met the forest.
The Life of Five Points had one fearful enemy. Its home was in
the black forest. Without any warning it was likely to break out
upon the town, its long red tongues leaping out, striving to lick
everything into its red gullet. It was a thirsty animal. If one gave
it enough water, it went back into its lair. Five Points had only
drilled wells in back yards. The nearest big stream was a mile away.
Twice already during the existence of the Life the enemy had
started forth from its lair. The first time was not long after the
town had started and the pattern of Life was hardly more than in-
dicated in the loosely woven threads.
Down in the forest the people saw a long red tongue leaping.
With brooms and staves they ran to meet it far from their dwellings,
beating it with fury. As they felt the heat of its breath in their
faces, they thought of ministers' words in past sermons. Young
desires and aspirations long dormant began to throb into being.
They prayed for safety. They promised to give up their sins. They
determined to be hard on themselves in the performance of daily
duties. The Life suspended above them untwisted its loosely
gathered in strands, the strands shone with a golden light and en-
twined again in soft forms.
With death-dealing blows they laid the enemy black and broken
about Grant's Mill, a mile away, and then went back to their homes
telling each other how brave they had been. Pride swelled up their
hearts. They boasted that they could take care of themselves. Old
habits slipped back upon their aspirations and crushed them again
into hidden corners. Life gathered up its loose-woven pattern of
dull threads and hung trembling over the town.
Worsting the enemy brought the people more closely together.
Suddenly they seemed to know each other for the first time. They
made changes, entered into bonds, drew lines, and settled into their
ways. Life grew quickly with its strands woven tightly together
into a weaving that would be hard to unloose.
The mill managers made money. They saw to it that their mills
buzzed away continually. They visited their homes regularly. Mr.



EDNA CLARE BRYNER
231
Stillman's farm flourished. His apple trees were bearing. The
school children understood that they could always have apples for
the asking. The Stillman boys did not go to school. They had a
tutor. Their father whipped them soundly when they disobeyed
him by going to play in the streets of the town with the other
children.
Dave Fellows had finally persuaded Dick Shelton to take a Cure.
Dick Shelton sober, it was discovered, was a man of culture and
knew, into the bargain, all the points of the law. So he was made
Justice of the Peace. His wife stopped taking in washing and spent
her days trying to keep the children out of the front room where
Dick tried his cases.
Dave Fellows himself gave up the principalship of the school,
finding its meagre return insufficient to meet the needs of an increas-
ing family. Yielding to the persuasion of Henderson, he became
contractor for taking out timber at Trout Creek Mill. He counted
on his two oldest sons to do men's work during the summer when
school was not in session. Fellows moved his family into the very
house in which Henderson had lived. Henderson explained that he
had to live in town to be near a doctor for his ailing wife and sickly
girls. The millmen told Dave Fellows that Henderson was afraid
of them because they had threatened him if he kept on overcharging
them at the Company store.
Abe Cohen did a thriving business in clothing. He had a long
list of customers heavily in debt to him through the promise that
they could pay whenever they got ready. He dunned them openly
on the street so that they made a wide detour in order to avoid going
past his store.
Dr Barton had established a reputation for kindness of heart as
well as skill in practice that threatened his rival's good will. Helen
Barton, the doctor's young daughter, perversely kept company with
her father's rival. Every one felt sorry for the father but secretly
admired Dr Smelter's diabolic tactics.
Long-forgotten was the enemy when it came the second time. On
a dark night when Five Points lay heavy in its slumbers, it bore
down upon the north side of the town. Some sensitive sleeper,
troubled in his dreams, awoke to see the dreadful red tongues cut-
ting across the darkness like crimson banners. His cries aroused the


232
THE LIFE OF FIVE POINTS
town. All the fathers rushed out against the enemy. The mothers
dressed their children and packed best things in valises ready to flee
when there was no longer any hope.
For three days and three nights the enemy raged, leaping in to
eat up one house, two houses, beaten back and back, creeping up in
another place, beaten back again. The school boys took beaters and
screamed at the enemy as they beat.
The older ones remembered the first coming of the enemy. They
said, “It was a warning!” They prayed while fear shook their ach-
ing arms. The Life of the town writhed and gleams of colour came
out of its writhings and a whiteness as if the red tongues were
cleansing away impurities.
The mill managers brought their men to fight the enemy. “We
mustn't let it go,” they said. Mr Stillman had his two sons helping
him. He talked to them while they fought the enemy together. He
spoke of punishment for sin. His sons listened while the lust of
fighting held their bodies.
Helen Barton knelt at her father's feet where he was fighting the
enemy and swore she would never see Dr Smelter again. She
knew he was a bad man and could never bring her happiness.
Lyda, eldest daughter in the Shelton family, gathered her little
sisters about her, quieting their clamours while her mother wrung
her hands and said over and over again, "To happen when your papa
was getting on so nicely!” Lyda resolved that she would put all
thoughts of marrying out of her head. She would have to stop keep-
ing company with Ned Backus, the hardware man's son. It was not
fair to keep company with a man you did not intend to marry. She
would stay for ever with her mother and help care for the children
so that her father would have a peaceful home life and not be
tempted.
All about, wherever they were, people prayed. They prayed until
there was nothing left in their hearts but prayer as there was noth-
ing left in their bodies but a great tiredness.
Then a heavy rain came and the red tongues drank greedily until
they were slaked and became little short red flickers of light on a
soaked black ground. The enemy was conquered. One street of the
town was gone.
People ran to the church and held thanksgiving services. A still-
ness brooded over the town. Life hardly moved; the strands hung
w



EDNA CLARE BRYNER
233
slack. Thanksgiving soon changed to revival. Services lasted a
week. The ministers preached terrible sermons, burning with terrible
words. “Repent before it is too late. Twice God has warned this
town.” People vowed vows and sang as they had never sung before
the hymns in their church song-books. The strands of Life leapt
and contorted themselves but they could not pull themselves apart.
The revival ended. Building began. In a few months a street
of houses sprang up defiant in yellow newness. In and out of a pat-
tern little changed from its old accustomed aspect Life pulsated in
great waves over the heavy strands. In and out, up and down, it
rushed, drawing threads tightly together, knotting them in fantastic
knots that only the judgement day could undo.
Mr Stillman's sons were now young men.
The younger was
dying of heart trouble in a hospital in the city. The father had
locked the elder in his room for two weeks on bread and water until
he found out exactly what had happened between his son and the
Barringer's hired girl. Guy Stillman, full-blooded, dark, and hand-
some, with high cheek bones like an Indian, declared vehemently
that he would never marry the girl.
Dave Fellows had taken his sons out of school to help him the
year round in the woods. Sixteen-year-old Lawrence had left home
and gone to work in the town barber shop late afternoons and even-
ings in order to keep on at his work in the high school grades just
established. He vowed he would never return home to be made into
a lumber-jack. Dave's wife was trying to persuade him to leave
Five Points and go to the city where her family lived. There the
children could continue their schooling and Dave could get work
more suited to his ability than lumbering seemed to be. Dave, too
proud to admit that he had not the capacity for carrying on this
work successfully, stubbornly refused to entertain any thought of
leaving the place. "If my family would stick by me, everything
would come out all right,” he always said.
Lyda Shelton still kept company with Ned Backus. When he
begged her to marry him, she put him off another year until the
children were a little better able to care for themselves. Her next
youngest sister had married a dentist from another town and had
not asked her mother to the wedding. Lyda was trying to make it
up to her mother in double devotion.
"


234
THE LIFE OF FIVE POINTS
a
Helen Barton met Dr Smelter once too often and her father made
her marry him. She had a child born dead. Now she was holding
clandestine meetings with Mr Daly, a traveling salesman, home
on one of his quarterly visits to his family. He had promised to
take Helen away with him on his next trip and make a home for her
in the city.
a
It was a sweltering hot Saturday in the first part of June. Every
now and then the wind blew in from the east picking up the dust in
eddies. Abe Cohen's store was closed. His children wandered up
and down the street, celebrating their sabbath in best clothes and
chastened behaviour. Jim Dunn was watching a large consignment
of goods for the Company store being unloaded. He was telling
Earl Henderson, the manager's nephew, how much it would cost
him to get in with the poker crowd.
George Brainerd had finished fixing up the Company's accounts.
He whistled as he worked. Dave Fellows was in debt three hun-
dred dollars to the Company. That would keep him another
year. He was a good workman, but a poor manager. Sam Kent
was in debt one hundred dollars. He would have to stay, too.
John Simpson had come out even. He could go if he wanted to.
He was a trouble-maker anyway. ..
Helen Barton sat talking with Daly in the thick woods up back
of the Presbyterian church. They were planning how to get away
undetected on the evening train. “If she was good enough for
you then, she's good enough now,” Mr. Stillman was saying to his
defiant son. “You're not fit for a better woman. You'll take care
of her and that's the end of it. ..
Widow Stokes' half-witted son rode up from the Extract Works
on an old bony horse. He brought word that the enemy was at the
Kibbard Mill, two miles beyond the Works. People were throwing
their furniture into the mill pond, he said. Every one laughed.
Mottie Stokes was always telling big stories. The boy, puzzled,
went round and round the town, stopping every one he met, telling
his tale. Sweat poured down his pale face.
At last he rode down to Trout Creek Mill and told Dave Fel-
lows. Dave got on the old grey mule and came up to town to find
out further news. The townsfolk, loafing under the trees around
Main Street and going about on little errands, shouted when they
.
.
а
>



EDNA CLARE BRYNER
235
saw Dave come in on his mule beside Mottie on the bony horse.
“Two of a kind,” was passed round the circle of business and gos-
sip, and sniggering went with it. Dave suggested that some one go
down to see just what had happened. Jeers answered him. “Be-
lieve a fool? Not quite that cracked yet!” Dave went about un-
easily if he had business to attend to, but keeping an eye searching
out in the direction of the Works.
In an hour or so another rider came panting into town. Back
of him straggled families from the mills and works with whatever
belongings they could bring on their backs. Fear came into the
hearts of the citizens of Five Points. They shouted in anger to
drive away their fear. "Why didn't you stay and fight it? What'd
you come up here for ?”
"Too big, too big,” cried the lumber folk, gesturing back over
,
their shoulders.
Far off a haze was gathering and in the haze a redness appeared,
growing slowly more and more distinct. The townsfolk stared in
the direction of the Works, unwilling to believe. Some one shouted,
"Better be ready!” Shortly every pump in the town had its hand
and everything that could hold water was being filled for the on-
coming thirsty beast.
Dave Fellows galloped down the long hills around curves across
the bridge at the mill and up again to his home, told his family of
the approach of the enemy, directed them to pack up all the easily
moved furniture, harness the two mules and be ready to flee out
through the forest past Goff's Mills to the next station thirty miles
further down the railroad. No one could tell where the enemy
would spread. He would come back the minute that all hope was
lost. The boys must stay at home and take care of the place.
"Bring Lawrence back with you,” his wife called after him, and he
turned and waved his hand.
When he got back into town thousands of red tongues were bear-
ing down upon the station street. The enemy belched forth great
hot breaths that swept the sky ahead of it like giant firecrackers
and falling upon the houses to the east of the town ran from one to
another eating its way up the station street towards the centre of
the town. Family after family left their homes, carrying valuables,
dragging their small children, and scattered to the north and south
of the advancing enemy. The town hotel emptied itself quickly


236
THE LIFE OF FIVE POINTS
of its temporary family. Jim Dunn left the station carrying the
cash box and a bundle of papers.
From building to building the enemy leaped. Before it fled group
after group of persons from stores and homes. Methodically it went
round the circle of shops, the most rapacious customer the town had
ever seen. Quarters of beeves in the meat shop, bottles of liquids
and powders on the drug-store shelves, barrels and boxes of food in
the grocery store, suits of clothing in Abe Cohen's, the leather whips
and carriage robes in the hardware store, all went down its gullet
with the most amazing ease.
Swelled with its indiscriminate meal, it started hesitantly on its
way up the street that led to the Presbyterian Church. Now people
lost their heads and ran hither and thither, screaming and praying
incoherently, dragging their crying children about from one place
to another, pumping water frantically to offer it, an impotent liba-
tion to an insatiable god. They knew that neither the beating of
brooms nor the water from their wells could quench the enemy that
was upon them. Red Judgement Day was at hand.
Meanwhile a peculiar thing happened. The Life that was hang-
ing above the town lifted itself up, high up, entire in its pattern,
beyond the reach of red tongues, of gusts from hot gullets-and
there it stayed while the enemy raged below.
Dave Fellows harangued the men who were beating away vainly,
pouring buckets of water on unquenchable tongues. He pointed to
the forest up the street back of the Presbyterian church. He was
telling them that the only thing to do was to call forth another
enemy to come down and do battle with this one before it reached
the church. "Yes, yes,” they chorused eagerly.
Craftily they edged around south of the enemy, scorching their
faces against its steaming flank, and ran swiftly far up the line of
forest past the church. There it was even at that moment that
Helen Barton was begging Daly to remember his promise and take
her with him on the evening train. .
The men scooped up leaves and small twigs and bending over
invoked their champion to come forth and do battle for them. Pres-
ently it came forth, shooting out little eager red tongues that danced
and leaped, glad to be coming forth, growing larger in leaps and
bounds. Dave Fellows watched anxiously the direction in which
the hissing tongues sprang. “The wind will take it,” he said at last.
9)



EDNA CLARE BRYNER
237
-
Fitfully the breeze pressed up against the back of the newly born,
pushing more and more strongly as the tongues sprang higher and
higher, until finally it swept the full-grown monster down the track
towards where the other monster was gorging.
"For God's sake, Henry, take me with you, this evening, as you
promised,” Helen was imploring Daly. "I can't stay here any
longer. My father-I wish now I had listened to him in the first
place, long ago." Daly did not hear her. He had risen to his feet
and holding his head back was drawing in great acrid breaths. His
florid face went white. "What is that?” he said hoarsely. Through
the thick forest red tongues broke out, sweeping towards them.
Helen clutched Daly's arm, screaming. He shook her off and turned
to flee out by the church. There, too, red tongues were leaping,
curling back on themselves in long derisive snarls. Daly turned
upon her. “You ..."
The two enemies met at the church, red tongue leaping against
red tongue, crackling jaws breaking on crackling jaws, sizzling gul-
let straining against sizzling gullet. A great noise like the rending
of a thousand fibres, a clap of red thunder, as the body of beast met
the body of beast, and both lay crumpled upon the ground together,
their long bodies writhing, bruised, red jaws snapping, red tongue
eating red tongue.
Upon them leaped the band of men spreading out the whole
length of the bodies and beat, beat, incessantly, desperately, tongue
after tongue, hour after hour, beat, beat. Lingeringly the enemy
died, a hard death. Three days it was dying and it had watchers in
plenty. Whenever a red tongue leaped into life, some one was there
to lay it low. In the night-time the men watched, and in the day
the women and girls. The men talked. “We will build it up again
in brick,” they said. “That is safer and it looks better, too.” The
women talked, too. "I hope Abe will get in some of those new lace
curtains,” they said.
Meanwhile families gathered themselves together. Those whose
homes were gone encamped picnic fashion in the schoolhouse or were
taken in by those whose houses were still standing. Two persons
were missing when the muster of the town was finally taken. They
were Helen Barton and Mr Daly. Jim Dunn said he wasn't sure
but he thought Daly left on the morning train. Daly's wife said
he told her he was not going until evening.
a


238
THE LIFE OF FIVE POINTS
They searched for Helen far and wide. No trace of her was ever
found. Her father stood in front of the Sunday School on the Sun-
day following the death of the enemy and made an eloquent appeal
for better life in the town. “The wages of sin is death,” he de-
clared, “death of the soul always, death of the body sometimes.”
The people thought him inspired. Widow Stokes whispered to her
neighbour, “It's his daughter he's thinking of.”
Dave Fellows was the only person who left the town. He went
back to his wife when he saw that the town was saved and said, “We
might as well move now that we're packed up. The town is cursed.”
Two days later they took the train north from a pile of blackened
timbers where the old station had stood. Lawrence went with them.
The enemy had eaten up all the records in the Company store,
and had tried to eat up George Brainerd while he was attempting to
save them. The Company had to accept the workers' own accounts.
George was going about with his arm tied up, planning to keep a
duplicate set of records in a place unassailable by the enemy.
Abe Cohen wailed so about his losses and his little children that
Mr Stillman set him up in a brand new stock of clothing. Abe was
telling every one, “Buy now. Pay when you like.” And customers
came as of old.
Guy Stillman married the Barringers' hired girl. His father es-
tablished them in a little home out at the edge of the town. The
nearest neighbour reported that Guy beat his wife.
Lyda married Ned Backus. “Suppose you had died,” she told
Ned. “I would never have forgiven myself. You can work in
papa's new grocery store. He's going to start one as soon as we can
get the building done. Mama will have a son to help take care
of her.”
Life, its strands blackened by the strong breath of the enemy,
settled down once more over the town and hung there, secure in its
pattern, thick and powerful. Under it brick stores and buildings
rose up and people stood about talking, complacently planning their
days. “It won't come again for a long time,” they said.



THUS TO REVISIT ...
BY FORD MADOX HUEFFER
V V
COMBIEN JE REGRETTE...
After a great many years of this studious seclusion, I emerged
for a time into the great world of English letters. This world was
beginning again to re-conquer a little of a moonlight glory—a Par-
nassian opulence. When I look again at the list provided for me
by my taskmaster, I perceive the names of four eminent men who
were not already eminent at the close of the first decade of this
century. Let me just repeat the list to save the reader the trouble
of turning back: (Messrs)
"Gosse
Bennett
Hudson (W. H.)
Wells
Doughty
Sinclair (Miss)
Bridges
Lawrence (D. H.)
Hardy
Wyndham Lewis, ‘etc., etc.'
Yeats
Meynell (Mrs)
Symons
Moore
Eliot
Dunsany (Lord)
Henry Newbolt (Sir)”
and, the reader will remember, Rudyard Kipling and any of Les
Jeunes that I liked. ... Alas, I liked them all!
If we add then the names of George Meredith and of Henry
James who were still alive and that of Mr Conrad and omit those
of Mr T. S. Eliot, Mr D. H. Lawrence, and Mr Wyndham Lewis
‘etc., etc.' who had not yet begun to write, we shall have a fair
view of those who, in the moonlight, occupied thrones, or at least
seats on the steps of England's Parnassus during the years
1907-8-9. It makes, this list, a distinguished and varied array, and
Heaven forbid that one should presume to criticize its individual
members. It wants just one thing-cohesion.


240
THUS TO REVIST ...
You can't imagine its units writing for any purpose under the
sun-except perhaps to proclaim the immorality of conscious
literary art. And, even to that, there would be one or two dis-
sentients. I, on the other hand, can't imagine a literature with-
out, behind it, some cohesion of writers. Writing—the poor old
métier de chien—is such a solitary business; without some sort of
contagion to sustain belief in himself a writer can do so little.
And the usual contagion supplied to the eminent English writer,
sitting solitary on his own little hill—the contagion supplied by
his cook, bottle-washer, solicitor, and several female friends is a
poor substitute for the sharpening of wits that will take place when
many rivals meet habitually together and talk about how to write
books. The poor dear old Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, the great
Flaubert-Turgenev-Zola-Maupassant group, the “Henley Gang”
as it called itself, the Yellow-Book association-each of these
movements did something towards providing a solution for one or
other of the problems of literature, even if it did no more than
prove
that generosity is not impossible even to the writer.
In the lightness of our hearts Arthur Pearson Marwood—alas,
that I should have to write, the late—and myself set out in one of
the three years I have mentioned to afford a nucleus for some sort
of movement. I have really forgotten what the year was—and
it does not matter. We aimed at founding a sort of aube de
siècle Yellow Book. We did—or perhaps we didn't .
At any rate, when I look again through the list of names pro-
vided for me by my taskmaster-with the additions of those of
Henry James, George Meredith, Mr Conrad, President Taft,
Anatole France, Gerhard Hauptmann, and Pope Pius X-I per-
ceive those of only four gentlemen who did not write for us and,
of these four, Mr Kipling was omitted only because he was too ex-
pensive. The other three we did not like.
Yet, of all the writers who contributed to our first three or four
numbers there was only one—and his name I have left out on pur-
pose !—who did not write to us to say that the English Review
was ruined by the inclusion of every other contributor! Mr
James said: "Poor dear old Meredith: God alone knows what
he means!” Mr Meredith said: “Poor James in ageing! He
has these mysterious internal rumblings.
But what do
they mean!” The over-familiar literary friend of Marwood and
.



FORD MADOX HUEFFER
241
.
myself wrote a serious letter of remonstrance—a full dress letter-
pointing out that we were “ruining our careers” by having "any- .
thing to do with” Mr Hudson, Mr Hardy, Mr Yeats, Mr Wells,
Mr Bennett
cela vous donne une fière idée de l'homme!
And, really, it was a mad idea that we had, that of cementing
together the immortals. “The bricks are alive to this day to testi-
fy: therefore deny it not.” We fell back upon Les Jeunes and,
in the end Les Jeunes made a very pretty movment for themselves,
only the war cut it short. Les Jeunes, as they presented them-
selves to us in those days, appeared successively as: (I am taking
the names, as far as I can remember, chronologically) Mr Pound,
Mr D. H. Lawrence, Wyndham Lewis, 'etc., etc.', Mr Flint, “H.
D.,” Mr T. S. Eliot
I daresay I am forgetting some-
body: he or she will perhaps forgive me!
I wish to be allowed to break off once again to pay a tribute to
the memory of the late Arthur Marwood. He was not a writer
but, large, fair, rather clumsy and gentle, he had the largest and
wisest intelligence of any man that I have ever met. He had the
largest general, he had the largest encyclopaedic knowledge that, I
imagine, it would be possible for any one man's skull to contain.
He could discourse—and accurately—about the rigging of Amer-
ican fruit-schooners, about the rotation of crops on sandy soils,
about the home life of Amerianus Marcellinus, the hidden aims of
Mr Chamberlain, the rapture of Higher Mathematics, the phon-
etic syzygy of Anosto, or how to patch up a leaky roof.
Why he ever had anything to do with the English Review I can-
not imagine! For he appeared to have no personal ambitions, be-
ing, if he was anything, a Yorkshire Tory Squire and the Fellow
of some Cambridge College--Trinity, I think
What
he was doing—what he can ever have expected to do in that
enterprise only Destiny, merciless, blind, and avenging could now
say. He had no ambition to appear like Maecenas: he had no am-
bition at all. And, if the enterprise did not ruin him—as it cer-
tainly ruined me—it certainly inconvenienced him and caused
him to endure a considerable amount of mental uneasiness and
public odium.
Its only outcome, as a movement-producer, was the group which,
from 1910 until 1914 figured as Les Jeunes of London literary
life. We printed the "first efforts” of Mr Pound, Mr Wyndham
.
.


242
THUS TO REVIST.
Lewis, Mr D. H. Lawrence-and I daresay we printed those of
other Futurists, Vorticists, Imagists.
At any rate in our
editorial salons they found chairs and sofas on which to recline
whilst they settled the fate of already fermenting Europe, and cer-
tainly we should have printed them all, if we had been able to keep
on. So for three or four years, culminating in the London season of
1914, they made a great deal of noise in a city that was preparing
to reverberate with greater echoes. They found their earthly home
and general headquarters in a cabaret beneath the New Gallery.
There, to the sound of prophetically African music they plotted
blowing Parnassus to the moon. They came near to doing it.
They stood for the non-representational in art; for vers libre; for
tapage in prose and for death to impressionism. They were a fine
band and did useful work. The war is said to have extinguished
them. I wonder if it has.
We now skip five years during which the moon did not shine--
or at any rate the denizens of our Parnassus, I understand, used to
pray that it would not.
VI
I write this section-in which I at last come to revisiting—with
great diffidence.
I should not write it at all if I had not been "put
right” by a young man already eminent in the world of letters. I
could have deduced the conditions of which he dogmatically in-
forms me, as a zoologist deduces the Ichthyosaurus from the long
deceased beast's little toe-joint. In short, according to my confi-
dent informant, himself Parnassian of the Parnassians, Academi-
cism is now triumphant in these Islands as it never was before. To
secure so much as publication you must bow to some image or other
of Minerva, subscribe to some Fifty Articles, and kiss some one's
great toe. Mr Pound, I am told, is dead; Mr Wyndham Lewis, I
think, is amongst the Immortals of Birmingham House; Futurism
is a bye-word; vers libre has been put into a decasyllabic strait-
waist-coat: all the Imagists are in the workhouse. ... I
wonder what has become of Impressionism. The Futurists killed
that, so they used to say, at the same time telling me, negligently,
that I was an Impressionist, if not the father of Impressionism in
these Islands.



