ascoe. It is
an exceptionally disappointing work because the author has liberated him-
self from stupid conventions of story-telling and has then failed entirely to
subject himself to any inherent discipline. The early life of the protagonist,
Samuel, is supposed to be told as he himself sees it; yet all too frequently
it sounds like a collection of bright remarks. Curioser and curioser, the
succeeding portion of the book, dealing with Lena, as yet unseen by Samuel,
is told in exactly the same way, yet is professedly objective. The mystery
is not cleared when one realizes at the end, with Samuel grown up, that he,
or the author, or somebody, is still writing in the style of childhood impres-
sions. The story is generally good, sometimes remarkably childish in its sen-
timent, and frequently spoiled by the absurd interludes. The genuine talent
which produced it is perceptible; its owner needs a more thorough training
than any other of our younger writers and is more likely to justify the pains.
THE OUTCAST, by Selma Lagerlöf (12mo, 297 pages ; Doubleday, Page:
$1.90). To have written Gosta Berling is a tremendous handicap for
any author. For any one but Miss Lagerlof to have written The
Outcast would have been a singular achievement. It is a novel with
height, breadth, and depth, but it lacks magic—a quality one can demand
only of the greatest. The Outcast is a book with a mission; it is art with
a moral, in other words diluted. The nightingale that in the branches
sang, is not singing in this book.
a
The Widow's Cruse, by Hamilton Fyfe (12mo, 304 pages; Seltzer : $2)
has its points, as stories go. The numerous ramifications of its plots all
hinge upon character, arguing ingenuity and perception in their author.
But it is a pity that so many novels are written professionally, or as a
relaxation from the arduous business of filling newspaper columns. After
Mr Fyfe's frothy competence, one remembers Harold Bell Wright not un-
pleasantly.
Lost VALLEY, by Katharine Fullerton Gerould (12mo, 452 pages; Harpers :
$2) is a first novel in which the author breaks many eggs without making
an omelet. It begins well in a setting beautifully sketched in, but once
the heroine and her half-witted sister leave Lost Valley, the artificially
concocted plot rides them past all realities. One can more easily be-
lieve in the Africa of Mrs Gerould's Vain Oblations than in the Mulberry
Street of her manufacture, where Madge, the heroine, finds romance, and
Lola, the defective sister, wakes at the point of death to distinguish
between the ethics of rightful and wrongful stabbing. It isn't done in
those half-circles. Mrs Gerould has, hitherto, etched cameos and probed
her own mind skilfully, but here, with the commoner realities of life
before her, she has failed through lack of understanding.


BRIEFER MENTION
113
Fresh Every Hour, by John Peter Toohey (12mo, 256 pages; Boni &
Liveright: $2) enjoyed a highly successful run in the Saturday Evening
Post; and no wonder: for although the Tired Business Man would
probably smile a trifle bitterly at the extravagant success that meets
Jimmy Martin's ingenious ventures at every corner, the irreparably
unsophisticated and belligerently optimistic business girl or housewife
must surely find Jimmy's colourful career as press agent an invigorating
refreshment, and love him for his enthusiasm, his never-say-die vitality,
his budding romance chastely suggested, his uncanny smartness hiding
the pure ideals which emerge suddenly on page 248.
DANCERS IN THE DARK, by Dorothy Speare (12mo, 290 pages; Doran:
$1.75). If this book had been written as a satire it would have been
inimitable. It is almost Daisy Ashford grown up-but not very far up.
Is it possible that the reading public reaches full mental bloom at the
age of fifteen? Or maybe the book is intended only for those in their
first or second childhood.
To The Last Man, by Zane Grey (12mo, 311 pages; Harper : $2) is a
sprightly tale with blood oozing from every page. Life in the Tonto Basin
was one glad sweet carnival of killings and though the psychological reac-
tions of the characters to these stirring events seem singularly uncom-
plicated, doubtless the people of Arizona are like that—they have not yet
issued a dementi. Zane Grey writes fluently and never allows the rush
of action to betray him into using an unusual or unexpected word.
EXPLORERS OF THE DAwn, by Mazo de la Roche (12mo, 292 pages; Knopf:
$2.50) is a story of three little boys—such as never were on land or sea.
Their gracefully narrated adventures make pleasant sugar-plum reading.
To be sure they live in an English Cathedral Town which suddenly expands
to a city and in the next chapter shrinks to a rural village. But why stickle
over geography, or even over American idioms dropped into the mouths
of English babes? The book has charm, and charm, like beauty, is its own
excuse for being
CZECHOSLOVAK STORIES, edited with an introduction by Sarka B. Hrbkova
(12mo, 330 pages; Duffield : $1.90). Humour, pathos, and tragedy are in
the pages of these stories, some of which are written with good-natured
charm, some with almost violent vigour, and most of which have a vivid-
ness and intensity that force attention, though at times the subject-matter
repels. Considered as a whole, they show a mastery of the short-story art,
and would make a notable contribution to the literature of any country.
KINFOLKS, by Ann Cobb (12mo, 82 pages; Houghton Mifflin : $1.50). The
author does not call these bits of Kentucky mountain life poetry. It may be
they are too ragged for that, but Ann Cobb is skilful in transcribing emo-
tions and the shades of character which go to make the mountaineer at once
unique and universal. The language, as well as the happy picturesqueness
and humanity of the verses, is that of a homespun Chaucer of the hills.


114
BRIEFER MENTION
MODERN RUSSIAN POETRY, chosen and translated by Babette Deutsch and
Avrahm Yarmolinsky (12mo, 179 pages; Harcourt, Brace: $1.75). It is
practically impossible to make really fine translations from Russian
poetry, but the co-authors of this book have, at least, permitted an idea
of its values to filter through their attempts, and the book is the more
valuable because the subject is elsewhere so little canvassed. There are
selections from thirty-seven poets included and they range from Pushkin to
Anatoly Marienhof, the Russian imagist. The biographical notes, although
necessarily sketchy and tentative, are interesting.
The Veil, by Walter de la Mare (8vo, 84 pages; Holt: $2) is as full of
thin music and ghostly allusion as the author's previous work has led us to
expect it would be. The volume is touched with delicate fantasy and
thrilling with eerie imagery, but one leaves it feeling that this poet's strange
wine is to be sipped at slow intervals, never drunk at a single draught.
The one way, it is exquisitely intoxicating; the other, it makes one merely
to drowse.
a
One Act Plays, by Alice Brown (12mo, 235 pages; Macmillan : $2.25).
These plays are written with dramatic power fortified by a shrewd under-
standing of human nature. The dialogue flows naturally, and the situa-
tions develop persuasively; the themes are simple, and for the most part
follow conventional lines; but the author has too pronounced a tendency
to soothe the reader with the "sugar-coated” ending, often at the expense of
dramatic effect. None the less, the plays are all ingenuously conceived and
carefully written, the atmosphere and the background of each stamps itself
vividly upon the mind, and the characters stand forth in bold relief.
THE POETRY OF DANTE, by Benedetto Croce (8vo, 313 pages; Holt: $2).
A methodological guide to The Divine Comedy by one of the most
distinguished of living critics. Signor Croce's book should bring a surge
of comfort to those of us who have been overawed by the elaborate ma-
chinery of the Comedy. Briefly this is his consolatory advice: we should
not bother our heads over the cosmogony; we should centre our attention
elsewhere, reading Dante in the fashion of all ingenuous readers, paying
little attention to the other world, very little to the moral division, none at
all to the allegories, and greatly enjoying the poetic representations. The
work is a remarkably lucid application of Croce's famous aesthetic: all art is
lyrical, and technique either does not exist or coincides with art itself.
a
WILLIAM WYCHERLEY: SA Vie, son OEUVRE, by Charles Perromat (8vo, 468
pages; Librairie Felix Alcan, Paris) is a defence of the earliest of the great
Restoration comedians; in bulk and completeness it resembles the dossier of
the Landru trial. Earlier critics judged Wycherley too often as if he were
an author of chamber dramas; they talked in library terms, whereas M
Perromat never forgets to think in terms of the stage. His other virtue
is thoroughness. Plays, poems, sources, influence, biography: he omits
nothing and uses no asterisks; his book cannot well be neglected by a
student of the Restoration drama.


BRIEFER MENTION
115
MY AMERICAN DIARY, by Clare Sheridan (illus., 8vo, 359 pages; Boni &
Liveright: $3). Aside from its political implications, which of course are
very shocking, this book will inspire two reactions. Most of its readers
will wish they might be as dashing, debonair, adventurous, well-connected,
dined-and-teaed as the author. The others will wonder how in the world she
gets away with two books of the sort. But everyone will enjoy reading a
magnum opus whose every page bristles with close-ups of people whom we
usually see only somewhat remotely figuring in Sunday supplements.
Tahiti, by Tihoti (George Calderon) (illus., 8vo, 260 pages; Harcourt,
Brace: $6) begins with that highly coloured surface gaiety which seems
to be characteristic of the genre and which can produce such a whimsical
description of the lifting of the island out of the sea as; “It was as if the
captain were a conjuror and had pulled it out of his pocket.” But this
mood passes with its illusion of delighted and tender amazement and is
imperfectly replaced with the description of a dingy colonial town, an
island cluttered by police, and a native population dying to avoid in-
curring the benefits of civilization. The writing is uneven and the narrative
disjointed owing to the fact that George Calderon, who visited the island in
1906 and began his book in 1914, was killed in Gallipoli in 1915 leaving the
manuscript to be completed by his wife and friends.
THE LAURENTIANS, by T. Morris Longstreth (12mo, 450 pages; Century:
$1.90). The Laurentians gives a humorous account of Mr Longstreth's
adventures in "discovering" the country of the habitant, and will be
an excellent guide book for those planning short trips among the
mountains of the Province of Quebec; Canada is singularly devoid of
travel books, especially of the eastern and more accessible provinces: it
is a joy to find one that is well written and at the same time practical.
THE RUIN OF ANCIENT CIVILIZATION AND THE TRIUMPH OF CHRISTIANTY,
by Guglielmo Ferrero, translated by the Hon. Lady Whitehead (8vo, 210
pages; Putnam: $2.50) takes for its thesis that a search for authority in
government has run through the centuries, testing in every regime, every
clique, every claim of religion, the right of a man to govern a state, the
right of a state to determine its government. Christianity by teaching
that a man, individually, owed his first obedience to God and that
temporal power was not worth maintaining, helped to undermine the
strength of all Rome had built. The situation to-day, Ferrero thinks,
is analogous to the state of affairs after Rome had fallen. The struggle
between the monarchical and the democratic systems, beginning in 1789,
have brought both parties into doubtful authority. The greatest ruin
brought about by the recent war was the destruction of all principles of
authority. Its result may be a long anarchy such as followed Rome's fall.
There is a hope, if the United States can demonstrate the validity of her
principle of existence, and if France can rebuild her democracy. All this
and more Ferrero expounds with sincerity, drawing on records of the
indisputable past and the unescapable present. If it is prophecy, the
United States has good reason to grow up and set about demonstrating.


THE THEATRE
SOME
OMETHING akin to divine assurance was restored to our the-
atre when From MORN TO MIDNIGHT was produced by the
Theatre Guild. The certainty we had so long lacked that the theatre
could give us anything hard and clear, swift and certain in its move-
ment, had been insufficiently challenged in the last year or two;
among Americans Mr O'Neill alone made it advisable to wait and
see. We understand fully that From Morn To Midnight is
neither the best example of Georg Kaiser's work nor an exceptional
example of expressionism on the stage. It is easy to quarrel with
the occasional wearing thin of the material out of which the play is
made. But one cannot question the profound conviction that this
play is a way of revelation for the cluttered and foundering theatre
of our time.
The police court reporters who seem always to displace the dra-
matic critics when a serious play is produced in New York found
this play either dull or mad. The conclusion that it is exceptionally
clear and thrilling is obvious, and justified. In seven scenes one fol-
lows a day in the life of a bank clerk from the moment when he is
misled into believing a client to be an adventuress, steals for her,
and discovers his error, to the moment in the Salvation Army shel-
ter when, having failed to find the pinnacle of life which his crime
has made imperative for him, he commits suicide. At the very be-
ginning he meets the simulacrum of death and rejects the offered
way to release; he returns "from the grave” to his home; he tries
the excitement of crowds at a race-course and the surexcitation of
drink and lust at a cabaret. From the penitent's bench he casts his
stolen money away, since he has found no game great enough, no
stake high enough for him to risk it; and he is betrayed.
The motions of the man's spirit are translated into visible dra-
matic action. Each scene is the outline of a drama, each phrase is
the circumference of an emotion. Nothing is done, nothing is
spoken, except the essential. The variety of the scenes is amazing.
In the snow-covered field the cashier speaks with imagined pres-
ences, then with his own soul, finally with death; in his home all
the characters speak small phrases which are actually the essences


THE THEATRE
117
of their unspoken thoughts; at the cabaret the technique is precisely
that of portions of Ulysses. The penitents at confession each repeat
a distorted fragment of the protagonist's experience until he can
bear it no longer and, gathering them to his heart, makes the confes-
sion for humanity.
There is with this an intermingling of ecstasy and irony which is
corrosive; the lightning flashes of the separate scenes are dazzling
and terrifying; the coup de foudre and the coup de théâtre coincide
to leave one appalled at the bitterness with which trivial and tawdry
things have been invested. The one enduring sense of satisfaction
is in the perfection of method; the sheer swift intelligence, the fine
sense of proportion are, for once at least, their own reward.
Mr Frank Reicher played the amazing part of the cashier mag-
nificently and produced the play almost as finely. The cast was
excellent with one deplorable exception. Miss Helen Westley
after being utterly distinguished in the first scene was unscrupu-
lously bad in the last. For her own sake and for the sake of the
Guild, if nothing can persuade her of the dignity of the work she is
doing, her vicious habit of attracting attention to herself instead of
to the play ought to be curbed. Lee Simonson's settings, without
reservations exquisite, might well be taken as a model of appro-
priate severity.
The second programme of the CHAUVE-Souris has greater love-
liness than the first, less pure fun. A triumph of character, not for
Mr Balieff alone, makes the second no less than the first a prime
event in intelligent entertainment.
G. S.


COMMENT
F the New York Times had not mentioned it we should never
I
man, 7 June) was directed against The Dial. Certain phrases, cer-
tain stresses have led hasty readers to believe that the Manifesto is a
recantation. We do not find it so at all; it even seems to us that
Mr Spingarn is deliberately unfair to himself when he adds “And
now the day of Revolt for Revolt's Sake is over” to this analysis
of his earlier position:
“It was necessary to destroy the academic dry rot that was under-
mining the creative and intellectual spirit of the nation. It was
necessary to rid ourselves of the last remnants of the older Ameri-
can ‘moralism' in thought and taste and action. It was necessary to
destroy, not discipline, character, morals, imagination, beauty, free-
dom, but the sterile forms which were made to serve instead of these
ealities. Not by making a faith of these dead forms can we breathe
the breath of a new life into the soul of man, but only by ridding
ourselves of their spiritual burden, so that the spirit of life may once
more be unhampered in the search for truth and beauty.”
The change to the present tense in the last sentence cannot be an
error; Mr Spingarn knows that however his words were taken he
did not call upon young men for rebellion for the sake of rebellion;
and he knows that, although he must face the implications of his
present Manifesto, he is not now calling upon them for faith in
the interest of faith. His whole essay reasserts the dignity and the
excellence of the creative life against the gross and trivial things of
the acquisitive life which make the creative life so harsh and diffi-
cult.
The chief implication which Mr Spingarn must meet is that he
is attacking youth. Actually he is attacking those "who think that
the fragile and ephemeral moment of physical youth is
the sole test of excellence.” He attacks not "modernity,” but the
habit of mind which holds that "the test of ideas is not truth or the
test of art, excellence, but the only test of both is ‘modernity.” He


COMMENT
119
6
attacks not "new forms,” but the disease of the intellectualist who
strives to make up for his artistic emptiness by the purely intellec-
tual creation of 'new forms.'” It is clear from the essay that "age,”
“
“tradition,” and “conventional forms” could just as well take the
place of “youth,” “modernity,” and “new forms”; only Mr Spin-
garn feels that the “fashionable theory' requires him to state the
case in his present terms.
We have again and again, specifically and by our practice, indi-
cated the irrelevance of certain terms to the life of the spirit. We
have believed that to publish the best work available in both the
accepted and the unconventional forms of expression was closer to
the ideal of a journal of art and letters than to publish work, how-
ever undistinguished, because the author was young or old or Ameri-
can or European or a member of the old school or of the new. The
application of this belief has led us to publish, with pleasure, the
work of those artists who worked in forms not yet familiar; and as
a result we have been held to be defenders not of the specific works,
but of the idea of "new forms.” It has led us to publish the work
of
young men and women-it could not do otherwise. Yet in the
silly hub-bub about the age of this second-rate poet or the youth of
that insignificant novelist we have had little or no part. We have
not been interested. It is necessary to recall these things because of
the wholly illogical assumption that if one does not think physical
youth a criterion of artistic excellence one must confine one's self
to the works of physical age. We assume that in this connexion Mr
Spingarn means what we mean, that one must confine one's self to
works of art.
It would be unjust to give the impression that Mr Spingarn's
Manifesto is wholly concerned with the elements we have taken up.
His burden is:
"What city of the spirit shall we build, and how?
And
so I, who once called upon young men for rebellion and doubt, now
call upon them for thought and faith.
There is only one
real division to-day that has any reality, and that is the difference
between an old-fashioned materialism and a new idealism.
It (idealism] divides those who seek truth inside the spirit of man
from those who seek it outside. And only on the basis of what is in-
side us can we build up that creative energy of thought and faith


120
COMMENT
which the world has lost, and with it its happiness. [Young
America) must learn once more to speak and to think in the terms
of ideal values.
We can acquire a new vocabulary only
by acquiring a new life.”
These are the words of a precursor and Mr Spingarn leaves us
not long in doubt as to the source of the new inspiration, which is
the outburst of Modern Idealism in Italy. Whether the healing
waters will come thence to cure what he calls the “morbus gallicus”
of les jeunes we shall not now predict. The critical and aesthetic
portions of the address are our present concern, and one is inclined
to congratulate Mr Spingarn on being aware, so early, of the proc
of change to which he is giving direction. Odd that he had disciples
before he began his preaching; it is the younger generation itself
which has repudiated the chatter of the middle-aged concerning
youth. It is they who have been seeking and, when it was appropri-
ate to them, finding an "ancient wisdom and austere control.” It
may be unfortunate that they had to go Beyond Good and Evil to
learn "dass alles, was es von Freiheit, Feinheit, Kühnheit und meis-
terlicher Sicherheit auf Erden giebt oder gegeben hat
in
den Künsten ebenso wie in den Sittlichkeiten, sich erst vermöge der
'Tyrannie solcher Willkür-Gesetze 'entwickelt hat
" But
if it is well for them to know this the name of the teacher does not
matter.






Courtesy of Paul Cassirer, Berlin
RICHARD STRAUSS. BY MAX LIEBERMANN



VI
THE
DIAL
TV
IX
TIT
OXXII
AUGUST 1922
LUCIDOR: CHARACTERS FOR AN
UNWRITTEN COMEDY
BY HUGO VON HOFMANNSTHAL
Translated from the German by Kenneth Burke
To
OWARDS the close of the 'seventies Frau von Murska was
living at a small hotel in the centre of town. She bore a title
which was not very well known, and yet not completely obscure.
From her own testimony it was to be concluded that a family estate
in the Russian part of Poland, rightfully belonging to her and her
children, was temporarily sequestered or withheld in some other way
from its legitimate owners. She seemed to be in tight circum-
stances, but only for the time being. With a grown up daughter
Arabella, a half-grown son Lucidor, with an old maid-servant she
occupied three bedrooms and a living-room fronting on the Kärtner-
strasse. She had hung a few family portraits, prints, and minia-
tures on the walls here; on a little round stand she had spread a
piece of old velvet embroidered with a coat of arms, and on this
she had placed a couple of silver mugs and baskets, good French
work of the eighteenth century
and here she received.
She had sent off letters, made visits, and, since she had an incredible
number of connexions on all sides, she worked up some sort of salon
with reasonable rapidity. It was one of those somewhat vague
salons which are found either possible or impossible, according to
the demands of the critic. In any case, whatever Frau von Murska
was, she was neither vulgar nor boresome; and her daughter was
even much more distinguished in her manner and bearing, and un-
usually beautiful. If one dropped in between four and six one was


122
LUCIDOR
sure to find the mother, and almost never without company. The
daughter was not always to be seen, while the thirteen- or fourteen-
year-old Lucidor was known only to intimates.
Frau von Murska was a really cultivated woman, and her culti-
vation had nothing banal about it. In the Viennese haut monde
with which she vaguely allied herself without ever having more
than a peripheral contact with it, she would have had a difficult
time as a "blue-stocking.” But in her head there was such a tangle
of experiences, quirks, forebodings, errors, enthusiasms, discoveries,
and apprehensions that it was not worth the effort to confine herself
to what she got out of books. Her conversation galloped from one
subject to another, and hit upon the most incredible transitions.
Her restlessness was enough to make one sorry for her; if you heard
her talking you would know, without her having to mention the
fact, that she suffered from insomnia to the point of madness and
was wearing herself out with complications and disappointed hopes.
But above all it was entertaining and really remarkable to hear her.
And without wishing to be indiscreet she occasionally was so to a
most alarming degree. In short, she was a little fool, but of the
amiable sort. She was a wholesome and, fundamentally, a charm-
ing and unusual woman. But her trying life, for which she had not
been fitted, had muddled her somewhat, so that by forty-two she
had already become a character. The majority of her judgements,
her conceptions, were peculiarly her own and of a marked spiritual
subtlety; but they most always came in the wrong place and would
not apply at all to the person or the circumstance which occasioned
them. The nearer a person was to her the less she examined him;
and it was quite in keeping that she had the most preposterous idea
of her two children and followed it blindly. Arabella was an angel
in her eyes, Lucidor a tough little thing without much heart. Ara-
bella was a thousand times too good for this world, while Lucidor
was just made for it. As a matter of fact Arabella was the image
of her dead father, a proud, discontented, and impatient man, and
very handsome; although quick in his resentments, he had con-
cealed them with perfect form. He had been respected or envied by
men, and loved by a great many women. But at bottom he was cold.
Little Lucidor, on the other hand, was all heart. But at this point
I should like to say that Lucidor was not a young man, but a girl,
by the name of Lucile. The notion of having the younger daughter
a


HUGO VON HOFMANNSTHAL
123
dressed as a boy during their stay in Vienna had, like all of Frau
von Murska’s notions, come upon her with lightning swiftness, and
came as the result of the most complicated system of ulterior mo-
tives and concatenations. One of the ideas involved was that of
making a telling impression on a mysterious old uncle who was for-
tunately quite near at hand. He lived in Vienna, and it was really
quite probable—all these hopes and entanglements were utterly
vague—that it was he that decided her on stopping in this city.
At the same time this change of clothing had certain real and out-
standing advantages. It was easier living with one daughter than
with two of somewhat differing ages, for the girls were nearly four
years apart; this was a simpler way out. Then again, it was a much
better, more appropriate position for Arabella if she was the only
daughter instead of the elder; and the right comely little “brother,"
a sort of groom, served as a foil to the beautiful creature.
A few accidental circumstances had also figured in the matter;
Frau von Murska’s whimsies were never based entirely on the un-
real. It was simply that they had a peculiar way of linking the
true, the actual, with what struck her fancy as being probable or
possible. Five years before—at a time when Lucile, as an eleven-
year-old child, was just getting over typhus—they had to cut short
her lovely hair. Further, Lucile preferred to ride a gentleman's
saddle. This custom had dated from the times on the estate when,
with the Little-Russian peasant boys, she had ridden the horses
bareback to the watering pond. Lucile accepted the disguise as she
would have accepted most anything. She was long-suffering, and
even the height of absurdity can easily become a habit. Also, since
she was painfully shy, she was charmed with the thought that she
would never have to appear in the salon and do the growing-girl
act. The old servant was the only one in the secret; outsiders did
not suspect anything at all. As a rule we do not see things accurately
enough to discern any questionable element about them. Also,
Lucile had a truly boyish narrowness at the hips, and there was
nothing else about her to betray the girl. In fact the secret re-
mained undiscovered, and when that twist came which made of little
Lucidor a bride, or something even more feminine, everyone was
astounded.
Naturally a young person of such beauty and attractiveness
as Arabella did not remain long without several more or less out-
a


