r the world and its lords,
Ringed round with a flame of fair faces,
And splendid with swords,”
were with carnal lions all aromp, shall vegetarianism alone wax
and rage?
“Tempora mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis."
New dishes, new appetites. Money talks.
Well, they have set up their standard. What will come of it
Peterkin is not yet in a position to state. But, as The Stocky
Emperor, The Glorious Epileptic, falsely observed: "God sticks
with the heavier battalions.” And one hundred thousand dollars!
And in Italian money! O Hieronimo! Robert Menzies McAlmon,
1 The four ciphers of our 10000 readers not in on this aesthetic know must
permit me to remind them (vide Dr Samuel Johnson) that Dr Williams
and Mr McAlmon together publish a local magazine, that Mr McAlmon
recently took to wife a young British woman, that he recently conceived
it is not yet established, I am in honour bound to state, whether or no this
conception actually did (as I do imply in the text) antedate matrimony-
the notion of buying print-paper in her country cheap, that he forthwith
dispatched himself and her to the British capital, and that by now he is in
a position to know the price of paper in his wife's home-town. It is, not
surprisingly, the same there as here.


COMMENT
609
where are you now? Matrimony always was a roundabout way to
arrive at anything. In Italy, so I've been told, paper has of late
taken a leaf from Wild Nature and now (right in between basilicas
and dovecots and aqueducts) just sprouts. St John Lateran is
positively reported to have come out in paper pantalettes. Like
a great turkey.
Corporal Heap (at steak and oysters) was overheard generously
to apportion Mr Kreymborg the space of ninety days wherein to
do his goose. This veteran has been there before. For my un-
seasoned part, I merely hope Mr Loeb does not bite off more than
I
he can conveniently—and with continence-chew.
Oh—as to that proposition of printing abroad-we home-keeping
fellows will profit too. The Dial is pleased to be able to an-
nounce (Telling Tales and Breezy Stories desire to be included
in this announcement) that The Dial gardener (the one with the
trowel in the right hip-pocket) will look upon it at once as a duty
and a privilege to walk through every number of The Broom.
Whenever he comes on anything really choice or novel, anything
adapted to the American sweet-tooth, he will not, massaging his
chin, permit the grass to grow beneath his dew-beaters. Rather
will he, unsheathing his trowel, dig up the pertinent blossom (the
fortunate bulb) and, without fuss or nonsense, quietly transplant
to a more domestic, if homely, sod. Americanization is, I believe,
the new word.
Certain of our more revered publishers, men of substance and
of parts, are, the birds say, peaked and peeved. The fact is there
has of late been, on the part of certain of the younger stags, alto-
gether too much cutting in—too much for bon ton, too much for
Major Putnam. Now, you see, the tables will, appropriately, be
turned. Or don't you? Why, not only journals of anthological
bent, like The Dial, but bona fide book publishers too, will find
it to their purpose to finger The Broom. Where young publishers
have been cutting out old-seducing their favourite authors—now
old publishers shall cut out-shears in hand—the brand-wet sheets
of the youngest publisher of them all.
The Golden Age does indeed begin anew: there shall be lifting
and with innocence: old publishers shall fatten upon young writers
and young writers shall go supperless rejoicing. For these latter
shall know the satisfaction, hitherto unguessed at, of being fathered


610
COMMENT
by a Wilfred Funk, by a Willis Wagnalls, or, better yet, by a
Harper Brother. For them that is enough. And as to innocence,
of course Shepherd Kreymborg is aware—it is not for me to teach
my grandmother to suck eggs-no gentle copyright will protect
his flock? He and they and I and Major Putnam and the American
Journal of Semitic Languages and Literatures should worry!
“ 'It's all happened so exactly right.'
“ 'It does sometimes,' said Jenny.”






Courtesy of the W'ildenstein Galleries
VOLUPTÉ. BY ARTHUR LEE



THE INDIAL
VA
IX
OXXIII
JUNE 1921
FOUR YEARS
1887-1891
BY WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
T the end of the 'eighties my father and mother, my brother
and sisters and myself, all newly arrived from Dublin, were
settled in Bedford Park in a red-brick house with several mantel-
pieces of wood, copied from marble mantelpieces designed by the
brothers Adam, a balcony and a little garden shadowed by a great
horse-chestnut tree. Years before we had lived there, when the
crooked ostentatiously picturesque streets with great trees casting
great shadows had been a new enthusiasm: the Pre-Raphaelite
movement at last affecting life. But now exaggerated criticism
had taken the place of enthusiasm, the tiled roofs, the first in
modern London, were said to leak, which they did not, and the
drains to be bad, though that was no longer true; and I imagine
that houses were cheap. I remember feeling disappointed because
the co-operative stores, with their little seventeenth century panes,
had lost the romance they had when I had passed them still un-
finished on my way to school; and because the public house, called
The Tabard after Chaucer's Inn, was so plainly a common public
house; and because the great sign of a trumpeter designed by
Rooke, the Pre-Raphaelite artist, had been freshened by some in-
ferior hand. The big red-brick church had never pleased me, and I
was accustomed, when I saw the wooden balustrade that ran along
the slanting edge of the roof where nobody ever walked or could
walk, to remember the opinion of some architect friend of my
father's, that it had been put there to keep the birds from falling


612
FOUR YEARS
off. Still, however, it had some village characters and helped us
to feel not wholly lost in the metropolis. I no longer went to
church as a regular habit, but go I sometimes did for one Sunday
morning I saw these words painted on a board in the porch: "The
congregation are requested to kneel during prayers; the kneelers
are afterwards to be hung upon pegs provided for the purpose.”
In front of every seat hung a little cushion and these cushions
were called "kneelers.” Presently the joke ran through the com-
munity, where there were many artists who considered religion
at best an unimportant accessory to good architecture and who
disliked that particular church.
II
I could not understand where the charm had gone that I had
felt, when as a school-boy of twelve or thirteen I had played among
the unfinished houses, once leaving the marks of my two hands,
blacked by a fall among some paint, upon a white balustrade.
Sometimes I thought it was because these were real houses, while
my play had been among toy-houses some day to be inhabited by
imaginary people full of the happiness that one can see in picture
books.
I was in all things Pre-Raphaelite. When I was fifteen or six-
teen my father had told me about Rossetti and Blake and given
me their poetry to read; and once at Liverpool on my way to Sligo
I had seen Dante's Dream in the gallery there, a picture painted
when Rossetti had lost his dramatic power and to-day not very
pleasing to me, and its colour, its people, its romantic architecture
had blotted all other pictures away. It was a perpetual bewilder-
ment that my father, who had begun life as a Pre-Raphaelite
painter, now painted portraits of the first comer, children selling
newspapers, or a consumptive girl with a basket of fish upon her
head, and that when, moved perhaps by some memory of his youth,
he chose some theme from poetic tradition, he would soon weary
and leave it unfinished. I had seen the change coming bit by bit
and its defence elaborated by young men fresh from the Paris art-
schools. “We must paint what is in front of us," or "A man must
be of his own time,” they would say, and if I spoke of Blake or
Rossetti they would point out his bad drawing and tell me to
>


WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
613
that power.
admire Carolus Duran and Bastien-Lepage. Then, too, they were
very ignorant men; they read nothing, for nothing mattered but
“knowing how to paint,” being in reaction against a generation
that seemed to have wasted its time upon so many things. I thought
myself alone in hating these young men, now indeed getting towards
middle life, their contempt for the past, their monopoly of the
future, but in a few months I was to discover others of my own
age, who thought as I did, for it is not true that youth looks before
it with the mechanical gaze of a well-drilled soldier. Its quarrel
is not with the past, but with the present, where its elders are so
obviously powerful and no cause seems lost if it seem to threaten
Does cultivated youth ever really love the future,
where the eye can discover no persecuted Royalty hidden among
oak leaves, though from it certainly does come so much proletarian
rhetoric?
I was unlike others of my generation in one thing only. I am
very religious, and deprived by Huxley and Tyndall, whom I de-
tested, of the simple-minded religion of my childhood, I had made
a new religion, almost an infallible church out of poetic tradition:
a fardel of stories, and of personages, and of emotions, inseparable
from their first expression, passed on from generation to generation
by poets and painters with some help from philosophers and theolo-
gians. I wished for a world, where I could discover this tradition
perpetually, and not in pictures and in poems only, but in tiles
round the chimney-piece and in the hangings that kept out the
draught. I had even created a dogma: “Because those imaginary
people are created out of the deepest instinct of man, to be his
measure and his norm, whatever I can imagine those mouths speak-
ing may be the nearest I can go to truth.” When I listened they
seemed always to speak of one thing only: they, their loves, every
incident of their lives, were steeped in the supernatural. Could
even Titian's Ariosto that I loved beyond other portraits have its
grave look, as if waiting for some perfect final event, if the painters
before Titian had not learned portraiture, while painting into the
corner of compositions full of saints and Madonnas, their kneeling
patrons ? At seventeen years old I was already an old-fashioned
brass cannon full of shot, and nothing had kept me from going off
but a doubt as to my capacity to shoot straight.
a


614
FOUR YEARS
III
I was not an industrious student and knew only what I had
found by accident and I found nothing I cared for after Titian, and
Titian I knew chiefly from a copy of the Supper of Emmaus in Dub-
lin, till Blake and the Pre-Raphaelites; and among my father's
friends were no Pre-Raphaelites. Some indeed had come to Bedford
Park in the enthusiasm of the first building and others to be near
those that had. There was Todhunter, a well-off man who had
bought my father's pictures while my father was still Pre-Raphael-
ite; once a Dublin doctor he was now a poet and a writer of poetical
plays; a tall, sallow, lank, melancholy man, a good scholar and a
good intellect; and with him my father carried on a warm exaspera-
ted friendship, fed I think by old memories and wasted by quarrels
over matters of opinion. Of all the survivors he was the most de-
jected and the least estranged, and I remember encouraging him,
with a sense of worship shared, to buy a very expensive carpet de-
signed by Morris. He displayed it without strong liking and would
have agreed had there been any to find fault. If he had liked any-
think strongly he might have been a famous man, for a few years la-
ter he was to write, under some casual patriotic impulse, certain ex-
cellent verses now in all Irish anthologies; but with him every
book was a new planting, and not a new bud on an old bough. He
had I think no peace in himself. But my father's chief friend was
York Powell, a famous Oxford Professor of history, a broad-built,
broad-headed, brown-bearded man clothed in heavy blue cloth and
looking, but for his glasses and the dim sight of a student, like some
captain in the merchant service. One often passed with pleasure
from Todhunter's company to that of one who was almost ostenta-
tiously at peace. He cared nothing for philosophy, nothing for eco-
nomics, nothing for the policy of nations; for history, as he saw it,
was a memory of men who were amusing or exciting to think about.
He impressed all who met him, and seemed to some a man of genius,
but he had not enough ambition to shape his thought, or conviction
to give rhythm to his style and remained always a poor writer. I
was too full of unfinished speculations and premature convictions
to value rightly his conversation, informed by a vast erudition,
which would give itself to every casual association of speech and
company, precisely because he had neither cause nor design. My
a


WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
615
father, however, found Powell's concrete narrative manner in talk
a necessary completion of his own, and when I asked him in a letter
many years later where he got his philosophy replied “from York
Powell” and thereon added, no doubt remembering that Powell
was without ideas, "by looking at him.” Then there was a good
listener, a painter in whose hall hung a big picture painted in his
student days of Ulysses sailing home from the Phaeacian court,
an orange and a skin of wine at his side, blue mountains towering
behind; but who lived by drawing domestic scenes and lovers'
meetings for a weekly magazine that had an immense circulation
among the imperfectly educated. To escape the boredom of work,
which he never turned to but under pressure of necessity and
usually late at night, with the publisher's messenger in the hall,
he had half-filled his studio with mechanical toys, of his own in-
vention, and perpetually increased their number. A model railway
train at intervals puffed its way along the walls, passing several
railway stations and signal boxes; and on the floor lay a camp with
attacking and defending soldiers and a fortification that blew up
when the attackers fired a pea through a certain window; while
a large model of a Thames barge hung from the ceiling. Opposite
our house lived an old artist who worked also for the illustrated
papers for a living, but painted landscapes for his pleasure, and of
him I remember nothing except that he had outlived ambition,
was a good listener, and that my father explained his gaunt ap-
pearance by his descent from Pocahontas. If all these men were a
little like becalmed ships, there was certainly one man whose sails
were full. Three or four doors off on our side of the road lived a
decorative artist in all the naïve confidence of popular ideals and
the public approval. He was our daily comedy. "I myself and Sir
Frederick Leighton are the greatest decorative artists of the age,”
was among his sayings, and a great Lych-gate, bought from some
country church-yard, reared its thatched roof, meant to shelter
bearers and coffin, above the entrance to his front garden to show
that he at any rate knew nothing of discouragement. In this fairly
numerous company—there were others though no other face rises
before me-my father and York Powell found listeners for a con-
versation that had no special loyalties, or antagonisms; while I
could only talk upon set topics, being in the heat of my youth, and
the topics that filled me with excitement were never spoken of.
a


616
FOUR YEARS
IV
Some quarter of an hour's walk from Bedford Park, out on the
high road to Richmond, lived W. E. Henley, and I, like many
others, began under him my education. His portrait, a lithograph
by Rothenstein, hangs over my mantelpiece among portraits of
other friends. He is drawn standing, but because doubtless of his
crippled legs he leans forward, resting his elbows upon some slightly
suggested object—a table or a window-sill. His heavy figure and
powerful head, the disordered hair standing upright, his short ir-
regular beard and moustache, his lined and wrinkled face, his eyes
steadily fixed upon some object, in complete confidence and self-
possession, and yet as in half-broken reverie, all are there exactly
as I remember him. I have seen other portraits and they too show
him exactly as I remember him, as though he had but one appear-
ance and that seen fully at the first glance and by all alike. He
was most human-human I used to say like one of Shakespeare's
characters—and yet pressed and pummelled, as it were, into a
single attitude, almost into a gesture and a speech as by some over-
whelming situation. I disagreed with him about everything, but I
admired him beyond words. With the exception of some early
poems founded upon old French models I disliked his poetry,
mainly because he wrote in vers libre, which I associated with
Tyndall and Huxley, and Bastien-Lepage's clownish peasant star-
ing with vacant eyes at her great boots; and filled it with unim-
passioned description of an hospital ward where his leg had been
amputated. I wanted the strongest passions, passions that had
nothing to do with observation, sung in metrical forms that seemed
old enough to be sung by men half-asleep or riding upon a journey.
Furthermore, Pre-Raphaelism affected him as some people are
affected by a cat in the room, and though he professed himself at
our first meeting without political interests or convictions, he soon
grew into a violent unionist and imperialist. I used to say when
I spoke of his poems: "He is like a great actor with a bad part;
yet who would look at Hamlet in the grave scene if Salvini played
the grave-digger ?” and I might so have explained much that he
said and did. I meant that he was like a great actor of passion-
character-acting meant nothing to me for many years—and an
actor of passion will display some one quality of soul, personified
again and again, just as a great poetical painter, Titian, Botticelli,


WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
617
Rossetti, may depend for his greatness upon a type of beauty which
presently we call by his name. Irving, the last of the sort on the
English stage, and in modern England and France it is the rarest
sort, never moved me but in the expression of intellectual pride and
though I saw Salvini but once I am convinced that his genius was
a kind of animal nobility. Henley, half inarticulate"I am very
costive,” he would say—beset with personal quarrels, built up an
image of
power and magnanimity till it became, at moments, when
seen as it were by lightning, his true self. Half his opinions were the
contrivance of a sub-consciousness that sought always to bring life
to the dramatic crisis and expression to that point of artifice where
the true self could find its tongue. Without opponents there had
been no drama, and in his youth Ruskinism and Pre-Raphaelit-
ism, for he was of my father's generation, were the only possible
opponents. How could one resent his prejudice when, that he him-
self might play a worthy part, he must find beyond the common
rout, whom he derided and flouted daily, opponents he could
imagine moulded like himself? Once he said to me in the height
of his imperial propaganda, “Tell those young men in Ireland that
this great thing must go on. They say Ireland is not fit for self-
government, but that is nonsense. It is as fit as any other Euro-
pean country, but we cannot grant it.” And then he spoke of his
desire to found and edit a Dublin newspaper. It would have
expounded the Gaelic propaganda then beginning, though Dr
Hyde had, as yet, no league, our old stories, our modern literature
-everything that did not demand any shred or patch of govern-
ment. He dreamed of a tyranny, but it was that of Cosimo de'
Medici.
V
We gathered on Sunday evenings in two rooms, with folding
doors between, and hung, I think, with photographs from Dutch
masters, and in one room there was always, I think, a table with
cold meat.
I can recall but one elderly man-Dunn his name was
-rather silent and full of good sense, an old friend of Henley's.
We were young men, none as yet established in his own, or in the
world's opinion, and Henley was our leader and our confidant.
One evening, I found him alone amused and exasperated: “Young
A-” he cried “has just been round to ask my advice. Would


618
FOUR YEARS
a
I think it a wise thing if he bolted with Mrs B-? Have you
quite determined to do it?' I asked him. 'Quite. Well,' I said,
‘in that case I refuse to give you any advice.'” Mrs B was a
beautiful talented woman, who, as the Welsh Triad said of Guinie-
vere, “was much given to being carried off.” I think we listened
to him, and often obeyed him, partly because he was quite plainly
not upon the side of our parents. We might have a different
.
ground of quarrel, but the result seemed more important than the
ground, and his confident manner and speech made us believe, per-
haps for the first time, in victory. And besides, if he did denounce,
and in my case he certainly did, what we held in secret reverence,
he never failed to associate it with things or persons that did not
move us to reverence. Once I found him just returned from some
art congress in Liverpool or in Manchester. “The salvation army-
ism of art,” he called it, and gave a grotesque description of some
city councillor he had found admiring Turner. Henley, who
hated all that Ruskin praised, thereupon derided Turner, and find-
ing the city councillor the next day on the other side of the gallery,
admiring some Pre-Raphaelite there, derided that Pre-Raphaelite.
The third day Henley discovered the poor man on a chair in the
middle of the room staring disconsolately upon the floor. He terri-
fied us also and certainly I did not dare, and I think none of us
dared, to speak our admiration for book or picture he condemned,
but he made us feel always our importance, and no man among us
could do good work, or show the promise of it, and lack his praise.
I can remember meeting of a Sunday night Charles Whibley,
Kenneth Grahame, author of The Golden Age, Barry Pain, now a
well-known novelist, R. A. M. Stevenson, art critic and a famous
talker, George Wyndham, later on a cabinet minister and Irish
chief secretary, and now or later Oscar Wilde, who was some ten
years older than the rest of us.
But faces and names are vague to
me and while faces that I met but once may rise clearly before me,
a face met on many a Sunday has perhaps vanished. Kipling came
sometimes, I think, but I never met him; and Stepniak, the nihilist,
whom I knew well elsewhere but not there, said "I cannot go more
than once a year, it is too exhausting.” Henley got the best out
of us all, because he had made us accept him as our judge and we
knew that his judgement could neither sleep, nor be softened, nor
changed, nor turned aside. When I think of him, the antithesis
,


WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
619
that is the foundation of human nature being ever in my sight, I
see his crippled legs as though he were some Vulcan perpetually
forging swords for other men to use; and certainly I always thought
of C—, a fine classical scholar, a pale and seemingly gentle man,
as our chief swordsman and bravo. When Henley founded his
weekly newspaper, first the Scots' afterwards the National Ob-
server, this young man wrote articles and reviews notorious for
savage wit; and years afterwards when the National Observer was
dead, Henley dying, and our cavern of outlaws empty, I met him
in Paris very sad and I think very poor. “Nobody will employ
me now,” he said. “Your master is gone,” I answered, “and you
are like the spear in an old Irish story that had to be kept dipped in
poppy-juice that it might not go about killing people on its own
account.” I wrote my first good lyrics and tolerable essays for the
National Observer, and as I always signed my work could go my
own road in some measure. Henley often revised my lyrics, cross-
ing out a line or a stanza and writing in one of his own, and I was
comforted by my belief that he also rewrote Kipling then in the
first flood of popularity. At first, indeed, I was ashamed of being
rewritten and thought that others were not, and only began in-
vestigation when the editorial characteristics-epigrams, archaisms,
and all-appeared in the article upon Paris fashions and in that
upon opium by an Egyptian Pasha. I was not compelled to full
conformity for verse is plainly stubborn; and in prose, that I
might avoid unacceptable opinions, I wrote nothing but ghost or
fairy stories, picked up from my mother or some pilot at Rosses
Point and Henley saw that I must needs mix a palette fitted to my
subject matter. But if he had changed every "has” into "hath”
I would have let him, for had not we sunned ourselves in his gen-
erosity? "My young men outdo me and they write better than I,”
he wrote in some letter praising Charles Whibley's work, and to
another friend with a copy of my Man Who Dreamed of Fairy-
land: "See what a fine thing has been written by one of my lads.”
VI
My first meeting with Oscar Wilde was an astonishment. I
never before heard a man talking with perfect sentences, as if he
had written them all over night with labour and yet all spon-


620
FOUR YEARS
taneous. There was present that night at Henley's, by right of
propinquity or of accident, a man full of the secret spite of dulness,
who interrupted from time to time, and always to check or disorder
thought; and I noticed with what mastery he was foiled and
thrown. I noticed, too, that the impression of artificiality that I
think all Wilde's listeners have recorded came from the perfect
rounding of the sentences and from the deliberation that made it
possible. That very impression helped him, as the effect of metre,
or of the antithetical prose of the seventeenth century, which is
itself a true metre, helped its writers, for he could pass without in-
congruity from some unforeseen, swift stroke of wit to elaborate
reverie. I heard him say a few nights later: "Give me The
Winter's Tale, ‘Daffodils that come before the swallow dare' but
not King Lear. What is King Lear but poor life staggering in the
fog?” and the slow cadence, modulated with so great precision,
sounded natural to my ears. That first night he praised Walter
Pater's Essays on the Renaissance: "It is my golden book; I never
I
travel anywhere without it; but it is the very flower of de-
cadence: the last trumpet should have sounded the moment it was
written.” “But,” said the dull man, "would you not have given us
time to read it?" "Oh no," was the retort, "there would have been
“
plenty of time afterwards—in either world.” I think he seemed
to us, baffled as we were by youth, or by infirmity, a triumphant
figure, and to some of us a figure from another age, an audacious
Italian fifteenth century figure. A few weeks before I had heard
one of my father's friends, an official in a publishing firm that had
employed both Wilde and Henley as editors, blaming Henley who
was "no use except under control” and praising Wilde, “so indolent
but such a genius”; and now the firm became the topic of our talk.
"How often do you go to the office?” said Henley. "I used to go
three times a week,” said Wilde, "for an hour a day but I have since
struck off one of the days." "My God,” said Henley, “I went five
times a week for five hours a day and when I wanted to strike off
a day they had a special committee meeting.” “Furthermore,”
was Wilde's answer, "I never answered their letters. I have known
men come to London full of bright prospects and seen them com-
plete wrecks in a few months through a habit of answering letters.”
He too knew how to keep our elders in their place, and his method
was plainly the more successful, for Henley had been dismissed.
a
>


WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
621
“No he is not an aesthete,” Henley commented later, being some-
what embarrassed by Wilde's Pre-Raphaelite entanglement; "one
soon finds that he is a scholar and a gentleman.” And when I
dined with Wilde a few days afterwards he began at once, “I had
to strain every nerve to equal that man at all”; and I was too loyal
to speak my thought: “You and not he said all the brilliant
things.” He like the rest of us had felt the strain of an intensity
”
that seemed to hold life at the point of drama. He had said on
that first meeting “The basis of literary friendship is mixing the
poisoned bowl”; and for a few weeks Henley and he became close
friends till, the astonishment of their meeting over, diversity of
character and ambition pushed them apart, and, with half the
cavern helping, Henley began mixing the poisoned bowl for Wilde.
Yet Henley never wholly lost that first admiration, for after
Wilde's downfall he said to me: "Why did he do it? I told my
lads to attack him and yet we might have fought under his banner.”
a
VII
It became the custom, both at Henley's and at Bedford Park, to
say that R. A. M. Stevenson, who frequented both circles, was the
better talker. Wilde had been trussed up like a turkey by under-
graduates, dragged up and down a hill, his champagne emptied
into the ice tub, hooted in the streets of various towns, and I think
stoned, and no newspaper named him but in scorn; his manner had
hardened to meet opposition and at times he allowed one to see an
unpardonable insolence. His charm was acquired and systema-
tized, a mask which he wore only when it pleased him, while the
charm of Stevenson belonged to him like the colour of his hair. If
Stevenson's talk became monologue we did not know it, because
our one object was to show by our attention that he need never
leave off. If thought failed him we would not combat what he had
said, or start some new theme, but would encourage him with a
question; and one felt that it had been always so from childhood
up. His mind was full of phantasy for phantasy's sake and he
gave as good entertainment in monologue as his cousin Robert Louis
in poem or story. He was always "supposing"; "Suppose you
'
had two millions what would you do with it?" and "Suppose you
were in Spain and in love how would you propose ?” I recall him


622
FOUR YEARS
one afternoon at our house at Bedford Park, surrounded by my
brother and sisters and a little group of my father's friends, describ-
ing proposals in half a dozen countries. There your father did it,
dressed in such and such a way with such and such words, and there
a friend must wait for the lady outside the chapel door, sprinkle
her with holy water and say, “My friend Jones is dying for love of
you.” But when it was over those quaint descriptions, so full of
laughter and sympathy, faded or remained in the memory as
something alien from one's own life, like a dance I once saw in a
great house, where beautifully dressed children wound a long
ribbon in and out as they danced. I was not of Stevenson's party
and mainly I think because he had written a book in praise of
Velasquez, praise at that time universal wherever Pre-Raphaelism
was accurst, and to my mind, that had to pick its symbols where its
ignorance permitted, Velasquez seemed the first bored celebrant
of boredom. I was convinced from some obscure meditation that
Stevenson's conversational method had joined him to my elders and
to the indifferent world, as though it were right for old men, and
unambitious men and all women, to be content with charm and
humour. It was the prerogative of youth to take sides and when
Wilde said: “Mr Bernard Shaw has no enemies but is intensely
disliked by all his friends,” I knew it to be a phrase I should never
forget, and felt revenged upon a notorious hater of romance, whose
generosity and courage I could not fathom.
VIII
I saw a good deal of Wilde at that time—was it 1887 or 1888?-
I have no way of fixing the date except that I had published my first
book The Wanderings of Usheen and that Wilde had not yet pub-
lished his Decay of Lying. He had, before our first meeting, re-
viewed my book and despite its vagueness of intention, and the
inexactness of its speech, praised without qualification; and what
was worth more than any review he had talked about it and now he
asked me to eat my Christmas dinner with him believing, I imagine,
that I was alone in London. He had just renounced his velveteen,
and even those cuffs turned backward over the sleeves, and had
begun to dress very carefully in the fashion of the moment. He
lived in a little house at Chelsea that the architect Godwin had


WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
623
decorated with an elegance that owed something to Whistler.
There was nothing mediaeval, nor Pre-Raphaelite, no cupboard
door with figures upon flat gold, no peacock blue, no dark back-
ground. I remember vaguely a white drawing room with Whistler
etchings, "let in” to white panels, and a dining room all white,
chairs, walls, mantelpiece, carpet, except for a diamond-shaped
piece of red cloth in the middle of the table under a terra-cotta
statuette, and I think a red shaded lamp hanging from the ceiling
to a little above the statuette. It was perhaps too perfect in its
unity, his past of a few years before had gone too completely, and
I remember thinking that the perfect harmony of his life there,
with his beautiful wife and his two young children, suggested some
deliberate artistic composition.
He commended and dispraised himself during dinner by attribu-
ting characteristics like his own to his country: “We Irish are too
poetical to be poets; we are a nation of brilliant failures, but we are
the greatest talkers since the Greeks.” When dinner was over he
read me from the proofs of The Decay of Lying and when he came
to the sentence: "Schopenhauer has analysed the pessimism that
characterises modern thought, but Hamlet invented it. The world
has become sad because a puppet was once melancholy,” I said,
"Why do you change 'sad' to 'melancholy'?” He replied that he
wanted a full sound at the close of his sentence, and I thought it no
excuse and an example of the vague impressiveness that spoilt his
writing for me. Only when he spoke, or when his writing was the
mirror of his speech, or in some simple fairy tale, had he words
exact enough to hold a subtle ear. He alarmed me, though not as
Henley did, for I never left his house thinking myself fool or
dunce. He flattered the intellect of every man he liked; he made
me tell him long Irish stories and compared my art of story-telling
to Homer's; and once when he had described himself as writing in
the census paper “age 19, profession genius, infirmity talent” the
other guest, a young journalist fresh from Oxford or Cambridge,
said, “What should I have written?” and was told that it should
have been “profession talent, infirmity genius.” When, how-
ever, I called, wearing shoes a little too yellow-unblackened
leather had just become fashionable— I realized their extravagance
when I saw his eyes fixed upon them; and another day Wilde asked
me to tell his little boy a fairy story, and I had but got as far as


