ts absence does.
a
From Honeydew we learn that as a composer of light music
Zimbalist is as bad as Kreisler, also that Gilbert and Sullivan are
still extant. Even "attachments à la Plato" and tea for three can-
not satisfy all of us. The awful mandarin, since he affects so much
hand business, might at least grow finger-nails. But in this show
they would be out of place. So is that Spanish dancer, whose
limbs and eyes and steps all have edge.
The American theatre owes a great deal to Africa and England:
the stage darky and the stage Englishman are the best things we
have. G. P. Huntley in Hitchy-Koo 1920 buys a postage
stamp as no one but an English gentleman with Agincourt and
Eton behind him could buy a postage stamp. The blandly cubistic
Master of the Revels, the adept Messrs Mosconi, girls, music, and
scenery slide all as smooth as whipped-cream.
S. T.


COMMENT
WHEN
HEN Margaret Fuller and Ralph Waldo Emerson edited
their Dial, they met with little encouragement from
that alien thing, the American public. Neither the Orphic Say-
ings of Amos Bronson Alcott nor the more sublunary animad-
versions of James Russell Lowell availed. Each hamlet rose
en masse to sling its brave quota of mud, while Philadelphia, as
always to the fore, asserted through its Gazette that these editors
were “considerably madder than the Mormons.” This last was
surely a hit below the Transcendental belt. After four thin Tran-
scendental years The Dial cashed in.
Among the contributors to that lavender publication was Wil-
liam Ellery Channing, a nephew of the divine, and himself the
poet of at least one well-preserved line:
“If my bark sinks, 'tis to another sea.”
So it was with no surprise that, forty years later, the well-
read observed The Dial bob up (or down) in so fas-
cinatingly “another sea” as the Chicago of 1880. And for thirty-
eight watery years it continued there to bob: the Nantucket
Shoals Lightship had a pendant. But The DIAL (I here
throw overboard my maritime simile) did not put on flesh. She
did not, like that foreign literary big-gun, Lord Byron, have to
chew soda-crackers. Instead, Chicago supplied wind.
In the summer of 1918, Germany having created a diversion,
the then publisher was enabled to execute a strategic retreat to
13th Street, New York. There were those who shook their heads
both at New York and at 13, but those most intimately concerned
were of good heart: it was thought the rose-tree in the back-yard,
the Presbyterian Church across the way, and the undertaker next
door would give tone. Also, politics were to be dove into.
. But
it was found, too late, that neither the rose-tree nor Reconstruc-
tion particularly blossomed.
So a year ago The Dial took for her health a somersault.
More or less coming up on her more or less renovated feet, clad
in reassuringly genteel tights, she smiled stiffly at the world. But


COMMENT
123
acrobatics are, like anything else, a business. And the particular
kind of acrobatics for which the editors of THE DIAL have a taste
did not fill the hat. Unwilling to follow The Atlantic Monthly
and confine themselves to skipping rope, yet anxious to meet their
public half-way, these editors, by way of further stiffening their
smile, instituted the department of Modern Forms. They thus
thought to get away with such of their turns as lacked any heart-
ening relationship to those setting-up exercises over which and
after which the world's great audiences perpetually yearn. But
even those tricks which were somehow developed from setting-up
exercises and so, however complicated and essentially distinguished,
were allowed by the spectators to be “art” or at least “letters,”
even these, when good enough for The Dial, were of course
MODERN. For were they not alive? Neither Yeats nor Moore
nor Conrad is yet wholly dead. Also the whole point of The
Dial was to give exponents of both the accepted and the unac-
cepted an agreeable carpet whereon they could fitly and cheek by
jowl and in their very different ways perform. To cage off either
group was almost to turn the show into a farce.
We have wiped off the smile.
In the course of an amusing year there have come our way some
really lovely letters; but to fill the cup of our contentment to over-
flowing we want somebody (he doesn't have to come from or stay in
Philadelphia) to step right up and to say in a fine clear tipstaff
voice: "considerably madder than the Mormons.” However, all
our sane tipstaff subscribers have, I fear, by now left us; only
those who subscribed with their eyes open and our first number
before them are still present. Perhaps that is why, though we
have ever more subscribers, we nowadays receive from the post-
man so few crackerjacks. We only get tiresome letters from for-
eign and domestic pundits who say we are the best shot at a civi-
lized journal yet fired in English.
The first issue of L'Esprit Nouveau, edited by Paul Dermée,
contains a spirited article on the painting of Georges Seurat, nu-
merous reproductions of the work of Seurat, Picasso, and others;
a capable manifesto, Sur la Plastique, by A. Ozenfant and Ch. E.
Jeanneret. Unfortunately the editor of L'Esprit Nouveau has
contributed a "lyric” manifesto wholly in contradiction with the


124
COMMENT
spirit of his star contributors, his remarks on flux are sheer rub-
bish; he should have taken a course in Benda before making them.
The enthusiasm of French artists for Coney Island, ragtime,
and other essentially American products continues scarcely less
intense than their enthusiasm for African fetishes. It is a ques-
tion of importing raw material, the rawer the better; and fertilizer.
L'Esprit Nouveau reproduces the photographs of some super-solid
American silos and grain elevators: “American engineers with their
reckonings pulverize a dying architecture.” The American movies
and particularly the movie stars, Norma Talmadge, Theda Bara,
Douglas Fairbanks, and the rest, are much admired. “W. Hart
(Rio Jim) evokes Beethoven and Michel Angelo.” “Chaplin
Charlot . . . is and remains the completest artist of the cinema.”
But we do not have to be told.
L'Esprit Nouveau is worth having for the sake of illustrations;
so also is the fifth issue of Action; in which we find the statement
that Littérature is “La seule revue française lisible.” This is
extreme, but the position is not without its advantages.
.
.
The HARVARD GLEE Club is asking young American com-
posers to submit choral works to be sung by the Club as examples
of American music at concerts in London and on the Continent
next summer. Ravel, Erik Satie, and Georges Auric are furnish-
ing the Glee Club with their French material; young English and
Italian composers are also contributing. The liberality of the
Club toward very modern composers ought to be sufficient inspira-
tion to young Americans. Detailed information can be had by
writing to The Harvard Glee Club, Harvard University, Cam-
bridge, Massachusetts.
Through an error in composition Mr Pound's notice of Blaise
Cendrars' Du Monde Entier was omitted from page 407 in the
October Dial, thus damaging the proportion of our correspondent's
estimate of relative interest of French contemporary authors,
among whom Cendrars has a definite place.






NA
Courtesy of the Daniel Gallery
AFTER SIR CHRISTOPHER WREN.
BY CHARLES DEMUTH



THE INDIAL
X XEST
FEBRUARY 1921
APPROACHES TO REMY DE GOURMONT
BY KENNETH BURKE
I
Notre civilisation, en dev-
enant démocratique, s'est
mise à tout prendre au
sérieux.-
La Morale de l'Amour
I
N his essay on women and language, de Gourmont comments on
the tendency of the young males to burn up the race, and adds
that certain Asiatic peoples are extinct not on account of their lack
of spirit, but because they had too much of it. De Gourmont him-
self began his career at a time when quite one of the most feverish
attempts in the history of European art was being made to burn up
the race.
The group of young males that gathered around Mal-
larmé, with their aesthetic of symbolism, and their philosophy of
idealism, were, as de Gourmont proudly showed in one of his early
insolent polemics, on the road to intellectual anarchism. If each
man was his own world—and surely, there are certain poems of
Mallarmé which we can only spy at quizzically, as one might look
through a 'scope at Venus under favourable conditions-it was in-
evitable that each man should have his own tongue. Although the
reduction to absurdity of individualism in art is to spend one's life
in talking to oneself, they were all too potent, too spirited, to be dis-
turbed by reductions to absurdity. If that was the quintessence of
symbolism, then there was nothing to do but talk to oneself; the
movement per se was its justification.


126
APPROACHES TO REMY DE GOURMONT
All this fever of innovation was decried by the papas of the uni-
versity under the name of decadence, although de Gourmont shows
in his Mallarmé et l'Idée de Décadence that the historical signifi-
cance of décadisme was that of times when the creative instinct was
at its lowest, not at its suicidally highest. But it has always been
the character of young rebels to carry their unfriendly appellations
scrawled in gold on their banners, with the result that the curse has
become more and more alluring, and nearly always signifies a writer
who has invented some distinctive element for himself. De Gour-
mont, in contraposition to the standard sterility of the Académie, is
a decadent.
To be a decadent, by another association of ideas, is to uphold the
infamous L'art-pour-lart. De Gourmont always had much too
strong a detestation for democratic standards to be anything but a
disciple of Art for Art's Sake. In Une Nuit au Luxembourg he says,
a
“The process of thinking is a sport, although this sport must be free
and harmonious. The more it is looked upon as useless, the more
one feels the need of making it beautiful. Beauty-that is perhaps
its only possible value."
And in one of his essays,
“To admit art because it can uplift the masses or the individual,
is like admitting the rose because we can extract from roses a medi-
cine for the eyes."
To be an artist is to feed an appetite, and nothing more.
Rooted in
the Welt als Wille of Schopenhauer, and the Olympianism of
Nietzsche, de Gourmont would naturally accept art as a sort of self-
justifying urge or energy; and anyway, anything was justified to
de Gourmont by the mere fact of its existence.
All this, of course, is hardly startling by now. There are enough
pimpled adolescents going about with chunks of live-your-own-life
in their mouths to make it almost impossible to be seen with a vol-
ume of Also Sprach Zarathustra, and if one happens to like Huys-
mans he has to explain himself uncomfortably for at least half an
hour unless his auditor happens to be more than ordinarily acute.
My point is simply to emphasize the free basis on which de Gour-


KENNETH BURKE
127
mont began his writing, and what opportunities it might offer to an
active mentality. The theories of individualism in art resulted in
his being at liberty to develop his medium as he saw fit; but the un-
conscious intention behind his work, the desire to communicate,
checked the absurdity of the theories, with the result that we have
from de Gourmont some forty volumes of graceful and intelligent
writing in a multitude of mediums.
Another factor which insured the liberty of his writing was the
uneventfulness of his life. Until just before his death, there was
no element of social experience strong enough to disturb him with its
prejudices. For years he lived alone with his books, seen by a few
intimates; for experience, he had his tomes, for vitality, the beating
of his own veins. We might say of him what he said of France:
"un pays qui possède, avec l'Italie, la littérature la plus libre de
l'Europe et la plus délicieusement érotique."
Beyond a few dates, the facts of de Gourmont's life are rare. He
was too subtle-minded to have a life of cataclysms, too intelligent
for personal tragedy, and there is no evidence that the greatest of
all ogres, financial difficulty, came to disturb him. On the whole,
there was nothing to compel the direction of his mind; he was left
with what he would call the "illusion of liberty.”
Remy de Gourmont was born on the fourth of April, 1858, in the
Château de la Motte, at Bazoches-en-Houlme, in the Orne. He
came of a very old family that had settled in Normandy back in the
times of tradition, and claimed descent from a prince of Denmark,
a nephew of an old King Gormon. During the fifteenth and six-
teenth centuries many of the Gourmonts were savants, painters,
philosophers, and printers, and as is always told in a life of de Gour-
mont, his ancestor Gilles was the first to introduce Greek and He-
brew characters into France. In addition to this line, which is im-
pressive enough, he could claim by his maternal grandmother to be-
long to the family of François de Malherbe.
When he was about ten, his parents moved to a manor-house at
Mesnil-Villeman, in the Manche, described in the anonymous ap-
pendix to Pendant l'Orage as a petit château bâti au bord d'un
étang, encerclé de bois de hêtres, evidently a spot of highly standard
romance. After showing an early aptitude at the lycée, he studied
law at Caen, where at the same time he went on with his interest in


128
APPROACHES TO REMY DE GOURMONT
literature, "et commença de vivre.” In 1883 he finally came to
Paris to begin his life as a man of letters, and found occupation al-
most immediately in the Bibliothèque Nationale. For the next
eight years he remained there, writing during this time some scienti-
fic articles of vulgarization; but in 1891 his connections with the
library were suddenly brought to a close by his publication in the
Mercure de France of an anti-chauvinistic article, Le Joujou Patrio-
tisme. It was about this time also that he suffered the beginning of
a malady which is alluded to only vaguely by his friends, but which
kept him for the most of his life confined to his rooms in the Rue des
Saints-Pères.
In 1890 Sixtine appeared, his first important work, although a
novel Merlette existed as early as 1886. This was soon followed
by a volume of research and erudition, Le Latin Mystique, in which
he actually studied the poets Huysmans had utilized so airily in
A Rebours without knowing. From now on dates a remarkable
activity which soon started the rumour in Parisian literary circles
that Remy de Gourmont was a group of writers using one pseudo-
nym. There were no further incidents in his life. It seems that
to the end of his days, his exterior life was that of an abstemious but
cultured friar. Besides his knowledge of the standard names in
philosophy and literature, his familiarity with Latin opened up to
him a great fund of mediaeval misery and error, and many a wicked
volume which he frankly admired for its lubricity. He remained,
until his death, a man closed in his study, living almost exclusively
with books, yet one who never wrote a sentence that did not have in
it the flux of a spontaneous emotion.
He died during the war, on the evening of September 27, 1915,
and like Flaubert, whose life is so parallel in many ways, he died of
a cerebral hemorrhage. Both men finally succumbed to the mere
mass of emotion and erudition they had heaped upon their brains.
Flaubert hated stupidity; de Gourmont loved intelligence; each im-
plies the other, but to hate stupidity all one's life will result in one's
becoming sacrificed to it, whereas the emphasis on the love of intel-
ligence is the beginning of a free and easy creation. And could
Flaubert ever have understood this? “You have finally got to such
a degree of imbecility that you look upon work not only as honour-
able, but as sacred, when in reality it is only a dire necessity.” Such
is the Olympianism of the "illusion of liberty.”


KENNETH BURKE
129
II
L’intelligence est un accident;
le génie est une catastrophe.-
Le Succès et l'Idée de Beauté
Super-Copernican, de Gourmont was not content with denying
the world as the centre of the universe; he also denies man as the
centre of the world. He found in Darwin "la pudibonderie
religieuse de sa race," and the purely theological tendency, even
while endangering the old religion, to place man as the ultimate aim
of nature. He insisted that man was neither first nor last upon the
earth. The privileges of humanity were hardly more than an ac-
cident, if one could speak of an accident in nature, and this accident
might just as well have happened to another species, indeed, may
still happen. Intelligence is perhaps an improper functioning of
the instincts, or the beginning of instincts which have not yet crystal-
lized—which would mean that the bee or the ant had gone farther
in evolution than man. In his Physique de l'Amour, he says, “Man
,
is not at the pinnacle of nature; he is in nature, one of the units of
life, and nothing more.” The purpose of this book was to "place
the sexual life of man in the one and only scheme of universal sexu-
ality.” De Gourmont never forgot that a man is of no more im-
portance in relation to the stars than a grasshopper. Nor did he
forget that a man in relation to himself is of tremendous importance.
Thus, while emphasizing the futility of the human race as a
whole, he also affirmed the all-importance of the individual. Des-
cartes' cogito; ergo sum, he says somewhere, is so simple, so rudi-
mentary that any savage could probably understand it. Humanity
is an abstraction, but the isolated human has cravings to satisfy and
pains to avoid; it is these exclusively personal experiences which are
important so long as sensation endures. De Gourmont has little
time for those perfect systems of government wherein the aggregate
of humanity is to be made happy at the expense of each individual.
"Let us accept as sufficient this theorem: What is useful to the bee
is useful to the hive.”
This composite of conflicting attitudes gives the work of de Gour-
mont a cautious equilibrium. It is Santayana, I believe, who
makes the distinction between the material basis of life" and "life's


130
APPROACHES TO REMY DE GOURMONT
spiritual fulfilment.” Someone like Zola would exemplify an ex-
clusive
grasp of the material basis; the yearning of the Middle Ages
for the City of God would be an exclusive grasp of the spiritual ful-
filment. De Gourmont, with his insistence upon the unimportance
of humanity and the importance of man, his conception of the intel-
ligence as a disease or an error along with his enthusiasm over the
beauty of a perfectly functioning intelligence, his balance of man
as an animal over against man as something distinct from all ani-
mals, attains that healthy equipollence of material basis and spirit-
ual fulfilment which we usually hand over to the Greeks without
reading them.
It is with this method of double-attitude that he approaches every-
thing. Thoroughly godless, for instance, he has always manifested
a passionate interest in Catholicism. His first important work of
erudition, Le Latin Mystique, is an anthology, with partial transla-
tions and comment, of “the poets of the antiphonary, and Symbol-
ism in the Middle Ages.” His Chemin de Velours is an analysis of
Pascal and the Jesuites. But as one might expect, his sympathy
for Catholicism is hardly likely to earn for him the benediction of
Rome. For he admires Catholicism in that it is preserving the rich
pagan institutions over against the aridity of Protestantism. Mere
matters of creed mean nothing to him; he is interested in the Church
merely as a form of beauty. He observes with regret that before
the Reformation the Church was incorporating the elements of
paganism as fast as necessary; as one of the proofs of this he gives
a list of Italian tutelary deities, and a parallel list of saints of the
calendar the Church has incorporated to replace them. He gives
another list of pagan temples taken over by the Christians, with the
ancient derivation showing through their names. Further, he points
out that the Greek God Orpheus, who often figures in early Christ-
ian art, was accepted as a prophet by no less an authority than St
Augustine. "A pure Christianity would have rejected the entire
Pythagorean system; Catholicism, true to its name, has handed
down to us, along with the religion of Christ, nearly all the super-
stitions and all the theogonies of the Orient.” It is not the Protes-
tant Revolution which distresses de Gourmont, but the Catholic
Reformation. From then on the existence of beauty in the Church
has been precarious; Church art practically ceased; the Church had
been Christianized.


KENNETH BURKE
131
"Il y a un art catholique; il n'y a pas d'art chrétien; le christian-
isme évangélique est essentiellement opposé à toute représentation
de la beauté sensible, soit d'après le corps humain, soit d'après le
reste de la nature."
.
As an inevitable corollary to such an attitude towards the Church,
was de Gourmont's insistence upon the dignity of sex. Although
I do not recall his ever mentioning the name of a psychoanalyst-
and he is always frank about his sources—the theories of Freud and
his epigons are continually finding expression in his works. “The
mistake of treating man's brain as the absolute centre of the man is
both fortunate and commendable, but it is a mistake. The only
natural aim of man is that of reproduction.” Or from another
angle, “La beauté est si bien sexuelle que les seules æuvres d'art in-
contestées sont celles qui montrent tout bonnement le corps humain
dans sa nudité. By its insistence on remaining purely sexual, Greek
statuary has lifted itself forever above all discussion.”
But all this is only one phase of his sympathy with the life of the
De Gourmont is even more thoroughly an Epicurean than
Anatole France. He says in Le Chemin de Velours that "Volup-
tuosity is a creation of man, a delicate art in which only a few are
especially proficient, like music or painting.” Une Nuit au Luxem-
bourg contains a new apology for Epicurus.
senses.
"My friend, for some centuries now the schools have been poison-
ing your sensibilities and strangling your intelligence by making
you believe that the pleasures of Epicurus were exclusively pleasures
of the mind. Epicurus was too wise to disdain any sort of pleasure.
He wanted to know, and he did know, all the satisfactions which
can become the satisfactions of men; he abused nothing, but he used
everything, in his life of harmony."
In the closing chapter of his Physique de l’Amour he has a long,
enthusiastic period: "Tout n'est que luxure. ...
: L'animal ig-
nore la diversité, l'accumulation des aptitudes; l'homme seul est
luxurieux.” M Paul Delior, in his Remy de Gourmont et Son
Euvre, illustrates the attitude of de Gourmont by citing the three
souls of Plato: the vows, mind, intelligence, located in the head;
the Būvos, passions, emotions, located in the breast; the étudvuńtukoy


132
APPROACHES TO REMY DE GOURMONT
with all the appetites which assure the conservation of the in-
dividual and of the race, located in the stomach, and according to
Plato a ferocious beast but which we must nurture in order to exist.
a
De Gourmont not only admired the purest activities of the intellect,
and the play of the sensibilities, but also recognized the dignity of
the appetites, understood that they are an excellent base on which
to erect the superstructure of intelligence and sensibility.
De Gourmont discovered himself for his critics when he used the
word “dissociations." De Gourmont is a dissociator, which is to
say that he examines a concept which we take as a unit and finds
that it can be subdivided. “Man associates his ideas, not in ac-
cordance with logic, or verifiable exactitude, but in accordance with
his desires and his interests.” In his essay, La Dissociation des
Idées, de Gourmont lets himself loose with this method, and pro-
duces a type of writing which is delightfully exact. After defining
the origin of the commonplace, he gives as an example, the associa-
tion of ideas Byzantium-decadence. He then goes over to the na-
ture of morality, and the reasonable probability that the individual
can develop more conveniently in immorality; but morality is the
determination to preserve the race at the expense of the individual.
From this he gets to the association carnal pleasure-generation, as
the foundation of sexual morality. Yet the true association, he
claims, is that of intellectuality-infecundity. Christianity, how-
ever, did make one remarkable dissociation, that of love and carnal
pleasure. Thus was the love of brother and sister made possible.
I recall that in his Octavius, Minucius Felix found it necessary to
refute the Roman scandal about the Christian "brotherly love.” De
Gourmont, as also Minucius, uses the instance of the Egyptians,
who could not understand love without sexual conjunction. From
this point he gallops on, next to take up Joan of Arc, and the con-
flicting associations she brings up in an English and a French mind.
Soon he has arrived at the army, showing how at one time the mili-
tary was associated with high honour; then came scandals, and the
mistake was just as radically the other way, the military becoming
associated with nothing but complete dishonour. So he goes on
running his scales, and ends with a list that he has not troubled to
examine, but which seem to fall apart by the mere clarity of their
juxtaposition: virtue--recompense; wrong--punishment; God
goodness; crime---remorse; duty--happiness; future-progress.
>


KENNETH BURKE
133
The philosophical writings of de Gourmont are a continual rain
of ideas, some new, some borrowed, but all enlivened by the eager-
ness of his intelligence.
III
Enfin il (Jéhovah) lui souffle dans
les narines et dit: Lève-toi. Ton
:
nom est Lilith.
Lilith se dresse ...: Donne-moi
l'homme, Seigneur.
Lilith
An author who lives most of his life in his head must perform his
transgressions on paper. There was many a wild act more or less
definitely spelled out in de Gourmont's ink. In his fiction, the
graceful libertinage of the man is perhaps one of his predominant
qualities. He seemed to prefer the contemplation of easy conquests,
of women that were at once refined and ready of access, and men who
were frankly satyrs. As a matter of course, Diomede attains all
women except Christine, and she is immune only because she does
not exist. True, in Sixtine, d'Entragues is baffled, but it is his end-
less ratiocination that defeats him; and as recompense, this same
ratiocination aids him in the last chapter to console himself, and
reach "le repos finale,” an excellent mock-Victorian "In Conclu-
sion.” In Un Coeur Virginal, the leading character fails with the
heroine because he is dangerously nearing his fifties, and de Gour-
mont is writing the physiology of virginity; it is part of the physi-
ology that a younger man should win. With this one important
exception, as he developed his method de Gourmont seemed to profit
more and more by his “illusion of liberty,” until in the Lettres d'un
Satyre, we have as hero a complete Olympian, who treats his women
as flowers in the approved Goethe fashion-Röslein, Röslein, Rös-
lein rot!--and plucks them where he will.
Blasphemy is another element which keeps turning up now and
then, blasphemy and sacrilege. Le Fantôme, for instance, is a per-
verse account of a courtship which he has wrapped with mysticism
by utilizing the language of the ritual. It is a pagan plot made
a


134
APPROACHES TO REMY DE GOURMONT
highly churchy, with a fictitious mass incorporated into it to cele-
brate the glory of love. However, in a personality as rich as that
of de Gourmont, blasphemy can never be mere insolence or cheap
derision. It is often the expression of the religious inclination in
an intelligence which cannot believe. Since it is impossible to
praise the divinities with sincerity, there is nothing left but to in-
sult them. Blasphemy is a serious experiment, a transgression by
means of the sins of others. To blaspheme is to restore the dying
gods that one may renounce them; it is the struggle of an emotion-
al nature, a protest against the intellect which tends to make it
sterile of religious ecstasy. Some of his blasphemous poems have a
peculiar warmth, or coolness, like that of a body which has just died.
Blasphemy is perverse, yes, but it is not a pose, not an Oscarian at-
titude.
The less versatile author devotes his early years of writing to ac-
quiring a vein, a field to exploit with slight variations for the rest
of his days. He is incomplete until he has attained his stride; once
he has fallen into this stride, however, he jogs along contentedly
enough until he is dimmed with senility or hushed by disaster. But
de Gourmont was continually finding new elements to handle. It
is true that he stopped moving in the direction of style after he had
reached a perfect lubrication of phrase—why should he go on :-
!--
but the nature of his books themselves is never the same in two suc-
cessive volumes. Like a rough little mountain stream, he cuts a new
path after every rain. Over against the opulent tangles of Sixtine,
lumbering on with its baggage of erudite irony and rhetorical ex-
cursions, is the heavily oiled Une Nuit au Luxembourg, advancing
as easily as a snake. There is the nearly conventional novel, Un
Coeur Virginal, with complications, opportune disclosures, and the
like; but there is also Les Chevaux de Diomède, "a little novel of
possible adventures, with thought, act, dream, and sensuality ex-
posed on the same plan and analysed with an equal good will.” His
fantastic stories written when symbolism was in its first rich glow
are counterbalanced by things like the Histoires Magiques, a peculi-
arly nasty mixture of the romantic and the realist. And scattered
in among this pliant fiction, are his criticisms, grammatical writings,
works of scientific research, philosophical essays, notes on contem-
porary society, discussions of art and literature, and an occasional
poem. De Gourmont's verse is that of a discriminating dilettante,
with a complicated artificial sincerity and a distinct technical


KENNETH BURKE
135
flavour. In an early essay, de Gourmont affirms the abnormality
of the individual, while at the same time he sees art as the expression
of the individual. Art, then, is a distinctly personal matter, an
exemplification of what is more or less subconscious in oneself.
Consequently, there is absolutely no reason at all why he should not
write as he wishes. After one has been buried for a week or two in
the volumes of de Gourmont, one is simply dumbfounded before the
endless pudencies and trite delicacies of the usual author. Refine-
ment, to de Gourmont, does not consist in misnaming and lascivious
innuendo, or in an old-maidish “that were better avoided"; but on
the contrary, refinement is the capacity for treating subtly and intel-
ligently of everything, of discovering just values and exact appel-
lations, of expressing oneself with suppleness. Then again, de
Gourmont has little care for the profoundest aesthetic principle of
modern democratic art: “Yes sir, you might ha' met them thar
"
people right here in Waynesville.” The mere mechanism of reality
does not interest him; Élade, Phocas, Vitalis, Pascase, Diomède,
Théodat, Régelinde, Phenissa, an enumeration of the names of his
characters would show well enough that he could hardly expect to
see his work flanked with the infallible evidences of greatness, ad-
vertisements for cold cream and automobile tires, or have his "set"
heralded in a club-offer with Kipling given away.
The Académie never fails, and the institution which neglected to
crown Balzac, Baudelaire, Flaubert, and Mallarmé also ignored de
Gourmont. Bazin, Bourget, and Bordeaux were duly canonized,
as was fitting for such representative platitudinarians. But the
Académie never fails; if de Gourmont was neglected, it must be
that he was one of the finest writers of his century.
a
IV
Mes idées sont mobilisées.-
PENDANT L'ORAGE
In his highly pietistic introduction to Pendant la Guerre, Jean
de Gourmont finds that
"in spite of the echo of the battle, and that atmosphere of anguish
in which we were all plunged, the writer's hand had not trembled,


