enemy. After the exhibitions of this spirit
all over the recently belligerent world, Irish people need no longer
apologize for their intolerance. It so happens that, as the nation
has become more conscious of its capacity for self-help, as the Sinn
Fein spirit has grown, there is a vastly larger measure of self-
criticism than is commonly found in other countries whose national
self-consciousness is alert. Mr. Brinsley MacNamara has been
congratulated, for the most part, because of the power of his
analysis of those elements in Irish politics which have heretofore
proved a source of grave danger. Now that a new generation and
a new party have achieved power and responsibility in Ireland, the
warning of this novel is not wasted.
While both novels are interesting contemporary documents, it
would be a mistake to salute them as masterpieces of literature.
Mr. Lysaght's pleases by the originality and freshness of the
material and outlook out of which The Gael has sprung. The
author makes no pretensions to the title of the novelist proper,
although he writes well and easily. Mr. MacNamara is a figure of
more significance to those interested in the evolution of Anglo-Irish
fiction. Like Mr. James Joyce, he has definitely broken with the
ancient stereotypes which have served the Irish novelist since the
days of Maria Edgeworth. He has some irritating tricks of style
which he must overcome, and his sense of form is still rather vague,


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a
as the smudged ending of The Clanking of Chains reveals. Above
all, he is not sufficiently aloof from his creations to convey that
sense of inevitability without which the realistic novel becomes as
fatally artificial as the soothing romances of the gladdest of best
sellers. In fine, although the novel has taken on a new lease of
literary life in Ireland, the field is still without a really fine flower.
It may be that the recrudescence of fiction is simply the suppressed
desire of Sinn Fein Ireland to express and explain herself, a political
rather than a literary phenomenon. If that is so, another hope must
be deferred, for the need for self-expression grows more imperative
with every suppression. As these lines are written it is announced
that all American papers have been seized at the post-office by those
ever-so-competent military authorities.
ERNEST BOYD


MR. MACKENZIE'S JEST
Poor Relations. By Compton Mackenzie. 12mo. 332
pages. Harper & Brothers. New York.
MR.
а
R. COMPTON MACKENZIE has placed himself in an extra-
ordinary position for a man of honour. He is apparently being
sued for breach of promise by at least half the eligible young women
of his native scene with no co-respondent named. The awkwardness
of the situation is not all on Mr. Mackenzie's side, for there must be
the pervasive feeling of having been a little too easily seduced.
In short, Mr. Mackenzie startled and delighted the critical world
in nineteen twelve or so by writing a very remarkable book called
Carnival. He had already published one work, a novel predestined
to be minor, and he followed his first triumph with a very long
account, in two volumes, of the childhood and adolescence of a boy
who was destined to be a priest. Toward the end of these lively
pages something alien crept in, and, although it was forgiven, it
caused a moment's apprehension. This was in turn banished by the ·
appearance of Guy and Pauline, an interlude of surpassing loveli-
ness. After it, a deluge of novels—three in number, but multitudi-
nous in their faults and terrible in the announcement they bore that
Mr. Mackenzie had at last found his way in the world. It was not
the
way
of Carnival and of Guy and Pauline; it was the sorry way
of the second half of Sinister Street. What was felt as an aberra-
tion has become an attitude, fixed, merciless, and distressing. I do
not wonder that some of his disappointed lovers have forced them-
selves to believe that he was always false.
Alas that he should be false at all who was so fair! It is a fit
theme for lamentation, but let those who lament be certain that they
know how Mr. Mackenzie has betrayed them. Above all it was with
beauty, with his creation of beauty and his love for the thing he
created. He was never irreproachable; his two novels of beauty are
full of lapses in taste and of artificial prettiness; but it is impossible
to deny them a fundamental honesty, and, what is more startling, an
effect of reality. Notably in Carnival Mr. Mackenzie painted each
lovely colour of his scene with, apparently, the hard pigment of life.


612
MR. MACKENZIE'S JEST
It was nobly imagined; it has been well observed; and the work of
passing what had been observed through the fire of composition had
been decently accomplished. When he moved from the hard pave-
ments of London to the moist airs of Oxfordshire, in Guy and
Pauline, Mr. Mackenzie's observation was even finer; certainly it
was more subtle and it was concerned'with less perishable stuff. The
poignancy of this novel—to put it unkindly, its subject is a girl's
first love and disappointment-is proof enough that it is psycho-
logically true. Otherwise the tragedy must have made it absurd.
The other novels of Mr. Mackenzie are a series of records, minute,
often entertaining, undeniably alive and accurate, of the actions and
emotions of several groups of young people. They have all the
qualities of good novels except creative strength, and all the appear-
ance of the spectacle of life except its emotional verity. When Mr.
Mackenzie gave up the creation of beauty he suffered more than his
readers; for he sacrificed, at the same altar, the one thing which,
for him, made life worth recording. That shows in his new novel.
Poor Relations is a farce. Any number of children and adults
pass through its pages, all acting exactly as children and adults act.
Their manners, their cheap wit, their meannesses and hypocrisies are
all set down. A plot of quite exceptional banality and incidents of
incredible age and vulgarity serve to display these life-like wares.
Trained animals could hardly respond so well, and mechanical
toys are not so versatile. But life escapes jauntily in this story of a
rich dramatist who flees from his greedy relatives to find-I quote
the jacket-romance in London. Romance! Dear Lord, the gen-
tleman marries a secretary whom H. G. Wells would have been
proud to give away at the registrar's.
What remains a mystery is the identity of the goddess at whose
altar Mr. Mackenzie laid down his precious gifts—the creative
imagination, the love of beauty, the deep, sane comprehension of
life. He had, at the beginning, escaped nearly all the perils; he had
rejected the outworn antithesis of realism and romance; his endow-
ment, his zeal, his passion, were abundant. He seemed to be the
only one of the young novelists of England who discerned the
wanton loveliness of life under the dreary trappings of existence
And to-day he is all trappings, unmistakably gaudy, dazzling in his
quick changes, still entertaining, a master of every effect except the
effect of creation.


GILBERT SELDES
613
A case could, no doubt, be made; the mystery might be solved.
But there is an indelicacy in the process. Mr. Mackenzie must fol-
low his inclination, and it would be as well to utter him no re-
proaches. But there are two who cannot reproach him and whom he
has served badly. In the cause of all that is decent in the art of the
novel they may be called up and placed before Mr. Mackenzie. One
is his own creation, the girl in Carnival, whose ineffable gaiety and
impudence and loveliness were so soon made a mockery in a cheap
series of adventures; the other is the great master of the English
novel who, a year or two before he died, chose Mr. Mackenzie for
his rare and special praise.
It would be easier to think lightly of Mr. Mackenzie's failure
if one did not have to remember what Henry James said of him.
Remembering that, and remembering Jenny Pearl, the brief story
of
Mr. Mackenzie's career takes on some of the proportions of tragedy.
GILBERT SELDES


.
A SOCIAL PIONEER
The Life of Francis Place: 1771–1854. By Graham
Wallas. 8vo. 415 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. New York.
E
INGLISH social history is most largely the creation of the
past thirty years. The intimate life of working-men and
women was not regarded by the classic historians as a fundamental
portion of the national record. A brilliant chapter in Macaulay,
statistics of births and deaths, some notes on changes in the fashions
of dress and houses—it was with scraps such as these that the great
Victorians treated us. For, after all, the ebb and flow of daily life
makes little enough show in the pomp and circumstance of great
events. It has little enough of the glamour by which martial
triumph‘is invested or of the splendid excitement which surrounds a
great
debate in the House of Commons. Yet slowly we are coming
to see that these are after all but the external trappings of the real
drama. They serve rather to conceal than to display the events
by which the nation was most deeply stirred. The great artist sees
deeper; and the novels of Dickens and Disraeli remain to tell us of
an England which has with difficulty found its way into accredited
history. It is in the pages of palimpsests like Sybil that we glean
some notion of why the Castlereagh of the Peace of Vienna had
none of its splendid symbols for the common people, or why the
majesty of Ricardo's name brought to them no echo of applause.
The mean dependence of men like Croker, the scent and curls of
genial fops like d'Orsay, the ruthless magnificence of roués like Lord
Hertford, have turned now to dust and ashes. Those who awaken
our enthusiasm are of different fibre. We respond rather to the
persistency of Richard Carlile who made of prison the temple of
freedom. Our veneration is for men like Thomas Hepburn to whom
the whole vista of modern trade-unionism seems to have been re-
vealed. The prophets of the time are not Peel or Lord John Russell
or Macaulay, but men like William Lovett with a burning zeal for
popular education, or Robert Owen who did not forget the tragedies
of his childhood in his days of comfort.
It is to this new tradition that Mr. Wallas' book belongs. It


HAROLD J. LASKI
615
a
is almost idle to praise it now, for it has taken its place among the
accepted masterpieces of English political biography. It has, in-
deed, a special historical significance the meaning of which is only
now emerging clearly into the light of day. The main burden of
its teaching was the need for research into the less obvious sources
before a final judgement is passed upon historic figures. Before Mr.
Wallas wrote, Place was little more than a casual foot-note in the
politics of Westminster; now it is clear that the perspective of the
time is better and more rightly seen within the mirror of his life
than in those of men who stride more proudly across the stage. He
.
worked, like a mole, in the dim twilight-world. Statesmen like
Grey and Lord John Russell would have barely known of his exist-
ence; or, if his name passed over their lips, it would have been with
some phrase that emphasized a doubt whether the influence of such
humble men as Place was wise. They still regarded politics as the
prerogative of a leisured class. They did not see that because it so
deeply touched the intimate recesses of the worker's life his interest
in it, could he be given the means of influence, was fundamental.
The worker, as Disraeli saw, was nothing so much as a separate
nation; and they would have closed the gates of power to Francis
Place because he did not, like Croker or Creevey, fawn his way to
the bottom of the rich man's table.
But Place was of a tougher fibre. His life had known bitter
hardship; and he was one of the priceless men whom misfortune
renders only more eager to mend the hardships of their fellows.
The friend of Bentham and the Mills, the political master of
Joseph Hume, without exception the ablest political organizer in
London, he did not need friendships that would not have been
offered upon an equal basis. He is one of those rare instances in
public life of men who devotedly serve the noblest of all causes
without demanding recompense in personal reputation. The his-
tory of modern trade-unionism turns upon the fundamental reform
he secured. He gave life and substance to the decayed radicalism
of England after its long somnolence during the Napoleonic wars.
It was his intervention which staved off that Wellington adminis-
tration of 1831 which might well have proved the prelude to a
disastrous revolution. He was active in the movement for popular
education. He was one of the pioneers of Chartism. He con-
tributed to political organization not a few of the chief technical


616
A SOCIAL PIONEER
F
1
í
instruments at its disposal. Wherever we meet him he is bluff,
careful, far-seeing, and, nine times out of ten, patently right. He
is capable of enthusiasm without being mastered by it. He is
tough without being hard. Determination never passes into
obstinacy. And, withal, his comments make clear that few men
were so shrewd in their judgement of the great public characters
of the time. He did not, like Greville, see them through the dis-
torted mirror of social rumour. He did not, like Macaulay, allow
party ties to sway his opinion. Peel, Brougham, Russell, Huskis-
son, from them all he seems to strip the façade which statesmanship
builds about its acolytes. He goes straight to the inner motive
which the declared purpose serves so often to conceal. He is
concerned only with the realization of right; and the touchstone
of his judgements is the help they render in actual effort to
the causes he had at heart.
Such is the figure that Mr. Wallas paints for us. It is difficult to
overestimate the significance that attaches to his portrait. He
makes evident, what Professor Dicey has shown us in the sphere
of the law, the almost overwhelming creativeness of Benthamism.
That creed, indeed, came at a time fortunate for its principles. The
evils it came to deny were too glaringly obvious to be capable of
effective defence. But there has never been in English history a
group
of men who so passionately or so singleheartedly worked out
the application of their principles to the events with which they
had to deal. Benthamism, it is not too much to say, made demo-
cratic England possible. It is easy now to see its faults. Its
formulae are too simple for a complex world. It did not realize
the inability of the average man to make headway against a fate
which is, for most, an inescapable and tragic one. The power of
combination did not sufficiently enter into its calculations. Yet
not even the last word of criticism can conceal the creative destruc-
tion that it wrought. It was a creed of hope where the blind forces
of the new industrialism seemed the progenitors of a new and
bitter slavery. Nor did Francis Place fail to understand the
obvious lessons of his effort. He saw how powerful are the forces
opposed to change. Liberalism, in the simple sense of a well-mean-
ing approval of advance, never attracted him. The liberalism for
which he cared was either a concrete definiteness like that of
Bentham or else an unflagging pursuit of the minutiae of organiza-


HAROLD J. LASKI
617
tion like that of Joseph Hume. He knew that power is poison,
and that it erects about itself a system of protective ramparts which
only persistent determination can overcome. The lesson he drew
from his experience was the simple one that the real path of progress
is institutional organization. Petitions, meetings, great words and
speeches, left him cold. It was the systematic if minute steps in
which he saw the secret of advance. Natura nihil facit per saltum
is the chief lesson the enthusiast has to learn. But Place knew
well it is the lesson most difficult to teach.
Nor was he handicapped by illusions as to the people. Not
the least stumbling-block in the way of democratic progress is the
zeal of those who are satisfied that a popular instinct for right is
all that is necessary to reform. Place believed in the popular capa-
city for self-government, but he was not hindered by ignorance as
to its difficulties. He recognized that the vast majority of the
working class does not find the centre of its interest in politics. He
knew that, even if it did, it lacked the education which made
possible the mastery of technical detail. He realized that facts
are obstinate things which fail to render obedience to popular de-
sire. There is a lesson no student of the democratic process should
neglect in his management of the repeal of the Combination Acts.
Here is the expert at his best, psychologically imaginative, econom-
ically accurate, armed cap-à-pie in the unanswerable panoply of
statistics fortified by serried masses of human experience. In our
own day, Mr. Justice Brandeis, in the famous brief in Muller v.
Oregon, Mr. Bevin, in the recent inquiry into Dockers' wages, have
shown us that scientific control of the facts will ultimately produce
an unanswerable result. The way is less easy than it seems; and it
is certainly far more difficult than the sudden projection into the
event of badly-organized mass-action in which French labour seems
to put its confidence. The method of Place is the slow and careful
tabulation of every instrument of service, the careful organization
of resources, the flinging of your power at a given point so that the
danger of competing interest is removed. The same grim states-
manship is seen in his hint to Sir Francis Burdett at the prepara-
tions needed for a revolution. It is shown in the technique by
which Wellington was overthrown in 1831. The management of a
case is half the secret of success in efforts such as these. They point
to the need of studying the strategy of labour politics with the
a


618
A SOCIAL PIONEER
a
same infinite care for detail that is expended by a general staff upon
a plan of campaign. They involve the careful preparation by fore-
handed effort of each step to be taken. They involve precise esti-
mates of the effect such steps will have upon the public as also the
effect an hostile analysis of those steps will mean. They imply
that every member of the organization has his allotted function
and knows to a nicety the duties of his station. Above all, they
demand consideration of the element surprise. It was in media
such as these that place worked, and his genius consists hardly less
in the methods he used than in the results he achieved. They are
a perennial well-spring of education just at the point where a de-
mocracy is most likely to be ill-informed.
Mr. Wallas himself has learned that lesson; and it is hardly too
much to say that his two subsequent books were an examination
into the psychological foundations of the technique implicit in
Place's work. It will, one imagines, be a task of no small difficulty
for the future historian of English thought, looking at Mr. Wallas'
three volumes, to explain the exact bearing of his work. He will
not find, as with Professor Bosanquet, a considered philosophy of
the state. He will not find, as with Mr. Sidney Webb, an organ-
ized analysis of economic structure. He will not discover, as with
Mr. Cole, a prophecy of our future almost perspiring in its en-
thusiasm. Yet the clue, it may be suggested, is a simple one.
What Mr. Wallas has emphasized is the inadequacy of the previous
formulae by which the complex facts of human association are ex-
plained. Fear as with Hobbes, consent as with Locke, the self-
interest of the Utilitarians, the habit of Sir Henry Maine, these,
at the best, are vaguely partial glimpses. Society, it is clear, is
a vast effort at intellectual coöperation. It is a coöperation
.
hindered at every stage by individual passion and the absorption
of some group in the quest of its self-interest. What Mr. Wallas
has done is to drive us to the examination of the methods by which
that coöperation can be best attained. A society in which men
were all as able and as altruistic as Francis Place would doubtless
hardly need the rules he seeks to discover; but we work with dif-
ferent data. What we mainly have to search are the impulses of
men in their social expression, the discovery of the channels by
which their satisfaction may be attained. It is not an easy task.
A genius like Bentham may escape the rule that a plan, to be a


