THE CARNEGIE LIBRARY
OF
The Pennsylvania State College
CLASS NO.
10.051
BOOK NO. D 54
R.
ACCESSION NO.93118
2308














aylor and under
!


les
१
.
ܕܐ
BREATH ON A WINDOW PANE.
BY KAHLIL GIBRAN
6
3



THE IN IX
v
DIAL
OXX IIO
JULY 1920
Qeril
A SEASON IN HELL
BY ARTHUR RIMBAUD
(TRANSLATOR's Note: It is generally believed that Rimbaud's
Une Saison en Enfer is not an imaginary or literary confession but
a sincere history of his inner life up to the age of nineteen. As
such it should be self-explanatory, since it deals quite explicitly
with various human moods or ideas by their familiar names. Some
words lead farther in Rimbaud's mind than they do in the mind
of his reader, but this is the case with any writer. A summary of
the important events of these nineteen years will probably give as
good a key as any to references and connotations.
He was born in 1854 in Charleville (Ardennes), the son of a
French army captain. On both sides. he came of peasant stock,
though his father's family cherished a tradition of descent from the
Counts of Orange. His own, impressions of his inheritance are ex-
pressed in the chapter “Bad Blood.??
His mother's catholicism, "fervid, rigorous, and mystic at the
same time,” gave Rimbaud as harsh a bringing up as German
Protestantism gave Nietzsche. Hence the rather mediaeval pre-
occupations of Une Saison.
In 1871, after numerous truancies, he finally broke loose from
his family and went to live with Paul Verlaine in Paris, at the
home of Verlaine's parents-in-law. The literary and artistic talent
of Paris, including Victor Hugo, admired his poetry and was at
first inclined to welcome him as a boy prodigy. Fantin-Latour
painted his portrait; M. Carjat the poet-photographist took his
photograph; when he was turned out by Verlaine's family Théodore
de Banville provided him with a garret and Madame de Banville


2
A SEASON IN HELL
gave him pen and ink. But he was arrogant and stubborn under
patronage. Opinion turned against him and he spent several
months as a vagabond in the Paris gutters. His memories of this
were not of the pleasantest (see “Adieu”).
In 1872 Verlaine left his wife and travelled with Rimbaud in
Belgium and England. Their life was strenuous. Verlaine, pliant
and sentimental, expected of Rimbaud a romantic affection; Rim-
baud on his side expected comprehension and self-control. Their
remarkable friendship became a source of annoyance and scandal,
and their final disagreement led to Verlaine's imprisonment for
shooting Rimbaud with a revolver. Rimbaud describes their rela-
tion in “Délires I,” Verlaine appearing there as the Foolish Virgin
and Rimbaud as the Infernal Bridegroom.
The chapter, “Alchemy of the Word,” deals with Rimbaud's at-
tempt to become a magician, which has been discussed in an article
in the June number of THE DIAL. He enumerates his methods
of hallucination and quotes some examples of what he considered
a new poetical language. He also tells how he grew sick and dis-
gusted with his ambitions, and how he fell prey to that old enemy
of independent man, the desire for happiness, or as the Church
calls it, Salvation, which had been the guide of his childhood and
which now supplied him with the properties, at least, for his hell.]
>
O
NCE on a time, if I remember rightly, my life was a feast at
which all hearts opened and every wine ran.
One evening I set Beauty on my knees.—And I found her sour.--
And I cursed her.
I took arms against justice.
I fed. O sorcerers, misery and hatred, it is to you my treasure
has been entrusted!
I was able to obliterate from my mind all human hope. Upon
each joy, to strangle it, I sprang with the soundless spring of a wild
a
beast.


ARTHUR RIMBAUD
3
I called the executioners that, dying, I might bite the butts
of their guns. I called the scourges to choke me with sand, with
blood. Misfortune was my god. I stretched myself out in the
mud. I dried myself in the air of crime. And I played folly some
good tricks.
And Spring brought me the frightful laugh of an idiot.
Now, just lately, finding I was on the edge of giving my last
couac, it occurred to me to look for the key to the ancient feast,
where I might perhaps find appetite again.
Charity is that key.-An inspiration which proves that I have
been dreaming
“You shall remain a hyena, and so on ..." objects the fiend
who crowned me with such amiable poppies. “Earn death with all
. "
your appetites and your egoism and all the capital offenses.”
Ah! I have taken too much of it:-But, dear Satan, I beg you a
less petulant eye! and while awaiting the several little misdeeds in
retard, you who admire in a writer the absence of all that might be
descriptive or edifying, I detach for your benefit these few hideous
pages from my damned man’s diary.
.
BAD BLOOD
From my Gallic ancestors I get my pale blue eyes, narrow skull
and awkwardness in fight. I find my costume as barbarous as theirs.
Only I do not butter
my
hair.
The Gauls were the clumsiest beast-flayers and grass-burners of
their time.
From them I get: idolatry and love of sacrilege ;-Oh! all the
vices, rage, sensuality--magnificent, sensuality ;-above all lying
and laziness.
I have a horror of all trades. Masters or workinen, all peasants,
low-born. The hand at the pen is no worse than the hand at the
plow,—and no better. What a century for hands! I will never
have my hand. After that, family life leads too far. The propriety
of begging wounds me to death. Criminals are disgusting like geld-
ings: as for me, I am intact, and don't care.
a
93118


4
A SEASON IN HELL
But! who made my tongue so deceitful that up to now it has
guided and guarded my laziness. Without having earned my bread
even with my body, lazier than a toad, I have lived everywhere.
Not a family of Europe that I do not know.-I mean families like
my own which hold everything from the declaration of the Rights
of Man.— I have known every son of a family!
a
If I had antecedents at any point whatever in French history!
But no, nothing.
It is perfectly evident to me that I have always belonged to the
under race. I cannot comprehend rebellion. My race never rose
except to pillage: so wolves the animal they have not killed.
I call to mind the history of France, eldest daughter of the
Church. As a vilain I must have made the journey to the Holy
Land; I have in my head routes in the Suabian plain, views of
Byzantium, of the ramparts of Solyma; the cult of Mary, the
yearning over the Crucified, awake in me among a thousand profane
fairy tales.-I am seated among broken pots and nettles, leprous,
at the bottom of a wall gnawed by the sun.—Later, to continue, I
must have bivouacked under Germany's nights.
Ah! again: I dance the sabbath in a red clearing with old women
and children.
I do not remember myself farther back than this country and
Christianity. I shall never finish seeing myself again in this past.
But alone always, with no family: what language did I use to
speak, even? I never see myself at the councils of Christ; nor at
the councils of the Lords,—the representatives of Christ.
What was I in the last century? I do not find myself again
till to-day. No more vagabonds, no more vague wars. The under
race has overrun everything—the people, reason, as they say; the
nation and science.
Oh! science! They have reclaimed it all. For the body and for
the soul—the viaticum-they have medicine and philosophy-old
women's remedies and popular songs rearranged. And the amuse-
ments of the princes and the games they used to forbid. Geog-
raphy, cosmography, mechanics, chemistry! .
Science, the new nobility! Progress. The world advances !
Why should it not turn?
-
•
0


ARTHUR RIMBAUD
5
It is the vision of numbers. We are on our way to the Spirit.
It is quite certain, it is oracular, what I say. I understand, and as
I do not know how to explain myself without pagan words, I wish
to be silent.
The pagan blood returns! The Spirit is near; why does Christ
not help me by giving my soul nobility and freedom? Alas, the
Gospel has gone by the Gospel! the Gospel.
I await God greedily. I belong to the under race for all
eternity.
Here I am on the Breton coast. The cities light up at evening.
My day's work is done; I am leaving Europe. The sea air shall
burn my lungs; lost climates shall tan me. Swim, grind grass,
hunt, above all smoke; drink liquor strong as boiling metal, -as
those dear ancestors of mine did formerly round their fires!
I will return with limbs of iron, dark-skinned, furious-eyed;
from my mask they shall think me of a strong race. I will have
money: I will be indolent and brutal. Women tend these terrible
invalids back from the hot countries. I will get mixed up in poli-
tics. Saved!
.
Now I am outcast, I have a horror of my country. The best
thing would be sleep, quite drunk, on the beach.
You don't go-Reënter the old ways here, loaded down with
my vice, the vice which has sent its roots of suffering into my side
ever since the age of reason, —which towers to the sky, strikes me,
knocks me down, drags me along.
Last innocence and last timidity. It is said. Not bring my dis-
gusts and betrayals to the world.
Come! The march, the burden, the desert, ennui and anger.
To whom am I to hire myself out? What animal must be
adored? What holy image assaulted? What hearts shall I break?
What lie ought I to hold to ?-In what blood walk?
Rather keep myself clear of the law.-A hard life, a plain self-
stultification, lift with withered fist the lid of the coffin, sit down,


6
A SEASON IN HELL
suffocate. In this way be rid of old age and dangers: terror is not
French.
-Ah! I am so weary that I offer my impulses toward perfection
to no matter what divine image.
o my self-abnegation, my marvellous charity! down here, none
the less.
De profundis, Domine, am I a fool!
a
a
While still a child I used to admire the incurable malefactor
upon whom the prison hulks shut forever; I visited the inns and
lodgings that he might have consecrated by his sojourn; I saw with
his idea the blue sky and the flowered work of the country; I used to
scent his fatality in the cities. He had more strength than a saint,
more good sense than a traveller—and he, he alone! as witness of
his glory and of his rightness.
On the high-roads, winter nights, shelterless, unclothed, without
bread, a voice clenched my frozen heart: "Weakness or strength:
you see, it is strength. You know neither where you are going nor
why you go; enter everywhere, respond to all. They will not kill
you any more than if you were a corpse.” In the morning I had
so lost a gaze, and a face so dead, that the people whom I met per-
haps did not see me.
In the cities the mud seemed to me suddenly red and black, like a
mirror when the lamp moves in the next room, like a treasure in the
forest! "Good luck," I cried, and I saw a sea of flame and smoke
up to heaven, and right and left all wealth blazing like a billion
thunder-storms.
But debauchery and the companionship of women were forbid-
den me. Not even a comrade. I used to see myself before the
cordon of executioners, weeping over the misfortune that they could
not understand, and forgiving them!—“Priests, professors, masters,
you are making a blunder in turning me over to justice. I have
never belonged to this people; I have never been a Christian; I be-
long to the race that sang in punishment. I do not understand the
law; I have no moral sense, I am a brute beast: you are making a
blunder.”
Yes, my eyes are shut to your light. I am a brute, a negro. But


ARTHUR RIMBAUD
7.
I can be saved. You are false negroes, you, maniacs, savages,
misers. You, broker, are a negro; you, magistrate, a negro; you,
general, a negro; emperor, old itch, you are a negro: you
have
drunk untaxed liquor of Satan's manufacture.-This people is in-
spired by fever and cancer. Invalids and old men are so respect-
able that they demand boiling. The spitefullest thing would be to
quit this continent where folly prowls in search of hostages for
these wretches. I am going to the true kingdom of the children of
Ham.
Did I use still to know nature? Did I know myself?---No more
words. I bury the dead in my belly. Shouts, drum, dance, dance,
dance, dance! I do not even see the hour when the whites will
disembark and I shall fall into nothingness.
Hunger, thirst, shouts, dance, dance, dance, dance!
a
The whites are landing. The cannon! You must submit to bap-
tism, put on clothes, work.
I have felt the stroke of grace in my heart. Ah! I had not ex-
pected it!
I have never done evil. My days are going to be easy, I shall
be spared repentance. I shall not have endured the tortures of the
soul almost dead to virtue, in whom the severe light comes back to
life like funeral candles. The lot of the son of a family, premature
coffin covered with limpid tears. Without doubt debauchery is
foolish, vice is foolish; filth must be thrown away. But the clock
will not have arrived at the point of striking no hour but that of
pure woe. Am I going to be carried off like a child to play in para-
dise, forgetful of all unhappiness?
Quick! are there other lives? Sleep in wealth is impossible.
Wealth has always been very public. Divine love alone dispenses
the keys of knowledge. I see that nature is nothing but a display of
liberality. Farewell, chimeras, ideals, errors!
The reasonable hymn of the angels rises from the ship of salva-
tion: it is the love divine.--Two loves! I can die of earthly love,
die of devotion. I have left souls behind whose grief will grow at
my departure. You choose me from among the shipwrecked; those
who remain, are they not my friends?
a


8:
A SEASON IN HELL
Save them!
Reason is born in me. The world is good. I will bless life. I
will love my brothers. These are no longer childish promises. Nor
the hope of escaping old age and death. God is my strength, and
I praise God.
I am no longer in love with disgust. Rage, debauchery, folly-
whose every impulse and disaster I know—all my burden is laid
aside. Consider without dizziness the expanse of our innocence.
.
I should no longer be able to ask for the solace of a bastinado. I
do not fancy myself embarked on a wedding with Jesus Christ for
father-in-law.
I am not the prisoner of my reason. I have said: God. I want
freedom in salvation: how am I to seek it? Frivolous inclinations
have left me. No more need of devotion or of God's love. I do not
regret the century of impressionable hearts. Every one to his own
.
reason, contempt, and charity. I retain my place at the top of this
angelic ladder of good sense.
As for settled happiness, domestic or not
no, I am in-
capable of it. I am too dissipated, too weak. Life blooms through
work, old truism; my life is not heavy enough, it soars and floats
high above action, that point so dear to the world.
What an old maid I am becoming, to lack the courage to be in
love with death!
If God granted me that heavenly, aerial quietude of prayer, -
like that of the ancient saints.—The saints, strong men! the
hermits, artists such as we have need of no longer!
Continual farce? My innocence would make me weep. Life is
the farce to lead everywhere.
.
Enough! here is chastisement.—March!
Ah! my lungs burn, my temples roar! Night rolls through my
eyes in this sunlight! Heart limbs
Where are we going? I am weak! the others advance. Tools,
weapons
time
.
.
.


ARTHUR RIMBAUD
9
Fire, fire on me! There! or I surrender.-Cowards !—I kill my-
self! I throw myself under the horses' hoofs!
Ah!.
-I shall get used to it.
This would be the French life, the path of honour!
NIGHT IN HELL
I have swallowed a famous throatful of poison.—Thrice blest be
the counsel that came to me!-My bowels broil. The shock of the
poison twists my limbs, distorts me, throws me to earth. I am
dying of thirst, suffocating, I cannot cry out. It is hell, it is the
,
everlasting torment. See how the fire blazes up! I am burning
properly. Away, demon!
In a confused dream I had been picturing my conversion to
virtue and happiness, my salvation. Can I describe the vision? The
atmosphere of hell is not congenial to hymns. There were millions
of charming creatures, a bland concert of spirits, strength and peace,
noble ambitions, I know not what else.
Noble ambitions!
And this is life still !Suppose damnation were eternal! A man
who wants to mutilate himself is quite damned, is he not? I be-
lieve that I am in hell, therefore I am. It is the catechism at work.
I am the slave of my baptism. Parents, you contrived my mis-
fortune and your own. Poor innocent!-Hell cannot touch the
heathen.—This is life still. Later the delights of damnation will
be more profound. A crime, quick, and I fall into nothingness
beyond the laws of men.
Silence, there, silence! Shame, reproach here: Satan who says
the fire is mean, my rage appallingly out of place.—Enough!
Of the errors they send me, magic, false perfumes, child-
ish tunes.-And they tell me that I hold the truth, that I perceive
justice: I have a sane, well-bridled judgement, I am ready for per-
fection.
Pride.—My scalp is parched. Pity! Lord, I
am afraid. I am thirsty, so thirsty. Ah! childhood, the grass, the
rain, the lake on the pebbles, the full moon when the clock was
striking twelve.
The devil is in the belfry at this hour.
Mary! Holy Virgin! -Horror at my inanity.
.
.
.


10
A A SEASON IN HELL
Out there, are those not honest souls who wish me well?
Help. · I have a pillow on my mouth, they do not hear
me, they are phantoms. Besides, no one ever thinks of others. Let
them keep off. I smell of seared fesh, like a heretic; there is no
doubt about it.
The hallucinations are innumerable. Just what I have always
had; no more faith in history, obliviousness of principles. I
will keep them to myself: poets and visionaries might be jealous.
We are a thousand times the richest; let us be close-fisted like
the sea.
.
.
.
.
.
.
There! a moment ago the clock of life stopped. I am no longer
in the world. Theology is serious, hell is certainly down below,-
and heaven above.--Ecstasy, nightmare, sleep in a nest of flames.
How malicious is attention in the country
Satan, Ferdi-
nand, runs with the wild grain . . . Jesus walks on the purple
briers, without their bending. Jesus was walking on the angry
waters. The lantern showed him to us standing, white with brown
locks, on the flank of an emerald wave
I am going to unveil all the mysteries: mysteries of religion or
of nature, death, birth, future, past, cosmogony, nonexistence. I
am master in phantasmagoria.
Listen! ...
I have all the talents!—There is nobody here, and there is some-
body. I should not care to squander my treasure.—Do you want
negro songs, houri dances? Do you want me to vanish, to plunge
after the ring? Do you? I will make gold, remedies.
Trust in me, then; faith assuages, guides, cures. All, come,-
even little children, that I may console you, that his heart may be
poured out for you like water,--the marvellous heart!--Poor human
beings, toilers! I do not ask
I
you for prayers; with your
faith
alone I shall be happy.
And think of me. This makes me barely regret the world. I
have a chance of not suffering any more. My life consisted of
mild follies only, it is to be regretted.
Bah! make all the grimaces imaginable!
Decidedly we are out of the world. No longer any sound. The
sense of touch has left me. Ah! my castle, my Saxony, my
wood of willow trees. Evenings, mornings, nights, days . . . Am
I tired!


ARTHUR RIMBAUD
11
.
I ought to have my hell for anger, my hell for pride,--and the
hell of laziness; a concert of hells.
I am dying of lassitude. It is the grave. I am going to the
worms, horror of horrors! Satan, you clown, you want to dissolve
me with your charms. I demand. I demand! a fork-thrust, a
drop of fire.
Ah! climb back to life! Gaze at our difformities. And this
poison, this kiss a thousand times accursed! My weakness, the
cruelty of the world! My God, pity, hide me, I am too ill!—I
am hidden and I am not.
It is the fire waking again with its damned.
DÉLIRES I
FOOLISH VIRGIN
THE INFERNAL BRIDEGROOM
!
a
Hear the confession of a companion in Hell:
“O heavenly Bridegroom, my Lord, do not deny the confession
of the most unhappy of thy servants. I am lost. I am drunken. I
am unclean. What a life!
“Forgive me, heavenly Lord, forgive me! Ah! forgive me! what
tears! And what tears again, later on, I trust!
“Later on I shall know the heavenly Bridegroom! I was born
subject to Him.—The other can beat me now!
“At present, I am at the bottom of the world, O my friends!
no, not my friends.
.. Never delirium nor torture to
equał these.
Is it stupid!
“Ah! I suffer, I cry out. I suffer truly. Nevertheless all is
allowed me, loaded with the contempt of the most contemptible
hearts.
“At any rate let me make this avowal, free to repeat it twenty
other times, -as depressing, as insignificant!
,
“I am the slave of the infernal Bridegroom, the one who ruined
the foolish virgins. It is surely that same demon. It is not a ghost,
not a phantom. But I, who have lost my wisdom, who am damned
and dead to the world—they will not kill me! How describe him
to you! I no longer know how to talk even. I am in black, I weep,
.


12
A SEASON IN HELL
a
.
.
.
.
I am afraid. A little freshness, Lord, if you will, if you will well.
"I am a widow .. .-I used to be a widow
.-why yes,
I was perfectly matter of fact once, and I was not born to become
a skeleton ! ... He was almost a child. .. His mysterious
delicacies had led me astray. I forgot my every human duty to
follow him. What a life! Real life is absent. We are no longer
in the world. I go where he goes, it is necessary. And often he
grows furious at me, me, poor soul. The Demon —He is a demon,
!
you know, he is not a man.
"He says: 'I do not care for women: love must be reinvented,
that's understood. They can do no more than desire a snug situa-
tion. When they have the situation, heart and beauty are discarded;
the only thing that is left is cold contempt, the rations of mar-
riage, nowadays. Or else I see women, clearly marked for hap-
piness, whom I might have made into good comrades, devoured
first by brutes as tender-hearted as a pile of faggots !'
“'I listen to him making shame a glory, cruelty a charm. 'I be-
long to a far-off race: my ancestors were Norsemen: they used to
pierce their sides, drink their blood. I will make gashes all over
my body, I will tattoo myself; I want to grow hideous like a
Mongol: you shall see, I will bellow through the streets. I want
to grow quite mad with rage. Never show me any jewels, I should
writhe and go into contortions on the carpet. My wealth, I want
it stained with blood all over. Never will I work.
On
several nights, becoming possessed of his demon, we rolled one
another about, I fought with him!-Often at night, when he is
drunk, he lies in wait for me in the streets or in the house to
frighten me to death.—'They will actually cut off my neck; it will
be disgusting. Oh! those days when he wants to walk with an
air of crime!
"Sometimes he speaks in a sort of tender child's talk, of death
that brings repentance, of the miserable wretches there must be, of
grievous toil, of farewells that rend the heart. In the stews where
we used to get drunk, he would weep as he watched the people
round us, the live stock of squalor. He picked up drunkards out
of the black streets. He had a bad mother's pity for little children.
He would move winsomely like a little girl at the catechism.-
He would pretend to be informed about everything, business, art,
medicine. I followed him, it was necessary.
>
.
a


ARTHUR RIMBAUD
13
а
-
1
"I was witness of all the adornment with which he surrounded
himself in spirit; garments, cloths, furniture; I lent him weapons,
a different face. I saw all that touched him, just as he would have
liked to create it for himself. When his spirit seemed to me
apathetic, I followed him far in strange and complicated actions,
good or bad; I was certain never to enter his world. Beside his
dear, sleeping body, what hours I have watched at night, seeking
to learn why he was so anxious to escape from reality. Never
was there a man with such a vow as that. I recognized,—without
being afraid for him,—that he might be a serious danger to society.
-Perhaps he possesses secrets that will change life. No, I replied
to myself, he is only looking for them. Finally his kindness is
enchanted, and I am its prisoner. No other soul would have the
strength,—the strength of despair-to endure it, to be loved and
protected by him. Besides, I would not picture him to myself
with another soul: one sees his Angel, never another's Angel,-I
believe. I used to exist in his soul as in a palace, which they have
made empty in order not to see so mean a person as yourself: that
was all. Alas! I was very dependent on him. But what did he
want of my colourless and facile being? He would not improve
me, unless he were to make me die. Sadly mortified, I sometimes
would say to him:
“ 'I understand you.' He would shrug his shoulders.
“Thus, with my vexation renewing itself daily, finding myself
more and more altered in my own eyes—as in all eyes which might
have cared to look at me, had I not been condemned everlastingly
to the oblivion of all men!—I grew hungrier and hungrier for
his kindness. With his kisses and friendly embraces, it was indeed
a heaven, a gloomy heaven, which I entered, and where I should
have wished to be left, poor, deaf, dumb, blind. Already I had
the habit of it. I used to see us as good children, free to walk in
the Paradise of sadness. We were in harmony with one another.
.
Much affected, we would work together. But after a poignant
caress, he would say: 'How funny it will seem to you when I am no
longer here, through whom you have passed. When you no longer
have my arms under your neck, nor my heart to fall asleep on, nor
this mouth upon your eyes. For I shall have to go away, very
far, some day. Besides, I must help others; it is my duty. Al-
,
though this may not be especially appetizing to you
dear
.