136 APPROACHES TO REMY DE GOURMONT
nor his brain; never perhaps, has Remy de Gourmont attained as
in these few months, such clarity of style and of thought stripped
of all vain metaphor, all vain literature.”
One was supposed to write such stuff during the war, but now
that things are clearing up again, I wonder if any one could honestly
claim that the war had brought to de Gourmont a greater “clarity
of thought.” For here, like poor Diomède of twenty years earlier,
,
de Gourmont had at last slipped against life, and had to suffer the
overbalancing of his intellect by his emotions. At last a social
force had appeared which was strong enough to break through his
detachment, and as Diomède finally accepted the ideal of the slug-
gish Pascase, so de Gourmont half fell in with the universal licking
of blood that for five years was supposed to be the purest expression
of humanity.
Once he had written,
“Detachment is the most aristocratic of all aristocratic at-
titudes. We should take part in the game, and with pleasure,
but not with passion. Passion disqualifies; it is the proof of an
elementary organism, without serious co-ordination.”. .
“Toutes les questions qui agitent les peuples, émeuvent les indi-
vidus, acquièrent . . . l'importance du fétu qui révolutionne une
formilière."
And again, in La Création Subconsciente, he remarks that a man
loses his personality in acting sympathetically with a great number
of people. Thus, de Gourmont himself has furnished us with rea-
sons to distrust his sudden blaze of patriotism. And whatever may
be said in favour of a blaze of patriotism, we have it on his own
authority that it can hardly be admired as an aid to greater clarity
of style and thought.
No, de Gourmont was now cast against life for the first time.
The war had startled him out of his theory, deprived him of the
purity of his Epicureanism. The vigour of his intelligence, it
seems, had delayed as far as old age the struggle with vital forces
that most of us have experienced before twenty. Until now, he had
succeeded in saddling his emotions with ideas; but the war, which
was hardly more than an irritation to so many, became an over-


KENNETH BURKE
137
whelming flood to him. For the most part, his war books are the
magnificent ruins of a great intelligence. Suddenly de Gourmont
needed his god; and since the godlessness of his youth was mobility,
his god became certainty. He still retained his keenness, and in
most cases his leisure, but the full force of the war, the threat of
France's being destroyed, called for affirmation, for patriotic dog-
matizing. De Gourmont joined the swarm pour la patrie, and
trained his learned barrage upon the barbarians. The spirit of
irony, of contradiction, of impersonality, that ultimate flavour of
his versatility which made him an exquisite writer, had dropped
away.
But even the ruins of de Gourmont are of no ordinary nature.
Never, during the entire war, did he degenerate to the level of a war
editorial. He is not one of those who would howl about Nietzsche,
for he recognized that Nietzsche was one of the most important
moralists of the time; and further, there is Nietzsche in every sen-
tence he wrote. He admitted the value of German music. He
managed to keep reasonably clean of the "regeneration” mud, the
thesis which is the reason for existence of three-fourths of the pres-
ent novel-manufacturing industry of England, the song that the war
must create a profound change in everyone. The trouble was, he
always had his but, since the formula was that the enemy was al-
ways wrong. He seemed to have forgotten his own dissociation
method, he was so busy helping to nourish the association, enemy-
turpitude.
Perhaps de Gourmont could no longer contradict, but he could
still modify. He recognized that the basis of this war, as of every
war, was the pugnacity natural to all individual or collective egos.
Even the trumpeted atrocities he sometimes defended as a corollary
of the war-spirit. He blamed the war on militarism, although
militarism to de Gourmont was not a term in economics; de Gour-
mont could always talk more enthusiastically of man in comparison
with his analysis of a sea mollusc than he could from consideration
of the industrial revolution. At basis, the present war for him,
aside from the painful fact that it was his own personal friends who
were dying, was no different from some unwritten event of pre-
history, some struggle with stones and clubs.
In Une Nuit au Luxembourg, where “Lui” is carrying on a dis-
cussion of the possible destruction of the human race, he dismisses


138 APPROACHES TO REMY DE GOURMONT
the idea of some great cataclysm like an explosion or the collision
with a comet, not because it is improbable, but because it is too
crude, too broadly theatrical, to interest him. Judging from the
development of de Gourmont's writing during the war, it seems that
if he had lived, perhaps the war would have suffered the same fate
with him. Gradually the almost brooding quality of his early
notes on the war disappears; he becomes more and more discursive,
with more emphasis on the purely theoretical and observational, in
other words, the essentially egotistic. He is in the war much the
way one would be on the sea or in the mountains; since it is the most
prevailing fact, he talks about it.
In La Culture des Idées he had written, "La diabolique Intelli-
gence rit des exorces mes, et l'eau bénite de l'Université n'a jamais
pu la stériliser, non plus que celle de l'Église.” And he might have
added, “ou de la guerre," for at the time of his death he was plan-
ning La Physique des Moeurs, a book entirely free of the war.
The chief works of Remy de Gourmont available in English are: A Night
in the Luxembourg, translated by Arthur Ransome and Philosophic
Nights in Paris, translated by Isaac Goldberg, published by John W.
Luce and Company, Boston; and Decadence and Other Essays on the Cul.
ture of Ideas, translated by William Aspenwall Bradley, shortly to be
issued by Harcourt, Brace and Howe, New York.


SIX POEMS
BY JOSEPH CAMPBELL
"SPRING EVER RETURNING"
Spring ever returning,
Cowslips thro' ages burning,
Rainbows never going,
Lark-song like water flowing.
Only bayonets rust and die
Under the madness of God's eye.
FRAOCHANS
(Bilberries)
No hand but a fairy's hand
Out of a dim, imagined land
Should pick these berries—for what day
Ever lighted less than they?
Or night gathered starry wings
Over fainter-shadowed things?
HARVEST
The garden swells with harvest.
Red as the moon of night
Apples cluster on the wall;
Marrows, fat and white,
Creep out of their borders;
Finches haunt the corn.
-Be patient, heavy woman,
Your child will soon be born.


140
SIX POEMS
"MY SONG IS AS A WATER-FIND"
My song is as a water-find
That bubbles from the hollow earth,
A shell the sea has left behind,
A burning faggot on the hearth,
A vagrant garden air that blows
Sweet with perfume of stock or rose.
I know no more of why I sing
Than does the chaffinch in the tree;
I am an elemental thing,
Folded about with mystery,
God-begotten, born of dust--
I sing my song because I must.
SATURN
I see the star, Aldebaran,
Slowly lift a jewelled can
To dying Helios; bright in air,
The gold of Berenice's hair;
And, swung dimly thro' the trees,
Seven-lanterned Pleiades.
Pale as ivory, overhead
Cassiopeia takes to bed
A blacker king than Cepheus,
Father of the negroes' house.
Boötes halts his breathing team
To water in the blue star-stream,
Where Cygnus swims, a bird of light,
Between the clouded banks of night,
And strong Orion languishes,
Hurt with the reeds of Artemis.
Red Antares' burning mouth
Makes a rose of the white south;
Lyra tunes her cithora;


JOSEPH CAMPBELL
141
And from a graven amphora,
A sweet-crusted Hyblaean jar,
Sirius, the honey-star,
Scatters the magic midnight dew
On bugloss and bramble-blow.
Every single star I see
In the vault's immensity
But lean-ribbed Saturn, dark and proud.
Shunner of the heavenly crowd,
Why shunnest thou the child that Earth
Bore to thee with troubled birth:
Thinkest thou not that my dream-eyes
Can pierce the armour of the skies-
Lay bare thy triple-cinctured rings,
Yellower than the tongues of kings,
Thy satellites, Enceladus
And Mimas, and the overplus
Of fiery-motes that leap and roll
About thy solitary soul ?
I am thy child by Earth, thy wife,
And share thy moods and live thy life,
Lean-ribbed Saturn, dark and proud,
Shunner of the heavenly crowd!
THE LITTLE YELLOW ROAD
(From the Gaelic. The original was taken down by Eoin Mac-
Neill from Michael MacRudhraighe in County Mayo, July, 1894.)
I am sick, sick,
No part of me sound;
The heart in
my
middle
Dies of its wound,
Pining the time
When she did stand
With me shoulder to shoulder
And hand in hand.


142
SIX POEMS
I travelled west
By the little yellow road
In the hope I might see
Where my Secret abode.
White were her two breasts,
Red her hair,
Guiding the cow
And the weaned calf, her care.
Until wine flows
From this stream west,
Until a green plain spreads
On the withered crest,
And white fields grow
The heather above,
My heart will not find
Kindness from my love.
There's a flood in the river
Will not ebb till day,
And dread on me
That my love is away.
Can I live a month
With my heart's pain
Unless she will come
And see me again?
I drink a measure
And I drink to you,
I pay, I pay,
And I pay for two.
Copper for ale
And silver for beer--
And do you like coming
Or staying here?



三 ​S.L
17.7.17
Courtesy of the Folsom Galleries
BY JOHN STORRS
WINTER.





-

Courtesy of the Folsom Galleries
BY JOHN STORRS
WOUNDED SOLDIERS.






23
ML
Courtesy of the Folsom Galleries
BY JOHN STORRS
THE SPIRIT OF THE NIGHT.


1


THE NEW ENGLANDER
BY SHERWOOD ANDERSON
HER
.
ER name was Elsie Leander and her girlhood was spent on
her father's farm in Vermont. For several generations the
Leanders had all lived on the same farm and had all married thin
women, and so she was thin. The farm lay in the shadow of a
mountain and the soil was not very rich. From the beginning and
for several generations there had been a great many sons and few
daughters in the family. The sons had gone west or to New York
City and the daughters had stayed at home and thought such
thoughts as come to New England women who see the sons of their
father's neighbours slipping away, one by one, into the West.
Her father's house was a small white frame affair, and when you
went out at the back door, past a small barn and a chicken house,
you got into a path that ran up the side of a hill and into an
orchard. The trees were all old and gnarled. At the back of the
orchard the hill dropped away and bare rocks showed.
Inside the fence a large grey rock stuck high up out of the ground.
As Elsie sat with her back to the rock, with a mangled hillside at
her feet, she could see several large mountains, apparently but a
short distance away, and between herself and the mountains lay
many tiny fields surrounded by neatly built stone walls. Every-
where rocks appeared. Large ones, too heavy to be moved, stuck
out of the ground in the centre of the fields. The fields were like
cups filled with a green liquid that turned grey in the fall and white
in the winter. The mountains, far off but apparently near at hand,
were like giants ready at any moment to reach out their hands and
take the cups one by one and drink off the green liquid. The large
rocks in the fields were like the thumbs of the giants.
Elsie had three brothers, born ahead of her, but they had all
gone away. Two of them had gone to live with her uncle in the
West and her elder brother had gone to New York City where he
had married and prospered. All through his youth and manhood
her father had worked hard and had lived a hard life, but his son
in New York City had begun to send money home, and after that


144
THE NEW ENGLANDER
things went better. He still worked every day about the barn or
in the fields but he did not worry about the future. Elsie's mother
did house work in the mornings and in the afternoons sat in a rock-
ing chair in her tiny living room and thought of her sons while
she crocheted table covers and tidies for the backs of chairs. She
was a silent woman, very thin and with very thin bony hands.
She did not ease herself into a rocking chair but sat down and got
up suddenly, and when she crocheted her back was as straight as
the back of a drill sergeant.
a
The mother rarely spoke to the daughter. Sometimes in the
afternoons as the younger woman went up the hillside to her place
by the rock at the back of the orchard, her father came out of the
barn and stopped her. He put a hand on her shoulder and asked
where she was going. “To the rock,” she said and her father
laughed. His laughter was like the creaking of a rusty barn door
hinge and the hand he had laid on her shoulder was thin like her
own hands and like her mother's hands. The father went into the
barn shaking his head. “She's like her mother. She is herself
like a rock,” he thought. At the head of the path that led from
the house to the orchard there was a great cluster of bayberry
bushes. The New England farmer came out of his barn to watch
his daughter go along the path, but she had disappeared behind
the bushes. He looked away past his house to the fields and to
the mountains in the distance. He also saw the green cup-like
fields and the grim mountains. There was an almost imperceptible
tightening of the muscles of his half worn-out ad body. For a
long time he stood in silence and then, knowing from long ex-
perience the danger of having thoughts, he went back into the barn
and busied himself with the mending of an agricultural tool that
had been mended many times before.
The son of the Leanders who went to live in New York
City was the father of one son, a thin sensitive boy who looked
like Elsie. The son died when he was twenty-three years old
and some years later the father died and left his money to the
old people on the New England farm. The two Leanders who
had gone west had lived there with their father's brother, a
farmer, until they grew into manhood. Then Will, the younger,
got a job on a railroad. He was killed one winter morning. It
was a cold snowy day and when the freight train he was in charge


SHERWOOD ANDERSON
145
a
of as conductor left the city of Des Moines, he started to run over
the tops of the cars. His feet slipped and he shot down into space.
That was the end of him.
Of the new generation there was only Elsie and her brother
Tom, whom she had never seen, left alive. Her father and mother
talked of going west to Tom for two years before they came to a
decision. Then it took another year to dispose of the farm and
make preparations. During the whole time Elsie did not think
much about the change about to take place in her life.
The trip west on the railroad train jolted Elsie out of herself.
In spite of her detached attitude toward life she became excited.
Her mother sat up very straight and stiff in the seat in the sleeping
car and her father walked up and down in the aisle. After a night
when the younger of the two women did not sleep but lay awake
with red burning cheeks and with her thin fingers incessantly pick-
ing at the bed-clothes in her berth while the train went through
towns and cities, crawled up the sides of hills and fell down into
forest-clad valleys, she got up and dressed to sit all day looking at
a new kind of land. The train ran for a day and through another
sleepless night in a flat land where every field was as large as a
farm in her own country. Towns appeared and disappeared in a
continual procession. The whole land was so unlike anything she
had ever known that she began to feel unlike herself. In the valley
where she had been born and where she had lived all her days every-
thing had an air of finality. Nothing could be changed. The
tiny fields were chained to the earth. They were fixed in their
places and surrounded by aged stone walls. The fields like the
mountains that looked down at them were as unchangeable as the
passing days. She had a feeling they had always been so, would
always be so.
Elsie sat like her mother upright in the car seat and with a back
like the back of a drill sergeant. The train ran swiftly along
through Ohio and Indiana. Her thin hands like her mother's
hands were crossed and locked. One passing casually through the
car might have thought both women prisoners handcuffed and
bound to their seats. Night came on and she again got into her
berth. Again she lay awake and her thin cheeks became flushed,
but she thought new thoughts. Her hands were no longer gripped
together and she did not pick at the bed clothes. Twice during


146
THE NEW ENGLANDER
the night she stretched herself and yawned, a thing she had never
in her life done before. The train stopped at a town on the
prairies, and as there was something the matter with one of the
wheels of the car in which she lay the trainsmen came with flaming
torches to tinker it. There was a great pounding and shouting.
When the train went on its way she wanted to get out of her berth
and run up and down in the aisle of the car. The fancy had come
to her that the men tinkering with the car wheel were new men out
of the new land who had broken with strong hammers the doors
of her prison away. They had destroyed for ever the programme
she had made for her life.
Elsie was filled with joy at the thought that the train was still
going on into the West. She wanted to go on for ever in a straight
line into the unknown. She fancied herself no longer on a train
and imagined she had become a winged thing flying through space.
Her long years of sitting alone by the rock on the New England
farm had got her into the habit of expressing her thoughts aloud.
Her thin voice broke the silence that lay over the sleeping car and
her father and mother, both also lying awake, sat up in their berth
to listen.
Tom Leander, the only living male representative of the new
generation of Leanders, was a loosely built man of forty inclined
to corpulency. At twenty he had married the daughter of a neigh-
bouring farmer, and when his wife inherited some money she and
Tom moved into the town of Apple Junction in Iowa where Tom
opened a grocery. The venture prospered as did Tom's matri-
monial venture. When his brother died in New York City and
his father, mother, and sister decided to come west Tom was already
the father of a daughter and four sons.
On the prairies north of town and in the midst of a vast level
stretch of corn fields, there was a partly completed brick house that
had belonged to a rich farmer named Russell, who had begun to
build the house intending to make it the most magnificent place in
the county, but when it was almost completed he had found him-
self without money and heavily in debt. The farm, consisting of
several hundred acres of corn land, had been split into three farms
and sold. No one had wanted the huge unfinished brick house.


SHERWOOD ANDERSON
147
For years it had stood vacant, its windows staring out over the
fields that had been planted almost up to the door.
In buying the Russell house Tom was moved by two motives.
He had a notion that in New England the Leanders had been
rather magnificent people. His memory of his father's place in
the Vermont valley was shadowy, but in speaking of it to his wife
he became very definite. “We had good blood in us, we Leanders,”
he said, straightening his shoulders. “We lived in a big house.
We were important people.”
Wanting his father and mother to feel at home in the new place,
Tom had also another motive. He was not a very energetic man
and, although he had done well enough as keeper of a grocery, his
success was largely due to the boundless energy of his wife. She
did not pay much attention to her household and her children, like
little animals, had to take care of themselves, but in any matter
concerning the store her word was law.
To have his father the owner of the Russell Place Tom felt would
establish him as a man of consequence in the eyes of his neighbours. .
"I can tell you what, they're used to a big house," he said to his
wife. “I tell you what, my people are used to living in style.”
The exaltation that had come over Elsie on the train wore away
in the presence of grey empty Iowa fields, but something of the
effect of it remained with her for months. In the big brick house
life went on much as it had in the tiny New England house where
she had always lived. The Leanders installed themselves in three
or four rooms on the ground floor. After a few weeks the furniture
that had been shipped by freight arrived and was hauled out from
town in one of Tom's grocery wagons. There were three or four
acres of ground covered with great piles of boards the unsuccessful
farmer had intended to use in the building of stables. Tom sent
men to haul the boards away and Elsie's father prepared to plant
a garden. They had come west in April and as soon as they were in-
stalled in the house ploughing and planting began in the fields near
by. The habit of a lifetime returned to the daughter of the house.
In the new place there was no gnarled orchard surrounded by a
half-ruined stone fence. All of the fences in all of the fields that
stretched away out of sight to the north, south, east, and west were


148
THE NEW ENGLANDER
made of wire and looked like spider webs against the blackness of
the ground when it had been freshly ploughed.
There was however the house itself. It was like an island rising
out of the sea. In an odd way the house, although it was less than
ten years old, was very old. Its unnecessary bigness represented
an old impulse in men. Elsie felt that. At the east side there
was a door leading to a stairway that ran into the upper part of
the house that was kept locked. Two or three stone steps led up
to it. Elsie could sit on the top step with her back against the
door and gaze into the distance without being disturbed. Almost
at her feet began the fields that seemed to go on and on for ever.
The fields were like the waters of a sea. Men came to plough and
plant. Giant horses moved in a procession across the prairies.
A
young man who drove six horses came directly toward her. She
was fascinated. The breasts of the horses as they came forward
with bowed heads seemed like the breasts of giants. The soft
spring air that lay over the fields was also like a sea. The horses
were giants walking on the floor of a sea. With their breasts they
pushed the waters of the sea before them. They were pushing the
waters out of the basin of the sea. The young man who drove
them was also a giant.
Elsie pressed her body against the closed door at the top of the
steps. In the garden back of the house she could hear her father
at work. He was raking dry masses of weeds off the ground pre-
paratory to spading the ground for a family garden. He had al-
ways worked in a tiny confined place and would do the same thing
here. In this vast open place he would work with small tools,
doing little things with infinite care, raising little vegetables. In
the house her mother would crochet little tidies. She herself would
be small. She would press her body against the door of the house,
try to get herself out of sight. Only the feeling that sometimes
took possession of her, and that did not form itself into a thought,
would be large.
The six horses turned at the fence and the outside horse got
entangled in the traces. The driver swore vigorously. Then he
turned and stared at the pale New Englander and with another
oath pulled the heads of the horses about and drove away into the
distance. The field in which he was ploughing contained two
hundred acres. Elsie did not wait for him to return but went into


SHERWOOD ANDERSON
149
the house and sat with folded arms in a room. The house she
thought was a ship floating in a sea on the floor of which giants
went up and down.
May came and then June. In the great fields work was always
going on and Elsie became somewhat used to the sight of the young
man in the field that came down to the steps. Sometimes when he
drove his horses down to the wire fence he smiled and nodded.
In the month of August, when it is very hot, the corn in Iowa
fields grows until the corn stalks resemble young trees.
The corn
fields become forests. The time for the cultivating of the corn
has passed and weeds grow thick between the corn rows. The
men with their giant horses have gone away. Over the immense
fields silence broods.
When the time of the laying-by of the crop came that first
summer after Elsie's arrival in the West her mind, partially
awakened by the strangeness of the railroad trip, awakened again.
She did not feel like a staid thin woman with a back like the back
of a drill sergeant, but like something new and as strange as the
new land into which she had come to live. For a time she did not
know what was the matter. In the field the corn had grown so
high that she could not see into the distance. The corn was like
a wall and the little bare spot of land on which her father's house
stood was like a house built behind the walls of a prison. For a
time she was depressed, thinking that she had come west into a
wide open country, only to find herself locked up more closely
than ever.
An impulse came to her. She arose and going down three or
four steps seated herself almost on a level with the ground.
Immediately she got a sense of release. She could not see over
the corn but she could see under it. The corn had long wide leaves
that met over the rows. The rows became long tunnels running
away into infinity. Out of the black ground grew weeds that
made a soft carpet of green. From above light sifted down. The
corn rows were mysteriously beautiful. They were warm passage-
ways running out into life. She got up from the steps, and walking
timidly to the wire fence that separated her from the field, put her
hand between the wires and took hold of one of the corn stalks.


150
THE NEW ENGLANDER
For some reason after she had touched the strong young stalk and
had held it for a moment firmly in her hand she grew afraid.
Running quickly back to the step she sat down and covered her
face with her hands. Her body trembled. She tried to imagine
herself crawling through the fence and wandering along one of the
passageways. The thought of trying the experiment fascinated
but at the same time terrified. She got quickly up and went into
the house.
One Saturday night in August Elsie found herself unable to
sleep. Thoughts, more definite than any she had ever known be-
fore, came into her mind. It was a quiet hot night and her bed
stood near a window. Her room was the only one the Leanders
occupied on the second floor of the house. At midnight a little
breeze came up from the south and when she sat up in bed the floor
of corn tassels lying below her line of sight looked in the moon-
light like the face of a sea just stirred by a gentle breeze.
A murmuring began in the corn and murmuring thoughts and
memories awoke in her mind. The long wide succulent leaves had
begun to dry in the intense heat of the August days and as the
wind stirred the corn they rubbed against each other. A call, far
away, as of a thousand voices arose. She imagined the voices
were like the voices of children. They were not like her brother
Tom's children, noisy boisterous little animals, but something quite
different, tiny little things with large eyes and thin sensitive hands.
One after another they crept into her arms.
She became so ex•
cited over the fancy that she sat up in bed and taking a pillow
into her arms held it against her breast. The figure of her cousin,
the pale sensitive young Leander who had lived with his father
in New York City and who had died at the age of twenty-three,
came sharply into her mind. It was as though the young man had
come suddenly into the room. She dropped the pillow and sat
waiting, intense, expectant.
Young Harry Leander had come to visit his cousin on the New
England farm during the late summer of the year before he died.
He had stayed there for a month and almost every afternoon had
gone with Elsie to sit by the rock at the back of the orchard. One
afternoon when they had both been for a long time silent he began


SHERWOOD ANDERSON
151
>
to talk. “I want to go live in the West,” he said. "I want to go
live in the West. I want to grow strong and be a man,” he
repeated. Tears came into his eyes.
They got up to return to the house, Elsie walking in silence
beside the young man.
The moment marked a high spot in her
life.
A strange trembling eagerness for something she had not
realized in her experience of life had taken possession of her.
They went in silence through the orchard but when they came to
the bayberry bush her cousin stopped in the path and turned to
face her. "I want you to kiss me,” he said eagerly, stepping
toward her.
A futtering uncertainty had taken possession of Elsie and had
been transmitted to her cousin. After he had made the sudden
and unexpected demand and had stepped so close to her that his
breath could be felt on her cheek, his own cheeks became scarlet
and his hand that had taken her hand trembled. “Well, I wish
I were strong I only wish I were strong,” he said hesitatingly
and turning walked away along the path toward the house.
And in the strange new house, set like an island in its sea of
corn, Harry Leander's voice seemed to arise again above the fancied
voices of the children that had been coming out of the fields.
Elsie got out of bed and walked up and down in the dim light
coming through the window. Her body trembled violently. “I
want you to kiss me,” the voice said again and to quiet it and to
quiet also the answering voice in herself she went to kneel by the
bed and taking the pillow again into her arms pressed it against
her face.
Tom Leander came with his wife and family to visit his father
and mother on Sundays. The family appeared at about ten o'clock
in the morning. When the wagon turned out of the road that ran
past the Russell Place Tom shouted. There was a field between
the house and the road and the wagon could not be seen as it came
along the narrow way through the corn. After Tom had shouted,
his daughter Elizabeth, a tall girl of sixteen, jumped out of the
wagon. All five children came tearing toward the house through
the corn. A series of wild shouts arose on the still morning air.
The groceryman had brought food from the store. When the


152
THE NEW ENGLANDER
a
a
>
horse had been unhitched and put into a shed he and his wife began
to carry packages into the house. The four Leander boys, accom-
panied by their sister, disappeared into the near-by fields. Three
dogs that had trotted out from town under the wagon accompanied
the children. Two or three children and occasionally a young man
from a neighbouring farm had come to join in the fun. Elsie's
sister-in-law dismissed them all with a wave of her hand. With
a wave of her hand she also brushed Elsie aside. Fires were
lighted and the house reeked with the smell of cooking. Elsie
went to sit on the step at the side of the house. The corn fields
that had been so quiet rang with shouts and with the barking of
dogs.
Tom Leander's oldest child, Elizabeth, was like her mother, full
of energy. She was thin and tall like the women of her father's
house but very strong and alive. In secret she wanted to be a lady
but when she tried her brothers, led by her father and mother,
made fun of her. “Don't put on airs,” they said. When she got
into the country with no one but her brothers and two or three
neighbouring farm boys she herself became a boy. With the boys
she went tearing through the fields, following the dogs in pursuit
of rabbits. Sometimes a young man came with the children from
a near-by farm. Then she did not know what to do with herself.
She wanted to walk demurely along the rows through the corn but
was afraid her brothers would laugh and in desperation outdid
the boys in roughness and noisiness. She screamed and shouted
and running wildly tore her dress on the wire fences as she
scrambled over in pursuit of the dogs. When a rabbit was caught
and killed she rushed in and tore it out of the grasp of the dogs.
The blood of the little dying animal dripped on her clothes. She
swung it over her head and shouted.
The farm hand who had worked all summer in the field within
sight of Elsie became enamoured of the young woman from town.
When the groceryman's family appeared on Sunday mornings he
also appeared but did not come to the house. When the boys and
dogs came tearing through the fields he joined them. He was also
self-conscious and did not want the boys to know the purpose of
his coming and when he and Elizabeth found themselves alone
together he became embarrassed. For a moment they walked to-
gether in silence. In a wide circle about them, in the forest of the
a


SHERWOOD ANDERSON
153
corn, ran the boys and dogs. The young man had something he
wanted to say, but when he tried to find words his tongue became
thick and his lips felt hot and dry. “Well,” he began, "let's you
and me,”
Words failed him and Elizabeth turned and ran after her
brothers and for the rest of the day he could not manage to get her
out of their sight. When he went to join them she became the
noisiest member of the party. A frenzy of activity took possession
of her. With hair hanging down her back, with clothes torn, and
with cheeks and hands scratched and bleeding she led her brothers
in the endless wild pursuit of the rabbits.
The Sunday in August that followed Elsie Leander's sleepless
night was hot and cloudy. In the morning she was half ill and
as soon as the visitors from town arrived she crept away to sit on the
step at the side of the house. The children ran away into the
fields. An almost overpowering desire to run with them, shouting
and playing along the corn rows took possession of her. She arose
and went to the back of the house. Her father was at work in
the garden, pulling weeds from between rows of vegetables. Inside
the house she could hear her sister-in-law moving about. On the
front porch her brother Tom was asleep with his mother beside him.
Elsie went back on the step and then arose and went to where the
corn came down to the fence. She climbed awkwardly over and
went a little way along one of the rows. Putting out her hand
she touched the firm hard stalks and then, becoming afraid, dropped
to her knees on the carpet of weeds that covered the ground. For
a long time she stayed thus listening to the voices of the children
in the distance.
An hour slipped away. Presently it was time for dinner and
her sister-in-law came to the back door and shouted. There was
an answering whoop from the distance and the children came run-
ning through the fields. They climbed over the fence and ran
shouting across her father's garden. Elsie also arose.
about to attempt to climb back over the fence unobserved when
she heard a rustling in the corn. Young Elizabeth Leander ap-
peared. Beside her walked the ploughman who but a few months
earlier had planted the corn in the field where Elsie now stood.
She was


