ou art hath in reason
taken from me all ostentation of sorrow.'
The reason?
What wouldst thou think of me if I should weep?'
'I would think thee a most princely hypocrite.'
'It would be every man's thought; ... every man would
think me a hypocrite indeed.'
Type of haughty reserve frequently found in the northern coun-
tries, in the most virile natures, who rather than glide insensibly
into a hypocritical exaggeration of beautiful sentiments which
would be repugnant to them, prefer to mask themselves with
cynicism or hardness.
Shakespeare denounces all the forms of hypocrisy, social and
moral-hypocrisy toward others, toward one's self. Among the
arrows he lets fly at them more than one outshoots the mark, when
it is such frenzied archers as Timon, King Lear, and Hamlet that
discharge them. In reaction against the sanctimonious optimism
of those who will not see, a biting misanthropy persists sometimes
in a vision so crude and murderous that it kills life and leaves
nothing but its rotting corpse—like those terrible sculptors at the
end of the Sixteenth Century who have chiselled beneath the image
of the “living” that of the “recumbent dead” being eaten by worms.
But the excess of this pessimism merely expresses the vision of the
world which is reflected in souls convulsed by an excess of suffering.
Without wishing to generalize it, Shakespeare shows pessimism to
be justified for those unhappy ones who abandon themselves to it;
and no one has the right to bring a judgement upon life or man
if he has not heard and weighed these formidable testimonies of
an eagle-eyed misery. Durch Leiden Licht.
In order little by little to habituate our eyes to this profound


ROMAIN ROLLAND
117
light, we will follow the progression inverse to that of the mind
that climbs step by step up the social pyramid, to the summit.
On the contrary we will come down from the summit-from kings,
princes, class hierarchies to man, naked man, stripped of his tinsel.
For if there are risks in attacking the prejudices of this or that
class, they are passing ones, and humanity as a whole is not inter-
ested. But what hits us in a tender spot is that which plunges into
the sources of life, that which scrutinizes our essential instincts,
love, pride, passion, action-our splendid idols, and the brazier
of our forces which burn in sacrifice at their feet.
Although living in the midst of an aristocratic society, a friend
of great lords and a court poet—although professing for himself
a high disdain of the political pretensions of the popular classes,
Shakespeare, whose work re-echoes all the vibrations of the uni-
verse, has at certain moments it seems enregistered there the dis-
tant rumbling of revolutions. One feels, as Hamlet says, that al-
ready "the toe of the peasant comes so near the heel of the courtier
he galls his kibe.” Shakespeare has no illusions as to the value
of titles and dignities. Cries the Prince of Aragon:
“O! that estates, degrees and offices
Were not deriv’d corruptly, and that clear honour
Were purchas’d by the merit of the wearer.
How many then should cover, that stand bare;
How many be commanded that command;
How much low peasantry would then be glean'd
From the true seed of honour; and how much honour
Pick'd from the chaff and ruin of the times
To be new varnish'd.”
The free and intelligent great lords who tolerated and even
cultivated his bourgeois friendship, Essex and Southampton, per-
mitted him boldly to question the value of birth and blood. Says
the King of France:
Strange is it, that our bloods,
Of colour, weight, and heat, pour'd all together,
Would quite confound distinction, yet stand off
In differences so mighty.


118
SHAKESPEARE THE TRUTHTELLER
"From lowest place when virtuous things proceed,
The place is dignified by the doer's deed. ..
>
.
“The property by what it is should go,
Not by the title.
honours thrive
When rather from our acts we them derive
Than our foregoers.”
Shakespeare's persiflage is often exerted with impunity at the
expense of the court nobility, its absurdities and vices, like
Molière's in the shadow of the great king. But Shakespeare goes
further than he against a new power, whose danger already an-
nounced itself and which upon the ruins of destroyed aristocracies
dominates the world to-day more than any oligarchy of blood has
ever done-money.
“Thus much of this will make black white, foul fair,
Wrong right, base noble, old young, coward valiant . .
Thou common whore of mankind, that putt’st odds
Among the rout of nations.
>
· Twinn'd brothers of one womb,
Whose procreation, residence and birth,
Scarce is dividant, touch them with several fortunes;
The greater scorns the lesser ... the learned pate
Ducks to the golden fool.”
And how is this gold—this seed of injustice and crime, gathered?
By crime. Here is the first call to the class struggle:
Bound servants, steal !
Large-handed robbers your grave masters are, -
And pill by law.”
“Break open shops; nothing can you steal
But thieves do lose it."
Gold buys justice and makes of it a watch dog that grovels be-
fore the rich, and bites the passing beggar:


ROMAIN ROLLAND
119
“..
.
see how yond justice rails upon yond simple thief.
Hark, in thine ear: change places; and, handy-dandy, which is the
justice, which is the thief? Thou hast seen a farmer's dog bark at a
beggar? And the creature run from the cur? There thou might'st
behold the great image of authority; a dog's obeyed in office.
The usurer hangs the cozener.
.
.
“Through tattered clothes small vices do appear;
Robes and furr'd gowns hide all. Plate sin with gold,
And the strong lance of justice hurtless breaks;
Arm it in rags, a pigmy's straw doth pierce it.”
A little gold will exempt from military service the most valid
of men at the counsel of revision over which the corpulent Fal-
staff, cynic and coward, presides with the little judge Shallow,
"this Vice's dagger, lecherous as a monkey.” But the poor will
always be "good for a pike.” Even when diseased in the feet,
wasted with sickness, and spitting blood. ... "Food for powder,
food for powder; they'll fill a pit as well as better.”
Money—or to call it by its broadest name, self-interest, is mas-
ter of nations as of individuals. One buys a State as one buys a
Judge. According to the price one gives, it is peace or war. The
blind and foolish mass does not know the true reasons; one does
with it what one likes. Some such nation that calls itself the
“knight of justice," and is so in truth,
66
whose armour conscience buckled on,
Whom zeal and charity brought to the field
As God's own soldier, rounded in the ear,
With that same purpose-changer, that sly devil,
That broker, that still breaks the pate of faith,
That daily break-vow, he that wins of all,
Of kings, of beggars, old men, young men, maids
That smooth-fac'd gentleman, tickling Commodity,
Commodity, the bias of the world;
The world, who of itself is peized well,
Made to run even upon even ground,
Till this advantage, this vile-drawing bias,
This sway of motion, this Commodity,


120
SHAKESPEARE THE TRUTHTELLER
Makes it take head from all indifferency,
From all direction, purpose, course, intent.”
At its will (self-interest or “Commodity") war is declared or
peace established. And indeed, it is much the same, and the one
is not much better than the other: “Peace makes men hate one
another” says, not without a certain common sense, a slave of
Aufidius. “The reason? because they then less need one another.”
And as to the cruelties of war, only those will be astounded by
them who will not see the cruelties of
peace:
“Religious canons, civil laws are cruel;
Then what should war be!"
One cannot be surprised, except at the futility of the reasons for
which thousands of men brusquely slaughter one another, and
which the Norwegian captain confesses with naïveté to Prince
Hamlet. But in truth, war, as peace, are two diverse and succes-
sive phases of the same malady, which is doubtless the malady of
life. “War breeds peace, and peace stints war, each prescribe to
other as each other's leech.”
If one had at least the hope of a possible progress by a change
of social conditions! But one does not feel this hope in Shake-
speare. He does not aspire to replace the masters of to-day by
other masters. As one of his characters says: “The king is dead
Ill news; seldom comes the better.” The people awaken no
hope in him. No one has spoken of them with a more violent
One could make a pamphlet The Antipeople with cita-
tions from his historical or Roman dramas. He expects nothing
from this “Hydra,” from
scorn.
"..
This common body,
Like to a vagabond flag upon the stream,
Goes to and back, lackeying the varying tide,
To rot itself with motion."
He is indignant at the idea of universal suffrage: let people vote
whose opinion is never the same, “such as cannot rule, nor ever
will be rul'd!"


ROMAIN ROLLAND
121
Coriolanus would like to take from the people every means of
control in the State. It would not only be (he says) in the in-
terest of the State, but in that of the people. One must "pluck
out the multitudinous tongue” so that it can no longer "lick the
sweet which is their poison.” The state “has not the power to do
the good it would, for the ill which doth control it.”
No, Shakespeare does not desire a popular revolution. The
bestial Caliban, conspirer against the master, and the ignoble Jack
Cade show that he does not expect a renovation from the rising
of the lowest stratum. His pessimism has not the mystical con-
solation of Jean-Jacques and Tolstoy, sanctioning the return to
nature.
Doubtless, whoever wishes to see truth naked, must return to
nature, must see humanity in the state of nature, as does King
Lear, tearing his garments in order to become a natural man like
poor Tom: “Off, off, you lendings! ... thou art the thing itself.”
But the spectacle which awaits him has nothing consoling in it.
Undressed by Hamlet, what becomes of love, what becomes of
all the beauty of the world? What a vision à la Pascal! And
that of Lear is still more terrible. His “infected imagination,” as
he says himself, is intent upon leaving no further illusions which
cover with a solemn mantle the shameful nudity of the human
animal. This glance, this atrociously cruel word, probes into the
most intimate secrets of the heart and body. And what remains
afterwards, for the being who is overcome with shame and disgust
for himself? Is all, then, destroyed
No. In the tragic night where walks sombre truth, a star sub-
sists, one poor light: Pity. Always she. After the mad old king,
"crowned with rank fumiter and furrow weeds, with burdocks,
hemlock, nettles, cuckoo flowers, darnel ...” has made the lies
,
of men appear before the tribunal of his implacable dementia,
after he has forced us to confess that we are all equal in shame,
it is not a condemnation that comes from his foaming mouth: it is,
unexpectedly, a rude pardon: “None does offend, none I say, none;
I'll able 'em."


FOUR POEMS
BY STEWART MITCHELL
LORRAINE
Westward lies home; my heart goes out to the west,
Leans to the vision of wide scarlet skies,
Longs for the haven where its wings shall rest
Over against the slumber of the west,
Over against the night, with quiet eyes.
Eastward and westward through these hills have gone
Conquerors proudly since the world was young:
Faces that blenched and faltered in the dawn
Only a memory, once they were gone,
Only a memory—of songs unsung.
They that have known this fatal land, and died,
Felt the throat thicken and the tired heart cease,
Terror and wonder leaving them wide-eyed-
Terror to feel how vainly they had died,
Wonder to taste of martyrdom such peace!


STEWART MITCHELL
123
A CHARACTER
Only reflected sunlight reached that room,
Flashing from western windows-counterfeit
Ever the twilight where we two would sit
And curse the common rout amid the gloom.
Though candles gazed upon us, their pale bloom
Glowed steadily as if their stolid wit
Heard what we said, not making much of it,
Stifling, like patient torches in a tomb.
Grave Buddha, squatting on a home-made shrine,
Looked as if never yet were fact so odd,
But thought could make its purposes
divine;
Seemed to remember others who would nod
Approval each to each over their wine-
Like mice between the grey paws of their god.
POSTSCRIPT
-Considering which, scuttle from dust and heat;
Yet not to thought, for ghastly shapes lurk there,
Octopus-like, to snatch you by the hair-
Better the blinding road and bloody feet.
Just between truth and falsehood, lies a neat
Scarce travelled path where your imperial air
Might vegetate in vacancy, and dare
To taste all passion, wear the best, and eat.
First of all worldly wise men spake Saint Paul:
Diversities of gifts? Indeed, there are
All manner of gifts—by which men rise or fall.
Though neither good nor evil take them far,
You, only, should thank God, for not to all
A star was given--much less, so steady a star.


124
FOUR POEMS
A PICTURE
She follows men with calm, sagacious eyes,
Watching them falter, looking on her smile;
Gazes as there were never thought so vile,
Or lust so strange that she could not surmise;
Out of her contemplation seem to rise
Visions of vanished life no studied guile
Of love made other than a weary while,
For her whom sinister gods had wrought so wise.
Standing before her, men have longed for sleep
Lulled in the arms of hidden luxuries:
Look as through twilight, feel the cool flesh creep,
Sensing the touch of sudden mysteries;
Strip naked unto grey winds, and plunge deep
Into the shadowed coil of treacherous seas.



9
HELEN. BY ENID FOSTER






JANE. BY ENID FOSTER





THE CI-DEVANT
BY MICHAEL ARLEN
Scene. The bedroom of a house in London, W. 1. A spacious
room, sparsely but richly decorated in black and gold lacquer. The
bed is in the very middle of the room, and is its presiding genius;
a large, square bed, raised on a platform. It does not obtrude on
the eyes as a bed, but as a divan, draped in heavy cloth of gold;
rather ostentatious and all that, but certainly impressive. Besides
the usual furniture of a bedroom, all lacquered in black and gold,
there are, in opposite corners, two tall fluted pedestals, on each of
which stands an exquisite ivory carving of an indecent but aesthetic
Chinese period. On a little table by the bed is a quaint toy-house
of brilliantly painted wood; in the toy-house is the telephone, No.
Mayfair 27946.
TIME. It is the time when one dresses for dinner, if one is that
sort of person.
.
Lady Beryl Trafalgar is sitting before the dressing-table, reading
a book, while Foster, her maid, is doing her hair. Her hair is
blue-black, and more noticeable, as Lady Beryl will tell you, in a
tête-à-tête than in a crowded room; her face, which is not strictly
beautiful, she will continue, is also of that genre. . . . Lady Beryl
is going to a very particular dinner to-night; she is not dining with
her husband, not so much because she does not want to, as because
he has ceased to expect her to. But they agree very well, and
sometimes meet in the same town, and are generally considered to
have an “understanding.” She is thirty-three years old, and con-
fesses to it, which is one of her seven “marvellous” virtues; the
other six are: Candour, courage, cleanliness (important in these
days of facile powder covering), wit, tact, and good manners. And
that is all there is to her, really. She wears her clothes very well,
though a friend did once remark that Beryl's clothes always looked
like very good ones made at a cheap shop.
Enter a restrained buzzing sound, the summons of a well-bred
telephone. Foster finishes with the particular hair-pin of the mo-


126
THE CI-DEVANT
ment; then goes to the little table, opens the door of the toy-house
and extracts the telephone.
.
Voice: Hullo!
FOSTER: Yes, who is that?
voice: Can I speak to Lady Beryl Trafalgar?
FOSTER: (bored): Who is that speaking, please?
voice (gently and persuasively): Now, look here, Foster, don't be
a damn fool all your life, and stand at attention when you
speak to me. Eh? . . Yes, you know me quite well. Just
ask Lady Beryl to the telephone. She will recognize my
voice right enough.
LADY BERYL (interrupting): Who is it, Foster?
FOSTER (placing a hand over the telephone's mouth): He won't
say, my lady. A gentleman who seems to know his way about
the house very well.
LADY B. (with eyebrows): ?
FOSTER: He has a very nice voice, my lady.
(Lady Beryl goes to the telephone.)
LADY B. (tentatively): Ye-es?
voice: Bravo, Foster! Well, Beryl, how are you?
LADY B.: The use of my Christian name comes so naturally to
you that I simply can't resist asking who you are. Do tell
me, please.
voice (surprised): My dear! d'you really mean to say that you
don't recognize my voice at all?
LADY B. (hedging in facing of a possible faux pas): We-ell—now
you come to mention it, I have a vague idea. You have the
voice of a man I dined with once.
voice (seriously): Yes, you dined with me, once-upon a time!
LADY B.: I said once, my friend.
voice: My dear, don't let's spoil a wonderful memory for the
sake of a numeral. Once, twice, often—what's it matter,
Beryl, so long as we did dine, anyway? You were perfect
?
then, and by your voice you must be perfect now.
LADY B.: Your own voice is not too disagreeable, you know.
But it must be a long time since I dined with you.
VOICE (gently): Yes, a long time ago. I've been abroad. . . .
...
But I'm such a commonplace person, I remember you.
.
.


MICHAEL ARLEN
127
LADY B.: But perhaps you were in love with me?
VOICE: You are standing by the bed now. I hate to keep you
standing so long, Beryl. Please no ceremony with me. Lie
down on the bed-on that battlefield of a bed! Lie down
on the cloth of gold, Beryl.
LADY B.: Forgive me interrupting—but you seem to know my bed. .
voice: By sight only. . . . Didn't you yourself say that
you
had
dined with me once? You received me in your bedroom
because you weren't ready, and you had an idea that I loved
to watch the ritual of rouge.
LADY B.: You're very cruel not to tell me your name. How do
I know that I wasn't ever so little in love with you in that
far-off time?
VOICE: Ah, I often wondered about that, but I never found out.
At that time you were passing through a phase of posing as
a daisy on a bank. You were marvellous !
LADY B. (thinking): No ... it's no use. I can't remember.
VOICE (lightly): Oh, well, we won't worry about that. But I
want to hear about your life, Beryl. Have you often been in
love lately?
LADY B. (seriously): Will you please believe me when I say that
I've been in love only once in my life-only once! Of course,
I've often been inquisitive.
VOICE (mocking): But how interesting! So you've been in love
once!
LADY B.: Don't sneer, my friend, else I shall regret my decision
to like
your
voice.
voice (contrite): Forgiveness, please!
LADY B. (firmly): I should so like to punish you.
voice: Then tell me of this serious love affair.
LADY B. (softly): Oh, it ended—it just ended, my dear. It had
gone on so long that I did not realize how good it was, and
—and I played the fool, and lost him.
VOICE: But men in love aren't so easily lost. . .
LADY B.: This one was a different sort of man. He fell in love
differently. .. Tell me, what sort of a fight do you put up?
VOICE (sincerely): I don't. I grovel.
LADY B.: But how nice of you! Do let's meet again some time.
Shall we?


128
THE CI-DEVANT
.
.
voice: You were telling me of your love-affair?
LADY B.: Oh, that's all there is of it. I loved him, I lost him. I
tried to make him jealous of other men, you see-
VOICE (softly): Yes, I understand.
LADY B.: What did you say?—and one day he disappeared. I
was lunching at the Ritz with a young man and he came up
to the table, and he said, "Good-bye, Beryl. I'm going away.”
And he went away, and never came back.
Voice: And if he did come back—what then, Lady Beryl?
LADY B. (gently): Ah, I wonder. . . . But the hands of the
clock go forwards, you know. (Briskly) Enough about me.
Tell me about your own life, you unknown man.
Voice: There's nothing to tell about myself except that I have
come back to England.
LADY B. (mocking): Oh, how serious you are!
VOICE: Forgive me, but I meant it rather seriously.
LADY B.: You have come back to England, then-disguised as a
voice on the telephone. Tell me, why have you come back?
VOICE: And now it's my turn to punish, for you choose to mock.
I came back because, somehow, I had to. D’you understand?
One night, two months ago, I was wandering up and down
the verandah of a friend's bungalow in Ceylon. I was think-
ing of anything but England, anywhere but home. I had
become used to all the sounds and smells around me, the whole
environment of the ancient tropics. Walking up and down
that night, I accepted quite gladly the incessant cricketing
and shrieking of the myriad Eastern insects, and from far
down the plantation the rising chant of the Tamil coolies.
I knew that in a few moments my host would come out and
yell a Tamil curse at the poor devils to stop their chanting,
and then there would be silence—the silence of Ceylon, my
Beryl, full of infinite noise! I wish I could add to this graphic
description the fact that the night was heavy with the scent
of a million flowers; but it wasn't, because the gorgeous
flowers of Ceylon have no smell. . . . And then, for the first
time, I realized a different note, above and below these nearer
noises—the sea! Faintly, insistently lapping the coast seven
miles away. I remember I stood still in my walk and listened.
.
It seemed to be saying something, lisping it threateningly, but
a


MICHAEL ARLEN
129
.
I did not catch what. Or perhaps it was only begging my
attention, for, quite suddenly, I heard the whirr of the tur-
bines of the P. and O. from Colombo to England. And the
whirr was capped by a tinkling something, a long-drawn silly
twitter, which could only be the music of the liner's orchestra.
A silly twitter I say, but seven miles certainly did lend a
strange grace to that musical scum of America. It stood,
somehow, poignantly, for home—for all that I was missing,
Beryl! And so I came back to London, to find that all my
friends are dead, or married, or in prison-except just you,
the sweetest of all. And I'm ringing you up to ask you to
dine with me to-night.
LADY B. (regretfully): But I can't, poor dear, because I'm dining
with some one else, whose name I know, what's more.
Voice (gently): I wouldn't have troubled you, only I thought
that you would recognize my voice.
LADY B. (eagerly): But I do—you are a man I dined with once!
VOICE: One of a long procession, Beryl ?
LADY B.: Don't be a beast to me, my friend. ... But was it
worth anything, our friendship? Was it worth while?
VOICE (sentimentally): Yes, always. .. And it was you who
taught me how to speak on the telephone. I might make an
epigram at any moment.
LADY B.: It would be wonderful to have an affair with you on
the telephone-
Voice (interrupting): Did you say "to continue"?
LADY B. (firmly): I said, “to begin.”
VOICE: Oh, I'm too old for acrobatics. . . . To go back to a mat-
ter near your heart: suppose your wonderful man came back,
would you recognize him if you saw him?
LADY B. (laughing): Of course I would! He had white hair.
VOICE: An albino?
LADY B.: Don't be silly-it was white 'cos of some awful illness
he had once. But it suited him adorably.
VOICE: I wonder if you'd say that of mine, for my hair has grown
white, too. But perhaps you have lost your taste for white
hair?
LADY B.: Well, it's very noticeable in restaurants and places, you
know. One has to be so careful in these days of new vices.
.


130
THE CI-DEVANT
VOICE: Are there any other signs by which you would know this
poor wretch?
,
LADY B.: A small snake tattooed on the back of his left hand. A
very good line in snakes it was, too. . Don't please tell
me you have got one! I couldn't bear it.
VOICE
Voice: I wish I had, but I haven't got a left arm. The war, you
know, and fighting for King and cocktails. . . . And if he
telephoned you after all these years, would you know his
voice?
LADY B.: That sweet, gay voice! How little you must know of
women to ask me that!
voice: I wonder what sort of a voice that could be, which you
could recognize so definitely?
LADY B.: Rather like yours.
VOICE (quickly): Perhaps it is mine.
LADY B. (laughing): No, no—my man had a sweet voice, but
yours is much harder, that of a man who has been in love
with many women, but not with one. He was an idealist.
But you left your ideals behind in—Ceylon, did you say?
Voice: In Flanders, everywhere—it was in Ceylon I finally buried
them, that's all. But to leave them there, I first had to take
them there-crushed and broken things that they were.
LADY B. (sincerely): Poor, poor you!
VOICE: But perhaps your man's suffered the same fate; perhaps
he, too, finally buried his in Ceylon, and then, because of the
tinkle of a ship's band, came dashing home—to ask you to
dine with him!
LADY B.: Just because, after all these years, he suddenly had a
whim!
voice: Yes, that would damn him sufficiently. It would be your
answer?
LADY B. (seriously): It is a difficult question, because I have to
explain myself. You see, below all this London, W. 1, verdi-
gris I am a sentimental woman, I love all the soft and wonder-
ful things in life. I love all the childish things, my friend,
the funny sincere things which are so real that, where there
is love, they must come to the surface as moss between the
crevices of rocks. And I am loyal to every memory.
voice: Then if he came back, like me-


J. DONALD ADAMS
131
LADY B. (interrupting): Like you?
1
VOICE: Well?
LADY B. (softly): He would be a man I had dined with once
(A very short silence.)
voice: Good-night, Beryl.
LADY B.: Come back again sometime, but-
voice: Good-bye, Beryl.
LADY B.: —but sweetly, Gerald!
(There is a soft, final click at the other end. She listens
vaguely for a long second, then puts up the receiver-and
with a quick glance at the clock, turns to Foster at the open
wardrobe:)
LADY B.: Hurry, Foster, dress me. I shall be terribly late.
(CURTAIN)
TINDER
BY J. DONALD ADAMS
We read some poems, you may remember,
And watched the fire dull to ember.
Subtly the music pierced the shell
Of guarded nothings we had spoken,
And through the comfortable dusk
A vague inquietude had broken.
You said: “Let's put a record on,'
And Kreisler's magic burned our blood.
You rose. The book fell with a thud. ..
“I'd like a high clean dive,” you
cried,
And I stood silent at your side.