14
A SEASON IN HELL
He gave
concerns.
friend.' All at once I foresaw myself, with him gone, the
prey
of
dizziness, plunged into the most frightful shadow: death. I used
to make him promise that he would not abandon me.
it twenty times, that lover's promise. It was as frivolous as my
saying to him:
“'I understand you.'
“Ah! I have never been jealous of him. He will not leave me,
I think. What will happen? He has no acquaintances; he will
never do any work. He wants to live like a somnambulist. Will
his kindness and charity alone give him rights in the world of
the real? At times I forget the trouble into which I have fallen:
he shall make me strong, we will travel, we will hunt in the deserts,
we will sleep on the pavement of unknown cities, care-free, exempt
from pain. Or I will wake up, and the laws and customs shall
have changed, -thanks to his magic power; or the world, while
remaining the same, shall leave me to my desires, pleasures, un-
Oh! the life of adventure which exists in children's
books, to comfort me for all I have suffered, will you give it
me? He cannot. I am in the dark as to his ideal. He has told
me that he has regrets, aspirations: that should not concern me.
Does he talk to God? Perhaps I ought to appeal to God. I am
at the very bottom of the abyss, and no longer know how to pray.
“If he were to explain his sorrows to me, should I understand
them more than his mockeries? He attacks me, spends hours in
making me ashamed of everything in the world which could have
touched me, and becomes indignant if I weep.
“ 'You see that polished young man, stepping into the beautiful
calm house yonder: his name is Duval, Dufour, Armand, Maurice,
I know not what? A woman has given her life up to loving this
wicked idiot: she is dead, a saint in heaven certainly, at present.
You would be the death of me, just as he was the death of that wo-
man. It is our fate, we charitable hearts. Alas! there were
days when the actions of all men made them seem to him the play-
things of a grotesque delirium; he would laugh frightfully, for a
long time.—Then, he would resume his ways of a young mother,
of an elder sister. If he were less wild, we should be saved. But
his tenderness also is deadly. I am subject to him.—Ah! I am
foolish!
“One day, perhaps, he will vanish miraculously; but if he is to
>
.
-


ARTHUR RIMBAUD
15
be taken up again into a heaven, I cannot fail to know, to look on
in some measure at the assumption of my little friend!"
Amusing household!
DÉLIRES II
ALCHEMY OF THE WORD
About me. Story of one of my follies.
For a long time I had boasted myself the possessor of all possible
landscapes, and had laughed at the reputations of modern paint-
ing and poetry.
I was in love with crazy paintings, over-doors, decorations,
tumbler's back-drops, signs, popular illustrations, out of date litera-
ture, church Latin, lewd books without spelling, the novels of our
ancestors, fairy-tales, little books for children, old librettos, silly
refrains, naïve rhythms.
I used to dream crusades, voyages of discovery of which we have
no accounts, republics without a history, religious wars nipped in
the bud, revolutions in customs, dislodgement of races and of
continents: I believed in all the spells of magic.
I invented the colours of the vowels!
A black, E white,
I red, O blue, U green.—I governed the form and movement of
every consonant, and with the aid of instinctive rhythms, I flat-
tered myself that I had invented a poetic language, which would
one day or another be accessible to all the senses. I reserved the
right of translation.
At first it was a sort of research. I used to write silences, nights;
I noted the inexpressible. I used to fixate vertigoes.
1
Loin des oiseaux, des troupeaux, des villageoises,
Que buvais-je, à genoux dans cette bruyère
Entourée de tendres bois de noisetiers,
Dans un brouillard d'après-midi tiède et vert?
Que pouvais-je boire dans cette jeune Oise,
-Ormeaux sans voix, gazon sans fleurs, ciel couvert! -


16
A SEASON IN HELL
Boire à ces gourdes jaunes, loin de ma case
Chérie? Quelque liqueur d'or qui fait suer.
Je faisais une louche enseigne d'auberge.
-Un
orage
vint chasser le ciel. Au soir
L'eau des bois se perdait sur les sables vierges,
Le vent de Dieu jetait des glaçons aux mares;
Pleurant, je voyais de l'or,-et ne pus boire. -
-
À quatre heures du matin, l'été,
Le sommeil d'amour dure encore.
Sous les bocages s'évapore
L'odeur du soir fêté.
Là-bas, dans leur vaste chantier,
Au soleil des Hesperides,
Déjà s'agitent-en bras de chemise-
Les Charpentiers.
Dans leurs Déserts de mousse, tranquilles,
Ils préparent les lambris précieux
Où la ville
Peindra de faux cieux.
O, pour ces Ouvriers, charmants
Sujets d'un roi de Babylone,
Vénus! quitte un instant les Amants
Dont l'âme est en couronne!
O Reine des Bergers,
Porte aux travailleurs l'eau-de-vie
Que leurs forces soient en paix
En attendant le bain dans la mer à midi.


ARTHUR RIMBAUD
17
The old stuff of poetry had a good part in my alchemy of the
Word.
I accustomed myself to plain hallucination: quite frankly
I used to see a mosque in place of a factory, a school of drums made
by angels, phaetons on roads in the sky, a parlour at the bottom
of a lake, monsters, mysteries; the title of a vaudeville raised up
terrors before me.
Then I explained my magical sophistries with the hallucination
of words!
I ended by deeming holy the confusion of my mind. I was
lazy, prey to a sluggish fever: I envied animals their contentment,
-caterpillars which symbolize the innocence of limbo, moles, the
sleep of virginity.
My nature became embittered. I said good-bye to the world
in kinds of romances :
}
CHANSON DE LA PLUS HAUTE TOUR
Qu'il vienne, qu'il vienne,
Le temps dont on s'éprenne.
J'ai tant fait patience
Qu'a jamais j'oublie.
Craintes et souffrances
Aux cieux sont parties.
Et la soif malsaine
Obscurcit mes veines.
Qu'il vienne, qu'il vienne,
Le temps dont on s'éprenne.
Telle la prairie
A l'oubli livrée
Grandie, et fleurie
D'encens et d'ivraies,
Au bourdon farouche
De très sales mouches.


18
A SEASON IN HELL
Qu'il vienne, qu'il vienne,
Le temps dont on s'éprenne.
I was fond of desert land, burnt orchards, shop-worn merchan-
dise, drinks grown tepid. I dragged myself through stinking alleys,
and with eyes shut, offered myself to the sun, the fire god.
“General, if there is still an old cannon left on your ramparts in
ruins, bombard us with dried blocks of earth. Before the mirrors
of the splendid shops! In the salons! Make the town eat its dust.
Oxidize the gargoyles. Fill the boudoirs with the burning powder
of rubies
Oh! the little fly drunk at the inn jakes, amorous of the borage,
and which a ray of light dissolves!
!
FAIM
Si j'ai du gout, ce n'est guère
Que pour la terre et les pierres.
Je déjeune toujours d'air,
De roc, de charbons, de fer.
Mes faims, tournez. Paissez, faims,
,
Le pré des sons.
Attirez le gai venin
Des liserons.
Mangez les cailloux qu'on brise,
Les vieilles pierres d'églises,
Les galets des vieux déluges,
Pains semés dans les vallées grises.
Le loup criait sous les feuilles
En crachant les belles plumes
De son repas de volailles:
Comme lui je me consume.


ARTHUR RIMBAUD
19
La salade, les fruits
N'attendent que la cueillette;
Mais l'araignée de la haie
Ne mange que des violettes.
Que je dorme! que je bouille
Aux autels de Salomon.
Le bouillon court sur la rouille,
Et se mêle au Cédron.
At length, O happiness, O reason, I stripped away the sky's
azure, which is blackness, and lived, gold spark of the radiance
nature. From joy I began to wear an expression of comic and
complete derangement.
1
Elle est retrouvée!
Quoi ? l'Eternité.
C'est la mer mêlée
Au soleil.
Mon âme éternelle,
Observe ton veu
Malgré la nuit seule
Et le jour en feu.
Donc tu te dégages
Des humains suffrages,
Des communs élans!
Tu voles selon.
Jamais l'espérance,
Pas d'orietur.
Science et patience,
Le supplice est sûr.


20
A SEASON IN HELL
Plus de lendemain,
Braises de satin
Votre ardeur
Est le devoir.
Elle est retrouvée!
-Quoi ?—l'Eternité.
C'est la mer mêlée
Au soleil.
a
I became a fabulous opera : I saw that all creatures have a fatality
for happiness: action is not life, but a way of spoiling some power,
an enervation. Morality is softening of the brain.
Every creature seemed to me to be endowed with several other
lives. This gentleman does not know what he is doing: he is an
angel. This family is a litter of puppies. Before a number of men
I would talk aloud with a moment of one of their other existences.
- In this way I once loved a pig.
Not one of the sophistries of folly,—that folly which one shuts
up inside oneself, have I forgot: I could repeat them all, I remem-
a
ber the system.
My health was endangered. Terror came. I used to fall into
periods of sleep lasting for several days, from which I got up again
only to resume the most depressing reveries. I was ripe for death,
and by a dangerous route my weakness brought me to the confines
of Cimmeria, the land of shadow and whirlwinds. I had to travel,
to seek distraction from the spells that were gathered in my head.
On the sea which I loved as though it were to wash me clean of
some stain, I watched the dawn of the consoling cross. I had been
damned by the rainbow. Happiness was my doom, my remorse,
my worm: my life must always be too vast to be given up to
strength and beauty.
Happiness! Her tooth, sweet unto death, used to warn me at
cock-crow, ad matutinum, at the Christus venit,-in the gloomiest
towns !
O saisons, ô châteaux!
Quelle âme est sans défauts ?


ARTHUR RIMBAUD
21
J'ai fait la magique étude
Du bonheur, qu'aucun n'élude.
Salut à lui chaque fois
Que chante le coq gaulois.
Ah! je n'aurai plus d'envie:
Il s'est chargé de ma vie.
Ce charme a pris âme et corps
Et dispersé les efforts.
O saisons, ô châteaux!
L'heure de la fuite, hélas !
Sera l'heure du trépas.
O saisons, ô châteaux!
That is passed. To-day I know how to honour beauty.
THE IMPOSSIBLE
Ah! that life of my childhood, the highroad in all weathers,
preternaturally solemn, more disinterested than the best of beggars,
proud to have neither country nor friends; what nonsense it was. —
And I see it only now. I was right in despising these good fellows
who lose no opportunity for a caress, parasites of the cleanliness
and health of our women, nowadays, when they are at such cross
purposes with us.
I have been right in all my scorns: because I am running away!
I am running away?
I explain.
Only yesterday I was sighing: "Heavens! are there not enough
of us damned down here! I myself have been so long already in
their company. I know them all. We always recognize one an-
1


22
A SEASON IN HELL
.
other; we disgust one another. Charity is unknown to us. But we
are civil; our relations with the world are very respectable.” Is it
surprising? The world! business men, simple fellows:—We are
not looked down on. But the elect, how would they receive us?
Now there are aggressive, cheerful persons, not the true elect, since
one needs audacity or humility if one is to approach them. They
are the only elect. They utter no blessings.
Finding that I have still two pennies of common sense,—that is
quickly spent!—I see that my unhappiness comes from not having
realized soon enough that we are in the Occident. The Occidental
swamps! Not that I believe the light altered, form shrunken,
movement gone astray. . . . Good! right here my spirit desires
absolutely to take upon itself all the cruel developments the spirit
has undergone since the end of the Orient. . . . It desires this,
does my spirit!
My two pennies of common sense are spent! The spirit is author-
ity. It wants me to be in the Occident. I should have to make it
be silent in order to conclude as I should like to.
I told the palms of the martyrs, and art's splendour, the in-
ventor's pride and the pillager's ardour, to go to the devil. I re-
turned to the East and to the ancient and eternal wisdom.-It
seemed that this was a dream of gross indolence!
Yet, I was not thinking particularly of the pleasure of escaping
from modern sufferings. I had not in mind the bastard wisdom
of the Koran.—But is it not a real affliction, that ever since that
declaration of science, Christianity, man has been playing, proving
his evidence, satiating himself with the pleasure of repeating those
proofs, and living only in that way? Subtle, ridiculous torture;
source of my spiritual aberrations. Nature can grow bored, per-
haps! M. Prudhomme was born with the Christ.
Is it not because we cultivate fog? We eat fever with our
watery vegetables. And drunkenness! and tobacco! and ignorance!
and devotions !-Is all that far enough from the thought of the
wisdom of the East, the first country? Why a modern world at
all, if such poisons are invented!
The churchmen will say: We understand. But you are talking
about the Garden of Eden. Nothing for you in the history of the
Oriental peoples.—True; it is of Eden that I was dreaming!
What has the purity of ancient races to do with my dream?


ARTHUR RIMBAUD
23
The philosophers: The world has no age. Humanity simply
shifts from place to place. You happen to be in the Occident, but
you are free to live in your Orient, as old a one as you please, -
and to live there comfortably. Don't be a victim. Philosophers,
you belong to your Occident.
My spirit, be wary. No violent taking sides to win salvation.
Exert yourself !-Ah! science does not move fast enough for us!
-But I perceive that my spirit is asleep.
If it were always wide awake from this moment on, we should
soon have arrived at the truth, which perhaps surrounds us with
its weeping angels! . . . If it had been awake up to now, I should
not have yielded to harmful instincts at an immemorial epoch!
If it had always been wide awake, I should be sailing under
full wisdom! ...
O purity! purity!
It is this minute of wakefulness that has given me the vision of
purity!-By the spirit one goes to God!
Heart-rending misfortune!
THE LIGHTNING
.
.
.
Human toil! that is the explosion which from time to time lights
up my abyss.
"Nothing is vanity; science and forward!” cries the modern
Ecclesiastes, which is to say Everybody. And yet the carcasses of
the wicked and of the slothful fall upon the hearts of the rest.
Ah! hurry, hurry a little; out there, beyond the night, those rewards,
future, everlasting . . . shall we miss them?
- What can I do? I know toil of old; and science is too slow.
Let prayer gallop and let the light roar. . . . I see perfectly. It
is too easy, and the weather is too warm; they will pass me by. I
have my duty; I will show my pride in it, after the manner of some
others, by setting it aside.
My life is worn out. Let us make believe, let us idle away, O
pity! And we will live for our own amusement, dreaming mon-
strous loves, and fantastic universes, complaining and finding fault
with the lineaments of the world, acrobat, beggar, artist, bandit,
.
93118


24
A SEASON IN HELL
O
priest! On my bed in the hospital, the smell of incense has come
back to me so overpoweringly: keeper of the holy perfumes, con-
fessor, martyr ..
There I recognize the vile education of my childhood. What
then! ... Go my twenty years if others go twenty years. ...
No! no! at present I rebel against death! Work seems too easy
for my pride; my betrayal to the world would be too brief a pen-
alty. At the last moment I should strike out right and left .
Then,-Oh!dear, poor soul, would eternity not be lost to us!
MORNING
Had I not once an amiable, heroic, fabulous youth, to write on
leaves of gold, "too much luck!” Through what crime, through
what error, have I earned my present weakness? You who pre-
tend that animals groan with vexation, that sick men despair, that
the dead dream ill, try to tell the story of my fall and of my sleep.
I myself can no more explain than the beggar with his continual
Paters and Ave Marias. I no longer know how to talk!
Yet I believe that to-day I have finished the tale of my hell. It
was hell, certainly; the ancient one, whose gates the Son of Man
opened.
From the same desert, out of the same night, always my tired
eyes woke to the silver star, always, while the Kings of life, the
three Magi, heart, soul and mind, did not stir! When shall we go
out beyond shores and mountains, to greet the birth of the new
toil, of the new wisdom, the flight of tyrants and demons, the end
of superstition; to adore,—the first !—Christmas upon the earth?
The song of the skies, the march of peoples! Slaves, let us not
slander life.


ARTHUR RIMBAUD
25
ADIEU
Autumn already!—But why long for a sun that will last for
ever, when we are busy with the discovery of the divine light, -
far from the men who die on the seasons?
Autumn. My bark, whose sails were set in the moveless fog,
turns toward the port of misery, the immense city with skies stained
by fire and mud. Ah! the rotten rags, the bread soaked with rain,
the drunkenness, the thousand loves which crucified me. She will
have no end, then, that ghoulish queen of a million souls and
bodies, which are dead and which will be judged! I see myself
again, my skin eaten by mire and plague, my hair, my armpits full
of worms, and still bigger worms in my heart, stretched among
unknown men, ageless, feelingless ... I might have died there
Frightful evocation! I abhor squalor!
!
And I am afraid of winter because it is the season of comfort!
-Sometimes in the sky I see infinite strands covered with white
nations in joy. Above me, a great ship of gold flutters its many-
coloured pennons in the morning wind. I have created all pageants,
all triumphs, all dramas. I have attempted the invention of new
flowers, new stars, new flesh, new tongues. I have believed myself
the possessor of supernatural powers. Well! I am going to bury
my imagination and my memories! A fine artist's and story-teller's
reputation gone to the devil!
I! I who called myself a wizard or an angel, free from every
rule of morality, am brought back to earth with a job to look out for
and harsh reality to embrace! Peasant!
Am I mistaken? would charity be death's sister to me?
Finally I will ask forgiveness for having fed myself on lies, and
I am off.
But not one friendly hand! and where shall I ask for help?
Yes, this new hour is at worst very hard.
For I can say that victory is mine: the teeth-gritting, fire-breath-
ing and pestilential gasps abate. All memories of the world are
fading. My last regrets are withdrawn,-envy of beggars, thieves,
friends of death, hangers-back of all sorts.—You damned ones, if
I were to avenge myself!


26
A MEMORY OF THE PLAYERS
.
It is necessary to be absolutely modern.
No canticles: hold to the step you have gained. Sore night!
The dried blood smokes on my face, and I have nothing at my
back but this horrible bush! The battle of the spirit is as
brutal as the clash of men; but the perception of justice is the
pleasure of God alone.
This, however, is the vigil. Welcome every influx of true vigour
and tenderness. And at dawn, armed with eager patience, we will
enter the splendid towns.
What was I saying about a friendly hand! One advantage is
that I can laugh at the old, false passions, and put to shame those
lying couples, -I have seen the hell of women down there;—and
it will be legitimate for me to possess the truth in a soul and body.
April-August, 1873.
A MEMORY OF THE PLAYERS IN A
MIRROR AT MIDNIGHT
BY JAMES JOYCE
They mouth love's language. Gnash
The thirteen teeth
Your lean jaws grin with. Lash
Your itch and quailing, nude greed of the flesh.
Love's breath in you is stale, worded or sung,
As sour as cat's breath,
Harsh of tongue.
This grey that stares
Lies not, stark skin and bone.
Leave greasy lips their kissing. None
Will choose her what you see to mouth upon.
Dire hunger holds his hour.
Pluck forth your heart, saltblood, a fruit of tears:
Pluck and devour.
a


THE EXCURSION
BY KENNETH BURKE
HA
AVING nothing to do, and having searched in vain among
the notes of a piano for something to think on, I started off
on a walk, trusting that I might scent a scandal on the breeze, or
see God's toe peep through the sky. I passed a barber shop, a gro-
cery store, a little Italian girl, a chicken coop, a road house, an
abandoned
quarry, a field of nervous wheat. All this distance I had
walked under God's blue sky, and still without a thought. But at
last, after trudging on for hours, I came upon a thought. Miles
upon miles I had walked for a thought, and at last I came upon an
ant hill.
Idly curious, I stopped to look at the ants. They would go from
one place to another and return to that first place again, and for no
reason that I could see. Little ants with big burdens, big ants with
bigger burdens, and ants with no burdens, the most frightened and
panicky of them all. As I watched them they seemed so human to
me that my heart went out to them. “Poor little devils,” I said.
But I grew tired of watching the swarming mass of them. "I
shall watch just one of them,” I said to myself after much delibera-
tion. And I picked out one frightened little ant to watch. He went
running about unaware of my presence, not knowing that a great
god was looking down on him, just as I did not know but that a
great god might be looking down on me. And with the toe of my
shoe I marked out a rut in his path, so that he had to climb over it.
And then I began dropping little bits of sand on him, and turning
him over with a blade of grass. "I am his destiny," I whispered;
the conception thrilled me.
As the poor little fellow rushed about in mortal terror, I realized
how massive his belief in life must be at this moment, how all-con-
suming his tragedy; my pity went out to him. But my blade of
grass was too limber; I picked up a little stone to push him with. I
drew a circle. "May God strike me dead, little ant, if you get out
of that circle.” I took that oath, and the battle was on. It was
long and uncertain, with victory now on his side, and now on mine.
>
a
a


28
THE EXCURSION
a
The little ant, in a last despairing burst, made for the edge of the
circle, and crossed it. I was aroused. “I'll kill the ant,” I shouted,
and brought the stone down on his body, his passions, his dreams.
Destiny had spoken. For an instant I was ashamed, for I had been
unfair. He had beaten me under the terms I had made myself. I
should have let him
go
free.
I began watching other ants. They irritated me—they were so
earnest, so faithful. Two ants came up and touched. I wondered
what that could mean. Do ants talk? Then I watched one of the
ants which had touched the other to see if it touched still other ants.
For it might be a herald of some sort; perhaps ants do talk.
One little ant was tugging and pulling at a dead bug. Slowly,
carefully, I took my stone and drew it over two of his legs, so that
he was wounded grievously, and began writhing in agony. My face
was distorted with compassion; how my heart bled for him!
I ran the stone across his other legs, and the motion was like a
thrust into my own flesh. I was almost sick with pity for the poor
little ant, and to end his suffering I killed him. Wide regret came
on me. "Perhaps," I thought, "perhaps he was a poet. Perhaps I
have killed a genius.”
And I began stepping on the other ants, digging up the ant hill,
scattering destruction broadcast about me. When my work was
finished, and only a few half-mangled ants remained alive, my sor-
row for the poor little ants had grown until it weighed on me, and
crushed the vitality out of me. “The poor little ants,” I kept mur-
muring, “the poor, miserable little ants.” And I was bitter with
the thought of how cruel the universe is, and how needlessly things
must suffer. I stood gazing at the death and slaughter about me,
stupefied with calm horror at what I had done. I prayed to God.
“O Great God,” I prayed, throwing back my head toward
Heaven and stretching out my hands like Christ on the cross, “O
Great God”—but I didn't really throw back my head, for I still
kept looking at the ants, and I did not address God, for at times I
even wonder if there be no God. I didn't do these things, I say,
since I was too intently watching the ants. “O Almighty God,” I
thundered out in mighty prayer, throwing back my head toward
Heaven and stretching out my hands like Christ on the crucifix,
"Thou who art Ruler of us all. Now I know why we suffer, and
ache, and moan, and I pity Thee, God.”



ADAM. BY GEORGE GREY BARNARD





THE SOUL OF KAJN TAFHA
BY KENNETH BURKE
NO
a
OBODY knew when Kajn Tafha had been young. Old Kajn
was like the great trees, which in their turn are like the great
angry rocks. The point of his beard extended down to his navel,
and the hair of his brows grew over his eye-sockets like shrubbery
about the Poison Cave. Nobody knew anything about Kajn save
that he was as wise as the little animals and that he ate no meat.
The lobes of his ears had been torn off; some say it had been done by
a passing demon who tried to whisper false counsel, and bit at him
when angered by his indifference; others say the priests had done it
as a punishment when Kajn called it a sin to throw she-babies into
the Ganges; but no one knew. Mothers frightened bad children by
telling them Kajn would get them, and yet when people were sick
unto death they called for Kajn. Kajn was very wise, so wise that
it is horrible to think about.
Then one day, just before the last bleeding agony of the sun,
when the dirty brats were gathered in front of their own homes, and
every one was tired, Kajn appeared in the midst of the village, and
lifted
up
his voice in prayer to his own gods.
“O ye miserable gods, you have made me wise, until I can fore-
O
I
tell the darkening of the moon, and know to fear not the quaking
of the earth; nor do I fear the heavens spewing fire and turmoil.
For years I have walked upright with the awareness of my
wisdom,
and now that I am wise, what has it gotten me? The ignorant
children about me pull back their lips from their teeth, and I know
that is a sign of laughter, which is a sign of happiness. I would give
my soul to be one of them. The weary toiler of the field comes home
and looks at his woman, and the look is one which, with all my
wisdom, I cannot understand, but which I would give my soul to
be able to practise for a day. Last night, while I read of imminent
spirits, and told myself how wise I was to know of them, I heard the
voice of a young girl swell above the noise of the little animals, and
I was made uncomfortable, and wanted things. And for those
things I would sell my soul. Like a seed fallen on the rocks, I am


30
THE SOUL OF KAJN TAFHA
withering away; I am dry and useless, like that seed. I turn against
you; I will sell
my
soul.”
And thereupon Kajn spat, and walked out of the village.
And the story went through the village like a wind of sudden
death. And when Adab Teegal heard it, he said:
“I am only an ignorant pariah; I know nothing of the things that
Kajn knows, but I have made two stocks of wheat sprout where my
father had made but one, and I have seen the ocean. I must find
Kajn Tafha.” And he walked out of the village in the direction
Kajn had walked.
Outside the village, Kajn came upon a rich merchant who was
riding on the howdah of a white elephant, with tusks that were
carved with sacred inscriptions. His servants carried caskets of
rugs and far ivory, and opium brought from a great distance. Oc-
casionally one of the servants would stumble under his excessive
burden, and the merchant would order him beaten. At such times
his own cries of delight were louder than the servant's cries of
anguish.
“I would sell my soul,” Kajn called up to the merchant as he lay
back on this rolling mountain of flesh.
“I will barter with you ivory taken from male elephants that live
beneath the earth, and which breathe out fire and pestilence. I have
rugs that were woven by monstrous spiders bigger than oaths, and
opium which will make you dream of nine evil women. Here is the
crystal of Confucius; if you gaze into it you will know all things
And here is a potion made of the eyes of live virgins
which will teach you that one thing. The man who rubs this stone
will live though vast throngs wail and die about him. And here
is a magic fruit, which you can eat for ever.”
“I would sell my soul,” Kajn answered, “and I will sell it for
one thing—youth.”
Whereupon the merchant became angry, and jabbed a goad into
the elephant's ear, until the animal roared with pain. Then he
began laughing disagreeably. "Listen, old man. When I have
passed out of sight, move the first finger of the hand on the side of
your heart, move it so fast that it drops off. And when it drops in
the dust, you will be young again.” But Kajn, who was wise,
knew that the merchant was toying with him; he continued on
down the road without moving his finger.
but one.