HAROLD J. LASKI
619
a
plan, must be put into readable form; and the accident that his
Dumont may not appear must be guarded against. A committee
like the British War Cabinet may break down on a fundamental
question because it has never considered the means by which ex-
pert testimony is best elicited. A cabinet like Mr. Wilson's may
cease to function because the principle of its action has been centred
in a mind that fails at a critical moment to have contact with it.
Little by little Mr. Wallas has forced the technique of social in-
quiry upon a new path. He has made us adjust our ethics to the
facts of human nature and our perspective is different because of
the hints he has given.
But he has done more. There are perhaps five or six living men
who can disentangle the social history of England in the nineteenth
century with the same knowledge and wisdom as Mr. Wallas. That
has made him in a real sense the parent of what is rapidly becoming
the most significant part of modern English historiography. No
country in the world to-day has a social history which surpasses in
quality the History of Trade Unionism by Mr. and Mrs. Webb,
the studies of English working-class life by the Hammonds, and
the more specialized studies of which they are only the chiefest part.
What, in the mass, it has done is to make the left wing of English
radicalism scientific in a sense to which no other party in English
politics can make claim. It has given to its ideas an historical per-
spective, a realistic background, and, above all, a knowledge of the
slow fashion in which ideas must strive to make their way, which
are the very breath of hope. For, in politics, the first condition
of hope is the ability to be optimistic in the face of certain dis-
illusion. Your enemies will defy your facts; half-hearted friends
will destroy your ideas by compromising with their opposite; your
followers will despair because you have not the firm outlines of
Utopia. The certainty of progress lies in the ability to discount
these things from the outset. That is why the study of history is,
with all its limitations, still the one sure path to political salvation.
And that, it may be added, is the one great lesson American
students of politics can draw from Mr. Wallas' Life of Place. An
English liberal who analyzes the American equivalent of his faith
cannot help but find it a little bare and meagre. It is negative
rather than positive. It has not been rooted in the hard facts of
its historic environment. It has not been nourished by continuous
$


620
A SOCIAL PIONEER
a
contact with that past from which it naturally springs. I know of
one book only—Mr. Croly's Promise of American Life—which has
striven to interpret the prospects in terms of the traditions that con-
trol it. I know of one other book—Mr. Lippman's Preface to
Politics—which has striven to analyze the proper method of in-
quiry. The rest seem little more than facile pictures of immediate
evil, or else the translation of the critic's personal experience into
the resplendent detail of a national programme. What they need
is the living substance of American history. It is, indeed, true in
no light degree that those who have made American historiography
have given them little enough of aid. Histories like Mr. Rhodes'
are the material less of understanding than of edification; American
life cannot be interpreted from the comfortable angle of a banker's
window. But in other directions there is material of the first im-
portance. For all its dullness, the vast tomes of Von Holst con-
tain more wisdom on the problems of federal structure than is to
be found in any other work. The superb suggestiveness of Pro-
fessor Turner, the careful criticism of Charles Beard, the older but
still important work of Hildreth, these are the things the student
must know if his work is to have the needed substance. Above all
they must go back to their texts. They must investigate in all their
bearings the works of Hamilton and Calhoun. They must learn
to win the friendship of lesser men like John Taylor. It will be
no easy task to hew from out these vast materials the principles of
which American liberalism stands in need. But there is no way to
political wisdom save through the dirt and sweat of historical
scholarship. Our safeguards of liberty are not to be known from
a hasty impression of the daily press. That is why the man who
will do most for the study of American politics will be the man
who impresses upon this generation the lesson Englishmen have
learned from Graham Wallas. It will be a great day when his
certain advent may be signalled.
Harold J. LASKI


AGAINST NIGHTINGALES
Picture Show. By Siegfried Sassoon. 12mo. 56 pages.
E. P. Dutton and Company. New York.
The War Poems of Siegfried SASSOON. 12mo. 95
SIEGFRIED
pages. William Heinemann. London.
EGI
NIGHT years ago when the Georgians first appeared as a group,
it seemed that they were discovering more strident harmonies,
subtler dissonances. But with the publication of each new an-
thology, the disappointment is cumulative. Every two years a vol-
ume bound in fresh brown boards, printed on fresh paper, but with
the contents so familiar, so delicately trite, reaching with such skill
to new heights of inanity. Out of all the group, one metaphysician
who slips between the boundaries of the unreal and the real; one
passionate consumptive; one forthright satirist-Siegfried Sassoon
—and the rest nightingales. It is by their absorption with night-
ingales, by their identification of themselves with the nightingale,
that one may recognize the Georgians.
O nightingale! creature something more than a bird, your trilled
notes are almost the dominant tones of English poetry. From
Chaucer's foule, that we were taught to speak of euphoniously as the
nichtingawle, to the sentimental melodist of Belleau Wood, we have
been tormented by the monotony of your song. Your supremacy
was threatened for a time by the red-poppy school of war poets, but
once more you rule unchallenged. O feathered pedant! O banal
O
rhapsodist confused by the tic-tac of iambics! You leave me, o
O
ecstatic bore, homesick for the hoot-owls and whippoorwills of an
Ohio dusk, or for one moment of lucent quiet in which to forget all
the nightingales that sang from Chaucer to John Drinkwater.
When a poet like Siegfried Sassoon tries, in lumbering pentame-
ters, to talk about something else than nightingales and the trees and
meadows which are their haunt; when he goes back to Donne and
Swift instead of the Elizabethan lyricists, he has to struggle against
a whole tradition of vapidity. He is fighting—whether or not con-
sciously—for the theory of poetry as a mature art, as against the


622
AGAINST NIGHTINGALES
a
a
theory which would attach poetry definitely to the childhood of the
race and the individual. Too much of contemporary verse expresses
the emotions of a girl of twelve in words of one syllable. It throbs
too insistently, and seems intended for recitation over a guitar, or in
accompaniment with the querulous allegro of an automatic piano.
Work of this sort was confined for a long time to the popular maga-
zines; one accepted it without a murmur. But when the Georgians
erected this throbbing naïveté into a sacrosanct school, they were
striking at the fundamentals of their art. Accept their premise, and
poetry takes rank as a medium of expression somewhere between the
movies and fancy needlework.
The virtues of the Georgians are manifold, and for the most part
negative. They are not unmelodious, not awkward, and never,
never improper. Sassoon is an alien among them; he started with
one poetic virtue-honesty—and that was unqualifiedly positive.
It was not a promising equipment for the early days of 1914.
He tried his hand at the usual echoes of Keats and Wordsworth,
his imitations always impressing one as being a little more ungainly.
than those of his contemporaries. Through them he was struggling
to express his own ideas, not the imaginings of his models, but the
fact was not apparent at the time. Sincerity is a cheap virtue in a
contented world.
Yet to-day Sassoon is the most successful of his group. One
searches for what he writes; reads it with respect; turns to him first
in the biennial anthology. One makes all sorts of qualifications,
and yet he remains a great poet-as poets go in these days. He
arrived at this position fortuitously. Perhaps he will continue in
it; there is a certain momentum in success.
One regrets that the collection of his war poems is not arranged
chronologically, with separate dates for beginning and middle and
end. For one thing, such an arrangement would determine whether
he wrote before Barbusse or afterwards. Probably Le Feu and The
Old Huntsman were in process of composition at the same time. It
is certain, at any rate, that he only said what whole regiments were
thinking. To do that is a trick that may be learned like any other
trick. His early war poems include not one that could not have been
better written by Julian Grenfell or Robert Graves, or half a dozen
other men. However, they did not choose to lead the way; the
honours of the pioneer remained for Sassoon.
a
a


MALCOLM COWLEY
623
a
Following him it was to be expected that others would express the
same ideas. And one was not disappointed; they marched forward
in platoons. The Wilfred Owens, the John McLeods. The Fred-
eric Mannings, the Richard Aldingtons, the Herbert Reads, the
Osbert-and-Edith Sitwells. Even Robert Nichols and Robert
Graves began to express the disillusionment of a uniform. In the
face of all this superior talent one waited vainly for the eclipse of
Sassoon; while they spurted brilliantly he marched on; a bit heavy-
footed, to be sure, but still with his eyes on the goal. There is a
solidity about his verse which the others lacked; it enabled him to
remain the leader of a movement for which he had acted as scout.
If Heinemann had attempted a chronological arrangement of his
poems it would show the steady development of a mind. There was
a time when Sassoon was as much obsessed as any by the glamour of
brass buttons. He trumpeted the glory of battle, but even from his
loudest trombone notes the do sol do of patriotism is strangely
lacking
Later came the great disillusion. The poems that resulted from it
are too familiar now for a long discussion. Except this: that
the verdict of many well-intentioned critics to the contrary, they are
not "delicately ironical.” The same gentlemen would probably
speak of lynching-bees as one of the delicate ironies of American
civilization. Sassoon lacks the masked sting of Pope or Voltaire;
he is a man with a bludgeon, run amok in a mad world.
The end of the war found him ludicrously unprepared. For three
years he had been leading the way to the promised land of peace,
but now that he had arrived in Canaan and the Amalekites were dis-
persed, he was left without an occupation, still making vain gestures
at imaginary opponents. A few months passed; he found himself
ridiculously alone and became silent. He recalled the war days to
his mind (perhaps, in spite of himself, a little regretfully) and asked
his countrymen, “Have you forgotten yet?"
“For the world's events have rumbled on since those gagged days,
Like traffic checked awhile at the crossing of city ways:
And the haunted gap in your mind has filled with thoughts that
flow
Like clouds in the lit heavens of life; and you're a man reprieved
to go,


624
AGAINST NIGHTINGALES
Taking your peaceful share of Time, with joy to spare.
But the past is just the same—and War's a bloody game. ...
Have you forgotten yet?
Look down, and swear by the slain of the War that you'll never
forget."
а
With that poem, he delivered his own valedictory.
And now he turned back to the old subjects, but without the zest
of ante-bellum days. He philosophized on Life, deciding that it
was just the pictures dancing on the screen of a picture-show. He
assured a childless woman that he Understood her. Since it is Sas-
soon speaking, one decides that he really believes these common-
places; this fact, however, does not give them the lustre of origi-
nality.
What position is he preparing for himself in the new civilization ?
Certainly his sincerity has its value elsewhere than on the battle-
field. Even in a world at peace there are common thoughts waiting
for some one bold enough to express them, and there are abuses that
stink to heaven as much as the corpses along the Bapaume Road. If
he discovers them, he will write about them, awkwardly but directly,
and once more the nightingales will tune their throats for a new
song.
While he was splashing through the iambic mud of Flanders
Sassoon acquired, somehow or other, the art of writing poetry; one
makes note of the fact when reckoning up the chances in his favour.
The value of some of his later war verse depends not at all on any
polemic vigour. Perhaps his best lines are in a poem he calls Con-
cert Party (Egyptian Base Camp):
1
1
1
.
“Jaded and gay, the ladies sing, and the chap in brown
Tilts his grey hat; jaunty and lean and pale,
He rattles the keys some actor-bloke from town
God send you home; and then A long, long tráil;
I hear you calling me; and Dixieland.
Sing slowly . now the chorus one by one
We hear them, drink them; till the concert's done.
Silent, I watch the shadowy mass of soldiers stand.
Silent, they drift away, over the glimmering sand.”
.
.


MALCOLM COWLEY
625
To analyze that stanza completely; to explain the shifting metres,
the dragging-in of extraneous, prosaic details, the alternation of di-
rection (known technically as change of pace), is to understand most
of the new movements in poetry from the Parnassans to the Unani-
mistes. If Sassoon can utilize that knowledge in his civilian verse,
he is well on the way to a new success. But first he must demobilize
his intellect.
Have pity on the poets of this war! They have been feasted,
adored, told that they were the representatives of the second renais-
sance. Since then eighteen months of peace have left them gasping
in the face of a disillusionment worse than the boredom of the
trenches. Let them rest for a time in quiet. If they are not bleached
too soon by the calcium of lecture tours they may recover themselves.
Till then have pity on them.
MALCOLM COWLEY


A NOVELIST'S BACKGROUND
LETTERS OF ANTON CHEkhov to His Family and
Friends. Translated by Constance Garnett. 12mo. 416
pages. Macmillan Company. New York.
ONE approaches Chekhov's letters, after reading the introduc-
a
had bought his freedom and achieved considerable prosperity as a
merchant at Taganrog. When Anton was sixteen, he had to witness
his father's failure, the sale of the household possessions, and the
drifting away of the family to Moscow, leaving him alone to sup-
port himself at school. The intensity of the family interest in
Chekhov's life appears in the fact that in his later prosperity he
made his father, mother, and sister share his home: and the relief of
a second interest is shown by the fact that he found consolation for
this early separation, in the high school girls of Taganrog. “The
mysteries of love I fathomed at the age of thirteen,” he wrote later.
One divines an exclusively Russian experience in these early days,
but of anything so generic as the exuberant brutality of Gorky's
family life the letters contain no trace, or of the ecstasy and sorrow
,
of youthful love. Chekhov took his degree in medicine in the Uni-
versity of Moscow during the years when the Nihilist movement was
'absorbing the Russian intellectuals, but of revolutionary ardour or
the passion for martyrdom there is nothing. He won early notice
by his stories in the Novoye Vremya, and his first play, Ivanov, was
a great controversial success. He enjoyed his fame, the stir and
excitement of society which it drew about him, the poignant per-
sonal relations which it opened to him, the whole experience made
more intense by the tuberculosis which already had shown itself.
One is reminded of the similar career which the youthful Stevenson
was leading in these same years—but for a temperamental reaction
upon it one looks in vain in Chekhov's letters. As Stevenson crossed
the plains of America, Chekhov crossed Siberia to examine the most
remote of the penal settlements on the island of Sahalin. He trav-
elled by horse and boat, and spent three months in Sahalin, making
a complete social survey of the island. His zeal found further ex-


ROBERT MORSS LOVETT
627
pression in the organization of famine relief, and in the fight against
the cholera epidemic into which his medical training brought him.
But no note of social enthusiasm which could explain these sacrifices
appears in the letters. His last years were full of variety and crisis.
The first production of The Seagull in 1896 was a failure, followed
by a complete reversal of the popular verdict and a general revival
of Chekhov's plays by the Art Theatre in Moscow. He married
Olga Knipper, one of the leading actresses of the company, in 1901.
The struggle between fame and love and death went on with in-
creasing violence. The Cherry Orchard, in which Chekhov's dra-
matic method reached its highest fulfilment, was produced in Janu-,
ary, 1904, the twenty-fifth anniversary of his commencing author,
with homage from all Russia; six months later he died.
It
may be said, then, that the letters of Chekhov are at first sight
disappointing. They corroborate only faintly and unemphatically
the life so vivid in outline. Either they have been subjected to a
drastic process of selection and expurgation, or they represent the
reduction of experience to an even, neutral tone of objective obser-
vation, of detachment, almost of indifference. Both explanations are
doubtless in a measure true. The letters to Olga Knipper, for ex-
ample, if any, would reveal Chekhov as a man of passion and sor-
row, and of these but few appear. But on the whole, and with
Chekhov's stories and plays before us, we must incline to the latter
theory. Among letter-writers he belongs to the school of Prosper
Merimée rather than Stevenson. The few letters to Mlle. Knipper
which have been included recall in their exquisite lightness and
playful charm the Lettres à une Inconnue. But whereas the atti-
tude of Merimée was a studied and disciplined pose, an artistic re-
straint defying passion, that of Chekhov was natural, unschooled,
inevitable. He recognized his lack of emphasis in life and in art as
a limitation, a sort of mediocrity.
“Life is short,” he wrote to Suvorin, “and Chekhov, from whom
you are expecting an answer, would like it to flash by brilliantly and
with dash. He would go to Prince's Island, to Constantinople, and
again to India and Sahalin. But in the first place he is not free, he
has a respectable family who need his protection. In the second, he
has a large dose of cowardice. Looking toward the future I call
nothing but cowardice.”