FORD MADOX HUEFFER
243
There would be nothing sad about all this if it were not that the
young have become Academic. That is the tragic aftermath of the
war. For to the war went all that was tapageur of the youth of the
country: to the war went the Futurists, the Imagistes, the Vorti-
cists, the Vers Librists—even the poor old Impressionists. The
Eminent Middle Aged remained in undisturbed possession of the
fauteuils of Parnassus, the steps of the fane were—and according to
my informant still are—occupied by a serried phalanx of metricists,
prosodists, bibliophiles, annalists, commentators; all the C's III and
the C. O.'s of the nation's young. That is inevitable; it was so in
Athens in the old days; so it will be for ever. But I hope some
public-spirited man will arise to give the Real Young a chance.
For apart from the censorship established by the Neo-Academics (I
am so dogmatically assured of its existence by one claiming to be on
the Board—that I must believe in its exsistence!) apart, then, from
that, the mere economics of to-day make it extremely difficult for a
young writer even to get his first book printed. Paper is very ex-
pensive, printing is very expensive, binding is very expensive.
Initiative on the part of publishers is almost prohibited for the
moment. I don't know that we ought to blame them: perhaps we
ought—but I am not minded to throw the first stone. We have to
blame first the indifference of the public, the want of conscience on
the part of the reviewers—and, apparently, my young friend's cen-
sorship. If these three would mend their ways, the publishers
would soon dance to their tune.
Reaction, then, towards Academicism is normal to all ages and to
most countries. That is decreed by blind and august Destiny: I
can't see why it is decreed, though I understand how it happens.
The reader will know: he was once young and tapageur: his waist
has grown or is in process of growing: he needs a nice country
house: so he seeks to drive all the younger cockerels off his dunghill.
It is, in short, decreed that we should grow old and wear our laurel
with a difference. ... The young usually have a fair chance
to dig our graves.
To-day they have none—and that is a very serious affair. It is
a serious affair for the Republic. We, as a nation, are too inclined
to be commercial—and a nation that becomes over-commercialized
is a nation destined either to decay or obliteration. The politics of
Parnassus are not merely domestic wrangles. Stodginess and Aca-


244
THUS TO REVIST ...
demicism at the fount of intellect means tenfold materialism in the
race that is content to endure them. A movement—any movement
-leavens a whole nation with astonishing rapidity: its ideas pour
through the daily press with the rapidity of water pouring down-
wards through interstices. A solitary thinker may take an aeon to
make his voice heard: seven working in concert will forty-nine times
shorten the process of induration. And movements make for
friendships, enthusiasms, self-sacrifice, mutual aid—all fine things:
and movements are things of youth
I should like to be permitted to write with some emotion of these
matters since they are those that I felt most deeply all my life. But
I am aware that emotionalism is inadvisable. Let us then take a
.
guarded view of where we stand. I fancy when he said that Mr
Pound was dead, Mr Lewis an R. A., Mr T. S. Eliot a Wall Street
operator and Mr Lawrence a whole-time librarian—when in short
he reported that the whole batalion of Les Jeunes of 1914 had been
wiped out, my young Academic friend was reporting rather what he
wished than what he knew to be the case. That is what censorships
will do. It is what they are for: thus they encourage recruiting!
.
So we may take it that those gentlemen are alive still. There are
also Mr Flint and “H. D.” of the original Imagists. It is not a
great showing—but it gives you a nucleus of people who can be
trusted to be decent to the young. There is also Mr James Joyce
and there is Miss Richardson.
I am inclined to think that Mr Joyce is riding a method to death
--but I do not profess to be sure. And at any rate it is a good thing
to ride a method to death, for it lets one see of what it is capable:
and nothing is more useful to the Arts than to be afforded an object
lesson of how far a method can be made go. In a sense Mr
Joyce descends from Henry James in his perception of minute em-
barrassments and related frames of mind and he has carried Mr
Conrad's early researches after ramified form almost as far as they
can go. But he is direct in his relation of incident. This Miss
Richardson isn't; she records incident so much through the medium
of emotion, and so minutely, that at times one has a difficulty in
following her. But then one is tired.
Women, indeed, who seem to be indefatigable, have assumed a
large share of responsibility for the carrying forward of the Arts
whilst their men-folk were absent at Thermopylae—or was it Can-



FORD MADOX HUEFFER
245
nae ?—I am aware, even in my remoteness—indeed in a remoteness
still greater from the glimpses of the moon, I was aware of Miss
Clemence Dane who has worked out a great deal of the method of
Mr James; of Mrs Virginia Woolf who seems to be making a
formidable attempt to revive the Standard Type of English Novel;
of Miss G. P. Stern who analyses modern trends of thought and of
feminism. And I should like to put in a special plea for Miss, or
Mrs, George Stevenson whose book Benjy, in a rather down-to-the-
ground style such as Mr Garnett tried to make popular in the nine-
ties, I have enjoyed as one used to enjoy books in one's childhood.
I have read it over and over again.
So that then, firmly in the saddle, we have representatives of the
four types of nineteenth century schools such as you found in the
early nineties: Mrs Woolf to represent the lingering tradition of
George Eliot; Miss Dane to speak for the Master; George Steven-
son to illuminate the workings of Mr Garnett, and Miss Stern to
unite most of the qualities of the non-Jamesian Yellow Book.
They carry on, then, these ladies, fine traditions, but I doubt if any
of them would really join revolts, or attacks, on the Parnassian
steps. And that, alone, really interests me.
I can't help it. I wish my nature would let me compose myself
to sit beside Mr Gosse, Sir Sidney Colvin, the editors of the more
Academic Reviews (the Academic Young who have established
claims to these mantles)—and the eminent bibliophiles, commenta-
tors, and Vorschungen-wallahs. But it will not: I have had
several manuscripts sent to me lately by young people who cannot
find publishers. That is hateful.
And so we come back to the plea with which I started this
paper.
I wish that some public-spirited man could be found to throw away
a couple of thousand pounds on the young-to be ready just to lose
that amount in order to promote a movement. Any movement.
A dead loss of a couple of thousand pounds may represent an amaz-
ing stretch of activities, just as a profit of a couple of thousand
pounds may be all that results from a trade-turnover of millions.
And I ask the reader to observe that I am not seeking to promote
the interests of any one school. I am not even asking any one to
give Mr Lewis, Mr Flint, or Captain Read what is called in mili-
tary parlance a “sporting chance” to make up the ground that they
lost by their periods of army service. I simply want to point out
a


246
YOUTH
that the healthy young are wise with a queer, instinctive wisdom.
They are no doubt also foolish; they need handicapping.
But to-day the handicaps against them are unjust. The econom-
ics of paper and print are against them: the Academics are unduly
strong against them; they lost too many of all ranks and their
nerves suffered too much in the fields of France and of
Flauders.
But I am letting emotion come creeping in. ...
YOUTH
BY HAZEL HALL
Perhaps his feet might choose in their new pride
A tread whose echoes ring more evenly--
But Life, a friendly hound, runs at his side
And will not let him be.
His spirits answer in good comradeship;
Yet he must have a care to face the street
Erect, lest this strange dignity should slip
Like sandals from his feet.
And in the awkward grace of his new gait,
His show of artlessness, becoming wise,
The past and future gravely arbitrate-
And gayly compromise.
So on he goes with sure, uncertain stride,
Holding with valiant grip his dignity-
But Life, a friendly hound, runs at his side
And will not let him be.



AFTER SEEING ISADORA DUNCAN.
BY VAN DEERING PERRINE


1


U
SONGS OF THE PUEBLO INDIANS
BY AMY LOWELL
WOMEN'S HARVEST SONG
I am waving a ripe sunflower,
I am scattering sunflower pollen to the four world-quarters.
I am joyful because of my melons,
I am joyful because of my beans,
I am joyful because of my squashes.
The sunflower waves.
So did the corn wave
When the wind blew against it,
So did my white corn bend
When the red lightning descended upon it,
It trembled as the sunflower
When the rain beat down its leaves.
Great is a ripe sunflower,
And great was the sun above my corn-fields.
His fingers lifted up the corn-ears,
His hands fashioned my melons,
And set my beans full in the pods.
Therefore my heart is happy
And I will lay many blue prayer-sticks at the shrine of Ta-wa.
I will give corn to Ta-wa,
Yellow corn, blue corn, black corn.
I wave the sunflower,
The sunflower heavy with pollen.
I wave it,
I turn it,
I sing,
Because I am happy.



248
SONGS OF THE PUEBLO INDIANS
BASKET DANCE
Dance!
Dance!
The priest is yellow with sunflower meal,
He is yellow with corn-meal,
He is yellow as the sun.
Dance!
Dance!
His little bells are ringing,
The bells tinkle like sunlight,
The sun is rising.
Dance!
Dance!
Perhaps I will throw you a basket,
Perhaps I will throw you my heart.
Lift the baskets, dancing,
Lower the baskets, dancing,
We have raised fruits,
Now we dance.
Our shadows are long,
The sunlight is bright between our shadows.
Do you want my basket?
Catch it!
Catch it!
But you cannot catch me,
I am more difficult.
WOMEN'S SONG OF THE CORN
How beautiful are the corn rows,
Stretching to the morning sun,
Stretching to the evening sun.
Very beautiful, the long rows of corn.


AMY LOWELL
249
How beautiful is the white corn,
I husk it,
I grind it.
Very beautiful, my white corn.
How beautiful is the red corn,
I gather it and make fine meal,
I am glad doing this.
Very beautiful, my red corn.
How beautiful is the black corn,
I give it to my father,
To my mother,
I give it to my child.
Very beautiful, the black corn.
How beautiful is the mottled corn,
Like the sky with little clouds,
I eat it looking at the sky.
Very beautiful, my mottled corn.
PRAYER FOR A PROFUSION OF SUNFLOWERS
Send sunflowers!
With my turkey-bone whistle
I am calling the birds
To sing upon the sunflowers.
For when the clouds hear them singing
They will come quickly,
And rain will fall upon our fields.
Send sunflowers!


250
SONGS OF THE PUEBLO INDIANS
PRAYER FOR LIGHTNING
My corn is green with red tassels,
I am praying to the lightning to ripen my corn,
I am praying to the thunder which carries the lightning.
Corn is sweet where lightning has fallen.
I pray to the six-coloured clouds.
FLUTE-PRIEST SONG FOR RAIN
Ceremonial at the Sun Spring
Whistle under the water,
Make the water bubble to the tones of the flute.
I call the bluebirds song into the water:
Wee-kee! Wee-kee-kee!
Dawn is coming,
The morning star shines upon us.
Bluebird singing to the West clouds,
Bring the humming rain.
Water-rattles shake,
Flute whistles,
Star in Heaven shines.
I blow the oriole's song,
The yellow song of the North.
I call rain clouds with
my
rattles:
Wee-kee-kee, oriole.
Pattering rain.
To the South I blow my whistle,
To the red parrot of the South I call.
Send red lightning,
Under your wings
The forked lightning.
Thunder-rattles whirl


AMY LOWELL
251
To the sky waters.
Fill the springs.
The water is moving.
Wait-
Whistle to the East
With a magpie voice.
Wee-kee! Wee-kee-kee!
Call the storm-clouds
That they come rushing.
Call the loud rain.
Why does it not come?
Who is bad?
Whose heart is evil?
Who has done wickedness?
I weep,
I rend my garments,
I grieve for the sin which is in this place.
My flute sobs with the voice of all birds in the water.
Even to the six directions I weep and despair.
Come, O winds, from the sides of the sky,
Open your bird-beaks that rain may fall down.
Drench our fields, our houses,
Fill the land
With tumult of rain.



BELPHEGOR
Essay on the Aesthetic of Contemporary French Society
BY JULIEN BENDA
IT appears to us that the aesthetic of contemporary French
society-or more precisely, its aesthetic will or desire-can be
summed up in one sentence:
Modern French society requires of works of art that they make it
experience emotions and sensations and no longer expects to realize
from works of art any kind of intellectual pleasure.
This desire in its nature is not peculiar to our time. Presided
over from the beginning by women and young people, French
society has always preferred in art that which caressed the senses
and made the heart beat faster to that which touched the mind.
The best received play of the siecle de la raison was Timocrate and
the most popular novel was not La Princesse de Clèves. What is
peculiar to our own time is the extraordinary perfection of this de-
sire, its precision, its violence; it is the concentration—the science
-brought to bear to satisfy this desire and to extend its province;
it is universal, and its traces may be found in the most cultivated
minds; peculiar above all is the fact that people are conscious of
it, take pride in it, and build systems on it.
We propose now to describe the chief symptoms.
DESIRE THAT ART SHOULD BE A MYSTIC UNION WITH
THE ESSENCE OF THINGS
One of the most striking symptoms—the one from which most
of the others are derived-is that doctrine which holds that art
consists in a mystic union with the essence of things. We know
that, according to a school which is extremely popular in our time,
art must break with everything which is Idea, existence of things
in the mind, and seize them in their own proper existence, must
unite itself with their “vital principle,” with their interior heart-
beats”--this by an act of pure love, "sympathy," "intuition”-in


JULIEN BENDA
253
TE
which, by definition, all varieties of intellectual activity, concepts,
symbols, habits of speech, founder. “Modern aesthetics," says
one of its apostles (M. Tancrede de Visan in l’Attitude du lyrisme
contemporain), "consists in grasping reality apart from all expres-
sion, translation, or symbolic representation”; its method is “in-
tuition, a kind of central vision which becomes the actual live and
changing rhythm of things”; intuition [the italics are the author's]
"does not reflect: it is action, heart, ego.” “If the rose," says
another, deriving his inspiration from a page of William James,
“if the rose were nameless, it would still be the force of life and
beauty which it is. To be one with this force while remaining un-
responsive to its names or in a more general way to what the under-
standing tells us about it, that is the function of art.” There,
surely, is an activity which is strangely troubling and one which no
society has ever before dreamed of demanding from the artist.
The contemporaries of de Musset and Lamartine undoubtedly
desired emotion in art above all other things; but they never ex-
pressly insisted upon it to the extinction of the understanding.
That is a real step in progress.
a
We will not discuss this conception of an art which has the pre-
tension of "dispensing with symbols”; we will not even mention
how many writers were artists (Petrarch, Malherbe) without at all
"uniting themselves with the soul of things”; nor that, if some of
them did practise this union (M. Barrès, for example, in certain
pages of Grande Pitié des Eglises de France) they were artists not
by this state of being, but by the form which they gave it, that is,
by the idea which they derived from it. Our intention is not to
discuss the ideas of our contemporaries, but to distinguish the de-
sires which are expressed in those ideas.
Let us carefully analyse the diverse cravings for sensation which
this doctrine implies:
First, art must grasp things in their life-principle. That is,
moreover, a reaction which our contemporaries demand of all the
activities of the mind: philosophy, science (biology at least)
must also, as we shall see, bring us in contact with the object "in
its essence,” in its “creative principle.” Let us observe that in order
to add emotional power, this doctrine is never allowed to be moder-
ate; it is always "palpitating, burning, dynamic.” The absolute
to-day is no longer quietude, but agitation; the Eternal has be-
Pਈ ਤੇ
9)


254
BELPHEGOR
come Passion; more than ever before one can say, with the poet, of
repose Qu'on en faisait jadis le partage des dieux.
Second, art must unite itself with life-principle, not ob-
serve or describe it, for these activities imply standing apart
from it; art must unite with it, or more precisely, become fused
with it, become confused with it. That is a formal article of the
creed: “You have at last understood” says a modern thinker de-
scribing the state of soul which, according to our aesthetes, must
stand as the true type of artistic activity, “that if your knowledge
of the trajectory, traced by an object moving through space, is not
a sufficient datum, it is because you are looking at it from the out-
side, instead of becoming one with the point which describes the
trajectory and experiencing its movement.” (Bergson, Essai sur
les données immédiates de la conscience.)
Similarly, when our preceptors announce that art “must stop
walking round the object, and must establish itself in its very
heart”; that does not mean at all according to them that art must
penetrate to the interior truth of things; quite the contrary. They
mean that art must give up all kinds of observation, since so long
as it observes it remains separate, and identify itself with the life
of things.
Repeatedly we hear our prophets declare that the artist must
"espouse the inner rhythm of things," "become the life of things,”
“live things.” Let us mark well this curious desire which is of
quite universal application, since they feel it in regard to the
critic, the historian, and the philosopher as well, and which
is so peculiar to our time as a conscious and formulated desire-
an abolition of the distinction between the artist and his material,
the dissolution of his personality in its soul, the extinction
of all judgement, and of all transcendence on his part in his rela-
tion to it. Is it necessary to cite the quite specially relished emo-
tion, the exquisite weakness, which this spectacle affords? Let us
add that even apart from this fusion of the artist with his subject,
the "adoption of the life of things” is in itself a strangely disquiet-
ing spectacle.
At the side of this emotion of gentle weakness at the thought of
the artist swooning upon the soul of things, let us note also a strong
emotion, caused by the spectacle of the glowing fusion of the soul
of the artist with that of the object, as by the vision of a profound



JULIEN BENDA
255
embrace. Let us recognize also in their desire to be established
in the core of things, the thirst for a sort of sexual invasion of
things, a violation of their intimacy, a mingling with the deepest
secrets of their being—a thirst which every one will admit has noth-
ing to do with the search for an aesthetic emotion. To be sure the
emotions we are analysing and separating here are not distinct in
the souls of our aesthetes, where each gains strength by the presence
of the others.
Third, art, in order to unite with the soul of things, must
yield to a state of pure love where mental activity of every sort is
in abeyance; in other terms, art must consist in a purely emotional
We shall see among our contemporaries still other forms
of this desire to know, in connection with products of the mind,
that infinitely disquieting thing, a purely emotional state. Let us
here testify to our admiration for the power, curious enough in men
of the world, to form so clearly this exceedingly abstract conception
of a purely emotional state, and their skill in denouncing intellec-
tual activity in its most subtle aspects: symbols, images, represen-
tations, habits of speech. Hate makes for genius. (Note:
“What is a symbol ? A sign employed instead of a reality. Now,
contemporary poets go direct to reality, to the living interior,
and not to the appearances, not to the exterior representations of
things.” T. de Visan, cited above.)
Note well that this pure sentiment of things, exempt from all
intellectual travail, is not, according to our aesthetes, a first essay
of artistic activity, a necessary but purely preparatory state upon
which the intelligence is presently to work like a demiurge; no-
and this is the entire originality of the doctrine—it is the sum total
of artistic activity; the artist does not become one with the souls
of things the better to express them; he must become one with
them and so remain; that is sufficient to earn him his title. Here
is an explicit and much admired statement on this subject:
“There exists at least one class of these privileged persons,"
(who move in the sphere of “pure perception,” that is, in the
pure
sentiment of things, unmixed with the intellect), “they are the
artists. ... Their sole preoccupation is to enlarge their per-
ception, without trying to rise above it” (Bergson, La Perception
du Changement). All the same, since they are compelled to real-
ize that the artist does express his feeling, they have invented a
a


256
BELPHEGOR
state in which the pure sentiment of things becomes, by its very
nature, artistic expression, a state which allows "the poet to think
his poem in a flash, to set himself in the interior of the object of
his song, to such a point that the expression of his song is his very
soul living in the moment of his consciousness.” But let us note
that in all this no demand is yet made on the intelligence: it is
feeling which creates the expression of art and thus defrays all
the cost of artistic activity.
This desire that sentiment alone suffice in art was, let us remark,
a thing unknown to the early romanticists. Some of them, in fact,
formally repudiated the idea: "I have had a soul” says Lamartine, ,
“it is true; that is all. I have uttered some cries from my heart.
But if the soul suffices for feeling, it does not suffice for expression.”
Let us also note how this mystic communion with things is, ac-
cording to our preceptors, essential to the artistic activity. It is
not one source among many possible sources of art. It is the
unique source. They admit reluctantly that a Gautier, painting
Venice and Toledo objectively without “identifying himself with
their heartbeats,” without "straining them to his breast” may still
be an artist. The belief that there can be no other art is so deep
in their marrow that they never even warn one of the restriction
implicit in all their treatises on aesthetics, in their ars poetica, in
all their precepts—"fusion with the soul of things,” “penetration
into their mysteries,” and so on, namely, that they apply exclusive-
ly to mystic art alone.
Finally let us note how stubbornly they insist upon calling this
aphasiac union with the essence of things “art.” Why at all cost
this inappropriate name? Why not simply “a state of being,"
"love,” “mystic union?” It is because the value of our words
comes from an age which set the qualities of the mind at the very
highest summit, and the name of art with its perfume of the intel-
lect still remains the flattering word. The tragic thing about the
modern barbarians is that they are still living under the verbal
tyranny of the civilized.
9
This purely emotional conception of art is expressed, among our
contemporaries, in inany other forms which are worth recognizing
and of which some will throw into particularly bold relief their
frenzied hunger for emotion, their horror of the Idea.


JULIEN BENDA
257
>
First. Art must be an immediate perception of the object, sup-
pressing all intermediaries, all "veils interposed” between ourselves
and the world ("veils” are the forms of representation). In this
aspect we touch upon the gluttonous appetite for the immediate
which characterizes our moderns, this desire to absorb things
themselves, a thirst which they try to quench not alone by art but
by philosophy and science; philosophy, we know, must give them
"a direct perception" of the world, an "immediate datum.” It is
most remarkable that they confer an order of superiority upon
those who show themselves capable of such perception, as if the
principal distinction of a creature in the scale of life were not pre-
cisely the faculty of replacing direct perception by indirect, from
the animal which knows the temperature of water by dipping in his
paw, to the man who knows it by looking at a numeral on a glass
tube. Nor let us forget that for them “direct perception" of a
thing does not mean a direct view of that thing, but suppression
of all view in becoming identical with the thing itself.
Second. Art must present things in their reality, not in the dis-
tortions due to the intelligence (we know that they have just dis-
covered how the intelligence deforms whatever it touches). This
distortion by the intelligence is only another name for the human
faculty of converting the world of the senses into an intelligible
whole—and is precisely what was considered by society in the
Seventeenth Century to be the chief honour of our race when it
was revealed to them by Descartes. That, also, is a good measure
of the progress made by French society. Moreover, it would be
too comic to discover any love of the truth in this horror felt by our
contemporaries for the distortion of things. Saint-Simon, tvo,
“distorts whatever he touches.” They know it and they venerate
him for it. Because he distorts with his passion. What they re-
ject is not the alteration of things but alteration wrought by
the intelligence.
This is the place to note one of the most curious traits of this
society: its hatred of the intellect. We have cited elsewhere the
numerous forms in which this hatred is manifested in the desire
to identify the intellect with dry and unimaginative reason, the bet-
ter to despise it; in the will to believe that the great discoveries
are made by a function (the intuition) which "transcends” intel-
ligence, in the disarray of the mind, beyond all logic, beyond the


258
BELPHEGOR
:
faintest whispering of intellectualism; in the joy of noting what
it considers the checkmating and the "failures” of science (instead
of being grieved by them); in the desire to believe that the intelli-
gence is linked only with our practical, utilitarian needs, with the
physical, inferior; that it is adapted to—what am I saying?—that
it is identical with the inert world, with matter, with the wastes of
the universe, and so on. This violent, conscious, organized de-
testation of the intelligence-intellectual has almost become a term
of contempt in our salons-constitutes an entirely new thing in
French society. The men of 1830 knew naught of it; the roman-
ticists of that day felt that they were writing for "an intelligent,
logical, rational élite”(Hernani). The new attitude will be the dis-
tinguishing mark of our time in the history of French civilization.
Let us note, however, the care taken by these enemies of all in-
tellectualism to declare that they are in arms only against intellec-
tualism imperfectly conceived, against the lazy intellectualism of
the pedant, and above all, that they represent “the true intellec-
tualism.” It is clear that even for its detractors, no matter what
they say, intellectualism, at least the name of it, preserves a sort of
shop-worn prestige. Even so the barbarian kings who came to des-
troy the civilization of Rome could think of no greater glory than
to be named consuls.
Third. Art must seize the object in all its uniqueness. Let us
distinguish two meanings in this commandment, and, as it were,
successive degrees in the desire to feel. First they mean that
art must create a form for each object (as science a category for
each fact), must evoke only the particular (object of sensation)
and forbid the type (object of thought). The ideal of our dilet-
tanti in this respect is the language of the Hurons, in which the
verb to eat varies as many times as there are things to eat; or that
of the Iroquois in which there is one word for the tail of a dog,
another for that of a sheep, another for that of an ox, but there is
no word for the tail in general. And yet this is not quite a com-
plete abolition of intellectual activity; an idea representing one
single object is still an idea; a name, even if it is a proper name,
is still a name.
And the demand for the particular in art most
often means that art must take the object outside of any mental
articulation, in all it has “of unique and inexpressible” (See Berg-
son, LeRoy, and so on).