KENNETH BURKE
31
Then Adab Teegal came upon the merchant, and addressed him,
saying:
"I am only an ignorant pariah, but I own two houses where my
father owned one, and I have seen the ocean. And now I am look-
ing for an old man, Kajn Tafha, who is very wise, and passed down
this road, and wants to sell his soul. And I wonder if the magni-
ficent stranger has seen him.” But since he was a pariah, the mer-
chant did not answer him; one of the servants, however, furtively
pointed down the road, and Adab knew that Kajn had passed.
In the meanwhile Kajn had come upon a very golden pathway
leading from the main road. It was the pathway to the Beautiful
Woman. He entered, and found her watching two naked servants
at play. Their game was to wrestle before a table of gorgeous
foods, and each was to prevent the other from eating. The Beauti-
ful Woman lay watching the snake-jewels the merchant had just
left her. They writhed in her hand, and tried to crawl between her
fingers. When Kajn appeared, she laughed, and sang, “What do
you want here, old man ?”
"I would sell my soul,” Kajn answered, “I would sell my soul
for youth.”
“I don't buy souls, old man. I sell my own.”
And Kajn went on down the road.
Then Adab Teegal came upon the very golden pathway. He
first prayed for protection, and then entered. The Beautiful Woman
was teasing her flowers. She would dart a glance at them, and they
would blossom and give forth delicate odours, for they loved her.
And when she looked away, they would close up again, and lose
their fragrance.
"I am only an ignorant pariah,” Adab Teegal said to her, “but
I have had two wives where my father had but one, and I have seen
the ocean. And now I am looking for an old man, Kajn Tafha,
who is very wise, and passed down this road, and wants to sell his
soul, and I wonder if the Beautiful Woman has seen him.”
"It is late, and will soon be dark. The night will be restless with
prowling things, and spirits that whine. Perhaps the stranger may
care to lodge here until sunrise. For I have seen no old man pass
here.” But her jealous flowers cried out that she lied, and Adab
Teegal hastened on down the road.
And in the meantime Kajn came upon another old man who was


32
THE SOUL OF KAJN TAFHA
niy
standing on his head in the middle of the road. And when Kajn
Tafha asked him why he stood on his head, he replied, "If I stand
on my feet, my reflection in the Sacred Lake is upside-down. But
if I learn to stand on my head, then I shall exist properly in the
Waters of the Gods."
Kajn marveled at his piety, and was ashamed to tell him that he
wanted to sell his soul. They blessed each other, and Kajn passed
on down the road into the gloom.
When Adab Teegal came upon the pious man it was so dark he
could scarcely see him. “I am only an ignorant pariah,” he said, ,
“but I have prayed to two gods where my father prayed to one, and
I
I have seen the ocean.” And when he asked the old man about Kajn,
the old man told him to hurry and he would catch him, for Kajn
had only just passed. Adab plunged into the squirming darkness.
Finally he heard faltering footsteps ahead. “Kajn Tafha, Kajn
Tafha,” he shouted, and the answer came back out of the blackness,
“Yes, I am Kajn Tafha, the wise man, and I would sell my soul,
and if my ears are honest, I hear the voice of Adab Teegal.”
“I am only an ignorant pariah, and not fit to talk of learned
things with Kajn Tafha, but I have seen the ocean. If Kajn Tafha
will tell me where he is in the darkness, I will lead him home.”
“Onward I go, Adab Teegal, for I would sell my soul.”
“I am only an ignorant pariah, but I have seen the ocean twice
where my father saw it but once, and maybe we can't sell our souls,
and maybe we don't even have souls to sell.”
Then Adab Teegal heard such a horrible shriek in the darkness
that he ran all the way home, and nothing was ever heard again of
Kajn Tafha.


AT JOAQUIN MILLER'S HEIGHTS
AFTER TWENTY YEARS
BY YONÉ NOGUCHI
This place was sacred before, because of his living breath,
This place is doubly sacred now with his death:
With my head low into the thoughts of twenty years since I with
him lived together,
I walk by the paths where his shadow (God bless thee, Joaquin,
God's gardener!)
Writes epitaphs among the petals of the roses.
"Your study awaits you as of old,” were the last words of the last
letter he wrote me;
Now I returned here—Alas, twenty years already passed!
The youth whom he called “My son” lost many hairs, is prone to
talk even sorrow.
How glad I was in night, with thee, Joaquin, to sleep amid the
stars in skies
And the star-dusts on the earth (who could tell where the stars
left off for the village lights),
That, I thought, appeared by thy command, “Let there be light!"
Thou wert a prophet, or a god, in top-boots, with a bearskin on
shoulders.
How in day we climbed up the mists furrowed by the hills,
Where we buried words and dug God's silence!
What a mighty silence there sailed in from the San Francisco
Bay's silvery room!
Again what a silence, when the king-like sun sank down through
the gate!
Joaquin, at such a moment, our ears opened to the crickets of eve,
How silently we roamed, and smiled to the big lantern of the sky.
I am glad, Joaquin, thou sleepest at the top of thy beloved
Heights,
Where, in spring, out of the purple air poppies and buttercups
spill songs of laughter,


34
AT JOAQUIN MILLER’S HEIGHTS
In Winter, like the ghost-battalions mists take possession of the
place,
When thou, Joaquin, I believe, movest out of thy grave to ride on
the mists,
As in thy song, “Columbus,” singing: "Sail on! Sail on! and on!”
Oh thou art, as in life's days, a mighty man of life and song.
I am not here, Joaquin, with idle songs of tears,
But, as thou commandest, seeking a rest between life's battles;
I cannot think thou art dead quite many years now,
I feel I hear a voice saying: “Joaquin has gone to town for a leg
of mutton,
Or a bottle of claret; wait, Noguchi, he will soon come home.”
Very good! With head and foot set to the evening smell of musk,
I will wait for his face beaming with shout: "Oh, Yoné, at last,
after twenty long years!”
November, 1919


1
THE RENDING
BY JAMES OPPENHEIM
.
T!
HERE is a bitter moment in youth, and this moment had
come to Paul. He had passed his mother's door without enter-
ing or even calling out to her, and had climbed on doggedly to the
top floor. Now he was shut in his sanctuary, his room, sitting at his
table. His head rested on a hand, his dark eyes had an expression
of confused anguish, a look of guilt and sternness mingled. .
He could no more have visited his mother, he told himself, than he
could voluntarily have chopped off his hand. And yet he was
amazed at the cruelty in himself, a hard cold cruelty which
prompted the thought: "Even if this means her death or my death,
I shall go through with this.”
It was because of such a feeling that he couldn't talk to his
mother. Paul was one of those sensitive youths who are delivered
over to their emotions—swept now and then by exaltation, now by
despair, now by anguish or rage, always excessive, never fully under
control. He was moody, and always seemed unable to say the right
thing or do the right thing. Suddenly the emotion used him as a
mere instrument and came forth in a shameful nakedness. But the
present situation was by all odds the most terrible he had faced:
for against the cold cruelty, there throbbed, warm and unutterably
sweet, like a bird in a nest of iron, an intense childish longing and
love..
You see, Paul was nineteen, the eldest son in a family of four,
and his mother was a widow. She was not poor: they lived in
this large comfortable house on a side street east of Central Park.
But neither was she well off, and Paul was very magnanimous; he
had given up college and gone to work as a clerk. Perhaps it
wasn't only magnanimity, but also pride. He was proud to be the
oldest son, to play father, to advise with his mother about the chil-
dren, to be the man of the house. Yet he was always a mere child,
living, as his two sisters and his brother lived, in delicate response
to his mother's feelings and wishes. And he wanted to be a good
son: he thought nothing was more wonderful than a child who


36
THE RENDING
was good to his mother. She had given all for her children, they
in return must give all to her. But against this spirit of sacrifice
there arose a crude, ugly, healthy, monstrous force, a terrible thing
that kept whispering to him: "You can't live your mother's life:
you must live your own life.”
Once, when he had said something conceited, his mother had
flashed out at him: “You're utterly selfish.” This stung and
humiliated him. Yet this terrible monster in himself seemed con-
cerned about nothing but self. It seemed a sort of devil always
tempting him to eat of forbidden fruit. Lovely fruit, too. There
was Agnes, for instance: Agnes, a mere girl, with a pigtail down
her back, daughter of the fishman on Third Avenue.
His mother held Agnes in horror. That her son should be in
love with a fishman's daughter! And all the child in Paul, re-
sponding so sensitively to his mother's feelings, agreed to this. He
had contempt for himself, he struggled against the romantic Thou-
sand and One Nights glamour, which turned Third Avenue into a
Lovers' Lane of sparkling lights. He struggled, vainly. Poetry
was his passion: and he steeped himself in Romeo and Juliet, and
in Keats's St. Agnes' Eve and The Pot of Basil. . . . It was then
the great struggle with his mother began, and the large house be-
came a gloomy vault, something dank, damp, sombre, something
out of Poe, where a secret duel to the death was being fought,
mostly in undertones and sometimes with sharp cries and stab-
bing words.
Now, this evening, with his head in his hand, he knew that the
end had already been reached. To pass his mother's door without
a greeting, especially since he was well aware that she was ill, was
so unprecedented, so violent an act, that it seemed to have the
finality of something criminal. His mother had said two days ago:
“This can't go on. It is killing me.”
“All right,” he flashed. “It sha'n't. I'll
,
get out.”
"I suppose you'll marry,” she said, “on fifteen a week.”.
He spoke bitterly:
“I'll get out of New York altogether. I'll work my way through
college. ..."
She almost sneered at the suggestion. And this sneer rankled.
He telegraphed his friend, Samuel, at a little fresh-water college,
and Samuel telegraphed back: "Come.” That day he drew his


JAMES OPPENHEIM
37
.
money from the bank, and got his tickets for the midnight sleeper.
And he did all this with perfect cruelty. .
But now the time had come to go, and things were different. An
autumn wind was blowing out of the park, doubtless carrying
seeds and dead leaves, and gusting down the street, blowing about
the sparkling lamps, eddying in the area-ways, rapping in passing
on the loose windows. . . . The lights in the houses were all
warm, because you saw only the glowing yellow shades: Third
Avenue was lit up and down with shop-windows, and people were
doing late marketing. It was a night when nothing seemed so sweet,
or sane, or comfortable, as a soft-lighted room, and a family sitting
together. Soft voices, familiarity, warm intimacy, the feeling of
security and ease, the unspoken welling of love and understanding:
these belonged to such a night, when the whole world seemed dying
and there was only man to keep the fires burning against death.
And so, out of its tomb, the little child in Paul stepped out again,
beautiful and sweet with love and longing. And this little child
said to him: "Sacrifice-surrender - let the hard heart melt with
pity. . . . There is no freedom except in love, which gives all.”
For a moment Paul's vivid imagination, which presented everything
to him like works of dramatic art, pictured himself going down the
steps, as once he had done, creeping to his mother's bed, Alinging
himself down, sobbing and moaning, "Forgive me. Forgive me.'
But just then he heard the stairs creak and thought that his
eldest sister was coming up to question him. His heart began a
frightened throbbing: he shook with a guilty fear, and at once
he saved himself with a bitter resurgence of cruel anger. He hated
his sister, he told himself, with a livid hatred. She always sided
with his mother. She was bossy and smart and high and mighty.
He knew what he would do. He jumped up, went to the door,
and locked it. So—she could beat her head on the door, for all
he cared!
He packed. He got out his valise, and filled it with his neces-
saries. He would let the rest go: the books, the old clothes. He
was going to start life all over again. He was going to wipe out
9
the past.
When he was finished, he anxiously opened his pocket-book to
see if the tickets were safe. He looked at them. It was now ten
o'clock. Two hours—and then the long train would pull out, and


38
THE RENDING
.
.
.
.
he would be gone.
. . To-morrow morning they'd come down-
stairs. His sister probably would sit at the foot of the table, instead
of himself. The table would seem small with himself gone. Per-
haps the house would seem a little empty. Automatically they
would wait for the click of his key in the front door lock at seven
in the evening. He would not come home at all. . .
His mother might die. She had told him this was killing her....
It was so easy for him to go, so hard for her to stay. . . She
had invested most of her capital of hopes and dreams and love in
him: he was the son; he was the first man. And now he was
shattering the very structure of her life. ...
Easy for him to go! He slumped into the chair again, at the
table. . . . The wind blew strongly, and he knew just how the
grey street looked with its spots of yellow sparkling lamplight; its
shadows, its glowing windows. He knew the smell of the
fish-shop, the strange raw sea-smell, the sight of glittering iridescent
scales, the beauty of lean curved fishes, the red of broiled lobsters,
the pink-cheeked swarthy fishman, the dark loveliness of Agnes.
He had written to Agnes. His mother didn't know of it, but he
was done with Agnes. Agnes meant nothing to him. She had
only been a way out, something to cling to, something to fight for
in this fight for his life.
Fight for his life! Had he not read of this in books, how the
young must slay the old in order that life might go on, just as the
earth must die in autumn so that the seeds of spring may be planted ?
Had he not read Ibsen's Master Builder, where the ageing hero hears
the dread doom which youth brings, “the younger generation knock-
ing at the door?” He was the younger generation, he was the young
hero. And now, at once, a vivid dramatization took place in his
brain: it unwound clear as hallucination. He forgot everything
else, he sat there as a writer sits, living his fiction, making strange
gestures with face and hands, muttering words under his breath. ...
In this phantasy, he saw himself rising, appearing a little older, a
little stronger, and on his face a look of divine compassion and
understanding, yet a firmness inexorable as fate. He repeated Ham-
let's words: "For I am cruel only to be kind.” Blame life, fate,
the gods who decree that a man must live his own life: don't
blame me.
He unlocked the door, crossed the big hall, stepped down the
.


JAMES OPPENHEIM
39
.
.
.
stairs. His mother's door was shut. The younger generation must
knock at it. He knocked. A low, sad voice said: “Come." He
opened the door.
This was the way it always was: a pin-point of light by the west-
ern window, a newspaper pinned to the glass globe of the gas-jet to
shield his mother's eyes, the wide range of warm shadow, and in
the shadow the two beds. But his sister was not in one of them.
His mother was alone...
He went to the bedside.
"Mother!"
"Paul !”
He took her hand.
"Are
you feeling better ?” he asked.
“A little more quiet, Paul.
“I am very glad.
Now there was silence. . . . Then he spoke quietly, honestly,
candidly. It was the only way. Why can't human beings be simple
with one another, be sweetly reasonable? Isn't a little understand-
ing worth more than pride and anger? To understand is to forgive.
Surely any one must know that.
Starting to speak, he sat down on the chair beside the bed, still
holding her hand.
“Mother, come, let's talk to one another. You think perhaps I
have stopped loving you. It isn't true. I love you deeply. All
this is breaking my heart. But how can I help it? Can't you see
that I am young, and my life all before me? The best of your
life is behind you. You have lived, I haven't. You have tasted
the sweet mysteries of love, the agonies of death and birth, the
terrors of lonely struggle. And I must have these, too.
hungry for them. I can't help myself. I am like a leaf in the
wind, like a rain-drop in the storm. . . . How can you keep me
here? If you compel me, I'll become a shadow, all twisted and
broken. I won't be a man, but a helpless child. Perhaps I shall
go out of my mind. And what good will that do you? You will
suffer more if I stay, than if I go. Oh, understand me, mother,
understand me!"
His mother began to cry. She spoke at first as she always spoke,
and then more like a mother in a poem.
“Understand? What do you understand? You know nothing
.
.
I am
а
a


40
THE RENDING
.
.
about life. Oh, I only wish you had children and your children
turned against you! That's the only way that you will ever
learn. I worked for you so hard. I gave up everything for
my children. And
your
father died, and I went on alone, a woman
with a great burden. ... What sort of life have I had? Sacrifice,
toil, tears. . . . I skimped along. I wore the same dress year
I
after year, for five, six years. . . . I hung over your sick-beds,
I
I taught you at my knees. I have known the bitterness of child-
bearing, and the bitter cry of children. . . I have fought alone
I
for
my
little ones.
... And you, Paul! You who were the
darling of my heart, my little man, you who said you would take
,
your father's place and take care of me and of your sisters and
brother! You who were to repay me for everything; to give me a
future, to comfort my old age, the staff I leaned on, my comfort,
my son! I was proud of you as you grew up: so proud to see your
pride, and your ambition. I knew you would succeed, that you
would have fame and power and wealth, and I should be the
proudest mother in the world! This was my dream. ..
.. Now I
see you a failure, one who cares for nothing but self-indulgence and
pleasure, a rolling stone, a flitter from place to place, and I-I am
an old woman, deserted, left alone to wither in bitterness. ... I I
gave everything to you—and you—you give back despair, loneliness,
anguish. I gave you life: you turn on me and destroy me for the
gift. Oh, mother-love! What man will understand it—the
piercing anguish, the roots that clutch the deep heart? . . . I feel
the chill of death creeping over me...
The tears rolled down Paul's cheeks. He pressed her hand now
with both of his.
“Oh, mother, but I do understand! I have understood always,
I have tried so hard to help you. I have tried so hard to be a good
son. But this is something greater than I. We are in the hands of
God, mother, and it is the law that the young must leave the old.
Why do parents expect the impossible of their children? Does not
the Bible say, “You must leave father and mother, and cleave to
me? Didn't you leave grandmother and grandpa, to go to your
husband? Can't you remember when you were young,
and
your
whole soul carried you away to your own life and your own future?
Mother, let us part with understanding, let us part with love."
"But when are you going, Paul ?”
.
.


JAMES OPPENHEIM
41
.
.
“To-night.”
His mother flung her arms about him desperately and clung to
him. .
"I can't let you go, Paul,” she moaned.
"Oh, mother,” he sobbed. “This is breaking my heart. ...
"It is Agnes you are going to,” she whispered.
“No, mother,” he cried. “It is not Agnes. I am going to college.
I shall never marry. I shall still take care of
you.
Think-every
vacation I will be back here.
She relaxed, lay back, and his inventions failed. He had a con-
fused sense of soothing her, of gentleness and reconciliation, of a
last good-bye.
And now he sat, head on hand, slowly realizing again the little
gas-lit room, the shaking window, the autumn wind. A throb of
fear pulsed through his heart. He had passed his mother's door
without greeting her. And there was his valise, and here his tickets.
And the time? It was nearly eleven. ... A great heaviness of
futility and despair weighed him down. He felt incapable of
action. He felt that he had done some terrible deed-like striking
his mother in the face—something unforgivable, unreversible,
struck through and through with finality. . . . He felt more and
more cold and brutal, with the sullenness of the friminal who can't
undo his crime and won't admit his guilt. : : :
Was it all over, then? . Was he really leaving? : Fear, and a
prophetic breath of the devastating loneliness he should yet know,
came upon him, paralyzed his mind, nade him weak and aghast.
He was going out into the night of death, launching on his frail
raft into the barren boundless ocean of darkness, leaving the last
landmarks, drifting out in utter nakedness and loneliness. All
the future grew black and impenetrable; but he knew shapes of ter-
ror, demons of longing and grief and guilt loomed there, waiting
for him. He knew that he was about to understand a little of life
in a very ancient and commonplace way: the way of experience
and of reality: that at first hand he was to have the taste against
his palate of that bitterness and desolation, that terror and helpless-
ness, which make the songs and fictions of man one endless trag-
edy. · Destiny was taking him, as the jailer who comes to the
condemned man's cell on the morning of the execution. There
was no escape. No end, but death.
.
.


42
THE RENDING
.
.
He was leaving everything that was comfort in a bleak world,
everything that was safe and tried and known in a world of un-
thinkable perils and mysteries. Only this he knew, still a child,
still on the inside of his mother's house. ... He knew now how
terrible, how deep, how human were the cords that bound him to
his mother, how fierce the love, by the fear and deadly helplessness
he felt. ... What could he have been about all these months of
darkening the house, of paining his mother and the children, of
bringing matters to such inexorable finalities? Was he sane? Was
he not possessed of some demon, some beast of low desire? Free-
dom? What was freedom? Could there be freedom without love?
And now, as he sat there, there came slow deliberate footsteps on
the stairs. There was no mistaking the sounds. It was Cora, his
older sister. · His heart palpitated wildly, he shook with fear,
the colour left his cheeks, and he tried to set his face and his throat
like flint not to betray himself. She came straight on. She knocked.
“Paul,” she said in a peremptory tone, clothed with all the au-
thority of his mother.
He grew cold all over, his eyelids narrowed; he felt brutal. ...
“What is it?'' he asked hard.
“Mother wants you to come right down.”
"I will come," he said.:
Her footsteps depaộted. He rose slowly, heavily, like the
man who must now face thọ exécutioner, ';. . He stuck his pocket-
book back in his coat and picked up his valise. Mechanically he
looked about the room. Then:hë:unlocked and opened the door,
shut off the gas, and went into the lighted hall.
And as he descended the steps he felt ever smaller before the
growing terror of the world. Never had he been more of a child
a
than at this moment: never had he longed more fiercely to sob and
cry out and give over everything. ... How had this guilt de-
scended upon him? What had he done? Why was all this neces-
sary? Who was forcing him through this strange and frightful
experience? He went on, lower and lower. ...
The door of his mother's room was a little open. It was all
as it had always been—the pin-point of light, the shading news-
paper, the sick-room silence, the warm shadow. . . . He paused
a second to summon up strength, to combat the monster of fear
and guilt in his heart. He tried with all his little boyish might to
.


JAMES OPPENHEIM
43
9
.
.
O
smooth out his face, to set it straight and firm. He pushed the
door, set down the valise, entered: pale, large-eyed, looking hard
and desperate.
He did not see his sister at all, though she sat under the light.
His mother he hardly saw: had the sense of a towel binding her
head, and the dim form under the bedclothes. He stepped clumsily
-he was trembling so—to the foot of her bed, and grasped the
brass rail for support. ...
His mother's voice was low and thick; a terrible voice. Her
throat was swollen, and she could speak only with difficulty. The
voice accused him. It said plainly: "It was you did this."
She said: “Paul, this has got to end.”
His tongue seemed the fork of a snake, his words came with such
deadly coldness.
“It will end to-night.'
"How ... to-night?”
“I'm leaving . . I'm going west.
“West. . Where?”
"To Sam's...
“Oh,” said his mother. ...
There was a long cruel silence. He shut his eyes, overcome with
a sort of horror. ... Then she turned her face a little away, and
he heard the faintly breathed words ...
“This is the end of me. ..
Still he said nothing. She turned toward him, with a groan.
"Have you nothing to say?"
Again he spoke with deadly coldness ...
"Nothing. :
She waited a moment: then she spoke .
"You have no feelings. When you set out to do a thing, you
will trample over every one. I have never been able to do anything
with
you.
You
may become a great man, Paul: but I pity any
one who loves you, any one who gets in your path. You will kill
whatever holds you—always. . . . I was a fool to give birth to
—
you: a greater fool to count on you. Well, it's over. ...
You have your way. ..
He was amazed: he trembling there, guilty, afraid, horrified, his
whole soul beseeching the comfort of her arms! He a cold
trampler?
a
O
.
.


44
THE RENDING
.
.
He stood, with all the feeling of one who is falsely condemned,
and yet with all the guilt of one who has sinned. ...
And then, suddenly, a wild animal cry came from his mother's
throat.
“Oh,” she cried, “how terrible it is to have children!"
His heart echoed her cry. ... The executioner's knife seemed
to strike his throat.
He stood a long while in the silence. . . , Then his mother
turned in the bed, sideways, and covered her face with the counter-
pane.
His sister rose up stiffly, whispering:
“She's going to sleep.”
He stood, dead. . . . He turned like a wound-up mechanism,
went to the door, picked up his valise, and fumbled his way through
the house. . . . The outer door he shut very softly. .
...
He must take the Lexington Avenue car. Yes; that was the
;
quickest way. He faced west. The great wind of autumn came
with a glorious gusto, doubtless with flying seeds and flying leaves,
chanting the song of the generations, and of them that die and of
them that are born.
•
.
.