124
LUCIDOR
a
spoken admirers. Among these Wladimir was by far the most im-
portant. He was of distinguished appearance, and had most un-
usually beautiful hands. He was more than well-to-do, and quite
unattached, with neither parents, brothers, nor sisters. His father
had been an Austrian officer of good birth, his mother a countess of
a very well known Baltic family. Among all those who concerned
themselves with Arabella he was the only real match. And there
was one additional circumstance which truly enchanted Frau von
Murska: it was his connexion, by some sort of family relationship,
with that unmanageable, unapproachable, and so utterly important
uncle, that same uncle on whose account they were living in Vienna
and for whom Lucile had become Lucidor. This uncle, who occu-
pied a whole floor of the Bouquoy Palais in the Wallnerstrasse, and
who had at one time been a much talked-of gentleman, had received
Frau von Murska very poorly. Although she was actually the
widow of his nephew-or more accurately, of his father's brother's
grandson—she had been able to see him only after the third visit,
and then had not even been invited to a breakfast or a cup of tea.
On the other hand, with a sufficiency of mauvaise grâce, he had
agreed that Lucidor could be sent to him once. It was an idiosyn-
crasy
of the old man's that he could not stand women, whether old
or young. Still there was the frail hope that he might do something
handsome for a young man who was undeniably related by blood
even though he did not have the same name. And even this very
uncertain and precarious hope was infinitely valued. Lucidor had
actually gone there alone once at her mother's command, but had
not been received; which made Lucidor very happy, although her
mother completely lost her temper, especially as nothing had hap-
pened since then and the precious strand seemed broken. For its
repair Wladimir, with his intermediate position, had surely been
sent by Providence. In order to get things going smoothly Lucidor
was frequently brought in without ostentation when Wladimir was
visiting mother and daughter; and things were furthered admirably
by the fact that Wladimir took a liking to the lad. At their first
meeting Wladimir offered to go riding with him to one place or
another and, after a quick exchange of glances between Arabella
and her mother, his invitation was accepted with thanks. Wladi-
mir's sympathy for the younger brother of a girl with whom he was
really very much in love was to be expected; and further, there is
a


HUGO VON HOFMANNSTHAL
125
a
nothing more appealing than the light of an unconcealed admira-
tion in the eyes of a trim little fellow of fourteen.
Frau von Murska was more and more on her knees to Wladimir.
Arabella became impatient at this, as with most of her mother's
actions, and although she was glad to see Wladimir she began, al-
most in spite of herself, to flirt with one of his rivals; this was a
Herr von Imfanger, a natty and very elegant Tyrolese, half peasant,
half noble, who, however, never came into consideration as a match.
At one time, when her mother ventured a few weak complaints that
Arabella was not treating Wladimir as he had a right to expect,
Arabella made an evasive answer in which there was much more con-
tempt and coldness for Wladimir than she really felt. Lucidor-
Lucile happened to be present. The blood shot into her heart and
left it again abruptly. A cutting sensation ran through her. She felt
anguish, scorn, and pain all in one. Her sister caused in her a dull
bewilderment. Arabella had always been a stranger to her; at this
moment she appeared almost dreadful, and Lucidor could not have
said whether she admired or hated her. Then all resolved itself into
an immoderate sorrow. She left, and locked herself in her room. If
she had been told that she plainly and simply loved Wladimir, she
would probably not have understood. She acted, as she had to,
automatically; while tears dropped, the true sense of which she did
not understand. She sat down and wrote a glowing love letter to
Wladimir. Not for herself, however, but for Arabella. She had
often been angry because her handwriting was almost indistinguish-
able from Arabella's. By force she had accustomed herself to an-
other quite ugly handwriting. But at any time she could go back to
her old way, which was especially adapted to her hand. Yes, after
all, it was easier for her to write this way. The letter was such as is
possible only to those who have no ulterior motives and are quite
beside themselves. It disavowed Arabella's whole nature; but that
was just what it wanted to do, what it should do. It was very im-
probable, but for precisely this reason became probable again, as
the expression of a powerful internal upheaval. If Arabella had
been capable of loving deeply and abjectly and had suddenly be-
come aware of this fact at one sharp blow, she could certainly have
expressed herself in just this way, with this boldness and burning
detestation of herself, of the Arabella everyone knew. The letter
was strange; but a cold, indifferent reader might find it the authen-


126
LUCIDOR
.
.
tic letter of a deeply passionate girl whom it would be hard to gauge
accurately. Further, to the man in love the object of his love is
always a creature of inexhaustible possibilities. And finally it was
the sort of letter a man in his position will always secretly desire
to receive and will always consider as within reason. I must hasten
to say here that the letter really did reach Wladimir; in fact, this
occurred the very next afternoon, on the steps, with Lucidor sneak-
ing along, calling cautiously and whispering
all this from
the supposedly excited and awkward postillon d'amour of his beau-
tiful sister. Naturally a postscript was added; it contained the
earnest, even beseeching request that he should not be angry if he
could not notice the slightest change in Arabella's actions towards
either her lover or any one else. Also she begged by all that was
holy that not a single word, not even a glance, should betray the
fact that he knew himself to be loved tenderly.
A few days pass in which Wladimir has only the briefest meet-
ings with Arabella, and never alone. He treats her as she has asked;
she treats him as she has said she would. He is both happy and
unhappy. He knows now for the first time how much he cares for
her. The situation is enough to make him immoderately impatient.
Lucidor, with whom he rides daily, the only person whose company
is soothing to him, notices with delight and horror the change in her
friend, his tremendously increasing restlessness. Another letter fol-
lows, almost tenderer than the first, another touching petition not
to disturb the precarious happiness of the uncertain situation, to let
these confessions be enough and to answer at the most only in writ-
ing through the medium of Lucidor. Every second or third day a
letter comes or goes. Wladimir has happy days, and Lucidor as well.
The tone between the two is altered; they have an inexhaustible sub-
ject of conversation. When, in some clump of trees on the Prater,
they have dismounted and Lucidor has handed over his latest letter,
he studies with anxious pleasure the features of Wladimir while
reading. At times he asks questions which are almost indiscreet.
But the excitement of the boy who is so implicated in this love af-
fair, his shrewdness, a Something which makes him look prettier and
more delicate each day · all this appeals to Wladimir. He
must admit to himself that although he had once been reserved and
haughty, he cannot help talking with Lucidor about Arabella. Fre-
quently Lucidor poses also as a girl-hater, the sage little youth with
.


HUGO VON HOFMANNSTHAL
127
a
а
his childlike cynicism. And what he brings to bear here is anything
but banal ; for he knows how to mix with it a little of what is known
to physicians as "introspective truths.” But Wladimir, who is not
lacking in self-esteem, is careful to make plain to him that the love
which he offers, which he offers to such a being as Arabella, is of a
quite peculiar and isolated nature. At such times Lucidor finds
Wladimir all the more admirable, and thinks of herself as small and
pitiable. They touch on marriage, and this subject is a torture to
Lucidor, since then Wladimir is concerned almost entirely with the
Arabella of real life and not with the Arabella of the letters. Also,
Lucidor has a deathly fear of every decision, every disruptive
change. His only thought is to keep things as they are. It is hard
to say what efforts the poor creature makes to preserve—for a few
days or weeks; he does not have the strength to think beyond this
some sort of equilibrium in this externally and internally precarious
situation. Now that the responsibility has fallen upon him of get-
ting something out of his uncle for the good of the family, he tries
his best. Frequently Wladimir accompanies him. The uncle is a
queer old man who takes delight in being at his ease before younger
people; and his conversation is of such a sort that an hour here is a
painful trial for Lucidor. Yet nothing seems farther from the old
man's thoughts than the idea of doing something for his relative.
Lucidor cannot lie and yet is anxious above all to quiet her mother.
Her mother, in proportion as the hopes she has placed in the uncle
sink lower, becomes more and more impatient because Arabella and
Wladimir seem no closer to anything definite. The two wretched
persons on whom her financial calculations depend begin showing
up her brilliant prospects as completely worthless. Her anxiety, her
painfully concealed impatience, communicate themselves to the
others, especially to poor Lucidor in whose head so many unbearable
things are jumbled together. But he is to receive still sharper and
subtler lessons in the strange school of life he is now attending.
Arabella's double nature had never been expressly mentioned.
But the conception arose of itself: the day-Arabella was distant,
coquettish, abrupt, cock-sure, worldly, cold almost to excess; the
night-Arabella, writing to her lover by candle-light, was immod-
erately confiding and dreamy. By accident or fate this also corre-
sponded to a deep division in Wladimir's nature. He, like every
temperament, had to a greater or less degree his day and night


128
LUCIDOR
phases. A somewhat steely haughtiness, a constant, high-tension
ambition shunning any hint of the obsequious
these were
opposed by a quite different set of emotions; or they were not pre-
cisely opposed, but inclined rather to hide themselves, and were
always ready to dive down beneath the half-dark threshold into the
subconscious. At times his soul was almost completely possessed by
an imaginative sensuality which could give him the feel of being an
animal, a dog or a swan. He did not like to recall those periods of
transition from boyhood to adolescence. But something of that was
always within him, and only a faint secret light touched this aban-
doned night-side of his nature, above which flew no thoughts and
which he had wilfully made desolate; this light was his love for
the invisible, other Arabella. If the day-Arabella had happened to
be his wife or his mistress, he would always have remained reason-
ably terre à terre with her and would never have allowed any place
in his life for the phantasms of his resolutely suppressed childhood.
But he thought of his dark lover otherwise, and wrote to her other-
wise. What was Lucidor to do when his friend clamoured to receive
something more, some more living sign than these lines on white
paper? Lucidor was alone with his timidity, his confusion, and his
love. The day-Arabella was of no help to him. Yes, it even seemed
as though she were driven by some demon to play against him. The
colder, the more fickle, the more mundane, the more of a flirt she be-
came, the more Wladimir begged and expected of the other. He
begged so well that Lucidor did not have the courage to refuse him.
Even if he did have the courage, his tender pen would have balked
at the movements which would spell out the denial. The night
came on which Wladimir was to think of how he would be received
by Arabella in Lucidor's room. In some way Lucidor had succeeded
in darkening the window facing the Kärtnerstrasse so completely
that one could not see an inch before him. It was plain that voices
must be lowered to an inaudible whisper; the servant was separated
only by one door. It was not stated where Lucidor spent the night;
yet he was apparently not in the secret, and some pretext had been
adopted for getting him out of the way. Strange, that Arabella wore
her lovely hair bound tight in a heavy cloth, and softly but resolute-
ly forbade the hand of her friend to undo it. But this was almost the
only thing which she did forbid. Several other nights passed which
were not like this night; but again one ensued which was like it, and


HUGO VON HOFMANNSTHAL
129
Wladimir was very happy. Perhaps these were the happiest days
of his whole life. The assurance of his nocturnal pleasure gives a
singular tone to his meetings with Arabella during the day. He
learns to get a special enjoyment from the fact that by day she is
so incomprehensibly different. There is something enchanting in her
control, as she never slips up with one glance, one motion. He seems
to notice that from week to week she is even colder to him the more
tender she has shown herself at night. He determines to appear no
less able, no less contained. By adapting himself so whole-heartedly
to this secretly strong feminine will, he feels that in a sense he is
earning the pleasure of his nights. He begins taking the greatest de-
light in their double life. That he owns this woman who seems so
completely apart from him, that this same woman who can surren-
der herself completely knows how to maintain such an untouched,
untouchable presence
really to experience this makes him
dizzy, like repeated drinking from some magic goblet. He begins to
see that he must thank the fates on his knees for blessing him in a
way so strangely suited to his deeper nature. He says all this effu-
sively, to himself, and also to Lucidor. There is nothing which could
strike poor Lucidor with a more mortal terror.
In the meantime the real Arabella was moving so pronouncedly
away from Wladimir that he would have noticed the change hourly
if he had not had the rarest of reasons for a wrong interpretation.
Without his actually betraying himself she senses between them a
something which did not use to be there. They have always under-
stood each other; they understand each other still; their day-selves
are identical; they could have struck off a very satisfactory marriage
of convenience. She and Herr von Imfanger do not understand each
other at all, but she likes him. She now realizes all the more that in
this sense she does not like Wladimir; that mute something which
seems to be vibrating between them makes her impatient. It is not
courtship, nor is it flattery; she is not quite sure what it is, but she
has no taste for it. Imfanger cannot help being aware that she cares
for him. Wladimir, on his part, believes that he has quite different
testimony. A most peculiar situation arises between the two men.
Each thinks that the other has all the grounds in the world for being
disgruntled, or for simply leaving the field. Each finds the other's
composure and comfortable good humour thoroughly ridiculous.
Neither knows exactly how to take the other.


130
LUCIDOR
.
The mother is in a most painful position. Several expedients
have failed. Friends leave her in the lurch. A loan advanced to her
under the guise of friendship is demanded back regardlessly. Frau
von Murska is on the verge of far-reaching decisions. She will break
up housekeeping in Vienna over night, take leave of her circle by
letter, and hunt out a retreat somewhere, even if it be on the se-
questered estate, in the house with the caretaker's family. Such a
step does not appeal much to Arabella, but despair is foreign to her
nature. Lucidor must fight down a truly limitless and excruciating
misery. Several nights had passed in which she had not summoned
her lover. She wanted to bring him again this night. The conver-
sation in the evening between Arabella and her mother, the decision
to leave, the impossibility of hindering their departure
all this is like the blow of a club to her. And if she were to take a
desperate stand, throw off all pretence, admit everything to her
mother, and especially expose it all to her friend .. there
creeps through her the icy terror of his disillusion, of his scorn. She
seems to herself like a criminal, but she does not think of the others,
nor hold anything against him. She cannot see him to-night. She
feels that she would wither away with shame, with distraction and
wretchedness. Instead of holding him in her arms, she writes to him,
for the last time. It is a most humble, touching letter, and nothing
suits it less than the name of Arabella with which she signs it. She
has never really hoped to be his wife. It would be an infinite joy
just to live brief years, one year, with him as his mistress. But that
must not, cannot, be. He must not ask, he must not importune
she demands that on his oath. To-morrow he shall come
for one more visit, but not until evening. The day after
they will probably be gone. Later perhaps he will learn, under-
stand, and she almost adds forgive; but the word seems so incred-
ible on Arabella's tongue that she does not write it. She sleeps poor-
ly, gets up early, and sends the letter from the hotel to Wladimir by
a servant. The morning is spent in packing. After lunch, without
saying anything about it, she goes to her uncle's. The idea came to
her during the night. She would find the words, the arguments, to
move this queer man. The miracle would happen and this tightly
closed purse would open. She does not think of these problems as
they really are, but she thinks of her mother, of their position, of
her love. With money or a letter in her hand she would fall at her
.
.
.


HUGO VON HOFMANNSTHAL
131
.
mother's feet and beg as her only pay
what?
her exhausted, aching head could hardly conceive of it
yes! what might be expected: she would ask that they stay in
Vienna, and that everything remain unchanged. She finds her uncle
at home. The details of this scene, which developed quite strangely,
will not be given here. Only this: that she really does move him.
He is just about to make the decisive gesture when a senile whim
changes his mind; he will do something later; just when he will not
say
and that ends it. She comes home, slinks up the
stairs, and dropping on the floor in her own room, in the midst of
boxes and packages, she gives in to her despair. Then she thinks that
she hears Wladimir's voice in the front room. She creeps along on
tiptoe and listens. It really is Wladimir, with Arabella, and the
two of them have raised their voices somewhat in the strangest dia-
logue.
In the morning Wladimir received Arabella's mysterious letter of
farewell. Nothing has ever affected him more deeply. He feels that
there is something dark between them, something other than their
love. He feels in himself love and strength enough to learn, to
understand, to forgive whatever this something might be. He cares
too much for the incomparable mistress of his nights to live with-
out her. Strangely enough, he does not think at all of the real Ara-
bella; it almost seemed out of place to him that she should be the
one he is coming to, to console, to lift up and take wholly and for
ever. He arrives and finds her mother alone in the salon. She is as
excited, confused, and dreamy as ever. He is different than she had
ever seen him before. He kisses her hands, he speaks
all
this in a disturbed, constrained manner. He begs her to let him talk
privately with Arabella. Frau von Murska is charmed, and raised
forth with into her seventh heaven. The incredible is her element.
She hurries to get Arabella, and presses her not to refuse the young
man her consent now that everything could take such a splendid
turn. Arabella is immeasureably astounded. “I am certainly on no
such terms with him," she says coolly. “You never know what sort
of terms you are on with men,” her mother rejoins, and sends her
into the room with Wladimir. Wladimir is confused, apprehensive,
and glowing. Arabella finds more reason to believe that Herr von
Imfanger is right in considering Wladimir a strange sort. Wladi-
mir, put out of countenance by her coldness, begs her finally to
.


132
LUCIDOR
a
abandon her disguise. Arabella is not in the least aware what dis-
guise she is to abandon. Wladimir becomes at once tender and
scornful, a mixture which appeals so little to Arabella that she ulti-
mately runs out of the room and leaves him standing there alone.
In his immoderate stupefaction he is about to put her down as in-
sane; but she has already indicated that she thinks the same of him
and is in perfect agreement with a third party on this matter. At this
point Wladimir would hold a very helpless monologue, except that
the other door opens and the strangest apparition falls upon him,
embraces him, slips to the floor in front of him. It is Lucidor, or
rather not Lucidor, but Lucile, a lovely girl bathed in tears, wear-
ing a dressing-gown of Arabella's, her boyishly short hair hidden
under a heavy silk cloth. It is his friend and confidante, and at the
same time his secret lover, his mistress, his wife. The dialogue which
follows might be invented by life itself
it could be par-
tially imitated in comedy
but not in a narrative.
Further, it is not expressly stated here whether Lucidor really
became Wladimir's wife, or whether in the day-time and in some
other country she remained what she had already been in the dark
of night, his delighted mistress.
One might doubt whether Wladimir was a sufficiently worth-
while man to deserve so much sacrifice. But in any case the full
beauty of an unconditionally sacrificial soul like Lucile's could not
have been revealed under any less peculiar conditions.
.
.


A LINE DRAWING. BY E. E. CUMMINGS





MORE MEMORIES
BY WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
XXIII (continued)
W
HEN she' opened her theatre she had to meet a hostile audi-
ence, almost as violent as that Synge met in January 1907,
and certainly more brutal, for the Abbey audience had no hatred for
the players, and I think but little for Synge himself. Nor had she
the certainty of final victory to give her courage, for the Comedy of
Sighs was a rambling story told with a little paradoxical wit. She
had brought the trouble upon herself perhaps, for always in revolt
against her own poetical gift, which now seemed obsolete, and
against her own Demeter-like face in the mirror, she had tried when
interviewed by the Press to shock and startle—to seem to desire
enemies; and yet, unsure of her own judgement being out of her
own trade, had feared to begin with Shaw's athletic wit, and now
outraged convention saw its chance. For two hours and a half, pit
and gallery drowned the voices of the players with boos and jeers
that were meant to be bitter to the author who sat visible to all in his
box surrounded by his family, and to the actress struggling bravely
through her weary part; and then pit and gallery went home to
spread their lying story that the actress had a fit of hysterics in her
dressing-room.
Todhunter had sat on to the end, and there were, I think, four
acts of it, listening to the howling of his enemies, while his friends
slipped out one by one, till one saw everywhere their empty seats,
but nothing could arouse the fighting instincts of that melancholy
man. Next day I tried to get him to publish his book of words with
satirical designs and illustrations by Beardsley, who was just rising
into fame, and an introduction attacking the public, but though
petulant and irascible he was incapable of any emotion that could
give life to a cause. He shared the superstition still current in the
theatre, that the public wants sincere drama, but is kept from it
by some conspiracy of Managers or newspapers, and could not get
out of his head that the actors were to blame. Shaw, whose turn
1
Florence Farr, at the Avenue Theatre, in 1894.


134
MORE MEMORIES
came next, had foreseen all months before, and had planned an
opening that would confound his enemies. For the first few minutes
Arms and the Man is crude melodrama and then just when the
audience are thinking how crude it is, it turns into excellent farce.
At the dress rehearsal, a dramatist who had had his own quarrel
with the public, was taken in the noose; for at the first laugh he
stood up, turned his back on the stage, scowled at the audience, and
even when everybody else knew what turn the play had taken, con-
tinued to scowl and order those nearest to be silent.
On the first night the whole pit and gallery, except certain mem-
bers of the Fabian Society started to laugh at the author and then,
discovering that they themselves were being laughed at, sat there
not converted—their hatred was too bitter for that—but dumb-
founded, while the rest of the house cheered and laughed. In the
silence that greeted the author after the cry for a speech one man
did indeed get his courage and boo loudly. “I assure the gentlemen
in the gallery” was Shaw's answer "that he and I are of exactly the
same opinion, but what can we do against a whole house who are of
the contrary opinion ?” And from that moment Bernard Shaw be-
came the most formidable man in modern letters, and even the most
drunken of medical students knew it. My own play, which had
been played with The Comedy of Sighs, had roused no passions,
but had pleased a sufficient minority for Florence Farr to keep it
upon the stage with Arms and the Man. I was in the theatre almost
every night for some weeks. "Oh, yes, the people seem to like Arms
and the Man,” said one of Mr Shaw's players to me, “but we have
just found out that we are all wrong, Mr Shaw did really mean it
quite seriously, for he has written a letter to say so, and we must not
play for laughs any more.” Another night I found the manager,
triumphant and excited, the Prince of Wales and the Duke of Edin-
burgh had been there, and the Duke of Edinburgh had spoken his
dislike out loud so that the whole stalls could hear, but the Prince
of Wales had been "very pleasant” and “got the Duke of Edin-
burgh away as soon as possible.” “They asked for me,” he went on
"and the Duke of Edinburgh kept on repeating 'The man is mad,'
meaning Mr Shaw, and the Prince of Wales asked who Mr Shaw
was, and what he meant by it.” I myself was almost as bewildered,
for, though I came mainly to see how my own play went, and for the
first fortnight to vex my most patient actors with new lines, I lis-


WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
135
tened with excitement to see how the audience would like certain
passages of Arms and the Man; I hated it; it seemed to me inorganic,
logical straightness and not the crooked road of life and I stood
aghast before its energy as to-day before that of the Stone Drill
by Mr Epstein or of some design by Mr Wyndham Lewis. He was
right to claim Samuel Butler for his master, for Butler was the first
Englishman to make the discovery, that it is possible to write with
great effect without music, without style, either good or bad, to
eliminate from the mind all emotional implication and to prefer
plain water to every vintage, so much metropolitan lead and solder
to any tendril of the vine. Presently I had a nightmare that I was
haunted by a sewing machine, that clicked and shone, but the in-
credible thing was that the machine smiled, smiled perpetually. Yet
I delighted in Shaw the formidable man. He could hit my enemies
and the enemies of all I loved, as I could never hit, as no living
author that was dear to me could ever hit.
Florence Farr's way home was mine also for a part of the way,
and it was often of this that we talked, and sometimes, though not
always, she would share my hesitations, and for years to come I
was to wonder, whenever Shaw became my topic, whether the cock
crowed for my blame or for my praise.
XXIV
Shaw and Wilde, had no catastrophe come, would have long
divided the stage between them, though they were most unlike-
for Wilde believed himself to value nothing but words in their emo-
tional associations, and he had turned his style to a parade as though
it were his show, and he Lord Mayor.
I was at Sligo again and I saw the announcement of his action
against Lord Queensberry when starting from my uncle's house to
walk to Knocknarea to dine with Cockrane of the Glen, as he was
called, to distinguish him from others of that name, an able old
man. He had a relation, a poor mad girl, who shared our meals,
and at whom I shuddered. She would take a flower from the vase
in front of her and push it along the tablecloth towards any male
guest who sat near. The old man himself had strange opinions,
borne not from any mental eccentricity, but from the solitude of his
life; and a freedom from all prejudice that was not of his own


136
MORE MEMORIES
discovery. “The world is getting more manly” he would say "it has
begun to drink port again," or "Ireland is going to become pros-
perous. Divorced couples now choose Ireland for a retreat, just
as before Scotland became prosperous they began to go there. There
are a divorced wife and her lover living at the other side of the
mountain.” I remember that I spoke that night of Wilde's kindness
to myself, said I did not believe him guilty, quoted the psycholo-
gist Bain, who has attributed to every sensualist "a voluminous
tenderness," and described Wilde's hard brilliance, his dominating
self-possession. I considered him essentially a man of action, that
he was a writer by perversity and accident, and would have been
more important as soldier or politician; and I was certain that,
guilty or not guilty, he would prove himself a man. I was probably
excited, and did most of the talking, for if Cockrane had talked, I
would have remembered an amusing sentence or two; but he was
certainly sympathetic. A couple of days later, I received a letter
from Lionel Johnson, denouncing Wilde with great bitterness. He
ad “a cold scientific intellect”; he got a "sense of triumph and
power; at every dinner-table he dominated, from the knowledge that
he was guilty of that sin which more than any other possible to
man would turn all those people against him if they but knew." He
wrote in the mood of his poem, To the Destroyer of a Soul, ad-
dressed to Wilde, as I have always believed, though I know noth-
ing of the circumstance that made him write it.
I might have known that Wilde's fantasy had taken some tragic
turn, and that he was meditating upon possible disaster, but one
took all his words for play—had he not called insincerity "a mere
multiplication of the personality" or some such words? I had met a
man who had found him in a barber's shop in Venice, and heard
him explain, “I am having my hair curled that I may resemble
Nero"; and when, as editor of an Irish Anthology, I had asked
leave to quote "Tread gently, she is near under the snow,” he had
written that I might do so if I pleased, but his most characteristic
poem was that sonnet with the lines
9)
“Lo! with a little rod
a
I did but touch the honey of romance
And must I lose a soul's inheritance."


WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
137
When in London for my play I had asked news from an actor,
who had seen him constantly. "He is in deep melancholy,” was the
answer. “He says that he tries to sleep away as much of life as pos-
sible, only leaving his bed at two or three in the afternoon, and
spending the rest of the day at the Café Royal. He has written what
he calls the best short story in the world, and will have it that he
repeats it to himself on getting out of bed and before every meal. .
Christ came from a white plain to a purple city, and as He passed
through the first street, He heard voices overhead, and saw a young
man lying drunk upon a window sill. Why do you waste your
soul in drunkenness?' He said, 'Lord, I was a leper and you healed
me, what else can I do? A little further through the town He saw
a young man following a harlot, and said, Why do you dissolye
your soul in debauchery?' and the young man answered, 'Lord, I
was blind, and You healed me, what else can I do? At last in
the middle of the city He saw an oldman crouching, weeping upon
the ground, and when He asked why he wept the old man answered,
‘Lord, I was dead and You raised me into life, what else can I do
but weep?”
Wilde published that story a little later, but spoiled it with the
verbal decoration of his epoch, and I have to repeat it to myself as I
first heard it, before I can see its terrible beauty. I no more doubt
its sincerity, than I doubt that his parade of gloom, all that late
rising, and sleeping away his life, that elaborate playing with
tragedy, was an attempt to escape from an emotion by its exaggera-
tion. He had three successful plays running at once; he had been
almost poor, and now, his head full of Flaubert, found himself with
,
ten thousand a year: “Lord, I was dead, and you raised me into life,
what else can I do but weep.” A comedian, he was in the hands of
those dramatists who understand nothing but tragedy.
A few days after the first production of my Land of Heart's
Desire I had my last conversation with him. He had come into the
theatre as the curtain fell upon my play, and I knew that it was to
ask my pardon that he overwhelmed me with compliments; and yet
I wonder if he would have chosen those precise compliments, or
spoken so extravagantly, but for the turn his thoughts had taken:
"Your story in The National Observer, The Crucifixion of the Out-
cast, is sublime, wonderful, wonderful.”


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Some business or other brought me to London once more, and I
asked various Irish writers for letters of sympathy, and I was re-
fused by none but Edward Dowden, who gave me what I considered
an irrelevant excuse—his dislike for everything that Wilde had
written. I heard that Wilde was at his mother's house in Oakley
Street, and I called there, but the Irish servant told me, her face
drawn and tragic as in the presence of death, that he was not there,
but that I could see his brother. Willie Wilde received me with
“Who are you, what do you want?" but became all friendship when
I told him that I had brought letters of sympathy. He took the
bundle of letters in his hand, but said, “Do these letters urge him
to run away? Every friend he has is urging him to, but we have
made up our minds that he must stay and take his chance." "No,'
I said. “I certainly do not think that he should run away, nor do
those letters advise it.” “Letters from Ireland," he said. “Thank
you, thank you. He will be glad to get those letters, but I would
keep them away from him if they advised him to run away.” Then
he threw himself back in his chair, and began to talk with inco-
herent emotion, and in phrases that echoed now and again his
brother's style at its worst; there were tears in his eyes, and he was,
I think, slightly intoxicated. “He could escape, O yes, he could
escape—there is a yacht in the Thames, and five thousand pounds to
pay his bail—well, not exactly in the Thames, but there is a yacht
-oh, yes, he could escape, even if I had to inflate a balloon in the
back yard with my own hands, but he has resolved to stay to face
it out, to stand the music like Christ. You must have heard it is
not necessary to go into details-but he and I, we have not been
friends; but he came to me like a wounded stag, and I took him in.”
After his release—this after the failure of his action against Lord
Queensberry, I think—"Stewart Headlam engaged a room at an
hotel and brought him there under another name, but the manager
came up and said 'Are you Mr Wilde ?! You know what my brother
'
is, you know how he would answer that, he said, 'Yes, I am Oscar
Wilde,' and the manager said he must not stay. The same thing
happened in hotel after hotel, and at last he made up his mind to
come here. It is his vanity that has brought all this disgrace upon
him; they swung incense before him.” He dwelt upon the rhythm
of the words as his brother would have done—"They swung it be-
fore his heart.” His first emotion at the thought of the letters over,
a
a


WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
139
even if
a
he became more simple, and explained that his brother considered
that his crime was not the vice itself, but that he should have
brought such misery upon his wife and children, and that he was
bound to accept any chance, however slight, that might re-establish
his position. "If he is acquitted,” he said, "he will stay out of
England for a few years, and can then gather his friends about him
once more—even if he is condemned he will purge his offence—but
if he runs away he will lose every friend that he has.” I heard later,
from whom I forget now, that Lady Wilde had said, “If you stay,
you go to prison, you will always be my son, it will make
no difference to my affection, but if you go I will never speak to you
again.” While I was there, some woman who had just seen him-
Willie Wilde's wife, I think-came in, and threw herself in a chair,
and said in an exhausted voice "It is all right now, he has made up
his mind to go to prison if necessary.” Before his release, two years
later, his brother and mother were dead, and a little later his wife,
struck by paralysis during his imprisonment, I think, was dead too;
and he himself, his constitution ruined by prison life, lived but a
few months longer; but I have never doubted, even for an instant,
that he made the right decision, and that he owes to that decision
half of his renown.
Cultivated London, that before the action against Lord Queens-
berry had mocked his pose and affected style, and refused to ac-
knowledge his wit, was now full of his advocates, though I did not
meet a single man who considered him innocent. One old enemy of
his overtook me in the street and began to praise his audacity, his
self-possession. “He has made,” he said, "of infamy a new Ther-
mopylae.” I had written in reply to Lionel Johnson's letter that I
regretted Wilde's downfall but not that of his imitators, but John-
son had changed with the rest. “Why should I not regret the fall
of Wilde's imitators”—I had but tried to share what I thought his
opinion—"They were worthless, but should have been left to criti-
cism.” Wilde himself was a martyr in his eyes, and when I said
that tragedy might give his art a greater depth, he would not even
grant a martyr's enemies that poor merit, and thought Wilde would
produce, when it was all over, some comedy exactly like the others,
writing with an art where events could leave no trace. Everywhere
one met writers and artists who praised his wit and eloquence in
the witness box, or repeated some private saying. Willie Redmond


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told of finding him, to his astonishment, at the conversazione of
some theatrical society, standing amid an infuriated crowd, mocking
with more than all his old satirical wit the actors and their country.
He had said to a well-known painter during one or other of
the trials, "My poor brother writes to me that he is defending me
all over London; my poor dear brother, he could compromise a
steam engine.” His brother, too, had suffered a change, for, if
rumour did not wrong him, “the wounded stag” had not been at
all graciously received. “Thank God my vices were decent,” had
been his comment, he, refusing at first to sit at the same table, had
dined at some neighbouring hotel at his brother's expense. His suc-
cessful brother who had scorned him for a drunken ne'er-do-well
was now at his mercy, and besides, he probably shared, until tragedy
awoke another self, the rage and contempt that filled the crowds in
the street, and all men and women who had an over-abundant nor-
mal sexual instinct. "Wilde will never lift his head again,” said
the art critic Gleeson White, “for he has against him all men of
infamous life.” When the verdict was announced the harlots in the
street outside danced upon the pavement.
XXV
Somewhere about 1450, though later in some parts of Europe by
a hundred years or so, and in some earlier, men attained to person-
ality in great numbers, “Unity of being,” and became like a “per-
fectly proportioned human body," and as men so fashioned held
places of power, their nations had it too, prince and ploughman
sharing that thought and feeling. What afterwards showed for rifts
and cracks were there already, but imperious impulse held all to-
gether. Then the scattering came, the seeding of the poppy,
burst-
ing of pea-pod, and for a time personality seemed but the stronger
for it. Shakespeare's people make all things serve their passion,
and that passion is for the moment the whole energy of their being-
birds, beasts, men, women, landscape, society, are but symbols and
metaphors, nothing is studied in itself, the mind is a dark well, no
surface, depth only. The men that Titian painted, the men that
Janssen painted, even the men of Van Dyck, seemed at moments
like great hawks at rest. In the Dublin National Gallery there
hung, perhaps there still hangs, upon the same wall, a portrait of
a


WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
141
some Venetian gentleman by Strozzi, and Mr Sargent's painting
of President Wilson. Whatever thought broods in the dark eyes of
that Venetian gentleman, has drawn its life from his whole body;
it feeds upon it as the flame feeds upon the candle—and should that
thought be changed, his pose would change, his very cloak would
rustle for his whole body thinks. President Wilson lives only in
the eyes, which are steady and intent; the flesh about the mouth is
dead, and the hands are dead, and the clothes suggest no movement
of his body, nor any movement but that of the valet who has
brushed and folded in mechanical routine. There all was an energy
flowing outward from the nature itself, here all is the anxious study
and slight deflexion of external force; there man's mind and body
were predominantly subjective; here all is objective, using those
words not as philosophy uses them, but as we use them in conver-
sation.
The bright part of the moon's disk, to adopt the symbolism of
a certain poem, is subjective mind, and the dark, objective mind,
and we have eight and twenty phases for our classification of man-
kind, and of the movement of his thought. At the first phase—the
night where there is no moonlight—all is objective, while when,
upon the fifteenth night, the moon comes to the full, there is only
subjective mind. The mid-renaissance could but approximate to
the full moon "For there is no human life at the full or the dark,”
but we may attribute to the next three nights of the moon the men
of Shakespeare, of Titian, of Strozzi, and of Van Dyck, and watch
them grow more reasonable, more orderly, less turbulent, as the
nights pass; and it is well to find before the fourth—the nineteenth
moon counting from the start—a sudden change, as when a cloud
becomes rain, or water freezes, for the great transitions are sudden;
popular, typical men have grown more ugly and more argumenta-
tive; the face that Van Dyck called a fatal face has faded before
Cromwell's warty opinionated head. Henceforth no mind made
like “a perfectly proportioned human body” shall sway the public,
for great men must live in a portion of themselves, become profes-
sional and abstract; but seeing that the moon's third quarter is not
yet passed, that abstraction has attained, but not passed its climax-
that half as I affirm it of the twenty-second night still lingers,
they still subdue and conquer, cherish, even, some Utopian dream,
they spread abstraction ever further till thought is but a film, and


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>
there is no dark depth any more, surface only. But men who be-
long by nature to the nights near to the Full are still born—a tragic
minority—and how shall they do their work when too ambitious
for a private station, except as Wilde of the nineteenth phase, as
my symbolism has it, did his work. He understood his weakness,
true personality was impossible, for that is borne in solitude, and at
his moon one is not solitary; he must project himself before the
eyes of others, and, having great ambition, before some great crowd
of
eyes; but there is no longer any great crowd that cares for his
true thought. He must humour and cajole and pose, take worn-out
stage situations, for he knows that he may be as romantic as he
please, so long as he does not believe in his romance, and all that he
may get their ears for a few strokes of contemptuous wit in which
he does believe.
We Rhymers did not humour and cajole, but it was not wholly
from demerit, it was in part because of different merit, that he re-
fused our exile. Shaw, as I understood him, has no true quarrel with
his time, its moon and his almost exactly coincide. He is quite con-
tent to exchange Narcissus and his Pool for the signal box at a rail-
way junction, where goods and travellers pass perpetually upon
their logical glittering road. Wilde was a monarchist, though con-
tent that monarchy should turn demagogue for its own safety, and
he held a theatre by the means whereby he held a London dinner-
table. “He who can dominate a London dinner-table," he had
boasted, “can dominate the world.” While Shaw has but carried
his street-corner socialist eloquence on to the stage, and in him one
discovers, in his writings and his public speech, as once, before their
outline had been softened by prosperity or the
or the passage of the years,
in his clothes and in his stiff joints, the civilization that Sargent's
picture has explored. Neither his crowd nor he have yet made that
discovery that brought President Wilson so near his death, that
the moon draws to its fourth quarter. But what happens to the
individual man whose moon has come to that fourth quarter, and
what to the civilization
?
I can but remember pipe music to-night, though I can half hear
beyond it in the memory a weightier music, but this much at
any rate is certain, that dream of my early manhood, that a modern
nation can return to unity of culture, is false; though it may
be
can achieve it for some small circle of men and women, and there
leave it till the moon bring round its century.
we


WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
143
The cat went here and there
And the moon spun round like a top,
And the nearest kin of the moon
The creeping cat looked up.
Minnaloushe creeps through the grass
From moonlit place to place,
The sacred moon overhead
Has taken a new phase.
Does Minnaloushe know that his pupils
Will
pass
from change to change,
And that from round to crescent,
From crescent to round they range?
Minnaloushe creeps through the grass
Alone, important and wise,
And lifts to the changing moon
His changing eyes.
XXVI
Henley's troubles and infirmities were growing upon him. He
too, an ambitious formidable man, who showed alike in his practice
and in his theory, in his lack of sympathy for Rossetti and Landor
for instance, that he never understood that but a little of our own
nature can be brought to perfect expression nor that little but with
great toil in a much divided civilization; though, doubtless, if our
own phase be right, that little may be an image of the whole, the
moon's still scarce crumbled image, as it were, in a glass of wine.
He would be, and have all poets be, a true epitome of the whole
mass, a Herrick and Dr Johnson in the same body and because this
-not so difficult before the Mermaid closed its door—is no longer
possible, his work lacked music, is abstract, as even an actor's move-
ment can be when the thought of doing is plainer to his mind than
the doing itself: the straight line from cup to lip, let us say, more
plain than the hand's own sensation weighed down by that heavy
spillable cup. I think he was content, when he had called before our
eyes—before the too understanding eyes of his chosen crowd—the
violent burly man that he had dreamed, content with the mere sug-
gestion, and so did not work long enough at his verses. He disliked
Victor Hugo as much as he did Rossetti, and yet Rossetti's transla-


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tion from Les Burgraves, because of its more technical mastery, out-
sings Henley in his own song
"My mother is dead; God's patience wears;
It seems my Chaplain will not have done.
Love on: who cares?
Who cares? Love on."
I can read his poetry with emotion, but I read it for some glimpse
of what he might have been as Border balladist, or Cavalier, or of
what he actually was, not as poet, but as man. He had what Wilde
lacked, even in his ruin, passion, was maybe as passionate as some
great man of action, as Parnell, let us say. When he and Stevenson
quarrelled, he cried over it with some woman or other, and his no-
torious article was but for vengeance upon Mrs Stevenson, who had
arranged for the public eye, what he considered an imaginary figure,
with no resemblance to the gay companion who had founded his life
to that life's injury upon “The august, the immortal musketeers."
She had caused the quarrel, as he believed, and now she had robbed
him over again, by blotting from the world's memory the friend
of his youth; and because he believed it I read those angry para-
graphs with but deeper sympathy for the writer; and I think that
the man who has left them out of Henley's collected writings has
wronged his memory, as Mrs Stevenson wronged the memory of
Stevenson.
He was no contemplative man, no pleased possessor of wooden
models and paper patterns, but a great passionate man, and no
friend of his would have him pictured otherwise. I saw little of him
in later years, but I doubt if he was ever the same after the death
of his six-year-old daughter. Few passages of his verse touch me as
do those few mentions of her though they lack precision of word and
sound. When she is but a hope, he prays that she may have his
"gift of life” and his wife's "gift of love" and when she is but a
few months old he murmurs over her sleep
“When you wake in your crib,
You, an inch of experience-
Vaulted about
With the wonder of darkness;
Wailing and striving


WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
145
To reach from your feebleness
Something you feel
Will be good to and cherish you.
And now he commends some friend “boyish, and kind, and shy"
who greeted him, and greeted his wife, “that day we brought our
beautiful one to lie in the green peace” and who is now dead him-
self, and after that he speaks of love “turned by death to longing"
and so, to an enemy.
When I spoke to him of his child's death he said, "she was a
person of genius, she had the genius of the mind, and the genius of
the body.” And later I heard him talk of her as a man talks of
something he cannot keep silence over because it is in all his
thoughts. I can remember too his talking of some book of natural
history he had read, that he might be able to answer her questions.
He had a house now at Mortlake on the Thames with a great
ivy tod shadowing door and window, and one night there he shocked
and startled a roomful of men by showing how far he could be
swept beyond our reach in reveries of affection. The dull man, who
had tried to put Wilde out of countenance, suddenly said to the
whole room, roused by I cannot remember what incautious remark
of mine made to some man at my side, “Yeats believes in magic,
what nonsense.” Henley said, “No, it may not be nonsense; black
magic is all the go in Paris now.” And then turning towards me
with a changed sound in his voice “It is just a game, isn't it.” I re-
plied, not noticing till too late his serious tone, and wishing to
avoid discussion in the dull man's company “One has had a vision;
one wants to have another, that is all.” Then Henley said speaking
in a very low voice "I want to know how I am to get to my daugh-
ter. I was sitting here the other night when she came into the room
and played round the table and went out again. Then I saw that the
door was shut and I knew that I had seen a vision." There was an
embarrassed silence, and then somebody spoke of something else and
we began to discuss it hurriedly and eagerly.
>
a
XXVII
I came now to be more in London, never missing the meetings of
the Rhymers' Club, nor those of the council of the Irish Literary
Society, where I constantly fought out our Irish quarrels and pressed


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upon the unwilling Gavan Duffy the books of our new movement.
The Irish members of Parliament looked upon us with some hostil-
ity because we had made it a matter of principle, never to put a
politician in the chair, and upon other grounds. One day, some old
Irish member of Parliament made perhaps his only appearance at a
gathering of members. He recited with great emotion, a ballad of
his own composition in the manner of Young Ireland, repeating over
his sacred names, Wolfe Tone, Emmet, and Owen Roe, and mourn-
ing that new poets and new movements should have taken some-
thing of their sacredness away. The ballad had no literary merit,
but I went home with a troubled conscience; and for a dozen years
perhaps, till I began to see the result of our work in a deepened per-
ception of all those things that strengthen race, that trouble re-
mained. I had in mind that old politician as I wrote but the other
day-
Our part
To murmur name upon name
As a mother names her child.
а
The Rhymers had begun to break up in tragedy, though we did
not know that till the play had finished. I have never found a full
explanation of that tragedy; sometimes I have remembered that,
unlike the Victorian poets, almost all were poor men, and had made
it a matter of conscience to turn from every kind of money-making
that prevented good writing, and that poverty meant strain, and for
the most part, a refusal of domestic life. Then I have remembered
that Johnson had private means, and that others who came to tragic
ends, had wives and families. Another day I think that perhaps our
form of lyric, our insistence upon emotion which has no relation to
any public interest, gathered together overwrought unstable men;
and remember the moment after that the first to go out of his mind
had no lyrical gift and that we valued him mainly because he
seemed a witty man of the world; and that a little later another who
seemed, alike as man and writer, dull and formless, went out of his
mind, first burning poems which I cannot believe would have proved
him, as the one man who saw them claims, a man of genius. The
meetings were always decorous and often dull, someone would
read out a poem and we would comment, too politely for the criti-
cism to have great value; and yet that we read out our poems, and
a
a


WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
147
thought that they could be so tested, was a definition of our aims.
Love's Nocturne is one of the most beautiful poems in the world, but
no one can find out its beauty, so intricate its thought and meta-
phor, till he has read it over several times, or often stopped his read-
ing to think out the meaning of some passage, and the Faustine of
Swinburne where many separate verses are powerful and musical
could not were it read out be understood with pleasure, however
clearly it were read, because it has no more logical structure than a
bag of shot. I shall, however, remember all my life that evening
when Lionel Johnson read or spoke aloud in his musical monotone,
where meaning and cadence found the most precise elocution, his
poem suggested by the Statue of King Charles at Charing Cross,”
it was as though I listened to a great speech, nor will that poem be
to me again what it was that first night. For long I only knew
Dowson's O Mors, to quote but the first words of its long title and
his Villanelle of Sunset from his reading, and it was because of
the desire to hold them in my hand that I suggested the first Book of
the Rhymers' Club. They were not speech but perfect song, though
song for the speaking voice. It was perhaps our delight in poetry
that was, before all else, speech or song and could hold the atten-
tion of a fitting audience, like a good play or good conversation, that
made Francis Thompson, whom we admired so much, and before
the publication of his first poem-I had brought to the Cheshire
Cheese the proof sheets of his Ode to the Setting Sun, his first pub-
lished poem-come but once and refuse to contribute to our book.
Preoccupied with his elaborate verse, he may have seen only that
which we renounced, and thought what seemed to us simplicity,
mere emptiness. To some members this simplicity was perhaps
created by their tumultuous lives, they praised a desired woman
and hoped that she would find amid their praise her very self, or at
worst their very passion; and knew that she, ignoramus that she
was, would have slept in the middle of Love's Nocturne lofty and
tender though it be. Woman herself was still in our eyes, for all
that, romantic and mysterious, still the priestess of her shrine; our
emotions remembering the Lilith and the Sybilla Palmifera of Ros-
setti, for as yet that sense of comedy, which was soon to mould the
very fashion plates, and, in the eyes of men of my generation, to
destroy at last the sense of beauty itself, had scarce begun to show
itself here and there, in slight subordinate touches among the designs
of great painters and craftsmen. It could not be otherwise, for John.
1