624
FOUR YEARS
a
"Once upon a time there was a giant” when the little boy screamed
and ran out of the room. Wilde looked grave and I was plunged
into the shame of clumsiness that afflicts the young. When I asked
for some literary gossip for some provincial newspaper, that paid
me a few shillings a month, he explained very explicitly that writ-
ing literary gossip was no job for a gentleman.
Though to be compared to Homer passed the time pleasantly,
I had not been greatly perturbed had he stopped me with: "Is it a
long story?” as Henley would certainly have done. I was abashed
before him as wit and man of the world alone. I remember that he
deprecated the very general belief in his success or his efficiency, and
I think with sincerity. One form of success had gone: he was no
more the lion of the season and he had not discovered his gift for
writing comedy, yet I think I knew him at the happiest moment of
his life. No scandal had touched his name, his fame as a talker
was growing among his equals, and he seemed to live in the enjoy-
ment of his own spontaneity. One day he began: "I have been
inventing a Christian heresy,” and he told a detailed story, in the
style of some early father, of how Christ recovered after the Cruci-
fixion, and escaping from the tomb, lived on for many years, the
one man upon earth who knew the falsehood of Christianity. Once
St Paul visited his town and he alone in the carpenters' quarter did
not go to hear him preach. The other carpenters noticed that
henceforth, for some unknown reason, he kept his hands covered.
A few days afterwards I found Wilde with smock frocks in various
colours spread out upon the floor in front of him, while a missionary
explained that he did not object to the heathen going naked upon
week days, but insisted upon clothes in church. He had brought
,
the smock frocks in a cab that the only art-critic whose fame had
reached Central Africa might select a colour; so Wilde sat there
weighing all with a conscious ecclesiastic solemnity.
IX
Of late years I have often explained Wilde to myself by his fam-
ily history. His father was a friend or acquaintance of
my
father's
father and among my family traditions there is an old Dublin
riddle: “Why are Sir William Wilde's nails so black ?" Answer,
“Because he has scratched himself.” And there is an old story still


WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
625
6
current in Dublin of Lady Wilde saying to a servant, “Why do
you put the plates on the coal-scuttle? What are the chairs
meant for?” They were famous people and there are many
like stories; and even a horrible folk story, the invention of some
Connaught peasant, that tells how Sir William Wilde took out the
eyes of some men, who had come to consult him as an oculist, and
laid them upon a plate, intending to replace them in a moment,
and how the eyes were eaten by a cat. As a certain friend of mine,
who has made a prolonged study of the nature of cats, said when he
first heard the tale, "Cats love eyes.” The Wilde family was clear-
ly of the sort that fed the imagination of Charles Lever, dirty, un-
tidy, daring, and what Charles Lever, who loved more normal
activities, might not have valued so highly, very imaginative and
learned. Lady Wilde, who when I knew her received her friends
with blinds drawn and shutters closed that none might see her
withered face, longed always perhaps, though certainly amid much
self-mockery, for some impossible splendour of character and cir-
cumstance. She lived near her son in level Chelsea, but I have
heard her say, "I want to live on some high place, Primrose Hill
or Highgate, because I was an eagle in my youth.” I think her
son lived with no self-mockery at all an imaginary life; perpetu-
ally performed a play which was in all things the opposite of
all that he had known in childhood and early youth; never put
off completely his wonder at opening his eyes every morning on
his own beautiful house, and in remembering that he had dined
yesterday with a duchess, and that he delighted in Flaubert and
Pater, read Homer in the original and not as a schoolmaster reads
him for the grammar.
I think, too, that because of all that
half-civilized blood in his veins he could not endure the sedentary
toil of creative art and so remained a man of action, exaggerating,
for the sake of immediate effect, every trick learned from his
masters, turning their easel painting into painted scenes. He was a
parvenu, but a parvenu whose whole bearing proved that if he did
dedicate every story in The House of Pomegranates to a lady of
title, it was but to show that he was Jack and the social ladder his
pantomime beanstalk. “Did you ever hear him
"Did you ever hear him say 'Marquess of
Dimmesdale'?” a friend of his once asked me.
“He does not say
'the Duke of York' with any pleasure.”
He told me once that he had been offered a safe seat in Parlia-
a
a


626
AUTUMN
ment and, had he accepted, he might have had a career like that of
Beaconsfield, whose early style resembles his, being meant for
crowds, for excitement, for hurried decisions, for immediate
triumphs. Such men get their sincerity, if at all, from the contact
of events; the dinner table was Wilde's event and made him the
greatest talker of his time, and his plays and dialogues have what
merit they possess from being now an imitation, now a record,
of his talk. Even in those days I would often defend him by say-
ing that his very admiration for his predecessors in poetry, for
Browning, for Swinburne and Rossetti, in their first vogue while
he was a very young man, made any success seem impossible that
could satisfy his immense ambition: never but once before had the
artist seemed so great, never had the work of art seemed so difficult.
I would then compare him with Benvenuto Cellini who, coming
after Michael Angelo, found nothing left to do so satisfactory as to
turn bravo and assassinate the man who broke Michael Angelo's
nose.
To be continued
AUTUMN
1
BY PADRAIC COLUM
A good stay-at-home season is Autumn: then there's work to be
done by all:
Speckled fawns, where the brackens make covert, range away unde-
terred;
And stags that were seen upon hillocks now give heed to the call,
To the bellowing call of the hinds, and they draw back to the herd.
A good stay-at-home season is Autumn: the brown world's striped
into fields;
The corn is up to its growth; there are acorns in the deep wood;
By the side of a down-fallen fort even the thorn-bush yields
A crop, and there by the rath the hazel nuts drop from a load.
From The Middle Irish: founded on a prose version by the late Professor
Kuno Meyer.
.



ant
ELEPHANTASTIC. BY C. BERTRAM HARTMAN






JOY RIDE. BY C. BERTRAM HARTMAN





THE SINGING FURIES
(To M. B.)
BY RICHARD HUGHES
The yellow sky grows vivid as the sun:
The sea glittering, and the hills dun.
The stones quiver. Twenty pounds of lead
.
Fold upon fold, the air enlaps my head.
Both eyes scorch: tongue stiff and bitter.
Flies buzz, but no birds twitter;
Slow bullocks stand with stinging feet,'
And naked fishes scarcely stir, for heat.
White as smoke,
As jetted steam, dead clouds awoke
And quivered on the Western rim.
Then the singing started: dim
And sibilant as rime-stiff reeds
That whistle as the wind leads.
The North answered, low and clear;
The South whispered hard and sere,
And thunder muffled up like drums
Beat, whence the East-wind comes.
The heavy sky that could not weep
Is loosened: rain falls steep,
And thirty singing furies ride
To crack the sky from side to side.
They sing, and lash the wet-flanked wind:
Sing, from Col to Hafod Mynd
And Aling their voices half a score
Of miles along the mounded shore:
Whip loud music from the trees


628
THE SINGING FURIES
Tuned to the echo's harmonies,
And roll their paean out to sea
Where crowded breakers Aling and leap,
And strange things throb five fathoms deep.
The sudden tempest roared and died:
The singing furies muted ride
Down wet and slippery roads to hell;
And, silent in their captors' train
Two fishers, storm-caught on the main;
A shepherd, battered with his flocks;
A pit-boy tumbled from the rocks,
A dozen back-broke gulls, and hosts
Of shadowy, small, pathetic ghosts,
-Of mice and leverets caught by flood;
Their beauty shrouded in cold mud.


THE COMIC MASK
BY G. SANTAYANA
THE
а
HE clown is the primitive comedian. Sometimes in the ex-
uberance of animal life, a spirit of riot and frolic comes over
a man; he leaps, he dances, he tumbles head over heels, he grins,
shouts, or leers, possibly he pretends to go to pieces suddenly, and
blubbers like a child. A moment later he may look up wreathed in
smiles, and hugely pleased about nothing. All this he does hysteri-
cally, without any reason, by a sort of mad inspiration and irresist-
ible impulse. He may easily, however, turn his absolute histrionic
impulse, his pure fooling, into mimicry of anything or anybody that
at the moment happens to impress his senses; he will crow like a
cock, simper like a young lady, or reel like a drunkard. Such
mimicry is virtual mockery, because the actor is able to revert from
those assumed attitudes to his natural self; whilst his models, as he
thinks, have no natural self save that imitable attitude, and can
never disown it; so that the clown feels himself immensely superior,
in his rôle of universal satirist, to all actual men, and belabours and
rails at them unmercifully. He sees everything in caricature, be-
cause he sees the surface only, with the lucid innocence of a child;
and all these grotesque personages stimulate him, not to moral sym-
pathy, nor to any consideration of their fate, but rather to boisterous
sallies, as the rush of a crowd, or the hue and cry of a hunt, or the
contortions of a jumping-jack might stimulate him. He is not at
all amused intellectually, he is not rendered wiser or tenderer by
knowing the predicaments into which people inevitably fall; he is
merely excited, flushed, and challenged by an absurd spectacle. Of
course this rush and suasion of mere existence must never fail on
the stage, nor in any art; it is to the drama what the hypnotizing
stone block is to the statue, or shouts and rhythmic breathing to the
bard; but such primary magical influences may be qualified by re-
flection, and then rational and semi-tragic unities will supervene.
When this happens the histrionic impulse creates the idyl or the
tragic chorus; henceforth the muse of reflection follows in the train
of Dionysus, and the revel or the rude farce passes into humane
comedy.
a


630
THE COMIC MASK
Paganism was full of scruples and superstitions in matters of be-
haviour or of cultus, since the cultus too was regarded as a business
or a magic craft; but in expression, in reflection, paganism was frank
and even shameless; it felt itself inspired, and revered this inspira-
tion. It saw nothing impious in inventing or recasting a myth
about no matter how sacred a subject. Its inspiration, however,
soon fell into classic moulds, because the primary impulses of na-
ture, though intermittent, are monotonous and clearly defined, as
are the gestures of love and of anger. A man who is unaffectedly
himself turns out to be uncommonly like other people. Simple sin-
cerity will continually rediscover the old right ways of thinking
and speaking and will be perfectly conventional without suspecting
it. This classic iteration comes of nature, it is not the consequence
of any revision or censorship imposed by reason. Reason, not being
responsible for any of the facts or passions that enter into human
life, has no interest in maintaining them as they are; any novelty,
even the most revolutionary, would merely afford reason a fresh
occasion for demanding a fresh harmony. But the Old Adam is
conservative; he repeats himself mechanically in every child who
cries and loves sweets and is imitative and jealous. Reason, with
its tragic discoveries and restraints, is a far more precarious and per-
sonal possession than the trite animal experience and the ancestral
grimaces on which it supervenes; and automatically even the phi-
losopher continues to cut his old comic capers, as if no such thing as
reason existed. The wiseacres too are comic, and their mask is one
of the most harmlessly amusing in the human museum; for reason,
taken psychologically, is an old inherited passion like any other, the
passion for consistency and order; and it is just as prone as the other
passions to overstep the modesty of nature and to regard its own
aims as alone important. But this is ridiculous; because impor-
tance springs from the stress of nature, from the cry of life, not from
reason and its pale prescriptions. Reason cannot stand alone;
brute habit and blind play are at the bottom of art and morals, and
unless irrational impulses and fancies are kept alive, the life of
reason collapses for sheer emptiness. What tragedy could there
be, or what sublime harmonies rising out of tragedy, if there were no
spontaneous passions to create the issue, no wild voices to be re-
duced to harmony? Moralists have habitually aimed at suppres-
sion, wisely perhaps at first, when they were preaching to men of
a


G. SANTAYANA
631
spirit; but why continue to harp on propriety and unselfishness and
labour, when we are little but labour-
machines already, and have
hardly any self or any passions left to indulge? Perhaps the time
has come to suspend those exhortations, and to encourage us to be
sometimes a little lively, and see if we can invent something worth
saying or doing. We should then be living in the spirit of comedy,
and the world would grow young. Every occasion would don its
comic mask, and make its bold grimace at the world for a moment.
We should be constantly original without effort and without shame,
somewhat as we are in dreams, and consistent only in sincerity; and
we should gloriously emphasize all the poses we fell into, without
seeking to prolong them.
Objections to the comic mask—to the irresponsible, complete, ex-
treme expression of each moment-cut at the roots of all expression.
Pursue this path, and at once you do away with gesture: we must
not point, we must not pout, we must not cry, we must not laugh
aloud; we must not only avoid attracting attention, but our atten-
tion must not be obviously attracted; it is silly to gaze, says the
nursery-governess, and rude to stare. Presently words, too, will be
reduced to a telegraphic code. A man in his own country will talk
like the laconic tourist abroad; his whole vocabulary will be Où?
Combien? All right! Dear Me!
Conversation in the quiet home will dispense even with these
phrases; nothing will be required but a few pragmatic grunts and
signals for action. Where the spirit of comedy has departed, com-
pany becomes constraint, reserve eats up the spirit, and people fall
into a penurious melancholy in their scruple to be always exact,
sane, and reasonable, never to mourn, never to glow, never to betray
a passion or a weakness, or venture to utter a thought they might not
wish to harbour for ever. Yet the irony of fate pursues these
enemies of comedy, and for fear of wearing a mask for a moment
they are hypocrites all their lives. Their very reserve becomes a
pose, a convention imposed externally, and their mincing speech
Sometimes this evasion of impulsive sentiment fos-
ters a poignant sentimentality beneath. The comedy goes on silent-
ly behind the scenes, until perhaps it gets
gets the upper hand and
becomes positive madness; or else it breaks out in some shy, indirect
fashion, as among Americans with their perpetual joking. Where
there is no habitual art and no moral liberty, the instinct for direct
turns to cant.


632
THE COMIC MASK .
expression is atrophied for want of exercise; and then slang and a
humorous perversity of phrase or manner act as safety-valves to
sanity: and you manage to express yourself in spite of the censor
by saying something grotesquely different from what you mean.
That is a long way round to sincerity, and an ugly one. What, on
the contrary, could be more splendidly sincere than the impulse to
play in real life, to rise on the rising wave of every feeling and let it
burst, if it will, into the foam of exaggeration?
Life is not a
means, the mind is not a slave nor a photograph: it has a right to
enact a pose, to assume a panache, and to create what prodigious al-
legories it will for the mere sport and glory of it. Nor is this art of
innocent make-believe forbidden in the decalogue, although bible-
reading Anglo-Saxondom might seem to think so. On the contrary,
the bible and the decalogue are themselves instances of it. To
embroider upon experience is not to bear false witness against one's
neighbour, but to bear true witness to oneself. Fancy is playful and
may be misleading to those who try to take it for literal fact; but
literalness is impossible in any utterance of spirit, and if it were pos-
sible it would be deadly. Why should we quarrel with human
nature, with metaphor, with myth, with impersonation? The fool-
ishness of the simple is delightful; only the foolishness of the wise
is exasperating


TWO POEMS
BY ALFRED KREYMBORG
MONOCLES
Reducing the universe
to one round view,
and terming it religion,
is truly beyond my capacity:
compressing one's view,
like a hoop,
for other folk to be whipped through-
squeezing the rim so tight
that not even a gnat
could manage the hole-
requires more strength
than I have the pincers for:
beholding what one is pleased
to call, God,
and greeting Him exclusively
through the monocle
of one's own righteousness-
that
eye
suffers astigmatism,
I prefer to try the other.


634
TWO POEMS
TURTLES
Orrick,
poet-laureate of St Louis,
and Albert,
king of Belgium,
are stopping at the Waldorf-Astoria.
This
could only happen
in New York,
and the people
packing Fifth Avenue,
sidewalks, windows, house-tops, flag-poles,
waiting for the
king, not the poet,
to emerge-
this
could only happen
in people-
for a king,
not a poet,
has to do with heads,
and an appeal to heads
makes people emerge,
wary
as
turtles.
Is it feet carry them?


ร
THE BATH OF THE AIR.
BY REX SLINKARD






HORSES AND FIGURES.
BY REX SLIVKARD


1


THE PRISONER WHO SANG
BY JOHAN BOJER
V
THE
HE world is by no means an ideal dwelling place, and a year
afterwards Andreas was a remanded prisoner expecting to be
transferred to the county jail. Bad people had prosecuted him once
more, because in all innocence he had gone the round of the
inner country districts receiving payment in advance on the sale
of a new sort of plough that would be sent from the firm of Hau-
gen and Dahl a few days later. Sentence had been pronounced
the day before and there were free board and lodging to be had
for quite a long while to come.
The door was opened and the warder entered accompanied by
a stoutish iron-grey gentleman with gold-rimmed spectacles.
"Yes,” said the stranger, “it is he right enough.—Thank you, Mr
Warder, only a moment you know.” The warder went out and
the stout gentleman wiped his glasses, smiled benevolently, sat
down, and started a conversation.
“I am Dr Jenson, and I was one of those present at your trial
yesterday. I don't know whether you noticed me?"
M-ye-es, Andreas thought he had. He stroked his stubble with
a sidelong glance at his visitor.
“It was a very interesting case, really.” The doctor nursed
his knees, smiling as if at pleasant memories. “Ahem. We all
agreed that you are a devil of a fellow and I have hardly slept all
night for thinking of you.
. Will you permit me to examine your
head a little ?"
He produced an apparatus which he placed round the prisoner's
head. He felt it carefully with his finger tips, breathing asth-
matically all the time. Then he stared out of the window, stuck
out his blue chin and said "ahem” several times. Finally he paced
up and down the floor, his boots creaking and his gold watch chain
dangling over his prominent stomach.
"Exactly, my friend, exactly what I expected.” His fat hand
9
a


636
THE PRISONER WHO SANG
with a big red signet ring made gestures in the air. “I say, my
man, has it never occurred to you that this sort of thing is not good
enough for you?''
Andreas, sighing, murmured something about his own innocence.
"M-yes, you are no ordinary criminal, my friend, you have
gifts, not only the very devil of a brain, but special gifts—up to
now misapplied, that is why you are here. I have theories of my
own on these things. I say, do you know what a theatre is ?”
,
Andreas guessed he knew that much. He had been to see a
play once or twice.
"I might ask whether you have ever felt a desire to become an
a
actor, but-no, please don't put on that face, it is not your own
at all-ha-ha-ha." The doctor had to take off his glasses in order
to wipe his eyes with his handkerchief. “Oh, at the trial yesterday
-ha-ha, you were really too wonderful.”
Andreas laughed too.
"Well,” the stout gentleman put his glasses on again and re-
sumed his pacing of the floor, playing with his handkerchief all
the while. "Well, you are a peasant lad, you have had very little
“
education, and you are in prison. That is all very satisfactory.
If it is possible in prison to educate oneself into a missionary
bishop, it should also be possible to be educated for a stage career.
I will see to it that you have books enough, and when you
have
finished
your six months of repentance, you come to me my man.
I am considered a close-fisted miser, but even I have whims. We'll
try to make a great man of you.”
When the prison chaplain saw Andreas he stroked his grey
beard saying “Ah, here you are, back again.”
The next day, however, he was very kind and helpful, and
wanted to give him lessons in history, English, and German.
Six months later Andreas went with the doctor to the tiny local
theatre. They entered a dark passage and crossed a big floor
where two men in white jackets were very busy with some furni-
ture. Finally they reached a small office, and after a while a
fair, beardless, slightly-built man rushed in and bowed to them
both.
“Good-morning, Mr Manager,” said the doctor. "Well, here
we are."
"Hm-is that he?' His brown eyes measured Andreas. “Your
theories, doctor, concerning genius and—and"


JOHAN BOJER
637
“We have discussed that already,” the doctor interrupted, plac-
ing one hand on each knee.
“If it were only as easy as you think. But it is difficult, dd
difficult I assure you.'
"We had another meeting last night,” the doctor continued,
“and we all agreed that if you wish to replace the Danish actors
by Norwegians you may reckon on our support and your company
might become the nucleus of a permanent theatre in this town.”
“I like that—Norwegians! Norwegians! We can't pick up
your damned Norwegians from the gutter or from-er-public in-
stitutions and shoot them on to the stage. I beg your pardon,”
he made a slight movement of the head towards Andreas.
The doctor made as if to leave. But the manager asked him into
the next room, and they went on talking, the doctor's voice becom-
ing more and more shrill. At last they returned.
“Bless my soul, let the man come here to-morrow at twelve.
I am too busy now, it is an absolute impossibility. And that re-
minds me—” the manager's face suddenly changed to a look of
misery, “I remember now—you have waited—”
The doctor clapped his shoulder smiling subtly. "You arrange
that when it suits you,” he said.
The next day Andreas was in for a new kind of trial. He was
asked to recite Terje Viken (by Ibsen) and thought nothing could
be easier. He knew all the thirty-five long verses by heart. The
doctor and the manager stared at him from their comfortable arm-
chairs.
“That will do,” said the manager jumping out of his chair.
“My dear man you recite as if you were a lay missionary at a
prayer meeting. Try telling the story as if you had been there
yourself and seen everything—something like this—” and the
manager started reciting.
Andreas was dumbfounded. That fellow surely knew how to
read out of a book! What a gift! Andreas had a lump in his
throat.
“Now try.”
Andreas tried_hard. He assumed the manager's voice, and
his mannerism, and his gestures until he saw that the two men
in the armchairs were laughing outright.
“That will do,” the manager said shaking his head with a glance
at the doctor.


638
THE PRISONER WHO SANG
“Let him try something else,” the doctor insisted eagerly. “Let
him try a real part—say Bishop Nicholas.”
“What? What did you say he was to try?” The manager
looked ready to faint.
"You let him try Bishop Nicholas in The Pretenders, and if I
am not right I shall thank God I never was an actor."
“He can darned well try anything as far as I am concerned.
Why not Hamlet straight away?” The manager rushed off to re-
turn with an elegantly bound volume, which he handed to Andreas.
Then the doctor button-holed his pupil and lectured him for a
while, explaining that they were in the great hall of a king's castle.
Sunburnt men in breast-plates and with spears lined the walls.
There was King Haakon who was such and such a man, and on the
other side was the Duke Skule who was something quite different,
and he, Andreas, was the old fiend of a Bishop.
“Mercy upon us,” Andreas exclaimed, "was the Bishop that
a
sort ?!
Then he read the part of the Bishop, while the doctor was both
Duke and King. Suddenly understanding broke in on Andreas'
mind. He knew in a flash how Nicholas looked, and he assumed
his likeness, growing old and stooping and hoarse of voice. Once
more he had to conceal his inward laughter, not from the eyes of the
parson, or of old Romer this time, but from the eyes of a king and
a duke and mailed knights.
"That is better," said the manager, "you go on, you keep on.”
At last he jumped up, and tore the book out of Andreas' hand.
“That'll do,” he cried, “that will do ten thousand times over.
Possibly you may be a hidden genius, but at present you are a very
rough diamond indeed, needing both scraping and cutting. Got
any money to keep alive with ?”
Andreas could not answer at once, needing a breathing space to
change from the Bishop into his ordinary self.
"Keep alive?” the doctor said, he was out of breath with acting
both Duke and King at once, but he radiated triumph. “Keep
alive? We must see to that of course.'
It was arranged that Andreas should receive a small sum monthly
from the theatre and another from the doctor, otherwise taking les-
sons of all sorts and working industriously. The doctor attended
to everything. He found board and lodging for his protégé in a
a


JOHAN BOJER
639
a
nice family, where they all washed their hands half a dozen times
a day. He had lessons with one actor and the other, and Andreas
took the line of least resistance, working at everything. He never
imagined before that it was an art to go in and out of a door, to
place his feet correctly when bowing, to laugh so as not to frighten
gentlefolk and to speak so as to show education. There were a
thousand things for him to learn. He frequently dined with the
doctor who expounded to him the great poets of the world and
taught him to read critically. “Have you no other clothes than
those ?” the doctor asked one day. Andreas had not.
“Then come
along to my tailor's.” And he was measured for several suits.
Another day the doctor remarked at table, “You begin to look a
gentleman but your nails—” and he took him into his bedroom ex-
plaining the care of the human civilized nails.
Another day his tie was attended to. "You must tie it thus,"
the doctor said, teaching Andreas before the looking glass.
Who would have imagined it of the doctor, the cynic, the mis-
ogynist and hermit, that he nursed a secret dream, which at last he
was about to realize? The stage had been closed to him in the
days long ago, and now he tried to create in Andreas the great actor
he himself had never had a chance of becoming. He walked
around Andreas as a sculptor goes round the lump of clay out of
which he will create an immortal statue. He would not have look-
ed twice at a young man with an education or even half an educa-
tion. He wanted the original material, virgin to the moulding
hand. Was he not entitled to have whims?
At last Andreas was given a real part. The local papers pub-
lished the startling news that the débutant hailed from their own
town, and that he was a young man with a remarkable life's history.
He was to act a head bank clerk, who in his old age steals from
the bank in order to satisfy his daughters' vanity. Andreas thought
that the author made the old man say rather stupid things, and
would have liked to substitute his own words, but he was not
allowed to do so.
The curtain rose. Andreas was quite used to acting before the
parish at church, and he felt the same sensation face to face with
the present audience. They applauded down there, and he felt the
same inward glow as when God-fearing people at church stared at
him, blessing themselves. Once between acts he met the doctor in
а


640
THE PRISONER WHO SANG
the wings. The worthy man was pale with excitement, and kept
on saying, “It is excellent. You carry the audience with you.
Nobody knew what this man with the mask of cynicism experienced
that night. He felt as if he, himself, were on the stage, as if his
life's dream had been realized.
Andreas was recalled several times and the manager shook hands,
saying, “That is all right,” and promised him a rise in salary. The
three local expert dramatic critics were a printer, a bankrupt busi-
ness man, and a veterinary surgeon. The doctor provided drinks,
and next morning the papers declared that the evening was unfor-
gettable.
ndreas cut out the reviews, and sent them to Jonetta.
He experienced the sensation of walking in the streets of a small
town, in the splendour of brand-new fame. Several times he passed
the great Romer and the old man seemed to remember that they
had met before. Anyhow he lifted his top-hat and Andreas con-
descended to return the salute.
The doctor invited him to a dinner party, and he was toasted as
the young hope of the town, and every morning when dressing he
felt as if he were mounting a golden cloud.
He was given new parts. The company went touring, and on
the steamer Andreas' proper place was no longer amongst the cases
and barrels on the foredeck. He had his meals in the first-class
dining-room, gave tips to the waiter, and could talk to ladies in the
saloon. He was everybody's equal and his only regret was that he
could not be seen by the lensmand. He had great parts and changed
himself into the most incredible persons, kings and knights, mur-
derers and old drunkards, young men pining, and sighing lovers,
and sad fathers. The theatre was sometimes a small meeting
house, sometimes a trades union clubroom, the stage as large as a
kitchen table, where one ran the risk of the scenery collapsing over
one's head while kneeling at the feet of some fair damsel. Life
was all excitement. No one knew what might happen next. One
lived at hotels and had to sneak away without paying. That was
fair enough when the town did not properly appreciate one's efforts.
At one place you risked being refused a shelter and at the next you
would be fêted by the best people and toasted in champagne. Life
was a fairy tale and days flew by and vanished like a dream. Some
members of the company came of good stock, one or two had passed
a


JOHAN BOJER
641
examinations and could teach the others. All were thrown inti-
mately together in the daily round of striving and quarrelling,
festivities and depression. Each one's good or bad qualities influ-
enced all the others, through rehearsals, performances, travelling,
meals, in the common life of fate commonly shared and hopes
jointly indulged in. The members of the company intrigued a
little against each other, criticized each other, praised each other,
helped each other, and were traitors to each other. You might come
off the stage elated by the applause from the audience and be met
with a colleague's icy remark on your wretched acting—or on the
other hand a woman might embrace you in an ecstasy of admiration.
All agreed that Andreas surpassed his colleagues in one thing-
in making up. No one could equal his skill in creating a perfectly
new face with a few strokes of grease paint.
More than a year went by in this way; then Andreas began to
feel an increasing dissatisfaction.
Acting was after all only make-believe. The audience were
fully aware of the fact that nothing was real. Nobody was de-
ceived. There grew a longing in his soul to act outside the stage,
in the streets, in people's houses, on the high road everywhere, to
change into incredible persons and stand before honest unsuspicious
people, making them stare at him, and deceiving them.
Some people took strong drinks. He did not. Others had to
have tobacco or go mad. He did not need it. Others sought
women and lost sense and reason over them—Andreas laughed at
them. All the same he had his own peculiar craving. He could
not endure the life any longer, to be himself and no other, deceiv-
ing nobody
One fine morning the craving got the upper hand and he disap-
peared taking with him nothing but some grease paint and a few
wigs. They might come handy some day.
He returned to the town where the doctor lived and learnt that
his friend was away, travelling. An hour later he was inside a
bank handing in a slip of paper bearing the name of his benefactor.
The manager glanced at him over his glasses. What name?
Well, yes, he remembered. The place was small enough for the
bank manager to know what all the world knew, how this young
man had been helped and supported by the doctor. Only the
amount was considerable.