THE GARDEN OF CARESSES
Moorish Cacidas of the tenth century
BY A. MIRCEA EMPERLE
HER NAME
If you want to know the name of her whom I loved best,
then try to remember the name of her who made me
suffer most.
Should your memory falter, should you not have known
her, so shape your lips as if to kiss. Thus was her name.
MY BELOVED
Whiter, and more luxurious than the tents of the Emir,
and even by far more precious, are your breasts,
-tents of
my
love-oh!
my
beloved!
When, in the dazzling noon, I hide my face in your
hair and search for your gaze, then your eyes are
like two stars breathing perfume into my night.
On the day, my beloved, when I shall learn that another
one has lain in your hair, that your eyes have radiated
light into the face of another-no! on that day I
shall not reach for my dagger, nor seek the aid of
poison. I shall whistle to my greyhounds and go to
bury for ever your silken kerchief with which I dry
my tears.


56
THE GARDEN OF CARESSES
THE SLEEP OF THE GREYHOUNDS
My two greyhounds rest in the sharp shadow of the
cypresses like arrows in a quiver. They close their
eyes and dream of your caresses. Your smooth hand
glides over them and they feel a fresh coolness
from the brook of Lebanon.
THE POTTER
Bent over the curves as the lover bends over
the carpet where lies his beloved, thus rest
the radiant eyes of the potter on his clay.
And narrowing the circle lovingly, he fondles
neck and mouth, the shape, then the entire body,
and his devotion to his work is like a long-
enduring kiss.
The shape-receiving earth winds itself in a
last embrace, and I admire the finished urn as
I admire your body when, from our bed, it rises
ecstatic and naked.


THE DANCE
BY LES MARTOVITCH
Translated from the Ukrainian by R. L. Wissotsky-Kuntz
VOLODIM
1
:
MIR, a recent graduate of a theological school, was
just about to leave the ball-room, when the dance-master an-
nounced the sixth figure of the quadrille, and the music struck up a
popular air. Volodimir remained for the sake of the music, which
brought to him memories of his school days. True, there was
nothing pleasant about those times, but those reminiscences drew
him out of his present state of dissatisfaction.
Volodimir had decided to get married, and it was this decision
that brought him to this ball-room. But after having spent a few
hours at the ball, he came to the conclusion that it was absurd to
attempt to choose a wife at a dance. An idealist and dreamer, the
young theologist hoped to find a wife who could understand and
share his ideas and impulses.
But here, at the ball, how could he begin? He had no acquaint-
ances, and surely, he could not just go over to one of the women
and say: "Pardon me, I should like to talk to you and see whether
"
you are the type of woman I should desire to make my wife.” Even
if he would not word his thought this way, he imagined it written
on his forehead in blood-red letters. With such thoughts passing
through his mind, Volodimir lost hope of finding there a wife who
would come up to his expectations. “The women here have their
holiday masks on, and their real selves are carefully concealed.”
These meditations left Volodimir very much dissatisfied with him-
self and his surroundings, and were it not for the familiar air he
would have left the ball-room. Gradually his dissatisfaction be-
came dissolved by the associations connected with the music. He
calmly watched the dancing women. The ladies, led by the dance-
master, formed a long chain, which glittered with the bright hues
of evening clothes, and glowed with the warmth of bare skin.
Volodimir could see only the back of this live chain. He soon
found himself scrutinizing the bare shoulders.


48
THE DANCE
a
.
Here were broad, plump shoulders of a stout young woman.
They wrinkled slightly around the shoulder blades. When the
owner of these shoulders turned around, Volodimir noticed a double
chin and the tip of a pug nose. Then followed a row of shoulders
-slim and stout, smooth and wrinkled, according to the position
of the arms. The shoulders of a tall woman held Volodimir's eyes
for a while. They seemed to differ from all the other shoulders.
They also changed with every move of their owner, but the skin
had a peculiar natural lustre, which was not affected by the artifi-
cial lights. Absorbed in the admiration of the wonderful shoulders,
the theologist lost the opportunity of seeing the tall woman's face.
But he was sure that he would recognize her by those shoulders.
To see those marvelous shoulders again, to find their owner, be-
came Volodimir's passionate desire. He searched all over the ball-
room, but it was impossible to find her in the crowded room. Vo-
lodimir felt uneasy at the thought that the girl with the beautiful
shoulders might leave before he had a chance to see her once more.
Suddenly he saw her. . . . He knew her by her gleaming skin.
A glow radiated from her bare neck and bosom, her face, and even
her hair. This glow caressed Volodimir's eyes, and gave his heart
a feeling of happiness and ease.
Although he looked at her very closely, Volodimir did not know
the expression of her face. He saw that she was a blonde with an
oval face, but could not even decide upon the colour of her eyes.
Her presence awoke a strange rapturous feeling in the theologist's
soul, which he could never put into words. Even if he would not
know her appearance, this ecstatic feeling would always foretell
the approach of the unknown woman. Volodimir impatiently
waited for the end of the dance, for he was determined to make the
acquaintance of the lady with the magnificent shoulders. But the
dance was in full swing. He saw her once more, and again his
heart throbbed and quivered. She was dancing with a man much
shorter than she. What was it that made her white skin glitter?
It seemed to penetrate through her clothes and lend warmth to her
dress. “During the quadrille,” thought Volodimir, “the women
turned from side to side to show off their bodies; but when do we
see their souls ?”
This thought irritated him. "What is her soul to me?” thought
he. “Do I want to marry her ?”


LES MARTOVITCH
49
He felt frightened and ashamed, but knew not whether it was
caused by his thoughts or her presence.
The quadrille finally came to an end. Volodimir watched the
object of his thoughts reach her chair, and as soon as the music
started to play a galop, asked her to dance. She rose and put her
left arm on his shoulder. But in his extreme excitement Volodimir
found it impossible to dance, and soon she sat on a chair, while he
stood near her, fearing to say a word. The lady was fanning her-
self, turning her head from side to side, and paid little attention to
Volodimir. He looked at her, addressing her in his thoughts:
"Please read the stamp on my brow, and answer, I implore you!
"You must be tired,” ventured he, looking first at her smooth,
low forehead, then at her white bosom, the sight of which sent a
thrill through his body.
"Is this love ?” thought he with fear.
She seemed to have no conception of his feelings and just an-
swered “No” to his question. Volodimir decided that her face was not
pretty. Even her skin, which attracted him from afar, was less effec-
tive now. And yet a strange power drew him toward this woman.
"Do
you
like to dance ?"
“Why shouldn't I ?" answered she, looking straight into his eyes.
Again he could not see the colour of her eyes, but her look irritated
him.
"Speak, speak, let me see more of your inner self!” pleaded he
with her in his thoughts. To her he said: “It all depends with
whom; perhaps with me not the same way as with some one else."
She did not even look at him: "I never gave it a thought,” an-
swered she, fanning herself.
Volodimir bent down over her: “Friendship and love are often
born during dances.”
She did not seem to understand his hint, and only said: “Indeed!”
"She's a fool,” thought Volodimir. “At least if she behaves
naturally, as she does at home in her village. This fanning and
turning of her head only accentuates her stupidity. But perhaps
this is becoming to her. Must a wife be clever? Perhaps life is
much more pleasant with a simple-minded wife.”
Again he looked at her face and bosom, and again that rapturous
feeling filled his heart. He decided to tell her of his intentions.
"Perhaps you love some one already,” asked he timidly.


50
THE DANCE
“I wouldn't waste my time,” was her indifferent answer.
“I do not suppose she came here willingly; she must have been
forced to come,” mused Volodimir. “Then why do I bother with
her? This is not love!”
But something kept him from leaving her. Just then her father,
a stout, red-faced priest, came over and sat down near them. Volod-
imir introduced himself, adding his title: Graduate Theologist.
“I know," answered Father Korolchouk, with a twinkle in his
eye. “There are only two theologists here: Harchouk and you. But
Harchouk is engaged to Magirsky's daughter. I wonder what
he found in her ?"
With these words Father Korolchouk looked at Volodimir and
read the sign on his forehead, which stated now: “I want to marry
your daughter, but have not decided yet.”
“I see you are hot and tired,” said the priest to his daughter. “Let
us have a cold drink. I hope you will join us," said he to
Volodimir.
The men drank whiskey, while the girl sipped lemonade. Volod-
imir scrutinized her from all angles with the same feeling of
ecstasy. The third time he asked himself: "Is this real love?" And
although something told him it was not real love, he kept on mak-
ing love to his neighbour. The priest, with his palm on his knee,
drank his whiskey and paid little attention to the young people.
Volodimir continued talking to the girl, who listened to him with her
usual apathy. Her indifference provoked the young man, who
tried hard to stir some emotions in this strange woman. At last he
openly made love to her, but the lady did not react even then. Sud-
denly, he found himself saying:
“I have serious intentions. May I hope ?”
She lifted her frightened eyes to him. Volodimir still could not
distinguish the colour of her eyes, but he saw an expression of ex-
treme fear in them.
“I suppose a lamb lifts such eyes to the wolf, who is about to eat
it,” thought he, and wanted to take his words back. Just then the
girl answered:
“I have nothing against it.”
The theologist felt that he ought to say something to her, but
could not find words. He tried to imagine her gleaming white
body, but saw her frightened eyes instead.


LES MARTOVITCH
51
a
a
"What did she tell me with those eyes of her? Did she beg me
to leave her alone? Did she not come here to find a husband? Or
was she brought here like a lamb to a wolf, and having no al-
ternative, she accepted my proposal. She is here with her father;
surely, he is her friend.”
Father Korolchouk noticed the awkward silence of the young
people, and the three of them went back to the dance-room. The
music was playing a mazurka. The young student invited the girl
with the marvellous shoulders. Volodimir watched her and seemed
to see only the frightened eyes dance to the rhythm of the music.
“I feel sorry for her, or perhaps, it is the feeling of love? But
why feel sorry? Nothing happened to her.”
It seemed to him that all the women were compelled to jump
around in order to show their physical fitness to the men. He could
see it on their gloomy faces, in their frightened eyes.
"Why do those eyes hunt me? I made a decided step in life, and
I suppose, my excited imagination makes me see things.'
"It is not music,” went on Volodimir's thoughts. "One can hear
the rhythmic sounds of the bass, which is here to chase these poor
women. The violin is just to camouflage the sound of the blows.
Before they were dragged around the room, now they are told to
jump. Who will save them from this sad situation? Surely, not
those, who inspire such fear in their eyes.”
Volodimir leaned against the door, and shut his eyes. Like little
fish out of water were those eyes jumping to the rhythm of the
music.
I am in love with her,” thought the young man. "Such
deep sympathy means tender love. But she, she ... Will she
ever love me? Why does she agree to marry me? She, who lived
life in a village, never having the opportunity to meet
people of her class; she, who was compelled to come here in search
for a husband, she whose life depends upon the first man who will
happen to like her. Can I ever bring peace to those fright-
ened eyes?"
He shut his eyes to rid himself of the vision of those two wonder-
ful restless lights.
"I guess
.
her young
a


THUS TO REVISIT
BY FORD MADOX HUEFFER
I
SOME REMINISCENCES
(CREDENTIALS: The conductors of The Dial have, very flatter-
ingly, asked me to contribute to their columns a compte rendu of the
English literary world at the present moment. I seize the oppor-
tunity gladly.
For I took my formal farewell of Letters, in some magazine or
other, about January, 1914. But I revisit with pleasure the glimpses
of a moon that I had thought never to see again.
That particular moon shines over England's Parnassus: the un-
grassed slopes of the northern bank of the Thames. They stretch
—these slopes—over monticules and little valleys: the reader
may not know them. Let him then mount Bedford Street from
the Strand and explore Covent Garden. Ten to one he will meet
one or two of our Immortals issuing from doorways and buttoning
fat cheques into bulging breast pockets. The reader will then bear
eastward and find Paternoster Row. There, there will be other
English men of letters.
But in those passages the streets are narrow and the houses rela-
tively high. So that, even on moonlight nights, you will there see
only glimpses of our chaste Diana.
The conductors of The Dial, then, ask me formally to treat of
(Messrs.)
“Gosse
Bennett
Hudson (W. H.)
Wells
Doughty
Sinclair (Miss)
Bridges
Lawrence (D. H.)
Hardy
Wyndham Lewis, 'etc., etc.'
Yeats
Meynell (Mrs.)
Symons
Moore
Eliot
Dunsany (Lord)
Henry Newbolt (Sir)”


FORD MADOX HUEFFER
53
and, as an afterthought: “Rudyard Kipling and any of Les Jeunes
that you like.”.
The reader will observe that the compiler of the list—and it is
a representative list enough—has omitted the names of Mr. Con-
rad and, naturally, of myself. I will begin, then, with Mr. Con-
rad and myself-classing these two writers among “Les Jeunes that
I like.”]
IT
T is twenty-two years and six months since, at Michaelmas, 1897,
I received a letter from Mr. Conrad, asking me to collaborate
with him. He stated that he had asked W. E. Henley to advise
him as to his difficulties with the English language. These were
very great since, he said, he thought in Polish, expressed his
thoughts more formally to himself in French, and, only with ex-
treme difficulty, rendered his thus-worded French thoughts and
images into English. Mr. Conrad stated that he then said to Mr.
Henley: “Why should I not take as collaborator the finest Eng-
lish stylist?" Whereupon Mr. Henley was said to have men-
tioned my own name.
Of course Mr. Conrad was lying: but what a gratifying men-
dacity that was! For I know that, at that date, Mr. Henley had
never heard my name. I had written five obscure books, but Hen-
ley had not read them. He told me so, afterwards, in the course of
a curious row I had with him one evening. It was a quite innocuous
combat over a slip of the tongue on his part and, as a parting shot,
he "squashed” me (people used to squash each other still in the
nineties of last century) by shouting: "Who the by H11 are
you, anyhow? I never heard
Henley was a fine fellow—a crystallized type of the English
village-dictator who sits in the settee by the corner of the ale-house
fire and utters wisdom. He was diseased and brave—as Johnson
was diseased and brave; he was wise as only Mr. Hardy and Mr.
Hudson are wise amongst the writers of to-day-with a self-for-
getting wisdom. And il faisait école! He was the revivifying
centre to which returned for reinspiration a whole company of Eng.
lish writers. As far as the lifetime goes of most men who are still
your name!”


54
.
THUS TO REVISIT
on this planet, he was the first English head of a school to advo-
cate conscious literary art.
You have, that is to say, to go back a hundred years to find such
a
another—in Samuel Johnson: yet another hundred and fifty years
to find one again: let us say in Ben Jonson, or Lyly.
I should like here to make the note that the literary history of
the United States parted company with that of these Islands forty
or fifty years ago. Before the seventies and eighties of last cen-
tury we had Hawthorne and Irving, Holmes, Emerson, and the
Concord group. They, for better or for worse, were English Great
Writers. But with Daisy Miller the United States was joined to
the main literary stream of the world which flows—and for two
hundred years has flowed—through France alone.
In 1895, or so, I bought at a Kentish farm house sale a great
many numbers—sixty or seventy—of the Atlantic Monthly of
the seventies and eighties. It was astonishing to buy these peri-
odicals beneath the high skies, off the trodden grass of an English
farm: heaps had been thrown down between the coulters of ploughs
and cider-tubs, on the green turf. But it astonished me still more to
find that correspondent after correspondent had written from Bos-
ton, Massachusetts, and from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to ask
the editor of the Monthly—how to write short stories! . . . Not
merely what moral attached to this or that example of his difficult
form, but quite simply: "how short stories should be written.”
I had never, in England, heard that question asked. The English
writer, as I knew him, bothered very much as to what magazines
printed short stories; as to the prices per thousand words paid for
them; even as to the respectability of the short story as compared
with that of the novel. But as to how the short short story, or the
long short story, or even the novel should be written. never!
Il ne s'en f-t pas mal!
For I think I am alone among English-born writers to bother
my head primarily about the "how" of writing. Henry James did;
but he was born in New England. Mr. Conrad did—but he was
born in the government of Kiev, thinks in French and translates
his thoughts with difficulty into English. Mr. Hudson does; but he
was born in La Plata, of New England stock. Mr. Robert Bon-
tine Cunninghame Graham does, and he too spoke Spanish before he
spoke English. That exhausts the list.
-
.
.
.
.


FORD MADOX HUEFFER
55
a
I don't mean to say that no other English writers bother their
heads at all about the "how" of writing. I remember for instance
listening respectfully to Mr. H. G. Wells whilst he lectured me on
how to write. But, so far as I could "catch on,” his only technical
rule was this: "Never introduce your hero and your heroine to-
gether in the first chapter.” Why this should be so I do not know.
For the sake of economy, I suppose. At any rate, Mr. Wells' other
advice limited itself to the choice of spirited subjects.
Mr. Bennett no doubt acquired a great knowledge of technique
during his lean years in Paris, but his employment of the pen has
been so exclusively commercial that I cannot conscientiously in-
clude him in my list. And of course I have forgotten Mr. George
Moore.
I so frequently forget Mr. Moore that, by force of remembering
him with successive shocks of conscience, I find him beginning to
occupy a very large space in the shadowy foreground of my moon-
lit revisitations. For Mr. Moore is the only consummate English
writer. (Of course he is Irish.) He alone amongst the novelists
of these Islands, and the writers of that fiction which is called
Memoirs, knows exactly what he wants to say and exactly how to
say it. Others of us get somewhere near it, sometimes, after great
labour: he alone goes straight to the point. But all his work repels
me, so that I seldom read him and too often forget him. I wish I
didn't: I can't help it. Intellectually I am lost in admiration for
him; sympathetically his work leaves me cold. Indeed it chills
me. But Hail and Farewell is beautiful and poetic.
I have said enough to strike the note that I want to strike in these
pages. I am, in short, interested only in how to write: I care
nothing—but nothing in the world for what a man writes about.
In the end that is the attitude of every human soul.
Let us see, then, where this dogmatic statement lands us. For
it is a dogmatic statement against which every English writer will
cry out—and violently. Yet it is so reasonable! You read Poe-
or you read Homer. What do they matter to you-murders in the
Rue Morgue or the dying hound of Ulysses? It is unlikely
that you will ever do murder or be murdered: it is improbable, even,
that your wanderings should be so protracted that, on your re-
turn, your wife will not know you, whereas your old nurse will
recognize your scarred feet, or your blind dog, your odour. Never-
,


56
.
THUS TO REVISIT ...
theless you have read The Pit and the Pendulum and you have read
the Iliad?
What? What is Hecuba to you?
II
PUISER DANS LE VIDE .
We set out then—for of course I did not refuse to collaborate
with Conrad-on our Research for the Absolute in Literature.
In those days Conrad was—Conrad. I have known many writers
intimately, but never another who showed so lucidly on his own
surface the soul of his books. Other writers you had to “dig into.”
If you “dug into” Mr. James, below many layers of caricaturable
oddities—and what finenesses ! —you came to What Maisie Knew,
The Death of the Lion, The Real Thing—and sometimes to The
Great Good Place. Ah, what a great man!
After a long acquaintance with Mr. Wells you might understand
how he wrote the wonderful stories that are collected in the volume
called The Country of the Blind; in time you would come to realize
that Mr. Arnold Bennett was indeed the Savoir Faire Papers and the
Grand Babylon Hotel. Under layers of verbal cruelties and sneers
you might find the more genial Meredith of Evan Harrington; be-
neath the kind gentlenesses of Mr. Hardy-as the roots of oaks are
buried beneath soft grasses and mossy turfs—you will find the oaken
permanence of this greatest of poets. And as for Mr. George
Moore.
But Conrad was always just Marlow, the reflective, hyper-
conscientious narrator of Youth, of The Heart of Darkness, and of
Lord Jim-Marlow whom Mr. James was in the habit of calling:
this monstrous master-mariner. But then Mr. James was in the
habit of calling me: “ce jeune homme modeste"
I don't know that I was modest: but I suppose I had the sense
to be silent in the presence of my pastors and masters. And life
for me was one long alternation between Mr. Conrad—who, as col-
laborator, used to tell me that I could not write, never should be
able to write, should do better if I occupied myself with anything
else--and Mr. James. Mr. James used to come to tea, every winter
afternoon for years, at my house in Winchelsea. He used to talk
.
in the never-ending sentences—the glamorous, lovable sentences--
.
.


FORD MADOX HUEFFER
57
about everything under the sun. But he was, I am perfectly certain,
serenely unaware that I had any other ambition than to write two-
and-sixpenny paragraphs for the daily papers.
Romance was the better known outcome of our collaboration: it
was preceded by another book, The Inheritors, which, I observe, has
baffled the comments of even Mr. Conrad's most inspired American
press agents. I fancy that neither book has any artistic value at
all—and I am using the story of the joint effort merely as a sort of
observation car from which to peruse in memory the shadowy liter-
ary history of the last quarter century. These glimpses of the
moon reveal, more and more, two solitary figures, for the history of
definite, conscious, and, as you might say, contagious aesthetic ef-
fort during this period became more and more a circumscribed story
of Mr. James and Mr. Conrad. For the several “schools” of the
early nineties either died natural deaths—or died of Oscar Wilde's
trial. Let us glance at them.
In the beginning there were Henley and his school. One remem-
bers of these Stevenson, R. A. M. Stevenson, Mr. Marriott Watson,
and George Warrington Steevens. There were no doubt others:
but these were enough to make up a vocal and combative body.
They admired physical force, lawlessness, piracy, the speed of auto-
mobiles, the deftness of linotypes, and they borrowed words from
the Authorized Version and the works of Sir Thomas Browne.
They were powerful and in earnest: before disappearing they es-
poused the cause of Mr. Conrad. They were succeeded, overlap-
pingly, by the Yellow Book School.
That school concerned itself with Form, with the expression of
fine shades, with Continental models and exact language. It gave
a second spring to Henry James, who, after the great blaze of popu-
larity which came with Daisy Miller and the American, had gradu-
ally declined into comparative obscurity and comparative inaction.
It had for its official and decorative chef d'école, Henry Harland,
another American of French training; but I have since heard—and
I dare say it is true—that the real motive power of this very impor-
tant affair came from Miss Ethel Colburn Mayne—another Irish
writer of French training.
I should like to make a note of digression here and say a word
about Miss Mayne. It is indeed my duty to make the digression
since the aesthetic-literary history of our Islands is incomplete with-


58
THUS TO REVISIT
out a strongly underlined note about this writer. To-day Miss
Mayne stands alone as an eschewer of "strong subjects,” as a delin-
cator of the fine shades of civilized contacts—as a portrayer, then,
of life as it is lived by you and me. For no one, to-day, will deny
that his life is not an affair of plots, conspirings, piracies, treacher-
ous and megalomaniac organizations of Wall Street panics, murder,
espionage, debauches, or the improbable rewards of virtue. And no
one will deny that his life is really a matter of “affairs”: of minute
hourly embarrassments; of sympathetic or unsympathetic personal
contacts; of queer jealousies; of muted terminations—a tenuous,
fluttering, and engrossing fabric. And intangible!
So that, now that Henry James is dead, there is only Miss Mayne
who has the perception and the skill to be the historian of our fugi-
tive day. She has, I fancy, no following at all and few readers. That
is queer: it is not strange; perhaps it is not wrong: it is just queer.
For if you write a story about a neighbourhood it will find readers
for miles around the spot: yet, if you write about a man's real life
he will say that he has to live enough of that during the hours of his
day, so that he desires to hear of Wall Street Pirates by his fireside.
At any rate it is certain that the writer who treats consummately
the life that, civilizedly, we lead must be content with few read-
ers,
The Yellow Book, then, directed by Miss Mayne, adorned by
Henry Harland, and providing a new stage for Henry James, dom-
inated a few short years of the early nineties in England. It
found imitators, rivals, detractors, disciples, trumpeters; and the
whole affair, whilst embracing the austerities, renunciations, and
delicacies of writers like Henry James and Miss Mayne, took
in also the remaining Pre-Raphaelites or Aesthetes and so met its
Armageddon.
For the Aesthetes proclaimed loudly the doctrine of Art for Art's
sake, whilst, at any rate in the persons of Wilde and Aubrey
Beardsley, stridently inferring that Art was largely a matter of
breaches of the Seventh Commandment. Between the two wings
of the movement—though I have again, flagitiously, forgotten to
mention Miss Ella D'Arcy as standing alongside Miss Mayne and
Mr. James—there flourished a whole band of writers like (Mrs.)
George Egerton, Herbert Crackanthorpe and, I fancy, Miss Dolf
Wyllard. These, as it were, translated comptes rendus of breaches


