THE CARNEGIE LIBRARY OF The Pennsylvania State College CLASS NO. 05.1 BOOK NO. D 54 P. 2 ACCESSION 83354 2308 > Paidi THE DIAL 食 ​ OTSINO VOLUME LXX January to June, 1921 THE DIAL PUBLISHING COMPANY NEW YORK CITY E Index 83354 INDEX VOLUME LXX PAGE . . 778 o . . 673 . . . . . . . . 73 . . . . . I . . AESTHETICS AGAIN Thomas Jewell Craven 211 AMERICAN LETTER W. C. Blum. 562 ANDERSON'S, MR SHERWOOD, AMERICA Robert Morss Lovett ANNOUNCEMENT The Editor 730 ARCHITECTURE, DYNAMIC Herman George Scheffauer 323 ART AND RELATIVITY . Thomas Jewell Craven 535 AVANEL BOONE Vachel Lindsay 540 AWAKENING OF THE ACADEMY, THE Thomas Jewell Craven BEERBOHM, MAX. Bohun Lynch 177 BEGGAR'S OPERA, OUR Gilbert Seldes 303 BUILDER OF HISTORY, A . Hendrik Willem Van Loon 202 CENSORSHIP, ADULT OR INFANTILE? Ernest Boyd 381 CHARACTER AND OPINION IN THE UNITED STATES Ralph Barton Perry 576 CHINLESS AGE, THE Malcolm Cowley COCK AND HARLEQUIN Jean Cocteau 55 Translation by Rollo H. Myers COMIC MASK, THE . George Santayana 629 Critics, SOME ENGLISH . Sganarelle 710 Dead MATTER IN AFRICA (Fiction) Llewelyn Powys 319 DECLINE OF THE DRAMA, THE George Moore . DE GOURMONT, REMY, APPROACHES TO Kenneth Burke . 125 DEVELOPMENT Marianne Moore 588 DUBLIN LETTER John Eglinton Dust For SPARROWS Remy de Gourmont, 24, 164, 313, 417, 559 Translation by Ezra Pound FANUTZA (Fiction) Konrad Bercovici 545 FOUR YEARS, 1887-1891 . William Butler Yeats 611 FRANK, WALDO, THE NOVELS OF Paul Rosenfeld . 95 GERMAN LITERATURE, MAIN CURRENTS IN CONTEMPORARY Alec W. G. Randall 422 He, INTRODUCTION TO Gregory Zilboorg 247 HE, THE ONE WHo Gets SLAPPED (Play) . Leonid Andreyev 250 Translation by Gregory Zilboorg HURLY-BURLY, THE (Fiction) A. E. Coppard. 369 IN DEFENCE OF IMPERFECT VIRTUE Benedetto Croce 159 ITALIAN LETTER Enzo Ferrieri 70, 197 JACAPONE DA TODI Marianne Moore 82 JAMES, THB ACADEMIC Joseph Jastrow . 466 LAST STAND, THE , Gilbert Seldes 340 LINDSAY'S, MR VACHEL, FUTURE . Gilbert Seldes 208 . . . 332, 682 . . . . . . . . . IV INDEX PAGE . . 386 448, 686 428 . . . . . . . . . . . 29 217 583 692 572 529 462 143 705 343 329 . . • 458 . LITTLE MASTER OF THE SKY, THE (Fiction) Manuel Komroff LONDON LETTER . T. S. Eliot . Loulou (Fiction) Thomas Mann . Translation by Kenneth Burke LOVE THY NEIGHBOUR (Fiction) Gordon Arthur Smith . MAKING OF A TORY, The . Robert Morss Lovett MAN OF FOUR WORDS, A. Helen Ives Gilchrist METROPOLITAN HERMIT, A . Marianne Moore MODERN ENGLISH NOVEL Plus, The Kenneth Burke MONALDI AT THE ALFIERI Rita Wellman Mystic FINGER-Post, The. Slater Brown NEW ENGLANDER, THE (Fiction) Sherwood Anderson New PsycHOLOGY, The Ordway Tead ORCHESTRAL POETRY . Babette Deutsch Paris LETTER . André Germain . PHILOSOPHER OF THE EROTIC Evelyn Scott PHILOSOPHY, RECONSTRUCTION IN Ralph Barton Perry POETRY AND THE PROFESSORS Thomas Jewell Craven POETS AND PREFACES Babette Deutsch PRISONER Who SANG, THE (Fiction) Johan Bojer . PROBLEM OF POPULATION, THE Harold Cox . Rex (Fiction) D. H. Lawrence ROBINSON, EDWIN ARLINGTON Stewart Mitchell ROMAN LETTER, A Richard Aldington SACRED WOOD, THE. Marianne Moore SANDBURG: A Psychiatric CURIOSITY Arthur Wilson SEVEN SAYINGS Kahlil Gibran SOUL OF Wir, The Babette Deutsch STIEGLITZ Paul Rosenfeld . THESE THINGS ARE BANAL Malcolm Cowley THEY WENT. John Mosher THUS TO REVISIT Ford Madox Huefier VICTORIAN HOME, A Robert Morss Lovett VICTORIAN LADY, A . Scofield Thayer WHITE HEART, A (Fiction) Aleksei Remizou . . . 454 347 89 491, 635 519 169 569 309 336 80 69 204 397 700 580 . . . . . 14 694 223 65 1 INDEX V VERSE PAGE Lawrence Vail 163 . . . . . . 443 410 63 626 378 321 443 444 139 526 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . AMERICANS. ANACREONTIC POEMS, TRANSLATIONS FROM THE APOSTOLIC BEASTS, THE . APPROACH OF WINTER AUTUMN CRUCIFIXION OF NOEL, THE DAGMARA . DREAM, THE FRAGMENT, A. FRAOCHANS FRIENDSHIP, A Translation by HARVEST "I REACHED UP FOR YOUR HEART- JANUARY JARDIN DES TUILERIES LITTLE YELLOW ROAD, THE MEXICAN DESERT MIDI MODERNITIES MONOCLES “My Song Is AS A WATER-FIND" OLD MAN SEES HIMSELF, AN On Poetic COMPOSITION ONE SONG, THE Translation by POMEGRANATE PORTIA'S HOUSEKEEPING PORTRAIT OF BATHYLLUS, A PUELLA MEA SAINT JOHN SAINT LUKE SAINT MARK SATURN SINGING FURIES, THE "SPRING EVER RETURNING" To ANACREON TO A CICADA TO A PIGEON TO THE SPRING TO A SWALLOW TURTLES UNKNOWN COUNTRY War MOODS WINTER TREES 139 328 63 679 141 672 322 539 633 140 301 679 527 . . E. Allen Ashwin D. H. Lawrence William Carlos Williams . Padraic Colum. Marsden Hartley André Spire E. Allen Ashwin E. Allen Ashwin Joseph Campbell Charles Vildrac Witter Bynner Joseph Campbell G. O. Warren William Carlos Williams John Dos Passos Joseph Campbell . Mina Loy André Spire : Edwin Arlington Robinson Alfred Kreymborg Joseph Campbell Conrad Aiken John Dos Passos Charles Vildrac Witter Bynner D. H. Lawrence John Drinkwater E. Allen Ashwin E. E. Cummings D. H. Lawrence D. H. Lawrence D. H. Lawrence Joseph Campbell Richard Hughes Joseph Campbell E. Allen Ashwin E. Allen A shwin E. Allen Ashwin E. Allen Ashwin E. Allen Ashwin Alfed Kreymborg Harold Monro Arthur Wilson William Carlos Williams . . . . 317 12 446 48 414 412 410 140 627 139 444 445 445 443 444 634 307 193 64 . . . . . . . . . VI INDEX ART . . . . . . . . . . . . . . AERODROME, AN . . AFTER SIR CHRISTOPHER WREN BATH OF THE AIR, THE . BOXING AND PACKING ESTABLISHMENT BROOKLYN BRIDGE CIRCUS RIDER, THE . Dawn. DRAWING, A DRAWING, A DRAWING, A DRAWINGS, FOUR. ELEPHANTASTIC FACTORY FOR OPTICAL INSTRUMENTS GEORGE, STEFAN Half Dome, THE HORSES AND FIGURES HOUSE OF FRIENDSHIP, THE Joy RIDE LINE DRAWINGS, Two LITHOGRAPH, A MACBETH: Act V. SCENE I MADONNA MASK, A. LA MONTAGNE New YORK-AN ABSTRACTION NOGUCHI, YONE OÙ IRAI-JE?. PEACOCK, THE PENCIL DRAWINGS, THREE PIETA SPANISH BULL Fight SPIRIT OF THE NIGHT, THE SUMMER MUSICIANS VOLUPTÉ WATER-COLOURS, Two WINTER Wood CARVING, A WOUNDED SOLDIERS YOSEMITE VALLEY, THE Erich Mendelsohn Charles Demuth Rex Slinkard. Erich Mendelsohn John Marin. Sidney D. Carlyle Lucy Perkins Ripley John B. Flannagan Wyndham Lewis. Elizabeth Nagel . E. E. Cummings . C. Bertram Hartman Erich Mendelsohn.. Reinhold Lepsius Marguerite Zorach Rex Slinkard. Erich Mendelsohn C. Bertram Hartman Carl Sprinchorn . George Biddle Robert Edmond Jones Alfeo Faggi James Earle Fraser . Gaston Lachaise . C. R. W. Nevinson Alfeo Faggi . . Jean de Bosschère Gaston Lachaise . Elizabeth Nagel . Alfeo Faggi. Hunt Diederich John Storrs Wyndham Lewis Arthur Lee Mina Loy John Storrs William Zorach . John Storrs Marguerite Zorach . March February June March May April June May January February January June March April February June March June June May April March January March January March May April May March April February January June April February February February February . . . . . . . . . . . . INDEX VII BOOKS REVIEWED Authors and Titles PAGE > . . ADAMS, FRANKLIN P., GEORGE HORACE LORIMER, Don MARQUIS, CHRISTOPHER MORLEY, Introductions by. The Gentle Art of Columning, by C. L. EDSON 475 ADAMS, Henry. Letters to a Niece and Prayer to the Virgin of Chartres . 108 AIKEN, CONRAD. The House of Dust 343 AIKEN, CONRAD. The Jig of Forslin.-Punch: The Immortal Liar.Senlin 700 ALMQUIST, C. J. L. ADOLPH BURNETT BENSON, translator. Sara Videbeck and The Chapel 231 ANDERSON, SHERWOOD. Poor White.-Windy MacPherson's Son.-Winesburg, Ohio 77 ANDREYEV, LEONID. Anathema.—He, The One Who Gets Slapped.—The Life of Man 247 ANDREYEV, LEONID. Satan's Diary 592 ANONYMOUS. In the Mountains 474 ANTHONY, KATHARINE. Margaret Fuller 108 AsQurTH, MARGOT. An Autobiography 223, 694 ATHERTON, GERTRUDE. The Sisters-in-Law 592 BARBELLION, W. N.-P. See Cummings, Frederick Bruce. Beck, MRS THEODORE, in collaboration with EVELYN UNDERHILL. Jacapone da Todi 82 BEERBOHM, MAX. A Christmas Garland.—The Happy Hypocrite.—More.—Seven Men.-The Works.-Yet Again.-Zuleika Dobson 177 Benét, WILLIAM Rose. Moons of Grandeur 233 BENNETT, ARNOLD. Our Women 475 BENSON, ADOLPH BURNETT, translator. Sara Videbeck and The Chapel, by C. J. L. ALMQUIST 231 Benson, E. F. Dodo. Our Family Affairs 694 BERESFORD, J. D. An Imperfect Mother . 474 BERGSON, HENRI. L'Evolution Créatrice . 89 BERGSON, HENRI. H. WILDON CARR, translator. Mind Energy 462 BLÁCAM, AODH DE. See de Blácam. BLACK, John, and CLEVELAND RODGERS, editors. The Gathering of the Forces, by WALT WHITMAN 593 BLOOD, BENJAMIN Paul. Pluriverse . 109 BLÜCHER, PRINCESS. See Evelyn, Princess Blücher. BOJER, JOHAN. Life 230 Bok, EDWARD. The Americanization of Edward Bok . 477 BORDEN, Mary, The Romantic Woman 231 BOURGET, Paul. Anomalies 355 BRADLEY, WILLIAM ASPENWALL, translator. Decadence and Other Essays on the Cul- ture of Ideas, by REMY DE GOURMONT . 125 BRAITHWAITE, WILLIAM STANLEY, editor. Anthology of Magazine Verse, for 1920 352 BRANGWYN, FRANK. Bookplates 354 Brooks, VAN WYCK. The Ordeal of Mark Twain 562 BROWN, Rollo WALTER, compiler. The Writer's Art . BRYHER, W. Development . BUFFALO BILL. See Cody, Colonel William F. BYNNER, WITTER. A Canticle of Pan . 109 CANBY, HENRY SEIDEL. Everyday Americans 232 CARNEGIE, ANDREW. The Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie 478 CARR, H. WILDON, translator. Mind Energy, by Henri BERGSON 462 CATHER, WILLA. Youth and the Bright Medusa 230 CENDRARS, BLAISE. Du Monde Entier . 124 CHAPIN, CHARLES E. Charles E. Chapin's Story 478 CHESTERTON, G. K. The Superstition of Divorce 233 COCTEAU, JEAN. Poésies 1917-1920 . . . 716 588 . IIO VIII INDEX . . . PAGE Copy, COLONEL William F. Buffalo Bill, An Autobiography 478 CONKLING, GRACE HAZARD. Wilderness Songs 477 CORBIN, ALICE. Red Earth 594 CORKERY, DANIEL. The Hounds of Banba.-A Munster Twilight 332 Couch, Sir ARTHUR QUILLER. See Quiller-Couch. COUPERUS, Louis. The Tour . 474 COURTNEY, JANET E. Free-Thinkers of the Nineteenth Century 479 CROTHERS, SAMUEL McCHORD. The Dame School of Experience . 475 CUMMINGS, FREDERICK BRUCE. (W. N. P. Barbellion.) A Last Diary 717 CURLE, RICHARD. Wanderings: A Book of Travel and Reminiscence 479 Dawson-Scort, C. A. The Headland 714 DE BLÁCAM, AODH. Holy Romans 332 DE GOBINEAU, COMTE. Mademoiselle Irnois 355 DE GOURMONT, JEAN. Introduction by. Pendant la Guerre, by REMY DE GOURMONT 125 DE GOURMONT, REMY. Chemin de Velours.-Les Chevaux de Diomède.-Un Coeur Virginal.-La Création Subconsciente.-La Culture des Idées (Decadence and Other Essays on the Culture of Ideas, William Aspenwall Bradley, translator).- La Dissociation des Idées.--Le Fantôme. Le Latin Mystique.—Lettres d'un Satyre.—Mallarmé et l'Idée de Décadence.—Merlette.—Une Nuit au Luxembourg (A Night in the Luxembourg, Arthur Ransome, translator).-Pendant la Guerre.- Philosophic Nights in Paris, Isaac Goldberg, translator.-Physique de l'Amour.- Sixtine 125 DELIOR, Paul. Remy de Gourmont et Son Oeuvre . 131 DELL, FLOYD. Moon-Calf . 106 De Morgan, WILLIAM. The Old Man's Youth and the Young Man's Old Age . 714 Des Imagistes, an Anthology . 564 DEWEY, John. Reconstruction in Philosophy 454 DEWEY, John and Alice Chipman. Letters from China and Japan 717 Douglas, NORMAN. South Wind. They Went . 580 DRINKWATER, John. Lincoln: The World Emancipator DUHAMEL, GEORGES. La Confession de Minuit . 355 DZIEWICKI, MICHAEL HENRY, translator. Kobiety, by SoFJA RYGIER-NALKOWSKA . 591 Edson, C. L. Introductions by FRANKLIN P. ADAMS, GEORGE HORACE LORIMER, Don MARQUIS, CHRISTOPHER MORLEY. The Gentle Art of Columning . 475 Edwin, Irwin. Human Traits and Their Social Significance . 705 EGERTON, GEORGE, translator. Hunger, by KNUT HAMSUN 106 Eliot, T. S. Portrait of a Lady.-Prufrock . 343 Eliot, T. S. The Sacred Wood 336, 712 Erskine, John. The Kinds of Poetry and Other Essays 347 EVELYN, PRINCESS BLÜCHER. An English Wife in Berlin . 716 Fellowes, E. H., editor. English Madrigal Verse, 1588-1632 . 715 Fenn, AMOR. Design and Tradition . 354 FERBER, Edna, and NEWMAN LEVY. $1200 a Year . 477 FLETCHER, John Gould. Breakers and Granite . 700 FLEURY, COMTE. Memoirs of the Empress Eugénie 107 Flint, F. S. Otherworld 89 FORD, WORTHINGTON CHAUNCEY, editor. A Cycle of Adams Letters—1861-1865 353 FRANK, HARRY A. Vagabonding Through Changing Germany 479 FRANK, WALDO. The Dark Mother.-The Unwelcome Man . 95 FRANK, WALDO. Our America . 562 GALLIENNE, RICHARD LE. See Le Gallienne. GALSWORTHY, John. In Chancery 340 GARLAND, Hamlin. Ulysses S. Grant 583 GARLAND, MARIE TUDOR. The Marriage Feast GEORGE, STEFAN. Blätter fur die Kunst 422 Gibran, Kahlil. The Forerunner, His Parables and Poems 594 GIBSON, WILFRID Wilson. Neighbours GOBINEAU, COMTE DE. See de Gobineau. GOLDBERG, Isaad Studies in inish-American Literature 476 GOLDBERG, ISAAC, translator. Philosophic Nights in Paris, by Remy DE GOURMONT 125 478 . . . 716 . 477 INDEX IX PAGE . . 211 . 475 GOLDRING, DOUGLAS. Reputations 710 GOURMONT, REMY DE. See de Gourmont. GREGORY, ODIN. Caius Gracchus . 593 GUÉRARD, ALBERT Léon. French Civilization 717 GUITERMAN, ARTHUR. Chips of Jade . 477 HALDEMAN-JULIUS, Mr and Mrs. Dust 714 Hall, G. STANLEY. Morale 109 HAMP, PIERRE. People 714 HAMSUN, KNUT. GEORGE EGERTON, translator. Hunger 106 HARTMAN, H. G. Aesthetics HASENCLEVER, WALTER. Antigone 422 HAUPTMANN, GERHART. Emanuel Quint.-Indipohdi.—Der Ketzer von Soana.- Der Narr in Christo (The Fool in Christ).-Vor Sonnenaufgang.–Der Weisse Heiland (The White Redeemer).-Die Winterballade 422 Howe, E. W. The Anthology of Another Town . 232 HUXLEY, Aldous. Leda 73 HUXLEY, ALDOUS. Limbo 107 JAMES, HENRY, editor. The Letters of William James . 466 JAMES, WILLIAM. HENRY JAMES, editor. The Letters of William James 466 JAMESON, STORM. The Happy Highways . 592 JASTROW, MORRIS. The Book of Job . 593 JOHNSTON, Sir HARRY. Mrs Warren's Daughter 474 JOYCE, JAMES. Ulysses 96 Julius, Mr and Mrs HALDEMAN. See Haldeman-Julius. KARTINI, RADEN ADJENG. Agnes L. SYMMERS, translator. Letters of a Javanese Princess 231 KELLEY, ETHEL M. Beauty-and Mary Blair . KEMP, Harry. Chanteys and Ballads 109 KIPLING, RUDYARD. Letters of Travel 479 KREYMBORG, ALFRED. Plays for Merry Andrews 108 LAWRENCE, D. H. Look! We Have Come Through.—The Lost Girl.-Women in Love 458 LAWRENCE, D. H. New Poems 89 LEE, VERNON. Satan the Waster 232 LE GALLIENNE, RICHARD. The Junk-Man, and Other Poems 233 LEONARD, WILLIAM ELLERY. The Lynching Bee 477 LEVY, NEWMAN, and Edna FERBER. $1200 a Year . 477 LEWIS, SINCLAIR. Main Street 106 LINDSAY, VACHEL. The Golden Book of Springfield 208 LORIMER, GEORGE HORACE, FRANKIN P. Adams, Don MARQUIS, CHRISTOPHER MORLEY, Introductions by. The Gentle Art of Columning, by C. L. EDSON . 475 LOVING, PIERRE, and FRANK SHAY, editors. Fifty Contemporary One-Act Plays. 353 Low, BARBARA. Psycho-Analysis, A Brief Account of the Freudian Theory . 478 LUCAS, E. V. Adventures and Enthusiasms . 475 LYND, ROBERT. The Art of Letters. 710 McFEE, WILLIAM. Captain Macedoine's Daughter 593 MACAULAY, Rose. Potterism 107 MacGill, PATRICK. Maureen 107 MACKENZIE, COMPTON. The Vanity Girl . 107 MACPHERSON, WILLIAM. The Psychology of Persuasion 705 MALLOCK, W. H. Aristocracy and Evolution.-Labour and the Popular Welfare.—The Limits of Pure Democracy.-Memoirs of Life and Literature. The New Repub- lic. Social Equality 217 MANN, HEINRICH. Der Untertan (The Subject) 422 MARQUIS, Don, FRANKLIN P. Adams, George HORACE LORIMER, CHRISTOPHER MORLEY, Introductions by. The Gentle Art of Columning, by C. L. EDSON . 475 MARTIN, EVERETT DEAN. The Behaviour of Crowds . 705 MASTERS, EDGAR LEE. Domesday Book . 352 MASTERS, EDGAR LEE. Spoon River Anthology 347, 448 MATHERS, E. Powys. The Garden of Bright Waters 108 MAYRAN, CAMILLE. The Story of Gotton Connixloo, and Forgotten 230 . . . . х INDEX PAGE . . . . . MENCKEN, H. L. Prejudices: Second Series 232 MITCHELL, STEWART. Poems 692 MONCRIEFF, CHARLES Scott. The Song of Roland 594 Monro, HAROLD. Some Contemporary Poets: 1920 448 MOORE, GEORGE. Abélard and Héloise 682 MOORE, George. The Brook Kerith 4 MORGAN, EMANUEL. Pins for Wings . 108 MORGAN, WILLIAM DE. See De Morgan. MORLEY, CHRISTOPHER, FRANKLIN P. ADAMS, GEORGE HORACE LORIMER, Don MARQUIS, Introductions by. The Gentle Art of Columning, by C. L. EDSON 475 MORTON, DAVID. Ships in Harbour 715 MURRY, JOHN MIDDLETON. Aspects of Literature.—The Evolution of an Intellectual . 210 NalkowsKA, SOFJA RYGIER. See Rygier-Nalkowska. NEVINSON, Henry W. Original Sinners 592 Nexö, MARTIN ANDERSON. Ditte: Girl Alive 106 Noguchi, YONE. Japanese Hokkus 204 Noyes, ALFRED. Collected Poems of Alfred Noyes, Volume III 477 NoYES, ALFRED. The Elfin Artist . 476 OBECNY, EDMUND, translator. The Comedienne, by WLADYSLAW S. REYMONT 474 O'BRIEN, EDWARD J., editor. The Best Short Stories of 1920 . 715 O’KELLY, SEUMAS. The Weaver's Grave. 332 O'Neill, Eugene. The Emperor Jones , Dif'rent, The Straw 715 ONIONS, OLIVER. A Case in Camera . 714 PANCRAZI, P. and P. PAPINI. Poeti d'oggi 70 PAPINI, P. and P. PANCRAZI. Poeti d'oggi . 70 PATRICK, G. T. W. The Psychology of Social Reconstruction 705 PERRY, Bliss. A Study of Poetry . 347 PHILLPOTTS, EDEN. Miser's Money 352 POOLE, ERNEST. Blind . . 230 QUILLER-Couch, SIR ARTHUR. On the Art of Reading . 108 Ransome, Arthur, translator. A Night in the Luxembourg, by Remy de GOURMONT . 125 REPPLIER, AGNES. Points of Friction . 475 REYMONT, WLADYSLAW S. EDMUND OBECNY, translator. The Comedienne 474 RHODES, HARRISON. American Towns and People . 231 RICHARDSON, NORVAL. Pagan Fire 715 ROBINSON, EDWIN ARLINGTON. The Three Taverns 569 RODGERS, CLEVELAND, and John BLACK, editors. The Gathering of the Forces, by WALT WHITMAN 593 Russell, COUNTESS. In the Mountains 474 RYGIER-NALKOWSKA, SOFJA. Michael HENRY DZIEWICKI, translator. Kobiety (Wo- man) SALMON, ANDRÉ Le Livre et la Bouteille . 354 SANDBURG, Carl. Smoke and Steel . SANGER, MARGARET. Woman and the New Race 594 SANTAYANA, GEORGE. Character and Opinion in the United States . SCHAUFFLER, ROBERT HAVEN. Fiddler's Luck SCHINZ, ALBERT. French Literature in the Great War SCHNITZLER, ARTHUR. Casanova's Heimfahrt.-Flink und Fliederbusch.—Die Schwes- 422 Scott, C. A. Dawson-. See Dawson-Scott. Scort, C. KAY. Blind Mice 592 SCOTT, EVELYN. The Narrow House . SCOTT, EVELYN. Precipitations 594 SEDGWICK, ANNE DOUGLAS. Christmas Roses 715 Seidlitz, W. von. See von Seidlitz. SERGEANT, ELIZABETH SHEPLEY. Shadow-Shapes 232 SHANKS, EDWARD. The People of the Ruins 231 SHAY, FRANK, and PIERRE LOVING, editors. Fifty Contemporary One-Act Plays 353 . 591 80 576 476 476 tern . . 591 . . INDEX XI PAGE 476 . 422 422 478 . SHERIDAN, CLARE. Mayfair to Moscow 716 SQUIRE, J. C. The Birds, and Other Poems SQUIRE, J. C. Books in General.-Life and Letters 710 STERN HEIM, CARL. Europa STUCKEN, EDUARD. Die Weissen Götter . 422 SUDERMANN, HERMANN. Die Ehre.—Das Höhere Leben. Die Raschoffs . SYMMERS, AGNES L., translator. Letters of a Javanese Princess, by RADEN ADJENG KARTINI 231 SYMONS, ARTHUR. Lesbia and Other Poems 89 TANSLEY, A. G. The New Psychology 705 TEASDALE, SARA. Flame and Shadow 476 THAYER, WILLIAM Roscoe. The Art of Biography 232 Thomson, J. ARTHUR. The System of Animate Nature 109 TOMLINSON, H. M. The Sea and the Jungle 717 TRIDON, ANDRÉ. Psychoanalysis and Behaviour UNDERHILL, EVELYN, in collaboration with MRS THEODORE Beck. Jacapone da Todi . 82 UNRUH, FRITZ VON. See von Unruh. UNTERMEYER, Louis. The New Adam 89 VALÉRY, PAUL. Album de Vers Anciens (1890-1900) 355 VON SEIDLITZ, W. A History of Japanese Colour-Prints . 354 VON UNRUH, FRITZ. Ein Geschlech.—Platz . 422 WADSWORTH, EDWARD. The Back Country, A Book of Twenty Drawings 233 WALEY, ARTHUR. Japanese Poetry 204 WALLAS, GRAHAM. Our Social Heritage 705 WALPOLE, HUGH. The Captives 353 Walsh, THOMAS, editor. Hispanic Anthology 233 WALTERS, L. D. O. compiler. An Anthology of Recent Poetry WASSERMANN, JAKOB. Christian Wahnschaffe 422 WEDEKIND, FRANK. Herakles 422 WELLS, H. G. The Outline of History WELLS, H. G. Russia in the Shadows 479 WHARTON, EDITH. The Age of Innocence 340 WHARTON, EDITH. In Morocco 231 WHITEHOUSE, J. HOWARD, editor. Ruskin the Prophet, and Other Centenary Studies 353 WHITMAN, WALT. CLEVELAND RODGERS and John Black, editors. The Gathering of the Forces 593 WILKINSON, Louis. The Buffoon 572 WILLIAMS, WILLIAM Carlos. Al Que Quiere 562 WILLIAMS, WILLIAM CARLOS. Improvisations 352 WILLIAMS, WILLIAM CARLOS. Kora in Hell 352, 562 WITTE, COUNT. ABRAHAM YARMOLINSKY, translator. The Memoirs of Count Witte 717 WOOLF, VIRGINIA. Night and Day-The Voyage Out 572 YARMOLINSKY, ABRAHAM, translator. The Memoirs of Count Witte 717 YEZIERSKA, ANZIA. Hungry Hearts 106 ZILBOORG, GREGORY. The Passing of the Old Order in Europe 354 716 . . 202 O . . . . XII INDEX MODERN ART PAGE 356 356 APOLLINAIRE, GUILLAUME, and Robert J. COADY COADY, ROBERT J., and GUILLAUME APOLLINAIRE GEFFROY, GUSTAVE, and CONSTANTIN GUYS Guys, CONSTANTIN, and GUSTAVE GEFFROY HARTLEY, MARSDEN INDEPENDENTS, THE MARIN, JOHN New SOCIETY OF ARTISTS. Non-ACADEMIC EXHIBITORS RELUCTANT FOREIGN EXHIBITORS SOCIÉTÉ ANONYME STIEGLITZ, ALFRED STORR, JOHN Two New SCULPTORS 721 721 113 595 597 II2 III 718 234 480 236 720 MUSICAL CHRONICLE AUDIENCES BLOCH, ERNEST CHARPENTIER'S LOUISE DAMROSCH, WALTER MUSEUM CONCERTS, THE POLISH MUSIC AND MUSICIANS STOKOWSKI, LEOPOLD YOUNG ITALIAN COMPOSERS 236 115 483 118 598 600 722 359 THE THEATRE 121 486 . AFGAR Bad Man, THE BAT, THE BIRTH OF A Nation, The BLUE EYES BOUTIQUE FANTASQUE, LA BROADWAY BREVITIES, THE BUDDIES CABINET OF DR CALIGARI, The CLAIR DE LUNE DEBURAU DECEPTION EMPEROR Jones, The ERMINIE Good TIMES GREEN GODDESS, THE HAMLET HEARTBREAK HOUSE HITCHY-KOO 1920 HONEYDEW KID, THE LADY BILLY LAST WALTZ, THE LILIOM 605 726 604 365 243 242 604 242 242 726 I 20 364 365 364 726 120 I21 I21 604 605 727 727 INDEX XIII PAGE 486, 726 604 . 726 728 . MACBETH MARY ROSE MARY STUART MIDNIGHT FROLIC MIDNIGHT ROUNDERS OF 1921, THE Mo Pin PASSES BY . Nice PEOPLE . PASSING SHOW OF 1921, THE PASSION RICHARD III Rollo's Wild Oat Rose Grrl, THE . SALLY. SAMSON AND DELILAH SERVANT IN THE HOUSE TAMURA TICKLE ME TIP-TOP Toto WINTER GARDEN, THE . ZIEGFELD MIDNIGHT FROLIC, THE 604 486 605 243 726 487 242 . 605 243 I 20 726 365 365 121 728 243 I 20 . . COMMENT 122 AFTER THE First Year . ANNOUNCEMENT ART AFTER THIRTY ART AND LULU BETT BLAISE CENDRARS Broom, THE . L'ESPRIT NOUVEAU EXPATRIATES, THE HARVARD GLEE CLUB MENDELSOHN, ERICH OUR ADVERTISMENTS POETS ON RECORDS. SAPIENT FOLK AND VANITY WILLIE HOWARD AND DR FREUD . DEPARTMENTS . BRIEFER MENTION COMMENT . DUBLIN LETTER ITALIAN LETTER LONDON LETTER . MODERN ART. MUSICAL CHRONICLE Paris LETTER . THEATRE, THE 730 246 244 124 606 123 489 124 488 246 244 488 366 .106, 230, 352, 474, 591, 714 . 122, 244, 366, 488, 606, 730 332, 682 70, 197 448, 686 .I11, 234, 356, 480, 595, 718 .115, 237, 359, 483, 598, 722 329 . 120, 242, 364, 486, 604, 726 ! > ( 19 Courtesy of the New Society of Artists BY JAMES EARLE FRASER MASK. THE DIAL OXXO:19 JANUARY 1921 THE DECLINE OF THE DRAMA BY GEORGE MOORE I - would like to avail myself of this rare occasion to say my little say on a topic that seems, from its frequency in the newspapers, to interest everybody—the decline of the drama. It appears from the papers that I read last Sunday that the dramatic critics themselves cannot sit through the plays now in course of performance at the London theatres, and leave dejected, broken in spirit, after the second act, to return to their homes to write discourses on the almost universal stupidity to which, unfortu- nately, they are obliged to pander. The articles of the discontented critics are concerned with the perennial problem of the actor manager, and the difficulties of obtaining enough rehearsals in the theatres that call themselves repertory theatres. State-subsidized theatres also occupy the pens of the critics, and everyone is certain that if some modifications were made, talent would return to the theatre. As certain are they as they ever were in the ’nineties, when the common critical announcement was that Wagner had made the writing of a bad opera from henceforth impossible. It was thought, too, in the , same 'nineties, that Ibsen had hit upon a dramatic road that would lead everybody to Parnassus who cared to go there, even Mr — But it would seem that whosoever produces a masterpiece, so far from helping his contemporaries to go and do likewise, poisons their aspirations: till the masterpiece is born the majority of men and women write the music and literature of their own time, and Art continues her matronly march down the well-known ways; but on the advent of the masterpiece Art is thrown into dismay, 2 THE DECLINE OF THE DRAMA the young attach themselves to the new formula, and the elders are broken-hearted, as well they may be, for from henceforth they are old fogies. I remember well how the spell of the seduction of unity stole over me in the stalls of the Gymnase Theatre in Paris in the 'sev- enties, and the ravishment with which I watched the skill of the dramatist, Dumas fils, introduce his characters into the same room one after the other, finding specious entrances and exits for all, and how my excitement at his handicraft was increased as the cur- tain rose again on the same furniture, not a table or a chair moved out of its place; the hand of God seemed in it all when on turning to the programme I learnt that the whole action of the play was comprised in the short space of a few hours. Maybe the play that astonished me out of my wits was Monsieur Alphonse, or may- be it was the work of some other craftsman, for there are always many about who can avoid soliloquies and asides. But to do this, , and skilfully, does not carry the dramatist, so it would seem, any nearer to Shakespeare than he was before; an unpopular doctrine this is, almost a heresy, but I will dare to say that it is better to write Hamlet with soliloquies and asides than Monsieur Alphonse without. At that time a large volume of Restoration plays was in my hand constantly, and my scorn of their craft brimmed over when I noticed that not one or two, but sometimes five, changes of scene occurred in each act, and that asides and monologues were the almost common means of expression of these forlorn dramatists. It may be that I dreamed of astonishing the London public with plays composed in the manner of Monsieur Alphonse, and it may be that no such thought entered my head, and it matters to nobody what I thought, or think that I thought, of Mr Jones' play, Saints and Sinners; it comes into my mind naturally, for it is the last, or one of the last, plays written in our old English dramatic for- mula, come down to us, with some variations, from the sixteenth century-three, four, or five scenes in each act, a forest glade fol- lowed by a parlour, a parlour by a street scene, a street scene by a lady's boudoir. The reader must think out for himself where the dramatist might have placed his fifth scene-in a cottage on a lonely heath, by the sea-shore, or in a tavern. It matters not where the scenes are placed; it's enough to say that all these changes GEORGE MOORE 3 were made within sight of the audience, the side scenes being pulled away by the scene-shifters. The craft of Saints and Sin- ners must have seemed to me very gross (after a long sojourn in France it could not seem otherwise), and it may be that once again I indulged myself in a dream of a play in three acts, in which the whole action would be confined to a parlour, each act comprising fourteen exits and entrances. Indeed, it could not have been else than that my thoughts turned to such a play, for the belief of every- body in the ’nineties was that to recapture Shakespeare we must denounce monologues and asides. Strange are the beliefs of men; but I am meditating history, so to continue. It was in the late 'eighties or the ’nineties that Ibsen began to be spoken of and The Doll's House was produced; and it was noticed at once that the master allowed himself to drop into short solilo- quies, but these, it was confidently predicted, would disappear as the master developed his craft. And for once the critics were right in their predictions; Ibsen forebore henceforth to soliloquize, to everybody's great delight, for everybody's delight in Art is in an externality of no moment whatever. Nobody remembered that the most beautiful things in Shakespeare, and the most real, are the soliloquies, and no thought was given to the fact that Ibsen's earlier plays (the plays in which he used monologues and asides as frequently as Shakespeare) are the most beautiful, and of all the most real. The master has never expressed himself better than in some of the monologues in The Pretenders. But critics are not usually interested in the result, but in the means, and one of the master's greatest works was alluded to as “a youthful indiscretion,” the reason being that for the last twenty years the critics have been busy cutting and pruning and making ready the road for the feet of the young Parnassians, who have, according to the Sunday papers, failed to "play up.” The critics stand waiting; the monologue has been felled, the aside has been grubbed up, and no doubt if a Don Quixote and a Sancho were sought in this journalistic reformation they would be found, for these are everywhere; but in finding them I should not escape a charge of attacking contemporaries who have, perhaps, on occa- sions, spoken well of my work. It will be well, therefore, to think of other designations that can point to nobody, and on returning from the window I bring back a remembrance of a lantern and a 4 THE DECLINE OF THE DRAMA you think post-box; as nobody, not even the most invidious, can fix these names upon men now living amongst us, I will call upon them if their opinion should be needed. The afternoon tea had just come in and I was filling a cup when a ring came at the front door, and who do my visitor was, reader? None other than my old friend Lantern. You will . understand easily that it was delightful to me to hear the maid- servant announce him; you can see me, no doubt, in your mind's eye start from my chair, and hear me beg of him to share my tea. He had not been to see me for a long time, and in his apologies The Brook Kerith happened to be mentioned. “But, my dear Lantern,” I said, “my affection for my friends is not dependent upon the fact that they read or do not read my books.” “My case is worse than not having read The Brook Kerith,” said Lan- tern in a very grave tone. “The truth is, I couldn't get on with it.” “Now how was that?” I asked, tickled in my incurable curiosity; and having always clung on to the belief in Lantern's shrewdness I was a little disappointed with the reason he gave for not being able to get on with The Brook Kerith. It appears that all the long pages about Joseph of Arimathea put him past his patience, for he wanted to know what I thought about Jesus and Paul. It was on my lips to remark that if I had begun with Jesus I could have escaped barely from the charge of rewriting the Gos- pels, but not wishing to embarrass Lantern (I love all Lanterns, be they bright or dim), I fell back upon Heine's celebrated answer to Berlioz, who came to see the lonely poet when he was dying: “Always original, Berlioz.” At which remark Lantern's wick spluttered in its socket for a moment, but it flared up quickly, and we fell to talking of Shakespeare, passing on to the way of the drama, the lighting of which had been my friend's care for many years. may well have been that he asked me if I were writing a play, and if that was his question, I answered that the modern play was so strict a convention that the form would have to be enlarged, broken up, as the old English comedy was scrapped about thirty years ago. Lantern asked me why I did not undertake the task . of writing something different from the ordinary play, but as nothing would be gained by noticing his irony, I answered that it required many years to create a new convention, and that perhaps It GEORGE MOORE 5 no single man could do this, but a generation of writers. Not only the man, but the moment is required,' as Matthew Arnold has put it. He might have said 'men' instead of ‘man,' for no man creates a literary tradition.” “But a man can start one,” re- . plied Lantern. “Do you think so ?” I asked. “Are you sure?” He answered, “Ibsen,” and we talked for some time, myself claim- ing that the Ibsen formula could be discovered in France, the gist if not the spirit of it at least. In all these debates many words are wasted, and to bring to an end an argument in which neither was in- terested, I remarked that if I had to begin my life again and my lot was cast in the theatre, I should not be satisfied with following the rut, but would seek (unconsciously perhaps, but I should seek) new formulas—the old bottles would not have satisfied me for the new wine, if I had any. "In what direction would you have sought the new formula ?” Lantern asked. “Or do you think it would have come of itself?” “The new form," I replied, "would come ” , unconsciously in response to some personal need.” "Can you tell me the need, or indicate it?” “Yes," I answered, “I think I can do that.” “The straitened form into which the drama has fallen would have set me thinking how it might be widened, and my take-off would have been the five-act comedy of our ancestors, each act consisting of three, four, perhaps