JULIEN BENDA
259
Fourth. Art must present the object in its indecomposable
totality. Here also we distinguish two desires. First, the simple
gluttonous desire for the Whole; second, the desire, again, to seize
the object in its "life,” in the feeling it has of its own existence,
which is indivisible, and not in the diverse and analysable aspects
which it has for the eyes of the observer from the outside. Never-
theless, in this last form, our aesthetes expressly avow their hatred
of everything which springs from the category of Number, a hatred
which has always been deep in the hearts of all the fanatics of
emotion. Being conscious of it, however, is a new thing among
men and women of the world.
As far as it is a gluttonous desire for the Whole it seems to have
been felt with a quite special intensity by M. Claudel. According
to one of his interpreters who speaks not disrespectfully of this
trait, “Claudel wanted to know everything and to possess every-
thing. Nature is a profundity and a totality, and this totality
which he could not embrace haunted and tormented his spirit.”
Some impressive quotations follow. Alas, here is something to
strike despair into the hearts of Claudel and his disciples. One of
the ancients went even further in this desire; in a tragedy of
Aeschylus of which only a few verses remain, he speaks of embrac-
ing Zeus, "who is the Whole and whatever exists beyond the
Whole.”
C
PROHIBITION OF CLEARNESS IN ART
CULT OF THE INDISTINCT
Another trait, relating to the foregoing, which again marks
the zeal of our people for experiencing sensations through art
and rejecting all intellectual states, is their desire that art should
ignore distinctions between things, clear-cut separations, definite
contours, and should present things in their “vagueness,” their "re-
ciprocal penetration,” in their "movement” and in their “fluidity.”
They are not unaware, indeed, that the perception of things as
distinct is the very essence of intellectual activity; they are especi-
ally aware of it now since the Essay on the Immediate Data of
Consciousness states this as its thesis. Nor are they unaware that
the lack of distinction, besides suppressing this detested activity,


260
BELPHEGOR
creates a sensation of inquietude which is particularly precious.
Let us note, finally, that the indistinct in modern aethetics is not
taken merely as a negation of the distinct, but for itself, as having
a positive value. (See, for example, "the idea of Disorder” in
Creative Evolution.)
Here, too, the desire we are noting is not new in its nature. In
every age sensitive souls have felt the seduction of the indefinite,
the ill-defined; long before this the art was loved which painted
those moments when “It is no longer night, yet not quite day.”
And Hugo cherished Cellini for knowing how to make "A lily
which becoming a woman remains a lily still.”
What is new is that they will not have any other art, that they
despise the art which is precise, that they have not merely a taste
for the indistinct but make a religion of it, and this in the name of
a system.
How do they propose to express the indistinct with words,
images, all evocations of distinct things? By accumulating their
expressions, instead of limiting themselves to those which are suit-
able, so that their number in some sort neutralizes the precision of
each; by proceeding through “successive approximations,” through
"transpositions of art,” through "perpetual suggestions,” through
"choosing images as disparate as possible,” so as to "prevent any one
of them from usurping the function of the intuition which they are
intended to invoke” (T. de Visan). It may be said that if the
ancients devoted themselves to correcting the vagueness of words,
the moderns devote themselves to correcting their precision.
This prohibition of contours, this aesthetic of the indefinite, ex-
tends to a domain where it is particularly surprising, that of the
plastic arts. To limit ourselves to painting, it means the proscription
of the design of things, the effort to paint things in their “mutual
imbrication,” in their “eternal fusion,” in their "perpetual instabili-
ty.” (“The gesture which we wish to reproduce on the canvas will no
longer be a fixed moment seized from the universal dynamism; it
will be simply the dynamic sensation itself. In fact, everything
moves, everything runs, everything transforms itself, et cetera”
-Futurist manifesto.) Moreover, the desire of the modern
painter to reject every intellectual element is translated into
another series of doctrines of which the intention, behind the many
glosses given to it, can be summed up in a phrase: to evoke the im-
"


JULIEN BENDA
261
pression we get from things without the significance given to those
impressions by our minds—the impressions, for example, we re-
ceive when, in the morning, we have just wakened and our intelli-
gence has not yet correlated them, or the impressions we get when
we are standing on our heads (in philosophical language, to sub-
stitute sensation for perception). We know that there exists at
the same time a school of exactly the opposite doctrine: that of
synthetic painting (cubism) in which abstraction to the utmost
attempts to reduce the representation of objects to a few elemen-
tary forms, pure creations of the spirit. That is a special case of
another sort of romanticism which we will observe later; it is the
romanticism of the reason.
A still more extraordinary thing is the demand for vagueness in
ideology. Criticism, science, even philosophy, are invited to shun
frontiers and definitions, and to proceed by indefinite colours, by
"shifting" categories, by "Auid concepts.” Writers who are formal-
.
ly presented as thinkers (Rolland, Sorel, William James), are
esteemed for the "mobility" of their words, for the "Auidity" of
their teaching. A critic is praised for his care in preventing his
thought from "becoming fixed in a definite mould” and for “an-
nouncing all affirmations at the same time.” “Cursed be the day,”
”
cries an aesthete apropos of one of his idols, “cursed be the day
when this mind becomes definite!” Philosophy must consist in an
unseizable affirmation (because it must imitate life); the philos-
opher must follow the procedure of the artist (read "without
rigour”); rigour "which is perhaps appropriate in a mathematical
demonstration, is totally unsuitable to a philosophical discussion."
A thinker of the great century (Spinoza) astonished his time by
saying that confused ideas come from God as certainly as clear
ideas; our age would be astonished to hear that distinct ideas come
from God as surely as vague ones.
That is still another measure
of our progress.
At the bottom of this taste for the writer who is exempt from
all clear and distinct ideas we may discover something more pro-
found and apparently common to all societies: the attraction to
the weak intellect, the aversion to the powerful mind. Let the
reader go back in history to the galleries of talents, let him think
of the names of poets, thinkers, journalists, conversationalists, wel-
comed by good society. How many fine, delicate, lovable, grace-
>


262
BELPHEGOR
ful spirits; how few vigorous minds! How many Meleagers,
younger Plinys, de la Fares, Abbé de Choisys, Jules Janins, Caros,
Bergsons; how few de La Rochefoucaulds and Montesquieus!
How many feminine natures; how few men! And really what
should they be doing with vigorous minds whose sole excuse for liv-
ing is in the search for whatever can charm? And who can deny
that frailty has a certain charm?
Finally, side by side with this scorn for distinction in ideas, let
us note this trait in our modern society: its complete incapacity
:
to make distinctions. The two things are not necessarily com-
bined, for it is even considered elegant to have a quality and to
despise it. We need only observe the lightest conversation in a
salon, on politics, art, religion, love, to witness the extraordinary
mental confusion which obtains among the speakers, their radical
incapacity to see the distinction between the least subtle, the most
commonplace, ideas; it is just a universal swamp in which we see
that they have not the vaguest idea of the difference, for example,
between political liberty and the privilege of doing as one pleases,
between the moving power of a work of art and its æsthetic value,
between the sentiment of religion and formal belief, between love
and tenderness. Likewise every one has learned that our society
folk are incapable of expressing with any precision the simplest
idea, even the simplest fact, to give with precision the simplest in-
formation, or to say in regard to the simplest matters what they
want to say and no more. We cannot help reflecting that these
are the children of a nation where the men and women of the
world were called Retz, St. Evremond, La Rochefoucauld, Mme.
de La Fayette, in which young women constantly made distinctions
like the following: “Passive adoration (oraison) consists of pure
love but pure love can exist without it” (Mme. de Grignan). The
disappearance of every kind of dialectic power in a French society
will be one of the stupefactions of history.
The same thing prevails with our writers. It is real-
ly incredible how totally ignorant of logic most of them are.
We are not speaking of the terrible mess they get into when they
try to handle ideas (see for example the polemics of certain cory-
phees, at the beginning of the war, against M. Paul Souday on the
subject of Nietzsche, Renan, the mysticism of the war). We are
speaking of much simpler things. I know one of our “masters"


JULIEN BENDA
263
who wrote a letter to a minister in order to change his military
status; he went about it in such a fashion that to find out
what he was driving at they had to ask him to begin again three
times in succession. Another asked the readers of a great news-
paper for subscriptions to a charitable work; he expressed him-
self so clearly concerning the method of remitting money that for
eight days the columns of the paper were filled with letters asking
for explanations. Compare that with the precision of a Racine
giving the smallest details of personal hygiene to his son, or with
the letters of Victor Hugo to his editors. Nowhere else does the
lowering of classic culture appear so clearly.
THE RELIGION OF MUSIC
MUSICALIZATION OF ALL THE ARTS
PLASTIC SENSIBILITY AND MUSICAL SENSIBILITY
An interesting aspect of this rejection of all artistic precision is
the supreme value which our contemporaries attach to music
among the arts, because they consider it "the art without forms,"
"pure fluidity,” the art which has been "finally liberated from the
categories of space.” (Let us remember in this connection their
quite special adoration for a certain modern music which is “in-
vertebrate,” their scorn for clear and definite musical ideas, for
"punctuation.” They want music to be the model for the other
arts, want poetry, painting, sculpture, and ideology itself to be
musical, to imitate the "pure mobility,” and indeterminateness of
this chosen art. This desire to musicalize all the arts shows better
than anything else that our contemporaries do not propose to draw
any intellectual experience from art but want a pure sensation, as
from a potion or from a flower. Moreover, music is not venerated
by them for its absence of form alone, but for the state of “pure
emotion” which it has the power to create, for its close connection
with “consciousness in its pure state," "whence all representation
has vanished, in a condition which is vegetative and irreducible to
the terms of the intellect.” Also for the power it has to “suggest
instead of expressing,” a trick which is now demanded even of
a
ideology; it is venerated also, although less dogmatically, for the


264
BELPHEGOR
particularly disquieting thing, sound. We will speak later of
another religion of music, created because it can express the human
soul in its profound (that is to say unintellectual) regions.
Who will write the history of the respect in which our different
sensibilities have been held throughout the ages? It would be in-
teresting to note that this regard for sensitiveness to music is a re-
cent thing. Sallust declared that a certain Roman lady “sang
with more taste than was proper for a decent woman.” The im-
perial epoch seems to have combined a great sensitiveness to music
with a very small esteem for this taste; Ammianus Marcellinus (it
is true he was a soldier) protests against this predilection of his
contemporaries. Nearer to our time, the great Arnould deplored
“that poison of Lulli's songs which is infecting all of France."
We will be told that he was a cleric, but would the ecclesiastics of
our time say as much? Mme. de Motteville denounced Louis
XIII's taste for music as a sign of his unhealthy nature. Among the
congenital weaknesses of the Duc de Bourgogne, St. Simon writes
down his penchant for music. Mlle. de Lespinasse confesses her
liking for this art, but, she says, she likes it only when she is un-
well, which is far from saying that, for her, it is a superior art.
To-day sensitiveness to music makes one a patrician of the spirit;
only a few cynics, indifferent to the contempt of their fellows, con-
fess that they care nothing for it.
The tendency thus shown by modern society can be defined more
closely still. Let us distinguish two kinds of sensibility. The
first, of which sight and touch are the principal modes, groups it-
self around the idea of form and, from that source derives a special
character of precision and firmness; let us call it plastic sensibility.
The other, represented by hearing, taste and smell, freed from this
rigid armour, consists in sensation without contour, incomparably
more disquieting; let us call it musical sensibility. The first seems
a more localized sensibility, no doubt because it touches nerves
which are more highly developed and specialized, and affects only
a specific corner of our consciousness. The second seems to invade
the entire being. The first is a centralized and correlated sensibil-
ity; it is the source of poise. The second is precisely a sort of
decentralization of consciousness, in a diffused and scattered sen-
sation, a notable source of intoxication and vertigo. Granting
this, it must be admitted that the sensibility toward which


JULIEN BENDA
265
modern society tends, that which it exalts by its judgements and
by its doctrines, that which it desires that art should satisfy, is
eminently a musical sensibility.
To make clear what we mean by musical sensibility we may cite
the feeling of love (an abstraction, of course, from the idea
of the object which causes the feeling; as, for example, that
produced by an aphrodisiac). Perhaps we should not consider
this sensation in men, where it seems to be localized, but rather in
women, where it is, apparently, diffuse and widely distributed.
In the matter of music itself we must remember that side by side
with music as source of diffusion, there exists another, a source
of stability: plastic music. This is the distinction which Plato
made when he banished the Lydian mode from the State and
recommended the Dorian. Bossuet, too, seems to have been con-
scious of this distinction in these curious lines:
“The music which Diodorus held up to the contempt of the
Egyptians because it tended to soften their courage was undoubted-
ly that soft and effeminate music which inspires only pleasure and
false tenderness. For the Egyptians were far from despising that
generous music, the noble harmonies of which elevate mind and
heart."
It could almost be maintained that all music, in so far as it is
a work of art, is, in a certain sense, plastic and not musical; that,
by the very fact of its essence being an absence of form, music could
not become a work of art except by abjuring, in some measure, its
proper nature and adopting that of plastic art; like the drowning
man, of whom Bergson speaks, who succeeded in saving his life
only by falling back upon whatever solidity the water still afford-
ed. One might maintain that the great creators in music, those
above all who delighted in the most fluid material, a Wagner or
a Debussy, were creators only because they could, to a certain ex-
tent, overcome their pure love of music and impose on themselves
the habits of plastic art. Here we evoke an intellectual drama in
which the imagination of our readers may find entertainment.
The same reflection applies to the writers who by nature de-
lighted in fluid material and yet were artists: the author of the
Rêveries d'un promeneur solitaire, Chateaubriand, and often Loti.


266
BELPHEGOR
Renan seems to us to be inferior to these masters because he was
not always able to impose a plastic form on the fluid material
which appealed to him.
This distinction between the plastic and the musical might be
used equally well in judging that literature which aims to
touch our sensibility alone, loosely called romanticism. We
should recognize that the romanticism of 1830, except that of
Lamartine, perhaps, is plastic, while that which dates from the
second half of the nineteenth century (Verlaine, Barrès) is eminent-
ly musical. Let us recall that Baudelaire injected the exploitation
of the senses of taste and smell, of which Hugo and his time never
dreamed. The special and systematic predilection of our contem-
poraries for musical romanticism would also be granted. The fol-
lowing, we think, is a good example of plastic romanticism:
“Our Bethlehemites were seated round their camp fire, their
muskets resting on the earth, and near them their tethered horses
forming a second and wider circle. When they had drunk their
coffee and spoken much together, all the Arabs except the sheik
fell silent. By the firelight I saw his expressive gestures, his black
beard and white teeth, the changing contours of his mantle as he
continued his story. His companions listened to him with a pro-
found attention, all bending forward their faces toward the
flames, uttering a cry of admiration, sometimes repeating with
emphasis the gestures of the speaker; the heads of some of the
horses taking shape in the darkness, the scene the most picturesque
character, when one saw behind it the faint outlines of the country
of the Dead Sea and the mountaines of Judea.” (Chateaubriand,
Itineraire.)
It would be superfluous to underline the extraordinary plasticity
of this page, its will to stir us, according to the mot of a classic
(Buffon), by the “vivid and well defined” image. Superfluous
also to iterate how much less it would be relished by our readers
than such “fluidities”—at times of an art quite as happy in other
”.
respects-as la Mort de Venise or Pêcheur d'Islande.
To be Continued


THREE POEMS
BY EVELYN SCOTT
SPRING SONG
Sap crashes suddenly through dead roots:
Sap that bites,
Harsh,
Impatient,
Bitter as gold.
My God, my sisters, how dark, how silent, how heavy is earth!
Shoulders strain against this eternity,
Against the trickling loam.
Earth dropped on the heart like a nerveless hand:
On the red mouth
Earth coils,
Heavy as a serpent.
Light has come back to the darkness,
To the shadow,
To the coolness of blackened leaves.
AIR FOR G STRINGS
White hands of God
With fingers like strong twigs flowering
Rock me in leaves of iron,
Leaves of blue.


268
THREE POEMS
Hands of God
Fashioned of clouds
Have finger tips that balance the almond white moon.
The pale sky is like a flower,
White tipped and pink tipped with dawn.
The white hands of God gather the blossoms with fingers
that hold me,
a
Cloud fingers like milk in the azure night,
Weaving silver chords:
Milk white hammocks of light in which God rocks me to sleep-
And one star, diamond sprinkled.
ASCENSION:
AUTUMN DUSK IN CENTRAL PARK
Featureless people glide with dim motion through a quivering blue-
silver;
Boats merge with the bronze-gold welters about their keels.
The trees float upward in grey
and
Clouds, swans, boats, trees, all gliding up a hillside
After some grey old women who lift their gaunt forms
From falling shrouds of leaves.
green flames.
.
Thin fingered twigs clutch darkly at nothing.
Crackling skeletons shine.
Along the smutted horizon of Fifth Avenue
The hooded houses watch heavily
With oily gold eyes.



ADOLF
BY D. H. LAWRENCE
WHE
HEN we were children our father often worked on the
night-shift. Once it was spring-time, and he used to arrive
home, black and tired, just as we were downstairs in our night-dres-
ses. Then night met morning face to face, and the contact was not
always happy. Perhaps it was painful to my father to see us gaily
entering upon the day into which he dragged himself soiled and
weary. He didn't like going to bed in the spring morning sunshine.
But sometimes he was happy, because of his long walk through
the dewy fields in the first daybreak. He loved the open morning,
the crystal and the space, after a night down pit. He watched
every bird, every stir in the trembling grass, answered the whinney-
ing of the pee-wits and tweeted to the wrens. If he could, he also
would have whinnied and tweeted and whistled, in a native lang-
uage that was not human. He liked non-human things best.
One sunny morning we were all sitting at table when we heard
his heavy slurring walk up the entry. We became uneasy. His
was always a disturbing presence, trammeling. He passed the win-
.
dow darkly, and we heard him go into the scullery and put down his
tin bottle. But directly he came into the kitchen. We felt at once
that he had something to communicate. No one spoke. We
watched his black face for a second.
“Give me a drink,” he said.
My mother hastily poured out his tea. He went to pour it out
into the saucer. But instead of drinking, he suddenly put some-
thing on the table, among the tea-cups. A tiny brown rabbit! A
small rabbit, a mere morsel, sitting against the bread as still as if it
were a made thing.
“A rabbit! A young one! Who gave it you, father?”
But he laughed enigmatically, with a sliding motion of his yel-
low-grey eyes, and went to take off his coat. We pounced on the
rabbit.
"Is it alive? Can you feel its heart beat ?”
My father came back and sat down heavily in his arm-chair. He


270
ADOLF
dragged his saucer to him, and blew his tea, pushing out his red lips
under his black moustache.
"Where did you get it, father?”
"I picked it up,” he said, wiping his naked forearm over his
mouth and beard.
"Where?”
“Is it a wild one?" came my mother's quick voice.
"Yes, it is.”
“Then why did you bring it?” cried my mother.
“Oh, we wanted it,” came our cry.
“Yes, I've no doubt you did—” retorted my mother. But she
was drowned in our clamour of questions.
On the field path, my father had found a dead mother rabbit and
three dead little ones—this one alive, but unmoving.
“But what had killed them, Daddy?"
“I couldn't say, my child. I s'd think she'd eaten something."
"Why did you bring it!” again my mother's voice of condemna-
tion. “You know what it will be.”
My father made no answer, but we were loud in protest.
“He must bring it. It's not big enough to live by itself. It
would die,” we shouted.
“Yes, and it will die now. And then there'll be another outcry.”
My mother set her face against the tragedy of dead pets. Our
hearts sank.
“It won't die, father, will it? Why will it? It won't.”
“I s'd think not,” said my father.
.
“You know well enough it will. Haven't we had it all be-
fore--!” said my mother.
“They dunna always pine,” replied my father testily.
But my mother reminded him of other little wild animals he had
brought, which had sulked and refused to live, and brought storms
of tears and trouble in our house of lunatics.
Trouble fell on us. The little rabbit sat on our lap, unmoving,
its eye wide and dark.
. We brought it milk, warm milk, and held
it to its nose. It sat as still as if it was far away, retreated down
some deep burrow, hidden, oblivious. We wetted its mouth and
whiskers with drops of milk. It gave no sign, did not even shake
off the wet white drops. Somebody began to shed a few secret
tears.


D. H. LAWRENCE
271
“What did I say?" cried my mother. “Take it and put it down
the field.”
Her command was in vain. We were driven to get dressed for
school. There sat the rabbit. It was like a tiny obscure cloud.
Watching it, the emotions died out of our breast. Useless to love
it, to yearn over it. Its little feelings were all ambushed. They
must be circumvented. Love and affection were a trespass upon
it. A little wild thing, it became more mute and asphyxiated still
in its own arrest, when we approached with love. We must not
love it. We must circumvent it, for its own existence.
So I passed the order to my sister and my mother. The rabbit
was not to be spoken to, nor even looked at. Wrapping it in a
piece of flannel, I put it in an obscure corner of the cold parlour,
and put a saucer of milk before its nose. My mother was forbidden
to enter the parlour whilst we were at school.
“As if I should take any notice of your nonsense,” she cried, af-
fronted. Yet I doubt if she ventured into that parlour.
At midday, after school, creeping into the front room, there we
saw the rabbit still and unmoving in the piece of flannel. Strange
grey-brown neutralization of life, still living! It was a sore prob-
lem to us.
“Why won't it drink its milk, mother?” we whispered. Our
father was asleep.
“It prefers to sulk its life away, silly little thing.” A profound
problem. Prefers to sulk its life away! We put young dandelion
leaves to its nose. The sphinx was not more oblivious.
At tea-time, however, it had hopped a few inches, out of its flan-
nel, and there it sat again, uncovered, a little solid cloud of mute-
ness, brown, with unmoving whiskers. Only its side palpitated
slightly with life.
Darkness came, my father set off to work. The rabbit was still
unmoving. Dumb despair was coming over the sisters, a threat of
tears before bed-time. Clouds of my mother's anger gathered, as
she muttered against my father's wantonness.
Once more the rabbit was wrapped in the old pit-singlet. But
now it was carried into the scullery and put under the copper fire-
place, that it might think itself inside a burrow. The saucers were
placed about, four or five, here and there on the floor, so that if the
little creature should chance to hop abroad, it could not fail to come



272
ADOLF
upon some food. After this my mother was allowed to take from
the scullery what she wanted and then she was forbidden to open the
door.
When morning came, and it was light, I went downstairs. Open-
ing the scullery door I heard a slight scuffle. Then I saw dabbles of
milk all over the floor and tiny rabbit-droppings in the saucers.
And there the miscreant, the tips of his ears showing behind a pair
of boots. I peeped at him. He sat bright-eyed and askance,
twitching his nose and looking at me while not looking at me.
He was alive-very much alive. But still we were afraid to
trespass much on his confidence.
“Father!” My father was arrested at the door. “Father, the
rabbit's alive.”
“Back your life it is,” said
life it is,” said my father.
“Mind how you go in.”
By evening, however, the little creature was tame, quite tame.
He was christened Adolf. We were enchanted by him. We
couldn't really love him, because he was wild and loveless to the
end. But he was an unmixed delight.
We decided he was too small to live in a hutch—he must live at
large in the house. My mother protested, but in vain. He was so
tiny. So we had him upstairs, and he dropped his tiny pills on the
bed and we were enchanted.
Adolf made himself instantly at home. He had the run of the
house, and was perfectly happy, with his tunnels and his holes be-
hind the furniture.
We loved him to take meals with us. He would sit on the table
humping his back, sipping his milk, shaking his whiskers and his
tender ears, hopping off and hobbling back to his saucer, with an air
of supreme unconcern. Suddenly he was alert. He hobbled a few
tiny paces, and reared himself up inquisitively at the sugar-basin.
He fluttered his tiny fore-paws, and then reached and laid them on
the edge of the basin, whilst he craned his thin neck and peeped in.
He trembled his whiskers at the sugar, then did his best to lift down
a lump.
“Do you think I will have it! Animals in the sugar pot!” cried
my mother, with a rap of her hand on the table.
Which so delighted the electric Adolf that he Aung his hind-
quarters and knocked over a cup.