FORD MADOX HUEFFER
59
of various commandments into terms of the life that we lived.
There were also the “decadent” poets.
So, in the early nineties, in England, literature was an affair for
the daily papers and the weekly illustrated periodicals. Our ink-
stands, our favourite pens, our porches, and our pergolas were
photographed for reproduction on shiny pages; our sayings were
chronicled in small paragraphs separated by asterisks; we had
specially trained domestics to ward off interviewers. But Oscar
Wilde was tried and, through sheer personal vanity, condemned.
(He was entreated by the British Government to take the seven
o'clock train for Paris on the day when the warrant for his arrest
was due to be issued at 8:30 P.M.) The Typical English Writer
rushed in and triumphed.
"Art for Art's sake,” he proclaimed, "ends thus in Oscarisms”.
in warrants, arrests, trials, and the rest of it. Harland died of
consumption; Herbert Crackanthorpe was drowned in the Seine;
Aubrey Beardsley died of consumption; Wilde wrote De Pro-
fundis.
The Typical English Writer had in the meantime pursued his
course in periodicals like To-Day and the Detroit Free Press. Mr.
Wells, Mr. Zangwill, Mr. Barry Pain, Mr. Morley Roberts, Mr.
Barr supported the one type of organ; Mr. Kipling, Mr. Frank
Harris, Mr. Harold Frederic, I believe, the other. Mr. Edward
Garnett was publishing, or had just finished publishing, the
Pseudonym Library and was being a chef d'école for a whole school
of writers who produced what is called Tranchées de la Viem
undecorated slabs of life in Mean Streets, cut out as a section is
cut from a melon. This last school had little or no preoccupation
with Literature as an Art: it had in revenge an immense desire to
further the Social Revolution, to remove Social Injustices, and to
emphasize the fact that Life is a very dull affair. This school gave
us George Gissing-and the Russians. Thus we owe a very great
deal to Mr. Garnett: I don't suppose we shall ever pay it. But let
it at least be put on record that, during very dark years, almost
,
alone, he made life possible for a great many earnest and meritori-
ous writers, and, almost alone, he gave us Turgenev.
In those dark days, then, the aesthetic influence of the Yellow
Book group disappeared, the Typical English Writer began again to
come into his own; the Typical English Critic, partly annalist, partly
a
a


60
.
THUS TO REVISIT
preserver of respectable traditions, like Sir Edmund Gosse, Mr.
Colvin, Professor Dowden, and my late uncle William Rossetti,
once more advanced towards academic eminence; Mr. Garnett's
labours assumed an aspect more and more subterranean; Mr.
Meredith, Mr. Hardy, and Mr. Swinburne, of the surviving Great,
lived each apart on his little hill; Mr. James took a serene flight of
his own, alighting on the battlemented heights of Rye. So there
remained no perceptible literary life in England. Books were
written: but the problems of how best to treat a given subject or
how most exactly to render an aspect of an affair—these problems
were banned and remained undiscussed.
During all these years—for many years that seemed to pass very
slowly-Mr. Conrad and I, ostensibly collaborating, discussed
nothing else. Buried deep in rural greennesses, we used to ask each
other how, exactly, such and such an effect of light and shade
should be reproduced in words. We read nothing but French: you
might say it was Flaubert, Flaubert, Flaubert, all the way. Oc-
casionally we would become enthusiastic over a phrase of Stephen
Crane's, such as: "the waves were barbarous and abrupt.” Occa-
sionally we would go together and have tea with Henry James at
Rye. I think that I was most preoccupied with the expression of fine
shades: Conrad's unceasing search in those days was for a new form
for the novel. But I do not believe that there were in the England
of those days any two other people whose whole minds and whose
unceasing endeavours were so absolutely given to that one problem
of expression between man and man which is the end of all con-
scious literary art. I do not mean to say that no other writers tried
to tell stories or that none told them better; merely that, as far as
I know, at a time when devotion to exact expression or to the
architectonics of art was regarded either as folly or as subversive of
morality, no other writers were so consciously and exclusively pre-
occupied with those dangerous topics
Since that day there have been no Movements in English letters
-until, just before the war, we had the Futurists, Vorticists,
Imagistes. The story of Literature became one of individual efforts
without any particularly visible cohesion. These I shall try to
analyze in subsequent papers.


1
I
1


A DRAWING. BY ANDRÉ DERAIN


MODERN FORMS
This department of The Dial is devoted to exposition
and consideration of the less traditional types of art.
FOREWORD
BY HENRY MCBRIDE
"WALTER
ALTER ARENBERG is quite mad. Mrs. Arenberg is
mad, too.” The remark ended a conversation. There was
a finality about it that would have ended any conversation.
My friend—one of the most reasonable and most educated of
men-admitted that the Arenbergs were delightful, but raving lu-
nacy was to him the only explanation for the possession of the works
of art that adorned the Arenberg salon. The Arenbergs' big studio
on West 67th Street is exclusively modern. The big panel by
Matisse of a woman perched upon a stool and with most of the
curved lines of the figure indefinitely extended to the confines of
the canvas—it proved very trying to the public when shown in an
exhibition in the Montross Galleries—is an item upon one of the
vast white walls. The shiny brass "Portrait” of the Princesse
Buonaparte by Brancusi that almost got rejected from this year's
Salon des Indépendants in Paris upon the grounds of immorality,
is another item. Things by Gris, Bracque, and Metzinger in vivid
colours so pull the eye of him who enters the door that the big, and
still uncompleted, chef-d'æuvre in glass by Marcel Duchamp that
is posed near the entrance is sobriety itself by contrast and assumes
all the reticence of a piece of furniture or of a Rembrandt in the
Metropolitan Museum of Art. Furthermore there is one of Pi-
casso's “reasoned derangements” in paint, some particularly dy-
namic African fetish carvings, and plenty of the latest local outpour-
ings in cubism. Some of the works individually verge towards
violence, but they have been so carefully placed by the mad owners
of the establishment that not only a perfect balance but a genuine
if hitherto unheard of harmony has been attained.


62
MODERN FORMS
However, my most educated friend saw only craziness and not
harmony in the room. His education had been, perhaps it is nec-
essary to explain, confined to the pictures of the past, and of life
as it is lived at present he knew little. Doubtless, too, the Aren-
bergs played a little up to him. The temptation to épater les
bourgeois is something nobody resists.
"Do
you want to see Marcel's latest work of art ?” Walter Aren-
berg asked me, upon the occasion of my first visit to the studio and
after we had had a long and easy conversation without a word of
reference to the Matisse, the Brancusi, and the other marvels, all
of which I had seen perfectly without looking at them. From the
grin upon his face I knew Marcel's latest was something larky.
When Arenberg lifted a glass bulb with a curious tail to it from the
protecting cottons of a wooden box I saw that my premonitions had
not played me false.
“It's air from Paris,” said my host, “hermetically sealed at a
particular street corner in that city.”
I'm not a bourgeois, so I didn't have a fit; I didn't even inquire
the name of the street on which the air had been caught. Like
Arenberg, I laughed. As a work of art “Marcel's latest" seemed
pleasant and droll. Perhaps I instantly saw that the joke did not
apply to me so much as to my educated friend. That's the advan-
tage in not being a bourgeois yourself. And sure enough when I
asked
my friend if he had seen the Air from Paris by the famous
Monsieur Duchamp, he replied drily:
“Do you suppose it's still air from Paris? Science tells us that
air tightly sealed in that fashion quickly rots and changes its char-
acter,” and before I could interpose an objection he wound me up
with his contention of the day before.
The only drawback to épaté-ing the bourgeois is that half the
time they don't know when they are épaté-ed. If my friend
chances to read these lines he'll know. I'll squander a copy on him.
The Arenbergs are at home a great deal, and it may surprise the
owners of J. Francis Murphys to know that they are seldom at home
alone. People seem to like to come to see them. In particular the
new poets and the newest artists flock to the studio. In addition to
the pleasure that young people evince in merely being together there
is always the further excitation that comes from a consciousness of
being in the van of a movement.


HENRY MCBRIDE
63
But apropos of the Arenbergs I mustn't drag in a plea for modern
a
art. I feel almost as though I were giving away a state secret in
even hinting that they and their friends are having a mediaevally
good time with it. But people have been so extraordinarily scary and
silly on the subject here in New York that it seems only Christian
to give this belated warning that there are social possibilities in the
new things that the Horace Walpoles of this period ought to look
into. The world is presumably to go on again with enough approxi-
mation to the old life to permit the arts to exist—at this moment
this is indeed a presumption and in this case people who have
money to spend might just as well as not get the Arenbergs to ex-
plain to them how it is that one gets in contact with the creating
talents in the world. If they can't or won't consent to mount Par-
nassus hand-in-hand with new geniuses, they will never get there.
Looking at old genius already at the top through spy-glasses will
not assist. One might just as well be in fact, one isma
dealer in second-hand goods. Patrons must be as hardy intel-
lectually as artists to register—as they say in the movies—as
genuine patrons.
My own recommendation to those in doubt upon this point is,
to know a "modern” artist. Mothers or fathers, for instance, whose
sons or daughters happen to turn out to be cubists are usually as
pleased as Punch after they get over the initial shock. Nothing
ever delights me so much as to hear a prim old New England lady
or a hard-headed Keokuk tram-car manipulator expatiating upon
the qualities of their offspring's cubism. (It doesn't have to be
cubism-I merely use that term as it still happens to be anathema
to most.) The wittiest study of the modern forms that has yet ap-
peared was an essay by C. R. W. Nevinson's father in the Atlantic
Monthly of some years ago in which he frankly confessed that
he had found he had to take up the subject to keep pace with
his son. And indeed, to drop into plain English, cubists are not
so bad. Some of them are cubists for moral reasons. Was it
Trelawney or one of the Gisbornes who met a young man at the
house of a friend in Italy who seemed to be all goodness and
purity but who bore the dreaded name of Percy Bysshe Shelley,
and who left the house demanding inwardly, "Can this innocent
creature really be the monster that is horrifying all Europe ?”
I have heard other Syrians say that Kahlil Gibran, one of whose
a


64
MODERN FORMS
modern group
drawings is the frontispiece to this Dial, is the chief stylist of the
of Syrian poets. He begins to have a second fame
in this country for his paintings, which is somewhat surprising when
the elusive quality of his work is considered. Almost any of his
drawings might be entitled A Wish. He seems to aspire for some-
thing he scarcely knows what. Perhaps in that he is no vaguer
than the rest of us.
For my part I looked upon him with new respect when I found
that Albert P. Ryder was one of his believers. The only time I
ever met the old gentleman was at an exhibition of Gibran's draw-
ings in one of the Fifth Avenue galleries. I myself was somewhat
exasperated by the muffied quality of the Syrian's work and so
looked with curiosity at an aged man who seemed to be devouring
the drawings with study. One of the attendants came to me and
explained who the old man was, and taking my courage in my two
hands, I spoke to him. Ryder embarrassed me at once by asking
me what I thought of the exhibition. I replied, as mildly as pos-
sible, that the artist seemed to desire to do vast things, but seemed
to be as yet uncertain as to which things were vast. Ryder looked
at me wistfully, and a shade disapprovingly, and said, "Well, the
main thing is, he tries.”
a
Mr. Gropper, the caricaturist, belongs to the famille Caran
d'Ache. His work is flowing, sure, and reasonably free from self-
consciousness. It looks better in print than on the original card-
board, and I have been uneasy in my mind of late years, suspect-
ing that this be true of all American illustrations. This may even
be a virtue; it is at any rate in line with the intense practicality for
which Americans are famous. But it prevents one from having an
affection for the production as it comes from the artist's hand.
Twenty years ago this could not be said of American illustrators,
and the originals of the illustrations of Abbey, Reinhardt, and
Alfred Brennan had a thousand qualities the machines could not
reproduce. Indeed in those days the redoubtable Joe Pennell used
to give the excellent counsel to “defy the machines—do things they
cannot do—make the machines hustle to keep up to us,” and so on.
But his wisdom was not hearkened to.


THE PAMPERERS
BY MINA LOY
Invisible Obvious
Picked
People
Houseless Loony
-
Porcelain breath Sèvres bow Gilded crimson - Curved
flutings Brocade — Tailored muscles — Whipped cream — Blue
spirals — Salved lips - Salon — Debussy — Azaleas -
— Ancestors
- Armorial complacencies · Ooze
-
Picked people melted by a distinguished method among the
upholstery.
Tag ENDS OF OVERHEARD CONVERSATION
.
.
The social fabric is a curtain
and that warm garnet
fold-shadow there, for souls hide and seek.
Decency shudders in the bare moment, taut between vestibule
and auto.
trees
.
.
.
my crystalline lorgnette,
at this season are all undressed.
The earth a poignant undertaker.
I wish I had a wig darling.
Observe the legs, the agony of the crucified
the tendons
delicate as Dresden china 15th century
ah yes! the troubles of the steam heating plant
man from Milan knows his business.
Oh Prince how charming of you
and what is your
opinion of the sex question?
How simple
still I can't quite agree with you
we shall never give up wearing silk stockings.
.
.
.
Somebody:
Ossy:
Ossy you know has discovered a genius
coming from the club
derful chap, see his predatory eye
won-
.


66
THE PAMPERERS
.
.
.
Somebody:
Ossy:
Somebody:
Ossy:
picking up cigar ends
the grand pas-
sion
pockets full
Picasso uses all sorts of odds and ends.
No critic dare anticipate the masterpiece this
man may stack
Mud larks and geniuses!
There's a revival in The Thing being a pa-
tron
I've got a Medici Villa somewhere
put the fellow in the stables here
heart's content . counting fags
Wait and see; fond of my dinner doesn't pre-
vent me having an enormous respect for these
creative sky-rocket-in-the-sewer chaps; wait and
.
.
.
.
.
.
see
.
I've got flair taken two of you to have
got onto those cigar ends
like that
•
my God!
.
.
I'd forgotten Diana
Diana collects
geniuses!
Somebody: She's got perfect toes
pedicured on a
diamond footstool
Somebody Else: Bach played for her bath
Somebody: Isadora Allen to dance her awake
S. E.:
Bought a museum to wear at a ball
Somebody: Has to have the Daily Mail transposed into the
Arabic for the autumn, British Journalese has
a bite in it
superfluously supplements
the morning frost
S. E..
Steam from hot cocoa is so suggestive of breath-
ing in the open
Somebody:
But she has so many butterflies in her night-
cap
S. E..
Avoiding the vulgarity of looking expensive she
waters the aloe in sack-cloth. Does nothing to
her complexion, but a penny worth of ice
Has her own bran-mash prepared for her at the
Ritz
reads Mahabharata through cotil-
lions
Somebody:
So bored
has the most perfect yawn in
.
.
.


MINA LOY
67
.
.
.
Europe
virgin eyelashes, and abortive
morals
why Di dear, we were just talk-
ing about you ·
.
.
.
(Diana turns off the light, sits on the pekinese
which sinking still deeper into cushions notices
nothing; and meditates in a fussy silence on the
dial of a luminous watch.)
(Two intimate friends sidle into the conserva-
tory)
Ist Friend:
2nd Friend:
Ist F.:
2nd F.:
Ist :
2nd F.:
Ist F.:
2nd F..
Ist F.:
2nd F.:
Can I trust you?
Did I trust you?
Then I will tell you where I really was last week
at home with a black
eye.
And where
?
Oh, he was at home with a black eye too.
How ripping!
Delicious, we wore Longhi masks and had
Watsiswinski play Handel on the spinet
Life can be very beautiful with a lover
The Wedgewood and the Venetian lustres are in
splinters and the ceiling had to be repainted
It is your passion for danger, serves you your
incontestable hold on our social circle, whose
criterion the intactness of porcelain, the watch-
word
‘No china is ever broken here;
here where the virginity of white carpets, sancti-
fies the passage of the correct
Profundity of superficies
While to Stavinski's meteors the animal whines
a million moons behind evening dress
Split passion to the forty gold pieces of a mani-
and there it still is
Strew souls in fractions on dressing tables
Oh keep it up ...
disintegratedly above
those others
what do you suppose they
do
with insufficient money to do it
with?
.
Ist F.:
2nd F.:
Ist F.:
cure set
.
.
2nd F.:
Ist F.:
.


68
THE PAMPERERS
2nd F.:
ist F..
2nd F.:
Ist F.:
2nd F.:
Nature looks after them
When you consider what our régime has done to
Nature
Diversion for our old age, in patching them up
Well, I suppose we're rotten
thank
God, we're rotting soft
Double pile
or an intellect walking
about on it
Don't make me think
might drive me
to anything
Come Di's lit up again
Ossy's cock-
tails
Remember
no china broken here
•
Ist F.:
.
2nd F.:
Somebody:
Diana dear, you might tell us where you were
while we were so patiently watching
you?
(Diana's chameleon rattles her emeralds.)
Diana:
Systematizing Futurist plastic velocity by the
displacement of the minute-hand. Но
capito.
Isn't she wonderful?
Somebody Else:
A man (whose monocle has been hypnotized to
idea associations by the luminous dial): I don't
know anything about Marinetti; I don't want to
know anything about Marinetti but I respect
him
he has a clean collar I am will-
ing to accept the creed of any man who wears a
clean collar
Why the devil shouldn't Marinetti wear a clean
collar?
I don't know why Marinetti shouldn't wear a
clean collar, all I say is
Marinetti
wears a clean collar!
Di. if you half guessed what I've
Somebody:
Ossy:


MINA LOY
69
.
.
.
caught in the stables, you'd throw futurism
to
Diana:
Don't mean
that I'm out of fashion
again
Ossy:
Since 1
dispensing entirely with
the middleman, we now have the genius served
directly to the consumer
Diana:
Let us consume
Ossy (to the footman): James! just fetch the whatsisname out of
the whatyoumecallems and don't let its feet
touch the floor.
P.M.
.
.
(The footmen carry in the Houseless Loony in
his natural condition
on a throne chair
with a step to it.
The Lady Diana has stood herself in front of
a large light that hazes her yellow hair.)
Somebody:
Di will be able to put him at his ease!
(The importation fixes on her his fanatical eyes,
set in the lewdest eyelids, the rest is stubbly.)
Diana:
Loony:
There are only two kinds of people in society
geniuses and women.
I hang out with God and the Devil
Diana (continuing impressively): I am Woman.
Loony:
May be
(sniffing her approach)
but you smell like nothing-at-all; and all that
truck on you, makes me eye sneeze
(Diana throws the emeralds, the chameleon and
divers odds and ends vaguely in the direction of
a Benozzo Gozzoli, and tries to imagine what
a smell is like
)
Diana:
I know
I knew
I have always
known
you alone can see beneath the
beneath the
beneath the truck!
.
.
.


70
THE PAMPERERS
.
.
.
Loony:
I am the elusion that cooed to your adolescent
isolation, crystallized in the experience of your
manhood
(Oh do stop blinking at me,
or I can't go on)
I am that reciprocal
quality you searched for among the moonlit
mysteries of Battersea Bridge.
I come to you with gifts those other women had
not to give
I am measured by the silence of inspiration,
tuned to a laudatory discrimination
made of the instigatory caress
I know
the moment to press the grape to thy lip
put ice on your head; for I am the woman who
understands
so do tell me what you
are going to make with those cigar-ends?
I am going to make Life out of cigar-ends
Life
I must have Life
more life
I am Life
my hair is full of life
my clothes are alive; but I am not satis-
fied.
I will have more life
I will make
Life out of cigar ends
When God made Life
he rested and
saw that it was
good
the
devil interfered, making it dangerous. But Life
is more than this or that. Life is amusing! And
you (to Diana)—you make me laugh!
I am the merriment to float your leisure
And what do you do when you are not picking
them up?
Sit in the pub arguing with my companion
You mentioned two
One and the same
‘God gives' and
'the Devil to pay!
.
.
.
.
.
0
more life
.
.
.
Diana:
Loony:
Diana:
Loony:
(The room fills rapidly with the Loony's curi-
osity, the 'taken for granted advances to audi-
ence gravenly noticeable.)


MINA LOY
71
.
.
.
.
O
•
Such are the secret dens of the terrorized. Look
here, you woman-as-you-may-say, strikes me I've
wasted a lot of theoretic sympathy on the sub-
merged
you don't look half sorry for
yourselves. Why I've knocked a fellow down,
out there in the Grand 'cause' he says 'they don't
feel' says he
'they can't have the same
feelings as we have.' And yet, and yet
what would happen if one scraped some of the
nap off you?
Somebody Else: So you're stopping at the Grand?
Loony:
There is no stopping at the Grand
the
Grand is all of 'Out There'
I am the
grand man let loose in it. Out there where no
knick knacks nudge you into minding your p's
and q's
‘my miraculous ambulance in
spatial mystery'; out there where there is every-
thing to find
the grand man is able to
pick up anything he is able to see.
Diana: (Sighs) Oh!
Oh! .. take me with
you,
I am the woman
who can see.
Loony:
You know not what you ask
Your aspirations are herculean
No human beings can be so polished, so seques-
tered, so hermetically sealed
but that
they may still be able to aspire. I am the
apostle of Fraternity. I find my brother in the
most secluded coward
But out there
they are not all as I am
their
sympathies have narrowed to their code. Were
I to take you among them
suffer
even my protection would not
.
.
.
.
.
.
you would
.
.
suffice you.
.
you would be
You would be slighted
criticised
considered soft.
You with your different way of sitting down, an
unfamiliar manner of gulping food. Your most
fervid conversation would lose itself as an im-
pertinent silence among the debonaire rumble of


72
THE PAMPERERS
a
Somebody:
.
.
Loony:
.
.
our caste. You would be witless and a bore; koh-
i-noors for the cultured ear
the crude
realism of our Imagists would call up none of
the emotions of the initiated in you
I say Ossy
we might be able to keep
peace with 'em there.
Not at all, with you the art of ribaldry relies en-
tirely on technique
dilettante
again the cowardice of the submerged
Ours has the healthy spring of creative expres-
sion rooted in action
we coin nothing
but the image and superscription of personal ex-
perience
My poor child (catching Diana's wrist as he de-
scends from his throne
shuffling the
velvet). Dare
Dare you look look
(he looks for something he is surprised not to be
able to find) I was going to try to make you see
the 'Grand.'
Oh Di, he wants a widow
James !
draw the curtains.
.
.
.
.
Ossy:
(The curtains are drawn
The gilded shutters thrown back)
in
.
Loony (to the grand outdoors): What an idea to muffle It up like
that
Oh thou from whom all colds are caught
they're afraid of you catching cold!
(to Diana): Now my pretty house fly! Think of that mud
that bloody awful mud
all the beauty of its bloody awfulness!
A quality that escapes you?
You have never felt it plasterly squelching be-
tween your toes, salving their parchment creak
cake coveringly for warm footed nights,
or sensuous slop cheek-spattering as a wench's
spittle
from about the Rolls-Royce
passing of the pitiably immune.
.


MINA LOY
73
Somebody:
Loony:
He can talk about something!
Under the lemon-peel sunslip
Human bracchalian stretches
Cautiously draw near to the feverish attainable,
The blood-shot calculations of an eye
Approximate spent ends
There are many on 'em
And there may
Be always more
Than man yet dares to wish for
I maintain
Though in those rare full hours of r-r-round
numbers
Perfection looms proportionate
The ever-widening cycles of our Future
Shall shed such transcendental showers of ideo-
fags
Shall muster the rear-forces of mentality
To sublimate
To boons that are
For man to pounce upon.
So in the low-geared meanwhile
The humble fanatic
Collects from where he can
Those battered finger-posts
To his ideal
Ashy iotas in the Balance of
The easier equilibrium of Life,
With patient love
To raise them where they lay
A tear of absolution
For the weak
Sucked to impersonality
By
The Zoroastrian mud.
While every here and there
The glowing ones
Flare to the common call
Till numerously Enough
.
.