628
A NOVELIST'S BACKGROUND
How the same sort of inhibition affected his art appears in another
letter to the same critic, who reproached him for leaving his story
The Party a mere bozzetto.
“I let myself go at the beginning and write with an easy mind;
but by the time I get to the middle I begin to grow timid and to
fear that my story will be too long! I have to remember that the
Syeverny Vyestnik has not much money, and that I am one of their
expensive contributors. This is why the beginning of my stories is
.
always very promising and looks as though I was starting on a novel,
the middle is huddled and timid, and the end is, as in a short sketch,
like fireworks."
a
The most important service which the letters of a writer of fiction
can render is to show us how his experience of life entered into his
work, became the material of his art. From this point of view the
letters of Chekhov are most revealing. Chekhov is the typical real-
ist of Russian life, as Maupassant is of French. His work consists
of an enormous number of cases, fully observed and amply an-
notated. How copiously these cases came to him may be seen by a
comparison of his stories, chronologically arranged, with the events
of his life. On a journey to Taganrog he wrote: “We talked of
railways. The inspector told us how the Sevastopol railway stole
three hundred carriages from the Azov line and painted them in its
own color,” an incident which furnished the germ of the story Cold
Blood. And in the same letter he wrote: “At an upper window at
the far end of the station sits a young girl (or a married lady, good-
ness knows which), in a white blouse, beautiful and languid. I look
at her, she looks at me,” etc., which eventuated in Two Beauties.
He worked up such suggestions with the aid both of his own experi-
ence and of imagination. His experience, transferred to his charac-
ters, gave them being; his imagination projected them on ways far
beyond the meagre frame of actual life in which he saw them. In
The Steppe it is clear that he is relying chiefly on experience: the
story is merely the steady, unflinching narrative of a boy's journey
day and night with the wagons which carried the wool to the market,
of his intercourse with the drivers, and observation of the land-
scape, vast, unyielding, sinister, like Hardy's Egdon Heath. In A
Dreary Story, on the contrary, it is imagination that carries the con-


ROBERT MORSS LOVETT
629
cept of the superannuated professor into a series of situations of gro-
tesque futility. Of another masterpiece, The Grasshopper, Chekhov
records with glee that it nearly precipitated a libel suit, so closely
had his imagination paralleled the course of an actual develop-
ment. His trip across Siberia was fruitful in providing both cases
and experience with which to enliven them. The hardships of horse
travel in the cold and wet of a backward spring, with streams over-
flowing and mud understreaming, the vast, meaningless face of
nature, the abject figures of men sunk in distance and blurred in
desolation, give to the letters the poignancy of his Siberian stories.
Undoubtedly Chekhov's profession was a cardinal fact in his
career. In the first place, it kept him from becoming seclusive in his
art. His stories are a natural and healthy by-product.
"Medicine is my lawful wife and literature is my mistress,” he
,
wrote. “When I get tired of one I spend the night with the other.
Though it's disorderly, it's not so dull, and neither of them loses
anything from my infidelity. If I did not have my medical work I
doubt if I could have given my leisure and my spare thoughts to lit-
erature. There is no discipline in me.”
But more essentially than this the practice of medicine deter-
mined both his material and his method. The number of his stories
which deal with sickness and death is very large, and in these the
objective experience of the physician is completed and intensified
by the subjective experience of illness itself. Chekhov was both
observer and sufferer. It speaks much for his generally buoyant and
healthy nature that in his work the objective element so distinctly
predominates. Moreover, contact with science made Chekhov an
analyst and a realist. He was of the school of Zola, which devoted
itself to realism in the name of science, and he looked with scorn on
such beginnings of the crusade against scientific materialism as
appear in Bourget's Le Disciple.
“Forgive me,” he wrote, “but I can't understand such crusades-
Whom is the crusade against, and what is its object? In the first
place, the materialistic movement is not a school or tendency in
the narrow journalistic sense: it is not something passing or acci-
dental; it is necessary, inevitable, and beyond the power of man.
They seek for truth in matter, for there is nowhere else to
.


630
A NOVELIST'S BACKGROUND
seek for it, since they see, hear, and sense matter alone. Of neces-
sity they can only seek for truth where their microscopes, lancets,
and knives are of use to them. .. Outside matter there is neither
knowledge nor experience, and consequently there is no truth.”
а
a
Holding this philosophy of literature Chekhov made it his aim to
come as close as possible to his subject matter. Theories of art he
abhorred as inhibiting, interrupting this immediate contact. “Of
the word 'art I am terrified, as merchants' wives are terrified of
brimstone.' . . . All conversations about what is 'artistic' only
weary me, and seem to me like a continuation of the scholastic dis-
putations with which people wearied themselves in the Middle
Ages.” Accordingly he wrote with careless haste and negligent ease.
“I don't remember a single story over which I have spent more than
twenty-four hours, and The Huntsman, which you liked, I wrote in
the bathing-shed. I write my stories as reporters write their notes
about fires, mechanically, half-unconsciously, taking no thought of
the reader or myself.” He apologized for this haste. “I do not
write very much,” he urged extenuatingly, “not more than two or
three short stories weekly.” After the first failure of The Seagull he
wrote: “When I got home I took a dose of castor oil, and had a cold
bath, and now I am ready to write another play.” The first charac-
teristic of his work is its copiousness: he was not the sparing artist
like Flaubert, but the lavish master of life, like Balzac. And there-
fore his work is more impressive in its mass than in its detail.
One continuous source of interest in Chekhov's letters is supplied
by his opinions of his contemporaries. These are invariably consis-
tent with his practice as analytical realist. Gontcharov he began by
admiring, but later dismissed as second-rate, chiefly on the ground
that his chief character, Oblomov, is exaggerated and overempha-
sized throughout a novel instead of being the hero of a mere story.
Dostoevsky he thought long and "indiscreet”—"over-pretentious.”
Turgenev he liked in parts. “Bazarov's illness [in Fathers and
Children] is so powerfully done that I felt ill and had a sensation
as though I had caught the infection from him.” But the girls and
women he thought insufferable in their artificiality and falsity. “All
the lionesses, in fact, fiery, alluring, insatiable creatures forever
craving for something, are all nonsensical. When one thinks of Tol-
stoy's Anna Karenin, all these young ladies of Turgenev's, with


ROBERT MORSS LOVETT
631
.
their seductive shoulders, fade away into nothing.” For Tolstoy he
had personal love and personal loyalty as to the leader and master of
Russian literature. Toward two younger contemporaries, Andreyev
and Gorky, his attitude is significant. Andreyev's practice of mass-
ing his material in support of a predetermined theme he regarded
with suspicion. "Andreyev's Thought is something pretentious,
difficult to understand, and apparently no good, but it is worked
out with talent. Andreyev has no simplicity, and his talent re-
minds me of an artificial nightingale.” Gorky he regarded with
the indulgent favour of a master for a promising pupil. He wrote to
him as Flaubert to Maupassant, and enforcing the same lesson.
“You are an artist. you are plastic—that is, when you de-
scribe a thing you see it and you touch it with your hands.” He did
not hesitate to admonish his pupil for false rhetoric, lack of re-
straint, and over-emphasis. “Your imagination is quick to seize and
to hold, but it is like a big oven which is not provided with fuel
enough. . You present two or three figures in a story, but these
figures stand apart, outside the mass; one sees that these figures are
living in your imagination, but only these figures—the mass is not
grasped.” But a few days later he added: “Twenty-Six Men and
a Girl is a good story. There is strong feeling of environment. One
smells the hot rolls."
Of his own work Chekhov was likewise soundly critical. He rec-
ognized that in his rapid handling of his material he missed many
opportunities, fell short of many achievements. "You say that the
hero of my Party is a character worth developing. Good Lord! I
am not a senseless brute, you know, I understand that. I under-
stand that I cut the throats of my characters and spoil them, and
that I waste good material.” This will stand as a final criticism of
Chekhov's work. It is followed by the passage, quoted above, in
which he speaks of his stories as beginning like novels, and ending
like sketches. He lacked the courage of the novelist: he lacked also
the sustained imagination. He conceived his characters with extraor-
dinary deftness, as doing and saying a great number of plausible
things; he objectified them fully; but he failed to pluck out the heart
of their mystery, if mystery they have. No better example of this
,
brilliant plausibility in detail leading nowhither is the story re-
ferred to, The Party. Chekhov saw his characters, but not to the
end. At times he displays a clairvoyance that results in a general-
a
a


632
A NOVELIST'S BACKGROUND
for a
а
ization of great pith and moment. He sees in the devotion of his
daughters proof that “Tolstoy is a great moral force ... for daugh-
ters are like sparrows: you don't catch them with empty chaff.
:
.
A man can deceive his fiancée or his mistress as much as he
likes, and, in the eyes of a woman he loves, an ass may pass
philosopher: but a daughter is a different matter.” What a theme,
one exclaims, for a novel or a play! But Chekhov had not the pa-
tience to collect and arrange material for the development of a
theme—and after all he distrusted the method. In his own plays
he worked from his characters, to achieve the vague, inchoate, cen-
trifugal quality of life, not the neat logical precision of the drama-
tist's art. How far even a microscopic study of his text leaves us
from realizing the fulness of his interition appears from the gloss
which he furnished Suvorin of his Ivanov. It is as needful to the
understanding of the play as a programme to Strauss' tone poems.
Eagerly he protested: “Ivanov and Lvov appear to my imagination
to be living people. I tell you honestly, in all conscience, these men
were born in my head, not by accident, not out of sea foam, or pre-
conceived ‘intellectual' ideas. They are the result of observing and
studying life. They stand in my brain, and I feel that I have not
falsified the truth nor exaggerated it a jot.” In the end he confessed:
“If on paper they have not come out clear and living, the fault is
not in them but in me, for not being able to express my thoughts.
It shows it is too early for me to begin writing plays.” Perhaps
it was still too early when he wrote The Seagull and The Cherry
Orchard. . Something may be conceded to immaturity when it is
remembered that Ibsen, whom he much admired, was thirty years
older when he wrote his prose plays. But more must be attributed
to the quality of the Russian life and character which he depicted.
Ibsen had before him his stiff Norwegians in their rigid social
frame, awaiting only their labels. Chekhov had the vagrant, fluctu-
ating, volatile souls of Russia in a setting of premature civilization
already struck through with decay. What wonder that the hand of
the dyer became subdued to the material in which he worked! He
recognized the fact with a note of prophecy in one of the few lyric
passages in his letters which he permitted himself: "Our society is
exhausted, hatred has turned it as rank and rotten as grass in a bog,
and it has a longing for something fresh, free, light-a desperate
longing."
Robert Morss LOVETT


ONE OF OUR SUN-GODS
Walt WHITMAN: The Man and His Work. By Leon
Bazalgette. Translated from the French by Ellen Fitz-
Gerald. 8vo. 355 pages. Doubleday, Page & Com-
pany. New York.
.
a
ROM the sophisticated standpoint of analytic psychology, it
is hard to know what to say about this Life by Bazalgette. If
I put myself in a more naïve attitude, then I get the emotional
echoes of the days when I, too, saw Walt as a "kosmos.” I am
charmed and moved: I feel that Bazalgette has built a staunch and
beautiful shrine for worship: that he has added another testament
to the new testament of the modern "founder.” Some of the
rhapsodic verity of Jean-Christophe is in this book, and this lambent
light lies over the facts of Walt's life so that the start is clear sun-
rise, and in the conclusion there is "splendor of ended day floating
and filling me.” Walt marches into his own in Europe through this
book, and perhaps may begin to march through it to his own in
America.
I am stimulated and must pull down my Leaves of Grass again,
and see whether a year has made any difference. It has not. Bazal-
gette grows a little dim; his was sunrise seen in a mirror, but here
I am out in the sunrise itself.
“Dazzling and tremendous how quick the sun-rise would kill me,
If I could not now and always send sun-rise out of me.
We also ascend dazzling and tremendous as the sun,
We found our own O my soul in the calm and cool of the day-
break.”
Where is there another song in the world like Song of Myself,
to my mind Walt's very greatest, as it was presumably his first?
It is really the discovery of a new continent, and in the morning
of time. Everything is at first-hand, and seen sparkling. Dawn is
so breathless that the young god who walks abroad in it is amazed


634
ONE OF OUR SUN-GODS
at the hair on the back of his hand. Why should a Bazalgette
celebrate Walt, when Walt did it so much better himself? “I
celebrate myself”—prodigiously, for “I” am the world, and the
sunrise in it, and launch forward a new race of heroes. . .
I cast an intellectual eye on the pages: they bear up even under
that strain. Like Nietzsche, Walt is ahead of the scientists, and
intuitively flashes many of our new attitudes. He fills out the void
left by the New Testament, the void of laughter, and the animal-
man, and the modern love of materials, and the open earth. He has
fought free of the ancient mystic's domination by the unconscious,
the "revelation":
“I believe in you my soul, the other I am must not abase itself
to you,
And you must not be abased to the other. ..."
This equality with the god hinges on an equality with men, and
he is mystical without fear of the supernatural. Nor, strangely
un-American, is he afraid of the feminine in himself, the brooding
mother who would give a new birth to his nation, the tender love
which finally changes the "rough” of Manhattan into the Good
Gray Poet of Camden. ...
If all this is true, why do I make any reservations, why do I wish
that instead of Bazalgette we had some impersonal psychologist to
re-value the Bard for us? The answer is partly in these lines:
“Know you, solely to drop in the earth the germs of a greater
religion,
The following chants each for its kind I sing."
>
It is the feeling that Walt stands directly in the line of inheri-
tance with Gautama Buddha, Jesus Christ, Mohammed, and Zara-
thustra. (Nietzsche stood there also.) He is the last of the great
revealers, the great teachers; and this may happen because he comes
just before that moment when modern psychology makes new mass-
religions and world-revelations for ever impossible. We may no.
longer take a great book as our guide to life, and feel that our god
walks beside us when we mouth the immortal lines. What we learn
of our "god" is through analysis of symbols, and authority is rooted


JAMES OPPENHEIM
635
firmly within us as individuals. My “truth” is not your "truth,”
nor yours mine.
Had Walt lived in the Middle Ages we should have had the
"imitation of Walt,” just as we had the “imitation of Christ.”
And it is here that I, for one, part company with Bazalgette, Binns,
Bucke, Edward Carpenter, and Horace Traubel. They are care-
ful, it is true, to assert that each must find what Walt found, and
each in his own way. But actually one feels the following in the
footsteps which is so repugnant to our modern conscience. If Walt
practises a white magic upon us, it behooves us to overcome and
slay him like any terrible father, lest we blunt ourselves with trying
to play-act another, to wear his mask, instead of revealing our own
faces, unilluminated as they are.
There is not the same problem with Nietzsche. Somehow behind
Zarathustra there lurks merely a very human and sick scholar, who
after hard intellectual struggle, was inundated by the unconscious.
Is the cause of the difference inherent in the difference between nine-
teenth century Europe and nineteenth century America? I have
talked of this with Van Wyck Brooks, who knows more about it
than most of us, and he points out how isolated our great and near-
great have been, how free from the critical insight of their fellow-
men, and hence, how quickly they turned into myths.
Wash-
ington, Barnum, Young, Mrs. Eddy, Walt Whitman. If a nation
cannot feel common background without a special mythology, then
we have gone the usual path and out of necessity created our heroes
and gods. And surely Walt Whitman played into this myth-
making tendency, inviting all America, his own and that of the
future, to hang about his neck.
This criticism would have little point, if it were not for the fact
that our age of heroes and of gods has passed, and a sterner and
more civilized age dawns upon us. Our great task to-day is to
overcome and demolish the American tradition, to replace pioneer
optimism and our naïve belief in our inherent superiority—by-
products of continent-conquest—by a new conquest of the self.
The Homeric age is over, the age of Aeschylean tragedy has begun.
It is a time for searching of our spirits, for catharsis. We are dis-
covering the abyss beneath us.
Our leaders to-day must be those who thus far have almost been
inarticulate in America. They are, in nature, quite the opposite of
.
-
a


636
ONE OF OUR SUN-GODS
Abraham Lincoln and Walt Whitman. They stem from Roskolni-
koff, Hamlet, and Dante. Hitherto the pioneer horde has trampled
them down, or converted them into sorry opposites of themselves;
and it is just these sensitive ones who are most attracted by the
sunrise affirmations of Whitman. They need to see their sun-god
as a man.
It is for such reasons that it seems to me that Bazalgette is a bit
belated. It is no reflection on Walt, the great Bard, truly one of
the great world-poets. It is a need in ourselves, which may be satis-
fied only by clear analysis and detached evaluating.
JAMES OPPENHEIM


ONE WOMAN COMPOSER
IMPRESSIONS THAT REMAINED. Memories by Ethel
Smyth. In two volumes. Illustrated. 8vo. 585
pages. Longmans, Green and Co. New York.
E
THEL SMYTH, with no literary pretension and an unabash-
edly colloquial, sometimes a slipshod style, possesses and em-
ploys the life-giving faculty of the born writer of memoirs. The
figures that people her pages seem as real to the reader as they must
be to her. An incident or anecdote is bitten in with the sureness, the
sharpness, the brevity of a master etcher. And it is all by-the-by.
The memoirs are documented on a mass of correspondence from the
protagonists, yet the effect of the book, as a whole, is just sufficiently
haphazard, what the French call décousu. And therein is the
strength of the book. There is no formal setting of stages and drill-
ing of the dramatis personae. Rather what is given has the quality
of being lived before our eyes.
Ethel Smyth was born into an English country family April 23rd,
1858. She was musical and a tomboy. Her father, a general in the
army who spent a part of his life in India, seems to have been a
worthy gentleman of the good conservative county tradition. Ethel
began shocking him early (“I think I am the only one of the six
Miss Smyths who has ever been really thrashed”) and continued to
shock him until paternal resignation became the better part of mili-
tary valour. Of course the General did not approve of a musical
career for young ladies, but ultimately he succumbed to filial
strength and strategy. Her mother was a rare woman, beautiful,
temperamental, gay, witty, not always tactful, and—musical. Be-
hind the immediate family group (there were five other daughters
and two sons) hovers the illusive and fascinating figure of “Bonne-
maman. This was the maternal grandmother, who married en
secondes noces an adventurer, whom she adored, lived in Paris, and
corresponded in an interesting manner with interesting members of
the opposite sex, and indeed strayed so far from the strict sect of
county propriety that her residence abroad was an obvious relief to
the majority of her family in England.