five, different scenes changed within sight of the spectator. This form would allow of more story, more variety, in a word, more life. If I can rely on your patience?” Lantern nodded acquiescence. “The stream "of story," I continued, “that the present dramatic formula permits is but a mere trickle; it is not of our tradition,” and to rouse Lan- tern out of a lifetime of prejudices I told him that before he came I was thinking of the joy I had experienced when a boy in the stalls of the Gymnase during a performance of Monsieur Al- phonse. “You have outgrown such crude aestheticism,” he said drily. “We grow into ourselves, Lantern, if we grow," I answer- ed. “But,” said Lantern, "you would not surely return to the whistle, at the sound of which a back cloth is lowered and the side scenes advanced or withdrawn?” “I am afraid I would," I answered, “and shall be able to give you some reason for prefer- ring the English form, which has come down, with some modifica- tions, from Shakespeare to Congreve, and was accepted by Sheridan > a 6 THE DECLINE OF THE DRAMA form may and Goldsmith; but I would ask you first to admit that a literary shrink and wither, and that,” “The dramatic form,” said Lantern, “is a hard material (stone or marble it may be com- pared to) through which the dramatist has to cut his way with hammer and chisel.” “But, Lantern, form is not meritorious in itself, it is but a ve- hicle, and a man is not a greater artist because he writes in the harder form of the ballade rather than in the looser form of the stanza." “The soliloquy," interposed Lantern, “is to some ex- tent defensible, but words should never be spoken on the stage that the bystander is not supposed to hear,” and shuddering slight- ly he spent the rest of his feelings on his watch-chain. “But will you tell, Lantern, why an aside should never be indulged in? Will you give me a reason? Shakespeare, all the Elizabethan dramatists, Goldsmith, Sheridan, and all the early French drama- tists use the aside—why, then, Lantern, why deride it?” “Be- cause the convention that only the audience hears the aside is too crude,” he answered. “We have progressed since then.” “In what, dear Lantern ?" I asked. “Not in the results, surely?” ? , "In the means,” he replied, and instead of twitting him, as I might have done, for looking upon the means as more important than the end, I said: “You think we should cling closer to Nature?” Lan- tern nodded, and I continued: “But we do not get nearer to Nature by imprisoning all our characters into a single set.” “You were thinking,” he answered, “of the joy that you experienced when a boy at a performance of Monsieur Alphonse.” “I was, Lantern, and busily comparing the different literary methods of Mr Henry Arthur Jones in Saints and Sinners and Dumas fils in Monsieur Alphonse.” “A strange association of styles,” said Lantern, and he seemed interested to hear how two plays so different should have come into the same meditation. "Saints and Sinners," I said, “ "was the last play written in the old English formula, several changes of scene in each act and the dialogue falling into soliloquies and asides, according to the nature of the story, without the author stopping to ask himself if the critics would approve, the method in its innocency reminding me of a picture by Francesca, in which one of the figures throws a shadow; the other figures in the pic- ture are shadowless." And I waited for Lantern to admire the point that I had made, but instead of rendering homage to it, he GEORGE MOORE 7 asked me, I thought a little drily, which play I preferred-Mon- sieur Alphonse, or Saints and Sinners. “Both are forgotten,” I answered. “Then,” he said, "you're talking about means rather than results,” to which I made reply that I did not say, nor did I think of saying, that an enlargement of the formula would cer- tainly lead to better results (of the results we can never be sure); my meaning was that the drama has fallen into the straitness that might be compared to certain forms of French verse. “It was in the 'nineties that Ibsen appeared in England—” “But Ibsen,” said Lantern, "whom you used to admire, wrote his greatest plays without dropping into monologues and asides.” “He did, Lantern, he did; we will speak of Ibsen's craft and the fruit it has borne presently. At the present moment I am think- ing of you walking at his head, with Post at his heels. By the way, I haven't seen Post for a long time, many years; I hope he is well ?” “We haven't seen each other lately,” Lantern answered, "but I believe him to be quite well. You were saying that in the ’nineties Ibsen appeared, with me walking at his head and Post at his heels.” “Yes, declaiming like the King of Dahomey's Ap- paritor, who walks on certain occasions in front of the King's bull, crying, 'this is the bull, the one bull, the only bull. I can see you still in my imagination leading the ringed bull, the little hairy Norwegian bull, crying, here is the bull of drama, the one bull, the only bull,' and little Post in the rear crying, “this is the bull, the King of bulls, the bull with the crumpled horn, that tossed the aside and trampled the soliloquy,' contriving exits and en- trances from the same drawing-room with a skill unequalled by any French dramatist, and writing a dialogue that makes French dialogue seem very halting.” “Did Post ever say that?”' Lan- tern asked. “Somehow I don't recognize him in it. It is much more like your own talk.” “No man ever wrote dialogue as skil- fully as Ibsen," I answered, “and his dreaming, questioning, spirit- ual soul was possessed of a particular sense of beauty.” “Well, then," cried Lantern, “you have the result; the means produce the result.” “Ibsen was a man of genius,” I cried, and like every man of genius he made the form that he acquired in France his own, extracting all that fourteen entrances and exits in each act can give, just as Wagner extracted all the beauty the leit-motif had for giving. In other hands the leit-motif is abhorrent, and 8 THE DECLINE OF THE DRAMA a in the same way the fourteen exits and entrances in each act are abhorrent except in Ibsen. The form has given what it could give. Moreover, the form grew up with Ibsen, and it was his need.” “The romantic formula having ceased to interest him, he turned to the realistic,” said Lantern. “But, my dear Lantern, how can dramatic Art be described as realistic? We begin by supposing a room with three walls; the convention that the fourth wall has been removed is the first con- dition of the existence of the theatre. And if the scene be in the open air, the painted canvas which does duty for trees wouldn't deceive a child, and the better painted the trees and the rhododen- drons are, the uglier they are. To look at even the finest pictures in the National Gallery for more than five minutes is weariness, but on the stage we have to look at the same rhododendrons for two hours and a half. Then we are asked to accept a gas-light shining through a hole in a curtain as a star, and if there be any haymaking in the play the moon will be, of a certainty, as big, or bigger, as the moon that lights George Mason's harvesters home from the fields. Conventions and artifices are part and parcel of the Art of the stage, of all Art, for Art is not Nature, because it is Art; why, then, should you object to soliloquies and asides, pre- ferring in the interests of reality eighty-four entrances and exits in the space of two hours and a half?” “Eighty-four?” inter- jected Lantern suddenly. “Yes, eighty-four,” I replied; "fourteen entrances and exits in the first act are twenty-eight, twice twenty- eight are fifty-six, and twenty-eight added are eighty-four.” “But," said Lantern, "the number of exits and entrances depends on the number of characters.” "Ibsen,” I answered him, "could write a play with five or six characters. To do this was his special gift, but the modern English comedy and the French contain if not eighty-four at least sixty-five or seventy exits and entrances. Have you never, Lantern, hand on your heart, experienced a feeling of exasperation when in the third act a man says that he will go and smoke a cigar on the terrace? In that horrid moment we feel dramatic Art to be more straitened and artificial than the ballade, the kyrielle, the rondeau, the rondel, the Sicilian octave, or the sestina. In its seventieth exit or entrance the modern comedy at- tains to the artificiality of the chant royal, and you will admit that 6 GEORGE MOORE 9 9 a this form has never produced a poem.' “But the ballade has produced many poems,” said Lantern, “and the form is nearly as strict as the chant royal.” “The ballade," I answered, "existed long before Villon. In the works of Gower, a poet who wrote in three languages with equal facility and equal mediocrity, will be found fifty examples of the ballade quite as correctly written as Villon, but without his poetry. Gower lived a hundred years be- fore Villon, and during these years the ballade was waxing to the perfect flower that it attained in Villon's ballade to his mother. More it had not for giving, and it died like a flower that has seeded. Even the genius of Banville was not able to breathe life into it, and the history of the ballade is the history of all Art formulas. "To return, Lantern, from poetry to the stage. I would like to ask you if the leanness of the dramatic formula does not awaken hope in you that somebody will be born who will dare to write long speeches in place of love scenes in which the lovers are almost mute. Instead of the love scene in Romeo and Juliet, we have the swain and his lady addressing the very curtest remarks to each other: He. Have you nothing to say to me? SHE. No, no. HE. No hopeful word? ShE. Do not press me to speak. HE. To-morrow? She. Perhaps. He. You will write? ShE. Yes, I will write. [Exit. The lady returns to the fire, which goes out slowly. CURTAIN. Such scenes as these, and they are common in London plays, set me wondering what Rachel, Désclee, Frédéric Lemaître, and Sal- vini would think if they were asked to speak such dialogue. I can imagine them gathering up their grave clothes, anxious to re- turn to their tombs, whispering, 'But we are men and women, and can make nothing out of the speech of daws, jays, and magpies.' A parrot is loquacious compared with these latter-day dramatists. I remember a comedy at the Haymarket in which the leading char- acters played dominoes, and my remembrance of the dialogue is: 10 THE DECLINE OF THE DRAMA Double-six.' (Long silence.) 'I can't play, I must draw one.' (Long silence.) 'It's your turn.' turn.' (Long silence.) An old woman occupied a corner of the stage, uttering now and again, as a parrot might: 'I don't think that man will come in to-night. I will not say, Lantern, for I wish to be quite fair with you, that in this play we have one after your own heart, but I do say that we have in it the ultimate fruit of the realistic formula, no soliloquies, no asides, no long speeches.” “A good deal can be proved by choosing examples from un- known plays,” Lantern answered, and I know he was vexed from the way he played with his watch-chain. “You would have been more convincing if you had chosen your examples from our best writers.” “From Galsworthy?" I asked, and called to his mem- . ory a love scene in Justice or Strife, I have forgotten which, in which the quest of realism is carried to a triumphant end, for so strangled are the characters by their emotions that they become far less articulate than parrots. “But does not passion render us speechless?” Lantern asked. “I think it does, Lantern, in real ? life, but we cannot carry real life into Art.” “Why not?” said ? Lantern. “Because Art, Lantern, is Art, and life is life. In the legend of The Ring, the beauty of Brunnhilde rendered Siegfried speechless, but Wagner did not follow the legend, he wrote the exultant duet, leaving Reyer, an inferior writer, to allow the lov- ers to stand mutely gazing at each other, like Mr Galsworthy's lovers.” “It all depends," said Lantern, “which you prefer—the realistic method or the romantic.” “But I do not prefer either, for I do not distinguish between the two, Lantern. Wagner was romantic to the finger tips, he was a realist from the crown of his head to his heels, and the difference between him and Reyer was that one man was a genius and the other—well, a man of talent, if you like.” “And “And you think then,” said Lantern, “that if you were to devote yourself to the stage your quest of realism, perhaps I should say truth, would have led you to changes of scene, in which two footmen carry two chairs and a small table on to the stage, whereat the actors continue their discourses.” “My dear Lantern, the illusion created by externals, scenes, costumes, light- ing, and short sentences is in itself illusory. The best perform- ances of plays and operas are witnessed at rehearsals. Jean de GEORGE MOORE 11 a Reszke was never so like Tristan at night as he was in the after- noon when he sang the part in a short jacket, a bowler hat, and an umbrella in his hand. The chain armour and the plumes that he wore at night were but a distraction, setting our thoughts on peri- ods, on the short swords in use in the ninth century in Ireland or in Cornwall, on the comfort or the discomfort of the ships in which the lovers were voyaging, on the absurd nightdress which is the convention that Isolde should appear in, a garment she never wore and which we know to be make-believe. But the hat and feathers that Isolde appears in when she rehearses the part are forgotten the moment she sings; and if I had to choose to see Forbes-Robertson play Hamlet or rehearse Hamlet, I should not hesitate for a moment. The moment he speaks he ceases to be a modern man, but in black hose the illusion ceases, for we forget the Prince of Denmark and remember the mummer. When in a stall in Covent Garden a woman sitting beside me said (when Chaliapin appeared), 'I have been waiting all the evening for Chaliapin,' I answered, 'And I have been waiting all the evening for Ivan the Terrible.'” PORTIA'S HOUSEKEEPING BY JOHN DRINKWATER We are thrifty of joy in this our modern house; We probe the springs of joy with uneasy rods, And shadow the worm in every thrilling bud. Virtue we know will walk in seedy rags Of knavery when the better humour fails; And we know the good man's shadow of desire. a It was not so with Portia. She was simple, Plain for clear yes or no and good or bad. Bassanio at Belmont in the evening, Walking the terrace with Antonio Was a good man with his friend, and that was all, Save that his lips were young and masterful. She had no fine philosophy of sin; You lied, and that was bad. You gave your word, And, when time came, redeemed it. A treasure kept At another's cost was ashes in your hand. She liked her roses red, her lilies white, And counted punctual hours in guests a virtue. Sometimes she thought of a Jew and a young doctor Standing before the majesty of Venice, And smiled, without approval, then again To sow the asters or feed guinea-fowl. Gratiano, finding ever new Nerissas Among her maids, she told not to be tedious, And Gratiano said she was growing dull. She liked the verse Lorenzo took to writing And made some tunes herself upon the lute To fit a little moonlight sequence. When Launcelot Gobbo stole a goose at Christmas, She did not say he was an honest fellow, But rated him and almost sent him off; He didn't brag about it to his fellows. JOHN DRINKWATER 13 She had two children, and said two were enough, And loved them. She believed there was a God With an impatient ear for casuistry. Bassanio had no regrets, but some Agreed with Gratiano. I do not know. In Belmont was a lady richly left? THUS TO REVISIT ... 2 BY FORD MADOX HUEFFER PART II THE BATTLE OF THE POETS I to say ASK to be taken as writing the pages that follow with some diffidence. When it is a matter of prose I know what I want; I know what I want to say; and I know that I can say what I want with some exactness. Prose is for me an instrument-like a tool of precision. But the moment I come to want to write about verse I feel-possibly doubts, possibly misgivings; certainly some of the diffidence of the novice. For I suppose I never really devoted to the problem of verse any of the close and sedulous thought that gives a man a real right to demand to be listened to. I began to think about verse desultorily about 1912; it was not until 1915 or 1916, during the enforced waitings of a life sometimes of rather frenzied action, that I devoted really the whole of my aesthetic mind to the practical side of verse-writing. I made, that is to say, a great number of metrical experiments of my own and thought con- stantly of the metrical devices that had been adopted by the writers of works that had given me that high, fine pleasure that poems alone can give. And, since that troubled time, I have continued in the same habits. I should like to make a confession of faith: I believe the con- ception—and if possible the writing-of poetry to be the only pursuit worthy of a serious man, unless the vicissitudes of his time call on him to be also a soldier. I have always held this belief; I have never changed in it; I trust that I never shall. I do not mean to say that there are no other pursuits, professions, callings, or avocations that Destiny may not force upon a proper man and he endure them with dignity, honour, and an unbent head. ... But even then, if he does not follow them in the spirit of a poet-and with the self-sacrifice of a soldier-he is not a proper man and I hope I may never have to know him. a FORD MADOX HUEFFER 15 But, until the earlier date that I have given above, although I never faltered in this belief, the only writings, at any rate of my own day, that I could call poetry had been in the form of prose, not of verse. When—so very occasionally in some of the writings of the poet laureate, of Mr Walter de la Mare, of Christina Rossetti, of Robert Browning, I came across passages that stirred me with an unmistakable call, it was the prose quality of those passages, not the metrical values, to which I attached importance. It was the beauty of the wording; it was the beauty of the image evoked by the con- tact of simple words one beside the other. Of that earlier time I remember images called up by the two liv- ing poets. The one rendered distant ships, like silver-points on a grey horizon: that was Mr de la Mare; the other made visible the depths of still fresh water, beside the piles of a boating stage- on the Thames, I should say. That was in a poem by Mr Robert Bridges. I do not mean to say that I cannot remember other pas- sages of these two poets: I can. I believe I could recite several poems by each of them, with possibly a verbal error here and there. And just, as far as I am concerned, as it is with these two living poets so it is with the two dead ones. Christina Rossetti was an in- finitely great master of words, but the emotions her work always gave me were those of reading prose--and so it was with Brown- ing. ... I have seldom received a greater stirring of enthusiasm than on the day when-quite late in life--I first came upon the words, at the end of the first paragraph of the Flight of the Duchess : “And all this is our Duke's Country!” And that is certainly a prose effect and a prose rhythm. But isn't it glorious?... So that, only the other day, I surprised myself by saying to Mr Pound, the words coming out from some subcon- scious depths where I did not know that the opinion lay: “After all the only English poet that matters twopence is Browning!” I don't know what Mr Pound answered; I very seldom do know what Mr Pound answers; but he neither knocked me down nor screamed, so that I daresay he was substantially in agreement with myself .. 16 THUS TO REVISIT . - . a I will try to make clear how this progression of effect has taken place in my thoughts. I was unconscious that it had taken place, as I have said; but the idea having, as it were, reported itself for duty, I can trace its genesis. I trust I may be allowed to repeat myself, I mean to repeat ideas that I have already put into print. I never came across any trace that any human soul had ever read any of my former critical writings; by certain reverberations I can now tell that I have some readers, so I will again make the statement that for a great number of years I could not read “poetry.” I wanted to; but I could not. I used to put that down to the fact that rhymes, accents, stresses, assonances, alliterations, vowel colourings, and the other devices of poets, embarrassed me. But this was not the case. The real fact is that—the dog it was that died. I have discovered this for myself from my own practice in verse. I found that as soon as I came to write a "poem” I automatically reduced my intelligence to the level of one nearly imbecile. And, looking one day through the Collected Edition of my own poems that some misguided publisher issued some years ago and that no soul appeared to purchase or read-looking them through again, then, I was appalled to observe that in the whole affair there were not twenty lines that, had I been writing prose, I should not have supressed. Everything; every single group of words was what in French is called chargé. It was not so much that the stuff was rhetorical; it had not the marmoreal quality of true rhe- toric—the kind that one finds on tombstones. It was just silly- with the silliness of a child of a bad type.' Heaven knows I cannot read my own prose with anything but mortification--but it is a mortification proceeding rather from the eternal sense of failure that every conscious artist must feel all his life unless he has a good bottle of wine beneath his waistcoat. One has had ideals and has fallen short. That is gloomy enough. But when I read my own verse I know that I have tried to write like a brandified sentimentalist. And I have succeeded every time. ... Now, why is this? I can assure the reader that alcoholism has very little to do with it. And I think I can give the answer. It is Having lived in the world of men I am aware that this confession makes easy quarry for those satisfied with shooting sitting pheasants. But I am anxious to make my point clear without being too uncivil to named col- leagues, predecessors, or Classics; and I do not much care, so long as I make my point, who scores off me. . a 1 FORD MADOX HUEFFER 17 a . simply that every poet—until lately every poet—the moment he takes pen in hand in order to write, say, a sonnet or a triolet or deca- syllables, rhymed or unrhymed, at once begins to "write” down. This was the case originally, simply because rhyme and metre were difficult things and an indulgent, primitive public made allowances. Nowadays the writing down has become a habit, a fashion, a ne- cessity—and a less primitive, less indulgent public can no longer be got to listen to Verse at all. At any rate there is hardly a poet of to-day or yesterday who ever, in his matter, his ideas, and his verbal texture, attempts to soar above the level of the intellect of scarcely adolescent pupils in your ladies' seminaries-hardly ever a poet who, in his verse, attempts to render a higher type of mentality than that to be found in a Grimm's Fairy Tale. . . . Or it might be more just to say Hans Andersen; for as far as I can remember Andersen was more of a snob than Grimm. Poets, in fact, once they put on their laurel crowns divest them- selves of every shred of humour, irony, or incisive knowledge of life as it is lived. I can hardly think of any save Heinrich Heine, Browning-and sometimes Christina Rossetti—who were born since 1790 and did not consider verse-writing as something aloof from life, art, form, and language. I will put the matter as a parable: the facts that follow are not exactly what happened. One must slightly obscure facts when one is writing of one's contem- poraries. But the truth of this parable to the Spirit of the Age is irrefutable. There are in the City of London, then, two eminent litterateurs. .. Let us call them Messrs X and Y. Both are men of brains, humour, and of a sufficient adroitness to have made for themselves comfortable careers—this last being no easy task and one which must have made them acquainted with a considerable surface of such life as is lived in what Henry James used to call the bas fonds of journalism. ... A pretty mean life. . . . But, in an evil A . hour, each of these gentlemen conceived the idea of writing Verse on a large scale. One—Mr X-produced a play in rhyme-a play of singular imbecility. Mr Y replied with a slice of an epic based on ideas that must have been Joe Millerisms to Macaulay's--or was it Mrs Barbauld's?- New Zealander. Each was a Reviewer! Mr Y reviewed his colleague's verse drama, writing a sort of paraphrase of Sheridan's Critic—the 18 THUS TO REVISIT ... Spanish Fleet Mr X's heroine could not have seen because it was not yet in sight, and so on. Mr X reviewed the instalment of the epic, in the style of Macaulay's review of Satan Montgomery. He pointed out that it is contrary to natural principles to write "Thus to its goal the aspiring soul doth mount As streams meander level with their fount,” or words to that effect. We were, in fact, presented with the in- spiring spectacle of a controversy in the good old style of The Edin- burgh versus The Quarterly Review. That of course is nothing. Some one in England is always trying to drag literature back to those days and that tone. The point was that Mr X concluded his review by saying that, though he had, regretfully, pointed out some of the innumerable absurdities contained in Mr Y's epic, neverthe- less Mr Y was to be congratulated on revealing his real personality in his work--an exhibition of courage rare in the poets of to-day: Mr Y, at the end of his review, stated that though he had regret- fully pointed out some of the innumerable imbecilities contained in his confrère's poetic drama, Mr X was to be congratulated on his rare courage in revealing his true personality in his poem. And, since each gentleman had called the other's work a product of an imbecile mind, that was hitting below the belt! As I read the portents of our moonlit heavens, these two-quite imaginary-gentlemen will be united on one point-they desire to drive out of Literature, Mr Pound, Mr Flint, and most of my favourite poets. And I beg the reader to believe that nothing would have dragged me back into the Literary Life from which I had taken a quite sincere farewell but the desire to prevent this infamy and this disaster. I should like to be taken as being entirely sincere in making this statement, and I should like to say that I have writ- ten the last three words, advisedly, after due thought and selecting exactly the words that express my meaning II I concluded the first part of this series of articles by lightly and, I trust, good-humouredly, grazing the subject of Les Jeunes who were quite young in the Season of 1914. I fancy the frame of mind FORD MADOX HUEFFER 19 of myself and the others who welcomed these then eccentric creat- ures was one of gentle bewilderment as to their products combined with an absolute confidence in the genius of the various young men whom we backed. I may point out that I come of a family that, for generations, has impoverished itself in combating Aca- demicism and in trying to help—geniuses. So I may claim to have in the blood the tic of combating Academicism and the hope of discovering genius—and I trust, the faculty of absolute indifference to my personal fate or the fate of my own work. Thus I profess to a certain inherited flair for-and a certain sense that it is a duty to forward-the recognition of young men with—to change the idiom-individualities, practising one or other of the arts. And towards the end of Marwood's and my career in control of the English Review, he and I and the few friends who were interested in a real revival of Literature, began to feel that life was worth living. .. There appeared on the scene-- I place them in the order of their appearance, as far as I can remember- Mr Pound, Mr D. H. Lawrence, Mr Tomlinson, Mr Lewis, H. D., Mr Flint-and afterwards some Americans–Mr Frost, Mr T. S. Eliot, Mr Edgar Lee Masters. And of course there were Gaudier-Brzeska and Mr Epstein. It was—truly—like an open- ing world. ... It was like an opening world ..., For, if you have worried your poor dear old brain for at least a quarter of a century, over the hopelessness of finding, in Anglo-Saxondom, any traces of the operation of a conscious art-it was amazing to find these young creatures not only evolving theories of writing and of the plastic arts, but receiving in addition an immense amount of what is called "public support.” I do not think I am exaggerating when I say that, at any rate for the London season of 1914, these , young fellows not only drove the old-oh, the horribly wearisome! - Academics out of the field, the market, and the forum: they created for themselves also a "public" that had never looked at a book otherwise than to be bored with it; or considered the idea that an Art was an interesting, inspiring, or amusing appearance. That was extraordinarily valuable. And I believe that their influence at that date extended across the Atlantic itself and that there it still obtains. We Anglo-Saxons are the mock of the world: there is no nation . 20 THUS TO REVISIT ... that does not despise us for our commercial ideals, our incredible foreign politics—and the complete absence of any art as a national characteristic .. The Dutch have their painters; the Flemings have their down-to-the-ground poets of mysticism; the Germans have their romantic music; their Grimmish lyrics. The French have everything. The Siamese have their beautiful pots; the Russians—again, possibly everything. The Poles have immense rhetorical gifts; the Zulus their folk-song; the Irish their Historic Sense, which is an art too. We have nothing, and there is no race in the world that does not point the finger of scorn at us. That is the lamentable fact. But in 1914 Les Jeunes had suc- ceeded in interesting a usually unmoved but very large section of the public—and had forced that public to take an interest not in the stuff but the methods of an Art. The Cubists, Vorticists, and the others proclaimed that the plastic arts must be non-representa- tional; the Imagistes, Symbolistes, who joined up, I think, with Vorticism, proclaimed the immense importance of the “live” word —the word that should strike you as the end of a live wire will, if you touch it. Actually, I fancy that the main point of their sympathy and contact was their desire to impress on the world their own personalities. Or, let us put it that the first point of their doctrine would be that the artist should express by his work his own personality. Let us consider this canon with some seriousness. The Impressionists—and it was the Impressionists that the Vort- icists, Cubists, Imagistes, and the rest were seeking to wipe out- the Impressionists in the plastic or written arts had been the lead- ers of the Movement that came immediately before these young fellows. And the main canon of the doctrine of Impressionism had been this: the artist must aim at the absolute suppression of himself in his rendering of his Subject. You were to see as little as possible of the image of M Courbet in a Courbet; you were to see nothing at all of Flaubert when you read Trois Contes. To look at a painting of willow trees under a grey sky; to read Coeur Simple, or Le Rouge et le Noir, What Maisie Knew, or Fathers and Children, was merely to live in the lives and the minds of Felicité, Mrs Wicks whose constant dread was that she might be "spoken to," or of Lavretsky. .. Above all the reader was to receive no idea of the figures of Stendhal or his followers. FORD MADOX HUEFFER 21 Let me—since even the first commandment of Impressionism is probably unfamiliar to the Anglo-Saxon reader-repeat this for- mula in another image. That is bad Art; but I hope to be par- doned by the shades of my Masters. Is the reader then conversant with the Theory of Podmore's Brother? ... Podmore's Brother was accustomed to perform certain tricks on members of the public whilst so holding their attentions that they were quite unconscious of his actions. He talked so brilliantly that whilst his tongue moved his hands attracted no attention. It is not a very difficult trick to perform. . . If the Reader will give a box of matches to a friend and then begin to talk really enthrallingly, he will be able to take the box of matches from his friend's hands without his friend being in the least conscious that the matches have gone. Closing his discourse, he will be able to say to his friend: “Where are the matches?”