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a
son’s favourite phrase, that life is ritual, expressed something that
was in some degree in all our thoughts, and how could life be ritual
if woman had not her symbolical place?
If Rossetti was a subconscious influence, and perhaps the most
powerful of all, we looked consciously to Pater for our philosophy.
Three or four years ago I re-read Marius the Epicurean expecting
to find I cared for it no longer, but it still seemed to me, as I think
it seemed to us all, the only great prose in modern English, and yet
I began to wonder if it, or the attitude of mind of which it was the
noblest expression, had not caused the disaster of my friends. It
taught us to walk upon a rope, tightly stretched through serene air,
and we were left to keep our feet upon a swaying rope in a storm.
Pater had made us learned; and, whatever we might be elsewhere,
ceremonious and polite, and distant in our relations to one another,
and I think none knew as yet that Dowson who seemed to drink so
little and had so much dignity and reserve, was breaking his heart
for the daughter of the keeper of an Italian eating-house, in dissipa-
tion and drink; and that he might that very night sleep upon a six-
penny
bed in a doss-house. It seems to me that even yet, and I am
speaking of 1894 and 1895, we knew nothing of one another, but the
poems that we read and criticized; perhaps I have forgotten or was
too much in Ireland for knowledge, but of this I am certain, we
shared nothing but the artistic life. Sometimes Johnson and Symons
would visit our sage at Oxford and I remember Johnson, whose re-
ports however were not always to be trusted, returning with a sen-
tence that long ran in my head. He had noticed books on political
economy among Pater's books, and Pater had said “Everything that
has occupied man, for any length of time, is worthy of our study."
Perhaps it was because of Pater's influence that we, with an affecta-
tion of learning, claimed the whole past of literature for our author-
ity, instead of finding it like the young men in the age of comedy
that followed us, in some new, and so still unrefuted authority, that
we preferred what seemed still uncrumbled rock, to the still un-
spotted foam; that we were traditional alike in our dress, in our
manner, in our opinions, and in our style.
Why should men, who spoke their opinions in low voices, as
though they feared to disturb the readers in some ancient library,
and timidly as though they knew that all subjects had long since
been explored, all questions long since decided in books whereon
the dust settled-live lives of such disorder and seek to rediscover


WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
149
in verse the syntax of impulsive common life? Was it that we lived
in what is called "an age of transition” and so lacked coherence, or
did we but pursue antithesis?
XXVIII
All things apart from our love and our melancholy, were a study
to us; Horne already learned in Botticelli had begun to boast, that
when he wrote there would be no literature, all would be but learn-
ing; Symons, as I wrote when I first met him, studied the music-
halls, as he might have studied the age of Chaucer, while I gave
much time to what is called the Christian Cabbala; nor was there
any branch of knowledge Johnson did not claim for his own. When
I had first gone to see him in 1888 or 1889, at the Charlotte Street
house, I had called about five in the afternoon, but the manservant
that he shared with Horne and Image, told me that he was not yet
up, adding with effusion "he is always up for dinner at seven.” This
“
.
habit of breakfasting when others dined had been started by in-
somnia, but he came to defend it for its own sake. When I asked
if it did not separate him from men and women he replied “In my
library I have all the knowledge of the world that I need.” He had
certainly a considerable library, far larger than that of any young
man of my acquaintance, so large that he wondered if it might not
be possible to find some way of hanging new shelves from the ceil-
ing like chandeliers. That room was always a pleasure to me with its
curtains over door and window and bookcase of grey corduroy, and
its walls covered with brown paper, a fashion invented, I think, by
Horne, that was soon to spread. There was a portrait of Cardinal
Newman, looking a little like Johnson himself, some religious pic-
ture by Simeon Solomon and works upon theology in Greek and
Latin and a general air of neatness and severity; and talking there
by candle light it never seemed very difficult to murmur Villiers de
l'Isle-Adam's proud words “As for living our servants will do that
for us." Yet I can now see that Johnson himself in some hidden,
'
half-conscious part of him desired the world he had renounced, de-
sired it as an object of study. I was often puzzled as to when and
where he could have met the famous men or beautiful women, whose
conversation often wise, and always appropriate, he quoted so
often, and it was not till a little before his death that I discovered
that these conversations were imaginary. He never altered a detail


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of speech, and would quote what he had invented for Gladstone or
Newman for years without amplifications or amendment, with what
seemed a scholar's accuracy. His favourite quotations were from
Newman, whom I believe he had never met, though I can remember
nothing now but Newman's greeting to Johnson, “I have always
considered the profession of a man of letters a third order of the
priesthood!” and these quotations became so well known that at
Newman's death, the editor of the Nineteenth Century asked them
for publication. Because of his delight in all that was formal and
arranged he objected to the public quotation of private conversa-
tion even after death, and this scruple helped his refusal. Perhaps
this dreaming was made a necessity by his artificial life, but long
ago when he wrote from Oxford to his very Tory but flattered fam-
ily that he had stood mounted upon a library ladder in his rooms
taking a book from a shelf and Gladstone about to pass the open
door on his way upstairs to some college authority, had stopped,
hesitated, come into the room and there spent an hour of talk.
Presently it was discovered that Gladstone had not been near Ox-
ford on the date given; yet he quoted that conversation without
variation of a word until the end of his life, and I think believed in
it as firmly as did his friends. These conversations were always ad-
mirable in their drama, but never too dramatic or even too polished
to lose their casual accidental character; they were the phantas-
magoria through which his philosophy of life found its expression.
If he made his knowledge of the world out of his fantasy, his knowl-
edge of tongues and books was certainly very great; and yet was that
knowledge as great as he would have us believe. Did he really
know Welsh, for instance, had he really as he told me, made his
only love song, his incomparable Morfydd out of three lines in
Welsh, heard sung by a woman at his door on a walking tour in
Wales, or did he but wish to hide that he shared in their emotion?
“O, what are the winds?
And what are the waters?
Mine are your eyes.”
!
He wanted us to believe that all things, his poetry with its Latin
weight, his religion with its constant reference to the Fathers of the
Church, or to the philosophers of the Church, almost his very cour-
tesy were a study and achievement of the intellect. Arthur Symons'


WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
151
a
poetry made him angry, because it would substitute for that
achievement, Parisian impressionism, "a London fog, the blurred
tawny lamplight, the red omnibus, the dreary rain, the depressing
mud, the glaring gin shop, the slatternly shivering women, three
dextrous stanzas telling you that and nothing more.” I, on the
other hand, angered him by talking as if art existed for emotion
only, and for refutation he would quote the close of the Aeschylean
Trilogy, the trial of Orestes on the Acropolis. Yet at moments the
thought came to him that intellect, as he conceived it, was too
much a thing of many books, that it lacked lively experience.
"Yeats,” he has said to me, "you need ten years in a library, but I
have need of ten years in the wilderness.” When he said "wilder-
ness” I am certain however that he thought of some historical, some
bookish desert, the Thebaid, or the lands about the Mareotic sea.
His best poetry is natural and impassioned, but he spoke little of it,
but much about his prose and would contend that I had no right
to consider words made to be read less natural than words made to
be spoken; and he delighted in a sentence in his book on Thomas
Hardy, that kept its vitality, as he contended, though two pages
long. He punctuated after the manner of the seventeenth century
and was always ready to spend an hour, discussing the exact use
of the colon. “One should use a colon, where other people use a
semi-colon, a semi-colon where other people use a comma” was I
think but a condescension to my ignorance for the matter was plain-
ly beset with many subtleties.
a
XXIX
Not till some time in 1895 did I think he could ever drink too
much for his sobriety—though what he drank would certainly be
too much for that of most of the men whom I knew-I no more
doubted his self-control, though we were very intimate friends, than
I doubted his memories of Cardinal Newman. The discovery that
he did, was a great shock to me, and, I think, altered my general
view of the world. I had, by my friendship with O'Leary, by my
fight against Gavan Duffy, drawn the attention of a group of men,
,
who at that time controlled what remained of the old Fenian move-
ment in England and Scotland, and at a moment when an attempt,
that came to nothing, was being made to combine once more our
constitutional and unconstitutional politics. I had been asked to


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years later
represent them at some convention in the United States, and I went
to consult Johnson, whom I found sitting at a table with books
about him. I was greatly tempted, because I was promised complete
freedom of speech; and I was at the time enraged by some wild
articles published by some Irish American Newspaper, suggesting
the burning down of the houses of Irish landlords. Nine
I was lecturing in America, and a charming old Irishman came to
see me with an interview to write, and we spent, and as I think in
entire neglect of his interview, one of the happiest hours I have ever
spent, comparing our tales of the Irish fairies, in which he very
firmly believed. When he had gone I looked at his card, to discover
that he was the writer of that criminal incitement. I told Johnson
that if I had a week to decide in, I would probably decide to go, but
as they had only given me three days, I had refused. He would not
hear of my refusal, with so much awaiting my condemnation; and
that condemnation would be effective with Catholics, for he would
find me passages in the Fathers, condemning every kind of political
crime, that of the dynamiter and the incendiary especially. I asked
how could the Fathers have condemned weapons they had never
heard of, but those weapons, he contended, were merely develop-
ments of old methods and weapons; they had decided all in prin-
ciple; but I need not trouble myself about the matter, for he would
put into my hands before I sailed the typewritten statement of their
doctrine, dealing with the present situation in the utmost detail.
He seemed perfectly logical, but a little more confident and impas-
sioned than usual, and I had, I think, promised to accept—when he
rose from his chair, took a step towards me in his eagerness, and
fell on to the floor; and I saw that he was drunk. From that on, he
began to lose control of his life; he shifted from Charlotte Street,
where, I think, there was fear that he would overset lamp or candle
and burn the house, to Gray's Inn, and from Gray's Inn to old ram-
bling rooms in Lincoln Square, and at last one called to find his
outer door shut, and the milk on the doorstep sour. Sometimes I
would urge him to put himself, as Jack Nettleship had done, into
an Institute. One day when I had been very urgent, he spoke of
“a craving that made every atom of his body cry out” and said the
moment after “I do not want to be cured,” and a moment later, "In
ten years I shall be penniless and shabby, and borrow half-crowns
from my friends.” He seemed to contemplate a vision that gave him
pleasure, and now that I look back, I remember that he once said to


WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
153
me that Wilde got, perhaps, an increase of pleasure and excitement
from the degradation of that crowd of beggars and blackmailers
where he sought his pathics and I remember too his smile at my sur-
prise, as though he spoke of psychological depths I could never enter.
Did the austerity, the melancholy of his thoughts, that spiritual ec-
stasy which he touched at times, heighten, as complementary colours
heighten one another, not only the vision of evil, but its fascination?
Was it only Villon, or did Dante also feel the fascination of evil,
when shown in its horror, and, as it were, judged and lost; and what
proud man does not feel temptation strengthened from the certainty
that his intellect is not deceived?
XXX
I began now to hear stories of Dowson, whom I knew only at The
Rhymers, or through some chance meeting at Johnson's. I was in-
dolent and procrastinating, and when I thought of asking him to
dine, or taking some other step towards better knowledge, he seemed
always to be in Paris, or at Dieppe. He was drinking, but, unlike
Johnson, who, at the autopsy after his death, was discovered never
to have grown, except in the brain, after his fifteenth year, he was
full of sexual desire. Johnson and he were close friends, and John-
son lectured him out of the Fathers upon chastity, and boasted of
the great good done him thereby. But the rest of us counted the
glasses emptied in their talk. I began to hear now in some detail of
the restaurant-keeper's daughter, and of her marriage to the waiter,
and of that weekly game of cards with her that filled so great a
share of Dowson's emotional life. Sober, he would look at no other
woman, it was said, but, drunk, desire whatever woman chance
brought, clean or dirty.
Johnson was stern by nature, strong by intellect, and always, I
think, deliberately picked his company, but Dowson seemed gentle,
affectionate, drifting. His poetry shows how sincerely he felt the
fascination of religion, but his religion had certainly no dogmatic
outline, being but a desire for a condition of virginal ecstasy. If it is
true, as Arthur Symons, his very close friend, has written, that he
loved the restaurant-keeper's daughter for her youth, one may be
almost certain that he sought from religion some similar quality,
something of that which the angels find who move perpetually as
Swedenborg has said, towards “the dayspring of their youth.”


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Johnson's poetry, as Johnson himself before his last decay, conveys
an emotion of joy, of intellectual clearness, of hard energy; he gave
us of his triumph; while Dowson's poetry is sad, as he himself
seemed, and pictures his life of temptation and defeat,
“Unto us they belong,
Us the bitter and gay,
Wine and women and song.”
Their very attitude to intoxication displayed their characters.
Johnson, who could not have written Dark Angel if he did not suf-
fer from remorse, showed to his friends an impenitent face, and
defeated me when I tried to prevent the foundation of an Irish con-
vivial clubit was brought to an end after one meeting by the in-
dignation of the members' wives--whereas the last time I saw Dow-
son he was pouring out a glass of whisky for himself in an empty
corner of my room and murmuring over and over in what seemed
automatic apology “The first to-day.”
9
XXXI
Two men are always at my elbow, Lionel Johnson and John
Synge whom I was to meet a little later; but Johnson is to me the
more vivid in memory, possibly because of the external finish, the
clearly-marked lineaments of his body, which seemed but to express
the clarity of his mind. I think Dowson's best verse immortal,
bound, that is, to outlive famous novels and plays and learned his-
tories and other discursive things, but he was too vague and gentle
for my affections. I understood him too well, for I had been like
him but for the appetite that made me search out strong condi-
ments. Though I cannot explain what brought others of my gen-
eration to such misfortune, I think that falling back upon my para-
ble of the moon I can explain some part of Dowson's and Johnson's
dissipation-
"What portion in the world can the artist have,
Who has awaked from the common dream,
But dissipation and despair.”
When Edmund Spenser described the gardens of Phaedria and of


WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
155
Acrasia he aroused the indignation of Lord Burleigh, “that rugged
forehead” and Lord Burleigh was in the right if morality were our
only object.
In those islands certain qualities of beauty, certain forms of
sensuous loveliness were separated from all the general purposes of
life as they had not been hitherto in European literature—and
would not be again, for even the historical process has its ebb and
flow, till Keats wrote his Endymion. I think that the movement of
our thought has more and more so separated certain images and re-
gions of the mind, and that these images grow in beauty as they
grow in sterility. Shakespeare leaned as it were, even as craftsman,
upon the general fate of men and nations, had about him the ex-
citement of the playhouse, and all poets, including Spenser in all
but a few pages, until our age came round, and when it came almost
all had some propaganda or traditional doctrine to give them com-
panionship with their fellows. Had not Matthew Arnold his faith,
in what he described as the best thought of his generation? Brown-
ing his psychological curiosity, Tennyson, as before him Shelley and
Wordsworth, moral values that were not aesthetic values? But
Coleridge of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan, and Rossetti in
all his writings, made what Arnold has called that "morbid effort,"
that search for "perfection of thought and feeling, and to unite this
to perfection of form,” sought this new, pure beauty, and suffered
in their lives because of it. The typical men of the classical age (I
think of Commodus, with his half-animal beauty, his cruelty and
his caprice) lived public lives, pursuing curiosities of appetite, and
so found in Christianity, with its Thebiad and its Mareotic Sea the
needed curb. But what can the Christian confessor say to those who
more and more must make all out of the privacy of their thought,
calling up perpetual images of desire, for he cannot say "cease to be
artist, cease to be poet,” where the whole life is art and poetry, nor
can he bid men leave the world, who suffer from the terrors
that pass before shut-eyes. Coleridge and Rossetti though his dull
brother did once persuade him that he was an agnostic, were devout
Christians, and Steinbock and Beardsley were so towards their lives'
end, and Dowson and Johnson always, and yet I think it but deep-
ened despair and multiplied temptation.
"Dark Angel, with thine aching lust,
To rid the world of penitence:


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MORE MEMORIES
Malicious Angel, who still dost
My soul such subtile violence!
When music sounds, then changest thou
A silvery to a sultry fire:
Nor will thine envious heart allow
Delight untortured by desire.
Through thee the gracious Muses turn
To Furies, O mine Enemy!
And all the things of beauty burn
With flames of evil ecstasy.
Because of thee, the land of dreams
Becomes a gathering place of fears:
Until tormented slumber seems
One vehemence of useless tears.
Why are these strange souls born everywhere to-day? with hearts
that Christianity, as shaped by history, cannot satisfy. Our love
letters wear out our love; no school of painting outlasts its founders,
every stroke of the brush exhausts the impulse. Pre-Raphaelism
had some twenty years, impressionism thirty perhaps. Why should
we believe that religion can never bring round its antithesis? Is it
true that our air is disturbed as Mallarmé said, by “the trembling of
the veil of the temple,” or “that our whole age is seeking to bring
forth a sacred book.” Some of us thought that book near towards
the end of last century, but the tide sank again.
XXXII
I do not know whether John Davidson, whose life also was
tragic, made that "morbid effort,” that search for "perfection of
thought and feeling,” for he is hidden behind failure "to unite it to
perfection of form.” At eleven one morning I met him in the Brit
ish Museum Reading Room, probably in 1894, when I was in Lon-
don for the production of The Land of Heart's Desire, but certainly
after some long absence from London. "Are you working here?” I
said; "No," he said, “I am loafing, for I have finished my day's


WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
157
>
a
work.” “What, already?” “I work an hour a day—I cannot work
longer without exhaustion, and even as it is, if I meet anybody and
get into talk, I cannot write the next day; that is why I loaf when
my work is finished.” No one had ever doubted his industry, he
had supported his wife and family for years by "devilling” many
hours a day for some popular novelist. “What work is it?” I said.
"I am writing verse,” he answered. “I had been writing prose for
a long time, and then one day I thought I might just as well write
what I liked, as I must starve in any case. It was the luckiest
thought I ever had, for my agent now gets me forty pounds for a
ballad, and I made three hundred out of my last book of verse.”
He was older by ten years than his fellow Rhymers; a national
schoolmaster from Scotland, he had been dismissed, he told us, for
asking for a rise in his salary, and had come to London with his wife
and children. He looked older than his years. "Ellis,” he had said,
"how old are you?" "Fifty,” Edwin Ellis replied, or whatever his
age was. “Then I will take off my wig. I never take off my wig
when there is a man under thirty in the room.” He had endured,
and was to endure again, a life of tragic penury, which was made
much harder by the conviction that the world was against him,
that he was refused for some reason his rightful position. Ellis
thought that he pined even for social success, and I that his Scots
jealousy kept him provincial and but half articulate.
During the quarrel over Parnell's grave a quotation from Goethe
ran through the papers, describing our Irish jealousy, “The Irish
seem to me like a pack of hounds, always dragging down some noble
stag.” But I do not think we object to distinction for its own sake;
if we kill the stag, it is that we may carry off his head and antlers.
“The Irish people,” O'Leary used to say, "do not know good from
bad in any art, but they do not hate the good once it is pointed out
to them because it is good.” An infallible Church, with its Mass in
Latin, and its mediaeval philosophy, and our Protestant social
prejudice, have kept our ablest men from levelling passions; but
Davidson with a jealousy, which may be Scottish, seeing that Car-
lyle had it, was quick to discover sour grapes. He saw in delicate,
laborious, discriminating taste, an effeminate pedantry, and would,
when that mood was on him, delight in all that seemed healthy,
popular, and bustling. Once when I had praised Herbert Horne
for his knowledge and his taste, he burst out, "If a man must be a


158
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а
)
a
connoisseur, let him be a connoisseur in women.” He, indeed, was
accustomed in the most characteristic phrase of his type to describe
“the Rhymers” as lacking in "blood and guts,” and very nearly
brought us to an end by attempting to supply the deficiency by the
addition of four Scotchmen. He brought all four upon the same
evening and one read out a poem upon the Life Boat, evidently in-
tended for a recitation, another described how, when gold-digging in
Australia, he had fought and knocked down another miner for
doubting the rotundity of the earth; while of the remainder I can
remember nothing except that they excelled in argument. He in-
sisted upon
their immediate election, and the Rhymers, through that
complacency of good manners whereby educated Englishmen so
often surprise me, obeyed, though secretly resolved never to meet
again; and it cost me seven hours' work to get another meeting, and
vote the Scotchmen out. A few days later I chanced upon Davidson
at some restaurant; he was full of amiability, and when we parted
shook my hand, and proclaimed enthusiastically that I had "blood
and guts.” I think he might have grown to be a successful man, had
he been enthusiastic instead about Dowson or Johnson, or Horne
or Symons, for they had what I still lacked, conscious deliberate
craft, and what I must lack always, scholarship. They had taught
me that violent energy, which is like a fire of straw, consumes in a
few minutes the nervous vitality, and is useless in the arts. Our fire
must burn slowly, and we must constantly turn away to think, con-
stantly analyse what we have done, be content even to have little
life outside our work, to present, perhaps, to other men, as little as
the watch-mender shows his magnifying glass caught in his screwed-
up eye. Only then do we learn to conserve our vitality, and to get
our mind enough under control and make our technique sufficiently
flexible to express the emotions of life as they arise. A few months
after our meeting in the Museum, Davidson had spent his inspira-
tion. "The fires are out," he said, “and I must hammer the cold
iron.” When I heard a few years ago that he had drowned himself,
I knew that I had always expected some such end. With enough
passion to make a great poet, through meeting no man of culture in
early life he lacked intellectual receptivity, and, anarchic and in-
definite, lacked pose and gesture, and now no verse of his clings to
my memory.
To be continued
a
a


STRAWINSKY. BY STUART DAVIS





TWO POEMS
BY STEWART MITCHELL
I
Tell me-if I had died,
Would your brain have gone damp
With smells of abandoned darkness
And stalactites of tears?
For me—whole days ache with your absence,
Whispering wet echoes of you.
I grow listless to the casual confusion of years,
Sure sequence of punctual suns,
Bursting of spent stars.
Here winds fall heavily
From black, blue-valleyed clouds,
Pour down steadily over high, broad plains.
This smoke of burning cedar
Blurs out your hollyhocks,
Pale, huge-cupped poppies,
Ceaseless titter of aspens.
Cedar smells of Persia:
Falcon-browed bowmen,
Lean javelin throwers,
Crisp-bearded kings in brass chariots
Swoop down from their altar hills.
Here hollow-footed years
Are seldom spoken of:
The wide earth slopes skyward,
Breaks off, remotely,
To the last cliffs of the world.


160
TWO POEMS
II
)
Not mellow sunlight
Slanting to smoky afternoons,
Not brittle stars,
Or fint-brown moons
Stay autumn for summer.
Skyward hot winds stalk crowds
Of heavy-headed clouds;
Spirals of dust spin dizzily
Through crumbling leaves.
Life lures men into words,
Yet from words to deeds is far,
Farther than wise words go.
Browse among slow, sleek herds,
Graze where salt pastures are:
Years bustleso.
Twigs crackle to eaves-dropping gusts;
Lawns left uncut
For colder years,
Grow wild with weeds.
Dear, petulant wind,
Turning up grey sides of poplar leaves,
Scattering beads of fountain spray through sunlight-
From over tiled housetops,
Up steep, walled streets of cobbled stairs,
You carry, hesitantly,
Faint invitations
From delicate bugles.
Pompeian-red dahlias
Sway pompously for reply-
Fluffy, cushion-soft clouds
Puff up flippantly
Into blue sky:
Poets prance through their paces,
Lament autumns,


STEWART MITCHELL
161
Speak well of springs,
Smear with damp hands of comment
All fragile, fleet things.
+
Plumed crests of pampas grass
Caution me dearly
How days pass:
Wake me to yearly
Recollections of lilies—
Tall hedges of callas
For walls of
my
world.
Fingers toughen
Tinkering with steel-cold words-
Thought casts lonely
Long shadows
In these pine-sweet lands.
I chafe at chattering birds-
Grow covetous only
Of certain deft
Fond hands.