THUS TO REVISIT
..
BY FORD MADOX HUEFFER
III
A LORDLY TREASURE HOUSE
WE
E set out then to search for a new form for the novel and
for a formula for the mot juste-a humble quest, but we
demanded nothing less!
I have said that Mr. Conrad was, more than I, preoccupied with
the question of form; so modesty demands that I should treat first
that branch of absolute literature—though whether, of right, tex-
ture should be given precedence of contour or not I leave to pens
more able to decide. Let us then begin by ascertaining what Mr.
Conrad meant when he spoke of a new form for the English novel.
Looking around us at the models provided by our predecessors
and contemporaries, we saw only one thing: the sacrificing—the
ignoring, indeed—of every other formal consideration in order to )
get the strong situation. All characters had to be outlined à coups
de hache, to be seven or nine feet high, and to stride from two to
three feet above the ground in order that, towards the end of a
book, one of them might exclaim: "And my poor fool is dead!” or
another: "Curse you, Copperfield!” And indeed, conversing only
the other day with one of our most eminent critics, I was astonished
to hear him say: “Yes, the real thing is all very well: but consider
the matchless situation in Chapter XVI” (or it may have been
XVII) “of Emilia. That scene alone is worth all that Henry
"
James ever wrote.” He said that he felt himself bound to confess
that all the rest of Emilia was boredom. But that one strong situa-
tion washed out all claims of the author of the Princess Casamassima
to be considered alongside the inventor of Evan Harrington.
I mention these two books on purpose, for, in each, the influence
of Dickens is overwhelmingly manifested. It was in fact as diffi-
cult for any one born shortly before 1870 to escape the influence
of the author of Copperfield as it is for all of us born since 1603
to escape that of the poet who wrote King Lear—and the transla-


FORD MADOX HUEFFER
133
tors of the Authorized Version. The great passion of humanity—to
be “told fairy tales to”—is naturally undying. Why indeed should
it die? C'est doux; c'est aimable, et ça sent la mère! I suppose.
And the marvels of Dickens and Shakespeare (leaving aside the
matter of their verbal texture) are fairy tales for adults.
It should be remembered that, at the date of which I am writing
-say a quarter of a century ago—the novel was still the newest,
as it remains the Cinderella, of all the arts, for that of the “movies”
had not yet appeared. The practice of novel-writing has existed
for barely two hundred and fifty years; and I suppose the idea of
the novel as a work of fine art, capable of possessing a form, even
as sonnets or sonatas have forms—that idea had hardly existed at
all before the days of Flaubert and existed, in the nineties, only in
France. Writers had aimed at "progressions of effect” in short
efforts, through many hundreds of years and I suppose that what
the typical English novelist of those days aimed at-if he aimed
at any form at all—and what the typical English critic looked for
--if he ever looked at any novel at all—was a series of linked but
separable incidents. Indeed that corruption of the novel has been
forced upon the English novelist by the commercial exigencies of
hundreds of years. The novels of Shakespeare were written for
ranted recitation from the stage: and the necessity for representing
concurrent, or nearly concurrent, events in differing places called
for the use of the curtain. So there must be strong situations. The
novels of Fielding, Dickens, or Thackeray were written for pub-
lication in parts—and at the end of every part there must be the
strong situation. So with the novels of the eminent contemporaries
of Conrad and myself in those days: if the writer was to make
a living wage he must aim at serialization—and once again, just
before
you write “To be Continued” you must have a strong situa-
tion. But
you do not need to go to commercialized fiction to find
the origin of the tendency: if the reader has ever lain awake in a
long school dormitory or in a well-peopled night-nursery, listening
to, or telling, long, long tales that went on from day to day or from
week to week, he will have known, or he will have observed, that
to retain the story in the mind of the audience—it was necessary to
introduce, just before each hearer's head sank onto the pillow—the
strong situation. Even Scheherazade felt that pressing need.
It was against the tyranny of this convention that Conrad was


134
THUS TO REVISIT
trying to make headway when he so passionately set out to search
for the new form. How often when, in those distant days, lament-
ing the unlikelihood of our making even modest livelihoods by our
pens, did we not slightly acknowledge that serialization was
closed to us! For I think that we both started out with this much
of a new form in our heads: we considered that a novel was a ren-
dering of an affair. I remember we used to say that a subject must
be gripped by the throat until the last drop of dramatic possibility
was squeezed out of it. We conceded, I suppose, that much to the
cult of the strong situation. Nevertheless a novel remained a ren-
dering of an affair: of one embroilment, one set of embarrassments,
one human coil, one psychological progression. From this the novel
was to get its unity.
I don't
say that it might not have one caesura-or several. These
however must be brought about by temperamental pauses: as it
were by markings of time when the treatment called for it. But
the whole novel was to proceed to one culminating point: to one
psychological revelation in the last sentence or the penultimate; in
the last phrase or the one before it. Of course you might have a
coda. But it must be fairly apparent that such a treatment of an
affair could not cut itself up into lengths of three or seven thousand
words at the end of each of which would be found a strong situa-
tion. That market was closed to us.
I have suggested, quite on purpose, that we were more alone in
our search for a new form than we actually were. (There was, of
course, Mr. George Moore!) Mr. Bennett at that date must have
been in process of acquiring the immense knowledge of French
tricks and devices that his works have always displayed. His Man
From the North was very nearly a masterpiece in the Franco-Rus-
sian mode—but I fancy he had as little love for form for its own
sake as he has for the French. I may be wrong. I have also, pur-
posely, a little misrepresented Mr. Wells when, in a previous
chapter, I stated that he lectured me on one sole aesthetic form-
that which prohibited the introduction of both hero and heroine
in the first chapter.
Certainly he lectured me: being the more avid of life and sensa-
tion, he would. Indeed, almost every one I have ever come across,
from Ruskin to Mr. Ezra Pound, always has lectured me. Never-
theless I pursued what you might call my independent investiga-


FORD MADOX HUEFFER
135
tions at intervals during Mr. Wells' conférence. It was, I suppose,
in 1897 or 1898. Mr. Wells had told me that it was sheer economy
that prescribed your not revealing at one glance your two strongest
trumps, and the colloquy proceeded as follows:
Self: I suppose then, in the matter of form, you arrive at the
sonata.
H. G.: Yes, that's it. What is the sonata form?
S.: This: You state your first subject (hero or heroine) in the
key of the tonic: then you state your second subject (heroine or
hero) in the key of the dominant if the first subject is in the major,
or in the key of the relative major if the first subject is in the minor
key. You repeat all that and that is the end of the first part. Then
comes what is called the free fantasia. In this you mix up the
themes of hero and heroine-call them A and B. You embroider
on them in any related or unrelated keys and tempi; you introduce
foreign matter and, generally, have a good time.
H. G.: Ah: foreign matter! A tertium, what is it?
S.: In the restatement you restate: A emphatically in his or her
key and B in that key too, so that that key becomes that of the whole
movement. B, in fact, is translated. You might restate the foreign
matter you introduced during the free fantasia: but that is irregular.
And you may or may not have a coda, a short, sweet closing pas-
sage—the children tumbling over the Newfoundland on the lawn.
H. G.: Or the feeling of relief after the divorce
S.: Of course the coda should give a feeling of relief
H. G.: Odd that you should have thought of all that. I took
you to be interested only in golf.
If you look at Marriage, the New Machiavelli, or Tono Bungay
you will see the sonata form fairly closely, if now and then rather
irregularly, adhered to. Nevertheless I shall not be misrepresent-
ing the rest of Mr. Wells' lecture if I say that it concerned itself
solely with the choice of subjects—significant, strong, of over-
whelming social interest, and so on.
And all the while, at Rye, Mr. James was magisterially perform-
ing the miracles after the secret of which Conrad and I were merely
groping. In the end Conrad found salvation—not in any new or
machined form, but in the attempt to reproduce in words life as
he had seen it lived. I dare say, if we could perceive it, life has a
pattern. I don't mean that of birth, apogee, and death—for in
.


136
THUS TO REVISIT
affairs a death does not solve but only complicates matters, nine
times out of ten. The figure in the carpet, James called it—and
that no doubt was the secret of his magic. He had perceived a
design!
But, though I walked, listening to the Master, day after day after
day, I remember only one occasion on which he ever made a remark
that was in any way a revelation of his own aims and methods.
That remark I will reserve until it falls under its own heading in
my pattern of the moment. For the rest my promenades with the
Master resolved themselves into my amazedly wondering at his
keen observation of the littlest of daily life. That was the lesson.
“Are you acquainted,” he would begin as we went under the
gateway down Winchelsea Hill towards Rye—and Ellen Terry
waved a gracious hand from her garden above the old tower, and
Maximilian, the dachshund, would require some readjustments of
his leash and a great many sotto voce admonitions as to his costly
habit of chasing sheep into dykes “Are you acquainted,"
he would begin again, "with those terrible words.
A higgler, driving a cart burdened with crates of live poultry,
would pass us. The Master would dig the ferrule of his cane into
the road. "Now that man!” he would exclaim. And he would
break off to say what terrible, what appalling, what engrossing,
what bewildering things happened in the little white cottages and
farm-dwellings that we could see, dotting Pleyden Hill and the
Marsh to the verge of the horizon. “Terrible things!” he would
say again. “Now that man who just passed us
And
then he would dig his stick into the road again and hurry forward
like the White Queen escaping from disaster, dropping over his
shoulder the words: “But that, possibly, wouldn't interest you!"
I don't know what he thought would interest me! I don't im-
agine, as I have said, that my own personality ever got through to
him-except once. That I should like to put on record. One day
he came over to Winchelsea to ask me if I thought a lady com-
panion would be a desirable feature in an eminent bachelor's house-
hold. He was in the midst of upheavals at Lamb House. I don't
know why he supposed me to have knowledge of such things: any-
how, he did not listen to me. But, going once again down Win-
chelsea Hill, he said: “H- -, you seem worried.” I said that I was
worried. I don't know how he knew-but he knew everything.
.
a


FORD MADOX HUEFFER
137
1
>
.
Ellen Terry waved her gracious hand from the old garden above
the tower: the collar of Maximilian needed adjustment. He be-
gan again, as it were: “Are you acquainted with the words, the
devastating, if I may say so, fiat of doom ...” The secretary
of the local golf club, coming up the road, got off his bicycle and
informed the Master that he had got the third hole replanned to
suit himself after all. In Rye High Street the old man exclaimed:
"I perceive a compatriot. Let us go into this shop!” and he
bolted into a fruiterer's. He came out, holding an orange
and
eventually, throwing it into the air in an ecstasy of nervousness,
stuttering like a schoolboy: “If it's money, H-" he said, “mon
sac n'est pas grand
Mais fourrez dans mon sac
I exclaimed that I was worried, not about money, but about the
"form" of a book that I was writing. He became much more ap-
palled, but less nervous: I dare say he was contemplating the greater
sacrifice.
"Well then,” he said, “I'm supposed to be ...
Um .
There's Mary Mrs. Ward does me the honour
I'm supposed to know
In short
Why not
let me look at the manuscript ?”
I had the decency not to take up his time with it
des
beaux jours quand on était bien modeste!
So, after just such digressions, he would finish his sentence on the
high step before the door of Lamb House. “Are you then ac-
quainted,” he would say, rolling his eyes from the heavens to the
cobbles, "with the terrible words: 'I don't know if you know Sir?'
As when the housemaid, bringing your hot water in the
morning, says: 'I don't know if you know, Sir, that the bath has
fallen through the kitchen ceiling!”
The last time I saw him was in August, 1915—in St. James Park.
“Ainsi!” he said, “tu vas te battre pour le sol sacré de Mme. de
Staël!!”
I suppose it was characteristic that he should say "de Mme. de
Staël” and not of Flaubert or even of George Sand. He added
and I know sincerely—that he loved France as he had never loved a
Um.
.
.
.
.
.
woman.
Revisiting thus the glimpses of the moon, one finds, alas, no
traces more of this great figure, nor of his huge influence, nor yet
of his love for France.


138
THUS TO REVISIT .
IV
MOTS JUSTES .
.
.
.
.
.
I have said that I remember only one occasion on which Henry
James spoke of his own work. It was like this: he had published
The Sacred Fount and was walking along beside the little ship-
yard at the foot of Rye Hill. Suddenly he said:
“You understand
I wanted to write the Great Good
Place and the Altar of the Dead.
There are things one
wants to write all one's life
Only one's artist's conscience
prevents one.
And then
perhaps one allows one-
self
I don't know what he meant. Or I do! For there are things one
wants to write all one's life-only one's artist's conscience prevents
one! That is the first-or the final, bitter lesson that the artist
has to learn: that he isn't a man, to be swayed by the hopes, fears,
consummations, or despair of a man. He is a sensitized instrument,
recording, to the measure of the light vouchsafed him, what is
be !--the Truth. I fancy that that is why the idea of
applying any theory of art to the process of writing is so disliked
by the typical English man of letters—we are such a nation of in-
dividualists. For I assure you it is disliked. It is hated—that
idea: it is cried down—as if in advocating the research for form in a
novel or the just word in a phrase you were advocating not only
an unnatural vice or practising a hypocrisy; but as if you were
likely to cause pecuniary loss to any one who followed, or even so
much as listened to, that haeraesia damnosa! How often have I
not read sentences like this which I remember from a ten-year-old
review in the Daily Telegraph:
what may
“Thank Heavens we have outgrown the stage when English
novelists bother their heads about the phraseology and the shape
of their fiction. Mr. writes a straightforward, rattling tale in
straightforward language
The novelist-I forget his name: it might have been Mr. Quiller-
Couch, Jr., Stanley Weyman, Mr. A. S. W. Mason, Mr. E. F. Ben-
son, Mr. Anthony Hope, Mr. Richard Whiteing, or Mr. William
de Morgan—had in fact "selected an excellent subject and treated


FORD MADOX HUEFFER
139
it in a spirited manner.” (That was Henry James' wonderful
sardonic politeness; he addressed it to novelists who sent him books
that he did not care for.) The work (I now remember the work)
may have caused the author some intellectual struggles. The read-
ing called for none, neither did it tell one much, I want to talk,
however, about the "phraseology.'
This author (Please! he was a modest, unaffected English gentle-
man and I never in my life grudged him anything that his simple
and honest novels brought him in—the desirable country place, the
charming wife, the sons at Harrow—nothing have I ever grudged
him)—this author, then, had been educated at Harrow and Oxford.
His "style” for pedestrian passages of narrative was that of the
daily organ with the better type of social circulation. For descrip-
tive passages he used the phraseology of Shakespeare as it is found
in the pages of Charles Lamb. He was fond of innocent quota-
tions: when describing starlight he would talk of "patines of bright
gold.” For really emotional passages, strong situations, or rare
"tragic” moments, he, and his characters too, had recourse to the
"phraseology” and the cadences of the Authorized Version or the
Prayer-book. But, for the most part, if the hero went anywhere
he hailed a hansom, or if a ship took fire at sea the conflagration
illumined the heavens, and the heroine said, “entreat me not to leave
thee or to leave off from following after thee.”. A simple soul
was here revealed!
Between that, then, and the "interjected finger” of R.L.S. that
“delayed the action of the timepiece” (and, for the matter of that,
the stretched forefinger of Old Time that I suppose must go on
sparkling for ever) we set out to search for the mot juste. Let me
now particularize very carefully, for, if I do not get this clear, all
is indeed lost. On the one hand we had the respectable journalist,
critic, and novelist whose desire was to make an easy living. On
the other side of the fence there were the literary alchemists whose
desire was to attain to immortality by producing from their
crucibles the jewels five words long. The respectable journal and
its supporters did not wish to be forced to use any more actual
verbiage than the cliché phrase—the phrase that has been mumbled
so over and over by tired jaws that you can write it half asleep
and “peruse” it without disturbance during the degustation of
your post-prandial port. Speakers, according to this dialect, are
.
.


140
THUS TO REVISIT
a
always cordially received: they do not anticipate a large exodus-
of Jews to Palestine! they oppose one thing or another on the
grounds that proposals are novel and of a far-reaching character-
and hansoms have to be hailed! The critics and supporters, then,
of these respectabilia did not object to the fabrications of jewels
five words long–because, when a jewel has been a jewel for long
enough it can be imported into diurnal columns and be hallowed as
a cliché. But they did object—and very wildly—to le mot juste.
To begin with, it was something foreign: then it was indescribably
troublesome! You had, said they, the sound English in which the
daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly press are written. You had
also fine writing, to be used occasionally: fourteen words, or forty,
or half a page of tired prose and then a fine word jewel! That is
easy. But—so it seemed to them-le mot juste meant that every
word must be a sparkler. That was a conception that appalled
our friends; it was contrary to trade union rules; it subverted the
ca' canny ideal; it was a product of snuffy, foreign, affected, sexu-
ally perverted minds. Alas, for that miserable man who—as I once
heard a French critic say—péchait par pur snobisme!
!
The trouble, however, with us was this: we could not get our
prose keyed down enough. We wanted to write, I suppose, as only
Mr. W. H. Hudson writes—as simply as the grass grows. We
wanted to achieve a style—the habit of a style—so simple that you
noticed it no more than you notice the unostentatious covering of
the South Downs. The turf was to be there or you would not
have the green earth.
But our constant preoccupation was to avoid words that stuck
out either by their brilliant unusualness or their “amazing aptness.
We wanted the reader to forget the writer-to forget that he was
reading. We wanted the reader to be hypnotized, if possible, into
thinking he was actually living what he read—or, at worst, into
the conviction that he was listening to a simple narrator telling-
not writing-a true tale. Mind you, it was not easy: it was perhaps
easier for me than for Conrad, since, by sheer reaction of
my
in-
heritance, I had even then an absolute hatred for the "tol-loll.”
Great Figures, the Quarterly Reviewers, and the for-ever-or-pose
poets who had overshadowed my childhood. I hated fine writing.
Conrad's difficulties were probably greater. He was conquering-
truly conquering—a foreign language—a language peculiarly diffi-
.
>


FORD MADOX HUEFFER
141
cult in that its politer forms, through centuries of literary usage,
have become absolutely unsuited to direct statement. It is impos-
sible to make a direct statement in literary English. And Conrad
came to it by way of Miss Braddon and the English Bible!
In the end nevertheless Conrad achieved a form and a language.
He invented the device of Marlow. To Henry James, whose eye
for other people's work was, strangely, too literary, Marlow was a
"monstrous master-mariner." James refused to believe in him
any more than he would believe in any other literary device. He
used to groan to me over the matter: suggesting that Conrad was
ruining my prospects. But he was wrong. For, in the end, Mar-
low is a natural and simple peasant type. He is wise in human
instances, not over-read in book lore that is so frequently destruc-
tive of wisdom. If I go up the hill from where I sit, fifty feet up, I
shall find an old shepherd. He will be just as wise in human lore
as is Marlow. And, gradually, from this old shepherd I am learn-
ing the history of a fabulous farmer, Mr. Cummings. I know that
in 1892 Mr. Cummings married his third wife. In 1870 he still
bred the old horned sheep. About 1880 he ate five pound notes
between thin bread and butter to annoy the Income Tax Collector.
In 1879 he married the first Mrs. Cummings: she was still living
when he married the second and third. He was a little, terrible-
swearing man with a pimply face and no teeth. Apparently all
three Mrs. Cummings lived together in the great old farm till
1900. In 1869 Annie Meggot drowned herself in the Arun, be-
cause of Mr. Cummings, who never got over that! For in 1902,
on his deathbed, Mr. Cummings said to the old shepherd: “That
Annie Meggot she was terribly pannickety. But upstanding and
withered cheeks.”
Nowadays I am learning a great deal
about Annie Meggot who drowned herself in 1869.
You perceive that that is how Marlow tells a story: for it is
in that way that life really presents itself to us—not as a rattling
narrative beginning at a hero's birth—but jumping backward and
forward, now in 1890, now in 1869, in 1902 and then again in
1869, as forgotten episodes come up in the mind of the simple nar-
rator. And if you put your story into the mouth of such a narrator
your mots justes will be the real thing for just so long as they re-
main within his probable vocabulary. There will be no jewels
five words long, nor will Mr. Cummings ever hail a hansom.
.


THE THIEVES
BY JAMES STEPHENS
TWO
WO pairs of silk stockings had been stolen, and the mistress
was not the one to let such a thing go easily by.
They had not been collected at one fell, criminal swoop, for
she had noted and discussed the absence of one pair at least a
fortnight before the companion pair disappeared. She was, how-
ever, an able lady and one from whom silk stockings could not be
stolen with impunity.
She gave each of the four servants a special afternoon off as a
reward, so she informed them, for their good service, their obedience
and tidiness. Then having guarded her exits and retirements by a
suddenly applied pressure of work on the remaining girls, she went
carefully through the boxes of the servant who was enjoying the
afternoon airs of freedom.
By these methodical tactics she came into the re-possession of her
missing property.
She made other discoveries while searching through the boxes
of her servants, and when the search was completed she had quite
a new psychological appreciation of them all, as servants, as human
beings, and as members of society. Thoroughness has as much the
aspect of a virtue as even cleanliness has, so she read the personal
letters which were under her hand, and gathered from them much
that astonished her, and much that caused her to believe the end of
the world was imminent.
“These ridiculous people!” she murmured, and she went on to the
next letter. Naturally on reviewing these matters the decision she
arrived at was, that at intervals which would not prejudice the effi-
cient working of her establishment she would discharge all her do-
mestics. She decided also that she would scrutinize the belongings,
and in particular the letters of every person to be employed by her
in the future. Of course she would have to employ these people
before she could read their letters, but it was worth it in order to
do that, and for the first time she reviewed the accustomed unending
succession of servants with something of complacency.