638
ONE WOMAN COMPOSER
This very giddy skeleton in a French closet was “hushed up before
her grandchildren as a sort of family disgrace,” but Miss Smyth,
after reading some of her letters in later years, came to the conclusion
that poor “Bonnemaman,” “gifted, warm-hearted, impulsive, and
thoroughly ‘injudicious,' ” would have been her favourite relation!
The reader would fain know more of the beguiling "Bonnemaman,”
and her escapades, and certainly the heredity indicated from mother
and grandmother is one more argument for the validity of the theory
that from out of some maternal reservoir of talent comes the endow-
ment which makes a given member of a given race stand apart from
and above the other members.
It was one of a series of more or less temporary and unhappy gov-
ernesses that passed in and out of the Smyth household of romping
children who decided Ethel's future course. “When I was twelve a
new victim arrived, who had studied music at the Leipzig Conserva-
torium, then in the hey-day of its reputation in England; for the first
time I heard classical music and a new world opened up before me.
I then and there conceived the plan, carried out seven years
later, of studying at Leipzig and giving up my life to music.” No
one in the family took this intention seriously, but it was a decision
cast in iron.
The summer of 1877 found Miss Smyth, having surmounted all
obstacles of tradition and paternal objection, actually in the Leipzig
of her dreams. “It should be pointed out,” she says, “that the scene
of that golden time was nothing less than a lingering bit of the dear
old Germany of Heine and Goethe, doomed presently to vanish un-
der the stress of Imperialism.”
Chapters follow on Leipzig, the quaintness of the town, the
groups into which its provincial society was sharply divided (Miss
Smyth, being a lawless English girl, was allowed by each group to
frequent the others!), the notable figures of each group, the Con-
servatorium, the Gewandhaus concerts, the extreme musical conser-
vatism, and the atmosphere of a provincial community that was
sincere and, for all its teapot tempests, restful-chapters often as
remarkable for the vivid turning of a phrase as for the spontaneous
eloquence of a profound sympathy and affection.
Miss Smyth soon outgrew the Conservatorium. "The glorious
part was the rest of the music life, the concerts and the Opera.” One
may judge the classical conservatism of musical Leipzig from the


PITTS SANBORN
639
fact that though in other towns the custom of playing excerpts from
Wagner at concerts had been started, such a thing was taboo within
the sacred walls of the Gewandhaus. "Not even the overtures to his
operas were tolerated, and I remember an all but successful attempt
to bar the Siegfried Idyll. This quite orthodox concert-piece was so
ill-received, several of the permanent subscribers staying away to
mark their indignation, that the experiment was not repeated.” The
great Frau Livia Frege, one of the dominant figures in music and
fashion, even boasted that she had never listened to a Wagner opera
because she wished to keep herself “musically pure.'
The glories of the Opera were for Miss Smyth, a wild English
girl, but not for the Brahmins of Leipzig!
"Though exception was made, of course, in favour of Mozart and
Fidelio, my group considered opera a negligible form of art, prob-
ably because Brahms had wisely avoided a field in which he would
not have shone, and of which the enemy, Wagner, was in possession.
Besides this, the Golden Age of Leipzig had been orchestral and ora-
torial, and both musicians and concert-public were suspicious of
music-drama. The old families, who had been rooted in their Ge-
wandhaus seats from time immemorial, seldom hired boxes at the
Opera. · I used to go and hear Carmen, still my favourite
opera, whenever I had a chance, and was indignant at Herzogen-
berg's patronizing remark that Bizet was no doubt ‘ein Geniechen'
(a little genius). But in that school Bizet, Chopin, and all the
great who talk tragedy with a smile on their lips, who dart into the
depths and come up again instantly like divers—who, in fact, de-
cline to wallow in the Immensities—all these were habitually
spoken of as small people.”
As a commentary on Miss Smyth's preference for Carmen, it is
worth recalling that Bizet's opera was at one time a positive fad
with no less a classicist than Brahms himself. Brahms the father
and Miss Brahms! But there is no hint in the memoirs that Ethel
Smyth knew of the foster-paternal predilection.
Here enter the three L's of Miss Smyth's destiny.
“In whatever set I might happen to find myself, three names were
constantly on all lips, uttered with respect, admiration, or devotion,


640
ONE WOMAN COMPOSER
as the case might be. Hitherto for various reasons I had met none
of these evidently remarkable personalities; then suddenly Fate
made good, and in the course of a single week Livia Frege, Lili
Wach, and Elisabeth von Herzogenberg swam into my
orbit.”
Frau Frege has already been mentioned. Lili Wach was Men-
delssohn's youngest daughter, “the only absolutely normal and sat-
isfactory specimen I have ever met of a much-to-be-pitied genus, the
children of celebrated personalities.” Frau Frege was older than
the other two.
"I used to note the beauty in her face and voice when she spoke of
Mendelssohn, who, with his wife, had been of her most intimate
friends. A world that since then had begotten Brahms, not to speak
of Wagner, was growing contemptuous of its former idol, and she
was aware of the fact, but did not consider it necessary even to dis-
cuss the matter. No insistence on his merit, no apology—just the
old love and faith. I thought this attitude wonderful, but to carry
it through you had to be Livia of the light-holding sapphire eyes.”
Elisabeth von Herzogenberg (Lisl), wife of Heinrich von Her-
zogenberg, the only aristocrat in town who was also a good com-
poser, was destined to be the dominant figure in Miss Smyth’s life,
though the friendship was violently and permanently interrupted
through, it seems, Miss Smyth's relation to Frau von Herzogen-
berg's sister and brother-in-law, Julia and Henry Brewster. But
almost from their first meeting Miss Smyth appropriated the Her-
zogenberg couple, and not long afterwards Heinrich von Herzogen-
berg took her under his wing as a pupil, thus rescuing her from the
“farcical” instruction at the Conservatorium.
It was inevitable that through the Herzogenbergs, Miss Smyth-
Brahms should meet Brahms himself.
.
"Early in 1879, I think some time in January, Brahms came to
Leipzig to conduct his Violin Concerto_played, of course, by Joa-
chim. . . . From the very first I had worshipped Brahms's music,
.
as I do some of it now; hence was predisposed to admire the man.
But without exactly disliking him, his personality neither impressed
nor attracted me, and I never could understand why the faithful had


PITTS SANBORN
641
such an exalted opinion of his intellect. Rather taciturn and jerky,
as a rule, and notoriously difficult to carry on a conversation with,
after meals his mind and tongue unstiffened; and then, under the
stimulus of countless cups of very strong black coffee, he was ready
to discuss literature, art, politics, morals, or anything under the sun.
On such occasions, though he never said anything stupid, I cannot
recall hearing him say anything very striking, and when his latest
pronouncement on Bismarck, poetry, or even music, was ecstatically
handed round, it generally seemed to me what anyone might have
said.”
And now comes the secret of the great gulf fixed between the
future militant and her musical idol.
.
"I think what chiefly angered me was his views on women, which
after all were the views prevalent in Germany, only I had not real-
ized the fact, having imagined ‘mein Mann sagt' was a local pecu-
liarity. . . Brahms, as artist and bachelor, was free to adopt what
may be called the poetical variant of the ‘Kinder, Kirche, Küche'
axiom, namely, that women are playthings. He made one or two
exceptions, as such men will, and chief among these was Lisl, to
whom his attitude was perfect, reverential, admiring, and affection-
ate, without a tinge of amorousness.
“To see him with Lili Wach, Frau Schumann and her daughters,
or other links with his great predecessors was to see him at his best,
so gentle and respectful was his bearing; in fact, to Frau Schumann
he behaved as might a particularly delightful old-world son. I re-
member a most funny conversation between them as to why the
theme of his D major Piano Variations had what she called 'an
unnecessary bar tacked on,' this being one of the supreme touches in
that wonderful soaring tune. She argued the point lovingly, but as
ever with some heat, and I thought him divinely patient. ...
“I like best to think of Brahms at the piano, playing his own com-
positions or Bach's mighty organ fugues, sometimes accompanying
himself with a sort of muffled roar, as of Titans stirred to sympathy
in the bowels of the earth. The veins in his forehead stood out, his
wonderful bright blue eyes became veiled, and he seemed the incar-
nation of the restrained power in which his own work is forged. For
his playing was never noisy, and when lifting a submerged theme


642
ONE WOMAN COMPOSER
out of a tangle of music he used jokingly to ask us to admire the
gentle sonority of his 'tenor thumb.'
“One of his finest characteristics was his attitude towards the
great dead in his own art. He knew his own worth—what great
creator does not?—but in his heart he was one of the most pro-
foundly modest men I ever met, and to hear himself classed with
such as Beethoven and Bach, to hear his C minor symphony called
'The Tenth Symphony' jarred and outraged him. Once, when he
turned up to rehearse some work of his, Reinecke had not yet fin-
ished rehearsing one of Mozart's symphonies—I forget which—and
after the slow movement he murmured something to Lisl that I did
not catch. She afterwards told me he had said, 'I'd give all my stuff
(Kram) to have written that one andante!'”
Brahms remained the musical idol, though he never became the
close personal friend, but in Miss Smyth's pages are clearly etched
glimpses of other famous musicians—the Joachims (touched in the
case of Joachim himself with a delicious malice), the Röntgens,
Rubinstein, Henschel, Grieg, Tchaikovsky—who bade Miss Smyth
cultivate the art of orchestration, scorned in Brahms-ridden Leipzig,
where the matter was held sacred and the manner might go hang-
the ruthless Mahler, Nikisch the lady-killer, and even the much
younger Fritz Kreisler.
There is a tragic anecdote of Mahler and the “demoniacal charm”
he possessed for women, "in spite of his ugliness.”
)
"I felt this even when I saw him last (it was in Vienna in 1907),
worn out, exasperated, prematurely aged, wrestling with the Haps-
burgs as personified by the Intendant of the Opera House he had
made the first in the world. He was far and away the finest
conductor I ever knew, with the most all-embracing musical in-
stinct, and it is one of the small tragedies of my life that just when
he was considering the question of producing The Wreckers at
Vienna they drove him from office. When he was gone his enemies
regretted their action; but the ideal of art he set, his passionate re-
fusal to abate one jot or tittle of his artistic demands, the magnitude
and purity of his vision, these are things that start a tradition and
linger after sunset. . :
: . At the time I am speaking of in Leipzig I
saw but little of him, and we didn't get on; I was too young and
.


PITTS SANBORN
643
raw then to appreciate this grim personality, intercourse with whom
was like handling a bomb cased in razor-edges."
a
а
Miss Smyth makes no allusion to his later experiences in New York.
The temptation to quote is so strong that unless one resolutely
reins in one would find oneself quoting the whole of the two vol-
umes. They are a series of shrewd, lively, evocative views of men
and women--big personalities, for Miss Smyth, though obviously
no snob in the vulgar fashion, does not waste time unnecessarily on
little ones, for the good reason that they do not interest her and man
lives here on earth but once. The big ones are there to be had for
those who in their turn are big enough to capture them. This book
is a rich and irresistibly vivid panorama. The reader has the pleas-
ure of it that he has of a portrait gallery whose subjects, interesting
in themselves, are delineated with comprehension and an unerring
instinct of reproduction. Further, from the wealth of indications
offered he may construe the forthright character of Miss Smyth.
The work of construing I do not mean to attempt—unto the
reader that which is the reader's! And then, much of the book has
to do with personal adventures of the author which the reader will
read but on which I do not even touch. There is, for instance, the
highly diverting interlude of her brief engagement to no less a per-
sonage than Willie Wilde. But through most of the two volumes
runs the recurrent theme of Lisl-less a leitmotiv than an idée fixe
—and it is her death that determines the end of the story.
In frankness Miss Smyth rivals that master of reminiscence, Mr.
George Moore, but unlike Mr. Moore she never plays the enfant
terrible. About herself she is apparently willing to tell anything.
But her sense of meum and tuum is keen and definite. Where
others are involved too intimately, as in the case of the Henry
Brewsters, she makes explicit her reserve. Read the book how you
will—for its evocation of other places and times, for the light it
throws on men and women of genuine consequence and often of
great fame, as one more revelation of self by a being whose self is
worth revealing, as treasure-trove for our friend the psycho-analyst
-read the book how you will, and you are sure to find that you have
wasted your time as little as the energetic and acquisitive Miss
Smyth was wont to waste hers.
Pirts SANBORN


JENS PETER JACOBSEN
Niels Lyhne. By Jens Peter Jacobsen. Translated from
the Danish by Hanna Astrup Larsen. 12mo. 284 pages.
The American Scandinavian Foundation. New York.
JAO
ACOBSEN’S poems and novels are part of general European
literature. Their influence has by far transcended the boun-
daries of Denmark. Characteristic of Danish literature at the mo-
ment when, under the leadership of Brandes, it was seeking to con-
front the present, though they are distinctively national in their
softness, their sweetness, their dreaminess, they have nevertheless
played an important rôle in the development of the literatures of
other countries, that of Germany in particular. Jacobsen the lyrist
stands in something of the relation of a forerunner to George, to
Rilke, to Hofmannsthal, to the entire group of excessively refined
and hieratic modern German poets; Jacobsen the romancer-con-
tributed largely to the defeat of the naturalistic school of novel-
writing. And it was precisely with Niels Lyhne that he helped exor-
cize Zola from the Teutonic lands, and bring about the recrudes-
cence of the analytical novel.
For just and poetic translations are the rule in Germany, and
Niels Lyhne, little diminished in the process of adoption, appeared
in German at the moment when its power was in the zenith. It
was the moment when the reaction against the complete preoccu-
pation with the composition of society and the complete neglect of
the psychology of the individual, of which Zola and his followers
all over the Continent had been so guilty, had begun to gather head-
way in artistic circles. The century, it will be remembered, had
begun with transcendentalism, and seen flourish a novel that mir-
rored and analyzed almost exclusively the self. Indeed, for the
novelists of the romantic school, the world itself was but an ema-
nation of the ego. But with the rise of industrialism and the
ascendancy of its accompaniment, positivism, the novel had swerved
into the study of the forces and conditions of nature and society to
which the individual is subjected. The self ceased to interest exclu-
sively, and diminished in importance for the novelist. In Balzac,


PAUL ROSENFELD
645
the two worlds, the subjective and the objective, are still fairly well
balanced. But with the arrival of naturalism, the psychology of
the individual was degraded to minor importance. In the novels
of Zola the characters are not very much more than types—prosti-
tutes, labourers, peasants and so forth. The world is conceived as
having an existence entirely independent of the visions of the char-
acters. Indeed, it is almost conceived as having an existence entirely
independent of the vision of the novelist himself. To be sure, Zola
had defined the naturalistic novel as “nature viewed through a tem-
perament.” In truth, however, his ideal was the scientific document,
the abstract and passionless narration of "facts.” Had he been able,
he would have created fictions approximating the deadly reports of
social investigators. Luckily for the novel, Zola oftentimes failed
of his goal. He was too much the poet. The tediousness of com-
plete impersonality has been attained only by his unique disciple,
Pierre Hamp. Still, his theories, his pseudo-scientific attitude, con-
tinued to weigh upon the form. Before the visions of the novelists
all over Europe there continued to float the ignis fatuus of the "ex-
perimental” romance, the scientific work.
However, toward 1885, the individualistic reaction had set in.
The self was once more become the centre, the principal matter, the
object of analysis. The new psychological novel was born; Bour-
get introduced Stendhal anew to France; Maeterlinck translated
Novalis; in Germany, folk ceased laughing at the romantic school.
And if the pendulum did not swing back all the way to the ground
of the romanticists, if novelists did not again conceive the world as
an emanation of the ego, nevertheless, Zola's conception of a world
independent of the vision of his characters, was entirely abandoned.
Impressionism, the study of the external world as the mirror and
revealer of the self, came into being. Henceforward, landscapes,
inanimate nature, the objective world, were to be represented only
because of what the characters felt toward them and because of the
strata of their selves revealed in the transference.
And Niels Lyhne gave the young German novelists of the nine-
ties a distinct and serviceable pattern. For it is the picture of the
states of soul of an individual, the record of the development of a
sensibility. It concerns itself almost exclusively with the inner life
of the hero, with his feelings and moods, rather more than with
his actions. It is the moments of intense consciousness, when the
a


646
JANS PETER JACOBSEN
$
1
soul is incandescent, that Jacobsen dwells upon. Niels' fantasies,
his moods and spiritual states, are developed at length in all their
cloudy beauty. The author seems continually bent over the murky,
unplumbed regions of character where sits enthroned the destiny of
individuals. Moreover, Niels himself is a figure intriguing to north-
ern artists. For the conception has in it something which the sen-
sitive man of the north feels, has always felt, to be true of himself.
Unfriendly nature has always tended to produce folk rich in inner
development, in imagination, in the power of feeling, and poor
in the power of action and enjoyment. And Niels, as well as most
of the characters of the novel-his mother, Begum, Mrs. Boye,
Fennimore, Gerda, are dreamers, dainty and lacking in will-power.
In all of them there is the devastating northern longing, the yearn-
ing of the human being cast into bitter climes, for the warmth and
ease and carelessness of the south and the sun. All of them, like
the painter in Pater's Imaginary Portraits, are famished for the
"something in the world that is there in no satisfying measure, or
not at all.” Niels' mother passes her girlhood in a perpetual day-
dream, tries to find a reality in marriage, is cruelly disappointed,
and sinks back bitterly into her fantasies. Only during the months
when she is slowly wasting away to death, when her desires no
longer have strength, does life come close to her, and does she taste
of the beauty for which she has pined all her days. Niels himself
is a distant relative of the Prince of Denmark in more than race.
He is one of the company of the half-poets. Apparently gifted for
creation, possessed by all the sensations from which poetry is sup-
posed to spring, welling in exquisite and poignant emotions, he
never achieves anything. Some inward fatigue weighs upon him.
.
He too cannot successfully leave his dreams for reality. A learned
writer in the Imago several years ago pointed out the character's
fundamental bisexuality, and the significance of his attachments to
his mother and to his friend Erik. Life slips through his fingers.
His friends die or become estranged from him; whatever he sets
hand to turns out tragically; he can find no one with whom he can
really share his life; his relationships with men and women are
spoiled by his damning passivity and lack of direction; after the
death of his young wife and child he loses all interest in living;
death in the war of 1864 puts an end to a life that was nothing
more than a great promise broken.