D. H. LAWRENCE
273
a
a
“It's your own fault, mother. If you left him alone,”
He continued to take tea with us. He rather liked warm tea.
And he loved sugar. Having nibbled a lump, he would turn to the
butter. There he was shooed off by our parent. He soon learned
to treat her shooing with indifference. Still, she hated him to put
his nose in the food. And he loved to do it. And so one day be-
tween them they overturned the cream-jug. Adolf deluged his
little chest, bounced back in terror, was seized by his little ears by
my mother and bounced down on the hearth-rug. There he shiv-
ered in momentary discomfort, and suddenly set off in a wild flight
to the parlour.
This last was his happy hunting ground. He had cultivated the
bad habit of pensively nibbling certain bits of cloth in the heart-rug.
When chased from this pasture, he would retreat under the sofa.
There he would twinkle in Buddhist meditation until suddenly, no
one knew why, he would go off like an alarum clock. With a sud-
den bumping scuffle he would whirl out of the room, going through
the doorway with his little ears flying. Then we would hear his
thunder-bolt hurtling in the parlour, but before we could follow, the
wild streak of Adolf would flash past us, on an electric wind that
swept him round the scullery and carried him back, a little mad
thing, flying possessed like a ball round the parlour. After which
ebullition he would sit in a corner composed and distant, twitching
his whiskers in abstract meditation. And it was in vain we ques-
tioned him about his outbursts. He just went off like a gun, and
was as calm after it as a gun that smokes placidly.
Alas, he grew up rapidly. It was almost impossible to keep him
from the outer door.
One day, as we were playing by the stile, I saw his brown shadow
loiter across the road and pass into the field that faced the houses.
Instantly a cry of “Adolf!" a cry he knew full well. And instant-
ly a wind swept him away down the sloping meadow, his tail twink-
ling and zig-zagging through the grass. After him we pelted. It
was a strange sight to see him, ears back, his little loins so powerful,
flinging the world behind him. We ran ourselves out of breath,
but could not catch him. Then somebody headed him off, and he
,
sat with sudden unconcern, twitching his nose under a bunch of
nettles.
His wanderings cost him a shock. One Sunday morning my


274
ADOLF
father had just been quarreling with a pedlar, and we were hearing
the aftermath indoors, when there came a sudden unearthly scream
from the yard. We flew out. There sat Adolf cowering under a
bench, whilst a great black and white cat glowered intently at him,
a few yards away. Sight not to be forgotten. Adolf rolling back
his eyes and parting his strange muzzle in another scream, the cat
stretching forward in a slow elongation.
Ha, how we hated that cat! How we pursued him over the cha-
pel wall and across the neighbours' gardens. Adolf was still only
half grown.
“Cats!” said my mother. “Hideous detestable animals, why do
people harbour them!"
But Adolf was becoming too much for her. He dropped too
many pills. And suddenly to hear him clumping downstairs when
she was alone in the house was startling. And to keep him from the
door was impossible. Cats prowled outside. It was worse than
having a child to look after.
Yet we would not have him shut up. He became more lusty,
more callous than ever. He was a strong kicker, and many a
scratch on face and arms did we owe to him. But he brought his
own doom on himself. The lace curtains in the parlour-my moth-
er was rather proud of them-fell on to the floor very full.
full. One of
Adolf's joys was to scuffle wildly through them as though through
some foamy undergrowth. He had already torn rents in them.
One day he entangled himself altogether. He kicked, he whirled
round in a mad nebulous inferno. He screamed-and brought
down the curtain-rod with a smash, right on the best beloved pelar-
gonium, just as my mother rushed in. She extricated him, but she
.
never forgave him. And he never forgave either. . A heartless
wildness had come over him.
Even we understood that he must go. It was decided; after a
long deliberation, that my father should carry him back to the wild-
woods. Once again he was stowed into the great pocket of the pit-
jacket.
“Best pop him i' th’ pot,” said my father, who enjoyed raising the
wind of indignation.
And so, next day, our father said that Adolf, set down on the
edge of the coppice, had hopped away with utmost indifference,
neither elated nor moved. We heard it and believed. But many,
.


D. H. LAWRENCE
i
275
a
a
many were the heart searchings. How would the other rabbits re-
ceive him? Would they smell his tameness, his humanized degrad-
ation, and rend him? My mother pooh-poohed the extravagant
idea.
However, he was gone, and we were rather relieved. My father
kept an eye open for him. He declared that several times, passing
the coppice in the early morning, he had seen Adolf peeping through
the nettlestalks. He had called him, in an odd, high-voiced, cajol-
ing fashion. But Adolf had not responded. Wildness gains so
soon upon its creatures. And they become so contemptuous then
of our tame presence. So it seemed to me. I myself would go to
the edge of the coppice, and call softly. I myself would imagine
bright eyes between the nettle-stalks, flash of a white, scornful tail
past the bracken. That insolent white tail, as Adolf turned his
flank on us! It reminded me always of a certain rude gesture, and
a certain unprintable phrase, which may not even be suggested.
But when naturalists discuss the meaning of the white rabbit's
tail, that rude gesture and still ruder phrase always come to my
mind. Naturalists say that the rabbit shows his white tail in order
.
to guide his young safely after him, as a nurse-maid's flying strings
are the signal to her toddling charges to follow on. How nice and
naïve! I only know that my Adolf wasn't naïve. He used to
whisk his flank at me, push his white feather in my eye, and say
Merde! It's a rude word—but one which Adolf was always seme-
phoring at me, flag-wagging it with all the derision of his narrow
haunches.
That's a rabbit all over-insolence, and the white flag of spiteful
derision. Yes, and he keeps his flag flying to the bitter end, sport-
ing, insolent little devil that he is. See him running for his life.
Oh, how his soul is fanned to an ecstasy of fright, a fugitive whirl-
wind of panic. Gone mad, he throws the world behind him, with
astonishing hind legs. He puts back his head and lays his ears on
his sides and rolls the white of his eyes in sheer ecstatic agony of
speed. He knows the awful approach behind him: bullet or stoat.
He knows! He knows, his eyes are turned back almost into his
head.
It is agony. But it is also ecstasy. Ecstasy! See the in-
solent white flag bobbing. He whirls on the magic wind of terror.
.
All his pent-up soul rushes into agonized electric emotion of fear.
He flings himself on, like a falling star swooping into extinction,
a


276
ADOLF
:
suer.
White heat of the agony of fear. And at the same time, bob! bob!
bob!
goes
the white tail, merde! merde! merde! it says to the pur-
The rabbit can't help it. In his utmost extremity he still
flings the insult at the pursuer. He is the inconquerable fugitive,
the indomitible meek. No wonder the stoat becomes vindictive
Ant if he escapes, this precious rabbit! Don't you see him sit-
ting there, in his earthly nook, a little ball of silence and rabbit-tri-
umph? Don't you see the glint on his black eye? Don't you see,
in his very immobility, how the whole world is merde to him? No
conceit like the conceit of the meek. And if the avenging angel in
the shape of the ghostly ferret steals down on him, there comes a
shriek of terror out of that little hump of self-satisfaction sitting
motionless in a corner. Falls the fugitive. But even fallen, his
white feather floats. Even in death it seems to say: "I am the
meek, I am the righteous, I am the rabbit. All you rest, you are
evil-doers, and you shall be bien emmerdé.”'


POEMES
1
PAR GUY-CHARLES CROS
NOCTURNE
Ce soir la lune se baigne
indolemment dans son halo
comme une femme qui règne
nue, dans les rides de l'eau.
Aux chants liquides des crapauds
le vent mèle son soliloque;
une enfant trop tendre sanglote
le front blotti dans ses rideaux
Mais son bien-aimé qui se moque
des nostalgies mélancoliques
se promène en fumant sa pipe
et se dit qu'il pleuvra tantôt.
VILLONESQUE
Tous ceux qui parlaient tant et tant
exposant, tranchant, pérorant,
durs gosiers, briseurs de tympans,
prêtres, avocats, députés,
causeurs de salons, de cafés,
diseurs de rien, bavards fieffés,
la mort leur a fermé la bouche
et l'on entend voler les mouches
sur les tertres où sont couchés
-De même en sera pour nous tous.
1
.


278
POEMES
Aussi, ces dames d'autrefois,
dévotes, maîtresses de rois,
ambitieuses sans foi ni loi,
diplomates en cotillons,
grandes dames en Cendrillons
si fort toujours en action,
que la mort nous les fait muettes
silencieuses et discretes!
Tout s'est tu, jusqu'aux oraisons
-Ainsi de vous toutes, pauvrettes.
Or, vous, feminines ardeurs,
et vous, tribuns et orateurs,
intrigantes ou discoureurs,
n'epargnez ni travaux ni veilles !
Le temps bataille contre vous,
si tôt il vous met à genoux,
Demain vous serez vieux et vieilles,
à tous est échu sort pareil;
mais aurez marché jusqu'au bout
De vos sentiers ou de vos routes,
serez restés folles et fous
Ainsi soit-il de tous et toutes.
.






FATHER AND SON.
BY ROCKWELL KENT.



MODERN FORMS
This department of The Dial is devoted to exposition
and consideration of the less traditional types of art.
THE DEMOCRATIZED ARTS
BY HENRY McBRIDE
IN
N browsing through the "Laws” that Jowett insists were really
written by the great Plato, I chanced upon one of those pas-
sages, frequent enough in the writings of the ancients, in which the
question which has become almost the whole question to contem-
porary young artists, pops up.
In the second book, an Athenian Stranger, who is discoursing
upon music, prohibition, and politics, chances to say:
"In all things which have an accompanying charm, either this
very charm is the chief part of their good, or, secondly, there is some
truth, or, thirdly, profit in them; for example, I should say that
there is a charm which accompanies eating and drinking, and the
use of food in general, and this we call pleasure; but that which
we term the rightness and utility of the things served up to us, or
more precisely their healthful quality, is also their highest recti-
tude.”
There are certain belligerent moderns of my acquaintance who
would bristle sufficiently at the theory that bodily health is the high-
est rectitude, but the individual to whom the remark was addressed
merely replied with true Platonian docility, “Very true”; and the
Athenian Stranger went on, with calm placidity, to tear his own
argument to tatters, at least for moderns, by giving it away, in the
application of his analogy to the laws of music, that art to him
meant "imitation,” and nothing more.
“And yet the poets go on and make still further havoc by separ-


280
THE DEMOCRATIZED ARTS
3
9 )
ating the rhythm and the figure of the dance from the melody, set-
ting words to metre without music, and also separating the melody
and rhythm from the words, using the lyre or the flute alone. For
when there are no words, it is very difficult to recognize the mean-
ing of the harmony and rhythm, or to see that any worthy object
is imitated by them. And we must acknowledge that all this sort
of thing, which aims only at swiftness and smoothness and a brut-
ish noise, and uses the fute and the lyre not as the mere accom-
paniments of the dance and song, is exceedingly rude and coarse.”
Linh
Compare this with “B. V.” Thompson's unsurprising and un-
contestedly modern remark upon Shelley: "So subtly sweet and
rich are the tones, so wonderfully are developed the perfect ca-
dences, that the meaning of the words of the singing is lost and dis-
solved in the overwhelming rapture of the impression,” and the
amount of water that has rolled beneath the bridges since Plato's
day, or rather since the Athenian Stranger's day, may be easily
gauged.
But one fact at least may be gleaned from the pseudo-Platonian
“Laws,” that Music got there first. Poetry may have been a close
second, but it was not until the present that art became free. Our
rather dull Athenian acquaintance remarks that "Music is more
celebrated than any other kind of imitation and therefore requires
the greatest care of them all”; an idea that passed current with the
fashionable for several thousand years, and, in fact, until about
twenty years ago. I heard it when first released from school, upon
venturing into the studios. It was a musician who said it, of
He wheeled about upon his piano-stool, and with the
double-assurance that comes from the knowledge that what one
says is not original, opined that “Music was the greatest of all arts
because it was the least tangible.” I was vaguely troubled, feel-
ing instinctively that there was something wrong with the assertion,
yet was unable to find an answer to it. At present one doesn't
have to answer it. , Modern painting, thanks to Cézanne, Seurat,
Picasso, Matisse, has become as intangible as any musician could
wish, and the democracy of the arts, now that the great war is over,
matches not insignificantly with the times we live in.
The Athenian Stranger's cry that modern art is “exceedingly
rude and coarse” is less echoed now than it was. Undoubtedly it
a
course.


HENRY MCBRIDE
281
>
was accused of roughness. It was thought vulgar merely because
it was a change. Human beings are more afraid of being convicted
of vulgarity than of sin, and exclaim “shocking” chiefly to distract
attention from themselves. The fear of fears is lest one see oneself
in the mirrors that these artists are always holding up to nature.
But that danger is over when the mirror is broken—that is to say
—when the artist dies. The sternest disciplinarian views the gay
doings of the court of Charles II with amused tolerance, and clergy-
men no longer passionately impeach Walt Whitman. Now that
the influence of “Camille” has lapsed from our stage, one is almost
tempted to remould the closing lines of that moving piece into a
generality more suited to contemporary needs; such as, "immoral-
ity is anything that has been insufficiently studied.”
The familiarity with the new pictures obliged by the practice of
my profession, soon robbed these productions of their terrors for
me, and now I see in the mistiest of them what I used to see in th
concrete classics—the aspirations of their makers. Lovable per-
sonalities make themselves felt in the new forms as in the old and
nobility is de trop in neither abstract painting nor vers libre. Im-
morality is there, as in the classics, neither more nor less, but since
it is not the whole of man, there is no occasion to make it the whole
of the argument. It is true that extremely young writers take an
unholy joy in trying to shock, but without genius they cannot upset
the bourgeois, so why should we worry over them? As I said be-
fore, it is not wickedness that alarms so much as the note of change.
We have the police to protect us from malefactors, but who can
safeguard us from an insidious idea? Felicien Rops, with his out-
and-out indencency, never kicked up half the row that good Mr
Percy Bysshe Shelley did; though Felicien Rops, to be sure, was
a very great artist, too, particularly now that he is safely dead.
(I see myself approaching nearer and nearer to the essay on Art
and Morals, which seems to be expected of every one, at least in
America, who lives long enough. If I am forced into it, I mean to
be as long and as deadly as Tolstoi was on the subject, so beware,
gentle reader.) So those who hope and fear for modern art need
not worry over its salaciousness. Its difficulty does not lie there
so much as in the fact that in limiting its forces exclusively to what
the Athenian Stranger calls “pleasure,” it limits its audience, for
who feel this pleasure except those who read the techniques of the


282
THE DEMOCRATIZED ARTS
arts, and who read the techniques of the arts but those who prac-
tise them? Heaven knows, those who practise the arts are compar-
atively few, especially in these states of America.
However, what artists ever think of their audiences? Why
should they think of them, when the Wordsworth who now seems
as English as an English hedge-row had “to create the taste by
which he finally was appreciated ?”
Before parting for ever with the Athenian Stranger, it is only
just, since I have disagreed with him so completely, to admit that
on one point, the drink question, I am still heartily in accord with
him. He would regulate the use of wine "which has
lences” but not abolish it. His regulations, contrasted with our
modern ones, indeed seem highly sensible. He says:
many excel-
“I would go farther than the Cretans and Lacedaemonians, and
am disposed rather to the law of the Carthaginians, that no one
while he is on a campaign should be allowed to taste wine at all;
but I would say that he should drink water during all that time,
and that in the city no slave, male or female, should ever drink
wine; and that no rulers should drink wine during their year of
office, nor pilots of vessels, nor judges while on duty should taste
wine at all; nor any one who is going to hold a consultation about
any matter of importance, nor in the day time at all, unless in con-
sequence of exercise, or as medicine; nor again at night, when any
one, either man or woman, is minded to get children. There are
numberless other cases also in which those who have good sense and
good laws ought not to drink wine, so that if what I say is true, no
city will need many vineyards.”


I
។
:



MTV
EZRA POUND. BY WYNDHAM LEWIS


H. S. MAUBERLY
BY EZRA POUND
ODE POUR L'ELECTION DE SON SEPULCHRE
For three years, out of key with his time,
He strove to resuscitate the dead art
Of poetry; to maintain the sublime”
In the old sense. Wrong from the start-
a
No, hardly, but, seeing he had been born
In a half savage country, out of date;
Bent resolutely on wringing lilies from the acorn;
Capaneus; trout for factitious bait;
>
*Ιδμεν γαρ τοι πάνθ' όσ' ένι Τροίη
Caught in the unstopped ear;
Giving the rocks small lee-way
The chopped seas held him, therefore, that year.
His true Penelope was Flaubert,
He fished by obstinate isles;
Observed the elegance of Circe's hair
Rather than the mottoes on sun-dials.
Unaffected by “the march of events,"
He passed from men's memory in lan trentiesme
De son eage; the case presents
No adjunct to the Muses' diadem.


284
H. S. MAUBERLY
II
The age demanded an image
Of its accelerated grimace,
Something for the modern stage,
Not, at any rate, an Attic grace;
Not, not certainly, the obscure reveries
Of the inward gaze;
Better mendacities
Than the classics in paraphrase!
The "age demanded” chiefly a mould in plaster,
Made with no loss of time,
A prose kinema, not, not assuredly, alabaster
Or the "sculpture” of rhyme.
III
The tea-rose, tea-gown, etc.
Supplants the mousseline of Cos,
The pianola "replaces”
Sappho's barbitos.
Christ follows Dionysus,
Phallic and ambrosial
Made way for macerations;
Caliban casts out Ariel.
All things are a flowing,
Sage Heracleitus says;
But a tawdry cheapness
Shall reign throughout our days.


EZRA POUND
285
Even the Christian beauty
Defects-after Samothrace;
We see το καλόν
Decreed in the market place.
Faun's flesh is not to us,
Nor the saint's vision.
We have the press for wafer;
Franchise for circumcision.
All men, in law, are equals.
Free of Peisistratus,
We choose a knave or an eunuch
To rule over us.
A bright Apollo,
τίν’ άνδρα, τίν' ήρωα, τίνα θεόν,
What god, man, or hero
Shall I place a tin wreath upon?
IV
These fought, in any case,
and some believing, pro domo, in any case ...
Some quick to arm,
some for adventure,
some from fear of weakness,
some from fear of censure,
some for love of slaughter, in imagination,
learning later
.
some in fear, learning love of slaughter;
Died some pro patria, non dulce non et decor”,


286
H. S. MAUBERLY
walked eye-deep in hell
believing in old men's lies, then unbelieving
came home, home to a lie,
home to many deceits,
home to old lies and new infamy;
usury age-old and age-thick
and liars in public places.
Daring as never before, wastage as never before.
Young blood and high blood,
Fair cheeks, and fine bodies;
fortitude as never before
frankness as never before,
disillusions as never told in the old days,
hysterias, trench confessions,
laughter out of dead bellies.
V
There died a myriad,
And of the best, among them,
For an old bitch gone in the teeth,
For a botched civilization.
Charm, smiling at the good mouth,
Quick eyes gone under earth's lid,
For two gross of broken statues,
For a few thousand battered books.
a


EZRA POUND
287
YEUX GLAUQUES
Gladstone was still respected,
When John Ruskin produced
“Kings Treasuries”; Swinburne
And Rossetti still abused.
Foetid Buchanan lifted
up
his voice
When that faun's head of hers
Became a pastime for
Painters and adulterers.
The Burne-Jones cartoons
Have preserved her eyes;
Still, at the Tate, they teach
Cophetua to rhapsodize;
Thin like brook-water,
With a vacant gaze.
The English Rubaiyat was still-born
In those days.
The thin, clear gaze, the same
Still darts out faun-like from the half-ruin'd face,
Questing and passive
“Ah, poor Jenny's case.”
.
Bewildered that a world
a
Shows no surprise
At her last maquero's
Adulteries.


FEUILLES DE TEMPERATURE
PAR PAUL MORAND
NICE
A VENDRE
les pagodes et les forteresses et les villas khédivales 1866.
Les lévriers russes pleurent leurs princesses
sans collier,
à la fourrière.
Les magnats hongrois pendeurs de chats font les ménages.
Adieu, chefs mexicans précinématographiques,
qu'une seule diligence enrichissait assez,
vjeux singes chéris bagués de filigrane,
comtes polonais dont le lit, au crépuscule, n'est pas fait,
adieu, vieux enfants anglais
dribbant leur ombre jusqu'au déjeuner
sous l'agitation stupide des hirondelles.
Victoire, victoire !
au bord des vagues de taffetas,
les sanatoriums font faillite,
PERSONNE NE MEURT PLUS.
Ces grands nécrophores de la guerre
font mettre de la fine Napoléon dans leur potage,
Salmis de bécasse en platine;
Dix mille lustres,
Lunch, Lynch.
Qui aurait cru à tant de zibelines
dans les stocks américains ?
L'azur P. L. M. a un goût d'aloès.


1
FEVER CHART
1
BY PAUL MORAND
NICE
1
!
For sale
the pagodas and fortresses and Khedival villas 1866.
The Russian wolfhounds mourn their princesses
collarless
in the pound
Those Hungarian magnates, stringers up of cats, are setting up
housekeeping
Farewell, precinematographic Mexican chieftains
whom one sole diligence used to enrich sufficiently,
old, dear monkeys basted with filigree,
Polish counts whose beds, at dusk, have not been made.
Farewell elderly British children
their shadows right up to lunch-time
under the stupid perturbation of the swallows.
Victory, victory!
beside waves of taffeta
the Sanitariums go bankrupt,
NOBODY DIES ANY MORE.
Those big necrophores of the war
have minced Napoleon put in their soup,
Salmis of woodcock on platinum,
Ten thousand chandeliers.
Lunch, Lynch.
Who could have believed there were so many sables
in the American stocks?
The Paris-Lyon-Mediterannée azure has a flavour of aloes.



290
FEVER CHART
ECHANTILLON
J'ai des émeutes plein les doigts,
des idées plein mon chapeau melon,
des gémissements plein mon mouchoir.
Les gens qui s'épanchent me gâtent le malheur.
On chercherait en vain deux heures de fou rire
dans la Bibliothèque des Grands Ecrivains.
L'optimisme est une boisson hygiénique
de Boston, inventée par Emerson.
Humide et méchant crocodile,
J.-J.-Rousseau souille l'eau d'Evian.
Un couple fait l'acquisition
d'un tube de pâte à reproduire
mais rien ne calme son tourment.
Sur les pavés
où déjà s'établit une lune ovoïde,
un ciel Magenta demeure décalqué
parmi les tuyaux articulés et les fleurs en celluloïd.
Pour moi,
je poursuis mon petit bonhomme de chemin de croix.


PAUL MORAND
291
SAMPLE
My fingers are full of riots,
My bowler hat full of ideas,
My handkerchief is full of groans.
The people who pour out their hearts are spoiling unhappiness
for me.
One would hunt in vain for two hours' mad laughter
in the Collection of Famous Authors.
Optimism is an hygienic beverage
from Boston, invented by Emerson.
Moist and wilful crocodile
J. J. Rousseau muddies the Evian water.
A couple make the acquisition
of a tube paste for reproduction
but nothing quiets their torment.
On the
pavement
where an ovoid moon is already established,
a Magenta sky lies counterdrawn
among the jointed stalks and celluloid flowers.
S.
As for me
I
pursue my charming little road to the cross.