74
THE PAMPERERS
For Life
Fourpence for dinner, sixpence for love
My life!
Among the geometric static of your bric-à-brac
Your idle wills
Exile the unforeseen
The nice initiative of ‘nosing about
Wilts to the barren orderly
Where bells and butlers
Places to put things in
Rob days of discovery
I ask what have you to find
Where can you pick things up?
(Diana indicating an ash tray, he reverently
pockets half a manilla.)
There, there! my good people
ask me to say anything
Don't
but forgive me.
(Retiring semi-despondently to his throne.)
The grandest of us
Have phases of diminished elasticity
The most expansive
Periodically contract
Can it be possible I am getting narrow?
(Looking with new interest at Diana, who is still
more preparedly posing.)
And is it likely that women have other quali-
ties besides their smell?
I have learnt something to-day
And in exchange
The spiritual explorer's


MINA LOY
75
Footprints
Humanize
The shameless purity
of that padding on your floor.
Let them remain
For ever
Encouraging
Your tentative toddle towards other ends
O .. 00
oh ...aah . aah!
thanks offly
cocktail ?
Ossy:
.
.
Somebody:
Diana:
Somebody:
(The Loony, lifting each cocktail successively
from the gold tray handed to him, drinks them
all off with appreciation.)
Di dear! as you're still looking intense would
you mind very much if we left him to you?
I have never met a genius I couldn't manage yet.
You sure you're not getting let down on this one?
The fellow uses the oldest-hat blank verse!
The cosmic form of the idea behind it!
Well if you think a drop or two of sulphuric
would help you at all
send to the
chemist.
Picked People evaporate.
Diana:
Somebody:
.
.
(The Loony has laid himself sublimely on a bro-
caded chaise-longue.
Diana rather at a loss, as she remarks his drow-
siness, plays a precocious trump taking off one
shoe and stocking.)
Loony (snoozily as he blinks at the little white thing blazing under
the electric light):
This little pig
That little pig
(But falls asleep.)
.
(Diana entirely at a loss, replaces the stocking
and shoe
and calls—James!)
.
.


76
THE PAMPERERS
Diana:
.
.
Tell the men there is one thousand pounds for
any one who will take that to a bath-room
and entirely clean it up
not boil it you
know
but any other possible means
and oh yes, dress it. the Duke's
will be about the right size
and then
determinedly
you can bring it back to
.
.
.
.
.
•
me.
AFTER THE IMMERSION
(Diana minus one shoe and stocking. The
Loony minus one shoe and stocking. They sit
on the edge of the chaise-longue wriggling toes
thoughtfully up and down
.
.
.
a
.
.
would you
not me
.
Diana:
You see after all they're very much alike.
Loony (anxiously): I am losing my self respect.
Diana:
Oh not at all I assure you
you'll feel
all right
it's only the first five minutes.
Loony:
Look here my dear
(resolutely draw-
ing on foot gear)
if you've mistaken
me for a blooming canary bird
Well. . I didn't size you up at first
For you're a woman you are—white
pulpy
wheedle-em-round your finger
?
!
You'd like to sap my brain to make a face cream
of . tack a string to my jaw and pull it
‘pretty, pretty'
louder for his precious!
You've made a boss shot
a holy error
thought I depended entirely on me pro-
tective cake of mud
• nothing inside but
slosh
active because itchy
think you can drain off the creative impulse
through a bath tube
just because you
depend entirely on your tags and tatters (tear-
ing savagely at the Mechlin on her shoulders
.
.
say Grand
.
.


MINA LOY
77
upon him
.
.
through which a miraculous white gleam bursts
)
Ah
(clenching his fists
to a
superhuman brake . he sits down on the
chair opposite her
smoothing his hair
from his brow in sudden weariness)
Ah! you thought you'd got me that time?
.
Diana:
I maintain that any time will do.
SILENCE
Diana:
.
.
.
.
are
.
Stand up-Sir—and dress your soul for dinner.
Throw out your chest and don't walk heels first
remember
It takes a genius five minutes to acquire what it
takes five centuries to breed into us
Those tirades about the Grand are the thing
dock them a bit
muddle people
up more
But when you're not holding
forth you must be like us you (hypnoti-
cally) are like us..
No use picking up cigar ends—Here ...
the whole cigars
(handing him the box
the genius picks out a cigar entirely at
his ease).
Here the Grand is the infinitesimal
noth-
ing so vulgar as the obvious.
When you talk to a Duchess treat her as if she
were a prostitute at the same time hold fast to
the ethics of property.
Shown a picture
look at the left-hand
corner
A book? pass an innocuous finger-nail down the
back of the binding.
Turn everything upside down and inside out
and you'll get on ··· you've got to
I have just telephoned you to
every daily paper in the kingdom and now
.
O
get on
.


78
THE PAMPERERS
look at me with those indomitable eyes
(turning to a step)
Dear Duke
I must present Houston
Loon to you
.
.
.
.
.
The great Vitalist
Europe raves about him
to-
morrow
Duke:
A pleasure
ah I see
you've got
a cigar
I'd just like to have your opinion on this
Benozzo Gozzoli.
Loony (holding his nose carefully to the left-hand corner):
Are you sure it's a Benozzo Gozzoli? by
the direction of the scratches
scratch a Benozzo Gozzoli from right to left
from the way he put the paint on
More probably a Genozzo Bozzolini.
a
.
you can't
My dear
(breathes Diana devoutly)
you'll DO.
The End
OF THEM ALL


Les
Groporr-
TRANSPARENT POST-CARDS. BY WILLIAM GROPPER






ca
Groporr-
SPITTOON PHILOSOPHERS. BY WILLIAM GROPPER






Granne.
RADICALS IN A TEA AND PASTRY SHOP. BY WILLIAM GROPPER






mlar
GROPER-
INVESTIGATORS. BY WILLIAM GROPPER





BOOK REVIEWS
NEO-DARWINIAN ECONOMICS
The Place ºf Science in MODERN Civilization, and
other essays. By Thorstein Veblen.
Thorstein Veblen. 12mo. 509 pages.
B. W. Huebsch. New York.
NE
OT many evaluations bear critical examination ten-and-thirty
years after their initial statement. The mere fact that Pro-
fessor Veblen sees fit to publish at this date articles which appeared
in various journals so many years ago gives the measure of his
achievement. The subject-matter of these scattered papers ranges
from recondite ethnology to facts of immediate social significance.
But they are all stamped with one mark, and linked by one interest
—the mark of a restless curiosity and the interest of the scientific
mind.
The title of the volume is well chosen. Practically every essay
included throws some light on the place of science in modern civili-
zation. The critical papers, as those on the economics of Professor
Clark or of Gustave Schmoller, imply an attack on pre-Darwinian
political economy. The more general researches are illumined by
that dispassionate precision, that substitution of a genetic for a
teleological bias, on which science insists. At the outset the author
declares that "Pragmatism creates nothing but maxims of expedient
conduct.” Whereas "Science creates nothing but theories.” And
chary as he undoubtedly is of the most generally recognized hy-
potheses, Professor Veblen is even more delicate in his consideration
of conduct, however expedient.
To students of his later works, it is true, this offers nothing sub-
stantially novel. They will find here a reiteration of those analyses
which distinguished such “theories” as that of the leisure class,
or that of business enterprise. There is the familiar stress on the
current claims of the price system, on the cleavage between busi-
ness and industry, on the spiritual significance of the machine tech-
nology, on the genesis and influence of the investment banker.
a


80
NEO-DARWINIAN ECONOMICS
But there is an amplification of certain points and, above all, an
emphasis on certain developments, which merit attention. Chiefly,
there is hard hammering on the importance of the Darwinian con-
tribution to the science of economics.
“The characteristic feature by which post-Darwinian science is
contrasted with what went before is a new distribution of empha-
sis, whereby the process of causation, the interval of instability and
transition between initial cause and definitive effect, has come to
take the first place in the inquiry; instead of that consummation in
which causal effect was once presumed to come to rest.”
“To the modern scientist the phenomena of growth and change
are the most obtrusive and most consequential facts observable in
economic life.”
“To any modern scientist interested in economic phenomena,
the chain of cause and effect in which any given phase of human
culture is involved, as well as the cumulative changes wrought in
the fabric of human conduct itself by the habitual activity of man-
kind, are matters of more engrossing and more abiding interest
than the method of inference by which an individual is presumed
invariably to balance pleasure and pain under given conditions that
are presumed to be normal and invariable. The former are questions
of the life-history of the race or of the community, questions of
cultural growth and of the fortunes of generations; while the latter
is a question of individual casuistry in the face of a given situation
that may arise in the course of this cultural growth. The former
bear on the continuity and mutuations of that scheme of conduct
whereby mankind deals with its material means of life; the latter,
if it is conceived in hedonistic terms, concerns a disconnected episode
in the sensuous experience of an individual member of such a com-
munity.”
These three quotations are taken from two papers, one dealing with
The Evolution of the Scientific Point of View, the second with
The Limitations of Marginal Utility. But they comprise the es-
sence of Professor Veblen's doctrine, if so dogmatic a name may be
given to his impersonal scrutiny of economic history.


BABETTE DEUTSCH
81
A large part of these essays is taken up with the examination
of the supersession of various economic schools, from the Physio-
crats, Adam Smith, and the hedonists, down to Marx and his fol-
lowers. It is characteristic of the author's treatment that he should
dwell mainly on the genetic background and the cultural concomi-
tants of each of these groups. So he traces the difference between
the Physiocrats and Adam Smith to the difference between the
feudal culture of the French and the less animistic, because more
pecuniary bias of the British. The discussion of the neo-Marxians
is similarly an inquiry into the effect of the state of the industrial
arts taken together with the neo-Darwinian habits of thought upon
Socialist theory. So he states that the frailest link in the chain of
Marxian logic is its doctrine of population, implied in the doctrine
of a growing reserve of unemployed workmen. “No one since Dar-
win would have the hardihood to say that the increase of the human
species is not conditioned by the means of living.” And again,
“Instead of the revolution being worked out by the leverage of
desperate misery, every improvement in working-class conditions
is to be counted [by the neo-Marxians] as a gain for the revolu-
tionary forces. This is a good Darwinism, but it does not belong in
the neo-Hegelian Marxism.”
It is sufficiently clear—and if not, it needs merely a glance at
this book to make it so—that the scientific viewpoint, based on the
discipline of the machine technology, is essentially opaque, imper-
sonal, and working along the lines of "efficient cause” rather than
of "sufficient reason.” If these old essays are valuable, in the face
of all that their author has since contributed, it is because of their
emphasis upon the spirit of his work; because, as much as any-
thing he has done, they show the impulse and intention of his
scholarship
There are here, as elsewhere, passages that rouse impatience be-
cause of the author's very carelessness of pragmatism. The essay
on Some Neglected Points in the Theory of Socialism is typical
in its indifferent, if suggestive, analysis. The sentence-structure of
these sporadic papers seems less involved—the development of
Professor Veblen's style being not unlike that of Henry James in
this regard. And like James, too, the richness of his irony seems
to run in inverse ratio to the simplicity of his phrasing. One won-
ders how far he thrust his tongue in his cheek when he observed:


82
NEO-DARWINIAN ECONOMICS
"If we are getting restless under the taxonomy of a monocotyle-
donous wage doctrine and a cryptogamic theory of interest, with
involute, loculicidal, tomentous and moniliform variants, what is
the cytoplasm, centrosome, or karyokinetic process to which we may
turn, and in which we may find surcease from the metaphysics of
normality and controlling principles ?”
What, indeed! But that sort of preciosity is less frequent than
the nice description of "obsequious salesmen and solicitors, gifted
with a tactful effrontery," or the quiet remark that “Under modern
conditions the struggle for existence has, in a very appreciable de-
gree, been transformed into a struggle to keep up appearances.”
If Darwinism is the theory of the accumulation of relatively slight
variations leading to evolution, then Professor Veblen's work is
eminently Darwinian: since it is by slightly varying considerations
that he develops one broad theme: the genetic account of the
economic life process: a cumulative process of adaptation of means
to ends that cumulatively change as the process goes on.
BABETTE DEUTSCH


THE MIND OF AN ARTIST
The LETTERS OF Henry James. Selected and edited
by Percy Lubbock. 2 Volumes. Ilustrated. 8vo. 945
pages. Charles Scribner's Sons. New York.
THE
HE Letters of Henry James have been published, and those
for whom he never lived or meant to live have discovered in
them the encouraging proof, at last, that he was a human being. If
they did not add, with the irony reserved to great majorities, that
he was a creature just like themselves, I should wish them joy of
their discovery and write no more about these Letters nor about
Henry James.
For if there is anything at all significant about the Letters—and
they are of surpassing fascination and importance—it is that they
give ground for the claim that Henry James was a human being
and exactly unlike "themselves.” They express, in brief, the pre-
tension of the creative artist to be more than the noblest of the
living, to be the master of life itself. The claim has been made
before, but I am not aware that it has been granted; the world
which is stupid enough in all conscience where art is concerned has,
after all, a flair for bastardy. It should find in Henry James the
a
first legitimate pretender who has been able to formulate his claim.
James was, in other words, one of the very few great artists born
into the world and the first one of these who was entirely self-con-
scious. He would himself have said "magnificently."
It is not my intention in this note to state the case of Henry
James in any detail; to do that would require a reasoned defence of
poesy and a far too long discussion of James' subjects and treat-
ments. I wish only to draw from his Letters such a clear statement
as he
may be found to make of his own conception of a novelist's
place in our society and from his Letters and his works to derive
one or two important qualities of his mind and of his methods, by
which his idea may be justified. No one who has understood the
work he accomplished can write briefly on James, since it is the
essence of his case that if it is to be treated at all, it must be treated
thoroughly. His work is either misguided, vain, and almost franti-


84
THE MIND OF AN ARTIST
cally wrong, or it is by all odds the finest achievement of any human
being of our time. I believe that the second statement is true, that
James' work in its relation to civilized humanity is of deeper sig.
nificance than that of any other writer, of any statesman, scientist,
reformer, religious, financier, builder of railways, master of pub-
licity, owner of newspapers, or maker of munitions, whose influence
we have undergone or are likely to undergo in our lifetime.
One makes no comparisons with creators in other arts, with
philosophers, and with private citizens, in spite of a prejudice in
favour of the form of the novel, the method of art, and the superior
effectiveness of the public career. But I do not propose to give all
my reasons for my belief, nor even to mention the lapses and faults
in James' work. Above all I shall omit the psychoanalysis of the
Letters. We have here, in flashes, the mind of an artist displaying
itself and formulating a distinct theory of art which we can verify
by the work which that same mind created. That is what the
critics (with the honourable exception of Dr. Percy Lubbock, the
editor of the Letters) have failed to discern here, and that, or at
least a part of that, is the theme.
For brevity one must turn at once to the end of the second
volume where the theme is stated in its full dignity, very much in
major. It comes in two letters to H. G. Wells, apropos of that
writer's parody of James in Boon. “I hold that interest may be,
must be, exquisitely made and created, and that if we don't make it,
we who undertake to, nobody and nothing will make it for us." To
this Mr. Wells, speaking of "our profound and incurable difference
and contrast,” replied, “To you literature like painting is an end,
to me literature like architecture is a means, it has use.” Where-
upon in the course of a letter which one cannot begin to value,
James wrote:
“Meanwhile I absolutely dissent from the claim that there are
any differences whatever in the amenability to art of forms of
literature aesthetically determined, and hold your distinction be-
tween a form that is (like) painting and a form that is (like)
architecture for wholly null and void. There is no sense in which
architecture is aesthetically ‘for use' that doesn't leave any other
art whatever exactly as much so; and so far from that of literature
being irrelevant to the literary report upon life, and to its being


GILBERT SELDES
85
made as interesting as possible, I regard it as relevant in a degree
that leaves everything else behind. It is art that makes life, makes
interest, makes importance for our consideration and application
of these things, and I know of no substitute whatever for the
force and beauty of its process. If I were Boon I should say
that any pretence of such a substitute was helpless and hopeless
humbug; but I wouldn't be Boon for the world, and am only yours
faithfully,
HENRY JAMES."
The best one can do in the mere way of writing about this state-
ment is to clear it of ancient prejudice and to say what it does not
mean, for what it does mean is definite and beyond the range of
argument. It is true, and to those who know it is true Henry James
was, in the words of T. S. Eliot, the most intelligent man of his
time. Or it is false, in which case there is nothing serious in civ-
ilization. If it is true, there is nothing serious in railroads. The
dilemma is at least engaging for those who are living in the twilight
of the mind.
Let them with some intensity inquire into the meaning of civiliza-
tion, which is not the brute conquest by man of the forces of nature.
It is not even the day-labourer's ideal of the adjustment of man to
his environment. The measure of man's civilization is precisely the
degree in which he knows and deals with the things of his heart
and of his mind and of his spirit. To see more widely, more deeply,
more clearly, and not to see a longer distance or with sharper lenses,
is an ideal of progress; to respond to many impulses, to enjoy many
sensations, to undergo all the emotional experience of which one is
capable: to do these things with the last possible degree of in-
tensity and discrimination—these are the beginnings of civilization.
The vegetation of life pushes itself rankly toward the sun, and it
is comparatively an easy thing to smell all fragrances and to see
every colour; but the culture of a generation is to be judged by
those who are really saturated with the living essences of these
growths and can bring them into germinating and fruitful relation
with each other. Order, in life, is placing things in such re-
lation to each other that their energies for power and beauty are
exploited to the highest degree; and the artist who is the master of
this discipline, whose whole work is to determine and to declare


86
THE MIND OF AN ARTIST
the relations of men and of things, is by no extravagance called
creative.
I have used the word "saturated," a favourite in these Letters,
and am caught sharp with the question, "Why, if Henry James was
saturated with life, if he was creative, why do his works give so
much the effect of thinness, of unreality, of wanting the vital spirit
of living?” The answer does not involve us in any defence of
James for not "going down town,” for ignoring business and poli-
tics, science and economics, everything statistical, the common-
places of "progress.” In truth, he ignored nothing: he set these
things in their proper place and noted and used them in their
ultimate effect on the civilization he described. He knew that
ideas—he must have heard of several—are important only when
they effect some change in the quality and temper of an individual.
He could not make the mistake of Henry Adams, whom a dynamo, I
believe, reduced to intellectual impotence, or that of Mr. Wells,
in whom some form of Socialism seems to induce an almost Mes-
sianic inspiration. James was essentially too realist, by which I
mean that his poetic was too thoroughly a part of him, to be misled
by things or ideas. His subject, from Roderick Hudson to The
Sense of the Past, was exclusively the human soul in all its con-
tacts, in all its abasements and exaltations.
In saying this one says only that he made use of material things
civilized mind makes use of them, one only repeats that it is
the test of civilization so to use them. There are, fortunately,
some happy examples of James' awareness and of the use he chose
to make of reality. In the dictated summary of The Sense of the
Past (the novel was never finished) we have a young American
of our time or nearly, who, without for a moment losing his identity
as heir of all the ages including the nineteenth century, changes
places with a forebear of the early eighteen hundreds. The sum-
mary gives us everything, down to the oddity of his having good
teeth back there in an age of dental infelicity. What one gets in
that part of the book which was completed is the sense of difference
which these details created, the uneasiness of the projected figure,
his fear of becoming, for the others, a monstrous apparition. The
detail is deep below the surface, and surfaces in the third manner
are of such a density that one doesn't either see or fall through
them; one simply rests, with satisfaction, on the solidity of the un-
as any


GILBERT SELDES
87
.
.
derlying mass. The research and observation are there, are
effective, are beautiful, making for the indispensable third and
fourth dimensions. It is perhaps no accident that the work of most
writers in which the detail is all presented, and is the only thing
presented, is in every sense flat.
The lesson is repeated, even more beautifully, in The Wings of
the Dove. The first two books of this work of supreme loveliness
contain the motive of the intrigue (which is not the same as the
theme of the novel) and place before us one character, Kate Croy,
in all her immitigable and desperate need of money. Her father,
the high dim dazzling damning apparition, her widowed and im-
poverished sister, the dreadful Condrips, the babies, the protective
aunt, even the dead mother, are all merciless powers of the given
quantity money. (C'est assez vulgaire, ça, mes chers fonction-
naires de la literature? Balzac ne pouvait mieux.) But the theme
of the story, the subject which this desire for money illuminates
and exposes, is that of Milly Theale
“of a young person
conscious of a great capacity for life, but early stricken and doomed,
condemned to die under short respite, while also enamoured of the
world: aware moreover of the condemnation and passionately de-
siring to put in before extinction as many of the finer vibrations as
possible, and so achieve, however briefly and brokenly, the sense of
having lived." The lives of Kate Croy and of Milly Theale meet
and merge for a moment and Milly Theale dies, it would seem,
because she can no longer make the effort to live. Again the
material has been used, mercilessly pressed to give out its last drop
of poisonous essence, to be distilled and added drop by slow drop
into the little vessel where the same unfaltering hand was pouring
the soul of Milly Theale. The poisonous juice is the story, no
doubt; but the novel is all the reaction which follows its use.
I note these two instances less to extenuate the apparent thin-
ness of James than to expound things fundamental in his way of
apprehending life and expressing (or creating) it. He was ab-
normally sensitive to the look and feel and smell and appearance
of things—he was after all a great success as a "descriptive writer”
in his day—and the visual effect of his places and people, in the
novels, is startling and complete. Even in The Golden Bowl,
which is the final novel of the definitive edition and is unredeem-
ably in the third manner, drama and physical sensation are felt to


88
THE MIND OF AN ARTIST
an almost intolerable degree. Always, in whatever he wrote, the
bodily presence of his characters and the effect of their presence on
others are tremendously rendered. Always the common detail is
used, placed, presented, and compelled to contribute to the spiritual
atmosphere or action of a scene. That is one point of method. The
other is easier to formulate but, I fear, far more difficult for nov-
elists to understand. It is that the theme and the plot, the idea
and the action, are not identical, that they may be even hostile,
and that unless the theme conquers and so gets itself finally pre-
sented, the novel is, by any artistic standard, a failure.
The exposition of these things takes one far from the Letters but
very close to the mind which created them. In a brief note on a
mind so rich and so varied, on an artist so full of lessons and en-
couragements, many things must be omitted. In all fairness it
should be said that the few points here chosen show least in bulk in
the Letters. The criticism of literature, of personalities and cul-
tures, the slow process of creating the European scene, of criticizing
and civilizing—these, with their countless profundities, felicities,
ironies, are what must make the Letters of universal interest. I pass
from them, for further light on James as artist, to the prefaces he
wrote for the New York Edition of his works. The twenty-six
volumes, published by Scribners, are the only absolutely indis-
pensable books in the world for the study of the art of fiction.
Again one is possessed of a wealth of material and is compelled to
make only one or two points. The first of these is in the preface to
The Wings of the Dove, a parenthetical sentence:
"Attention of perusal, I thus confess by the way, is what I at
every point, as well as here, absolutely invoke and take for granted;
a truth I avail myself of this occasion to note once for all-in the
interest of that variety of ideal reigning, I gather, in the connexion.
I
The enjoyment of a work of art, the acceptance of an irresistible
illusion, constituting, to my sense, our highest experience of 'luxury,'
the luxury is not greatest, by my consequent measure, when the work
asks for as little attention as possible. It is greatest, it is delight-
.
fully, divinely great, when we feel the surface, like the thick ice
of the skater's pond, bear without cracking the strongest pressure
we throw on it. The sound of the crack one may recognize, but
never surely to call it a luxury."


GILBERT SELDES
89
Immediate is the connexion between "luxury” and “it is art that
makes life, makes interest, makes importance.” Immediate, too,
the relation of this passage to the idea of civilization which James
always held. Again comment can add nothing to the statement. It
is the development of the reader's side of the writer's attitude. En-
joyment, acceptance, are the not wholly passive states correspond-
ing to the joys and ardours of the creator.
For the second point no specific reference need be given, although
the preface to The Awkward Age will serve. There one finds the
complete elaboration of James' belief in form. I take it, loosely,
that his devotion to the form of his works grew as his preoccupation
with relations, states of being, affairs, overcame whatever desire he
may have had to present any superficial action. As he gradually
grew to care little for presenting movement-he cared always and
cared intensely for presenting Action-as he came to care more and
more to present an embarrassment, a predicament, above all a
relation or a set of relations between men and women, he was com-
pelled to go behind his characters, to render the chief of them
through the medium of others. (The "classic example” is Homer's
description of the beauty of Helen of Troy.) The consequent en-
richment of James' scene was excessive, and to practise the strictest
economy of presentation he had to establish his points of view, to
create in each case a consistent recording substance and then to
throw upon it everything it could bear. What Maisie Knew is per-
fect in this order. The Awkward Age, conceived dramatically and
with virtually no going behind, is the perfect example of the ar-
rangement of centres, each of them, as the author described it, a
social occasion the glow of which illuminates one side of his subject
and is caught in one facet of his theme.
It is not true that a novel must progress from centre to centre;
it is not even necessary that a novel should have a form, suitable
and sympathetic to the subject, created by the working of some
obscure law in the mind of the artist. It is only true that the novel
can have and do these things, and that when the subject is of any
depth or delicacy, the care for form is enormously justified. It is
justified because it prevents the “leak of interest” which one feels
so maddeningly in the imitators of the Russian school and in con-
temporary English novels. I speak of justification only for the
reader; for the artist a form will usually justify itself.