154
THE NEW ENGLANDER
She could see the two people coming slowly along the rows. An
understanding had been established between them. The man
reached through between the corn stalks and touched the hand of
the girl who laughed awkwardly and running to the fence climbed
quickly over. In her hand she held the limp body of a rabbit the
dogs had killed.
The farm hand went away and when Elizabeth had gone into
the house Elsie climbed over the fence. Her niece stood just
within the kitchen door holding the dead rabbit by one leg. The
other leg had been torn away by the dogs. At sight of the New
England woman, who seemed to look at her with hard unsympa-
thetic eyes, she was ashamed and went quickly into the house. She
,
threw the rabbit upon a table in the parlour and then ran out of
the room.
Its blood ran out on the delicate flowers of a white
crocheted table cover that had been made by Elsie's mother.
The Sunday dinner with all the living Leanders gathered about
the table was gone through in a heavy lumbering silence. When
the dinner was over and Tom and his wife had washed the dishes
they went to sit with the older people on the front porch. Pres-
ently they were both asleep. Elsie returned to the step at the side
of the house but when the desire to go again into the cornfields
came sweeping over her she got up and went indoors.
The woman of thirty-five tip-toed about the big house like a
frightened child. The dead rabbit that lay on the table in the
parlour had become cold and stiff. Its blood had dried on the
white table cover. She went upstairs but did not go to her own
A spirit of adventure had hold of her. In the upper part
of the house there were many rooms and in some of them no glass
had been put into the windows. The windows had been boarded
up and narrow streaks of light crept in through the cracks between
the boards.
Elsie tip-toed up the flight of stairs past the room in which she
slept and opening doors went into other rooms. Dust lay thick
on the floors. In the silence she could hear her brother snoring as
he slept in the chair on the front porch. From what seemed a far
away place there came the shrill cries of the children. The cries
became soft. They were like the cries of unborn children that had
called to her out of the fields on the night before.
Into her mind came the intense silent figure of her mother sitting
room.
a


SHERWOOD ANDERSON
155
on the porch beside her son and waiting for the day to wear itself
out into night. The thought brought a lump into her throat. She
wanted something and did not know what it was. Her own mood
frightened her. In a windowless room at the back of the house
one of the boards over a window had been broken and a bird had
flown in and become imprisoned.
The presence of the woman frightened the bird. It flew wildly
about. Its beating wings stirred up dust that danced in the air.
Elsie stood perfectly still, also frightened, not by the presence of
the bird but by the presence of life. Like the bird she was a pri-
soner. The thought gripped her. She wanted to go outdoors where
her niece Elizabeth walked with the young ploughman through the
corn, but was like the bird in the room-a prisoner. She moved
restlessly about. The bird flew back and forth across the room.
It alighted on the window sill near the place where the board was
She stared into the frightened eyes of the bird that
in turn stared into her eyes. Then the bird flew away, out through
,
the window, and Elsie turned and ran nervously downstairs and
out into the yard. She climbed over the wire fence and ran with
stooped shoulders along one of the tunnels.
broken away.
over.
Elsie ran into the vastness of the cornfields filled with but one
desire. She wanted to get out of her life and into some new and
sweeter life she felt must be hidden away somewhere in the fields.
After she had run a long way she came to a wire fence and crawled
Her hair became unloosed and fell down over her shoulders.
Her cheeks became flushed and for the moment she looked like a
young girl. When she climbed over the fence she tore a great
hole in the front of her dress. For a moment her tiny breasts
were exposed and then her hand clutched and held nervously the
sides of the tear. In the distance she could hear the voices of the
boys and the barking of the dogs. A summer storm had been
threatening for days and now black clouds had begun to spread
themselves over the sky. As she ran nervously forward, stopping
.
to listen and then running on again, the dry corn blades brushed
against her shoulders and a fine shower of yellow dust from the
corn tassels fell on her hair. A continued crackling noise accom-


156
THE NEW ENGLANDER
panied her progress. The dust made a golden crown about her
head. From the sky overhead a low rumbling sound, like the
growling of giant dogs, came to her ears.
The thought that having at last ventured into the corn she
would never escape became fixed in the mind of the running
woman. Sharp pains shot through her body. Presently she was
compelled to stop and sit on the ground. For a long time she
sat with her closed eyes. Her dress became soiled. Little insects
that live in the ground under the corn came out of their holes and
crawled over her legs.
Following some obscure impulse the tired woman threw her-
self on her back and lay still with closed eyes. Her fright passed.
It was warm and close in the room-like tunnels. The pain in her
side went away.
She opened her eyes and between the wide green
corn blades could see patches of a black threatening sky. She did
not want to be alarmed and so closed her eyes again. Her thin
hand no longer gripped the tear in her dress and her tiny breasts
were exposed. They expanded and contracted in little spasmodic
jerks. She threw her hands back over her head and lay still.
It seemed to Elsie that hours passed as she lay thus, quiet and
passive under the corn. Deep within her there was a feeling that
something was about to happen, something that would lift her
out of herself, that would tear her away from her past and the
past of her people. Her thoughts were not definite. She lay
still and waited as she had waited for days and months by the
rock at the back of the orchard on the Vermont farm when she
was a girl. A deep grumbling noise went on in the sky over-
head but the sky and everything she had ever known seemed very
far away, no part of herself.
After a long silence, when it seemed to her that she was lost
from herself as in a dream, Elsie heard a man's voice calling.
“Aho, aho, aho," shouted the voice and after another period of
silence there arose answering voices and then the sound of bodies
crashing through the corn and the excited chatter of children. A A
dog came running along the row where she lay and stood beside
her. His cold nose touched her face and she sat up.
The dog
ran away. The Leander boys passed. She could see their bare
legs flashing in and out across one of the tunnels. Her brother
had become alarmed by the rapid approach of the thunder storm


SHERWOOD ANDERSON
157
and wanted to get his family to town. His voice kept calling
from the house and the voices of the children answered from the
fields.
Elsie sat on the ground with her hands pressed together. An
odd feeling of disappointment had possession of her. She arose
and walked slowly along in the general direction taken by the
children. She came to a fence and crawled over, tearing her dress
in a new place. One of her stockings had become unloosed and
had slipped down over her shoe top. The long sharp weeds had
scratched her leg so that it was criss-crossed with red lines, but
she was not conscious of any pain.
The distraught woman followed the children until she came
within sight of her father's house and then stopped and again sat
on the ground. There was another loud crash of thunder and
Tom Leander's voice called again, this time half angrily. The
name of the girl Elizabeth was shouted in loud masculine tones
that rolled and echoed like the thunder along the aisles under the
corn.
And then Elizabeth came into sight accompanied by the young
ploughman. They stopped near Elsie and the man took the girl
into his arms. At the sound of their approach Elsie had thrown
herself face downward on the ground and had twisted herself into
a position where she could see without being seen. When their
lips met her tense hands grasped one of the corn stalks. Her lips
pressed themselves into the dust. When they had gone on their
way she raised her head. A dusty powder covered her lips.
What seemed another long period of silence fell over the fields.
A strong wind began to blow and the corn rocked back and forth.
The murmuring voices of unborn children, her imagination had
created in the whispering fields, became a vast shout. The wind
blew harder and harder. The corn stalks were twisted and bent.
Elizabeth went thoughfully out of the field and climbing the fence
confronted her father. “Where you been? What you been a
doing?” he asked. "Don't you know we got to get out of here?”
When Elizabeth went toward the house Elsie followed, creep-
ing on her hands and knees like a little animal, and when she had
come within sight of the fence surrounding the house she sat on
the ground and put her hands over her face. Something within
herself was being twisted and whirled about as the tops of the


158
THE NEW ENGLANDER
swer.
corn stalks were now being twisted and whirled by the wind. She
sat so that she did not look toward the house and when she opened
her eyes she could again see along the long mysterious aisles.
Her brother, with his wife and children, went away. By turn-
ing her head Elsie could see them driving at a trot out of the yard
back of her father's house. With the going of the younger woman
the farm house in the midst of the cornfield rocked by the winds
seemed the most desolate place in the world.
Her mother came out at the back door of the house. She ran
to the steps where she knew her daughter was in the habit of sitting
and then in alarm began to call. It did not occur to Elsie to an-
The voice of the older woman did not seem to have any-
thing to do with herself. It was a thin voice and was quickly
lost in the wind and in the crashing sound that arose out of the
fields. With her head turned toward the house Elsie stared at
her mother who ran wildly around the house and then went in-
doors. The back door of the house went shut with a bang.
The storm that had been threatening broke with a roar. Broad
sheets of water swept over the cornfields. Sheets of water swept
over the woman's body. The storm that had for years been gath-
ering in her also broke. Sobs arose out of her throat. She aban-
doned herself to a storm of grief that was only partially grief.
Tears ran out of her eyes and made little furrows through the dust
on her face. In the lulls that occasionally came in the storm she
raised her head and heard, through the tangled mass of wet hair
that covered her ears and above the sound of millions of rain-
drops that alighted on the earthen floor inside the house of the
corn, the thin voices of her mother and father calling to her out
of the Leander house.


IN DEFENSE OF IMPERFECT VIRTUE
BY BENEDETTO CROCE
Translated from the Italian by Arthur Livingston
ON
a
NE would think from the frequency with which all of us
have to claim indulgence for our share of human frailty that
the rigorist in ethics would be a hard man to find; yet he is always
popping up whichever way we turn.
To the excessive annoyance
of people of good sense and to the despair of candid trusting souls,
he is forever on hand, ready, however loathe we are to follow his
pointing finger, to turn up the corner of the tapestry we have been
admiring and compel us to count the intricate roughnesses on the
under-side. Here is a man whom you have ventured to praise as
strong. Our rigorist will show how really weak he is. Here is
an act you may have thought courageous—he will lay bare, one
by one, the cowardly precedents leading up to it-expert in fer-
reting out selfishness where you have seen generosity, and mean-
ness where you have found nobility and self-sacrifice. How often
were we consoled during the late war with the forced reflection
that war really has no heroes--that the soldier goes ahead because
he does not dare run away; that he faces death because he is so
crushed, physically, mentally, and morally, that life and death are
alike indifferent to him; that not the sense of duty but personal
vanity, lies at the bottom of his sublime achievement ?
And the worst of it is that, for the most part, all the things the
rigorist says are, taken one by one, unanswerable and true. But
the peculiarity of such truth is, that instead of illuminating and
giving courage and joy--the inevitable effect of any serious dictum
of truth-it fills your mind with confusion and your soul with
gloom, and you feel, somehow, that all you have been told is quite
,
true, but, at the same time, utterly false.
Where, in fact, does the rigorist take us? Must we deny the
reality of any good? But the human soul, in every one of its
impulses, affirms that the good exists-on no other premise would
it function at all. Is our cynic holding up such an exalted ideal


160
IN DEFENSE OF IMPERFECT VIRTUE
of virtue that it is never realized in human life? But, excuse me,
an ideal unrealizable in human life, is no ideal at all-it is just
plain humbug. Or is he depreciating the vile present to glorify
a wonderful past, or, even, condemning present and past with re-
ference to a radiant future we should strive toward? But the
forces operative in the present have been and will be operative in
past and future, and reality is always one. Isn't the situation,
after all, more simple? The rigorist gets us nowhere, and what
he says is certainly false.
Treating the rigorist with an indulgence and a justice he fails
to use toward other people, we may overlook the psychological
motivations, often base enough, of his censoriousness, and rest con-
tent with pointing out the fallacy that besets the rigorist's mind.
The premise of all such criticism is that virtue is a perfect thing,
and that, to be thus perfect, it must come into being instantan-
eously, and proceed, in a straight line, without hesitation, without
,
backsliding, without compromise, pure in its initial stage, pure in
the stage of its completion-one gets the picture of a gymnast
executing a somersault backwards—to present itself to rigoristic
analysis and receive the rigorist's diploma as something absolutely
above reproach.
A beautiful conception of conduct indeed, unless you choose to
call it about the ugliest imaginable! Beautiful as a mechanism,
but ugly as a living organism; beautiful as an attraction, but ugly
as a reality; beautiful, as something which does not exist, in the
eyes of people who have such poor taste as to like non-existant
things; but very ugly for people who demand, as the essential pre-
requisite of their admiring a thing, that the thing, to begin with,
have being.
Life, as we all know, is not perfect-for the very reason that
life is life, development, struggle, while only the non-living, the
dead, that which is free from struggle, is perfect. What gives
rise to any act of the will or to any tendency of character? Is it
love for that vacuous abstraction which the rigorist calls moral
perfection? Is it that imaginary leap out into the void? Or is
conduct not, rather, an engraftment on the trunk of our personal
impulses and passions, hot with the blood of life, and reeking with
the grime of life, of the life of which conduct is not the negation,
but a function and an expression? Only thus, indeed, does con-


BENEDETTO CROCE
161
duct arise, and therefore conduct is born of struggle, and struggle
means hesitation, wavering, yielding, failure, defeat; all of which,
again, mean struggle anew; so that from defeat we rise to repent-
ance, we recover our grip on things, we progress, we reach a higher
point than the level from which we fell, we fail again and we
recover again, and again, and again, and again in a constant ef-
fort towards the better.
And sometimes the enemy we are fighting, our selfishness, our
self-seeking, is so strong we dare not meet it face to face-we com-
promise, we choose to fight on a somewhat lower level, setting one
low impulse off against another, trying to weaken the impetuous-
ness of the one with the violence of the other. More of us than
are aware of it carry on struggles of just this kind. How many
people do excellent things, really because they are looking for the
advantages that come from public approval, or refrain from doing
wrong because they are afraid of public condemnation, or be-
cause they think of those they love, or even because they pity
the humiliation of the man they hate when he is forced to
recognize their merit and their success! Why should we be sur-
prised that the soldier seems to require dire punishments to insure
his obedience, when even the man who is attracted to letters and
art often finds his initial impulse failing and has recourse to ex-
pedients of constraints? Alfieri certainly had the "tragic fury”
if anyone ever had. Well, his own work often bored him so that
he would cut his hair off short, so that he would not dare go out
of doors; and at other times he had himself tied into his chair.
Such, surely, are compromises, ennobled of course by the end they
hold in view, and directly opposite to the "directions of intent”-
the lines of least resistance of Jesuitical ethics; for whereas the
Jesuitical compromise adapts ideals to personal impulses and
aspirations, these other compromises try to use the lower motiva-
tion in the service of the ideal.
Compromise—which is the wormwood in the bitter cup
operates in the moral life as the temporary expedient. It is the
drug in the crisis of fever, the bridge over the unfordable torrent.
And ethical training strives to strengthen and consolidate the power
of the will, to endow it with a capacity, a virtue, which will make
the need of compromise less frequent, and transform the compro-
mise, which is an alliance between the high and the low in a man,


162
IN DEFENSE OF IMPERFECT VIRTUE
a
into a predominance of the higher over the lower. And when a
man has accomplished that transformation, we call him a good
man, an upright man, a hero, a saint.
But he is such only in the eyes of the world, in the eyes of other
people, for all heroism, all saintliness, all virtue, has a deal of leg-
end attached to it. In his own conscience the hero does not see him-
self as heroic, nor the saint as saintly, nor the good man as upright.
Where other people do not observe defects, he is perfectly aware
of them; where other people are not conscious of impurity, he feels
and is ashamed of it; where other people notice only courage, he
remembers cowardliness and shrinkings. And that is why the saint
has scruples and remorse, why the good man is humble and charit-
able, and the hero is modest and unassuming.
When we say "other people,” here, we of course mean people
of good sense, people of candour and trustfulness; for the ethical
rigorists never see any of the saint's saintliness, nor of the hero's
heroism; their eyes are forever fixed on the defect, on the weak-
ness, on the impurity; and in this they think they are very shrewd,
when in reality they are very obtuse, if obtuseness consist in losing
sight of the action in the maze of its incidents, of the big in the
little, of the creative drama of humanity in the hesitations, the
waverings, the set-backs, which attend every creative effort of the
race. They look at things that way because they have a moral
ideal in mind which would serve admirably as a jack-in-the-box
of pure and perfect virtue-a splendid mechanism of elastic steel;
but we, who like men with spines made not of steel but of bone
and marrow, look up, instead, to another virtue, the only virtue
that is real, the only virtue that is virtue--the virtue, in other
words, that is imperfect.



A WOOD CARVING.
BY WILLIAM ZORACH





AMERICANS
BY LAWRENCE VAIL
Americans
Of shaven handsome visage,
Of pompous cautious eloquence, ,
Forget your jaws,
Your safety razors,
The morning's business puzzle.
Bite foolish wind,
Nurse fairy blisters,
Cough doom and roman candles.
Take her,
Your rich expensive Dorothy
Not to the tabernacle,
Nor to the Midnight Giddies;
Wield all of her:
Petticoats, chaste legs, stilted soul
Across your knees
And spank her-humorously.
Tell her that virgins should not aggravate
By hiding beneath dignity and silks
Fair blood and gentle bosom.
Proud American womanhood should smart
To furnish wild sweet wenches.
Firmly, strip her of poise and underwear,
Ply oft and hard your manly palm
Against her soft pink places;
Thus break to-morrow's haughty neck
On yesterday's glum altar.


DUST FOR SPARROWS
BY REMY DE GOURMONT
Translated by Ezra Pound
130
Earthly justice can't be much good among people who have ac-
cepted as divine justice a system wherein the sins of the fathers
are visited upon the children, and for whom a scoundrel respecting
their dogmas and following their rites is of more worth than a
saint who hasn't the luck to be a believer.
131
The church has had this profound idea, namely that crime does
not exclude redemption nor even sanctity.
132
Upon the day of aridity, shadow, and sadness, perhaps an ember
of love conserved beneath so many ashes, will set the world on fire,
and cause life, purified by grief, to be reborn warmer and more
agreeable than ever.
133
One of the most decided partisans of the death penalty I have
ever met confessed to me one day that he had insisted on his mis-
tress having three abortions, and that she had died of the com-
plications ensuing upon the third intervention. He sighed, add-
ing, "Poor little thing, I was very fond of her.”
134
The only cheap and quick justice is that one can do oneself, with-
out, of course, lèse-society.
135
At the marriage of a French prince and a Spanish infanta, one


REMY DE GOURMONT
165
of the items of the celebration was to have been a grilling of Jews
and of people who had fallen back into heresy. It was only omit-
ted at the request of the French ambassador; they had to be con-
tent with a bull-fight.
136
The ferocity which marks the Spanish fanatic is not European;
it is Asiatic and African and must have been brought in by the
Moors and converted Jews.
137
There is no doubt that there should be a difference between the
spirit of justice and its legal application; as for example when
this serves to open public life to a family reduced to misery.
138
Superstition is rather more human than religion, because it has
no morality.
139
There is a science; there is especially an art which cannot read.
140
Torquemada is the best demonstration of the affinity between
the temperaments of fanatic and assassin.
141
It is easy to understand that those who have had a childhood
unhappy and full of mortifications and injustices have even to an
advanced age a soul melancholy and yet avid of pleasures.
142
The social life in superior civilizations is too harsh, too arid, too
sad to be bearable without the aid of excitements. Wine is the
best of these stimulants, being agreeable, noble, and having the
sanction of antiquity.


166
DUST FOR SPARROWS
143
All vices are of interior origin. Cards do not make the gambler
nor a bottle the drunkard.
144
If one deprived humanity of the pleasures of good wine, life
would be rather like catholicism without fiestas and without art.
145
If gambling to amuse oneself or drinking a few glasses of wine
were enough to turn a normal man into a drunkard or a gambler,
who in this world would be without these two vices?
146
To-day as in Horace' time good wine continues to be the con-
solation of life, and the sole means of evoking, for an instant,
happy hours, or the fevers of love, when youth is no more but a
memory.
147
Bernard Palissy said that all birth pangs are painful, especially
those of intelligence. Nevertheless, the creative fever gives trans-
ports of enthusiasm and divine inebriations.
148
The art which cannot, in a verse, a phrase, a melody, a brush-
stroke evoke all of an instant of life may be a goldsmith's product,
it is not, at any rate, art.
149
The Napeoleonic epopee was really a resurrection of Julius
Caesar; transferred from Rome to Paris and having Gauls to
carry his triumphant eagles . . . to the borders of Europe. The
war of 1870 was the return of the barbarians. Will we see Caesar
resuscitated or will the Latin eagles remain for ever vanquished by
the other proud eagles?
.


REMY DE GOURMONT
167
150
Various of the books ridiculed by Cervantes in Don Quixote
were used by Wagner in writing his musical poems. This shows
that one may have plastic genius and the highest sense of the comic
without possessing an atom of poetry.
151
The Italians are the cleverest interpreters of the grand passions.
They are perhaps the only people who can play Shakespeare. But
he who can do the greater cannot do the less, although Novelli has
almost proved the contrary. One must not put a race horse in
carriage shafts or demand pirouettes of an elephant.
a
152
The sanguinary vehemence of the southerner is not in most cases
the outburst of a brutal temperament. May it not be a great love
of justice, a great cult of friendship which makes him drive a knife
into the heart of a companion who is dishonest in business, cheater
at cards, or disloyal in affections ?
153
A sacred orator has told us that one of the greatest proofs of
the infinitude of God's kindness is that he has put poison in the
serpent's mouth and not on the lips of woman.
154
If women suspected the amenities mental and even spoken which
men address to them in the impatience of the delay?
155
One sole thing distinguishes mankind from the animals, making
man the most ferocious of all, especially against his own species:
it is fanaticism.
156
Many people, moreover intelligent ones, care far more for what
men say than for what they do.


168
DUST FOR SPARROWS
157
Charity as practised in Christian countries is good in itself and
even indispensible, but rests in final analysis the charity of a
master who, having over-driven his slaves all their lives, sends
them to hospital when they are ill or to an asylum when old age
has made them impotent.
158
Hearts corrodible by human tears are condemned to all the
defeats, for true tears are abundant and false tears are a deluge.
Beware of imitations.
159
At passing into adolescence, brought up as they have been in
accordance to a strict moral code which exalts purity of sentiments,
children generally suffer and are indignant at seeing not the incon-
sequence of strangers but of their own parents. It must be a fairly
bad world where the fathers find themselves obliged to teach their
children a moral code which they despise; inculcating conditions
which, after their entry into life, the children will respect no more
than they themselves do.
160
The right to revolution, legitimate though it may be, like that
of legitimate defence, has been greatly discredited by having been
so much abused.
161
Evidently the English suffragettes are in a bad way. Love is
really the goal of all human struggles; if women had penetrated
this verity they might easily have had all the world's government
in their hands.
To be continued


REX
BY D. H. LAWRENCE
Sever
INCE every family has its black sheep, it almost follows that
every man must have a sooty uncle. Lucky if he hasn't two.
However, it is only with my mother's brother that we are concerned.
She had loved him dearly when he was a little blond boy. When
he
grew up black, she was always vowing she would never speak to
him again. Yet when he put in an appearance, after years of ab-
sence, she invariably received him in a festive mood, and was even
flirty with him.
He rolled up one day in a dog-cart, when I was a small boy. He
was large and bullet-headed and blustering, and this time, sporty.
Sometimes he was rather literary, sometimes coloured with business.
But this time he was in checks, and was sporty. We viewed him
from a distance.
The upshot was, would we rear a pup for him. Now my mother
detested animals about the house. She could not bear the mix-up
of human with animal life. Yet she consented to bring up the pup.
My uncle had taken a large, vulgar public-house in a large and
vulgar town. It came to pass that I must fetch the pup. Strange
for me, a member of the Band of Hope, to enter the big, noisy,
smelly plate-glass and mahogany public-house. It was called The
Good Omen. Strange to have my uncle towering over me in the
passage, shouting “Hello Johnny, what d'yer want?" He didn't
know me. Strange to think he was my mother's brother, and that
he had his bouts when he read Browning aloud with emotion and
éclat.
I was given tea in a narrow, uncomfortable sort of living-room,
half kitchen. Curious that such a palatial pub should show such
miserable private accomodations, but so it was. There was I, un-
happy, and glad to escape with the soft fat pup. It was winter-
.
time, and I wore a big-flapped black overcoat, half cloak. Under
the cloak-sleeves I hid the puppy, who trembled. It was Saturday,
and the train was crowded, and he whimpered under my coat. I
sat in mortal fear of being hauled out for travelling without a dog-
a


170
REX
a
a
>
a
ticket. However, we arrived, and my torments were for nothing.
The others were wildly excited over the puppy. He was small
and fat and white, with a brown-and-black head: a fox terrier.
My father said he had a lemon head—some such mysterious tech-
nical phraseology. It wasn't lemon at all, but coloured like a field
bee. And he had a black spot at the root of his spine.
It was Saturday night-bath-night. He crawled on the hearth-
rug like a fat white tea-cup, and licked the bare toes that had just
been bathed.
"He ought to be called Spot,” said one. But that was too ordi-
nary. It was a great question, what to call him.
“Call him Rex—the King,” said my mother, looking down on
the fat, animated little tea-cup, who was chewing my sister's little
toe and making her squeal with joy and tickles. We took the name
in all seriousness.
“Rex-the King!” We thought it was just right. Not for
years did I realize that is was a sarcasm on my mother's part. She
must have wasted some twenty years or more of irony, on our in-
curable naïveté.
It wasn't a successful name, really. Because my father, and all
the people in the street failed completely to pronounce the mono-
syllable Rex. They all said Rax. And it always distressed me.
It always suggested to me seaweed, and rack-and-suin. Poor Rex!
We loved him dearly. The first night we woke to hear him
weeping and whinneying in loneliness at the foot of the stairs.
When it could be borne no more, I slipped down for him, and he
slept under the sheets.
"I won't have that little beast in the beds. Beds are not for
dogs,” declared my mother callously.
.
“He's as good as we are!" we cried, injured.
“Whether he is or not, he's not going in the beds.”
I think now, my mother scorned us for our lack of pride. We
were a little infra dig., we children.
The second night, however, Rex wept the same and in the same
way was comforted. The third night we heard our father plod
downstairs, heard several slaps administered to the yelping, dis-
mayed puppy, and heard the amiable, but to us heartless voice
saying "Shut it then! Shut thy noise, 'st hear? Stop in thy basket,
stop there!"
"It's a shame!" we shouted, in muffled rebellion, from the sheets.