642
THE PRISONER WHO SANG
Andreas shivered. This was acting! This was excitement.
He knew that he might lose all by the slightest mistake on his part,
in the quivering of an eyelid. This was art. It was poetry
"Wait a moment,” the bank manager said, going out.
“He is going to telephone to the doctor,” thought Andreas.
“They often play cards together at the club. But the doctor is not
at home to-day."
The pale, bald-headed man returned, evidently still in doubt.
The next moment meant either money or prison.
The bank manager looked at him, twisting the slip of paper
be-
tween long white fingers. Finally a movement showed that he had
made up his mind. Some line, or some fleeting shadow of expres-
sion in the face of the younger man, had decided him.
The slip of paper was passed to other desks and the cashier pres-
ently pronounced his name. Andreas counted the big bundle of
notes with deliberate care before placing them in his pocket-book.
Then he took a look around, and finally left very deliberately,
whilst through the whole of his being there ran a fierce delight as
if he held a lovely woman in his embrace.
Once more he found lodgings and went to bed, drunk with
achievement in a state of incomprehensible bliss, which once more
found expression in the humming of a hymn tune.
What childish pranks were the tricks he had once played in the
home valley. He really ought to try and make amends for them.
Shutting his eye he could visualize Mr Kaalseth on his farm, and
Mr Bergheim on his. Supposing he did try and make amends, in
such a way, and such a manner.
A few days later Mr Kaalseth was inspecting his farmyard rather
aimlessly when the local postman opened the gate to hand him a
letter. The old man wiped his glasses in order to have a good look
at it. Then he touched his shaggy white head. "Oline,” he called
.
finally, "there is a letter for you. Come here.”
Fair Oline came running, her slippers clattering, while she wiped
her hands on a blue-checked apron. The letter was from Andreas.
He asked her pardon for what he once did concerning a clean shirt
and the Conciliation Board, and he hoped she would kindly accept
a small souvenir, for which, perhaps, she might be able to find a
place in the spare bedroom.
Mr Kaalseth and his wife looked at one another.


JOHAN BOJER
643
“What does the fool mean this time ?" she asked lifting the fair
hair from her forehead. Mr Kaalseth smiled reflectively.
Whilst thus standing in doubt they heard the noise of wheels
and a big cartload of furniture came to a standstill before them.
“It came by to-day's steamer,” observed the agent who was driv-
ing the precious load in person, “with orders to bring it here straight
away.”
Mrs Kaalseth stared. Her husband had to wipe his right eye-
glass, in order to see better, being blind in his left eye.
The farm boy came up, and one by one six upholstered chairs
came down, with a grand polished woodwork couch, and twelve
pictures for the walls. True enough the spare bedroom had been
empty these many years, but Mr Kaalseth did not recover his senses
until every article was in its proper place. Then he came to the
conclusion that he would rather not accept the gift. He was sit-
ting in one chair and his wife in another, staring at each other.
Things happened at Mr Bergheim's farm, too, on the very same
day. A sealed parcel arrived by post just when everyone was at
breakfast, and the whole household fixed its attention on the open-
ing of it. First there was a letter from Andreas. He wrote say-
ing that he had forgiven Mr Bergheim for those ten kroner, and
asked him to accept a small souvenir. “The darned fool,” the old
man hissed making a ball of the letter and throwing it out of the
window. "What!" He looked at them not sure whether he
wanted to sob or laugh, all the others laughing derisively.
“Look here, there is more,” said his wife, Marit, unwrapping lay-
ers of tissue paper until she held a gold watch in her hand. Every-
one stared agape. Mr Bergheim caught hold of the watch and was
for sending it after the letter, but his wife restrained him. She
opened the lid of the watch and read aloud the inscription. There
was Mr Bergheim's full name and furthermore "to remind you of a
friend.”
Even then the old man wanted to throw it out of the window,
but gold is gold and the watch he had already was only silver. He
was quite overpowered, his wife and household all around him.
There was nothing for him to do but accept the present and bite
his beard, staring.
In the course of time the doctor returned from his journey, and
at the club card-table when his friend the bank manager mentioned
a


644
THE PRISONER WHO SANG
the big cheque, he let his cards drop to the floor. What? He re-
adjusted his glasses and refused to believe it. But next day in the
bank he was allowed to hold the pretty little bit of paper in his own
hands and he was so intensely moved that he sank into an armchair.
He realized that hitherto he had not been sufficient of a cynic, and
remained staring before him like one who had lost his only illusion.
"Well,” he said at last, stroking his beard, "well, well.”
He informed the police, and they followed what they supposed
to be Andreas' track as far as a distant inland village. There all
traces disappeared, for the only stranger in those parts was a lay
missionary, black-haired and black-bearded, who traded in bibles
and conducted prayer meetings, and aroused a wave of revivalism
within the parish. But Andreas was not to be found.
VI
a
His new life was full of excitement. Mr Sorensen, lay mission-
ary, was a great part for an actor and at last he was allowed to
choose words for himself. People singing hymns around him there
had no thought of play-acting, they looked at him, believing, they
were alive and were deceived.
He had listened to lay preachers and parsons and clergymen
without end, and could undertake to impersonate a bishop if need
be. But now he created a figure to suit the country people in that
little valley so far from the rest of the world.
There was more edge to his excitement in standing at the end of
a long deal table facing rows and rows of intent eyes, than he had
ever experienced facing the most enthusiastic applause from a the-
atre audience. He could sway all these people. A few words
were sufficient to draw a new line in an old man's face or to make a
toothless mouth droop deeper. He could change a self-assertive
mien into one showing fear and sorrow, and he could even taste the
pleasure of coaxing the sunshine of joy into the harrowed face of
some poverty-crushed man.
Then there were the young girls. It was easy enough to fill their
eyes with tears, but to show them bright hope afterwards and con-
jure up beautiful visions in their minds was like transforming them
into angels, and at the same time getting wings for himself. The
thing grew on him. He no longer saw faces only, he felt himself


JOHAN BOJER
645
playing on a great and wonderful instrument. What was God to
him? A violin bow with which he touched the minds of men, and
he perceived a rare and powerful tone swelling within himself.
"Brethren, let us pray.” It was miraculous.
As
yet it was still only a part that he played. Soon, however, the
rôle grew beyond all bounds. He never knew what the next min-
ute might bring. He would be called to a deathbed in the middle
of the night. A young girl would come to him with her sad love
story, a mother with her heart full of sorrow for the son who was a
drunkard.
He no longer read faces, but souls, who trusting him opened
their holy of holies to him. Whilst to himself he thought, "This
then is what it means to be a missionary, I am living through the
life of one now.”
To begin with, it was a relief to doff the false beard behind well-
drawn blinds in his locked bedroom. He would draw a deep
breath. At last he dared to unmask, becoming his real self.
Should he laugh or cry. “What are you doing? What is happen-
ing to you? Is this really you?" After a while, however, he un-
masked his face reluctantly. It grew painful to part with Mr Sor-
ensen, the lay preacher, who was so superior to Mr Berget. Who
was this Andreas? He became a stranger who could be kept at a
distance all day, but whom he had to meet at night. He more and
more lost his respect for that wild fellow, whom he began to view
with the eyes of the lay preacher. God be praised, he was no
longer the same man. Vague visions floated in his mind of the
apostles and prophets of whom he had read so much. He felt him-
self living through a little of their experience, and covering days
long gone by with his own days. This was art, life, poetry.
One day he was summoned to the bed of an old woman who was
dying, and he felt a curious sensation when he noticed her humped
back.
It was a tiny workman's cottage and suddenly Andreas seemed
to be at home sitting by his mother's bed.
"Do
you
think there is salvation for me?" the old woman asked
looking at him with dimmed eyes.
Andreas was strangely moved. He saw himself in his relation
to the home valley. There he was a pariah, an ex-convict, and
here now he was to decide whether a soul should be saved.
a
a


646
THE PRISONER WHO SANG
How could she doubt God's grace? he asked, stroking the sunken
cheeks, and comforting the troubled old woman till she died smiling.
As he left he hummed a hymn tune as in the days of old. He
was no longer the wandering lay preacher, he was Andreas. The
day had given him back some respect for his own youth. Not Mr
Sorensen but Andreas had visited the dying woman, the lad from
the forest cottage had shown his hunch-backed mother the way to
the
gates of Paradise.
Weeks went by. It happened even then that behind all his sol-
emnity he could feel laughter welling up inside him. But the
laughter was no longer malicious. It was a feeling of freedom, of
joy at the thought that he was in a way apart from his own fate,
a spectator. He was not so immutably bound to be and remain
one person that he could not, to-morrow, become another.
One evening he paced up and down his room behind drawn
blinds and locked doors, mechanically taking off his false beard and
putting it on again.
“It cannot go on,” he said, again and again. “You are in love,
and you can win her. But whom shall she marry? Andreas Ber-
get or Mr Sorensen the lay preacher? You are two persons, and
you must go away from here.”
The real fact was that he had out-played his part. He knew by
that time to the smallest detail how to be an apostle so well that
after that the life would be nothing but repetition.
There was a festive gathering in his honour at the meeting house
when he left. The next day a number of revivalists followed his
hired buggy up the hill road, singing hymns as they went.
When finally they left him alone with the driver he stopped the
horse, paid his man, and continued his journey on foot, valise in
hand. He looked back for a last view at the valley around the
blue lake in its summer loveliness.
The lay preacher was left behind down there. "Good-bye,” he
said. He had been, as it were, visiting a strange personality for a
time. Now the two took leave of each other. "Good-bye.”
He turned off from the road, found a brook, placed his beard in
his valise and washed his hair until it was fair once again. Then
he made use of a small looking glass. “Good-morning, Andreas,"
he murmured, “it is quite a long while since we met in broad day-
light.”
>
a


JOHAN BOJER
647
E.
He walked on, his valise over his shoulder, his hat well back on
his head, singing to himself.
He thus obtained a few hours of liberty. He would have to as-
sume a fresh face before venturing down amongst people again.
A week later he was in Christiania. To him it was a great city
and the street traffic seemed nearly bewildering. “Excuse me,” he
said lifting his hat to a policeman, "could you recommend me a
cheap place for board and lodging ?”
The policeman stroked his ruddy moustache in a most friendly
manner. Certainly he could and would. His sister kept a board-
ing house in a small way. “You come with me”; Andreas followed
a
him.
Andreas' name was now Mr Sendstad, a farm bailiff without em-
ployment for the moment. His hair was a fiery red, so were his
small whiskers, and he was just a little lame in one foot.
The boarding-house was situated in a sombre dirty street. The
stairs were dark, there was a bad smell in the hall, and the telephone
seemed to be the only bright thing in the whole place. The par-
lour was low-ceilinged. A grey film of dust lay over the red plush
of the furniture, and a parrot in a cage started swearing when they
entered. A white-haired lady with an ear trumpet entered the
>
room.
a
“What did you say, Kristian? What? Yes, certainly we have
a room. My daughter will be here directly."
He was given a dark little hole overlooking the court-yard; when
he was alone he flung himself down on the couch. “Why am I
here? Well, one ought to see the Capital of one's country-and-
perhaps—who knows”
“Mr Sendstad, dinner is ready, please.”
A small company had assembled in the dark little dining-room
where odours from the kitchen pervaded the atmosphere. He was
introduced to an old grey-bearded captain, two telegraph office-
girls, two university students as thin as rakes, and a sallow-faced
young office-girl who had one shoulder higher than the other.
To Andreas, accustomed to fresh air in the country, this mixture of
smells of washing, soot, gas, and dust was sufficient to kill all ap-
petite before the meal had begun.
"So you are an agriculturist,” the captain began in a friendly
manner across his plate of soup, "and your name is Sendstad--per-


648
THE PRISONER WHO SANG
haps then
you are related to my old friend Sendstad at Inderya ?”
"He is my uncle,” Andreas replied, “but he has been bedridden
of late.”
“Well-yes-one grows old. He must be over eighty by now.”
“Eighty-five,” Andreas said, who had no idea of whom he was
speakin.
During the meal an old bent man entered the room. He wore a
brown wig and his eyes were red-rimmed and watery. An elderly
woman accompanied him, she was the landlady. Her eyes also
were red. The old man's hands trembled and he and the old lady
with the ear trumpet sat down at a separate table, after the land-
lady had introduced him to Andreas as her father, Mr Iversen,
Bank Messenger.
Andreas viewed the old man with special interest. “Could I
“
manage to impersonate him, so that people would be deceived?"
was his involuntary thought.
“And how many millions have you carried from one bank to
another to-day, Mr Iversen ?” the captain asked.
“Oh, I won't say millions,” the old man said turning his red
eyes towards the company, "but I will confess to hundreds of
thousands.”
At coffee afterwards Andreas entered into conversation with the
Bank Messenger who told him where he was employed and what
the nature of his work was. He went to the various banks with
bills of exchange and carried money back, or he took money some-
where to buy bills, carrying bills and money alike in his leather bag.
Oh! it was responsible work. Andreas also learnt something about
the firms with whom his employers most often had dealings. He
asked no more questions after that, but the old man was quite
touched by the young gentleman's interest in his concerns.
The days passed. Andreas sauntered about in the town sight-
seeing. One day the captain offered to show him round. "I hear
it is your first visit to Christiania,” he said. “Go with me up Carl
Johan Street, and you shall see all our famous men. At this time
of the day old Ibsen usually leaves his café, and if we are lucky we
may even meet the Prime Minister on his way home from his office."
They were lucky. First they met a very old little man, who
wore a black silk hat and spectacles, whose frock coat was tightly
buttoned, and who walked along with quick short steps. Andreas
>


JOHAN BOJER
649
remembered all the Ibsen rôles he had acted, more especially Eng-
strand, the joiner in Ghosts, which was his very best. After a
while, however, he began to imagine the life of this man. How
did his brain work? What were his reminiscences, memories,
dreams, visions? “Could I assume his likeness?" Involuntarily
"?
he felt in a vision as if he were the great author, he made a few of
Ibsen's short, tripping steps, and felt as if he were Ibse;
“There goes the Prime Minister," the captain said.
Andreas allowed time to slide. He sometimes went to the the-
atre, but mostly stayed indoors, reading. He liked books of travel
best, and then history, as he had done in the old days. Reading
about Napoleon was the same as visualizing him, assuming his per-
sonality and becoming like him. Through the medium of one book
he traversed Mexico and through another Africa. He caught the
fever and he was wounded by poisoned arrows. Every page
brought a new vision. Where was he? At the head of a Roman
fleet on his way to burn down Carthage. “Here I am. My name
is Scipio."
“Mr Sendstad, please, supper is ready.”
The Bank Messenger became his friend. Andreas constantly,
though furtively, studied the old furrowed face with the red-
rimmed eyes, its wrinkles, its fold downwards from the right corner
of the mouth-unconsciously his brain assimilated the whole per-
sonality, in order to re-create it in his own room afterwards.
One day when the parlour was empty Andreas espied the old
man's leather bag. He ventured to open it and found some bills
of no value. He put a few in his pocket and afterwards studied
these valueless bits of paper behind a locked door in his room.
Here was the firm's signature, and the office stamp. Fully two
thousand pounds had been drawn on a London bank.
From that day he had a strange sensation when after a talk with
the messenger he entered his own room. It was as if the old man
accompanied him, trait by trait. In there Andreas began to possess
that shuffling gait, those trembling hands, to wipe his eyes con-
stantly, and to protrude his knees. What did it mean? What
was going to happen?
One day the old man was not seen at dinner. The landlady be-
wailed her father's illness, and the necessity of an operation at the
hospital next day.
a


650
THE PRISONER WHO SANG
The next day Andreas went out carrying a small valise and
ordered a room at a small hotel. When he left there his face was
that of Iversen, a brown wig, red-rimmed eyes, wrinkles, and old
age. He also carried a well-worn leather bag with bills of ex-
change inside it, and he directed his slow steps straight towards the
Credit Bank.
He was Iversen outside and in. He felt too tired to go on
with that kind of work much longer. Probably he would have to
go to the hospital and undergo an operation. At the same time
another person was sufficiently awake in him to create a sensation
of excitement. How would it come off?
He entered the bank. There was a fog outside, and the gaslight
burnt dimly. Business went on briskly behind the counters, people
went in and out, some sat waiting for their turn. The cashier called
out names and those waiting went up to him to pay in money or
to receive payments. A young man behind a brass grill caught
sight of the old messenger over there in the shadow, and called out
in a kindly voice: "Well, Iversen, what brings you here to-day?"
"Only a trifle,” Andreas replied, coughing and clearing his
throat before he opened his bag and handed in the bills. He re-
ceived his number and sat down, slowly, on a seat. He blew his
nose and wiped his eyes and also his forehead. It is hard to grow
old.
Supposing luck was bad and another messenger from Iversen's
firm came and began asking difficult questions? The next few
moments would bring him much money, riches even—or prison.
Yet Andreas was not so very excited after all, to such an extent
had he assumed the real personality of old Iversen. He remem-
bered his long life of work for the great bank. And at home he
had a daughter who had misconducted herself he was sorry to say,
and now she had a child. O dear, O dear, life is a burden.
Then his number was called out from the cashier's desk.
a
VII
It is not always easy to find sleep even late at night, and Andreas
was wide awake. The fact was that the lay preacher had followed
him and was now scolding him severely. A thief he called him,
defrauder, rascal. Poor people have deposited their savings in the


JOHAN BOJER
651
bank. They will suffer for your foul deed to-day. And old
Iversen will be discharged of course, perhaps accused, how do you
imagine he will get along afterwards ?
But Andreas was well read by that time and easily created an-
other person who could talk down the preacher. He was a young
man, a cigarette-smoking dude, somewhat of a chemist if bombs
were needed, but more especially an orator and revolutionary agi-
tator, a modern idealist.
“The money,” that young gentleman argued, "belongs to a com-
pany of capitalists who use their gold to oppress the poor. How
.
much fraud and how many forgeries have they committed in order
to gain their riches ? Countless, most probably. And do you
be-
lieve their consciences prick them? You rest at ease, Andreas.
You even repaid those two thousand kroner to the doctor. You
are an honest man after all.”
“Of course I am,” Andreas declared from his bed, nodding his
head at the lay preacher. "Henceforth you and I have no more to
do with each other. I will live as my inclination and my natural
gifts dictate. Good-night. I thank you for the time we have
spent together.”
A little later however when he opened his eyes, Mr Iversen with
his stick and his leather bag stood beside his bed
“Don't be afraid," he said, “it's only I. I should like to know
why the model for me, old Iversen, is now at the hospital. It is
all due to you. You absorbed him bit by bit. You took his fea-
tures one by one and sucked him dry for your own ends. Now he
is in the hospital.
Andreas suddenly sat up in bed. "What is this madness," he
whispered, "am I drunk with success once more? There is nobody
here.”
If any one wants to travel and meet fairly pleasant people with-
out calling undue attention to himself, he can easily do so by styling
himself a commercial traveller, Hansen by name, and nobody
will make any remarks. Mr Hansen, commercial traveller, is not
a person, he is a generality and he can travel over the same route
indefinitely without arousing any one's comments.
During spring and summer life on board the larger coasting
steamers is quite pleasant. You meet interesting people travelling
first class. Sometimes there are some officials, a handful of for-
>


652
THE PRISONER WHO SANG
eign tourists, and another day perhaps a parliamentary committee
on inspection, a Persian prince with suite, a touring theatrical com-
pany, every possible type. Young women sometimes travel alone
and are glad of a helping hand when it is proffered with due respect.
Andreas knew.
After his last performance in Christiania he was very sure of him-
self. He felt it in him to play the part of a State Secretary as easily
as that of a stoker, and to make people believe in him. Why then
should he not be everybody's equal ? A mild excitement arose in
his mind whenever they landed at some small town. Things might
have happened without his knowledge. But the steamer left the
quay to proceed on her journey, and life still ran smoothly.
He would lounge on deck in a wicker chair smoking a cigar and
watching the hills, islands, and rocks glide past. Where was he
going? He was on his way to a new deed of daring, or to a new
personality; perhaps he would become a prince to-morrow. His
whole life was a fairy tale, and he gave up all resistance to the
magic of it. He was not Caesar, nor Scipio Africanus, but he was
capable of unheard of foolhardiness, and he was a lone hand
against all the world. He wished to treat the world according to
his own caprice; he could afford to do so.
“A commercial traveller, am I?” He would walk up and down
the deck enjoying the feat of submerging himself in another mind,
and giving up his own to the person he himself had created. “I
am Mr Hansen, a commercial traveller. My mother's name was
Mary and I have a sister in Bergen. I went to school there. Do
I not remember the old Latin teacher? How long have I been on
the road? For five years on behalf of the firm of Greenwich and
Sons, Manchester. All right.”
“A fine evening, Mr Hansen," the first mate would remark
stamping past him, pipe in mouth.
“Wonderful,” Mr Hansen would answer, “but I say, Mr Mate,
could we not arrange a dance on deck. Those young ladies look
as if they would like it."
"I'll try,” the mate would answer.
One day a slender young man boarded the steamer. Andreas
felt compelled to look at him. He was exquisitely dressed, and
carried himself like a grand seigneur, with great ease and yet with
much dignity. When he spoke a tiny smile showed in the corner
a
>


JOHAN BOJER
653
of his mouth as fascinating as the man himself. His voice possessed
a certain light fulness not commonly heard.
Involuntarily Andreas began to hover near the newcomer.
There are some people whose personality have a certain musical
quality which is most alluring. Andreas suddenly grew dissatis-
fied with himself. He felt vague cravings to become like the man,
to change himself, adopt his nature, even to become the man him-
self. He sensed pleasure and joy in speaking to him and listening
to the hidden music of his ideas, always with the involuntary self-
questioning: “Could I be like him? Have I in my nature the
hidden instrument whence emanates such sweetness of harmony?”
The stranger went ashore one day leaving Andreas to dream of
him, weaving romance about him. One fine day he, himself, left
the ship, the captain and mate waving him farewell.
“I hope to meet you again,” Andreas said.
That very day he started working before the looking glass in
the room at his hotel.
If you want to create a Norwegian-born engineer from Alaska,
his correct outer appearance is not sufficient, neither is his life
story, nor his character and manners. You must even have a
something of his knowledge though merely enough for conversa-
tion in a steamer's saloon. Andreas had to call at the bookseller's,
and reading takes time. Also it took time to acquire before the
mirror the habit of this charming man's little mannerisms, his
laughter, his way of coughing and clearing his voice, his intonation
and table manners. He had a special way of sitting down and of
getting up, and when insisting on some idea he moved his right
hand in a rhythmic gesture. But first and foremost he had a
masterpiece of a smile. All this meant work for Andreas, who
would hum a tune, and keep on trying. Sometimes he wore him-
self out, and sank down in a chair exhausted, and there were
moments when he nearly gave up the task before him, also there
were moments when he worked like an artist inspired. Thus the
days passed.
The hotel maid dusting the stairs saw a stranger descending,
whom she had not seen go up.
"Pardon me," he said, “my friend Mr Hansen went on board
the north-going steamer just now. He asked me to pay his bill
and have his luggage sent down to the quay."
a


654
THE PRISONER WHO SANG
“Certainly, sir,” the maid answered blushing before the look in
his eyes and at his generous tip.
Andreas was travelling once more.
He dived into this new
person and felt like looking at fresh scenery never viewed before.
“Ah! Is this the outlook here!" He began exploring and liked
it. “Fancy me reaching thus far, and think of all my experiences.”
His reading of Alaska changed into personal memories. He had
been the manager of a gold mine and could remember how the
boys used their revolvers, and also the nights of bright starlight
and the singing of Indian girls.
Life like this was fascinating and pleasant. He met friends
from former trips who did not recognize him. He was tickled
when the county magistrate, who had once completely ignored
Mr Hansen, invited Mr Starr, the engineer, to a seat at his side.
From this new point of view he could laugh derisively to himself
as he watched many unsuspecting persons. There was for instance
the country doctor who went about inspecting poor people's clean-
liness and sanitary arrangements, himself reeking of whiskey and
tobacco, while blissfully ignoring his own dirty nails. The per-
sonage Andreas had created was superior to this. At the steamer's
table he listened to every possible opinion concerning life and
death. One face would twist with faith, another with doubt,
one man's Adam's apple would jump up and down with political
zeal, everyone trying to force his opinions on his neighbours. The
person created by Andreas was more refined in his reserve. In the
smoking room over whiskey and soda, gossip ran riot, worse than
at a country Dorcas meeting, and prominent men were openly
slandered, only here, among the upper class, they called it ideals
and convictions. The person created by Andreas was above such
things. Days slipped by. One morning, it may be while brush-
ing his teeth, Andreas conceived the idea of a fresh person not built
after a model this time but according to a desire he felt when
young, a childish dream of being such and such a man. Now it
might be done. For a week or so he would build up his man, ,
adding new features until one fine day he would launch him out
upon the world. Andreas went ashore. The captain and his
mate waved their caps.
“See you again some day, sir," they would say.
“Hope so," Andreas would answer.


JOHAN BOJER
655
a
He was no longer afraid of landing in a fresh town.
The police
were probably diligently seeking some person who existed no
longer. He travelled from one life to another, it was like death
and resurrection in a new shape. He often sat on the steamer's
deck dreaming in his own way. A commercial traveller may be
taken ill and die, an engineer may be shot by his workmen, but he,
himself, was above them both and above all. He only changed
his life incessantly as if he could not be trapped by time nor by
death, he was like a small rivulet in a world of men, running for-
ever towards eternity. Then he would wake up with a mind to
have a good hidden laugh—and that he could always afford.
At Bod there arrived one fine day a foreigner, an Englishman,
very stiff and very erect. His luggage consisted of twelve cases,
all bearing the legend "Glass—with great care.” As they were
being unshipped the crew were excited with sheer carefulness.
“Look out there,” called the mate, and even the captain on the
bridge let fall a warning. "Steady boys, easy does it.” The
sailors screwed up their mouths with the effort and handled the
cases as gingerly as if they were treading on pins and needles.
“You be careful, Jens,” one of them said, stopping, and a moment
later another exclaimed, “Are you mad, Kristian?
know it's glass you're handling ?” The entire dozen cases were
"
unloaded with the utmost care, and yet not one of them contained
a thing beyond stones and old newspapers.
"What does it mat-
ter ?” the stranger thought to himself; the fact only enhanced the
highly strung nervousness of their faces. The papers brought news
of a great bank fraud that had been committed in Christiania some
The amount represented a fortune and headlines were
many and conspicuous. The whole country was agape. Re-
markably enough the Bank Director himself remembered having
been suspicious about the bills, but old Mr Iversen was so well
known to be a reliable man that he had waived his hesitation. On
the other hand the registers of the Government Hospital showed
that old Mr Iversen, Bank Messenger, was operated upon just that
day, so that he could not possibly have been at the bank. Lawyers
and police tore their hair, the whole country seemed to stare in
wonderment.
A new Methodist parson arrived at a north country townlet.
Prominent members of the congregation waited for him on the
Don't you
time ago.