90
THE MIND OF AN ARTIST
The dangers of both the idea and the method are obvious. It
is clear that to some readers all the characters in the novels of
Henry James are only highly polished surfaces, set at crafty angles,
so that they reflect precisely nothing. It is clear that if one be-
lieves in centres, one may forget to believe in the progression of
the story from one centre to another. Happily James has escaped
both dangers. His surfaces reflect everything, and his need for
going behind, for having these projecting mirrors, was always de-
pendent upon the density or the delicacy of the subject he treated.
Nor was he fanatic about his structure. He knew well enough that
his form was not the only possible form; and his letters to other
novelists show how gravely and how generously he understood what
others were trying to do. He wrote to Daudet and to Mrs. Hum-
phry Ward, to Wells and to Compton Mackenzie; he wrote of
everybody who tried to write at all. And only the most flagrant of
charlatans roused him to bitterness.
One thing he found intolerable: the bad work which comes from
a low esteem of one's art. One thing he would not admit: limits on
the availability of the novel-form. For this was more than a pas-
sion; it was a great, a consuming and sacrificial devotion. He had
deserted, for a period of years, his proper field, the novel and the
tale. When he returned and gave himself up to them utterly, he
realized all their capacities, all their magnificent freedoms, and all
the burdens of work which they demanded of him. It was then that
The Ambassadors, The Golden Bowl, and The Wings of the Dove
were written. Few writers had done so much before for the art
of fiction; and to none was the reward of perfect achievement more
lavishly granted. For these three novels are masterpieces and one
of them, The Wings of the Dove, is the only novel which stands
with Flaubert's bitter Madame Bovary in unchallenged precedence
before all other works of fiction.
I do not think that the lesson of this supreme triumph needs to
be much emphasized. The golden bowl was filled to the brim, was
filled even to the last moment of living, because it was without
fault or stain; and because it was held high it caught the purest
rays of the sun and into it were poured the rare wines of life, un-
adulterated and of an infinite richness and refreshment.
GILBERT SELDES


A HERO WORSHIPPED
WILDERNESS. A Journal of Quiet Adventure in Alaska.
By Rockwell Kent. 8vo. Illustrated.
217 pages.
G. P. Putnam's Sons, New York.
HOSE early Baireuth audiences that first heard the Brunhilde
Yo-ho-to-ing on the hills must have been singularly thrilled.
There was something overwhelming in the call even as given by
so late a singer as Ternina. What did the cry mean precisely? It
was clear as daylight to whole generations who once ignited to it,
but volumes have been written in explanation of it and now singers
understand it too well to sing it. Though it will always continue
as music, it is doubtful if our young people will be any more likely
to catch afflatuses from it now than they will be to catch a suicide
mania from a reading of Werther. Moral agencies are like bee-
stings. They get but once effectively beneath the skin, and for each
new generation there is a new set of bees.
The time is out of joint for any great outcry over morality or
art. It is too soon after the war. The entire world is still uncertain
whether it has been heroic or foolish, and until the next election has
settled this point for Americans, the citizens of this country will
scarcely permit themselves to be led into generous exaltations. A
degree of mental leisure is required for that sort of thing.
But a little band of restless professionals here in New York has
lately been led into an enthusiasm that has been pronounced enough
to suggest—like one of those furtive thunder-storms in March-
that if summer is not come, at least summer will come. This flurry
occurred over a book with drawings by Rockwell Kent, called
Wilderness; A Journal of Quiet Adventure in Alaska; and the
flurry was more over the drawings than over the book, although
the drawings are more debatable than the book. Both in the draw-
ings and in the book Mr. Kent Yo-ho-tos from the cliffs and the
little band referred to sat up straight in their chairs and had every
outward appearance of resolving to lead better lives in the future.
Such a phenomenon bears being looked into, and in such a time
as this, if Mr. Kent's call really has any vitalizing quality, it should
.


92
A HERO WORSHIPPED
be given all the benefit that printed comment may bestow. I,
however, who have 'en accused before this of being a free com-
mentator—the exac 'usation was "too free”—hesitate foolishly
at what ought to be a pleasant task. But no duty that has con-
fronted me in a trying winter has seemed so formidable as this. I
once refused point-blank to do this article, but with the pistols of
The Diau's editors levelled at my head I am obliged to con-
tinue; saying to myself that words after all are but words, words,
words. Already in the New York Sun I have discussed the draw-
ings that figure in this book, The Wilderness, and though the
review passed for what most people would consider “a good notice,"
I felt constrained to begin it with a moving plea to the artist not to
read it. This request Mr. Kent—who is in many respects remark-
able-granted, and he assured me that when members of his family
tried to read to him some of the most honeyed phrases he stuffed
his fingers in his ears and would not listen. This was all very
well
and fortunate for once. But will the miracle happen twice? See
how these lines tremble. I am in a state of abject fear.
And all this simply because I am twelve years older than Rock-
well Kent. Rockwell Kent is a young, young artist working for
young, young people. What right has one sunk in years to go test-
ing him by the standards of other days? Particularly when he
is still in the process of making himself? There you see—what an
offensive sentence that last one is! Rockwell Kent to those twelve
years younger than himself is a fait accompli. What abysses of
separation two dozens of years can make! However, there
are signs that young people with aspirations seem to have realized
that they are in a bad way in the present day. On comparing
aspirations they find they match! To tiresome elderly people the
uniformity of the chicks that are hatched from standardized in-
cubators is no surprise, however disconcerting the bits of Auff that
have been robbed of individuality by modern conditions may find
it. . . . Rockwell Kent went to the far North. He took his
young son, aetat nine, with him. He fled presumably from the
straight streets, the block-like houses, the cells that pass as rooms,
and the newspapers that induce six million New Yorkers to think
the same thought each morning. He lived the Alaskan winter
upon a lonely island whose population that winter was three, for
Kent's only neighbour was an old man who was thought by some
.


HENRY MCBRIDE
93
in distant Seward to be a fool. The snows and the thermometer
descended so that the water pails ten feet fror, the raging hot stove
froze two inches thick. Even the clock jed—starting again
from the warmth of breakfast cooking. But in the mornings Mr.
Kent and his young son washed in the snow, invariably.
.
.
“And with a mug of water in hand clean our teeth out there
and this in the coldest weather. We scour our pots with snow
before washing them, throw the dish water right out of the door,
and generally are in and out all day. It is surely nonsense
to think that changes of temperature give men colds. Neither of
us has had a trace of a cold this winter; we haven't even used
handkerchiefs-only sleeves. Nor does it give one a cold to be
cold. I've tried that often enough to know. And a variable
climate has, too, nothing to do with it, for what variableness could
exceed an Alaskan winter ? Colds, like bad temper and loss of
faith, are a malady of the city crowd.”
Heroic? I should say!
But there is more than mere weather to Alaska-there is ad-
venture. Early in the book, in the chapter called Arrival, Rock-
well, Jr., and his pa, when returning by row-boat from the seven-
mile trip to the mainland, almost came to grief in a sudden and
dangerous squall. The seething current bore them towards the
rocky coast that meant sure death. It was necessary to pull at right
angles to the course and to put every ounce of strength into the
effort.
" Father,' pipes up Rockwell from behind me at this tragic
instant, 'when I wake up in the morning sometimes I pretend my
toes are asleep, and I make my big toe sit up first because he's the
father toe.' At another time Rockwell, who had shown a little
panic-a very little-said, 'You know I want to be a sailor so
I'll learn not to be afraid.'”
Finally there came the moment when Kent, Sr., reached the point
where he could turn with chances of safety towards the island—and
where he had to. The shelter was reached with incredible swift-
ness,


94
A HERO WORSHIPPED
“the sea boiling in our wake, racing furiously as if to engulf us,-
and then bearing us so smoothly and swiftly upon its crest that if
it had not been so terrible it would have been the most soothing
and delightful motion in the world. In rounding the headland of
our cove a last furious effort of the eluded storm careened us sailless
as we were far on one side and carried us broadside toward the
rocks. It was a minute before we could straighten our boat into
the wind and pull away from the shore, then twenty feet
away.”
The landing was made in safety "and that night in their bed
Rockwell and his father put their arms tight about each other
without telling why they did it.”
Experiences like that for an artist are truly educational. There
were others, too. About the first of January old Olsen, the one
neighbour that the Kents possessed, sailed for Seward to fetch back
the longed for Christmas mail, and instead of an absence of a few
nights, six long weeks intervened before the stormy winter seas per-
mitted his return. Then father and son were really alone and the
diary descriptive of the daily chores cheerfully performed and of
the high spirits with which the long drawn out exile was faced
makes the climax to the book. The wood-cutting for the stoves that
roared day and night might have seemed occupation enough for one
individual, but in addition there were meals to be cooked and—I
don't know why I mention it last—drawings to be made.
Before going to the north to brave the elements in this fashion
Mr. Kent had become an excellent draughtsman in black and white.
He might have been called an illustrator except that editors of
magazines would not accept his drawings and his fame was chiefly
in the minds of his fellow artists. He was however unusually dex-
terous in the use of the pen and it is difficult now to see how the
editors could have been so dull as not to take him on. He painted
marines, too, boldly and broadly, and it is not too much to say that
of all those who were helped in their knowledge of the aspects of
the sea by Winslow Homer, he stands foremost. The Winslow
Homer vein, however, was rightly abandoned as being unworkable,
and it was abandoned for something like symbolism. And it was
about this time that the young people who must have their heroes
and ought to have their heroes began to talk of Rockwell Kent
with bated breath.


HENRY MCBRIDE
95
The "quiet adventure” in Alaska came to an end with the winter
and when the two Rockwells returned to what one of them had
brooded considerably over in the wilds—civilization, a shop on
Fifth Avenue received their portfolios and made the contents
promptly fashionable. The adoration lavished on the work by the
wan and pale members of the Art Students League who hovered
over the drawings all day long and had to be shooed out when
closing time came was positively pretty. It seemed almost a shame
that old people were allowed in the galleries at all, for most of them
had a tendency to exchange meaning glances at the terms of the
young people's praise. They, worse luck, had read their job and
thrilled to Blake's drawings for Job. They had seen the mediaeval
drawings of saints being boiled in oil, by artists who had assisted
at the boiling. How could they thrill to pictures of people who
were only playing at being Blakes and hermits? They are to be
pitied of course, for the games of youth are lovely, and this game
of the Wilderness was certainly played by both Rockwells for
all there was in it.
Henry McBRIDE


AN AMERICAN HUSBAND
AN AMERICAN IDYLL: The Life of Carleton H. Parker.
By Cornelia Stratton Parker. 12mo. 200 pages. Atlan-
tic Monthly Press. Boston.
The Casual LABORER AND Other Essays. By Carleton
H. Parker. With an introduction by Cornelia Stratton
Parker. 12mo. 199 pages. Harcourt, Brace and Howe.
New York.
CAR
NARLETON PARKER was for several years a teacher of
economics in the University of California, and later head
of the department of economics at the University of Washington;
he very quickly reached national prominence in his profession,
served the State of California in various investigations into the
western labour situation, and during the last two years of the war
was successful in adjusting several labour disputes for the Fed-
eral Government. He was a keen student of some of the psycho-
logical effects of the existing industrial system and social organiza-
tion on special classes of workers; the points of view toward these
problems he developed during the last two years of his life are ex-
tremely suggestive for the growing application of the results of
modern psychology to the social question. As a teacher and a man
he was a personality unusually stimulating and ingratiating.
These outstanding facts about the man may be set down in
advance without serious danger of the inaccuracy that attaches to
almost any statement about another's life; but neither they nor any
elaboration of them would much illuminate any of the questions
these two volumes are likely to raise in the mind of any reader with
a certain sharp modern sense for problems. For, if one shares at all
any of the disrespectful inquisitiveness of the day, Parker's life and
work will inevitably present more than a single simple and comfort-
able matter for discussion, and these bare facts about him will bring
one scarcely to the threshold of a number of problems that are likely
to seem speculative as well as embarrassing, because they are the
product of a new and indecorous attitude toward human biography
a


VIRGIL JORDAN
97
a
-an attitude which Carleton Parker himself in no small way helped
develop. The first problem one encounters here is that of this book
itself, Mrs. Parker's record of her life with her husband that bears
the disturbing title of An American Idyll, and it is in a sense the key
to all the succeeding problems that Parker himself suggests.
The Idyll belongs apparently to that class of interesting” books
into the sources of whose interest the reader—at least the American
reader—is careful not to inquire too pertinaciously. But that such
a book should be found pleasant or unpleasant reading by anybody
to-day, and why, is a matter not without interest in itself, and one
in very pertinent connection with Parker's own work.
To take our reader of The Idyll at his very best we may suppose
he is a sober student of the labour problem or of some other phase
of social science, and has come to the book in search of some plain
information about Parker's work. As he submits himself to Mrs.
Parker and is scudded rather undignifiedly along in the breezy
pages
of this memorial to her husband, he will be very likely to ex-
perience a disconcerting sense of "estrangement.” He will shortly
feel that he is really out of place, that his mind is not tending strictly
to business, and that he had better go home at once. His conscience
will complain, of course, that he—and Parker—are concerned with
a problem of great importance for social theory, and that it is a
rare personality cut off in its prime he is reading about. But other
matters will intrude upon his attention, and he will surprise his
thoughts at most impudent and indecorous holiday pranks.
He will catch himself musing over western college life, with its
wide, ingenuous vacuity; over the rosy-cheeked, healthy hysterics
it produces; over its sororities and student social life, with the pat-
terns they impose on American culture; over especially its girls and
"co-eds,” with their emotional puffs and breezes; over, in brief, this
whole splendid culture ground for all the paradox and pathos of
American romance. From here he will find himself galloping be-
hind wild horses through hilarious but sombre reflections on Ameri-
can honeymoons, American matrimony, the American birth-rate,
American housekeeping, American domestic morale, and on the
tortuous personal undercurrents of American life, domestic and
academic. These and many other mischievous nixies of suggestion
will beckon him away from the serious concern to which he set
himself, and despite all his inhibitions of politeness, decorum, or


98
AN AMERICAN HUSBAND
scientific attitude, he will gradually find his interest in Parker the
social scientist, or even in Parker the teacher and man, overwhelmed
by a piquant and sympathetic interest in Parker the American hus-
band.
Anyone with a previous appreciation of Parker's work and a
knowledge of its very general pertinence to all phases of the social
situation will see at once that some aspects of Parker's life so ines-
capably and insidiously suggested by Mrs. Parker's record, so far
from being irrelevant to his work, are most intimately connected
with it, if his method and point of view have any validity at all;
that they are but special angles of a new general method of approach
to the study of modern society, one aspect of which Parker himself
was interested in. He will see that Parker, the professor and hus-
band, and his intense interest in and sympathetic devotion to the
hobo, the blanket-stiff, and the wobbly, are as much part of the
total picture of the stresses and strains, the frustrations and balk-
ings in American life, the individual gestures and group movements
of compensation, as are the I.W.W. and the reactions of the casual
labourer of whatever type. Parker himself was this fearless kind of
social student, with a keen eye for these new intimacies of sociology,
and no one would have enjoyed more or gotten more out of An
American Idyll than he—if it had been written by some other
man's wife.
He would have admitted quite freely that even a university pro-
fessor's dominant interest is no more casual than the fall of a spar-
row is unobserved; that man does not become enthusiastic over
Freud accidentally, nor exhibit unusual industry in understanding
and explaining the state of mind of the American hobo only for
patriotic or scientific motives, and that these things in human be-
haviour are quite as problematic and quite as worthy of explana-
tion as a riot of hop-pickers, because they are no less real and influ-
ential for the social problem. Parker and the hobo are parts of
the same situation; if Freud's doctrines have any validity at all in
application to social psychology they must be true for everybody;
we cannot have one Freud for the hobo and another for the pro-
fessor.
Every level of life in modern society, domestic, industrial, or
professional, has its own way of walking the ties of freedom, and
its own hobos; and every level has likewise its universities and its
a


VIRGIL JORDAN
99
а
professors. At any given moment each individual may belong to
more than one level, and the stresses of all the levels combined will
determine his own special picture of compensation or sublimation,
whether it be crop-burning or the study of the psychology of crop-
burning. But the stresses of the predominant level are determining
for his general behaviour.
If we recognized this we would not, of course, find it necessary
to make such a fuss over the balked instincts of this or that class.
We would have regarded it, as we still do, as a novel and abstruse
discovery that at least some people are human beings; and we
would not suppose that a syndicalist is necessarily more of a human
being than a stock-broker, nor that he is possessed of the most ter-
rific instincts which must be satisfied forthwith while the stock-
broker's may go hang. Before venting a bellow for the free and
unlimited coinage of instinct satisfactions we would probably feel
obliged to at least institute a census of instinct expressions and
base our redistribution or socialization of contented instincts on
some such scientific ground. And when we got out of the present
stage of such crude romanticism about instinct we might find that
the professor is living nearer the minimum limit of instinct subsis-
tence than the hobo.
The use of the psychoanalytic approach, the behaviouristic or
functional points of view, or in general the whole attitude of what
is called “the new psychology” in the interpretation of individual
and
group
behaviour is the essence of the social and cultural revo-
lution that is going on before our eyes; but unless it is used as a
general and comprehensive key to the social problem in all its as-
pects and with full cognizance of its focal relation to all the cur-
rents of the times, it slips readily into a ridiculous over-emphasis of
parts of the picture. This was, of course, inevitable in a man who
was, as regards the deliberate application of this method to his
field, a pioneer.
Parker's attention was fixed from the very first on certain out-
standing things in the life of the American wage-worker—the ex-
treme mechanization of his labour, the subjection of his freedom of
movement and work to the capricious impersonal forces of our in-
dustrial organization, the domestic and social conditions associated
with his birth and occupation--all of which led to a balking of what
Parker considered the fundamental and imperative instincts of any
a


100
AN AMERICAN HUSBAND
human being-of sex, family life, and so forth. He studied these
frustrations quite minutely in certain occupations, such as meat-
packing and steel-working, and among the vagrant labour of the
West, and reached conclusions regarding the influence of emotional
frustrations in these classes which he would doubtless have devel-
oped into a more complete and satisfactory theory had he lived.
But as his discussion stands and so far as it has been carried on it
is so fragmentary and one-sided as to appear somewhat crude and
far-fetched.
Parker did not see clearly what is revealed in the life of any man,
including himself—that these things are true of all levels of social
life to-day and that the phenomena of creative frustration are beau-
tifully complementary in all classes. They are of course always less
obvious in a bank president or in a lively young western personality
like Parker, but they are none the less there if one has the eye for
them, and biographies like the Idyll to help. The forces that led
a band of plundered, starved, and driven hop-pickers to the violences
of the Wheatlands riots are the same in every essential respect as
those that led the ranch owner to his oppression and exploitation
and the sheriff's posse to its cruelties. Mr. Palmer suffers as much
from a balking of creative expression as any “Red”; it merely hap-
pens that he is constrained to exhibit his frustration in opposite
ways.
What is more important, Parker did not apparently see that any
or all of these modes of expression or any of the list of motivating
inherited tendencies to action which he, like all psychologic enthu-
siasts, had to compile and pin to the American worker are quite rela-
tive and not in the least final or imperative. Not only do they
modify each other in endless variation in the individual and in the
group but they are purely instrumental, in even their most funda-
mental forms and most constant manifestations, to the basic, cre-
ative, life or growth forces in the individual and the group. It is this
protean creative force that motivates the conflict in any individual
and its mode of expression will depend upon the special problem of
adjustment with which the individual is concerned and upon the
carriers—of action, thought, habit, idea, ideal, convention, cus-
tom, or institution—that one's life history and environment pro-
vide as media of discharge. It is absurd to analyze the process of
life or growth or creative expression into any number of definite
a


VIRGIL JORDAN
101
acts or typical kinds of behaviour. Instincts are not things in them-
selves any more than political institutions; they are modes of dis-
charge of power, instruments of a creative activity, but not in
themselves final or essential. If this were not true there would be
no such phenomenon as sublimation, which, so far as society is con-
cerned, is the crux of modern psychology.
For this reason any list of fundamental imperative instincts is
a testimony to a deficient sense of humour. It is no more illumi-
nating to say that people live in cities because of their "gregarious
instinct" or that the I.W.W. loves to start a row because of his
“pugnacious instinct,” than to say that men like automobiles be-
cause of an "automotive instinct” or marry because of a "matri-
monial instinct.” Men are gregarious, sexual, pugnacious, or any-
thing else only because that is the mode of response or expression
or growth their environment and character happen to have estab-
lished in them. To set down on the basis of certain laboratory
experiments a list of instincts which must be satisfied by all classes
lest society perish is a return to the naïve romantic naturalism of
Rousseau. The modes of creative expression in any living thing are
fortunately infinite, and the problem of society arises from the fact
that it establishes through use certain types of creative discharge
which in some way are originally instrumental and adaptive but
eventually become rigid and purely formal, and in any stage never
quite fit all individuals. A society is fortunately not composed, as
Parker pictured it, of bundles of specific distinct desires which
must be satisfied or it goes to pot. The process of association, like
the
process of individual life, is in a sense one continuous sublima-
tion or transformation of energies. The task of a creative society
is to devise possible sublimations or carriers which leave the least
recoil. That is the best it can do. No human individual can ever
slake his quenchless thirst for life and more life, and it is problem-
atic whether, as an atom among myriads, he will not always have to
go to some extent thirsty.
VIRGIL JORDAN


BRIEFER MENTION
WOMAN TRIUMPHANT (La Maja Desnuda), by Vicente Blasco
Ibanez, translated by Hayward Keniston (12mo, 322 pages;
Dutton), is another recherche de l'absolu, a novel of an artist
frustrated in his passion for painting the perfect nude. Renovales
is a consummate "heavy,” bitter after the manner of 1830 that
he has been dragged by his wife into commercial art, edging
her with his bitterness into an Early Grave, and then becoming
madly in love with her memory after death. He finally suc-
ceeds in reconstructing her face—to his liking, at least—but can-
not recall her body, and scours brothel and music hall for a prosti-
tute who can serve as an adequate model. But his disillusion is
complete, and he has nothing left but to "gaze at the dreaded
end of the last journey. the dwelling from which there is
no return—the black, greedy abyss-death!”
.
RESPONSIBILITY, by James E. Agate (12mo, 317 pages; Doran),
a first and promising novel, concludes abruptly with the Great
War and a dirge on illegitimacy's slur on the father. The theme
from which the book takes its title blossoms in the last fifty
pages; hardly sufficient to have merited such emphasis. Agate is
too interested in throwing brickbats on his characters to develop
his narrative, which has glints of gold. Literary epicures will
like the robust introduction, while the plot will appeal to delvers
in realism and iconoclasm.
We MODERNS: Enigmas and Guesses, by Edwin Muir (12mo,
244 pages; Knopf), is homage à Nietzsche, avowedly, but more
because it shows the assimilation of Nietzsche's thought than be-
cause it imitates his manner. A series of some two hundred para-
graphs and epigrams, on a variety of topics, nearly all of which
are “thought out.” There are lapses, superficialities, but on the
whole this is criticism, of life and of literature, which must
effect a change in one's habits of thought. The author is a
young Scotsman, the “Edward Moore” of The New Age.