JAMES STEPHENS
143
She would certainly read their letters, for it was illuminating
work and it was interesting; but, in the light of these revelations, it
was more and much more than that, it was a duty which every right-
minded person owed to her home and to the community in which
she moved.
Indeed some of the letters which she discovered she bore away
within her blouse as keepsakes—no, as evidence; she would produce
them later on when the domestic person concerned had become the
culprit which all servants do inevitably become.
But these reflections would have time to grow fruitful later on;
her immediate concern was to deal righteously with the person who
had stolen not only her stockings but her silk stockings; and that
person, pale, flustered, vehement, vague, and tearful, was standing
before her. A few paces away stood the housemaid, the indispen-
sable witness whom she had called upon when she had made the dis-
covery, and had bidden to note and be prepared to swear that thus
and thus only had the stockings been found, and in this place, a
servant's box to wit, had they been concealed. Another girl had
been despatched, but without the criminal being aware of it, to
fetch a constable, and she was due to return with a constable in the
fewest of minutes.
“You know,” said the mistress in a voice wherein sadness and
admonition had blended, and were terrible, "you know that this is
a theft; one must, one simply must be protected against robbers, and
you stole my silk stockings! What did you want with them? Why
did you steal them? Who are you to want to wear silk stockings?
What kind of bringing up did you get? What kind of school did
you go to? Did they not teach you any religion there? Did they
not-?"
The constable, helmetted, buttoned, truncheoned, whiskered, a
sour-faced being, a bleak, gaunt, bone and hieroglyph of that which
cannot be eluded or opposed, arrived; and he came almost too soon
for one who had many things which required not only to be said, but
to be reiterated; and in a tempest of tears and entreaties the girl was
taken away, screaming, until the door closed behind her, that she
wanted to be taken in a cab.
She was a majestic woman; her eyes demanded your homage; her
;
nose commanded it. She had the air of authority which comes only


144
THE THIEVES
to one who can pay for it and she carried the graces of rectitude
with an air which is legitimate only in an employer.
Nevertheless she had failings. She did not admit them, per-
haps she did not know of them, and perhaps, therefore, she had not
got them; she called them by a different name, and so they were not
the same thing as that indicated by people who use another word.
When, for example, she took a thing she only took it, but when
another person took a thing that other person stole it.
The distinction is real enough, and her attitude was justified, for
laws are not framed against the wealthy but against the necessitous
class, and that which is acquisition in the one becomes, by polarity,
depravity in the other. Most wealthy people are acquisitive; they
would not be wealthy if they were not; all necessitous people are
acquisitive; they would not be human if they were not; but the
premise in each case is different; and the ergo takes its careless,
logical road.
She was as acquisitive as a magpie, and as indiscriminate in the
selection of her booty as that pleasant bird is in the satisfaction of
his wide and varied desires. Are all rich people selfish? It is an im-
possible postulate, for one may forge a generalization which will be
true of a class, but which will be untrue if applied to the individuals
of that class. But too often in their dealing with the other
class the rich display a shrewd unnecessary meanness which takes
some of the gilt off their gold, brings wealth under contempt,
destroys the sanctity of property, and is the worst possible kind of
bad business.
She, as the saying goes, would lift the cross off an ass's back, but
she would not rob anything, for she was wealthy enough to have no
necessity, no reason, to be a criminal and so was not a criminal.
Her just, strict, able dealing with the peccant maid-servant
pleased her for days, and the memory of that swift retribution was
a comfort to her every time she saw or talked to another servant.
She learned from her cook that a draper near by with whom she
sometimes dealt was, in a distant way, a kind of relative, a kind of
several-times-removed connection of the girl who was now purging
her sins in duress.
A respectable man, she said, and was warmed to find herself thus
generously candid towards one who after all was attached to sinister
people. She hoped he was properly ashamed of his eccentric re-
a
a


JAMES STEPHENS
145
lationship, and, remembering his occupation and his face, she felt
quite certain that he was adequately and respectably ashamed.
She fashioned reasons to visit his shop, and on several occasions
she interviewed its head.
A sandy head, very quiet, very attentive, most obliging, very-
the description halted a moment—but found means to continue, al-
though at a tangent—one of these heads which take on a queer shape
of its occupation, and as grooms evolve or have imposed on them a
horsey look and bearing, so he had acquired a shoppish expression, a
shoppish gait. Passing him in the street you suddenly murmured:
“That”-not knowing he was that—"that reminds me that I
wanted to buy—” whatever it was that you wanted to buy. And
in the criss-crossing of your "thats” the trail became blurred which
might have indicated that he was the stimulus to your memory.
She almost expected, she certainly hoped that he would mention
and apologize for his disreputable relation however many-times-re-
moved, but as he did not do so she mentioned the fact herself.
But this draper was a shopman and no more; he would drape her
and drape for her, but he would not converse with her except about
the weather; so, when she opened a subject which was neither
draperies nor weathers, he bowed before her and said "Ah!” and
washed his hands at her in the shop manner, and produced as if from
his sleeve a new and interesting "line” in blouses for her approval.
She dismissed him from her mind and left him thereafter to the
peace
of the little wooden office on the right-hand middle of the
shop, and to the company of a brisk girl who snapped in the silver
of the clients and rapped out the copper of the shop with unweary-
ing vigilance and promptitude.
She might have marvelled at these people, were it not that to do
so would be to distinguish them, and by extension to acknowledge
them, and thus, on a longer remove, to break up the mould of
society.
These thoughts were quite apparent to her, not indeed as words
or verbal statements, for she thought as it were in the lump, which
is the way most people think, and we do not need the elucidation of
words until we have become suspicious of our thoughts, and must
take them to pieces to examine their machinery.
Meanwhile there was a kind of satisfaction, a piquancy, in fre-
quenting the premises of a man a member of whose family has been


146
THE THIEVES
in your service, has pilfered your house and is veritably in jail at
your instance. The satisfaction was made up in good part by the
glow which comes from the successful forgiveness of sins; she was
not withholding her custom; nor was she visiting the sins of the
children upon the fathers; and if there was a spice of malice in the
thought of entering the premises of the man who was invisibly
linked to her by a petty larceny, it was still a small thing by the
side of her forbearance and generosity.
She came often to the shop. Indeed for a time she transferred
most of her custom to this shop, and the brisk girl who sat with the
draper at the receipt of custom raked in her coins of silver, rattled
out her change in weighty copper metal, and bade her good-day and
good-bye in a voice which had taken on something of the clash or
chime of the precious metals which rang and rang again under her
agile fingers.
About this wooden hutch at the right-hand middle of the shop
there was always an air of bustle without confusion. Ordered ac-
tivity reigned here; the whole shop flowed to this point and ebbed
from it; and here the shopman in a dilemma went hastily for instruc-
tions and returned with an instant healing advice which pacified the
customer and restored to his own lips the smile which the dilemma
had chased from them.
One day she came into the shop and, as was her custom, went on
a tour of inspection. Various shop-people produced for her ap-
proval a special “line” in this or that department, or something
quite new which the firm had discovered and commanded and recom-
mended. She was interested by the articles produced, but her in-
terest was in nearly every case intellectual and not personal. Not a
silver coin of hers went to the till.
There were a good many people in the shop, and there was an
active movement about the central wooden office.
One of the shopmen went suddenly and swiftly to this office and
in a low voice he delivered himself of his woe. He received a com-
mand which caused him to snatch quickly at a hat and precipitate
himself into the street.
In about half a minute he returned and he was accompanied by a
policeman.
When this latter personage stepped into the shop there entered
with him or there was simultaneously released into the shop a cer-
a
a


JAMES STEPHENS
147
a
a
tain stir and tension. People looked at the policeman, then they
looked at each other, then they looked at the ceiling, for who has
ever seen a policeman in a shop? The hands of the salesmen ceased
for a tense moment to wash themselves, and their facile words hung
and ended on the air; the draper himself trotted his grey face and
sandy head from the office and advanced to meet the law.
Mercy! They were coming towards her! They were looking at
her.
The policeman was looking at her; a large brown glitter of a look
composed of eyes and buttons. The draper was looking at her, a
small, grey, blinking, defined, and spectacled kind of look; other
people, a speckle and wobble of small points, were looking at her.
The draper lifted his closed hand and pointed one atrocious finger at
her; and he spoke to the policeman; his incredible words were audi-
ble and distinct; you could hear them without an effort; indeed they
leaped into one's ear and stayed there and like obscene insects they
bred themselves half a dozen times over in two seconds; he said:
“This is the person, officer, and I give her in charge for theft.”
“Come on, mum,” said the policeman, and he said it to her.
She gasped.
“How dare you,” she stammered, “How dare you!"
The policeman had a moment of misgiving—that nose. These
contours of rectitude!
The draper turned to an assistant-
“This is the person, is it not ?''
The assistant regarded her profoundly, and replied:
“That's her; she swiped, took two pairs of silk stockings off my
counter. She put them into her muff.”
He pointed at the muff, and his fingers remained pointing.
The policeman extended an unending hand towards the muff.
She leaped from his hand as one would leap from fire, but some one
gripped her elbows from behind and jerked her arms backwards.
Then the draper put forward his veined claw and delicately, length-
ily, fished out of her muff two pairs of long, grey, silk stockings. He
held them high, inert and dangling before the eyes of the policeman
and handed them daintily to him who pouched them without regard
for the fabric.
"It is not the first time this has happened,” said the draper, "and
this is not the only charge we will make against this person. Articles


148
THE THIEVES
have been disappearing from our establishment for a long time.
We ordered solitary sets of specially marked material from the
wholesalers and these have been stolen. We have traced all the
missing goods to this woman, and I intend to get a warrant to search
in her house for our property.
That unending hand reached towards her again and the grip on
her elbows had not relaxed.
She shrank from the policeman.
“Don't! Don't!” she said.
But he put his hand on her shoulder, and at the touch she opened
her mouth widely and screamed twice so that the whole shop tingled
and went still.
“Come on, mum!” said the policeman.
She thrust all her weight backwards. “I want a cab,” she cried.
“I won't go unless you get me a cab.”
The great hand suddenly became a compulsion, but the eyes she
looked into, the voice she heard, were kindly.
“We'll get a cab outside, mum!"


GEORGE BERNARD DONLIN
BY ROBERT MORSS LOVETT
IT
T is more than a task of piety to record the services of George
Bernard Donlin to The Dial, and to American letters. Al-
though the brilliant promise of his active life was cut off by ill
health some years ago, his mere presence among the living, the assur-
,
ance of his watchful interest and sympathy, and the support of his
advice counted for much, and the news of his death on June 17th
brought a renewed sense of loss to all whom personal or literary
contact with him had made his friends.
George Donlin's connection with The Dial began in 1914, when
his name first appears as the author of signed articles. It is pleasant
to recall the little magazine of those days, which, since its found-
ing at Chicago by Francis Browne in 1880, had been a sort of
outpost on the literary frontier of America. It was an institution
which helped to justify on the culture map issued by the women's
clubs a more emphatic shading about the upper shore of Lake
Michigan. Conscious of its high duty of upholding standards and
maintaining traditions, the paper kept the faith of an aesthetic
puritanism with an inflexibility of tone proclaimed by the severity
of its appearance. This attitude Donlin treated in The Impotence
of American Culture (The Dial, September 19, 1918).
“The scramble for what we call (whether mistakenly or not)
culture has been largely a struggle to save the soul alive by with-
drawing it from the environment. It was the counterpart of
Protestant salvationism and only a little less fierce. Feeling itself
so largely on the defensive, our culture has never been able to afford
the luxury of that genial tolerance which was the other side of our
commercial ruthlessness. Nowhere, surely, has the sheer fanaticism
of the classical spirit been so evident as among our elder humanists,
men whose sensitiveness turned from the crudity about them to the
finished and achieved—to what was irrevocably dead. Something
in them clove irresistibly to the static; mere becoming shocked them
like an impropriety.”


150
GEORGE BERNARD DONLIN
It was toward emancipation from this religion of culture that
George Donlin's influence steadily tended. In August, 1916, Mr.
Martyn Johnson became owner of The Dial. In the number
dated October 19th of that year Donlin published an article en-
titled Our Hospitable Age, which sounded the note of a new policy
of the journal, and expressed his own tolerant critical spirit.
"But the critic has another reward: he is able to repay, in a
measure, the debt he is under to such as have given him pleasure,
and to repay it in the most satisfying way, by communicating his
pleasure to others. He will be on his guard against any premature
stiffening of his sensibilities, which would restrict his pleasure.
Convinced that beauty, like everything else, is relative, he will
speak mild words. He will be little likely to repeat the gesture of
Canute. He will, with whatever reluctance, grant to realists,
romanticists, symbolists, impressionists—yes, he will grant also to
imagists and futurists—the right to live.”
Three months later Donlin was announced as the Editor of The
Dial, and, during the year vouchsafed him before failing health
forced him to give up his active service, he with Mr. Johnson
wrought an extraordinary metamorphosis in the journal. In place
of the conservative, laboured, academic criticism familiar to its
readers, The Dial opened its columns to the free winds of new
faiths and doctrines.
With the movement which carried The Dial distinctly into the
field of political and social discussion I fancy that Donlin was not
in entire sympathy. He recognized, however, that such a change
was as inevitable in the case of The Dial as in that of The
Athenaeum. The removal of the magazine to New York also
must have cost him some regrets. His own work had been so
closely associated with the Middle West, and his view of the im-
portance of such a journal as The Dial to that environment was so
clear that he must have felt a sense of defeat when the field was
abandoned, even for a larger opportunity. He continued, however,
to serve loyally on the editorial board until May, 1919, contribut-
ing both literary and personal support.
The most conspicuous quality of Donlin's editorship was re-
flected in the skill with which he chose his contributors, and the


ROBERT MORSS LOVETT
151
happy certainty with which he suggested to each the task for which
his talent and training fitted him. It was a combination of wide
knowledge of books and men, and extraordinary patience and tact
which brought about the successful achievement of his plan for a
literary journal. Hampered by lack of funds, Donlin was com-
pelled to do a large part of the routine work of the editorial office
himself and undoubtedly he laboured beyond his strength.
It was unfortunate that Donlin's editorial labours during their
continuance limited his contributions to The Dial to compara-
tively unimportant reviews. One suspects also that his habitual
modesty and generosity led him to hand over to others the more
brilliant opportunities to which he would have done justice. At
all events his best writing was done before and after his active
editorship. Mention should be made of his article on Dostoevsky
(The Dial, January 1, 1915), one of the most penetrating and
revealing criticisms of that baffling subject, and that on Joseph
Conrad (The Dial, September 21, 1916). Together they show
what was Donlin's constant endeavour in criticism, the pursuit of
beauty. From the essay on Conrad a few sentences may be quoted
to illustrate the revelation of such beauty through the colour and
cadence of Donlin's own writing.
"He abounds in pictures struck off swiftly and with fine imagi-
native sufficiency-pictures of the gleaming tranquillity of waters
under a tropical sun; of the sudden appalling onrush of storms and
their maniacal fury; of the immemorial calm of the jungle, brood-
ing inert over a teeming and mysterious activity. The effect is
always large and free, as of a globe swimming in ether, a sea empty
to the horizon. And this vastness, this aloofness of nature is set
over against the feverish comings and goings of men, crawling with
oars up tropical rivers between endless banks of mud, risking in-
fection, madness, death, all manner of nameless evils for the sake of
a little bread.”
Of Donlin's personal characteristics I think courage seems the
chief. Hampered by deafness and ill health, he faced life steadily,
and made his place in it. If his work seems fragmentary and incom-
plete, we have to remember that, as Carlyle says, “Disjecta membra
are all that we find of any poet or any man.'


LONDON LETTER
July, 1920.
T is told that the late Mr. Joseph Chamberlain, returning in
far-off Edwardian days from South Africa, where his policy,
to speak with restraint, had not been at all points successful—it is
told of Mr. Chamberlain, I say, that at this moment in his career
he remarked to a friend in the opposite party: “You may tear up
all your leaflets and all your pamphlets and you may forget all
the arguments you have so painfully got by heart. We are going
to talk about something else.” And within a few months the
whole country was indeed talking with manifest excitement about
Protection, Tariff Walls, Making the Foreigner Pay, and similar
matters. In this case Mr. Chamberlain, who understood very well
that his party must either find something new to talk about or else
suffer grave defeat at the next elections (it did, in fact, do both),
created the changed atmosphere deliberately and by the force of
his own intellect and personality. But these are times, and in
other spheres besides the political, in which we suddenly discover
that we are “talking about something else” and do not know quite
how the topic has been started. At this moment in England we
are talking, all together and most of us at the tops of our voices,
about criticism. I do not know how the wave of interest came
into existence; but it is upon us, it engulfs us, and it is, after all,
by no means a bad subject of conversation. The word "criticisin”
has about it immemorially a flavour of reproval, of acidity, of
astringency; and, in a community which tends to produce too much
literature and to be too easily pleased by what it produces, a little
astringency may have beneficial results. One is pleased, therefore,
to see the name of Sainte-Beuve reappear, and the names of Cole-
ridge and Dryden, and even the august and learned ghost of Aris-
totle resurging from his tomb. Longinus, so far as I know, is as yet
undisturbed; and we have not reached the point of quoting the
precepts of Boileau. But the discussion is full as well as vigorous,
,
and no complaint of it need be made.
One of the most interesting contributions to it is to be found in


EDWARD SHANKS
153
a recent issue of The Monthly Chapbook, which is published by
that untiring benefactor of letters, Mr. Harold Munro, at the
Poetry Bookshop. This number contains three essays, the first by
Mr. T. S. Eliot on the criticism of poetry, the second by Mr.
Aldous Huxley on the subject-matter of poetry, and the third by
Mr. F. S. Flint propounding certain axioms and statements of prin-
ciple on the nature of poetry, which he illustrates by examples.
With Mr. Flint's article I agree so little that there is not enough
space for me to deal with it here. He chooses as an example of
bad poetry a work that I admire and as an example of good poetry
a work that I certainly do not. He may be right and I may be
wrong; but there is so little ground that is common to us that any
effort to get to grips with him would occupy more pages than I can
well spare, or indeed feel any desire to spare. And when he re-
marks that at this point of time "all work in metre should be
scrutinized with the utmost suspicion,” I feel that I am no more
taken by his critical method than by his taste.
Mr. Eliot and Mr. Huxley are two of the most admirable of
our young writers and both are contributors to The Athenaeum,
which, rejuvenated under the editorship of Mr. J. Middleton
Murry, provides for us weekly examples of that new astringency
which (perhaps) is going to regenerate our somewhat flaccid liter-
ary tissues. Here they both suffer (as do so many critics nowa-
days) from want of the proper space in which to develop their all
important themes. But, and with the proper flavour of acidity,
they have something to say which is worth saying. Mr. Eliot is
greatly concerned with making a useful distinction between criti-
cism and reviewing. Reviewing, he feels, is essentially a piece of
news, printed in a newspaper and intended to assist its reader in
choosing among books which he has not seen. Criticism, on the
other hand, is the discussion and explication of a work of art which
is supposed to be equally well known to both writer and reader.
The reviewer, if he judges nicely of social duty and literary
propriety, will say: “This is a good (or a bad) poem,” and leave it
at that. Indeed I suppose that the best possible method would be
if a reviewer whose judgement commanded a more or less general
respect were to deliver his opinion in some such form as this, so
much and no more:


154
LONDON LETTER
“I certify that I have examined Bread and Nightingales
by Mr. Louis Wallop and have marked it Beta Plus.
(Signed) EZRA JENKS,
Fellow of the Chartered Institute
of Reviewers."
For, strictly speaking, that is about as much as most reviews come
to in practice, when they come to so much; and one would at least
know where one was.
But these hard and fast categories do not, unfortunately, exist
in real life. Reviewing shades off into criticism for several reasons.
The reviewer often does not know how many of his readers will
have seen the book in question; and, moreover, reviewing according
to the formula of Mr. Ezra Jenks, however it may be disguised and
developed, is a form of writing which is comparatively sterile, and
exceedingly uninteresting for both parties. Some persons will want
to know what Mr. Jenks or The Something Weekly has to say about
the book before they take the trouble to get it, others want to know
precisely because they have read the book, have formed their own
opinion and would like another. The reviewer therefore tends to
write as much like a critic as his capabilities, his space, and his
editor will allow. It is clear then that so long as you move only in
the realm of ideas you can make a distinction in kind between
reviewing and criticism; but when you consider the real world of
events this distinction has only a limited working value.
This of course does not alter the fact that most of our reviewing
in England to-day is very bad criticism indeed. And the whole
business of reviewing is really rather absurd. Reviews pullulate in
every printed sheet. From fifty to one hundred copies of every
new book are circulated for this purpose; and the author may con-
sider himself neglected who does not obtain in return for this
largesse from thirty to seventy notices. But he may consider him-
self very lucky if among this number he finds five which are of the
slightest value to him or to any reader. He is himself, of course, a
reviewer. That is the way most poets and a good many novelists
earn the living which is denied to them in return for their creative
work. It is in most cases highly probable that two given poets will
receive more payment in the course of a year for writing notices of
one another's books than either will receive from the books them-


EDWARD SHANKS
155
selves. Let us add that almost always reviewing, and especially
anonymous reviewing, is badly paid work. The cost of living has
gone up in England since 1914 by about one hundred and twenty
per cent, but not, bless you! the price per foot of the written word.
It follows that reviewers are tired, jaded, embittered, disillusioned
men, whose taste and knowledge and ideals are rapidly eaten away
by overwork and underpayment, by the continuous, necessary exer-
cise of a profession which can be described only by the expressive
phrase métier de chien.
This is the state of affairs which Mr. Eliot deplores. He deals
with the criticism of poetry. Mr. Huxley, in this issue of The
Monthly Chapbook, is the critic of poetry; and his burden is that
contemporary versifiers are too apt to choose those subjects which
have succeeded in the past and which are consecrated to the service
of verse by long usage. It is perhaps a little unfair to confront a
preacher with his own practice. Heaven help us all if we preached
no better than we practised! But Mr. Huxley's new collection,
Leda and Other Poems, has just appeared and is exciting some at-
tention, and the opportunity is a little too tempting to be resisted.
In this article Mr. Huxley alludes to the part which the "conjuring
trick” plays in poetry, and though, so I think, he rather unfairly
chooses José Maria de Hérédia as an example of the pure conjuror,
it is not difficult to understand what he means. But, he contin-
ues (in some such words as these), the conjuring trick, to secure any
effect at all, must be original and it is useless to produce from your
hat a series of second-hand Keatsian rabbits. We turn to the
beautiful title-poem of Mr. Huxley's volume and there we discover
a number of lines such as these:
“Then one did sing
A ballad of a far-off Spartan king,
Who took a wife but left her, well-a-day!
Slain by his foes upon their wedding-day.”
(I am travelling and have not the book by me; but I can guarantee
the essential accuracy of the quotation.) To this, remembering Mr.
Huxley's critical remarks, the reader can only subjoin, in a hushed
voice, the words: My hat! For the poet, dealing as he indubitably
is in second-hand Keatsian rabbits, is not so much producing them


156
LONDON LETTER
by prestidigitation from his hat as unpacking them stolidly in broad
day out of a Morris crate. Strange how desire doth outrun per-
formance! And Mr. Huxley, I think, in his article as well as in
his verse is typical of the young poets of to-day. He wants so
much to be original and he finds it so hard. He searches the world
for subjects that shall mean something to him, and when, as not
always, he manages to renounce those which Keats and Morris
have already exhausted, is there, is there (and I believe the ques-
tion echoes in his own mind) any great merit in choosing instead
those which have been exhausted by Arthur Rimbaud and Jules
Laforgue and Villiers de l'Isle Adam? I can say all this with a
confidence based on my belief that Mr. Huxley's predicament is
not so grave as in his heart he thinks it is. Since the appearance of
his first book of verses, The Burning Wheel, in 1916, there has
been evident in him the qualification to be a good writer. His Leda,
though it by no means squares with his own requirements, has ex-
cellent passages and is what people call a substantial achievement.
His volume of prose, Limbo, which appeared earlier this year, per-
haps indicates better the real direction which he will take in the
future. This book contains stories of a spirit and style which are
admirable and genuinely original. He has a curious acute mind, a
sense of humour, irony, and satire; and he handles his English with
the delicacy of a master. Limbo is his best performance so far, but,
I am certain, only the promise of many better to come.
In writing on Mr. Huxley I have wandered so far from the
point that I can return to it only with a considerable wrench. But
perhaps I have already made it clear. It is that in England there
is at this moment a considerable amount of creative talent, which
is however oppressed by its problems and which feels itself to be
wandering in the wilderness. There is also not too little but too
much criticism, a babel of critics, shouting in a hundred keys,
plucking the bewildered poet by the sleeve and perplexing him into
a desire to fall down and weep impotently where he stands. Into
this inferno a new breath has come. We have begun to think about
criticism instead of aimlessly producing it in quantities much too
large. Perhaps this will produce a certain coagulation of ideas
which are at present loose and floating or, to express it better, that
co-ordination of ideas without which genius cannot do its proper
work.
EDWARD SHANKS
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UNE MAISON. BY EMANUEL FAY