DOCTOR GRAESLER
BY ARTHUR SCHNITZLER
Translated from the German by Paul Bloomfield Zeisler
V
OCTOR GRAESLER undertook his next visit to The Range
20F1
reminiscences all manner of things that might seem worth recount-
ing, though at first, to be sure, he had been a trifle grieved at finding
that a life which gave an outward appearance of having been mod-
erately active should on closer scrutiny yield so very little in real
content. At any rate there was here and there an event that might at
least be made out to resemble an adventure. On a South Sea island,
for instance, he had taken in a bit of a raid by the natives, and on
this occasion a ship’s-lieutenant had been killed. The suicide of a
pair of lovers on the high seas; a cyclone in Indian waters; landing
in a Japanese coast-town that had been destroyed by an earthquake
the day before; a night in an opium-den, whose conclusion, to be
sure, would have to be altered somewhat for recitation in the family
circle—all this, he thought, might be spun out stimulatingly enough.
Moreover, his memory had retained with sufficient clearness several
of his patients in different watering-places—swindlers, odd charac-
ters, among them even a Russian grand-duke who had been murdered
during the succeeding winter and had had a presentiment of his
fate. And as he was leaning carelessly against the railing of the
verandah at Schleheim's on a calm summer's evening and in response
to a chance question of Karl's began to tell his stories, he noticed
that many a faded reminiscence brightened and quickened in the
telling and that many a long-forgotten incident came floating up
out of the depths of his soul; and at moments he was even further
amazed at a hitherto unfamiliar capacity for helping out his mem-
ory with bold invention whenever it threatened, now and again,
to fail him. He was reconciled to this all the more easily because
it allowed him to taste again the pleasure, long unenjoyed, of being


ARTHUR SCHNITZLER
163
for a good while the important central figure in a circle well dis-
posed to him, and because he could thus bring into the dreamy still-
ness of the woodland cottage the seductive echo of a life his own
memory of which had almost faded.
On a subsequent occasion, while Sabine and her mother were
entertaining callers in the garden—as happened rarely enough—he
and the old singer sat alone upon the verandah. The latter spoke
that day more animatedly than ever of his former activities at
municipal theatres and at the smaller royal opera houses, and
always in such a tone as would have given one to believe that it was
an especially fertile and proud life which he now mourned. Al-
though, after the premature loss of his voice, an opportunity of
making the transition to a middle-class profession had been offered
him through the good offices of his wealthy father-in-law, a wine-
dealer in the Rhineland, he had nevertheless decided on the flight
into the wilderness and the solitudes, where he was not in the way
of being constantly reminded of what had been lost to him, as
would have been the case in any city, and where he might find un-
disturbed happiness in what was left him: the pleasures of home
life—which he mentioned not without a touch of irony—and the
excellence of his children, a quality which he again assigned to
them almost regretfully. "Yes,” he remarked gloomily, "if Sabine
had only inherited my temperament along with my talents, what a
future would have been in store for her!” And he informed Graes-
ler that in Berlin, where she had, according to his judgement, lived
in an altogether too middle-class home with relatives of his wife,
she had for a time occupied herself with the study of singing and
dancing, but had given them up again because of an invincible dis-
inclination to the loose ways of her young colleagues, men and
women.
"Fräulein Sabine has a truly pure soul,” Graesler thereupon
remarked.
“Yes, that she has. But what does that signify, my dear fellow,
if you weigh it against the enormous gain of learning to know life
in all its heights and depths? Isn't that better than keeping your
soul pure?” A far-away look was in his eyes; then he continued
peevishly:
“And so one fine day she abandoned all her— I should say my-
prospects of art and fame, and, with deliberate stress on the an-


164
DOCTOR GRAESLER
tithesis, proceeded to register for a course in nursing, to which pro-
fession she believed she had suddenly discovered herself especially
adapted.”
The doctor shook his head. “It seems, however, that Fräulein
Sabine did not find this profession altogether satisfactory either,
since she gave it up after a few years, if I understood correctly the
other day.”
“That is another story entirely,” Schleheim replied. “While she
was a nurse she made the acquaintance of a young physician to
whom she later became engaged. A very able young doctor, so
they say—a man of the very highest promise. I never had the
chance of meeting him myself.” And as Karl happened to come
running by, he concluded hurriedly and in a soft tone, “Unfortu-
nately the young fellow died.”
“Died,” Graesler repeated contemplatively and without particu-
larly deep sympathy.
Karl reported that coffee was ready under the pines. The men
walked down into the garden and the doctor was introduced to the
visitors, a widow and her two daughters, both of whom were a little
younger than Sabine. They had already known each other by sight,
so that over their coffee and cake an unconstrained and lively con-
versation soon got under way. Every afternoon sharp at a quarter
of three the two young ladies had had occasion to observe the doctor
from their window—where, at that hour, they were of course busy
with their needle-work—as he left the hotel; at which times he had
a habit (so they insisted) of pulling out his watch, holding it to his
ear, shaking his head, and rushing off in a great hurry towards his
lodgings. What was it the doctor had to attend to at home that was
so important, the younger one asked banteringly. Keep office-hours?
Why, that was surely just a joke! It was a matter of common
knowledge that sick people never came to this so-called health-
resort. The interesting young man who always had himself trun-
dled to the pump-room in a wheel-chair was engaged by the
management, the real truth being that he was an actor from Berlin
who always contracted to play the patient here during the vacation
months in return for his keep. As for the elegant lady with the
seventeen hats, she was not by any chance an American or even an
Australian, but just as good a European as any of them; and for
that reason, when she was sitting on the bench in the casino gardens


ARTHUR SCHNITZLER
165
a
yesterday evening with the officer in mufti who had just arrived
from Eisenach to visit her, she had not by any means been talking
English, but as a matter of fact a quite indubitable Viennese. The
doctor conceded the American, who was, besides, under treatment
by a colleague, but on the other hand put forward a French couple
who had travelled all over the world and had found this place as
beautiful as any they had seen. Thereupon the older sister began
in all seriousness to extol the landscape of woods and hills and the
friendly coziness of the little town which only bloomed in its full
loveliness when all the summer visitors were off and away. And
turning to the doctor, Frau Schleheim corroborated this statement.
“Some time you really ought to spend a winter here,” she said.
“You will never know until then how beautiful it can be here."
Doctor Graesler did not reply; but everyone could see that vistas
lay mirrored in his eyes, vistas which had not theretofore been dis-
closed to the others and hardly ever would be.
When, a little later, everyone was getting ready for a walk, the
head of the house declared that he would rather stay at home and
continue his reading of a history of the French Revolution, a period
he professed himself especially interested in. At first the little com-
pany held together closely, but later Graesler was allowed, as
though on purpose, to go on ahead with Sabine. That day he felt
more sure of himself in her presence, more of a match for her, more
in her confidence, than ever before. It seemed to him not impossible
that Sabine had stood in more intimate relationship with the young
doctor who had been her fiancé until he died than either her father
or her mother perhaps suspected. In that case she might be regarded
as a young widow, which could after all be taken as somewhat
adjusting the difference in age between her and him.
To the sound of music by the local orchestra they closed the
pleasant day on the large terrace of the casino with a joint supper
for which Herr Schleheim also put in an appearance, so elegantly,
even foppishly attired that the doctor could not rightly conceive of
him as having just bobbed up out of a sea of Franco-revolutionary
violence. Sabine's friends expressed their admiration of him some-
what facetiously, but without reserve, while Sabine herself seemed
not entirely to approve her father's assumption of pomp—if the
doctor correctly interpreted her look. For the rest, everyone was in
the best of humour, and the little Fräulein missed no opportunity of
a


166
DOCTOR GRAESLER
making sportive and mischievous remarks about the other guests.
Thus she had soon discovered the lady with the seventeen hats, who
sat at a nearby table in the company of three young men and a
middle-aged fourth and was swaying her head back and forth to the
strain of a Viennese waltz in a manner surely not customary in
Australia. Once, when for an instant Doctor Graesler felt some-
one's foot touch his fleetingly, he was almost frightened. Sabine ?
No, certainly it could not have been she. He himself would not
have wished that; more than likely it was the jolly little Fräulein
sitting opposite him and making such a particularly innocent face.
As the gentle contact immediately ceased, it might also, to be sure,
have been accidental, and it was in Doctor Graesler's nature to lean
strongly to this supposition, but at the same time feel not a whit
appeased by that solution. All his life his worst fault had been
excessive modesty, a certain underestimation of his own worth;
otherwise he should not now be sitting here in this ridiculously
small watering-place as an ordinary physician, but rather at Wies-
baden or Ems, as privy councillor to the board of health. And
despite the fact that Sabine occasionally cast him a glance of evi-
dent friendliness, once even smilingly pledged him in a glass of
wine, he nevertheless perceived that he was this time again becom-
ing more melancholy with every drop he drank. His failing spirits
seemed gradually to communicate themselves to the entire circle;
the older ladies were obviously getting tired and the conversation
of the younger ones lapsed. The singer, looking about him gloomily,
smoked a heavy cigar in silence, and when the company finally took
leave of one another, Graesler felt as lonely as ever.
VI
The school-vacation came to an end and Karl was carried off
by his mother to Berlin, whence, as might have been expected, she
returned after a few days with a case of indigestion. Doctor Graes-
ler was now again in demand in a professional capacity and ap-
peared every evening at The Range, continuing in fact to do so even
after Frau Schleheim had fully recovered. Frequently it so hap-
pened that he chatted alone with Sabine for hours in the house or
out in the open, as the parents—who probably suspected, and no
doubt complacently, an understanding between the two-were only


ARTHUR SCHNITZLER
167
a
too glad to hold aloof. Graesler spoke of his youth, of the old
battlemented, many-spired city of his birth, and of the parental
home and ancestral dwelling which waited patiently, year in, year
out, to shelter him—and, until a short time ago, his sister as well-
for a few short weeks or days of rest in the spring or in autumn.
And when Sabine listened to him attentively and not unmoved, he
somehow always tried to imagine how beautiful it would be if he
were to return home with her and how he would surprise his old
friend, the attorney Boehlinger, the only human being who still
maintained a certain loose connexion between him and his native
city.
And when autumn set in—unusually early and with especial
potency—and most of the patients at the health-resort fled before
the customary time of departure, and all the hours that he could
not spend at The Range were, for Doctor Graesler, empty and deso-
late, there came over him such a fear of beginning his lonely, mean-
ingless, and hopeless wanderings anew that he sometimes positively
thought himself determined to prefer his suit for Sabine in all due
form. But instead of putting the question to her point-blank—a
thing for which he could not get up the necessary courage—he hit
upon the notion (as though this offered a way to seek his counsel
straight from fate) of making a general inquiry as to whether Doc-
tor Frank's sanitarium, of which Sabine had recently spoken casu-
ally for the second time, were really for sale, and if so, on what
terms. As he could get no definite information on the matter, he
sought out the proprietor, with whom he was personally acquainted.
He found the morose old fellow dressed in a dirty yellow linen
suit and sitting on a white bench in front of the sanitarium smoking
a pipe, looking much more like an eccentric yokel than like a physi-
cian, and asked him straightway whether there was really any
foundation for the rumours he had heard. It seemed that Director
Frank, too, had only casually betrayed his intentions here and there,
and had apparently been expecting, on his part also, something in
the nature of a sign of fate. In any case he was thoroughly disposed
to be rid of his property, and the sooner the better, as he wished to
pass the few years still allotted to him as far removed as possible
from real and imaginary patients and to recuperate from the hun-
dreds of thousands of lies to which his profession had all his life-
time condemned him.


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DOCTOR GRAESLER
“You can take it on," he said; "you are still young"—which
prompted Doctor Graesler to a gloomily deprecatory gesture.
He inspected the establishment from top to bottom, but found it,
to his regret, even more neglected and run-down than he had feared.
Nor did the few patients he encountered in the garden, in the corri-
dors, and in the inhalation-room, serve in any way to give him the
impression of being satisfied and hopeful people; nay, it even
seemed to him as though mistrust, and almost enmity, lay in the
glances with which they greeted their doctor. But when Graesler
stood upon the little balcony which was a part of the director's
private home, and let his eyes stray over the garden, and then
farther, up to the pleasant valley, and as far as the gently rising
hills which were wrapped in a faint fog, and speculated that some-
where at their base lay The Range, he was suddenly seized with such
a passionate longing for Sabine that for the first time he recognized
with absolute certainty that his feeling for her was love, and saw
before him, like a magic goal, the prospect of soon standing on this
very spot in close embrace with Sabine and of laying at her feet,
for his companion and wife, the whole newly restored and beautified
property. He had to exercise a deal of self-control in order to
appear to be as yet undecided when he took leave of Director
Frank; but the latter was quite indifferent to this attitude. That
same evening, at The Range, Graesler thought it proper to make no
mention of his visit to the establishment; on the very next day,
however, he took the contractor, Adelmann, his daily table-com-
panion at the Silver Lion, along to the sanitarium in order to get
expert advice on his problem. It turned out that less costly and
extensive alterations were necessary than Doctor Graesler had
feared; indeed the contractor was willing to assume entire responsi-
bility for making the establishment present an absolutely new ap-
pearance by the first of May of the following year. In the presence
of the director Doctor Graesler continued to appear irresolute; but
when they had departed and were alone, the contractor urged him
even more decidedly to make this advantageous purchase.
That very evening—which for a change was as warm as in sum-
mer—when he was sitting on the verandah of The Range with Sa-
bine and her parents, he began, as though casually, to tell of his con-
ference with Doctor Frank, which he represented as having come
about by accident, inasmuch as he had simply chanced to be passing


ARTHUR SCHNITZLER
169
the gate of the sanitarium in company of the contractor just as the
proprietor stepped forth. Herr Schleheim thought the terms of sale
in the highest degree favourable, and even frankly advised Doctor
Graesler to forego practising in the South that very winter, so as
to be on the spot and thus better able to push this important affair
forward with all speed. But of this Doctor Graesler positively
would not hear. He could not thus without more ado disregard his
obligations to the Lanzarote management, and if he left the matter
in the hands of such a capable man as the contractor assuredly was,
he felt he could depart with an easy mind. In her simple way
Sabine thereupon offered to keep watch over the work during Graes-
ler's absence and regularly to render him some account of what
progress was made. As though by agreement, the parents soon took
themselves off into the house, and the doctor and Sabine waiked
slowly up and down the avenue of pines that led from the house
to the road, as they were fond of doing. She had in mind all man-
ner of shrewd proposals for the transformation of the old building,
so that one might have suspected her of having already busied her-
self with the question for some time. In addition, she considered
as indispensable the employment of a woman—a real lady, she
qualified her statement—as a sort of chief housekeeper, for it had
obviously been some such supervision of a more or less social charac-
ter that had been above all wanting in the establishment during
the past few years. At last Doctor Graesler felt with a beating
heart the word had been spoken which might and should be taken
by him as a point of departure; nay, he even thought himself pre-
pared to speak, when Sabine, as though she actually wanted to hin-
der him, supplemented her last suggestion with unaccustomed haste.
"You can manage that best through the papers," she remarked.
"If I were you, I should not hesitate at even a trip in order to
obtain a suitable person for this important position. Why, you
have a lot of time at your disposal just now. Almost all your pa-
tients are already gone, are they not? By the way, when
did you yourself intend to leave ?”
“Oh, in · four or five days. But first of all I have got to
go home, of course—to my own city, I mean. My sister did not
leave any will, and my old friend Boehlinger writes me that it will
be necessary for me to settle various matters on the spot. But before
I leave want to go over the sanitarium once more in full detail.
a


170
DOCTOR GRAESLER
But I could not arrive at a definite decision under any circumstances, ,
until I have talked the matter over with my friend Boehlinger.”
And so for a little while he discussed the affair pro and con, at
the same time carefully and awkwardly, and in any case thoroughly
dissatisfied with himself; for he did not conceal from himself that
at this moment clearness and decision would have been more becom-
ing in him. As Sabine continued to say not a word, he thought it
wisest to take his leave, on the pretext of having to pay a profes-
sional visit. He seized her hand, held it tightly clasped for an
instant, raised it of a sudden to his lips and pressed a long kiss
upon it. Sabine offered no resistance, and when he looked up the
expression on her face seemed to him more satisfied, nay, even more
cheerful, than before. He knew that he must now say nothing
more, let her hand fall, climbed into the carriage, drew his rug over
his knees, and drove off. When he looked back Sabine stood there
still, motionless in the dim light; but it was as though she were
gazing elsewhere-into the night-into the void—and not at all in
the direction in which he gradually vanished from her sight.
VII
Without real zest, more as a matter of duty, Doctor Graesler be-
took himself to the establishment the very next morning in a miser-
able, drizzling rain. A third time he asked to be led through the
various rooms, but he had on this occasion to content himself with
the company of a very young assistant, whose excessive show of
studied politeness was probably aimed not so much at Graesler the
elder colleague as at Graesler the presumable future director, and
who missed no opportunity of making apparent his familiarity with
the most thoroughly up-to-date curative methods—for whose appli-
cation, he said, every facility was at present unfortunately wanting.
To Doctor Graesler the whole building seemed even more neglected,
and the garden more uncared for, than on the day before, and when
in the bare office he at last sat facing the proprietor, who was just
having his breakfast among bills and business papers, he stated
that he should have to reserve his decision until after his return from
his native city which would be in about three weeks. The proprietor
received this news with his customary indifference and only re-
marked that he, of course, would likewise not consider himself


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171
bound in any way. Graesler entered no further proviso, and was
conscious of a sense of positive deliverance when he again stood in
the street and then, with spread umbrella, strode off towards the
little town. Heavy rain-drops trickled down around him from the
rim of the umbrella, and all the hills lay deep in fog. It had, more-
over, turned so cool that his fingers began to stiffen, so that he had
to put on his gloves, holding the umbrella over him with some diffi-
culty the while. He shook his head disapprovingly. It was really
very
doubtful whether he could still accustom himself at all to pass
late autumn and winter in the zone improperly called temperate in-
stead of in the south, and he almost wished that he might be able
to inform Sabine that very evening that the sanitarium had, so to
say, been snatched away from under his very nose by a more alert,
but truly unenviable purchaser.
At his lodgings he found a letter, addressed in the handwriting of
Sabine. He felt his heart suddenly stand still. What could it be she
had to write him? It could be only one thing: she was begging him
not to come any more. That kiss of her hand yesterday—why, he
had felt it immediately—that had spoiled everything. Such things,
now, were simply not at all becoming in him. He must have seemed
unspeakably ridiculous in that moment. Of a sudden the envelope
was open, Graesler himself knew not how, and he read:
“Dear Friend-for you will surely allow me to call you that,
will you not? You are coming again this evening, and I want you
to have this letter beforehand. For if I should not write you, who
knows but you might leave me this evening just as you have left me
all these past days and evenings; and in the end you might have
departed from here without speaking and flattered yourself that it
had been very wise and proper in you. Therefore nothing remains
but that I should do the speaking myself, or rather—as I know I
could never bring myself to do literally that—should write you
what is in my heart. Well, then, my dear Doctor, my dear friend,
I write it down here, and you will read it, and it will probably make
you a little happy; I hope you will not consider it unwomanly, and
I feel that I may write it down. I should not mind at all, not at all,
if by any chance you were to ask me whether I would be your wife.
There, now it is out. Yes, I would love to be your wife, for I feel
for you such a deep and sincere affection as I have never felt for


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DOCTOR GRAESLER
any one I ever knew. It probably is not love-not yet. But it is
certainly something that is very close to love and might very well
turn into it in time. The last few days, whenever you spoke of leav-
ing, I actually had the strangest feeling in my heart. And this even-
ing when you kissed my hand, that was quite lovely. But then, when
you rode away into the darkness, I had a feeling all at once as
though it were all over, and I was actually afraid that you were
never coming to visit us again. Well, that, of course, is already
over now. That is just the sort of thing one thinks at night-time,
isn't it? I know that you are coming again. To-morrow evening.
And of course I know that you are just as fond of me as I am of
you. One does not really have to say that kind of thing in words.
“But sometimes it has seemed to me that you suffer from a lack
of confidence in yourself. Isn't that so? And I have been thinking
what the reason may be. I think the reason is that you have not yet
taken root anywhere and that all your life you have really not yet
taken the time to wait for someone to attach herself to you, heart
and hand. Yes, I should think that is it. And perhaps there is some-
thing else besides that makes you hesitate. Of course it is pretty
hard for me to write you that. But so long as I have once started,
I cannot very
well stop half way, can I? Well, then, you know, my
dear friend, that I was once engaged. That was four years ago. He
was a doctor, like you. I suppose my father gave you certain intima-
tions. I loved him very much, and it was a great sorrow to me when
I lost him. He was so young! Only twenty-eight! I thought at the
time that everything was over for ever; one is inclined to think that
sort of thing at such a time. As a matter of fact, in order to be per-
fectly truthful I must confess that that was not my first love-affair.
Before that there had been a singer with whom I was infatuated.
That was at a time when, with the very best intentions, my father
wanted to drive me into a career which I simply was not born to.
And that was really the most passionate emotion that I have ever
experienced. To be sure, one cannot really say 'experienced.' But
surely—'felt.' And it ended in a perfectly silly way. You see, he
thought he was dealing with a creature of the kind he was accus-
tomed to meet in his own circle, and he behaved accordingly, and
well, that was the end of it. But the curious thing is that to this
very day I think much more often of that man than of my
fiancé
who was so dear to me. For six months we were engaged. There-
a


ARTHUR SCHNITZLER
173
then, my
-
and now comes what is a little hard to say. Do you really know,
dear Doctor Graesler, what I have been thinking? You suspect
something that is not true, and that is what has been making you
hesitate. To be sure, it is at the same time a proof of
your
affection
for me. But is there not also—you will excuse me, won't you, if I
say it—a little squeamishness in that, or vanity? Of course, a vanity
and a squeamishness quite common among men; I know that well
enough. But I just wanted to tell you that you do not have to
worry about that any longer. Must I make it even clearer? Well,
dear friend, I have no confessions of any kind to make to
you. As a matter of fact, when I think back to it, it was a remark-
able kind of relationship. In those six months I do not believe that
he kissed me more than ten times altogether.
“But the things one writes a good friend in the middle of the
night, especially when one knows that in the end the letter does not
have to be sent off at all! But the letter really would not have any
purpose if I didn't write everything that happened to run through
my head.—And yet, how dear he was to me! Perhaps just be-
cause he was so serious and gloomy. He was one of those doctors-
and there are not many like that—who themselves suffer all the
sorrow and misery they have to look upon. And so life was terribly
difficult for him; and where would he have got the courage to be
happy? Well, in time I should have managed to teach him where.
I gave myself credit for that much ability. But it was simply not
to be. I shall show you his picture too. I have been keeping it, of
course. I no longer have the one of the other man, the singer. I
did not receive it from him; I bought it of an art-dealer, before I
even knew him. How much I still have to tell you! It is past mid-
night. Here I am, still sitting at the table, and I have no desire at all
to be done writing. Besides, I can hear Father downstairs walking
up and down and up and down. He is having those restless nights of
his again. We have really bothered very little about him lately,
haven't we? We two, my dear Doctor. Well, that will soon be dif-
ferent, won't it? Yes, and now I want to hurry and put down some-
thing else that has just occurred to me. Father was saying—about
the sanitarium, you know—that in case you cannot convert the neces-
sary amount into ready money without a lot of trouble, he would be
glad to place some of his funds at your disposal. In fact, I believe he
would even be willing to interest himself financially in the matter.
a