656
THE PRISONER WHO SANG
quay, and when he appeared on the gangway they at once recog-
nized the man whose photograph had been published in their own
Methodist monthly.
He was tall and handsome and wore his moustache after the
fashion of the Kaiser. He carried a suit case in one hand and a
rain-coat over his arm. “Good morning, dear brethren,” he said.
"We did not expect you till Saturday,” said one of the elders.
"You mentioned Saturday in your letter, I think.”
“The journey was shorter than I thought,” was the reply.
The new pastor performed a wedding ceremony, and christened
some babies, and on Saturday his congregation arranged a welcome
festive meeting in their new meeting house.
Late in the evening there was a disturbance at the door, a
stranger insisted on entering. All turned to look and see.
A rather small man with a red moustache à la Kaiser walked up
the floor, looking very bewildered, regarding the assembly and the
chandeliers alternately.
“There he is,” said the man who accompanied him, pointing out
the new pastor who was just drinking a cup of cocoa, surrounded by
a circle of women.
The stranger lifted his eye-glasses and stared. He was breath-
ing hard, and the sight of his own face on another man evidently
made him excited.
"Excuse me,” he said at last, going nearer, “I—I am the new
parson.”
The other visitor sipped his cocoa before answering in a very
friendly manner, "So am I.”
The two regarded each other. The congregation began to crowd
round them. The stranger continued, "I think there must be a mis-
take somewhere. My name is Johnson, Harry Johnson.”
“Yes,” was the answer, "so is mine.”
“Is your name also is your name Johnson, Harry
Kristian Johnson ?"
"Certainly,” said the pastor kindly, placing his cup on a table.
The stranger looked from one to the other. He wiped his brow,
regarded his hands, giving an impression as if he wanted to pinch
his own arms to make sure that he was awake.
“I have just left the Stavanger congregation,” he said faintly,
hoping for help from that fact.
A pause.


JOHAN BOJER
657
a
“So have I,” came the astounding reply.
"What?” The little man opened his eyes wide. "Have you
come—from Stavanger ?''
“Certainly,” the pseudo-pastor declared, wiping his mouth with
his handkerchief. “I have worked in Stavanger for four years.'
“For four years? You? In Stavanger ? Impossible!"
The stranger looked as if he asked pardon from the assembly for
not yet having gone mad.
“And now our bishop has sent me here to work for the congrega-
tion in this place,” continued the pastor wiping his fingers before
placing the handkerchief in his pocket.
"Our bishop-has-sent you? You—you say?” The little
man fumbled for support.
Everybody was dumbfounded until Mr Olsen, the young uphol:
sterer, took courage and spoke. “This seems rather remarkable,"
”
he said. “I don't want to say that either gentleman is a fraud.
But . you who arrived to-night-you are bald—and the photo-
graph in the paper was not of a bald man.”
“Bald!" The little man felt his scalp. “Yes, the photograph
was taken some years ago. Gracious me! Any one of us may hap-
pen to grow bald."
”
Several men in the assembly made an involuntary movement to
feel the tops of their heads, and were able to confirm the statement.
More staring went on, until the tall parson spoke.
“This matter must be cleared up. You come here accusing me
of being someone else and pretending to be me. I cannot allow
this to go on.
Will you meet me with your witnesses at the police
station to-morrow at twelve ?"
"Most certainly I will. We have our papers both of us I guess,
that will clear up the matter. I will certainly meet you to-morrow
at twelve.” The little man bowed, apparently quite satisfied with
the proposed arrangement. He did not feel quite sure of his own
identity, whether he was really Peter or Paul!
When the tall parson left all eyes followed him, and then stared
at the other who folded his hands.
“Oh, my brothers and sisters," the little fellow began in a trem-
bling voice, “let us pray."
The tall parson did not present himself on the following day, and
the police made inquiries at his hotel. No, Mr Johnson, the Meth-


658
THE PRISONER WHO SANG
odist parson, did not sleep there last night. He was called to a
death-bed far away in a Lapp camp, and had left in a reindeer
sledge.
“Really,” ejaculated the police inspector dryly. “I guess he
needed a couple of policemen to help him.”
The police were busy tracking him and no one paid any attention
to the fact that an organ grinder had arrived in the village that
very day. He was a poor consumptive and in rags. His organ
stayed and moaned outside the police master's own house until the
worthy official rushed out and giving him some coppers asked him
to go to—Jericho.
“Thank you, sir,” said the beggar, pocketing the money with a
smile; then he shouldered his organ and tottered off.
Andreas liked to arrange that sort of little event in order to keep
the police from becoming stale. He needed the excitement—he
wanted the whole nation to act parts in a private performance for
his sole enjoyment.
What a life it was. People began to be mere masks behind
which there was only a species of clockwork which he manipulated.
A famous German gynecologist suddenly appeared at a watering-
place. He spoke a little broken Norwegian, was very sociable, and
several ladies from Christiania took advantage of the opportunity
to consult him. He never refused nor did he ask for any fee. Af-
ter a thorough examination of the patient he would wash his hands
with great care and would look out of the window for a while be-
a
fore giving his advice. It was not until a month later that it leak-
ed out that he was an impostor, but by that time he was far away.
The police suffered. Once more all the papers printed the well-
known legend, “it is supposed that the criminal has succeeded in
escaping abroad.”
Closing his eyes at nights Andreas saw before him a long proces-
sion of persons, created by himself, and every one of them fleeing
before the police. Sometimes he grew anxious on their behalf, he
was anxious for their safety.
At last a change took place.


JOHAN BOJER
659
VIII
“Really, Sophy dear, you ought to be more careful with a per-
fectly unknown person.” “Mother dear, do you call Mr Will-
mann a perfectly unknown person?” The young girl lifted her
face from her embroidery the better to look at a grey-haired lady
crocheting by the window.
“Yes I do. What do we know about him?"
“We know what the papers say.
As soon as he arrived two local
papers had him interviewed, and after his lecture you certainly
were as enthusiastic as any one else.”
“M—m-yes, only being able to speak in an interesting way
about life at a Brazilian farm does not imply that—” The doctor's
wife stopped short, touching her hair with her crocket hook.
“And his idea of a direct line of steamers—is that nothing?
And the service of commercial men wanted out there, and the great
market waiting for Norwegian trade? You know he works night
and day, and I am sure he will achieve great things.
Her mother was crocheting now. “Yes, I admit that, it was I
who opened our house to him. He has very charming manners
and once a stranger of that sort is accepted he grows to be very pop-
ular indeed—only—"
"Only ?”
“Well, dear, you have every reason to be very
careful
you
know.”
Which was true. The young girl, though still in her early
twenties, had been engaged to be married twice, both engagements
having come to an end with a considerable amount of gossip, and
there was a time when her parents were afraid for the poor girl's
reason.
Since the arrival of the stranger, however, her steps were more
elastic, her faced bloomed fresher, and in her half-dulled eyes youth
once more kindled gleams of kindly fun.
She rose and folded up her needlework, and humming to herself
she went to the window.
"Surely you are not going to meet him now again ?"
Without answering, the young girl swept a wave of dark hair
away from her forehead, then she laid her arms round her mother's
neck, pressed her cheek against hers, closing her eyes for a few sec-
onds. Then she ran out.


660
THE PRISONER WHO SANG
She appeared on the front steps in a bright hat and with a sun-
shade, but perceiving a number of doves on the eaves she returned
into the house only to come out with hands full of peas for the
pretty birds. It seemed as if she could not take her own pleasure
before seeing that others were happy.
It was summer, the gardens in front of the low wooden houses
were full of flowers, a cool breeze from the sea came up the wide
streets. She hurried off thinking to herself, “perhaps someone be-
hind some curtain is wondering where I am going. I had better
not look to the right or to the left.”
Just outside the town there was a broad stretch of green park up
towards View Hill; there he awaited her. He was a tall, well-
built young man, dark haired, and ruddy of complexion, clean
shaven. His light summer clothes were well fitting, he wore a thin
gold chain round his left wrist, his tan shoes were American made.
"At last you have come!”
“Have you been waiting ?”
They walked up the wide gravelled paths under the vaults of
spruce branches.
“Adolph, dear, do you know you have told me next to nothing
of your childhood ?”
“Really? It is much more fun to talk of
yours, dear.”
"No, be good to-day, I want to know. Where was your home?
What was your life like when a boy? Can't you see, dear, that I
want to know everything about you?”
“I have had no childhood, my dear girlie, I am poor Boots of
the fairy tales with no relatives and little knowledge of either
father or mother. Do you hate me for that ?'
She caught his hand and pressed it hard. He had such beautiful
hands in spite of having worked so hard in his difficult life.
Why should it be necessary to learn everything about such a fairy
tale Prince Charming? He came here from a far country, weather-
beaten and strong, full of adventurous stories about his life out
there, with a thousand schemes for the future. Is it not meet that
he should be a self-made man beginning life in a country cottage ?
She caught his hand once more. Would to God she could be a real
help-mate!
Soon their talk was sweet nonsense again. They looked at each
other smiling because they were just those two walking alone.


JOHAN BOJER
661
a
a
Their talk was like a duet sung in harmony with little heed to the
actual words. They discussed at one and the same time their wed-
ding in the autumn, the journey to Brazil, all the trousseau neces-
sary for her, love between elderly married people, and life after
death, stopping short once in a while to look into each other's eyes.
They reached the top of View Hill and saw the summer evening
dying in a glory more golden than anywhere else. On the far hori-
zon heaven and sea met in a shimmering golden mist, and above the
nearer islets a cloud of white gulls drifted through the air, their
shrill cries at that distance taking the tone of joyous sounds from
an aerial feast.
“Won't you sit down a bit, girlie ?”
“No, I must hurry home,” she answered sitting down in spite of
her words. A moment after her head lay on his shoulder.
Late that night the young man walked alone along the water's
edge. Finally he sat down, folded his hands round one knee, re-
garding the spruce clad hillside across the broad bay. .
He thought of his life's fairy-tale. Once upon a time there was
a boy in rags who stood cap in hand when a young gentlewoman
drove past him through the forest. Now one of them had come
to him, embracing him.
The boy and the forest? Were they dreams only? What was
truth and what imagination?
Surely Adolph Willmann was a real person; he needed but to
close his eyes, and he remembered Brazil, his farm, his touches
of fever and of sunstroke-poisonous reptiles and wild beasts.
The only difficulty was that even Adolph Willmann needed cer-
tain credentials in order to be decorously married and he could not
possibly remember where they were.
What then? He knew somebody who could easily produce
genuine credentials. But Mr Willmann was a white man; not
for worlds would he lead a young girl into a doubtful situation,
least of all this young girl who had already suffered such hard
experiences.
At last life had offered him a wonderful romance.
girl who had twice been struck down by hard fate rose again at
his bidding, saying, with arms stretched towards him, “I have
still a grain of trust and faith in the world and in mankind, I offer
it to you.” He had seen how her cheeks filled out with health
This young


662
THE PRISONER WHO SANG
>
and joy. Oh, it was wonderful, wonderful, and yet in other ways
passing strange. Never before had he succeeded in creating a
figure who could wake any one from the dead.
Where would it all end? Andreas felt giddy sometimes, stop-
ping bewildered to try and take his bearings. Where am I now?
Is this the land where Don Juan dwells?
It was summer, with sailing excursions in twilight nights.
Their white boat would run smoothly before the evening breeze
far out from the shore, the sun sinking in the west, painting in
golden outlines the black silhouette of the lofty rig of a sailing
vessel far away on the horizon. “Is this just you and I, Sophie ?”
he would think, caressing her with his eyes. “Would it were all
true—would we were never to row to land again.”
Little quarrels would occur, the sort that lead to tears and end
in smiles and kisses. “You do not always speak the truth, Adolph,
and heaven help me if I cannot trust you.”
"What is it I have been telling stories about, now then ?” he
would ask, and she would mention some of his statements which
did not tally with what he had told her previously. It was really
hard on her, she had nothing but his word to rely on. It took a
lot of explanation and many caresses to reassure her.
But afterwards—his credentials? It is a wonderful experience
to be under the influence of a young girl. Her point of view
became involuntarily his. "What do you think of the relations
between labour and capital ?" she asked one day. He was touched
that her little head should be bothered with such problems and he
answered as he thought she would like him to. Why could he
not think as she did, just as well? And every opinion thus ac-
quired became like a caress which she breathed into his soul, and
therefore they also grew imperative and precious. She trans-
formed him incessantly into something finer than he was, and with
her he breathed an air so free of lies and fraud that one moment
he felt as innocent as herself, and the next he felt that he ought
to be swallowed up by the earth beneath his feet.
His papers?
When the red disc of the sun rose above far distant islands he
was still brooding in the same place. A solitary diver came flying
so low that spray flew up under his wings. A new morning had
dawned, one day would follow another, and before long the matter
would have to be straightened out.


JOHAN BOJER
663
Should he confess? That would strike her down once more.
And who was to take Mr Willmann's place? And who was he
really after all? He might travel all over the world seeking
Andreas Berget without finding him again. He had left him so
infinitely far away, and for years he had been nothing but a part,
a fiction, a piece of art—not a man for any girl to marry.
Was there no power in heaven or on earth who could help him
now, who could transform Mr Willmann into a real living man,
and make everything come true?
Was there no help in prayer, faith, work, sacrifice, payments,
or entreaties? Was there no way of salvation, not one?
Should he break off the engagement? and kill her. Should he
disappear? Then she would keep his memory green, and it would
be a fraud like the twelve boxes marked Glass.
Poor little Sophie.
IX
A little before Christmas a new prisoner arrived at the solitary
confinement prison in Christiania. He behaved differently from
most others, being neither defiant nor broken-hearted. His eyes
had a straight-forward look, he asked for nothing nor about
anything, and answered in monosyllables only. He put on his
prison clothes as carefully as if dressing for a dinner-party. His
cell was Number 14, and his task was basket-making. No rela-
tives inquired about him. He never asked leave to write a letter.
Christmas Eve in prison is generally a day of unrest. Then you
may hear weeping and harsh laughter, loud prayers or simply the
restless pacing of the cell-floor up and down, up and down.
Number 14 was as quiet that day as on every other day. It did
not concern him, and everything was as it should be.
A young man had obtained permission from the Authorities to
visit the prisons and talk to the prisoners. One evening he entered
cell Number 14. The warder remained outside. The stranger
was of slender build, pale, and wore eye-glasses, but in his eyes a
fire was burning. He shook hands with the prisoner and treated
him as an equal, without on the whole being aggressively friendly.
He merely asked as a favour to hear the life story of the prisoner.
Number 14 regarded him. Then he smiled closing his eyes.
“My history? Really? You wish to write it down for your


664
THE PRISONER WHO SANG
1
1
a
never.
•
.
own use ? Really?” After a while he opened his eyes and began
telling his tale.
It grew to be a most profoundly moving story of a poor boy
who as a child was beaten, kicked, and starved, with hardly any
clothes. His mother was a drunkard, his stepfather a thief, a sad
household. Later on he passed from hand to hand and was ill-
treated wherever he came, being forced to work day and night
even when he was ill. The natural outcome of such a life was
unavoidable, and he was now in prison.
The young man wrote rapidly, wetting his pencil between his
lips and writing again, with a sigh now and then. The tale told
at last, he gathered his papers and regarded the unhappy man.
“To what do you owe all your unhappiness do
you
think?"
The prisoner pondered very seriously. "To sin,” he said at
last, "and to Satan.”
“Sin,” the young man laughed derisively, “Satan. Well I
No, I will tell you who bears the dreadful respon-
sibility. Have you never thought of it?”
The other shook his head.
“It is society.”
The prisoner opened his eyes and a light dawned in them. "You
don't say so," he said, “I never thought of that. Of course it is
society.”
And when the young man had talked himself tired Number 14
followed him two steps to the door. The warder turned the key
in the lock. The basket-maker resumed his task, humming a hymn
tune with a smile.
Prison life is hard. No prisoner ever sees another. Sometimes
the cell is not heated and one prisoner may cough until he gets a
rupture, another may die quietly of pneumonia in the night. No
news penetrates those grey walls. The world carries on. All
sorts of things happen out there, but within the walls events con-
sist of footsteps in the passages. Every step is known separately,
they become the language which tells a little of the world outside.
You listen! That is the watchman, that is the inspector. Wait
a moment, there is no mistake about it, but there is the Director
himself. Well, really—it pleases the reverend chaplain to let his
saintly soles crunch upon the floor. Presumably he is going to
call on the man next door who committed arson.


JOHAN BOJER
665
a
One day the prison chaplain entered Number 14. He was a tall
broad-shouldered man, with a red face reminding one of Julius
Caesar, and wearing a black skull cap, a masterful man who had
been at the prison for twenty years, so that nothing human
astounded him.
"Well, good-morning, my friend,” he said sitting down on a
camp stool which the warder had brought into the cell. "At last
you have sent for me, I hope we shall both derive benefit from the
fact.”
The small grilled window did not let in much light. Perhaps
it was winter outside or an April snow-fall. The prisoner leaned
against the naked wall with a pale smile towards the chaplain.
“I needed time to think,” he said. “There are many tangles
to clear up.”
“Naturally, and you have been thinking for six months now.
Would it be indiscreet to ask what you have been thinking 'of ?”
The chaplain stroked his chin and wriggled into a more comfort-
able position, ready for a long entertainment.
The prisoner walked a few steps backwards and forwards in the
narrow room, his hands behind his back.
“I remember,” he began, “when I attended the Engineering
College at Hanover
“What? Have you attended an Engineering College at Han-
over?” The chaplain stared.
“I beg your pardon.” The prisoner closed his eyes stroking his
forehead. . . . "I meant to say when I was travelling agent for
the firm of Greenwich in Newcastle."
The chaplain interrupted him once more. "Were you ever an
agent for any Newcastle firm?”
The other man waived the question aside with a movement of
his hand. “Oh, no, I thought of the time when I owned a coffee
plantation in Brazil.
"What is the meaning of this?” the chaplain exclaimed rising.
“Do you think we do not know your life? Your name is Andreas
Berget. You hail from the north country, you have been in prison
several times; once you were an actor, but otherwise you have had
no real occupation though sailing under a variety of false flags.
If you want to speak with me you will leave out any pretences.
Don't you think it is about time for you to reform a bit ?''
"
O
.
.


666
THE PRISONER WHO SANG
“Reform—whom?” The prisoner turned towards the chaplain.
“Whom, do you say?"
“Yes, I do ask. For a man is a complexity of individuals."
“Hm.”
“And they are not all equally bad. You just think now, there
is a lay preacher, an agriculturist, a commercial traveller, an
engineer, a bank messenger, a gynecologist, and a number of
others, and they are all myself.”
“Certainly all these persons are yourself.”
“Which one of them ought I to reform?"
“Look here, my friend, if you think I have come here to be made
a fool of by you—”
“Are you, then, one person?”
“ "If you will not talk seriously I will leave you.” The chaplain
thrust his hands into his coat sleeves on account of the cold.
“Well, I had something quite private to speak to you of, or
rather a favour to ask, but if you will not even try to understand
me I am very sorry I have bothered you to come at all.”
The prisoner bowed as if to say good-bye.
The chaplain turned to the door, hesitating. This man who
seemed perfectly absent-minded during his sermons, and who had
up to now been so very inaccessible, had asked for him at last.
Was his plan to pretend insanity?
“What is it you have to tell me?" he finally asked, turning back.
The other man smiled. His fair hair was now grey and his
clean-shaven face pallid. But he kept on smiling as if at himself
and all the world. His teeth were perfectly white.
"Have you never felt, that when you want to make up your
mind, you are at a general meeting? One person within you
clamours against another, and every one is of a separate opinion.
With me the lay preacher tears his hair when the gynecologist
smokes a cigarette, well content with the scheme of things. What
is right and in whom shall I believe?
“Well another day you express an opinion on something or other
and you suddenly become aware of the fact that you are borrowing
some prominent man's power of judgement? You not only ask
‘what would he have done?' but you feel his form, his outer person,
he possesses you, or you him—don't you? It happens to me sev-
eral times a day, and was it he or you who spoke out ?''


JOHAN BOJER
667
The chaplain sat down again, breathing hard through his nose.
“And what then? We are, all of us, more or less normal ?".
“Normal, ha-ha,” the other man gave a short laugh, so that his
blue breath shot out into the cold air. The chaplain pulled his
overcoat more tightly around himself.
“Normal. A man came here the other day, with eyeglasses and
a pencil, he was not only a lunatic, he was a poster on two legs.
But you, you are a man, a human being, your soul is not made of
paper, you do not declare that a man is mad because he makes
you
think you—”
“What do you want me to do?” the chaplain interrupted making
as if to rise once more.
"Well-yes, it is only that we—we human beings, we are never
one, we exchange both soul and body with each other: often it is
impossible to say which is which."
The prisoner: walked across the floor for a couple of turns.
Then he proceeded.
"Have you never had a sorrow or a hope that you have given
human form? Have you never travelled by train and thought,
‘the bishop is going by this train. It is I. Do you never stand
'
by an open grave and feel with a shudder the dead man down there,
'It is I.' When reading history do you never mount to Napoleon's
charger or Martin Luther's pulpit? Who was St Paul? Have
you never said 'I was St Paul ? »
The chaplain stared before him smiling stiffily. "And what
then? What do you aim at with all this talk?”
“At explaining myself. My crimes consist in imitating other
people. I could not rest content with being shut inside one fate,
I hungered for fresh ones. Why is it such a joy and a pleasure to
don a new suit of clothes? Is it not because we get rid of an old
person and put on a fresh one? Why do we alter our principles,
forsake our friends and make alliance with one time foes, why do
men change wives, work for promotion and new positions? Is it
not in order to give scope to a fresh person within oneself? That
is what I have done. There were voices within me clamouring
for fresh human shapes, and fresh shapes again, it meant to me
study, evolution, a longing for life eternal, life itself.”
“But is it not remarkable that all your impersonations were
frauds ?"
a


668
THE PRISONER WHO SANG
“A novel or a play, sculptured marble, are also frauds, yet they
are the highest truths if good enough.”
“But you were not sculptured marble.”
The prisoner laughed, then answered staring towards the win-
dow.
"The greatest work of art is the human being. My various im-
personations were worked out under inspiration. A poet dreams
of what he can never achieve in reality, therefore he makes the
dream come true in a poem. So did I. The only difference is that
I did not confine my dream to people within a book or a piece of
stone, but I gave them my own legs, I made them go about by
steamer or train”
“And then you made them into criminals,” the chaplain inter-
rupted, "was that inspiration, too ?”
“An artist needs the stimulant of the world's recognition and of
its faith in his art. He claims some assurance that it is alive.
When I presented a false cheque at a bank, you may say it was done
to obtain money, but I say it was not. It was done to place my
work before the severest of all critics, asking, 'Is this alive? Do
you believe in it? Does my art give a complete illusion? Is it
true to life?"
The chaplain rose. “And the question of good and evil ?"
The other passed his hand across his forehead. After a while
he sighed looking at the chaplain. “That depends, naturally, on
the person who reigns supreme at the time. A lay preacher judges
A
differently from an Alaska engineer.”
The chaplain pressed his lips together and turned to leave once
more. Suddenly he stopped, looking down at his feet. Then he
turned to the prisoner.
“It is cold here. Are you badly treated ?"
The other man shrugged his shoulders, “No, I am quite comforta-
ble," and he hid his chilblained hand in his pockets.
"Have you no relatives? Are your parents alive? Have you
no one-no-to love ?!!
The prisoner bowed his head, and a slight shiver ran through his
body.
“Oh, yes—perhaps one.”
“Really—one?”
For a moment the young man regarded the chaplain as if reluc-


JOHAN BOJER
669
tant to shrive to that masterful mind, although he had no longer the
courage to be silent.
"When you leave here,” the chaplain continued, “what then?”
"God knows. There are visions and dreams in my soul, not yet
realized but-after this I do not think I shall be able to do any
more. Sir,” he asked, “will you do me a favour?”
“That depends."
"Try and discover something for me."
"Hm.”
"Concerning a—young woman. I often wonder whether she is
still alive."
The prisoner bowed his head and placed one hand across his fore-
head.
“It is not impossible that she may be living still. She was—she
was engaged to be married to a planter from Brazil, and he was
drowned, sailing on the fjord a week before the wedding-his boat
was found drifting, empty. That planter was myself.'
The chaplain looked calmly at him. “Indeed,” was his sole com-
ment.
“Some time afterwards there came to her town an old man, white-
haired and white-bearded. He played in the streets, begging.
That old man was me.”
The chaplain lifted his eyebrows. The prisoner smiled and talk-
ed on, leaning backwards against the wall.
“I ventured into her mother's kitchen and saw that there was a
trained nurse in the house. Later on I passed the house in the night
and noticed that one window was lit. What then? The fact kept
me standing there, and next night I came again. What wrong
did
I do watching there? My time was my own, and although it was
winter and snow fell once in a while and the night wind was chilly,
that winter passed more quickly than any other.
.
“Spring came once more and one Sunday morning I happened to
pass
her front door. She came out with her mother, prayerbook in
hand. She had changed a great deal and she was dressed in mourn-
ing, but I recognized her face under her black veil.
"Well, an old beggar surely may be permitted to follow gentle-
folk in the street, if he keeps at a respectful distance, and God
knows I did that. I followed the two women to church. They sat
rather apart from the others, and the mother joined in the singing


1
+
1
670
THE PRISONER WHO SANG
but the young girl bent forwards hiding her face in her hands. I
can see every detail even now.”
“And she did not recognize you?” the chaplain asked.
“What? Me?” The prisoner gave him a side glance. "No,
but afterwards I ventured into the kitchen once more to beg a meal
again. And I was lucky, for she came out in the kitchen. She
looked at me and asked a few questions, and I?-I was an old bent
man in rags, my white head shaking and my sore hands trembling.
She gave me both money and food. It was strange to take such
gifts from her hands.”
Again the prisoner closed his eyes, hands in pockets.
“And then ?” the chaplain asked.
“Well, afterwards I travelled about trying to create fresh persons
but I did not succeed as I had done before. Can you understand
why? I have pondered over the matter very much, and I believe
it was because I had become too fixed in the shape she loved, and it
was impossible to give it up completely as I should have to do to
create another. And then? Then I began doing clumsy things
and the police caught sight of me. Every man has his limitations.
And now I am here."
The chaplain stroked his chin. “Who is she?”
The prisoner opened his eyes and took a few steps backwards and
forwards burying his hands deeper in his pockets, eyes downcast.
It was evident that he shrank from giving her name.
“If I am to learn anything about her I must know her name,
surely you see that ?”
“Look,” said the prisoner at last pointing to the wall. "I have
done a little decorative work-in my own way.” He laughed self-
consciously. The chaplain went nearer and read the name and ad-
dress scratched on the wall.
"I will think about it,” he promised and turned to leave; at the
door he looked at the prisoner once more.
“And yourself ?"
“Excuse me for bothering you. Myself? I know nothing."
“But there are only a few months left before your time is up-
what then?"
The younger man shook his head. “What do I know? I do not
even know who I am, myself. I am but a memory of one person or
the other, who were once I. Who am I when I leave here? I do
not know. If I live to see that day I shall feel as if I had no face.


JOHAN BOJER
671
.
if
“The first thing for me to do will be to find a new human form
for myself, but why should I? There is——there is only one glim-
mer of a hope, but it is impossible.”
"A hope ?"
“Yes—one can't help hoping-even stupidly-ha-ha.”
“You think of that young girl still?”
“If she were still alive, and if she were strong enough-perhaps—
who knows? Ahem. Perhaps I would go to her and ask her help
to create something new from the beginning.
The next
moment however the prisoner closed his fists half turning away as
annoyed with himself for having said the last words.
“M-m, yes,” the chaplain said thoughtfully, "I will think it
over.”
He opened the door, the warder fetched his stool, and their steps
died away down the long passage.
The prisoner remained leaning against the wall, looking straight
before him. Then he began pacing the cell with short angry steps.
.
"Why did I lay bare my inmost soul to that man,” he muttered;
“idiot that I was.”
Days came and went. At rare intervals he guessed that the sun
was shining on the wall across the prison yard. His baskets were
not finished as quickly as before. He began hungering for a change,
fresh work, something else to occupy his fingers. But why ask for
it? The hours would pass anyhow. Steps were the real events,
steps coming or going in the passage.
There was the watchman, then the inspector, and one day even
the director's footsteps were heard. The prisoner closed his eyes
and stopped working. When would the chaplain come again?
One evening he was startled, and listened. But the steps passed.
Time went on, even there, and he finished another basket. By
that time there would be full spring outside, every day the sun
reached farther down his wall. Something began to grow in his
soul, a craving for a fresh personality, a longing to create—he would
like to create a human being who was happy.
“Sunshine," he reflected looking at the yellow band of light on
his grey wall, “sunny countries, and sunny people, the Mediter-
ranean
What he once read of the Roman fleet sailing for Carthage took
shape before his inner vision. “How did Scipio look? Had he a
heart's desire, unfulfilled? Could I assume his shape ?”