MODERN FORMS
This department of The Dial is devoted to exposition
and consideration of the less traditional types of art.
THE WINTER OF OUR DISCONTENT
BY HENRY MCBRIDE
A
S far as the outward show was concerned last winter's art
season in New York was the dullest, flattest, least profitable
within the memory of man. As the delightful actor person in
Trelawney of the Wells used to say, there wasn't a part that one
could chew on, or at least, chew on long. One masticated the sparse
items on the menu with much less than the thirty-two bites that
Gladstone recommended for roast beef. There was, indeed, no roast
beef served. Without searching too wildly and widely for the
reason, one may attribute the general leanness to the economies
necessitated by the war. Our young artists lived some, we are all
hoping, but they were released from military service too late to
assemble their new knowledge for our last winter's profit.
And with all that, the season began auspiciously. The autumnal
fires had scarce been lit in the vestibule at Knoedler's when Mr.
Elie Nadelman scandalized the staid frequenters of that hall of
classicism by exposing there in sculpture his views of New York
night life. Like all foreigners who come here, Mr. Nadelman has
been seeing things we should have preferred him not to see. He
heard possibly with pleasure the music of our famous jazz orchestras
but saw too many plump and tightly laced ladies dancing with
popinjay youths to suit the sticklers for propriety. With some-
thing like a sense of guilt the custodians of our morality, who knew
that once we sent Margaret Fuller abroad as a representative
American, saw a quite different type being put forward. However,
,
to do our connoisseurs (if that is what they may be called) justice,
it was abstract rather than concrete immorality that caused them
their little flurry. It was not so much that Mr. Nadelman had made


158
THE WINTER OF OUR DISCONTENT
obviously soulless ladies handsome, by means of art, but that he
had simplified all their physical charms into two or three swift
phrases, even daring to eliminate things such as feet that happened
not to be essential to his thought. Now moralists in this country
suffer through their lack of education in art and always have. Not
understanding the language, the real thing escapes them. When
the famous Lexington Avenue Armory exhibition went to Chicago
there had been so much outcry made in New York over its
modernity that actually a "vice committee” of the western city
studied it with a view to condemning, if it possibly could, its im-
morality. But being completely baffled by its cubism of Picasso,
Matisse, Duchamp, and the others, the committee retired in con-
fusion, conceding that the exhibition was virtuous and would do
no harm to the women and children of Chicago. And all the time
a set of drawings compounded entirely of sin by Jules Pascin were
ensconced on the walls there before their eyes. But these drawings
-probably the wickedest ever brought into America and certainly
among the most artistic—were tiny and in lead-pencil! It never
occurred to Chicago's purity committee that vice could assume so
modest a dress. The sponsors of the Armory show laugh about the
affair occasionally to this day. While great claims for New York's
response to either virtue or art cannot be made, at least it can be
given a higher rating on both counts than Chicago. Here quite a
few amateurs saw that Pascin's drawings were naughty—and
promptly bought them up!—and here, too, there were plenty of
academicians so wedded to the idea that ladies, no matter how
reprehensible, must have feet, that quite a respectable ten-days'
uproar was raised over this purely technical aspect of Mr. Nadel-
man's sculpture. No one in Chicago has ever mentioned the word
"technique.”
But if we take the "pas” over Chicago we do not take it by any
great length. After this tiny triumph in the fall the winter dragged
its slow length along, and there was not even any laughter until the
Independent artists opened their doors upon the Waldorf roof in
the spring. A first-rate exhibition by a serious artist, Gaston
Lachaise, was given in the Bourgeois Galleries in February and ap-
peared to escape attention. Not even Chicago could have been
more obtuse to a subtle and original art than was New York. Mr.
Lachaise, who is still young, came to this country from France
a


HENRY MCBRIDE
159
a
when a boy and he is so luckily constituted as an artist that com-
plete isolation will not be so necessary for him as for most Ameri-
can artists—who succumb usually to the social machinery that
standardizes human beings—for he has preserved not only his in-
dividuality but his Gallicism intact. Mr. Lachaise is more French
than most French, and I never see a single one of his pieces without
thinking of the Marseillaise. I bragged about the fuss we made
over the peculiarities of Mr. Nadelman's style. It is wrong to brag.
I shouldn't have done so. The fact is that Mr. Nadelman happens
to have a fashionable clientele for his portraits who came to the
galleries expecting to see similar manifestations of his talent-
hence the outcry when presented with an unexpected idea! Mr.
Lachaise has no clientele to become excited over his double life-
and so he must start in the usual way with a handful of more or
less obscure but forceful sympathizers to win his way up the public
heights. Whenever I consider the fate of original geniuses like
Mr. Lachaise and Mr. Pascin in America, I find myself regretting
the mediaeval system of patronage. How is one to sway the un-
wieldy public, especially a public that likes to have a fit over some-
body else's morals but doesn't care a pin what it does en masse, in
their behalf? I must hasten to say that neither of these artists, both
of whom I love and admire very much, are really immoral. Mr.
Lachaise's Muse happens to be fat. That is all. But in the Middle
Ages, with a complacent duke at one's elbow, Mr. Lachaise's
mag-
nificent but fat Venus might have been instantly in a public park
that would have been worthy of it. If we should attempt to place
it in our Central Park I am convinced there would be public riots.
Dr. Robinson, for one, I know, would leave the city.
I
Also late in the spring a collection of pictures by Mr. Charles
Burchfield was shown in the Kevorkian Galleries, and this was the
most interesting "first appearances” of the winter. Mr. Burchfield
had the great good fortune to pass his young life-he is but twenty-
six-in the loathsome town of Salem, Ohio, and his pictures grew
out of his detestation for this place. No German hated England
so hardly as Mr. Burchfield hated, and I hope hates, Salem! for
what would become of Mr. Burchfield's art if Salem should reform
or if he should move to some likable place? Salem is a place of
shanties, so Mr. Burchfield says, dreadful, wobbly shanties that
seem positively to leer with invitation at the passing cyclones,


160
THE WINTER OF OUR DISCONTENT
which, however, disdain them. It is one of those places which are
cut through by the straight and terrible line of a railway and
Mr. Burchfield has drawn this railway and the switchman's little
hut with the sarcasm of a Swift. Mr. Burchfield is, of course,
,
extremely young to be a Swift, so his case presents problems. There
is almost nothing in his work but this hatred, and if he lived to be
sixty he could not be a more vehement hater. What is to provide
him with material if he progresses along this line? Salem cannot
hold out all that time. He might come to New York. There is
much in New York that is certainly worth hating, but somehow I
feel it in my bones that Mr. Burchfield is not the man to hate it.
Besides it's been done already. Nobody could hate New York so
well as Lafcadio Hearn hated it, and that has gone on the records.
The Independents provided, as I have said, the only gaiety of
the year. This society progresses into the public affections and
seems to have become a fixed institution. Its severest critics are
those who misapprehended its mission from the beginning and who
say it shelters bad pictures! So it does, of course. That was in-
evitable with an "open door.” But not even the most ardent of
the Independents foresaw how entertaining these unedited works
of art would be, nor how the general public would relish doing its
own editing. The unsophisticated comment overheard in this bois
sacrée is as free and ingenuous as the works of art that arouse it.
It is a trifle disappointing that no one with ideas has as yet sought
this asylum. The Independents so far have rather concentrated
upon the naïve. Most of the new people who emerge there are
people like Miss Julia Kelly and Mr. Emile Branchard who reek
with naïveté and who are so far from mastery of their mediums
that anything like training would kill them utterly. The open door,
however, is there, and artists who have impelling ideas will not
now have to wait, like Mr. Elie Nadelman, until their influence
becomes powerful enough along other lines to compel an opportunity
for their most cherished schemes.
The European contributions to the winter were not many.
Ambrose McEvoy, one of the fashionable portrait painters of the
day in London, had a mildly successful exhibition at Duveen's.
That is to say, he secured many commissions among the nouveaux
riches but failed to excite as much discussion in the studios as Mr.
Nadelman did. Erté and Drian, two clever Parisians, exhibited the


HENRY MCBRIDE
161
originals of their illustrations to crowds of the frivolous at
Knoedler's, and the De Zayas Galleries had a Gauguin exhibition
which aided much in the comprehension of this genius, whose fame
spread abroad through the land this winter like a contagion, thanks
to the propagandism in Mr. Maugham's best-selling novel founded
upon the story of this artist's life.
The business of reading artists from their works is as perilous
as reading character from handwriting, but there will always be
rash critics and chirographists to venture both. For instance, judg-
ing Mr. Stuart Davis by the chance drawings of his that have come
my way I felt him from the beginning to have been an enfant gatée,
and yielding to the general fondness that everyone has for
enfants gatées, I made all sorts of allowances for him. I thought
sometimes, secretly, that the boy ought to be spanked for his care-
less workmanship but I believe I never went so far as to counsel
it publicly. At the recent Independent exhibition there were two
canvases by him that were more "meant” than any of his I had
seen lately; so I singled them out for mention in the public prints,
with especial pleasure. But I said they were “Cuban” landscapes.
Mr. Davis at once, like a hot young Laertes, wrote in protest
that his pictures had been made in Hoboken, but that I was right
in one thing, that is, in saying they were good. A critic writing
in The Little Review also took exception to my remark and said
that the word “Cuban” was probably intended as a compliment.
The word "Cuban” is, of course, always a compliment, but I used
it inadvertently. The fact is, that when, happening to give two
glances instead of the usual one to Mr. Davis' contributions to
the Independent, a young man, a perfect stranger, stepped up to
me and said: "Stuart's Cuban pictures are great, aren't they? Glad
you like 'em.” I supposed this young man knew; I even supposed
for an instant that I was possibly beginning a life-long acquaint-
ance with the artist himself. Hence the mysterious word, "Cuban.”
M. Bernard Fay's amusing design excites in me the envy I usually
feel for the assistance the French get from their environment.
Where everything is “material,” even the butcher-shops, it is no
wonder that the French arrive at the ability to start out with a
clear intention. Whoever saw a paintable butcher-shop in America?


SIX POEMS
BY WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS
PORTRAIT OF A LADY
Your thighs are appletrees
whose blossoms touch the sky.
Which sky? The sky
where Watteau hung a lady's
slipper. Your knees
are a southern breeze-or
a gust of snow. Agh! what
sort of man was Fragonard?
-As if that answered
anything.—Ah, yes. Below
the knees, since the tune
drops that way, it is
one of those white summer days,
the tall
grass
of
your
ankles
flickers upon the shore-
Which shore?-
the sand clings to my lips-
Which shore?
Agh, petals maybe. How
should I know?
Which shore? Which shore?
—the petals from some hidden
appletree-Which shore?
I said petals from an appletree.


WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS
163
TO WAKEN AN OLD LADY
Old age is
a flight of small
cheeping birds
skimming
bare trees
above a snow glaze.
Gaining and failing
they are buffeted
by a dark wind-
But what?
On harsh weedstalks
the flock has rested-
the snow
is covered with broken
seed husks
and the wind tempered
with a shrill
piping of plenty.
THE DESOLATE FIELD
Vast and grey, the sky
is a simulacrum
a
to all but him whose days
are vast and grey and
In the tall, dried grasses
a goat stirs
with nozzle searching the ground.
My head is in the air
but who am I . . ?
-and my heart stops amazed
at the thought of love
vast and grey
yearning silently over me.


164
SIX POEMS
WILLOW POEM
It is a willow when summer is over,
a willow by the river
from which no leaf has fallen nor
bitten by the sun
turned orange or crimson.
The leaves cling and grow paler,
swing and grow paler
over the swirling waters of the river
as if loth to let go,
they are so cool, so drunk with
the swirl of the wind and of the river-
oblivious to winter,
the last to let go and fall
into the water and on the ground.
BLIZZARD
Snow falls:
years of anger following
hours that float idly down-
the blizzard
drifts its weight
deeper and deeper for three days
or sixty years, eh? Then
the sun! a clutter of
yellow and blue flakes-
Hairy looking trees stand out
in long alleys
over a wild solitude.
The man turns and there-
his solitary track stretched out
upon the world.


Us
WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS
165
SPRING STORM
The sky has given over
its bitterness.
Out of the dark change
all day long
rain falls and falls
as if it would never end.
Still the snow keeps
its hold on the ground.
But water, water is seething
from a thousand runnels.
It collects swiftly,
dappled with black
cuts a way for itself
through green ice in the gutters.
Drop after drop it falls
from the withered grass stems
of the overhanging embankment.
1


U
THE ART OF POETRY
BY RICHARD ALDINGTON
I
THE
HE following remarks are intended to express a theory of
poetic style and a few general ideas on the art of poetry.
I
do not for one suppose that these ideas are new but, rightly or
wrongly, I believe that they embody certain principles of good writ-
ing in all times. They are the result of some thought on the prob-
lems involved, but I am happy to acknowledge my indebtedness to
the writings of Mr. F. S. Flint and M. Edouard Dujardin who have
recently expressed rather similar views. I see no reason why I
should not add my conviction to theirs.
What is the purpose of poetry in modern life? Let us begin by
saying what it is not. Obviously, the purpose is not ethical. The
poet does not desire to improve the morals of his readers. The old
cant of a poet's "message” is now completely discredited and the
theory of “uplift” may be left to the unimportant provinces where
it still flourishes. Didactic poetry is now almost universally recog-
nized as an impertinence.
The danger of poetry's becoming a kind of after-dinner amuse-
ment is far greater than the danger of its reverting to a method of
moral instruction. Literature to-day is too cheap; poetry tends to
become a sort of pleasant little hobby, something which “nice
people” play with when there is nothing more amusing to do.
People's minds are absorbed in commerce, sociology, politics. Lit-
erature has lost prestige. We are very far from the times when
Lorenzo Valla's discourses on Latin grammar disturbed the suprem-
acy of the Popes and equally far from the more recent times when
a pamphlet by Chateaubriand re-established at least temporarily
the dynasty of the Bourbons. Literature seems out of touch with
men's lives, with their real interests. And so in their popular forms
books are something people read to amuse themselves, to beguile a
tedious railway journey, or to pass the long unemployed Sunday
afternoon. Knowledge of modern literature, even in its more in-


RICHARD ALDINGTON
167
tellectual forms, and especially poetry, is an accomplishment, not
a passion, an entertainment for idle women, not a real force.
Petrarch, who wept with emotion over that copy of Homer he
could not read, would appear a very ridiculous sight to-day. No-
body would think of becoming emotional over the possession of a
mere book, an object to amuse a few leisure hours. I do not suppose
many people read modern poetry for mere amusement, but even
here the motive is not so much a purely aesthetic enjoyment as a sort
of snobbery, an outcome either of the foolish desire to know the
latest fashion in poets or of that affectation of superior wisdom
which claims a monopoly of culture.
I conclude, therefore, that poetry is neither a means of ethical
instruction, an after-dinner amusement, nor the lawful prey of
snobs and dilettanti.
II
a
I have never found that any of the abstract or epigrammatical
definitions of poetry I have read ever helped me to enjoy poetry
more. So I am going to assume that there is an art of poetry and
that this art deserves attention.
Normally it is considered necessary to draw a distinction between
prose and poetry. I am not at all sure that any such distinction is
possible and I am inclined to believe that in literature there is only
one art—the art of good writing, though this has innumerable
forms. Of course, Monsieur Jourdain's distinction between prose
and verse still holds good, but poetry is something quite indepen-
dent of verse and verse forms. If we say that poetry is the finest
.
type of creative writing—and that is what I claim for it—then I
want to call the L’Éducation Sentimentale a poem. If we speak of
a work like the Orlando Furioso as a poem, can we deny that praise
to a work like Du Côté de Chez Swann, which contains beauties,
perceptions, and thoughts of which Ariosto was incapable? I am
not attacking the Orlando. I am only claiming that for us to-
day Du Côté de Chez Swann is the finer poem. Is it only Ariosto’s
"ottava rima” and rhyme endings which make his work poetry?
Is it only the lack of these devices which makes M. Proust not a
poet? Even if you make poetry a matter of verbal harmony—an
?
opinion from which I violently dissent—there are in M. Proust's
book finer cadences, more lovely conjunctions of sound, more orig.


168
THE ART OF POETRY
inal rhythms even than in that melodious Italian work to which I
have referred. May we not then say that all good creative writing
is poetry though this poetry has many forms? Non-creative writing
is not poetry at all, but a distinction may be usefully made between
objective poetry which deals with action and manners—in which
case the epic, the novel, the short story, and the drama are con-
gruous—and subjective poetry, which deals with personal emotions,
subtle relations, acute momentary perceptions, reveries, in which
case the form of the lyric or elegy or ode is proper. But this lyric
utterance may perfectly well have the appearance of a short piece
of prose, which we call a prose poem or a poem in vers libre. Such
writing is sharply distinct from objective poetry, though there are
gradations of each which approach the other. It is with poetry of
this lyric type that I am here concerned.
The my conception of good writing and hence of poetry
and of the "lyric utterance," is contained in these words of Sainte-
Beuve:
a
germ of
“The end and object of every original writer is to express what
nobody has yet expressed, to render what nobody else is able to
render.”
9
In other words, before a man can properly be called a poet he
must convince us that he can give us something no one else can give.
It is not that we expect him to discover a wholly original content,
which would probably be impossible. But we do expect a personal
vision from him. I agree with Mr. Flint that the first qualities to
look for in a poet are sincerity, personality, and style. Sincerity
does not mean that a poet must tell other people the truth; it
means that he must tell himself the truth. A poet is an artist whose
medium is words, who expresses in words thoughts, emotions, and
sensations as a painter expresses them in colour and a musician in
sound. That sounds a truism, but it is of the highest importance
that the poet should express his emotions, his sensations, his
thoughts. All writers who call themselves poets imagine that they
are sincere; they all believe that they express their own thoughts
and emotions and sensations. Actually they do nothing of the
kind; they repeat, more or less inaccurately, the thoughts of others,
the sensations of others, the emotions of others. Their impulse is


RICHARD ALDINGTON
169
6
vicarious; their words are approximate. That is not art; it is not
poetry. Books which are written without this sincerity, which is
what Rossetti meant when he talked of "fundamental brainwork,”
are vain efforts, mere waste. Before the writer can give his thoughts,
his vision of the world, he must discover them for himself, he must
be sincere with himself. Then, however slender his talent, he is an
artist, he is a poet.
This sincerity is simply a piece of elementary justice to the world
in general and to reviewers in particular; it is an examination of
self to discover whether one really has anything worth saying, or,
in other words, whether one has personality. The external mark
of personality is style. By style I do not mean that "correctness"
"
of schoolmasters and professors which is a dead rhetoric. I do not
mean artificial graces, or singularity, or affected speech; I mean
neither Euphuism nor Purism; and I do not mean that absurd
elegance which consists in avoiding split infinitives, final preposi-
tions, and the repetition of one word twice in a sentence. These are
the mere aping of style. Style is thinking, perceiving, and express-
ing oneself precisely and individually. Without sincerity (funda-
mental brainwork) there is no personality; without personality
there is no style. And, we may add, if there is no style there is
neither personality nor sincerity.
If we wish to discover whether a writer is a poet we must exam-
ine his style. This is the first elementary test. If his style is bad,
if it is made up of conventional expressions, approximate phrases,
dead or mixed metaphors; if we find he is using his medium, words,
merely for their sound (as if he were a musician, not a writer), for
their prettiness (as if he were a painter), for any quality first of all
but their essential meaning, then he is not a poet. He has broken
the great rule for all writers: use words according to their meaning.
It is a profound error to suppose that all writers do this. A small
minority, a very few in each generation are sufficiently sincere, have
enough personality to seek style, to use words according to their
meaning. All the rest use words approximately and theirs is an
approximate art. Poetry has no place for mere intellectual count-
ers. It has no place for stereotyped phrases, unconscious quota-
.
tions of other men's works. It has no place for the dead metaphor,
the metaphor which was striking when new, which was the expres-
sion of a real perception, but which through use and misuse has


170
THE ART OF POETRY
become a mere phrase, the counterfeit of an emotion. To judge a
book of poetry, to make it pass the first test, examine the style, look
for the precise expression of thoughts really thought, emotions
really felt, perceptions really perceived. Look for the phrases
which give one a sudden shock of illumination, which really evoke
an object or convey a sensation. Examine the metaphors. If you
find a writer's thought approximate, his phrases stereotyped, his
metaphors dead, then you may conclude he is not a poet, he is not
one of the few who are privileged to make the world live for us
with a life of their giving.
There are some critics who judge a poet by the noise which his
words make, as if poetry were merely a matter of sound. That
seems to me a false criticism, an ignoring of far more essential quali-
ties. The rhythm of words is something spontaneous, developed
inevitably by the writer's emotion; it is not an artificial arrange-
ment of syllables. Real rhythm comes from real emotion; it is not
something copied from Milton or Shelley or Swinburne. A copied
rhythm is false, the expression of a false or second-hand emotion.
To put sound first and meaning afterwards in poetry is decadence.
It is as decadent as the columns and flutes in the Anthology or the
"picture-poems” of Apollinaire. I am no enemy of the traditional
verse forms of English poetry and I can enjoy Keats or Donne or
even Chaucer as well as the next man. But I am an enemy of
conventional imitations. And I think that five centuries of intense
production have somewhat exhausted the possibilities of our pros-
ody. If our poetry is to be anything but a pastiche of masterpieces
we must get back to the essential qualities of poetry which may
develop new methods of expression. Vers libre, which is still in
the experimental stage, may be a move in the right direction. It
has certain advantages. It forces the writer to concentrate on
meaning; it compels, or rather incites towards, concision, exactness,
sincerity. It has the admirable result of reducing output. It forces
a man to create his own rhythms instead of imitating other people's.
The absence of the accepted rhetorical devices, the discounting of
virtuosity, force both writer and reader to look for more essential
qualities. The pleasant devices of rhyme and harmonious metres
may impose bad work upon us for a time, but emptiness is at once
obvious in the naked structure of vers libre. It forces the writer to
abolish that mass of archaisms, inversions, stock poeticisms, poetic


RICHARD ALDINGTON
171
clichés, pretty and sonorous words—all the useless cumbering of the
poetaster. It brings one face to face with a human personality, not
with a dictionary and a commonplace book.
III
As I began by stating generally what poetry is not, so I shall be-
gin here by quoting a piece of writing which is not poetry:
“Do not think, Eve, I do not know you, Eve,
Sailing your body down this London way,
Sowing the air with rosy loves to weave
Around us, Eve-or is it Lesbia?
“Robed in the graces of all Paradise
In body, Eve, or is it in the soul?
Circe, Medusa, whose enchanting eyes
The script of Nature's debt shall here unroll.”
a
Consider those lines carefully. The first line, if a little clumsy, is
quite plain. The next introduces us to the metaphor "sailing your
body.” Now when the writer put down those words did he have a
vision of a street as a river, a woman as a boat, gliding on the
waves between banks of houses? If he did he was sincere, he was a
poet. But if he had no such vision, if he merely used phrases he
had heard, or if he used "sailing” not to express "sailing" but only
motion, then he was not sincere, he was not a poet. Let us grant
him his sailing body, however, and with what image he has evoked
in our minds, let us read a little further. “Rosy loves” is a cliché,
a dead phrase. But I, at least, am amazed to find that the "sailing
body” has now begun to "sow,” not seeds, but “rosy loves” which
perform the singular feat of "weaving around us Eve.” What does
he mean? What is this curious monster, more odd than that de-
scribed in the Ars Poetica, which is at once a sailing boat and a
sower of such peculiar seed? Surely the words “sailing," "sow,"
and "weave” are used without any reference to their meaning?
The next quatrain is even worse. If we are to believe in the
writer's sincerity we must now visualize a sailing body which sowed
rosy loves and then becomes Circe, Medusa, Lesbia, and Eve,
>


172
THE ART OF POETRY
“robed in the graces” (a cliché). And lastly we are introduced to
the enormity of "enchanting” eyes which perform the most singular
feat of unrolling a script, the script of "Nature's debt," whatever
that may be. Perhaps a misapprehension of certain metaphors of
Shakespeare and Henley. Does all this mean anything? Does it
give us anything? Did the writer feel any emotion but that of a
confused mind? Is there personality, sincerity, style in those lines?
I do not think so. I do not think that is poetry.
In order to be quite fair it was originally my intention to analyze
a piece of bad vers libre in the same way, but considerations of space
forbid. I regret it because the analysis was instructive if only be-
cause it showed how much more difficult it is to impose mere empti-
ness on the reader when vers libre is used.
IV
There are two poems in vers libre which I should very much have
liked to quote as examples of fine writing, but both Mr. Ford
Madox Hueffer's On Heaven and Mr. F. S. Flint's Otherworld
are far too long-a curious comment by the way on the usual jour-
nalist's complaint that vers libre poems are too short! Here is a
piece of writing by Mr. D. H. Lawrence:
“It is not long since, here among all these folk
In London, I should have held myself
of no account whatever,
but should have stood aside and made them way
thinking that they, perhaps,
had more right than 1—for who was I?
“Now I see them just the same, and watch them.
But of what account do I hold them?
"Especially the young women.
women. I look at them
as they dart and flash
before the shops, like wagtails on the edge of a pool.
“If I pass them close, or any man,
like sharp slim wagtails they flash a little aside


RICHARD ALDINGTON
173
pretending to avoid us; yet all the time
calculating-
"They think that we adore them—alas, would it were true!
Probably they think all men adore them,
howsoever they pass by.
"What is it, that, from their faces fresh as spring,
such fair, fresh, alert, first-flower faces,
like lavender crocuses, snowdrops, like Roman hyacinths,
scyllas and yellow-haired hellebore, jonquils, anemones,
even the sulphur auriculas,
flowers that come first from the darkness, and feel cold to the
touch,
flowers scentless or pungent, ammoniacal almost;
“what is it that, from the faces of the fair young women
comes like a pungent scent, a vibration beneath
that startles me, alarms me, stirs up a repulsion?
“They are the issue of acrid winter, these first-flower young
women;
their smell is lacerating and repellent,
it smells of burning snow,
of earth, winter-pressed, strangled in corruption;
it is the scent of the fiery-cold dregs of corruption,
when destruction soaks through the mortified, decomposing
earth,
and the last fires of dissolution burn in the bosom of the
ground.
“They are the flowers of ice-vivid mortification,
thaw-cold, ice-corrupt blossoms,
with a loveliness I loathe;
for what kind of ice-rotten, hot-aching heart must they need to
root in.”
a
If we examine that piece of writing we shall notice that it really
says something, that it has a significance. Words are used here for


174
THE ART OF POETRY
their meaning; there is no cliché, no dead metaphor. It is vivid,
realized, and appeals directly to our senses, to see the colour and
shape of these flowers, to feel the coldness of their touch, to realize
the scents which are so elaborately defined. The thoughts, the
emotions, the sensations which it "presents” may be something one
dislikes, but that is not the point if it has the essential qualities. I
think it has and I think we are justified in calling it a poem.
Something of a different kind, a piece of writing which is less
strongly emotional, less acrid, more personal, the record of an
humble instead of a rather arrogant soul, but equally an experience
and a reflection is the following poem by F. S. Flint:
IMMORTALITY
“Tired faces,
eyes that have never seen the world,
bodies that have never lived in air,
lips that have never minted speech,
they are clipped and garbled,
blocking the highway.
They swarm and eddy
between the banks of glowing shops
towards the red meat,
the potherbs,
the cheapjacks,
or surge in
before the swift rush of the clanging trams-
pitiful, ugly, mean,
encumbering
"Immortal ?
In a wood,
watching the shadow of a bird
leap from frond to frond of bracken,
I am immortal,
perhaps.
But these?
Their souls are naphtha lamps,
guttering in an odour of carious teeth,
and I die with them.
.