PAUL ROSENFELD
647
a
And then, the world of Niels Lyhne is exclusively the world of
Niels' proper vision. The very quality of soul of Niels and his
mother comes to us through the landscapes and descriptive pieces of
the novel. Because of the fatigue, the exquisite sensitiveness, the
unsatisfied yearning of the protagonists, the world of the novel is
suffused with delicate and tired sunset hues, all the pale and wistful
colours of the spectrum. Both the strong vibrancy of noon, and the
black passion of night, are absent from its colour-scheme. The
novel has the quality of a late autumn afternoon, a windless, tran-
quil hour of waiting, when both strong desire and strong regret are
absent, and when in a mood of reverie and forgiveness we let the
world glide from us. A sense of something honey-sweet, faded, and
delicate pervades it—the smell of lavender, old spotless rooms, femi-
nine refinement. The springtide when it comes flooding the shores
of the smiling lake where the anaemic northern woman lies dying is
strangely perfumed and idyllic and caressing, not at all shrill nor
humid nor cruel, but pretty almost, a delicate drift of naïve bright
flowers, a sparkle of gliding water, a rain of sweet soft lights and
scents. And the vignettes of the damp, dreary northern fall, and the
wet endless Baltic winter which we are given, are almost equally
soft and sweet and faint.
But most contributory of all to the power of the book was the
unusual loveliness of its surface. The naturalistic novel is charac-
terized after all by looseness of form and reportorial style. The zest
to approximate the appearance of life, to depart from the classical
forms and constructions and to utilize the vernacular, had made
Zola and his group disregardful of the demands of the medium, the
actual problems of their art. Jacobsen, on the contrary, was in
love with suave rounded forms and with the ring and timbre of
words. How deeply he was the literary artist the Larsen transla-
tion unfortunately little reveals. Though it is more faithful to the
original than the general run of translations to which we here in
America have become accustomed, its prosiness and stiffness, its
air of being all too patently the translation, prevent it from repre-
senting Jacobsen quite fairly. For Jacobsen is the seraph of Danish
literature. Even in the German translations, his novels are prose
poems. Frau Marie Grubbe is the work of a sort of prose Ver-
meer of Delft; its style is suffused with a bland sweet light that re-
calls the pearly canvases of the magic Dutchman. And Niels Lyhne


648
JENS PETER JACOBSEN
cence.
is a lyrical novel, a chain of songs and flights in novél form. Its
language is to a great degree the inherited language of poetry, the
rich, simple, colourful language of the lyric poets. The diction has
a certain ceremonialism, a slow proud march, a quiet and magnifi-
The words defile in gentle melody. The prose is full of
images. Moods are birds with strong pinions; the soul speaks to
Niels like wild challenging trumpet-blasts, like exultant fanfares;
blossoming sprays build rose castles, vaulted choirs of roses; spring
comes up the Alpine valleys in triumphal march. And one deli-
cately handled episode follows another. Jacobsen must have sunk
himself fully into each of the moods of his book, must have sought
to drink in their beauty completely, must have dwelt with them
till he had extracted from them all their beauty. One scarcely
knows which one one prefers. Episodes such as the story of Ber-
tholine's girlhood and marriage and disillusionment, or the descrip-
tion of Niels' encounter with his young aunt in the darkened, rose-
scented room, or the scene where he overhears the conversation be-
tween Begum and Edele, or the chapter where he falls in love with
love, or that in which his mother languishes and dies in spring-kissed
Clarens, might stand by themselves as a fine lyric stands.
And yet, as lovely a thing of its sort as it is, Niels Lyhne is not
Jacobsen's most perfect work. Marie Grubbe surpasses it as a work
of art. Jacobsen was a sick, a dying man when he wrote it, and his
illness in one or two instances dimmed his artistic vision. The last
chapters of the book, which deal with the mature life of Niels, are
somewhat thinner than the first. Unable to live himself out because
of his consuming malady, Jacobsen was doubtlessly unable to face
the maturity of his character with the same ardour with which he
faced his youth. Almost nothing is said of the wedlock of Niels and
his girl-wife. Only one scene is described at length. And that is the
scene at the death-bed. And then, the novel is overfull of
prema-
ture deaths. Practically each of the principal characters meets an
untimely end. Niels' father and mother die in early middle life;
Edele, Erik, Gerda, the child, Niels himself, perish in their youth.
It is as though Jacobsen, aware of his swiftly approaching end, and
overcome by the tragedy of his own existence, had unconsciously
wished to insist on it, to bring the sense of the sadness of a lot like
his own forcibly home to his readers. Still, despite these blemishes,
the work has a particular importance, an importance quite apart-
a


PAUL ROSENFELD
649
from its influence. It is Jacobsen’s realistic representation of him-
self. If Marie Grubbe and the shorter prose works and the lyrics
are no less expressive of Jacobsen, and in certain ways more per-
fectly expressive, they are nevertheless more idealistically so. The
tale of what life did to the exquisite seventeenth-century lady is
Jacobsen in an ideal representation; the history of the nineteenth-
century dreamer, "Frühgereift und zart und traurig," as Hofmanns-
thal has qualified him, is Jacobsen situated in his own time, con-
nected with the Denmark of his day. In this latter, the author
sought to draw the line closely about himself, to utilize experiences
of his own, to trace his features accurately. In it he sought to voice
his particular loneliness, his sense of the nullity of his existence, his
deep disappointment. In it he set out to write his “vita somnium
breve.” And he accomplished what he set out to do. One can de-
mand nothing more of the violet than that it be content to remain
the violet. And Jacobsen, though he had far less appetite, less vol-
ume, less flow, than had some of his great contemporaries in France
and Russia, even in England, did situate himself in his time in Niels
Lyhne, did achieve his own style of autoportrait. One shuts the book
with the sense of satisfaction that arises from having encountered a
piece of work that is entirely one thing. And one finds oneself won-
dering whether the little novel does not contain in hard form some-
thing that is in many of us to-day as it was in many of those of yes-
terday, and that will be in those who are to be born to-morrow and
the day after?
PAUL ROSENFELD


A DIVINE BEACHCOMBER
Noa Noa. By Paul Gauguin. Translated from the
French by O. F. Theis. Illustrated. 12mo. 148 pages.
Nicholas L. Brown. New York.
PAU
AUL GAUGUIN, according to some authorities, was born in
Paris on the 7th of June of 1848. His father, who was a
Parisian journalist, a Breton by birth, died during a journey to
Lima while yet a young man. His mother was a Peruvian Creole.
Gauguin ran away to sea when he was fourteen and so presaged for
us his later adventurous spirit; but returning to Paris when he had
just passed adolescence he temporarily belied the fears of the more
cautious among his friends and relatives by a determination to
pursue a sensible calling. In his anxiety to reassure society with
the commonplace it desired, he became the employee of a well-
known banker. In this capacity it was possible for him to wed a
Danish lady of depressingly unimpeachable respectability. Though
it can hardly be said that Gauguin was ever a father, Nature made
him responsible through this alliance for several children. Then
suddenly, without warning, at the age of thirty he turned vagabond
and painter almost in the same moment. Not that he became a
physical exile from the Beulah land of bourgeois success so early as
this. The outward sign of the inward grace was slow to accumulate.
He began painting on Sundays while the remainder of the week was
devoted to a kind of remunerative penance. At last, however, his
determination to express himself conquered the habit of clerical
diligence and he devoted his entire effort to becoming an artist.
In 1880 he first exhibited, landscapes in the manner of Pissarro.
The following year he showed, besides similar landscapes, a
study of a nude woman of which Huysmans wrote that no painter
had as yet struck a note “aussi véhémente dans le réel.”
From this time forward his work took an unexpected trend and
his emancipation was as swift as his preparation had been deliberate.
Manet and Dégas were the strongest influences which affected his
maturing talent. Gauguin did not doubt the sincerity of Pissarro and
Monet, but he did not find in them the colours that he remembered
а


EVELYN SCOTT
651
in the luxuriant shores along which he had coasted in his youth and
he began to seek for models to affirm this recollection. In 1886 he
went to Brittany and painted his first independent landscapes. He
was displeased with the result of his experiments, and, impatient
with his surroundings, resolved on a journey to Martinique. Here
Gauguin saw a new world and the revelation reaffirmed his spirit
of revolt. On his return to France he found the method of Pissarro,
who had been his first admiration, more than ever impossible. Cé-
zanne and Manet were now the painters whose work approached his
ideal.
It was about this time that Van Gogh, with whom he had
previously become acquainted in Paris, persuaded him to come to
Arles. According to Gauguin, it was Van Gogh only who profited
by their association, but it is probable that each gave something to
the other, as the friction of their contradictory natures called forth
in each complementary reactions. Van Gogh, to the end of his life,
retained the greatest reverence for his older comrade and in a
letter to Gauguin written shortly before his death continues to
address him as “Maître," a detail which Gauguin, in one of his
communications to Charles Morice, cannot forbear mentioning. In
any case it was during the time passed at Arles that Gauguin pro-
duced what were, from the colouristic standpoint, the most notable
pictures of his European period, including his extraordinary yellow
Christ.
Perhaps Gauguin's vanity suffered from overcrowding in Europe,
for he began to long once more to return to the tropics. His
friends were compassionate. On May 21, 1891, the first per-
formance of Maeterlinck's L'Intruse was given at the Vaudeville
for the joint benefit of Gauguin and Verlaine. The proceeds of the
entertainment covered the cost of the long anticipated journey to
Tahiti. After 1891 Gauguin returned to Europe only as a visitor,
bringing with him some written impressions of unusual foreign life
which appeared in book form under the title Noa Noa, and some
superb pictures which reflected a more profound experience.
The French edition of Noa Noa has, intercalated between
Gauguin's original narrative chapters, verse by Charles Morice,
somewhat in the manner of occasional music. This verse, while
polished, detracts rather than adds to the significance of the book
and is wisely dropped from the English version by the good taste


652
A DIVINE BEACHCOMBER
а
of the translator, O. F. Theis, who has lately given in our alien
tongue an excellent rendition of the little volume.
Noa Noa is a narrative of charming if specious simplicity,
which in the opening pages, with a deliberate absence of literary
preparation, transports us to the unfamiliar city of Papeete, the
Tahitian capital. Gauguin has recounted his experiences through
disconnected incidents and the absence of other than a chronological
sequence in the events described lends the book the appearance of
being an unstudied transcription from life. As a littérateur Gauguin
has all of the delightful vices from which his pictorial and sculptural
art is such a spontaneous escape. He paints his Tahitian models
with respect, but as he writes of them his regard is full of that
fastidious sentimentality of the man of culture for the race toward
which he holds a position of unassailable superiority. Gauguin,
with less taste but a more successful artlessness, writes like Pierre
Loti, a kind of exalted and impressionistic journalism flavoured
with self-conscious wistfulness. He is with intent the painter
wielding the pen. Never before have we been given so much of the
literal colour of the tropics, the colour which assails the eye as if
with defiance.
All life comes to us in his lines as if through the eyes, and
watching the bare feet of the girls in the roadway they agitate us
as though with their strong toes they gripped our souls. There
is a delicious description of Vaïtüa, a real princess who, however,
conducts herself with more imagination than the royalty whom we
are accustomed to see photographed for the illustrated journals.
I feel like comparing this narrative to a similarly personal volume
by a Christian missionary, An African Trail, by Jean Mackenzie,
and I perceive in the hatred of her kind for savage practices,
especially the more cruel incidents of sexual ruthlessness, a fear a
little nearer reality than the attitude of moral protectiveness which
Gauguin assumes toward those from whom he has never felt any
menace. There is something pathetic in the grotesque contortions
of inverted morality with which the Christian ethicist would saddle
oblivious Nature, but I sense in this book by a woman the insight
of the weak through which they appraise the ways of the strong,
always a keener gaze than the casual vision with which the strong
behold their inferiors. In Gauguin's make-up there was no need for
the Christian legend, for he had not, at least at the time Noa Noa


EVELYN SCOTT
653
a
was written, discovered his necessities. The social feelings were
always beside his needs. As a member of the human race he was
never more than a dilettante. It was perhaps because he was able
to gratify every want through his art that he retained his spiritual
independence. Again in contrasting the missionary outlook with
the viewpoint of Gauguin I am reminded of that age-old rivalry
between woman and the arts—woman whose maternal disabilities
confine her freedom within the limitations of the moralities. War-
ring with Nature for his possession, she dare not permit man that
faith in himself which makes the social compromise superfluous. So
early in his childhood while he is yet subject to her she attempts to
impregnate his soul with her pessimism. Art, because it also ignores
the social compromise, she must consider an alliance with the enemy.
There are moments in Noa Noa when Gauguin escapes from his
pretence of humanity. Then only the trees, the lizards, the silence,
the ocean, and the earth exist with the painter, and where he
touches form, and especially colour, his reactions spring from the
depths of his being and anticipate deception so that his constant
desire for the picturesque arrives too late to affect his utterance.
Out of the placid and impersonal perfection of this sea and sky and
bronzed foliage we can imagine the evolution of the deliberate
figures which adorn his canvases. Figures which give us the im-
pression of an eternity that is at once substantial and fleeting, they
are as heavy and placid as the huge clouds which hang on the ho-
rizon with the weight of mountains, yet are at any moment liable
to disintegrate.
In most descriptions of alien environment the author in sub-
conscious conformity to some idea which dominates his attitude, will
eliminate much that is for him irrelevant, but necessary for the
fidelity of a realistic impression. Gauguin visualizes his Tahiti so
completely because he does not discriminate in recounting the trivial
and the grandiose details of his surroundings.
There was a moment in the silence of the forest with no other
companion than his male guide, Totefa, when Gauguin awoke with
the sudden shock of his strange surroundings to a supreme, a dis-
torted instant of being. The first impulse of self-intoxication was
toward an act of violence, but his exaltation developed in him a
kind of menacing calm, a grandiose feeling, a little absurd, which
prompted him to take the axe from his guide and fell a tree with
a