BRIEFER MENTION
103
>
Best AMERICAN HUMOROUS Short Stories, edited by Alexander
Jessup (16mo, 276 pages; Boni & Liveright), in order to be com-
prehensive, has had to span more years than smiles. The com-
piler steers a safe, somewhat academic course, and there are in-
evitably some inclusions of historical rather than hilarious inter-
An interesting survey, which shows that the American
humorist "dates” rapidly.
est.
LANCELOT, by Edwin Arlington Robinson (12mo, 184 pages;
Seltzer). In the second of his poems dealing with Arthurian Ro-
mance, Mr. Robinson has chosen to retell the story of the ruin
of the court at Camelot as the last setting of the love of Lancelot
and Guinevere. All the familiar characters are present—some-
what unfamiliar, in their halting, introspective speech to the
reader of the Idylls of the King. The verse moves with dignity
and attains at times even a detachable beauty, and yet the mem-
orable lines are comparatively few-for this author. Beneath
the surface of the well-known story one feels, however, the quiet
current of the allegory that must have been the motive for a
return to this legend.
SALOME; The IMPORTANCE OF Being Earnest; Lady WINDER-
mere's Fan, by Oscar Wilde (16mo, 216 pages; Boni & Live-
right), puts three diverse manifestations of Wilde's dramatic art
into the accessible and convenient form of the Modern Library.
Here is a craftsmanship which doesn't grow stale.
a
Now It Can Be Told, by Philip Gibbs (illus., 12mo, 558 pages;
Harper), has been largely disparaged because it is not sensa-
tional; one does feel that the censors must have disallowed quite
a number of piquant bits which Gibbs neglects to tell. But when
he does announce his careful judgement that a tremendous num-
ber of British lives were sacrificed for nothing except what might
be called Staff reasons, he is sensational enough. It is a bit
querulous about the obvious indignities; but it is calm and ter-
rible about the great wrongs. The author was knighted for his
earlier work; England, not being a republic, understands grati-
tude.


THE THEATRE
I
was more than interesting to witness, at the end of a season, the
marionette play made by Ellen Van Volkenburg and Maurice
Browne out of A MIDSUMMER Night's Dream. The special dex-
terities and amenities of the performance do not need to be em-
phasized. What was startling was the capacity of a sophisticated
audience to yield itself so quickly to an illusion which by all ap-
pearance ought to have been preposterous. With excisions and
some variations the poetry of the text was spoken by disembodied
voices; a text familiar enough, one might call it riddled with
prejudices. Yet after the first few moments one lost all prejudice,
as one lost all sense that the marionettes were not possibly the
speakers, as one lost all sense of the commonplace in simply and
wholly believing in the puppet show.
This is, to be sure, a tribute to those most interested in the pro-
duction. What one gets out of it is a tribute to the stage and to
the mental capacities of modern audiences. And one wonders why
most of our authors and most of our producers avail themselves so
little of this exceptional will to believe. The devotion of an au-
dience to the fortunes of a musical comedy heroine, the intensity
with which millions of men and women live through the serial ad-
ventures of Tiger Face or whoever is now the weekly villain in the
moving pictures, are even more impressive instances of this un-
critical acceptance. It may be a very serious thing for the mind of
the race; I do not know. But it is an asset to the dramatist, for he
can turn it to his own uses. Our regular stage has so little of fan-
tasy; its nearest approach is through extravaganza, which is not the
same thing. There is no madness of mirth in our comedies; the
probable has engulfed everything in comedy just as the prosaic
threatens to take possession of the serious play. I glance back at
the season with no tabulations to aid me, and can remember a few
wild moments in The HOTTENTOT, an act of The FAITHFUL as
exceptions to this statement. The productions in which John Barry-
more figured are exempt for other reasons. For the rest, the long
list of entertaining plays is a tribute to common sense, a totally un-
necessary sacrifice on the altar of realism. The effort to make actions
a


THE THEATRE
105
and people credible, after they have been set in motion, has clearly
hindered the dramatist from his first business, that of creating,
then letting the force and genius of his creation do all the persuad-
ing he needs to have done.
Mr. Stephen Graham, writing of Brussof's RePUBLIC OF THE
Southern Cross, says that he once read outside a Russian theatre
the warning words, "People of weak will are asked to refrain from
taking tickets for this drama.” There are wills and wills; the
will to endure boredom has sometimes been the first requirement for
the critic; the willingness, if not the positive will, to be startled
or turned from the ordinary course of one's life might have been
asked for by the Theatre Guild when it produced The Dance of
Death. But the amusing sign (so Russian, one would have said a
few
years ago) demands a will which simply does not exist—the
will to resist illusion.
1
The passion of Eugene O'Neill's Beyond the Horizon must
have overcome those whose business it was to represent his charac-
ters on the stage; for representation and not a second act of crea-
tion was all that they attempted. The play has been published by
Boni and Liveright and richly deserves its permanent form. Read-
ing it, one succumbs even to its false notes; one is conscious that the
defects of the play are not ill cuttings of the cloth but ill matchings
of quite different pieces, so that the texture is uneven. The defects
are not excesses but intrusions and they indicate the real capacities
for dramatic presentation which Mr. O'Neill possesses. He is still
theatrical, but not by virtue of being finely of the theatre; he is
theatrical because his sense of the drama fails him at times and he
falls back on tricks. His characterization likewise tends to run to
grease-paint and wig. The weaknesses in each case were empha-
sized by the players, who were accustomed to them. The fine
qualities are in the book.
Gilbert Seldes


COMMENT
SEC
URE, apparently, of its own "niche in the temple of Fame,” the
recognized poetry of literature has had the pretension to defy or
discredit, as depraved or irredeemably vulgar, the poetic motions
in the living genius of to-day. Yet the genius of to-day, extant and
forcible, the wakeful soul of present time consciously in possession,
will assert its poetic along with all its other rights; and in regard to
the curiosity, the intellectual interest, it has of course the advantage
of being close at hand, with the effectiveness of a personal presence.
...At best, poetry of the past can move one with no more direct-
ness than the beautiful faces of antiquity which are not here for us
to see and unaffectedly love them. Our demand is for a poetry, as
veritable, as intimately near, as corporeal, as the new faces of the
hour, the flowers of the actual season. The poetry of mere liter-
ature, like the dead body, can not bleed, while there is a heart, a
poetic heart, in the living world, which beats, bleeds, speaks with
irresistible power. Elderly people, Virgil in hand, may assert pro-
fessionally that the contemporary age, an age, of course, of little
people and things, deteriorate since the days of their own youth,
must necessarily be unfit for poetic uses. But then youth, too, has its
perpetual part to play, protesting that, after all said, the sun in the
air, and in its own veins, is still found to be hot, still begetting,
upon both alike, flowers and fruit; nay! visibly new flowers, and
fruit richer than ever. ... The age renews itself; and in imme-
diate derivation from it a novel poetry also grows superb and large,
to fill a certain mental situation made ready in advance. . . . Here
is a poetry which boldly assumes the dress, the words, the habits, the
very trick of contemporary life, and turns them into gold. It takes
possession of the lily in one's hand, and projecting it into a vision-
ary distance, sheds upon the body of the flower the soul of its
beauty. Things become at once more deeply sensuous and more
deeply ideal. As at the touch of a wizard something more comes
into the rose than its own natural blush ... the visible is more
visible than ever before, just because soul has come to its surface.
We have omitted quotation marks from the preceding passage
and changed the tense of the verbs to the present because every word
a
а


COMMENT
107
of it is as full of instruction as when Walter Pater wrote it, of the
poetry of Ronsard, in Gaston de Latour. This is the everlasting
truth about poetry and such an instruction in generosity, in appre-
ciation, in judgement, as our own time most notably needs. It
says everything, with justice, precision, and beauty. It restores to
those who have to face the outcry against modern poetry a neces-
sary courage and faith; and it helps to explain why Walter Pater
is not of the small day of literature.
a
1
CONCENTRATION is presumably the key-word not only to success in
life, but to appreciation of the arts. Our verbose ancestors need to
be boiled down, and their essence five times distilled may yet prove
tiresome to the modern brain which has so much less time and can
apprehend things so much faster.
We are moved to these banalities by the announcement of a series
of condensations of the one hundred best novels, in which, for once,
the hack work was decently accomplished by skilled hands. Who
condensed Marius the Epicurean, who took out the chaff in Madame
Bovary, we do not know; but we do not envy the worker in the
overgrown garden of Henry James, nor the hacker of George Doug-
lass Brown's House With Green Shutters.
Without prejudice to this series one wonders why the idea is
not made effective in other arts. A few themes, with specimens of
orchestral method, ought to rob Beethoven of his longueurs, a gen-
eral idea of the Moses with, say, the horns in their original pro-
portions, would lead us gently to Michelangelo without the un-
nerving effect of the whole statue. And so on. The inevitable task
of condensing the condensations will be done in time. For the
moment one wonders why prose fiction alone is thus to be made
palatable to the moderns.
a
Had they been scratched on the base of an ancient obelisk or painted
in on the margins of a mediaeval romance, how our antiquaries and
aesthetes would praise the fantasy of Krazy Kat! What flight of
the imagination would they not find there, and what deductions
would they not draw of the spirit and temper of the age which
could produce such a wild unreality and take it with such sobriety
of appreciation. The cult of the genius of the comic strip who has
created the fantastic little monster is a growing one and there is


108
COMMENT
9
talk of Herriman's economy of strokes, of his composition, of his
backgrounds and middle distances. Let them say what they say.
Here is a veritable creation, standing cheek by jowl with all the
incredibly vulgar and stupid work of our comic artists. It is as real
as the Ueberbrettl', as indigenous for us as Coq d'Or is of Russia,
as Jolson to the Winter Garden.
The profound wisdom, the
miraculous technique, the strict observance of a convention, are
things of wonder, and if we have to condemn utterly the press
which demoralizes all thought and makes ugly all things capable
of beauty, we must still be gentle with it, because Krazy Kat, the
invincible and joyous, is a creature of the press, inconceivable with-
out its foundation of cheapness and stupidity. He is there to en-
liven and to encourage and to give much delight.
If everything works well next year the Metropolitan Opera
House will regale its subscribers with a revival of the Tales of
Hoffmann. Marta has not been dropped from the repertoire and
no doubt a good time will be had by all. If this is a commentary
on the taste of New York, we have nothing to say. But if it is
sheer stupidity which allows the greatest opera company in the
world to go on, season after season without Don Giovanni, without
Otello, without Falstaff, without Chovanstchina, with a niggardly
list of modern ballet and an overwhelming lot of faded Italian
operas—why, then, let ruin fall upon the house and all within it!
They do produce Samson; let them think a moment of its signifi-
cance.


1
4



#
AsRoHL
RIVER SCENE: CHINA. BY JEROME BLUM



THE
E
V
VI
VIJI
DIAL
W
I
X
OXX IIO
AUGUST 1920
SHAKESPEARE THE TRUTHTELLER
BY ROMAIN ROLLAND
Translated by Helena Van Brugh de Kay
OM
NE of the points on which men of all times have been in
accord is the platonic love they profess for Truth, and the
very real fear they have of it. This fear they manifest by showing
they do not wish to recognize it, and by their ingratitude toward
those who point it out. The word truth is in every one's mouth;
but who applies it? It should be, it would seem, the rôle of the
thinkers, the writers, whose sight is sharpened by their habits of
observation and analysis. But they would need for this as much
courage as intelligence. And if the latter is not common the former
is exceptional. One does not realize this at first, when one enters
the career of letters as an enthusiastic and confident novice who
believes the only difficulty to be that of finding the exact artistic
expression of what one thinks. But one discovers, little by little,
that the greatest difficulty is to wish to say what one thinks—still
more, to dare to think it. For conscience, vaguely dissatisfied with
the limits imposed upon its veracity, seeks a remedy in drowsiness,
puts on blinders and no longer thinks save by halves; up to this
point—no further. Like children at play, who end by convincing
themselves that if they jump one step outside of the chalk line on
the pavement they will fall into the abyss created by their imagina-
tions. A tiny enclosed space of the human soul, narrowly bound by
the thorny hedges of social convention and the ditches of prejudice.
The mind browses with docility on the pasture reserved for it.
Hardly do a few beasts, a bit more daring, risk a look across the


110
SHAKESPEARE THE TRUTHTELLER
barrier. To try to clear it, is to break one's neck! Only a few
madmen like Nietzsche or Pascal have attempted it!
It is nevertheless according to the more or less truthful hardihood
contained in a work, that we can judge of the moral and even the
intellectual superiority of the artist. From this point of view,
what a surprise to realize on close inspection to what a small matter
a
this hardihood reduces itself! Particularly in the theatre, for one
speaks, there to average men who merge their passions, conventions,
and prejudices in the common mass. In order to be heard by this
thousand-headed monster, in order that his hard ears may perceive
the sounds, the artist must adopt one of those "temperaments,” as
they say in music, where the crudity of the too precise shades of
thought disappear in a compromise which renders them uniform.
At most, if he has the flair, he can unmuzzle his truth and loosen
the reins of his prudent audacity on the trail traced by the passions
of the time and its hidden desires. For, in the general constraint
which society imposes upon itself, it happens that to relieve itself it
conceives obscurely a desire of partial emancipation in a particular
direction. Like to a man who suffers from a general sickness and
does not dare to go to the source of the trouble, who fixes his at-
tention upon one of the symptoms only and tries to persuade him-
self that is the principal enemy he must combat! The moralist and
the satirist profit by it to throw light on this point: it is a hole in
the hedge; truth passes through it; but she is a setter dog that obeys
orders and goes barely farther than is permitted. When the tone
of society is given by a king, who finds his profit or satisfaction in
lowering the pride of the upper classes, comedy, as with Molière,
jeers at the vices of the nobility or the absurdities of the newly rich
bourgeoisie and the literary scoundrels. When the sceptre has
passed into the hands of an ambitious, reasoning, vigorous, and
strong-backed bourgeoisie, the satire is exerted upon the religious
field, for there is the rival to be ousted. But it is rare that what the
free-thinker gains on one side, he does not lose on the other. One
would say that the writer pays for his audacity along one line by
adulatory concessions on all the rest. Man does not bear willingly
universal criticism, the too sincere vision which depreciates the
world, this “nutshell” where he lives. Secretly, he dislikes who-
ever prevents him from dozing on the pillow of illusions. He
knows well they are illusions; once in a way he consents to be re-


ROMAIN ROLLAND
111
minded of this. But suddenly, only in passing, with laughter, with-
out insisting. In order to have man accept her, truth must equip
herself with a mask-symbol or paradox. In order to have him
—
accept her, truth must appear a lie.
Shakespeare came up against these difficulties. Doubtless he had
the advantage of living in a less timorous epoch, when the artist
did not have to coddle the sensibility of a public hardened to the
sight of physical misery. Hamlet could go as far as he liked in
his meditations upon the tragic enigmas of life and death without
the public holding its nose. But as soon as he arrived at the criti-
cism of society, his task was just as difficult as that of modern writ-
ers, even more so; for he was exposed to the dangers of a capricious
and tyrannical authority, several of them even, one encroaching
upon the other: royalty, great lords, churches, a brutal populace. In
one of his sonnets (Lxvi) he expresses his disgust of a life where
all free forces, all truthful art, are bound and gagged. And yet he
succeeded in saying, if not all, at least enough, so that one can
read the very bottom of this intrepid soul which, while loving life
to the point of espousing all its forms, penetrated it so thoroughly
that he was the dupe of none.
His disguises are multiple.
And, first of all, one of the games which pleases his malicious
irony is to put in the mouths of the characters themselves such criti-
cisms as they would never submit to from others. Thus princes
will with impunity speak ill of royalty, the king of birth; and no
keener satire of women will be made than that uttered by the
witty Rosalind.
But Shakespeare entrusts his profoundest verities to two classes
of spokesmen, who are at the two poles of the moral universe: more
commonly to the very humble, to slaves, to fools, to those who can
say all because they do not count; and occasionally to those who
count too much-those for whom all the human barriers are too
narrow, and who burst them—to the Uebermenschen, the heroes.
In this latter category, with which I will deal first, one
must include not only those who are heroes essentially, but occa-
sionally men at the height of misfortune, or the dying, whose eyes
are opened to see what they would never have dared look in the
face of until their last hour. A weak and childish king like Henry


112
SHAKESPEARE THE TRUTHTELLER
>
VI, an Egyptian prostitute, a “black and wrinkled gypsy” like
Cleopatra, are suddenly transfigured at the threshold of death;
they see and judge calmly from above the illusions of men and
things, of which they had long been the voluntary dupes. The
furious Macbeth, in the hurricane which sweeps his life, perceives
in the gleam of a lightning flash the tragic inanity of all human
will. Gloucester (in King Lear), as a fugitive, discovers with his
.
blind and bloody eyes not only the ferocious irony of impassive
Destiny (like Spitteler's Ananché) but social inequality, and a gust
of almost proletarian revolt passes through his words.
In these examples, man, wretched or dying, has no difficulty in
being true: he is already outside of life; conventions no longer
hold him. But those souls who in the midst of life, in the midst
of the social order, remain intrepidly true, true through and through
in their vision, their words, and their acts, how many of these does
one see in a century? They are rare in all times, and one must
fear will be ever more so; for the democratic levelling of the
world, advantageous to the mass, decapitates the chiefs, the peaks
of the forest. The spectacle of the present epoch furnishes us with
the proof; never have the independent and truthful personalities
failed more conspicuously. The diffusion of public sovereignty
among the herds of citizens, far from favouring the moral liberty
of isolated individuals, imposes upon them the tyrannical veto of
public opinion—forty million masters instead of one!
In Shakespeare's time when the great rebels were not so rare as
to-day, they still were rare enough. It caused him, when he wished
to represent certain types, to place them in the distance of legend
and history. And even so one can easily distinguish them in his
work: a few valiant servitors of princes, who dare, from a feeling
of honour, from a need of frankness not less than from a desire to
serve the interest of their masters, to hold out audaciously against
them and tell them the most cruel truths. Thus Kent in King Lear,
and Paulina in The Winter's Tale.—Above them a little élite of
princes, who, dominating from a sufficiently high point the men
fate has given them to govern, do not have their sight obstructed
by flatteries and prejudices: the lucid and reflective Henry V and
his chivalrous adversary, the impetuous Hotspur, whose violence
leads to his ruin, but who by his magnificent veracity is the equal
of him who slays him. Still further up that “lion who laughs,”


ROMAIN ROLLAND
113
the Bastard, of King John. Alcibiades-Bonaparte, sweeping away
the lawyers, the rotten politicians and putrid jurisprudence. And
finally, at the very top, the free, absolutely free hero, alone against
the entire world, whose every word hits the world with a truth:
Coriolanus. One could say of this Uebermensch that he incarnates
the Ueberwahrheit, the heroic super-truth, so difficult is it at mo-
ments for ordinary men to breathe.
But if we should have to count upon the Coriolanuses, the
Bastards of Faulconbridge, or even the Kents and Paulinas in
order to hear the truth, we would risk never knowing its taste.
Those stars are comets returning at long intervals if they do not
lose themselves in the night of space. For ordinary life we must
resort to expedients. If truth cannot express herself with face un-
veiled, she will wear a mask. And here the Fool's usefulness is
revealed and his capital rôle in ancient society as in Shakespeare's
theatre, which is its mirror. Says the melancholy Jaques:
.
“I must have liberty, as large a charter as the wind, to blow on
whom I please; for so fools have. Invest me in my motley;
give me leave to speak my mind, and I will through and through
cleanse the foul body of th' infected world
.
There is the true fool and the false one, and it is often difficult
to distinguish exactly the one from the other. Precisely in this
confusion lies the disquieting attraction of this character. So long
as one considers him a buffoon who amuses the fortunate of the
world by his coarse sallies and his deformity, one has good cause
to despise, as one does to-day, a society capable of such pastimes.
But to do so is to see nothing; one is too easily satisfied with a
conviction of one's own superiority. The interest—I will even
say the grandeur of this custom, is that this deformed, pitiful being,
the weakest of all, sitting on the lowest step of the social ladder,
represents the free mind, and that no one, not even the king, is
sheltered from his irony. One laughs, and one pretends to be-
lieve him irresponsible, extravagant. Does one really so believe?
We can be permitted to doubt it. “He uses his folly like a stalk-
ing horse, and under the presentation of that he shoots his wit.”
It is a necessary fiction, to allow the free air to penetrate a little
in these courts asphyxiated by their despotism.


114
SHAKESPEARE THE TRUTHTELLER
-
One finds in Shakespeare all degrees of this make-believe mad-
ness, from the coarsest to the most innocent: Coriolanus' slaves,
the clowns of The Winter's Tale and All's Well That Ends Well;
even the ignoble Thersites (Troilus and Cressida) whose atrocious
envy sometimes renders him clairvoyant. -But let us go up a step:
here is the fool of King Lear, who pines away with sorrow after
Cordelia's banishment, and remains faithful to the old King when
the others abandon him. Who will dare to say he is really mad?
Goneril knows well he is not: (“You, sir, more knave than
fool ..."). -Let us go up one step more, not in morality, but
in intelligence. Here are the cynics, the vicious, the debauched,
who know life and are the dupes of nothing: Apemantus in Timon,
the enormous Falstaff, all of whose vices and truths one forgives
because one is grateful for the good humour he radiates about
him; but he says some terrible words about what society regards
as its pillars: the army, justice, honour.—Still further up, the
man of great heart and high race, unbalanced by the strokes of
fortune: Timon and Lear.–Finally, at the top, the best and most
intelligent of men, who is not mad, but wishes to appear so, and
who, behind this veil can express the naked soul of the poet:
Hamlet. (Let us note in passing how strange it is that the feigned
or real madness of Hamlet has been so long discussed, when Shake-
speare's text indicates precisely Hamlet's will to play this rôle.)
Let us group a few of the redoubtable verities that Shakespeare
lends these characters.
The fundamental vice he never ceases to pursue is hypocrisy.
All peoples suffer from it, the more so, perhaps, the stronger they
are, the more energetic their animal instincts, and the more nar-
rowly society is bound by the will of the State. In our modern
civilizations there is hardly one of the vices that dares show itself
as it is; they all borrow those hypocritical appearances which are,
as they say, homage rendered to virtue. Perhaps—but also the
most dangerous of the traps that are laid for it. For thereby the
mass of men becomes able no longer to distinguish false virtue
from true, or prefers the former which costs less effort. Let us
say further: the just man will always be looked on askance (if he
is not crucified), for he embarrasses, he is a living reproach to the
comfortable lie of false truth and false virtue.-The highest poets


ROMAIN ROLLAND
115
have seen in hypocrisy their principal enemy. If the chase be the
distraction of kings, the chase of hypocrites is the preferred exer-
cise of poets. It is sufficient to remember the names of Molière
and Ibsen. In England, great hunters abound: Ben Jonson, Swift,
Byron, Dickens, Thackeray, Bernard Shaw.
Shakespeare never grows weary of stalking this big game. Hypo-
crites are found in almost all his plays, and drawn in what power-
ful relief! I will not delay describing them. It is the “honest
Iago,” masterly poisoner of souls, Italian of the Renaissance, re-
fined in his villainy, who plays with his victims and enjoys their
convulsions. It is the sinister Angelo, of Measure for Measure,
odious, not to be despised, an example of the dangers to which
excessive compression of a disproportionate social constraint may
lead, together with the hidden brutality of a still beastlike human
nature. There is the queen in Cymbeline, that mixture of Bélise
and Agrippina, honeyed wife and step-mother, femme savante
studying medicine, concocting poisons, ambitious and murderous
to the profit of her royal idiot son. In the comic note it is Mal-
volio, the amorous and baffled puritan of Twelfth Night. Then
again we have the intellectuals to whom Timon tells a few truths:
the best men of art in their line (a painter and a poet), their only
little fault is that they "love and feed and keep a knave in their
bosom,” while "remaining assur'd that he's a made-up villain.”
And we have then the admirable All is True (as Henry VIII was
entitled in the revival of 1613), a consummate drama of court
life, where the passions hide their claws under velvet gloves: the
two princes of hypocrisy, king and cardinal, the chat-fourré and
the royal tiger-cat, who looks the other up and down with a terrible
and smiling tranquillity. But the most complete of all, the great-
est stroke of genius, the most tragic, is the “rooting hog” of York,
the "bottled spider,” the "poisonous hunchback'd toad” (Richard
III), Tartuffe as king and hero, the most extraordinary creation of
the rarest species of hypocrite, the one who plays the brute, the
rude and simple man—“I am too childish-foolish for this world”
--the man who dares make a declaration of love beside the coffin
of him he has assassinated, to the widow, the daughter, the mother
of those he has assassinated, and who makes himself loved by these
women who hate him, makes them abandon to him, the one her
body, the other the flesh of her flesh, her daughter.
So pro-
.
.
.


116
SHAKESPEARE THE TRUTHTELLER
found is the poet's aversion to hypocrisy that it is one of the
reasons he gives for the strange conduct, licentious and frivolous,
of his favourite historical hero, young Harry, Henry V. When
his father is sick unto death, Harry continues to laugh and play
the extravagant, although his “heart bleeds inwardly.” To his
companion in folly, Poins, who is astonished at this indifference,
he answers:
. ‘keeping such vile company as th