—and the friend will not have any idea of their whereabouts.. It is a trick worth performing—the tongue deceiving the eye. ... It is a trick worth performing—because it is the trick of Im- pressionism—the Impressionist writer or painter telling his story with such impressiveness that the Reader or the Observer will for- get that the Impressionist is using pen or brush; just as our sup- positious Reader's Friend, lost in your conversation, forgets that you can take the matches from his hands. The Cubists, Vorticists, Imagistes, Vers Libristes, who in 1914 seemed about to wash out us Impressionists, said simply: all this attempt to hypnotize the public is mere waste of time. An Artist attracts; gets a public or royalties from sales because he is a clever fellow. Let him begin by saying, "I am a clever fellow. .. And let him go on saying: “What a fellow I am!” Conspuez the Subject! A bas all conventions of tale-telling! We, the Vortic- ists, Cubists, Imagistes, Symbolistes, Vers Libristes, Tapagistes are the fine, young Cocks of the Walk! We and we only are the Play- boys of the Western World. We and we only shall be heard. They came very near it. I remember very well a walk I took once with one of my young geniuses on one side of me and Mr Pound on the other. ... Of what Mr Pound talked, I have no idea. He was expressing him- self, in low tones, in some Trans-Atlantic dialect. This Genius however was plain to hear: a . 22 THUS TO REVISIT ... 9) . . . . "What is the sense,” he said, "of all this justification of a sub- ject that Maupassant and you and Conrad indulge in. ... You try to trick the reader into believing that he is hearing true stories. ... But you can't. ... Maupassant takes three hundred words out of a two thousand word conte to describe a dinner party with a doctor at it. . . . And the doctor tells a story. ... Or Conrad takes twenty thousand words out of an immense novel to describe a public house on the river at Greenwich. In order to justi- fier his story. It is a waste of time. What the public wants is Me. Because I am not an imbecile, like the com- ponent members of the public! . I daresay he was right. ... At any rate our public took Mr Lewis and Blast; Signor Marinetti and his immense noises, his lungs of brass; Mr Epstein and his Rock Drill, with great serious- ness and unparalleled avidity. And I was so much a member of the public that I determined—very willingly, for I always de- tested writing-to shut up shop. I said to myself: “I will write one more book!”—a book I had been hatching for twelve years. “And then no more at all!”. . So the Vorticists and the others proceeded on their clamorous ways. They abolished not only the Illusion of the Subject; but the Subject itself. ... They gave you dashes and whirls of pure colour; words washed down till they were just Mr Pound's a . . “Petals on a wet black bough!" Signor Marinetti shouted incredibly in the Doré Gallery and a sanguinary war was declared at the Café Royal between those youths who wore trousers of green billiard cloth and whiskers and those who did not. ... The Cabaret Club was raided by the Police and found to be full of the wives and aged mothers of Cabinet Ministers. ... The Academic writers of the Athenaeum, . with their incredibly dull snufflings about the placket-holes of Shelley's mistresses, paled till they had the aspect of the posters of yesterday on the walls of the year before last. ... Alas, that was in 1914. ... To-day they are all back again in the saddle and the gobbling noises about the tuberculous lungs of Keats—a bautiful user of words who, you might have thought, would have escaped the attention of these stamp collectors the FORD MADOX HUEFFER 23 . gobbling noises about the lungs of Keats, the immense, long articles about the orthography of Shakespeare's Fourth Folios; the volumi- nous disquisitions on the poetasters from whom Scott derived his chapter headings—all these incredibly uninteresting matters have once more killed the interest of the public in the Arts. For what is the public to Fanny Brawne? I will put the matter in another parable, the facts being this time true... The wife of my headmaster once said to me--I was revisiting my school and she was looking at a Literary Journal that I had brought down-once said, looking musingly over the top of the paper: “Love letters of John Keats to Fanny Brawne, edited by Buxton Forman." She was reading the title of a review. And she went on to ask: “Who was Keats?” I said: “A thing of beauty is a joy for ever. . . . And immediately she continued: "Its loveliness increaseth, it shall never Pass into nothingness. ... It was not, that is to say, that the lady was closed to or ignorant of the beauty of Keats—it was simply that the Literary Journal was so intolerably wearisome that she knew nothing of the sort of But perhaps I am saying too much. ana. DUST FOR SPARROWS BY REMY DE GOURMONT Translated by Ezra Pound 101 We frequently hear said of someone who is chasing fortune precipitate, “I like him, he's a fighter”; in reality Mr So-and-So is an unscrupulous person who dares risk being gaoled for his manner of doing business. 102 The greater number of skeptics whom I have known were of the type in fashion in the eighteenth century, who if it thundered while they were eating ham-omelette on Good Friday would hurl the plate through the window, saying: "What a fuss about a mere omelette!" 103 If in the midst of nihilism the most complete of ideas needs only a feminine smile or the squalling of an infant to drive every- thing out of our heads, why pledge ourselves to reject the argu- ments of feeling? Is life a problem of mathematics? In our ignorance of all finality is not a pleasant sensation more important to our happiness than an exact piece of reasoning? 104 Borrowers at the end of their tether usually tap people who have helped them before, not only because they count on their kindness or weakness, but because they feel that precedent makes for a servitude. 105 To-day when one presents certain young folk with “the case of the mandarin” one has to go into detailed explanations, for they REMY DE GOURMONT 25 think they are being made fun of; one ends by posing the question in this form: would you strangle your millionaire bachelor uncle, whose heir you are, if you were sure of not being found out? 106 The most terrible tyrants have been those who had the horror of action, those who would not shed blood themselves; who never laid eyes on their victims, but had them coldly eliminated; as if making mental operations which dealt with abstractions only. 107 The theatricality common among vain, mediocre persons has produced the opposite type which always looks gloomy in public, though it smiles and enjoys itself privately. There are, likewise, others almost professionally happy and pleasant in society, who suddenly turn lugubrious as soon as one stops gushing over them, as soon as they stop trying to please those about them. 108 The men grossest and most tyrannic in intimacy are those who are, from baseness or pusillanimity, most honeyed to strangers. 109 When in certain celebrated novels we observe the intimate re- lations of mother and daughter, for example, in high European society, we find in their attitudes and words a deal of manner. Is this not simply because we are vexed at seeing them endowed with a culture more finely developed than ours? 110 A life of great emotional satisfactions, even if crossed by fracas and difficulties, is worth more than an existence sacrificed in the chase of a fortune which comes too late, when the vital spring is broken; the solitary man is nothing but an expensive watch, mark- ing inutile hours. 111 It is fortunate for women coldly correct and incapable of gen- erous impulse, that they very rarely take count of the intimate contempt included in the homages offered to their respectability. 26 DUST FOR SPARROWS 112 There are people with souls so dessicated, so lacking in sap, that to talk with them is like chewing a blotter. [Vide Catullus on dryness. E. P.] 113 Strange return to casuistry! It is odd that in a period whose characteristic is unscrupulous egoism, the favourite subject of many novels is an act contrary to the social pact, for which the committer is tortured by remorse despite the fact that he believed it permissible; despite the fact that he had so judged it in accordance with nature's morality. 114 We need believe in nothing which passes the domain of natural intelligence; nevertheless we may suppose the affirmers of a sú- preme cause nearer verity than the deniers, for the first lot ap- proach more nearly to natural logic and the aspirations of the human soul; at the same time their belief helps to make life less bitter and harsh. There is neither fortune nor moral compensa- tion in life comparable to the tranquillity of the dying of a just man who has confidence in resurrection and in the supreme rewards. 115 Generally, men happiest in youth have a gloomy age, for they do not see that with the slide of time the qualities which drew to them the sympathy of others must needs be replenished by new acquisitions. 116 The greatest collective suicide was Egypt's, a people which pre- ferred to endure as mummy, rather than to prolong an empire. To spend sums and enormous labour in honouring death is to go pigheadedly contrary to the future, that is, to life. 117 People who really, or pretendedly, pay no attention to what they eat are either not elevated, or obstinately refuse to elevate REMY DE GOURMONT 27 themselves above humanity. The race is voracious in proportion to its savagery and bestiality; as it is tamed it shows tastes and predilections proportional to the level it has reached. The parrot is fussy about its food, the dog has very marked tastes, the monkey is a gourmet, the ass likes thistles, and the pig all he is given or finds. 18 In the Genius, the contrary of Cervantes' immortal pair, it is Sancho Panza, not the knight, who commits follies. 119* In the case of genius, as with all intelligences, there is a duality resulting from the tensions, minima or maxima, with which he works. Hence comes it that men of extraordinary gifts may seem equal or even inferior to the ordinary, when from disdain or weariness they give way to laziness of mind. 120 * Great men have a habit, when they arrive at celebrity, of no longer changing their silhouette. Thus they get the satisfaction of contemplating themselves in the very lines of the future statue. 121 Poverty, condition propitious to sanctity, is by even that, a school for character, and, for the great spirit, a spur to audacious action. Without it humanity would drowse in contented medi- ocrity, and we should have no more heroes either of thought or of action. 122 Those who establish laws establish also prejudice and the droits du seigneur. 123 As the beautiful has no sex and as the female body is the ob- ject of eternal and passionate male praise, it is not extraordinary that for certain feminine eyes there is nothing more beautiful than the holy body of Venus. 28 DUST FOR SPARROWS 124 One conceives the intimate friendship of a young man and young woman, but they need only exposure, as the two elements of an explosive; they go off at the slightest disturbance. 125 The romantics, nearing thirty, were full of despair, they died young, they committed hari-kari. Why? Probably because they ? had false ideas about everything, especially about love which they conceived only as a cult or an orgy. A state of perpetual physical and moral instability could lead only to the cemetery or to mad- ness. 126 As the truths have traversed many centuries in the mask of paradox, it is good to affirm that there is a profound difference between commerce and theft. The first spoils the client with his consent, the second consults only its own desires. 127 Man's will is a conscious application of the fatalities which rule the universe: a balance which knows what it does when we forbid it to act automatically. 128 One may have friends whom one does not value; but it is im- possible to be friends with certain people whom one respects. 129 When fathers really attend to the education of their sons they will insist on an ethical teaching which implies a virile contempt of life and a strict respect for one's own convictions; seeing that man is by nature a rapacious being, endowed with all the instincts of animality, and that an artificial civilization makes him every day more cunning and dangerous. To be continued > 1 > . WLze A DRAWING. BY WYNDHAM LEWIS Wynton ** SUMMER MUSICIANS. BY WYNDHAM LEWIS LOVE THY NEIGHBOUR BY GORDON ARTHUR SMITH ONTAIGNE has remarked in his Essays that there is no M , . of life left in his body. That the statement is true seems prob- able, and as corroborative evidence I desire to call attention to the cases of Joel Hobbs and Timothy McShane. . The hamlet known as East Buchanan lies three miles from the town of Buchanan and the nearest railroad. Neither Buchanan nor its neighbour is a flattering monument to that president of the United States from whom the name was taken, for Buchanan is a small manufacturing town, badly paved, badly lighted, ugly, and evil-smelling: East Buchanan is a mere label tacked to a score of rotting frame houses, a church, and a general store. Syracuse, the nearest city, is some forty miles distant from the Buchanans and is visited once or twice a year by the richer members of the community, among whom was Joel Hobbs, proprietor of the gen- eral store at East Buchanan, and therefore butcher, grocer, clothier, apothecary, and sheriff. He and his inseparable companion and enemy, Timothy McShane, who owned the livery and feed stable, were the richest and most prominent men in the village. Hobbs was a Republican; McShane a Democrat. They hated each other. They hated each other, but inevitably during the long, snow- bound winters that are Aung yearly like a white shroud over the upper portions of New York State, they were thrown much to- gether. Through those bitter months, when the wind came raw and snow-laden down from the Great Lakes, when the daylight was brief and wan and the evenings black and unending, there remained but three solaces for Timothy McShane and Joel Hobbs: drink, argument, and checkers. All three of these they indulged beside the stove that, constantly overfed, glowed and panted in the rear of Hobbs' store. Now, neither Joel nor Timothy had wife, children, or blood kindred this side of heaven. Hobbs was husband of a dead wife and father of a dead child, and I doubt if the wife or the child 30 LOVE THY NEIGHBOUR At any . was sorry to die. His wife's sister lived in the village and did the washing of those who were rich enough or lazy enough not to do their own. Sometimes she was paid: often she was not; but every Christmas Joel gave her five dollars and boasted of it during the succeeding twelve months. Timothy McShane sprang from God knows where. rate Timothy did not know. He talked fluently but vaguely of the McShanes of Cork, and he was ever threatening to return to the Old Country when he should have laid aside a little more money. He thought that he was fifty-two years old and he knew that he had trouble with his kidneys. Hobbs, on the other hand, knew that he was fifty-three and thought he had trouble with his heart. There were other points of dissimilarity, but those were perhaps of the most consequence. One afternoon, in December 1918, a vastly ambitious and en- terprising life-insurance salesman, with a zeal worthy of better results, drove out to East Buchanan in search of "prospects. He hitched his horse and sleigh to one of the three iron posts in front of Hobbs' store, threw a blanket over the horse, stamped some of the cold out of his feet, beat his fur gloves together, shivered, and entered. “Good afternoon, gentlemen,” he said. "Pretty raw sort of day, isn't it?" “Yep,” agreed Joel, who was always polite to potential cus- tomers, “pretty raw. Take a seat by the stove and thaw out." “Thanks,” said the visitor. "I don't mind if I do.” He moved up a chair, Aung his coat and gloves on the floor, and seated himself with a hearty sigh. “Gentlemen,” he said, producing a pair of visiting cards, "allow me. My name's Proctor–Harry Proctor. Insurance business. Representing the Foresight Company at Buchanan. You've prob- ably heard of it.” Joel and Timothy consulted the visiting cards carelessly, and then Joel, the necessity of being polite no longer existing, tilted back his chair again and replaced his feet on the stove. “No,” he said slowly, "I can't say as I'm pertickly interested.” But Timothy said: “Don't ye be mindin' him, me man, he's not particularly inthirested in annything but himsilf. An' he's alone in that inthirest." GORDON ARTHUR SMITH 31 Mr Proctor laughed in acknowledgement of Timothy's wit- but not loudly or overmuch, out of respect for Joel's feelings. "Well,” he said, “it's just people that are interested in them- selves that we're looking for. These are our best customers. If you'll give me five minutes of your time I'm sure I can convince you, Mr-er?” “Hobbs is my name,” said Joel. “And this is Mr McShane.... But I can't say as I'm much interested." "You will be,” Mr Proctor assured him, when he had acknowl- edged the introduction, "you will be. And there's not much else to do to-day anyhow except talk. Unless you gentlemen will let me buy a round-a little whiskey, eh, to keep the weather out?” “There spakes a man,” said Timothy heartily. “Joel, go fetch the Honeydew." "I can't say as I mind,” said Joel, and descended to the cellar. When the glasses were filled and healths drunk, Proctor began his exposition of the advantages of life insurance. “We offer three kinds of policy,” he said, “the ordinary life, the limited payment life, and the endowment policy. These policies extend different inducements and attractions, but for any man over-well, say over forty-five, who is willing to set aside a small sum of money annually in order that, at his death, those who are near and dear to him will be provided for, that his wife and children will be assured of food and shelter and some of the little comforts of life, that" “Stop,” interrupted Joel. “There ain't nobody in the world I want to leave money to, and if there was I guess I'd outlive ’em. I've a lot o' years between me and the cemetery yet.” “In that case,” said Proctor eagerly, “one of our endowment policies would be just the thing for you. You pay a small prem- ium for ten, fifteen, or twenty years, and if you're alive at the end of that period the company pays you—and the longer you live the more it pays you." Joel reflected. “What's that?” he said at length. "Say that again.” Mr Proctor obligingly provided him with all details. "Yep,” said Joel, “that sounds good-sounds fine. But it ain't. It ain't or the company wouldn't do it. I guess the com- 32 LOVE THY NEIGHBOUR pany ain't givin' nothin' away. I guess the company fixes it so they get more money out o' me than I get out o' them. They wouldn't be doin' business if they didn't. No, young feller, I guess I ain't signin' to-day. Try Timothy McShane, there. He's Irish and creddylous.” “Faith, thin,” said Timothy, "I'm crayj’lous that I'll still be in this wur-ruld iv sorrow whin Joel Hobbs is undther the daisies. 'Tis mesilf'll be drivin' his hearse to the cimitery, an' I'll whip up me ould tame iv roans so's the job'll be done the quicker.” Joel did not permit himself to be disconcerted. "And how about your kidneys ?” he asked. “Niver ye be worryin' f'r me kidneys. How about ye'er own heart ?” "I guess,” said Joel—"I guess as how my heart will last out the year." “An' maybe it will, too, this bein' the month iv Dicimber. 'T will not likely be 'til next Christmas I'll be sendin' ye a wreath.” Hobbs snorted his unbelief and spat far and accurately under the stove. Mr Proctor not having made much progress, betrayed symptoms of restlessness. He suggested another drink, which Timothy agreed to but for which he insisted on paying. "Hobbs, here,” said Timothy, "will drink all ye give him, but divvle a wan will he pay for." “I'll pay for the next one,” said Hobbs majestically, on his way to the cellar. “Do you think there is any chance of my getting him to take a policy?” whispered Proctor, indicating the departed Hobbs with a motion of his thumb. "I do not,” answered Timothy. "Annything that costs money is as ree-pulsive to him as holy water to the Evil Wan.” “And how about yourself ?” "Bad,” said Timothy, "bad. I'd rayther insure me ould roan mare thin insure mesilf. She's the more valyable.” “I'm afraid, then, I've wasted my time.” McShane denied this with a broad wave of his arm. “Have ye tried the docther an' the priest? Both of thim's in- thirested in death an’ well varsed in the subjick, what with killin' and buryin'ivry man, woman, an' child in this village since thirty years. But,” and here Timothy chuckled and raised his GORDON ARTHUR SMITH 33 a voice, “but 'tis mesilf will be buryin' Joel Hobbs, an' glad to do it.” “You're a liar, Timothy McShane,” said Joel shrilly, his wizened face appearing above the stair-opening in the floor. "You're a liar and I'll live to prove it." McShane rose from his chair, his big face purple with temper; and his heavy, slouching figure towered above Joel's little bald, bullet-shaped head. Proctor feared for an instant that the Irish- man was going to kick Joel in the mouth. “Git back out o' my way,” recommended Joel, frightened but assertive. " “Set down where you belong.” Timothy hesitated. “If it wasn't for the fear iv spillin' good liquor—” he insinuated. But he returned more calmly to his chair by the stove. Hobbs poured the whiskey with a hand that shook a little. He was a man of words not of blows, and Proctor reflected that, after all, Mr Hobbs would be a poor risk for any insurance company. “Before I drink,” said Timothy emphatically, “_before I drink with ye, Hobbs, ye'll be askin' me pardon for callin' me a liar.” “Well,” reflected Hobbs who, among his other accomplishments, possessed a store of legal catch-phrases, “they do say that the greater the truth the greater the libel. I ask your pardon, if you want, for a great libel.” Timothy, with his glass at his lips, was too eager for his drink to grasp the full significance of this extraordinary apology. He emptied the glass in one large noisy gulp. Proctor, anxious to be off now that all hope of doing business was gone, followed suit. Hobbs sipped at his gingerly, but patiently and persistently. “Forty-five cents,” said Hobbs when Proctor rose to go. “Come in again if you're passin'." "Thanks,” said Proctor—"I won't.” Left together, the two men were, strangely enough, a little em- barrassed. Their disputes had always waxed hottest in the pres- ence of others—they were at their best before spectators. Per- haps Hobbs, when alone with the Irishman, kept a curb on his tongue from a quite reasonable fear of physical assault. At any rate, after the departure of Mr Proctor, there ensued a short, un- easy silence which was broken by McShane's suggestion that they get out the checker board. Hobbs agreed with alacrity, and, as 34 LOVE THY NEIGHBOUR . it was growing dark, he pulled a hanging lamp down on it's chain from the ceiling, lighted it, and placed the table underneath it. Then they played. Mr Hobbs lost the first game through inexcusable errors both of commission and omission. It was evident that he was not playing up to his habitual form; and, since each game cost him twenty-five cents, he appeared loath to continue. "What's ailin' ye?” asked the triumphant McShane. "Well,” said Hobbs, "I guess I ain't got my mind on it. I've been thinkin' of other things.” "Iv death an' the divvle an’ the lake iv burnin' pitch, most likely,” suggested Timothy. Hobbs squinted up his little ferret eyes. "No," said he, “I've been thinkin' o' this life insurance. Timothy, how much money have you got in the bank at Buchanan? Ten thousand dollars ?'' “I have not, thin,” replied Timothy. “I have five thousand.” “Is that all? I kinda thought you had more.... Well, I don't know as it's worth while considerin' in that case.' “Ye don't know as what's not worth while considthrin'?” de- manded the Irishman, aroused at this aspersion on his wealth. "The projick I had in mind,” said Hobbs. “Faith,” said Timothy, “'tis likely a small projick if it can be fittin' ye'er mind.” Joel shook his head slowly. “It was a ten thousand dollar projick,” he asserted, “but I guess as how it's too big for you ... Here's the doctor, though. I'll speak to him about it.' The doctor, a middle-aged, anaemic, complacent man, driven to East Buchanan by repeated failures elsewhere, came into the store with a blast of cold air that set the lamp flame leaping in its glass. “Good evening,” he said, "good evening. Thought I'd drop in for a nip on my way home to supper. Joel, you might fill the glasses with what's in that bottle.” “An’’tis Hobbs that pays,” chuckled Timothy. “He was afther makin' the gin'rous offer befure ye come in, docther.” "Well,” said the doctor, “I'm willing Hobbs should pay, but I I don't think you ought to drink, McShane. I've told you it's bad for those kidneys." ) GORDON ARTHUR SMITH 35 "Ha-ha,” said Hobbs. "He won't live twelve months.” “Ye lie, Joel Hobbs—ye lie. An' ye’ersilf knows ye lie.” Hobbs leaned forward eagerly in his chair, his gleaming little eyes fixed on the Irishman. “McShane," he said slowly, “I'll just bet you five thousand dollars that I'm alive a year from next New Year's and that you're not. If we're both alive, neither wins. There's a life insurance policy for you, and I guess there ain't any premiums attached, neither.” Timothy was shaken out of his anger. He did not at first grasp the proposition, but the mention of the sum of five thou- sand dollars—all his savings—registered an acute impression on his brain. “What's that?” he demanded. "What's that, Hobbs? Will ye be afther repatin' that sintince agin?” “I will,” replied Hobbs calmly, and he re-stated his offer. “An' if I'm livin' a year come nixt New Year's it's five thou- sand I get from ye’ersilf ?" “Yep,” said Mr Hobbs, "providin' I'm dead." "Why, thin,” said McShane-"why, thin, Hobbs, ye’re a domn fool an' I take ye'er wager an' ye'er money.” And to cement the transaction he gripped Hobbs' bony hand with his big, red paw. Then he winked at the doctor and swallowed his drink. “I'm suited if you are,” said Hobbs drily. They proceeded to the details. Hobbs pointed out that, in the case that both of them should survive the term of the wager, no money would change hands, and he suggested that, with the con- sent of both parties the wager might be renewed annually, thus constituting an insurance policy of five thousand dollars with the survivor as beneficiary. To this McShane agreed. Furthermore, in order that the survivor and beneficiary should encounter no difficulty in collecting his money, Hobbs proposed that he and McShane should each make out a cheque for five thou- sand dollars in favour of the other, dated January 1st, 1920. These cheques, together with a statement of the wager, duly signed and witnessed were to be handed over to the doctor for safe-keep- ing during the interim. Upon the death of either party before the agreed date both cheques were to be handed to the survivor. Of this McShane approved. 36 LOVE THY NEIGHBOUR Finally (Mr Hobbs was prepared for every contingency), to make certain that neither party to the wager reduce his balance at the bank below the requisite five thousand dollars, Hobbs sug- gested that they concede to each other the right to examine the condition of their accounts with the bank at any time, and that if the balance of either appeared deficient the wager should be automatically cancelled and a fine of five hundred dollars be im- posed on the delinquent. To this McShane agreed. With much labour they set all this down in writing, signed it, and had it witnessed by the awe-struck doctor. And they were both reasonably sober. . Shortly after that momentous day, the doctor found to his pleas- ure that his weekly income was being perceptibly augmented by the addition of a new and regular patient. It was Mr Hobbs. "I want you should look me over real well, doctor," he ex- plained. “Every organ, but pertickly my heart. And if there's “ anything I hadn't oughta do, or anything I hadn't oughta eat, I want you should tell me right out.” The doctor plumbed him and prodded him in a very wise man- He found nothing amiss, but his ignorance of his profession was so extensive that he thought it best to display caution. “Avoid starchy foods and don't over-exert yourself," he said. "And come back in a few days. I don't quite like the heart action.” That cost Hobbs a dollar, but for once he did not begrudge it. He considered it money well spent, and he came back regularly once a week to be re-examined. What was a dollar or two when he was gunning for five thousand? But Timothy McShane displayed no such anxiety. If he gave an extra thought to his kidneys, he at least did not pay the doctor for the privilege of expressing the thought 'aloud; nor did he alter his manners, morals, or customs in the slightest degree. He was a picture of health and confidence, was Timothy McShane. That New Year's Eve, McShane stumbled through the snow to Hobbs' store, where, as usual, Hobbs and the doctor were awaiting him, huddled close to the roaring stove. Winter had set in in earnest, and, outside, the snow was piled in shining drifts almost up to the window sills. The boughs of the hemlocks that lined the road were bent to the ground under their white burden, and the tall pines beyond shivered in the moonlight and flung long, rest- ner. رو GORDON ARTHUR SMITH 37 a less shadows across the snow. A great, desolate silence hung over the earth. Not the bark of a dog, not the whinny of a horse, not the tinkle of a sleigh-bell. McShane was the only thing astir. Suddenly, as he rounded the corner beside Hobbs' store, he heard a vicious, frightened howl, and a small black shape with a pair of gleaming eyes shot from nowhere across his path into no- where. It was a black cat. "Holy Mother!” cried McShane aloud, “ 'tis an ayvil omen.” And he crossed himself, trembling. He was still trembling when he entered the store. “Do ye be givin' me a drink, Hobbs,” he said huskily. The sting of the liquor steadied him, so he continued to drink. "You look kinda peaked,” said Hobbs, eying him closely. “How do you feel ?" Hobbs had been very solicitous concerning Timothy's health ever since the night of the wager. Very solicitous, and, at the same time, markedly generous in offering him drinks. Hobbs, as village apothecary, knew something of the effect of alcohol on weak kidneys. "You drink too much, McShane," said the doctor. The Irishman laughed. “Faith,” he said, “I'd drink annything that Hobbs give me free. Ye'd not have me be niglictin' an opportunity, docther?” "Have another," said Hobbs. They drank until late; or, rather, McShane drank, and Hobbs poured out the liquor for him. At midnight the clock on the church across the road struck twelve harsh, deliberate notes, and immediately thereafter the cracked old bell, high up in the wooden belfry, began to clamour into the still night as a sign that the new year had come. Then all was silent again, for to those who dwelt in East Buchanan, resigned to lifeless lives, the coming of a new year had no significance and held no excuse for joy. They were numb both to pain and to pleasure, to hope and to despair. At the first stroke of the clock, Hobbs, McShane, and the doc- tor got solemnly to their feet and raised their glasses. “Here's to the new year,” said the doctor. “Health to us all.” “A long life,” said McShane, with his eyes on Hobbs. Hobbs said: “Prosperity to them as earns it,” with his shifty eyes on the floor. . 