RICHARD ALDINGTON
175
Now, whereas Mr. Lawrence's poem was rather complex, this
is rather simple, a mood based on a contrast, an impingement of
harsh reality on ideal beauty. So, as is natural, the first was broken
into eight different strophes, the latter into only two: an example
of instinctive form. The meaning of this poem is clear, adequately
realized. First we get a London street, the spiritually maimed,
physically thwarted people, the glowing shops, the street stalls,
with shouting men, the confused movement and noise. Then after
a pause the writer gives us his reflection, his significance. Can the
minds, the desires, the passions of these crushed souls, creating and
created by this hell, be immortal? A sensitive mind, one which
would naturally delight in silent solitude among trees, such might
be immortal; but these other souls, like faring smoky lamps, seem
doomed to oblivion and seem also to involve others in their disaster.
I think we may say that it is a poem, that it has the essential quali-
ties of poetry, though the scene be sordid and the mood one of
despair.
These two poems are records of experiences in the life of a
modern city. Here is a piece of writing by Ezra Pound of a more
refined and abstract nature.
"Be in me as the eternal moods
of the bleak wind, and not
As transient things are-
gaiety of flowers.
"Have me in the strong loneliness
of sunless cliffs
And of grey waters.
Let the gods speak softly of us
In days hereafter,
The shadowy flowers of Orcus
Remember Thee.”
That is very different in content from the preceding poems; it is
not "experiential” but a reverie, a rather exquisite mood of affec-
tion. I think it needs no analysis to show the sincerity, personality,
and style of that piece of writing. Its simplicity, its masterly use
of words, the absence of cliché of thought and phrase, are obvious.


176
THE ART OF POETRY
V
It will no doubt be felt that I have no right to quote the writings
of H. D. in public and I certainly feel that it would be better if I
could omit any reference to them. But, if I did, I should be depriv-
ing myself of the best piece of evidence I have for my case and I
should feel more hesitation if other and better writers had not
before this expressed a similar opinion of their value. The op-
ponent of vers libre who is shocked by this proceeding may take
comfort in the fact that there is still so little good vers libre that I
am forced into this uncomfortable position to complete my argu-
ment.
The poem
poem I am about to quote is sharply different from the others
I have cited. It is subtle, elusive, rather philosophic, tragical, and
symbolic; it is set in no particular age or climate and yet every
image is sharp and clear-cut, every perception realized. It is a
poem of great emotion restrained by intellect. What it has to tell
is the tragedy of the artist's worship of beauty, his almost religious
devotion, his agony and loss, and his knowledge that in spite of
this he can do nothing but worship. Beauty is figured as a goddess,
a statue in a shrine looking over the sea, a perilous and rocky sea,
no safe harbour for merchants. The quiet men, those who are not
marked by the fate of the lover of beauty, find this beauty evil,
something to avoid. But beauty is unsheltered, set in the midst of
thunder and sea and hail. This beauty is useless, a lure to disaster,
if by disaster we mean worldly failure. The landsmen, the crowd,
are certain beauty is useless, but for her lovers "honey is not more
sweet than the salt stretch of your beach."
The mood changes to one of terror. This perception of loveliness
brings with it a strange agony, that grief which Plato says is
an inevitable part of the passionate love of beauty. It is a sorrow
which seems to cleave the very bones, to stun and dazzle. Wise
men, the prudent, the insensitive gave warning of this, proved that
beauty was useless, its service fatal. And yet, some are doomed to
this barren agony which is also delight. And since the hands of the
goddess have touched them, "the waves can never thrust us back
from the splendour of your ragged coast.”
>


RICHARD ALDINGTON
177
THE SHRINE
(“She looks over the Sea”)
I
“Are your rocks shelter for ships-
have you sent galleys from your beach,
are you graded—a safe crescent-
where the tide lifts them back to port-
are you full and sweet,
tempting the quiet
to depart in their trading ships?
“Nay, you are great, fierce, evil-
you are the land-blight-
you have tempted men
but they perished on your cliffs.
“Your lights are but dank shoals,
slate and pebble and wet shells
and seaweed fastened to the rocks.
“It was evil-evil
when they found you,
when the quiet men looked at you-
they sought a headland
shaded with a ledge of cliff
from the wind-blast.
“But you—you are unsheltered,
cut with the weight of wind-
you shudder when it strikes,
then lift, swelled with the blast-
you sink as the tide sinks,
you shrill under hail, and sound
thunder when thunder sounds.
"You are useless-
when the tides swirl


178
THE ART OF POETRY
your boulders cut and wreck
the staggering ships.
II
“You are useless,
O grave, O beautiful,
the landsmen tell it, I have heard-
you are useless.
"And the wind sounds with this
and the sea
where rollers shot with blue
cut under deeper blue.
“O but stay tender, enchanted
where wave-lengths cut you
apart from all the rest-
for we have found you,
we watch the splendour of you,
we thread throat on throat of freesia
for your shelf.
“You are not forgot,
O plunder of lilies,
honey is not more sweet
than the salt stretch of your beach.
III
"Stay-stay-
terror has caught us now,
we passed the men in ships,
we dared deeper than the fisher-folk
and
you
strike us with terror,
O bright shaft.
"Flame passes under us
sorrow, splitting bone from bone,
and sparks that unknot the flesh,


RICHARD ALDINGTON
179
splendour athwart our eyes
and rifts in the splendour,
sparks and scattered light.
“Many warned of this,
men said:
there are wrecks on the fore-beach,
wind will beat your ship,
there is no shelter in that headland,
it is useless waste, that edge,
that front of rock-
sea-gulls clang beyond the breakers,
none venture to that spot.
IV
"But hail-
as the tide slackens,
as the wind beats out,
we hail this shore-
spirit between the headlands
and the further rocks.
“Though oak-beams split,
though boats and seamen founder,
and the strait grind sand with sand
and cut boulders to sand and drift-
"your eyes have pardoned our faults,
your hands have touched us-
you have leaned forward a little
and the waves can never thrust us back
from the splendour of your ragged coast.”
French poets
Had I permitted myself to go for examples to contemporary
I could have fitted myself out handsomely from the
works of men like Laforgue, Rimbaud, Vielé-Griffin, Régnier, Ver-
haeren, Romains, Spire, Valèry, Vildrac, Duhamel, to mention only
a few. But it seemed preferable to keep to English examples. The
medium of another language necessitates a certain readjustment,


180
THE ART OF POETRY
though, if we are considering the essential qualities of writing, the
standard exacted in this article applies just as well, a virtue which
can hardly be claimed by those who make prosody their foot-rule.
Of course, every man brings to literature his own temperament, his
own prejudices and qualities; it is an old truism. But not every
one who admires Shakespeare admires the best in him, not every
one can tell you what he admires in the great Elizabethan. Simi-
larly not every one who denounces the works of Miss X, the
popular novelist, can give an adequate critical reason for his horror.
Even the principles laid down here, simple as they are, will be
interpreted by each person according to his former convictions. I
do not desire to convert people to my views, even if they are right,
because, if they are right, honest independent thought will come to
similar conclusions by different means. Disloyal thought is of no
permanent importance. And if my views are wrong I should not
like to have misled any one.


)

STUART DA VIS 1919
5
FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY. BY STUART DAVIS






HD
SIVART DANS
THEODORE PREISER. BY STUART DAVIS






Delo
Hin
Det
STUART
DAVIS 1918
JOHN SYNGE. BY STUART DAVIS






Wakiwa
Thu
STUART DAYISION
N. OSTROVSKY. BY STUART DAVIS





ILLUMINATIONS
BY ARTHUR RIMBAUD
TOWN
(LONDON)
AM a transient and not at all too discontented citizen of a me-
I
tropolis considered modern because every known style has been
eluded in the furnishings and exterior of the houses as well as in
the general scheme of the town. Here you would not distinguish
the traces of any monument of superstition. Ethics and language
are at last reduced to their simplest terms! These millions of people,
who have no need of making one another's acquaintance, carry on
so uniformly their education, business, and old age, that the average
life here must be several times less long than that which a silly
statistic reckons for the peoples of the Continent. Also, as I watch
from
my window new ghosts rolling through the thick and everlast-
ing coal smoke-our tree shade, our summer night!-new Furies,
before my cottage, which is my country and all my heart, since
everything here resembles this,-Death without tears, our busy
daughter and servant, a despairing Love and a pretty Crime, chirp
in the mud of the street.
CHILDHOOD
I
This idol, black-eyed, yellow-haired, parentless and courtless,
nobler than the fable, Mexican and Flemish; his domain insolent
azure and greenery, runs upon beaches named by shipless waves
with ferociously Grecian, Slavic, Celtic names.
At the edge of the wood,—the dream flowers tinkle, burst open,
flare,—the orange-lipped girl, knees crossed in the bright flood that


182
ILLUMINATIONS
wells from the fields, nakedness that is overcast and clothed by the
rainbows, the flora, and the sea.
Ladies who revolve on terraces by the sea; children and giantesses,
suburb blacks in the moss of verdigris, jewels erect on the rich soil
of thawing tree-clumps and little gardens,-young mothers and
big sisters, their glance filled with pilgrimages, sultanas, princesses
with the carriage and costume of tyrants, little strangers and per-
sons gently wretched.
What a bore, the hour of "dear body" and "dear heart”!
.
II
It is she, the little dead woman, behind the rose bushes.—The
young mother who is no more comes down the steps.—The cousin's
phaeton grates on the sand. The little brother (he is in the In-
dies!) there, in front of the sunset, on the meadow of pinks.The
old men whom they have buried standing, in the rampart of wall-
flowers.
The swarm of gold leaves surrounds the general's house. They
are in the South. You follow the red road to come to the empty
inn. The château is for sale; the blinds have been taken down.-
The curate will have carried off the key to the church.—Round the
park, the lodges of the keepers are untenanted. The fence palings
are so tall that you can see nothing but the rustling tree tops.
There is nothing there to see anyway.
The meadows slope up to villages with neither cocks nor anvils.
The lock gate
is
up. O the calvaries and mills of the desert, the
islands and haystacks!
III
Magic flowers murmured. The bank cradled him. Animals of
a fabulous elegance passed to and fro. Thunder clouds gathered
on the high sea made of an eternity of hot tears.


ARTHUR RIMBAUD
183
IV
In the wood is a bird; its song stops you and makes you blush.
There is a clock which does not strike.
There is a gully with a nest of white animals.
There is a cathedral that descends and a lake that climbs.
a
There is a little carriage, abandoned in the shrubbery, or that
comes down the path, running, beribboned.
There is a troop of little comedians in costume, seen in the road
across the edge of the wood.
Finally, when you are hungry and thirsty, there is somebody who
chases you away.
V
I am the saint in prayer on the terrace, as the flocks pasture down
to the sea of Palestine.
I am the scholar in the gloomy armchair. Branches and rain
throw themselves against the library casement.
I am the tramp of the highroad through dwarfed woods: the
sound of anvils covers my steps. For a long time I see the
melancholy golden wash of the sunset.
I might well be the child abandoned on the pier, gone away to
the high seas, the little servant following the alley, whose forehead
touches the sky.
The paths are rough. The hillocks are overgrown with broom.
The air is motionless. How far away the birds and springs are! It
can only be the end of the world, by going on.


184
ILLUMINATIONS
VI
At length, let them rent me this tomb, whitewashed, with the
lines of cement in relief,--away underground.
I lean my elbows on the table, the lamp illuminates very brightly
these papers that I am a fool to reread, these uninteresting books.
At an enormous distance above my subterranean salon houses
are taking root, fogs are gathering. The mud is red or black. Mon-
strous town, endless night!
Not so high are drains. Laterally nothing but the thickness of
the globe. Perhaps gulfs of azure, wells of fire? It is on these
planes, perhaps, that moons and comets, seas and stories, meet.
In my hours of bitterness, I imagine for my pleasure balls of
sapphire, of metal. I am master of silence. Why should the sug-
gestion of a shaft show white in the corner of the vault?
LIVES
I
O the vast avenues of the holy land, the terraces of the temple!
What have they done with the Brahmin who explained me the
Proverbs? I still see even the old women of that time out there!
I remember the hours of silver and sun toward the rivers, my com-
panion's hand on my shoulder, and our caresses as we stood in the
peppered plains.—A fight of scarlet pigeons thunders round my
thought.—In exile here, I have had a stage for the performance of
the dramatic masterpieces of all literatures. I could show you
riches undreamed of. I follow the history of the treasures that you
might have found. I see the result! My wisdom is treated as
contemptuously as chaos. What is my nothingness compared with
the stupor which awaits you?


ARTHUR RIMBAUD
185
II
I am an inventor very differently deserving from all those who
have preceded me; a musician, even, who has found something like
the key to love. At present, squire of a meagre countryside with a
gloomy sky, I try to stir myself with memories of my beggar's child-
hood, my apprenticeship or my coming into sabots, of my polemics,
six or seven widowhoods and several parties when my strong head
kept me from rising to the diapason of my comrades. I do not
regret my old rôle of divine gaiety: the sober air of this sour
country feeds very diligently my atrocious skepticism. But as this
skepticism cannot be put in practice hereafter, and as besides I am
at the service of a new disorder,--I expect to become a very wicked
idiot.
III
In an attic where I was shut up at the age of twelve, I made the
acquaintance of the world, I illustrated the human comedy. In a
cellar I learned history. At some night festival in a city of the
North, I encountered all the women of the ancient painters. In
an old passage at Paris they taught me the classic sciences. In a
magnificent abode girdled by the whole Orient, I accomplished my
enormous task and spent my illustrious retirement. I have brewed
my blood. My duty is remitted me.
It is no longer necessary
even to think of that. I am really from beyond the grave, and no
errands.
DEPARTURE
Enough seen. The vision is encountered again on every air.
Enough had. Noises of towns, at evening and in the sun and
always.
Enough known. The suspense of life.-0 Noises and Visions!
Departure in new affection and new sound.


BOOK REVIEWS
HILDA AND THE UNCONSCIOUS
Poems BY A LITTLE GIRL. By Hilda Conkling. 12mo.
120 pages. Frederick A. Stokes Company. New York.
THIS
HIS, as has been remarked in various degrees of profundity,
is the era of the child. For several years an army
of
pro-
fessional educators, statisticians, eugenists, psychologists have been
busy charting the child's power of absorption, adaptability, mimetic
desires, and all that has been conveniently lumped under “poten-
tialities.” And now, in the midst of being thumbed and ana-
lyzed, the subject suddenly stops being a creature and becomes a
creator. First one and then another country exhibits its infantile
prodigies; wunderkinder blossom in every art gallery, oust their
elders on the concert platform, run rapidly into large paper and
fourteenth editions. Truly, the child has come into its own-
and other people's—royalties. Austria begins with Erich Korn-
gold, the infant Richard Strauss. Italy offers Romano Dazzi, the
fourteen-year-old Steinlein. France counters with the haunting
designs of Denise. Not to be outdone, England presents a pair
of popular successes in two fields: Pamela Bianco, for whose
Botticelli-like drawings Walter de la Mare has written verses,
and the classic Daisy Ashford. Without waiting for the rest of
our allies to add their quota, America has rushed into the fast-
filling breach with Opal Whitely (whose fame has spread from
the Atlantic Monthly to the Pacific weeklies), Horace Atkisson
Wade (George Ade's young visiter), and most gifted of them
all—Hilda Conkling.
Hilda is not quite ten years old, the daughter of Grace Hazard
Conkling, a poet. Hilda began to write poems—or rather, to talk
them at the age of four. Since that time she has created more
than one hundred little verses, many of which are astonishing in
exactness of phrase and vision, none of them sinking to the plane
of polite mediocrity attained by the majority of her more mature


LOUIS UNTERMEYER
187
confrères. Hilda “tells” her poem and her mother makes notes
or copies it down from memory, arranges the line-divisions, adds
-
the title and reads it afterwards to the child for corrections. In
this process there is, of course, the possibility that certain modifica-
tions, certain subtle refinements may result; it is even more prob-
able that a tentative and half-conscious shaping has already taken
place. But, conceding the natural impress and occasional precon-
scious echoes of the mother, the quality which shines behind prac-
tically all of these facets of loveliness is a directness of perception,
an almost mystic divination. It is its own stamp of unaffected
originality, a genuine ingenuousness.
a
HAY-COCK
“This is another kind of sweetness
Shaped like a bee-hive:
a
This is the hive the bees have left;
It is from this clover-heap
They took away the honey
For the other hive!”
Turn, from such a quiet glorification of a nature-fact, to this
more sweeping figure:
MOON SONG
“There is a star that runs very fast,
That goes pulling the moon
Through the tops of the poplars.
It is all in silver,
The tall star:
The moon rolls goldenly along
Out of breath.
Mr. Moon, does he make you hurry?”
Here is an abrupt breath-snatching fantasy, with the child's
voice asserting its peculiar treble in the last altogether child-like
line. And here, with uncanny assurance and technical balance, a
lesson in elementary physics is turned into sudden and surprising
poetry:


188
HILDA AND THE UNCONSCIOUS
.
WATER
“The world turns softly
Not to spill its lakes and rivers.
The water is held in its arms
And the sky is held in the water.
What is water,
That pours silver,
And can hold the sky ?”
1
.
Here we face the twisted problem of the child as artist. What
force impels it? What supplies it with backgrounds that the child
has never known? What directs its candour, sharpens its edges,
illumines its clarity? . The answer, I believe, lies in its
very immaturity. It is still the emotional primitive, still free of
superimposed patterns, drawing its substance directly from the un-
conscious. The child knows beyond knowledge, tapping that vast
source of intuitive wisdom. "Out of the mouths of babes and
sucklings” was written by one who was not only a prophet but a
biblical psychoanalyst. Is this to say that every child is therefore
an embryonic painter, poet, musician? Precisely. Did the world
,
so desire, it could have a race of artists in one generation. That
it prefers to starve or "sublimate” the creative hunger, to direct
this expressive energy into channels of more efficient industry is
one more cause of man's growing neuroticism, his wavering alle-
giance to the modern world, his failure to adjust. Civilization
has broken down almost all his individualistic resources. When
it first took away his art, it left him, as a substitute, his craft.
But now, lost among his own machines, he turns in upon himself
-a disillusioned and defeated child.
Only the artist escapes—the artist who is a child that has reached
maturity without having its vision distorted or its contact with
the subconscious made difficult by prejudice and pressure. But
where the child pierces the subconscious from beneath, the artist
sounds it from above. The great danger lies in reaching the dead
level of reason and remaining there; getting stuck fast in tradition,
education, and all that is derivative and conscious is what happens
to ninety-nine per cent. of us. Even in this extremely first book
one sees it happening to Hilda. It is ridiculous to talk of the


LOUIS UNTERMEYER
189
"stages” in the work of a ten-year-old child and yet the verses
conceived between four and seven are more vivid, seem more spon-
taneous and less—absurd as it may seem—sophisticated than those
written between seven and nine. Literature and an almost domesti-
cated sapience rather than the child's naïve wonder take hold of her
"later” poems. A line like
"Windmills wake and whirl"
is too workmanlike to be convincing; her satiric The Tower and
the Falcon and One Morning-Glory that Flowered betray influ-
ences even beyond a precocious sense of irony. There is an un-
naturally canny symbolism in certain of the concluding poems that
might have come straight from the pens of our best imagists. It
is no wonder that Miss Lowell is enthusiastic about so Amy Lowell-
like a picture as
POEMS
“See the fur coats go by!
The morning is like the inside of a snow-apple.
I will curl myself cushion-shape
On the window-seat;
I will read poems by snow-light.
If I cannot understand them so,
I will turn them upside down
And read them by the red candles
Of garden brambles.”
But this child not only feels and listens with the concentration
of a child-artist, she sees and hears with the extraordinary sensi-
tivity of a master-craftsman. She hears the chickadee talking
“The way smooth bright pebbles
Drop into water.”
The rooster has a comb "gay as a parade,” he has "pearl trinkets
on his feet,” and
"The short feathers smooth along his back
Are the dark color of wet rocks,


190
HILDA AND THE UNCONSCIOUS
Or the rippled green of ships
When I look at their sides through water.”
And again:
"Tree-toad is a small gray person
With a silver voice.
Tree-toad is a leaf-gray shadow
That sings."
Hilda learns much besides her geography from the trees:
"Hemlocks look like Christmas.
The spruce tree is feathered and rough
Like the legs of the red chickens in our poultry yard.”
She imagines, with amazing precision, that the father of an In-
dian papoose has a voice
“... like ice and velvet,
And tones of falling water."
She observes
“The water came in with a wavy look
Like a spider's web.”
It will be the next phase that will show many things. Is she
going to develop along her own quaint lines? Or, moulded by
?
well-meaning teachers, is this to be the end of Hilda ? Irrespective
of what other obligations the mother may have, Mrs. Conkling's
duty to the world of letters is clear. She should lock her library,
resign from all the Poetry Societies, and pack Hilda off to Tahiti.
The subconscious is going to have a hard time of it if it remains
too close to poets, professors, and publishers.
Louis UNTERMEYER