672
THE PRISONER WHO SANG
His cell became the Mediterranean. It is quite possible for
one's fingers to make a basket while one's thoughts besiege a city.
He felt his left shoulder becoming chafed after a while with the
armour he would not take off until Carthage was nothing but
smouldering ashes.
Other reminiscences of his readings filled his mind, and he tried
to give a human shape to them all.
Bending over his basket work he hummed hymn tunes, while
fresh visions and fresh dreams crowded through his brain. "In ten
thousand
years there will come one who will rule the whole planet.
What will he be like? Could I impersonate him?
“But in a hundred thousand years there will come one who will
unite three inhabited orbs into a defensive union in the universe, a
king to rule over stars. How will he look? Could I impersonate
him?"
In the neighbouring cells wondering men listened to a happy pris-
oner who paced up and down his floor-singing-singing,
The End
MEXICAN DESERT
BY MINA LOY
The belching ghost-wail of the locomotive
trailing her rattling wooden tail
into the jazz-band sunset.
The mountains in a row
set pinnacles of ferocious isolation
under the alien hot heaven
Vegetable cripples of drought
thrust up the parching appeal
cracking open the earth
stump-fingered cacti
and hunch-back palm trees
belabour the cinders of twilight.



.
uillm
1
:
A DRAWING. BY CARL SPRINCHORN.





.:42

&
S
A DRAWING. BY CARL SPRINCHORN.





THE AWAKENING OF THE ACADEMY
BY THOMAS JEWELL CRAVEN
I
N 1913, in what was known as the Armoury Exhibition, at
New York, the art of the Post-Impressionists was first intro-
duced to the American public. Most of us remember the ignoble
attitude of the press towards those rebellious painters: the critical
obscurantists railed with indignation; fanatic was too mild a term
-the exhibitors were maniacs, charlatans, degenerate Frenchmen.
Eight years have passed; and now the Pennsylvania Academy of
the Fine Arts has opened its finest galleries to the pictures of the
modern Americans. It seems paradoxical that the few men who
have anything beautiful to offer the world should have to fight for
existence, but such is one of the ruinous effects of industrialism, and
it is indeed remarkable that in so brief a time our younger artists
should have been victorious over Philistine resentment, and should
have found a response in one of the most conservative institutions
in the United States. The Philadelphia Academy is to be com-
mended for its new vision: it abandoned its traditional judgement
that art should be a representation of material phenomena, and in-
vited to its halls a group of painters who have at least one interest
in common, the knowledge that art is based on design and not on
natural imitation. The Committee of Selection is also to be ap-
plauded, both for its disinterested method of hanging the can-
vasses, and for its inclusive choice of painters. Eighty-eight ex-
hibitors and two hundred eighty pictures were listed in the cata-
logue; for once modern art was adequately presented, and the spec-
tator was spared the abortive efforts of those innumerable and
vain-glorious persons who bought space in the Independent Show
at the Waldorf-Astoria.
The exhibition was on view for a month. It did not provoke
wild excitement. The day of condemnation is over; the shock-
ing modern infant who, it seems only yesterday, screamed its mes-
sage in discordant colours and thrashed its arms in Futuristic
gestures, is strangely old and sober; the public has accepted the
new painting, has reconciled it with contemporary life, and seeing


674 THE AWAKENING OF THE ACADEMY
that it is not so new after all, but closely affiliated with the art of
the
past, has come to like it. Some, of course, will not admit this;
they will join voices with the elderly clergymen of the museums
and the newspapers, and deprecate every movement that has di-
rected its energies against naturalism. Happily, their voices will
not be heard, and the art of to-day will have what it needs most-
big spaces, ample room to stand alone and to state its fresh and
valid appeal to visitors without the disconcerting nonsense of in-
trusive attendants. Not the least of the public benefits of this
exhibition is the opportunity for making new valuations. The bou-
doir painter is painfully exposed, and those canvasses which ask
for recognition because of superficial cleverness and textural deli-
cacy, shrink back into fitting insignificance. The mincing pretti-
ness which has unfortunately crept, now and then, into modern
painting, is simply annihilated by the big spaces: robbed of its
pretentious aestheticism inherited from Victorian England and
hung in the company of composed and undiluted form, it loses
even its appearance of merit.
Size, to be sure, is not the criterion of worth. The latter quality
is to be discovered in large form, direct and ordered masses, clean
and definite contrasts, and it is with these elements that some of
the more advertised of the moderns fail, while others less known
stand out conspicuously. There were on the walls huge canvas-
ses which accomplished nothing; on the other hand, there were pic-
tures which arrived almost at classic grandeur, and a number of
small things whose carrying power and general impressiveness
were extraordinary. And that strained triviality, which used to be
so irritating in the new movement in America, was noticeably
absent—in its place we saw dignity, the dignity which comes of
growth, poise, and readjustment. Here and there among these
canvasses we beheld the glimmering of the truth of great art; and
there was abundant evidence on all sides of lucid conviction and
sound knowledge. The future of American art will certainly re-
pose in a number of men represented at Philadelphia, not in the
illustrators, imitators, and literalists of fashionable exploitation.
In the first place, technical experimentation, which has hitherto
preoccupied the groping talents of the younger painters, and which
has been so puzzling and offensive to the layman, has practically
disappeared. The majority of the men have ripened to the point


THOMAS JEWELL CRAVEN
675
where they no longer feel the need of playing with the purely sen-
sational effects of pigment and texture; they have the modern
means more or less under control, have discarded colour hypotheses
which could never have existed without European eloquence, and
have concentrated their attention on the delineation of form. A
conclusive sign of solid development.
Second: There are examples of unrestricted rendering of natu-
ral forms in which the feelings of the painter are indicated in a
distinctly personal manner. This is a selective art. To get at its
truth we must realize that the artist has considered himself as more
important that his subject; that formalistic accuracy of drawing,
ne, perspective, and verisimilitude are subordinate to ideas of
value. Such ideas are not always defensible; they lend themselves
freely to idiosyncrasy; but in their worst aspect go far beyond the
mechanical copying of nature as taught by the academy. In this
class we must include Ben Benn, Emile Branchard, Arthur B.
Carles, Andrew Dasburg, Preston Dickinson, Edward Fisk, Ber-
nard Gussow, Henry McCarter, D. W. McCouch, Henry L. McFee,
Gus Mager, John Marin, A. H. Maurer, George F. Of, Samuel
Halpert, Marsden Hartley, Bertram Hartman, Yasuo Kuniyoshi,
Owen Merton, Lyman Sayen, Maurice Sterne, and Charles Demuth.
Third: To one unfamiliar with primitive design and with the
recent trend of abstractionism, several pictures will appear as little
more than bands of ragged colour or sharp flashes of spectral light.
Works of this order present arbitrary combinations of geometrical
units, and when successful have the value of pure decoration.
Strict symmetry of the flat surfaces is neither desired nor at-
tempted; the direction of the lines is determined by the artistic
impulse, which, in some instances, is recklessly manifested. As
new architectural forms are evolved this art will take its place in
the modern world in much the same fashion as the arabesque in the
buildings of past ages. John Covert, E. E. Cummings, Edward
Nagle, and Carl Newman are good examples.
Fourth: The influence of Cubism is apparent but not engross-
ing. The reduction of natural objects to their nearest geometrical
equivalent offers advantages for plastic design, but in imitative
hands it results in a complicated pattern that is highly disturbing.
Form is disintegrated rather than composed, and a certain sem-
blance of unity is attained by the strange scaffolding, and by the


676 THE AWAKENING OF THE ACADEMY
translation of natural tone-values into terms of colour. Textures
have been drawn into some of the pictures, textures amazingly
executed, but of no aesthetic importance. This art is spirited and
exciting, but structurally it is often fragmentary and lacking deci-
sion. It is represented by Paul Burlin, A. S. Baylinson, Carl
Kahler, Man Ray, Morton L. Schamburg, Charles Sheeler, Joseph
Stella, and Max Weber.
Fifth: The dissatisfaction with sterile transcripts of nature
has given rise to a new symbolism, an art allied with Futurism
when it deals with the figure, and with Expressionism when it be-
comes abstract. Both manifestations were seen at the Pennsyl-
vania Academy. These pictures engage to present states of the
soul, to put into graphic form indefinable emotions, to stir the
sensibilities of the observer into response by means of arresting
emblems portrayed in brilliant colour and free line. A language
of this kind is not always articulate; it leads to a curious personal-
ization that is foreign to the psychic states of the audience, and
its message is lost. To appreciate its real meaning an actual ac-
quaintance with the artist is almost necessary. Beautiful pat-
terns have sprung from this art, patterns which seem to grow
spontaneously like crystals. In this group are Homer Boss,
Arthur B. Davies, Arthur G. Dove, Georgia O'Keefe, A. Wal-
kowitz, Marguerite Zorach, and William Zorach.
Sixth: The undying stimulus of Classicism is evident in sev-
eral canvasses. Here art is created by tectonic methods; the
design is severe, and though in most instances limited to a single
figure, it testifies to careful study of the masters of the High Re-
naissance in Italy. Works of this tendency are connected with
modernism by two processes: first, by the notation of lines and
planes of structure in terms of colour, as exemplified in the water-
colours of Cézanne; and second, by an elaboration of the ordered
Impressionism of Renoir. Colour is made predominant; it is ap-
plied purely and with little tonal value; so far as it is possible
line is abolished and the form established by definite areas of colour,
each chosen according to its relative intensity, and bounded by line
after it has taken its position in space. An art opposed to objec-
tivity and destined to a rich future. The principal exhibitors
were S. MacDonald Wright and William Yarrow.
Seventh: Another phase of classical composition comes into
prominence—the selection of objective and dispersed facts of ex-


THOMAS JEWELL CRAVEN
677
perience, and their incorporation as units of structure into a complex
and limited form where all the parts tend to sequential relationship.
Such an art can hardly be called modern; it appears in the culmi-
nating periods of the whole history of the expressive life of man,
and is symptomatic of the everlasting human need of finding kin-
ship and meaning in the details of the external world. In this
exhibition, like the colour-art just mentioned, it derives liberally
from the Renaissance, but it contains no perceptible traces of
Cézanne and Renoir. Thomas H. Benton is a characteristic expo-
nent. As a composer, Gaston Lachaise might be included here, but
his drawings by no means measure his sculptural gifts, and his
work shows oriental and modern French influences rather than
Italian.
The last tendency is difficult to catalogue. There are etchings
analogous to Hogarth. It were a waste of time to say these prints
are not modern: they may be caustic, satiric, documentary, but all
the same, they are artistic and will remain as records of American
life. There are water-colours depicting actual scenes in which the
characters are recognizably drawn. These, too, are beautiful; and
yet they are purposely descriptive—their beauty relates to Dau-
mier. And there are pictures where design and the new means are
employed in humorous situations—legitimate and successful
efforts. Works of this order were shown by Louis Bouché, Horace
Brodsky, Marius De Zayas, Alfred J. Frueh, Wood Gaylor, Walt
Kuhn, Jules Pascin, and John Sloan.
In putting forward these divisions only a general classification
is intended. One is conscious of the overlapping of tendencies, and
it is doubtful if a single canvas may be fitted unreservedly into a
given category. Art, like life, becomes positive only when it is
narrow and puritanical; and one of the most encouraging features
of the show was its breadth. These pictures speak unanimously
when they say that art is not the reflex of actuality; that it must
create a reality peculiar to itself to bear the stamp of meaning and
the signature of beauty; they speak triumphantly against pedantry
and studio formulae; they transport us into a world of freedom
where preferences large or small, emotional or ideational, true or
fanciful, may have their expression.
Is there anything American in the exhibition? Is it merely a
repetition of foreign experiment? A comparison with the French
Masters temporarily hung in the Brooklyn Museum will help to


678 THE AWAKENING OF THE ACADEMY
answer these questions. The same tendencies were obvious in
both collections, a condition to be expected in a world becoming
daily more closely knit, where social and intellectual problems in
the larger sense are identical, and where the commerce of ideas goes
on continually. Nor can we overlook the fact that France is the
home of the whole modern movement. In casting about for differ-
ences it is readily seen that our own painting is less assured; that it
is harder, more conscious, and marked by a heavier volitional force;
while the European work flowers easily from a well-cultivated soil.
The Brooklyn exhibition represented men of undeniable maturity,
men who have, as we say, arrived, and have taken their place in
history; in Philadelphia there were comparatively few who have
really found themselves, who have full command over their powers.
All things considered, we can detect in our younger painters a
spirit which points to a stiff determination, a sort of will to grow,
whether the ground be good or bad, a distinctly un-European
quality. This originates from the want of a cultural background:
in America art is compelled to live on itself, and the pompous dis-
play of the dead with its returns in money has usurped the col-
lector's appreciation of living talent. The artist dwells in spirit-
ual loneliness, and on those rare occasions when he comes into
contact with society his mood is inhibitive and one of combat. He
does not dare to be expansive and friendly. The mental habits
reflecting his inheritances and his environment direct the form of
his pictures—he struggles for existence; he is hard, wilful, pas-
sionate, practical—and native to some soil. Many of the can-
vasses at Philadelphia were too imitative of the French to count
for very much; on the other hand, the larger number would stand
out in any foreign gallery as American productions.
It is hardly necessary to add that the modern painters have de-
served official recognition. Their work has justified their claims;
and the Pennsylvania Academy, by giving them annual representa-
tion, could do art an immense service. It would mean that New
York would fall into line, and Boston, and the schools throughout
America. The life of art does not, of course, rest with the
academies; but every exhibition increases the audience and en-
courages appreciation. In this manner the public would more
quickly learn of the value of the new men; and the dealer, whose
interest in pictures is largely commercial, would be forced either to
change his policy or to go out of business.


DEX

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"*****
TWO POEMS
BY JOHN DOS PASSOS
JARDIN DES TUILERIES
(To A. K. McC.)
This is a garden
where through the russet mist of clustered trees
and strewn November leaves,
they crunch with vainglorious heels
of ancient vermilion
the dry dead of spent summer's greens
and stalk with mincing sceptic steps
and sound of snuffboxes snapping
to the capping of an epigram,
in fuffy attar-scented wigs
the exquisite Augustans.
ON POETIC COMPOSITION
There was a king in China.
He sat in a garden under a moon of gold
while a black slave scratched his back
with a backscratcher of emerald.
Before him beyond the tulipbed
where the tulips were stiff goblets of fiery wine
stood the poets in a row.
One sang
One sang of the intricate patterns of snowflakes.
of the hennatipped breasts of girls dancing
and of yellow limbs rubbed with attar.
One sang of the red bows of Tartar horsemen
and the whine of arrows, and bloodclots on new spearshafts.


680
TWO POEMS
Others sang of wine and dragons coiled in purple bowls,
and one, in a droning voice
recited the maxims of Lao T'se.
1
(Far off at the walls of the city
a groaning of drums and a clank of massed spearmen.
Gongs in the temples.)
The king sat under a moon of gold
while a black slave scratched his back
with a backscratcher of emerald.
The long gold nails of his left hand
twined about a red tulip blotched with black,
a tulip shaped like a dragon's mouth
or the flames bellying about a pagoda of sandalwood.
The long gold nails of his right hand
were held together at the tips
in an attitude of discernment:
to award the tulip to the poet
of the poets that stood in a row.
(Gongs in the temples.
Men with hairy arms
climbing on the walls of the city.
They have red bows slung on their backs,
their hands grip new spearshafts.)
The guard of the tomb of the king's great grandfather
stood with two swords under the moon of gold.
With one sword he very carefully
slit the base of his large belly
and inserted the other and fell upon it
and sprawled beside the king's footstool;
his blood sprinkled the tulips
and the poets in a row.
(The gongs are quiet in the temples.
Men with hairy arms


JARDIN DES TUILERIES
681
scatter with taut bows through the city.
There is blood on new spearshafts.)
The long gold nails of the king's right hand
were held together at the tips
in an attitude of discernment:
the geometric glitter of snowflakes,
the pointed breasts of yellow girls
crimson with henna,
the swirl of river-eddies about a barge
where men sit drinking,
the eternal dragon of magnificence
Beyond the tulipbed
stood the poets in a row.
The garden full of spearshafts and shouting
and the whine of arrows and the red bows of Tartars
and trampling of the sharp hoofs of warhorses.
Under the golden moon
the men with hairy arms
struck off the heads of the tulips in the tulipbed
and of the poets in a row.
The king lifted the hand that held the flaming dragonflower:
To him of the snowflakes, he said.
On a new white spearshaft
the men with hairy arms
spitted the king and the black slave
who scratched his back with a backscratcher of emerald.
There was a king in China.


DUBLIN LETTER
May, 1921
WHA
>
a
HAT are we to say of the Silence of the Gods in Ireland
—that is to say, of those Irish writers who have attained
their intellectual thrones and sit thereon through these dark days
in unhelpful aloofness? Even that most garrulous of gods, Mr
Bernard Shaw, is rather silent now about Ireland: his pam-
phlet on Home Rule was perhaps the only completely futile shaft
ever sped from that far-darting hand. A.E., indeed, intervenes
from time to time with solemn adjurations and vaticinations; yet
his philosophy of a “national being,” according to which the pres-
ent population of Ireland is conceived of as an organic unity ac-
tuated from within by a creative impulse communicated to it by
divine beings in the dawn of history, is difficult to apply to a
situation in which the centre of gravity of the modern Irish nation
is the very point to be determined. Meanwhile, "nescio quid
majus nascitur,” A.E. is, I hear, engaged upon a work which
may well be his magnum opus. He imagines an episode in a revo-
lutionary movement of the future, when a fortuitous company
of idealistic reformers, awaiting execution together, abandon all
reserve in a last discussion of their conflicting ideals, imperialist,
socialist, individualist, anarchist, et cetera. My own experience
of political idealists inclines me to suspect that they are as much
in need of clearing up their ideas as ordinary people, and I wish
it were possible for them on some less tragic occasion to determine
amongst themselves precisely what each of them is driving at.
Mr W. B. Yeats refers directly but guardedly to contemporary
happenings in his new volume of verse published by the Cuala
Press. In several of these poems, his detachment from the pas-
sions of the popular movement originated by Pearse and Con-
nolly is avowed, and is instructive when we consider it in connec-
tion with his propensity to ruminate over his own ancestry, which
appears to have numbered various picturesque and powerful in-
dividuals of the Anglo-Irish stock. If only the sentiment of
1 Ten of these poems appeared in The Dial for November, 1920.


JOHN EGLINTON
683
these ruminations could be expanded into a true race-sentiment,
Mr Yeats might be explicitly and professedly the poet of the
Anglo-Irish, who are in need of some poetic justification of their
existence. In a very beautiful poem, A Prayer for my Daughter,
he expresses an aspiration for the maintenance by a child of his
race of the sanctities of ceremony and custom in a world given
over to the blatancy of opinion and passion. The pleasure derived
from Mr Yeats' recent verse lies in its frequent surprise of curi-
ously felicitous yet often whimsically selected phrase. Somewhat
similarly Wordsworth, in his later period, when the lyric affilatus
had departed from him and his “ear had become morbidly sensi-
tive to the clashing of consonants," devoted endless toil to short
"
poems, poor enough sometimes in thought, but in which the mar-
vellous clarity of the language has never perhaps been sufficiently
admired.
But Mr Yeats' expression is uncertain. His meaning is un-
certain. What proves it is that he is never satisfied with his
expression. In every edition of his poems there are alterations-
.
themselves with no air of finality—and if his poems ran through
twenty editions the first version of one of his poems might hardly
recognize the last. And yet Mr Yeats' striving after the “in-
evitable phrase” is apparent. Is the moral perhaps that a poet
”
should not entertain too many ideas? A
A poet
of
a very different
kind from Mr Yeats, Thomas Campbell—a man, one would say,
of few and rather stereotyped ideas—wrote a very fine ballad on
the Battle of the Baltic, in which he appears to have said exactly
what he wanted to say: yet the first version, a long poem with only
a hint here and there of the final form, appears now no better than
a canvas screen thrown up while the latter was preparing.
The most Epicurean of the gods is Mr George Moore. His
book of Héloïse and Abélard is a precinct of aloof quietude. It
is not merely that no sound from the distracted world mounts to
mar its calm, but its tiltings and tramplings, its vicissitudes of
scene and circumstance, all blend into one another and break off
as in a dream-world where nothing strikes the ear. The book is
one long series of visualizations—tapestry, as one critic has aptly
called it. But the heroic patience of the whole undertaking! Its
amazing evenness of tone! The pervasive witchery of the
language! The author remembers beautifully that Nominalism


684
DUBLIN LETTER
}
and Realism, architecture, minstrelsy, et cetera, are not the whole
of the twelfth century, and his book is most like the Middle Ages,
perhaps, in its wealth of animal life. But has Mr Moore done
what he set out to do, has he told the story of Héloïse and Abélard?
It is easy to understand how a story-writer may be attracted by
some episode or period of the past, and before he is aware be
drawn into that pitfall of so many great reputations, the histori-
cal novel. Why is the adventure so hazardous? Is it not because
the conception of the story has occurred once for all in the popular
consciousness, or by some miracle of fortuitous happenings in
history itself, so that the organic growth and shaping of the story
can never really happen over again in the mind of the artist? The
story no longer follows the inevitable development of a story
which has sprung up in his own mind, and he becomes liable to
the inquiry how far his reading and powers of divination have
admitted him into the manners and mentality of a bygone age.
A writer may be visited with an intuition as to what really hap-
pened at the dawn of the Christian era, or during the Crusades,
and this may serve as an original conception; but in retelling one
of the world's love-stories like that of Héloïse and Abélard, his
chance of success must depend on his power of conceiving the
story as no one else has conceived it. Mr Moore appears to have
been interested chiefly in imagining how it may actually have
occurred.
There are writers who have brooded so long over some period
that they actually understand life better in terms of the manners
and ideals of that period. Nay, it is true of most men that they
are not fully contemporaries: some atavism of the eighteen cen-
tury, of the sixteenth, or it may be of some far earlier system of
things, persists in the psychology of most of us, and supplies a
medium through which a distorted image reaches us of contempo-
rary reality. Mr Moore belongs temperamentally to an age more
comfortable and less crude than the age which he has delineated:
like Théophile Gautier, he is "a man for whom the sensible world
exists,” and he has imported certain comforts and tastes from a
maturer world into his delineation of the twelfth century, as well
as a Voltairean detachment from its controversial issues, which
nevertheless he has been at considerable pains to master. A sym-
pathetic interpreter of that century would feel the full impact


JOHN EGLINTON
685
upon his own mind of the problem which indicated its centrality
by throwing men into the angry factions of Nominalists and Real-
ists; similarly he would endeavour to realize what Pope calls the
"struggle of grace and nature" in the soul of Héloïse. The
fact that Héloïse and Abélard passed the years after their union
apart from one another constitutes the main difficulty in telling
their story in such a manner that one lover shall be presented as
fully as the other, and seems to render it inevitable that the story
should be told, as it actually however imperfectly was, in their
letters. As Pope makes Héloïse say:
“Heaven first taught letters for some wretch's aid,
Some banished lover or some captive maid;
They live, they speak, they breathe what love inspires,
Warm from the soul and faithful to its fires."
John EGLINTON


LONDON LETTER
May, 1921
THE PHOENIX SOCIETY
In my last letter I mentioned an approaching performance by the
Phoenix Society of Ben Jonson's Volpone; the performance proved
to be the most important theatrical event of the year in London.
The play was superbly carried out; the performance gave evidence
of Jonson's consummate skill in stage technique, proceeding with-
out a moment of tedium from end to end; it was well acted and
both acted and received with great appreciation.
Almost the only opportunity for seeing a good play is that
given by a few private societies, which by reason of their "private”
character are allowed to give performances (for subscribers) on
Sunday evenings. These are not commercial enterprises, but de-
pend upon the enthusiasm of a few patrons and the devotion of a
few actors, most of whom have other engagements during the week.
The Phoenix, which restricts itself to Elizabethan and Restoration
drama, is an off-shoot of the Incorporated Stage Society, which pro-
duces modern and contemporary plays of the better sort—the
better sort usually being translations. At the beginning of its ven-
ture, last year, the Phoenix was obliged to suffer a good deal of
abuse in the daily press, especially from the Daily News and the
Star. These two journals are, to my mind, the least objectionabl
of the London newspapers in their political views, but their Man-
chester-School politics gives a strong aroma of the Ebenezer Tem-
perance Association to their views on art. The bloodiness of
Elizabethan tragedy, and the practice of the Society in presenting
the complete text of the plays, were the points of attack. The
Daily News reviewed the performance of The Duchess of Malfi
under the heading, Funnier than Farce! Mr William Archer
mumbled “this farrago of horrors . . . shambling and ill-composed
· funereal affectation . . . I am far from calling the Duchess
of Malfi garbage, but . Still droller was a certain Sir Leo
Money: “I agree with Mr Robert Lynd that 'there are perhaps, a
dozen Elizabethan plays apart from Shakespeare's that are as great
as his third-best work, but I should not include the Duchess of
.