174
DOCTOR GRAESLER
And as long as we are just talking about the sanitarium, and if you
understand pretty well what this letter is saying—I am probably not
making it too hard for you—why, perhaps you could save yourself
the advertisements and also the trips, for I can recommend myself
for the position of housekeeper with the very clearest conscience.
And wouldn't it really be lovely, dear Doctor Graesler, if we two
should work together as comrades—I almost said as colleagues-
in the establishment. That sanitarium, now—as a matter of fact,
if I must confess it, I have been fond of it for a long time. Longer
than the future director. The location and the layout of the park
are wonderful. It is a pity the way Doctor Frank has let it go
to rack and ruin. And besides, they made a mistake in accepting
every imaginable kind of patient that did not belong there at all,
as they have recently done. I think it ought to be equipped again
exclusively for neuropathics. With the exception of cases of real
mental derangement; that goes without saying.
.
“But where am I getting to ? There is still plenty of time to talk
that over—in any event at least until to-morrow—even if, for the
rest, we should not altogether understand one another. At any rate,
you could use your period of travel to get publicity for the institu-
tion in Berlin and in other big cities. As a matter of fact, I am ac-
quainted with several Berlin professors from my nursing days; per-
haps they will still remember me. Oh, I can see you smiling. But
I'll have to put up with that. A letter like this is not such an alto-
gether common occurrence, is it? I know that perfectly well. Ma-
licious people might call it throwing yourself at somebody, or some-
thing of the kind. But you are not a malicious person and you will
.
take the letter in the spirit in which it was written. I love you, my
friend, not perhaps in just the way you read about in novels, but
from my very heart nevertheless. And I suppose my being so sorry
to see you wandering around in the world so lonesome has a little
to do with it. It is really quite possible that I should never have
written this letter if your good sister were still alive. For she was
good; I am sure of it. And perhaps I love you also because I respect
I
you as a doctor. Yes, I do. To be sure, one might find you a bit
cold at times. But I suppose that is just a way you have about you;
I
inside I am sure you are sympathetic and kind. And the essential
thing is that one has confidence in you immediately, as happened
with Mother and Father. And that, my dear Doctor Graesler, was


ARTHUR SCHNITZLER
175
after all the way it all started, wasn't it? And when you come to-
morrow—I don't want to make it hard for you—why, if you'll only
just smile or kiss my hand again as you did this evening when you
left, then I'll know. And if things should be different from the way
I have been imagining, why, then, just tell me so right out. You
needn't let it worry you. Then I'll simply hold out my hand to
you, and think to myself that those were lovely hours I spent with
,
you this summer, and that one must not all of a sudden be so im-
modest as to want to be Frau Doktor or even Frau Direktor. And
as a matter of fact I don't care particularly about that last part of
it. And now take notice: you can bring along some other wife next
year, some beautiful foreigner from Lanzarote, or some American,
or even an Australian-but a real one; in any case it is settled that
I stand watch over the construction work at the sanitarium, in case
this purchase is actually consummated.
“For these are two things that have, at bottom, nothing to do
with one another. Well, and now I guess it is really about enough.
I am quite curious whether I will actually send you this letter to-
morrow morning. What do
you
think?
“But, farewell. Auf Wiedersehen! I love you and remain, no
matter how it may all turn out, your friend, Sabine.”
Graesler sat long over this letter. He read it a second and a
third time, and even then did not really know whether its contents
made him happy or sad. This, at least, was clear: Sabine was will-
ing to be his wife. She was even throwing herself at him, as she her-
self had put it. But at the same time she explained that it was not
love she felt for him. But then, her view of him was altogether
too clear-sighted, one might almost say too critical, for that. She
had brought out correctly enough that he was squeamish, was vain,
cool, undetermined—characteristics, all of them, whose presence in
him he did not want in any way to deny, but which Fräulein Sabine
would have taken less notice of, and would hardly have empha-
sized, if he had happened to be ten or fifteen years younger. And he
immediately asked himself: if all his faults had not escaped her
even from a distance and if in her very first letter she did not forget
to underscore them for him, what in Heaven's name would happen
later, in close daily intercourse which would be sure to bring many
of his other shortcomings to light for her? One would have to


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DOCTOR GRAESLER
strain every effort to hold one's own. Always to be on one's guard,
be play-acting to a certain extent—which at his age was certainly
not particularly easy, nay, was almost as hard as it might prove to
turn oneself suddenly from a somewhat morose, precise, indolent
old bachelor into an amiable, gallant young husband. At the begin-
ning, of course, it might go well enough. For she certainly had a
great deal of sympathy for him, even one simply could not express
it in any other way—a sort of maternal tenderness. But how long
would that last? At all events no longer than the day when there
would by chance appear another demonic singer, or some gloomy
young doctor, or some other seductive male, whose opportunity for
happiness with the pretty young woman would be all the more fa-
vourable in that she would have become more mature and experi-
enced through her marriage.
The clock struck half past one; his customary lunch-hour was
considerably past and he found this distinctly unpleasant. Stub-
bornly aware of his fastidiousness, he set out for the hotel. At the
table reserved for the regular guests he came upon the contractor
and a member of the town-council sitting in a corner over their
coffee and smoking. The alderman nodded knowingly to the doctor
and received him with the words:
"Well, I hear that you are to be congratulated.”
“How so?” Doctor Graesler asked, almost frightened.
“Haven't you bought Doctor Frank's sanitarium?”
Doctor Graesler drew a sigh of relief. “Bought ?” he repeated.
“There is no question of that yet. It still depends on all sorts of
things. Why, that shanty is in an awful condition. It has to be re-
built all the way from the ground up. And our friend here”—he
studied the bill-of-fare and waved his hand casually in the direction
of the contractor—"is making estimates!"
The contractor affirmed vehemently that he really did not want
to make a thing on the business; as for the so-called damages to the
building, they were perfectly easy to repair, and if the contracts
were assigned without delay, the whole establishment would be
ready, as bright as new, by the fifteenth of May at the latest.
Doctor Graesler shrugged his shoulders and did not fail to refer to
the fact that the previous day the contractor had set the first of
May as the outside limit. Moreover, everyone knew, of course, how
it was with these construction jobs; the outside limit, of time as well
>


ARTHUR SCHNITZLER
177
as of expense, was always exceeded. For his own part, he no longer
felt that he was active enough to let himself in for that kind of
thing; besides, the owner was asking a ridiculous figure, and
“Who knows,” he added, jokingly of course, “but that you, my
dear Mr Contractor, are in league with the director.”
The contractor flared up, the alderman sought to quiet him,
Graesler gave his remark a mild turn; but good terms could not
be restored, and soon both gentlemen, the contractor and the alder-
man, after a cool parting, left the doctor sitting at the table alone
and thoroughly dissatisfied with himself. He did not even touch
the last course, and hurried home, where there was awaiting him a
patient who before departing wished to be given directions to follow
during the winter. The doctor imparted them absently, impatiently,
accepted his fee with a bad conscience, and was sensible of a dull
resentment not only towards himself, but also towards Sabine, who
had not failed in her letter to reproach him with indifference to his
patients. Then he stepped out on his balcony, lit his cigar which had
gone out, and gazed down into the wretched little garden in which,
despite the dreary weather, his landlady sat on a white bench over
her embroidery, her sewing basket at her side, as was her daily cus-
tom at that hour. This elderly lady had as late as three or four
years ago entertained quite unmistakable intentions with reference
to himself; at least this had been asserted over and over again by
Friederike, who had always believed her brother beset by spinsters
and widows with matrimonial inclinations. God knows, there had
not been very much to that idea. Why, he was a born bachelor,
had been an eccentric fellow, an egotist, and a puritan, all his life.
And of course Sabine had been perfectly sensible of that, as was
clearly and conclusively shown by her letter, even if for several rea-
sons—among which her so-called love for him played the very
smallest part—she had insisted on throwing herself at him. Ah, but
if she had really done that, then the whole affair would look dif-
ferent. But the thing which he felt crinkling in his coat-pocket,
why, that was absolutely anything but a love-letter.
The carriage, which had been ordered for the drive out to The
Range every evening, was announced. Doctor Graesler's heart beat
violently, for he could not in that instant conceal from himself that
there was only one thing for him to do, hurry to Sabine, thank her
tenderly, seize in his those beloved hands which were stretched out


178
DOCTOR GRAESLER
to him so heartily and unreservedly, and ask the sweet creature to be
his wife, even though there were a danger that the happiness which
was being disclosed to him might prove to be of only a few years'
or even months' duration. But instead of plunging down the stairs
he remained standing there as though rooted to the spot. He felt
that he had first definitely to clear up something, and could not call
to mind what that thing was. Suddenly it occurred to him: he
would have to read that letter from Sabine over again. He took it
from his breast-pocket and withdrew into the quiet consultation-
room where, completely undisturbed, he might allow Sabine's words
again to work upon him. And he read. He read slowly, with
strained attention, and he felt his heart growing more stark with
every word. Everything sweet and sincere seemed to strike him as
cool, even positively scornful; and when he reached the places where
Sabine casually touched upon his reserve, his vanity, and his fastid-
iousness, it seemed as though she were intentionally repeating
something with which she had already that very morning reproached
him to the point of exasperation, and unjustly besides. Just why
had she fallen into the notion of calling him squeamish, and a
Philistine-he who had been prepared, without another word, and
how gladly, to forgive her even a real false step? And not only
had she not even remotely suspected this; she had even insinu-
ated that it was for that reason, for that very reason, that he
had hesitated. How little she knew him. Yes, that was it. She did
not understand him. And from this point of view the whole riddle
of his life suddenly seemed to him newly illuminated. For it was
now clear to him that nobody had yet ever really understood him,
neither woman nor man. Not his parents, not his sister—as little as
his patients and his colleagues had understood him. His taciturnity
was regarded as coldness, his love of order as squeamish, his gravity
as prosiness; and so, as a man incapable of extravagance and scin-
tillation, he had been all his life predestined to loneliness. And since
he was once for all that sort and not another, and, moreover, so
many years older than Sabine, therefore he could not, dared not,
accept the happiness which she was prepared to offer him, or which
she thought herself prepared to offer and which would probably
turn out not to have been happiness at all. He hastily took a sheet
of writing-paper and began to write her.
“Dear Fräulein Sabine! Your letter moved me deeply. How can
-


ARTHUR SCHNITZLER
179
I thank you, lonely old man that I am!” Oh, what rot! He tore up
the sheet and began over again.
"My dear Fräulein Sabine! I have received your letter, your
beautiful, kind letter. It moved me deeply. How can I ever thank
you! You have revealed to me the possibility of a happiness of
which I would scarcely have dared to dream, and for that very rea-
son—let me say it in this connexion immediately—I dare not seize
it, I mean, not seize it at once. Give me a few days' time for delib-
eration, allow me to come to a realization of my good fortune, and
oh, dear Fräulein Sabine, will not you also ask yourself once more
whether you are really and truly willing to entrust your sweet youth
to such a mature man as myself.
"Perhaps it turns out well that, as you know, I have to make a
several days' trip to my native city. It is now my intention to
advance that trip by a few days and to leave here as early as to-
morrow morning instead of waiting until Thursday. Thus we will
not see each other for something like fourteen days, and during this
time both you and I shall make our decisions. Unfortunately I have
not the gift, dear Fräulein Sabine, of making my words read as
beautifully as do yours. If you could only look into my heart! But
I know that you will not misunderstand me. I think it is better that
I do not come to The Range to-day; better that for the present I
take my leave of you with this letter. May I at the same time ask
your permission to write you and beg that you do likewise ? My
home address is Am Burggraben 17. As you know, I intend when
I get home to confer with my old friend, the attorney Boehlinger,
concerning, among other things, the purchase of the sanitarium.
Consequently, I omit for to-day to enter into the very kind offer of
your esteemed father, for which I only wish for the present to
express my sincerest thanks. As a matter of fact, it might be best to
confer with an architect foreign to this town, in addition to the local
contractor—against whom, of course, I do not wish to be thought
to have any objections. But of all this another time. And now, dear
Fräulein Sabine, farewell. Give my kindest regards to your parents,
to whom I beg you to say that an urgent telegram from my attorney
has hastened my departure by a few days. In two weeks, then. Oh,
that on my return I shall find everything here just as I have left it!
With what impatience shall I await your reply at home! But I


180
DOCTOR GRAESLER
must say no more. I thank you. I kiss your dear hands. Auf
Wiedersehen! Auf glückliches Wiedersehen! Your friend, Doctor
Graesler.”
a
He folded the sheet. At times during the writing of the letter he
had been aware of tears in his eyes, out of some undefinable emo-
tion towards himself and also towards Sabine; but now that a ten-
tative decision had been made, he sealed the letter, dry-eyed and
composed, and handed it over to the driver, who was to deliver it
personally at The Range. For a while he watched the carriage from
the window as it drove away; once he was on the point of recalling
the driver, but the words died on his lips and soon the carriage
vanished from his sight. Then he made his preparations for the
hastened departure. He had so much to dispose of and attend to
that at first he could think of nothing else; but later, when it
occurred to him that his letter must surely be in Sabine's hands by
this time, he had an actual physical ache in his heart. Then he
waited to see whether some reply might possibly come. Or whether
she might not simply jump into the carriage and come to get him
the undecided bridegroom. Yes, in that case she could really say
that she was throwing herself at him. But her love was, after all,
not strong enough to undergo that test. She did not come; not even
a letter came. And much later, from the window he saw the carriage
as it rolled by in the twilight with some unfamiliar passenger.
Graesler slept very restlessly that night; and in the morning, shiver-
ing and out of sorts, with a sharp rain rattling down upon the india-
rubber top of the open carriage, he rode off to the station.
To be continued



Courtesy of Gallery Flechtheim, Berlin
STANDING FIGURE. BY ERNESTO DE FIORI






Courtesy of Gallery Flechtheim, Berlin
WALKING FIGURE. BY ERNESTO DE FIORI





SIX SONGS FOR PURITANS
BY RICHARD ALDINGTON
"Od's life, must one swear to the truth of a song?”
-Matt. Prior
I
Unlike that aged Teian boaster
And those who ape his senile lies,
I cannot show a monstrous roster
Of ladies captive to my eyes.
Yet five or six I might discover
(Did grateful prudence not restrain)
Who felt a pleasure-giving lover
Should not be cut, but come again.
If this were ill, may they forgive me;
They never seemed to take alarm;
Whate'er John Wesley says, believe me,
Women know best what does them harm.
II
Euphemia studies law, Aminta
Inspects the ailments of the poor,
Eudocia prays and Araminta
Numbers the stars on heaven's floor;
Yet Chloe for my mistress I decree
I
Whose only art is artless love of me.
'Tis not the statute binds together,
Physic ignores the wounds we share,
Love works in dull or starry weather
And nakedness suits not with prayer;
Then let your learning, Chloe, still consist
In all the various ways of being kist.


182
SIX SONGS FOR PURITANS
III
Believe not, Chloe, all your grace
Can dwell within that lovely face,
Believe not all your beauty lies
In the mild prison of those eyes.
Yet, Chloe, think not I incline
To passions abstract and divine,
'Tis not a soul alone could move
This ardent flesh to sue for love.
But when that rose-tipped breast I see
Or the white splendour of your knee,
I covet a more precious fleece
Than ever Jason brought to Greece.
IV
When to Dorinda I impart
My passion,
She vows the mistress of my heart
Is Fashion,
That Celia, Chloe, and Lucinda
Shall never rule with proud Dorinda.
I crave more beauties than do stir
My vision,
For all reply she shows me her
Derision.
Shall I then suffer this, a martyr
That dares not rise above her garter?
If she persists a prude, I swear
I'll leave her
Till some dull clumsy cuckold dare
Relieve her;
As heavy guns take virgin trenches
So husbands smooth our way to wenches.


RICHARD ALDINGTON
183
V
Pulvis et umbra! Chloe, why
Quench my desire with ill-bred gloom,
Since many an amorous death we die
Ere we are borne to lie
Loveless and chilly in th' uncomely tomb?
Why, pretty fool, is that a tear
Wronging the cheek I kissed so late?
There is no dust or shadow here;
Come, kiss me without fear
And let me bring you to the ivory gate.
VI
Daphnis, pray breathe this pastoral vein;
Strew not my broidered sheets with flowers
Dripping cold rain;
Can any civil maid embrace
Daffodils dropped in freezing showers
That soil her lace?
Be (if you choose) a poet, but
Expect to find my window shut;
Though Chloe loves whene'er she can
She loves no pseudo-shepherd-man.


THE FOX
BY D. H. LAWRENCE
III
ON
N the ninth day after he had left her he received this letter:
“Dear Henry,
I have been over it all again in my mind, this business of me and
you, and it seems to me impossible. When you aren't there I see
what a fool I am. When you are there you seem to blind me to
things as they actually are. You make me see things all unreal and
I don't know what. Then when I am alone again with Jill I seem
to come to my own senses and realize what a fool I am making of
myself and how I am treating you unfairly. Because it must be
unfair to you for me to go on with this affair when I can't feel in
my heart that I really love you. I know people talk a lot of stuff
and nonsense about love, and I don't want to do that. I want to
keep to plain facts and act in a sensible way. And that seems to me
what I'm not doing. I don't see on what grounds I am going to
marry you. I know I am not head over heels in love with you, as I
have fancied myself to be with fellows when I was a young fool of
a girl. You are an absolute stranger to me, and it seems to me you
will always be one. So on what grounds am I going to marry you?
i
When I think of Jill she is ten times more real to me. I know her
and I'm awfully fond of her and I hate myself for a beast if I ever
hurt her little finger. We have a life together. And even if it can't
last for ever, it is a life while it does last. And it might last as long
as either of us lives. Who knows how long we've got to live? She
is a delicate little thing, perhaps nobody but me knows how deli-
cate. And as for me, I feel I might fall down the well any day.
What I don't seem to see at all is you. When I think of what I've
been and what I've done with you I'm afraid I am a few screws
loose. I should be sorry to think that softening of the brain is set-
ting in so soon, but that is what it seems like. You are such an abso-
lute stranger and so different from what I'm used to and we don't
a
.


D. H. LAWRENCE
185
seem to have a thing in common. As for love the very word seems
impossible. I know what love means even in Jill's case, and I
know that in this affair with you it's an absolute impossibility. And
then going to Canada. I'm sure I must have been clean off my
chump when I promised such a thing. It makes me feel fairly
frightened of myself. I feel I might do something really silly, that
I wasn't responsible for. And end my days in a lunatic asylum.
You may think that's all I'm fit for after the way I've gone on, but
it isn't a very nice thought for me. Thank goodness Jill is here and
her being here makes me feel sane again, else I don't know what I
might do, I might have an accident with the gun one evening. I love
Jill and she makes me feel safe and sane, with her loving anger
against me for being such a fool. Well what I want to say is won't
you let us cry the whole thing off? I can't marry you, and really,
I won't do such a thing if it seems to me wrong. It is all a great
mistake. I've made a complete fool of myself, and all I can do is to
apologize to you and ask you please to forget it and please to take
no further notice of me. Your fox skin is nearly ready and seems
all right. I will post it to you if you will let me know if this address
is still right, and if you will accept my apology for the awful and
lunatic way I have behaved with you, and then let the matter rest.
Jill sends her kindest regards. Her mother and father are staying
with us over Christmas.
Yours very sincerely
Ellen March.”
a
The boy read this letter in camp as he was cleaning his kit. He
set his teeth and for a moment went almost pale, yellow round the
eyes with fury. He said nothing and saw nothing and felt nothing
but a livid rage that was quite unreasoning. Balked! Balked again!
Balked! He wanted the woman, he had fixed like doom upon hav-
ing her. He felt that was his doom, his destiny, and his reward, to
have this woman. She was his heaven and hell on earth, and he
would have none elsewhere. Sightless with rage and thwarted mad-
ness he got through the morning. Save that in his mind he was
lurking and scheming towards an issue, he would have committed
some insane act. Deep in himself he felt like roaring and howling
and gnashing his teeth and breaking things. But he was too intelli-
gent. He knew society was on top of him, and he must scheme.


186
THE FOX
So with his teeth bitten together and his nose curiously slightly
lifted, like some creature that is vicious, and his eyes fixed and
staring, he went through the morning's affairs drunk with anger and
suppression. In his mind was one thing—Banford. He took no
heed of all March's outpouring: none. One thorn rankled stuck
in his mind. Banford. In his mind, in his soul, in his whole being,
one thorn rankling to insanity. And he would have to get it out.
He would have to get the thorn of Banford out of his life, if he died
for it.
With this one fixed idea in his mind, he went to ask for twenty-
four hours leave of absence. He knew it was not due to him. His
consciousness was supernaturally keen. He knew where he must
go—he must go to the captain. But how could he get at the cap-
tain? In that great camp of wooden huts and tents, he had no idea
where his captain was.
But he went to the officers' canteen. There was his captain stand-
ing talking with three other officers. Henry stood in the door-way
at attention.
“May I speak to Captain Berryman ?”—The captain was Cornish
like himself.
"What do you want ?” called the captain.
“May I speak to you, Captain ?"
“What do you want ?” replied the captain, not stirring from
among
his
group
of fellow officers.
Henry watched his superior for a minute without speaking.
a
“You won't refuse me Sir, will you?” he asked gravely.
“It depends what it is.”
“Can I have twenty-four hours' leave ?''
“No, you've no business to ask.”
“I know I haven't. But I must ask you.”
"You've had your answer.”
“Don't send me away, Captain.”
There was something strange about the boy as he stood there so
everlasting in the door-way. The Cornish captain felt the strange-
ness at once, and eyed him shrewdly.
"Why, what's afoot ?'' he said, curious.
“I'm in trouble about something. I must go to Blewbury,” said
the boy.
"Blewbury, eh? After the girls ?”


D. H. LAWRENCE
187
a
“Yes, it is a woman, Captain.” And the boy, as he stood there
with his head reaching forward a little, went suddenly terribly pale,
or yellow, and his lips seemed to give off pain. The captain saw and
paled a little also. He turned aside.
"Go on then,” he said. “But for God's sake don't cause any
trouble of any sort."
“I won't, Captain, thank you.”
He was gone. The captain, upset, took a gin and bitters. Henry
managed to hire a bicycle. It was twelve o'clock when he left the
camp. He had sixty miles of wet and muddy cross-roads to ride.
But he was in the saddle and down the road without a thought of
food.
At the farm, March was busy with a work she had had some time
in hand. A bunch of Scotch fir-trees stood at the end of the open
shed, on a little bank where ran the fence between two of the gorse-
shaggy meadows. The furthest of these trees was dead-it had died
in the summer and stood with all its needles brown and sere in the
air. It was not a very big tree. And it was absolutely dead. So
March determined to have it, although they were not allowed to
cut any of the timber. But it would make such splendid firing, in
these days of scarce fuel.
She had been giving a few stealthy chops at the trunk for a
week or more, every now and then hacking away for five minutes,
low down, near the ground, so no one should notice. She had not
tried the saw, it was such hard work, alone. Now the tree stood with
a great yawning gap in his base, perched as it were on one sinew,
and ready to fall. But he did not fall.
It was late in the damp December afternoon, with cold mists
creeping out of the woods and up the hollows, and darkness waiting
to sink in from above. There was a bit of yellowness where the sun
was fading away beyond the low woods of the distance. March took
her axe and went to the tree. The small thud-thud of her blows
resounded rather ineffectual about the wintry homestead. Banford
came out wearing her thick coat, but with no hat on her head, so
that her thin, bobbed hair blew on the uneasy wind that sounded in
the pines and in the wood.
"What I'm afraid of,” said Banford, “is that it will fall on the
shed and we'll have another job repairing that.”
“Oh, I don't think so," said March straightening herself and


188
THE FOX
wiping her arm over her hot brow. She was Aushed red, her eyes
were very wide-open and queer, her upper lip lifted away from her
two white front teeth with a curious, almost rabbit-look.
A little stout man in a black overcoat and a bowler hat came pot-
a
tering across the yard. He had a pink face and a white beard and
smallish, pale-blue eyes. He was not very old, but nervy, and he
walked with little short steps.
"What do
you think, father ?" said Banford. “Don't you think
it might hit the shed in falling ?”
“Shed, no!" said the old man. “Can't hit the shed. Might as well
say the fence.”
“The fence doesn't matter," said March, in her high voice.
“Wrong as usual, am I!” said Banford, wiping her straying hair
from her eyes.
The tree stood as it were on one spelch of itself, leaning, and
creaking in the wind. It grew on the bank of a little dry ditch be-
a
tween the two meadows. On the top of the bank straggled one fence,
running to the bushes uphill. Several trees clustered there in the
corner of the field near the shed and near the gate which led into
the yard. Towards this gate, horizontal across the weary meadows
came the grassy, rutted approach from the highroad. There trailed
another rickety fence, long split poles joining the short, thick,
wide-apart uprights. The three people stood at the back of the tree,
in the corner of the shed meadow, just above the yard gate. The
house with its two gables and its porch stood tidy in a little grassed
garden across the yard. A little stout rosy-faced woman in a little
red woollen shoulder shawl had come and taken her stand in the
porch.
“Isn't it down yet,” she cried, in a high little voice.
“Just thinking about it,” called her husband. His tone towards
the two girls was always rather mocking and satirical. March did
not want to go on with her hitting while he was there. As for him,
he wouldn't lift a stick from the ground if he could help it, com-
plaining, like his daughter, of rheumatics in his shoulder. So the
three stood there a moment silent in the cold afternoon, in the bot-.
tom corner near the yard.
They heard the far-off taps of a gate, and craned to look. Away
a
across, on the green horizontal approach, a figure was just swinging
on to a bicycle again, and lurching up and down over the grass.