A NOVELIST OF COURAGE
The Rescue. By Joseph Conrad. 12mo. 404 pages.
Doubleday, Page and Company. New York.
11
T was rather shocking to read, in a recent London Letter to The
Dial, that the appearance of Joseph Conrad's new novel was
awaited "in the expectation that it will definitely establish him as
one of the greatest of our writers.” The caution, the extravagant
moderation of that statement, give one pause. For myself I am not
sure what the critic meant. Was it that Mr. Conrad, after
Nostromo and Lord Jim, for example, might at long last write one
novel which would rank with the highest-one by implication
superior to his others? Or is it simply necessary that a writer of
fiction should justify any claim to immortality by producing one
masterpiece after another—to the total of ten? I think that my
passion for the English novel is not less than that of Mr. Shanks;
I hold in small enough esteem the writers who are short of breath
so that one fine novel exhausts them and they go bad when they
have most reasons to be good. Yet I could not, if my life were on
it, find courage to ask Mr. Conrad to prove anything, to establish
anything however definitely, by writing another masterpiece. It
would be churlish.
So I reject that statement, reject caution, too, with but one faint
concession. If the recognition of Joseph Conrad's place is still so
uncertain, there may be some excuse for analysis and comparison
and the whole tedious business of literary criticism. The exact posi-
tion in line of a writer can be, at best, of small significance to him-
self or to his readers. The important thing is to know what kind of
pleasure the writer imparts, in what degree he gives it, to what
qualities in all the multitudinous qualities of the human soul he
sends his summons and offers his benediction. I say these things
are important without misgiving because whatever helps us to un-
derstand any art is not without its dignity; but I should imagine
that very few in writing about Mr. Conrad would not feel the
slightly sick sense that the importance was wholly his. It would
be easier, it would be more decent to surrender criticism entirely and
a


192
A NOVELIST OF COURAGE
a
only breathe a quiet word of gratitude that his miracle should
happen in our time.
The proper subject for criticism is always method and almost
never subject. By method I do not mean the artist's technique,
composition, and, let us say, sentence structure alone, although
Heaven knows these are important enough at a time when a novel is
considered done if the words just barely make sense and the gram-
mar is only just acceptable. There is in addition the artist's fashion
of regarding his donnée, the way in which for the purposes of his
art he sees the crowded world. What he sees, the subject itself,
does not matter, except to him. For let him write of Hecuba or
the King of Alsander; let him carve Bartolomeo Colleoni on his
horse or paint a woman paring her finger nails—we do not care.
Yet in regard to Mr. Conrad one word can be said of subjects only
to correct a peculiarly sturdy and stubborn misapprehension which
seems to have gathered new vigour with the publication of The
Rescue. The particular wonder of this novel is said to be the per-
fection of tone in a work begun twenty years ago, left undone, and
then taken up, continued, completed, with no perceptible break, cer-
tainly without any failure of interest and without any muddling
of colour. The triumph, for those interested in the craft, must be
very great, but it would be more remarkable if Mr. Conrad had, as
is generally believed, forsaken the subject of this work in the inter-
val and devoted himself to other things. He has, it seems to me,
done nothing of the sort. His subject, his chief interest, has always
been the same, because it has never been anything except the gallant
and valorous effort of human beings to solve the notable case of
conscience which comes to every man at least once in a lifetime,
and leaves him with the bitterness of wisdom or the satisfaction of
having known life too profoundly ever to be enchanted by it again.
Lord Jim is an obvious instance. It is great because it renders,
with precision, the full bearing of its subject; the subject is an
adventure of the soul. I am convinced that the story of James
Wait is no less. One might say that Typhoon at least escaped from
Mr. Conrad's obsession; but at the height of that tempest it is
not the power of the sea that troubles MacWhirr so much as the
indecency of having a gang of Chinese rolling between decks, fight-
ing for silver dollars. I find this preoccupation everywhere—it is
not surprising, for no man can regard life long or render it well


GILBERT SELDES
193
without coming to it. How many agonists has he created, intent
on preserving their honour, how many more struggling to discern
their true relation to each other and to the world? I do not know.
I know only that as his people pass before me I am aware that
they have leaped over palisades and faced death, have sailed the
seas and sought far-off treasure. With each one comes the flash of
vision, the moment of action, of violence. I am aware of and see
these things, but I know that the reason I remember them is because
I have been present when they sat in quiet places and struggled
with the soul and all its maladies and its strength. It is true for all
of them—all of them who count.
66
‘There is that in me,' Lingard murmured, deeply, 'which would
set my heart harder than a stone. I am King Tom, Rajah Laut,
and fit to look any man hereabouts in the face. I have my name to
take care of. Everything rests on that.'
“ 'Mr. D’Alcacer would express this by saying that everything
rested on honour' commented Mrs. Travers.”
—and more surely than the name of Lingard, D’Alcacer sends
memory rushing back, to that French naval officer, lately third
lieutenant of the Villeneuve, flagship of the Pacific Squadron, who
spent thirty hours on board the Patna and later discoursed with
such odd eloquence and such devastating clarity to the indulgent
Marlow.
.
.
“ 'But the honour-the honour, Monsieur! .. The honour,
that is real—that is! And what life may be worth when'
he got on his feet with a ponderous impetuosity, as a startled ox
might scramble
up
'when the honour is gone
-ah, fa! par exemple—I can offer no opinion. I can offer no
opinion—because-Monsieur, I know nothing of it.'
from the grass
.
.
So the case of conscience passes from one book to another. It
appears in many guises. The names which Mr. Conrad most im-
pressively associates with it are fidelity and courage. And no one
regarding his own work can doubt their fitness. For although sub-
ject does not matter, the courage with which a writer accepts his
obligation to his chosen theme, and the faith with which he carries


194
A NOVELIST OF COURAGE
it out, in the face of countless temptations to scant it or to betray
it—these matter enormously, these and no others are, in fact, the
moral qualities of a work of art.
In The Rescue the theme is Tom Lingard's effort to fulfil an old
obligation in the face of a new situation and of an incredible pas-
sion. The intrigue is familiar in most of its details to readers of
Conrad. Nothing is repeated, to be sure, and the story passes with
the vehemence, the passion, the fury, not so much of a first novel
as of a first event. It is the history of Tom Lingard taking the
brig Lightning through “the shallow sea that foams and murmurs
on the shores of the thousand islands, big and little, which make up
the Malay Archipelago.” Intent on restoring to his throne a native
prince who had befriended him and to whom he had passed his
word, he is mercilessly entangled in the fate of two men and a
woman on board an English yacht stranded on the Shore of Refuge
at the very threshold of his enterprise. The men are captured by
the natives and just as Lingard wins their safety his pledge of peace
is broken without his knowledge. The point of honour demands the
return of the captives; the point of passion rises from the simple
wonder of Lingard's simple soul, a wonder and an exaltation, in
loving Mrs. Travers, the wife of the stranded Englishman. The
catastrophe is magnificent.
I have said that one remembers action in Mr. Conrad's work
because one has been present at the deepest moments in the lives of
his people; but one may record, in passing, the very real pleasure in
the tremendous go of his story. The tale quality, the story
supremely well told, is a rare thing and Mr. Conrad has it. In
The Rescue the narrator is absent and those who cannot follow
Marlow in all his curiosity about life will find this story more direct
--and perhaps "easier to read," although Heaven alone knows pre-
cisely why a book should be easy. The action is not quite continu-
ous, but the filling in is succinct and of an interest all its own. And
if we must quarrel at all with this wonderful book it is because Mr.
Conrad has ever so slightly weakened the effect of restoring Lingard
to his brig and retrospectively telling how the thing was done, since
the return of Mr. Travers and D’Alcacer is treated in the same way.
There are several reasons for mentioning this special gift in Mr.
Conrad, and the reader of contemporary fiction (and of contem-
porary journalistic criticism) will not be unconscious of them. But


GILBERT SELDES
195
one cannot press the point. Action for action, Stevenson and
Anthony Hope told their stories quite as well. As scenic property
Treasure Island is equivalent to Carimata. And counting subject,
action, and setting as accessories one must arrive, not at Mr. Con-
rad's secret, but at the knowledge of where his secret is hidden. It
is of course in the treatment of all these things.
And here, of course, it is possible to analyze, but it is not neces-
sary. Mr. Conrad's treatment is simple, consists fundamentally of
the successful effort to render his subject with all its power and all
its beauty. The first principle is that the men and things presented
shall lose none of their vehemence, none of their private intensity,
in the process of narration. I say intensity rather than violence
because in so many of his books Mr. Conrad has placed characters
in sharp contrast to each other—Flora de Barral and Captain
Anthony, Mrs. Travers and Captain Lingard, the quiescent over
against the active--and has never failed to convey the equal sense
of life beating fiercely within them. His people are often those
whom Dante rejected from Heaven and Hell alike, and I suppose
it is his peculiar wisdom to make us understand the terrible activity
of the soul in those who seem to pass their lives in denial and
renunciation.
It is a distinct point that Mr. Conrad does not create those
mythological heroes, “strong characters.” What he does is to treat
whatever character strongly. He subjects them to every pressure,
he exhibits every quality. And the same thing is true of his story.
It is always carried to the extreme point-everything is told that
can be told. Except for the reservation made before, I think that
The Rescue is told in the only possible way. The disaster which
overtakes Lingard would pass beyond the limit of endurance if one
did not have it reported, later, to Lingard himself, and the variation
of tempo effected by the use of direct narration, both before and
after, is one of the two things which keep the reader alive through
the calamitous end.
The other is Beauty. The Rescue has all the fineness of a thing
perfectly done. It has, in addition, a special magic. At times the
magic of a picture:
“There was no wind, and a small brig that had lain all the
afternoon a few miles to the northward and westward of Carimata
a


196
A NOVELIST OF COURAGE
a
had hardly altered its position half a mile during all these hours.
The calm was absolute, a dead, flat calm, the stillness of a dead sea
and of a dead atmosphere. As far as the eye could reach there
was nothing but an impressive immobility. Nothing moved on
earth, on the waters, and above them in the unbroken lustre of the
sky. On the unruffled surface of the straits the brig floated tranquil
and upright as if bolted solidly, keel to keel, with its own image
reflected in the unframed and immense mirror of the sea. To the
south and east the double islands watched silently the double ship
that seemed fixed amongst them forever, a hopeless captive of the
calm, a helpless prisoner of the shallow sea."
Again, the evocation of Mrs. Travers:
“Now and then he bent slightly over the slow beat of a red fan
in the curve of the deck chair to say a few words to Edith Travers,
who answered him without looking up, without a modulation of
tone or a play of feature, as if she had spoken from behind the
veil of an immense indifference stretched between her and the man,
between her heart and the meaning of events, between her eyes and
the shallow sea which, like her gaze, appeared profound, forever
stilled, and seemed, far off in the distance of a faint horizon, be-
yond the reach of man, beyond the power of hand or voice, to lose
itself in the sky.”
One cannot determine how much of this is in the cadence of Mr.
Conrad's enchanted prose. One knows that the secret cannot rest
there, for the beauty which breathes through this book cannot be
charted in page and paragraph. The meetings between Mrs. Trav-
ers and Tom Lingard are four or five, but these two never exchange
a word which fails to throb with a passionate beauty. Their brief
moment of waiting, in the night before the catastrophe, is hardly
described at all; their parting on the sand bank is brief, almost
commonplace—and heartbreaking.
It is not easy to find another name for genius. The effort to
describe it is ungrateful enough. When it penetrates so deep to the
roots of life one can pay it the tribute of becoming silent at the
earliest possible moment.
GILBERT SELDES


THIS SIMIAN WORLD
This Simian WORLD. By Clarence Day, Jr. With
illustrations by the author. 12mo. 95 pages. Alfred
A. Knopf. New York.
MAN
AN is forever trying to describe himself, trying to leave mo-
mentarily his prison of ridiculous clay, to stand aside and
consider the small place he occupies in an immense and incalculable
universe. Having invented all his own words, he is almost power-
less to picture this universe otherwise than in terms of himself.
Since their first appearance upon earth, poets have been robbing
trees, clouds, the weather, of their natural dignity by comparing
them to men. This is often explained and forgiven as part of man's
ancient longing to transcend his animal nature. The much closer
comparisons between animals and ourselves in our better moments,
we seek to avoid. But we can give no names to the actions of these
near relatives other than the names of our own actions. Few indeed
have been the men who by a subtle regrouping of familiar words
could draw an impersonal picture of our race. It is a talent rare
among creatures whose firm belief in predestined world-empire and
even in kinship with God, makes any attempt to view themselves
from the impartial standpoint of an animal, a deity, or the inhabi-
tant of another planet seem blasphemous or impossible. Just this
rare quality of detachment, of complete independence from man's
ancient myopia of self-esteem is the chief among the many high
qualities of Mr. Clarence Day's This Simian World.
No less complete and varied than his estimate of man is Mr.
Day's expression of it: a natural blend of wisdom with lightness,
humour with profundity, hope with art, economy with abundance,
kindliness with malice. The quality that makes possible such al-
liances is the one most infrequently granted to mortals: Mr. Day
sees things as they are beneath accumulated centuries of appear-
ances; he cannot, he will not be fooled. Given such an equipment,
he
may have had, but he did not require, biology.
Swift required no knowledge of biology to see that man would
be less unlike his best self if he were more like a horse. And with


198
THIS SIMIAN WORLD
>
no help from biology Anatole France saw the very close resemblance
between men and penguins. The rest of us at some time or other
feel dimly aware of “the beast with which we are crossed.". It is
an uncomfortable feeling, one we should like to forget, for what
divides us most sharply from our fellow animals is an intense de-
sire to become something else. Even if Darwin had never been
born, we should have felt the chimpanzee stirring in our blood,
and been angry, ashamed, and untruthful about it. So, Darwin or
no Darwin, once Mr. Day had perceived that man is descended
from or closely related to other animals, he would have seen for
himself that if men's ancestors were the animals they most re-
sembled in behaviour, these animals must have been monkeys.
Consider our civilization, says Mr. Day, were we descended from
any other sort of creature. Ants, for instance. They lead “chaste
and industrious lives.” Too industrious, in fact: "The ant is know-
ing and wise, but he doesn't know enough to take a vacation."
The vision of a super-ant civilization is highly distasteful to us
simians: it would be "an orgy of work.”
"
The great cats are more promising than ants: “They are free
from this talent for slavehood.” Imagine a noble race descended
from tigers: “Instead of the small flat head of the tiger, they would
have had clear smooth brows; and those who were not bald would
have had neatly parted hair, perhaps striped.” But they are ner-
vous, high-strung; a race of super-cats "would have needed sani-
tariums; but fewer asylums. And their asylums would have been
not for weak-minded souls, but for furies."
Cats honour combat above all things, while “few normal simians
are keen about bloodshed and killing; we do it in war only because
of patriotism, revenge, duty, glory. A feline civilization would
have cared nothing for duty or glory, but they would have taken
a far higher pleasure in gore.” This pleasure, held by us to be a
base one, would have been hallowed by tigers. "Super-cat men
would have been outraged had their right of personal combat been
questioned. The simian submits with odd readiness to the loss of
this privilege. What outrages him is to make him stop wagging
his tongue. He becomes most excited and passionate about the
right of free speech, even going so far in his emotion as to declare
it is sacred.” But though cats would hold words to be of but slight
importance, they would surpass us in singing: "Even in the stage


ROBERT LITTELL
199
of arrested development as mere animals, in which we see cats, they
wail with a passionate intensity at night in our yards. Imagine
how a Caruso descended from such animals would sing.”
And Mr. Day goes on to reconstruct a feline Utopia. Brief quo-
tation from his description will show only a glimpse of his art.
And quotation cannot translate the amusing, wistful, imaginative
little drawings that all too seldom decorate the book. You must
turn to page eighteen to see Vera Pantherbilt for yourself.
But instead of this noble breed, our descent seems rather to be
from monkeys. For even if we have a few qualities of our
own, we share in a multitude of purely simian traits. The Ban-
darlog never, for instance, could keep still. Nor will their
descendants:
“A discovery that helps them to talk, just to talk, more and more,
will be hailed by these beings as one of the highest of triumphs.
[Simians] will set their young to spending a decade or more
of their lives in studying duplicate systems—whole systems—of
chatter. Those who thus learn several different ways to say the
same things will command much respect, and those who learn many
will be looked on with awe—by true simians.”
Equally ridiculous is their curiosity, and yet it has helped them
to conquer the world. They think they have conquered nature.
Really, they have only adapted themselves to her. And are un-
grateful as well. They will forget they're her sons.
Inquire a little into their strangely firm belief that they are fallen
angels, or in some other way very close to God. Why do we have
gods? Some explanation lies in a consideration of our cousins:
"Imagine you are watching the Bandarlog at play in the forest.
As you behold them and comprehend their natures, now hugely
brave and boastful, now full of dread, the most weakly emotional
of any intelligent species, ever trying to attract the notice of some
greater animal, not happy unless noticed, -is it not plain they are
bound to invent things called gods ?”
And of course there should be no god without a devil, to account
for the


200
THIS SIMIAN WORLD
.
“strange perverse obstinacy
theologians call original sin.
They regard it as the voice of some devil, and say good men should
not listen to it. The scientists say it isn't a devil, it is part of our
nature, which should of course be civilized and guided, but should
not be stamped out. (It might mutilate us dangerously to become
under-simianized. Look at Mrs. Humphry Ward and George
Washington. Worthy souls, but no flavour.)”
Haphazard quotation cannot do justice to This Simian World.
It must be read as a whole. Only then can one see how idea fol-
lows idea, how artfully and with what purpose Mr. Day varies
the cadences of his prose, how skilfully he contrives now to make
us go on with him and forget what has been said, now to make us
hear the undertones when he wants the echoes of what he has been
saying to be prolonged. Only from the book as a whole can one
learn in what just proportions can be combined the casual and the
profound; the light touch and the brief glimpse into chasms of
darkness or into unknown heavens. Mr. Day sees our simian selves
with a sharp eye, all the sharper because it is kind. He sees in-
numerable possible grounds for despair, yet he does not despair:
he is gay. He avoids completely the peevishness of the satirist
mocking a bitter world. He can feel-suggest—hope, infinite mag-
nificent hope, a slow ignoble march toward an unutterable destiny,
but this cannot make him even faintly sentimental.
In this slim book, which looks so unimportant and will live so
long, a weary mind, pausing a moment from its frantic simian ac-
tivity, will find a merciless, yet temperate portrait of his race. It
is not a picture that need tempt him to discouragement, to trans-
form to inaction his busy futility. Rather will he see that there are
new ways of looking at himself, new things to discover about him-
self, and that both art and profit can result from the attempt. He
will find, too, something uncommonly not human about the book,
a detachment incompatible with the self-importance, the self-esteem
of most humans, a suggestion of the wisdom and impersonal amuse-
ment of some kindly deity here on visit.
ROBERT LITTELL
a


PSYCHICAL RESEARCH: THE PHILOSOPHY
OF PERSONALISM
HUMAN PERSONALITY AND ITS SURVIVAL OF BODILY
Death. By Frederic W. H. Myers. 12mo. 307 pages.
(Abridged Edition) Longmans, Green and Com-
pany. New York.
The Cosmic RelationS AND IMMORTALITY. By
Henry Holt. 2 volumes. 8vo. 1071 pages. Houghton
Mifflin Company. Boston.
.
MAN AND THE UNIVERSE. By Sir Oliver Lodge. 12mo.
294 pages. George H. Doran Company. New York.
PsychiCAL MiscellaNEA. By J. Arthur Hill. 12mo.
118 pages. Harcourt, Brace and Howe. New York.
A CLOUD OF Witnesses. By Anna De Koven. 12mo.
273 pages. E. P. Dutton & Company. New York.
.
Meslom's MessageS FROM THE Life BEYOND. By
Mary A. McEvilly. 12mo. 139 pages. Brentano's.
New York.
The CASE AGAINST SPIRITUALISM.
By Jane T.
Stoddart. 12mo. 141 pages. George H. Doran Com-
pany. New York.
Do the Dead Still Live? By David Heagle.
12mo. 203 pages. The Judson Press. Philadelphia.
"The chronic belief of mankind that events may happen for the sake
of their personal significance is an abomination."-William James.
THE movement that acquired a widespread
habitation and a now
familiar name—Psychical Research—in the year 1882, is again
riding upon a crest of interest, recorded in new issues and reissues of
the eternal search for rare verities. After twenty years, the work
of Frederic Myers retains its distinction. He died in 1901—an
honoured scholar of the classics, and a leader of the new move-
More than any other, he was the accredited spokesman
of the cause which Psychical Research expressed, and in that'ex-
ment.