D. H. LAWRENCE
171
She was
"I'll give you shame, if you don't hold your noise and go to
sleep,” called our mother from her room. Whereupon we shed
angry tears and went to sleep. But there was a tension.
"Such a houseful of idiots would make me detest the little beast,
even if he was better than he is,” said my mother.
But as a matter of fact, she did not detest Rexie at all. She
only had to pretend to do so, to balance our adoration. And in
truth, she did not care for close contact with animals.
too fastidious. My father, however, would take on a real dog's
voice, talking to the puppy: a funny, high, sing-song falsetto which
he seemed to produce at the top of his head. “'S a pretty little dog!
's a pretty !
little doggy!-ay-yes!—he is, yes!—Wag thy strunt,
then! Wag thy strunt, Raxie!-Ha-ha! Nay, tha munna—”
This last as the puppy, wild with excitement at the strange falsetto
voice, licked my father's nostrils and bit my father's nose with his
,
sharp little teeth.
“ 'E makes blood come,” said my father.
”
.
"Serves you right for being so silly with him,” said my mother.
It was odd to see her as she watched the man, my father, crouching
and talking to the little dog and laughing strangely when the little
creature bit his nose and toused his beard. What does a woman
think of her husband at such a moment?
My mother amused herself over the names we called him.
“He's an angel-he's a little butterfly-Rexie, my sweet!”
"Sweet! A dirty little object!” interpolated my mother. She
and he had a feud from the first. Of course he chewed boots and
worried our stockings and swallowed our garters. The moment
we took off our stockings he would dart away with one, we after
him. Then as he hung, growling vociferously, at one end of the
stocking, we at the other, we would cry:
“Look at him, mother! He'll make holes in it again.” Where-
”
upon my mother darted at him and spanked him sharply.
“Let go, Sir, you destructive little fiend.”
But he didn't let go. He began to growl with real rage, and
,
hung on viciously. Mite as he was, he defied her with a manly
,
fury. He did not hate her, nor she him. But they had one long
battle with one another.
"I'll teach you, my Jockey! Do you think I'm going to spend
life darning after your destructive little teeth! I'll show you
if I will!”
my


172
REX
But Rexie only growled more viciously. They both became
really angry, whilst we children expostulated earnestly with both.
He would not let her take the stocking from him.
“You should tell him properly, mother. He won't be driven,”
we said.
“I'll drive him further than he bargains for. I'll drive him out
of my sight for ever, that I will,” declared my mother, truly angry.
He would put her into a real temper, with his tiny, growling de-
fiance.
“He's sweet! A Rexie, a little Rexie!”
“A filthy little nuisance! Don't think I'll put up with him.”
And to tell the truth, he was dirty at first. How could he be
otherwise, so young! But my mother hated him for it. And per-
haps this was the real start of their hostility. For he lived in the
house with us. He would wrinkle his nose and show his tiny dag-
ger-teeth in fury when he was thwarted, and his growls of real
battle-rage against my mother rejoiced us as much as they angered
her. But at last she caught him in flagrante. She pounced on him,
rubbed his nose in the mess, and Aung him out into the yard. He
yelped with shame and disgust and indignation. I shall never for-
get the sight of him as he rolled over, then tried to turn his head
away from the disgust of his own muzzle, shaking his little snout
with a sort of horror, and trying to sneeze it off. My sister gave
a yell of despair, and dashed out with a rag and a pan of water,
weeping wildly. She sat in the middle of the yard with the be-
fouled puppy, and shedding bitter tears she wiped him and washed
him clean. Loudly she reproached my mother.
mother. "Look how much
bigger you are than he is. It's a shame, it's a shame!”
"You ridiculous little lunatic, you've undone all the good it
would do him, with your soft ways. Why is my life made a curse
with animals! Haven't I enough as it is—”
There was a subdued tension afterwards. Rex was a little white
chasm between us and our parent.
He became clean. But then another tragedy loomed. He must
be docked. His floating puppy-tail must be docked short. This
time my father was the enemy. My mother agreed with us that
it was an unnecessary cruelty. But my father was adamant. "The
dog 'll look a fool all his life, if he's not docked.” And there was
no getting away from it. To add to the horror, poor Rex's tail
a


D. H. LAWRENCE
173
must be bitten off. Why bitten? we asked aghast. We were as-
sured that biting was the only way. A man would take the little
tail and just nip it through with his teeth, at a certain joint. My
father lifted his lips and bared his incisors, to suit the description.
We shuddered. But we were in the hands of fate.
Rex was carried away, and a man called Rowbotham bit off the
superfluity of his tail in the Nags Head, for a quart of best and
bitter. We lamented our poor diminished puppy, but agreed to
find him more manly and comme il faut. We should always have
been ashamed of his little whip of a tail, if it had not been short-
ened. My father said it had made a man of him.
Perhaps it had. For now his true nature came out. And his
true nature, like so much else, was dual. First he was a fierce,
canine little beast, a beast of rapine and blood. He longed to hunt,
savagely. He lusted to set his teeth in his prey. It was no joke
with him. The old canine Adam stood first in him, the dog with
fangs and glaring eyes. He flew at us when we annoyed him. He
flew at all intruders, particularly the postman. He was almost a a
peril to the neighbourhood. But not quite. Because close second
in his nature stood that fatal need to love, the besoin d'aimer which
at last makes an end of liberty. He had a terrible, terrible neces-
sity to love, and this trammelled the native, savage hunting beast
which he was. He was torn between two great impulses: the native
impulse to hunt and kill, and the strange, secondary, supervening
impulse to love and obey. If he had been left to my father and
mother, he would have run wild and got himself shot. As it was,
he loved us children with a fierce, joyous love. And we loved him.
When we came home from school we would see him standing at
the end of the entry, cocking his head wistfully at the open country
in front of him, and meditating whether to be off or not: a white,
inquiring little figure, with green savage freedom in front of him.
A cry from a far distance from one of us, and like a bullet he hurled
himself down the road, in a mad game. Seeing him coming, my
sister invariably turned and fled, shrieking with delighted terror.
And he would leap straight up her back, and bite her and tear her
clothes. But it was only an ecstasy of savage love, and she knew it.
She didn't care if he tore her pinafores. But my mother did.
My mother was maddened by him. He was a little demon. At
the least provocation, he few. You had only to sweep the floor,
а
a


174
REX
and he bristled and sprang at the broom. Nor would he let go.
With his scruff erect and his nostrils snorting rage, he would turn
up the whites of his eyes at my mother, as she wrestled at the other
end of the broom. “Leave go, Sir, leave go!” She wrestled and
stamped her foot, and he answered with horrid growls. In the end
it was she who had to let go. Then she flew at him, and he flew at
her. All the time we had him, he was within a hair's-breadth of
savagely biting her. And she knew it. Yet he always kept suf-
ficient self-control.
We children loved his temper. We would drag the bones from
his mouth, and put him into such paroxysms of rage that he would
twist his head right over and lay it on the ground upside-down, be-
cause he didn't know what to do with himself, the savage was so
strong in him and he must fly at us. “He'll fly at your throat one
of these days,” said my father. Neither he nor my mother dared
have touched Rex's bone. It was enough to see him bristle and roll
the whites of his eyes when they came near.
How near he must
have been to driving his teeth right into us, cannot be told. He
was a horrid sight snarling and crouching at us. But we only
laughed and rebuked him. And he would whimper in the sheer
torment of his need to attack us.
He never did hurt us. He never hurt anybody, though the
neighbourhood was terrified of him. But he took to hunting. To
my mother's disgust, he would bring large dead bleeding rats and
lay them on the hearth-rug, and she had to take them up on a shovel.
For he would not remove them. Occasionally he brought a mangled
rabbit, and sometimes, alas, fragmentary poultry. We were in ter-
ror of prosecution. Once he came home bloody and feathery and
rather sheepish-looking. We cleaned him and questioned him and
abused him. Next day we heard of six dead ducks. Thank
heaven no one had seen him.
But he was disobedient. If he saw a hen he was off, and calling
would not bring him back. He was worst of all with my father,
who would take him walks on Sunday morning. My mother would
not walk a yard with him. Once, walking with my father, he
rushed off at some sheep in a field. My father yelled in vain. The
dog was at the sheep, and meant business. My father crawled
through the hedge, and was upon him in time. And now the man
was in a paroxysm of rage. He dragged the little beast into the
road and thrashed him with a walking stick.


D. H. LAWRENCE
175
“Do you know you're thrashing that dog unmercifully?” said a
passer-by.
“Ay, an' mean to," shouted
my
father.
The curious thing was that Rex did not respect my father any
the more, for the beatings he had from him. He took much more
heed of us children, always.
But he let us down also. One fatal Saturday he disappeared.
We hunted and called, but no Rex. We were bathed, and it was
bed-time, but we would not go to bed. Instead we sat in a row in
our night-dresses on the sofa, and wept without stopping. This
drove our mother mad.
“Am I going to put up with it? Am I? And all for that hate-
ful little beast of a dog! He shall go! If he's not gone now, he
shall go.'
Our father came in late, looking rather queer, with his hat over
his eye. But in his staccato tippled fashion he tried to be consoling.
"Never mind, my duckie, I s'll look for him in the morning.”
Sunday came-Oh, such a Sunday. We cried, and didn't eat.
We scoured the land, and for the first time realized how empty and
wide the earth is, when you're looking for something. My father
walked for many miles—all in vain. Sunday dinner, with rhu-
barb pudding, I remember, and an atmosphere of abject misery
that was unbearable.
“ "Never,” said my mother, "never shall an animal set foot in this
house again, while I live. I knew what it would be! I knew."
The day wore on, and it was the black gloom of bed-time, when
we heard a scratch and an impudent little whine at the door. In
trotted Rex, mud-black, disreputable, and impudent. His air of
off-hand "how d'ye do!” was indescribable. He trotted round with
suffisance, wagging his tail as if to say “Yes, I've come back. But
I didn't need to. I can carry on remarkably well by myself.”
Then he walked to his water, and drank noisily and ostentatiously.
It was rather a slap in the eye for us.
He disappeared once or twice in this fashion. We never knew
where he went. And we began to feel that his heart was not so
golden as we had imagined it.
But one fatal day re-appeared my uncle and the dog-cart. He
whistled to Rex, and Rex trotted up. But when he wanted to
examine the lusty, sturdy dog, Rex became suddenly still, then
sprang free. Quite jauntily he trotted round—but out of reach of


176
REX
.
my uncle. He leaped up, licking our faces, and trying to make us
play.
“Why what ha' you done wi' the dog-You've made a fool of
him. He's softer than grease. You've ruined him. You've
made a damned fool of him,” shouted my uncle.
Rex was captured and hauled off to the dog-cart and tied to the
seat. He was in a frenzy. He yelped and shrieked and struggled,
and was hit on the head, hard, with the butt-end of my uncle's whip,
which only made him struggle more frantically. So we saw him
driven away, our beloved Rex, frantically, madly fighting to get
to us from the high dog-cart, and being knocked down, whilst we
stood in the street in mute despair.
After which, black tears, and a little wound which is still alive
in our hearts.
I saw Rex only once again, when I had to call just once at The
Good Omen. He must have heard my voice, for he was upon me in
the passage before I knew where I was. And in the instant I knew
how he l'oved us. He really loved us. And in the same instant
there was my uncle with a whip, beating and kicking him back, and
Rex cowering, bristling, snarling.
My uncle swore many oaths, how we had ruined the dog for ever,
made him vicious, spoiled him for showing purposes, and been al-
together a pack of mard-soft fools not fit to be trusted with any dog
but a gutter-mongrel.
Poor Rex! We heard his temper was incurably vicious, and he
had to be shot.
And it was our fault. We had loved him too much, and he had
loved us too much. We never had another pet.
It is a strange thing, love. Nothing but love has made the dog
lose his wild freedom, to become the servant of man. And this
very servility or completeness of love makes him a term of deepest
contempt.-"You dog!"
We should not have loved Rex so much, and he should not have
loved us.
There should have been a measure. We tended, all of
us, to overstep the limits of our own natures. He should have
stayed outside human limits, we should have stayed outside canine
limits. Nothing is more fatal than the disaster of too much love.
My uncle was right, we had ruined the dog.
My uncle was a fool, for all that.



A DRAWING.
BY ELIZABETH NAGEL





MAX BEERBOHM
BY BOHUN LYNCH
I
IT
T is in the unchanging things that we find our greatest pleasure,
and though by imperceptible degrees the apple-tree grows sturd-
ier, its blossom each year remains the same. If as a young tree, it put
forth tiger-lilies, we should certainly say that it was very affected
and precocious and we would hope that the under-gardener would
cut it down—the nasty unnatural thing. Unfortunately, however,
such is the peculiarity of our vision that we are frequently prone to
mistake any fine but very early blossoming for, so to put it, tiger-
lilies; and the under-gardener gets to work and sees what he can
do about it. The head-gardener, on the other hand, if he under-
stands his job, bides his time and waits for the next year to see
whether after all it is real apple blossom or not.
He will then,
if he has kept his under-strapper in hand, perceive that what had
almost deceived his sharp eyes was only a particularly fine
variety of blossom; and he will be glad: and many years later
when, the fine blossom being still as fine, the tree has grown sturdy
and mature, he will be very glad and will rub his hands. “But for
me ..." he will say.
So, despite an imperfect and somewhat laboured analogy, it has
been with Mr Max Beerbohm and the critics. He began to write
as an undergraduate at Merton and his writing was so surprisingly
good that the critics, unaccustomed as we are now to subscribing the
literary reputations of an hundred nurseries, looked askance. Some
jeered, some put on cap and gown and swished the birch, and some,
understanding their job, remembered that letters were letters and
that the age of the writer, though interesting, should not be used
either for palliation or impeachment.
In his attitude to the critics appears almost the only trace of bit-
terness that Mr Beerbohm has ever shown—the only thorn the
apple-tree ever put forth. "It is a pity,” he says in his Letter to the
Editor, printed in Volume II of the Yellow Book, answering the


178
MAX BEERBOHM
serious abuse poured upon his Defense of Cosmetics in Volume I, "It
is a pity that critics should show so little sympathy with writers,
and curious when we consider that most of them tried to be writers
themselves, once." That last venomous comma is worth a page of
invective and is entirely characteristic. However, that was only
at the beginning: the critics have all become wise head-gardeners,
and have recognized the high truth that whilst much blossom predi-
cates fruit, it is for its own beautiful sake worthy of intense admira-
tion. We, who never forget the prime importance of being earnest,
look about us now and again for refreshment, for something upon
which we can absolutely rely not to bother us with piety or pity,
with serious issues, with the true reflection of our own sombre habit
of mind and we think of Treasure Island and The Ghost Stories
of an Antiquary and other books which can ordinarily be relied upon
for amusement and we reject them (sometimes) because we require
that which besides not being useful is, positively and especially,
ornamental: and we happily call to mind one of Mr Beerbohm's
cartoons, in which he represents the Shade of Stevenson looking at
the modern novelists standing upon their upturned tubs, saying to
Mr Gosse, “You have shown me the propagandists and the pam-
phleteers and grinders of axes (or words of that meaning), now will
you show me some of the writers?” That was a very valuable
piece of criticism, widely if not universally deserved. And in writ-
ing stories for those stories' sakes, essays to amuse, and not to edify,
and in never preaching, he has practised what he implicitly laid
down as a golden rule.
There are two outstanding features of Mr Beerbohm's literary
work, which, with a little necessary difference of expression, apply
also to his caricatures. These are his style and a certain daintiness
of imagination. His sense of humour can hardly be separated from
his style: the two must be regarded as inextricable. Some men
write amusingly of common things, some write amusingly of amus-
ing things, some write of amusing things unamusingly—that is to
say, in the last predicament, though the author may succeed in mak-
ing you laugh at the humour of his subject, it is the subject and not
the author which is the immediate--and only--cause of your gigg-
ling. Mr Beerbohm has written-though not often-of subjects
which would be generally amusing and he has drawn a great deal
of latent fun out of most common things: but the fun which froin


BOHUN LYNCH
179
first to last has never, upon any occasion, been of the bucolic or up-
roarious kind, has been so intermingled with his style of writing
that each almost invariably includes the other. The way he has
said it has generally improved very notably upon what he has said.
“For my own part,” he says in his essay on Ouida, “I am a dilet-
tante, a petit maître, I love best in literature delicate and elaborate
ingenuities of form and style.”
It is this very delicacy both in the manner and matter of his own
writings which distinguishes him. His aim is clearly to amuse
himself and us in that order. He has always written in the first
person, more than once he has made his characters speak of him by
name, he has given his views upon things in general with a happy
and conscious affectation of vanity which led reviewers of the past
to talk of his “delicate impertinences,” which, having a regard for
the meaning of words, they were not. The only description which
really fits is "sheer delicious damned cheek.”
“To give an accurate and exhaustive account of that period,” he
writes of the year 1880, “would need a far less brilliant pen than
mine . . . and I look to Professor Gardiner and to the Bishop of
Oxford.” And those of us who were once made to slumber with
our elbows upon Dr Stubbs' History will bear him out.
Deliberately to sit down and try to sift separate sentences of a
particular author for nuggets seems, on the face of it, an excruciat-
ingly funny procedure: and yet the biggest nuggets will paradoxi-
cally be caught by the finest sieve. It is by little tricks of style that
Mr Beerbohm gets his effects.
In one of his earliest essays, reprinted in The Works, upon Dan-
dies and Dandies, he tells us that Brummell left Oriel for a commis-
sion in the Tenth Hussars, “Crack though the regiment was
young Mr Brummell could not bear to see all his brother officers
in clothes exactly like his own.” The separation of the epithet
from the noun it usually goes with arm in arm is very typical
of Mr Beerbohm's humour. Anybody could and generally would
say "though it was a crack regiment.” Wit in style is often but the
quick snatching at unlikely straws, and Mr Beerbohm has often
made us split our sides by splitting hairs. There was much in Mr
Beerbohm's early work which, though it provoked and does still
provoke, pleasure, can safely be put down to the perversity of
youth. He invented words: he wrote “innowise" and "inver-


180
MAX BEERBOHM
ideed,” he exhorted us—“Perpend!” But, to fall back for the last
time upon the apple-tree analogy, the blossom remains, only the
trunk has become sturdier, the growth has been steady and imper-
ceptible, but Max Beerbohm is still-Max Beerbohm. His indi-
vidual sense of the unfitness of things, his "mischievous and spritely
wit," as it obviously must have been called on many occasions, was
exemplified in his essay, Servants, published in the March number
of The London Mercury, where he writes of the pond by Jack
Straw's Castle "at all seasons so much barked around by excitable
dogs.” In that sentence lies the chief secret of Mr Beerbohm's
style--an ultimate refinement of splendid silliness. Other in-
stances of the same sort of thing tumble over one another out of
memory. Again to quote from the Letter to the Editor of the Yel-
low Book, when he complains of his treatment at the hands of the
reviewers-“If I had only signed myself D. Cadent or Parrar
Docks ... all the pressmen would have said that I had given them
a very delicate bit of satire. But I did not, and hinc, as they them-
a
I
selves love to say, illae lacrimae.” That's all-- just the cleavage
of that tag—but there is no one else who would have thought of it,
even at two and twenty. The amusing abuse of qualification is
seen in two diverse services to which he puts the word rather. “The
labour I set myself,” he says in his "history” of the year 1880, "is
rather Herculean.” “I am quite unable to cope with burglars,”—
he is complaining in an essay on Punch that after Keene's pictures
of burglars in knee-breeches and masks, he cannot persuade himself
that a burglar is really but an ordinary individual in trousers—"so
they come rather often."
And in More there is one essay which defies the snipper of short
quotations, but which provides instances of almost all these elusive
gestures under present and laborious scrutiny. It is The Case of
Prometheus—who, to Mr Beerbohm (judging from the paper read
before the Royal Geographical Society by Mr Richard Mitchell)
is still vinctus upon the summit of Mount Caucasus.


BOHUN LYNCH
181
II
So much for what Mr Beerbohm himself might accuse Mr
Frank Harris of calling style-humour, to which it will be necessary
to return. The other salient characteristic, we have said, is a cer-
tain daintiness which is also wedded to the style; but which can be
separated from it because it is almost always seen in Mr Beerbohm's
chosen subjects. And of these, his first love to which, as all good
lovers should, he returns again and again, is costume-clothes them-
selves and anecdotes about clothes. In Dandies and Dandies, (re-
printed in The Works, 1896) he says:
“For some years I had felt convinced that in a perfect dandy this
affinity must reach a point, when the costume itself, planned with
the finest sensibility, would change with the emotional changes of
its wearer, automatically. .
One day, he tells us, he went into a club of which a member was
Lord X who had been plunging up to the hilt on the day's running.
"His lordship was there, fingering feverishly the sinuous riband
of the tape-machine. I sat at a little distance, watching him.
Two results straggled forth within an hour, and, at the second of
these, I saw with wonder Lord X's linen actually flush for a mo-
ment, and then turn deadly pale. I looked again and saw that his
boots had lost their lustre. Drawing nearer I found that grey
hairs
had begun to show themselves in his raven coat. It was very pain-
ful and yet, to me, very gratifying. In the cloak-room, when I went
for my own hat and cane, there was the hat with the broad brim
(Lord X's) and (lo!) over its iron-blue surface little furrows had
been ploughed by Despair.”
Fiftern years or so later we find him changing, in the Duke of
Dorset's shirt, two white pearls respectively to black and pink, be-
cause of his sudden love for Zuleika Dobson. His fidelity to
clothes is remarkable.— Besides the essay set apart for that subject
there are constant references elsewhere-in King George the
Fourth, Poor Romeo-where we find an antiquarian inquisitiveness
into the history of a forgotten dandy. Madame Tussaud's, as well


182
MAX BEERBOHM
as in the stories-Zuleika Dobson, The Happy Hypocrite, and
Enoch Soames (the first of Seven Men), and especially in the carica-
tures of all periods. The same vanity (or affectation of it) is to be
seen in the frequency with which he has introduced his own ex-
quisitely-dressed figure in caricatures with one or more people whose
clothes were not remarkable for elegance. Of these the best is the
“sudden appearance of Mr Max Beerbohm in the New English
Art Club” where various individual members, shaggy and tousled,
stare in consternation and point uncouth fingers at the intruder.
Indeed repetition, by no means in the adverse sense, is to be found
whenever the reader takes a comprehensive view of his work from
1894 to the present day. In a manner of speaking, the story of
Enoch Soames does incidentally for the ’nineties, more by allusion
that by statement direct, very much what the essay 1880 sets out to
do for that year.
One of the most telling qualities in a good style, a qual-
ity especially remarkable in Stevenson's work, is that of giv-
ing the reader a little happy mild surprise by the correct but unusual
use of ordinary words. The Mashers who "were often admirable
upon the steps of clubs” provide a case in point.
The essay about An Infamous Brigade (More, 1899) doubly il-
lustrates the author's attitude. He had seen a fire in the distance
and had driven towards it.
“Persons in absurd helmets ran about pouring cascades of cold
water on the flames. These, my cabman told me, were firemen.
I jumped out and, catching one of them by the arm, bade him
sharply desist from his vandalism. I told him that I had driven
miles to see this fire, that great crowds of Londoners, poor peo-
ple with few joys, were there to see it also, and I asked him who
was he that he should dare to disappoint us. Without answer-
ing my arguments, he warned me that I must not interfere with
him 'in the discharge of his duty. The silly crowd would not
'
uphold me, and I fell back, surreptitiously slitting his water-hose
with a pen-knife.”
a
That, with all deference, is somewhat eighteen-ninetyish and
young at that, delightful though it may be. But on the opposite
page comes a genuine triumph of restraint which might have been


BOHUN LYNCH
183
a
expected of a much maturer writer. He is speaking of the magni-
ficent fires they have in Chicago, "and indeed it must be splendid
to see those twenty-three story buildings come crashing down in less
time than was required to build them up.” How many people
would not have pointed to the joke by saying “even in less time."
“I love best in literature delicate and elaborate ingenuities in
form and style”; and that love is patent throughout his work.
More is dedicated: "To Mlle de la Ramée with the author's com-
pliments and to Ouida with his love." Was ever homage more
gracefully paid?
Isolated sentences, illustrating that daintiness, that delicacy in
style, each giving its peculiar little thrill of pleasure, return to the
mind from time to time:-Of Queen Caroline-"Fate wrote her a
most tremendous tragedy, and she played it in tights”; of George
IV—“we know he was fond of quoting those incomparable poets,
Homer.” “Ere long it may be that tender parents will be writing
"
to complain of the compulsory baccarat in our public schools”; of
jokes in the usual comic paper—"whether such jests require, or are
in any way strengthened by a picture of a décolletée girl sitting in
the shadow of a standard lamp, with a bald man bending over the
back of her chair, is a question on which I have already made up my
mind”; of signboards and the "dressing” of shop windows—“why
should the sea give up its dead to fishmongers who harrow us with
the corpses?" "He was the backbone of the nation, but ought
backbones to be exposed ?" And from Seven Men, his latest book:
"a small and faded, but circulating, library”; "his very age was
moderate: a putative thirty-six, not more ('not less,' I would
have said in those days)”; “Head or tail was just what I hadn't
made of that slim green volume"; "a soft black hat of clerical kind
but of Bohemian intention”; there are, too, hoaxes played upon the
reader, such as the description of Prangley Valley, a delightful and
undiscovered place quite close to London, which no one has ever
heard of and which the author apologizes for giving away and help-
ing to make popular: there are inspirations, as when it is suggested
that King Edward (then reigning) should pay a state visit to
Switzerland. Who would receive him? The President of the
Swiss Republic. “You didn't expect that,” he says. No more
you did. You never thought of Switzerland as a Republic. There
would be a banquet-
a


184
MAX BEERBOHM
a
“Whereat His Majesty will have the President's wife on his
right hand, and will make a brief, but graceful speech in the Swiss
language (English, French, German, and Italian, consecutively)
referring to the glorious and never-to-be-forgotten name of William
Tell (embarrassed silence) and to the vast numbers of his subjects
who annually visit Switzerland (loud and prolonged cheers). Next
morning, let there be a review of twenty thousand waiters from all
parts of the country, all the head-waiters receiving a modest grade
,
of the Victorian order. Later in the day, let the King visit the
National Gallery—a hall filled with picture-postcards of the most
picturesque spots in Switzerland; and thence let him be conducted
to the principal factory of cuckoo-clocks, and after some of the
clocks have been made to strike, be heard remarking to the Presi-
dent, with a hearty laugh, that the sound is like that of the cuckoo."
Then there is the Pathetic Imposture (Yet Again) of the leader-
writers who would not say “Lord Roseberry has made a paradox,”
but
“Lord Roseberry
whether intentionally or otherwise, we
leave our reader to decide,
or, with seeming conviction,
or, doubtless giving rein to the playful
humour which is characteristic of
him,
has
expressed a sentiment,
or, taken on himself to
enunciate
a theory, which
or, made himself respon-
sible for a dictum
we venture to assert,
or, we have little hesi-
tation in declaring,
or, we may say without
fear of contradiction,
nearly akin to
is or, not very far re-
moved from
sfer
oy
the paradoxical.”
In the same volume Mr Beerbohm scrutinizes in the same way
The Humour of the Public, and compiles a list (which he proceeds
to discuss quite literally) of the themes which amuse the public
whether in the music halls or in the comic papers.
.


BOHUN LYNCH
185
"Mothers-in-law
Henpecked Husbands
Twins
Jews
Frenchmen, Germans,
Italians, niggers
(not Russians, or other
foreigners of any
denomination)
Old maids
Fatness
Thinness
Long hair (worn by a man)
Baldness
Sea-sickness
Stuttering
Bad Cheese
‘Shooting the Moon.''
a
There is no nonsense about that essay: it is a scientific inquiry,
based upon honest research. The author finds a plausible explana-
tion for the public laugh in each case except that of Bad Cheese,
which beats him, as well it may.
III
His caricatures of all periods and the parodies collected in A
Christmas Garland combine to demonstrate Mr Beerbohm's per-
sistence in continuing to be his original self. Even easy and
obvious parody of peculiar style may be clever and amusing, but
there is much more than mere cleverness in these. Anybody with
a knack for mimicry can exaggerate the salient eccentricities of
an exceptional manner of writing, but in A Christmas Garland
the parody is twofold: the style is imitated and the method of con-
struction, but not too grossly caricatured: and better still
the treatment apart from the actual subject of each parody-
which is Christmas is recognizable as the potential treatment
of each separate victim. Mr Beerbohm might be described as
a devil who has temporarily possessed these writers. In Some
Damnable Errors about Christmas Chesterton is made to say:
9
.
“If Euclid were alive to-day (and I dare say he is)
"We do not say of love that he is short-sighted. We do not
say of Love that he is myopic. We do not say of Love that he is
astigmatic. We say quite simply, Love is blind. We might go
further and say, Love is deaf. That would be a profound and
,
obvious truth. We might go further still and say, Love is dumb.
But that would be a profound and obvious lie.”


186
MAX BEERBOHM
Mr John Galsworthy relates a story where Jacynth, an old
lady, sorely tempts her old husband on Christmas morning to feed
the birds outside their window. He has to remember that "these
sporadic doles can do no real good”-must even degrade the birds
who receive them.
And Fond Hearts Askew is a beautiful title for a story by
Maurice Hewlett.
It
may
be said that P. C., X, 36 is unfair to Mr Rudyard Kip-
ling, because it is a parody of an extremely various author's least
pleasing manner. But that author's trick of displaying technical
knowledge in an extremely nonchalant fashion is delightfully
counterfeited, so that to the general reader Mr Beerbohm's non-
sense seems just as right as Mr Kipling's academical accuracies.
“Now when Judlip sighs the sound is like unto that which issues
from the vent of a Crosby boiler when the cog-gauges are at
260° F.”
Judlip, moreover, flashes "his 45 c. p. down the slot of a two-
grade Yale."
In fact, is it nonsense?
And there is no trifling (and perhaps temporary) insincerity of
which an author may be guilty, for which Mr Beerbohm fails to
belabour him, though it is with a jester's bladder. The more in-
timately the reader becomes acquainted with the writings of the
persons mocked in A Christmas Garland the more severe grows
the strain upon him in finding epithets of admiration for the
parodies. It is indeed impossible to say how they could be im-
proved.
Amongst others parodied is Henry James, but an earlier and
more concentrated essence of that author's manner is to be found
written, in Mr Beerbohm's way, not under or over, but close about
two caricatures of him. In one of these Henry James is revisiting
America.
“... so that, in fine, let, without further beating about the
bush, me make to myself amazed acknowledgement that, but
for the certificate of birth which I have, so very indubitably, on me,
I might, in regarding, and, as it somewhat were, overseeing, à l'oeil


BOHUN LYNCH
187
de voyageur, these dear good people, find hard to swallow, or even
to take by subconscious injection, the great idea that I am-oh,
ever so indigenously!-one of them.”
IV
-
“The word 'classic' inevitably suggests itself,” wrote one re-
viewer when The Happy Hypocrite was first published, and a
quarter of a century (which seems like a patent fact stated in
terms of gross exaggeration) has shown that even a much profaned
word may make a very sound suggestion. The story is now prob-
ably the most widely known of Mr Beerbohm's works and lately
has been re-issued, expensively and with illustrations. It is a good
fairy-story—the ultimate expression of that daintiness already
mentioned-apart from the accessories, such as foot-notes giving
quotations from imaginary authorities, which are separately enjoy-
able, ornaments which do not draw away too much attention from
a clearly defined outline.
Lord George Hell was a dreadfully naughty man, who at Carl-
ton House, “often sat up until long after bedtime," the mention
of whose very name caused riotous chldren to "behave,” who “sel-
dom sat down to the fashionable game of Limbo with less than
four, and sometimes with as many as seven aces up his sleeve.”
When the simple little dancer, Jenny Mere, refuses him, he thinks
for a moment of drowning himself.
“There was no one in the garden to prevent him, and in the
morning they would find him floating there, one of the noblest of
love's victims. The garden would be closed in the evening. There
would be no performance in the little theatre. It might be that
Jenny Mere would mourn him. 'Life is a prison, without bars,' he
murmured, as he walked away.'
As with the fires at Chicago, so here, the unnecessary but usual,
word was omitted. We are not directly told that Lord George
thought better of his rash inspiration; and the elision is pleasing.
“I want the mask of a saint,” Lord George says to Mr Aeneas,
the mask-maker.