重
​



12
orx
CANDLE LIGHT. BY RICHARD BOIX






forme
pamun
மை
12
1301X
DROUGHT.
BY RICHARD BOIX






1301X
PORTRAIT. BY RICHARD BOIX






BOOK REVIEWS
AN AMERICAN MORALITY
The ORDEAL OF Mark Twain. By Van Wyck Brooks.
12mo. 267 pages. E. P. Dutton and Company. New
York.
THI
THE official biography is one of the legacies of the nine-
teenth century. In that Arcadian period it was the
right of every biographee to have his course of life presented in
two or three volumes in strict accord with the theory upon which
his success was based—a right as inalienable as that to a portrait
by Watts, a statue by Woolner, or an epitaph by the poet laureate.
It is not surprising to find that right challenged by the succeed-
ing generation. Sheer impatience with eulogy would have ac-
complished the result, revolt against overdone complacency, dis-
gust at the repetition of Aristides the Just. Moreover, the scien-
tific mind can no longer be restrained from penetrating the sacred
precincts of what used to be called private life. And finally the
need of creating a past serviceable in terms of the present is in
part accountable for the reappraisement. Of the first tendency Mr
Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians may be taken as a shin-
ing example; of the second, Professor Harper's Life of Words-
worth; and of the third no better instance can be found than Mr
Van Wyck Brooks' The Ordeal of Mark Twain.
With Walt Whitman, Mark Twain shares the distinction of
being the greatest figure in American letters in the half century
following the Civil War. And his motif, blared forth by the
brazen horns of fame, was heard by millions, to the hundreds
who listened to the persistent theme of his rival. Both Twain
and Whitman were recognized as distinctly American, no longer
Colonial English, voices; but while Whitman remained half for-
gotten at Camden, Mark Twain went up and down the great
white ways of the world, from Fifth Avenue to Ringstrasse, ban-
queted by kings and emperors in recognition of triumphant dem-


294
AN AMERICAN MORALITY
ocracy, and greeted everywhere by vast audiences and roaring
seas of applause. No literary man except Dickens has ever gath-
ered in any comparable manner the rewards of success in his call-
ing, and Mark Twain surpassed Dickens in so far as his world
was larger and more cosmopolitan. He deserved the title which
he was fond of appropriating-ambassador at large of the United
States. As a public character, an American granted the freedoin.
of the world, he deserves his full length monumental biography
erected in four volumes of life and letters by Albert Bigelow
Paine, as well as the intimate portrait bust by W. D. Howells.
No one will grudge him these mortuary masterpieces, certainly
not Van Wyck Brooks. But Mr Brooks insists on adding a
third. Mr Paine has presented Mark Twain as a national hero
-Our Mark Twain. Mr Howells has left his own peculiar
friendly appreciation-My Mark Twain. Mr Brooks has drawn
him from a third point of view—Mark Twain's Mark Twain.
He has done it with no less piety than his predecessors. Indeed,
he may maintain that he is fulfilling Mark Twain's own auto-
biographical intention in revealing to the world what he really
Furthermore, he is animated by a distinct missionary in-
terest in his own generation in presenting the interior view of the
much whited sepulchre. America has suffered often from tak-
ing too literally the official biographies of its post bellum heroes,
from Garfield to Roosevelt. Now in the interest of art and life
it is well to peruse the truth, which is, frankly, that Mark Twain
was false to both—an artist who sold his birthright for a mess
of pottage, a prophet who remained at ease under his gourd tree,
too cowardly to deliver his message "Yet forty days and Nineveh
shall be destroyed.” Here is Mr Brooks' thesis:
was.
"It is as old as Milton that there are talents which are death to
hide,' and I suggest that Mark Twain's talent was just so hidden.
That bitterness of his was the effect of a certain miscarriage in his
creative life, a balked personality, an arrested development of
which he was himself almost wholly unaware, but which for
him destroyed the meaning of life. The spirit of the artist
in him, like the genie at last released from the bottle, over-
spread in a gloomy vapour the mind it had never quite been
able to possess.


ROBERT MORSS LOVETT
295
Mr Brooks builds up his case with extraordinary skill. He
shows Mark Twain steadily a victim of circumstances, his life
a chapter of accidents, his will always subject to external control.
Born into squalid poverty he was forced by his father's death
to assume early financial and, more important, moral responsibil-
ities. His promise to his mother to be and make good, in her
sense of the word, was, in Mr Brooks' opinion, the beginning of
his dereliction from truth to himself. From this time forth “his
will is definitely enlisted on the side opposed to his essential in-
stinct.” The immediate effect, however, of his father's death
was to thrust him into the printer's trade whereby he earned
money to pay the premium for his education in the difficult art
of piloting on the Mississippi. This, Mr Brooks thinks, was the
happiest, most fulfilling achievement of Mark Twain's life, the
mastery of “a career that called supremely for self-reliance, in-
dependence, initiative, judgment, skill”; and he apparently finds
in this success a reason for believing that Mark Twain might
have brought these same qualities to bear in other fields into which
fate speedily threw him. For the Civil War put an end to river
traffic. A brief episode as Confederate soldier, and he was on
his way to the Nevada gold fields. Failure in prospecting re-
duced him to quartz-crushing. Weary of this he found relief in
writing for the Virginia City Enterprise. Successful jesting took
him to San Francisco. The Jumping Frog, which he wrote to
please Artemus Ward, carried him to New York. Lowell's opin-
ion that it was "the finest piece of humorous writing yet produced
in America” led him to continue to work the same vein; and
Anson Burlingame's advice to "seek companionship among men of
superior intellect and character” caused him to join himself to the
pious pilgrims who became The Innocents Abroad. Henry Ward
Beecher told him how to make a contract for his book which made
him the best paid writer in America except Horace Greeley. His
success brought him the daughter of a rich coal dealer of Elmira
as wife, and W. D. Howells, editor of the Atlantic Monthly, as
critic and friend. Together they "combed him all to hell” as
Huck Finn would say. “She edited everything I wrote. And
what is more-she not only edited my works—she edited me!”
The Elmira standard of respectability was high, and if Mark
Twain could not always meet it in his writing, he achieved it



296
AN AMERICAN MORALITY
nobly in his social, religious, and pecuniary life. Mr Howells
introduced him to select literary society in Cambridge and Boston;
the Reverend Joseph Twitchell became his spiritual director at
Hartford; his books brought increasing royalties, and General
Grant made him his literary broker. When his publishing firm
failed, H. H. Rogers took his financial rehabilitation in hand.
In short, Mark Twain was subjected to every best influence that
America recognizes, in home, school, church, and business—a pious
mother, a devoted wife, a sympathetic pastor, the Atlantic
Monthly, and Standard Oil. And by Mr Brooks' thesis, they
all were temptations, among which Mark Twain wandered like
Everyman-or devils who fought for his soul and won it.
It is uncomfortable to think of Jane Clemens, Henry Ward
Beecher, the Reverend Joseph Twitchell as temptations, and still
harder to think of Mr Howells and “that heavenly whiteness,”
Olivia Clemens, as devils, yet Mr Brooks leaves us no choice. He
deduces their baleful character from the background which he
establishes in his earlier chapters—the background of American
life in the half century following the Civil War. It was a society
based on the great experience of America, that of pioneering. Mr
Brooks quotes as his fundamental position the statement of Mr
Herbert Croly in The Promise of American Life.
“In such a society a man who persisted in one job, and who
applied the most vigorous and exacting standards to his work
was out of place and really inefficient. ... It is no wonder,
consequently, that the pioneer democracy viewed with distrust
and aversion the man with a special vocation and high standards
of achievement. Such a man did insist upon being in certain
respects better than the average; and under the prevalent eco-
nomic and social conditions he did impair the consistency of feel-
ing upon which the pioneer rightly placed such a high value.”
This generalization supplies the explanation for Mark Twain's
failure as an artist on the negative side. For the positive im-
pulse which led him to put material success above spiritual gain
Mr Brooks refers us to the “truly religious character of American
business.”


ROBERT MORSS LOVETT
297
“Industry and foresight, devoted to the pursuit of wealth-
here we have at once the end and the means of the simple, uni-
versal morality of the Gilded Age.
Private enterprise
became for the pioneer a sort of obligation to the society of the
future; some instinct told him, to the steady welfare of his self-
respect, that in serving himself well he was also serving America.
To the pioneer, in short, private and public interests were identi-
cal, and the worship of success was actually a social cult.”
"
It was this spirit uttering itself through the voices that Mark
Twain trusted, which betrayed him. Even New England could
not save him—New England which with the drain of its virile
life into the West "had passed into the condition of a neurotic
anaemia in which it has remained so largely to this day.”
That Mark Twain was the victim of this environment no one
will deny. That he acquiesced consciously and bitterly in his
degradation it will be equally agreed. He recognized the taboo
to which he submitted. “In our country," he says, “we have
those three unspeakably precious things; freedom of thought,
freedom of speech, and the prudence never to practice either.”
But instead of a protest against it, he offered merely an illustra-
tion of it. At the height of his fame came the criminal Spanish
War, but except in private he was silent. He was equally reticent
over the cruel and treacherous conquest of the Filipinos. In the
generosity of his newly found warmth of English cousinship he
upheld even the Boer War. It may be said that he had no weap-
ons in his arsenal to fit these occasions, such as Bernard Shaw
found for the Denshawi atrocity or Zola for the Dreyfus affair.
But when a brother man of letters, a guest of his country, an
ambassador of a cause which he held sacred, was made the victim
of a brutal and hypocritical assault by the American press—when
mere good nature, to say nothing of humour, would have met
the situation with some success, he blenched. Mark Twain's
abandonment of Maxim Gorky is one of the great refusals of his
life, and the least pardonable.
It was his conviction of sin both by omission and commission
that, in Mr Brooks' theory, bore fruit in the pessimism which
grew upon him with the years, which found occasional expression
in bits of satire such as The Man that corrupted Hadleyburg


298
AN AMERICAN MORALITY
and The Mysterious Stranger, and which provoked him to plan
vast mysterious confessions and satires in which the worst of "the
damned human race" should once for all be spoken. It was the
repression of his higher and truer instincts which resulted in his
humour. That his fun-making was for the most part trivial and
unworthy is obvious. At its best, it evaded present realities and
was content to occupy itself with the remote incongruities of
King Arthur's court or with the escapades of boy life. At its
worst, it provided the protective colouring for the pioneer spirit
and the religion of business. It flattered a country without art,
letters, beauty, or standards, into laughing at these things.
“To degrade beauty, to 'debase distinction and thus to sim-
plify the life of the man with an eye single to the main chance-
that one would almost say, is the general tendency of Mark
Twain's humour.”
was.
It is part of Mr Brooks' thesis that in Mark Twain the world
has lost one of its great satirists—that if he could have maintained
his integrity and self-mastery, if he could have brought to bear
upon his literary career the energy, independence, judgement which
he had developed as a river pilot the age would have had the
Rabelais, Cervantes, or Swift which it so sorely needed, and which
Mark Twain's admirers are never weary of assuring us that he
This conclusion does not altogether follow from the prem-
ises. Certain qualities of the satirist Mark Twain had, but they
were of the heart rather than the head. He had the saeva in-
dignatio in full measure, but of the penetrating vision, the under-
standing mind, he shows little trace. Such essays as he made
seem clumsy and crude enough. Compare The Man that Cor-
rupted Hadleyburg with The Modest Proposal and the point is
clear. It is as fair to argue that Mark Twain should have fol-
lowed in the footsteps of Jeremiah as in those of Swift.
No, the great truth of Mr Brooks' analysis lies elsewhere.
Mark Twain was not only the victim of America, he was Am-
erica. As one follows his ordeal, one is constantly forced to say,
“There but for the grace of God (or in spite of it) go I.” Exter-
nally there is his nervous violence, finding vent in profanity;
there is his proneness to excess whether in cigars or billiards; there



ROBERT MORSS LOVETT
299
is the oscillation between comfort and display which made him
wear slippers in the theatre and his Oxford gown at home; there
is his reaction from the sermons of Dr Twitchell to the skepticism
of Bob Ingersoll, and from the "heavenly whiteness” of Olivia
Clemens to the Memoirs of Casanova; there is his genius for good
fellowship that condoned Uncle Joe Cannon, worshipped Saint
Andrew Carnegie, and placed H. H. Rogers on a pinnacle of friend-
ship; there is the mixture of impudence and cringing toward those
whom he too readily accepted as superiors, the New England
,
Brahmins and the English; there is his subservience to W. D.
Howells and his utter contempt for art; there is the revolutionary
inheritance that makes him (temporarily) a Mugwump; there
is his sympathy with oppressed peoples coupled with the feeling
of courtesy to the oppressor, the conscientious objection to un-
necessary bloodshed united with a sense of wholesome decorum
befitting the citizen of a country at war; there is the business zest
of Get-Rich-Quick-Wallingford and his dupes combined, and the
aplomb that can be tested perfectly only by bankruptcy; there is
the fullest enjoyment of the comforts of civilization enriched by
the cynical wish that "it was in hell where it belongs.” All these
things Mr Brooks brings out in his study—an immense number of
little blocks delicately chiselled out of Mr Paine's biography and
letters and fitted neatly together for a purpose which has already
been indicated. But after all, one's final pleasure is in scrambling
the blocks together anyway and seeing how inevitably they fall
into the same pattern. Mr Brooks has related the Ordeal of Mark
Twain. He has also written a morality which might be called
.
Every American.
ROBERT Morss LOVETT



FOLK SEERS
VisionS AND BELIEFS IN THE West of IRELAND. Col.
lected and arranged by Lady Gregory. With two essays
and notes by W. B. Yeats. 2 Volumes. 8vo. 636 pages.
G. P. Putnam's Sons. New York.
MR
R YEATS contributes a concluding essay to each of the
volumes of Visions and Beliefs in the West of Ireland—an
essay on Witches, Wizards, and Irish Folk Lore, and an essay on
Swedenborg, Mediums, and the Desolate Places. In these the poet
relates to the ideas of the great seers, and to philosophic systems
established or in the making, the fancies, the beliefs, and the folk-
lore that Lady Gregory has collected. It is well to read the essays
for they are learned and enlightening, but it is well, too, to read
them without reference to the visions and beliefs that make up this
collection.
One should read these for their atmosphere, their picture, their
phrase—“She told me she slept in Ballylee mill last night, and that
there was a cure for all things between the two wheels there.'
That is something that adds to our own stock of imaginative be-
lief. Not everything in these volumes is imaginative or pictur-
esque. Much is prosaic, for Lady Gregory's records are of the
every-day experience of the people around her.
The collector assures us that leisure is an essential for those who
would go in quest of folk-lore. And leisure also is to be recom-
mended to those who would read these volumes with understand-
ing. They are volumes to be visited as we would visit a cottage,
taking a place at the hearth. Lady Gregory, of course, goes over
a ground that has been gone over, to some extent, before. Lady
Wilde was there and brought back her too literary but quite charm-
ing Legends of Ireland. Dr Douglas Hyde brought back from
around the same ground his splendidly dramatic Legends of Irish
Saints and Sinners (in The Every Irishman Library, published by
Stokes), and an American, Mr Wentz, has studied the visions and
beliefs of all the Celtic peoples and has systematized them in his
The Fairy Faith of Celtic Countries. Lady Gregory's method is



PADRAIC COLUM
301
unique, and, as I think, particularly apposite: she writes as of
one neighbour writing of another; she gives, not only the peoples'
thought, but something very close to the peoples' speech. Hers is
a report, and something more than a report—it is a report that car-
ries with it the smell of the peat and the gleam of the candle.
One of the things that go to make these visions and beliefs de-
lightful is the gentleness of all of them. Here there is no fierceness
and no fanaticism. It is true that the man or woman or child sus-
pected of being a fairy changeling is treated badly. But there is no
persecution—none of that frenzy about witchcraft that disgraced
all the Puritanical and some of the Catholic countries at one time
or another. It is worth noting that there is no word for witch in
Irish, and that the only word that carries any evil significance when
applied to the doings of old women is derived, as Dr Hyde has
pointed out, from the Scots Gaelic, which, in turn, took its word
for witchcraft from the Lowland Scots. The fairy faith as shown
by Lady Gregory and other collectors of Irish lore has seldom a
harsh or an ungracious side.
The Fairies presented in these records are not the diminutive
beings of English tradition or the trolls of Teutonic or Norse
mythology. They are as great as human beings and they show
traits of the heroic spirit. In what way are they related to the
Tuatha De Danaans of Celtic mythology? Like the De Danaans
they are the inhabitants of Tir-nan-oge, the Land of Youth, and
they are associated too with the raths and lisses—the green forts
and mounds that are all over the country. But they are not de-
fined in the traditions that Lady Gregory has recorded as the De
Danaans were defined in the cycles of romance. No longer are
there personalities amongst the beings of Faery as there were in the
old days when Lugh, and Mananaun, and Angus represented de-
finite conceptions. In this connection it is worth while remember-
.
ing a suggestion that T. W. Rolleston made in his Myths of the
Celtic Race: it is that the gods of the Celts were defined only in
the lore of the Druids, and that for the people they remained the
undefined nature powers—the spirits of woods, and plains, and
mountains. The Druids made them the representatives of the arts
and sciences, but while the druidic conception has faded the popu-
lar conception remained and remains in the visions and beliefs of
to-day.


302
FOLK SEERS
Lady Gregory suggests that if, by an impossible miracle, every
trace and memory of Christanity could be swept out of the world
“it would not shake nor destroy at all the belief of the people of
Ireland in the invisible world, the cloud of witnesses, in the immor-
tality of the life to come.” Unlike our belief in immortality and
the invisible world theirs colours the whole of their outlook and
has concern with the growth of the crop and the milk of the cow.
To read these volumes is to be transported back to the imaginative
life such as is in the Mabinogion and the Lays of Marie de France.
That Faery world in which such wonderous adventures befell the
heroes and heroines of the early Welsh and Breton romance is all
around us as we read these writings about Lady Gregory's neigh-
bours.
Here is the reminiscence of one who saw one of the Sidhe.
a
us.
“Yes, the Sidhe sing, and they have pipers among them, a bag
on each side and a pipe to the mouth. I think I never told you
of
one I saw. I was passing a field near Kiltartan one time when I was
a girl, where there was a little lisheen, and a field of wheat and when
I was passing I heard a piper beginning to play, and I couldn't but
begin to dance, it was such a good tune; and there was a boy stand-
ing there, and he began to dance too. And then my father came
by, and he asked me why were we dancing, and no one playing for
And I said there was, and I began to search through the wheat
for the piper, but I couldn't find him, and I heard a voice saying,
You'll see me yet, and it will be in a town.' Well, one Christmas
eve I was in Gort and my husband with me, and that night at Gort
I heard the same tune beginning again—the grandest I ever heard
-and I couldn't but begin to dance. And Glynn the chair-maker
heard it too, and he began to dance with me in the street, and my
man thought I had gone mad, and the people gathered round us,
for they could see or hear nothing. But I saw the piper well, and
he had plaid clothes, blue and white, and he said, 'Didn't I tell you
that when I saw you again it would be in a town.'
9 )
How charming that episode would be in one of the stories that
are at the beginning of European literature-Welsh or Breton, or
the still earlier Irish.
PADRAIC COLUM


THE NEW FRONTIER
12mo.
314
The New FRONTIER. By Guy Emerson.
pages. Henry Holt and Company. New York.
MR
it says.
a
R EMERSON has written a book which is extremely in-
teresting from several angles. It is interesting first in what
But it is also interesting in the simple fact that it has been
written at all, and interesting in the fact that Mr Guy Emerson
is the author.
From the present reviewer's standpoint the last two facts demand
the fullest treatment. To go over one by one the points as Mr
Emerson makes them would be to spoil the real treat in store for
his readers. The New Frontier is a fascinating book; there is
"something doing” after every period right down to the last.
Some indication, however, must be given as to the contents, if only
to let the reader know that Mr Emerson has not written a detective
story, but a new treatment of an old theme which, if it perhaps be-
longs in the field of the dismal sciences, is important for all that,
and in Mr Emerson's handling, entrancing. It will be sufficient
to say that he is occupied with the old question, "What is
America?” and that he is not satisfied with the current phrases
“land of the free," "melting pot,” and so forth, but demands that
something definite, active, constructive be meant when we speak
of the American character or the American spirit. Either the word
“American,” he says, means something outside of geography, or it
does not. It evidently cannot be equated with “liberty-loving” if
it is to have distinctive meaning, for others besides ourselves have
loved liberty. Neither can it mean democratic in any of the
senses of that word. We are not the first or the only people demo-
cratic in manners, government, or ideals. There must be some-
thing else meant, if “American” is not to be an empty word when
we speak of character or spirit. This something Mr Emerson finds
in our history. It is the psychological attitude produced by the
westward march of civilization in this country, with all its effects
on our life public and private, our government and law, which
gives the American character the chance of acting as a unique
reagent in the social and economic equations which constitute the


304
THE NEW FRONTIER
New Frontier. To those who would have us follow in the path of
Russia, for instance, Mr Emerson's answer is that there is no need,
seeing that in the American character itself there lies positive as-
surance of solutions better adapted to American conditions. And
to those who would have us believe that in the status quo we have
the Ideal Commonwealth of the Fathers, he would also reply by
pointing to history and its effects on American character. It is
part of our heritage, he would remind them, to be sensitive to new
problems and dissatisfied with old solutions.
So far, so good. Mr Emerson knows his American history thor-
ghly. He is also a student of American psychology, as is shown
by his success in directing the publicity of the Liberty Loan drives.
These two characteristics probably account for much of his ability
to strike out a new path in the already overcrowded field of "Amer-
icanization.” For that there is novelty and freshness in his attack
on an old problem, no one can deny. Nor should it be held against
him that he has achieved this novelty through a distinctly original
and forceful use of another man's idea. It is now nearly thirty
years since Professor Turner of Harvard delivered the address be-
fore the Wisconsin Historical Society which experts declare to
have revolutionized the specialist's conception of American history.
Who but the experts, however, know how or why this revolution
was accomplished ? Not one man in a thousand, even among
college graduates, thirty years after. Nobody has seen in all these
thirty years the value to the “Average American” of Professor
Turner's thought. Yet what America will do, what she can do in
the future, depends upon what resources, spiritual as well as mater-
ial, have been built up for her in the past. If it is true, as the ex-
perts admit, that her past has been different from that of any other
nation through the conditions of her westward expansion, her
psychological inheritance is different too and her future will be
original and characteristic in so far forth. This fact (and it is the
first outstanding merit of his book) Mr Emerson has realized as no
one has yet done in all its undeniable bearings on the social and
economic questions which he calls the New Frontiers. He has
developed Professor Turner's profound conception of the Influence
of the Frontier in a new field; for the purpose of his argument he
has made it his own; he has progressed surprisingly far in an opti-
mistic estimate of the "promise of American life.”



LINCOLN MAC VEAGH
305
Mr Emerson is by profession, or business if you like, a financier.
A reading of his book, however, quite apart from the chapter on the
democratic make-up of Wall Street's personnel, will show that his
attitude on social and economic questions is that of the average
American. It might be better if the average American showed
some of Mr Emerson's application in his leisure hours. But in
any case the average American is what we call self-made, whatever
position in life he holds, and the attitude of the self-made man is
Mr Emerson's attitude, as it was Abraham Lincoln's. It is the at-
titude of equal opportunity for all and of what Mr Emerson calls
“the Politics of the Middle of the Road.” Developing hitherto
under the influence of the Frontier, America, he says, is neither
radical nor reactionary; she does not believe in building men to a
single standard, ruling out individuality, initiative, reward,
whether this is accomplished on the basis of a given set of conditions
or after a new deal of the cards. America is liberal. And Mr
Emerson gives his idea of the American liberal (a word now much
misused by the more timid writers, radical or reactionary) in these
words:
“The Liberal seeks the solid and eternal middle ground, perhaps
less alluring than the by-ways, but visible through the ages as the
highway of the actual forward movement of the race.
No man or
woman can be called liberal to-day who lacks a deep sense of the
necessity for adjustments and even substantial changes in the re-
lationships of men and things. But where the radical simply
wants to go, the liberal wants to go somewhere. When a half-
considered measure of reform is proposed, the radical shouts
Now,' the conservative retorts Never,' while the liberal may
simply say 'Not Yet.'”
)
This Liberal America is the America of the vast majority, the
America of the “silent vote,” the America too often hidden under
the name of “the public,” which has come to be almost proverb-
ially patient under the pestiferous activities of noisy individuals
and minorities. It is remarkably heterogeneous, composed of rich,
poor, and well-to-do of all ages and both sexes; it cannot be called
a class or separated into classes. It is a phenomenon which upsets
all the calculations of thinkers trained on the European plan.