202
THE PHILOSOPHY OF PERSONALISM
a
pression strove to legitimatize a morganatic union which Psychology
with increasing emphasis declines to recognize. There were others,
like Podmore, better equipped for critical appraisal; Myers had
the constructive psychological talent. He had in him the making
of a fine psychologist, with much of the acumen associated with the
Gallic temperament. His animus is that of a psychic-researcher,
not a psychologist—a paradoxical opposition with which that
science is unfairly burdened.
Myers takes his start, as does the corresponding chapter in the
psychology of to-day, from the study of lapses and disintegrations
of personality, and proceeds in accredited fashion through the
phenomena of sleep and dreams, of hypnosis, of sensory and motor
automatisms, to the study of trance and its many varieties and
obscurities. He includes, and rightly, the discussion of genius and
those related partial and limited endowments that form a legiti-
mate problem, as yet lacking a definite solution. Yet through the
exposition run the alien strands which, to his view, make the vital
pattern and the truer meaning of the world of mind. His quest
is for “the latent faculties of man," which psychical research re-
veals, and for them posits a "spiritual environment in which these
faculties operate, and of unseen neighbors who speak to us thence
with slowly gathering power.” He recognizes that hysteria—a
potent concept, whose potency he acknowledges but with fixed
limitations—is the clue to many of the phenomena of the region
called abnormal psychology by the academic, and the privileged
domain of "psychic phenomena,” by those enlisted in the "psy-
chical” secession. In that realm, ordinary delusions of the "paltry
or morbid type” give way to those "which in themselves are reason-
able and honorable” and morbid only in their intensity. There,
"the vague name of hysteria must give way to the vague name
of genius”; there operates a "force more concentrated and at higher
tension” than ordinary thinking; its analogue is the common form
of mentation to which the mind easily drifts—dreams. Hence,
the encompassing theory of the "subliminal uprush” which embraces
dreams and visions, calculating prodigies and flashes of genius,
presentiments and telepathy, and eventually the phantasms of the
dead, and the proof of bodily survival. His formula is the dis-
sociation of personality on the one side, and the spiritual environ-
ment on the other—an emulsion of oil and water. The few, whether



JOSEPH JASTROW
203
>
by way of genius or by way of hysteria, or of moderate suscepti-
bility to the subliminal uprushes of high or low degree, reveal the
latent powers which complete as they transcend the ordinary cir-
cumscribed life of consciousness.
But the fine temper and restraint with which this theory is ad-
vanced will not save it from the inherent stigma which James
called "an abomination.” The Myers philosophy is the philosophy
of personalism; his psychological analyses recede when they ap-
proach the crucial extension that would naturalize the super-
natural. The nine-tenths of the phenomena are rendered unto psy-
chology, but the remaining tenth—which is the choicer and rarer
portion—must be rendered unto psychical research, yet ever with
the sanction of a unitary science. With spiritualism as a faith he
will hold no converse: “I altogether dissent from the conversion
into a sectarian creed of what I hold should be a branch of scien-
tific inquiry.” The physical phenomena (though he accepts them)
do not shape his belief. “If a table moves when no one is touch-
ing it, this is not obviously more likely to have been effected by
my deceased grandfather than by myself. We cannot tell how I
could move it; but then, we cannot tell how he could move it either."
It is characteristic of his restraint that, in expressing his “absolute
belief” in the moving of material objects by methods unrecognized
by science, he should add: “Their detailed establishment, as against
the theory of fraud, demands an expert knowledge of conjuring
and other arts which I cannot claim to possess.”
The “subliminal uprush” is legitimatized by its recognized part
in dreams and hypnosis, in dissociation and hallucinations (sensory
automatisms) and automatic writing (motor automatisms); but
the fullness of its power is revealed only in the supernatural realm.
The distinctive hallucination is the "veridical” one, the presenti-
ment that comes true and acts as a personal warning; the phantasms
that appear at the moment of death; the revelations of mediums:
these establish telepathy and the entire world of happenings that
will not square with the philosophy or the experience that guides
the objective work of science and of the every-day man. This, too,
is frankly admitted. “The inquiry falls between the two stools of
religion and science; it cannot claim support either from the fre-
ligious' world or from the Royal Society.”
To Myers, the world assumed a different aspect after the Society


204
THE PHILOSOPHY OF PERSONALISM
for Psychical Research announced its positive findings in favour
of telepathy and of residual phenomena transcending known ex-
perience. Thence dated for him no less than for Conan Doyle
and all the rest, who conspicuously lack his restraint in belief or
reserve in statement, “The New Revelation." All accept the new
dispensation, that year by year appeared between the covers of the
Proceedings of the S.P.R. Since A.D. 1882, personalism ceased to
be an abomination and became a clue to the universe and a means
of salvation. In view of the personal comfort which the belief af-
forded one of its most distinguished adherents, it seems harsh to
record the opinion, shared by most psychologists, that its chief
effect has been to further a pernicious superstition and obscurantism.
Mr. Henry Holt combines the profession of publisher with that
of editor, novelist, and contributor to psychical research. In the
last field, he appears as a commentator, not as an original investi-
gator, though he offers personal experiences and is clearly much
influenced by them. For Mr. Holt, the “subliminal uprush” con-
veys slight satisfaction, and any naturalistic explanation is to him
as out of date as the hypothesis of fraud which, in addition to be-
ing declared passé, is also dubbed silly. His master phrase is the
"cosmic inflow" by which the unknown universe is brought into
relation with the human soul. All the strange happenings and
striking previsions and revelations of mediums result from the oc-
casional penetration of the cosmic inflow; the strange sources of
knowledge come from the cosmic memory; the polysyllabic evi-
dence of transcendence of normal physics and normal psychology-
telepathy, and telakousis, and telekinesis, and telergy, and teles-
thesia, and telopsis, and teloteropathy (see the glossarial index)-
all the operations that produce thoughts and materials from the
conjurer's hat of psychical research are supplied from the cosmic
reservoir, which, however, overflows or leaks through only for per-
sonally significant moments.
The newly discovered stream—to many still the questionable
“River of Doubt”-flows through the Proceedings of the S.P.R.;
and a goodly share of Mr. Holt's sumptuous one thousand pages
is lifted from this land of promise amply fulfilled. The "corre-
lated knowledge,” in terms of which the world does its business,
serves as a brief introduction (eighty pages) to the "uncorrelated
knowledge” that composes the annals of psychical research (seven



JOSEPH JASTROW
205
hundred pages); while the “attempts at correlation,” though in-
teresting, are forced and unconvincing. Mr. Holt, despite his
cosmic terminology, is a persistent and insistent devotee of the
philosophy of personalism; for him evolution has a personal mo-
mentum, and the cosmos operates for personal ends. Mr. Holt
chooses the manner of lively banter, and the cosmic relations now
and then are jauntily tossed between the jocular and the oracular.
He guesses frequently and variably; he admits uncertainty; he has
a vigorous prejudice against dogmatism. But his philosophy takes
its form as rigidly from these bantering guesses, as though other
guesses did not exist. His mind is firmly set in a personalized con-
viction. Because he is convinced that in his dreams he invents
architectural refinements for which he has no wake-a-day endow-
ment, is he assured that the source of his dream inspirations is the
cosmic reservoir. The power of mediums to tap the same stream
in far more marvellous fashion is readily accredited; and he is com-
mitted to the entire series of "uncorrelated” incidents in which
others recognize the fertile products of delusion and fraud. No
one is louder than he in denouncing much and most of the mediums?
revelations as drivel and bosh; but the saving remnant is there, and
by accumulation of years, the remnants—like rejected building
stones—make an impressive temple, in which the altar of per-
sonalism is erected as that of the true God, however informal the
inscriptions on its pedestal.
The consequences are lamentable. The divining-rod is reinstated
as a manifestation of the cosmic force; the "mind-reading” per-
formances of professed conjurers require in part a supernormal ex-
planation; the ancient myth of the transposition of the senses be-
comes part of the new dispensation; dreams are invested with a
significance to which controlled thinking vainly aspires; and in
the supplement added in the new edition, credence is given to
the preposterous experiments of Dr. Crawford, proving the power
of spirits to lift tables by psychic cantilevers and to decrease the
weight of the indispensable medium by fifty pounds, yet with no
visible shrinkage. Standards of credibility are abandoned; sub-
jectivism replaces criticism; and miracles are rampant. Because all
these conclusions are consistent with the precepts of personalism
and support them, are they cherished and embraced.
When Mr. Holt tells us that he is extremely skeptical concern-


206
THE PHILOSOPHY OF PERSONALISM
ing most of the revelations of mediums with automatic writing,
but that the Voices from the Void of Mrs. Traverse Smith seem
to him profoundly evidential, we turn to those revelations with a
promptly shattered hope. For they seem to the unprejudiced mind
just as inconsequential, just as saturated with the errors of self-
deception, as the mass of material which he rejects. The void is
more impressive than the voice. And that is the marvel and the
pity of this philosophy in its effects upon strong-minded men.
Belief in the supernormal saps the critical faculties and blinds to
glaring inconsistency. The extravagances of Conan Doyle are
foreign to the comparatively temperate indulgence of Henry Holt;
but the latter, independent as his thinking remains, yields to the
former the tribute of extravagant approval.
The position of Sir Oliver Lodge is too well known to require
detailed statement. The volume formerly called Science and Im-
mortality is reissued as Man and the Universe, but it remains
unaltered as an attempt to reconcile science and religion by way of
psychical research and the philosophy of personalism. Sir Oliver's
interest lies deeply imbedded in matters of faith and religious
observance; he desires these aids to high living and noble purpose
to be assimilated to the aspirations that science stimulates and
develops. He finds the solution in the expansion of the universe
beyond the realm of ordinary knowledge, but by the accredited
methods of science. The revelations of psychical research, though
“beyond the pale of science,” are "some of them inside the Uni-
verse of fact," and their significance must be acknowledged. To
him, psychical research is a supplementary revelation, profound
and impressive. His system of belief might well remain secure
without this consummation. It is only because this position leads
logically—as it has led actually—to the pitiable irrelevancies of
Raymond and the naïve confidence in questionable mediums as
pillars of a personalistic philosophy, that the psychologically
minded reader is tossed between admiration for the mental endow-
ments of such men as Myers, Holt, and Lodge, and the mystery
of their adherence to “facts” and “theories" so uncongenial to the
intellectual temperament.
In the same class fall the writings of Mr. J. Arthur Hill, though
his reputation rests solely upon his contributions to psychical re-
search. But Mr. Hill knows the temper of science and presents a



JOSEPH JASTROW
207
brief which the advocate of the opposite view can respect, while
he is convinced that it is penetrated with fallacy and shot through
and through with an unwarranted personalism. Mr. Hill is the
author of a history of Spiritualism and is much more of a spiritual-
ist than the writers here cited. He approaches Mr. Holt in finding
in some world-soul theory-after the manner of Fechner, whose
leadership he reinstates—the encompassing formula for psychic
intrusion; he is convinced of personal survival and accepts the
personal motive that inspires (?) mediumistic and allied phe-
nomena. The philosophy of personalism enlists its devotees, as it
finds its armament, in many and unrelated intellectual as well as
unintellectual settlements.
In an essay on Christian Science—whose weakness and strength
he discerningly appraises—Mr. Hill explains Mrs. Eddy by one
word-monoideism. “She was a person of one idea.”
We need not go so far as the parable of motes and beams, to
raise the issue whether the manner of adherence to the revelations
of psychical research, even in minds capable of absorbing its mes-
sage in the steadying terms of a responsible philosophy, has not
something in common with the monoideistic cults of other bearing
and admittedly of far lower logical status. When one reviews the
unsavoury and discredited material in the history of spiritualistic
beliefs and mediumistic practices, with which the newer evidence
must somehow reckon, and which so many of the newer converts re-
accept and re-instate, the optimism in regard to the saving remnant
that converts an abomination into a grace, seems strangely akin to
the monoideistic delusions, taking comfort in the soundness of a
part of a questionable egg. Such beliefs seem to be held not wisely
but too well. From the dubious practices of mediums preying upon
a naïve personalism, to the philosophies incorporating their revela-
tions in an exalted edition of the same psychological motives, there
is a common nature all compact. The affiliation is real, and by that
token the intellectualists of the movement assume a momentous so-
cial responsibility
Such contributions as Mrs. De Koven's and Miss McEvilly's
represent the personalism without the philosophy. They are highly
individualistic and subjective. By their nature they deal with in-
timate relations, which the reviewer would prefer to respect, were
not the publicity of their expression a challenge to a critical ap-


208
THE PHILOSOPHY OF PERSONALISM
praisal. Mrs. De Koven introduces her revelations through a
well-known medium by an argumentative defence of her faith in
terms of the findings of others. It is intelligible that an amateur
should be impressed by the most extravagant and discredited at-
tests and speculations.
Such is Mrs. De Koven's comment. Accepting as facts requir-
ing an extravagant explanation, dubious experiments including
large ingredients of fraud and delusion, Mrs. De Koven enters
upon the account of her communications with her deeply mourned
sister, with a fatal prepossession. It is kinder to the author to
refrain from further comment.
But the promoters of psychical research cannot enter a plea of
"not guilty" when they are charged with responsibility for the
great mass of hopeless, foolish, and insane speculation, of minds
utterly ruined, and doctrines set forth with a pseudo-scientific war-
rant, which rivals the credulous temper of mediaevalism. The
accounts of the other world revealed by a sacrilege of holy rela-
tions, take the form of a vapid feministic travesty, so pitiable in
its frailty that its incoherence is masked by its irresponsibility.
These are sad human documents to expose to a critically inquisi-
tive world, yet inevitable incidents; for they are the natural issues
of personalism run wild and flourishing upon an exuberant emo-
tionalism, unrestrained by the stabilizing quality which a training
in science aims to confer. Literary babblings one may call them,
and fortunately evanescent, but none the less finding a by no
means negligible clientele when proclaimed as authentic by A Cloud
of Witnesses-spreading the fog of unreason and carrying an ap-
peal by the very personalism that is their cardinal transgression.
To the same class belongs Miss McEvilly, trained to a career as
an operatic singer, but diverted by her power of automatic writing,
and by such endorsements of her revelations as that of James
Rhoades, "poet and theosophist,” who places these banal religious
pronouncements via planchette on a par with the finest utterances
of Dante. On the cover of Meslom's Messages, we read that these
trivial pieties are the "thoughts of a 15th century Hindu,
vital, palpitating, aflame.” One irresponsibility leads to another-
a mad world indeed if this popular brand of psychical research is to
be circulated indiscriminately, to the damage of the uncertain foun-
dations upon which a democratic faith in education places its hope.



JOSEPH JASTROW
209
Voices of protest are not wanting. But it will require mightier
counter-thrusts than the slight rebuff of Miss Stoddart to make
any headway against the encroachments of the insidious brand
of personalism sponsored by psychical research. Miss Stoddart
appeals to a religious sobriety that is enlisted in the cause up-
held by science and sanity. But she is preaching in part to a
convinced and in part to an absent congregation; nor will her
invocation, cogent as it may appear to those of her persuasion,
divert the powerfully motivated stream which she is trying to
stem. Dr. Heagle is interested in presenting the belief in immor-
tality as cumulatively supported by arguments derived from phi-
losophy, from religion, from physics, biology, and psychology, and
over and above these largely analogical buttresses, by the direct
evidence of psychical research. An earnest and well-meaning in-
tention will not atone for the lack of critical discrimination. The
assumption that one may select the favourable bearings of certain
of the conclusions of what Dr. Heagle calls “abnormal psychology"
and escape the responsibility for the disastrous influences of the
movement as a whole, combines the naïve with the confusing. The
book is an unfortunate example of juggling with incommensurables.
Religious arguments thus adulterated suggest the attitude of the
“almost providential,” seeking re-enforcements that add not to the
strength but to the burden of argument.
Such books are significant as indicating in some quarters the
realization of the need for education and enlightenment in regard
to the foundations and implications of this strangely unmodern,
latter-day philosophy. The policy of campaigns is determined by
the magnitude of the clientele and its make-up. How to meet the
formidable invasion of psychical research is an unescapable if un-
welcome and discouraging task for the psychology of the era of
reconstruction. It is not a question of painting and papering and
refurbishing the mental appointments; it is a matter of sound
logical foundations.
JOSEPH JASTROW


BRIEFER MENTION
STORMS OF Youth, by Viola Roseboro' (12mo, 317 pages; Scrib-
ners), portrays sharply etched characters against a rather dull
background. The criss-crossing of marriages and politics in a
small town affords opportunity for many pregnant sayings.
Abundant human sympathy is the mark of this wise novel-a
sympathy that is far from superficial or burdensome and that
emphasizes the major qualities of bravery and pity. Hence the
characters are well realized, the situations are poignant, and the
method of narration becomes progressively more coherent and
telling. As in her short stories, Miss Roseboro' reveals here a
decided capacity for handling human destinies in their varied
"functioning.”
The THUNDERBOLT, by G. Colmore (12mo, 353 pages; Thomas
Seltzer), plays with variations on Jane Austen's instrument, the
polite society comedy among provincials of a small English town.
Respectability and its leashed emotions, needlework guilds and
intrigues, society satellites and lesser satellites, the proper dull-
ness, are all turned loose for inspection. The tragic climax comes
with syphilis to an innocent girl and her death at the old nurse's
hand, during an illness. The author looks down kindly from his
observatory on his mildly interesting characters.
.
SHEEPSKINS AND Grey Russet, by E. Temple Thurston (illus.,
8vo, 310 pages; Putnam), is a book the Times would find “de-
liciously whimsical; about three lovable characters who stand
apart from this restless age; a book that wins your heart; a book
with quiet laughter,--and with tears.” Nevertheless, Sheep-
skins and Grey Russet is really of value. The frailest of plots—
an experiment of two amateurs at farming-serves as a pretext
for what are at times remarkably right strokes. And as for the
laughter and tears, Mr. Thurston is discreet enough to keep his
laughter at an Horatian moderato, while his tears trickle rather
than splash. This is a most gentlemanly book, with good ante-
cedents, a reasonable income, and an excellent digestion.


BRIEFER MENTION
211
RAIN BEFORE Seven, by Eric Leadbitter (12mo, 345 pages;
Jacobs, Philadelphia), is the first novel of a very grave and very
garrulous young Englishman who has not yet discovered how
many things have been said before. The trail of his story is lost
under an underbrush of truisms, though through the brambles one
catches glimpses of landscape not unlike some of Mr. Macken-
zie’s milder panoramas. With infinite weeding however he may
sometime develop a neat English garden, with trim box hedges
shutting off the vulgar world, though it is to be feared that his
paths will lead to the most obvious coverts, and his flora be chiefly
precious as funereal tokens to the passing phrase.
The Great Accident, by Ben Ames Williams (12mo, 405 pages;
Macmillan), is an epic of the enforcement of prohibition which
every 1/2 of 1 per cent. American should read. Winthrop Chase
wakes up from drunkenness to find that by a trick of the town
politicians he has been elected mayor, his ticket being to see that
the town is really dry. Whereupon, he turns reformer, and en-
forces the law. As is necessary in an American novel pulsing
with democracy, there are plenty of powerful arms, faces twisted
with anguish, and the Guiding Influence of a Pure Woman. The
end of Book V is “My God! My God! Oh, my God!" But
Book VI is entitled Victory.
Passion, by Shaw Desmond (12mo, 400 pages; Scribners).
This book is the meticulous diary of a mediocre soul. It is a
novel without even novelty to redeem it. Its bravery is bom-
bastic, its stupidity heroic, its mediocrity passionate, its passion
impotent.
BALLADS OF OLD New York, by Arthur Guiterman (12mo, 301
pages; Harpers), is an attempt to catch and bottle the essence
of colonial Manhattan, but a great deal of it escapes before the
corking thereof. Mr. Guiterman rhymes adroitly and end-
lessly; he has read his histories well and especially his Diedrich
Knickerbocker; if he cannot intoxicate his readers, he can at least
surround the Dutch settlers with a dim romantic mist in which
their broad pantaloons flap ghostlily and in which their rolling
guttural names boom out like fog-horns.


212
BRIEFER MENTION
Poems, by Charles Reznikoff (12mo, 48 pages; Samuel Roth), is a
little fragmentary, reading like a collection of quotations from
great unwritten poems. Similes are piled helter-skelter like
packages from a bundle chute; the costly ones are confused in-
extricably with the junk from the bargain basement, but the
general effect almost always exceeds expectations. The volume
is an auspicious introduction to a series in which the newer poets
will be presented inexpensively.
a
A CRITIC IN Pall Mall, by Oscar Wilde (12mo, 290 pages;
Putnam), contains some of the best critical writing of "amiable,
esurient” Oscar, but omits A Jolly Critic and a few others. This
is in the Ravenna Edition, a pleasant way to have Wilde; and
it has all his delights and all his superficialities and all his faults.
There is an important tribute to Walter Pater and an exceed-
ingly unfortunate collection of remarks, the latter proving that
precisely because Wilde was an artificial epigrammatist he reads
better when the mica is embedded in the rock. For his wit was
mica most of the time; his jewels he took care to set so that they
are all context.
VICTORIAN RECOLLECTIONS, by John A. Bridges (12mo, 203 pages;
G. Bell & Sons, Ltd., London), early, mid, and late, are here on
the defensive against the ribald criticism launched by the genera-
tions of Edward and George. Mr. Bridges maintains stoutly
the virtues of his day—domestic wives, unambitious lower classes,
and a real interest in "the land.” He grants inefficiency in some
few things, and withal presents a very mellow picture of a stag-
nant period. This is the average Victorian squire speaking, com-
placent and class-minded. It explains better than even Wells
can, against what odds young England has struggled toward
clean-edged thinking and swift action.
а
INDISCRETIONS OF THE NAVAL CENSOR, by Rear Admiral Sir Doug-
las Brownrigg (illus., 12mo, 315 pages; Doran), is an amusing
book, withdrawing a wispy smokescreen from one of the "higher-
ups” in the British Admiralty; it will entertain hugely those who
know anything about the way wars are run and will sketchily
but cheerfully inform the others.



BRIEFER MENTION
213
EDUCATION IN WAR and Peace, by Stewart Paton (12mo, 106
pages; Paul B. Hoeber, New York), raises so many points for
debate that an adequate review would be as long as the book
itself. Briefly, we may say that when Dr. Paton speaks as a
psychologist his criticism of our educational system and his sug-
gestions for correcting personal aberrations in behaviour are val-
uable; when, however, he speaks with the gestures of a National
Security Leaguer one discovers that his sociology is painfully
warped by that tendency toward wishful thinking which he him-
self has so roundly condemned.
AFRICA AND THE DISCOVERY OF AMERICA, Vol. I, by Leo Wiener
(12mo, 290 pages; Innes and Sons, Philadelphia), is an amus-
ingly pretentious farrago of documentary lore and philological
speculation. The author has set himself the modest task of over-
throwing some of the most assured results of Americanist research
by proving that tobacco, manioc, and other plants were not gifts
of the American Indian to the civilization of the world but were
introduced into America by the Negroes! Not a tittle of botani-
cal evidence is adduced. Worthless as a scholarly contribution,
the book provides the psychologist with a valuable example of
distorted erudition and methodological incompetence.
a
CURRENT SOCIAL AND INDUSTRIAL Forces, edited by Lionel D.
Edie (12mo, 393 pages; Boni & Liveright), requires not a review
but a notice, for its value is clear enough. It is an anthology;
or perhaps the documentation of social unrest. The excerpts and
reprints are skilfully grouped, so that the reader—for the book
can be read as well as consulted—can grasp the material handily.
The selections are made without prejudice, especially without
prejudice toward liberal thinkers on the problems of industry
and of society.
In Winter Quarters, by Alvin Howard Sanders (16mo, 220
pages; Breeder's Gazette Press, Chicago), keeps a truant fancy
under the thumb of a tranquil style. Homely themes serve as
pegs for slippered chat, projected with what the author himself
characterizes as "an arm-chair outlook."
a


THE THEATRE
N the course of a very intelligent review of the past season in the
Century Magazine, Mr. Alexander Woollcott writes on the
need of "theater sophistication” in the American provinces. Thus:
IN
"In all these lesser cities the very people who would make the
best and most intelligently responsive audiences for honest and
more aspiring dramatic works have found so little in average fare
to whet their appetites for more that they have ceased to go to the
theater at all..
ور
The critic's cure is a preliminary course in the mere habit of see-
ing plays. That is very good, and since this blessed summer is the
moment when one drops the habit, one may stop and regard the
published plays to see what our public is likely to find if it does ex-
ercise itself by weekly jaunts to the playhouse.
Mr. George Middleton's one-acters of contemporary life are
not likely to be produced. Masks (Holt) gives scant reason for it.
The long first play deals with the corruption of an artist's soul
when he turns from real life to falsify it—just to prevent his wife's
hands from roughening at the washtub and the ironing-board.
Jim's Beast is a playlet of a triangle spoiled by a diplodocus. It
could be amusing. Only in AMONG THE Lions is there any deftness
either of characterization or of action. Mr. Middleton has pub-
lished six books of plays. He is also a "good property” on Broad-
way. The American theatre will still have to look elsewhere, not
because Mr. Middleton fails to aspire. He fails only to achieve.
The First Plays of A. A. Milne (Knopf) are the work of one
of the gayest and brightest of Punch's men. They do not aspire;
but they are intelligently amusing and have all the quality of ad-
mitting a thousand technical imperfections and carrying them off
with wit or the grace of nice human relations. “Probably the whole
thing is an invention,” says the author about one of the plays. That
is the right word. They are all inventions, not without a savour



THE THEATRE
215
.
of reality, and abundant in charm. We other Americans care little
for the type of wit which says, “Was it next Thursday or this
Thursday you were to come? . . . So confusing to have them
both named Thursday, isn't it?” For some reason we seem to lose
a certain ironic quality of characterization by our disapproval of
lightness. We do want our fun funny.
I SUPPOSE that Frank W. Chandler has read a thousand plays
for The CONTEMPORARY DRAMA OF France (Little, Brown); he
has written a book full of meat, sufficiently informed concerning the
movements, sufficiently incisive concerning the separate values of
the men in them. The combination of enthusiasm and judgement is
excellent. But what moves one most as one reads Dean Chandler's
summaries of plots is the amazing fertility of the French play-
wright, his exuberance of fancy and invention, his capacity for
putting any plot, any theme, any character on the stage. Surely if
we had a drama so rich and so varied, even if it were a drama of
small things, the habit of theatre-going would not be hard to form.
.
Mr. Thomas Seltzer is publishing a series of Plays for a
People's Theatre, presumably English in its beginnings, for the first
two plays are The Fight For Freedom, by Douglas Goldring, and
Touch AND Go, by D. H. Lawrence. “It will inevitably be a revo-
lutionary (and hence an internationalist) theatre,” says Mr. Gold-
ring in his introduction. "People, ah God! Not mannequins
not burly pairs of gaiters,” says Mr. Lawrence in his. And there
is nothing fundamentally internationalist or revolutionary in Mr.
Lawrence's play nor anything much beyond mannequins and
gaiters in Mr. Goldring's. The advertisement in each case is ex-
cellent. Regrettably the performance is unequal to it. I am not
sure that Mr. Lawrence has not written the best prologue to a
people's theatre; I am sure that these two plays will not be long
in its repertoire. Mr. Goldring's best is in the sudden reversal
from the expected toward the end of his play, when his theoretical
revolutionary becomes human—and a bit detestable for once. Mr.
Lawrence, of course, cannot escape his genius. The secondary
qualities of Touch and Go are superior to the big things in the
work of many other dramatists.
GILBERT Seldes


COMMENT
IT
T is always distressing to note the signs of decadence in a dear
and valued friend. Yet what can we make of the discussion
now going on in England, in the columns of the sober Daily Mail
and of the rough New Age, a discussion about Progress? The Dean
of Westminster, none too popular during the war because he had
the bad grace to speak frankly at moments, has recovered general
interest by questioning the whole idea of modern Progress. Where-
fore the Press, in itself the veritable, the highest, the irrefutable
proof of Progress, opens its columns to discussion.
We should say, at this distance, that it is a symptom of peace-
weariness, the beginning of the decline. In a sound healthy com-
munity one knows that progress exists and that it is all right; and
what one does not know one does not speculate about. Consider
our more vigorous press. It discusses everything. The Home
Forum and the Voice of the People are tremendous witnesses to our
health and sanity. Do we Airt with abstractions? Do we ques-
tion solid things? Do we attempt to compass with our small minds
the questions answered for us by ages of experience? We do not.
We write letters to the papers about politics, the proper length of
bathing suits, the right to smoke in public places, the morals of the
moving pictures. It is not so much that our thoughts are prac-
tical; we are the romantic nation, thank Heaven! It is that they
are immediate. We did not feel the war; so far we have not signed
the peace. And our minds are unclouded by the terrors and
phantoms which have provoked all of England to wonder whether
men are better now than they ever were, and if so, what it means
to be better. Such are the consolations of health. It is not our pur-
pose to boast nor to be censorious. But hadn't England better at-
tend to business and let these questions alone? There is such a
thing as international exchange, even of ideas. We are exposed to
Europe. We do not propose to be corrupted by the vicious habit
of thinking
.
.
“Oh, well, if you are going to be critical It seems to us that
that might be the beginning of discussion, but it is usually the end.