188
MAX BEERBOHM
“Mask of a saint, my lord? Certainly! With or without
halo?"
That trick of modern and in this instance tradesman's phras-
eology is seen again in Seven Men. Savonarola speaks:
".
when I should occupy
A felon's cell? O the disgrace of it!
The scandal, the incredible come-down!
I see in
my
mind's
eye
The public prints—'sharp sentence on a Monk!”
Later Cesare Borgia says:
"Lo! 'tis none other than the Fool that I
Hoof'd from my household but two hours agone."
This, after pages of pseudo-Elizabethan.
Zuleika Dobson, or An Oxford Love Story, is the only long novel
that Mr Beerbohm has published. It was planned and partly
written whilst he was still an undergraduate, though no doubt the
new part was not added without "scrutiny and titivation" of the
old (to borrow his own words from an introductory note to More).
To be willing and able to continue writing a story dropped six-
teen or seventeen years before is remarkable evidence of the per-
manency of his inspiration.
Zuleika Dobson must be measured in half a dozen different
dimensions. First of all and most important it is an excellent
story, apart from locality or time: it is a wonderful parody of
various other novelists who have written about Oxford: it is a
satire on Oxford itself: it is a history, every word of which is
invented, but every word of which is essentially true: it is a study
of character which, transcending realism, is genuine art in the
innermost meaning of that expanding word: it covers all the ground
upon which Max Beerbohm usually walks and finds for him fresh
fields as well, notably in the account of Salt Cellar, one of the
quadrangles of Judas College.
Once again it is difficult to quote, because quotations imply
gems, and this book, without that tiresome coruscation which be-


BOHUN LYNCH
189
a
comes a weariness, is a mine of them; and it is better to keep to the
characteristic turns of thought. Sweat, Mr Beerbohm tells us,
started from the brows of the Emperors outside the Sheldonian,
as Zuleika Dobson drove by: and he goes on to tell us about these
Emperors, who are “exposed eternally and exorably to heat and
frost, to the four winds that lash them and the rains that wear
them away, they are expiating, in effigy, the abominations of their
pride and cruelty and lust; who were lechers, they are without
bodies; who were tyrants, they are crowned never but with crowns
of snow”; and as if that wasn't enough-"who made themselves
even with the gods, they are of American visitors frequently mis-
taken for the Twelve Apostles.” Zuleika Dobson, without being
exactly beautiful, had by some accident of appearance and person-
ality, seated herself with calm assurance upon a pinnacle of fame,
the immediate excuse for which was an indifferent conjuring enter-
tainment. In every country that she visited the men went mad
for her.
“Prince Vierfünfsechs-Siebenachtneun offered her his hand, and
was condemned by the Kaiser to six months' confinement in his
little castle. In Yildiz Kiosk, the tyrant who still throve there con-
ferred on her the Order of Chastity, and offered her the central
couch in his seraglio. She gave her performance in the Quirinal
and, from the Vatican, the Pope launched against her a Bull which
fell utterly flat.”
9
She was the inspiration of the New York Press :
“Zuleika Dobson walking on Broadway in the sables gifted her
by Grand Duke Salamander Salamandrovitch-she says: You
can bounce blizzards in them’; Zuleika Dobson yawning over a
love-letter from Millionaire Edelweiss; relishing a cup of clam-
broth—she says 'They don't use clams out there';
start-
ing for the musicale given in her honour by Mrs Suetonius X.
Meistersinger, the most exclusive woman in New York; chatting
at the telephone to Miss Camille Van Spook, the best-born girl in
New York; laughing over the recollection of a compliment made
her by George Abimelech Post, the best-groomed man in New
York.”


190
MAX BEERBOHM
The hero of this novel is the Duke of Dorset, of whose feet it is
said, “So slim and long were they, of instep so nobly arched, that
only with a pair of glazed ox-tongues on a breakfast table were
they comparable.”
And another comparison :
“The moon like a gardenia in the night's button-hole—but no!
Why should a writer never be able to mention the moon without
likening her to something else-usually something to which she
bears not the slightest resemblance?
,
Mr Beerbohm narrates his story as an eye-witness, who takes no
part in its action: and is most conscientious in explaining how he,
unlike some others, came to see not only what was passing in cer-
tain colleges and rooms, but in the minds of his characters. It ap-
pears that Clio was dissatisfied with the history books and of The
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, she said "Otis toia exel
εν ηδονή έχει έν ηδονή τοια.” It cocurred to her that it would
be a fine thing if the historian had the novelist's privilege; she
asked Zeus (who at that moment was disguised as the latest work
of Miss Annie S. Swan) to give facilities and she chose Mr Beer-
bohm as the chronicler of Zuleika Dobson's visit to Oxford.
Once, however, tugged in opposite directions by honour and fidel-
ity to his employer, Max Beerbohm allowed himself an hour's ease
from the latter strain. Zuleika poured a jug of water from her
window on to the Duke. Mr Beerbohm floated up and regarded
Oxford from a great height. He could not bear to pry upon the
Duke in that dreadful moment.
Seven Men, Mr Beerbohm's latest book, has been published too
recently to need much comment. Almost throughout it the old
nonsense remains, but allusion is more deft. Again and again we
,
catch echoes of the earliest work, or, more exactly, since echoes die
away-our memories are jogged. There are five stories in this
volume, of which the first, Enoch Soames, reproduces the literary
and a little of the social air of the ’nineties in such a way that time
seems to become fluid, rolling back and exposing old rocks and more
especially old houses built upon the sand.
At the end of this entirely delightful story, the author relates


BOHUN LYNCH
191
how he nodded and smiled at the Devil (who plays an important
part in the action of the story) and the Devil stares at him without
recognition.
"To be cut-deliberately cut-by him! I was, I still am, furi-
ous at having had that happen to me.”
A very awkward sentence-uncomfortable and difficult to say ?
Intentionally so. Nothing short of that triumphant dissonance
would quite have conveyed the sense of childish petulance which
is here required.
Certainly the full enjoyment of this story about an ineffectual
and decadent poet predicates some familiarity with the period, and
it is hard to say how, without that familiarity, the story would
strike one. But that is not to say that its interest is ephemeral.
If we say that the best stories in the language are those which are
independent of period, locality, class, morals, and religion, we must
be careful not to exclude one that derives much additional delect-
ability from one at least of these shifting values.
V
In his early essays Mr Beerbohm is deliberately and consciously
self-satisfied with what he might then have called the cock-
certainty of youth, which no doubt exasperated the more pompous
of his elders. Indeed there are still people living whose only
epithet for his work would be “affected.” They would no doubt
talk of “wasted powers” and a keen brain put to no serious pur-
pose. Such people will find their attitude explained for them in
the essay on Going Back to School (More).
"Not that I had any special reason for hating school! Strange
as it may seem to my readers, I was not unpopular there. I was
a modest, good-humoured boy. It is Oxford that has made me
insufterable.
Undergraduates owe their happiness chiefly
to the consciousness that they are no longer at school. The non-
sense which was knocked out of them at school is all put gently
back at Oxford or Cambridge."
.


192
MAX BEERBOHM
Very earnest folk, to whom the quiet, and indeed harmless,
amusement of their fellow men makes no appeal, might find it in
their eager hearts to condone that. But for the nonsense that,
gently put back in 1890, remains in 1920, they can find no forgive-
Mr Beerbohm has not tried, heavily, to make the world bet-
ter: he has succeeded in making a small part of it happier. His
hand is always light: in writing he has a soft, stroking touch, as
sure and inevitable as, in drawing, his own “line.” Of critics, in
the essay on Ouida, Mr Beerbohm said:
ness.
“You may call it monstrous that a good writer should be at the
mercy of such persons, but I doubt whether the good writer is him-
self aggrieved. He needs no mercy. And, as a matter of fact,
the menaces hurled by the ordinary reviewers, whenever something
new or strange confronts them, are very vain words indeed, and
may at any moment be merged in clumsy compliments.”
And there-as he might represent Henry James as saying-you,
so very emphatically, are! Of Brummell, he wrote:
“But it is as an artist, and for his supremacy in the art of
costume
and for that superb taste and subtle simplicity of
mode that I do most deeply revere him.”
.
May the present writer, with all diffidence, eliminate the quota-
tion marks and suppress the Brummell ?
Seven Men, Mr Beerbohm's latest work to appear in this country, is pub-
lished by Alfred A. Knopf, New York, with six illustrations by the author.
A new volume of essays has been announced in England.



THE HALF DOME.
BY MARGUERITE ZORACH






-
--
--
X2
THE YOSEMITE VALLEY.
BY MARGUERITE ZORACH





WAR MOODS
BY ARTHUR WILSON
I
I saw a man of the name of God rise
Like a peal of lilies. He scattered light,
And with light, armies. Across the broad bright
Back of the earth in smoky tumult flies
His work. My feet take hold on death. Vain cries
Jet forth of me, like roses, in God's sight;
And suddenly my flesh shivers with might
Of dying—"God, answer me my torn eyes!"
“They fight for peace who fight at all,” God saith;
“They best who kiss the purple throb of pain.
Dust are they now, but dust will not remain.
Out of this horrid earth with shouting faith
They shall leap like arrows. If Life is Death
Be sure that Death is only Life again.”


194
WAR MOODS
II
Go over, years, go over.
Let him live.
Mark him and be astonished; he will make
The Spring again, and utter song. I give
My only all, but him you must not take.
A noise of fighters in the fighting places;
A blasphemy of guns, where, with no breath,
Piteous little gashed boys writhe and lift faces
In the golden delirium of death.
Go over, years, go over. Let one flower
Crash with white bells of truth this petalled gloom,
Unruined live while others in an hour
Slip down the delicate tideways of doom.
God's aching eyes; foamed lips; and the shrewd haze
Of violet smoke-roses where life shuts!
All the land's bright flesh stirred in one mauve blaze,
Streaked with bayonets lean out-letting guts!
Go over, years, forget. He minds not death,
Nor should he, even though in that last storm
Lewd horns of crimson music drown his breath
And bleeding kisses wash his sun-densed form!


ARTHUR WILSON
195
III
Alone at last I fail like one in love,
Mouth crushed to earth in desperate delight;
Or sitting watch the lazy petals of
A poppy feast on fading crumbs of light.
The battle-shoutings die in anguished prayer;
Brief tones of light mysteriously blow to stars;
And pleading space with holy eyes astare
Steals like a little nurse to kiss my scars.
I see the sultry hills that slowly rose
Under the winds of steel: and here are they
Who tossed their vibrant happy hearts in throws
Of blood like crimson curses all this day.
Pale sleepers in the gloam, pale heroes told,
Pale warriors one with moon-dust-drift to-night,
No more than haunting notes of music-gold
Struck from the gongs of illimitable light.
To-morrow I may journey on the Quest:
So let me think in terms of long ago
The only truth is being at your best,
The only beauty is in dying so.
a
I shall fall like a blind black bird, of birth
By screaming eagles, one of these wild hours;
And shouting dive into the daisied earth
And take my immortality in flowers.


196
WAR MOODS
IV
Where are they now who kissed the Shade?
Where are our lords who went away?
Dun herds, dun herds, dun herds who played
The game of battle unafraid?
Out of the smoke, the flame, the neigh
Of iron, swarmed up the last wall
A foam of flesh still undismayed?
Into the earth sink one and all.
Now by God's grace where is that gay
Well-wisher, Paddy Dee? And Spade,
King of his kind, the papers say?
And where is strong Madonna laid,
Who killed so many? Dizzy Dade,
The clown (wings on his shoulders tall,
Bells on his feet) by girls obeyed ?
Into the earth sink one and all.
Where are our knights who dreamed alway
Of blood-bath, smoke-plume, cavalcade?
Mock-duck, the cook, of one foray?
And that Blond Beast who looped his strayed
Entrails across his arm, delayed?
The lances, guns, the bugle-call,
Apples and flagons, gold brocade?
Into the earth sink one and all.
God, where the battle rolled all day
My heroes fell in ancient Gaul;
Ashes and echoes, dust and clay,
Into the earth sink one and all.


ITALIAN LETTER
January, 1921
A
NYBODY interested in getting some understanding of the
times we are living in must go—and beneath the surface
-into a number of important movements which we are examin-
ing here in Italy because we are Italians and find Italian mate-
rials ready to hand; though the movements themselves are wide-
spread, not to say general.
In a preceding note we explained—and with the meticulous
thoroughness of a pedant, we thought—what the young men of
the last twenty years have been driving at. To belong to one's
own time, however benighted that time may be, to attain one's
own vision of things and create one's own poetry, are obligations
no reasonable man would shirk, if he could. So possibly we owe
it to ourselves, out of loyalty to the faith that is in us, to elucidate
a number of questions that arise in the same connection and re-
duce them, if that be possible, to their simplest terms. With a
vagueness corresponding to the vagueness of the subject itself,
people are talking, as we are talking ourselves, about "restora-
tions,” about "returns to the past,” or, more precisely, about
"classicism" and "neo-classicism.”
To make the meaning of such words clear--who will doubt that
their significance is as tremendous as it is uncertain ?-we must
adopt
a purely negative procedure. Since the present conditions
of art are felt, generally, to be a final consequence of romanticism
a term which, with all due reserves, we take in a psychological,
and, so far as Italy is concerned, an historical sense—the escape
from those conditions has assumed the form of a relentless indict-
ment of this decadent, this lifeless romanticism, the nature of
which we ought to understand better if for no other
purpose
than
that of destroying it more expeditiously.
This latter-day romanticism is fundamentally a romanticism
that has survived its own funeral. The life-drama that inspired
and justified it, originally, has run its course, leaving an heritage
behind that has lost its value. We have still with us, in other
a


198
ITALIAN LETTER
words, the rhetoric of romanticism. In that rhetoric we are wal-
lowing up to our necks as with a growing resentment and with
all our illusions gone we are coming to realize. Our poetry has
been trying to live apart from developments in philosophy, in
thought, deriving from the latter indeed only an impulse toward
lyrism which, unable to embrace totality—the soul of art—has
scattered its energies in pursuit of the fragment, in an effort bound
to be sterile in its ultimate achievements however significant in
some minor respects it may be. Philosophical idealism, perhaps
for the very reason that if properly understood it would have laid
a very formidable task upon the poet, has not proved to be a pro-
ductive stimulus in the field of art and has remained a state of
mind rather than a mood.
The exasperating paradox resulting is the typical paradox of all
periods of decadence-I may cite in evidence the experience of
Italy in the late Cinquecento and all through the Seventeenth Cen-
tury. Art cannot live on the bread of charity. It can thrive
only by the sweat of its own brow. Its rejuvenation must be
thoroughgoing, comprise the totality of the spirit, lay hold upon
the soul and not upon the mind only; just as romanticism, in its
time, was a dolorous rebirth of the whole spirit of Italy and, be-
cause of that all-embracing scope, was able to save poetry-in
Manzoni.
This post-romanticism of ours, for all of its plethora of intel-
lect, is distinctly anaemic in faith; indeed for lack of faith-
faith in its own inner world-it is now in its dying agony. Every-
thing is from the brain in the literature and art of our younger
generation; and the various tendencies, the various schools and
reform's that have passed and are passing through the life of our
time are reactions of an intellectual character, various positions as-
sumed for attacking this or that aspect of one general condition.
Now schools have little importance in themselves; but we must
admit, if we are honest, that the critical perspicacity in which all
this brain-storming has resulted is, fortunately, the driving power
that is impelling post-romantic art to rise superior to itself. In
view of all we have been through in recent years it will soon be
impossible, even for the most ingenuous souls, to be led astray by
such aberrations as excessive colouration, overstress on the pictur-
esque, undue emphasis on sentiment, fondness for the exceptional,


ENZO FERRIERI
199
vagueness of expression, confusionism in verbiage—things, all,
that bade fair to endure as the most dangerous of the legacies the
new fads passed on to us. If we reflect that the opposite of all
these accuracy of line, introspection, sound and solid architec-
ture, and so on-are the distinctive traits of periods of the "grand
style,” we can see a possible meaning, in our own day, of the
word "neo-classicism,” as an aspiration, an inclination, of the
critical mind toward a classic form, for which, meanwhile, every
substantial prerequisite is lacking. In this sense of the term, neo-
.
classicism has spread all over Europe and even to the United
States—I am speaking of the time just before the war-and has
affected all the arts. Just think of what happened in painting,
after impressionism, through cubism and all the primitivistic and
pre-Raphaelite movements of French and our own Italian painters
who, through Cézanne and Ingres, go back as far as Poussin!
It is about the same with literature. Not to mention such ten-
dencies as are deliberately reactionary, it is clear that the very
people who seem to be most advanced—for instance the French
dadaists of the moment or the Italian paroliberists of yesterday
-are, after all, turning away from the sentimental and the pic-
turesque and getting down to essential forms; and, throwing con-
sistency to the winds—for logically anything classic should be
taboo with them-are gaily knocking the last leg from under the
decadence.
With this view of the negative aspects of a decrepit romanti-
cism struggling from the very excellence of its critical insight to get
away from itself by contradicting everything it has stood for in the
past, we must now examine the only positive result our young men
are trying to attain; and there will be less danger of misunder-
standings here if we look at things from the most characteristic
view point of contemporary theory—the concern as to form.
Theoreticians of painting--the most modernist ones too-are
for ever harping on design, perspective, study of the masters. And
no one will deny that such advice, however rarely followed, is good
advice; since something must be done to instil into the anarchists
of the present a knowledge of the trade they simply cannot do with-
out-technique, to be unpardonably frank, which may not indeed
have anything to do with the essence of art, but still does enable a
man to express himself accurately and fully.
-


200
ITALIAN LETTER
Just as salutary also is the tendency of such writers as are now
uncompromising in their reaction against anarchy in style, which
has by this time done all the good and all the harm it was able to
do. I may cite one name as the most significant in this respect-
that of Carlo Linati. But we must bear in mind that such sound
doctrine solves only part of the problem. The value of a word
honestly, properly, used, however great its efficacy may be, has no
such miracle-working power as can restore a life and a vitality to
poetry that must come, wholly, exclusively, from the spirit.
Technical problems arise only when the critic is fashioning his ab-
stractions. The poet's concern is with expression alone.
Poetry acquires new life only as it feels new moods; and these
create their own expressive forms. A classicism based merely on a
new technique is nothing but a fiction--and a dangerous one-of
the critical mind, a fiction originating in the failure adequately to
understand certain fundamental traits in classic art. Classicism may
easily seem to be an art where the poet is so far lost in his own poet-
ical world that he sinks his own, his personal, vision in the objec-
tivity of things. But such objectivity, not to belie its own pur-
pose and raison d'être, must always involve a happy betrayal:
Bene vixit qui bene latuit!
Nobody, surely, is so barbarian nowadays as to take any stock
in that doctrine of the artist's aloofness from the matter observed
which the Parnassians vaunted so loudly against those who would
find the artist in the work he creates. It is even trite to remark
that there is nothing more Flaubertian in the world than the charac-
ters whom Flaubert prided himself on having least in common with.
Frédéric, and Madame Bovary, for all their pretended objectivity,
are faithful representatives of the author's raging nihilism.
So in the classic poet as well, the lyric individuality is as in-
fluential as it may be inobvious. He has the same inner burning,
the same faith in his poetic world, though he views the latter under
its universal aspects and treats all details with definiteness absolute
-a manner and a view which we recognize as classic.
The art of "pure form” is the noblest emprise of an age that is
spiritually dead. One thinks of a parallel that might be drawn
in the ethical field, a morality of “pure form” related to pragmatic
anarchy in ethics as the art of “pure form” stands toward anarchy
in style. But Kant, the last philosopher to resurrect that fallacy,


ENZO FERRIERI
201
refuted it in the very system he built around it. And no better
luck may come, perhaps, to our neo-Kantians in art. Not that
the inconsistency would in itself be harmful; for the gate to salva-
tion is through the spirit, just as the Bible says. And we shall be
saved not by denying individuality in art but by having that in-
dividuality born again in accord with the spritual needs of our time,
and by an inner process which will transform the work of art in
its entirety, recreating the historical matter from which the modern
life-drama must spring.
In fact, even in the very worst manifestations of our decadence,
the few signs of life come from the resistance the artist's personality
offers to the efforts made to suppress it, and they are hopeful in
proportion as this resistance is strong. Irony itself, to become a
real inspiration to poetry, must give wings rather than poison to the
drama of life.
In short, the "return to form” that is being preached to-day
would, if accomplished, mean a flop from a bastard romanticism
into a bastard classicism, from a frying-pan we know is hot enough
into a fire of whose terrors we have no conception. The disease of
romanticism has been diagnosed, and microscoped in all its historical
causes and evolution. Classicism is offered us as a remedy, whose
effects upon us we do not know, though we should have to shoulder
responsibility for them. Fortunately, however, schools go one way
and poetry itself another; and the spirit, and not the mind, is the
final arbiter in all these dire travails of art!
ENZO FERRIERI


BOOK REVIEWS
A BUILDER OF HISTORY
The OUTLINE OF HISTORY. By H. G. Wells. Two
volumas. Illustrated.
.
Izmo.
1324 pages. The Mac-
millan Company. New York.
WH
HEN these words appear in The Dial, the world of lit-
erary supplements, magazines, and newspaper blurbs will
have said all that possibly can be stated upon the subject of H.
G. Wells and his Outline of History.
Learned men will have noted, described, and annotated what-
ever slips and misstatements the mocking Gods of our Modern
Hurry have sprinkled across the thirteen hundred pages of these two
mighty tomes. Men of less learning but of greater enthusiasm will
have used little texts from this great book to preach their own ser-
mons of faith and hope, minus the charity.
But as an humble fellow worker in the vineyard of Clio, I must
refrain both from praise and criticism.
I can only express profound gratitude. If I were a Russian
peasant, and lived in the darkest interior of the distant Omsk gov-
ernment, I would burn a little candle to my Patron Saint and I
would thank him that I had lived to see the world set free of one
terrible superstition.
For many generations we have been held prisoners in the dun-
geons of Teutonic Wissenschaftlichkeit. Our jail was in the heart
of a mighty fortress, built upon a high mountain of established
facts, surrounded by vast marshes of footnotes and dense forests
of documentation. Whenever we peered out from behind the bars
to catch a breath of fresh air—to get a glimpse of the distant and
joyous world, the turnkeys pulled us back and told us to study our
books and not waste our time upon useless frivolities. It is true
a few brave men ventured forth to relieve our suffering, but they
were either lost in the near-by morass or they perished under the
deluge of mildewed wisdom which the watchmen of the tower
poured down upon their courageous but foolhardy enemies.


HENDRICK WILLEM VAN LOON
203
Then, one day, the miracle happened.
A very ordinary citizen-no spurs, no medals, no indications of
high rank-kicked in the door of our dungeon-he opened the
window to let in the light of day—he started the victrola run-
ning—he brought us the latest copies of the sporting papers and
when the keepers remonstrated with him on account of his unseem-
ly behaviour within their hallowed walls, he used very plain lan-
guage- -threw the key of the gate into the moat and gave orders
that the countless bales of wisdom which lay stored within our
ancient garrets and cellars be carried to the market place and be
exhibited for the benefit of the humble citizens who dwelt in the
towns and villages of the vast countryside.
For this is the true and lasting value of the work of Wells
that he has given our world a greatest common historical denomi-
nator. All of his contentions and all of his opinions will not be
equally appreciated by all of his readers. But whatever differ-
ences of personal opinion may exist, the good people of Japan
and Russia and Germany and France and the Argentine and Siam
will find, within these two volumes, certain main points of a com-
mon interest upon which they can agree without reservations.
The world needed this book and needed it badly.
Our great-grandfathers who obtained their history from the
books of the Old Testament possessed certain definite historical
conceptions which followed them into the barren wilderness of
Massachusetts and across the veldt of Africa.
Modern criticism has long since exploded the propagandistic
fables of Exodus and Deuteronomy. This labour of destruction
was necessary.
But the scientific historian left the wreckage be-
hind while he hastened to new tasks and did not bother about erect-
ing a new edifice. Research was triumphant, but the public was
left out in the cold, exposed to the storms of their provincial pre-
judices and the terrible dark of international ignorance.
Wells has given us all a new home.
Some of the tenants will object to the architecture of the roof
and others will dislike the arrangements of the cellar. The win-
dows of several rooms let in a draught of doubt. The pictures
upon the walls are not of equal value.
But the building stands, firm and sound, and the master can be
proud of his handiwork.
HENDRICK WILLEM VAN Loon


THE SOUL OF WIT
JAPANESE Poetry. The “Uta.” By Arthur Waley.
Illustrated. 12m0. 110 pages. Oxford University Press.
New York.
JAPANESE HOKKUs. By Yoné Noguchi. 16mo. 115
pages. Four Seas Company. Boston.
>
HE satire of the Roman intellectual, the epigram of the wigged
and lacy Frenchman, the poignancy of an American
poet dy-
ing at thirty with the major part of her work undone, have one thing
in common. This is shared by a race of poets older than the United
States, older than the civilization of Paris, fresh and young before
the Imperial City ever was built. Apparently Japanese poetry is
utterly different from these others in one important respect. Its
brevity is not the fine fleur of a culture travelling from the loose
barbarism of the epic toward the exquisite refinement of the bon
mot. Among the oldest specimens of Japanese poetry extant one
finds long poems or "long-songs” as they are called-alternating
five and seven syllable lines—but there are only three hundred and
twenty-four of these in contrast with over four thousand "short-
songs” of five lines. It is easy enough to draw comparisons be-
tween the ancient Noh drama and the ritual drama of the Greeks.
It is decidedly difficult to find anything in the literature of the West
which recalls these brief lyrics, which confine within seventeen or
at most within thirty-one syllables the passion of a life or the
shadowing imminence of death.
Lafcadio Hearn on the one hand and John Gould Fletcher on
the other have tried to bring the western world into touch with
the spirit illuminating these foreign songs. It remained for Ar-
thur Waley, to whom we are indebted for so much of what is vital
in the poetry of the East, to collect a group of Japanese “uta”
poems, with some grammatical notes and a vocabulary, to bring the
English reader en rapport with the essence of these Spring poems
and death songs.
As a jest lies in the ear of him that hears it, so the worth of