654
A DIVINE BEACHCOMBER
it, persuading himself as the blows resounded on the trunk that he
could lay waste the forest before him. The boastfulness of his
mood gave him hallucinations of the sort that beset children. He
was a God walking light-footed across the tops of the mountains
he had created. Nevertheless as he suggests to us his isolation and
the grandeur of his surroundings, he stirs within us a contagion of
this sense of elevation and power. Like echoes we play his game
of defiance. It was after this orgasm of the spirit that Gauguin,
pursued by a feeling of unrest which he pretends not to have under-
stood, undertook a pilgrimage to one of the remoter parts of the
island, but instead of continuing his journey to this destination,
halted at the first strange native hut where he was offered a wife,
Tehura, a girl of thirteen.
When the time comes for Gauguin to return to France—and part
with Tehura—he gives a final sight of her as she sits on a stone on
the quay, calm, exhausted with weeping, her feet touching the soiled
water, the flower which she has put behind her ear in the morning
fallen wilted on her knee. This tableau of departure is from the
pen of the Parisian who sees in all life an opportunity for reticent
adornment. Gauguin the writer has not permitted the rhythm of his
beauty to be interrupted by ugly moral jerks, but his harmony is
false, being arrived at only by exclusion. To Gauguin the painter
beauty is so inclusive that the contradiction which would have re-
mained outside in the work of another has been swallowed up by
his inspiration and ceases to exist.
Gauguin's home-coming on this occasion did not bring him the
anticipated triumph, and a succession of disappointments culmi-
nated, in a financial sense at least, when in 1895 he had a sale at
the Hotel Drouet which realized a contemptible sum. He longed
as before for the distinction of exile, for alone it is possible to re-
main dignified in failure. Carrière procured him a cheap passage
back to Tahiti on the pretext of an official mission. Ill health and
further financial difficulties now kept him away from Europe to the
end of his life.
Gauguin from the beginning in Papeete to the end in the even
more remote Marquesas, preserved himself through his very real
difficulties with all of the consolations of self-pity. He was sorry
for himself when he found there was no way of equalizing emotions
with the childlike Tehura. He was sorry for himself because he


EVELYN SCOTT
655
1
persons, felt it
went to the wilderness when already too exhausted for unmodified
pagan experiences. He was sorry for himself when his implacable
wife wrote him in terse language of the death of the daughter whom
he had elected to abandon. The truth is that Gauguin, like most
outrageous that he was expected to make irrevocable
decisions.
There are many things in the psychology of this unpremeditated
genius which suggest the typical marooned white whom one con-
tinually encounters in tropical lands. Like all of these derelicts he
preserved the double privilege of his failure. Among the natives he
was the white man distinguished for ever by his superior informa-
tion. No matter how low the European may sink he will usually
find with the dark-skinned aborigines those who are willing to
assume some of the burden of his support for the doubtful benefits
of association. At the same time with visitors of his own colour
Gauguin was distinguished, though often looked at askance, because
of the race among which he had cast his lot. To the missionaries
of many years' standing, for whom he had the most unreserved dis-
like, is meted out something of the same fate, for where they main-
tain a nominal financial independence and are at liberty to put an
end to the term of exile whenever they have the courage to recant,
their license is curtailed by the incapacity for readjustments which
the passage of time develops, and they are able often for years to
pity themselves for the lack of those adjuncts of their original en-
vironment which could no longer be of any use to them.
Gauguin, on account of his financial troubles, accomplished his
removal to the Marquesas with some difficulty, having encountered
opposition from his wife, whose legal consent was required for a
disposal of his meagre belongings. Some years before, Robert Louis
Stevenson had visited Hiva-oa and his comments on the Marquesans
heighten our conception of the people among whom Gauguin passed
his last days. At the time Stevenson visited here he found these the
least impressed by civilization of all of the Polynesian groups, but
this race, removed from cannibalism by only a decade or two, was
the handsomest and in many respects the most pleasing in the South
Sea Islands. Their salient temperamental characteristic, how-
ever, was their profound melancholy and the continual fear of death
which expressed itself in the morbidness of their mythology. This
terror was constantly reiterated by the appearance of the islands
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656
A DIVINE BEACHCOMBER
а
themselves which had become, through successive epidemics that on
different occasions all but demolished this race of physical demi-
gods, veritable tombs. On every side were the evidences of death
in graves, unburied skeletons, and ruined paepaes, or native habita-
tions. During forty-six years the population in one district had de-
clined from six thousand to less than four hundred. The dead of
the Marquesans were jealous of the living and beyond the grave
indulged those customs of cannibalism which the white man no
longer permitted in life, and to offset this constant menace from re-
pugnant and merciless super-beings every act of existence was pro-
tected by the art of the witch doctor. In this atmosphere of super-
stition which treasured death as so vivid a commonplace, Gauguin
suffered for everything but the actual means of subsistence, waiting,
like so many tropical expatriates, the relief that was to come from
the land beyond the sea.
When I read of Gauguin's last days I thought of a white-washed
church on a hill by the seaside in a South American town, and I re-
membered the excitement of the three Americans and the two
Englishmen who constituted the foreign population when the signal
flags were run up on the tower announcing the first mail boat des-
patched from a war-ridden zone in over thirteen weeks. Or in
Benguella in West Africa, in that climate of depression and ennui,
the same continual agitation in expectation of a letter—the letter.
There is not one among the banished who does not await his letter.
Sometimes it is a love letter. Sometimes it is a letter which is to
bring news of kin. More often, as in Gauguin's case, it is the letter
which is to bring money. As some monotonous lives at home are
sustained by faith in the miracle of religion, so is the life of the exile
made bearable through his confidence in the letter which will one
day arrive from God knows where and bring fortune with it. The
native who attends on the white man also believes in the letter.
This passage of mail back and forth, to and from the unknown, is a a
proof of the favour of the gods which rests on the white man, for
the native does not receive letters and existence holds for him only
those familiar things which he can see and touch.
Of course in most cases the letter fails to arrive. Day follows
uneventful day. The tropical foliage, withered as if by the breath
of despair, shrivels grey in the heat. Autumn comes. The rains
begin. Thick white clouds descend to the very earth, and in the


EVELYN SCOTT
657
mist, through which nothing is visible but light, one hears the
shower, a sibilant and barely audible music which seems never to
cease.
It is spring perhaps, that spring of impeccable blue skies against
which the young mango leaves hang in sharp reddish bunches.
There are no shadows anywhere on earth and along the glaring
beach the dead fronds which still hang on the cocoa-nut trees rattle
huskily in the warm wind. Then a flag is run up on the church
tower of the consul's flagstaff. A ship is in sight.
Suddenly we understand that the day has arrived. The low
houses look bright and strange. The stretch of sand sparkles curi-
ously as if with intention. The palm trees clash and swirl their
green swords against the cobalt blue of the sky. On the sapphire
waves hundreds of white-caps burst in abrupt explosions like seed-
pods which havè ripened and scatter to the air little showers of
white. Far out some thin disappearing streaks of silver show where
a group of flying fish has darted up. Then like a strange presence
approaching, something for which we have no name, appears the
ship, the tramp steamer or third-rate passenger boat which carries
mail. She is like the barque bearing the grail. More alien she
seems as she looms larger to the shore. She will stand off or she will
be able to make a landing, but in either case hours may pass before
the mail is out, hours in which one is never for a moment un-
conscious of that presence, a presence so vivid and compelling that
it is almost sinister. Rusty she may be, faded vermillion streaks on
the dingy hull which they are beginning to paint. Boats cluster to
her sides and sweating natives jostle each other in the hurly-burly
of dust clouds while their songs and cries echo above the indolent
creaking of the pulleys. Impassive, enigmatic, she rests motionless
in the lap of the water, and when, for some freak of the engineer,
her whistles blow it is as though one listened to the voice of the
Colossi in the dawn at Memnon. About her keel float potato peel-
ings and a curious reddish brown scum which is a mingling of sea
weed and refuse. Here and there the dark blobs of quicksilver
shadow are covered with an opalescent skin of kerosene like isin-
glass. A sandy-haired man in his shirt sleeves, his collar open at
the neck, leans over the far from immaculate rail, chews a tobacco
cud, and, half closing his dull twinkling eyes, spits luxuriously.
In this man as in everything that pertains to the vessel one feels


658
A DIVINE BEACHCOMBER
1
.
a glow of proprietorship and interest. The wooden pier, the houses
grey in a sudden shower, the rustle of the ragged sage-coloured
cocoa-nut leaves as they bend and twist against a dun and silver sky,
the bitter smell of rain: all of these things seem breathed as from
the permanent atmosphere of the ship. Their familiarity is the
familiarity of the steamer which one has never seen before. They
and it have been and ever shall be as they are in this beginning
instant.
Hours pass. The mail has been distributed but the letter is still
missing. How many months will drag by before we are allowed a
repetition of our disappointment! It is five o'clock in the afternoon.
The sun shines again, but moistly and indecisively. Past the point
surmounted by three palm trees; past the fort whose crumbling
walls are covered with orchids; past the fishermen naked to the waist
who look very small as they stand far off upright in a canoe which
the waves oscillate so that it seems continually to rise, the ship
moves out. She is a two-master with a single smoke-stack. Her
spars appear almost unbelievably fragile as they pierce the diapha-
nous sunshine. The flat sluggish moving hull lies heavily in the
shadow, and blown toward the land from the squat chimney, like a
mourning scarf waved in the breeze, the purple smoke hangs in a
tattered fluttering streak above the twilight blue of the water.
Smaller the ship on the horizon. All the melancholy of that un-
broken line culminates in the minute point which grows every
moment less. The ship disappears.
The ship disappears. Sea, earth, sky, all are as
empty as the womb from which a child has been torn. The wind,
,
as it blows inland over the ocean that knows no winter, seems colder.
The fishermen's canoe is grounding on the beach. The men, up to
their waists in the sea, pull in the boat against the dragging of the
tide which is moving imperceptibly out. The waves, still a pale
green, roll, roll in one continuous desponding undulation with the
hopelessness of the tide which will after all never escape the shore.
The sun sets abruptly, dropping quickly like a shot bird behind the
mountain top, and at the same moment colour is drained from every-
thing and the night rises like a vapour as if from the earth. One
thinks with unreasoning depression of the steamer already lost
between two solitudes each of which seems to reflect and magnify
the other, and the land of the white man is farther by a million miles
than it has been that morning. The night elongates. Nothing can
1
i
a


EVELYN SCOTT
659
.
halt that inexorable ship which drags the darkness after her until
miles and hours are one, and in her wake the shadows unwind in
long streamers of black.
For Gauguin, bedridden with a disease which was probably the
combined result of a syphilitic taint and the malnutrition which is
so often produced, even in those accustomed to it, by the inadequate
diet of a primitive people, the letter came too late. You imagine
him in one of those houses of types so similar all over the tropics—
houses which permit of no reserves—and you see him lying in this
hut day after day waiting for the ship, wondering perhaps which
will arrive first, death or the materials which will allow him to
paint.
The natives were indolent; they were curious, but some were not
altogether indifferent to the white man's fate. These acquaintances
who surrounded him watched the end approach regretfully but
with the resignation of savages which without intention utterly
isolates the person in distress. However, Gaugin had chosen his bed
and died in selected surroundings so that as a man we should offer
him no regret. His tenacity in the pursuit of his dominant aim was
extraordinary, but it is the only quality expressed in his personal
confessions which would command more than a commonplace re-
gard. Yet if there is little in the man stripped of his art which
would arrest our admiration, there is enough in the painter to make
Christians of the most grudging—Christians who welcome the artist
who has shirked everything that society obliges with the same feast
prepared for the drudge of responsibility.
I have heard it objected that Gauguin was no primitive, that he
touched his savages with the brush of Parisian sophistication. In-
stead of considering this statement as a depreciation I find in it the
simplest explanation of the fidelity of the painter's reaction to
savagery. It is the thing that forces upon us a conviction of
separa-
tion which impresses us most. Our senses register the foreign ex-
perience with superior acuteness, and the individual who compels
our recognition is he who by the sharp definitions of his personality
reiterates his distinction. It is this law of being which orders that
the
great be lonely, and that death grip most firmly the imagination
of him whose life is intense. The hieroglyphic drawings of savages
express an elemental reaction to the accidents of existence, but the
primitive man, so little self-aware, cannot feel himself so keenly


660
A DIVINE BEACHCOMBER
apart from his surroundings. The more sophisticated we become,
the more we realize our isolation in an intensifying perception of
what lies outside us, and this vision is itself the recognition of the
impassable barrier which surrounds us. The stimulation which our
senses receive from the pictorial art of the earliest historians results
from the shock of extreme alienation. Imitation, however, is always
a lie since for none of us does there exist an identical reality. To
attempt through an effort of will to approximate the spirit of the
primitive in his approach to life is a futile artifice, for the truth he
sought as his own does not exist for us. At best we may represent
it in an ideal or purely decorative manner as a conventionalized
motif which permits of interminable repetitions.
I doubt that the sensuous experience of the primitive is sharper
than our own, but though this be so, its articulation through art
must be less vivid. No one indulges in this superfluous creation in
the moment of living. Before creation can become a complete act
there must be a definite realization of self with a will which sus-
tains through its means the flash of an involuntary joy or sorrow.
In the savage this will to self-expression can be little more than a
tendency, and the savage man reflects his own individuality only
through remote inferences. For an inclusive recognition of elemental
life Gauguin's method was almost perfect. He did not attempt to
make intellectual patterns of the life he got at second hand as might
a painter who worked backward from ideas to emotions. Gauguin
was labouring for an immediate effect, his personal reaction to
this unaccustomed atmosphere. The limbs, torsos, arms which Gau-
guin painted seem to flow upward from the earth. The strange trees,
the flowers, the men, the women, even the stone figure of some in-
scrutably ugly deity, are as synthetic as the landscape which on
waking one morning one sees from the deck of a ship. Simul-
taneously in all its parts a new world has come into being.
Gauguin painted in bold strong outlines with occasional dreary
planes, but in giving us a nude without traditions he extended the
frontiers of art far beyond the confines of Tahiti. Always he used
clear and simple colours, complaining to others that their work was
"never light enough,” and much of his strength was drawn from
his avoidance of the weakness of overfinish. In his picture of a
Youth Between Two Girls, which is representative of some of his
best attributes, there is a perfection of grouping, an exquisiteness of


EVELYN SCOTT
661
a
>
line, and a mastery of planes which give perfect satisfaction. Here
so little is analysed that we are left to appropriate everything in a
single emotion. This is a primary religious feeling which supersedes
a stereotyped declaration of a God—a feeling that is impossible
when the emotions are considered before they are articulated, for to
criticize and appraise is to take account of a universe which exists
only in parts. With the mathematical erection of a patchwork deity
the emotional conviction of unity departs for ever.
“D'où venons-nous—que sommes-nous—où allons-nous” is the
title of what is, I believe his most ambitious painting. The theme
of this canvas is human destiny. Birth, to the right, is represented
by the mother and the lately born. Death, to the left, is suggested
by the old woman crouching in an attitude of brooding but stoical
despair. In the centre of a fantastically impressive landscape a
huge Maori stands plucking fruit. In the background is a calm and
grotesque idol with uplifted arms, and semi-distant from the fore-
ground appear symbolical figures which Gauguin himself has named
Vanity (of speculation) and Certainty (of another existence). This
picture, perhaps a little too pretentious in composition, nevertheless
forces upon us a conviction of its inevitability. The metaphorical
inferences which half emerge from the more obvious aspects of these
languid planes are like words formed by the lips in silence. They
command us to an attention which one never gives to what is clearly
overheard, and the effect upon us is a sense of immanence, of con-
tinual approach, as though the finger tips in the darkness rested upon
something unseen which for ever eluded the grasp. Here life and
death, instead of contradicting one another, are the common flowers
of the same melancholy peace.
In one of his letters Gauguin hopes that he may be allowed two
years more of life in which to discover himself. It is quite possible
that this often insupportable egoist—erstwhile the too picturesque
proprietor of the shop in the Rue Vercingetorix-while he was so
doubtfully supported by the opinions of others, in his heart was but
half aware of his own profundity. "... for there is nothing in
my work which could produce bewilderment save this savage strain
in me for which I am not responsible," he writes not long before his
death in a letter to Charles Morice. Gauguin failed to realize that it
was the truth, always strange, which bewildered his contemporaries,
and what staggered the critics was not barbarism of some local


662
A DIVINE BEACHCOMBER
origin, but the unknown which is invariably barbarous. “Every
human work,” Gauguin continues, "is a revelation of the individual.
Hence there are two kinds of beauty; one comes from instinct, the
other from labor. The union of these two—with the modifications
resulting therefrom-produces great and complicated richness."
Gauguin's work was truly a revelation of the fidelity of instinct, for
a
only the will is able to enjoin a lie, and the artist whose intention
is directed from the subconscious depths of his being where the will
is evaded is unable to falsify. Logic is unscrupulous, as ready to
impose an appearance of harmony upon a fundamental discord as
to adapt itself to an exposition of truth. The intelligence may
modify but should always make itself subservient to the inspiration.
An artist with brains should at least at times be wise enough to re-
fuse to think. Gauguin, fortunately, in the comparative poverty of
his intellectual understanding, could not entirely elevate himself
above his sense impressions so that he was compelled to be great
where his often tawdry wit might have dictated artifice.
“Physics, chemistry, and above all, the study of Nature, have
produced an epoch of confusion in art, and it may be truly said that
artists, robbed of all their savagery, have wandered into all kinds of
paths in search of the productive element which they no longer
possess. It is true that I know little but what I do know is my
By preserving the unique quality in himself he was able to
draw from the stream of life before the intellect had made it barren.
It is impossible to feel and to appraise an emotion with the same
breath and as a consequence of this disability the intelligence is
aware only of what has already ceased to exist. The element in
Gauguin's work which he was pleased to describe as savagery took
rise in his perception of the existence of all things as simultaneous
with his own. This was what gave his work its static quality. In
his paintings the universe and the artist live together in an eternal
now. Education is our means of recognizing the past, and Gauguin,
,
for whom there was nothing but the present, was essentially un-
educated. It is for this reason that the aesthetic renegade has the
privilege of vitality. But for culture all great works of art would
remain for ever contemporary. The mission of culture is a denial
of the present, through which we learn to endure a purely retrospec-
tive existence and to construct the future as an inverted past.
Unhappily conventionalized judgements soon grow in the public
.
.
own.”