306
THE NEW FRONTIER
2
Hitherto it has been inarticulate. Comprising within itself near-
ly all writers in the country on whatever topic, even the writers
whose business it is to seek out a middle-class to destroy it, it has
been too divided in business to show self-consciousness of purpose,
ideals or power. But there are many signs that the time of indif-
ference is over. Mr Emerson's book is one of them. The indivi-
dualistic American people brought up in the tradition of personal
initiative and self-reliance, but also in that of the law-court and the
town meeting, is slowly but surely getting together, and the result
will be more like the One Big Union than anything yet realized or
dreamed by that European thing, a proletariat. It is a question
of common beliefs and purposes made plain and articulate. And
beliefs and purposes spring more from inheritance and early
environment than from soap-box speeches and Russian books.
But Mr Emerson's book is a sign of the times not only in having
been written at all, but in the manner in which it is written. It
is a bold book, full of push and drive in its ideas as well as in its
language. It has the self-assurance of the boxer who stands
squarely on both feet as he plants his blows. Take, for instance,
the treatment of capitalism. Admitted that there are evils at-
tendant on capitalism as we now practise it, says Mr Emerson, does
that mean that capitalism is wrong in principle, that it should
forthwith be eradicated root and branch? His answer can be
found in the chapter Fifty Million Capitalists. Or take that
modern bogey called “propaganda.” Propaganda has in the past
been used unscrupulously, is being so used now.
majority of cases it has perhaps been used for evil. Mr Emerson
admits all that and then writes his chapter on The Weapons of
Truth. Wall Street has not always acted in accordance with the
New Testament; it has not always forgotten itself entirely and
acted exclusively in the interest of, say, the farmers of the Middle
West. What then? Is Wall Street rotten to the core? Is it an un-
American institution ? Mr Emerson, who is not a New Yorker
and brings to his task no predispositions in favour of Wall Street,
writes his chapter, The American Federation of Brains, as sharp
and accurate a reply as his reply that the cure for capitalism is more
capitalism, and for propaganda more propaganda. Always he writes
in the liberal spirit, but the liberal spirit attacking, not passive, the
liberal spirit sure of its ground, wide awake as to its logic and its
In the great



LINCOLN MAC VEACH
307
appeal to liberal-minded men and women with their frontier back-
ground of common sense, ingenuity, frankness, fair play, and sense
of humour.
Lastly there is the fact that Mr Emerson himself wrote the New
Frontier. What does it mean when a very busy business man, un-
trained for the writing of books, with no axe to grind politically,
no need of making money by his pen, no desire to acquire reputa-
tion as a writer, jumps into the literary prize-ring with an idea in
his head and a punch in both fists? If the book itself is a sign of
the times, showing that in America there are thinking men, out-
side of the small array of professional theorists, who are aware of
the tasks ahead and aware too of a characteristically American
method of settling them, the fact that Mr Emerson wrote it is even
more significant. It shows that even those not called upon by reason
of their training or vocation are willing to cooperate in making this
new national-consciousness explicit. It shows that the dormant
Gulliver is alive in every limb. A danger sign to the Lilliputians
indeed!
But the book itself must be read to get its full import. It is too
vital and suggestive from first to last to be caught in the flashlight
of a review. From such a picture only one or two points can be
expected to stand out, and these have been given briefly above.
The New Frontier takes up an original and striking position in re-
gard to the possibilities of further progress in America along
specifically American lines, counter-attacks vigorously a number of
widespread notions concerning characteristic American institutions
and methods, and in the fact of its having been written at all, and
by Mr Emerson in particular, furnishes an indication of the growth
and nature of a certain self-consciousness in our public.
LINCOLN MACVEAGH



A KEY TO THE ENIGMAS OF THE WORLD
Tertium ORGANUM: A Key to the Enigmas of the
World. By P. D. Ouspensky. Translated from the
Russian by Nicholas Bessaraboff and Claude Bragdon.
Introduction by Claude Bragdon. Svo. 344 pages.
Manas Press. Rochester, New York.
IN
a
N Russia, "if we are to believe its writers,” people still engage in
violent discussion of what is neither here nor there. Idealists,
materialists, theosophists, and even Christians roar at one another
and tyrannize when they have the chance. Over here where ab-
stractions are left to badly paid professionals, where a university
education in philosophy has no effect except to make a few boys
skeptical about the trinity, vindications of abstract freedom seem
superfluous. One has heard the ladies talking about faith on the
porch. But the business man, but the scientist—beyond a preju-
dice in favour of church or against it—what does he care, what on
earth or in heaven does he care?
The fact is we are definitely committed, and talking would appear
ridiculous. The church has seen that it will not amount to any-
thing without one billion, three hundred million dollars. There
was a minister who disapproved of art because “nothing is worth
while which is not self-supporting.”
And just lately it has become popular among Americans to mater-
ialize the spirits. The post-bellum revival is made out of very solid
stuff indeed.
Now, however, quite inapropos, comes another book out of Rus-
sia by a mathematican, the mathematical ideas of which are an-
nounced as being simple enough for the understanding of a person
with a high school education (touché!), Tertium Organum: A Key
to the Enigmas of the World. This title might formerly have
been rewarded by a ceremonial burning, and now seems to ask for
a place in the fourpenny box beside magic pamphlets and dream
books. But as dream books have recently endured an apotheosis,
the reader will advance with caution.



W. C. BLUM
309
!
“I have called this system of higher logic Tertium Organum be-
cause for us it is the third organ (instrument) of thought, after
those of Aristotle and Bacon. The first was the Organon, the sec-
ond, Novum Organum. But the third existed earlier than the
first."
In other words the author does not claim to have invented here
anything new; and since nearly every analogy and argument ad-
vanced has attached to it some other name, one assumes that the
question of originality does not enter into his purpose.
Whereas
among scientists one cannot find the egg for the clucking.
The purpose is unimportant. What he has accomplished is an
artistic synthesis of certain liberating implications of the new
mathematics with the very old affirmations of the mystics, who did
not need mathematical assistance, but whose remarks can be made
more palatable to moderns with the reassurances of modern author-
ity. You get a man somewhat bewildered by telling him that the
scientist whom he respects so much is beginning to think that two
and two make five, and then you land on him with the full weight
of the impossible. The thing has been tried before, but never, I
think, so quietly.
Ouspensky's thesis is that the best way to change the world
is to change one's point of view, one's consciousness; and in elabor-
ating it, he lets out the famous secret that there is nothing else be-
sides consciousness, that all one has to do is to take possession of
one's property.
Starting with Kant's doctrine that time and space are necessary
conditions of sensuous receptivity, categories of the intellect, with-
out which we cannot approach the external world at all, he sees the
present impossibility of our knowing the thing-in-itself, not as an
eternal limitation, but as a problem. If the outer world is eternally
limited, one can start from the inside. As a matter of fact we
know already that the same things look different to different people;
and how much more so to different animals. Consciousness has
changed, has developed, apparently, though perhaps not according
to Darwin's theory. Its further development should be conscious,
will, perhaps, have to be conscious.
“The snail moves upon a single line and except for that line is


310
A KEY TO THE ENIGMAS OF THE WORLD
not conscious of anything. All sensations entering from the out-
side, the snail senses upon the lines of its motion, and these come to
it out of time—from the potential they become present. For the
snail our entire universe exists in the future and in the past, that is,
in time.” [The snail in fact is a one-dimensional being, existing
in two other dimensions of which it has no inkling.)
“The higher animals—the dog, the cat, and the horse--are two-
dimensional beings. To them all space appears as a surface, as a
plane. Everything out of this plane lives for them in time.”
There is not room here for the arguments with which Ouspensky
reinforces this assertion, although they occupy some of the most in-
teresting pages of the book. People who think they know animals
will doubtless be annoyed at such a bald statement; but one can
only suggest that they read Chapter IX, which may give them at
least a respect for Ouspensky as an observer who does not tell
anecdotes.
The implication, however, is inescapable. Man, too, is occupy-
ing space of which he has no inkling-fourth dimensional space-
the phenomena of which appear to him in time.
Having come so far from the abysmal snail it would be a pity to
stop, it would be worse than a pity. Analogies, however, are not
going to help us farther. Why not say approximately what we
mean?
Very obligingly Ouspensky makes the attempt, beginning again
at the beginning. The axioms of Aristotle's Organon were these:
A is A.
A is not Not-A.
Everything is either A or Not-A.
Expressed by Bacon in Time:
That which was A will be A.
That which was Not-A will not be A.
Everything was and will be either A or Not-A.
After this pattern the superlogical axioms might be:
A is both A and Not-A.
Everything is both A and Not-A.
Everything is All.


W. C. BLUM
311
1
“But these axioms are in effect absolutely impossible. ... In
reality the ideas of higher logic are inexpressible in concepts. . . .
Let us therefore reconcile ourselves to the fact that it is impossible
to express superlogical relations in our language as it is at present
constituted.”
1
9
>
There remains the method of art, which never used logic as more
than a scaffolding for hints. Ouspensky, in the latter half of his
book, “talks round” the subject, gives the negative side, and quotes
the mystics. These are the pages in which he lands on his readers,
in which, to use the more elegant phrase of the translator, he “rubs
their noses” in mysticism.
Although women may feel more at home in this atmosphere,
many persons will probably look back with regret at the analogies,
and others will like neither analogies nor questions. But Ouspensky
has got over discouragement at lack of understanding.
“We” are
very stupid, “we” are very lacking in boldness and a sense of re-
sponsibility, as a race. But perhaps there are in reality two races.
“The correctness of the very expression 'we' is subject to grave
doubts. . . . Imagine a menagerie full of monkeys. In this menag-
erie a man is working. The monkeys observe his movements and
try to imitate him but they can imitate only his visible movements;
the meaning and aim of these movements are closed to them; there-
fore their actions will have quite another result. And should the
monkeys escape from their cages and get hold of the man's tools,
then perhaps they will destroy all his works and inflict great damage
on themselves as well. But they will never be able to create any-
thing. Therefore a man would make a great mistake if he referred
to their 'work,' and spoke of them as 'we.'”
>
To Ouspensky as to other reformers (Jesus included) there are
people with the same vision as himself and there are imbeciles. The
imbeciles are not going to be punished; they are not wrong, they
are quite all right, indeed. It is perfectly possible to describe their
attributes in human language. Take their morals for example:
“Division into good and evil. Dualistic morals. Attempts to
replace the inner law by the outer one.
Consciousness of



312
A KEY TO THE ENIGMAS OF THE WORLD
responsibility for immediate results of action only and in one rela-
tion only. The imposition of responsibility upon others, or upon
institutions. 'I am fulfilling my duty or the law, and I am not
guilty.'”
This is bull-moose psychology and would explain several billions
of wars.
But if the two races are so cleanly divided, whom is Ouspensky
talking to, whom is he persuading? There must be a lot of people
on the edge, uncomfortable in either camp, perhaps some prominent
ones among them. Ouspensky takes many quotations from The
Varities of Religious Experience; but he also quotes, rather mali-
ciously and without comment, a passage from A Pluralistic Universe
which suggsets that William James never got beyond a reading ac-
quaintance with the absolute: “First, you and I,” wrote James,
“just as we are in this room, and the moment we get below the sur-
face, the unutterable itself! Doesn't this show a singularly indi-
gent imagination? Isn't this brave universe made on a higher pat-
tern with room in it for a long hierarchy of beings ?” Alas, where
is Memorial Hall, where is the Arboretum?
Ouspensky hints that if he wanted to he could tell of other
methods of getting revelation besides the anaesthetic one. He
recommends another book of his, The Wisdom of the Gods, to peo-
ple who desire a truly ineffable experience of the absolute.
Tertium Organum, however, closes not with an exhortation to a
more virtuous life, but with a rather strong statement in favour of
freedom. Positivism, says Ouspensky (and by positivism he
means materialism that goes to church and materialism that does
not), was once a force of liberation, breaking apart the old dualistic
tyranny. But now, the very people who formerly fought it are its
most vigorous supporters. The method is no good any more, and
at some future time it will be defined as a system by which it was
possible not to think of real things and to limit oneself to the region
of the unreal and illusory.” The idea of evolution is dead, and re-
incarnation along with it. The very popularity of the idea of pro-
gress compromises progress seriously. It was to be expected. Dead
people cannot keep even true ideas alive. But to the living "all
that arrests the motion of thought-is false.”
W. C. BLUM


A CRITIC OF MUSIC
Musical PORTRAITS. By Paul Rosenfeld. 12mo, 314
pages. Harcourt, Brace and Howe. New York.
THE
THE author of Musical Portraits certainly cannot complain
of having had his work unnoticed. The chorus of critical
indignation—both in print and in private—that greeted its ap-
pearance made me rather curious to see what manner of book this
might be that ruffled so many musical sensibilities.
Mr Rosenfeld is rather provocative. You can agree with him
or disagree, but you will probably do neither without violence. His
book is a series of studies of the work of some twenty composers,
ranging from Debussy, Block, Stravinsky, and Ornstein back to
Liszt and Berlioz. He begins with Wagner, and what he writes of
the Baireuth master has caused much head-wagging, and will cause
more. Wagner is no longer vitally significant, he thinks:
"Of late a great adventure has befallen us. . We
who were born and grew under the sign of Wagner have witnessed
the twilight of the god. He has receded from us.
He has depart-
ed from us into the relative distance into which during his hour of
omnipotence he banished all other composers.
He has been displaced. A new music has come into being, and
drawn near.
Little by little, during the past few
years
our relation to him has been changing. Something
within us has moved.
A song of Moussorgsky's or Ra-
vel's, a few measures of Pelléas or Le Sacre du Printemps, a single
fine moment in a sonata of Scriabine's or a quartet or a suite of
Bloch's, give us a joy, an illumination, a satisfaction that little of
the older music can equal.”
.
.
Which is probably just the tone in which many a post-Eliza-
bethan literary critic wrote about Shakespeare. I'm not so sure
that you can pack Wagner off to bed like that, with a pat on the
head and a penny: “Run along, now, Richard. Daddy's busy.
Mr Scriabine and Mr Stravinsky are downstairs, waiting to talk


314
A CRITIC OF MUSIC
a
business.” The old man has a good deal of vitality left, and who-
ever seeks to give his bones a decent burial risks having to sit on
the grave to keep the departed in his place. Certainly his hold
upon the public at large has not lessened. This argument, I admit,
I
might also be advanced for Puccini, but in Wagner's case I think
it is valid, for Wagner, like Shakespeare, was one of the popular
great. It was the critics and other professionals, not the public,
who fought him at the start.
As for his influence upon composers, it is still inescapable. If
you want to know why Wagner is immortal, play a certain passage
written by a man who was opposed to Wagner's scheme of things
with every fibre of his being-Claude Debussy. Turn to page 56
of the piano-vocal score of Pelléas et Mélisande, and play the
“fountain” theme, the first bar at the top of the page. Now turn
to the score of Das Rheingold, and play the first two bars that are
sung after the curtain rises, Woglinde's "Weia! Waga! Woge,
du Welle!” and hear what you shall hear. It is not that Debussy
is plagiarizing Wagner. It is merely that Wagner said "water, "
in music, and when Debussy wanted to say "water,” simply and
directly—he had to say "water,” too. Wagner said certain simple,
fundamental things in music, and said them right. It is as though
some one man had thought of the words “fire," "water,” “forest."
To me the glory of Shakespeare is not “To be or not to be,” but a
phrase like “making night hideous”, which has become, not Shake-
speare, but English idiom. And the glory of Wagner is not the
Meistersinger overture. It is the discovery that the melodic inter-
val of the minor seventh, downward, is the word “love." To get
away from Wagner completely, a man would have to invent a new
system of forming melody; and not even Debussy, his arch-anti-
thesis, succeeded in doing that.
So when Mr Rosenfeld says, “We of our generation have finally
found the music that is so creatively infecting for us”-meaning
Stravinsky, Ornstein, and the others—he makes me feel, for the
first time in my life, elderly. And a bit indignant. Who the devil
does he mean by that “we?” Certainly not I, without reservations.
Is senility upon me? Have I, then, become one of the Old Guard?
However, Mr Rosenfeld also says:
“The course of time
... has brought Berlioz the closer to


DEEMS TAYLOR
315
.
us and shown him great.
It is as though the world had
had to move to behold Berlioz, and that only in a day germane to
him and among the men his kin could he assume the stature right-
fully his, and live."
So I am content. If the younger generation, which I so trust-
fully joined, is going in for Berlioz, put me among the gaffers!
Time was when Richard Strauss seemed on the way to dominat-
ing the musical world well-nigh as completely as had the other
Richard. But that time is past. The artistic degeneration of one
who was once the significant figure in modern music is analysed by
Mr Rosenfeld in what is in some ways the best essay in the book.
To him it is the old story of genius in a vessel to weak to hold it:
a
“It is as the victim of a psychic deterioration that one is forced
to regard this unfortunate man. The thing that one sees happen-
ing to so many people about one, the extinction of a flame, the
withering of a blossom, the dulling and coarsening of the sensibil-
ities, the decay of the mental energies, seems to have happened to
him, too.
He is the type of man unfaithful to himself
in some fundamental relation throughout his deeds. Many people
have thought a love of money the cause of Strauss's decay.
The truth is that he has rationalized his unwillingness to go
through the labor pains of creation by pretending to himself a con-
stant and a great need of money.
.
.
In the chapters upon Gustav Mahler and Ernest Bloch he dis-
cusses frankly and sensibly the problem of the Jew as artist. The
reason the Jewish race has produced so few great artists, he says,
is that the Jew, feeling himself an alien in a predominatingly
Christian and Occidental civilization, so seldom has the courage to
be true to his racial feelings. Not that he must write "Jewish”
music, particularly, but “he must not attempt to deny his modes of
apprehension and realization because they are racially coloured. He
must possess spiritual harmony. The whole man must go into his
expression.” It was just this spiritual harmony Mahler lacked.
“There was in him the frenetic unconscious desire to rid himself
of the thing he had come to believe inferior. And rather than ex-



316
A CRITIC OF MUSIC
press it, rather than speak in his proper idiom, he made, unaware
to himself, perhaps, the choice of speaking through the voices of
other men
of accepting sterility and banality and impo-
tence rather than achieving a power of speech.”
The other, the Swiss Jew, however, has had just that courage,
just that fearless and simple racial consciousness.
.
“There is music of Ernest Bloch that is a large, a poignant, an
authentic expression of what is racial in the Jew.
There
are moments when this music makes one feel as though an element
that had remained unchanged throughout three thousand years, an
element that is in every Jew and by which every Jew must know
himself and his descent, were caught up in it and fixed there.
And yet, the Jewish composer that the man is so often said to
be, he most surely is not.
It is only that as a Jew it
was necessary for Ernest Bloch to say yes to his own heredity be-
fore his genius could appear.”
.
There are interesting chapters on the Russians. Borodine he
rather overrates, I think, forgiving him too much banality for the
sake of his few master-strokes. He is cruel, but I am afraid just, to
Rachmaninoff. To Rimsky-Korsakoff he is unfair. His music, he
says, is "like one of the books, full of gay pictures, which are given
to children”_which is, on the whole, true-and then hammers him
soundly for being objective and frivolous! And why not?
Who wants profundity from jolly, bearded, bespectacled Rimsky,
the Santa Claus of music, bless his silly old heart! There are so
many of us to beat our breasts, and so few to beat the drum. A pic-
ture-book is a comforting thing at times.
To Moussorgsky he pays eloquent and moving tribute; but ad-
mirable as the chapter is, some of it seems based upon a mis-
conception; for Mr Rosenfeld shows no realization of the extent
to which Moussorgsky utilized Russian folk-
music in his work.
He takes it for granted, apparently, that all of the themes in the
operas and cantatas are of Moussorgsky's own invention. “They
are so much like folk-tunes that one wonders whether they were not
produced hundreds of years ago and handed down by generations
of Russians,” he writes. And that is precisely what many of them


DEEMS TAYLOR
317
are—folk-tunes; and Mr Rosenfeld ought to know it if he's going
to discuss them. Of the death scene in Khovanchtchina he writes:
“At the moment that the old boyar
goes to his doom,
there is intoned by his followers the sweetest melody that Mous-
sorgsky wrote or could write."
That's all very well, but Moussorgsky didn't write it. It is a
Great-Russian wedding song, which Moussorgsky got from a
peasant named M. F. Shishto. He gave the tune to Rimsky-
Korsakoff, who published it, with an account of its origin, in his
Collection of Russian Folksongs, Opus 24 (1874; Volume I, page
92).
Of the coronation scene in Boris he says:
“Then like Boris himself, Moussorgsky sweeps through in stiff
blazoned robes, crowned with the domed, flashing Slavic tiara.”
>
This refers, I imagine, to the Gloria chorus, which is a peasant
“song of praise” as familiar in Russian folk-music as Malbrouck is
in French—and a good deal older.
It is hard for us Americans, who have no folk-music, to realize
the extent to which Russian composers use folk-tunes in their works.
The famous andante cantabile of the Tchaikovsky string quartet,
Opus 11, is the tune of a peasant song about "little Ivan, who sat
on the divan, drinking rum”; the fast theme of the 1812 Overture,
the variations theme in the finale of the Fourth Symphony, most of
the choruses in Rimsky's Sniegourochka and A Night in May, are
Russian folk-tunes; so is the postilions' dance in Petrushka. As a
matter of fact, the score of Boris is at least one-fourth folk-music;
the proportion is even greater in Khovanchtchina. Varlaam's song
in the tavern scene of Boris, two themes in the great folk scene in
Act II, the Gloria chorus already referred to, the music at the
climax of the revolution scene, are all folk-tunes; and there are
many others.
This is the very essence of Moussorgsky's greatness: that, heed-
ing Glinka's admonition, “the people are the creators; you are but
the arrangers," he listened, humbly and selflessly, to the voice of
his country as she spoke through the songs of her people. And how


318
A CRITIC OF MUSIC
close the union was between him and his native land, how utterly
he thought in terms of folk-music, is attested by the very fact that
Mr Rosenfeld has not always known which was Moussorgsky and
which was Russia.
I can't say that I share Mr Rosenfeld's enthusiasm for Ornstein
and the later Stravinsky. Here are fragments of what he has to
say of them:
"The new steel organs of men have begotten their music in Le
Sacre du Printemps. For with Stravinsky, the rhythms of
machinery enter musical art.
Through him music has
become again cubical, lapidary, massive, mechanistic.
There are come to be great, weighty, metallic masses, molten piles
and sheets of steel and iron, shining adamantine bulks
rhythm that lunges and beats and reiterates and dances with all
the steely tirelessness of the machine.”
.
.
.
"Ornstein is a mirror held up to the world of the modern city.
The first of his real compositions are like fragments of some cos-
mopolis of caves and towers of steel.
They
record · all the violent forms of the city, the beat of
frenetic activity, the intersecting planes of light, the masses of the
masonry with the tiny, dwarf-like creatures running in and out,
the electric signs staining the inky nightclouds.
While
one speculates whether these pieces are music or not, one discovers
that one has entered through them into the life of another being, and
through him into the lives of a whole upgrowing generation.”
.
.
a
I'm not competent to discuss Le Sacre du Printemps, as I have
heard it only on the piano. But assuming that all that Mr Rosen-
feld says of it is true, that Stravinsky is mechanism become music,
and that Ornstein is a mirror held up to the modern city, I don't
want it. It seems to me too literal and at the same time too literary
a basis for authentic music. I don't think men can write preludes
and ballets expressive of power plants and the housing problem,
any more than they can write symphonic poems about the spirit of
collective bargaining.
And I do think that Ornstein and Stravinsky and Malipiero are
demanding too much thought of their auditors and doing too little


DEEMS TAYLOR
319
5
thinking themselves. They put down the facts—the beat of dwarf
feet upon pavements, the tireless, lifeless energy of machinery, yes.
But who cares about the facts? The truth is what counts. I don't
want music talking in terms of machinery; I want machinery ex-
pressed in terms of music. These men don't disturb me, as do
Bloch and Scriabine. They bore me. I'm bored with their imita-
tions of noises—I can go hear the real noises—and their mono-
tonous cacaphony. Of course, it sounds like cacaphony because I'm
not used to it, and it probably sounds all alike for the same reason
that Chinamen all look alike to me: I'm not well acquainted.
However, Mr Rosenfeld sincerely admires them. Stravinsky is
one of his gods, and the phrase "Leo Ornstein and the Age of Steel”
Aits through the book like a refrain.
One notable feature of the book the extracts will have shown:
Mr Rosenfeld knows how to write. This fact alone would make
him of the minority among those who write at and about music.
His style is nervous, clear, ironical if not humorous, and he uses
words with precision. A few pet unusual words he over-uses.
"Magistral,” for instance, is a good word, but after its fourth or
fifth appearance one begins to wonder rather wistfully what has
happened to “masterly" or "authoritative.” One of the best bits
of characterization I have read in a long time is his miniature por-
trait of Liszt:
“You draw from your violin passionate laments. In a sort of
ecstasy you celebrate Hungaria. Then, smiling brilliantly, you
pass the hat."
A fine phrase is that describing Sibelius' orchestral works—"full
of the gnawing of bassoons and the bleakness of the English horn.”
He writes tenderly and beautifully of the great, grave, passionate,
resigned creature that was Brahms.” The whole passage, which
is too long to quote here, might serve as the credo of all good and
honest artists.
A well-written, interesting, sincere, exasperating book. In other
words, a book worth reading.
DEEMS TAYLOR


BRIEFER MENTION
Tamarisk Town, by Sheilla Kaye-Smith (12mo, 393 pages; Dut-
ton), deteriorates slowly like the town it describes; the author
seems a little uncertain when she dips into sociology instead of
confining herself to the natural processes of the soil. The hero,
however, is as full-length a portrait as she ever attempted; he
looms up grandiloquently against the background of the little
watering place he created and then destroyed in the unstable
pursuit of a dream.
Hills of Han, by Samuel Merwin (12mo, 365 pages; Bobbs-
Merrill, Indianapolis), is a story of a journalist and by a journal-
ist, retailing rather journalistic impressions of a revolution in
Hansi, and ending with a wedding in a mission compound to the
accompaniment of Chinese flageolets. Written without any very
deep conviction, it leaves the final impression of a honeymoon
trip to Chinatown in a white bus outlined with jerky paper
lanterns.
Hey RUB-A-DUB-Dub, by Theodore Dreiser (12mo, 312 pages;
Boni & Liveright), holds American life under a competent but
somewhat foggy microscope, disclosing its artistic shortcomings
and its social defects with literal accuracy. Democracy, art, sex,
labour, newspapers, and millionaires come successively under
the lens, while Dreiser sets down his findings with all a green-
grocer's assiduity, and not a little of a greengrocer's unimagina-
tive painstaking. Here is a surprising absence of the creative in-
stinct in a creative writer. Even iconoclasm is entitled to its
exhilarative intervals, but Dreiser dons the cowl of a carping
critic, and makes such a solemn business of his expostulation that
he might well pass for one of the puritans whom he abjures. If
he had left out some of the lengthy passages in which he rei-
terates what every one concedes, and replaced them with a vital,
creative impulse, woven out of artistic experience, his book would
be closer to kindling the imagination, and further from kindling
the furnaces of the Philistines.