BABETTE DEUTSCH
205
is a
)
these seemingly slight lines lies in their rich allusiveness. What
appears to the Occidental as trivial, rings for his Eastern brother
with the slow echo of a temple bell. It is as much from the foot-
notes as from the translations themselves that incense rises from
these pages. Thus, the literal reading is not “My heart ... is like
a swift river,” but “My heart ... swift-river-like.” The Japanese
for "waking up startled” is “having woken-startled.” Mr Waley
translates as “the Lightning” what is really “the Thunder-God
flashing." Especially beautiful and striking are the fixed epithets,
which, curiously enough, are poetry to the western ear, but stock
expressions to the Japanese. “Fuy-komori,” for example, mean-
ing Winter-imprisoned, is a fixed epithet of spring. “Aratama,"
which the translator declares "probably only means new,'
fixed epithet of the New Year and is written with characters mean-
ing “new jewels.” And then there are the queer Oriental com-
pounds, the turnings of phrase, the charm that is begotten of strange-
ness. The poet, wondering when he will go to bed, is wondering
"When I do a 'Shall I lie down.'” The wakeful lover laments,
“As for the night spent, there was not even a shall-sleep means.'
The lover comparing his love to the movement of water under ice
asks, "Is it because I am the freezing-on-top of the winter-river
that my love ...” And finally there is that line of pure poetry:
“Autumn will come and find) a not-forgetting.” The more elab-
'(
orate and intricate double-entendre is too long to quote. Practical-
ly every poem is a pun or an acrostic.
In the preface to The Awkward Age Henry James makes a note,
with reference to good talk -- to representing the allusive respon-
siveness of a group in a self-centred and sophisticated society
on "the beauty and the difficulty ... of escaping poverty even
though the references in one's action can only be, with intensity,
to each other, to things exactly on the same plane of exhibition as
themselves.” It is of this that the uta makes one think. It is all
compact of references, intense references, but these are all or near-
ly all only “to things (one might perhaps say to people] on the
same plane of exhibition as themselves.”
And yet there are many reminiscences here of the poetry with
which we are more familiar. Nous n'irons plus au bois is sung in
the same sad key. There are lyrics of meeting and farewell, there
are haunting scents of spring, there is the red hush of autumn,


206
THE SOUL OF WIT
drifting into a barren silence. Catullus of the countless kisses sings
in Japanese:
“My love-
If you care to know (its quantity)
Count the number
Of the waves which may be approaching
The sea-shore at Tago.”
There is a foreboding of Où sont les neiges d'antan? in the reversal
of thought of the Emperor Sutoku:
“The flowers to the tree's root,
The birds to their old nest
Have returned;
But whither spring has gone
No man knows."
And there is probably no language which fails to hold such a song
of sorrow as this one:
1
“Because he is young
And will not know the way to go
Would I could bribe
The messenger of the Underworld
That on his shoulders he might carry him!”
The difference between the Japanese spirit and our own can be
measured by the difference between these translations and another
book of Japanese poems which were written in English by Yoné
Noguchi. Noguchi writes hokkus -- the uta has fourteen more
-
syllables than the hokku — some actually in the seventeen-syllable
measure, but all endeavours to capture the hinted expression of
rich meanings. Whether it is because he is writing in a foreign
language, or because English cannot have packed into it the asso-
ciations of thousands of years and the treasure of half-forgotten
philosophies, the Japanese poet fails to produce the effect achieved
by Waley in his translations from these very old lyrics. There is
in fact one hokku that seems like an odd rearrangement of Symons'


BABETTE DEUTSCH
207
"Oh to part now, and parting now,
Never to meet again,
To have done forever, I and thou,
With joy, and so with pain.”
It runs :
"Oh, to part now, does it mean that we shall never meet again?
To have done forever with joy, thou and I,
Then to begin with pain again!"
Japanese poetry is utterly distinct from the sick languors of the
eighteen-nineties. It is crisp and terse, rich and brief. Welt-
schmerz is heavier when it goes half-uttered. Beauty, like music
and fragrance, is sharpest when it is passing. The western poet
can learn from these old poems a new intensity: written, like the
characters for the New Year, to mean "new jewels.”
BABETTE DEUTSCH


MR VACHEL LINDSAY’S FUTURE
The Golden Book OF SPRINGFIELD. By Vachel Lind-
say, a Citizen of that Town.
12mo. 329 pages. The
.
Macmillan Company. New York.
THE
a
HE good citizens of Springfield, Illinois, in These States, are,
we have reason to believe, in something of a flurry on account
of Mr Lindsay's book about the Springfield that is to be. Return-
ing from his triumph in England, Mr Lindsay has found his ped-
ple busy identifying his characters and has assured them, as a
patriot would, that only the good and the true among thein are
flung across his bridge of a hundred years. The bad ones, he says,
are all Peoria folk.
Through sources authoritative enough to be called unimpeach-
able, information has reached the writer sufficient for all but the
most minutely curious. But it would be unfair to identify the
characters without identifying, at least for a moment, the quality
of the book itself.
In a somewhat awkward setting--a prognosticators' club, a
book revealed, characters foreseeing themselves after a century-
Mr Lindsay has told the story of the town he loves as it will be
Anno Domini 2018. It is an adventure story with riots, lynch-
ings, air-duels, spies, politics, grafters, civic idealism, buried treas-
ure (and even buried booze!), things eternal and things trivial.
Springfield within its outer and inner walls, trafficking with
Chicago but hating urban corruption, Springfield a city which is
a University and a Fair, Auttering pennons in every wind, loyal
to the World Government, to the United States, to Illinois, and to
itself, putting individualists in jail for treason and adoring a girl
who rides with a sword, Springfield with more than a suggestion
of the guilds restored and with the millenium still distant-all
this is Mr Lindsay's country.
It is interesting chiefly because of the vehemence with which all
of his people seem to take their jobs. They may not be real peo-
ple, even in the fictional sense, but they are energies let loose and
they represent what one poet thinks America can be. To one


GILBERT SELDES
209
reader the great material blessing of the New Springfield is the
continual outcropping of the old. To another it may be the vogue
of coffee. Mr Lindsay's America, in any case, may smack of the
uplift as decidedly as Carol Kennicott, but it has a thousand times
her intensity.
One reason may be that the author has not done what his fel-
low-citizens think he has done. Writing of the future in such a
fashion as to declare a vision and set forth a way toward it, he
was writing also a social satire. His people are therefor out-
standing personalities, and in some cases they are the dominant
types of American life. Mr Lindsay wants his book to be a civic
Koran. It is to prevent the amateur sleuths from reducing it to
an acrostic that the following key is given.
Gregory Webster, the artist, is in 1920 an obvious sketch of
the teacher at the New York School of Art of whom Mr Lindsay
always boasts—the late William M. Chase. In 2018 he “be-
comes” Sparrow Short, and in that incarnation is a plain caricature
of Walt Whitman, no less. Rabbi Terence Ezekiel, who figures
as a devotee of the movies and as a reformer in politics, is un-
questionably Rabbi Stephen S. Wise of New York; Mother Grey
and her associates are to be taken as Mr Lindsay's tribute to
Mrs Eddy and her fellow-workers; the fighting, sword-forging
Michaels are descendants of Andrew Jackson whose life is sug-
gested in the brief biography of the founder of the clan; in the
case of Black Hawk Boone, Mr Lindsay has not even disguised,
but he has added William Morris to Daniel Boone as prototype;
St Friend is no Springfieldian of the day, but St Francis of Assisi;
Cave Man Thomas derives from Douglas Fairbanks and an evan-
gelist named Reverend Billy Sunday; the sinister Singaporean can
be loosely identified by the activities attributed to Professor
Münsterberg during the bad days of the war; Mayo Sims represents
the idea of McKinleyism (didn't Mr Lindsay write Bryan! Bryan!
Bryan! Bryan!) wherever it appears. Portia, the singing aviator,
is Miss Harriet Monroe. The identity of Avanel we can not dis-
close.
The architectural changes noted by Mr Lindsay are less mystify-
ing, but it will interest those who live not far from Fifth and
Monroe, that they are already possessed of one of the Sunset Tow-
ers which are in the future to ring the town. As for Mr Lindsay's


210
MR. VACHEL LINDSAY'S FUTURE
war, it is not obscure. I take at full value his intention to enlist
the intelligence by making Japan our ally instead of our enemy.
These are, I believe, the major mysteries, and they are not of the
highest importance. More important, to American literature, is
the fact that this book comes to take its place in an unpremeditated
collection of books on the Middle West, books of which Mr Lind-
say may well say that they are written “with the fanatical zeal of
the major Prophets of the Old Testament,” for to the believer in
America they all possess the divine fire. We may mention Main
Street, Moon-Calf, Poor White, Mitch Miller, The Domesday
Book, and Shelby M. Harrison's book, Social Conditions in an
American City, dealing directly with Mr Lindsay's own city.
We have heard directly enough that Mr Lindsay considers the
publication of these books as a triumphant event in his own life.
His own courage and dash are magnificent. He may not establish
the festival of Johnny Appleseed nor lead us on pilgrimages to
the Hundred Shrines; but he has shown us that to one aborigine-
we may call him that-America is still what it used to be to the
alien-born, the Land of Promise.
GILBERT SELDES


AESTHETICS AGAIN
AESTHETICS: A Critical Theory of Art. By H. G. Hart-
man.
250 pages. R. G. Adams and Company.
Columbus.
12mo.
M.
(
R Hartman's book is strange and significant. It is strange
that a man of to-day should, at times, write with the dead
and pretentious erudition of the old Scotch sciolists; that a mod-
ern professor should elaborate his reasonings in a manner similar
to the monachal logicians of the Middle Ages who argued ever-
lastingly of a heaven they had never entered; that, in a world
rich in literary and pictorial masterpieces, a man should neither
read nor see. It is significant, among the mass of worthless treatises
written on the aesthetic problem, that the author of this small
volume should be, at times, dangerously sane and gratifyingly
honest; that he should be the first American to place insistence
on the material elements employed in the making of the object of
art. He has avoided the easy and impressive practice of most
writers—the immediate transition from fundamental criticism to
hypothetical word-painting; and it is eminently to his credit that
most of his chapters are devoid of poetical nonsense and are rigor-
ously bound to his essential thesis.
Art, to the creator, is form, that is, the ultimate and sequential
order assumed by his materials; to the layman who goes to art
for diversion it is suggestion, a vague and varying emotion aroused
in him by a misunderstanding of the materials; and because of
this erroneous and secondary interest most comments on aesthe-
tics are of no importance. No experience is unproductive of asso-
ciative images, and in examining the completed object, where the
constituents are drawn from a repository of general experience,
it is extremely difficult for the average observer to apprehend these
factors in their artistic relationship instead of being carried away
by the subordinate appeal of one or more of the separate parts.
Mr Hartman, in emphasizing materiality, makes it possible for
many an amateur to approach art with a fair chance of finding its
meaning. A painting, or a poem, must be considered concretely;


212
AESTHETICS AGAIN
adequate appreciation is gained only when the ingredients are care-
fully weighed and judged in their combination toward unity. The
end of creative activity is artistry--not truth, nature, life, or any
other abstraction—and the artist strives, consciously and uncon-
sciously, to manipulate his materials so that their kinship in the
finished work is recognized at once as organic and inevitable. It is
not art for art's sake that inspires him, nor art for expression's
sake-it is his love of organization, the power to bend the materi-
als of experience into a form that can be grasped in its entirety.
Like all serious men he labours to make a statement beyond the
fragmentary utterances of every-day life. He who works for art's
sake, for the cheap pleasure of skilful rendition, whose life is de-
voted to the acquisition of mechanical proficiency, has missed the
goal, as he who is satisfied with mere expression and professes to
tell the story of his soul with a random splash of colour or a sooth-
ing word, has missed it.
But Mr Hartman's interpretation of materiality is gravely con-
fusing; at no point does he quite succeed in dissociating it from that
bastard issue known as technique. If we regard the material of art
as the actual matter undergoing fusion in the artist's hands, that
is, literal phrase and pigment; and if we regard virtuosity and deft
brushing of first importance, nothing remains but craftsmanship
upon which to build our structure of appraisal and to establish our
conception of art as a social impetus.
It is obvious that good craftsmanship is a necessary thing, but it
is equally obvious that it cannot by the most liberal extension of
its meaning account, either historically or aesthetically, for the
many and diverse manifestations of art which confront the student.
Were mechanical perfection in itself sufficient, were the beauty of
colour and the intricate flow of line, with all of their involved com-
plexities, not instigated by something far more profound than the
ideal of impeccable carpentry, we should have no explanation of
the dissatisfactions and revolutions that follow, one upon the other,
in the world of art. In truth, were this material beauty the quint-
essence of art, no new forms would ever appear: the repetition and
perfection of old and standardized models would be enough to oc-
cupy the mind of the artist.
It is this characteristic of Mr Hartman's argument that is weak
and misleading. His theory logically pursued would limit the


THOMAS JEWELL CRAVEN
213
study of art to its surface attributes. Of course, one must first
penetrate the surface, and if the author succeeds in enlisting a few
Americans into contemplating even the superficial forms of art
without wandering away into sentimental rhapsodies, a good deal
will have been accomplished. But as an explanation of art his
book is disappointing. After the dogmatic assurances of the preface
that aesthetic values have, at last, been eternally fixed, the failure
is more keenly apparent. Mr Hartman's knowledge of the psych-
ology of art and artists is defective. Had he been in a position to
analyse the origins of the Modern Movements, and to observe the
art forms which have accompanied it, he would have discovered
treasures infinitely beyond the mechanical fusion of matter which
he stresses with such prominence.
That the material of art is of supreme importance is undeniable,
but to maintain this supremacy it must be made identical with form
-form selected and differentiated in the mind of the artist, and
wholly divorced from matter, or more precisely, from the instru-
ments and appliances used in presentation. The student of aes-
thetics must not forget that the concrete object before him is the
fruit of a cumulative process of laborious selection, and that it is
not the externalization of an original and complete idea already
executed in the brain and demanding only perfect technique for its
revelation. Hence it will be seen that the meaning of art is to be
gathered from the study of the psychology of the selective opera-
tions of composition, and in no case from the exhaustive investiga-
tion of the mechanics of exposition. No wholly significant opin-
ions on the problem can be voiced by one who is not familiar with
the mental equipment of artists; in fact, it ought to be well known
by this time that the great secrets of plastic endeavour, the meaning
of Michelangelo's sculptures, for instance, and the understand-
ing of Balzac, are for ever withheld from those who have never
created anything
Mr Hartman's knowledge of painting has been derived from
books and not from pictures. There is no evidence in his curious
comments that he has ever seen a canvas, or a painter at work. In
discussing this branch of art he divides the elements of a picture
into two classes which are arbitrarily designated Presentative and
Representative. The old question of content drives him into the
prodigious blunder of separating form from a supposititious idea


214
AESTHETICS AGAIN
which the form is constrained to embody. When art is esteemed
as anything more than a vehicle for extraneous ideas no such divi-
sion can be made. The distinguishing feature of art is that it has
no ideas separable from its form. In this respect it differs from
philosophy, science, and history, where thought may adopt any one
of a number of forms and still preserve its essential meaning. In
art the material garnered from experience retains its meaning only
in the form given it—change one detail and another meaning in-
stantly appears. A painter drawing an arm attempts to deliver a
definite unit of form and has no intention of conveying a detached
idea. By association an abstract idea may attend the delivery, but
even this abstraction would have to be re-established if the config-
uration of the drawing were altered.
It is unfortunate that the aesthetician is so seldom an artist.
Were he to practise any one of the arts intelligently he would never
confound the purely creative processes with those of documentary
expression and translate the meaning of art into terms of philos-
ophy, religion, science, or sentiment. In performing the tasks of
his own critical department he begins with confused ideas which he
proceeds to clarify in verbal form, and having analysed the par-
turition of his own productions he concludes that art is brought to
light in similar fashion, and an aesthetic is erected on the basis of
his personal experience. It is plain to him that all abstract ideas
are of necessity inchoate until they are formulated; it is also evi-
dent that in his own work these ideas may have several forms and
be equally intelligible, and from these deductions he drops natur-
ally into the fallacy of placing the form and content of art into
separate categories and insisting that the art idea is capable of as
many
forms as his own ideas.
In painting, all construction begins with materials concretely ex-
perienced. Ideation occurs in the act of manipulation and the true
meaning of the picture lies in the total form consequent upon the
handling of the materials and is inseparable from it. The precepts
of science and philosophy may be couched in many languages: an
art idea is intrinsic to the form in which it first appears. In the
scientific sense, art can do nothing for truth or knowledge—it rules
another sphere which we must patiently explore to discover its
value.
When a painter delineates an arm he is moved by fact memor-


THOMAS JEWELL CRAVEN
215
ized or felt and not by a predetermined abstraction. During the
period of construction the abstraction is born: whatever is ide-
ological is to be found in his conception of the affinity of the sep-
arately experienced parts. The opinion, prevalent among critics,
that a painter visualizes the complete form of his graphic object
before attempting to present it is absolutely without foundation.
This error, above all others, is responsible for the division of art
into form and idea with an intervening technique. It is respons-
ible for the vagaries of the hedonists, empiricists, and association-
ists, who, with subtle premises drawn from this triple partition,
give preponderance to one of the members. Mr Hartman begins
well, but his theory of materials convicts him of analogous errors
and virtually leaves us to discover the truth of art in some sort of
technical excellence. Somewhat more crudely and with results
far more damaging to art the dealer in pictures shares the same
opinions. In the galleries where paintings are exploited the only
terms used are those relating to surface appearances—“scintillat-
ing,” “jewel-like," "a gem”—and the like.
Expressionism, with its firm stand for the individual, has abol-
ished many critical sophistries, yet, as a philosophical explanation
of art it is untenable. Mr Hartman is one of the first writers to
disclose the weaknesses of this theory, and for this he is to be ap-
plauded, but the very objections which he hurls against the mis-
takes of the expressionists, namely, that art is a sublimated rep-
resentation of something quite apart from the component elements,
can be turned against himself with the same deadly effect. Until
representation, in the terminology of aesthetics, is regarded as an
associative quality no satisfactory rationale of art will ever appear.
Representation of some sort by psychic necessity accompanies
every art form-nothing outside of experience has ever been form-
ally portrayed, and even in the most abstract examples of “Modern
Art” it is impossible to escape the world of everyday fact. Art
transcends representation when it implants in us the feeling of
complete harmony, the conception of relativity; when it shapes
into a compact unit all that is diffuse and incoherent in the life of
The artist chooses his material from his myriad experiences
and welds and moulds it into a single and complete statement. The
psychology of art treats of the evolution of this idealistic organ-
ization.
man.


216
AESTHETICS AGAIN
Subject-matter is the motif, the stimulus to creation-art begins
when this is lost in form. On the field of subjective material most
of the critical battles have been waged, and absurd evaluations
of the artist's susceptibility to nature have triumphed over what
he has had to offer in the way of form. Such is the popular and
journalistic attitude, where space is garishly filled by any idiosyn-
cracy that may be remotely connected with the artist's subjective
preferences. This is legitimate when it concerns the personality of
the artist, but it does not pertain to his compositions. The mean-
ing of art, the centre of interest to the creative intellect, remains,
as has been reiterated, in the organization of the materials of ex-
perience. It does not follow that the artist is limited to the range
of his immediate contact with the objective world: his material is
vast and comprehensive; it is influenced by every sentient moment;
it is the aggregate of all those experiences which have taken form
in his imagination. Were it not for the immeasurable mass of
adaptable form stored in the mind, art would be a shallow and
poverty-stricken affair.
Why writers of aesthetics pay such exorbitant and ponderous
attention to the literature of art and so little to masterpieces is an
inexplicable question. Possibly it is a professorial habit. Not
once in his book does Mr Hartman try his theory on an object to
see what will happen. Had he made this experiment he would
have been convinced that the material of art is the stuff of exper-
ience formulated in the imagination; he would never have alien-
ated form and content but would have realized that content, in
the subjective sense, accompanies and is inseparable from all form;
he would have agreed that the business of the artist is organization,
the forging of many particulars into one form that is general.
THOMAS JEWELL CRAVEN


THE MAKING OF A TORY
Memoirs of Life and LITERATURE. By W. H. Mal-
OF LIFE
lock. 12mo. 379 pages. Har per and Brothers. New York.
w
earlier adaptation of Plato's title in a book which appeared
in the late 'seventies bearing the name of William Hurrell Mallock.
The difference between the New Republic of to-day and Mr Mal-
lock's conception is useful in marking the movement of thought in
the intervening years. Our New Republic looks toward a reconstruc-
tion by democracy, by working from the base of the pyramid up-
ward. Mr Mallock's proceeds from the apex, socially speaking. It is
a discussion of Literature, Faith, and Philosophy in an English
Country House, carried on in the midst of surroundings intended to
recall the most perfect things in the inheritance and achievement of
civilization. Otho Laurence has gathered a party of the intellec-
tuals of his day at his villa on the south coast of England, and pro-
vided not only a physical but also a conversational bill of fare, be-
ginning with the Aim of Life and lapsing by natural gradations in-
to a discussion of the essentials of an ideal state of society. And as
a method of procedure it is proposed to begin with the highest class
in the state, and consider what "we really think that the highest
and most refined life consists in, that is possible for the most fa-
voured classes.”
The discussion which follows is an anatomy, in the Elizabethan
sense, of modern culture. Laurence's guests are indeed no other
than the pundits and prophets of the day—and the caricature is al-
most as brilliantly impudent as Max Beerbohm's. Mr Luke, who
is Matthew Arnold, gives us a delicious moment when he turns to
Dr Jenkinson, who is Jowett, for support. “Personal immortality
and a personal Deity are no doctrines of Christianity. You, Jen-
kinson, I know, agree with me.” Pater as Mr Rose contributes to
the discussion his aestheticism. Tyndall, Huxley, and Clifford,
as Stockton, Storks, and Saunders, offer their scientific materialism
respectively rendered sweet by sentiment, dry by stoicism, and bit-
ter by mordant atheism. But it is to be noted that the discussion
>


218
THE MAKING OF A TORY
a
concerns entirely what “society or the life of the highest classes
would be at its best.” Even Herbert, who with the golden voice
of Ruskin utters the final prophecy of doom to a culture which has
no longer faith in God, immortality, and duty, approves the pro-
cedure of “forming a picture of a perfect aristocracy.” “For," he
says, “it is one of the most vital of all truths, that in a perfect state
all the parts will be perfect; and that if the highest classes be as
good as they can be, so also will be all the other classes.”
To readers of the New Republic forty odd years ago this might
have seemed part of the irony of the book, but now come Mr Mal-
lock's Memoirs to show how far from ironical was his doctrine of
aristocracy, and how firmly he believed in the most favoured classes
as the nursery of that aristocracy. For forty years Mr Mallock
has stood in the lists of controversy on the far right. In politics
and political economy he has championed the principle of posses-
sion as the basis of society, and the extreme rights of the possessors,
against Herbert Spencer, Henry George, Benjamin Kidd, and the
socialists; in philosophy he has been a defender of an inspired, in-
fallible, supernatural faith in God and immortality against Mr
Frederic Harrison and the positivists, against Professor Huxley
and the agnostics, against Professor Clifford and the materialists,
against Matthew Arnold and Mrs Humphry Ward with their at-
tenuated Christianity, and against Jowett, Maurice, Farrar, and
the rationalism of the Broad Church. Against all these antagon-
ists he has used the searching dialectic, the relentless irony, the
trenchant style which made the New Republic a textbook of Ox-
ford. And now he confesses that the pragmatic basis of the faiths
which he espoused so generously and fought for so ardently is to be
found in what has been believed “always, everywhere, and by all”
the best people.
Mr Balfour, whose method Mr Mallock follows and with whose
results he in general agrees, has made us familiar with the notion of
“psychological climate.” Mr Mallock's psychological climate was
determined for him by his birth, one of “the Mallocks who have for
nearly three hundred years been settled at Cockington Court,” on
which place he dwells with loving intimacy in the first chapter of his
Memoirs. Here is to be found the explanation of William Hur-
rell Mallock, of what he was and was always to be, of what makes
him a case so exemplary in the modern world. As Ruskin could


ROBERT MORSS LOVETT
219
say that he went down from the garden-terrace of Schaffhausen
with his destiny fixed "in all of it that was to be sacred and use-
ful,” so Mallock speaks of the landscape of Devonshire.
"The feelings excited by a landscape such as this bore a subtle
resemblance to those produced in myself by the heraldrics which
thronged the church. From the windows, indeed, of all the houses
of which I have just been speaking the prospect was morally, if not
visually, the same. They all looked out, as though it were the un-
questioned order of things, on wooded seclusions pricked by mane
nanga
ial chimneys or on lodges and grey park walls, while somewhere
beyond these last lurked the thatch of contented cottages, at the
doors of which, when a member of the 'family' passed, women and
children would curtsy and men touch their foodlocks.”
His early education was at the hands of the Rev. W. B. Philpot,
("a favourite pupil of Doctor Arnold's at Rugby, an intimate friend
of Tennyson's”) whose vague democratic and latitudinarian opin-
ions inspired Mallock with his first contempt for liberalism, politi-
cal and relgious. From Dr Philpot, Mallock went to Oxford, then
in a progressive mood of reaction against the Tractarians, and to
Balliol, under Jowett the stronghold of the modernists. The effect
on him is stated in his own words:
“Thus, in whatever direction I turned, I felt that, if I listened to
the reasoning of liberal Oxford, I was confronted with an absurd-
ity of one kind or another. Of the only liberal answers attempted
to the riddle of life, not one, it seemed to me, would bear a mo-
ment's serious criticism; and yet, unless the orthodox doctrines
could be defended in such a way that in all their traditional strict-
ness they could once more compel assent, life, in the higher sense of
the word, would—such was my conviction—soon cease to be tolera-
ble.”
It was in London that Mallock found the environment which
confirmed him in his already determined course. He went there
from Oxford with a reputation for cleverness, with a vast social
connection, and with nothing to do but make himself at home. He
The London society of the 'seventies “coincided,” he says,
did so,


220
THE MAKING OF A TORY
"with what in the country, I had known and accepted, when a
child, as part of the order of Nature.”
Such a society is the fundamental concept in Mr Mallock's world.
To preserve its economic and social basis he wrote his mono-
graphs, Aristocracy and Evolution, The Limits of Pure Democ-
racy, Labour and the Popular Welfare, and Social Equality. He
dealt with these subjects in a massive style which frightened the
Conservative Committees on Parliamentary seats, but he loyally
schooled their candidates and prepared vast compilations of statis-
tics for the use of less informed speakers. His economic position is
stated in the Memoirs with pragmatic frankness. The only way in
which the economic production of a population can be increased is
by "the intellectual direction of the super-capable few," and to in-
duce these few to function society must offer the utmost in material
reward and social prestige. “It would be easier to make men
Trappists than to make them Socialists.”
In the limited world of London he found a portal to an inner
society, still more intimate and distinguished. Shortly after his ar-
rival he arranged to share a suite of rooms with two Catholic friends
"who had access to the world of Catholic gaiety,” to which Mallock
was admitted, and in which he confesses he found himself most at
home. He was the only non-Catholic at a great luncheon party
given by Lord Bute, the original of Lothair in Beaconsfield's novel,
in honour of Cardinal Manning. To defend the faith which was
the basis of this delightful exclusiveness he intervened in the con-
troversy between Dr Wace and Professor Huxley, with his trench-
ant article, Cowardly Agnosticism. He asserted the same position
in the Reconstruction of Belief, Religion as a Credible Doctrine,
and The Veil of the Temple. In seeking the basis of religious as of
social belief he is frankly a pragmatist looking steadily to the sanc-
tion of society, and naturally to the best society.
The true force of Mr Mallock's apologia lies not in these general
positions but in the wealth of detail by which he shows society, as
he knew it, interesting and worth preserving; just as the exquisite
Epicureanism of The New Republic is the best reason for accepting
a religion which would justify it. Mr Mallock knew many charm-
ing people and remembers them in their charm-Lord Houghton,
Lord Lytton, Augustus Savile, Hamilton Aidé, Wilfrid Blunt, Al-
fred Montgomery. Of this world the women are still more note-