38 LOVE THY NEIGHBOUR Then they sat down again in silence. ... Toward the middle of March, the winter, which had been a mild one, gave signs of breaking up. Heavy thaws set in, and the roads became soggy rivers of mud and slush. Wide pools of water formed in all the hollows of the countryside-pools which froze overnight to melt again at noonday. Dank, brown grass ap- peared in splotches on the slopes of hills exposed to the sun; and the drip of melting ice filled the mild air with an incessant crystal tinkling Then, finally, in April, the last traces of winter van- ished; the snow that had lain, soiled but tenacious, in the shadows of the woods, disappeared; a touch of green livened here and there the desolate, moist waste of brown fields; the ditches by the roadside overflowed their margins, flooding roads and fields with frothing, yellow water and decayed leaves; and one day the voice, if not of the turtle, at least of the robin, was heard in the land. With the coming of spring, East Buchanan shook off some- thing of its sombre desolateness. Dogs barked and roosters crowed to the sun; children laughed as they paddled barefooted in the muddy pools; women talked shrilly to one another across fences while they hung out their washing, and young girls giggled over the crocusses. But to Mr Hobbs came none of the pleasant sensations of spring renascence. He was feeling poorly—very poorly—a fact which, however, he admitted to no one but himself and his physi- cian. And, to add to his suffering, Timothy McShane was, on the contrary, the embodiment of health. Spring seemed to have taken five years off McShane's age, and that, to Joel Hobbs, was at the rate of a thousand dollars a year. Something must be done, a Hobbs reflected—something must be administered more potent than the whiskey with which Hobbs had patiently and hopefully plied the Irishman during the long winter. And while he pondered the devil came to him and tempted him. He wrestled with the devil until he was breathless and exhausted-in fact until he re- membered that the doctor had told him that overexertion would be fatal to his weak heart. So rather than die of angina pectoris, he submitted to the devil, and, late one night, locked the door of his store and took from a shelf in his drug department a volume entitled Poisons and Their Effects. And this he studied in his cellar, by the flame of a single candle, until far into the night. a . GORDON ARTHUR SMITH 39 Now, that summer, on the first day of July, the War-time Pro- hibition Act, as I think we all know, went into effect. Hobbs, far- sighted and avaricious, had laid in a handsome supply of whiskey which, as sheriff, he foresaw little difficulty in disposing of at a substantial profit during the period of drought. On July 1st, ac- cordingly, he displayed a sign in his store window which read: "No alcoholic liquors sold hereafter.” But he was at pains to inform his friends and customers that he was ready to give them a drink, whenever they desired, out of his own stock, the only proviso being that they purchase a peppermint stick or a package of chewing gum. The price of these innocent luxuries he raised on these occasions to forty cents apiece. So, if Joel did not thrive physically, he at least thrived financially. But to McShane-McShane, his life-long friend, his hated com- panion—he displayed an amazing and lavish generosity: he gave him outright a five-gallon jug of his best rye whiskey. McShane, had he not been overwhelmed by emotion and surprise, might have noted that, although the jug was full to the brim, the seal had been broken. Hobbs, in conferring the gift, made but one stipulation, to which Timothy readily consented. "Timothy,” said Hobbs, “I'm givin' you this jug because I don't wanta see you goin' dry all year. But I'm givin' it to you only if you swear you won't share it with a livin' soul and you won't tell a livin' soul you have it. Take it home with you, Tim- , othy, and lock it up, and when no one's round go and pour your- self a drink. But don't you tell a livin', breathin' soul about it. I . guess as how I'd get into some trouble if you did. Not a livin' soul, now-not even the doctor." “Not the divvle himself,” vowed Timothy. “And I thank ye, Joel, I thank ye very kindly. Mesilf an' ye may have had mis- undtherstandin's in the past, but let bygones be bygones, now that I'm afther seein' the kind iv heart's inside ye.” "I guess as how that's all right,” said Joel, but he turned quickly away and avoided meeting Timothy's grateful eyes. If winter in East Buchanan was desperately cold, summer was similarly hot. A dull, listless heat that throbbed like a pain in the head. And with the heat came quantities of dust that spread over the land like a plague of locusts. a 40 LOVE THY NEIGHBOUR By mid-July, Timothy McShane was ailing. By mid-August he took to his bed. He complained of his stomach, and the doc- tor reiterated his advice not to drink. For a fortnight McShane lay in bed on his back, suffering so acutely that he did not have the strength or even the desire to descend to his cellar and tap the whiskey jug which Mr Hobbs had given him. And, whether or not on that account, he gradually began to feel better. By Sep- tember he was around as usual and drinking as usual, still weak and very thin, but with something of his pristine confidence in himself and his constitution. When McShane fell ill, Mr Hobbs could scarcely conceal his satisfaction. True it was a nervous sort of satisfaction, an un- easy, precarious satisfaction, but it was a satisfaction that was reflected in his manner and in his appearance: his eyes shone with a renewed fire; his cheeks took on a trace of colour; his hands ceased to tremble. No longer frightened when he consulted the doctor, he went to the other extreme and pounded his chest vigor- ously, boasting that he was sound in wind and limb. And every day he made a particular point of visiting poor, sick McShane to inquire as to his health and to listen eagerly to his symptoms. McShane was deeply touched. As I have said, Timothy was around as usual early in Septem- ber, and one evening he invited Hobbs to share his supper with him. They had become, you see, the best of friends. Hobbs accepted. Timothy's house was typical of the houses of East Buchanan- a decrepit frame structure, built of clapboards and resting on an uneven foundation of brick piers. One of the front steps had caved in and never been replaced; several boards were missing from the floor of the piazza; the roof lacked so many shingles that the rain came through almost at will, to the perpetual detri- ment of the ceilings. Behind this forlorn dwelling was the livery and feed stable, a not ungainly structure and in perfect repair; for McShane cared for his animals' comfort more than he cared for his own. Supper was served at six o'clock in the square, low-ceilinged dining room The floor of this room was so uneven that to reach the far window from the door one walked up a perceptible incline. The walls and ceiling were partially papered with a hideous, dirty GORDON ARTHUR SMITH 41 brown paper on which a pattern could vaguelyi bé :discernida pattern of some gigantic flora that might have been either. sun-. flowers or cabbages. TE The two men sat down at a pine table covered.by a:red.checker- ed cloth. McShane jingled a handbell. : ... :.:::::. “Ye can be bringin' the soup, Dalia,” he said to the over-heated, unkempt Irish girl who attended to his wants. The meal was disposed of rapidly. Delia cleared away the dishes and retired to the kitchen, and then McShane launched in all innocence a remark that set Hobbs to shaking. "I'll be afther fetchin' up some iv ye’er good whiskey, Joel,” he said. “'Tis only dacint ye should have a taste iv it.” Hobbs opened his mouth to refuse but no words came. The sweat stood cold on his forehead and his hands turned clammy. “We'll make a night iv it, me bye,” added McShane genially, and left the room without waiting for an answer. He returned, bearing the jug, before Hobbs could concentrate. He set two glasses on the table and filled them to the brim with the dark, am- ber liquid. Hobbs shuddered as if it had been his heart's blood being poured out. “Here ye be!" cried Timothy. “Here's to oursilves, an' may we live foriver!" “Thankee, Timothy,” said Hobbs with a ghastly smile- "thankee, but I guess I won't deprive you—I won't deprive you o' ' your good liquor, Timothy. You'll need all of it before the year's out, Timothy, and—and, well, I guess it'll be mighty hard to get now.” “Nonsinse, man,” urged McShane. “Wasn't it ye’ersilf that give it me? Well, thin, it's mesilf that's offrin' ye some iv ye’er own. Drink it, man, an' let the divvle worry his head over where the more'll be comin' from. What's ailin' ye that ye sit lookin' at it like a corpse? Drink it, man, I do be tellin' ye.” Hobbs shook his head. “I dassen't, Timothy,” he said hoarsely—“the doctor told me I mustn't drink any more." ” “An' so did the docther tell me,” cried the Irishman. “Niver ye be mindin' what a docther says or ye'll die young an' niver know joy. Drink it, there's a good man.” “I can't, Timothy, I can't. It's bad for It's bad for my heart.” 42 LOVE THY NEIGHBOUR McShane' paused: with his glass in mid-air. His face lost something of itş geniality and settled into hard, severe lines. ::So it's båt för ye’er iheart, it is ?” he said. “So it's bad for ye’er heart?: Well, if it's bad for ye’er heart, 'tis good for me kidneys.?: . And he emptied the glass down his throat. Then he seized Mr Hobbs' glass and repeated the operation. Mr Hobbs cowered in his chair, watching him with frightened eyes. There followed a silence. "I guess I must be startin' for home,” said Hobbs at length. "I don't feel sorta right, Timothy.” “An' ye don't be lookin' sort iv right, nayther,” said Timothy. “Most likely 'tis the heat. Maybe, though, 'tis not. Good-night to ye, Hobbs.” “Good-night, Timothy,” said Mr Hobbs weakly .... During the rest of that summer, and throughout the autumn, Timothy's health seemed to ebb along with the whiskey in the jug. By November the jug was drained of its last drop and McShane was an emaciated wreck. There was no health in him. He could not eat; he could not sleep; he complained of agonizing pains, as if knives were being thrust into his stomach. On the first of December he took to his bed again, where he lay in torture, moaning and praying to the saints. On two occasions he sent Delia out in the middle of the night to fetch the priest that he might receive extreme unction; but each time, clinging desperately to life, he pulled himself through. The doctor had given him up long ago. Nevertheless he con- tinued to visit him daily, felt his pulse, shook his head wisely, administered a sedative, and collected a dollar. Mr Hobbs often accompanied the doctor, and sometimes he came alone. On the latter occasions he would sit by McShane's bedside and read aloud to him from the Bible. But ever since the night that Hobbs had refused to drink with him, the old hatred of Hobbs had once more entered into the heart of McShane. Unfortunately he was too weak to do justice to that hatred in words, so he was forced to con- tent himself for the most part with showing it in his eyes. I think that Hobbs understood, but Hobbs was no longer afraid. ... “Docther," whispered McShane, one evening shortly before Christmas—"docther, will I be seein' the New Year?” "I hope so, Timothy, I hope so." "If I do be seein' the New Year,” said McShane, " 'tis Hobbs GORDON ARTHUR SMITH 43 will not be seein' me five thousand.” And he turned to face the wall with a long sigh. “Docther,” he complained, after a silence, “docther, I'm burnin' up inside me.” "It's the whiskey that has ruined your stomach,” said the doc- tor. "Maybe it is—and maybe it is not,” said McShane. "Whiskey is a poison, especially to a man like you, with your ailment.” "It is that,” said McShane. And he repeated slowly: "Whis- key's a pizen ... Hobbs' whiskey ... Mesilf should iv known.” The doctor paid scant heed-he thought the Irishman was breaking mentally as well as physically; and when, later in the day, Mr Hobbs sought him out to demand a report on McShane's condition, the doctor answered: “Low-very low. There's no hope for him. He won't last out the week.” "No hope ?” echoed Hobbs with an eagerness that did not es- cape even the doctor. “No; your five thousand's as good as won.” “Oh,” said Hobbs, collecting himself, "I wasn't thinkin' o' that. Why, I guess I'd give ten thousand to have poor Timothy back, well and strong, the way he useta be. We've come to be good friends, me and Timothy." On Christmas day McShane lost consciousness. The doctor worked over him for two hours. He almost lost the fight, for Timothy's strength was spent from lack of nutrition. He had not been able to eat for six days. When he finally came to him- self the first question he asked was: “What's the day iv the month ?” "It's the twenty-fifth-it's Christmas,” said the doctor. “Oh," said Timothy. “I was hopin' 'twas later. 'Tis six more long days I'm needin'." The doctor marvelled at him during those days. McShane hoarded the little strength left him like a miser. He would lie for hours at a stretch, motionless, speechless, his eyes closed, with only the fitful rise and fall of his shrunken breast to show that he was still fighting his fight. Mr Hobbs, meanwhile, was behaving like a man gone mad. Customers found his store usually locked up during business hours, or, if by chance it was open, Mr Hobbs would be pacing wildly 44 LOVE THY NEIGHBOUR . up and down the floor, haggard, twitching, so nervous that he could scarcely attend to their wants. It was the general opinion that Mr Hobbs was "takin' on awful bad about Tim McShane's mortal sickness,” and a sort of wondering sympathy and indul- gence was therefore accorded him. The doctor, as the new year approached, found it impossible to be rid of Hobbs, who clung to him like an uneasy shadow. After a visit to McShane, the doctor would invariably find Joel waiting for him in the office, full of inquiries, eager for the most insignifi- cant details, hanging on his words. "You're getting all wrought up," pointed out the doctor. “Better take it more easy." “How can I take it easy," quavered Hobbs, “when poor Timo- thy's dyin'? ... He is dyin', doctor, ain't he? There's no hope ?” “None," said the doctor briefly. On the thirtieth of December Hobbs came to the doctor and pleaded to be allowed to move into Timothy's house, in order to care for him until he died. “He's got nobody but that Delia,” Hobbs explained. “I could be of help, I guess. We're such good friends, Timothy and me.” “All right," said the doctor. So Hobbs moved into McShane's parlour, sleeping on the worn- out horsehair sofa and helping Delia with the cooking. Delia cooked only for herself and Hobbs, for McShane ate nothing. That first night Hobbs aroused Delia and sent her out into the snow to summon again the priest. He was convinced that Timothy was dying or dead. And again the priest was disturbed premature- ly, for Timothy, with a horrible grim smile on his lips struggled through the night. When the dawn of the last day of the old year stole, wan and gray, through the soiled curtains of the window, Timothy sighed, relaxed, and slept. Hobbs listening to his breath- ing, found it less troubled; and Hobbs felt the leaden weight of apprehension grow heavier within his own heart. At ten o'clock, when the doctor arrived, McShane was still asleep. "How-how do you think he is?” asked Hobbs. “He won't live through the day,” answered the doctor. Hobbs put his head in his hands and rocked back and forth in his chair, sobbing hysterically. Obviously he was unstrung. .. GORDON ARTHUR SMITH 45 At five o'clock that afternoon, McShane opened his eyes. The . room was in complete darkness. He heard no sound at first except the banging of a shutter downstairs, and the faint murmur of the snow-laden wind in the pines. And then he heard a laboured, ir- regular breathing beside his bed. It was Hobbs. Timothy could . not see him but he knew it was Hobbs. The Irishman, too weak to speak, lay still, his eyes open, and what was left of his mind focussed desperately on one thought: to live. At intervals Hobbs took from his pocket and consulted a watch with a radium dial. At six o'clock the door opened and a shaft of light shot across the floor. It was Delia, bearing broth for Mr Hobbs. When she lighted a candle on the bureau, McShane instinctively closed his eyes. “How's he doin'?” whispered the girl. "He's still breathin',” said Mr Hobbs. “The doctor's comin' at nine o'clock." "May the Holy Saints rist him,” said Delia, and, with a pity- ing glance at the dying man, closed the door softly behind her. While Hobbs swallowed his broth, McShane opened his eyes again and spoke. "What's the hour, Hobbs ?” he asked. Hobbs started in terror and spilt the broth down his chin. “Is it you, Timothy ?” he whispered. “An' who else was ye expectin'?” asked Timothy. “The Angel iv Death, belike ?" Hobbs shuddered, and groped for words. “ 'Tis the hour I do be askin' ye,” repeated Timothy. “Half-past five," said Hobbs. “Six hours an' wan half,” muttered the Irishman, as if think- ing aloud. “Ate hearty, Hobbs, an' be shure that ye’er watch isn't fast.” The doctor came, as he had promised, at nine o'clock. He listened to McShane's breathing and felt his purse. Then he beckoned Hobbs aside. “I'll stay here until he dies," he whispered. “There's no call for you to wait if you don't want to." “I-I guess I'll stay,” said Hobbs. . IMI They both waited. And Timothy waited. But they waited for him to die, and Timothy waited for midnight and the new year 46 LOVE THY NEIGHBOUR The church clock struck eleven. Timothy counted the strokes on his fingers. They could see them move slightly against the red blanket that covered him. He kept his eyes tightly closed and he had not spoken a word since he had addressed Hobbs. The doctor cleared his throat nervously, and Hobbs was incessantly mopping his face with a large blue handkerchief. Downstairs the shutter was still banging in the wind, and the candle flickered a little as the draught sifted in through the window-curtains. From time to time McShane moaned and clinched his hands, as if the fight was going hard with him. The church clock struck the half hour. Hobbs drew out his watch, shook it, put it to his ear, and with trembling fingers set it back three minutes. "Is that clock right ?” he asked. “It's as right as anything in this hell's village,” answered the doctor. “I-I just wanted to know," Hobbs explained vaguely. Those last minutes passed slowly. Hobbs had his watch almost constantly in his hand. Occasionally he would shake it to make certain it had not stopped. When it lacked five minutes of mid- night, he glanced at the man on the bed and then at the doctor. “I think he's dead, doctor,” he whispered. The doctor looked up and then moved quickly over to the bed. He pulled down the red blanket and laid his ear to McShane's breast. Straightening himself again, he took from his pocket a small round mirror and placed it at the patient's lips. When he drew the mirror away there was a faint mist on it, dimming the surface. “Not yet," said the doctor; but he fetched his chair from be- neath the window to the bedside. As he did so, the candle on the bureau sputtered and almost went out. It had burned down to its socket. And then, shattering the silence, there came from the church across the road the first stroke of midnight. The dying man on the bed made no move, but Hobbs, in his terror, thought he saw a smile deepen the corners of his mouth. The twelve strokes rang out like blows on a cracked anvil. Hobbs stood, leaning over the bed, with the sweat cold on his face. The doctor held McShane's wrist. As the sound of the last stroke GORDON ARTHUR SMITH 47 echoed and faded and died, McShane opened his eyes. He mo- tioned to the doctor to bend nearer him. “Give me back me cheque, docther,” he whispered. “'Tis New Year's mornin'.” The candle went out and left them in darkness, and into the darkness went the soul of McShane. PUELLA MEA BY E. E. CUMMINGS Harun Omar and Master Hafiz keep your dead beautiful ladies. Mine is a little lovelier than any of your ladies were. In her perfectest array my lady, moving in the day, is a little stranger thing than crisp Sheba with her king in the morning wandering. Through the young and awkward hours my lady perfectly moving, through the new world scarce astir my fragile lady wandering in whose perishable poise is the mystery of Spring (with her beauty more than snow dexterous and fugitive my very frail lady drifting distinctly, moving like a myth in the uncertain morning, with April feet like sudden flowers and all her body filled with May) -moving in the unskilful day my lady utterly alive, to me is a more curious thing (a thing more nimble and complete) than ever to Judea's king were the shapely sharp cunning and withal delirious feet of the Princess Salomé carefully dancing in the noise of Herod's silence, long ago. a E. E. CUMMINGS 49 a If she a little turn her head i know that i am wholly dead: nor ever did on such a throat the lips of Tristram slowly dote, La beale Isoud whose leman was. And if my lady look at me (with her eyes which like two elves incredibly amuse themselves) with a look of faerie, perhaps a little suddenly (as sometimes the improbable beauty of my lady will) -at her glance my spirit shies rearing (as in the miracle of a lady who had eyes which the king's horses might not kill.) But should my lady smile, it were a flower of so pure surprise (it were so very new a flower, a flower so frail, a flower so glad) as trembling used to yield with dew when the world was young and new (a flower such as the world had in springtime when the world was mad and Launcelot spoke to Guenever, a flower which most heavy hung with silence when the world was young and Diarmid looked in Grania's eyes.) But should my lady's beauty play at not speaking (sometimes as it will) the silence of her face doth immediately make in my heart so great a noise, as in the sharp and thirsty blood of Paris would not all the Troys of Helen's beauty: never did Lord Jason (in impossible things victorious impossibly) so wholly burn, to undertake 50 PUELLA MEA Medea's rescuing eyes; nor he when swooned the white egyptian day who with Egypt's body lay. Lovely as those ladies were mine is a little lovelier. And if she speak in her frail way, it is wholly to bewitch my smallest thought with a most swift radiance wherein slowly drift murmurous things divinely bright; it is foolingly to smite my spirit with the lithe free twitch of scintillant space, with the cool writhe of gloom truly which syncopate some sunbeam's skilful fingerings; it is utterly to lull with foliate inscrutable sweetness my soul obedient; it is to stroke my being with numbing forests, frolicsome, fleetly mystical, aroam with keen creatures of idiom (beings alert and innocent very deftly upon which indolent miracles impinge) -it is distinctly to confute my reason with the deep caress of every most shy thing and mute, it is to quell me with the twinge of all living intense things. Never my soul so fortunate is (past the luck of all dead men and loving) as invisibly when upon her palpable solitude a furtive occult fragrance steals, a gesture of immaculate perfume—whereby (with fear aglow) E. E. CUMMINGS 51 my soul is wont wholly to know the poignant instantaneous fern whose scrupulous enchanted fronds toward all things intrinsic yearn, the immanent subliminal fern of her delicious voice (of her voice which alway dwells beside the vivid magical impetuous and utter ponds of dream; and very secret food its leaves inimitable find beyond the white authentic springs, beyond the sweet instinctive wells, which make to flourish the minute spontaneous meadow of her mind) —the vocal fern, alway which feels the keen ecstatic actual tread (and thereto perfectly responds) of all things exquisite and dead, all living things and beautiful. (Caliph and king their ladies had to love them and to make them glad, when the world was young and mad, in the city of Bagdad- mine is a little lovelier than any of their ladies were.) a Her body is most beauteous, being for all things amorous fashioned very curiously of roses and of ivory. The immaculate crisp head is such as only certain dead and careful painters love to use for their youngest angels (whose praising bodies in a row between slow glories fleetly go.) Upon a keen and lovely throat 52 PUELLA MEA a the strangeness of her face doth float, which in eyes and lips consists -alway upon the mouth there trysts curvingly a fragile smile which like a flower lieth (while within the eyes is dimly heard a wistful and precarious bird.) Springing from fragrant shoulders small, ardent, and perfectly withal smooth to stroke and sweet to see as a supple and young tree, her slim lascivious arms alight in skilful wrists which hint at flight -my lady's very singular and slenderest hands moreover are (which as lilies smile and quail) of all things perfect the most frail. (Whoso rideth in the tale of Chaucer knoweth many a pair of companions blithe and fair; who to walk with Master Gower in Confessio doth prefer shall not lack for beauty there, nor he that will amaying go with my lord Boccaccio- whoso knocketh at the door of Marie and of Maleore findeth of ladies goodly store whose beauty did in nothing err. If to me there shall appear than a rose more sweetly known, more silently than a flower, my lady naked in her hair- i for those ladies nothing care nor any lady dead and gone.) a When the world was like a song heard behind a golden door, a E. E. CUMMINGS 53 poet and sage and caliph had to love them and to make them glad ladies with lithe eyes and long (when the world was like a flower Omar Hafiz and Harun loved their ladies in the moon) -fashioned very curiously of roses and of ivory if naked she appear to me my flesh is an enchanted tree; with her lips' most frail parting my body hears the cry of Spring, and with their frailest syllable its leaves go crisp with miracle. Love!-maker of my lady, in that alway beyond this poem or any poem she of whose body words are afraid perfectly beautiful is, forgive these words which i have made. And never boast your dead beauties, you greatest lovers in the world! never boast your beauties dead who with Grania strangely fled, who with Egypt went to bed, whom white-thighed Semiramis put up her mouth to wholly kiss- never boast your dead beauties, mine being unto me sweeter (of whose shy delicious glance things which never more shall be, perfect things of faerie, are intense inhabitants; in whose warm superlative body do distinctly live all sweet cities passed away- in her flesh at break of day are the smells of Nineveh, 54 PUELLA MEA in her eyes when day is gone are the cries of Babylon.) Diarmid Paris and Solomon, Omar Harun and Master Hafiz, to me your ladies are all one- keep your dead beautiful ladies. Eater of all things lovely_Time! upon whose watering lips the world poises a moment (futile, proud, a costly morsel of sweet tears) gesticulates, and disappears of all dainties which do crowd gaily upon oblivion sweeter than any there is one; to touch it is the fear of rhyme- in life's very fragile hour (when the world was like a tale made of laughter and of dew, was a flight, a flower, a flame, was a tendril fleetly curled upon frailness) used to stroll (very slowly) one or two ladies like flowers made, softly used to wholly move slender ladies made of dream (in the lazy world and new sweetly used to laugh and love ladies with crisp eyes and frail, in the city of Bagdad.) Keep your dead beautiful ladies Harun Omar and Master Hafiz. A DRAWING. BY E. E. CUMMINGS A DRAWING. BY E. E. CUMMINGS 10 A DRAWING. BY E. E. CUMMINGS 2 A DRAWING. BY E. E. CUMMINGS COCK AND HARLEQUIN Notes Concerning Music BY JEAN COCTEAU Translated from the French by Rollo H. Myers A The musiciare opens file cage-door to arithmetic ; the draughts- RT science in the . the man gives geometry its freedom. A work of art must satisfy all the Muses—that is what I call “Proof by nine.” A masterpiece is a game of chess won “check-mate.” A YOUNG MAN Must Not INVEST IN SAFE SECURITIES. Royal families.-Only a sense of hierarchy permits of sound judgement. Amongst works of art which leave us unmoved, there are works which count; one may smile at Gounod's Faust-but it is a masterpiece; one may revolt against Picasso's aesthetic, but recognize its intrinsic value. It is this sense of quality which relates artists belonging to absolutely opposite schools. Emotion resulting from a work of art is only of value when it is not obtained by sentimental blackmail. In art every value which can be proved is vulgar. Truth is too naked; she does not inflame men. A sentimental scruple which prevents us from speaking the whole truth makes us represent Venus hiding her sex with her hand. But truth points to her sex with her hand. Every “Long live So-and-So” involves a “Down with So-and- So.” One must have the courage to say this “Down with So-and- So" or be convinced of eclecticism. 56 COCK AND HARLEQUIN Eclecticism is fatal to admiration as well as to injustice. But in art, it is a kind of injustice to be just. It is hard to deny anything, above all a noble work of art. But every sincere affirmation involves a sincere negation. Beethoven is irksome in his developments, but not Bach, because Beethoven develops the form and Bach the idea. Beethoven says: “This pen-holder contains a new pen; there is a new pen in this pen-holder; the pen in this pen-holder is new” -or “Marquise, vos beaux yeux, et cetera.” Bach says: “This pen-holder contains a new pen in order that I may dip it in the ink and write, et cetera,” or “Marquise, vos beaux yeux me font mourir d'amour, et cet amour, et cetera." There lies the difference. There is a moment when every work in the process of being created benefits from the glamour attaching to uncompleted . sketches. "Don't touch it any more!” cries the amateur. It Is THEN THAT THE TRUE Artist Takes His CHANCE. SENSES. The ear repudiates but can tolerate certain kinds of music which, if transferred to the sphere of the nose, would oblige us to run away. The bad music which superior folk despise is agreeable enough. What is disagreeable is their good music. Sculpture, so neglected on account of the current contempt for form and mass in favour of the shapeless, is undoubtedly one of the noblest arts. To begin with, it is the only one which obliges us to move round it. That bird-catcher and scare-crow over there is a conductor. a The creative artist must always be partly man and partly woman, and the woman part is almost always unbearable. The public asks questions. They ought to be answered by works, not manifestos. JEAN COCTEAU 57 The beautiful looks easy. That is what the public scorns. Even when you blame, only be concerned with what is first-class. Impressionist music is outdone by a certain American dance which I saw at the Casino de Paris. This is what the dance was like. The American band accom- panied it on banjos and thick nickel tubes. On the right of the little black-coated group there was a barman of noises under a gilt pergola loaded with bells, triangles, boards, and motorcycle horns. With these he fabricated cocktails, adding from time to time a dash of cymbals, all the while rising from his seat, posturing, and smiling vacuously. Mr Pilcer in evening dress, thin and rouged, and Mlle Gaby Deslys, like a big ventriloquist's doll, with a china complexion, flaxen hair, and a gown of ostrich feathers, danced to this hur- ricane of rhythm and beating of drums a sort of tame catastrophe which left them quite intoxicated and blinded under the glare of six anti-aircraft search-lights. The house was on its feet to ap- plaud, roused from its inertia by this extraordinary turn which, compared to the madness of Offenbach, is what a tank would be by the side of an 1870 state-carriage. To defend Wagner because Saint-Saëns attacks him is too simple. We must cry “Down with Wagner!” together with Saint-Saëns. That requires real courage. I am not attacking modern German music. Schoenberg is a master; all our musicians as well as Stravinsky owe something to him, but Schoenberg is essentially a blackboard musician. The German public has a strong stomach which it stuffs with heterogeneous nourishment which is respectfully absorbed but not digested. In France this nourishment is refused; but there are four or five stomachs which select and digest better than anywhere else in the world. Germany is the type of an intellectual democracy, France of an intellectual monarchy. With us a young musician from the beginning meets with op- position, in other words, a stimulant. In Germany he finds ears. 58 COCK AND HARLEQUIN The longer they are the more they listen. He is taken up, and academized, and that is the end of him. We must be clear about that misunderstood phrase, “German influence.” France had her pockets full of seeds and, carelessly, spilt them all about her; the German picked up the seeds, carried them off to Germany and planted them in a chemically-prepared soil from whence there grew a monstrous flower without scent. It is not surprising that the maternal instinct made us recognize the poor spoilt flower and prompted us to restore to it its true shape and smell. Satie acquired a distaste for Wagner in Wagnerian circles, in the very heart of the Rose-Croix. He warned Debussy against Wagner. “Be on your guard,” he said. “A ‘property' tree is not convulsed because somebody comes on to the stage.” That is the whole aesthetic of Pelléas. Satie does not pay much attention to painters, and does not read the poets, but he likes to live where life ferments; he has a flair for good inns. Debussy established once for all the Debussy atmosphere. Satie evolves. Each of his works, intimately connected with its pre- decessor, is nevertheless distinct and lives a life of its own. They are like a new kind of pudding-a surprise--and a deception for those who expect one always to tread the same piece of ground. The impressionists feared bareness, emptiness, silence. Silence is not necessarily a hole; you must use silence, instead of using a stop-gap of vague noises. Black Shadow.-Black silence. Not violet silence, interspersed .