BRIEFER MENTION
321
Peter Jameson, by Gilbert Frankau (12mo, 431 pages ; Knopf),
is in keeping with the newest invention in novel-writing, the
thesis that four years of slaughter in France purifies all English-
men. Peter thought only of business before the war, but the
trenches made him sensitive, so that he returns with a true love
for his wife, whom he had formerly treated just as a "good pal.
The once saddened Patricia realizes that at last her husband loves
her, so that she can now love him; she nurses him back to health,
and for the first time in her life she sees the beauty and dignity of
bedroom thoughts. The story ends on Armistice Day, with
every one drinking "in token of civilization's triumph over the
Beast.”
Four Mystery Plays, by Rudolph Steiner, translated by H. Col-
lison, S. M. K. Gandell, and R. T. Gladstone (in two volumes;
12mo, 560 pages; Putnam), will doubtless command the atten-
tion of the author's disciples, but they are too formidable to win
the interest of the average outsider. The plays form a contin-
uous series, intended to “reveal the psychic development of man
up to the moment when he is able to pierce the veil and see into
the beyond.” The blank verse translation is adequate, but
hardly inspired
а
Chill Hours, by Helen Mackay (12mo, 191 pages; Duffield),
justifies a belated entry into the domain of war sketches by a re-
freshing simplicity of treatment and an unfailing sensitiveness in
conception. Now that the feverish flood of war books has sub-
sided, one welcomes a writer who seeks to do something besides
capitalize human emotion.
The FUNCTION OF THE Poet, by James Russell Lowell; collected
and edited by Albert Mordell (12mo, 224 pages; Houghton
Mifflin), sets forth a sheaf of critical essays which will tip the
scales of his rating neither on way nor the other. They are
pleasant, scholarly, informal; they polish off literary subjects
gracefully, even if not dazzlingly. A book for Lowell admirers
to welcome, and for others to use perhaps—in the phrase of Van
Wyck Brooks—"to stop the gap where a great critic ought to
have been.”


322
BRIEFER MENTION
An edition of The LIFE OF James McNeill WHISTLER, by E. R.
and J. Pennell (8vo, illus., 454 pages, Lippincott, Philadel-
phia), so far revised and corrected and improved in detail as to
justify the publisher's claim that it is virtually a new work, does
not at all diminish the high esteem which the original editions
won for the authors. There will always have to be special mono-
graphs about special things in the life of this painter, who be-
came an obsession with the wits of his time for a very secondrate
a
sharpness of speech, and who is likely to be an obsession with
painters and amateurs for many generations, because he worked
hard and thought hard about his art. A book giving, in addition
to Whistler's personal history, the story of many of the paint-
ings as they were done, and discussing with the sure words of
authentic artists the methods and the theories of Whistler's
creations, is, to use a mild word, invaluable. And the book, be-
cause of the treatment no less than because of the subject, is
vastly entertaining.
A Guide to Russian LITERATURE (1820-1917), by Moissaye J.
Olgin (12mo, 323 pages; Harcourt, Brace and Howe). The
grouping of the material in this rather "sketchy” volume is some-
what inadequate. Authors whose influence was very small are
at times given more attention and space than is seemly in com-
parison to those who are very characteristic and important both
from the historical and psychological point of view. The chap-
ter, The Recent Tide, which is of special interest for a student
of contemporary Russia, is thoroughly incomplete. Such authors
as Shmeliov, Sourgouchov, A. N. Tolstov, and Igor Sievierianin
who are the real expressions of the modern Russian spirit are not
mentioned at all and the chapter thus fails to throw much light
upon Russia of the last decade or so.
THE DEATH OF Titian, by Hugo Von Hoffmannsthal; translated
from the German by John Heard, Jr. (16mo, 27 pages; Four
Seas, Boston), is a forthright translation of a very glamorous
poem. The dramatic form, unfortunately for the translator, is
only skin-deep. Essential drama, apart from its verbal expres-
sion, loses nothing in a new language: poetry, and The Death
of Titian in particular, lose most everything.


BRIEFER MENTION
323
The GUARDS CAME THROUGH, and Other Poems, by Sir Arthur
Conan Doyle (12mo, 76 pages; Doran), was published, says the
preface, only on account of the demand for its contents as reci-
tations. Indeed nothing so good for Friday afternoon readings
in public schools has been written since The Charge of the Light
Brigade. More sophisticated audiences are beginning to demand
authentic horrors, however, and show some impatience with the
vicarious bravery of old men by the fire in England.
JAPAN: REAL AND IMAGINARY, by Sydney Greenbie (12mo, 460
pages; Harper), is a downright judgement of Japan, people,
customs, morals, and values, by a young American who, spend-
ing two years there, keeps an accurate record of his actions and
reactions, and sets them down without fear or conscious bias.
It is real as far as the author can see, and not very imaginary.
It is the best book on actual Japan, by an American, in some
time; best from the viewpoint of fact, not poesy nor romantic
charm. No one interested in the Far East as related to America
should miss it.
Our ECONOMIC AND OTHER PROBLEMS, by Otto H. Kahn (8vo,
420 pages; Doran), has the defect of all collections of speeches
and writings done for special occasions. That is, the fundamen-
tal ideas must be pieced together by the reader. In this case the
authority of the writer and the frankness of the writing make
the effort worth while. The chapter on the railroads will be of
less interest, though of great importance in itself, than that on
labour and capital. Mr Kahn holds to the belief that under-
production is the primary cause of poverty and holds the balance
of blame between the workers and their employers. A liberal
attitude, totally without radicalism, in the sense that the author
accepts the present order of things and looks for amelioration, for
commonsense changes, and does not care to foresee the destruc-
tion of the system of which he is himself an avowed enthusiast.



THE THEATRE
CON
ONTINUING the pleasant exercise of speculating about
printed plays, begun in the previous issue of The Dial and
destined to end abruptly as the New Season (thrilling words!) ap-
proaches, we come to The INWARD Light (Knopf) which was
written by Allan Davis and Anna R. Stratton and has an introduc-
tion by Walter Prichard Eaton. The drama of conscience in the
midst of war has not generally excited our playwrights. From
Secret Service (or was it Shenandoah ?) to The COPPERHEAD
we have had action, action all the way, with the result that we
haven't, simply, a corpus of plays to which the student of American
war psychology can refer. I would far more readily see SECRET
SERVICE a second time than see L'ELEVATION anywhere except at
the Comédie Française or any time except during the Great War.
For all that, L'Elevation is a finer play and holds something be-
yond the passing interest. In The INWARD Light the authors
have set forth the struggle in a little Quaker village during the
Civil War. Needless to indicate that some of the items are "re-
markably contemporary”; needless to say that the occasional in-
trusion of a phrase we fancied our own jolts us into a recognition of
some eternal traits of human character. The difficulty about this
play is that it is dull, at least to read, and one fears that it would be
made interesting on the stage only by some cheapening of its bet-
ter qualities. It lacks, in short, what Secret Service has, and
what every play should have: a continuous, well-constructed
action, a consuming interest growing out of that action. The
beauty of the French drama is that it has always been able to treat
a psychological theme in terms of action which could be visualized
and created on the stage. Nothing Mr Eaton says of the spiritual
fineness of this play is amiss; the play lacks that very secondary,
but indispensible commodity, cleverness. As for cleverness, one
has no excessive opinion of it for itself. The next paragraph ex-
plains why.
Mr Philip Moeller's Sophie (Knopf) is an acted play which
gains by publication, for the maddening pointlessness of the witty


GILBERT SELDES
325
lines is not so apparent when one does not have to listen to actors
and actresses trying to make their own points out of them. Mr
Moeller has the supreme romantic fault, the fault of believing that
Japanese are Oriental to themselves, that there is a special essence
of exoticism which makes Sourabaya exotic in and to itself, and
that men and women who seem artificial to us were artificial in their
own time. Miss Emily Stevens encouraged this delusion on his
part; the drastic and ironic commonplace atmosphere of Mr
Moeller's early playlet about Helen of Troy has been lost in the
effort to give a social tone which succeeded only in robbing the play
of all its chances. For to project any illusion in an historical play,
the people on the stage must be taking each other for granted, must
be totally real to each other; there must be no sly asides from the
actors to the audience, no confession that they are aware of the
brightness and beauty illuminating the scene. Mr Moeller's wit,
when it is read, is at least not stupefying; received across the foot-
lights, it gives only the effect of a silly charlatanism. The same
thing, done without any restraint, succeeds in La Belle Helene
because the author does not pretend. And Mr Moeller seems to
go through every variation of the word: pretend, pretensions, pre-
tentiousness.
The summer's reading was interrupted by several lyric outbursts.
The Follies, by all report, have changed their atmosphere and
tone, being far less revue and far more the exhibition of beauty,
chastely draped one assumes, colourful, gay. The change in our
entertainment is more marked by the Shubert production at the
Century. Here the midnight show is almost an unblemished revel
of lightness, beauty, and fun. If the reader imagines that this is
.
no new thing in the American light theatre, his experience has been
happier than mine. He has not seen the pomposities and has not
heard the selections from operas, nor had to suffer the tortures of
aesthetic dancing on the variety stage. The Promenade has exer-
cised the virtue of excision. To enjoy a show, without remorse
and without stultifying one's self, is a rare experience.
GILBERT SELDES


COMMENT
a
a
We
E trust that our readers are not misled by our failure to re-
port on politics as we report on even the minor arts. It is
not essentially lack of interest so much as lack of space. The arts
are not excessively noticed in our daily press and politics not too
frequently mentioned in these pages. That is all. Yet, at this mo-
ment, these linked acerbities of days too long drawn out which mark
a political campaign, we do take notice. It arrives to our conscious-
ness that so far neither party has cried out that God fights exclusive-
ly on its side. They are tursting to the heavier battalions, and this
reticence about the Deity is pleasant. They care enough, we are sure.
But they do not boast. To this point the arrogance and the fervour
of the war have subsided. We wonder only whether the in-
telligence we read so much about, the political sense, the double-
dealing and the high diplomacy of a convention and of a campaign,
are not at least as much over-advertised as the similar virtues in
the High Commands during the war. The formula for tremen-
dous wisdom was discovered by a day labourer in the Garden of
Eden, we believe. It is that if you stumble and fall, you call it
an accident. But if you stumble and fall on your adversary, you
call it a manoeuvre. The march-past of candidates, big and little,
impresses us as a stumbling match; but we are content to know
that the idea of a great man has become repugnant to Americans.
(Wherever did they get the idea that they had experienced the in-
fluence of such a one?) Instead we shall have an advertised presi-
dent. Twelve mystic words for one, a sibilant sentence for the
other; two agencies will run the campaigns, and will “sell” their
candidates to the American people. Quaint idea! Precious
thought! And with such brutal frankness set before us. Really
we are moved
even to the point of casting a ballot for the
a
.
.
best man.
MR GILMORE of the Christian Science Committee on Pub-
lication has been kind enough to bring to our attention
a misleading implication in regard to the scholarly attainments
of Mrs Eddy which appeared in an article by Mr Ananda


COMMENT
327
.
Coomaraswamy in the June DIAL. Certain facts laid before us
by Mr Gilmore make it evident that Mrs Eddy had the advantage
of a much better education than anybody on The Dial staff
(which comprises nothing more exceptional than a scattering of col-
legiate degrees). Beyond this admission we can scarcely go-
except into the unknown. May we add that the Scientists seem
to us much more admirable in their consistency than certain de-
sultory readers of The Dial, who criticize the followers of Mrs.
Eddy for pretending that pain is non-existent, and, who, almost
in the same breath, object to modern realistic fiction on the ground
that "there are so many pleasant things in the world to write
about, why ..." To Mr Menken the task of making a catalogue
,
of ennuis and barbarities traceable to the repressions in American
literature.
i
Having been told that a very pratical comic weekly with a mis-
leading name had taken a fall out of The Dial, we looked up
the
copy in question and found what we were after. It was just; it
was amusing even to us. We were encouraged to read the rest of
the copy. It contained:
1. Chestnuts which recalled our comparatively recent childhood.
2. Animadversions on contemporary institutions, for which the
adjective vulgar is wretchedly inadequate.
3. A drawing by the founder of a venerable school of American
illustrators, among the representatives of which he is considered the
,
most presentable.
4. More drawings, style 1880.
5. A dismal cartoon by a celebrated Dutch cartoonist who, pre-
vious to the armistice, appeared to be enjoying himself thoroughly.
This cartoon also in the American style. Doubtless he is tired of
having the exchange against him. Or perhaps he is dead. The
number of vertebrae in the skeleton is perfectly correct.
6. Mild deliberations on recent political events by a much-be-
loved, whimsical deliberator, who is credited by his friends with
several notorious witticisms. Perhaps the only wit in the concern.
We wish the magazine every success.
In another sixty years, America will have put up for and with
this sort of thing for a century.



THE DIAL
Educational Service Department
THE
Washington School
of New York
Beginning with this issue The Dial will
open a department in its advertising pages
in which will be found notices of educa-
tional institutions which are applying the
scientific principles of modern psychology
to the development of an improved type of
education.
Our Educational Service Department has
compiled extensive information concerning
institutions of this type throughout the
United States, and will be glad to corre-
spond with any Dial subscriber who desires
data or other assistance in selecting such
a school.
Sargent's Handbook of
AMERICAN PRIVATE SCHOOLS
An Annual Survey and Review describing
PRIVATE SCHOOLS of all classifications and
SUMMER CAMPS for Boys and Girls.
A Guide Book for Parents, supplying intimate information,
A Compendium for Educators.
which makes possible a discriminating choice.
Comparative Tables give the relative Cost, Size, Age, Spe-
cial Features, etc.
Introductory Chapters review interesting Developments of
the Year in education.
Educational Service Bureau will be glad to advise and
write you intimately about any School or Camp in
which you are interested. Write full particulars.
Consultation by appointment.
Circulars and Sample Pages on Request.
PORTER E. SARGENT, 14 Beacon St., Boston, Mass.
An endowed non-sectarian private school,
appealing particularly to parents who wish
to select a school for their children where
the highest educational ideals are not made
impossible through lack of funds.
The school accepts only pupils of a high
degree of mental ability; it studies care-
fully each one with a view to developing to
the maximum his special aptitudes. This is
done by giving to the pupils those experi-
ences and enthusiasms which make them
active agents in directing and controlling
their own social activities. Furthermore,
there is promoted a constantly increasing
understanding and appreciation of our social,
economic, and industrial life, its development
and its problems for the future.
This is done to the end that our pupils
may be prepared for participation and
leadership in the world of to-morrow.
For detailed information write to
PHILIP W. Cox, Headmaster,
17 East Sixtieth St., New York City
Mr. Cox will be at the school week days
after August 15th for consultations and
registration.
VISIONS
and
BELIEFS Ireland
in the
West
of
WHERE THE SUN SHINES
Collected and Arranged by
LADY GREGORY
All
Book
Two Essays and Notes by
Sellers
W. B. YEATS
2 vols.
650 pages
$4.50
2 W.45. Str.
-Putnams
New York
By Gertrude Capen Whitney
Author of I Choose, Yet Speaketh He,
Roses from my Garden, Above the Shame of
Circumstances, and The House of Landell.
Appealing equally to the imagination of childhood
and the experience of age, “Where the Sun
Shines" will be received with delight by both
youthful and mature minds, and will place the
writer still more firmly in alignment with such
writers as Charles Kingsley, J. M. Barrie, and
H. G. Wells.
At all bookstores. $1.50
Christopher Publishing House, Boston
French Literature
THE NEW YORK
POETRY BOOK SHOP
BUYS AND BUILDS
UP LIBRARIES
49 West 8th Street, near 6th Avenue
of the GREAT WAR
By Albert Schinz, Ph. D.
The first book to give an exhaustive treatment
of this literary period.
$2.00 net
D. Appleton and Company PUBLISHERS
When writing to advertisers please mention The DIAL.






-
Courtesy of the American Juscun of Natural History

CHAC-MOOL.



THE INDIAL
W
IX
OXX 110
OCTOBER
1920
UNDER THE DOME
BY WALDO FRANK
.
They were two figures under the grey of the Dome .. two
straight faint figures of black: they were a man and woman with
heads bowed, straight ... under the surge of the Dome.
I
-
.
.
.
you for?
Friday night, when always he broke away in order to pray in
the Schul, and when she sat in the shop and had to speak with
the customers who came, these praying hours of Friday night.
Shabbas morning at least he did not go also.—My heart tells me
it is wrong. Lord, forgive me for Esther and for my little girl.
Lord, you know it is for them I do not go to Schul on Shabbas
morning. . But by God, you will keep the store those two hours
Friday! Do you hear? By God, what else have I ever asked
?
Don't you sit around, do nothing all the day, and
aren't Flora's clothes a filth? and hardly if you'll cook our meals.
But this you will do: this you will do! Friday nights. Lord,
why is there no light in Esther? What have I done, Lord? what
have I not done?
She sat in a chair, always, near the side wall: her eyes lay
burning against the cold glare of the gas.
Above her shoulder on the wall was a large sheet of fashions:
women with wasp waists, smirking, rolling: stiff men, all clothes,
with little heads. Under the table—where Meyer sits with his
big feet so much to look at—Flora played, a soiled bundle, with
a ball of yarn and a huge gleaming scizzors.—No one perhaps



330
UNDER THE DOME
.
comes, and then I do not mind sitting and keeping the store. I
saw a dead horse in the street. ... A dead horse, two days
dead, rotting and stiff. Against the grey of the living street, a livid
dead horse: a hot stink was his cold death against the street's
clean-ness. There are two little boys, wrapped in blue coat, blue
muffler, leather caps. They stand, above the gaunt head of the
horse and sneer at him. His flank rises red and huge. His legs
are four strokes away from life. He is dead. The naughty
boys pick up bricks. They stand, very close, above the head of
the horse. They hurl down a brick. It strikes the horse's skull,
falls sharp away. They hurl down a brick. It cuts the swollen
nostril, falls soft away. The horse does not mind, the horse does
not hurt. He is dead.
-Go away, you two! Throwing stones at a dead horse! Go
away, I say! How would you like ... When one is dead, stones
,
strike one's skull and fall sharp away, one is moveless. When one
is dead, stones strike the soft of one's throat and fall soft away,
one is hurtless. When one is dead one does not hurt.
She sat and turned her eyes away from her child. Flora had
smear on her face; her hands were grimed with the floor. One
of her stockings was down: her little white knee was going to
scrape on the floor, be black before it was bloody. So
А
long shining table under a cold gas spurt. A store with clothes
and a stove: no place for herself. A row of suits, all pressed
and stiff with Meyer's diligence. A pile of suits, writhed with
the wear of men, soiled, crumpled with traffic of streets, with
bending of bodies in toil, in eating, in loving perhaps. Grimed
living suits. Meyer takes an iron and it steams and it presses
hard, it sucks up the grime. It sucks out the life from the suit. .
The suit is stiff and dead, now, ready to go once more over the
body of a man and suck to itself his life.
The automatic bell clangs. There in the open door was a dark
tall woman-customer.
Esther stood, too. She felt she was shorter and less tidy:
more beautiful though.
Two women across the tailor-shop, seeing each other.
"I came for my husband's—for Mr Breddan's dress suit. Mr
Lanich told him it would be ready at seven ?”
Esther Lanich moved, Sophie Breddan stood. Between slow


WALDO FRANK
331
dark curve, swift dark stroke of these two women, under a tail-
or's table the burn of a dirty child, mumbling intent with scizzors
between her soiled frail legs, at play with loose hair.
"Is this the one ?"
The curve and the stroke came near across the table.
“Yes."
Eyes met. She is tidy and fresh, less beautiful, though, than
1. She has no child. She has a flat with Sun and a swell hus-
band who wears a swallow-tail and takes her out to parties. She
has a diamond ring, her corsets are sweet.
She has things to put
into her time like candies into her mouth, like loved kisses into
my mouth. She is all new with her smooth skin going below the
collar of her suit.
-She has a child, and she lets her play dirty with scizzors under
a tailor table. “How much is it?" ... After a decent bedtime.
-Does she think I care about this? “Oh, no hurry. Better
come in and pay my-Mr Lanich. Any time.”
The clang of the bell.
Esther is seated. Her gray tilted eyes seem sudden to stand
upon the farther wall of her husband's shop, and to look upon
her. Her eyes speak soft warm words that touch her hair, touch
her lips, lie like caressing fingers upon the soft cloth that lies
upon her breast.
-Less beautiful than I, though. My flesh is soft and sweet,
it is the colour of cream. What for? My hair is like an autumn
tree gleaming with sun. I can let it fall through the high chan-
nel of my breast against my stomach that does not bulge but lies
soft and low like a cushion of silk. What for? My eyes see
beauty. What for? O there is no God. If there is God, what
for? ... He will come back and work. He will eat and work.
He is kind and good. What for? When he is excited with love,
doesn't he make an ugly noise with his nose? What else does he
make with his love?
Another like Flora? God forbid.
What for?
She did not pull down the wide yellow shade, though it was
night. The street was a ribbon of velvet blackness laid beside
the hurting and sharp brightness of the store. The yellow light
was hard like grains of sand under the quick of her nails. She
was afraid of the street. She was hurt in the store. But the
.