T. S. ELIOT
687
Malf' in the dozen. . . . I did not see the Phoenix production, but
..
I hope that some fumigation took place.” Sir Leo writes frequently
about the Tariff, the income tax, and kindred topics. For my part,
I am more and more convinced that the Phoenix is wholly justified
in its refusal to admit any expurgation whatever. The sense of
relief, in hearing the indecencies of Elizabethan and Restoration
drama, leaves one a better and a stronger man.
I do not suggest that Jonson is comparable to Shakespeare.
But we do not know Shakespeare; we only know Sir J. Forbes-
Robertson's Hamlet, and Irving's Shylock, and so on. The per-
formance of Volpone had a significance for us which no con-
temporary performance of Shakespeare has had; it brought the
great English drama to life as no contemporary performance of
Shakespeare has done. Shakespeare (that is to say, such of his
plays as are produced at all) strained through the nineteenth cen-
tury, has been dwarfed to the dimensions of a part for Sir Johnston
Forbes-Robertson, Sir Frank Benson, or other histrionic nonentities:
Shakespeare is the avenue to knighthood. But the continued popu-
larity of Shakespeare perhaps has this meaning, that the appetite for
poetic drama, and for a peculiarly English comedy or farce, has
never disappeared; and that a native popular drama, if it existed,
would be nearer to Shakespeare than to Ibsen or Chekhov. It is
curious that the popular desire for Shakespeare, and for the operas
of Gilbert and Sullivan, should be insatiable, although no attempt
is ever made to create anything similar; and that on the other hand
the crudest American laughter-and-tears plays, such as Romance or
Peg o' My Heart, should be constantly imported. Curious, again,
that with so much comic talent in England—more than any other
country-no intelligent attempt has been made to use it to ad-
vantage in good comic opera or revue.
Music-HALL AND REVUE
This is an age of transition between the music-hall and the revue.
The music-hall is older, more popular, and is sanctified by the ad-
miration of the Nineties. It has flourished most vigorously in the
North; many of its most famous stars are of Lancashire origin.
(Marie Lloyd, if I am not mistaken, has a bit of a Manchester ac-
cent.) Lancashire wit is mordant, ferocious, and personal; the
a


688
THE LONDON LETTER
a
Lancashire music-hall is excessively intime; success depends upon
the relation established by a comedian of strong personality with an
audience quick to respond with approval or contempt. The fierce
talent of Nellie Wallace (who also has a Lancashire accent) holds
the most boisterous music-hall in complete subjection. Little Tich,
and George Robey (though the latter has adapted himself in recent
years to some inferior revues) belong to this type and generation.
The Lancashire comedian is at his best when unsupported and
making a direct set, pitting himself, against a suitable audience; he
is seen to best advantage at the smaller and more turbulent halls.
As the smaller provincial or suburban hall disappears, supplanted
by the more lucrative Cinema, this type of comedian disappears
with it.
The music-hall comedian, however, can still be seen to perfection,
whereas the revue comedian never is, because the revue is never
good enough. Our best revue comedienne, Miss Ethel Levey, has
seldom had the revue, and never the appreciation, that she deserves.
Her type is quite different from that of Marie Lloyd or Nellie
Wallace. She is the most aloof and impersonal of personalities;
indifferent, rather than contemptuous, towards the audience; her
appearance and movement are of an extremely modern type of
beauty. Hers is not broad farce, but a fascinating inhuman grotes-
querie; she plays for herself rather than for the audience. Her art
requires a setting which in this country at least) it has never had.
It is not a comedy of mirth.
An element of bizarrerie is present in most of the comedians
whom we should designate as of the revue stage rather than the
music-hall stage: in Lupino Lane, in Robert Hale and George
Graves; a bizarrerie more mature, perhaps more cosmopolitan, than
that of Little Tich. But the revue itself is still lacking.
a
CARICATURE
Baudelaire, in his essay on le Rire (qui vaut bien celui de Berg-
son) remarks of English caricature
“Pour trouver du comique féroce et très-féroce, il faut passer la
Manche et visiter les royaumes brumeux du spleen ... le signe
distinctif de ce genre de comique était la violence."
1


T. S. ELIOT
689
Perhaps the best of the English caricaturists of journalism is
H. M. Bateman. He has lately held a very interesting exhibition
at the Leicester Galleries. It is curious to remark that some of his
drawings descend to the pure and insignificant funniness without
seriousness which appeals to the readers of Punch; while others
continue the best tradition from Rowlandson and Cruikshank.
They have some of the old English ferocity. Bateman is, I im-
agine, unconscious of the two distinct strains in his work; Mr Wynd-
ham Lewis, in his exhibition now on show at the same gallery, is
wholly conscious and deliberate in his attempt to restore this pecu-
liarly English caricature and to unite it with serious work in
paint. Mr Lewis is the most English of English painters, a student
of Hogarth and Rowlandson; his fantastic imagination produces
something essentially different from anything across the Channel.
I have always thought his design at its greatest when it approached
the border of satire and caricature; and his Tyros may be expected
to breed a most interesting and energetic race.
The State Of CRITICISM
The disappearance of the Athenaeum as an independent organ,
and its gradual suffocation under the ponderous mass of the Nation,
are greatly to be deplored. It leaves the Times Literary Supple-
ment and the London Mercury as the only literary papers. The
former is a useful bibliographer; it fills, and always will fill, an
important place of its own. This place it can only hold by main-
taining the anonymity of its contributions; but this anonymity,
and the large number of its contributors, prevent it from upholding
any definite standard of criticism. Nevertheless it possesses more
authority than the Mercury, which is homogeneous enough, but suf-
fers from the mediocrity of the minds most consistently employed
upon it. Mr Murry, as editor of the Athenaeum, was genuinely
studious to maintain a serious criticism. With his particular tastes,
as well as with his general statements, I find myself frequently at
variance: the former seem to me often perverse or exaggerated,
the latter tainted by some unintelligible Platonism. But there is no
doubt that he had much higher standards and greater ambitions for
literary journalism than any other editor in London. When he is
not deceived by some aberration of enthusiasm or dislike, and when


690
THE LONDON LETTER
he is not deluded by philosophy, he is the only one of the accredited
critics whom I can read at all. There is Mr Clutton-Brock, whose
attention is not focussed upon literature but upon a very mild type
of philosophic humanitarian religion; he is like a very intelligent
archdeacon. There is Mr Robert Lynd, who has successfully culti-
vated the typical vices of daily journalism and has risen to the top
of his profession; and there is Mr Squire, whose solemn trifling
fascinates multitudes; and there are several writers, like Mr Ed-
mund Gosse and Sir Sidney Colvin, whom I have never read and
so cannot judge.
I cannot find, after this muster, that there is any ground for the
rumour current in the chatty paragraphs of the newsprint several
months ago, that the younger generation has decided to revive criti-
,
cism. There has been a brisk business in centenaries. Keats and
Marvell have just been celebrated in this way. The former has
been particularly fortunate. All the approved critics, each in a
different paper, blew a blast of glory enough to lay Keats' ghost
,
for twenty years. I have never read such unanimous rubbish, and
yet Keats was a poet. Possibly, after the chatty columns of the
newsprint have ceased to cheer the “revival” of criticism, they will
get a tip to lament its decay. Yet the “revival” of criticism as a
“form” is not the essential thing; if we are intelligent enough, and
really interested in the arts, both criticism and "creation” will in
some form flourish.
lary
The True CHURCH AND THE NINETEEN CHURCHES
While the poetry lovers have been subscribing to purchase for
the nation the Keats house in Hampstead as a museum, the Church
of England has apparently persisted in its design to sell for demoli-
tion nineteen religious edifices in the City of London. Probably
few American visitors, and certainly few natives, ever inspect these
disconsolate fanes; but they give to the business quarter of Lon-
don a beauty which its hideous banks and commercial houses have
not quite defaced. Some are by Christopher Wren himself, others
by his school; the least precious redeems some vulgar street, like
the plain little church of All Hallows at the end of London Wall.
Some, like St Michael Paternoster Royal, are of great beauty. As
the prosperity of London has increased, the City Churches have


T. S. ELIOT
691
fallen into desuetude; for their destruction the lack of congrega-
tion is the ecclesiastical excuse, and the need of money the ecclesi-
astical reason. The fact that the erection of these churches was
apparently paid for out of a public coal tax and their decoration
probably by the parishioners, does not seem to invalidate the right
of the True Church to bring them to the ground. To one who, like
the present writer, passes his days in this City of London (quand'io
sentii chiavar l'uscio di sotto) the loss of these towers, to meet
the eye down a grimy lane, and of these empty naves, to receive the
solitary visitor at noon from the dust and tumult of Lombard Street,
will be irreparable and unforgotten. A small pamphlet issued for
the London County Council (Proposed Demolition of Nineteen
City Churches: P. S. King & Son, Ltd., 2-4 Gt. Smith Street, West-
minster, S.W.1, 3s.6d. net) should be enough to persuade of what
I have said.
T. S. ELIOT


BOOK REVIEWS
A METROPOLITAN HERMIT
Poems. By Stewart Mitchell. 12mo. 85 pages.
Duffield and Company. New York.
I
N all artists, there is a tendency towards hermitry and a desire
for justification from those who know what beauty is. The
man has a disgust for humanity; the artist expresses himself in
symbols which only humanity can read. In Mr Mitchell's work,
a self-evolved independence as a result of this conflict we feel
very much. We are conscious of hauteur, yet a contempt for the
occasions to hauteur—for the tyranny, panic, and fetishism of
urban life: the passion in these poems is real and the coldness is
real: there is sensuous beauty and a desire to replace susceptibility
to it with something more fundamental. It is not always possible
to tell whether a man or a woman is designated in certain of the
poems and this is as it should be; in so far as a poem is a work of
art, one does not wish to know, and must not know too definitely,
the facts which underlie the expression. Mr Mitchell feels the
aesthetic value of courage, but he also has courage.
He makes no concessions; he forces nothing on one and although
the very quality which makes the craftsman cautious and technically
competent, hampers expression, in Mr Mitchell's poems thought
and feeling triumph over formality and while a radical might object
to the method, one is always sure that the underlying thought has
justified the writing. There is honesty and depth in these poems;
there seems to be extant in this author a power of self-expression
which is not self-conscious—which is devoid of that blatantly self-
analytical aggressiveness which is characteristic of certain modern
contortionists.
In the descriptive detail, note the actuality in Autumn: "Webs
of grey mist, a glitter of black wings, life circled with fire," and
in From a Garden: “the purple well of night walled with the elms
like shadows of vast fountains.” The sea is treated with great
dis-
a


MARIANNE MOORE
693
tinction, both allusively and directly. We have in Ego, “Out of
contending light and darkness, springs the tempest on the sea” and
in Sea Side, reversing the stereotyped order of comparison, Mr
Mitchell says:
“The waters tremble where the grey wind sets
His blue lips to the body of the sea,
Cloud over as your face, now it forgets
Some vague pledge common between such as we-
Startled to hear my tedious regrets
That
you
it was who were the death of me."
One's taste in verse forms varies as one's taste in gems varies.
It may vary with the occasion but it is essentially a matter of tem-
perament. For a poet not to know this is to throw away his power
of attack. For Mr Mitchell to be erratic or showy would be to
forfeit distinction. There is something very pleasing about the
arrangement of the words in the following line: “Till life shall
be as love may please” and in Mr Mitchell's work throughout, the
faceted correctness of the verse structure gives pleasure. There
are in it, various best things—Ego, Sea Side, Lucretius, A Theorist,
Astarte, Helen, and, especially in Ipswich Dunes, the sea is brought
before us in all its calm, savage finality:
"If ever we could love them who are sped,
Out of the world with swift and trackless feet,
I should have known your England from my bed,
In fields of poppies sown through deep, green wheat
•
.
Stretched on these dunes—white sand, sweet-smelling bay,
I think I taste the draught of your disdain-
Only what you have told of Beauty, we,
Who love you best, remember-turn away
From idle fancy, and your age-old vain
Unprofitable comradeship with pain,
On wings of light, wings that desire the sea.”
MARIANNE MOORE


A VICTORIAN HOME
Our Family Affairs. By E. F. Benson. 8vo. 336
pages. George H. Doran Company. New York.
MONG the admirers of Edward White Benson, former Arch-
A of ,
a
Church of England owed its existence in unimpaired unity, amid
storms of heresy and ritualism, to his executive wisdom and ad-
ministrative zeal. Though this view is exaggerated, it does a certain
justice to his ardent championship of the institution to which he
gave in full his extraordinary ability and energy. Amid his ecclesi-
astical triumphs the archbishop was disappointed in his sons.
Martin, the eldest and most promising, died while a school-boy.
Arthur became no more than a master of Eton and a graceful
essayist. Only the youngest, Hugh, took orders, and he later fell
away to the Church of Rome. It would have been to His Grace
a startling revelation of the ways of Providence could he have fore-
seen that from the least ecclesiastically minded of the four-from
the graceless author of Dodo-would proceed this most winning
and convincing apology for the Church of England. It is a part
of the irony of human nature that the sermons, speeches, and letters
of the archbishop, his life of Saint Cyprian, and his judgement of
the Bishop of Lincoln, should be outweighed in service to the
church by this unpretending record of the affairs of his family.
The paradox, however, is characteristic of the Church of England.
The great quality of the institution, by virtue of which it is truly
national, is that it has made religion a part of civilization. The
church has piled up volumes of theology and records of saints and
martyrs; it has organized education, charity, and worship; it has
built schools, colleges, cathedrals, and lately monasteries and settle-
ments. More important than any of these things are its homes.
In the seventeenth century men like Jeremy Taylor and George
Herbert gave to the Anglican faith its special domestic character.
Since then the effect of this culture can be traced in its offspring,
especially in the children of churchmen—in Addison, in Coleridge,
in Tennyson, and in whole families, the Wilberforces, the Arnolds,


ROBERT MORSS LOVETT
695
and the Bensons. Granting all that Martin Mar-Prelate and John
Milton have urged against Prelatical Episcopacy it cannot be denied
that to the institution is due a certain strain of moral beauty-a
beauty of holiness—that grew in homes consecrated by a “pure
religion breathing household laws."
The church furnished the support and background for the utterly
charming existence which Mr Benson records. He knew his stately
father first as Headmaster of Wellington College, where he and his
brothers and sisters looked remotely on at the life of a great public
school. Then the rising churchman became Chancellor of Lincoln,
and in the Chancery house within the cathedral close the children
established their museum, and in the garden they played "siege”
about a mediaeval tower, and in the cathedral itself Edward fell
in love with a choir-boy and used to pray night and morning, “O
God, let me enter into Lincoln Cathedral choir, and abide there in
happiness evermore with Thee.” Next, came the Bishopric of
Truro, and "the enchantment of Cornwall instantly began to weave
its spell.” The primitive museum expanded into elaborate collec-
tions of flowers, birds' eggs, butterflies, and water life. "Siege”
was replaced by "pirate." A joint literary effort known as the
'
Saturday Magazine made its appearance. And finally the Bishop
of Truro became Primate of all England, and the young Bensons
had Lambeth Palace and Addington to play in. It has been held
by some broad-
minded persons a sufficient excuse for the presidency
of Roosevelt that his family enjoyed the White House so much.
A similar extenuating circumstance might have been urged by
Queen Victoria had her conscience demanded any apology for the
elevation of the archbishop.
Life at Lambeth was rather formal and stately, but "it was a
pompous pleasure to see the traffic stopped at Hyde Park Corner,
so that we might ride past saluting policemen through the arch. .
After all, if you happened to be riding with your father, for whose
passage in those days all traffic was stayed, you might as well enjoy
it.” At Addington the riding was a different sort.
“Away went the cavalcade at a violent gallop up the long slope
of turf in front of the house with ‘Braemar' in the shape of a comma,
and 'Quentin' playing the piano in the air with his forelegs, and
‘Ajax' kicking up behind, and 'Peggy' going sideways, just because


696
A VICTORIAN HOME
my father had mounted first and smacked 'Columba' over the rump
while the rest of us were betwixt and between the gravel and the
saddle. There were hurdles stuck up on the slope, and 'Braemar,'
shrilly squealing, bucked over the first, and 'Ajax' ran out, and
‘Peggy' trod solemnly on the top of one, and 'Quentin’ still hopping
on his hind legs refused and was whacked, and my father went
pounding on ahead as we rocketed after him.”
In the Christmas holidays they made a toboggan-run "which soon
became unmitigated ice," and played golf in the snow and mist.
.
“The Saturday Magazine made frequent appearances. . . . Be-
tween whiles Arthur composed voluntaries to be played on the
organ of the chapel at prayers, Nellie studied the violin, Hugh
produced a marionette theatre, and wrote a highly original play
for it, called The Sandy Desert; or Where is the Archbishop? and
Maggie made oil pictures of her family of Persian cats.”
You may say that this is the life of any healthy young English
family of the upper class, but you will be wrong. The church gave
not only the material support but the peculiar distinction of this
life, the ecclesiastical principle being here as recognizable as else-
where the feudal; and religion gave to it its flavour and charm as
definitely as chivalry might have done. It was a part of young
Benson's "circumstances” that his father "wore black cloth gaiters,
an apron, and a hat with strings at the side.” He feared, on first
going to school, that it would be a handicap, but he was relieved
when on his father's visit at his confirmation the whole school was
given a special holiday at the request of His Grace. “He had just
asked for it, so it appeared, and in honour of his visit, it was
granted. 'Can't you be confirmed again?' was the gratifying com-
ment of friends. 'I say, do be confirmed again.'” And through the
busy days at Truro or Addington wound a thread of ritual marked
by prayer and music. The children grew deadly tired of this devo-
tion, just as little pages must have wearied of watching by their
arms. “The Day of Rest in fact became a day of pitiless
fatigue.” But the reaction took such wholesome and humorous
forms that the original restraint is almost justified by it. Mr
Benson gives us an entrancing picture of himself reading from The
a


ROBERT MORSS LOVETT
697
Lives of the Saints to his somnolent family underneath the trees
at Addington on a Sunday afternoon, "Hugh with swoony eyes,
laden with sleep, Nellie and Maggie primly and decorously listen-
ing, their eyelids closed, like Miss Matty's because they listened
better so, and my father, for whom and by whom this treat was
arranged, with head thrown back and mouth nakedly open.' And
when after giving them a bit of St Catherine and a bit about
another Saint, and a bit of the general introduction, and the end
of St Francis he closed the book it was to hear His Grace exclaim
“Wonderful!" An entirely beautiful picture, edifying even in its
gentle hypocrisy. If any one doubts the value of the religious back-
ground in English family life, let him turn to Margot Asquith's
account of the Tennants !
Mrs Benson connived at mitigating the rigours of devotion.
When His Grace was away she was quite capable of saying "We
won't have prayers tonight for a treat." She was not ecclesiastical,
and yet she could not possibly have achieved her exquisite com-
pleteness anywhere but in the archbishop's palace. She belonged
to the Lambeth of Victoria as utterly as Lucrezia to the Vatican of
the Borgias. She furnished the healthy vivacity, the humorous
relief, in the family life. “Did ever any other mother," asks Mr
Benson, “at the age of forty run so violently in playing at that stren-
uous game called, “Three knights-a-riding that she broke a sinew
in her leg? Mine did.” And the account of her feminine passion
for the concrete against the abstract devotion of her husband is bet-
ter characterization than Dodo.
“Just as she cared not two straws for the Pan-Anglican Confer-
ence, yet delighted in the human members of it, so, when standing
in front of the west façade of, say Rheims Cathedral, or looking
across from the Riffel Alp to the Matterhorn, her real attention
would not be devoted to these silent sublimities, but much rather
to a cat blinking in the sun, or a sparrow building in the eaves. ...
I doubt if she ever looked with eagerness or wonder at the Matter-
horn, except on the day when she knew that one of her sons was
near the summit in the early morning.”
It is entirely characteristic that a large part of Our Family
Affairs should be concerned with school. One of the happiest


698
A VICTORIAN HOME
aspects of Mr Benson's book is its perfect illustration of the way
in which English family life leads into school life, and remains
interwoven with it. And here again the influence of the church on
a most important part of the nation's culture, the education of
youth, is easily apparent. As young Levites, the Benson boys were
eligible to scholarships in various great public schools. Eton was
their natural destination, and there Arthur and Hugh entered and
won distinction. Edward was unsuccessful in various competi-
tions, and forced to content himself with Marlborough where,
however, he made himself perfectly at home. Not since Tom
Brown have we had so winning an account of an English boy's
school-days. The shy master, Beesly, who for his pupils made the
Greeks “the supreme interpreters of humanity,” and was a champion
at rackets; the matches at cricket, rackets, and football; The Marl-
burian; the "Penny Readings" with Haydn's Toy Symphony and
recitations by Harry Irving, all these elements of school life are
delightfully present. But the theme which Mr Benson touches
most delicately and subtly is friendship—the friendship of boys.
“That which above all gilded and glorified these delights, that
which was the stem from which their green leaves drew nourish-
ment, was friendship. All these were the foliage that was fed from
that stem, though the sun and the clear windy air and the rain
fortified and refreshed them and swelled the buds that expanded
into flowers. For what man is there, surrounded though he be
with the love of wife and children, who does not retain a memory
of the romantic affection of boys for each other? Having felt it,
he could scarcely have forgotten it, and if he never felt it, he
missed one of the most golden of the prizes of youth, unrecaptur-
able in mature life.”
Here is the English school-boy's version of Newman's theme,
The Parting of Friends.
“ 'It's been ripping anyhow,' he said. “Did two fellows ever
have such a good time?'
“Quite suddenly at that, when the passing-bell should have been
loudest, it ceased altogether. The whole of my dismal maunder-
ings about days that were dead and years that were past, I knew


ROBERT MORSS LOVETT
699
<
to be utterly mistaken. Nothing that was worth having was dead
or past at all: it was all here now, and all mine, a possession
eternally alive.
“ 'But did they?' he repeated, as I did not answer.
“ Never, nor will. And there's chapel-bell. Get up.'
'
"He stood up and picked the grass seeds from his clothes.
“ 'Psalms this morning,' he said telegraphically.
“ 'I know. “Brethren and companions' sake.”
sake.” Didn't think
you had noticed.'
“ Rather. Good old Psalm.'
“I took up the cricket-bag, and he pulled at it to carry it. A
handle came off.
"'Ass,' said I.
“ 'Well, it was three quarters off already,' said he. 'Come on;
we shall be late. You can leave it at the porter's lodge.'
''Oh, may I, really? Thanks awfully,' said I.
Sarc,' said he.”
There are two races which have made boyhood and young man-
hood a perfect thing of wonder and delight, the Greeks and the
English. With both, the magic elements are reverence and friend-
ship, the fear of the gods and the love of man. How much of this
simple human beauty was due to the presence of an established
religion so traditional as to be taken for granted, so beautiful in
its forms and worship as to be compelling, so intimate as to enter
into the daily routine, can be seen in Mr Benson's book. Doubt-
less the author of Our Family Affairs and of Dodo would describe
himself as eminently a secular person, a man of the world. Yet,
as it were in spite of himself, he has given in his best and truest
writing an apology for the ecclesiastical system from which he made
it his earnest preoccupation to escape, a defence of the Church of
agland—and, let it be added, a strong argument against the
celibacy of the clergy.
Robert Morss Lovett


THESE THINGS ARE BANAL .
.
BREAKERS AND GRANITE. By John Gould Fletcher.
12mo. 163 pages. The Macmillan Company. New
York.
Punch: The IMMORTAL LIAR. By Conrad Aiken.
12mo. 80 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. New York.
IT
T is easy to be dogmatic about Conrad Aiken or John Gould
Fletcher, but in their case dogmatism carries one nowhere. The
very obviousness of their defects and their virtues makes it danger-
ous to render a final judgement of the sort that should go ringing
down the halls of a questionable eternity. One could say safely,
“Fletcher is ecstatic but muddy.” One could say, "Aiken is a
great musician who can work only in one key.” In such limited
judgements one would be reasonably safe. But whether Fletcher's
muddiness or his ecstasy, and whether Aiken's melody or his mo
notony will be remembered, it would be impossible to say. Mean-
while they offer definite qualities to imitate and to avoid. And
there is the assurance that they are willing to learn by their own
mistakes—and by each other's.
The weakness of Breakers and Granite is even more apparent ,
than is usual with Fletcher. He has attempted the extravagant
task of writing a book about America. In a hundred and sixty
pages of verse he tries to delineate the spiritual geography of a
territory whose area you may find by consulting the World Al-
manac, and to bottle the fine essence of a hundred million lives.
Naturally most of the essence escapes; the book resolves itself into
a sort of Cook's Tour of the United States, in which he sweeps
across prairies and mesas, ricochets from bank to bank down the
Mississippi, and sketches Chicago and Manhattan briefly as if
from an aeroplane. In this case he is a poet led astray by the
desire for infinity.
This is a criticism of the general plan of the volume; it does
not apply to the individual poems. Here his virtues are just
as obvious; when he pauses in his headlong course to paint a par-


MALCOLM COWLEY
701
ticular landscape he can be thoroughly satisfying. There is no
muddy rapture, for example, about his Mississippi River poems;
instead there is a detailed ecstasy and immediacy. His poem on
the Canyon of the Colorado is grandiose, but here the subject re-
quires a certain grandiosity:
“I have seen that which is mysterious,
Aloof, divided, silent;
Something not of this earth.”
The adjectives are not new, but they are arranged exactly as they
should be; he has said the only thing possible about the Canyon.
The defects of Aiken's last book are as obvious as Fletcher's.
He is another victim of the nostalgia of the infinite, only in his
case the infinities are temporal rather than spatial. He has walled
himself about in a barren circle of love and death. When he has
stripped life arbitrarily to these essentials, it becomes as monoto-
nous as a prison, and there is no escape for him except by projecting
his troubles indefinitely through time. That is why the Punch of
the present volume is called The Immortal Liar instead of being
treated as an untruthful individual. That is why Punch rushes
through the centuries to bargain with Mephistopheles and to sit
on the lap of the Queen of Sheba.
There is a certain monotony of effect about the volume, but
the monotony lies in Aiken's attitude toward his subject and not in
his technique. The melody of his verse is apparent as never before.
Partly it is apparent because he has returned to more regular verse,
with a skill acquired during his divagations among free forms. He
has mastered the art of first establishing a pattern and then varying
from it. Punch, in the alehouse, speaks in bawdy couplets. Punch
reflects in blank verse. And when Punch falls to cosmic boasting,
the metre is altered grandiloquently:
a
"This heart that beats here,—underneath my hand,
All of the clocks in the world keep time with it!
Even the stars in the sky, the sun and planets,
Measure their time by me! I am the centre!"
In this passage one notices again the preoccupation with time.


702
THESE THINGS ARE BANAL .
I made the distinction of infinity and eternity between Fletcher
and Aiken; although it may seem a little arbitrary, it holds through-
out their respective volumes with amazing consistency. With re-
gard to form, the genesis of their work is even more different.
Whereas Fletcher thinks naturally in free verse, or rather in that
sort of free verse where the line unit is a single breath, Aiken, on
the other hand, is most at ease in iambic pentameters; the heroic
line is the norm towards which and away from which he varies.
Aiken uses rhyme naturally. Fletcher avoids it, and when he does
rhyme, one can usually detect the influence of Aiken.
For these two poets, in many ways so different, at one time
reacted strongly on each other. During a winter not so far distant
(I do not remember the exact year) they lived in neighbouring
garrets on Beacon Hill. There was a great deal of visiting back
and forth, and, necessarily, a certain interchange of ideas. One
poem of Aiken's, written about that time, shows his debt to Fletcher
especially; even the title of The White Nocturne is reminiscent of
the latter's colour symphonies. Meanwhile Fletcher was playing
the borrower as well as the lender. It was in his White Symphony
that he wrote:
“In midnight, in mournful moonlight
By paths I could not trace
I walked in the white garden,
Each flower had a white face.
Their perfume intoxicated me; thus I began my dream.”
The most familiar elements of Aiken's magic are here: the
garden, the moonlight, the perfume, the dream. In a stanza
from The Empty House (included in a volume which Fletcher
published in London two or three years later) the relationship of
the two poets is even more apparent:
"Was this a dream-house? Or was I the dream?
Wind and dancing sunlight gave no answer.
I only knew that I was abandoned,
Betrayed by these back-shrinking walls.”