-- with violet shadows. We may soon hope for an orchestra where there will be no caressing strings. Only a rich choir of wood, brass, and percussion. I should not be averse from substituting for the cult of St Cecilia that of St Polycarpe. It would be a fine thing for a musician to compose for a mechan- ical organ, a veritable sound-machine. We should then hear properly employed the rich resources of this apparatus which are now lavished, haphazard, upon hackneyed tunes. JEAN COCTEAU 59 The public, accustomed to redundancy, disregards works that are terse. To the musical public terseness signifies emptiness, and stuffing prodigality. The public only takes up yesterday as a weapon with which to castigate to-day. The indolence of the public: its armchair and its stomach. The public is ready to take up no matter what new game so long as you don't change it, when once it has learned the rules. Hatred of the creator is hatred of him who alters the rules of the game. Publics. Those who defend to-day by making use of yester- day, and who anticipate to-morrow (one per cent). Those who defend to-day by destroying yesterday, and who will deny to-morrow (four per cent). Those who imagine that to-day is a mistake, and make an ap- pointment for the day-after-to-morrow (twelve per cent). Those of the day-before-yesterday who defend yesterday in order to prove that to-day exceeds legitimate bounds (twenty per cent). Those who have not yet learnt that art is continuous and believe that art stopped yesterday in order to go on again, perhaps, to- morrow (sixty per cent). Those who are equally oblivious of the Day-before-Yesterday, Yesterday, and To-day (one hundred per cent). To Please, and to Retain One's Merit.-If an artist yields to the public's overtures of peace, he is beaten. A favourite phrase of the public is: “I don't see what that's meant to be.” The public wants to understand first and feel afterwards. A fall makes peoples laugh. The mechanism of falling plays an important part in causing the laughter which greets a new work. The public, not having followed the curve which leads up to this work, stumbles suddenly from where it was standing down on to the work which it is now seeing or hearing. Consequently a fall takes place, and laughter. Music is the only art which the masses will allow not to be like 60 COCK AND HARLEQUIN something else. And yet good music is music which has some resemblance. One does not blame an epoch; one congratulates oneself on not having belonged to it. Of course Wagner is “good” and Debussy is “good”—we are only discussing what is "good.” Needless to say that Saint-Saëns, Bruneau, and Charpentier are very bad. Pelléas is another example of music to be listened to with one's face in one's hands. All music which has to be listened to through the hands is suspect. Wagner is typically music which is listened to through the hands. One cannot get lost in a Debussy mist as one can in a Wagner fog, but it is not good for one. Too many miracles are expected of us; I consider myself very fortunate if I have been able to make a blind man hear. FRAGMENTS OF IGOR STRAVINSKY AND THE RUSSIAN BALLET 9 And the flower-Maidens: Amongst the most recent flower- Maidens, the most maidenly and the most flowery, I class the Russian Ballet. I had a presentiment that I should have to find an excuse for my enthusiasm for this Barnum, a last scruple before clearing out “on the quiet.” It was in 1910. Nijinsky was dancing the Spectre de la Rose. Instead of going to see the piece, I went to wait for him in the wings. There it was really very good. After embracing the . young girl the spectre of the rose hurls himself out of the window .... and comes to earth amongst the stage-hands who throw water in his face and rub him down like a boxer. What a com- bination of grace and brutality! I shall always hear that thunder of applause; I shall always see that young man, smeared with JEAN COCTEAU 61 grease-paint, gasping and sweating, pressing his heart with one hand and holding on with the other to the scenery, or else fainting on a chair. Afterwards, having been smacked and douched and shaken he would return to the stage, and smile his acknowledge- ments. LE SACRE DU PRINTEMPS The Sacre du Printemps was given in May 1913 in a new theatre, untarnished by time, too comfortable and too cold for a public used to emotions at close quarters in the warmth of red velvet and gold. I do not for a moment think that the Sacre would have met with a more polite reception on a less pretentious stage; but this luxurious theatre seemed, at first glance, symbolic of the misunderstanding which was confronting a decadent public with a work full of strength and youth. A tired public, reposing amidst Louis XVI garlands, Venetian gondolas, luxurious divans, and cushions of an orientalism for which the Russian Ballet must be held responsible. Under such conditions one digests, as it were, in a hammock, dozing; the really New is driven away like a fly; it is disturbing. Let us recall the theme of the Sacre. First Tableau. The prehistoric youth of Russia are engaged in springtide games and dances; they worship the earth and the wise elder reminds them of the sacred rites. SECOND TABLEAU. These simple men believe that the sacrifice of a young girl, chosen from amongst all her peers, is necessary in order that Spring may recommence. She is left alone in the forest; the ancestors come out of the shadows like bears, and form a circle. They inspire the chosen one with the rhythm of a long drawn-out convulsion. When she falls dead, the ancestors draw near, receive her body and raise it towards heaven. This theme, so simple, so devoid of symbolism, to-day seems to hold a symbol. I see in it the prelude to the war. Let us now return to the theatre in the Avenue Montaigne, while we wait for the conductor to rap his desk and the curtain to go up on one of the noblest events in the annals of art. The audience 62 COCK AND HARLEQUIN behaved as it ought to; it revolted straight away. People laughed, boo-ed, hissed, imitated animal noises, and possibly would have tired themselves out before long, had not the crowd of aesthetes and a handful of musicians, carried away by their excessive zeal, insulted and even roughly handled the public in the loges. The uproar degenerated into a free fight. Standing up in her loge, her diadem awry, the old Countess de P. flourished her fan and shouted, scarlet in the face, "It's the first time for sixty years that anyone's dared to make a fool of me." The good lady was sincere; she thought there was some mystification. At two o'clock in the morning Stravinsky, Nijinsky, Diaghilev, and I piled into a taxi and drove to the Bois de Boulogne. No one spoke; the night was fresh and agreeable. We recognized the first trees by the smell of the acacias. When we had reached the Lakes, Diaghilev, enveloped in opossum furs, began to mutter in Russian; I felt Stravinsky and Nijinsky listening, and when the driver lit the lamps I saw that there were tears on the impresario's face. He went on muttering, slowly and indefatigably. “What . is it?” I asked. “Pushkin.” Again there was a long silence; then Diaghilev stammered out a short sentence, and the emotion of my two companions seemed so acute that I could not refrain from interrupting in order to know the reason. "It is hard to translate,” said Stravinsky, “really very hard; too Russian .. too Russian. It means, roughly, Veux-tu faire un tour aux îles. Yes, that's it; it is a very Russian expression, because, you know, in our country one goes to the islands in the same way as we are going to the Bois de Boulogne to-night, and it was in going to the islands that we conceived the Sacre du Printemps.” It was the first time the scandal had been alluded to. We came back at dawn. You cannot imagine the state of softness and nostalgia of these men, and whatever Diaghilev may have done since, I shall never forget his great wet face, in the cab, reciting Pushkin in the Bois de Boulogne. . THREE POEMS BY WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS JANUARY Again I reply to the triple winds running chromatic fifths of derision outside my window: Play louder, you will not succeed. I am bound more to my sentences the more you batter at me to follow you. And the wind, as before, fingers perfectly its derisive music. APPROACH OF WINTER The half stripped trees struck by a wind together, bending all, the leaves flutter drily and refuse to let go or driven like hail stream bitterly out to one side and fall where the hard carmine of the salvias- like no leaf that ever was- edges the bare garden. 64 THREE POEMS WINTER TREES All the complicated details of the attiring and the disattiring are completed! A liquid moon moves gently among the long branches. Thus having prepared their buds against a sure winter the wise trees stand sleeping in the cold. A WHITE HEART BY ALEKSEI REMIZOV Translated from the Russian by John Cournos I WAS waiting for a tram-car. There was no way of getting on; people were hanging on, jostling one another. Well, simply like wild beasts. Ten tram-cars I let go past. I saw an old woman standing there, like myself, waiting. An ancient grandmother. To look at her face you would have thought that it had always been like that, that she had always been a grandmother; her wrinkles were so minute; she was toothless, and goodness was in her face. I looked more intently; she was standing patiently; did her tired eyes see anything? Yes, they saw. “Don't leave me to myself,” said to me the grandmother. “Let us go on the tram together. I simply can't manage to crowd in.” “All right,” said I. “We'll go together. Only we'll have to wait here for some time; I'm no good for pushing, or hanging on.” “God preserve us from that!" the grandmother interrupted me. Yes, the grandmother saw that she was not alone. А young woman was standing near us, and it was quite clear that she was with us; but the young woman could hold out no longer, and when the eleventh tram came up she suddenly changed—what had become of her gentleness! She joined the tram crowd and hung on with the rest. The matter had become desperate for us. Nothing seemed left for us to do but to go on foot. “Let us go, grandmother; it's all the same." "I'll never get so far.” It was true. The old woman could have never got there. We were standing on a corner of the Ninth Line, and the grandmother's destination was the New Village. I conquered my despair, and it was evident that the grandmother had conquered hers long ago. At last, with God's help, we got a tram and pushed in. The tram was full; it was useless to even think of a seat. They 66 A WHITE HEART were all soldiers. As for me, I'm not good at hanging on; still, I managed to stand somehow. It was different with the old woman; she bent quite in two, and her legs refused to obey her—she was like a blade of grass at every jolt. "Won't some one give grandmother a seat!” said I to the pas- sengers. That was not the first time I had spoken like that; so I did not expect any mercy. But this time it seemed to work; two sailors rose from their seats. “There are good people in this world-please sit down.” I seated the grandmother. It is good for a man to be like these sailors. I looked at them and, perhaps, even standing, they felt at that instant as happy as the grandmother. As for her, having rested a while, she began to talk. Though she did not speak loudly, every word of hers was audible; there was something in her voice which cheered even the sailors, who had given up their place to her; her harshest words came from a white heart. The old grandmother told about herself, of the place she had come from, and of her hard and lonely life. And in the course of her story she recalled the present, as it were, and, raising her eyes to me, repeated : “Don't leave me to myself. We'll get off together.” “Together, together, grandmother!" repeated I, as well as the two sailors, rocking from the jolts. Without words, they seemed to say as they rocked—"together, together!" It was hard for the grandmother in the white world; that was the word she used—“hard.” The grandmother was not a native here; her own country was at the other end of the world; some- where near Kovno. Many times she had been driven out; they always told her that the Germans were coming. Nothing was cer- tain for some time; she would gather up her goods and get ready then one day would pass, then another, and everything would be as it was before, and she would remain. "In the end they made it hard for me, and I had to go.” “Who made it hard for you—the Germans ?” “No!” said the grandmother, as she remembered something very bitter, but she added, in a voice without bitterness: "My own children.” to go; > ALEKSEI REMIZOV 67 a The soldier passengers exchanged glances. And the voice of the old woman became even more audible. For some reason the whole car grew quiet, and no one went out. Did they all go the same way-grandmother's way? “I had a little house. I thought I'd die there. I was quite alone in the white world. I had had a daughter of about sixteen; she died. Another daughter married, lived a year, and died. I had three sons, who worked in a factory here in St Petersburg. When my old man died, I held up the funeral for three days, thinking they would come. But they didn't come. I suppose they never got my telegram. Then, when the war began, all my sons were taken as soldiers. And no matter how many times I wrote and in- quired, they could tell me nothing about them. Just like a stone thrown into the water." “Perhaps they are in prison ?” “No; I think they are gone.” Again the grandmother remembered something bitter; again spoke in her good voice: “And when the children came, they set fire to my little house, and left only the ashes. I wept and I said to them: 'Oh, don't ‘ set it on fire-do let it alone!' So you want to live with the Ger- mans! You're a German woman! We'll throw you into the fire! ' I thought to myself: Let them throw me in; as it is, mine is a hard life, and all of God's Saints have been burnt. I stand there and think to myself, and they are arguing. One says: 'Let's throw her into the fire!' and the other says: 'No, let her alone!' Then, when the house burnt down, I went away. It took me three months, going on foot.” The grandmother became lost in thought; was she thinking of her house there at the end of the world, where charred bits of wood alone remained under the snow? Or was she thinking of her sons, who had worked in the factory here, and were now out there -there under the snow? And I thought, as I lookd at the bowed grandmother, who had grown silent (the whole car was now looking at her): “Grandmother, you with your heart, which has suffered bitter loss; with your white heart white heart you have accepted your bitter fate- otherwise how could you speak of your spoilers as your children? -and now you are alone in the white world with your white heart, a a 68 A WHITE HEART a and your life is hard; you are living your last days and who is there to comfort you? Who will comfort us? Grandmother, it is hard for us too; I speak for all, and to all, all, all. Who feels at ease, who can feel happy at the sight of the white ruins of your house, , at the sight of the white grave of your lost world? What wild beast, or what leering, shaggy soul; or what soul, crushed, like a rotten, worm-eaten mushroom, or heart resembling a begnawed dry bone? No; here we are, all of us; and if there is any one who had not understood with his mind, then he has felt it with his heart- every one of us-your oppressive burden . . . the whole cross is ours to bear!” “Don't be uneasy,” said the grandmother, "a woman in Moscow had a dream. She dreamt of Virgin Mary, who said to her: "The Russian kingdom is in my hand; go and seek such an ikon as will show me as I am now. That same woman went all over Moscow, through all the churches and into all the houses—and she couldn't find it. At last she went to the village of Kolomensk, near Mos- cow, and went into a church that had been built in the times of Ivan the Terrible. It was full of ikons--they were lying there below, one on top the other, like slabs of the dead. She picked up one after the other, one after the other and suddenly exclaimed: “That's the very one!' and now this ikon is being taken all over Moscow, and prayers are being offered it for salvation. And I saw it. At the top a kind of rainbow and Sabaoth, then clouds, and then Virgin Mary in porphyry and crown-in one hand the sceptre, in the other the earth.” It was now time for the grandmother to leave the tram. We left together; it was easy for us to leave, for every one made way for us. I led the old grandmother to a stopping-place, saw her into an- other tram, and said good-bye. “Good-bye, grandmother!" “Christ be with you!" And I went my way, through the St Petersburg darkness, and in the darkness bore along with me in a white heart-a tranquil light. a NEW YORKAN ABSTRACTION. Courtesy of the Bourgeois Galleries BY C. R. W. NEVINSON SEVEN SAYINGS BY KAHLIL GIBRAN I I said to Life, “I would hear Death speak,” and Life raised her voice a little higher and said, “You hear it now.” > II My friend, you and I shall remain strangers unto life and unto one another and each unto himself, until the day when you shall speak and I shall listen deeming your voice my own voice, and when I shall stand before you and think myself standing before a mirror. III When God threw me, a pebble, into this wondrous Lake I dis- turbed its surface with countless circles. But when I reached its depth I became very still. IV You are truly a forgiver when you forgive murderers who never spill blood, thieves who never steal, liars who utter no falsehood. V Crucified One, you are crucified upon my breast, and the nails that pierce your hands pierce the walls of my heart. And to- morrow when a stranger passes by this Golgotha, he will not know that two bled here. He will deem it the blood of one man. VI Great beauty holds us, but a beauty still greater frees us even from itself. VII Every thought I have imprisoned in expression I must free by my deeds. ITALIAN LETTER December, 1920 THE 1 HE utter lack of any definite character or style in contem- porary letters cannot give us the right to refrain from con- cerning ourselves in the matter. The tentatives of the last twenty years have led to nothing definite, but they have certainly marked a renewal of thought and conscience or, to speak more modestly, have at least marked the road for such a renewal. Never has there been such an enormous "liquidation” of the past as in this period. Actually, the triad of the last century has been surpassed more in manner than in substance. Carducci, and, even more, Pascoli " and d'Annunzio, live still in the new generation; but the younger writers have tried resolutely to free themselves from this inherit- ance, though often without success. Their principal merit is that they have definitely felt that Car- ducci's eloquence, d'Annunzio's aesthetics, and Pascoli's crepus- cularity are embodied in forms which have already given all they can give—and, if they are over-arrogant in claiming to have sur- passed even the inspiration of these poets, and certainly belittle them unreasonably, in this same fallacious belief is to be found a proof ab absurdis of that critical passion which is a really new feature, and which eventually becomes the form, in the philosophic sense of the word, of a new art. If these works lack that new content of love which is the usual manifestation of the new in poetry, a provident hatred unknown to the preceding generation has at least been created. The new Italian poets have no affirmative powers, but they have learnt to be negative with distinction, and they use this power courageously against themselves, raising endless objections to their own work: indeed, by their zeal in tearing the flesh from the bones of their poetry they may be said to have annihilated it completely, or at least to have succeeded in reducing it to its most naked and primitive elements. Thus we have Palazzeschi, musician, deny- 1 See the recent anthology of Italian poetry (Poeti d'oggi--di P. Papini e P. Pancrazi, Valleschi, Via Ricasoli 8, Florence). ITALIAN LETTER 71 ing all melodious sound; and Soffici, painter, self-deprived of colour. Of this disintegration the most obvious result is the abolition of all acknowledged literary distinctions; and at the first stroke, that between prose and poetry. The writers of the first ten years, who, like Gozzano, remained true to poetry in verse, themselves raised precisely the most formi- dable objection to this traditional style. Using it with irony, they sang its requiem. The historian of to-day, having the work of these twenty years to classify, finds before him the fragment and the lyric discourse; the one already out of date; the other in full flower; the first: precious relics kept carefully apart, lifted, pure and transparent between two fingers, from the gangrene of the past; the second: an endeavour to establish a relation between these ruins, without however, rebuilding in the original architecture. The problem which our generation has set itself is to discover a new art in which the dominating part shall no longer be the theme, subdivided into its objective details, but rather the breath and lyric progression. The facts of this progression are touched, merely, or suggested, and not, as formerly, unfolded to a con- clusion. However that may be, the greater part of the problems of our Sturm und Drang, even those which may seem the most antithetic, are attached to this desperate passion for the purely lyrical. Our generation has hereby suffered the singular adventure of those futurists who imprisoned themselves in the force of their love of liberty; while the opposite movement may be traced to the same impulse. The neo-classic restorers see in parole libere, and indeed in almost all the expressions of the literary activity of the later nineteenth century, a more or less painful parenthesis, interrupting the Leopardian and Manzonian tradition which had already conquered, in a definite and final manner, verse and forme chiuse; and have found salvation possible only in collecting the heritage of these two great men in their lyric prose. But between these two extremes, futurism and anti-futurism, the other more or less recognizable tendencies of the new school still spring from the same root. This craving for lyric nudity explains, for instance, the poverty of crepuscular intimacy, crepuscular intimacy, the sensuality of the Neo- 72 ITALIAN LETTER any result. parnassians, the rocky anfractuosity which we associate with Jahier, and the rich luminosity of Linati. Were we treating only of a mental substrata the matter would be interesting as a philo- sophic problem rather than as art itself, but something must al- ready exist in poetic sensibility before we can speak of Reading consecutively a specimen of the work of a writer of each period, the impression received is one of two ages, more than estranged, absolutely opposed to each other. It is too early to say how much of the Parnassian remains in the new art form, but one can mark the influence exercised on the new style up to the present, at least in its later dispositions, in the exasperated love of detachment, of renunciation, not material only, but of inspiration itself. There is a feeling for severity al- most hieratic; in the more limpid pages no mistiness supervenes; and one is sometimes even reminded of the oracular odes of the archaic age of letters. The writing is weighted with a singular religious sense never transformed into irony, all fervour suppressed for the better exposition of the austerity, sometimes the hardness, of the rite. So one may say that the new movement, if it has not yet at- tained definite aesthetic results, has certainly regained a solid ethic character, and a moral decorum to be respected; hence the aversion from that facile literature which the fiction of comedy of to-day has carried into the suffocating realms of charlatanry: hence the growth of irony and terseness. We also find works of another kind, of austere comportment, enlivened with a sort of humour, which, if not conspicuous for critical severity, and sometimes childishly paternal in tone, are pronouncements significant at least in our country inclined to gos- sip and provincialism. By which I do not mean to indicate a contentment we are far from feeling. If instead of pursuing the further lyric and critical course of the above indications, we have preferred a position of careful ascertaining, diligent in the interests of literature, and se- lecting only small and slight points of worth, it is because this enterprise has more solid foundations and great possibilities. For the rest our dissatisfaction remains. Possibly the new poets will have need of all those present-day elements which we have discussed, and of that sacred spirit which is of all time. ENZO FERRIERI BOOK REVIEWS THE CHINLESS AGE LEDA. By Aldous Huxley. 8vo. 80 pages. George H. Doran Company. New York. EDA is a book of adolescence; its author recognizes this fact explicitly, going so far as to quote definitions from the Herd Instinct of the invaluable Mr Trotter. The adolescent suffers from that instability of mind "produced by the mental conflict forced upon man by his sensitiveness to herd suggestion on the one hand and to experience on the other.” A chinless age, Aldous Hux- ley goes on to call the period (he uses his own words this time); an age feebly skeptical, inefficient, profoundly unhappy. In other words it is the stage at which one measures the traditional precepts into which one has been educated against the immoral realities of experience; depending on which force proves the stronger, one be- comes idealist or realist. A third outcome is possible, and up till the present Mr Huxley has chosen this one. It consists in preserving and refining the strug- gle instead of searching for any solution thereof; in other words it consists in prolonging adolescence indefinitely. Laforgue recom- mends this path to the artist (Nous, poètes, restons des enfants de quinze ans, toujours pubères); the theory has even been advanced that genius in general is a state of continued puberty. At any rate genius has this much in common with adolescence; that they are both regions imperfectly explored, and this despite a myriad of Jean-Christophes; despite an almost equal number of Penrods and of painstaking caricatures of youth in English boarding schools. Of the two puberty is especially difficult to explore because it is new territory. It is a region created by modern education, which lengthened so tragically the period between the first rumbles of the voice, between the first faint doubts about God, and the time when one's ideals are lopped finally into the forms of useful citizenship. Aldous Huxley, always impeccably the modern, has undertaken to 74 THE CHINLESS AGE write the Baedeker of this region. More than that he is himself the explorer. He documents his poems out of his own experience; impersonality is only one of his poses. There are times when the pose wears thin. Especially this is true in passages from the best of his longer poems. He offers Soles Oc- cidere et Redire Possunt as a day from the life of a dead friend. To put it baldly, some of the details are not the sort of things one knows about a friend. They impress one rather as the fragments of an autobiography; Confessions of the Rousseau type; sometimes in bad taste and proud of the fact. It seems a shabby trick to at- tribute them to the unretorting dead. And yet the courtesy or discourtesy of the poem is not a case in point. Its sole important feature is the fact that Mr Huxley has used the incomplete gestures of adolescence as material for a work of art. At one place the poem may seem a study in immature sexu- . al psychology, mentioning always: “The unseen woman sitting there behind The door, making her ceaseless slow appeal To all that prowls and growls in the caves beneath The libraries and parlours of the mind.” At another point it is a chronicle of survivals from childhood; of such tricks as walking with shortened or lengthened steps to avoid the cracks between the stones. Or the poem may burst into a prayer to the ideal in terms of the disagreeable; a sort of O Lord Deliver Us running somewhat in this fashion: "From the quotidienity of this city, from quarrels over breakfast at eight-ten and the newspaper and the tube at eight-thirty; from the dirty dishes of this city, from sex and excrement and soiled linen, may some Christ die to save us, and me, forever and ever, Amen.” When he is complaining or mocking Mr Huxley can rise to real heights of bombast; at such times he writes good mouth-filling stuff with a little of the Elizabethan spirit, but with more acidity. His adolescence was even more than usual a period of destructive critic- ism; looking at the world from beneath, he played the Scapin to a MALCOLM COWLEY 75 perfection. And yet his own views are separated only by an ima- ginary line from those he ridicules. There is one place (among a number of excellent prose poems dedicated to Beauty) where Mr Huxley attempts to draw up an independent aesthetic; it echoes a little banally against its surroundings: “I desire no Paphian cloister of pink monks. Rather a rosy Brotherhood of Common Life, eating, drinking; marrying and given in marriage; taking and taken in adultery; reading, think- ing, and perhaps when thinking fails, feeling immeasurably more subtly, sometimes perhaps creating.” This is his manifesto; it has the same value as all other mani- festoes from the Unanimiste to that of the ninety learned German professors. It is for his satires, then, that he is to be valued, rather than for any gropings toward a philosophy; for his prose poems as long as they are satires; for Soles Occidere et Redire Possunt as long as it remains a criticism and a complaint. Most of his other work must be disregarded. Indeed to read Mr Huxley intelligently is a pro- cess of elimination. He is erudite and inclined to be imitative; one must begin by striking out the parts where he has given way to these weaknesses. Indeed one can draw up a list of desirable excisions, beginning with the part of his work that was written by the dead hand of Jules Laforgue, and ending with the solitary poem in which he collaborates unconsciously with D. H. Lawrence. Even the title poem can be eliminated by such tests; it is pomp- ously classical, and shows signs of being written with the tongue in the cheek. And yet whatever the tests that one may apply, there are always a few pages-five, ten, twenty, it does not matter- that definitely survive. And this is the thing that distinguishes Mr Huxley. Apply the same tests to the others of his generation, and their whole production is apt to be eliminated. The almost universal judgement on Leda has been that of "pro- mising." "Perhaps its greatest value,” says the critic of the Lon- don Mercury, "lies in the indication it gives that Mr Huxley's next poem may be twice as good.” At this point I disagree. The volume is an achievement, not a promise; the part of it that sur- vives the test is able to stand by itself. On the other hand, one is 76 THE CHINLESS AGE in the greatest uncertainty as to what Mr Huxley's mind may next bring forth. He is a man that works by precedents. Up to the present time, he has been able to follow the sure examples of Rim- baud and Laforgue; here their guidance ceases. Rimbaud gave up writing at the age of twenty and Laforgue died exhausted at twenty-seven. Mr Huxley also can die or cease to write; it is more probable, however, that he will persist. But in what vein? His own adolescence must have come to an end; he can go on developing his memories of it, or he can strike out in a totally new direction. In any case Leda stands as an obituary of that adol- escence. Malcolm Cowley MR SHERWOOD ANDERSON'S AMERICA 12mo. 371 Poor White. By Sherwood Anderson. pages. B. W. Huebsch. New York. • R ANDERSON, like Deukalion, creates his man from a clod VL of earth"found in a little hole of a town stuck on a mud bank on the western shore of the Mississippi.” Hugh McVey as a boy followed his father listlessly about the town, sweeping saloons, cleaning outhouses, or slept beside him on the river bank with the smell of the fish upon them and the flies about them. A New England woman, the wife of the station-agent, took Hugh and taught him "to keep his naturally indolent body moving and his clouded sleepy mind fixed on definite things.” After her de- parture his awakened will forced him into activity. “He arose from his chair and walked up and down the station platform. Each time as he lifted one of his long feet and set it slowly down a special little effort had to be made. 