COMMENT
217
There seems to be something unfair in the assumption that any one
is going to put intelligence to its proper use. The word itself has
come to connote anything but judgement. If you are really critical
you are fairly certain to be unpopular. It is a pity. Because the
engines for accelerating and predisposing favourable opinion are
grown remarkably in our time. The dynamics of reputation are a
serious study, the mechanism for creating fame is always in smooth
and certain motion. We have little respect for the ancients who
represented Fame with but one trumpet and a mere handful of at-
tendants. Good enough for the days when Euripides and Sophocles
hired their rival claques. Not for us. We have had our recent ex-
amples of reputation made to order, from Señor Blasco Ibañez to
the young man who announced that he was going to write one novel
and make money enough to live comfortably until he died. The
careful attention given these men does not indicate anything cor-
rupt. It is not fear of the advertising department. It is the terror
of being thought critical. Not superior, not poseur. Merely to
confess that you are trying to distinguish for yourself between good
and shoddy has become the sign of an inferior mind—the mind
which cannot recognize a great thing simply because it happens also
to be popular.
Certainly an amount of excellent work is produced in our time.
The proportion is small only because the machine has made it so
easy and so profitable to produce bad stuff. That is not a danger.
No one can legitimately quarrel with that dear Pollyanna for being
cheerful. But the machine of publicity which has continued to
work with the machine which publishes has made it possible to fob
off all varieties of tinsel for the real right thing. That is why the
painful effort to judge independently must be made, why the im-
pulse to write the quotable line must be downed. It explains also
why those who are unashamedly critical are so inclined to be un-
restrained in praise at the first faint glimmering of excellence. If
criticism is to be of any service, if it is to effect some change in the
very habit of receiving the work of an artist or of a journeyman in
the arts, it must hold with all severity to its independence. It must
fight everlastingly against the gentle and insinuating voice of propa-
ganda. The world of art is not really in any special danger; it will
survive press agents; it will survive the inertia of potentially good
minds. But its civilizing influences will be more rapidly felt if there


218
COMMENT
will always be a cohesive body of skeptics who will look with little
more than an indulgent smile on the efforts of the press-agentry.
The drawing which served as frontispiece to Modern Forms of
last month, a notable head by André Derain, was reproduced from
an extraordinary French magazine called l’élan. The regrettable
absence of the credit line under the picture allows us this oppor-
tunity to mention the magazine, which was founded during the war
and had among its contributors Guillaume Apollinaire, one of the
most interesting of the French artists who fell in battle. The maga-
zine itself is a fantasy of type-faces, arrangements of lines, and
remarkable pictures, and since it has received, among others, the en-
couragement of men and women we should expect to be fairly con-
servative, it makes us wonder how the French manage these things
-whether it is better for a wild magazine, as we should call it, to
be praised or damned, in order to make a success of it. In any case,
L'élan has all the vitality of its name and in point of make-up and
format is a pure delight. Unless the vicissitudes of peace have
recently ruined it, at the present rate of exchange it would
hardly cost more than a copy of Snappy Stories.
а
The mention of rate of exchange suggests that Continental Europe
is virtually exiled from our thoughts because no one can afford to
pay American dollars for American magazines. An effort is being
made to remedy this, through the coöperation of publishers and of
learned societies, and if one may speak of it without being political,
the effort should be prospered. If there was anything serious in our
war aims and our procedure during the first year of peace, then
,
what we are and what we think ought to be of the highest inspira-
tion and encouragement to our former enemies. We cannot fail to
aid the new countries we helped to create by showing them the fruits
of culture and of democracy. Our purgation in the fires of faith
has not made us obnoxiously holy, and we ought to let the stranger
who is in a fairly bad way look upon us and be gladdened. We
should be horribly hurt if he failed to appreciate what we can do
for him.
.






Courtesy of Harcourt, Brace and Howe
REMY DE GOURMONT.
BY HELENE DU FAU



THE EN IV
TX
DIAL
OXX I ITO
SEPTEMBER 1920
DUST FOR SPARROWS
BY REMY DE GOURMONT
Translated by Ezra Pound
[TRANSLATOR's Note: In June, 1915, Remy de Gourmont
wrote to me that because of ill health he could send me, for a pro-
posed literary venture, only "indications of ideas” not “pages
accomplies.” The section of his unpublished work headed Dust
for Sparrows (Poudre aux Moineux) is presumably of that period,
physical fatigue, war fatigue combining against the author. I do
not offer an excuse for these detached and semi-detached para-
graphs; I simply wish to indicate that they must be considered in
their relation to the rest of his work. It is not the fault of the
present Dial management that the greater part of his writing did
not from 1880 onwards appear simultaneously in France and
America ; and as they would have done, had there existed proper
communication between our two countries; nor that there is not
yet an adequate American edition of his already known work. We
can but begin with things as we find them and assure the American
readers of de Gourmont that they will receive his remaining writ-
ings as soon as his own compatriots. This is the first of a series
appear in The DIAL.
following pages
not intended as epigrams;
are indications and transitions of thought; in them
that will
The
they
are
lucidity which had characterized Remy de Gour-
mont's best work; they are not so highly energized as a selec-
tion of passages from thirty of his critical books would be, but they
are nearly all concerned with some problem of contemporary philo-
is the


220
DUST FOR SPARROWS
sophy—directly, not as vague general speculation. They are given
especially for those to whom de Gourmont's work is familiar; those
to whom it is not, will possibly find a finer aroma after considera-
tion of that work as a whole, remembering Les Chevaux de Dio-
mèdes and the critical work beginning in Le Livre des Masques,
which practically established a whole new generation in French
literature.
Naturally, the thoughts in such a note-book as the present are
of varying degrees of importance; some would have been amplified,
others erased; the translator, at any rate, begs to be excused the
responsibility of erasure and believes that the giving of a complete
text will be the only satisfactory procedure.
Paragraphs marked with an asterisk have already been privately
printed in an edition of fifty copies, only in French.]
.
THINGS THOUGHT, FELT, SEEN, HEARD, AND DREAMED
1
When we believe it needful to say something which we, at any
rate, judge useful for the progression of ideas, or the knowledge
of verity, we must not hesitate: Better exposure to another's
censure than to our own self-contempt.
2
A two line peremptory assertion is not always presumptuous; it
is a way of forcing meditation.
3
We have more difficulty in ascribing consciousness to an inert
body than to a living thing. Yet, even among those who deny
the existence of the soul, the general idea of the self is of some-
thing unmoveable and of one piece.



REMY DE GOURMONT
221
4
Even when we arrive at the conviction that free will (liber
arbitrio) is nothing but an illusion, we still find repugnant a con-
clusion, thence, that the self is a complexity; so greatly do we feel
it a unity—so great is the impression of unity which we get from
it. What prevents us from supposing that the instants of the
sensation of being succeed each other, in us, as rapidly as the frag-
mentary images of the cinema, which in their succession produce
the illusion of life?
5
The brook-water seems to stop, lazily to reflect the bank's beau-
ties as its mirror: Error: water never the same, running, ever
renewed.
6
The water again, the agitation of its transparency, now de-
forming its reflections in confusion, now a veridic mirror, might
give us, perhaps, a figure for passing vagrancy of the mind?
7
The mechanism of whistling, which instinctively reproduces all
the musical modulation, seems to indicate that intelligence is, in
origin, purely imitative. Everything is, of necessity, reflected in
it; an instability or an uncompellable vibratability obliges the child
to reproduce all the sounds he hears, all the movements he sees.
8
a
There is at times a mental activity whereof the mechanism seems
inconceivably complicated: as in the faithful execution of a por-
trait: arduous labour for the brush, it is realized instantly and to
perfection in a mirror.
9
And, in times past, the civilized exemplified the intellectual
torpor of the Pampas Indians by pointing out that when the latter
were taken from their huts to a city, they showed no surprise at
seeing their faces in mirrors
The mentally torpid being


222
DUST FOR SPARROWS
those who had not taken count of the fact that the earliest men
must have been struck by the phenomenon of reflection upon first
regarding their features in placid water.
10
The idea of God is like a limitless mirror in which the physical
and moral image of man passes from the relative to the absolute.
11
In the near-arctic, the pale oblique sun and the whitish una-
nimity of the landscape either suppress shadows almost alto-
gether, or give them excessive value. The gods of Scandinavian
mythology may have for origins these colossal figures, fantastic,
disproportioned, which the early Norsemen saw before them in
the indefinite perspective of the snowscape.
12
In the eternal activity of wanting to understand the structure
of this thing which thinks, feels, and wills inside itself; there is
a something of the infant who turns the mirror about to see if
there isn't another him hidden behind it.
13
If in the new creations of man's wit—however original they
appear—we could clearly distinguish all the elements, immediate
or distant, from which they derive, as we can with new varieties
of plants, their originality would be found reduced to a labour
of joining, and one would see that their novelty consists only in
the style, that seal of paternity.
14
When one analyses the language, seeking the origin and evolu-
tion of words, one discovers that there are among the most ven-
erated (prestigeuses) phrases, some like Spanish statues covered
with gold and velvet, celebrated for their miracles, and having
wooden insides.
15
Every thought is a stem, potentially flower and fruit; some
bois



REMY DE GOURMONT
223
suggest, question the unknown, interview truth; some affirm.
[All this little series of paragraphs should be taken in relation
to Gourmont's essay on style. E. P.]
16
If we cannot think without words, without articulating them
mutely to ourselves, as is shown by the movements of our throats
and tongues; how can we admit telepathy, lacking a wireless alpha-
bet for its purpose?
17
And if this thought transmission were possible, one would have
so perfected the process that the Telepathic Company would have
already ruined Marconi.
18
Wasting my time imagining the mechanism of memory, I have
represented it to myself as a noisily crowded department store.
The inspectors tell you where a given line is to be found, the
clerks are behind their counters, others look up things in the cata-
logue, and all with order and simplicity in the midst of a terrible
apparent confusion.
19
When we are persecuted and obsessed by the search for a for-
gotten word, we unconsciously take note that it has been invoiced,
and that it ought to appear.
The search is made in the phantom
department store without our knowledge, and some one suddenly
brings it to us.
20
The ages of faith have heaped upon our minds such amassments
of rhetoric and mystery, that now, when we seek natural explana-
tions for lofty and beautiful things, we seem to commit a coarse
triviality.
21
The difference between popular and savant music is very likely


224
DUST FOR SPARROWS
the same as that between lace and packing cloth. Distance enor-
mous, but not perhaps, a matter of substance.
22
To judge how high a child's talent will reach, do not attend
so much to his greater and smaller facility for assimilating tech-
nical notions, but watch to see whether his eyes are occasionally
clouded with tears of enthusiasm in the work.
23
Melodic and rhythmic music really says [Italics mine. E. P.]
nothing; but it gives us the impression of hearing marvelous verse
the sense of which we think we divine, by means of emotive asso-
ciation. Symphonic music, as it evolves nothing, is merely a prose
absolutely denuded of sense, and it gives many people at the opera
the impression of facing a Chinese play accompanied on a tom-tom.
*
24
At thirty the spring of curiosity is broken, the mind becomes
sedentary; at fifty and after the body can enjoy only table and
bed.
25
Never have literary works seemed so beautiful to me as when
at a theatre, or in reading, because of lack of habit or lacking a
complete knowledge of the language, I lost the meaning of many
phrases. This threw about them a light veil of somewhat silvery
shadow, making the poetry more purely musical, more ethereal.
[This is the most dangerous of confessions; it offers a basis for
an attack on all the Gourmontian criticism; and yet it is prob-
ably true autobiography. The enjoyable, silvery, and ethereal
in comprehension may, however, be safer for some minds than
for others. E. P.]
To be continued



THE LIFE OF FIVE POINTS
BY EDNA CLARE BRYNER
A , ,
a
LIFE went on in the town of Five Points. Five Points, the
town was called, because it was laid out in the form of a star
with five points and these points picked it out and circumscribed it.
The Life that was lived there was in this wise. Over the centre of
the town it hung thick and heavy, a great mass of tangling strands
of all the colours that were ever seen, but stained and murky-looking
from something that oozed out no one could tell from which of the
entangling cords. In five directions heavy strands came in to the
great knot in the centre and from it there floated out, now this way,
now that, loose threads like tentacles, seeking to fasten themselves
on whatever came within their grasp. All over the town thin
threads criss-crossed back and forth in and out among the heavy
strands making little snarls wherever several souls lived or were
gathered together. One could see, by looking intently, that the
tangling knotted strands and threads were woven into the rough
pattern of a star.
Life, trembling through the mass in the centre, streamed back
and forth over the incoming strands, irregularly and in ever-chang-
ing volume, pulling at the smaller knots here and there in constant
disturbance. It swayed the loosely woven mass above the school-
house, shaking out glints of colour from the thin bright cords, golden
yellows and deep blues, vivid reds and greens. It twisted and un-
twisted the small black knot above the town hotel. It arose in
murky vapour from the large knots above each of the churches. All
over the town it quivered through the fine entangling threads, mak-
ing the pattern change in colour, loosening and tightening the weav-
ing. In this fashion Life came forth from the body which it
inhabited.
This is the way the town lay underneath it. From a large round
of foot-trampled earth five wide streets radiated out in as many
directions for a length of eight or ten houses and yards. Then the
wide dirt street became a narrow road, the narrow board walks flank-
ing it on either side stopped suddenly and faintly worn paths carried


226
THE LIFE OF FIVE POINTS
out their line for a space of three minutes' walk when all at once
up rose the wall of the forest, the road plunged through and was im-
mediately swallowed up. This is the way it was in all five direc-
tions from Five Points.
Round about the town forests lay thick and dark like the dark
heavens around the cities of the sky, and held it off secure from every
other life-containing place. The roads that pierced the wall of the
forest led in deeper and deeper, cutting their way around shaggy
foothills down to swift streams and on and up again to heights, in
and out of obscure notches. They must finally have sprung out
again through another wall of forest to other towns. But as far as
Five Points was concerned, they led simply to lumber mills sitting
like chained ravening creatures at safe distances from one another
eating slowly away at the thick woods as if trying to remove the
screen that held the town off to itself.
In the beginning there was no town at all, but miles and miles
of virgin forest clothing the earth that humped itself into rough-
bosomed hills and hummocks. Then the forest was its own. Birds
nested in its dense leafage, fish multiplied in the clear-running
streams, wild creatures ranged its fastnesses in security. The trees,
touched by no harsher hand than that which turns the rhythmically
changing seasons, added year by year ring upon ring to their girths.
Suddenly human masters appeared. They looked at the girth of
the trees, appraised the wealth that lay hidden there, marked the
plan of its taking out. They brought in workers, cleared a space for
head-quarters in the midst of their great tracts, cut roads out through
the forest, and wherever swift streams crossed they set mills. The
cleared space they laid out symmetrically in a tree-fringed centre of
common ground encircled by a main street for stores and offices,
with streets for houses leading out to the edge of the clearing. In
the south-east corner of the town they set aside a large square of
land against the forest for a school-house.
Thus Five Points was made as nearly in the centre of the great
uncut region as it could well be and still be on the narrow-gauge
railroad already passing through to make junction with larger
roads. In short order there was a regular town with a station half-
way down the street where the railroad cut through and near it a
town hotel with a bar; a post office, several stores, a candy shop and
a dentist's office fronting the round of earth in the centre; five
a


EDNA CLARE BRYNER
227
churches set each on its own street and as far from the centre of the
town as possible; and a six-room school-house with a flagpole. One
mile, two miles, five and six miles distant in the forest, saw-mills
buzzed away, strangely noisy amid their silent clumsy lumbermen
and mill folk.
One after another, all those diverse persons necessary for carrying
on the work of a small community drifted in. They cut themselves
loose from other communities and hastened hither to help make this
new one, each moved by his own particular reason, each bringing to
the making of a Life the threads of his own deep desire. The
threads interlaced with other threads, twisted into strands, knotted
with other strands and the Life formed itself and hung trembling,
thick and powerful, over the town.
The mill owners and managers came first, bringing strong warp
threads for the Life. They had to have the town to take out their
products and bring in supplies. They wanted to make money as
fast as possible. “Let the town go to hell!” they said. They cared
little how the Life went so that it did go. Most of them lived alter-
nately as heads of families at home two hundred miles away and as
bachelors at their mills and extract works.
Mr Stillman, owner of hundreds of acres of forest, was different.
He wanted to be near at hand to watch his timber being taken out
slowly and carefully and meanwhile to bring up his two small sons,
healthy and virtuous, far away from city influences. He made a
small farm up in the high south-west segment of the town against
the woods, with orchards and sheep pasture and beehives and a big
white farm-house, solidly built. He became a deacon in the
Presbyterian church and one of the corner-stones of the town.
Mr Goff, owner of mills six miles out, kept up a comfortable
place in town to serve as a half-way house between his mills and his
home in a city a couple of hundred miles distant. He believed that
his
appearance as a regular townsman had a steadying influence on
his workmen, that it gave them faith in him. His placid middle-
aged wife accompanied him back and forth on his weekly visits to
the mills and interested herself in those of his workers who had
families.
Mill Manager Henderson snapped at the chance to run the
Company store as well as to manage several mills. He saw in
it something besides food and clothing for his large family of


228
THE LIFE OF FIVE POINTS
red-haired girls. Although he lived down at one of the mills, he
was counted as a townsman. He was a pillar in the Methodist
a
church and his eldest daughter played the piano there.
George Brainerd, pudgy chief clerk of the Company store, was
hand in glove with Henderson. He loved giving all his energies,
undistracted by family or other ties, to the task of making the Com-
pany's workers come out at the end of the season in the Company's
debt instead of having cleared a few hundred dollars as they were
made to believe, on the day they were hired, would be the case. The
percentage he received for his cleverness was nothing to him in com-
parison with the satisfaction he felt in his ability to manipulate.
Lanky Jim Dunn, the station agent, thirty-three and unmarried,
satisfied his hunger for new places by coming to Five Points. He
hated old settled lines of conduct. As station agent, he had a hand
in everything and on every one that came in and went out of the
town. He held a sort of gauge on the Life of the town. He chaffed
all the girls who came down to see the evening train come in and
tipped off the young men as to what was doing at the town hotel.
Dr Smelter, thin-lipped and cold-eyed, elegant in manner and in
dress, left his former practice without regret. He opened his office
in Five Points hoping that in a new community obscure diseases did
not flourish. He was certain that lack of skill would not be as ap-
parent there as in a well-established village.
Rev. Trotman had been lured hither by the anticipation of a
virgin field for saving souls; Rev. Little, because he dared not let
any of his own fold be exposed to the pitfalls of an opposing creed.
Dave Fellows left off setting chain pumps in Gurnersville and
renewed his teaching experience by coming to Five Points to be
principal of the school. Dick Shelton's wife dragged her large
brood of little girls and her drunken husband along after the Fel-
lows in order to be sure of some one to bring Dick home from the
saloon before he drank up the last penny. It made little difference
to her where she earned the family living by washing.
So they came, one after another, and filled up the town—Abe
,
—
Cohen, the Jew clothing dealer, Barringer, the druggist, Dr Barton,
rival of Dr Smelter and a far more highly skilled practioner, Jake
O'Flaherty, the saloon-keeper, Widow Stokes, rag carpet weaver and
gossip, Jeremy Whitling, town carpenter, and his golden-blonde
daughter Lucy, school teacher, Dr Sohmer, dentist. Every small


EDNA CLARE BRYNER
229
a
a
community needs these various souls. No sooner is the earth scraped
clean for a new village than they come, one by one, until the town
is complete. So it happened in Five Points until there came to be
somewhat fewer than a thousand souls. There the town stood.
Stores and offices completely took up the circle of Main Street
and straggled a little down the residence streets. Under the fringe
of trees business hummed where side by side flourished Grimes' meat
shop, the drug store with the dentist's office above, Henderson's
General Store, as the Company store was called, Brinker's grocery
store, the Clothing Emporium, McGilroy's barber shop, Backus’
hardware, and the post office. The Five Points Argus issued weekly
its two pages from the dingy office behind the drug store. Graham's
Livery did a big business down near the station.
Each church had gathered its own rightful members within its
round of Sunday and mid-week services, its special observances on
Christmas, and Easter, and Children's Day. In the spring of each
year a one-ring circus encamped for a day on the common ground in
the centre of the town and drew all the people in orderly array under
its tent. On the Fourth of July the whole town again came together
in the centre common, in fashion less orderly, irrespective of creed
or money worth, celebrating the deeds of their ancestors by drinking
lemonade and setting off firecrackers.
After a while no one could remember when it had been any
different. Those who came to town as little children grew into
gawky youths knowing no more about other parts of the world than
their geography books told them. When any one died, a strand in
the Life hanging above the town broke and fapped in the wind, ,
growing more and more frayed with the passing of time, until after
a year or so its tatters were noticeable only as a sort of roughness
upon the pattern. When a child was born, a thin tentacle from
the central mass of strands reached out and fastened itself upon him,
dragging out his desire year by year until the strand was thick and
strong and woven in securely among the old scaly ones.
The folk who lived at the mills had hardly anything to do with
the Life of Five Points. They were merely the dynamo that kept
the Life alive. They were busied down in the woods making the
money for the men who made the town. They came to town only
on Saturday nights. They bought a flannel shirt and provisions at
the Company store, a bag of candy at Andy's for the women folk,


230
THE LIFE OF FIVE POINTS
and a flask of whiskey at the bar in the town hotel and then went
back to have their weekly orgy in their own familiar surroundings.
They had little effect on the Life of the town. That was contained
almost entirely within the five points where the road