ROBERT MORSS LOVETT
221
cate,"
a
very far
worthy, of whom Mallock distinguishes three-Constance, Duchess
of Westminster, Caroline, Duchess of Montrose, and the Duchess
of Somerset "remarkable for the peculiar magic of their voices and
for a peculiar sense of humour which their voices managed to indi-
past mistresses of the nuances by which social intercourse be-
comes a sort of music. Of country houses Mr Mallock was a con-
noisseur and a collector. Country house society in its intimacy re-
minds Mr Mallock of Catholic society in London. “Everybody
here not only knew everybody else, but had known them, or had
at least known about them, always.” It is with a certain engaging
naïveté that he confesses that of his serious work he did a large part
in country houses, and adds "the fact that society was never
away
I have usually felt as a stimulus, and very rarely as
a disturbance."
By a coincidence which Mr Mallock thinks worthy of note it
was at Ardverikie where he had first embarked on a serious study
of social problems that he received an invitation to present his view
of them to American audiences. The invitation came from the
Civic Federation, and under the management of the "distinguished
secretary,” Mr Easley, Mr Mallock was provided with "congrega-
tions of the educated classes only" at Columbia, Harvard, Chicago,
Pennsylvania, and Johns Hopkins'; and meanwhile enjoyed so
many “social amenities” that, as he kindly says, he could hardly tell
whether he was in New York or London. At all events, he found
his true psychological climate. Lunching at Mrs John Jacob As-
tor's he might have been in Grosvenor Place and so might half the
company. He found himself sitting by “Mrs Hwfa Williams,
and opposite was Monsignor Vay di Vaya “who, when I last saw
him, had been winding wool in the Highlands for Mrs Bradley
Martin.” Mr Mallock's appreciation of American society is writ-
ten in the simple good faith which characterizes the Memoirs as a
whole, and we look in vain for any trace of condescension, even
though his chief contact with thought was through Nicholas Mur-
ray Butler, with wit through Mrs Stuyvesant Fish, and with politi-
cal activity through Roosevelt. His touching reference to a clergy-
man whose congregation "had the honour of comprising Mr J. Pier-
pont Morgan” is convincing testimony to the texture of Mr Mal-
lock's social faith as strong to survive a transplantation. If one
suspects the ironist of the New Republic let him read this: “Why


222
THE MAKING OF A TORY
the temperament of one place should differ from that at another it
is not easy to say, but at Philadelphia I was not only listened to
without question, but at every salient point I was greeted with up-
roarious applause.” Philadelphian applause was the high point of
Mr Mallock's visit, and it is perhaps best to take leave of him as he
basks in it, convinced that always and everywhere in the society of
the best people it is possible to keep alive one's faith in a best of all
possible worlds.
ROBERT Morss LOVETT


A VICTORIAN LADY
Margot Asquith. An Autobiography. Two volumes.
Illustrated. 8vo. 558 pages. George H. Doran Com-
pany. New York.
LESSED with a father who had a mind of his own and a
B
this world with a "Here's me!” And
And through these five hundred
and fifty pages its “Here's me!” all the way. But that is as it
should be: that is what autobiography means.
We can read about
Home Rule Bills in several other places.
The years have rubbed off none of the satisfaction with which in
her nursery days Mrs Asquith heard her injured brother assert “You
are more like lions than sisters!” As to herself the brother was a
little ore than half right. If you can more or less measure a
man's wisdom by the things he knows—dates and percentage-tables
aside—you can gauge far better what is far more important, his
character, by the things he doesn't. In this pelting age slashes in
one's knowledge are as honourable as were of old time slashes in
one's face. In extremely early youth Mrs Asquith discovered she
was bad at sums, "and from that day to this I have never added a
single row of figures.” Apart from a body's ignorance, the only
other legitimate test of character is that body's literary style. I
am not aware of any other writer who has so well described the ap-
pearance of the coat of a dark chestnut horse as does Mrs Asquith
when she likens it to "the back of a violin.” “All that was fast,
furious and fashionable" is so topping a phrase that, as is the way
with good phrases, it makes one question whether one has not heard
it before. Of her wise friend, the Master of Balliol, when he tried
on her that wise gesture of incontinently going dumb, Mrs Asquith
remarks, “Something had switched him off as if he had been the
electric light.” Of those "common, shrewd men” among whom
her father was "thrown from his earliest days” (though, like his
daughter, blessed with a superabundance of ability to take care of
himself) Mrs Asquith observes they were "most of them not only
on the make but I might almost say on the pounce.” It has been


224
A VICTORIAN LADY
held against Mrs Asquith that she wrote her autobiograhpy before
breakfast in bed: following Lincoln I wish certain of her critics
could be supplied with that brand of bed.
It was into the drawing-room of Victorian empire that with her
“Here's me!" Margot Tennant plumped.
“The Sunday class I taught need have disturbed no one, for I
regret to relate that, after a striking lesson on the birth of Christ,
when I asked my pupils who the Virgin was, one of the most prom-
ising said:
“Queen Victoria !'”
We had thought the Christian religion in making of a Virgin a
mother had gone pretty far: to make of her a grandmother was
left to the British Empire. But the Virgin is not the only one to
suffer a sea-change into something rich and strange. Mrs Asquith
appears to have taken out to dinner more than once Lord Randolph
Churchill and that bad and petulant boy is here exhibited above
the illuminating motto, “Randolphus Africanus.” Imperialists
too, as Al Jolson would say, must have their moments.
But in these days there flourished in England a name more epi-
phanal than that of Queen Victoria, a name more consular than that
of Randolph Churchill. We here pluck out the pride of the bag.
"Margot: .. .. And I know Mr Gladstone too!
Arthur Walter: What a fortunate young lady!"
“On Saturday, 29th May, 1886, Mr and Mrs Gladstone came
to pay us a visit at 40 Grosvenor Square.” Margot and her family
entertaining at tea Mr Gladstone and his “Aunt Pussy” present a
spectacle which, if a trifle reminiscent of Alice, the March Hare,
the Mad Hatter, and the Dormouse, is not for that reason the less
engaging. Mr Gladstone went so far as to assert he had "regretted
all his life having missed the opportunity of knowing Sir Walter
Scott, Dr Arnold, and Lord Melbourne. ‘Tories have no
hope, no faith,' he continued . . . 'and there is surely a silent les-
son to be learnt from the tombstone.'
.
.
.
“The March Hare took the watch and looked at it gloomily;


SCOFIELD THAYER
225
then he dipped it into his cup of tea, and looked at it again: but
he could think of nothing better to say than his first remark. 'It
was the best butter, you know.'”
> >
1
Yes, and on December 17th, 1889, that "dear and honoured”
one underwent the fructifying experience of inspiration and brought
forth a poem of four stanzas which, by demonstrating four rhymes
to Margot, "emphasizes” the "uncommon genius” of the poet. I
refrain from giving the poem entire only because I know my read-
ers will want to try to dig out for themselves as many of those
rhymes as their varied intelligence will permit. There are in these
volumes fourteen other poems which to my mind are not a whit less
genialisch. From the pen of Lord Curzon let me cite, by way of
example, a poem which unreels thirty corruscating stanzas. Would
all this not go to indicate that William Gladstone, like William
Shakespeare, was not so much a lonely peak as we had fancied him?
Should we not look upon him rather as one of a nest of singing
birds? Mrs Asquith furnishes us with a photograph of him, show-
ing his umbrella, his dignity, and, appropriately enough, a book.
Himself rather of an old lioness, it is not surprising that he and the
Tennant whelp so halcyonly hit it off.
“She asked me what I was most interested in after hunting and
I said politics.” When a woman rides as well as does Mrs Asquith,
it is but natural that among the concerns of this world she should
rate hunting first. But, as Aristotle long ago determined, man re-
mains primarily a political, not a fox-hunting, animal. In the
ideal state, we may be sure, not only the fox-hunting, but also the
,
-
politics will be "fast, furious and fashionable.” In England poli-
tics have been fashionable for several years and that is why, I
suppose, the sun never sets upon the British flag. But in speed
and fury these English politics leave much to be desired. Mrs
Asquith speaks as though she and her sister Souls were the only
hostesses to bring together statesmen of opposing camps. But
of course that celestially chatty relationship had, long before her
avatar, already distinguished the politics of England from those
of the Continent. One is not astonished to find so naïve a lady as
Margot Asquith recording this tea-time reciprocity as an all-white
virtue. And in itself so it is. Given two statesmen of opposed
political ideals, the more these men can be brought together for


226
A VICTORIAN LADY
rational conversation and the mutually beneficial denting which
occasionally results therefrom, the better. But this pre-eminent
virtue of English politics, like so many other accepted virtues, is
but the unimportant reverse of an important vice. The reason these
hard-headed and smooth-fingered bosses of empire let little magpies
like Margot Asquith teach them to “play pencil-games” and the
other after-dinner exercises which their hostesses may deem “inspir-
ing,” the reason why a "great Liberal statesman” is willing to nib-
ble the same macaroon with "a damned Tory,” is plain as a barn
door. In his heart of hearts (and that is where macaroons go) each
champion jolly well knows the other fellow is "a decent sort,” in
other words, that he will play cricket, in other words, that to the
established order he is loyal. Of course these statesmen themselves
are never aware of this: they are English gentlemen and no Eng-
lish gentleman is ever aware of what his heart of hearts knows.
But how do they get away with it? Aristotle also pointed out,
rather unnecessarily, that in the practical world each event is the
result of impossibly innumerable causes. But the nose of the mat-
ter remains obvious. Of that tight island “the resident aristocracy”
swing the one empire that is big enough emotionally to count. And
they make it count for every drop that is in it. Therewith they
heat up the multitudinously anaemic dispossessed and therewith
they ensure these latter shall continue to kick themselves down-
stairs, and quietly. But this is vieille chanson.
Let us return to the people who matter and among whom, inci-
dentally, Margot Asquith has been accustomed to eat her straw-
berries and cream. A man's knowledge of and sympathy with those
whom he governs is tremendously dependent on such irrelevant
facts as the numbers of those governed, the acres they inhabit, and
,
the temples wherein they congregate. Lord Randolph Churchill,
for all his great big roaring heart and despite the most Christian of
intentions and of sisters, could not conceivably feel for and into the
Masai of Africa quite as he could have, had they subsisted on
something more English than raw blood. And in India and in
Ireland there are other tastes quite as far without the imagination
of a Churchill. So the Christian conscience will not this time
save from boredom. Yet the same imperial idea, impotent though
it be to excite among the rulers intelligent animosity, acts upon
their heads no less potently than upon those less polished. The



SCOFIELD THAYER
227
big guns and the big flags and the big ships induce a grateful
nystagmus: the affairs of London and of Manchester shrink to a
wee pettiness, and the game is up.
.
All this is merely to explain why Mrs Asquith had such success-
ful dinners. Her guests had not strong enough heads to keep their
eyes on that Manchester about which they might really have cared
enough to knock each other healthily down: the heady fumes of
empire had tamed the savage breast. These fumes themselves, on
the other hand, were easily worked off in pompous oratory, top hats,
and The Diamond Jubilee. Revolutions, martyrdoms, assassina-
tions on the Continent they all flourished. But the Anglo-Saxon,
pursued by his indefatigable fate, was here again, as the reward of
his native hardihood, worldly luck, and great possessions, from
healthy passion willy-nilly cut off.
To inhibitions such as these we must trace that gross, appalling at-
mosphere of a great public-school which at length swallowed what
was once Merry England. Practically, empire is the best of all
forms of government; aesthetically it is the most intoxicating;
morally it is the most noxious. And morally Mrs Asquith and
Mr Gladstone paid. A pinch more of the leonine in their roos
and like Lord Byron they might have kept their integrity. Then
too, there is always laudanum and there is always Dostoevsky.
But Mrs Asquith, like Mr Gladstone, went wrong more commonly
and more repulsively: after that most delectable of teas, Margot
drove him back to 10 Downing Street, went home and wrote in
her diary: “perhaps it was the light of the setting sun, or the wind,
or perhaps something else, but my eyes were full of tears.” Shoo!
Mrs Asquith. Whatsoever brought those tears, surely you were not
the girl not to know! With the gay sliding of these morally un-
focused years, this false feeling, this sick sentimentality, this moral
,
degeneration, has so obscenely waxed and so abominably multiplied
that to-day Mrs Asquith can write (and publish) the ensuing
sentence:
"If ever I were to be as unhappy again as I was there, I would fly
to the shelter of those Rackham Woods, seek isolation on those curv-
ing coasts where the gulls shriek and dive and be ultimately healed
by the beauty of the anchored seas which bear their islands like the
Christ Child on their breasts."


228
A VICTORIAN LADY
But let us veil our heads and turn aside for one time this woman,
even she, was called, and with some show of reason, a lioness.
In a characteristic passage from which we learn that King
Edward VII was more "touchy” than the present incumbent, Margot
tells us how at Ascot she picked a winner. And indeed no inhibition
could kill that Tennant instinct for the main chance. In affairs
of the heart Mrs Asquith gives herself out to be "a very old hand.”
"When Henry told me he cared for me that unstifled inner voice
which we all of us hear more or less indistinctly told me I would
be untrue to myself and quite unworthy of life if, when such a man
came knocking at the door, I did not fling it wide open.”
I suppose the best criterion of old-handship in any business remains
the "inner voice”: when its reaction to emergency is immediate and
automatic, then the possessor becomes "an old hand.” In re Peter
Flower, mum was the word. The inner voices of prominent Vic-
torians were extraordinarily dependable; they were, to use an in-
appropriate language, bien documentées. This was the quality by
virtue of which they so patly chimed with more negotiable things.
Mr Gladstone, being wise, was an intransigeant moralist; he was
also, being wise, an intransigeant opportunist. So—like the
glancing ball upon the fountain and no less unconsciously—this
Victorian lady has contrived immortally to bob, at once in the sun-
light and in the splash.
But of course the really interesting thing about Mrs Asquith's
book is the indignant miaowing of those who none the less lap it
up. They quote her own words against herself, “Reticence should
guard the soul and only those who have compassion should be ad-
mitted to the shrine.” They do not seem aware that the smug
theatricality of this phrasing is far worse than any breach of re-
ticence could ever be. But let us quote a different passage—for
this autobiography, like the Bible, can furnish more texts than one
—and this time for the defence. During “the first scene in my
life,” when hard-pressed by the jealous Mrs Bo, our heroine de-
ployed, strategically, this observation: “However, every one has a
:
different idea of what is right and wrong ... .” But to penetrating
moralists like Mr Savonarola Hackett such a sentiment as this can
only serve lamentably to establish what he has already publicly



SCOFIELD THAYER
229
stated, namely, that Mrs Asquith lacks "spiritual pellucidity” and
that she “had no chance to be seriously educated.” But I can't
help being sorry for the lady none the less. So uncanonical of me.
Though The New Republic number its readers in the tens of
thousands, shall not ginger be hot i' the mouth?
But quite apart from the just denunciations of these moralists,
there seems to be about a very general and genuine bitterness
against Mrs Asquith. Of course there was the war and of course
everyone knows how the wife of England's Premier was gloriously
snubbed. But that war is over. . Poor Mrs Asquith is paying for
a different war and for one her friends will not win. Where you
have empire you have classes, and where you have classes you have
class-loyalty, and a great many people are much fluttered lest her
frankness may have given away the show. That's what comes
of having a lower class; it's as bad as having a servant: one has to
drop one's voice. I take off my hat to a lady who didn't.
SCOFIELD THAYER


BRIEFER MENTION
YOUTH AND THE BRIGHT MEDUSA, by Willa Cather (12mo, 303 pages;
Knopf). Perhaps the striking interest, the catch charm of Miss Cather's
stories lies in the fact that they take us behind scenes with the sort of
person
generally revealed to us only in Sunday supplement articles. The "bright
Medusa" is art, and in six of these eight stories, including some of her
earliest and of her most recent work, it is of the art of music and of its
votaries she writes. Not romantic pictures of the great women of the
opera, they seem an informed appraisal, cold, cut cameo-like against a
blank background of experience. In itself almost a trick, this stark treat-
ment of the most emblazoned persons of our world is at once intriguing
and disturbing. Sifted by such scrupulous analysis the residue comes
through too completely cerebral to be quite comprehended in a sentimental
world. As studies of success, of the successful, of the victims of "big
careers," as simply of ambition, above all of the quality of ambition in
women, they probably are not surpassed; but a coldness, a minimizing
of the emotional element, even in an emotional situation-perhaps es-
sentially lacking in such people, it can be argued—will disappoint and
baffle the public which greedily seeks the story-only the story.
BLIND, by Ernest Poole (12mo, 416 pages; Macmillan). A carefully
concealed roman à thèse. The book is constructed along the lines of an
honest symbolism: the hero is blind, for instance, as our age is blind;
in the dark, with the aid of his typewriter, he recovers his impressions of
the last forty years, focusing on the economic upheavals precipitated by
the war.
On the whole, it is newspaper correspondence worked into the
shape of a novel. The parts dealing with Russia immediately after the
fall of the Czar are especially interesting. The blind writer is susceptible
to all the human forces of the conflict, sympathizing vacillatorily with
Times-o-phobic Red as well as with hundred-percentism. And Mr Poole
makes his final plea by having his unmistakable American marry the
widow of the German chemist who perfected gas.
cameos
THE STORY OF GOTTON CONNIXLOO, and FORGOTTEN, by Camille Mayran
12mo, 160 pages; Dutton), are
, two
carved from the
tusks of war by a knife which might easily have dropped from the hand
of Jens Peter Jacobsen. As delicate as two brooches, they are as appeal-
ing to the heart as they are fragile to the eye. Set in English by Van
Wyck Brooks they constitute an unusual ornament to the library of
Franco-American literature.
Life, by Johan Bojer (12mo, 339 pages; Moffat Yard), peoples a broad
canvas with feverish figures, and handles its theme in a more sophisticated
key than most of the preceding Bojer. A restless civilization is silhouetted
against the eternal whiteness and bleakness of the north-a dazzling, if
to alien eyes distorted, effect.
,



BRIEFER MENTION
231
THE PEOPLE OF THE Ruins, by Edward Shanks (12mo, 314 pages; Stokes).
This novel has the abandon of a Jules Verne romance, the terror and ex-
citement of a Nick Carter tale, and the ultimate literary claims of a
Münchausen invention. But the author writes entertainingly, imagina-
tively, and with a creative skill that makes his work pleasant if not nutriti-
ous reading.
The ROMANTIC Woman, by Mary Borden (12mo, 347 pages; Knopf),
holds the thread of interest to the end of a very tangled skein. Shrewd
character drawing, fidelity to types, and vigour in narration are here in
good measure, though occasionally the writer forces the situation beyond
the boundary of literary discretion, and indulges an almost paperback fling.
SARA VIDEBECK AND THE CHAPEL, by C. J. L. Almquist, translated by
Adolph Burnett Benson (12mo, 229 pages; American Scandinavian
Foundation, New York), are two simple stories by a Swede who lived
in America during Civil War days. Into their characteristic Scandina-
vian simplicity and mysticism are woven threads of Southern thought
and feeling-Rousseauism, for instance, which here gives a quaintly
archaic pattern to the individualism of the North. But Sara Videbeck,
whose story was published and destroyed in 1838, is at the same time
quaintly modern in her matter-of-factness about marriage and sex.
LETTERS OF A JAVANESE Princess, by Raden Adjeng Kartini, translated from
the Dutch by Agnes L. Symmers (8vo, 310 pages; Knopf). Kartini, a
Javanese of noble birth, was the first native Javanese to feel the Euro-
pean current of emancipation. These letters are the daily register of
her strengthening convictions, her growing ability to deny the rigid and
arbitrary customs of her people. Rooted in a tradition of the cloistering
of women, she fought especially for the social freedom of women. Per-
haps the greatest thing in her favour is that, as much as the worship of
the shibboleth was in her blood, she did not blindly supplant the shib-
boleth of native practices with the shibboleth of European pratices. On
account of her excessive handicaps, however, her grasp of expression is
by no means unusual; and as a result, the book is more valuable histori-
cally than as a piece of literature.
IN Morocco, by Edith Wharton (8vo, 290 pages; Scribner), adds another
swiftly-told, graceful, vivid, and yet informative travel book to Mrs
Wharton's globe-trotting shelf. She has caught Morocco in a mood which
its after-the-war exploitation will efface for ever, and the descriptive nar-
rative is particularly welcome on that account. Mrs Wharton may be the
tourist, but she is never that baleful monologist—the sightseer.
AMERICAN TowNS AND PEOPLE, by Harrison Rhodes (Illus., 12mo, 274
pages; McBride), has its classic prototype in Henry James's The Amer-
ican Scene, but it is a version highly journalized and simplified, intended
not so much to interpret as to amuse. In this doubtless quite as important
capacity, it for the most part succeeds admirably, only at times seeming a
little fatuous, a little too effusive, a bit bland perhaps.
а


232
BRIEFER MENTION
SHADOW-SHAPEs, by Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant (12mo, 237 pages; Hough-
ton Mifflin), discloses an effective mingling of personal impressions in
France with bits of description and snatches of vivid scenes, all penned
with a staccato intensity which admirably reflects the sensitive reactions
of convalescence. The book derives a unity from its synthesis of frag-
ments—a shade too clinical at times, but otherwise sharply realistic and
delicately expressed.
EVERYDAY AMERICANS, by Henry Seidel Canby (8vo, 183 pages; Century),
casts a trial balance of current prejudices and possible ideals, as they are
reflected in the prevailing type of citizenship. Accepting the “finished
product of bourgeois life in America—the middle class incarnate" as the
measure of what we are, the author runs an appraising eye over our intel-
lectual, religious, and literary life, and then withdraws without computing
the total. A timely, undogmatic contribution to an exceedingly lively issue.
THE ANTHOLOGY OF ANOTHER Town, by E. W. Howe (12mo, 181 pages;
Knopf), consists of backyard gossip about the inhabitants of Atchison,
Kansas; as such it is unexpurgated and entirely delightful. Naturally
it invites comparison with the more famous anthology which preceded it.
There are biographies in the first part of Spoon River which could be
written out as prose and inserted in this volume without seeming out of
place. On the other hand Mr Howe does not adulterate his gossip with
mysticism; he is not so cosmic as Mr Masters and he is a great deal
casier to read.
PREJUDICES: Second Series, by H. L. Mencken (12mo, 254 pages; Knopf),
might be conceived as an allegory based on a great American epic. Eliza,
the fugitive slave of American literature, with her child, Puritanism, held
tight in her arms, is hotly pursued by the Mencken bloodhounds of vitri-
olic scorn and aristocratic anger. Just as they are about to tear the in-
fant from her grasp, Eliza leaps upon the artificial ice of academic critical
approval, and is temporarily, at least-saved. Doubtless the exhilarat-
ing chase will be resumed in Prejudices: Third Series.
THE ART OF BIOGRAPHY, by William Roscoe Thayer (12mo, 155 pages;
Scribner), embodies a scholarly, illuminating survey of a theme which
never grows stale. The author views the entire field of biographical
literature, with considerable critical comment on modern work in its histor-
ical relations.
SATAN THE WASTER, by Vernon Lee (12mo, 350 pages; Lane), is described
on the jacket as “a philosophic war drama." Since its philosophy is
somewhat melodramatic and its drama somewhat discursively philosophic,
it scarcely can be termed a war play. Furnished with copious notes and
a lengthy prolegomenon it is an interesting discussion of our international
imbecilities and sets forth with pomp those precise opinions whose less ele-
gant expression recently sent several hundred Americans to jail. Mr Ber-
nard Shaw has given the book high praise.
7


BRIEFER MENTION
233
THE BLACK COUNTRY, A Book of Twenty Drawings, by Edward Wadsworth
(4 to, The Ovid Press, London), is introduced by Arnold Bennett with
a dextrous flippancy that scarcely fits the stern beauty of the plates.
Slag-heaps, blast furnaces, steel mills, subject-matter so tempting to illus-
tration, are converted by Wadsworth into the pure art of dramatic de-
sign; indeed, so far as representation is concerned, the fuliginous squalor
of The Black Country might as well denote the slag-heaps of hell. The
artist, a cubist by method, is a master of precise line; his abstractions
are never allowed to destroy the graphic idea; many lines are used but
each is clearly bound to the objective forms. Sometimes the masses stand
out of the drawings like concretions, but as a whole the design is unbroken
and powerful.
Moons OF GRANDEUR, by William Rose Benét (12mo, 176 pages; Doran),
embodies some of the best work of a poet who seldom strays far from the
fonts of genuine inspiration. Mr Benét's favoured themes are romantic,
and he has the faculty of investing them with feeling and colour and
verve, through the competent exercise of an authentic talent. His verses
are refreshingly free from pose; they are light and firm in texture.
THE JUNK-MAN, and Other Poems, by Richard Le Gallienne (12mo, 243
pages; Doubleday, Page). One of the outstanding qualities of Mr Le
Gallienne's verse, and one hardest to understand when one considers that
he is by nature a globe-trotter and cosmopolitan, is his fixed, romantic
opposition to life and its shaded meanings. In The Ballade of Pessimists,
in the earlier part of his book, he consigns dreamers, poets, and thinkers
of the type of Nietzsche, Freud, Poe, Remy De Gourmont, and
D'Annunzio to Hades and suggests rat-poison as a cure for their spiritual
malaise. It is consoling to know that the next generation, as well as
those that follow, will not find it necessary to do the like for the author
of The Junkman. Facile charm that is safely mummified can do neither
weal nor woe to the spirit of art or life.
HISPANIC ANTHOLOGY of poems translated from the Spanish, collected by
Thomas Walsh (16mo, 779 pages; Putnam), is a valuable book not
alone for its well-arranged collection of poems, but for the fine reproduc-
tions of famous portraits and for the biographical notes. The poems
themselves have not always been happily translated and have, no doubt,
lost much of their music in coming out of the Spanish. Except for the
old ballads, the most interesting and beautiful of the poems are the work
of the modernists. They seem to have made no violent break with the
older poets, but their work has far greater freedom of form and imagery,
and a certain natural, carthy beauty that is very delightful.
In The SUPERSTITION OF DIVORCE (12mo, 150 pages; Lane), Mr G.
K. Chesterton maintains that the Catholic Christian teaching is historically
and socially justified. To encourage divorce and re-marriage is to destroy
the normal in favour of the abnormal and will result in economic slavery
as the family disappears. Mr Chesterton thinks clearly and his style jolts
ons, almost, into agreement.


MODERN ART
IT
T was said of Marsden Hartley when he first exhibited a tend-
ency to apply paint in mosaic-like touches to the canvas-and it
was Mr Stieglitz who said it—that this inclination was spontane-
ous and had occurred in some remote country place in New Eng-
land far from the influences of Paris. The information was con-
veyed through a muted larynx-Mr Stieglitz was truly noble in
the aid he gave to young painters—and the impression was given
to sympathetic hearers that supernatural agencies were at work
here and there seeking favouring “controls” through whom the
various manifestations that had already excited so much comment
in Paris—and were later to be known as “Modern Art”-might be
vindicated.
Another "control” was Maurice Sterne who exposed the painted
records of his sojourn among the South Sea Islanders at the Berlin
Photographic Gallery and who had been subjected to a plus fort
que moi influence whilst at Bala. Maurice had never seen the
paintings of Cézanne, so Mr Birnbaum told the late Sir William
Van Horne, and Sir William admitted that to his mind Maurice's
pictures vindicated Cézanne completely—and in fact, he preferred
them to Cézanne's. Cézanne had only imposed his palette and his
lines for tree forms and hills upon Mr Sterne, the latter refusing
to surrender his classic ideas of the figure to the dead man from
Aix; or perhaps the spectral Cézanne admired them too much to
wish to have them changed, since he did himself at one time try
to draw like Bouguereau, as nearly as he could, and Mr Sterne
knows far more of the figure as it is, than Bouguereau ever did.
But the question of vindications or influences is interesting only
as we begin the progress towards the stage where we do our own
imposing, a stage not near, as yet, since we have no dead Cézannes
and Rousseaux, nor live Matisses and Picassos, to compel the
hordes to yield to their fashions. We do have one, Marcel Du-
champ, who speaks a language strictly his own, and who charms
immensely a somewhat private circle—but it is not certain as yet
whether Marcel is really ours or merely a loan from France, and
it might be unseemly for us to brag of him. In the mean time, we



MODERN ART
235
а
begin to have a respectable list of artists whom we do own who
play the modern game and who tend to make us forget the work
of other celebrities. Among these is Mr Stieglitz's Marsden Hart-
ley, who stood out well with a group of floral panels in a recent
international show at the Société Anonyme; Charles Demuth,
whose watercolours at the Daniel Galleries proved one of the im-
portant exhibitions of the season; John Marin; Max Weber; Man
Ray; Abram Walkowitz; Charles Sheeler; Joseph Stella; and the
Zorachs.
Charles Demuth as an artist grows in strength if not in gaiety.
When in Paris he read Zola, and possibly Balzac, and in the student
days before the war there was still enough romantic glamour hang-
ing over all the various classes of ladies vaguely known as “profes-
sional” to invest them with appreciable worth as material to an ar-
dent student, and so Mr Demuth came back to us laden with draw-
ings of circus riders and music hall singers, somewhat à la Toulouse-
Lautrec. It seemed as though we were about to have a new carica-
turist, but Mr Demuth had scarcely unpacked his boxes and en-
sconced himself in a studio than a change came o'er the face of his
dream. Professional ladies in America are obliged to live so fur-
tively and without glamour that even the most willing artists are
powerless to aid them. Mr Demuth saw that they were fitter sub-
jects for pathological research than caricature--and gave them up. .
He
may still be a caricaturist, but if so, he laughs at our architec-
ture, rather than at our ladies. His themes have been found in
Pennsylvania and in New England, and not even Hawthorne has
been so painstaking with gables as has Mr Demuth. He draws the
sharp clean line of our souvenirs of Sir Christopher Wren with
an intensity that suggests an inward rage. When a modern mill,
with its lofty smoke-stacks and concrete-and-iron walls, falls with-
in his vision, there is no doubt whatever that one side of Mr De-
muth's nature is up in arms—but que voulez-vous?—the other side
of him is pure artist, and the result, in spite of the concrete, is beau-
tiful. The Coatesville Steel Mill is one of the most important pic-
tures in modern American art, and the town of Coatesville in Penn-
sylvania, which once burnt a nigger odiously at a stake, now has a
more worthy claim to fame, thanks to the fact of an artist having
chanced that way.