'If I do not move and keep moving I'll become like father, like all of the people about here? Hugh said to himself.” His will carried his body to Bidwell, Ohio, and his mind through the laborious processes of inventing machines for planting cabbages and loading hay; the industrial ex- pansion of the town bore him on to wealth and a kind of distinc- tion. There Hugh sticks, and Mr Anderson brings up his reserves in the person of Clara Butterworth, daughter of a magnate of the town who has made money out of Hugh's inventions. Clara's story is one of sexual awakening. Through her hoydenish girl- hood on her father's farm, her course at a co-educational college, and her association with her masculine friend Kate Chanceller she remains dissatisfied. It is her will which forces Hugh into mar- riage and eventually into cohabitation with her. Mr Anderson does not tie on a romantic conclusion as in Windy MacPherson's Son. He leaves Hugh and Clara incomplete and spiritually grop- ing, part of “That life, whose dumb wish is not missed If birth proceeds, if things subsist; The life of plants, and stones, and rain.” 78 MR SHERWOOD ANDERSON'S AMERICA In this severely elemental conception there is a certain grandeur. Hugh McVey is a distinct human type-a sort of sub-conscious Lincoln. Even when his individual story ceases to interest us he remains a symbol of the country itself in its industrial progress and spiritual impotence. Hugh McVey, the physically overgrown, al- most idiotic boy, is the microcosm of that Middle West in the early ’eighties which Mr Anderson knows so well and sketches so lacon- ically. "In all the towns of mid-western America it was a time of wait- ing. The country having been cleared and the Indians driven away into a vast distant place spoken of vaguely as the West, the Civil War having been fought and won, the minds of men were turned in upon themselves. The soul and its destiny was spoken of openly on the streets. Robert Ingersoll came to Bidwell to speak in Terry's Hall, and after he had gone the question of the divinity of Christ for months occupied the minds of the citizens. The ministers preached sermons on the subject, and in the evening it was talked about in stores. Every one had something to say. Even Charley Mook, who dug ditches, and who stuttered so that not a half dozen people in town could understand him, expressed his opinion.” And Hugh McVey, harnessing his mind to problems of mechanical invention and solving them by a power he does not understand, typifies the spirit of industrial pioneering in all its crude force. “A vast energy seemed to come out of the breast of earth and infect the people. Thousands of the most energetic men of the Middle States wore themselves out in forming companies, and when the companies failed, immediately formed others. In the fast-growing towns, men who were engaged in organizing companies representing a capital of millions lived in houses thrown hurriedly together by carpenters who, before the time of the great awakening, were engaged in building barns. Without music, without poetry, without beauty in their lives or impulses, a whole people, full of the native energy and strength of lives lived in a new land, rushed pell-mell into a new age.” ROBERT MORSS LOVETT 79 a a The pattern of Mr Anderson's book is determined even in its detail by this fundamental conception. He makes use of the abundant material which Winesburg, Ohio revealed without di- minishing, and each minor character and episode contributes to the picture as a whole. Sarah Shephard with her school-mistressly formula: "Show them that you can do perfectly the task given you to do, and you will be given a chance at a larger task”—what is she but the spirit of New England, brooding on the vast abyss of the Middle West, and making it pregnant? Harley Parsons with his boast "I have been with a Chinese woman, and an Italian, and with one from South America—I'm going back and I'm going to make a record. Before I get through I'm going to be with a woman of every nationality on earth, that's what I'm going to do,” what is he but an ironic incarnation of our national destiny? Joe Wainsworth, the harness maker who in warfare against machinery and machine-made goods kills his assistant—he is the ghost of the past attacking the present. Smoky Pete, the blacksmith who shouts out to the fields the scandal he dares not utter on Main Street-he is the true spirit of American prophecy, the Jeremiah of Ohio. These and countless other figures show Mr Anderson's easy mastery of Middle Western life, and his power to touch it with significance. He has made his story a Pilgrim's Progress, peopled with char- acters as actual and as full of meaning as those of the immortal allegory. Mr Anderson's formula is realism, enlarged and made significant by symbolism. It is the formula of Frank Norris—but Mr Ander- son's realism is more seizing and his symbolism more sustained, while his emphasis is far less. It is in lack of emphasis that Mr Anderson's novel falls below the effect of his short stories. Poor White does not end—it merely stops. Even so it may be regarded as an advance on Mr Anderson's earlier novels. No ending is bet- ter than a false one, and perhaps any emphasis would be misplaced in Vr Anderson's cosmos-or chaos. ROBERT Morss LOVETT a SANDBURG: A PSYCHIATRIC CURIOSITY SMOKE AND Steel. By Carl Sandburg. 12mo. 268 pages. Harcourt, Brace and Howe. New York. Eus ITHER Carl Sandburg is dead or he is very sick. Some of us, who annunciated this great poet when his epiphanal accents crashed out in Chicago, now look up from the useless pages of Smoke and Steel with a gasp of astonished grief. Is this the latest cry of our divine ballyhoo-poet, whom we have seen and heard so often just outside the circus-tent-of-life, crudely and eloquently ranting of such God-awful splendours within? Yes, it is, I sup- pose: although the cry might have been shrieked by a gas-light gamin hired to assassinate Sandburg, so completely is it murder. As a cry which is variously yodelled one hundred and ninety-three times (I refer to the number of poems in the book; and each has the most inspiring title), it is mostly characterized by the sen- tentious garrulity which makes nine-tenths of Whitman impossible to a man of any taste. The rest of the cry, with some perfectly astounding exceptions, is what Americans call an encore. Briefly, tragically, as a single long ullulation, it lacks the certitude of genius. Surely one who has wept and raved over the true Sandburg may be permitted to repudiate the false; in a spirit of hope, of passionate petition, may even be permitted to name the hell he has credulously blundered into. For the poet is not dead. He is merely whoring after alien gods. And that sort of thing, in the special meaning of the allusion, is a mental disease. In charity, the disease is nystagmus—which is nothing more or less than oscillation of the eyeballs, or dizziness. It is produced in the world of aviation by a tight spiral or a tail-spin. In the world of literature-in Sandburg's world—it is produced by the centrifugal stresses of asinine adulation. The result is the same in both worlds: neither aviator nor poet can fly straight until he recovers. It was, it is the conventional practice of critics, in the absence of sound appreciation, to acclaim each succeeding mani- festion of inferiority as the best thing Sandburg has ever done. Such unfair acclamations have turned the poet's head. Such sug ARTHUR WILSON 81 gestions of universal merit, actuating his mental ailerons and kick- ing over his spiritual rudder, have inevitably thrown him into a tail-spin which has disturbed the fluid of his semi-circular canals and produced a really dangerous condition of nystagmus. So much for the nature of the disease. The symptoms are absolutely appalling. Sandburg has lost (at least temporarily) the one and only thing which makes him great- the ability to determine when he has written something good. He now apparently believes that everything he writes is a poem. Often -such is the extremity of his trouble-he seems to think he has written poetry when he makes out a little list of a few things he has seen here and there in the street. Moreover, he appears to write his stuff on an eight-hour working day. Lost in smoke, confounded by steel, he has reduced to a mechanical effort the gestures neces- sary to make a poem. He imitates Gary, and turns his product out on a quantity basis. It would appear foolish to ask him what he has done with that rare conception of quality which integrated the earlier expressions of his genius. At one time he actually phrased the spirit ofcommercial America. Now he is himself that spirit. He is a factory hand in the very hell he abominates. I simply refuse to say any more of these heart-breaking things than are necessary to get my little idea across. My idea may help. It may not. Crashes frequently occur before the victim of nystag- mus has time to level out and get his ship's nose safely back on the horizon. Only two years ago Sandburg might have posed for Dardé's Faune. Then, in one of his most acceptable moods, he apotheosized that charming brute—so cruelly swift with rapacious hands, so selfishly insistent—cynical, hard, disillusioned-instinct with a spinous and hairy masculinity which had just enough childish in- nocence in it to make his flesh fatally attractive—a fantastic old- young god smelling like a goat, reeking with strange lusts, remem- bering unspeakable things, full of pagan perspicacity, smiling at death, a matrix himself of abundant and beautiful life. Such was at least one aspect of this multi-splendoured poet then. Only one out of many. And now God of Paul Dardé, resuscitate! ARTHUR WILSON JACAPONE DA TODI JACOPONE DA Todi, Poet and Mystic-1228-1306: A Spiritual Biography. By Evelyn Underhill. With a selection from the spiritual songs—the Italian text trans- lated into English verse by Mrs Theodore Beck. 521 pages. E. P. Dutton and Company. New York. THE \HE life of Jacapone da Todi is a highly romantic, dramatic narrative; it is a background for religious poetry as beautiful as any that we have; more than anything else, however, it is as the name indicates, a spiritual biography. Of the conspicuously ro- mantic episode of Jacopone's conversion, too much, perhaps, has been made. It is not more romantic nor dramatic than each of the successive phases of his life as a friar and scarcely more than alluded to by Miss Underhill, the tragedy is one of which he, him- self, has seen fit not to speak at all. At the age of thirty-seven or eight-in one of the years between 1265 and 1267—he was mar- ried to Vanna, daughter of Bernardino di Guidone of the lesser Umbrian aristocracy, of a house Ghibbeline in politics as was his The ideal wife he has told us, should be "beautiful and healthy, well-bred and sweet-natured. She must have a large dowry and must not have a nagging tongue.” We infer that Vanna was the personification of his requirements with perhaps the excep- tion of the dowry and the fact that she was desirous of living a life of religious seclusion. Accomodating herself outwardly to Ser Jacomo's requirements, she had accompanied him to the home of an acquaintance on the occasion of a marriage festival and during the progress of the ball, was dancing on a balcony when the balcony fell and she was mortally hurt. When her injuries were being cared for, it was discovered that beneath her magnificent garments, she wore a shirt of hair. “Life he must have”: says his biographer; "he needed its colour, its perpetual calls to action, its romance. Now his temporal life lay in ruins around him: but through the rents in its wall, eternal life was suddenly disclosed.” “Mystics, she says, “do not spring full-grown from the wreck of their worldly own. 9 MARIANNE MOORE 83 careers. They pass for the most part through a period of spiritual childhood and hard education, marked by the child's intensity of feeling and distorted scale of values, its abounding vitality, dram- atic instinct and lack of control ... In this, Jacopone was true to type.” He had led the life of the intellect for nearly forty years. “When others went to Mass or to hear a sermon, he pre- ferred to stay at home and have a good dinner and a little music." From having thus deferred to the dictates of intellect and sense, he now became wildly ascetic-subject on the one hand to wild states of rapturous adoration, recalling in exuberance the "French-like rejoicings” into which St Francis is said to have broken out, and on the other hand to "profound reactions of self-hatred and des- pairing grief,” going so far beyond the requirements of convent piety that he was refused admittance to the Convent of San For- tunato at Todi. We do not know where the years were spent until 1278; we do know that the “superficial character of mere physical aus- terities'' had at this time become clear to him; he found that he had "but exchanged one kind of wealth for another." He had achieved a conquest over the senses; he now felt it to be essential that he should make a complete sacrifice of his personal will and with the end in view of subjecting himself to the uncongenial restraints of convent life, he again sought admittance to the Convent of San Fortunato and was received. His entrance into the convent was no more a matter of satis- faction to the friars than it was to him for “although the Spiritual party and those who followed the ‘relaxed' rule, had alike accepted Holy Poverty theoretically, as theoretically, ordinary Christians have accepted the Sermon on the Mount,” they felt "the contivu- ance and success of the primitive Franciscan methods” to be a re- proach to them; nor was Jacopone, we read, "easily transformed into the pattern friar.” Contemplation was not in accord with his disposition. "Fasting and prayer were welcome-indeed, he loved them to excess—but it was long before he learned to accept with meekness the small mortifications of daily life.” The poem on im- patience cited by Miss Underhill in this connection shows how dif- ficult for him was the conquest of hot temper and self-esteem. (Lauda XXVIII) 84 JACOPONE DA TODI OF IMPATIENCE, WHICH BRINGS ALL OUR GAINS TO NOTHING I laboured long, I strove with might and main: And yet I cannot keep the good I gain. Yea, I have been a monk full many a year, Have suffered much, and wandered far and near, Have sought and found—yet held not, -till I fear That nothing can I show for all my pain. In calm retreats my truest joy I found; I strove in prayer with no uncertain sound; I fed the poor for many miles around; In sickness, very patient have I lain. In uttermost obedience did I dwell, In suffering and poverty as well; Yes, I was chaste and happy in So far as my poor powers could attain. my cell, Famished and weak, I fasted many a day; Dried up by heat and pierced by cold I lay; I was a pilgrim on a weary way, Or so it seemed, in sunshine and in rain. To pray, I daily rose before the sun; Mass did I hear before the dark was done; To tierce and nones and vespers would I run, And, after compline, still to watch was fain. And then was said to me a scornful word: -Deep in my heart the poisoned arrow stirred,- At once my tongue was ready when I heard, With fierce and burning fury to complain. Now see how great and wealthy I must be! I heap my gains for all the world to see; Yet one poor word so fiercely angers me, That I must strive to pardon it in vain! MARIANNE MOORE 85 a >> Affectation of learning was to him an acute source of discipline, and one notes that it is pride of intellect, not learning which he con- demns—that for instance, in laude xvii and xxxi, he "ex- presses merely the contempt felt by the inheritor of a solid culture and an unassailable social tradition for the thinly-veneered imita- tion—the intellectual 'beggar on horse-back.'” The works char- acteristic of his middle period are "remarkable for their insistence on order and measure.” “There is something deeply impressive, Miss Underhill says, “in the spectacle of this vehement nature thus , capitulating to the austere Augustinian concept of love as to the very principle of order itself at the moment in which it is still swept by the tempest of feeling-ready to justify its own impass- ioned state.” Having triumphed over the senses and the will, the supreme achievement yet remained to him—the conquest of the spirit. He finds that "still the busy intellect has not been put in its place. It continues to possess its own ideas, and therefore to be possessed by its own limitations. Entangled in these, it ranges around, seeking to understand; only to find that the brick-built conceptual universe intervenes between it and reality.” This transcendence of sep- arateness, says Jacopone, “is the testing-house where the academic and the real mystic part company. The first is still held in the realm of speculation; lofty indeed yet tethered to the earth like a captive balloon. The second has the free flight of a bird . . not needing to see because it is at home.” Jacopone was impris- oned by Pope Boniface vin in 1298, and we infer that it was at this time that he entered upon his third stage of mystical develop- ment. Only life can speak of life, and his words are testimony to the fact of an unprecedented vital force within. He speaks of per- sonal oppositions having at last been transcended and says that he is “no longer troubled by the temptation to take an interest in his food,” that “when it is nice, he refers its flavours to God” but that he permits himself such gratitude only as is permitted to those who can refer everything to God. In the attainment of power through acceptance of the untoward circumstances of life, he re- minds one of the live oak which cannot be killed by cutting, with its tent-like foliage and contradictory intricateness of growth. The genius for attaining to sphere after sphere of spiritual develop- ment is a secret even when explained, but what Boethius has defined as the “total and perfect possession of unlimited life at a single . 86 JACOPONE DA TODI moment" seems less far removed from the world of experience when its transcendence is seen to stand out in as bold relief as in the present instance. It is, as Miss Underhill says, Jacopone's poems upon which we base our knowledge of his inner life. The Italian text of certain of these laude is printed at the end of the book with the translation beside it. The selections vary in interest but each is a work of marked individuality. The author's ability to sustain a key, his passion for symmetry, and the dramatic instinct are apparent throughout. Repetition, the bane of some writing, is in the laude a powerful adjunct and the writer's accomplished use of accent is a rare delight. Although one involuntarily prefers the language in which the poems are written, to a translation, it is due the trans- lator to note that the English version has here and there more charm than the original, as in the lines (Lauda xxv): “My vanity is lying in the tomb; My flesh decayed, my bones take little room;" and (Lauda c) "O human nature, dark and poor and low, Like withered grass a-droop for death to mow.” In the Italian, more is presented to the eye at a glance than in the English; the correspondence between the rhythm and the frame of mind of the writer is also more apparent in the Italian than in the English; one tone-deaf and form-blind must admit the felicity of the opening lines of Lauda xxv: “Quando t'alegri, omo de altura va', pone mente a la sepultura.” Our religious consciousness to-day, is so far removed from the mediaeval consciousness in its expression of love for God in terms of human love, that we can but theoretically enter into Jacopone's imagery; nevertheless, it is clearly depersonalized passion of which we read. In Lauda xc—the Amor de Caritate-the velocity, concen- MARIANNE MOORE 87 tration, and irrepressible expansiveness of the writer's nature con- verge to a most august expression. Quoting, with omissions: “Glowing and flaming, refuge finding none, My heart is fettered fast, it cannot flee; It is consumed, like wax set in the sun; Living, yet dying, swooning passionately, It prays for strength a little way to run, Yet in this furnace must it bide and be: Where am I led, ah me! To depths so high? Living I die, So fierce the fire of love." "For I have lost my heart, my will, my wit, My hopes, desires, my pleasures and my taste; Beauty seems vile, corruption crawls on it, Riches, delights and honours all are waste.” “My friends, who loved me, called me oft away, “ , Far from this bitter path, this arid track; But how can kingship sink to serfdom? nay- Who gives himself hath given and takes not back.” "Now we are one, we are not separate; Fire cannot part us nor a sword divide; Not pain nor death can reach these heights so great Where Love hath snatched and set me by His side: Far, far below, I see the world gyrate, Far, far above, my heart is satisfied.” In preparing the life, Miss Underhill has been at pains to put one in possession of all her sources, and that the subject's spirit should make the impression on one that it does, so different in the resonant note that it strikes, from that made on one by other Christian mystics and mediaeval writers, is the result of no mere abstract literary intention. The biographer's comprehension of the worldly accomplishments of her subject and her equal insight into his spir- itual attainments, is strikingly the counterpart of that two-sided- 88 JACOPONE DA TODI ness which she emphasizes in the man himself-his instinct for the superlative among those interests which are transient, and his abil- ity to unfold the most intensive of mystical doctrines. The bibliography apart from its immediate value as indicating the sources of the present work, will be of service to those inter- ested in the whole subject of Christian mysticism. MARIANNE MOORE. mu ( POETS AND PREFACES 12mo. 78 pages. New Poems. By D. H. Lawrence. B. W. Huebsch. New York. OTHERWORLD. By F. S. Flint. 12mo. 66 pages. Poetry Book Shop. London. England. pages. The The New Adam. By Louis Untermeyer. ADAM 12mo. 120 pages. Harcourt, Brace and Howe. New York. Lesbia and Other Poems. By Arthur Symons. iżmo. LESBIA AND OTHER 142 pages. E. P. Dutton and Company. New York. THE THE work of contemporary English and American poets is dis- tinguished, like that of a certain Irish playwright, by their prefaces. Thomas Hardy and Edwin Arlington Robinson do not seem to feel the necessity for preface-writing, and a few others abroad and at home are similarly reticent. But with many-poets of the calibre of John Gould Fletcher, F. S. Flint, Louis Unter- meyer, and, inevitably, Amy Lowell—the preface is the thing wherewith to catch the conscience of the critic. Illuminating as much of this prefatory work is, there is often a flavour of falsity about it: a tinsel glitter and a thin metallic clash that reminds one of the showman before his booth: and this in spite of the fact that the poets state, quite truly, that what they have to offer is caviar to the general and less than prose to M Jourdain. What they are chiefly concerned with is, in fact, the difference between prose and poetry. The effort of the poet to clarify it for a reluctant audience is much like the effort of M Bergson to prove the weakness of the intellect by an elaborate intellectual structure. L'Evolution Créatrice is a masterpiece of rationalization. By the same token, it is by their prose, rather than by their poetry, that many contemporaries try to prove that what they are writing is poetry and not prose. It is a truism that we move easily through life until a sphinx blocks our journey. All this argument about it and about has its origins in some definite obstacle to poetic progress. It began, per- 90 POETS AND PREFACES haps, with the discovery that poetry was encroaching upon the field of prose, and the latter was jealous of her domain. It may con- clude with the discovery that prose is encroaching upon that of poetry. The prose of Dorothy Richardson, for example, dealing with the unexciting world of a dental secretary, is imagistic, if the word imagist has any meaning. Miss Richardson uses the exact word, she does not copy old rhythms, she renders particulars exactly, she is hard and clear-she is concentrated: only an artist concentrating with terrible intensity upon moments could use five volumes to cover three trivial years. The same is true to a degree of James Joyce. He certainly believes “passionately in the artistic value of modern life,” and more especially in the artistic value of vulgar life. But both Joyce and Richardson are dealing with consciousness which is directed by emotion, so that the algebraic character of prose is eliminated from their work; and we have that trespassing upon the kingdom and the power of the poets which leads these to look to their glory. “In the immediate present there is no perfection, no consumma- tion, nothing finished. The strands are all flying, quivering, inter- mingling into the web, the waters are shaking the moon. There is no round consummated moon on the face of running water, nor on the face of the unfinished tide. There are no germs of the living plasm. The living plasm vibrates unspeakably, it inhales the future, it exhales the past, it is the quick of both, and yet it is neither. There is no plasmic finality, nothing crystal, permanent. If we try to fix the living tissue, as the biologists fix it with forma- tion, we have only a hardened bit of the past, the bygone life under our observation.” This is not, what it well might be, an excerpt from a criticism of either of the two novelists just mentioned. It is part of D. H. Lawrence's preface to his New Poems. Instead of emotion recol- lected in tranquillity, the contemporary poet seeks “mutation, swifter than iridescence, haste, not rest, come-and-go, not fixity, inconclusiveness, immediacy, the quality of life itself, without dé- nouement or close.” But this is what the prose writers also are seeking. Hence, perhaps, in part at least, the need for explana- tion and examination. BABETTE DEUTSCH 91 In the preface to F. S. Flint's latest volume, Otherworld, he carries the connection further by declaring that for the poets he has in mind "there are two forms, which are really one, the first being prose and the second .. unrhymed cadence. The one merges into the other; there is no boundary line between them; but prose, gener- ally, will be used for the more objective branches of writing—for novels, plays, essays, and so on... cadence will be used for personal, emotional, lyric utterances, in which the phrasing goes with a stronger beat and the words live together with an intenser flame." In concluding, Flint summarizes his three propositions: "the first being that poetry is a quality of all artistic writing, inde- pendent of form; the second that rhyme and metre are artificial and external additions to poetry and that, as the various changes that could be rung upon them were worked out, they grew more and more insipid, until they have become contemptible and en- cumbering; and the third that the artistic form of the future is prose, with cadence-a more strongly accented variety of prose in the oldest English tradition—for lyrical expression.” a The last of these propositions is acceptable only if one swallows the second of them whole. This is a little difficult to do. Because men reject rhyme and metre to-day as insipid, contemptible, and encumbering, is all the more reason why they should accept them to-morrow as liberating, noble, and pungent. If imagism, futur- ism, and Dadaism have taught us anything, they have taught us that art, like the life it reflects, is a pendulum, swinging forward and back from classicism to romanticism, from convention to anarchy, from sophistication to naïveté. Anarchy, for that mat- ter, is itself a convention. Naïveté is the challenge of the highly sophisticated artist. But Flint's first proposition, that poetry is a quality of all artistic writing, seems to hold water. One can readily accept a paragraph by James or one by Conrad, a page of Flaubert or of Santayana as shining with the glamour that lights up the strophes of Shelley 92 POETS AND PREFACES and breaks through the cadences of Flint. Ezra Pound says that poetry is affirmation. One may go a step beyond both Flint and Pound and say that this is so because the reaction of the artist to life, even in its uglier and more vulgar aspects, is like the impulse of the lover, who more than any other man is a yea-sayer. Not for nothing do Pound and Yeats use the vocabulary of love in dealing with art. The elder Yeats speaks of the sustained desire of the artist; William Butler Yeats of his trial by fire. It is because poetry, like the supreme human relation, like the saint's striving after perfection, or the self-dedication of the revolutionist, is one of the varieties of religious experience. Poetry feeds on comparison, not on contrast. Metaphor ex- ceeds simile. The Chinese stop-short, the Japanese hokku, give no more than a hint of the poet's meaning. Comparison and meta- phor are the language of love. Implication and a larger or lesser mystery the very body of religion. Every man is a poet when he is in love. Every poet is, in some sort at least, a lover. Why then do the lyric utterances of our contemporaries differ from those of Symons' generation, or even of Henley's? Is it merely that the expression is different, that these reject an exhausted technique? Has poetry become something greater or something other than this ardour of affirmation? According to Louis Untermeyer, whose latest book is an exciting embodiment of his theory, the poetry of love itself is changing. He says: . “In the last few years, we have been witnessing a return to the upright vigor, the wide and healthy curiosity of our outspoken ancestors poets like Thomas Hardy, Lascelles Abercrombie, Rupert Brooke, Edwin Arlington Robinson, and, most notably of all, D. H. Lawrence, are writing dramatic lyrics and monologs that reveal the loved one as fully as they express the lover.” He might have added Louis Untermeyer to his list, but it is clear that he could not have included Arthur Symons, whose Lesbia looks a little odd and unreal clothed in the Satanic fame and scented hair of 1890. Modern English love poetry seems to draw on the sources of Richard Dehmel or even Otto Julius Bierbaum for that que com- BABETTE DEUTSCH 93 woman. posite of physical excitement and spiritual wealth which it cele- brates in the tongue of Pope and Shelley, Tennyson and Rossetti. It is true that men like Lawrence and Flint and Untermeyer are freeing themselves from a Scylla in the image of Queen Victoria and a Charybdis in the guise of a long, lank Lilith. But it is not merely that they are returning to "the upright vigor, the wide and healthy curiosity of our outspoken ancestors.” The frankness of the Germans has its roots in a point of view different from our own regarding the great constringent relation between man and Even Browning, to whom all honour, had not studied Freud, or Adler, or Jung, or even Steinach (though some of James Lee's wife's utterances might make one think so). The releases of the world war, which is overthrowing the old inores in sexual as well as other social relations, were unknown to Tennyson, and must have a certain curious unreality to Symons, if he is aware of them. The new poetry, like the new prose, is affirmative, but it affirms our peculiar Weltanschauung. Flint's Love Song for a Woman I Do Not Love, like his older poem Accident, Lawrence's Seven Seals, Untermeyer's Summer Storm are not paralleled in English love lyrics of the last century not because the emotions of those elder poets were different, nor because they were ignorant, as Un- termeyer truly claims, of the Woman they worshipped with a capital W. The difference lies deeper. They were ignorant also of the springs of their own impulses. Symons writes, “I cannot, having been your lover, Stoop to become your friend." Untermeyer writes, “Will you not give yourself a desperate trial And, much forgetting, learn to comprehend Love, that is less a father than a friend?” The situations are admittedly and obviously distinct. But the author of Lesbia, whose traditions are nineteenth-century tradi- tions, would not think of treating what his successor bluntly calls "Neurosis." 94 POETS AND PREFACES Contemporary poetry, like contemporary prose, is at once a re- action and a revolution. Joyce is coarse, but he is not Rabel- aisian. Lawrence is frank, but he is not John Donne. Art is a wheel that touches the ground with the same surface again and again, but that after all is driving forward. “Où sont les neiges d'antan?” Buried in Bergson's revolving snowball. Poetry is like love; but as love grows more self-conscious, poetry is likewise more analytical and sometimes tormented. It is not mere honesty that sets the moderns off even from Browning and Meredith. It is knowledge, or the groping toward knowledge. The prose writers are engaged with the stream of consciousness. The poets are aware that the images they employ and the dreams they dream have a background in primitive impulse and barbarous taboo. Their need for self-explanation may be really rooted in a subconscious fear of their own iconoclasmof substance even more than of technique. Lawrence's immediacy and Flint's cadences are directed toward a more vivid content, a subtler manner. But these are embodied in a poetry "that searches even while it sings.” Agreeing with Untermeyer, one can go a step beyond, demanding a poetry that searches not only the beloved, but probes, as Browning could not and as Symons would not do, the very stuff of love itself: a poetry which is like love in its affirmation, and, too, in its fusion of the empiric body with the ardour of the mind. BABETTE DEUTSCH THE NOVELS OF WALDO FRANK The Dark Mother. By Waldo Frank. 