D. H. LAWRENCE
189
"Why it's one of our boys—it's Jack," said the old man.
“Can't be,” said Banford.
March craned her head to look. She alone recognized the khaki
figure. She flushed, but said nothing.
“No, it isn't Jack, I don't think,” said the old man, staring with
little round blue eyes under his white lashes.
In another moment the bicycle lurched into sight, and the rider
dropped off at the gate. It was Henry, his face wet and red and
spotted with mud. He was altogether a muddy sight.
“Oh!" cried Banford, as if afraid. “Why it's Henry!"
"What!” muttered the old man. He had a thick, rapid, mutter-
ing way of speaking, and was slightly deaf. “What? What? Who
is it? Who is it do you say? That young fellow? That young
fel-
low of Nellie's? Oh! Oh!” And the satiric smile came on his pink
face and white eyelashes.
Henry, pushing the wet hair off his steaming brow, had caught
sight of them and heard what the old man said. His hot young
face seemed to flame in the cold light.
“Oh, are you all there!” he said, giving his sudden, puppy's little
laugh. He was so hot and dazed with cycling he hardly knew where
he was. He leaned the bicycle against the fence and climbed over
into the corner on to the bank, without going into the yard.
"Well, I must say, we weren't expecting you,” said Banford
laconically.
“No, I suppose not,” said he, looking at March.
She stood aside, slack, with one knee drooped and the axe resting
its head loosely on the ground. Her eyes were wide and vacant,
and her upper lip lifted from her teeth in that helpless, fascinated
rabbit-look. The moment she saw his glowing red face it was all
over with her. She was as helpless as if she had been bound. The
moment she saw the way his head seemed to reach forward.
"Well, who is it? Who is it, anyway?” asked the smiling, satiric
old man in his muttering voice.
"Why Mr Grenfel, whom you've heard us tell about, Father,"
said Banford coldly.
"Heard you tell about, I should think so. Heard of nothing else
practically,” muttered the elderly man with his queer little jeering
smile on his face. "How do you do,” he added, suddenly reaching
out his hand to Henry.


190
THE FOX
The boy shook hands just as startled. Then the two men fell
apart.
“Cycled over from Salisbury Plain, have you” asked the old
man.
“Yes.”
"Hm! Longish ride. How long d'it take you, eh? Some time,
eh? Several hours, I suppose.”
“About four."
“Eh? Four! Yes, I should have thought so. When are you
going back then?”
"I've got till to-morrow evening.”
"Till to-morrow evening, eh? Yes. Hm! Girls weren't expect-
ing you, were they?”
And the old man turned his pale-blue, round little eyes under
their white lashes mockingly towards the girls. Henry also looked
round. He had become a little awkward. He looked at March,
who was still staring away into the distance as if to see where the
cattle were. Her hand was on the pommel of the axe, whose head
rested loosely on the ground.
“What were you doing there?” he asked in his soft, courteous
voice. “Cutting a tree down ?”
March seemed not to hear, as if in a trance.
“Yes," said Banford. "We've been at it for over a week."
“Oh! And have you done it all by yourselves then?”
“Nellie's done it all, I've done nothing,” said Banford.
“Really!—You must have worked quite hard,” he said, address-
ing himself in a curious gentle tone direct to March. She did not
answer, but remained half averted staring away towards the woods
above as if in a trance.
“Nellie!" cried Banford sharply. “Can't you answer?”
”
"What-me?” cried March starting round, and looking from one
to the other. "Did any one speak to me ?”
"Dreaming!” muttered the old man, turning aside to smile.
“Must be in love, eh, dreaming in the day-time!"
“Did you say anything to me?” said March, looking at the boy as
from a strange distance, her eyes wide and doubtful, her face deli-
cately flushed.
“I said you must have worked hard at the tree,” he replied court-
eously.


D. H. LAWRENCE
191
“Oh, that! Bit by bit. I thought it would have come down by
now.”
“I'm thankful it hasn't come down in the night, to frighten us
to death,” said Banford.
“Let me just finish it for you, shall I ?” said the boy.
March slanted the axe-shaft in his direction.
"Would you like to," she said. .
“Yes, if
you
wish it,” he said.
“Oh, I'm thankful when the thing's down, that's all,” she replied,
nonchalant.
“Which way is it going to fall?” said Banford. “Will it hit the
.
shed?"
"No, it won't hit the shed,” he said. "I should think it will fall
there—quite clear. Though it might give a twist and catch the
fence.”
“Catch the fence!" cried the old man. “What, catch the fence!
When it's leaning at that angle?—Why, it's further off than the
shed. It won't catch the fence.”
“No,” said Henry, "I don't suppose it will. It has plenty of room
to fall quite clear, and I suppose it will fall clear.
“Won't tumble backwards on top of us, will it ?" asked the old
man sarcastic.
"No, it won't do that,” said Henry, taking off his short overcoat
and his tunic. “Ducks! Ducks! Go back!"
A line of four brown-speckled ducks led by a brown-and-green
drake were stemming away downhill from the upper meadow, com-
ing like boats running on a ruffled sea, cockling their way top speed
downwards towards the fence and towards the little
group
of people,
and cackling as excitedly as if they brought news of the Spanish
Armada.
"Silly things! Silly things!” cried Banford going forward to
turn them off. But they came eagerly towards her, opening their
yellow-green beaks and quacking as if they were so excited to say
something
“There's no food. There's nothing here. You must wait a bit,”
said Banford to them. “Go away. Go away. Go round to the
yard."
They didn't go, so she climbed the fence to swerve them round
under the gate and into the yard. So off they waggled in an excited


192
THE FOX
>
string once more, wagging their rumps like the stems of little gon-
dolas, ducking under the bar of the gate. Banford stood on the top
of the bank, just over the fence, looking down on the other three.
Henry looked up at her, and met her queer, round-pupilled, weak
eyes staring behind her spectacles. He was perfectly still. He
looked away, up at the weak, leaning tree. And as he looked into
the sky, like a huntsman who is watching a flying bird, he thought
to himself: "If the tree falls in just such a way, and spins just so
much as it falls, then the branch there will strike her exactly as she
stands on top of that bank.”
He looked at her again. She was wiping the hair from her brow
again, with that perpetual gesture. In his heart he had decided her
death. A terrible still force seemed in him, and a power that was
just his. If he turned even a hair's breadth in the wrong direction,
he would lose the power.
"Mind yourself, Miss Banford,” he said. And his heart held per-
fectly still, in the terrible pure will that she should not move.
“Who me, mind myself ?" she cried, her father's jeering tone in
her voice. "Why, do you think you might hit me with the axe ?”
“No, it's just possible the tree might, though,” he answered
soberly. But the tone of his voice seemed to her to imply that he
was only being falsely solicitous and trying to make her move be-
cause it was his will to move her.
“Absolutely impossible,” she said.
He heard her. But he held himself icy still, lest he should lose
his power.
“No, it's just possible. You'd better come down this way.”
“Oh, all right. Let us see some crack Canadian tree felling,” she
retorted.
“Ready then,” he said, taking the axe, looking round to see he
was clear.
There was a moment of pure, motionless suspense, when the world
seemed to stand still. Then suddenly his form seemed to flash up
enormously tall and fearful, he gave two swift, flashing blows, in
immediate succession, the tree was severed, turning slowly, spinning
strangely in the air and coming down like a sudden darkness on the
earth. No one saw what was happening except himself. No one
heard the strange little cry which the Banford gave as the dark
end of the bough swooped down on her. No one saw her crouch a
a


D. H. LAWRENCE
193
a
little and receive the blow on the back of the neck. No one saw her
flung outwards and laid, a little twitching heap, at the foot of the
fence. No one except the boy. And he watched with intense bright
eyes, as he would watch a wild goose he had shot. Was it winged,
or dead? Dead!
Immediately he gave a loud cry. Immediately March gave a wild
shriek that went far, far down the afternoon. And the father
started a strange bellowing sound.
The boy leapt the fence and ran to the figure. The back of the
neck and head was a mass of blood, of horror. He turned it over.
The body was quivering with little convulsions. But she was dead
really. He knew it, that it was so. He knew it in his soul and his
blood. The inner necessity of his life was fulfilling itself, it was he
who was to live. The thorn was drawn out of his bowels. So, he put
her down gently, she was dead.
He stood up. March was standing there petrified and absolutely
motionless. Her face was dead white, her eyes big black pools.
The old man was scrambling horribly over the fence.
"I'm afraid it's killed her,” said the boy.
The old man was making curious, blubbering noises as he huddled
over the fence. “What!” cried March, starting electric.
“Yes I'm afraid,” repeated the boy.
March was coming forward. The boy was over the fence before
she reached it.
"What do you say, killed her?" she asked in a sharp voice.
"I'm afraid so,” he answered softly.
She went still whiter, fearful. The two stood facing each other.
Her black eyes gazed on him with the last look of resistance. And
then in a last agonized failure she began to grizzle, to cry in a shiv-
ery little fashion of a child that doesn't want to cry, but which is
beaten from within, and gives that little first shudder of sobbing
which is not yet weeping, dry and fearful.
He had won. She stood there absolutely helpless, shuddering her
dry sobs and her mouth trembling rapidly. And then, as in a child,
with a little crash came the tears and the blind agony of sightless
weeping. She sank down on the grass and sat there with her hands
on her breast and her face lifted in sightless, convulsed weeping.
He stood above her, looking down on her, mute, pale, and everlast-
ing seeming. He never moved, but looked down on her. And among
a
а
a


194
THE FOX
all the torture of the scene, the torture of his own heart and bowels,
he was glad, he had won.
After a long time he stooped to her and took her hands.
“Don't cry,” he said softly. “Don't cry.”
She looked up at him with tears running from her eyes, a sense-
less look of helplessness and submission. So she gazed on him as if
sightless, yet looking up to him. She would never leave him again.
He had won her. And he knew it and was glad, because he wanted
her for his life. His life must have her. And now he had won her.
It was what his life must have.
But if he had won her, he had not yet got her. They were mar-
ried at Christmas as he had planned, and he got again ten days'
leave. They went to Cornwall, to his own village, on the sea. He
realized that it was awful for her to be at the farm any more.
But though she belonged to him, though she lived in his shadow,
as if she could not be away from him, she was not happy. She did
not want to leave him: and yet she did not feel free with him.
Everything around her seemed to watch her, seemed to press on her.
He had won her, he had her with him, she was his wife. And she-
she belonged to him, she knew it. But she was not glad. And he was
still foiled. He realized that though he was married to her and pos-
sessed her in every possible way, apparently, and though she wanted
him to possess her, she wanted it, she wanted nothing else, now, still
he did not quite succeed.
Something was missing. Instead of her soul swaying with new
life, it seemed to droop, to bleed, as if it were wounded. She would
sit for a long time with her hand in his, looking away at the sea.
And in her dark, vacant eyes was a sort of wound, and her face
looked a little peaked. If he spoke to her, she would turn to him
with a faint new smile, the strange, quivering little smile of a
woman who has died in the old way of love, and can't quite rise to
the new way. She still felt she ought to do something, to strain her-
self in some direction. And there was nothing to do, and no direc-
tion in which to strain herself. And she could not quite accept the
submergence which his new love put upon her. If she was in love,
she ought to exert herself, in some way, loving. She felt the weary
need of our day to exert herself in love. But she knew that in fact
she must no more exert herself in love. He would not have the love
which exerted itself towards him. It made his brow go black. No,
a


D. H. LAWRENCE
195
he wouldn't let her exert her love towards him. No, she had to be
passive, to acquiesce, and to be submerged under the surface of love.
She had to be like the seaweed she saw as she peered down from
the boat, swaying for ever delicately under water, with all their
delicate fibrils put tenderly out upon the flood, sensitive, utterly
sensitive and receptive within the shadowy sea, and never, never
rising and looking forth above water while they lived. Never.
Never looking forth from the water until they died, only then wash-
ing, corpses, upon the surface. But while they lived, always sub-
merged, always beneath the wave. Beneath the wave they might
have powerful roots, stronger than iron, they might be tenacious
and dangerous in their soft waving within the flood. Beneath the
water they might be stronger, more indestructible than resistant oak
trees are on land. But it was alw.ys under-water, always under-
water. And she, being a woman, must be like that.
And she had been so used to the very opposite. She had had to
take all the thought for love and for life, and all the responsibility.
Day after day she had been responsible for the coming day, for the
coming year: for her dear Jill's health and happiness and well-
being. Verily, in her own small way, she had felt herself responsible
for the well-being of the world. And this had been her great stimu-
lant, this grand feeling that, in her own small sphere, she was re-
sponsible for the well-being of the world.
And she had failed. She knew that, even in her small way, she
had failed. She had failed to satisfy her own feeling of responsi-
bility. It was so difficult. It seemed so grand and easy at first. And
the more you tried, the more difficult it became. It had seemed so
easy to make one beloved creature happy. And the more you tried,
the worse the failure. It was terrible. She had been all her life
reaching, reaching, and what she reached for seemed so near, until
she had stretched to her utmost limit. And then it was always
beyond her.
Always beyond her, vaguely, unrealizably beyond her, and she
was left with nothingness at last. The life she reached for, the hap-
piness she reached for, the well-being she reached for all slipped
back, became unreal, the further she stretched her hand. She wanted
some goal, some finality—and there was none. Always this ghastly
reaching, reaching, striving for something that might be just be-
yond. Even to make Jill happy. She was glad Jill was dead. F


196
THE FOX
she had realized that she could never make her happy. Jill would
always be fretting herself thinner and thinner, weaker and weaker.
Her pains grew worse instead of less. It would be so for ever. She
was glad she was dead.
And if she had married a man it would have been just the same.
The woman striving, striving to make the man happy, striving with-
in her own limits for the well-being of her world. And always
achieving failure. Little, foolish successes in money or in ambition.
But at the very point where she most wanted success, in the an-
guished effort to make some one beloved human being happy and
perfect, there the failure was almost catastrophic. You wanted to
make your beloved happy, and his happiness seemed always achiev-
able. If only you did just this, that, and the other. And you did
this, that, and the other, in all good faith, and every time the failure
became a little more ghastly. You could love yourself to ribbons,
and strive and strain yourself to the bone, and things would go
from
bad to worse, bad to worse, as far as happiness went. The awful
mistake of happiness.
Poor March, in her goodwill and her responsibility, she had
strained herself till it seemed to her that the whole of life and
every-
thing was only a horrible abyss of nothingness. The more you
reached after the fatal flower of happiness, which trembles so blue
and lovely in a crevice just beyond your grasp, the more fearfully
you become aware of the ghastly and awful gulf of the precipice
below you, into which you will inevitably plunge, as into the bot-
less pit, if you reach any further. You pluck flower after flower
-it is never the flower. The flower itself—its calyx is a horrible
gulf, it is the bottomless pit.
That is the whole history of the search for happiness, whether it
your own or somebody else's that you want to win. It ends, and
it always ends, in the ghastly sense of the bottomless nothingness
into which you will inevitably fall if you
strain
any
further.
And women ?—what goal can any woman conceive, except happi-
ness? Just happiness, for herself and the whole world. That, and
nothing else. And so, she assumes the responsibility, and sets off
towards her goal. She can see it there, at the foot of the rainbow.
Or she can see it a little way beyond, in the blue distance. Not far,
not far.
But the end of the rainbow is a bottomless gulf down which you
be
a
a


D. H. LAWRENCE
197
can fall for ever without arriving, and the blue distance is a void
pit which can swallow you and all your efforts into its emptiness,
and still be no emptier. You and all your efforts. So, the illusion of
attainable happiness!
Poor March, she had set off so wonderfully, towards the blue
goal. And the further and further she had gone, the more fearful
had become the realization of emptiness. An agony, an insanity at
last.
She was glad it was over. She was glad to sit on the shore and
look westwards over the sea, and know the great strain had ended.
She would never strain for love and happiness any more. And Jill
was safely dead. Poor Jill, poor Jill. It must be sweet to be dead.
For her own part, death was not her destiny. She would have to
leave her destiny to the boy.—But then, the boy. He wanted more
than that. He wanted her to give herself without defences, to sink
and become submerged in him. And she-she wanted to sit still,
like a woman on the last milestone, and watch. She wanted to see,
to know, to understand. She wanted to be alone: with him at her
side.
And he! He did not want her to watch any more, to see any more,
to understand any more. He wanted to veil her woman's spirit, as
Orientals veil the woman's face. He wanted her to commit herself
to him, and to put her independent spirit to sleep. He wanted to
take away from her all her effort, all that seemed her very raison
d'être. He wanted to make her submit, yield, blindly pass away out
of all her strenuous consciousness. He wanted to take away her con-
sciousness, and make her just his woman. Just his woman.
And she was so tired, so tired, like a child that wants to go to
sleep, but which fights against sleep as if sleep were death. She
seemed to stretch her eyes wider in the obstinate effort and tension
of keeping awake. She would keep awake. She would know. She
would consider and judge and decide. She would have the reins of
her own life between her own hands. She would be an independent
woman, to the last. But she was so tired, so tired of everything.
And sleep seemed near. And there was such rest in the boy.
Yet there, sitting in a niche of the high wild cliffs of west Corn-
wall, looking over the westward sea, she stretched her eyes wider
and wider. Away to the West, Canada, America. She would know
and she would see what was ahead. And the boy, sitting beside her


198
THE FOX
staring down at the gulls, had a cloud between his brows and the
strain of discontent in his eyes. He wanted her asleep, at peace in
him. He wanted her at peace, asleep in him. And there she was,
dying with the strain of her own wakefulness. Yet she would not
sleep: no, never. Sometimes he thought bitterly that he ought to
have left her. He ought never to have killed Banford. He should
have left Banford and March to kill one another.
But that was only impatience: and he knew it. He was waiting,
waiting to go west. He was aching almost in torment to leave
England, to go west, to take March away. To leave this shore! He
believed that as they crossed the seas, as they left this England
which he so hated, because in some way it seemed to have stung him
with poison, she would go to sleep. She would close her eyes at last,
and give in to him.
And then he would have her and he would have his own life at
last. He chafed, feeling he hadn't got his own life. He would never
have it till she yielded and slept in him. Then he would have all
his own life as a young man and a male, and she would have all her
own life as a woman and a female. There would be no more of
this awful straining. She would not be a man any more, an inde-
pendent woman with a man's responsibility. Nay, even the respon-
sibility for her own soul she would have to commit to him. He
knew it was so, and obstinately held out against her, waiting for the
surrender.
"You'll feel better when once we get over the seas, to Canada,
over there,” he said to her as they sat among the rocks on the cliff.
She looked away to the sea's horizon, as if it were not real. Then
she looked round at him, with the strained, strange look of a child
that is struggling against sleep.
"Shall I ?" she said.
“Yes,” he answered quietly.
And her eyelids dropped with the slow motion, sleep weighing
them unconscious. But she pulled them open again to say:
“Yes, I may.
I can't tell. I can't tell what it will be like over
there."
“If only we could go soon!” he said, with pain in his voice.
The End



ESPRIT DES FORÊTS. BY MICHEL LARIONOW





THOUGHTS ON THE IDIOT OF DOSTOEVSKY
BY HERMANN HESSE
Translated from the German by Stephen Hudson
,
compared with Christ. Of course such a comparison can be
made. One can compare with the Saviour every man who lays bare
magical truth, who no longer separates thought from life, and who
on that account lives a life of solitude among hostile neighbours.
From that point of view there seems to be no great likeness between
Myshkin and Jesus. Only one trait in Myshkin's character, but that
an important one, appears to me as Christlike. I allude to his timid,
morbid purity. The secret fear of sex and of procreation is a trait
which must be reckoned with in the message of Christ for it plays a
distinct part in his world mission. Even the superficial portrait of
Jesus by Renan does not entirely overlook this feature.
But it is curious little as I sympathize with the constant com-
parison between Myshkin and Christ—that I also see the two inter-
mingled in some strange fashion. This occurred to me only latterly
and in connexion with a point of comparative insignificance. It
came into my mind one day, while I was thinking of the Idiot, that
my first thought of him was always an apparently secondary one.
In the first flash of my imagination, I always see him in one par-
ticular minor side-scene, in itself not specially significant. And so
it is with Christ. When any association suggests to me a presenta-
tion of Jesus or when the word of Christ meets my ear or my eye,
then I never see Him on the Cross or in the desert, or as a miracle-
worker or as a raiser of the dead. I see Him in that moment when
He drinks the cup of solitude to the dregs in the Garden of Geth-
semane, when His soul is torn by the agony of death through which
He must pass to His higher birth, and how He then in a last mov-
ing and childlike longing for comfort, turns to His disciples. He
turns to them for a little human warmth, for a fleeting illusion of
affection in the midst of His bitter loneliness. He turns to them,
and the disciples are asleep. There lie excellent Peter and beautiful
a
a


200
THE IDIOT OF DOSTOEVSKY
a
John; they are all asleep together, these worthy men, about whom
Christ in His goodness has experienced disappointments over and
over again. He has shared His thoughts with them as though they
understood His words, as though it were in actual fact possible to
communicate His thoughts to such as these, to arouse in them some-
thing like a vibration of kinship, something akin to understanding,
to relationship, to unity with Himself. And now in the moment of
unbearable torment, He turns to these few comrades He has. He is
so utterly human, so utterly alone, so utterly the Man of Suffering,
that He would now approach them as never before, to find some
poor solace, some poor support in any stupid word they might utter,
even in a friendly gesture. But no, they are not even there—they
are sleeping, snoring.
This cruel moment, in what way I know not, seared itself into my
mind in early youth, and when I think of Jesus, unfailingly it
springs into my memory.
The parallel with Myshkin is this. When I think of The Idiot,
an apparently unimportant moment bursts upon me in the same
way. In that case also the moment is one of incredible isolation, of
tragic solitude. The scene I have in mind is that evening in Pas-
lovsk in the Lebedyevs' house, when the prince, convalescent, some
days after his epileptic attack, receives the visit of the whole
Epanchin family. Into this society, serene and elegant, in spite of
tensions and hidden fires beneath, there suddenly bursts a band of
young revolutionaries and nihilists. The wretched youth Ippolit
with the pretended “Son of Pavlishtchev," with the “Boxer” and
the other individual make their appearance. Then comes that dis-
agreeable, repellent scene, a scene which one reads with equal excite-
ment and disgust. These shallow-minded and misled youths stand
upon the stage, naked in their helpless malignity. Every single one
.
of their words inflicts a double pain upon Myshkin, the pain of their
effect upon himself and the pain caused by the revelation of their
own souls through every word they utter. This strange and unfor-
gettable scene, though not in itself particularly weighty is the one
to which I referred. On the one side a company of elegant people,
people of the world, rich, powerful, and conservative. On the other
the raging young anarchists, inexorable in their hostility, caring
only to gratify their spite against everything that exists, with con-
sideration for no one and, in spite of their rhetorical pretence of in-