332
UNDER THE DOME
He was
see.
brightness clamped her. She did not move.-0 let no more cus-
tomers come! “Keep quiet, Flora.” I can not move. She was
clamped.
But the store moved, moved.
There was a black wheel with a gleaming axle—the Sun—that
sent light dimming down its spokes as it spun. From the rim of
the wheel where it was black, bright dust Aung away as it spun.
The store was a speck of bright dust. It flung straight. It moved
along the velvet path of the street, touching, not merging with
its night. It moved, it moved, she sat still in its moving. The
store caught up with Meyer. He entered the store.
there. He was there, scooped up from the path of the street by
the store. Now her work was over. He was there. The store
was a still store, fixed in a dirty house. Its brightness the spurt
of two jets of gas. He was back from Schul.—That is all.
A man with blond hair, fiat feet that shuffled, small tender
hands. A man with a mouth gentle, slow; with eyes timid to
“Come dear: that is no place.”—Why she lets the child play
with my shears!
Tender hands pull Flora from beneath the table. Flora comes
blinking, unprotesting. Where her father's hands leave off from
her, she stays. She sinks back to the floor. She looks at her
little fists from which the scizzors are gone. She misses hard
gleaming steel. She opens and shuts her fists and looks at them:
she cries. But she does not move.
Her mother does not
Her father does not move. He squats on the table.
His head sways with his thoughts. He knows that Flora will
stop. .. what can he do? ... in perhaps half an hour.
It is a weak cry. Grows weaker. He is used to it. There is
work.
He sews.
A woman of valour who can find? For her price
is far above rubies' . . . She will stay here, stay here silent. Flora
should be in bed. Who to put his child in bed? Hard gas-light
on her beloved hair? A wither, a wilt ... She is like the mer-
chant ships; she bringeth her food from afar'. . . He sews and rips.
-What, Lord, have I left undone? I love my Esther. ... He
sews.—I love my little girl. Lord, I fear the Lord . 'She look-
eth well to the ways of the household, and eateth not the bread of
idleness.'—Lighten me, Lord, give me light. There is my daugh-
.
move.
.
.
.
.


WALDO FRANK
333
a
ter crying, who should sleep: and my wife sitting, who will not,
who will never without me go home. She is afraid. She says
she is afraid. She is sullen and silent. She is so fair and sweet
against my heart. Lord! why did her hands that held my head
speak a lie? and her silent lips that she let press upon my mouth,
why were they lies? Lord, I can not understand. Lord, I pray,
.
I must sew bread for Esther and for my child. I go to Schul at
least once each Shabbas, Lord ... Do I not fill the deep ten Peni-
tential Days from Rosh Ha Shonoh to Yom Ha Kippurim with
seeking out of heart? .. He sews, he rips. The weeping of his
child is done. Long stitches, here. She has found a chair's leg
to play with. Her moist fingers clasp at the shrill wood. The
wooden chair and her soft flesh wrestle. Esther sits still. He
O
sews.
'Her children arise, and call her blessed;
Her husband also, and he praiseth her ;
Many daughters have done valiantly,
But thou excellest them all.-
Grace is deceitful and beauty is vain;
But a woman that feareth the Lord, she shall be praised.
Give her of the fruit of her hands;
And let her works praise her in the gates.'
II
In the door and the clang again of the bell, a boy with them. A
boy they knew-son of their neighbours—big for his years and
heavy, with fat lips, eyes clouded, hair black and low over his
clouded eyes. Esther alone saw, as he lurched in, one foot drag-
ging always slightly.
He went for little Flora with no greeting for them: familiarly
as he knew he would find her, had come so, often.—He loves her.
The man who squats on the table and sews smiles on the boy who
loves and plays with his child.
“Hello, kid,” voice of a thick throat, “look—what I got for you
here.”
Flora lets the chair of her late love lurch against her back,
а



334
UNDER THE DOME
strike her forward. She does not care. She watches two hands
-grey-caked over red-unwrap from paper a dazzle of colours,
place it to her eyes on the floor, pull with a string: it has little
wheels, it moves!
"Quackle-duck,” he announces.
Flora spreads out her hands, sinks on her rump, feels its green
head that bobs with purple bill, feels its yellow tail.
"Quackle-duck-yours," says the boy.
She takes the string from his hand. With shoulder and stomach
she swings her arm backward and pulls. The duck spurts, bob-
bing its green long head against her leg.
She plays. The boy on his knees with soiled thick drawers
showing between his stockings and his pants plays with her. ...
Meyer Lanich did not cease from work, nor his woman from
silence. His face was warm in pleasure, watching his child who
had a toy and a playmate.—I am all warm and full of love for
Herbert Rabinowich: perhaps some day I can show him, or do
something for his father? Now there was no way but to go on
working, and smile so the pins in his mouth did not prick.
The eyes of Esther drew a line from these two children back to
the birth of the one that was hers. She dwelt in a world about
the bright small room like the night: in a world that roared and
wailed, that reeled with despair of her hope.
She had borne this dirty child all clean beneath her heart. Her
belly was sweet and white, it had borne her: her breasts were high
and proud, they had emptied, they had come to sag for this dirty
child on the floor-face and red lips on a floor that any shoes might
step.
Had she not borne a Glory through the world, bearing this stir
of perfect fesh? Had she not borne a Song through the harsh
City? Had she not borne another mite of pain, another fleck of
dirt upon the City's shame-heaps ?
She lies in her bed burned in sweet pain. Pain wrings her body,
wrings her soul like the word of the Lord within lips of Deborah.
Her bed with white sheets, her bed with its pool of blood is an
altar where she lays forth her Glory which she has walking carried
like a Song through the harsh City.—What have I mothered but
dirt?.
A transfigured world she knows she will soon see. Yes: it is


WALDO FRANK
335
a flat of little light—and the bugs seep in from the other flats no
matter how one cleans—it is a man of small grace, it is a world of
few windows. But her child will be borne to smite life open wide.
Her child shall leap above its father and its mother as the sun
above forlorn fields. ... She arose from her bed. She held her
child in her arms. She walked through the reeling block with
feet aflame. She entered the shop. There—squatting with
feet so wide to see—her man: his needle pressed by the selfsame
finger. The world was not changed for her child. Behold her
child changing_let her sit for ever upon her seat of tears—let
her lay like fire to her breast this endless vision of her child chang-
ing unto the world.
- I have no voice, I have no eyes. I am a woman who
has lain with the world.
The world's voice upon my lips gave my mouth gladness.
The world's arms about my flanks gave my flesh glory.
I was big with gladness and glory.
Joyful I lost in love of my vision my eyes, in love of my
song my voice.
I have borne another misery into the world.
.
.
Meyer Lanich moves, putting away the trousers he has patched.
-O Lord, why must I sew so many hours in order to reap my
pain? Why must I work so long, heap the hard wither of so
many hours upon my child who can not sleep till I do, in order that
all of us may be unhappy?
.
The clang and the door open. The mother of the boy.
“Oh, here you are! Excuse me, friends. I was worrying over
Herbert.
Well, how goes it ?”
She smiled and stepped into the room: saw them all.
:
.
“All well, Mrs Rabinowich,” said Meyer. “We are so glad
”
when your Herbert comes to play with Florchen.”
Mrs Rabinowich turns the love of her face upon the children who
do not attend her. A grey long face, bitterly pock-marked, in a
glow of love.
“Look what your Herbert brought her,” Meyer sews and smiles.
“A toy. He shouldn't, now. Such a thing costs money."


336
UNDER THE DOME
.
row.
Mrs Rabinowich puts an anxious finger to her lips.
“Don't,” she whispers. “If he wants to, he should. It is love-
ly that he wants to. There's money enough for such lovely
wants.
Well, Darling. Won't you come home to bed ?”
Herbert does not attend.
His mother sighed—a sigh of great appeasement and of content.
-This is my son! She turned to where Esther sat with brooding
eyes. Her face was serious now, grey ever, warm with a grey sor-
Her lips moved: they knew not what to say.
“How are you, Esther ?”
“Oh, I am well, Mrs Rabinowich. Thank you.” A voice
resonant and deep, a voice mellowed by long keeping in the breast
of a woman.
"Why don't you come round, some time, Esther? You know,
I should always be so glad to see you.”
"Thank
you,
Mrs Rabinowich.”
“You know-we're just next door," the older woman smiled.
"You got time, I think. More time, than I.”
“Oh, she got time all right!” The sharp words flash from the
soft mouth of Meyer, who sews and seems in no way one with the
sharp words of his mouth. Esther does not look. She takes the
words as if like stones they had fallen in her lap. She smiles away.
She is still. And Lotte Rabinowich is still, looking at her with a
deep wonder, shaking her head, unappeased in her search.
She turns at last to her boy: relieved.
"Come Herbert, now. Now we really got to go.”
She takes his hand that he lets limply rise. She pulls him gently.
“Good night, dear ones. ... Do come, some time, Esther-yes ?”
"Thank you, Mrs Rabinowich.”
Meyer says: “Let the boy come when he wants. We love to
have him.”
His mother smiles.-Of course: who would not love to have
him? Good heart, fine boy, dear child. “It's long past bedtime.
Naughty!” She kisses him.
Herbert, a little like a horse, swings away his heavy head.
They are gone in the bell’s jangle.
1
“What a good boy: what a big-hearted boy!” Meyer said aloud.
“I like the boy. He will be strong and a success, you see.”


WALDO FRANK
337
-
Her words "I saw him lift the skirt of Flora and peep up” she
could not utter. She was silent, seeing the dull boy with the dirty
mind, and his mother and Meyer through love thinking him good.
What she saw in her silence hurt her.
Her hurt flowed out in fear. She saw her child: a great fear
came on Esther.-Flora is small and white, the world is full of
men with thick lips, hairy hands, of men who will lift her skirt
and kiss her, of men who will press their hairiness against her
whiteness.
-There is a Magic, Love, whereby this shame is sweet. Where
is it? A world of men with hair and lips against her whiteness.
Where is the magic against them? Esther was very afraid. She
hated her daughter.
III
.
Meyer Lanich came down from his table and drew down the wide
yellow shade and shut out the night. No more stray customers to
enter. He turned the key of the door. He had his back to the
door, seeing his work and his child who now sat vacant upon the
floor and grimed her eyes with her fists too sleepy to hunt play-
seeing his wife. He sought to see this woman who was his wife.
To this end came his words, old words, old words he had tried often,
often failed with, words that would come again since they were the
words of his seeking to find the woman his wife.
"Esther,” he said, “it is nine o'clock and I have much work to
do-a couple of hours of work. ..."-I could work faster alone,
-
.
it will be midnight so with this pain for ever in my eyes. “Esther
won't you go
you go home and put Florchen to bed ?”
She looked at him with her full lovely eyes. Why since he saw
them lovely could he not see them loving? He had said these words
before, so often before. She looked at him.
“Esther,” he said, “it is bad for a baby of four to be up so late.
It is bad for her to sit around on the floor under the gas—smelling
the gas and the gasoline and the steam of the clothes. Can't you
consider Flora ?”
"I am afraid.”
"What is there to be afraid of? Can't you see? Why aren't


338
UNDER THE DOME
)
you afraid of what will happen to Flora? Eh-that don't frighten
you, does it? She's a baby. If my Mother could see
“Meyer, I can't. Meyer, I can't. You know that I can't.”
He waved his hands. She was stiff. They came no nearer one
to the other. About them each, two poles, swirled thoughts and
feelings—a world that did not touch the other.
He clambered back to his work. The room was hot. The gas-
light burred. Against his temples it beat harsh air, harsh light, the
acrid smells of his work—against her temples.
Esther sat. The words of her man seeking the woman she was
had not found for him but had stirred her. Her breast moved fast,
but all else of her was stiff. Stiff, all she moved like a thick river
drawn against its flow, drawn mounting to its head.—I can not go
home alone, to the empty hall alone, into the black rooms alone.
Against their black the flicker of a match that may go out, the dare
of a gas-light that is all white and shrieking with its fear of the
black world it is in. She could not go home alone.—For, Esther,
loneliness
you
will find
your life. I am afraid of my life.
She was caught, she was trapped.—I am miserable. Let me only
not move. . . . Since to move was to break against walls of a
trap. Here in the heart of movelessness a little space. Let her not
а
stir where the walls and the roof of the black small trap will smite
her!
in your
IV
The room moves up the dimension of time. Hour and hour and
hour. Bearing its freight toward sleep. Thick hot room, torn by
the burr of two lights, choked by the strain of two bound souls,
moving along the night. Writhing in dream. Singing.
.
-My flesh sings for silk and rich jewels;
My flesh cries for the mouth of a king.
My hair, why is it not a canopy of love,
Why does it not cover sweet secrets of love?
My hair cries to be laid upon white linen.
I have brought misery into the world.
.


WALDO FRANK
339
I have lived with a small man and my dreams have
shrunk him,
Who in my dreams enlarged the glory of princes.
He looks upon me with soft eyes, and my flesh is hard
against them.
He beats upon me with warm heart, and my breasts do not
rise
up
for him.
They are soft and forgetful of his beating heart.
My breasts dream far when he is near to them..
They droop, they die.
His hands are a tearful prayer upon my body ...
I sit: there is no way between my man and my dream,
There is no way between my life and life, ,
There is no way
between
my
love and
my
child.
I lie: and my eyes are shut. I sleep: and they open.
A world of mountains
Plunges against my sleep.
-Lord, Lord: this is my daughter before me, her cheeks that
have not bloomed are wilting. Preserve her, Lord. This is my
wife before me, her love that has not lived is dead.
Time is
a barren field that has no end. I see no horizon. My feet walk
endlessly, I see no horizon.
I am faithful, Lord.
.
.
The tailor-shop is black. It has moved up three hours into mid-
night. It is black.
Esther and Meyer walk the grey street. In the arms of the man
sleeps Flora. His arm aches. He dares not change her to his
other arm.
Lest she wake.
He has undressed her. Gentle hands of a man. He holds her
little body, naked, near his eyes. Her face and her hands, her feet
and her knees are soiled. The rest of her body is white--very
white-no bloom upon her body. He kisses her black hair.
He lays her away beneath her coverlet.
There is his wife before him. She is straight. Her naked body
rises, column of white flame, from her dun skirt. Esther-his love
-she is in a case of fire. Within her breasts as within hard jewels
move the liquids of love. Within her body, as within a case, lies



340
BREAKERS
her soul, pent, which should pour forth its warmth upon them.
He embraces her.
“Esther. . . . Esther ...” He can say no more.
His lips are at her throat. Can he not break her open?
She sways back, yielding. Her eyes swerve up.
Her eyes swerve up. They catch the
cradle of her child.
-Another child. another agony of glory · another
misery to the world?
She is stiff in the unbroken case of a vast wound all about her.
So they lie down in bed. So they sleep.
She has cooked their breakfast.
They walk, a man and a woman, down the steep street to work.
A child between them, holding the hand of a man.
a
They are grey, they are sullen. They are caught up in the sul-
len strife of their relentless life. There is no let to them. Time
is a barren field with no horizon.
BREAKERS
BY LEGARE GEORGE
A white tumult,
Flashing and tumbling,
Writhing over black, drenched rocks.
On the beach
They run up to a lapping thinness-
Quicksilver circling to nothingness
Over hard sand.
They slide back,
Sibilant,
Bubbled to foam,
With a vague sigh
Subsiding


THE APPROACH TO M. MARCEL PROUST
BY RICHARD ALDINGTON
WH
HEN we speak of literary filiation we have frequently to
make quite considerable mental reservations in the use of
the term, for it is not so much the mere game of tracing influences
which is involved as the implied definition of the artist's status, his
relation not to the men of his own period but to his illustrious pre-
decessors. Conducted with tact, the investigation is a kind of
criticism; it is at any rate a first means of approach. In the case
of quite definitely minor intelligences—a Dowson or a Collins or,
to be a little classically pedantic, a Calpurnius Siculus—men who
have simply found a nugget or two in a mine previously worked
by a more competent hand; in such a case we can hardly talk of
literary filiation in the precise sense. Here, if it is not a matter
of imitation "pure and simple,” it is at least a case where the
smaller mind is self-ranked as such by its almost dazzled yielding
to the greater. And in the case of sturdier minds which have
achieved a certain something which we yet know almost by in-
stinct to be devoid of distinction—a Wells or a Bourget-here
again our filiation is of small importance. It is like trying to
persuade ourselves that an agreeable parvenu has the surface, the
inimitable manner of some finished example, of the centuries' se-
lection. But apply the method to an écrivain de race, one who at
least appears to be in the grand line, and the result is illuminating.
Either we find that our subject is not quite so fine as our enthu-
siasm proposed, a little uneasy among the permanent residents of
Parnassus, or we discover that we have put down the outline of
a critical sketch. To establish these relationships, these spiritual
ancestries as it were, is as important to the student of literature
as the correct tracing of family descents is to an enthusiastic gene-
alogist. Of course no contemporary author can apear to us with
the prestige of those whose memories have suffered from genera-
tions of incense burners, just as a Howard to-day is not the same
thing as a Howard of the sixteenth century. But the mere fact
of noting the filiation has its uses if only those of introduction and


342
THE APPROACH TO M. MARCEL PROUST
>
of avoiding the merely uncomparative method of criticism which
leaves one wondering whether the superlatives are superlatives or
only politenesses. It means that we are judging an artist by his
peers and implies the compliment that we consider the immortals
as such. "Influences," as such, are uninteresting; but it is valu-
able to trace the main roots of a vigorous growth, or, to vary the
metaphor, to select an artist's spiritual affinities, the minds he
would frequent in some ideal Elysium of the Landor kind.
As an artist M. Proust does nothing without significance; or
rather everything he does, even his use of the word “and,” of a
blank space, has a significance. His recent article on Flaubert in
La Nouvelle Revue Française not only displayed a critical finesse
which left one breathless but revealed the writer's own methods,
inasmuch as he was doing startling things with prose and achiev-
ing unheard of subtleties. It is hardly fantastic to see in M.
Proust's Pastiches not so much a set of parodies which would rank
above even a brilliant book like A Christmas Garland, as a state-
ment, oblique but unmistakable, of his literary filiation. There
may be a further significance in the fact that this book is dedicated
to an American, which is at least piquant and suggestive. I feel
almost sure that in publishing these elaborate essays in the styles
of his predecessors—pastiches which are at once a criticism and an
homage-M. Proust had the intention of showing us a few of the
writers from the study of whom he has built up his own unique
style and something of the fabric of his thought. Balzac, Flaubert,
Sainte-Beuve, Henri de Régnier, the Goncourts, Michelet, Faguet,
Renan, and Saint-Simon—this is at once a formidable list of "great
names” and, if the phrase may be used without impropriety, a
somewhat heterogeneous paternity for an artist. Yet the list is by
no means complete, for we must add to it the name of an English-
man—let the super-modern reader prepare to start—John Ruskin,
and probably Chateaubriand and Mallarmé.
I see I was right to speak of that list as "formidable,” not be-
cause of the implied pretentiousness, but because of the very
elaborate analyses which would become necessary if these rela-
tionships were minutely discussed. The responsibility may be
thrown on M. Proust; he is not only an elaborate artist but the
cause of elaboration in others. His work is perhaps the most com-
plex literary “problem” of this decade; it is certainly the most


RICHARD ALDINGTON
343
fascinating. But I can do no more than hint at the immense op-
portunities for literary analysis which I see in this problem. To
pursue them at all far would involve me in endless subtleties. Yet
one or two suggestions may be usefully made.
It will be noted that only five of the first ten artists named were
novelists; the others were historians, critics, philosophers, and
writers of memoirs. This is significant, for if M. Proust is first
of all a novelist of tremendous ability he is also an acute critic,
a philosopher in morals, and a writer of contemporary history. His
work is the first attempt at a synthesis of modern European civili-
zation, localized at a point of intensity. It is this attempt (and
its success) one of the many motives of the million word A la
Recherche du Temps Perdu which gives the volumes which have
appeared their first startling importance. The book has so many
roots, so many intentions; it is packed so full of meaning, of
thought and observation; that it is a kind of literature in itself.
The writer of memoirs, of contemporary social history, is con-
spicuous in M. Proust. If this side of varied talent links him
partly to Balzac it also proves a closer filiation with Saint-Simon.
It is not the modern habit of decrying Balzac which causes me to
set M. Proust above him in this particular; it is because M. Proust
has a conception of the art which places him, lower indeed than
Saint-Simon, but in Saint-Simon's class. Balzac too often wrote
as a woman acts; from intuition. His observations on social life,
his attempts at an epitome of the civilization he lived in, are gen-
erally brilliant guesses, sometimes rather ridiculous guesses. Saint-
Simon, with his more restricted purpose, enjoyed the advantages
of really knowing the life he described and the characters he ana-
lysed. The creative value of his work is not greater than Balzac's,
it is not even more voluminous, but it has that sense of reality
which is the gift of intimacy alone (in comparison with which
Balzac's writing appears like that of an art-critic insufficiently edu-
cated in pictures), it has so many of those details and shades of
meaning which are the life of memoirs. To speak of Saint-Simon
in the terms of a French Pepys, as an English critic recently did,
is an enormity of bad taste and insensitiveness. The likeness is
that of a well to a lake. M. Proust, with his extreme sensitiveness
in critical perceptions, understands perfectly the significance of
Saint-Simon as an artist, in sharp distinction to his significance
а
a


344
THE APPROACH TO M. MARCEL PROUST
as an author of documents which time has invested with interest.
M. Proust has studied and used Saint-Simon's methods in render-
ing his own observations of modern life. And merely because they
are observations of modern life M. Proust's writings have a more
intimate if less stately and imposing meaning for us. The com-
plicated but perfectly controlled knowledge, the enthusiasm for a
"situation” which Saint-Simon put into the discussion of some
problem of precedence, some court manoeuvre, are devoted by M.
Proust to the modern interests of psychological analysis, a nuance
of sentiment, a delicate relationship, an appreciation of some fine
distinction. When he describes so minutely the exact manner and
air in which Swann raised his hat during a certain period of his
life, or renders that amazing dinner-party with M. de Norpois,
M. Proust is definitely doing for his age and generation what
Saint-Simon did for his. The conditions, the "data,” of the prob-
lem are all changed; the method is the same. It is M. Proust's
misfortune that he is dealing in fact-in spite of certain exceptions
which remain like fine old houses in a modern street-only with
a luxurious bourgeoisie, preoccupied essentially with what is “chic”
as distinct from what is really cultured. He feels the lack of an
established aristocracy, which was so precious an asset to Saint-
Simon. And inasmuch as M. Proust's own intelligence is aristo-
cratic, he is an anachronism. He suffers in the same way as Renan,
who could never find a place in an omnibus because he was too
polite to precede another passenger. He lacks that ordered state
of society where an exquisite refinement of this kind is forseen and
compensated by privileges.
I do not wish to create the feeling that M. Proust is a pompous
or intolerably refined person, though I can see a line of argument
which could represent him merely as the most astonishing case of
neurasthenia which ever existed. But in each case his manners are
too good for him to be any of these. His sensitiveness, that habit
of mind which can be described only by the misused “cultured,”
is something so intimate, so unforced and yet so controlled that the
personality disengaged from his books becomes something typical
and representative, an ideal presentation of the best in the old
world as Whitman, in another sense, was of the new. The com-
plaints directed against M. Proust's amorously detailed analyses
and the inordinately long curves of his thought are unjustified. M.


RICHARD ALDINGTON
345
Proust is neither a pompous nor a wordy writer. Unhesitatingly
one can point to Flaubert as his closest predecessor and he shares
with Flaubert that salt of irony which makes Bouvard et
Pécuchet one of the world's great satires. M. Proust has assimilated
Flaubert's methods and even refined on them. One can trace the
Flaubert manner throughout his pages, not as an "influence” but
as a similar habit of mind. In some respects even M. Proust's
gigantic novel