EVELYN SCOTT
663
mind to represent the work of the great dead and these master spirits
are finally allowed to communicate themselves only through the in-
ferior minds of their disciples. Let us then take advantage of a
diminishing opportunity and acquaint ourselves with Gauguin be-
fore his challenging outline is smudged with tradition, lest the
shadow of posterity fall backward on his canvases and obscure those
strong figures which gain their effect of flatness and simplicity
through the uniformity of tropical light.
Evelyn Scott


BRIEFER MENTION
A LANDSCAPE Painter, by Henry James (12mo, 287 pages; Scott
& Seltzer), is a collection of stories, early flowerings of the por-
tentous genius of their author. They are superior stuff; but the
fashion of believing that James corrupted his style in his later
years is proved silly enough by the fact that intensely passionate
and fine as they are, they do not quite come off. For any one else
they might be considered little masterpieces; for him they are but
the grammar of novelettes.
The Matrix, by Maria Thompson Daviess (12mo, 260 pages;
Century), lights another beacon to celebrate the post-bellum dis-
covery of Lincoln. It is a gentle taper. Attempting to tell the
story of the girlhood and wooing of Nancy Hanks with sim-
plicity, the author occasionally lapses into primer-technique. A
maturer style could have given form to a more enduring romance.
Evander, by Eden Phillpotts (12mo, 200 pages; Macmillan),
presents the English novelist tracking a favourite theme of his
back to the borderland of mythology, where it is threshed out
amid a verbal clash of the gods. Evander is one of those self-
righteous male beings, with a serene ignorance of human emotion,
such as Phillpotts drew in The Thief of Virtue, and more recently
in Storm in a Teacup. The projection of this type against a
background of pagan philosophy gives the author a satirical scope
less marked in his modern stories.
a
Luca Sarto, by Charles S. Brooks (12mo, 360 pages; Century),
tilts a merry lance amid the sombre moderns with their black-
visored Freudian fiction, unfolding a lively tale of conspiracy
and adventure, laid, in Paris in the days of Villon. It has the
sparkle of brightly burnished armour and a pulse-quickening
pace. The manner of the telling is not without a touch of
swagger, spiced with the salt flavour of the modern point-of-
view, humorous and whimsical. A novel to the king's taste-if
there are still kings who can boast that quality.


BRIEFER MENTION
665
The Tall Villa, by "Lucas Malet” (12mo, 256 pages; Doran).
A husband in South America, a ghostly lover, and a "wide-eyed,
fragile, and excessively lovely” lady ring a fresh variation on the
eternal triangle in this story of love in the fourth dimension. It
is the last straw in spiritism—and about the last straw from
"Lucas Malet."
WHERE ANGELS FEAR TO TREAD, by E. M. Forster (12mo, 283
pages; Knopf), is trite only in title. This is what Meredith and
the gallery would respectively term comedy and tragedy. With
somersaults of motive and swift satire the story makes its way
from England to Italy, where childlike sinfulness and the sun-
shine of mediaeval towns are refreshing after the irritated mis-
understandings of the English family who rushed in.
>
Hand-Made Fables, by George Ade (illustrated, 12mo, 332 pages;
Doubleday, Page), are so many essays on Compensation. They
deal with such worldly assets and liabilities as time's whirligig
turns topsy-turvy; and, whatever their individual prejudices—
each fable has at least one robust American prejudice-collec-
tively they maintain a genial optimism regarding man's plight in
the world as it is. Here Mr. Ade once more demonstrates that the
American slang vernacular has capacities for clearness, force, and
(yes!) elegance that quite escape the base-ball reporter.
>
SOME PERSONAL IMPRESSIONS, by Take Jonescu
Take Jonescu (12mo, 292
pages; Stokes), is reminiscent of the illusioned time when diplo-
mats were regularly called "distinguished.” The author, some-
time Prime Minister of Roumania, had all the notabilities of
Europe on his calling list, and most of them got into the book
one way or another.
PORTRAITS OF AMERICAN WOMEN, by Gamaliel Bradford (illus-
trated, 12mo; 276 pages; Houghton Mifflin, Boston), is a series
of politely written impressions of seven New England women
and one Middle Westerner, drawn for the most part from letters
and diaries. The portraits are far from clear, and Abigail Adams
and Margaret Fuller would be chagrined to know how dim they
have become, even to an admirer.


666
BRIEFER MENTION
HITHER AND THITHER IN GERMANY, by William Dean Howells
(illustrated, 16mo, 131 pages; Harper), undertakes the by no
means slight task of ignoring the intervening upheaval and writ-
ing as if such a thing as war had not occurred. This circumstance,
combined with the tranquil, orderly nature of Mr. Howells' style,
gives the volume an almost antiquarian flavour. The Mr. and
Mrs. March of Their Silver Wedding Journey are here conducted
with care through descriptions of Hamburg, Leipsic, Weimar,
Berlin, and the Rhine country. On the last page Mrs. March
remarks that they “romped” through Germany, but that is merely
a touch of homeward-bound hyperbole.
.
A SPORTSMAN'S WANDERINGS, by J. G. Millais (8vo, 298 pages;
Houghton Mifflin, Boston), reflects the catholic taste and broad
horizon of the man whose career has followed such diverse trails
as those of soldier and artist, naturalist and landscape gardener.
Here is a readable blend of lively reminiscence and first-hand ob-
servation, without verbal or scientific excess baggage.
The AMERICAN Credo: A Contribution Toward the Interpreta-
tion of the National Mind, by George Jean Nathan and H. L.
Mencken (12mo, 191 pages; Knopf), lists some five hundred
tersely stated articles of belief—superstitions and near-supersti-
tions—in some of which almost any American will see certain
facets of his mind unflatteringly mirrored. More than half of the
volume is occupied by its preface, for which the authors advance
the one excuse “that, having read it, one need not read the book”
—a grateful choice.
The Quest of The Ballad, by W. Roy Mackenzie (12mo, 247
pages; Princeton University Press). Professor Mackenzie, of
the English Department of Washington University, has recorded
enthusiastically his experiences while collecting ballads from
delightful "touchy” old men and women in Nova Scotia. His
volume contains suggestive notes upon the nature of variations in
the old songs from singer to singer, and concerning ballads of
well-attested local events where the proportion between the ac-
tual and the imagined may be observed—notes of great value to
students of folk-literature.


BRIEFER MENTION
667
MODERN AMERICAN Poetry: An Introduction, edited by Louis
Untermeyer (12mo, 170 pages; Harcourt, Brace & Howe), fol-
lows through broken country the contemporary reaches of that
strong troubled stream of poetry which flows from Whitman.
Though it too often misses the authentic current, is too often led
away into stagnant marshes, it is perhaps as good a map as we
yet possess. The editor is a better conversationalist than guide.
MACEDONIAN MEASURES, and Others, by John Macleod (12mo, 41
pages; Cambridge University Press, England), is the work of a
young poet who strives not so much to measure himself with life
as with other rhymesters. He comes out pretty well in the
encounter: he has a powerful rhythmic sense and the knack of
handling intricate verse forms. Yet evidently his serious work
still lies in front of him. As a war poet he ranks somewhere
between Alan Seeger and Lurana Sheldon, the bard of Bath, Me.
a
The TEMPERING, by Howard Buck ( 12mo, 77 pages; Yale Univer-
sity Press), is a first book of verse wherein jubilant youthfulness,
unwearied even in the poems of war experience, marches to gay
pipes with a sweeping stride and an idealism unappalled.
>
War Daubs, by R. Watson Kerr (12mo, 56 pages; John Lane),
is aptly named. Imperfect assimilation might be diagnosed as the
chief malady of these sketches from dugout and camp. The
author has completely digested neither his war experiences nor
the aesthetic of the new poetry. Despite his force and sincerity,
he is treading a little too closely in the footsteps of a more famous
contemporary: “The Wedding Guest he beat his breast, For he
heard the loud Sassoon.”
a
The GENIUS OF the Marne, a play by John Lloyd Balderston
(12mo, 86
pages; Nicholas L. Brown, New York), has an intro-
duction on the theory of inspiration. “Mr. Balderston,” it says,
"seems to think a man of genius is but the mouthpiece of a voice
speaking from beyond.” Very good as applied to Napoleon and
Joffre at the Marne. But no indication is given as to the author's
own inspiration; and no necessity to assume its existence is created
by reading the play.'


668
BRIEFER MENTION
Pan-Islam, by G. Wyman Bury (12mo, 212 pages, i map; Mac-
millan), is an unpretentious attempt to explain the ways of the
Moslem world to that suburban electorate in whose hands the
government of the British Empire, with the aid and consent of
the
permanent under-secretaries in the Foreign Office, ultimately
rests. The Carnegie Peace Commission should send the last chap-
ter, A Plea for Tolerance, to every missionary organization.
ARMENIA AND THE ARMENIANS, by Kevork Aslan (12mo, 138
pages; Macmillan), presents in condensed form the history of the
Armenians from earliest times down to 1914. The work is
translated from the original French by Pierre Crabites, whose
Introduction is an impassioned plea for Armenian independence.
PATRONS OF DEMOCRACY, by Dallas Lore Sharp (16mo, 57 pages;
Atlantic Monthly Press, Boston), criticizes private and voca-
tional schools as destructive of democracy, and urges a uniform
national public school system as the educational basis for "living
together.” This essay had the distinction of being publicly
laughed at by Graham Wallas; but in so far as we differentiate
our educational courses by reference to pecuniary rather than to
biological differences, Mr. Sharp's polemic against any kind of
differentiation should be helpful in restoring our social equipoise.
EUROPE IN THE MELTING Pot, by Dr. R. W. Seton-Watson
(12mo, 400 pages, 7 maps; Macmillan), is his latest book on the
problems of the European settlement. Partly written before the
Armistice, it expresses the principles and prejudices of The New
Europe for "integral victory" against Bolshevism, for the league
against imperialism—and is especially well informed, competent,
and obstinate in dealing with Southern Europe.
Local Government in Ancient India, by Radhakumud Mook-
erji (8vo, 229 pages; Oxford University Press), widens our
Western European perspective of the guild system and municipal
institutions by demonstrating the existence of the same modes of
associative life at the Vedic headwaters of Hindu civilization.
A book to place alongside Venkatarama Ayyar's Townplanning
in Ancient Dekkan.


BRIEFER MENTION
669
An Irishman Looks at His World, by George A. Birminghamı
(12mo, 307 pages; Doran), carries the reader into a temperate
mental climate where the winds of doctrine are silent and the
dust of controversy no longer threatens the eye. The method is
expository; the author's judgements are equitable; and the con-
clusion is a fing at those who have created an Irish Problem by
confining themselves to the political problem of Ireland. “We
Irishmen, all of us, are spending most energy on what matters
least, the form of the State; and far too little energy on what
matters most, the making of men, that education which goes on
continuously from the cradle to the grave.”
"
The Opium Monopoly, by Ellen N. La Motte (12mo, 84 pages;
Macmillan), is one of the best arguments yet advanced against
the mandatory system pieced together at Paris. With personal
observation and official records at her service, the author shows
that Great Britain is benevolently drugging to death most of the
subject races entrusted to her care.
The Monroe DoctriNE AND THE GREAT WAR, by Arnold Ben-
nett Hall (16mo, 177 pages; McClurg, Chicago), is an admirable
summary of the foundation of the doctrine, its evolution, and its
relation to the League of Nations. The author believes that
“when all the criticisms of the Monroe Doctrine have been exam-
ined. . most of them will be met by more tactful and dip-
lomatic methods of its assertion, a scrupulous and sympathetic
regard for the dignity and rights of Latin American republics,
and the abandonment of the spirit and idea of the United States
hegemony in Pan-American affairs."
The War With Mexico: 1846–1848, by Justin H. Smith (2
vols., 8vo, 1192 pages; Macmillan), presents an elaborate, but
not very plausible, justification of the policy of the United States
government in this conflict. The author contends that Mexico
had systematically violated American rights for many years
before the war and scouts the theory that the annexationist ambi-
tions of the Southern slave-owners exercised any appreciable
influence. And his final conclusion is that the war was a rather
good thing for both countries!


670
BRIEFER MENTION
>
a
SOCIALISM IN THOUGHT AND Action, by Harry W. Laidler (12mo,
546 pages; Macmillan), cannot be dismissed merely on the
ground that it is a text-book; for the truth is that it excels in its
kind, and ever since Mr. William English Walling turned his
back on himself nothing of or near its kind has been produced
in English. Dr. Laidler has that discreet receptivity for con-
flicting opinion and dogma which gives his work, within the
limits of socialism, the stamp of a firm, intelligent neutrality.
His appraisal of Socialist thought and his description of the
international movement are thoroughly adequate. The New
York State Board of Regents should make this text required
reading for all Albany legislators, established or incipient.
THE ARMY AND RELIGION, a report edited by the Rev. D. S. Cairns
(12mo, 447 pages; Association Press), is, as far as one may
judge, an uncensored summary of evidence gathered from some
hundreds of men serving in, or connected with, the British Army.
The investigating committee found that the war had created or
revealed a widely prevalent theism of the vaguest sort, but that
in most cases the men did not connect their religious emotions
with Christianity, and were, in fact, farther away from the
Church than ever. The suggestions as to Orthodox means of
overcoming this difficulty are perhaps less significant than the
confession of its existence.
ORIGIN OF GOVERNMENT, by Hugh Taylor (12mo, 259 pages; B. H.
Blackwell, Oxford), should be dedicated to l'Homme à Cheval.
It is an argument for the strong self-imposed ruler who is believed
to arise at every period of social crisis to save the body politic
from chaos; and by a stroke of mental sleight-of-hand this ruler
is identified with the conquering war-lord who creates the social
crisis in the communities upon which he inflicts himself! De-
voted largely to a criticism of Spencerian ideas, the Origin of
Government has that lax unfamiliarity with modern scholarship
which makes much minor British thought a hunt for originality
through the thickets of crotchetiness. Perhaps Mr. Taylor
avoided Holsti's Relation of War to the Origin of the State in
order that he might leave to his descendants the task of coping
with his contemporaries.


BRIEFER MENTION
671
Moslem Architecture: Its Origins and Development, by G. T.
Rivoira, translated from the Italian by G. McN. Rushforth
(340 illustrations, 4to, 373 pages; Oxford University Press), is
a comparative study of Moslem architecture as exhibited in its
religious edifices. The interest of the text is technical and archae-
ological, but the splendid collection of photographs with which
the book is interleaved cannot help enthralling the most cursory
student of architecture.
The Cossacks, by W. P. Cresson (illustrated, 8vo, 239 pages;
Brentano), recounts, in the romantic mood, the history of the
frontiersmen of the Czar's old empire. The book is not to be
taken too seriously as a contribution to historical literature, but
vivacity of style and the Wild-Western colour of the subject-
matter made the pages interesting enough.
The SKILLED LABOURER: 1760-1832, by J. L. Hammond and
Barbara Hammond (12mo, 397 pages; Longmans, Green), is the
third movement in that great symphony of the Industrial Revo-
lution which the authors have essayed to compose out of the now
open files of Home Office correspondence. The martial note is pre-
dominant, for as the authors observe at the beginning “the history
of England at the time discussed in these pages reads like a his-
tory of civil war,” but in spite of the fascinating episode of Oliver
the Spy the social and economic themes are never unduly subor-
dinated. The result is a tragic history, greatly told.
The Flow of VALUE, by Logan Grant McPherson (8vo, 473
pages; Century), is an examination of prices, profits, wages, and
capital along the lines traditional in commercialist economics.
The categories are pre-scientific abstractions, like Utility; and
the descriptions of processes, in spite of the author's wide experi-
ence in railroad transportation, are consistently hypothetical.
The book is not so much a fresh contribution to economics as an
illumination of the possibilities of that “new reservation of time”
which William Jewett Tucker has pointed out as the crown of a
busy administrator's career.