MALCOLM COWLEY
703
There are any number of lines in Senlin and in The Jig of Forslin
which recall these. At the moment I can only quote as prototype:
-
"Has Senlin become a forest? Do we walk in Senlin?
Is Senlin the wood we walk in, ourselves,—the world?
Senlin! we cry
.. Senlin! again
. No answer,
Only soft broken echoes backward hurled.”
.
a
This quoting of parallel passages could be extended indefinitely
—and vainly. If one chanced to exhaust the relationship between
Fletcher and Aiken, one could turn to that between Fletcher and
Amy Lowell—sometimes much more obvious. Or one could use
the parallelisms between Aiken and T. S. Eliot, like a writer in a
recent Dial. And at the end very little would be accomplished.
For one would have proved only that poets learn from their con-
temporaries as well as from their predecessors—a fact which one
-a
could have verified more easily from readings in Shakespeare and
Marlowe, or from a study of Dorothy Wordsworth's Diary.
And yet it is a fact which the more romantic members of the
present generation (in other words, the majority) are striving
vigorously to forget. Behind Miss Deutsch's attack on Conrad
Aiken there lay an idea of a totally different sort: namely, that
poems may spring, fully adorned, from the forehead of
any
casual
Jove. Put in another way, it is the idea of the poet as a modern St
Simeon Stylites, who, standing aloof on a pillar, draws master-
pieces from the wells of the Inner Consciousness.
The whole question of authorship and originality has been ridicu-
lously over-emphasized during the last century. The results are
upon us in an epidemic of bad grammar and bad workmanship, and,
curiously enough, in a great deal of unconscious plagiarism.
Far better if the imitation be conscious. The poet is a workman
to whom a certain task has been set, and it is no dishonour if he
calls on his fellows to aid him. Or he might be compared more
specifically to a builder at work on the unfinished edifice of litera-
ture. He contributes an arch or a nave or the portion of a wall,
and passes on; the important question is not his identity but
whether he has done his work well. The workman who succeeds
him builds further upon what has already been constructed, as La-


704
.
THESE THINGS ARE BANAL .
forgue built on Baudelaire and as T. S. Eliot has built on Laforgue.
There are periods of general demolition—and they are very neces-
sary—in which the false work of several generations is torn down,
but never is one forced to begin again on new foundations. For to
be completely original, one would have to invent a language of
one's own; even the idiom in which we work is a sort of crystallized
poetry. ... These things are banal, but they are irritatingly true.
Aiken and Fletcher recognize their truth; that is why these bor-
rowings back and forth are significant. In a generation so proud
of its independence that it gets nowhere, they have been content,
for a little while, to work together towards a common aim. A
certain amount of shoddy workmanship must be debited to each
of them, but they accomplish something; their aim and their
achievement is part of the mind of the race.
MALCOLM COWLEY


THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY
HUMAN TRAITS AND THEIR SOCIAL SIGNIFICANCE.
By Irwin Edman. 12mo. 467 pages. Houghton
Mifflin Company. Boston.
The PsyCHOLOGY OF PERSUASION. By William
MacPherson. 12 mo. 256 pages. E. P. Dutton and
Company. New York.
The BEHAVIOR OF Crowds. By Everett Dean Mar-
tin. 8vo. 312 pages. Harper and Brothers. New
York.
The Psychology of Social RECONSTRUCTION.
By G. T. W. Patrick. 12 mo. 273 pages. Houghton
Mifflin Company. Boston.
The New Psychology. By A. G. Tansley. 8vo.
.
283 pages. Dodd, Mead and Company. New York.
Our Social HERITAGE. By Graham Wallas. 8vo.
307 pages. Yale University Press. New Haven.
of to
TH
HE new psychology is really a departure-new in content,
for an understanding of human nature and the laws underlying
its effective adjustment to the world. Nowhere has this new con-
tent been more succinctly indicated that in Mr Tansley's defini-
tional paragraphs:
“The New Psychology looks upon the human mind as a highly
evolved organism, intimately adapted, as regards its most funda-
mental traits, to the needs of its possessor,
built
up
and elaborated
during a long course of evolution in constant relation to those needs,
but often showing the most striking want of adaptation and ad-
justment to the rapidly developed and rapidly changing demands
of modern civilized life. Its most fundamental activities are non-


706
THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY
rational and largely unconscious activities. The power of conscious
reasoning is a later development, playing but a minor part, even in
the most highly developed human being, on the surface, so to speak,
of the firmly built edifice of instincts, emotions, and desires, which
form the main structure of the mental organism. In many cases
the apparent importance of rational activity is seen to be illusory,
forming as it were a mere cloak for the action of deep-seated in-
stincts and desires.
“The New Psychology obtains its material from the whole field
of mental life, normal and abnormal, from external observation and
from introspection, from the study of behaviour and conduct, from
art, literature and practical life, from mythology and history, from
the habits and customs of primitive peoples, and from those of the
most advanced civilizations. Already great strides have been
made towards a self-consistent and illuminating interpretation of
the human mind, and the field of future investigation seems illimi-
table..
-
Each of the books here under review evidences the changed
emphasis of contemporary psychology. Whether it be Professor
Edman making a lucid statement as to the characteristic elements
of the human equipment and of the typical social interactions which
it evokes, or Professor Wallas concerned to see how those psychic
factors in our civilization which are not matters of physical inheri-
tance are to be transmitted from one generation to the next, the
interest is fundamentally the same; it is to get a picture of the
scope, strength, and weakness of the human mind under the stresses
and strains of civilized life. Psychology has become to a sur-
prising degree, and almost against its will, but because of its ap-
preciation of the forces which make mental life possible, a social
science concerned with the actual and possible effects of mind upon
mind. Even the psychology of mental measurement although con-
cerned with individual status measures from a base which is usually
socially derived and the result is in terms of a comparison of the
individual's attainments with those of some hypothetical "normal"
or "average” person.
Not less truly is the method of these studies similar-based
largely on accumulated bodies of such fact data as observation of
behaviour, biography, current events (although one could hardly say
a


ORDWAY TEAD
707
that the laboratory methods of a consistent behaviourist like Wat-
son are applicable to the type of crowd study made by Mr Martin).
This similarity of method means that the element of interpretation
and personal bias is a factor to be reckoned with and scientific
success is determined by the degree of disinterestedness in the choice
and use of illustrative matter. It does not necessarily mean,
however, that the closer a writer will cling to tested laboratory con-
clusions, the sounder his findings will be; admittedly the labora-
tory method of controlled experiment is available for comparatively
little of the more active and elaborate human behaviour which we
seek to understand. But it does mean that the closer the author
will stick to accepted psychological findings or to statements which
can be reinforced by quantitative measurement, the less assailable
is his work likely to be. Thus Edman and Tansley fare better,
scientifically speaking, than Patrick.
Again, in result these widely different volumes come to much the
same thing. They supply a general picture of our human nature
which despite differences in vocabulary is fundamentally similar
in each volume. The characterization which the above-quoted
paragraph from Mr Tansley provides is typical, although Wallas,
Edman, and Patrick would probably argue a much greater actual
influence of intelligence in life than Tansley suggests. The com-
mon recognition given to the influence of events which are forgot-
ten, but in some way still powerful in conduct, and to impulses
which the individual has attempted to suppress, shows the wide in-
fluence of the Freudians in respect to their significant contribution.
Indeed the recent books of W. H. R. Rivers of Cambridge and Pro-
fessor Hollingworth of Columbia agree in finding another than the
sex basis for the “neurosis," and thus while accepting the idea of
functional neurosis they find a wider causation than simply sex re-
pressions. Which means that from one angle or another a needed
corrective is being given to psychoanalytical psychology which
promises to bring its unique results into harmony with the central
body of accepted psychological scholarship and terminology. Cer-
tainly, as Tansley shows, a reading of any considerable number of
the volumes in this school brings an appreciation of the fact that if
the medical writers of the Freudian group had been familiar with
"straight psychology,” they would have been less at pains to build
up an independent nomenclature, thus compounding confusion in
a


708
THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY
any discussion which is honestly seeking to recognize the kernel of
new truth which they are bringing.
Of special interest is the concern which is manifested in several
of these books—notably those of Edman, Martin, Patrick, and
Wallas—as to the future of civilization. Whether or not man
can control the industrial enterprise he has built up, whether he
can get his mind around the idea of world co-operation sufficiently
to act wisely on world issues, whether he can provide education so
that the will to co-operate and the data for intelligent co-operation
will keep pace with the necessity for co-operation—these are ques-
tions to which the reflective student is led when once he knows what
frail higher mammals we are. The very asking of them seems to me
a salutary thing. We are, as a civilization, coming out of a period
of warfare of unprecedented magnitude where the co-operative ef-
fort called into play was likewise on an unprecedented scale. The
machinery of “persuasion,” of propaganda, of crowd influence was
developed and used with a precision heretofore unthought of.
Inter-allied administrative agencies operated successfully on a scale
formerly impossible. The forces of destruction invented and made
manifest were hideous; the forces of constructive human
power,
of
moral devotion and fortitude displayed were grand. Prophecy con-
cerning reconstruction after an era of such deep-seated contradic-
tions is of little avail. But if civilization is becoming too heavy
to carry itself, we shall at least be warned; we shall see human
nature for what it is and we shall continue to overtax it at our peril.
It is because the new psychology can without becoming senti-
mental or too conjectural consider these problems of social control,
“heritage,” and “reconstruction,” that we have a right to be
cautiously hopeful about it. The attitude of "conscious experi-
mentalism” for which Dewey has argued is taken more or less de-
liberately by all of the writers here under review and we get an
appreciation at once of values and purposes in social life which the
past has tested to a point which warrants our serious consideration
of them while at the same time a basis is laid for their revaluation
in our increasing knowledge of the functional limits of our natures.
A word as to the individual merits of these books may suggest
their relative usefulness. Professor Edman has, I believe, pre-
sented the clearest, most direct and authoritative statement thus
far made of the consensus of present psychological scholarship re-
a


ORDWAY TEAD
709
garding the human equipment and its typical behaviour. Written
for freshmen at Columbia it has an appeal and value for a wide
non-academic audience.
Mr MacPherson's book about "persuasion” is suggestive of some
of the uses of a psychological technique in affecting changes of in-
dividual opinion. In a new field where tremendously important
aids to social integration are to be looked for, he has really only
hinted at the possibilities and he has failed to take adequate account
of the most recent American experience on the subject.
Mr Martin has attempted to establish a connection between the
characteristics of crowd behaviour and the repression mechanism of
the Freudians. While calling attention to some of our gravest
problems of social adjustment, he does not seem to me by his an-
alogy to contribute especially to a deeper insight into those prob-
lems. The book is more valuable as analysis than synthesis.
Professor Patrick is mindful for the future of our country and
civilization. He inclines to the view that we are "going to the
dogs"-with drink, dancing, dames, and disintegration of moral
standards undermining our life. His criticism of modern notions
of "self realization” are in point and his insistence on the uses of
"applied science” sound; but as a whole the book seems to me to be
more moralistic than rigorously scientific.
To Mr Tansley must go credit for accomplishing successfully a
difficult task. He has taken his McDougall, his Trotter, and his
Freudians, mixed them with shrewd insight and common sense, and
produced a generalized view of human nature which is a distinctly
synthetic and incisive contribution. It deserves unqualified com.
mendation.
Mr Wallas in his most recent study carries on the implications
of his earlier work. He is concerned for the ability of the mind so
to master its heritage of necessary ideas that it can effectively play
its rôle in modern life. He puts a fundamental problem with great
artistry—indeed one feels at times that a classic literary excellence
has been achieved at the sacrifice of sharpness and brevity of argu-
ment. To me the chapter summaries at the beginning of the book
seem more effective scientific writing than the actual text. But the
book repays reading, even if the admiring student of Mr Wallas'
contribution to modern thought feels, as I did, that his earlier work
was more significant.
ORDWAY TEAD


SOME ENGLISH CRITICS
LIFE AND LETTERS. By J. C. Squire. 12mo. 320
pages. George H. Doran and Company. New York.
REPUTATIONS. By Douglas Goldring. 12mo. 232
pages. Thomas Seltzer. New York.
The Art of LETTERS. By Robert Lynd. 8vo. 240
pages. Charles Scribner's Sons. New York.
THE EVOLUTION OF AN INTELLECTUAL. 8vo. 227
pages. ASPECTS OF LITERATURE. 8vo. 204 pages.
By John Middleton Murry. Alfred A. Knopf. New
York.
T
HE books noted above are all collections of critical essays and
book reviews by English writers and taken in lump they are
impressive. They encourage us to believe that in England a great
many books are reviewed by literary critics, and Mr Lynd speaks
of "an immense public which reads book-reviews,” and says that
"many thousands of readers have acquired the habit of reading
criticism of current literature.” Yet Mr T. S. Eliot is of the
opinion that Coleridge was in a sense the last of England's critics;
an icy voice alluded to by Mr Murry announces that "there is
reviewing, but no criticism," and Mr Murry himself reproaches
the London Mercury for leaving us still a little in the dark con-
cerning those standards of authoritative criticism which it proposed
to restore. Private information (from one who has not recov-
ered from the war and therefore asks that the source of his authori-
ty be kept secret) leads us to believe that criticism there is a feud
as well as an art. There is said to be a Daily News gang and there
was an Athenaeum gang and, such is the potency of format, a
London Mercury group. These, with daggers, complete the an-
alogy to our own position and although I get more satisfaction from
reading the work of Mr Eliot and of Mr Murry than I get from any
contemporary critic publishing regularly in America, I am per-
suaded that art and letters are very much in the same predicament
a


SGANARELLE
711
there as here. The predicament is their odd and variable relation
to criticism.
There appears to be an opinion widely held that it is a good
thing for a large number of people to read a large number of books;
perversely enough this is associated with the phrase, the greatest
good of the greatest number, and is amusingly called utilitarianism.
Those who hold this opinion think highly of the reviewer and are
never quite sure what the critic is driving at. And they would, I sup-
pose, urge Mr Squire to remain always Solomon Eagle. Although
the present collection appeared under Mr Squire's proper name it
contains even less of criticism than the two volumes of Books in
General. The New Statesman was the first source; Land and
Water published the present lot; there is no reason why The Out-
look should not afford a third. Mr Squire makes everything about
books agreeable; one encounters here a genial spirit who cannot re-
sist anything between covers and is competent to talk about his
weekly liaisons with literature. In the course of his causerie Mr
Squire shows himself sensible always, reasonable, and with some
sound prejudices. When he says something which ought to be said,
you are grateful because you know that Mr Squire's readers are
aware of his pontifical position elsewhere and will probably give
him heed. Mr Squire's books, until he begins to publish his criti-
cal work, will lead men to letters, and leave them there with no
particularly acute appreciation of them. As for himself, it is futile
to attempt judgement, since these books, being written without
power, show no limitations. .
Mr Lynd and Mr Goldring, whatever their politics may be, do
much less for the purely numerical grandeur of letters. They
both want good books to be intelligently read. Mr Goldring is
impatient of certain manufactured reputations and is equally im-
patient with the slow process by which good work imposes itself
upon the reading community. He is appreciative and serious,
but all sorts of extraneous matter creeps into his essays so that they
fall as short of clear thinking as of pure literature. Mr Lynd is
much more the professional critic and reviewer; at least part of his
criticism is his apology for his reviews. A review, he believes,
should be a portrait of a book, or better still, a portrait of an
author. He is therefore indifferent to those reviewers who spend
their time attacking the Hall Caines and Corellis and Garvices for
not being Conrads and Anatole Frances and Hardys. He might


712
SOME ENGLISH CRITICS
make his point more certain by noting that these are the very critics
who usually acclaim the next cut above the mediocre and are really
dangerous because they convince people that the nearly good are
good enough. Criticism is a different thing:
“True criticism is a search for beauty and truth and an announce-
ment of them. It does not care twopence whether the method of
their revelation is new or old, academic or futuristic. It only asks
that the revelation shall be genuine. It is concerned with form
because beauty and truth demand perfect expression. But it is a
mere heresy in aesthetics to say that perfect expression is the whole
of art that matters. It is the spirit that breaks through the form
that is the main interest of criticism.”
Mr Lynd's book is written in that spirit, with occasional
diversions by way of reviewing. It is clearly written and enter-
taining; Mr Lynd is not afraid of quoting, and he quotes with
discrimination; in writing of Wilde he has a pretty turn, saying, for
example: "He was addicted rather than devoted to language.”
There is no passion for letters; there is very little passion of any
kind in the book. But he writes with admiration of admirable
books and people; his portraits of Walpole and Shelley are exceed-
ingly attractive. He likes the sensation of being just.
There is passion enough in the books of Mr Middleton Murry.
Although he is a reviewer of books, with him we pass almost alto-
gether out of the range of the reader. The direction of his criticism
is towards the creator, the artist. The title of one of his books
confesses him an intellectual and whatever concerns literature in
that book is secondary, for it is Mr Murry's morality and his
philosophy which are important there. It is about the war and
expresses very well the evolution of despair and the grim re-
crudescence of courage which were the history of many intellectu-
als. But as far as criticism of literature goes it gives instances
enough of what Mr Eliot calls? "the pernicious effect of emotion.”
The pernicious effect of ideas Mr Murry would probably accept
as a tribute to his later work. I have said that he is interested in
the artist; he is deeply interested in the ideas of the artist and he
seems to be trying to ennoble literature by giving it good ideas.
1 In the Sacred Wood (Knopf). Reviewed in The Dial for March.


SGANARELLE
713
I am aware that the words are odd, but it would be much the same
thing if one said high ideals, and neither should suggest that Mr
Murry is a prig or a preacher. He says that “the pith and marrow
of Aristotle's literary criticism is a system of moral values derived
from his contemplation of life.” Moral values Mr Murry cares
for, and the reason he cares for art is because “there is no other
power than our aesthetic intuition by which we can imagine or
conceive it [an ideal of the good life); we can express it only in
aesthetic terms." And criticism is valuable because it is the har-
monious control of art by art.” Or, about Chekhov: “There is
in him less admixture of preoccupations that are not purely
aesthetic, and probably for this reason he has less creative vigour
than any other artist of equal rank.” It seems to me that at an
earlier stage Mr Murry might have suggested that if Chekhov had
had Tolstoi's ideal of humanity, he would have been a greater
artist; critics are continually suggesting that sort of thing and Mr
Murry's intellectual honesty shows in his refusal to reduce Chekhov
in rank. But the quality of his mind and his idea of criticism are
as implicit in that one judgement as they are explicit in the other
sentences I have quoted from him. Compare this with some of Mr
Eliot's requirements for the critic: “ a creative interest, a
focus upon the immediate future. The important critic is the per-
son who is absorbed in the present problems of art, and who wishes
to bring the forces of the past to bear upon the solution of these
problems.” Perhaps it is unnecessary to emphasize words in this
It is not even necessary to choose between Mr Murry
and Mr Eliot; but it is important to understand that if Mr Murry
is going to serve letters by bringing illumination to the artist, Mr
Eliot will serve letters no less by bringing light to the critic.
.
statement.
SGANARELLE


BRIEFER MENTION
1
A CASE IN CAMERA, by Oliver Onions (12mo, 320 pages; Macmillan) is a
well conceived and very well written story which escapes the classification
of "mystery" by several miles, yet is probably better than any mystery
story of the year because of Mr Onions' endless skill with his characters,
his complete mastery of his method, his abundant humour, because, in
short, he is a competent novelist who has chosen to twist a theme he has
used before-justifiable homicide-to the uses of a psychological puzzle.
Credible human beings, doing things for obscure, credible reasons, are rare
in any kind of fiction; they are a godsend in stories of entertainment. Mr
Onions has knocked the dummy detective story utterly cold.
1
PEOPLE, by Pierre Hamp (12mo, 206 pages ; Harcourt, Brace & Company)
brings to American readers a proletarian De Maupassant. The author,
rich in experience, identifies himself with short and extremely realistic
sketches of women of the streets, scullions, carpenters, clerks, all those
types of the submerged strugglers of Paris. For the most part objective,
the reader will note at times a profound irony behind the writer's work.
There are moments when the intense social consciousness of Maxim Gorki
manifests itself so strongly as to suggest a deliberate discipleship on Pierre
Hamp's part.
The Old Man's YOUTH AND THE YOUNG Man's Old Age, by William De
Morgan (12mo, 528 pages; Holt) left unfinished at the author's death, is
satisfactorily rounded out by Mrs De Morgan's interpolated chapters, and
secures a place beside his other novels-shrewd, leisurely, sprightly, and
minutely detailed. A curious blend of the Victorian and the modern in
spirit, and deriving an added interest from the fact that it is more or less
autobiographical.
Dust, by Mr and Mrs Haldeman-Julius (12mo, 251 pages; Brentano)
makes no compromise with its theme-the drab, unhorizoned, soul-
destroying existence of one who harvests, not to fill his bins, but to swell
his coffers. As a picture of the drudgery of farm life on the Kansas plains,
it is a substantial performance, free from affectation and skilful in char-
acterization.
The HEADLAND, by C. A. Dawson-Scott (12mo, 276 pages; Knopf) may be
described as a “highstrung" novel. Its locale is the wild Cornish coast
where the family of Pendragons have lived for hundreds of years. The
major theme of the book is the degeneration of this family and the action
at times rises to a horror that is emphasized through the nervous naturalistic
style of the author. The head of the Pendragon family, an old man suf-
fering from palsy, may almost be described as a Sadist because of the
extreme pleasure he takes in the sufferings of others. The style of the
author shows the influence of the later May Sinclair.


BRIEFER MENTION
715
Pagan Fire, by Norval Richardson (12mo, 382 pages; Scribner) has back-
ground and sophistication-attributes which lift it above the level of a
mere story of political and romantic intrigue. Mr Richardson is at home
with his material, and the result is a novel of decided interest, keenly
written and shrewd in characterization.
CHRISTMAS Roses, by Anne Douglas Sedgwick (12mo, 326 pages ; Houghton
Mifflin) comprises stories of English life, neat as a clipped hedge, but
somewhat thin and precious even in their most unconventional moments.
In emotion, they are artificial, and in atmosphere, they give off the vitiated,
unexhilarating air of a hothouse.
The Best Short STORIES OF 1920, edited by Edward J. O'Brien (12mo,
500 pages; Small, Maynard) needs at this date no detailing of its merits.
As the sixth volume of a series long since past the experimental period, it
presents itself as a sane, stimulating, and judicious handbook, as varied
and inclusive as one can humanly demand for a work of this kind. Its
bestowal of the laurel is basically broad-minded; a catholic taste preserves
a nice balance between purely aesthetic values and those of psychological
and imaginative reality. A marked trend towards the elevation of content
above form, of substance above the mere technique of a well-made tale, is
perhaps the outstanding impression which one gleans from the present col-
lection.
The EMPEROR JONES, DIFF'RENT, THE STRAW; by Eugene O'Neill (12mo,
285 pages ; Boni & Liveright). Two of these plays have been presented
this year with a success to substantiate considerably Mr O'Neill's reputa-
tion, and The Straw, we hear, is to appear next season. Just how much this
play concerning the love of two consumptives will beguile the public
remains to be seen. Only from reading it we prefer those plays of fishing
smacks and the Caribbean Sea to this one of a sanatorium, with all its
sputum cups. Certainly in this book The Emperor Jones is distinctly the
most important, the best reading, in spite of its essentially pictorial char-
acter. But we miss in them all that living talk of the earlier one-act plays.
Ships in Harbour, by David Morton (12mo, 101 pages; Putnam) presents
its author as a sonneteer of facile grace but rather tenuous thought. There
are approximately ninety poems in the book of which all but a meager
dozen are shaped in the Shakespearean sonnet form. There is nothing casier
to do badly than this particular form and it is surprising to note how well
Mr Morton lifts his efforts above mediocrity. It is still more surprising to
note that after the volume is completely read the reader does not carry one
sonnet away in his memory.
ENGLISH MADRIGAL VERSE, 1588-1632, edited by E. H. Fellowes (12mo, 640
pages; Oxford University Press) is a collection, buttressed formidably
with notes, of madrigals, canzonets, and ayres. The minor lyricists of the
Elizabethan and Jacobean period have suffered the fate of being discussed
a great deal and very little read; in fact Mr Fellowes' volume is the first
complete reprint of their work as it appears in the old songbooks.


716
BRIEFER MENTION
THE MARRIAGE Feast, by Marie Tudor Garland (12mo, 145 pages; Put-
nam) is so natural and genuine an expression of life that the author seems
at times a very mouthpiece of the earth. With no trace of mannerism, with
scarcely any thought for form, Mrs Garland has written of love, mother-
hood, dreams, and disillusionment, taking the world as she finds it and
with a keen passion for living. The poems are often musical and always
vivid, but there is some disparity between the beauty of the thought and
the sometimes monotonous form of the verse. The rhythms are too often
stroked the wrong way. This is not the conscious casting off of form to
concentrate on the image. It is expression too eager for its vehicle, full-
hearted, intent on understanding.
AN ANTHOLOGY OF RECENT POETRY, compiled by L. D. O. Walters (12mo,
113 pages; Dodd, Mead) does not profess to include the best of recent
verse; rather it represents the taste of one man. Mr Walters stresses
the innocuous side of Georgian poetry; his selections deal with dogs and
donkeys and trees and babies. As a result his anthology resembles noth-
ing quite so much as A Child's Garden of Verse. . Harold Monro
contributes an introduction in words of one syllable. The same book, with
illustrations, has been published by Brentano's and serves a different pur-
pose most agreeably.
The WRITER's Art, compiled by Rollo Walter Brown (12mo, 357 pages;
Harvard University Press) is a text-book on literary craftsmanship dif-
fering in this important respect from most pedagogic pamphlets—it is writ-
ten entirely by men who themselves know how to write. Comprising the
opinions of two generations of authors, and including such diverse names
as Diderot, Buffon, Copleston, Hazlitt, Stevenson, Spencer, Thackeray,
Schopenhauer, Maupassant, De Quincey, Emerson, Lewes, Poe, Conrad,
James, Quiller-Couch, and Norris, the book is a collaborative treatise on
nearly every problem of the pen. It will of course inform no one how to
become a genius. Indeed, it probably will not cure even one fool of his
folly, for the simple reason that none but the elect are likely to peruse it.
MAYFAIR TO Moscow, by Clare Sheridan (illus., 12mo, 239 pages; Boni &
Liveright) is a journal which reflects the feminine graces by its intuition,
and the artistic graces by its vivacity. Here are Russian impressions caught
by observation and verified in plaster, together with much anecdote and
just enough sophisticated gossip to give it flavour. When Winston
Churchill said to her: “Clare! You have the most enviable position in the
world-you are a woman, you are an artist, you are free and you have
children"-Mrs Sheridan did not dissent, and so the capitulation of Bol-
shevik dictators became but a question of time.
An English Wife in Berlin, by Evelyn, Princess Blücher (8vo, 336 pages;
Dutton) is a simple and affecting book, sharing little of the sensational
quality of other war diaries, making a revelation or two of importance, but
revealing, far more significantly, a spirit sensitive to the madness which it
was more poignantly than most able to experience and to understand. The
title of the book and the parentage of the writer indicate the setting.


BRIEFER MENTION
717
LETTERS FROM CHINA AND JAPAN, by John Dewey and Alice Chipman
Dewey (12mo, 311 pages; Dutton) have an informal charm which oblit-
erates the family tie and initiates the casual reader into the delights of
their chatty intimacy. The descriptive bits are gay and humorous, and the
comment and observation have a background of sanity and scholarship
sadly lacking in the factory run of travel books for American consumption.
The SEA AND THE JUNGLE, by H. M. Tomlinson (8vo, 354 pages; Dutton)
enjoyed a succès d'estime many years ago and is republished so that more
readers may learn to know Mr Tomlinson's great narrative gifts—this
record of a sea voyage is full of enchanting stories—and his for the most
part unpretentious style in descriptions of the unknown reaches of the
Amazon. It is more interesting than most novels, probably because the
author was willing to expose himself to a hundred experiences and to a
thousand sensations without falsifying a single one in his port.
A Last Diary, by W. N. P. Barbellion, with a preface by Arthur J. Cum-
mings (12mo, 148 pages; Doran) completes The Journal of a Dis-
appointed Man. It has the humour and the shamelessness which Bruce
Cummings hoped reviewers would find in that earlier work of his; little
essays on politics and on literature; but chiefly the daily entries of a supe-
rior being in torture. It is full of courage and justifies the quotation on its
title-page, “We are in the power of no calamity while Death is in our
own.'
THE MEMOIRS OF Count WITTE, translated from the original Russian manu-
script and edited by Abraham Yarmolinsky (8vo, 445 pages; Doubleday,
Page). These leisurely reminiscences of "Russia's great liberal statesman'
have neither the psychological curiosity of a Retz nor the iridescent on-dits
of the incomparable Saint-Simon. This circumstance, however, does not
detract from the high value of the book as indubitable source material for
the history of the reigns of the last two autocrats of all the Russias. It is
remarkable for the variety and interest of the experience so unpretentiously
presented. Although a stickler for the divine right, Witte does not spare
anointed personalities, which accounts for the Czar's attempts to seize the
manuscript. While the book does not permit us to discover how large the
editor's contribution has been, the work has been patiently and judiciously
done.
FRENCH CIVILIZATION, by Albert Léon Guérard (12mo, 328 pages; Hough-
ton Mifflin). This volume, the companion to M Guérard's French Civil-
ization in the Nineteenth Century, is concerned only with the past tense of
culture. From the Eolithic age down through mere antiquity and the
Middle Ages, the vitality of French culture is kept before us, the details
which illustrate it being unerringly selected to reveal the continuity and
the breadth of the process. It is a delightful book with much of the charm
of Froissart in its manner and the erudition of Guizot in its matter. Clear,
compact, and vigorous, its brief space is crammed full without loss of
human colour or keen ironic comment on the immaturities of old institutions
and ideals.