12mo. 376 pages. Boni and Liveright. New York. BOTH OTH the novels of Waldo Frank, The Dark Mother as well as the earlier The Unwelcome Man, are large and remarkable conflagrations. But they are conflagrations which pour forth less clear orange flame than choking black smoke. The presence of a literary force, a force potentially richer and more abundant than that of perhaps any other of the young American prosemen, is most indubitably announced in them. The traits of the man who could cast up the many deposits of bulky, energetic, and hot-blooded prose to be found in both, who could agglutinate words into the arresting forms scattered through them, entertain such piercingly personal visions, and construct, even theoretically, a complicated pattern of human relationships like that in The Dark Mother, must appear well-nigh grandiose to any clear-sighted person. In his most confused, most jejune moments one knows, always, that Frank is a passionate and powerful and living creature, a man who has something to express, and who is driven by a veritable need of ex- pression. But, unfortunately, the immense narrative power of Frank is still intimated rather than revealed. His force is still a force tangled and uneducated. It is a force which has not yet been wholly channeled, and which, instead of pressing outward steadily, quietly, sustainedly, charges sporadically and abruptly, sometimes even in a series of clumsy and irritating assaults. In- stead of persuading, it oftentimes stings in its frenzy, butts wildly against the reader's breast. In the form of both Frank's novels there exists an acute disloca- tion. Both works are frames into which have been set, quite ar- bitrarily, rich canvasses entirely unfitted and unrelated to them in shape and in size, with the result that neither frames nor canvasses function. Both introduce us to sets of characters and to the ex- periences which they are supposed to undergo and by which they are supposed to be developed, and between the protagonists and the experiences, the often intrinsically impressive and magnificent 96 THE NOVELS OF WALDO FRANK own. effusions, visions, lyrical moments, there is no veritable relation- ship. The author has sought, very consciously, particularly in The Dark Mother, to use the expressionistic method of representation; he has striven to develop his characters by underlining sharply what lies between them and the objects present to their consciousness; he stresses without cessation the personal projections in their visions. He has striven to penetrate surfaces, to develop the half-conscious rhythms. But it is precisely the personalization of his characters' sensations which Frank has failed to achieve. He has left, on the contrary, their sensations completely unindividualized, or, at least, completely unrelated to what he would have us believe, from their names, their races, their parents, their environments, their histories, to be their individualities. The worlds perceived by the characters of the Ulysses of Joyce, for instance, are sharply, definitely their It is Stephen Dedalus that Stephen Dedalus sees; Mr Bloom perceives, quite unconsciously, Mr Bloom; Gerty MacDowell's uni- verse is the clear projection of her own person. But the reactions of Quincy Burt in The Unwelcome Man, and those of the two heroes of The Dark Mother, David Markand and Tom Rennard, are identical, undistinguished. Quincy on Brooklyn Bridge and in the streets of New York on New Year's Eve, David in Wall and Water streets, Tom aboard the Chicago-New York express, appear endowed with exactly similar nervous systems. All three of them appear to come of the same race, to have had similar histories, similar opportunities, similar intellectual developments, emotional adventures, similar pains and resentments. Not only do they ex- hibit the general resemblance which men of a single generation, a single class, a single race and nation might be supposed to possess. The three of them, and, for that matter, Cornelia Rennard also, react as a single person. Quincy on Brooklyn Bridge overlooking Manhattan appears, to himself, "to be looking down upon an illimitable graveyard. Each house was become a tomb-stone, each towering building, in the light of day a sentinel of progress, appeared now a monument to some great death.—The moiling tenements glowed forth like coral. Poverty, catching a deflected ray, turned lurid.---The waters were in shadow as if night had been an emanation from them, pushing the sun re- lentlessly back across the rim of the world. Above the harbor was PAUL ROSENFELD 97 a deep pall, night's advance guard in its grey, the sun's resistance in its orange fretting. The pall fell, and the waters grew more brackish. The sun plunged down through the mists, pouring a frenzy of disparted colour that shot above the buildings of South Manhattan.” During the first year of his career in the lower city, he perceives New York "The hammering monotony of huge buildings that are neither beautiful to look nor useful to be dwelt in-monuments of vanity and folly, hideous with stolen decoration no one understood, or lavished with detail, intricate, costly, stupid, that no one ever saw, sheathed in insincerities whose one successful purpose was to hide the structure;—the fetid subways, packed with humanity as no humane company would pack a poultry car, cesspools that stunk in summer and were a stain upon the community that used them, al- ways; the crass, nasty, lying theatres of Broadway, expressive of a mudworm's aspirations ;-all of it shutting out the blue of heaven, the glance of the sun on the Hudson, the murmur of the few sur- viving trees, the spirit of the few surviving souls.” But that is almost precisely the manner in which David Markand, the country boy fresh from the bicycle repair shop, feels on his first day of business life in New York. The same furious challenge and denial, the same bursting of the surcharged gallbag over the scene, the same inordinate excitement, lyricism, the same superabundant mental activity, are present in him, too. In the street-car, he, and his uncle "reading his third morning paper-swayed down the great iron street.—What he saw was himself surrounded by mournful men- clottings of men under straps--and all devoured by the news they sucked from their papers, all immersed by the same strange shadows —angular shadows—he felt in his own veins. Beyond the maze of men ran out the mazes of traffic. Capering strides of horses with yearnful nostrils; interminable houses, motley, jagged, restless, broken off into squares and corners like herded wild things before the assault of other wild things more volatile than they.” 98 THE NOVELS OF WALDO FRANK On Wall Street, he perceives “Glass casements fronting heavy buildings, huge masonry pillared by slender stone-the grass and loom, the hypocrisy of Power. Spawn of the buildings: men with naked singing nerves like wires in storm, and women with dead eyes, women with soft breasts against a hard tiding world. Furious streets. A street wide and delirious with men waving their straw hats like banners. Streets narrow and sombre that curled like smoke acoss the feet. Streets eaten with secret moods. Streets cluttered and twisting with pent power. Streets pulsant like hose. Streets slumberous like pythons. Streets writhing and locked. A wide gash of sky. The sun was a stranger. The blue was a burn.-David-walked to- ward his uncle's office that was to swallow him up. Walked down to where it waited him, a block from Wall Street. Life was sea- yearning. Shops sold sails and compasses and binnacles. In the smart of the salt a scent and a sense of spices. Coffee and wines were at home here in the grime of the North, had brought with them the linger of their homes. Tobacco. Musty housings for jagged yellow leaves. A brooding, reeking, murmurous street.- David fell down the funnel of a world. The waters touched him that touched far lands. Pregnant waters.” a a And the sensations of Tom Rennard the young lawyer, the future politician, are of a colour, a character, not at all different. As the train swung him “southward from Chicago about the duned neck of the Lake," he has a vision of the town of his childhood. And for him “The train was swimming up the path of the sun. The world cut flat from the train's stride like a sea from the prow of a racing vessel. The horizon swayingly scooped: trees low and faint in the shrill sky, nude in young leaves, lascivious in blossoms, almost bowled over by the roll of the world--and the blue belch of sturdier chim- neys beyond, scattered half-acres of hell spewing soot and shadow over a scarred and flowered prairie. In his eyes an old sick town—. The long street swooned under foliage. Trees crowded between the two rows of houses as if they had burst them apart. Under the arrogant verdure the little wooden boxes of men crouched and were PAUL ROSENFELD 99 smothered. A man came out from the dull pressure: he walked into the sway of the trees: he went forth to his toil: he was im- mersed in the redundance of fields." Indeed, it would be possible to assign, arbitrarily, the gorgeous sensations of any one of these youths to any other, without dis- turbing the drawing. One could put David on Brooklyn Bridge and let him see what Quincy saw without committing a vandalism, make Tom Rennard see Wall and Water streets with David's eyes, imagine Quincy both "falling down the funnel of a world” on the East River front of Manhattan, and perceiving the street of his native village of Harriet, Long Island, "swooning under foliage.” What is more, one could even manage to place any one of the three youths in the situation of Cornelia in the chapter which describes the Thanksgiving Day morning of that shadowy sister of the Alissa of Gide, and attribute to him, without excessive adaptation, the experiences described there. But although the reactions of Quincy, David, Tom, and Cornelia are the reactions of a single person, that person, it is scarcely neces- sary to point out, is neither a boy named Burt born into an unintel- lectual family in Harriet, Long Island, a boy named Markand fresh from a bicycle repair shop in central New York, a young lawyer and future politician, nor a sculptress fugitive from paternal puri- tanism. These complex emotions, states of depression, lyrical exalt- ations, are charged with a personality in nowise plotted by the data with which Frank has sought to limn his characters. Could David have felt in the manner indicated by the author, he most certainly would not have done what Frank assures us he did, remained in his uncle's tobacco business and found advancement in it. He would have departed immediately for Paris and sat waiting for Marinetti to join him. But it is not possible that he could have felt with those particular nuances of feeling. For in order that he should be able to do so, there would have had to be circulating in his veins a blood entirely other than that supposedly his. Behind the person who could feel as Frank’s protagonists are said to feel, there must have been lying an experience entirely other than that presumed by the author. The accents, the nuances of these sen- sations, refer to a very highly and specially developed intellectuality, to a mentality very richly endowed with the artistic faculty of 100 THE NOVELS OF WALDO FRANK dramatizing life. They refer with an unswerving consistency to a very distinct personage who, instead of being situated in the books, is situated well outside them. And that person, without a doubt, is no other than the author, Waldo Frank himself. The acute dislocation in the form of Frank's novels, the attribu- tion of special and individual sensations to characters entirely un- related to them, the form which is neither fiction nor confession, but a perplexing jumble of the two, is the result, of course, of a pro- found and secret irresolution in the mind of the author at the hour of composition. What, it seems evident, Frank really wanted to write, was confession. There was in him a powerful and voluptu- ous sense of himself that would not quite yield itself, that slipped perversely through his fingers whenever he sought to lay hand on it. There was in him a mirror which at moments showed to his sharp gaze a visage that excited him immeasurably, then, immediately, clouded over and dimmed. There were, stored in his flesh, the memory of a thousand bitter and sweet experiences, which would never quite consent to be captured, came close and vanished into distance again. There were wounds that would not heal. Life, we know, is cruel to everyone, and Frank, nervously and mentally highly endowed, indubitably suffered intensely. Childhood had indubitably been filled with dark and ignorant pain, left gashes that kept bleeding. Adolescence had left others, equally deep; early manhood had added to their number. They would not close, and kept draining his best energies. And in him, without a doubt, , there had often risen a cry of resentment against life, which takes the newborn child, and smites it with the hunger and pain and un- fulfilment of its parents, and cripples it from birth. It is a cry that has risen in us all, and which we are entirely justified in mak- ing. For it is perhaps no principle of evil in the nature of things, but merely the wilful stupidity of the human race, that condemns the most of us to frustration from the hour of our birth. But, though Frank wanted to make confession, and be cured of his wounds, for the man who can see himself in his true relations to others is healed of the great sting of pain, he could not quite succeed. For, that the confessions be true, that the confessor perceive him- self in his relations to others, it is necessary that he possess the abil- , ity to experience the reality of another human being, and through that discovery, to emerge into the region of personality that is de- PAUL ROSENFELD 101 tached from self, and at peace with all men. For the little black animal ego with which we are all sent into the world, is not con- cerned with the truth of relationships. It does not wish to discover the reality of other egos. It is in love with itself; it is concerned entirely with its proper glories; it wishes to see itself preferred to the rest; it wishes to judge others in the name of its proper majesty, and entirely for the sake of the imperial gesture of judgement. From the compulsions of this insane little Jehovah the confessor, quite as much as the novelist, must be free. Once free, though, he speaks of himself, he is indeed holding what Ibsen called “Judge- ment Day" over his old self. He is the race speaking in the name of the race and for the sake of the life of the race, to the race. He is human energy seeking to communicate itself through material form. He tells of his suffering out of hatred of the evil in himself as in others, and in behalf of the beauty in others as well as in himself. And Frank, through no fault of his own, was prisoned in himself; and unable to find his way to others. If part of him wanted to confess, there was another part which forbade the self-detachment. What Frank's little Jehovah wished to have believed, was that it had been singled out and elected by Life; that it had been done, out of sheer malice, a great wrong; that it was a thing ruthlessly singled out and sacrificed, one of a generation foredoomed, above all other generations, to failure and nonentity. For there was in Frank a manner of very youthful inverted pride which took pleasure in the thought of the painful election. It would not permit him to confess; for confession, in establishing the truth of the relation between his ego and the egos of others, would have disproved its claim of fateful distinction. Of course, it could not express its convictions directly, for its conclusions were probably repugnant to Frank's conscious mind, which was quite aware that the facts of his existence did not at all justify his feelings about himself. But pride demanded justification, and, down in the subcellar of the unconscious, planned its strategy. This it found in the form, first of The Unwelcome Man; later, of The Dark Mother. This form permitted a certain amount of confession. But, in place of the scheme of relationships relevant to the confessions, it substituted one in no wise relevant to it, a fantasy which tended toward proof that the author was justified 102 THE NOVELS OF WALDO FRANK a in his sense of painful election. It permitted the author, situated in the very dungeon of himself, the air of perfect detachment; it permitted him to prove his thesis through what seemed general and unpointed remarks. So Frank found himself in 1915 and again in 1917, at work on what he, probably most unquestioningly, con- ceived to be fiction; believed himself to be registering the general experience. The Unwelcome Man, he seems to have told himself, was to be the tragedy of the sensitive and lovely man half-born, the record of the ruin of a tender and poetical being by the hostile forces of the family and of American society; just as, later, he told him- self that in The Dark Mother America was to get its L'Education Sentimentale and its Les Déracinés, its history of a generation up- rooted and condemned to mediocrity and failure, its picture of a period of transition, the period between the wars with Spain and with Germany. So persuaded, Frank commenced his work, and so persuaded, he concluded it. He appears to have remained innocent of the fact that he did not truly wish to write fiction; that he was not truly interested in experiences other and greater than his own. He appears never to have perceived that the ineffectuality and the mediocrity of the American generation which matured during the last years of the last century did not excite his interest and sym- pathy quite as warmly as he supposed; that he was not interested in the sensitive boy born into a family in Harriet, Long Island; in the boy on Wall Street fresh from the bicycle repair shop; in the brother and sister fugitive from paternal puritanism. To be sure, Frank made intensest attempts to render his people real to himself. In the effort to touch them, he scattered many cute descriptive remarks through his fabrics. Quincy, we are informed, was, at seventeen, “fairly tall, lithe, splendidly loose- knit. His muscles were soft but long. His shoulders were sharp. His neck was thin, and he held his head always slightly forward.” We are shown David in bed at night: "His strong arms were thrown up like an infant's. His open palms pillowed his neck. As he breathed, the muscles in his abdomen rolled gently. He was a powerful boy, with white skin and a wave of golden hair upon his body.” As for the women, the author has tried to realize them for himself by insisting on their breasts. He goes to lengths to con- vince himself of their palpability. Nevertheless, we remain un- convinced by these maneuvres. The boys are not defined. The PAUL ROSENFELD 103 few scenes in which they commence to have reality, the scenes between Quincy and his sisters, the later deeply moving scenes between Tom and David, only serve further to accentuate their unconvincingness in the remaining stretches. The breasts remind me more a little of the sham breasts of rubber said to be pur- chaseable at drug-stores. For there was in the author an element that denied his very personages. Not only did he refuse to listen to the characters he had proposed himself, and made them see and feel and hear Waldo Frank. He also showed that he considered them negligible. Little they do is motivated. Quincy, whose sen- , sations have become sharper and whose conflict has become intenser toward the last of the book suddenly loses all individual initiative and joins the stream of accepting, unrevolting beings. “The Stream” the author tells us "is the solution of what had been the flaring eager things of life,” and then blandly continues “The Stream's source is Quincy. Quincy's epilogue is the Stream.” Tom and David are supposed to have a homosexual attraction for each other; and the author, to prove it, makes some incomprehens- ible passes with a pipe. But the attraction is not for a moment felt or motivated, for all the intimations of mother and sister com- plexes. Only when the relationship is breaking does it begin to become real. Cornelia walks to death out of the window as non- chalantly as folk walk to their breakfasts. The author discusses, discusses, discusses his characters; investigates Tom's masochism; makes David perceive everything, light, the world, as gashes; had lying out before him a complex pattern of the movements his char- acters make. But it is he who moves them. And the wires rasp. . It is probable, that, had America abstained from entering the war in 1917, The Unwelcome Man would have stood alone, a bril- liant error of youth, and gotten no sister to stand beside it. For, soon after the completion of the first novel, Frank had begun to The short stories which he composed in 1916 have a far healthier tone, and are fairly objective. But with the entry of America into the war, everyone returned to infantilism; fantasy thinking prevailed; the country was full of paranoiacs who vacil- lated between the conviction that they were being hounded by spies -"Crains, dans le mur aveugle, un regard qui t'épie!” the whole of America might have cried—and the conviction that they were elected of providence to save the world. Because of the general mature. a 104 THE NOVELS OF WALDO FRANK helplessness, the amour-propre of each became rampant; whatever tendency to self-pity lay in one was immeasurably strengthened. The young men in the trenches all felt a need of writing something about the ineluctability of life. And Frank, who like every other man of his age, was waiting to be drafted and sent abroad to feed Moloch, suddenly found issuing into his conscious mind a new Un- welcome Man. To be sure, the new disguise was far more subtle than the old. During the two years that lay between the composi- tion of the old and the new books, Frank had matured rapidly; he had doubtlessly gotten a smell from his old book which did not entirely please him; he was probably beginning to discover the blind spot in his mind; was on guard against Unwelcome Men; and being prepared for the superb and generous gesture of Our America. But, for all his increased selfconsciousness, the old in- fantile pride was at work again, and he did not quite recognize the boy Quincy in David, Tom, and Cornelia, “the sacrificed genera- tion of 1898,” nor see that he was again trying to prove the special hatred of Life for the sensitive young man born in America with reactions very much like Waldo Frank's. Perhaps he did suspect it. His immense and remarkable effort to give the history an air of reality through plentiful applications of the romantic psycho- analysis of Jung would seem to prove it. Miserable Sarah Burt is become The Dark Mother of the Equal Brood, pregnant America in whose womb the characters rest; stupid Josiah Burt is mythol- ogized into the Puritanism of the Rev. Curtin Rennard and the Capitalism of Uncle Anthony Deane. Indeed, the laboriousness of the narrative itself, by far so much greater than that of The Unwelcome Man, would further prove that the author was in- hibiting his instinct while he wrote, and trying to substitute theory for intuition. But the struggle was unavailing; the impulse that sent Frank to write the book was the old one. It was not to be converted. It hacked its way through, negating the art. The characters remained unliving. The Dark Mother is at the core, but another Unwelcome Man, more imposing, perhaps, than the earlier, naïver, but also, because of its laboriousness, less genial. It remains another frame into which has been set quite arbitrarily a rich picture entirely unrelated to it in size and shape, with the result that neither frame nor canvas function. In consequence, the vast talent of Frank remains, in his novels, a PAUL ROSENFELD 105 a force still very much at war with itself. Of course, it would be the grossest of injustices to point to the man as an individual dis- tinguished by his saying of “You” and “He” and “They” with the intention “I.” That is precisely what most of us are doing, in our novels, our poems, our criticisms, our paintings, our music, and Frank has merely done it a little more crassly and a great deal more powerfully, than we. Nor is it alone the artists who are guilty. The entire world is saying "He” and “They” with the same signifi- cation. If, then, we would have the world speak otherwise, do otherwise, we must take good care to arrest, by whatever means in our power, the process in ourselves immediately. That is perhaps the only method of transforming the race, of refusing to do to others what others have done to us, which lies in our feeble power. It does not matter much whether Frank, for instance, eventually pre- fers the form of fiction to the more lyrical forms, or the lyrical to the fictional, for a story recently published in The Dial makes one feel that he is greatly gifted for work in the novel as well as in the confessionary forms. What alone matters is that he, and all of us, arrive, somehow, through rigorous self-criticism, at that state of maturity in which the artistic energies are turned outward, toward other people. What alone matters is, that we reach the state where what concerns us chiefly is not whether we are com- posing the great three-dimensional, six-cylindered, Waterbury watch-movemented novel, but whether we are giving the thing which it is our own to give. There, and there alone, will we find ourselves doing substantial and constructive work, and contacting reality. And among the deeds which will be done once that eminence is reached, there will be none more memorable, more splendid, we can be sure, than the novels, or the confessions, of Waldo Frank. Paul RosenFELD BRIEFER MENTION Moon-Calf, by Floyd Dell (12mo, 394 pages; Knopf), will have a sequel and will certainly be compared with Jean-Christophe, but it has its private merits in moments of unexpected loveliness, in the occasional presentation of relevant and illuminating truth. These are chiefly in the story of Felix Fay's childhood, after which the author writes carefully until adol- escence with all its terrors sets in. The author has surprised his enemies by not writing à thèse and delighted his friends by a masquerade, but Moon-Calf, as it stands, has the importance of showing how serious and how well-composed an American novel can be without losing caste. It is an effective compromise, in manner, between the school of observation and the school of technique. HUNGER, by Knut Hamsun, translated by George Egerton, introduction by Edwin Björkman (12mo, 266 pages; Knopf), is symphonic in structure. There are four movements all built upon the title theme, except for a brief ironic movement of passion in the scherzo, and progressively powerful in their rendering of human sensation. The work belongs to the naturalist movement of thirty years ago. Its belated appearance in America may be excused on the ground that no public could have been found for it ear- lier. The author has just been awarded the Nobel prize for literature. DITTE: GIRL Alive, by Martin Anderson Nexő (12mo, 333 pages; Holt), interprets life in terms of acceptance rather than of challenge. A philosophy of acquiescence shapes the novel, both in style and substance, and the pic- ture is subdued by shadows—drab but not despairing, like the peasant types with which it is peopled. The Danish author has not been fortunate in the translation, however, which is uneven and lacking in idiomatic grace. Hungry Hearts, by Anzia Yezierska (12mo, 208 pages; Houghton Miff- lin), is a cry in behalf of beauty from the New York ghetto. The charac- ters in these ten stories of imaginative squalor are truly conceived as portraits, but their speech is too often falsely poetic. Miss Yezierska has a firm command over her subject-matter; when she restrains herself she is artistic; but her impassioned writing is thin and sentimental. Alto- gether a promising book. MAIN STREET, by Sinclair Lewis (12mo, 451 pages; Harcourt, Brace & Howe), is an American Bovary, wherefore there is no breath of passion as Continentals understand passion, and a Young Wives Tale of Minne- sota, wherefore it is astonishingly interesting, immediate, easy to verify. The “abysmal bedragglement" of small-town life is mercilessly, bril- liantly exposed by one who, in other days, has been the prophet of the Aivver and free air. The book has more social than artistic implications, but it is no wonder, for the author dug his hands into the richest soil in America, and his fingers are a little grubby. BRIEFER MENTION 107 LIMBO, by Aldous Huxley (16mo, 292 pages; Doran), is startling because it is young and sophisticated, ironic and malicious, delicately and forcefully written-qualities rare enough in the work of old masters, but apparently upsetting to critical standards when found in a first book. Limbo is a very superior book of short stories and sketches, written in the spirit of omniscience, a little elusive, and for those who can bear irony, delightful. Happily Ever After is the masterpieces of the collection; it dives down into reality once, and the reinforcement of its bitterness by this plunge into life is probably the best sign-post to the author's future. POTTERISM, by Rose Macaulay (12mo, 227 pages ; Boni & Liveright), has by this time become a bromidiom. The Potterites themselves, however, cannot be dismissed as mere bromides. They are the genus: the bromides are only a species. Even such sulphitic creatures as the anti-Potterite Potters are infected. There are signs that the author herself is not en- tirely immune. It is cleverly conceived and cleverly written, but it is a little too hasty to be complete. MAUREEN, by Patrick MacGill (12mo, 375 pages; McBride), presents a heroine overshadowed by her background. A telling contrast is drawn between the old Irish peasantry warming their hands before turf fires, and their children busy with war and Sinn Fein. The chief and tragic em- phasis falls upon youth, in spite of which the best of the story lies in the penetrating, vivid, and thoroughly human presentation of the old people. The Vanity Girl, by Compton Mackenzie (12mo, 366 pages; Harpers), is not meretricious only because it is not quite so pretentious as the novels which followed Sinister Street. What was gracious in Mr Mackenzie has yielded to what is smart, and his new novel is as utterly captivating as the Gaiety Girl he writes about can be on the stage. Unfortunately, in reading a book one is not protected by the footlights and one has the sensation of being asked to chop down the trees in the second-act back- drop. MEMOIRS OF THE EMPRESS EUGENIE, by Comte Fleury (8vo, zvols, 1034 pages; Appleton), are not the enactment in daily life of a Watteau pic- ture. The Empress regarded dress as she would regard the wheels of a coach-of necessity perfect, but being so of no further moment. Her one thought was the Empire; her ideal, "a tyrant of genius who would lead the people toward goodness and happiness without bothering them to know how he accomplished this end." Comte Fleury combats the trend of social evolution in assuming that an aristocratic government could not but be better for France than a re- public; and his view of Napoleon as the liberator of Italy does not impose itself on one with much power; but it is ironic that one who could strike a balance between French Catholic disapproval, the amour propre of the See of Rome, and the impetus of Italy toward political unity, should be a victim of the quibble with regard to the placing of a Hohenzollern prince on the throne of Spain. One cannot but agree with Comte Fleury in hat- ing the Republic for declaring itself when one half the governing power was in England and the other at Wilhelmshöhe. 