THE THEATRE
THE
HE current month in the New York Theatre has been a con-
stant temptation to the reviewer. He wants so much to set a
date on things. The piece which stirred him most dated from three
or four centuries before Christ. The production which caused the
most comment was written in the seventeenth century A. D. The
criticism which the month brought forth seemed to go back to that
dim age when discrimination was not yet the proud property of the
human race. And the present reporter, to make his point, must in-
voke December, 1896, as a temporal shield. That season lacked
the new lighting and the higher stagecraft, but it was a fine year
for it was the best of those years in which Bernard Shaw was critic
for The Saturday Review.
The month was the month of Sir Henry Irving's production of
Richard III. Conscious of the incapacity of any one individual to
make headway against the tide of approval setting in for John
Barrymore's Richard, I have turned to Mr. Shaw and find these
words (written about one Barry Sullivan): “If he had devoted him-
self to the drama instead of devoting the drama to himself as a mere
means of self-assertion, one might have said more for him.” So
much for Barrymore. So much, by implication, for Arthur Hopkins.
Of the three men concerned with this production, Robert Edmond
Jones alone comes out of it with a great artistic achievement
to his credit. His ingenuity and his imagination are equally
.
admirable, and the fact that he provided a setting which literally
towered above Mr. Barrymore and the ill-chosen rabble of his cast,
is not against him. It is not Mr. Jones' fault that he was asked to
do well by a play which, if it had not been written by Shakespeare
and did not provide a startling part for a very shameless actor,
would never have come to production at all.
It was a production of Hamlet, with settings in another very dis-
tinguished style, which really gave Shakespeare his chance against
the Medea of Euripides last month. The critical mind could no
more be satisfied with Mr. Hampden's Hamlet than with the entire
production staged by Maurice Browne and Ellen Van Volkenburg,


GILBERT SELDES
673
a
but any mind at all must have been captivated by the thought that
the mere subject and action—not counting the beauty and dignity
of the verse of these plays had more power to move us than the
most current of modern themes. Of the latter, Jane CLEGG is an
example. If the emotions of an audience can be stirred by illumina-
tion of their own lives, if careful observation and faithful transcrip-
tion could project the accent of truth into the spoken words of a
play, Mr. Ervine would lead this noble field of dramatists. With
JANE CLEGG, Mr. Ervine actually sinks a few inches deeper into the
rut of our serious writers for the stage. His only accomplishment
has been the complete bewilderment of the critics.
The dismal school of playwriting has never been so well served
by the dull school of actors. The Theatre Guild has all uncon-
sciously done a perfect thing; the setting, the voices, the tempo, the
grouping of this play are faultlessly suited to the subject. This in
itself is so rare a phenomenon that the critics praised it; but since
neither they nor the audiences took the trouble to find out why the
play was so thoroughly unsatisfying, much had to be made of the
“restraint” of the acting. It apparently did not occur to those who
spoke of it and ordered some of our more tearful players to go, see,
and be lessoned in the art of acting, that restraint in itself is no vir-
tue, especially when the dramatist has, through some oversight,
neglected to supply one single human passion for the actors to ex-
press. One wonders what Shakespeare (or Shaw) would say to a
playwright who took a few snips and shreds of feeling, stuck them
to the bare mast of a social thesis, and pretended that he had a sail
filled with the violent wind of human energy.
a
If our actors and critics really care a rap about restrained acting,
let them observe the work of Mr. Russ Whytal in The LETTER OF
The Law. It is Brieux's great gift to endow one or two personages
in his thesis-plays with life, to give them background and depth;
such a one Mr. Whytal undertook to portray, with a fineness and
justice unsurpassed in many a day of our theatre. Here were emo-
tion which grew with every check put upon it, and a quite excep-
a
tional intelligence. Mr. Lionel Barrymore was much better in this
play than any one who had seen his Neri had any reason to expect;
but it was Mr. Whytal alone who created the tragic dignity without
which the play would have remained foreign to our lives.
GILBERT SELDES
1


!
COMMENT
T
HEY order these matters a little more viciously in England.
The literary life of London has an acerbity for which we find
no parallel in America, perhaps because the art of controversy does
not flourish here, perhaps because neither our sober nor our inebriate
artists are so convinced of the exclusive completeness of the truth
they have been lucky enough to hit upon. When we find The Lon-
don Mercury, a young but eminently sober review, damning the
dead with the definition "Blast: a flatulent disease of sheep,” talk-
ing of "dealers in chaos” and quoting from Patience, we suspect that
the literary Guelphs and Ghibellines are rioting in Kensington and
are not surprised to hear, privately and from one of the moderns,
that no artist who had any self-respect would allow his name to
appear in the review which Mr. J. C. Squire is editing with such a
fine sense for evenness of tone. We wonder whether this bitterness
is as much a symptom of health and power, whether all the heat is
the fire of inspiration, or a little of it simply fever temperature.
And in a very practical way we wonder whether it is necessary to
reject anything, in the old forms or the new, except the dishonest
and the shallow and the feeble in execution. The question is prac-
tical because The Dial has set itself the task of including a great
many things which fall under the ban of one or the other of the
challenging pontiffs of art. As we have said before, the place of a
,
contributor in any “movement” backward or forward does not con-
cern us; and until we are convinced that we are in error, we shall
hold to that principle.
From an aesthetic point of view the world is and probably al-
ways will be divided into people who think that every able-
bodied man should be compelled to work at least six hours every day
and people who do not. The alignment makes some rather peculiar
bedfellows. On one side are: Mr. Gompers, the Y. M. C. A.,
,
General Wood, the Republican party, the Democratic party, the
Bolsheviki, Mr. Edison, Mr. Brandeis, the Socialists, and all right-
minded persons. On the other side are: the vicious and idle rich, a
few priests, some tramps, some artists, some orientals, some anar-


COMMENT
675
a
chists, and other persons whose hearts are not in precisely the right
place. It is not hard to see which side is the stronger. But the
weaker side would gladly forego a complete victory, being too busy
with other pastimes to bother—cud-chewing, conversation, and dys-
peptic dreams. All they care about is that a few scuppers should be
accidentally left open, through which those who sincerely desire
leisure might slip modestly out of sight. The mobilization must not
be so efficient as not to overlook somebody now and then.
This is not a plea for privilege; but for something easier to
supply: a little inefficiency. Perhaps this ancient perquisite of
humanity will some day prove its salvation.
The Devil may have all the good tunes but he no longer has a mo-
nopoly of press-agents. He who was despised and rejected of men-
particularly men of action—is already the priceless servant of both
sides and may be master yet. There was a time, a better time, when
the man who wrote was considered harmless enough. Not to-day.
At any moment the obscure rhymes of a very second-rate poet may
be read in the Senate as evidence and, no doubt, the theories of Pro-
fessor Einstein, had they been advertised during the war, would have
been put down as most insidious bits of “enemy propaganda” by
both sides, since he is a Swiss and the logical (censorial) outcome
of his ideas must be the denial of absolute justice. It is no longer
safe to be a novelist, although it is very profitable to be one, and the
detached thinker, if one is left, is in danger of being summoned as
a witness on the merits of prohibition or industrial democracy. It
is rather amusing to find that the practical men are the ones who are
nearest to panic at the sight of a book-store, while the literary philos-
ophers are going in for direct action. In any case letters are looking
up; they have come to the level of journalism and are nearly on an
equality with strike-breaking. Still it is hard to consider John Ad-
dington Symonds or Robert Browning as the hired press-agent of
Italy, or Turgenev as the secret mediator in the Franco-Russian
agreement. The Muses are having their revenge, at last, and as
usual the ironic Muse of Comedy is preparing for the last laugh.
a
Last month in our paragraphs on the financial side of art we sug-
gested a method of speculation for persons who were willing to wait
twenty or thirty years for their returns. There are persons, how-


676
COMMENT
ever, who expect to die, who do not love their children, or who have
some other reason for wishing to realize quickly on their investments.
And as these people are in the majority, we shall probably devote
most of our space to their problems.
First, then, let us warn them against the critics, whose opinions
are not at all sound financially. Ordinary advertisements are a
much better guide to the value of a product than most critical ar-
ticles. Criticism, in fact, is only a shady form of advertising. The
critic does the advertiser's dirty work. No advertiser, for instance,
considers it professional etiquette to abuse his rivals openly in an
advertisement. He can do no more than warn against imitations.
When he wants to say something really mean he gets a critic to do
it for him. We do not wish to imply that all the critics are for sale;
with the exception of the musical critics they are scarcely sensible
enough. But the simple fellows can easily be got round by a little
flattery, and can be persuaded not only to run down competitors, but
to sing the product's praise as well, and in terms the diffident adver-
tising man would blush to employ!
The idea, however, that the critics set the pace of the market is
ridiculous. A few, a very few, anticipate the fashion; the majority
can scarcely keep abreast of it.
Perhaps the best criterion for placing a critic is the language he
uses. If he is still talking about plein air, if he still condemns arms
because they are like bananas and praises them because they are like
arms, if he quotes Tennyson or Huysmans or Oscar Wilde or George
Moore, you may be sure that he is not on. The artists of the coming
mode are painting with entirely different intentions, and how on
earth is he going to guess which one is going to succeed? . . . But
more of this later.
.


2



Courtesy of the Kingore Galleries
EL MAJO. BY HUNT DIEDERICH



THE EN TI
DIAL
Y II
JUNE 1920
DESIRE
BY JAMES STEPHENS
HE
E was quite excited as he told the story to his wife, and in the
telling he revealed to her a depth of credulity of which she
would not have believed him capable. He was a hard-headed
man, and conducted his business on hard-headed principles: in-
deed he had conducted his courtship and matrimonial affairs in
a manner which she would not have termed reckless or romantic.
When, therefore, she found him excited, and over such a story, she
did not know what to think. She ended by agreeing with him, not
because her reason was satisfied or even touched, but simply because
he was excited and women generally welcome anything which dis-
turbs or varies the dull round of use and wont, and will bathe in
excitement whenever they get the chance.
This was the story he told.
As he was walking down Grafton Street to lunch a motor car
came spinning down the road at a speed much too dangerous for
that narrow and always congested thoroughfare. A man was walk-
ing in front of him and, just as the car came behind, this man
stepped off the path with a view to crossing the road. He did not
even look behind as he stepped off. Her husband on the moment
stretched forth a long muscular arm that swept the man back to the
pavement one second before the car went blaring and buzzing by.
“If I had not been there!” said her husband
The two men grinned at each other, her husband smiling with
good-fellowship, the other crinkling with amusement and gratitude:
they walked together down the street and they had lunch together;
they sat for a long time after lunch, smoking innumerable ciga-


680
DESIRE
a
little angrily, “it is not fair to me; you are older than I am now, but
in a few years this will mean that I shall be needlessly older than
you. I think it was not a loyal wish.”
“I thought of that objection,” said he, “and I also thought that
I was past the age at which certain things matter, and that both
temperamentally and in the matter of years I was proof against,
well, say, female attractions, or femininity of any kind. It seemed
to me to be right, so I just registered my wish with him.”
“What did he say?" she queried.
“He did not say anything, he just nodded, and began to talk
again of other matters, religion, life, death, mind, a host of things,
which, for all the diversity they seem to have when I enumerate
them, were yet one single theme.
“I feel a more contented man to-night than I have ever felt," he
continued, “and I feel in some curious way a different person from
the man I was yesterday.”
Here his wife woke up, as it were, from the conversation and
began to laugh.
“You are a foolish man,” said she, "and I am just as bad. If
any one were to hear us talking this solemn silliness he would have
a right to mock at us.”
He laughed heartily with her, and after a supper they went to bed.
During the night his wife had a dream.
She dreamed that a ship set off for the Polar Seas on an expedi-
tion in which she was not sufficiently interested to find out its reason.
The ship departed with her on board; for a time she was concerned
with baggage and with counting and going over the various articles
she had brought against the arctic weather.
She had thick woollen stockings; she had skin boots all hairy in-
side, all pliable and wrinkled without; she had a great skin cap
shaped like a helmet and fitting down in a cape over the shoulders;
she had even, and it did not astonish her, a pair of very baggy fur
trousers; she had a sleeping sack—she had an enormous quantity of
things, and everybody in the expedition was equipped, if not with
the same things, at least similarly.
These traps were an unending subject of conversation aboard, and
although days and weeks passed the talk of the ship hovered about
and fell continually into the subject of warm clothing.


JAMES STEPHENS
681
There came a day when the weather began to be perceptibly
colder, so cold indeed that she was tempted to draw on these wonder-
ful breeches and fit her head into that most cozy hat, but she did not
do so, for, and everybody on the ship explained it to her, it was
necessary that she should accustom herself to the feeling of cold,
and, she was further informed, the chill which she was now feeling
was nothing to the chill she would presently have to bear.
It seemed good advice, and she decided that as long as she could
bear the cold she would do so, and would not put on any protective
covering; thus, when the cold became really intense, she would be
to some degree ready for it and would not suffer so much.
But steadily, and day by day, it became colder, and now they
were in wild and whirling seas wherein great green and white ice-
bergs went sailing by, and all about the ship little hummocks of ice
bobbed and surged, and went under and came up, and the grey
water slashed and hissed against and on top of these small hillocks.
Her hands were so chilly that she had to put them under her arm-
pits to keep any warmth in them, and her feet were in a worse con-
dition. They had begun to pain her, so she decided that on the
next day she would put on her winter equipment and would not
mind what anybody said to the contrary. “It is cold enough,” said
she, "for my arctic trousers and my warm soft boots, and my great
furry gloves; I will put them on in the morning,” for it was then
almost night and she meant to go to bed at once.
She did go to bed, and she lay there quite cold and miserable.
In the morning she was yet colder, and immediately on rising she
looked about for the winter clothing which she had laid ready by
the side of her bunk, the night before, but she could not find them.
She was forced to dress in her usual rather thin clothes, and having
done so she went on deck.
When she got to the side of the vessel she found that the world
about her was changed. The sea had disappeared. Far as the eye
could go was a level plain of ice, not white but grey, and over
it there lowered a sky grey as itself and of almost the same shade.
Across this waste there blew a bitter and piercing wind so that her
ears tingled and stung. No one was moving on the ship and the
dead silence which brooded on the snow lay heavy and almost solid
on the vessel.
She ran to the other side, and found that the whole ship's com-


682
DESIRE
a
pany had landed and were staring at her from a little distance of
the land, and these people were as silent as the frozen air, as the
frozen ship. They stared at her and made no move and made no
sound.
She noticed that they were all dressed in their winter furs, and
while she stood ice began to creep into her veins. One of the ship's
company suddenly strode forward a few paces and held up a bundle
in his mittened hand. She saw the bundle contained her clothes,
her broad furry trousers, her great cozy helmet and gloves.
To get from the ship to the ice was painful but not difficult, for a
rope ladder was hanging against the side and down this she went.
The rungs felt hard as iron for they were frozen stiff, and the touch
of those glassy surfaces bit into her tender hand like fire. But she
got to the ice and went across it towards her companions.
Then, to her dismay, to her terror, all these suddenly, with one
unexpressed accord turned and began to run swiftly away from her,
and she, with a heart that could scarcely beat, took after them.
Every few paces she fell, for her shoes could not grip on the ice,
,
and each time she fell those monsters stood and turned and watched
her and the man who had her clothes waved the bundle at her and
danced grotesquely, silently.
She continued running, sliding, falling, picking herself up until
her breath went and she came to a halt unable to move a limb
further and scarcely able to breathe, and this time they did not stay
to look at her. They continued running but now with greater and
greater speed, and she saw them become black specks away on the
white distance, and she saw them disappear, and there was nothing
left where she stared but the long white miles and the terrible
silence and the cold.
How cold it was! and with that there rose again a little wind,
keen as a razor, which whipped into her face, swirled about her
ankles like a whip, and stabbed under her armpits like a dagger.
“I am cold,” she murmured.
She looked backwards whence she had come, but the ship was
no longer in sight, and she could not remember in what direction
it lay. Then she began to run in any direction. Indeed she ran in
every direction to find the ship, for when she had taken an hundred
steps in one way she thought frantically, “This is not the way,” and
at once she began to run on the opposite road. But run as she might


JAMES STEPHENS
683
she could not get warm; it was colder she got, and then she slipped
again, and went sliding down a hollow faster and faster, she came
to the brink of a cleft and swished over this and down into a hole of
ice and there she lay.
“I shall die,” she said. “I shall fall asleep here and die.”
Then she awoke.
She opened her eyes directly on the window and saw the dawn
struggling with the darkness, a film of greyish light which framed
the window, but did not lift the obscurity of the room, and she lay
for a second smiling to herself at her grotesque dream and thanking
God that it had only been a dream; the next second she felt that she
was cold. She pulled the clothes more tightly about her, and she
spoke to her husband.
“How miserably cold it is!” she said.
She turned over in the bed and lay against him for warmth, and
then she found that the atrocious cold came from him, that it was
he. She leaped out of bed with a scream, switched on the light and
bent over him. He was stone dead, he was stone cold, and she stood
by him shivering and whimpering.
a
a


AMERICANISM AND LOCALISM
BY JOHN DEWEY
WH
HEN one is living quite on the other side of the world, the
United States tend to merge