236
MODERN ART
many visitors
The Folsom Galleries took the plunge with the exhibition of
John Store's work, and with commendable results, if
and much publicity be thought commendable. Mr Storrs is a
young man, at the threshold of his career, who has travelled much,
experimented much-all in the modern way--and who succeeds to
the extent that he arouses expectations. He exposed sculptures,
drawings, and wood-cuts; his surest work, the prints. He has not
shaken clear of the "influences," as yet, the most marked impress
upon his style suggesting the late Secessionist business in Vienna,
but doubtless the general kindness that was meted out to him at his
début, will go far towards enabling him to find his true bearings.
For a good deal of this kindness, he may thank his wife. This lady,
a Frenchwoman who wrote under the name of Mme Debrol, sup-
plied an “appreciation” of her husband for the catalogue, which
had a succèss fou. Perhaps appreciation is a mild word, Mrs
Storrs clearly being an enthusiast upon the subject. A few of her
sentences, roughly translated, give an idea of her style. Ecoutez;
“My husband is an artist. He escapes then all definition. He
is sculptor, designer, engraver, architect, poet, dreamer; he is a
chameleon. He changes humour with the light and under inspira-
tion is like a drop of water in the sunlight. His soul takes on all
the little differences of the air his soul is like the robe de Peau
d'Ane, colour of the weather. He is as gay as an infant playing
in a flowering orchard of a spring morning-on certain days; on
others he is as thoughtful and reserved as a chapel where but a sin-
gle candle burns. He is charming, irritable, nervous, sensitive,
taciturn, exuberant, insupportable, adorable, indefinable—he is an
artist.”
a
>
Everyone was enchanted with Mrs Storrs' little effort. Frank,
free writing like that is rare in exhibition catalogues, and the art set
decided with remarkable unanimity that two desirable additions
had been made to their list of acquaintances.
HENRY MCBRIDE


MUSICAL CHRONICLE
AUDIENCES
THE
THE audience of the first of the season's concerts by the Flon-
zaley Quartet expressed directly and flatly its dislike of the
novelty performed, the Strawinsky Concertino. The traditional
damnation with faintest applause, exclusion with low, quasi-
hysterical guffawing, were superseded extensively by some, you
know, un-Anglo-Saxon and Continental hissing, which increased in
vehemence, drowning quite the laughter, when the members of the
quartet made faintly as though to recommence the brief composi-
tion. The strong silent businessman, usually prompt only with his
tears and his flapper-like exclamations of "oh, isn't that just too
lovely,” forgot for the nonce his timidity, and hissed. His sisters
and his cousins and his aunts, ladies blonde, brunette, and grizzled,
supported him with amazing alacrity, and sent forth in the direction
of the platform where stood the embarrased Flonzaleys, some long-
drawn and remarkably sustained sibilations. Each row of stalls
seated at least one individual who declared roundly to his approv-
ing entourage that “if he ever saw that composition announced on
a programme again, he would stay away,” and defied the musicians
to do without his two dollars. Indeed, feathers stood dangerously
ruffled, everyone looked "what the devil does Betti mean, anyway! "
until the performers began making amends by watering the 1840
rosebuds of the Schumann a-major quartet, and left the audience
to dream fondly, eyelids closed, lips parted, on grandmother's
bridal wreath.
Something had been sharply, savagely relieved in the concertino.
The fiddles had spoken bitterly: futility. They had spoken
angrily: boredom; spoken: the joke of it all. The Strawinsky
music is a drab, rasping, tired shuffle and breakdown. It is like
a locomotive which has fallen off the track, making its wheels re-
volve in air. Rhythms prolong themselves out of sheer inertia;
pound on, wearily. A lyric coda of a few measures, a sort of
momentary illumination of a darkened landscape, breaks off into
silence just as it begins to establish itself. Petruchka, seedier,


238
MUSICAL CHRONICLE
older, sullener, is on the boards again, dancing. Before the war his
,
mad energy used to come out of him in forms of beauty. He threw
himself against the walls of his prison in frenzied desire of release
that was terrible and wonderful. But now, it comes out of him in
ugly gestures; he no longer deems it worth his while striving for es-
cape; he is grown vindictive. He dances—because he was born
with his mind in his feet, and also, because he is hungry. But he
loses interest in his dance long before his feet cease shuffling and
beating; he asks himself bitterly “What's all this for?” while his
feet continue for some reason to execute the movements, which be-
come stupider and stupider. The machine continues of its proper
momentum long after the meaning of its activity has been lost.
At the end, Petruchka summons himself to speak. He wants to
say something conclusive about life, to seize the spark of emotion
which suddenly glints in him. He commences "Oh, Life!," then
stops short. There is so much to be said that it serves no end to
speak. There is nothing to be said at all. Finis-the world for
him. Finis—perhaps for all men. Finis--of a certainty, a civil-
ization,
The concertino is a piece of post-armistice existence. It is a
splinter of mirror in which there reflects itself sharply the disinteg-
ration of life in progress since the conclusion of the war. Stra-
winsky is an artist: he does not make things for the sake of making
something beautiful, but in order that he may see the truth. He
will see the truth, even though it prove the head of Medusa. Noth-
ing else is worthy his effort. And this music for string quartet, all
his recent works, the childish, half-idiotic songs as well as the con-
certino, express what he feels all thinking people to be. The music
represents the quality of life in him, in sapient folk, the weariness,
the dull indifference to a world whose machinery has refused all
human control, and which is seen hurling them to destruction. The
weight that depresses men to-day, and robs them of all but a modi-
cum of desire, is not on them only because of the energy expended
in war, because of the gigantic wastage of human and material re-
sources done. It is not on them only because of the general bitter
misery. The mortmain of weariness flung heavily on the bubbling
bourn of life is but what men at all times have felt during the col-
lapse of a civilization. Something like it the Greeks must have felt
when their freedom was extinguished by the Macedonians and the



PAUL ROSENFELD
239
Romans; something like it must have been felt by the men who
went to die in life in the Thebaid during the collapse of the Roman
world. Life is once again seen, a flux of unrelated meaningless
moments, none more important, more significant than another; the
victories of the Alexanders, the thoughts of wise men, no more
important than the squealing of swine in Pyrrho's farmyard. Of
no matter the birth of a man; of no matter his death; no matter
whether one persist or perish. It is, indeed, a sort of new pyrrhon-
ism, the thing sapient folk, most of them, feel to-day. One sees
it in the posthumous novel of Guillaume Apollinaire, with its mass
of ludicrously unrelated detail; in the poetry of the dadas, stu-
diedly unselective; in the recent music of Strawinsky.
Certainly, the ugly, infinitely significant music of the concertino
is of a piece with the lives of the folk who listened to it that eve-
ning in Aeolian Hall. The place was more a unit during the per-
formance of the Strawinsky than it has almost ever been, at any
other concert. Audience, performers, composition, the tasteless
and vulgar decorations of the hall itself, were interwoven, inter-
playing, doing much the identical thing. A light had suddenly
been cast from some secret source, illuminating cruelly matters till
then half shadowed. The drabness, the weariness, the joylessness
of the music seemed to proceed out of the hundreds packed, as they
are packed evening after evening, into the rows of the seats. One
perceived the players anew through the music, perceived the want
of conviction, want of enthusiasm, in them. One perceived the
audience, starkly, unforgettably. The fatigue, the flaccidity of the
American public was relieved. Money one saw, food, complacent
coiffures that said "Well, here we are!” But neither youth, nor
eagerness, nor joy, nor resiliency, were visible. Wherever in the
audience the eye rested, it saw dun, grey, whether it fell on year-
less faces or on yeared. People were sitting; everything was sit-
ting. Life was headless, lukewarm, weary from inaction, from in-
adequate action. One thought perforce of rubber bands from
which all elasticity has passed. One saw what America does to
young people, to old people. The modern conveniences, dentistry,
plumbing, did not awaken respect during those few minutes. Life
was what the music was—tired, inane, the weary revolutions of a
machine no man can arrest.
And the audience hissed. It did its utmost to punish the musi-


240
MUSICAL CHRONICLE
cians who had dared offer them this work. It did its utmost to
banish for ever the composition from the concert halls. Not that it
had failed to see the implications of the music. On the contrary,
it had felt them only too well. And for that reason, it sought to
exclude it, to destroy it. The mechanism that makes the American
public so hostile, so blind, to the contemporary artistic expressions,
was at work in the audience again. The living artist comes to folk
with the offer of a contact with the present. He comes to them
with the truth of an experience, with the fact of what his life is, of
what their own lives are. He comes to tell them what is at work
in the world to-day, what the tenure of his own existence is, what is
happening or about to happen to them. And that is precisely what
our musical and artistic public does not wish to know. For the
members of this public are largely persons who have money, who
have gotten what they want of life, and therefore want nothing to
change. They want their position of privilege maintained, they
want nothing new to come into the world to threaten their power,
they want to have obtain the “normalcy" which is their own master-
hood. Nevertheless, new elements are continually coming into
play in the world. For all their Hardingism, the ground is rapidly
slipping away from underneath their feet. They themselves are
being ruined by the cumberousness of an obsolete banking-system.
The machine has refused their control, too. But, being too weak,
too slothful, too tired to realize that life is a perpetual battle that
goes only to him who never relaxes his watch, and that their sole
means of defence lies just in foreseeing, in seeing as clearly as possi-
ble the state of the world, in viewing themselves as nakedly as they
can, and thus preparing themselves, and strengthening their adjust-
ment to the world, they elect to play the ostrich. They permit
themselves to be persuaded that if they can but keep a thing from
their consciousnesses, they will have abolished it. They refuse to
open their eyes.
.
So they help rob the concert hall, the place that ought be nothing
other than a bath of reality, of its lovely function. There are few
musicians who will stand out against them in board meetings, few
who will stand firm against signs of displeasure from audiences.
There is always a courtesan in a virtuoso. And since nothing will
get them the applause on which they feed except musical Mother
Goose rhymes, Mother Goose it is that is performed.
For, after all, what is it that our audiences demand other than
a



PAUL ROSENFELD
241
“Ride a cock horse
a
To Banbury Cross”
or
"Bye, Baby Bunting
Daddy's gone a-hunting”?
What is it that they demand but compositions which have been
heard so often that no edge remains to them, compositions in which
there are no surprises, compositions which demand of the auditor
no effort, no vivacity of imagination? All they ask, after all, is
,
that they be not forced to think, to enlarge their experiences, to en-
ter into another's mind. Symphonies are repeated with nauseating
regularity, and excite applause infallibly. A sigh of relief issues
from the house as some Fifth Symphony, Beethoven's, Tschaikows-
ky's, Dvorak's, is attacked. The listeners know that they will meet
nothing unexpected, nothing novel, nothing difficult to apprehend,
nothing that will make them stretch their brains. To be sure, were
someone to appear on the platform and recite to them
"Mary, Mary,
Quite contrary”
or
“Tom, Tom, the piper's son
Stole a pig and away he run”
they would hiss, as they hissed Strawinsky. For the truth about
themselves would be dangerously nigh to dawning upon them.
But, when our “music-lovers” have before them Stokowski and the
Philadelphia Orchestra playing the musical equivalent for Mother
Goose—the moron music of Dvorak's New World Symphony, with
its dulled edges, its ignoble platitudes, its largo that might do
rather nicely at the movies when the old darky dies on the film, its
scherzo with its chorus of wealthy milkmaids—they sit in bliss,
and rattle applause that is like salvos of artillery.
They do not appear to be in the least aware toward what it is
that they are at the very moment, stretching out their throats.
PAUL ROSENFELD


THE THEATRE
IT
T is always pleasant to surrender to a charm so definite, so dis-
tinct as that of Miss Lotus Robb who has been discovered as the
perfect ingénue for Miss Clare Kummer's comedies. But in Rol-
Lo's Wild Oat the pleasure was perforce secondary since this play
restored to the English-speaking stage the high and subtle talents
of Mr Roland Young after a Babylonish captivity in Buddies and
such like Hobartian twaddle.
Mr Young's is by all odds the freshest intelligence active in our
theatre of comedy and in this play it is joined to another talent
equally rare and equally precious, that of Miss Kummer. The
peculiar airiness and frivolity with which Miss Kummer treats
comedy is a bit startling to our dramatists who work so hard at it.
They very properly accuse her work of being thin, but they forget
that in comparison with shoddy, silk is thin; and the clean, soft,
and sheer silkiness of Miss Kummer's happiness they cannot even
imitate.
G. S.
a
All right-minded people keep in their hearts a particularly soft
place for Paris, Pierrots, and the 1830's, while in Mr Belasco we
cherish, luckily, so eminently right-minded a producer as himself
to be not unaware of this fact. Mr Belasco has brought to us the
really rather sensitive child of Sacha Guitry, first, bien entendu,
having had the boy to London and there fitted out with a Granville
Barker suit (Eton collar, chestnut-curls, Eton jacket, et cetera).
This introduction of the little fellow to the good people of New
York is gone through with firmly and squarely: in the end a very
vigorous Belasco light ensures against misunderstanding. The play
is
pretty if ineffective; the rhymed translation is amusingly hit-or-
miss and, like all Mr Barker's work, somewhat rococo and somewhat
cute. In the chief female part, that of Marie Duplessis, Elsie Mac-
kay goes a long way toward proving she cannot act: under Mr Zieg-
feld or Mr Tappé she might discover a vocation. Rose Coghlan as
Madame Rabouin plays with gusto and competence. As Deburau
Lionel Atwill is blatantly miscast. Anyone who had seen him act


THE THEATRE
243
Ibsen should have known him to be the last man to take the
part
of
a Pierrot. As an interpreter of the moral disintegration of Hjal-
mar Ekdal he was wholly expressive: as a Pierrot he is dumb in
gesture as well as in voice both in and out of that costume. Self-
conscious, as every man must be who plays a part he cannot live, he
forgets and is himself only at the end of the third act. There the
categorical imperative galvanizes to life. His erect stride across
the stage, his geometrical handling of the cane, his finely rhetorical
utterance of “I play to-night," these together organize a dramatic
moment. Lionel Atwill as an interpreter of the moral and intel-
lectual emotions remains admirable; but what is wanted here is
a more Mediterranean, a more gesticulatory, a more suavely irides-
cent, a more watered-silk or John Barrymore type of actor. All of
which Mr Belasco, had he been up to his job, would have known.
SALLY is a successful failure. There is no doubt but that the
rather pretty Urban scenery, the rather pretty costumes, and the
rather pretty music will keep the raft afloat; also there are alto-
gether too many people who love Marilynn Miller. Leon Errol
puts as much punch as one man can into a show that nevertheless
succeeds in sticking baby pink and baby blue.
The WINTER GARDEN appears to have bred a long line of heroes.
In The BROADWAY BREVITIES Eddie Cantor having tried and fail-
ed, in The PASSING Show of 1921 it is Willie Howard who makes
bold to impersonate The Great Al. Brash youth, he even ventures
upon the sacred anguish of Mammy Chloe. These imitators put
one in mind of Ossian: “They went forth to the war, but they
always fell.” The same Howard together with his brother and two
adequate ladies present the Quartette from Rigoletto in that man-
ner toward which as an ideal Grand Opera for ever tends. Sammy
White with his rubber legs achieves, at moments, a Cummings
drawing. There are also two men who commit the unpardonable
impropriety of clogging without hats and two women who are so
unhappy as to suggest underdone steak Béarnaise. Harry Watson
deserves a better part: batted on the head, his face fluttered.
Why does not somebody (not Mr Drinkwater) write a farce fea-
turing Daniel Webster? I for one should pay well to see H. Wat-
son spout that "indignant eloquence.'
S. T.
ور


COMMENT
Icon
a
N these columns, about a year ago, we fulfilled the prime func-
tion of a magazine when we gave our readers all the informa-
tion necessary for making a fortune. How many of them profited
by it we have no means of knowing, for readers and rich men are
proverbially ungrateful. In any event we did not promise that
they should become rich before ten years. Having done so much
we felt at liberty to talk about art, for a little time.
It is now our duty to provide another severely practical excuse
for our existence, and we make the following suggestion in the most
practical spirit. There is money in it. Extant among us to-day
are a number of poets who write verses grateful, in the Latin sense,
to listeners. In his Island of Paris Mr Pound noted the French
tendency to allow a poet to speak his verses, and the same amiable
weakness is discernible among us. It has been capitalized, but only
in the slovenly fashion suitable to poets. A few readings, a few
recitations. It needs to be put into quantity production, it needs
mechanics. And the mechanism exists. The phonograph which
records Mr Kreisler's playing of his own compositions should not
withhold a like service from Mr Vachel Lindsay and Miss Amy
Lowell. We have heard a second-rate recitalist (n'est-ce pas?)
do Annabel Lee on the phonograph and have wished that he (or
we) hadn't. But we fancy that Poe conceivably could have done
it superbly. And it would be a thousand pities if the intonations
which we know to be immortal should be denied the lesser grace of
becoming permanent. We have not consulted the poets named
here, and we mention no others so as to avoid making invidious
comparisons. For these two, at least, would be 12-inch records and
sealed in the colour of eminence.
Perhaps it is the result of the war; perhaps it is due to the de-
cline of the classics as a prescribed study; perhaps it is only another
instance of economic determinism; we do not know. What we do
know is that loose thinking and ill logic and a sheer incapacity to
use words in their simple meanings are apparently the only qual-
ities required of a writer for the public prints. We recall, for ex-



COMMENT
245
ample, an editorial in a notable journal to the effect that since the
Lilliputians had made peace with the Laputans and had only the
Brobdingnagians to fight against, there was no excuse for the con-
tinued mobilization of the Lilliputian army (the names were differ-
ent, but those we use are less provocative). We have before us a
violent attack on the threatening censorship of plays which ends by
embracing the horrid thing (an intelligent censorship, of course! a
censorship which would forbid cheap and tawdry plays) as the pos-
sible saving grace of the American theatre. And finally, in the
most pregnant instance of easy thinking we have seen in a long
while, we have Miss Zona Gale openly, publicly in the New York
Globe, asking herself why the happy ending, superimposed after
the first night on her play, Miss Lulu Bett, is inartistic. In an ar-
ticle which is intensely interesting and full of clearness, Miss Gale
allows herself to ask why is marriage an inartistic ending at this
moment.
Our position, for the purpose of argument, is impregnable, for
we are not yet acquainted with Miss Gale's play and can virtuously
repel the accusation of prejudice. For all that, we could answer
her first question with our eyes shut and without having to look up
more than two or three words in the dictionary. But we are too
fascinated by the second question. It always disturbs us when peo-
ple say "artistic (or inartistic) now.” We always think of the
gentle and earnest young woman (and her a mother!) who told us
that Othello was a bad play now because people didn't, or at least
shouldn't believe in jealousy and Desdemona was such flabby
character anyway. If Mr Kenneth Macgowan, to whose depart-
ment in The Globe Miss Gale made moan, really wants to do the
drama a service, let him give over the pedantic and tiresome dis-
cussion of the comparative merit of current and forgotten plays,
and let him conduct a symposium under the general heading, Has
Modern Civilization Rendered the Bolster Inartistic as a Dramatic
Expedient?
It may be an impertinence to suggest that definition of the terms
used in discussion is a valuable exercise. We aren't, really, obtuse
and we know what Miss Gale was trying to say. We may even
note, marginally, that marriage as an ending, if not as an end, has
occupied our most serious thought. We consider that marriage
between Pickwick and Mrs Bardell would have been inartistic even
a


246
COMMENT
then; and that marriage between Samuel Weller and the house-
maid Mary was demanded by art no less than by nature. And
we have also thought and made up our minds about the relation
of the public moral conscience to the validity of works produced
by the creative intelligence.
Only this year we heard a man of thirty announce that there
had been no first-rate poet in France since Verlaine, and a man of
sixty that there had been no poet anywhere since Tennyson. The
expressions “poet” and “first-rate poet” are open to definition, but
when you have said Verlaine or Tennyson you have said almost
enough.
By collecting a series of such "reactions” one could reconstitute
the history of artistic importation. Find the oldest native you
can who will assure you that Cézanne is the last French painter,
figure out the year of his twentieth birthday, and you will know
the date at which Cézanne's work began to reach America.
There is no occasion for any one to give himself airs. The two
gentlemen whose judgements we have reported were both "literary”
in their way, had both printed their verse in periodicals. Creative
artists are just as blind and deaf to new things after twenty as
politicians, and women are as bad as men.
But there are ways of opening even the mind of a man of thirty.
The Dial will go on inviting contemporary artists to touch off
their little friendly charges of dynamite in the parietal bosses of
its readers—believing grey matter is to be found inside.
We are often asked by our subscribers and other readers in what
ways we can use their good will. One way is this: whenever you
answer an advertisement in The Dial, make it a point to call to
the attention of the advertiser in what place you have discovered
his wares. This applies, of course, quite as much to the man who
buys in person as to him who orders through the mail. We are not
catering to the oceanic public and our advertisements illuminate
that fact. It behooves the scattered Sons of Light to make their
sparse blows count.


المال



Photograph by Charles Sheeler
LA MONTAGNE.
BY GASTON LACHAISE



THE INDIAL
© X XI XII
MARCH 1921
HE, THE ONE WHO GETS SLAPPED
BY LEONID ANDREYEV
Translated from the Russian by Gregory Zilboorg
INTRODUCTION
L
EONID ANDREYEV as a literary figure was born in the
Igloomy atmosphere of depression of the 'nineties. He thus
appeared upon the literary stage at a period when the old and
splendid generation of Turgenev and Dostoevsky had already passed
away and when Chekhov had begun to demonstrate before the
reader the gloom and colourlessness of Russian life.
This was a period when the social forces of Russia were half
destroyed by the reaction under Alexander III, and when the young
generation was trying to rest and to get away from the strain of
social hopes and despair. This period, briefly speaking, was a period
of melancholy, of commonplace, everyday preoccupations, and of
dull terre à terre philosuphy.
It must be borne in mind that literature was the only outlet for
the moral and intellectual forces of Russia. Political reaction,
censorship, complete absence of civil liberties, and the cult of popu-
lar ignorance upon which Czardom based its power, all these made
the written artistic word almost the sole expression of Russian
social longings and idealistic expectations.
It is therefore only natural that Russian literature in its general
development is closely interwoven with the political and social
conditions of Russia at the given moment.
The 'nineties were a
period of depression. After the assassination of Alexander II


248
HE, THE ONE WHO GETS SLAPPED
eye. His
His sym-
(1881) and the subsequent tightening of the chain of reaction, com-
bined with a general débâcle in progressive and radical circles, the
Russian intellectual fell into a state of pessimism. His faith in
an early liberation was shattered, his hope of recovery was broken.
Chekhov is the most characteristic representative of that period;
he himself called his heroes “the dull-grey people.”
Maxim Gorki and Leonid Andreyev appeared almost simultane-
ously at that time. The former brought the message of a rebel
spirit which forecast a new moral upheaval, a new social protest;
the latter appeared clad in the gloom of his time, which he strange-
ly combined with a spirit of almost anarchistic revolt. From the
point of view of historical completeness Leonid Andreyev is more
representative of the epoch, demonstrating at once two contradict-
ory
elements of the Russia of the 'nineties: lack or even absence
of faith interwoven with protest and mutiny.
Andreyev is symbolic and romantic. Her Majesty Fate and
His Excellency Accident, these are the two dark, unknown, at times
brutal forces which dwelt ever before his mind's
bols are full of horror and at times unbending atrocity. Beginning
with his short stories, In Fog, The Life of Basil of Thebes, through
his dramas, The Life of Man, and Anathema, until his last writ-
ings, he saw human beings in the form of ghosts and ghosts in the
form of human beings dominating every step, every breath of life.
Still his gruesome symbolism, despite his genius for rendering his
images in a clear-cut, almost crystalline manner, did not appeal to
many of his contemporaries because the dark shroud in which
Andreyev enveloped life was impenetrable and at times it was im-
possible to discern in that gloom the few values which Andreyev
still found in life. Leo Tolstoy said once: “Leonid Andreyev
tries to frighten me, but I am not afraid.”
Even in his splendid realistic dramas it is difficult for Andreyev
to rid himself of the habit of symbolizing and dimming the few
rays of light which try to filter through.
There was nevertheless a little corner in Andreyev's artistic heart
where there appeared some indefinite hope which never acquired
a specific artistic form, but which was alluded to many times in
his writings. In his short story, Thought, he makes fragmentary
allusions to his half-hope, half-idea: “If the lot of the Man be to
become a God, his throne will be the Book,” says the hero.
9)


LEONID ANDREYEV
249
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But the red laugh of the Russo-Japanese war, the abortive revo-
lution of 1905, the general ignorance and darkness of the masses,
the strain of the last war, the depreciation of human life as a value
in itself, brought Leonid Andreyev to the last step of the pessimistic
ladder which he was ever descending into the abyss of hopelessness.
This state of mind is best illustrated by his last dramatic work,
He, the One Who Gets Slapped.
Here we see a man of high education, of great intellectual
achievement, who leaves life, willingly in appearance, but forcibly
in fact. The relations of man to man, of group to group, accord-
,
ing to Andreyev are such that the Man is forced to efface himself.
Even Thought, or the Book, could not help the Man to become a
God. He becomes a clown. He performs stunts, he gets slaps;
the public laughs, being unaware that this laughter is a mockery at
itself, at its culture, at its thought, at its achievement.
The characters of the play, as the reader will see, are depicted
with a bitter sarcasm and unfriendliness, for Andreyev seems to
have lost his last faith in the Man. The good, the innocent and
clean heart is bound to suffer and die. His Consuelo, Zinida,
Bezano are only stray rays of light out of place in the world and
even in the world-circus which is full of spiders, champagne, and
human outcasts. Andreyev does not blame these outcasts. On
the contrary, he feels sympathy, if for anybody, for just these
clowns, jugglers, and bareback-riders; but life, this strange com-
bination of fate, accident, and cowardly slander, is stronger, and
they collapse under the burden of this combination.
He is perhaps the best work of Andreyev, at any rate his best
dramatic work. It is more adapted to stage conditions than his
.
previous plays and is not overcrowded with symbolic ghosts.
Furthermore, He is a remarkable summary of Andreyev's phi-
losophy.
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GREGORY ZILBOORG
11
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HE, THE ONE WHO GETS SLAPPED
CAST OF CHARACTERS
Consuelo—a bareback rider in a circus. Billed as “The Bareback Tango
Queen.”
MANCINI-Consuelo's father.
He-a clown in Briquet's circus. Billed as “HE, The One Who Gets
-,
Slapped."
BRIQUET-Manager of the circus.
ZINIDA--a lion tamer, Briquet's wife.
ALFRED BEZANO-a bareback rider.
A GENTLEMAN.
BARON REGNARD.
JACKSON-
a clown.
TILLY
POLLY
THOMAS, ANGELICA, and other actors and actresses of Briquet's circus.
}-musical clowns.
The action takes place in one of the large cities of France.
ACT I
A very large, rather dirty room, with whitewashed walls. To the left, in
a niche, is a window, the only outside window in the room, opening on a
court-yard. The light from it is so dim that even by day the electricity has
to be turned on.
At the very top of the centre-back wall is a row of small dusty windows.
They open on the circus hall. At night, when the performance is going on,
a bright light shines through. By day they are dark. In the same wall is a
large white door, reached by two stone steps, and nailed fast.
On the right, almost in the corner, is a high, wide, arched doorway which
leads to the stables and the ring. By day it opens into pale darkness, at
night into pale light.
The room is used for many purposes. It is the office of Papa Briquet,
manager of the circus; here he keeps his little desk. It is the cloak-room of
some of the actors. It is also the room where the cast g