!
MODERN ART
THE
1
HE failure of the Pittsburgh exhibition to be international
this year provides food for thought. An unusually generous
sum was set aside by Mr Carnegie for the furtherance of this
annual art gala, but apparently after all he did not set enough
aside to entice foreigners to lend us their thoughts. A sketch of a
soldier by Augustus John and casual canvasses by Sir John Lavery,
George W. Lambert, and Laura Knight—and somehow one feels
that the mighty British Empire has not cared to say it to us in
pictures. France, which almost owes its life as a nation to its
leadership in the arts, sends us works by Charles Cottet, Lucien
Simon, and René X. Prinet, who are all able enough in their several
ways, but scarcely exhilarating in the role of leaders.
We behold, in consequence, America having a singularly easy
time in a competition with rivals who used to be formidable, carry-
ing off all the money prizes and commanding such interest as there
is. Ardent patriots, noting the fact, might jump too quickly to
optimistic conclusions were it not for the hyphenated among us
who insist that Europe still has the goods and could if it would
show us up. In that case there's something in the situation that
needs explaining, for Europe might as well be warned that we
are only too eager to make the eagle scream the word "art" loud
enough to ring around the world, and that there are some among
us who at the first fancy that Europe may be too proud to fight
would be even willing to take advantage of the technical situation
created by the failure of the Carnegie Institute's exhibition to be
international.
It needs explaining upon two counts; first to us, for though not
absolutely convinced that international exhibitions are desirable
yet, since we have paid the money for one, we insist upon getting it;
and secondly to Europe, for if Europe fondly hopes that the second
class will still be good enough for America it is time she should be
undeceived.
The question, of course, brings in politics. How shall republics
be protected against their politicians? How shall true art be
encouraged, how shall we obtain officials who are more concerned


HENRY MCBRIDE
719
in the advancement of genius than in the preferment of friends, and
finally how shall a country put its best artistic foot foremost in a
time of international comparisons? Some hold that a Secretary
of Arts in the cabinet of the President would go a long way in
solving the problem, but in this connection it is well to remember
that the French have long had a Secretary of the Beaux Arts, and
the French, of all people, need to ponder most over the above
questions.
By some miracle the British Government did ask its foremost
men to take their paint boxes with them into the trenches, and by
another miracle these Muirhead Bones and Major Sir William
Orpens did memorable work there. For a modern government to
discriminate intelligently among its artists is so rare that some held
that this lone example must have been an accident. Governments,
like the artists themselves, are entitled to all the credit that they
can squeeze from their happy accidents, but this British instance
having occurred, it would seem likely that a little study of it with
the help of scientists—Christian or otherwise-might induce mira-
cles to happen in other countries.
The poor showing of France at Pittsburgh cannot be blamed
upon the war. In 1914 the French exhibit was only less stupid
than that of 1921 by a fraction, if at all. The affair is a matter
of bigotry, narrow-mindedness, of wrong committees, and politics.
During the war French artists were badly hit, as were artists every-
where. Innumerable little societies were formed by Americans to
assist the Frenchmen during this trying time (none that I heard
of were formed to help our almost equally distressed Americans)
and for all this Americans will continue to congratulate themselves
that they were able to help a little. Constant little collections of
ill-chosen French pictures were sent here by the usual hasty philan-
thropists desirous of getting a ribbon or other decoration, and these
were invariably treated as kindly by the critics as the charity of the
affair, and the state of war, obliged. But the fact remains that all
the works of art that have been sent us during the recent years
through more or less official channels have been unworthy of the
great reputation of the French. Now though as artists we are
rivals of the French, and though we intend to snatch the world
supremacy from them just as soon as we are able, we are after all
friendly rivals, and it is as friends rather than rivals that we advise
a


720
MODERN ART
them to look after their politicians. Certain people here are begin-
ning to think that nothing lively and interesting is claiming the
attention of Parisian art circles, that the academic productions
seen at Pittsburgh represent the summit of French achievement.
If these do not (and of course they do not) then see to it, Monsieur
le Ministre des Beaux-Arts, that the work of your genuine celebri-
ties gets to us. There's millions in prestige, as you know. You
have prestige. Why throw it away?
a
Two new sculptors were presented to the New York public
recently, Arthur Lee and Alfeo Faggi, and a word or two in regard
to each should go upon the record.
Mr Lee's tall gods and goddesses in white plaster crowded one
of the small rooms at Wildenstein's, reminding me of Rodin's
Citizens of Calais in that they seemed to spring up all over the
place, but not reminding me of the Citizens in
any
other
way.
Mr
Lee's Gods seemed more familiar with soap and water than the
haggard burghers and in fact it is clear they've had the best of
possible bringings-up since infancy. Possibly they had a French
nurse-French nurses are the best—and that explains the faint
far-away resemblances to something in the work of Joseph Bernard
and Maillol.
But Mr Lee is a sculptor and a sculptors' sculptor. It will prob-
ably be his fellow craftsmen in the end who will help him with
clients.
Not so with Mr Faggi. If success comes to him, and let us hope
it comes quickly to both these sculptors, it will come to him in
spite of his rival artists. Mr Faggi's work is the product of soul
torture and the clay and the bronze are minor incidents. He evi-
dently has terrific struggles with the unwilling materials, and
though in practically each of the pieces shown in the Bourgeois
Galleries there were passages of inspired modelling the thing as a
whole seldom came off. The Eva, a tall, slim, primitive, and still
innocent Eva, was his most complete performance, but there were
not enough complete performances in the show to justify prophecies
for the future. Mr Faggi's fellow sculptors, while admitting the
fine modelling of the legs in the Pietà, or the undeniable dignity of
the figure of the standing woman, or certain touches in the portraits,
will be apt to rebel at the other touches that jump out of value, at


HENRY MCBRIDE
721
the chaos of the groups, and the uncertainties of most of the bases.
On the other hand, there is real feeling in the work, and a decided
streak of mysticism. As there is much mysticism in the air these
days, due doubtless to the fearful shaking up the world has had,
there may be a popular response to Mr Faggi's effort. But it will
be some time before he conquers sculptors.
There's an immense amount that's consoling to artists in the
life of Constantin Guys and the beautiful new edition of the story
by Gustave Geffroy-Les Editions G. Crès et Cie.—will be found
fortifying. Almost any artist in any garret could die happy were
he persuaded that fine art must win eventually upon its merit and
that it does seems to be the moral of Constantin Guys' history.
Guys, himself, did all he could to shun fame. He had a passion
for obscurity, and even when fate knocked at his door in the person
of Charles Baudelaire he refused the poet permission to name him
in the essay that was being consecrated to his work, and so, though
the artist saw himself put down in immortal words, the public
could only guess at the individuality of the man whom Baudelaire
called Le Peintre de la Vie Moderne. Then Guys grew old, met
with an accident, spent seven lonely years in hospital, died, and
in spite of a famous chapter of eulogy by a famous writer, was
forgot
Guys produced his drawings of the coaches in the bois and the
filles of the dance-halls in prodigious quantities and scattered them
to the four winds prodigally. He sold the larger ones for a franc, ,
and others for fifteen and even ten cents. It is said that one could
obtain packets of them. Such lightly appraised work naturally
vanished speedily, but enough of it survived, when the sign changed,
to give him his great modern fame.
M Geffroy takes occasion to exclaim at the futility of criticism,
seeing that Guys sank from the public sight in spite of the eloquence
of Baudelaire. But Baudelaire was scarcely futile. His critique
remains the supreme one upon the subject of Guys and when the
careless public in its knockings-about from chains to liberty hap-
pened upon a moment of revulsion from scholasticism it verified
its instinct for an appreciation of Guys by Baudelaire.
The book is exceedingly handsome, with excellent illustrations
of the best drawings.
HENRY MCBRIDE
a


MUSICAL CHRONICLE
TWA
WAS in the musical red-light district that the New York sea-
son of Mr Stokowski finished. All-Tchaikowsky was the pro-
gramme tastefully confectioned for the final concert of the
Philadelphia Orchestra. Amid the spoiled humanity of the Sym-
phonie Pathétique, the pousses-cafés of the Nutcracker Suite, the
subnormalities of the 1812 Overture, the young conductor sported.
,
.
But even his sporting, like almost everything else he had been doing
on the platform during the last two years, was wanting in intensity.
The red lights burnt feebly. Never before had as little compulsion
lain in his gestures. The orchestra remained tight and shut, re-
minded one at times of a violin of inferior make. The music of
the self-pitiful Russ seemed thoroughly demoded, outworn, obso-
lete, useless, and good only for the chamber of musical horrors.
The audience, from its apathy, appeared to have gotten not a sensa-
tion. No trumpet-blast had set fire playing about the nipples.
No parabola of the woodwind had serpentined up the spinal cord.
Usually, the Symphonie Pathétique rouses "hurrahs," no matter
how flatly it is presented, makes the clappers utter noises and high
and extended “Yea's” at the conclusion of each movement.
Usually, nothing conducted by the gentleman from Philadelphia,
unless perchance it be a concerto in someone else's style by Emanuel
Moor, fails to please an audience, ready, as is his metropolitan, to
be delighted. But, on this evening, despite the warmth of March,
there was a notable frigidity in and about Carnegie Hall. The
audience resembled nothing so much as a child who, but a moment
before the proud owner of a ruby air-sailing balloon, suddenly hears
a slight report above him, and finds falling earthward a shrivelled
dusky film. One was surprised that what had commenced as brave-
ly as had the New York career of Mr Stokowski should have de-
veloped a thing as empty as this concert. That was all.
Two years since, at the conclusion of the New York season of
the Philadelphia Orchestra, the late James Huneker saw the
young Polish-American conductor holding the Metropolitan or-
chestral situation in his palm. Very few members of the concert-
public did not at the time see eye to eye with the musicographer.
Out of the prevalent fog, the Stransky mist, the Damrosch mist, the
a


PAUL ROSENFELD
723
town.
Rabaud-Monteux mist, Mr Stokowski had risen like a young sun.
The concerts given in 1916 and 1917 for the Society of the
Friends of Music, the five matinées given in 1918, had, it was
perceived, introduced a veritably musical personage to the starved
A man was throwing himself into the instrumental sea,
making its waves vibrate and surge and foam with beauty, re-
leasing himself through the tones of the orchestra. The carpers
who muttered “Prima-donna conductor,” and pointed disparag-
ingly to the somewhat fatuous exhibition that was the performance
of the Mahler Symphonie der Tausend, were good-humouredly dis-
regarded by a public impressed with the significance of the ap-
parition. For, if the man, in his years, was already as sensitive
.
and elastic and sensuous as Mr Stokowski showed himself to be,
what might not be expected of him, so thoughts ran, as the passage of
time matured and developed him, suppressed the self-consciousness,
and approfondized his feeling? One had, indeed, but to look at
him, especially during the moments when he forgot himself and
Aubrey Beardsley, and moved unconstrainedly, to be assured of his
latent mastery. The bodies of musicians, after all, quite as direct-
ly as their performances, reveal how gifted they are; what external-
izes itself in tone, is already evident previously in the co-ordination
of the frame. You need not hear Mr Walter Damrosch for in-
stance in order to know what manner of conductor he is. You
have but to observe him cross the platform, watch his movements,
to know the degree of his limitation as a leader. Nor was it neces-
sary to hear Dr Muck to know the fineness and sobriety of his
direction. The man looked good-natured as an archfiend of Hell;
his visage betrayed a scarcely controlled desire to stick pins into
the eyes of every one of his auditors; but his great musicianship was
in his gait and manner. And Mr Stokowski, in his person, seemed
to presage another epiphany of the good fire, another conductor
of premier order.
But it was only for a summer that the newcomer held, or seemed
to be holding in his palm the metropolitan orchestral situation.
Immediately his winter began, it was evident that he was letting it
dribble rapidly through his fingers. With his auditorium entirely
filled for the season, a parterre of dowagers and former borough
presidents spread fanwise before his stand, a horseshoe of friendly
bosoms attentive to his every mood, he gave shockingly little.
Neither that year, nor the last, did Mr Stokowski make anything


724
MUSICAL CHRONICLE
notable of the immense opportunity offered him by his success. At
the veritable beginning of his race, he appears to have thought it
opportune to rest on his oars. One could not believe that he was
earnestly working, delving, sweating. For he was not creating.
The sensuous quality of his art, of course, had not abated; when the
energy was in him, he could still entrance with some voluptuous
piece of music, Scheherazade, the Tannhauser Bacchanale, a Liszt
Rhapsody, squeeze all the lingering sensuality out of Wagner and
Rimsky. But the inwardness which it was necessary he develop
to counterbalance his purely physical understanding, that put in
its appearance neither last season nor this. When Mr Stokowski
conducts the Pastorale Symphony at present, one knows that he
never has understood what it is to go sick from the city, and feel
the goodness of the countryside, the release of trees and fields and
waters and the healing power of green and growing things. When
.
he conducts the Jupiter Symphony, one knows that he has never
sensed the radiant life-affirmation of Mozart, never floated up on
the ceiling amid clouds, never fled out into the universe through the
singing planets. He turns the Fourth of Brahms to melodrama;
he does not weep with the Ornstein Funeral March; he makes the
brilliant dream-cavalcade that passes through the middle of Fêtes
by Debussy sound dangerously in the style of Die Meistersinger.
Moreover, his entire morale seems to have been relaxed. His pro-
gramme-making, these last two years, has been tasteless and con-
ventional. During the first of his series of evening concerts, the
principal novelty presented was the incredible Bells of Rachman-
inoff. Here, again, one sensed the conductor busy over the miser-
able advertising-game of America. This winter, the New World
Symphony of Dvorák, the c-major of Schubert, appeared on his
programme. But of Haydn, Bruckner, the symphonies of the
modern Frenchmen, there was never a sign. Tchaikowsky, how-
ever, figured largely. The Five Orchestral Pieces of Schoenberg
were promised among the novelties, but nothing new save the Italia
of Casella, the poor stuff of Moor mentioned above, and the compo-
sitions of Cyril Scott, conducted by their author, was played. There
was a revival of Tod und Verklärung (a veritable mania among
conductors for being transfigured and transfiguring others, ex-
posed itself this season) and a performance of the amorphous
Requiem of Brahms. But there was no grip in the season of Mr
Stokowski, no enthusiasm, no faith, no redness and courage and


PAUL ROSENFELD
725
energy. The series of his concerts was yellow, tired, courageless.
At each performance, the conducting of the man seemed to grow
more etiolated. An afternoon concert in January showed the old
passion still there; showed that it would relume at will. But it
did not relume.
Still, one would not let go of him. One would not resign one-
self to expecting nothing of him. The man was too musical a
person not to compel one's faith even when he was doing everything
to dispel it. A blessing was always about to come from him. And
when it persisted in absenting itself, one was always ready to be-
lieve that it was just around the corner, and poised for landing.
It took some deed as raw, insolent, and impotent in conception, as
impotent in execution as the final concert of the season just ended,
to disillusion one, and set the toy balloon plunging earthward a
wrinkled skin. At present, of course, one stands facing the com-
ing season of the Philadelphia Orchestra no less convinced than
before of the latent genius of the young conductor. But one stands
other than before. For nothing much is expected. It seems en-
.
tirely too possible to us that Mr Stokowski may never again be
seen the man he was a few
years
since. He has shown himself none
too strong a person to wage the terrible war against an unnourishing
a
environment which every artist who wishes to persist in America
is compelled to wage. He doesn't seem to have in himself the pre-
servative force and freshness and faith, which alone can make the
musician to survive and flourish here. Not being, as was Dr
Muck, an aristocrat, he has no inner support and bulwark to
serve him in a devitalizing atmosphere. One is very sorry for the
precious porcelain smashed, to be sure. We shall never be a civil-
ized people till we manage to feed these artists who cannot feed
themselves. But, at present, no matter how sorry one is for the
harm, one finds that there wells sympathy only for those who
discover within themselves the will to show fight. Of course,
should it appear that Mr Stokowski has it in him to gird his loins,
to give largely and generously, to give due respect to himself and
Beethoven and the public, a few sincere hosannas would doubt-
lessly burst from the choked breast. Till then, however, we must
be excused if we stand, like Mephisto, legs crossed, expression
contemplative, and say quite calmly: "Neugierig bin ich, ob er
wieder kommt.”
PAUL ROSENFELD


THE THEATRE
WS
>
ALTER HAMPDEN'S tired nobility was 0. K. in the
SERVANT IN THE House, it was defensible in HAMLET; in
Macbeth it was desolating. Mary Hall could neither animate her
lord nor carry on by herself. Only while they sat on the little bench
at the foot of the stair did they give us much pleasure—a pleasure
created less by their conduct than by their costumes and surround-
ings. Claude Bragdon, the "art director,” kept his scenery well
under control, and when he did cut loose, produced some very
beautiful and useful effects. The banquet scene was in the style
of Rembrandt-dun cloths, rounded backs; the scene for the last
appearance of the witches reminded my companion of those dreary
trenches round the S. O. S. at Tours. A vertical light used in the
latter part of this scene was one of the neatest tricks we know
about in modern staging. The witches themselves were bizarre."
Shakespeare failed again to give a unified account of himself; there
was too much cancelling among
S. W.
1
the pawns.
A Play in high-sounding but not exceptionally beautiful English,
in a dramatic framework which was obviously inappropriate, Mary
a
Stuart ran a brief course in New York and may be revived in the
Drinkwater repertory season which threatens our peace for next
year. Perhaps by that time Miss Clare Eames will come out of the
trance in which she played the Queen when I saw it. It is not the
mark of intelligence to appear unremittingly intellectual in a play
dealing with the passions. For the family life of queens in general
I prefer Deception, in which it was not the spectacle but the emo-
tional truth of the picture which impressed one most. Even apart
from Emil Jannings whose Henry VIII was even richer and more
impressive than his Louis XV in Passion, the film was notable for
the direction of Ernest Lubitsch. His ideas were in action at the
same time as those of Mr Griffith, for The Birth Of A NATION
underwent revival and impressed tremendously.
1 “Bizarre, i. e., shocking to the majority of reasonable persons”—Prof.
Chanler Post.


THE THEATRE
727
The Last Waltz is Messrs Shubert's two hundredth musical
comedy and it is very good. The essentials: a score by Oscar
Straus, grateful to the ear; the singing of Miss Eleanor Painter
and Mr Walter Woolf; the bizarre, maddeningly funny clowning
of James Barton, looking like a comic strip and cutting up auda-
ciously in the atmosphere of an operetta in the grand manner; the
girls and the settings, ninety per cent of each agreeable to the eye.
The whole production is remarkably finished and smooth. More
of this and we could dispense with revivals.
The production of Liliom ought to be epoch-making, in the
sense that no playwright and no producer of the future should re-
main unaffected by it. Except that The Theatre Guild plays it as
if the idea and not the drama were of first importance, the produc-
tion is perfect; and like most Continental dramatists Molnar is so
much at home with ideas that he can stand being produced as if he
were a philosopher and a prophet, which he is not. The heartbreak
in the Guild production is too voulu, that is all.
Mr Lee Simonson's settings possess an imaginative life of their
own and participate in the play; his obscure and dewy scene in the
park, the solidity and straightness of the railway arch, the loftiness
of the scene in heaven, the niceness of the cottage at the end, have
a creative power as definite as voice or movement and are very
beautiful. Miss Eva Le Gallienne and Mr Joseph Schildkraut are
so good that they make one forget all the bad and most of the good
acting of the season, and others in the cast, especially Mr Dudley
Digges, Miss Lillian Kingsbury, and Miss Evelyn Chard, tread
softly lest the illusion break. Mr Frank Reicher is to be congrat-
ulated on the technical successes of the play, and The Theatre Guild
on having been temporarily weaned from St John Ervine. G. S.
In re Liliom, I desire to depone three things: first, that the
heavenly courtroom is positively Fra Angelico; second, that Hor-
tense Alden is all-wool peasant-girl; third, that Helen Westley, as
the thaumaturgical Mrs Muskat, bangs, wheezes, bumps, clatters,
and in every other way comports and squeaks herself with that
degree of horse-power appropriate to the proprietress of a steam-
propelled round-about. She might honourably peacock: "Les
chevaux de bois, c'est moi."
>


728
THE THEATRE
"There is no reason why an audience may not get as great an
aesthetic, emotional thrill out of a MIDNIGHT FROLIC as out of a
Maeterlinck play. The MIDNIGHT Frolic is created and per-
formed by the highest-priced artists that money can procure.” So
delivered himself of a faceful F. Ziegfeld, Jr. Which appears to
imply that Mr Ziegfeld pays as high as does Mr Maeterlinck.
News. Bob Lasalle, real U. S. A. jazz stepper, Bird Millman,
buster queen of "the realm of buoyancy,” and Jack Hanley, world's
champion retriever of tennis-balls with a soup-ladle, are worth their
Maeterlinckian hire. The Dance to the Great Spirit, pulled off
by Princess White Deer, was, however, more particularly in the
distinguished foreigner's line.
It is the pleasure of Mr Leo Ditrichstein to throw himself away
upon trifles. But the present vehicle, in the mouths of this Kansas
company, distends to considerably more than a peccadillo. Yet once
a Ditrichstein, always a Ditrichstein; and, in this rôle of King
Toto, even the nape of that neck demonstrates the acclaimed strut.
The high-geared face as always hits on all twelve cylinders.
а
To Michael Strange God has been good. Since He so indulged
the fancy of that well-to-do shepherd-girl of Domrémy, permitting
her to sport mail, to stride a stallion, and to fuddle and otherwise
discommode fat interloping outre-Manche sheep all over the lot, no
other young woman of her class has, so far as I know, been allowed
such acres of rope. To have uttered a Borzoi volume (entitled Re-
surrecting Life) to have put over a $5.00 a seat drama (entitled
Clair de Lune) and to have knocked down in matrimony a perfect
36 genius (entitled Mr John Barrymore)—these things bunched
amount to the sort of man's job the late Mr Roosevelt, when he
talked earnestly to us about “the strenuous life,” in small—and as
“through a glass, darkly"-inkled. [One is again aware of the Re-
public's loss. ]
First, let us consider—upon the Paschal theme of Resurrecting
Life-Exhibit A: The nude Excalibur female sliding up the middle
of the fully coloured frontispiece semaphores attention. She has,
in her undraped longitude, already given the slimy down-stage
beasties (even the one with the Last Judgement J. Barrymore an-
gles) the happy slip. She is on her way. The next depot-a
.
-


THE THEATRE
729
22-carat Holy Grail-cheers and glimmers in the flies. This ob-
ject is daisy-chained and electrically wired and generally dolled
up to kill and comfort. Pushing on, we next attack the Contents.
Here we note the kind authoress has herself indicated three major
provinces; the Visionary, the Emotional, the Descriptive. This
book need not detain us further.
Secondly, let us take up, at the Empire, Clair de Lune. Of
course there is a great deal of scenery and a wealth of shrubbery and
adjectives. But the fresco monkey throwing a kiss to the bobbed
saint of the stained-glass window, the sea-going all-silk curtains,
the fauns, fantasts, bacchanales, poppies, and such-like small-talk
small-fry popping impatly out and in the perfumed gullets of these
bad, bad men and women are not by a long shot the whole show.
For Ethel is there—ETHEL-and large as life. Her as-of-old
untied (or should I rather say unlaced?) womanly voice makes
everything somehow quite different: viscous with humanity, it
jumps back the wholesome and homely grandeur of Our own Mrs
McChesney. (Under their téclas, good Queens and good Sales-
ladies beat much the same tune.)
The unfortunate husband of Mrs John Barrymore, the unfor-
tunate illustrator of Resurrecting Life, the unfortunate hero of
this execrable play, mercifully, if tardily, drowns himself in what
we are permitted to hope proves on gulp honest sea-water.
Through two and one-half highly unpleasant acts he had—before
this drastic swallow—been—with pious horror-observed piteously
to wade, desperately to plunge, and glutinously to crawl onward
and about through oceans upon oceans upon oceans of what was
indeed labeled innocent Clair de Lune, but what oozed out, under
assay, the dreaded Oil of Luna.
There are white wigs a thing just now and where fashions come
from fashionable—and a nice closet-a thing so always anywhere.
And all might so easily have been otherwise. For Michael
Strange is one of those who can give pleasure by simply being looked
at. Why then did she and her good man not have the gumption
privately to burn this odorous and mangy drama? And why did
she not show us instead, wisely, herself?
But, seriously, this book and this play should both have been
still-born. Certain women, like children, should be seen and not
heard.
S. T.
а


ANNOUNCEMENT
Afiel
1
1
1
FTER a year and a half of not easy sledding, The Dial finds
itself in a position to say a very few words. And what is a
sight more important, it is now so placed as to be able to look for-
ward every year to doing at least one young American writer a good
turn. The Dial announces that on January the first of each year
it will acknowledge the service to letters of some one of those who
have, during the twelvemonth, contributed to its pages by the pay-
ment to him of two thousand dollars.
This payment is in no sense at all a prize. There are fields of
endeavour wherein the idea and the feeling of competition are,
quite simply, not required; wherein men and women strive not to
outdo one another, but merely and with hunched backs so to right
at once their own splay selves and the malignant wrongness of the
objective world as to exist–for brief, hieratic moments—un-
thwarted and unbound. These moments themselves constitute re-
.
ward sufficient. And as there is of them for those with the heart
to grapple a store infinite and inexhaustible, to speak here of com-
petition were a confusion of terms: it were to talk of rivalry in
worship. Such is the way of the Good Life, and such is the way
of Art and of Science. To feign otherwise were hypocrisy.
But artists like Mendicant Friars have to live. From that
epoch in which the highest unit of civilization was but the tribe,
men have had the sense to feed and to clothe their priests. In some
singularly enlightened communities, notably in those of the South
Sea Islands, orders of artists have been kept and treated with quite
as much ceremony as these priests themselves; and, while it is only
amongst enlightened Polynesians that such is the bright case, all
who know what the word Art signifies know that every Artist, in so
much of that word as the sense is good, remains the most direct
channel of the religious emotion. Wherefore in Greece the artist
was the guest-friend of the whole world; in the Middle Age he was
the child of the Church; in the Renaissance there were magnani-
mous princes; in the Eighteenth Century (the last in which men
knew to live well) there was the not ignoble system of literary
patronage; in the Twentieth, disrupted and bankrupt Europe still
1


ANNOUNCEMENT
731
makes shift to feed and clothe her artists. America, sound as a nut
and rich as Tophet, feeds 'em air.
When it is a question of Frans Hals and of Raphael Sanzio, our
sausage-kings do indeed go the whole hog. And they are guilty
of the distinguished vulgarity of tearing out beautiful objects from
that European frame which is their flesh. And they are so sunken
in vandalism as to puff themselves over that ownership which,
to the citizen of feeling, is a brand of shame. For, with about all
our own poets and painters squatting above the Elevated and there
on their hunkers licking condensed milk cans, to pay eight hundred
thousand dollars to butcher a Sienese chapel and from the offal to
manufacture upon Long Island a Social Register holiday, is, I had
thought obviously, not the thing to do. One wonders how long be-
fore how many people will wake up to just what is on. But we do
know that if America is ever to be more than a storehouse for dead
dreams, a new tack must be taken.
A year and a half ago The Dial set out to give a hand to the
a
young writers and artists of America. Too many Mary Gardens
and Henry Jameses had had to go abroad for recognition; we found
it high time somebody set up to recognize good work at home. So
far, reckoning our accomplishment against our intention, we have
accomplished powerful little. We have, however, notably in the
last few months, achieved, both here and in Europe, considerable
recognition. We have also cut down that annual deficit which we
shall always take care does not eventuate in what, in the present
state of affairs, we should deem a dishonourable income. It is thus
that we now find ourselves in a position both to extend our own
recognition to another and to give that recognition some small
pecuniary weight. Among those who realize The Dial to be in-
tellectually sound, there will be some worth to a man in our mere
endo sement of his name; and the two thousand dollars will pass
current even among those to whom the name of The Dial is not
yet a household word.
Money is always the least significant of gifts: like a bad work
of art it requires a descriptive tag. What we really want to give
is leisure, leisure through which at least one artist may serve God
(or go to the Devil) according to his own lights. If there were
any way of doing up this leisure with white paper and a pink
string, we should not have to fall back on so drab a medium. Since
a


732
ANNOUNCEMENT
1
there is not, we have fixed a sum which should amount, when
reckoned in the more important commodity, to approximately one
year. But if the man or woman we hit on should turn out a live
wire he may smuggle himself over to Italy; favoured by Italian
sunlight and the present rate of exchange the service to God might
be proportionately prolonged. If, on the other hand, he should
turn out a live genius, he may blow-in a whole year—and above
the afore-mentioned Elevated-in one night. That is up to him.
One overhears a lot of silly talk about environment; one has
oneself been asked whether modern America "furnishes” the proper
environment for an artist. The only environment that counts is
liberty; the only liberty that counts is leisure; and this all good
artists know. They know that leisure is—at least for such as
they-quintessentially and intimately the Good Environment:
they would rather-in so far as they are worth their salt-be re-
mittance-men in Hell than master-financiers in Heaven. And they
are the kind of remittance-men Yankee Land wants.
Why doesn't somebody else (some fine fellow who doesn't know
what the word deficit means) come over with two HUNDRED
thousand? Why not?
l





1
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ID:000020203238
051054 v.70 Jan. - June 1921
The Dial
Browne, Francis F. (F
route to: CATO-PARK
in transit to:
UP-ANNEX
8/7/2005,8:18






A000020203238

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