108 BRIEFER MENTION MARGARET FULLER, by Katharine Anthony (12mo, 223 pages; Harcourt, Brace & Howe). In this book Miss Anthony has done two things. She has removed from Margaret Fuller the curse of the absurd which had been placed upon her equally by the Transcendentalists' romantic projec- tion of her personality and Carlyle's realistic reduction of it to “a strange, lilting, lean old maid.” She has rescued Margaret Fuller from literature and given her back to life. And she has illustrated a new type of bio- graphy, scientific in the pathological as well as the documentary sense. Margaret Fuller is a subject made to the hand of the Freudian. Under psychoanalysis she becomes as fascinating a case as Mary Olivier. But, as her biographer laconically notes, her companions are equally good ma- terial-Hawthorne, Emerson, Higginson. Miss Anthony should give us a psychological history of the Transcendental Movement. LETTERS TO A NIECE AND PRAYER TO THE VIRGIN OF CHARTRES, by Henry Adams (8vo, 134 pages; Houghton Mifflin). Puritanic side- lights on the South Seas and gravely humorous comments on European society. The poem to the Virgin, a noble tribute cast in sober music, con- tains the little-known Prayer to the Dynamo, a transcendental condemna- tion of the atom, and a hymn to religious faith. ON THE ART OF READING, by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch (8vo, 250 pages; Putnam), is a most invigorating series of lectures on topics generally made unreadably pedantic. The versatile "Q" talks on all phases of his "art" - from the child's portion to The Value of Greek and Latin, where his viewpoint is original and disturbing. Belletristic pedagogy that every teacher should read, digest, and apply. PLAYS FOR MERRY ANDREWS, by Alfred Kreymborg (12mo, 177 pages; The ' Sunwise Turn, New York), are full of madness and delight and be- wilderment. Their un reality and irony are invigorating and real, and Gordon Craig was quite right in considering them as a test for actors. The title should warn the professionals off and attract the amateur. Pins For Wings, by Emanuel Morgan (8vo, 32 pages; The Sunwise Turn, New York), combines the art of metaphor with that of criticism, brilliant in the one, gently malicious in the other. It consists of five-or-six-word epigraphs on about two hundred contemporaries, chiefly poets. They are brilliant, or shocking, or immeasurably appropriate, or amusingly wrong, but always audacious and good fun. The Garden of Bright Waters, by E. Powys Mathers (12mo, 109 pages; Blackwell), bears on its jacket the familiar Sanskrit decoration, which, be- ing translated, is simply “toi et moi.” And the book, like Coloured Stars, and like the long and wonderfully lovely Black Marigolds, is the English version of the Asiatic approach to that old relation. These songs are reminiscent of the earlier volumes in their subject matter and in the vivid beauty of the translation. They seem to exceed the first in power. The Garden of Bright Waters is as sweet as forbidden fruit and flashes ever and anon like a certain angel's sword of flame. BRIEFER MENTION 109 A CANTICLE OF Pan, by Witter Bynner (12mo, 214 pages; Knopf), is not the most interesting poem in the book of which it is the title. But like the majority of the poetry therein contained it reverts to Bynner's earlier man- ner; that of the author of Grenstone poems, rather than that of The Be- loved Stranger. Occasionally there are flashes of vivid insight, penetrating beauty, as in The Enchanted Toad, Carvings of Cathay, and some of the other Oriental pieces. The translation from the Russian of Polonski is remarkable for its lyrism. But what one has here in the end is Bynner, the man, rather than Bynner, the poet. He is a delightful man, clever and keen and kind. But he is too full of his message to be truly moving. CHANTEYS AND Ballads, by Harry Kemp (12mo, 173 pages; Brentano's), suffer fearfully by being compared on the jacket advertisement with the ballads of Villon. The outrageous taste of the advertiser puts one utterly out of mood for enjoying stuff of the careless calibre of Robert Service. a THE SYSTEM OF ANIMATE NATURE, by J. Arthur Thomson (8vo, zvols, 687 pages; Holt). Twenty lectures on the realm and evolution of or- ganisms. The author's resources in the way of naturalistic erudition are astounding, and his command of English at once fresh and fascinating. An exhaustive psychology of animal behaviour is presented; and though no claims are advanced to an original philosophy, the thesis trends solidly toward a religious purposiveness in all life against the hopeless material- ism of Spencer. A monumental biology. Morale, by G. Stanley Hall (12mo, 377 pages; Appleton), might be called a sequel to Adolescence. Humanity is here further vivisected and the physiological psychology of its problems brought up to date. All that goes to the strengthening of moral fibre under stress is gathered into a comment- ary on humanity, its wars, industries, women, and leadership. The book is keenly analytic, a little coloured by the Freudian trend of what phil- osophy people will read nowadays, but helpful in its breadth and applica- tion, to any one concerned with studying or directing the rest of the race. PLURIVERSE, by Benjamin Paul Blood (12mo, 263 pages; Marshall Jones). Significantly enough, the "anaesthetic revelation," the basis of Blood's thesis, came to him while he was recovering from gas in a dentist's chair. His philosophy arises from what is "signalized” at that vanishing point of the understanding; thus, he does not say that the metaphysical quiddity is understood then, but hinted at. Our intelligence cannot define this, but it can sense it, just as “a proud and sulky Indian may be chafing under the pressure of abstractions so easily connoted by us.” And if you insist on too great a certainty, Blood answers damningly that "the question is in bad form-a kind of counting of the spoons." There is appended a remarkably acute analysis of sound, as a poetic constant, starting from the fact that "the word icicle is not a fit name for a tub." . . . Blood, in thorough keeping with the best in American philosophy, thinks wavering- ly and writes excellently. His soul is a disturbing flux from that of a mystic enwrapped in the contemplation of his own navel to that of a very successful half-back. 110 BRIEFER MENTION ) POESIES 1917-1920, Jean Cocteau (Editions de la Sirène, Paris). , As melopoeia possibly nil, yet logopoeia certainly; indications, certainly, of ideas; and, as such, probably underestimated by the typically British critic.—For after twelve years residence I at last and tardily begin to feel the full weight and extent of the British insensitivity to, and irrita- tion with, mental agility in any and every form. Beauty, indeed, they talk about. I once heard Mr Binyon say: “Slowness is beauty”; and that he meant something not wholly comic; even though one cannot bring oneself to believe that slowness is an inseparable condition or component of To kalov. The young aesthetic, as distinct from the prematurely aged aesthetic, is, in this year of grace 1920, partial to a beauty very rapid in kind; the most hair-raising proposition I have heard from a younger poet being: “Oh, people never read every word, they merely get a general impression of the page.” Miserum humanium gentes! Yet the world will not end with my par. ticular strata of poets. I, “we” wanted and still want a poetry where the reader must not only read every word,, but must read his English as carefully as if it were a Greek that he could not rapidly be sure of com- prehending. As the present reversed aim of literature, the literature from Cocteau to Rodker, we find a sort of writing which is sometimes incom- prehensible if one does read every word and try to parse it in sequence. His contemporaries called Keats "incomprehensible.” The life of a village is narrative; you have not been there three weeks before you know that in the revolution et cetera, and when M le Comte et cetera, and so forth. In a city the visual impressions succeed each other, overlap, over- cross, they are "cinematographic," but they are not a simple linear se- quence. They are often a flood of nouns without verbal relations. I don't say that this is better than the simple narrative of the Flamenca or that it is more desirable, but if Cocteau and his semblables wish to re- duce this sort of thing to a species of ideographic representation, it is not for us to demand a Vergilian eclogue. They are the "lyric" (as the word is loosely used) voice of the age-possibly its Demussets-; they are the lyric voices precisely because the motor bandits and aero mechanics do not react verbally. Cocteau and his semblables are of the age, its roman- tics, if one may strain that term to excess—just as you and I are very possibly against the age. Let us say we refuse to swallow its buncomb, its rhetoric, its accepted dogmas and values, as Rabelais refused to swallow the beliefs of his scarcely more ignorant, bigoted, stupid, and unspeakable era. But to disagree with Cocteau intelligently we must recognize his quality, which is the quality of perceptive intelligence, or of intellectual sensitivity--from the type font on his yellow cover to the drawing of the mermaid on the reverse of the book; and for lack of this quality the Brit- ish official poetry of the past fifteen years has been born dead. This quality may not, perhaps, contain the whole art, but with it Cocteau gives the feel of the age; and indicates the mode and modality of its hurrying ideation. (Ecole de Laforgue, if you like.) E. P. MODERN ART W a ITHOUT too complete a satisfaction in the second annual exhibition of the New Society of Artists, it is yet possible to regard it optimistically as a straw that shows the wind to be in the right direction. It is more academic than new, but it is new enough to afford a lively contrast to the almost moribund institution from which it seceded. It appears to be a rather close corporation and the rules governing the accession of new members are not clear. Apparently candidates for admission have to make a reputation elsewhere before they may be considered eligible. Genius in itself is not enough, it must get itself 0. Ki'd first. But this trifling little stricture is not so serious as it was once. With an Inde- pendent Society in full operation that shows anything, and a half- dozen complacent dealers who recognize that there is capitalizable publicity in the use of their galleries by the new men, he must be weak indeed who does not now gain a hearing. With two societies taking the official attitude towards the public, and one of them leaning towards the problems of the day, the future may be faced. be faced. The Academy alone made good Americans blush, but now that a more vigorous establishment takes the field, the original institution may be amiably winked at, in spite of its career of crime. It becomes powerless to block the march of events. Little by little all the elements of the vast machine necessary to propel art activities in metropolitan centres seems to be assembling in New York, and if the future is to contain art at all, apparently we shall have it. It has always been a pet idea of mine that art went where the money went, and when the war broke out, without taking upon myself too much credit for clairvoyancy, I saw the money floating westward-and when the Louvre had been definitely closed pour cause de la guerre and the wild American students had been forcibly shipped home, it was impossible for the sentiment- alist not to recognize that the recording angel had turned over a much scribbled-upon page in art history, and that a brand new leaf lay before us, waiting for daring writers. Thoughts like these seem treason to those who have already played the Paris game and won, but others who judge a country by its art and have long been 112 MODERN ART restive at the third-rate position of this land, will have a different feeling. It is impossible for them to entirely stifle conjectures as to how to keep such benefits as the war may have tossed our way, nor to refrain from effectivizing our methods. It is the fashion, of course, to speak tearfully of our foster-mother and of the trials she has recently undergone, but we have shared in those trials and through them have come to the stature of men-but that we are really adult will not be proved until we actually cut loose from the apron-strings. If cornering the riches of the world does give us a corner in the arts, we may square our consciences by making it as pleasant for the Europeans who come here to study as they made it for us in the past. To tot up our gains since the grand dispersal in Paris, 1914, we now have these; An Independent Society of Art, a Mont- martre in the shape of Greenwich Village, the New Society of Artists, the Société Anonyme, and last but not least, The DIAL. All that remains to be wished for is a public that shall be capable of thinking for itself. But the future is not the present. The European visitor to the exhibition of the New Society of Artists might imagine that the court language of the world still was French. The nasal accent of Uncle Sam is not heard in those precincts. Two of the most notable of these artists, the sculptors Elie Nadelman and Gaston Lachaise are European born, but most of the others went to great trouble and expense to learn to paint in the foreign manner. George Bellows, the most talked of among the painters present, paints in the Manet fashion, with occasionally a Goya touch thrown in for good measure. His portrait of two old women and a little girl is the best thing he has turned out in some years, albeit the colour is sickly and the brushwork laboured. The figures appear to have been spotted upon the black background so that they compose uneasily. They are not enough out to have excited comment but for the rumour that Mr Bellows practises the infall- ible Hambidge system of composition. Partisans of old-fashioned instinct had a good time debating the point with the mathemat- icians. No other painter succeeded in provoking this much com- ment. Mr Glackens had a spurt of ambition and essayed Mr Walter Hampden as Hamlet, but the best friends of both could only wish them better luck next time. His Hamlet was a wobbly HENRY MCBRIDE 113 creature and certainly not the person to say “Boo” to a ghost. Mr Glackens has been trying to paint just like Renoir for years, has been scolded for it, and now doesn't even paint, as the Irish say, like himself. Mr Luks also submitted a full length portrait, a study of a “Flapper,” a species of young woman, but interested 30 DC no one. ar I n. e + of L. Je The honours went decidedly to the sculptors, and this is novel in America, for usually in our mixed exhibitions the populace pays slight attention to the sculpture. To be sure, so far as the said populace was concerned, Mr Lachaise and Mr Nadelman achieved only succès de scandales. The smug academicians who ventured near Mr Lachaise's Woman were horrified by the young sculptor's exultant rhapsody to the "new" woman and had not the faintest idea that they were looking at a very first-rate work of art. Mr Nadelman's Seated Woman, seen last year in plaster, has now been carved in wood and it is as clever and startling and witty as Mr Fraser and Mr Calder complete a quartet of sculptors who dominate the show. There is a suggestion of the remote poetry of other days in Mr Fraser's work, but Mr Calder is of to- day. He is a successful man of this world. The clients who buy his work get exactly what they want. He is somewhat of a Bernini. He does not trouble the mind. He knows just the per- missible amount of allure to give a mermaid, just where it is allow- able to be sketchy, and just when one must be hard as nails. His measure is worth taking by those progressives who intend to see to it that some day American shall be über alles in the arts. He illustrates vividly the status of the present-day Maecenases. ever. al e 21 Et 1 t . The well-known painter, Marsden Hartley, gave a lecture upon modern art, in the rooms of the Société Anonyme, November 30, before a large audience of rapt young folk. Some of the principal points of the lecture were as follows: “The business of the artist is to present his experience directly without too much interpretation. The experience which the painter presents is his personal appreciation of his object, but he should not translate that appreciation into purely personal terms but should make it the penetrating understanding of the object itself. His experience of the object he will get from his sensa- 114 MODERN ART tions of colour and line but he will in painting it synthesize his sensations into one impression according to his own system. That system, while personal, should not be swayed merely by his mood but should be controlled by his intellectual interest in the thing for painting is essentially intellectual. In finding his scheme for syn- thesizing his impressions and conveying his experience he must experiment with various forms and an intelligent public will be tolerant of his experiments." “There has been a great revival of modern painting in Europe and there will be a steadily developing interest in it here, though America is slower in any cultural development than Europe be- cause she has not the old cultural tradition.” 9) When the lecturer had finished questions were in order, and a cool stranger caused considerable of a flurry among the ranks of the answerers, not so much by the profundity of his questions, as by the exceeding cleverness of his use of words. He was evidently a practised debater, and as debate is an art in itself, he had the artists in complete confusion for a time. For instance, when Mr Hartley said that “all genuine art was a series of experiments,” the stranger interrupted him to ejaculate, "In other words, bad manners." Now as most of the young artists in the assembly knew in their inmost hearts that their desire of all desires was to have a manner, this criticism from one who so evidently had at the same time the most finished manners and no manners at all, hurt considerably. So much so that when the speaker shortly after raised his voice above the tumult to inquire of all and sundry, "What is cub- ism ?" no one could tell him. The voice of a lady was heard to say that the term was a slang phrase invented by critics, but Mr Hartley himself said he didn't know what it was. man inquired what Dadaism was, the committee of the Société could have informed him, for it had come prepared for that question, the Société being advanced or nothing. Apparently to those present, a definition of Cubistic Art had just as much per- tinency to the present-day events as a definition of ancient Egyptian Art would have had. However, after it was all over, it was generally agreed that there had been something dada about the evening after all. HENRY MCBRIDE Had the young MUSICAL CHRONICLE Ehast murmurs. RNEST BLOCH is one of the few men living who listen. He has the art of hearkening, of hearkening veritably to his proper body. The most of us, musicians, poets, prosemen, do not know how to hear, how to lean attentively over ourselves. We do not know how to pause suspended and give heed to what the blood We are outside, averted, deaf to the fine trickle of song always within the body. We struggle to fit ourselves into forms bequeathed to us. We persuade ourselves we feel, as other men felt, an hundred years ago, fifty years ago; persuade ourselves we hear c-major, simple march and dance movements, broad sustained chanting melody, a plain, straightforward, unmottled gush of sen- sation, a melodic line with an accompaniment. Such is the world, we rest assured. Expression is undertaken prejudicially, the mat- ter adjudged, the award bestowed upon the accepted forms. We do not even inquire whether the individuals who thought to hear these patterns heard them indeed, or were deceived. Dead things are produced, and we either do not know at all that they are ob- solete, or are entirely unable to account for their uselessness. But Bloch does that which Bach did, which Wagner did, which Debussy did, which every true musician will ever do. He goes directly for his substance, his form, to the warm, moist quick of sensation. He permits himself to be guided not by what others have felt, or said they have felt, but by what takes place within his flesh. He is eager only to hear that murmurous evanescent thing, to seize it in its immediacy, to fix it in its ineluctable, unfathomable flow, before it escape him and us entirely. He hearkens until his spirit ear becomes sensitive to its wayward flow, till a continuity, a pattern, commences to define itself in the chaos. He hears, al- ways in progress in him, the transformation of pain into pleasure, of pleasure into pain; the unrelenting piling of edifice upon edifice, each superstructure subsiding immediately to make way for the coming one; the melting in the solidification, the retreat in the ad- vance. He hears the pain of the years crystallized into an in- candescent moment of pleasure; he hears the drag of hours of de- pression, the movements in him up and down. He knows what 116 MUSICAL CHRONICLE takes place between him and the objects of New York when he goes out; what the deeds of men mark in him; what rhythms rise from within to meet the ugliness, what rhythms come from without and insist themselves on him and carry him before them. He knows the state of his life, the submerged, before-dawn light. And always within him, he is aware of the presence of an impulse to embrace all things and men, a great will to say yea. It is perhaps the impulse that realized itself too naïvely, too romantically, too thoughtlessly, in the c-sharp minor symphony, and which the ex- perience of life, of men, of the world, has driven in, chained, weighed to earth. But it is alive, and fumbling for egress. It is always there, beneath the bitterness, beneath the melancholy brood- ing, beneath the pain, beneath the ape-like joy and tenderness, veiled, grand, and sorrowful. And it forces itself upward, lacerat- ed, woeful, half-broken, till at last the doors give, the old prophetic strain stands free and speaks again, stammers with excess, stands silent while the clouds part in the light of dawn. One already knew, before the performance of the orchestral, from the piano-version, how sheer, how rare, how remarkable a piece of self-expression, self-registration, the Bloch viola suite is. But the performance of the work by the National Symphony early in November thrust the fact in on one again, and in thrusting it a second time, made it penetrate even more profoundly. For the two versions are like two of the prints which Alfred Stieglitz some- times makes of a single negative, and which, because of differences quality of the printing-paper, are quite distinct from each other. The pianoforte, of course, makes the suite an intimate thing; adumbrates colours in place of stating them. It gives one the pleasure of hearing orchestral hues through another medium. The orchestra, on the other hand, both swells and subtilizes the ideas; the colours are boldly, shrilly, fully stated. The differences of medium, in consequence, made one to hear the composition, al- ready familiar, quite afresh. Indeed, it is possible that one heard it for the first time entire this fall, for Bloch is determined an orchestral writer, and the version for the larger instrument is per- haps the superior. It was perhaps only the fact that Bauer played at the première of the pianoforte version while Bodansky conducted at the orchestral première, that made the former, to not a few , auditors, seem the more successful. The instrumentation of Bloch PAUL ROSENFELD 117 a a is original and daring beyond his pianoforte style. It is exceedingly rich; fruits are held under one's nostrils. And yet it is exceedingly net and dry and pointed. The dynamics of the band are seldom called into play; the sign ff appears only a few times in the score. Nevertheless, the orchestra is heard in its entirety and power. Both the extremes of colouration are reached; the Bloch score calls into play at once a shrillness and a sombreness that seem new to music. In spite, however, of the green flames of the flutes, the darker timbres prevail. The difference between the orchestration of Bloch and that of Debussy is much the difference between the alto and the soprano voice. There are browns and purples and golds in Bloch's score deeper than those that appear in any of Debussy's. The bass tones of the harps, the old gold of the solo viola, predominate. Furthermore, the instruments of percussion demanded by Bloch give his music a sharpness and briskness alien to Debussy's. He uses the snare-drum as effectively as does Strawinsky; there is a memorable passage in the allegro ironico composed of a melancholy soliloquy of the viola over curious dry taps of the instrument. A small wooden box adopted from the jazz bands is employed, in conjunction with the celesta, with whipping effect in the last move- ment. And, as never before, one recognized the masterliness of the work. The Viola Suite is perhaps not the most powerful of Bloch's works. It has neither the grandiose full lyricism of the Psalms, nor the intensity and vehemence of the String Quartet. It is the first of his compositions entirely conceived and executed since his immigration to America, and the difficulties of adjustment to the life of the new world are indubitably somewhat responsible for the comparative smallness of scale. Moreover, Bloch is ripening aesthetically very rapidly; it may be he has repressed himself a little in order to obtain greater control over his style. Still, the work has qualities that make it in many respects a signal improve- ment over anything else he has written. The Suite is the music of one who has himself entirely in hand. It is a capital piece of organization. There are no dead, no insignificant spots in it. It is always in motion and yet always a single thing. It evolves re- lentlessly, and yet by almost imperceptible stages; it is always there, and yet persistently in process of development. The four movements are the four facets of a single cube, and still entirely 118 MUSICAL CHRONICLE individual. Throughout it, one has the sense that the composer is entirely free, entirely at ease; pouring himself out naturally and richly. It promises that when Bloch does succeed in mounting again to the heights attained in the Quartet and in the Psalms, he will mount in order to achieve works completer, more solid, formally harder even than they. It promises the achievement in the grand region of the masterwork he has already achieved in the more cir- cumscribed. It promises for Ernest Bloch attainments of which perhaps no other living composer is capable. The admirers of Walter Damrosch are used to justifying their regard for him by pointing to his programmes. So finely wrought are these, they pretend, so original and catholic, that alone because of them their author ranks high among conductors. As a leader, of course, no one, not even his admirers, finds him anything more than a mediocrity. The man's inability to express himself, the want of rhythm and co-ordination and plasticity in his perform- ances which fill Aeolian Hall so many Sunday afternoons with something that resembles nothing so much as the Gilbertian "bloom on cold gravy,” is apparent to everyone. Indeed, you meet with little but sympathy when you complain of the regularity with which compositions are muffed and fumbled at the concerts of the New York Symphony, the absurdly heavy accent placed on the personal display. No one enjoys the conductor's little exhibitionistic habits on the platform; his majestic and lumbering entrance which makes you wonder whether you have before you Bossuet advancing to pro- nounce the funeral oration of Queen Henrietta Maria, and which is ever so much more impressive than the entrance of the first theme of the symphony; his trick of facing about during the performance of a work and fixing the audience with his regard; his delight in addressing fatuous explanatory remarks to the assemblage in a voice amazingly out of place in such a burly person. But on the question of the programme, the admirers of Damrosch remain in- transigent; they will have it that he is a great educator who has steadily developed the taste of the public through his programme- making. There is no need our hesitating over the question which immedi- ately proposes itself, the question whether anyone who conducts as Walter Damrosch conducts would indeed be able to develop public PAUL ROSENFELD 119 taste, even did he make programmes like an archangel. For the programmes of the New York Symphony, although better than those of the Philharmonic, are neither the programmes of an archangelic, an angelic, nor even a very fine or very robust human intelligence. They are not even quite as catholic as are those which the National Symphony is offering this fall. They are mere- ly the ordinary concert programmes, ranging chiefly from Beethoven to Debussy, a little more cleverly scrambled, and cunningly varied from time to time with pricking novelties of unequal value. One need only glance at the programmes of the Damrosch Historical Cycle, in progress this season at Carnegie Hall, to be assured of it. In order that an audience shall get the sense of the development of the symphonic orchestra from the time of Rameau to our own day, there is necessary something more than a chronological arrangement of familiar music and a grouping of composers separated from each other by several centuries in “national” sets. That the imagination shall be stimulated, there is necessary, first, the performance of the more unfamiliar representative compositions of the masters, and the performance of compositions by the great “eccentrics,” the men who have had the very boldest visions of orchestral music. But the programmes of the Damrosch cycle do neither. It is the first, the fifth, and the seventh of the Beethoven symphonies that are scheduled, not the far too rarely played second and fourth. Debussy is represented by the familiar first two of his Nocturnes; not by La Mer or Ibéria. Berlioz is represented by Harold; Liszt by Tasso; Rimsky by two movements of Scheherazade; Franck by the Variations Symphoniques. The errors of complete omission are greater. Saint-Saëns, Tchaikowsky, Rachmaninoff, and d’Indy are included. But Chabrier, Bizet, Bruckner, Balakirew, Mous- sorgsky, Borodin, Dukas, Magnard, Strauss, and Bloch are neglected. Haydn is practically neglected by representation only through the Clock symphony. Strawinsky figures only as composer of the early Firebird. While Chadwick, Hadley, and Damrosch (!) figure on the American programme, Henry Gilbert is excluded. Indeed, Walter Damrosch maker of programmes seems not the great superior of Walter Damrosch conductor, which his partisans pretend him to be. For, in this sphere, too, the accent is more on the exhibition than on the performance. Paul ROSENFELD THE THEATRE THA HAT portentous thing, the serious drama, went a long way to- ward justifying itself last month with the production of three several pieces: HEARTBREAK House, EMPEROR Jones, and SAMSON AND Delilah. Of two of these it has been said that they are "not plays" and of the third it may be said, in brief, that it is a bad play. If there is a paradox in saying that these three justify the serious drama, the fault is not ours but that of the slang of theatrical criticism. The actual position is absurdly simple. These plays brought to the theatre certain desirable things: a mystic fervour and a pas- sionate philosophy in Shaw, a colourful, energetic imagination in Mr O'Neill, an actor of great qualities in Jacob Ben-Ami—and these are not only necessary to the theatre but are not supplied by the non-serious drama which can prosper without them. Shaw and O'Neill needed only Sven Lange's dreary well-made play to prove that the theatre exists for the production of whatever ex- pression an audience will listen to. The play is no more an essen- tial of the stage than the key-signature is of written music. It is a convention and a convenience. But the theatre can give us things of finer texture than the drama as we know it. That Mr Shaw, an old master, and Mr O'Neill, an arriving one, should both deliberately sacrifice "dramatic effect” and express with free- dom, establishing their own inscrutable laws of technique, is a singular and hopeful sign. G. S. The ZIEGFELD MIDNIGHT FROLIC used to be girls and iron and jazz. When Mr Ziegfeld did over his Roof and doctored up the iron girders to look like cheap candy we feared the worst, and every show since that time has justified that fear. At present there are only Ruth Budd and Jack Hanley to make one recall what was once the very crater of volcanic Manhattan. This girl and her rope and her courage prove that mankind did not in becoming human forfeit all arboreal virtue: this fellow puts out a candle THE THEATRE 121 by tapping it on the head with a mallet and rolls dice as big as grave-stones. The gargoyles of Notre Dame have nothing on . Jack Hanley The public loves to be humbugged and Afgar is the worst show in town. In Paris Alice Delysia never was anybody anyhow. Her name and her feathers and one or ten other things prove that more than all these are needed to recompound that terrifyingly real thing, Gaby Deslys. But there was Lupino Lane (who hop- ped divers divans and has since hopped back to London) and there are costumes by Poiret (to whom God has granted not to be here and so not to see how they are worn) and there is a harem (which Mr Gest has taught his actors to pronounce fearlessly hareem). In Tip-Top The Brown Brothers illustrate music and The Dun- can Sisters illuminate childhood. Fred Stone himself with a man- sized whip cracks miracles—but he is the sort of boy who could (Why doesn't he have a mind to?) put a snap into near-beer. The London Palace Girls show what organization can do, while the scenery shows even better what i