HERMANN HESSE
201
tellectuality, wild, foolish, trashy. Between these two parties, the
prince, alone, exposed to the fire of both, regarded with equal dis-
trust by both. And how does the situation end? Myshkin, in spite
of small mistakes, due to his agitation, reveals his sweet, tender,
childlike nature. He smilingly accepts affront and insult, answers
the most shameless with a Christlike selflessness, is ready to accept
all the fault, to take upon himself all the blame and exactly in such
a way as to incur the full weight of odium, displeasure, and con-
tempt from both sides—not from one side or the other, but from
both. All turn away from him, for he has trodden on the toes of
all. One moment more and the extremest social antagonisms, differ-
ences in ages and opinions are wiped out. All are completely united
in a common resentment against the single clean one amongst them.
Upon what turns the impracticability of a being such as the
Idiot in this world? Why does no one understand this man whom
almost all somehow or other love, whose tenderness is so sympa-
thetic to all as to lead to a sort of transfiguration? What separates
this magical creature from ordinary men? Why are they right when
they turn aside from him? Why must they necessarily do so? Why
must he be like Christ who was deserted not only by the world, but
even by His own disciples?
It is because the Idiot thinks other thoughts than the rest of the
world. It is not because his thinking is less logical or more childlike
than theirs. His thinking is that which I call "magical.” This
compassionate Idiot denies the whole of Life, all thinking and feel-
ing, all that the world and reality mean to others. For him Reality
is something entirely different than for them. Their Reality is for
him a shadow. For that reason, because he sees and offers a new
Reality, he becomes the enemy.
The difference is not that they esteem highly such values as power
and wealth, family and state, and that he does not. It is not that
he stands for the Spirit while they stand for the Material or what-
every way one likes to put it. That is not the reason. For the Idiot,
too, material concerns matter, he invariably recognizes the signifi-
cance of such things even though he does not consider them of prime
importance. His gospel is not an ascetic-Indian ideal, a dying to the
world of apparent reality to make the joy of the immortal soul
which alone shall know Truth.
No, Myshkin would readily come to an understanding with other


202
THE IDIOT OF DOSTOEVSKY
people regarding the mutual claims of Nature and spirit and on the
necessity of their working together.
It is simply that while the simultaneity and equivalue of both
worlds is for them an intellectual concept, for him these considera-
tions constitute Life and Reality.
This is not clear. Let us try to elucidate the matter.
Myshkin is different from others because, as an Idiot and an epi-
leptic who is at the same time an exceptionally clever man, he has
much closer and less obscure relationships with the Unconscious.
He has had rare instants of intuitive perception, occasional seconds
of transcendent exaltation. For a lightning moment he has felt the
all-being, the all-feeling, the all-suffering, the all-understanding.
He has known all that is in the world. There lies the kernel of his
magical being. He has not studied, and is not endowed with, mysti-
cal wisdom, he has not even aspired to it. He has simply expe-
rienced the thing itself. He has not merely had occasional signifi-
cant thoughts and ideas. He has literally, once and more than once,
stood on the magic borderland where everything is affirmed, where
not only the remotest thought is true, but also the contrary of such
thought.
That is the fearful part of it, that is the part of him rightly feared
by others. He does not stand quite alone, not all the world is against
him. There are a few people, very doubtful, risky, dangerous people
who stand in close relationship to him. Rogozhin, Nastasya. He is
understood by criminals and by hystericals; he, the innocent, the
gentle child. But this child is not so soft as he seems. His innocence
is not so harmless and men are rightly in awe of him.
The Idiot is, as I said, from time to time near that borderland
where every thought and its opposite are equally true. That is, he
has an intuitive perception that no thought, no law, no mould, no
form exist which are true and right except as regarded from one
pole—and every pole has its opposite. The situation of a pole, the
taking up, that is to say, of a position from which to view and order
the world, is the first stage in the foundation of every cultural form,
of every society and morality. Whosoever considers Spirit and
Nature, Spirit and Freedom, Good and Evil as interchangeable, if
only for a moment, is the deadliest foe of every order of civilization.
For there begins the contrary of Order; there begins Chaos.
A line of thought which turns back to the Unconscious, to Chaos,
a


HERMANN HESSE
203
a
disturbs every human system of order. It was once said to the Idiot
that it was lamentable he no longer told only the truth. So it was.
Truth is everything. It is possible to say “Yes” to everything. But,
to order the world, to achieve material results, to render possible
Law, Society, Organization, Culture, and Morality, No must fol-
low Yes. The world must be polarized, it must be divided against
itself into Good and Evil. Establish every No, every prohibited
thing, every wickedness upon a foundation sufficiently solid to make
it accepted law and as soon as such law is enforced, as soon as it
becomes the basis of a new mode of viewing things, a new order, it
equally becomes absolute and sacred.
Highest Reality in the sense of human culture is the division of
the World into Light and Dark, Good and Evil, Allowed and For-
bidden. Highest Reality for Myshkin is the magical experience of
the reversibility of all institutional forms, of the existence of a
negative equivalent to all moral values. The Idiot finally consid-
cred, introduces the Mother-claim of the Unconscious, he is the
blaster of Civilization. He does not break the Tables of the Law,
he simply turns them round and shows that the contrary to them is
written on the other side.
It is the secret of this terrifying book that this enemy of Order,
this fearful destroyer does not appear as a malefactor but as a
charming, shy creature full of childlike grace, full of warm-hearted,
unselfish goodness. Dostoevsky drew upon the depths of his im-
agination when he made this man a diseased epileptic. All Dostoev-
sky's harbingers of a new and fearful and sinister future, all his
forerunners of Chaos are enigmatic, burdened with pain and disease,
Rogozhin, Nastasya, the four Karamazovs: all are represented as
strange, exceptional beings, but in such a way that their eeriness and
soul-sickness inspire that sort of awed veneration that the Asiatics
feel for the insane. The remarkable and peculiar thing is not that
an epileptic of genius between fifty and sixty years old had such
fantasies and made an epic of them. The significant, the ominous
consideration is that during three decades the youth of Europe has
more and more been accepting these books as full of prophetic
gravity. Another strange thing is that we look these criminals,
hystericals, and idiots of Dostoevsky in the face in quite a different
way from that in which we regard the criminals or fools in other
novels, even in novels we have affection for. It is strange and un-


204
THE IDIOT OF DOSTOEVSKY
canny to realize that in some curious way we love these bad people,
to realize that there must be in us something akin to them, some-
thing that is like them.
This does not come about by chance and still less has it anything
to do with the obvious and literary in Dostoevsky's work. Puzzling
as are certain of his characteristics—consider only the way he bears
one forward towards a solidly constructed psychology of the Un-
conscious—we are not surprised at his work being the finished ex-
pression of a highly developed insight nor at its artistic interpreta-
tion of a daily world with which we are thoroughly familiar. What
actually impresses us is its prophetic import, its foreshadowing of a
disintegration and of a Chaos into which we have during these last
years seen Europe obviously descending. It is not as though this
world of Dostoevsky's were a picture of the future in an ideal sense.
No one will accept it as that. No, we do not feel that Myshkin and
the rest afford us a prefiguration in the sense of “This is what you
must become.” It is something different, but fully as significant:
“We must pass through this. This is our Destiny."
The future is uncertain, but the road which he shows can have but
one meaning. It means a new spiritual dispensation. This takes us
beyond Myshkin, it points towards magical thinking, to the ac-
ceptance of Chaos, to a return to anarchy, back into the unconscious,
into formlessness, into the beast, back far beyond the beast, back to
the beginnings of everything. Not to stay there, not to become
beast or primeval matter, but to start in a fresh direction, to discover
new springs of development and action deep down in the roots of
our being in order to reach to a higher and nobler creation and valua-
tion and division of the world. No programme can teach us to find
this road, no revolution will cast down the walls that we may enter
into it. Each one must approach it alone, each one for himself.
Each one of us must in one hour of his life stand on the threshold of
the borderland where Myshkin stood, where truths cease and new
ones begin. Each one of us must once, for one moment in his life,
experience something of what Myshkin experienced in his flashlight
seconds, of what Dostoevsky himself experienced in that moment
when he stood facing his condemnation and with prophetic vision
took his way onward.
a



ESPAGNOLE. BY NATALIA GONTCHAROVA





AVATARS
BY BABETTE DEUTSCH
Yet I have loved these walls-
grave with spaced etchings,
darkened by their books,
like stones that mellowing mosses climb
have loved the furniture
cherished of time:
firm contours and old colours, with the flare
of russet bittersweet in a green bowl
and the black Persian shawl of my great-grandmother
Aung, like her gracious shadow, on this chair.
Yes, I have loved
soft rugs, and softer flowers,
the silver and the cedarwood, the purple, the fine linen
that is ours.
I have loved things
more intimately known than men and women,
things that, beyond the feeble flesh, endure,
agéd and fine, familiar and secure.
Yes, I have loved
And now I stand reproved
by you, who want
for this bodily tenement
as temporal a house as some brief tent-
you, whose sole cedar grows on Lebanon,
shaking its awful banners like a paean,
you, whose sole purple is the dawn adored
above the desert,
you, whose sole linen
is the weave abhorred
that was the loin-cloth of the Galilean.


VIENNA LETTER
July, 1922
THE
.
THERE are a great many things which I should like to discuss
with Dial readers in my Vienna Letter, for numerous subtle
spiritual threads reach out from Vienna to the east and west. But
perhaps I should speak first of the most important, of what I might
call the main current of our artistic life
and that is un-
doubtedly the battle of this city, after the collapse of a thousand-
year-old political situation, to maintain its rank as the artistic and
intellectual capital of southeastern Europe. At the very moment
of collapse Vienna took up this struggle with the deliberation of an
endangered creature drawing on its last resources, and without a
doubt it is being carried through to victory. Since the end of the
eighteenth century-or even eighty years earlier-Vienna was su-
preme not only as the theatrical centre of Germany, but almost of
Italy as well, owing to dynastic connexions. Its only rival as a the-
atrical city in the entire civilized world was Paris. When I speak of
the theatre as the real strength of Vienna's artistic life--which is
not to be identified entirely with the intellectual life, any more than
literature or poetry is exclusively a matter of the stage—I do not
thereby distinguish opera and lyric drama from the usual spoken
play, nor do I make a division into superior and inferior plays. All
such distinctions are artificial, and smack of histories of literature
or treatises on aesthetics. Where a true sense of the theatre, a
modicum of theatrical genius, has been distributed over an entire
people as with the Austrians, the Celts, or the Greeks, these divisions
fall away; for one form of the living theatre metamorphoses into
another, one genre grows out of another. The Celtic stock has its
genius rooted in the musical and the mystical, in its motivity by
rhythm and mystery, in the yearning and the visionary; on the other
hand Greek drama rests on a passionately inspired preference for
the plastic, corporeal presentation of ideas, an architectural theatre;
while with the Austrians there is a double root from which sprouts
its whole theatrical existence: the gift for social life and for music.
The Austrian has infinitely more social sense than the north Ger-
man, more feeling for human relationships, an incomparably finer
a


HUGO VON HOFMANNSTHAL
207
appreciation of nuance. He has great tact, and it is no accident that
this word has both a musical and a social application. Lafcadio
Hearn gave as a remarkable instance of social differentiations the
fact that if a Japanese woman passed by his garden door he could
tell by the shades of her speech to what social station she belonged,
and it was not a matter of two or three, but of twelve or fourteen
sharply distinguished castes. The same thing might be said of
Vienna. And the public's sharp, vigilant sense of these nuances has
afforded the stage a great opportunity; for the mimic differentia-
tions of these various levels go hand in hand with the conversa-
tional ones, and there is no better education for the actor than a
public which is sensitively awake to the significance of
gesture. In
dramatic art this is joined with the musical ear, reaching a full ex-
pression in waltz and song as in farce or melodrama. Further, there
is nothing more remarkable than the fact that one definite spot in
Europe could produce something so broadly human as Viennese
opera, which has appealed to all sorts of people, like something ac-
cepted, needing no adapting because it was at home everywhere.
But I cannot possibly speak of the Viennese theatre without com-
ing immediately upon Arthur Schnitzler, who celebrated his sixtieth
birthday this May and who has long been looked upon as Vienna's
representative dramatic author in Germany as well as on the rest of
the Continent, including Russia. In recent years his works have
been penetrating into America through the thousands of tiny and
tangled pores and channels by which such spiritual transfusions are
effected. Schnitzler's plays are naturally as much the result of
Vienna's theatrical life as they are a contribution to it. But they
touch on only one phase of it, the drama of conversation as it was
nurtured in the Burgtheater, the famous imperial theatre which was
housed in an annex to the imperial castle itself. In the years be-
tween 1860 and 1890, at that period in Schnitzler's youth which is
the most decisive age to the creator, the conventional drama was
just at its height on this stage. The Vienna stage was unquestionably
supreme among the Germans; and the Comédie Française felt and
frequently gave expression to its sisterly relationship with it. Here
arose a quite distinct style of presentation, built on the subtleties of
social values among the aristocratic and upper bourgeois circles; it
was perhaps a bit precious, but was nevertheless graceful and rich
in nice distinctions. Without doubt it had its influence in shaping
Schnitzler's dramatic manner, not only as to style, but also as to the


208
VIENNA LETTER
a
а
a
canvas on which it was embroidered; by which is meant the society
dramas of those days, the works of Dumas fils, Sardou, Augier, and
Scribe. These same works also had a deciding influence on Ibsen's
earliest technique, and their traces were never quite lost. Perhaps
their effect on Schnitzler could be found not only in the technique
of his larger works, while his shorter ones may be indebted to those
miniature pieces, late descendants of the mimes of Herondas and
Sophron, which came from the pen of Henri Lavedan, Abel Her-
mant, Courteline, and many others, and appeared in the columns of
contemporary French weeklies, especially in Gil Blas from 1880 to
1890 or thereabouts; but also a further effect of this Parisian the-
atrical atmosphere is to be seen in Schnitzler's predilection for the
problem of marriage, or rather of adultery, as the fulcrum of his
larger dramas. Against this, the other prime mover of his theatrical
production is thoroughly Viennese and expresses unmistakably the
passionate love of the theatre which for a hundred and fifty or two
hundred years has been the common grounds for all classes in
Vienna, from prince to cab driver. I refer to “The Theatre” as a
symbol, mustering all mortals for a mutual inspection, the comedy
of words, manners, and social acts, the big and little scenes with
which we serve one another in love, or the salon, or politics. Out of
all this Schnitzler has assembled the mechanism of his larger and
smaller pieces in the most skilful combinations and permutations of
motives. Precisely in the construction and operation of these small
but very subtle machines he showed his superiority as an artist.
The decisive element, the quality of international value, does not
lie in these matters of structure, but in the vivid dialogue. Here
great skill is employed to make the flow free and natural, while the
characters analyse one another and frequently expose very deep
undercurrents of thought and feeling; the conversation rolls on as
though it were there simply for its own sake, to interest the people
on the stage as well as those in the audience. For this reason it often
happens that Schnitzler and Bernard Shaw are linked together, but
they are fundamentally different in spirit and temperament. Their
superficial point of contact is a preference for irony, but in this re-
spect they could be classed with many men of genius, and especially
with Plato's Socrates, who must be unconditionally reckoned among
the fathers of ironic comedy. In fact, certain of the Platonic Dia-
logues are clever little comedies with Socrates as the leading charac-
ter, the genuine farceur. And classic literary tradition, which con.


HUGO VON HOFMANNSTHAL
209
tains many facts that are corrupt but indirectly true, has it that
Plato died with the farces of Sophron under his pillow. The virtu-
osity of this sceptical irony is the peculiarity and strength of
Schnitzler's comedies. And if I may say so, those pieces of his seem
to me the best wherein this irony is situated not merely in the dia-
logue—as in all his more serious works where the genre comes quite
close to the comédie larmoyante—but where irony also dominates
the very nature of the action, as in the historical farce of The Green
Cockatoo, or in several other of his one-act plays.
Physician and son of a physician, and thus a sceptic by calling,
he is a product of the upper bourgeoisie at the close of the nine-
teenth century, a sceptical, observant, and historically-minded pe-
riod not lacking in internal affinities with French life and culture
of the eighteenth century; it is to be expected, therefore, that this
important and applauded dramatist should be a writer of distin-
guished short stories. Indeed, no two art forms have ever been
closer to one another than the psychological play and the psycho-
logical story of the last generation. He is an unusual narrator; but
it is not preëminently in the short form of which Maupassant and
Kipling were masters, nor in the novel, but in the tale of medium
length that he seems to me almost without a rival among his con-
temporaries. There is a peculiarly compelling force in the sheer
narrative of these works. They hold the reader to the highest de-
gree of suspense, and do this by an art which is rightly called sober,
an epithet rarely applicable to a German author. But also in the
case of his stories the strongest seem to me those in which his irony-
with its constant touch of melancholy—is given a major importance,
as in that charming mixture of the comic and the tragic which
characterizes his Fate of the Baron von Leisenbohg.
But I must revert from Schnitzler to my real subject, which is
the Viennese theatre. I have said that Schnitzler's plays touch on
only one phase of Vienna's theatrical life, the drama of conversa-
tion, and perhaps that is more European than specifically Viennese.
Nor has he given us the entire range of Vienna's peculiarly broad
and complex social life. The’aristocracy and the masses, even the
lower middle class, are represented simply in occasional ironic types;
the world of his plays is the circumscribed world of an educated, or
more accurately, intellectual bourgeoisie. Out and out intellectuals,
artists, musicians, doctors, amateurs of living, or well-to-do young
A translation of this story will appear shortly in The DIAL.
1


210
VIENNA LETTER
a
men of somewhat indeterminate social setting with their wives or
casual mistresses
such are the people who unveil for us
by turns their inner life, their aspirations, egoisms, and resignations.
And the language in which they do this, with a few humorous ex-
ceptions, is highly cultivated and delicately equipped; it has the
brilliancy, the richness of clever formulae, which is the property of
this distinct social group. Group I could not speak of it
as a clique, for this word has a depreciative connotation, while class
or caste would be too broad; we are dealing with a distinct social
nuance which is at the same time a mental nuance, and which will
remain very characteristic of the time between 1890 and the great
war. Later, perhaps, it will be called simply Schnitzler's Vienna,
just as a certain society at the time of Louis Philippe is Balzac's
Paris, although this is not quite identical with its real existence.
But now I return to the broad main current of Viennese theatrical
tradition. Its strength lay in the fact that it excluded no social ele-
ment, and spread out a world in all colours of the rainbow. This is
a world like Shakespeare's or Calderon’s, containing the highest
element, the king, or even beyond him to saints, angels, and fairies,
along with burlesqued manual labourers, ass-drivers, cooks, and lit-
ter-bearers. I recall the essay on the theatre in which twenty or
more years ago W. B. Yeats, together with Lady Gregory and J. M.
Synge, laid out the field for the Irish National Dramatic Company.
He was concerned above all with the idea of a theatre which would
appeal to the uneducated, or in other words to those who would take
in a drama by means of a sensuously receptive imagination, rather
than by the intelligence. This makes me suddenly realize what a
wealth we have had in our centuries of the people's theatre.
“The audiences of Sophocles and of Shakespeare and of Calderon
[Yeats says) were not unlike the audiences I have heard listening in
Irish cabins to songs in Gaelic about ‘an old poet telling his sins,'
and about 'the five young men who were drowned last year' and
about 'the lovers that were drowned going to America.'
We must ſhe goes on to say] make a theatre for ourselves and our
friends, and for a few simple people who understand from sheer
simplicity what we understand from scholarship and thought."
In Vienna there has never been an actual complete break between
the theatre of the educated and the theatre of the uneducated; and


HUGO VON HOFMANNSTHAL
211
the unifying element was the wide-spread feeling for dramatic per-
formance and the universal ear for music. Everyone was able to
enjoy and to judge the finest subtleties of the actor's art, and this is
as true of the heroic style as of low characterizations or burlesque.
In the same way it was perfectly natural for everyone to repeat the
melody of an aria or dance out the rhythm of a waltz. All interest
in the theatrical fare centred in the actor, the singer, or the danseuse;
thus, King Lear or Faust was reached through the actor, Don Juan
through melody and the singer, and pantomime through Fanny Els-
sler, Taglioni, or, in our own generation, Wiesenthal. Consequently
the theatre in Vienna, as is still the case in Paris, had been a matter
of general public concern for three hundred years or more—for as a
matter of fact the theatre of the Middle Ages, with its burlesque in-
terludes and its imposing musical moments, passes directly into the
opera of the seventeenth century and the popular theatre of the
eighteenth. In England it has ceased to fulfil this function since the
days of James I, and in America it never began. In either case it is
fundamentally a question of religion. (I refer to the basically
divergent conceptions of the theatre as an institution, starting from
either Roman Catholicism or Puritanism.)
Perhaps such a representative personality as Maria Jeritza, whose
acting and singing captivated the New York public in one season,
or even on her first appearance, can best illustrate what I mean when
I designate the performer, the mimic element, as the essential of our
theatre. No one better suits this atmosphere than Max Reinhardt,
and it is high time that he returned here. I say returned because
Vienna is both the city of his birth and the root of his work, even
though he has spent fifteen or twenty years—he is now forty-eight
-directing the leading theatres of Berlin, and has been more active
in nearly all the rest of Europe than in Vienna. He belongs to those
rarest of figures, the truly creative theatrical directors. And one
could almost count the men of his calibre on the fingers of one hand,
taking into consideration all countries of Europe and the span of a
century. For our own period he has been linked with Antoine, the
creator of the théâtre libre, and with Stanislawski, the founder and
incomparable manager of the Moscow Art Theatre. These are per-
haps the three names which deserve most to be engraved in golden
letters on the honour roll of the modern European theatre. At some
distance one might also include the name of Diaghilev, who made
the Russian Ballet what it meant to Europe over a period of ten


212
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years: something good to look upon and a concentration point for
everything new, bold, and charming in the pictorial-decorative and
the musical-rhythmic. Likewise I should mention Granville-Barker,
although his theatrical experiments do not approach those of the
first three mentioned in the strength and breadth of their accom-
plishment. But Max Reinhardt is probably inferior to Stanislaw-
ski in the one respect wherein Stanislawski's theatre stands first in
the world; I refer to the completeness of the ensemble, where dra-
matic values and counter-values are harmonized with the delicacy
and propriety of a landscape by Cézanne. Such harmonization as
this can originate only in the Russian nature, giving the actor a rich
sensibility and sympathy for his fellow performers. Also, in Mos-
cow alone, and in no other spot of Europe or America, was it pos-
sible to give hundreds of rehearsals without concern for either time
or money. The actors, who formed a sort of brotherhood, lived a
completely cloistered communal life, sinking their civil or personal
existence in the artistic one; and as a result they brought a truly
religious intensity to bear even on rehearsals, carefully weighing the
force of every tone, every movement of the head or hands.
But Reinhardt surpasses the two other great theatrical leaders I
named with him in versatility and in the continual freshness of his
creative powers. His imagination is as easily kindled by Tasso and
Le Misanthrope as by a Shakespearean comedy, as easily by the
ghostly pieces of Strindberg's last period as by a Chekhov or a Tol-
stoy. But he can also be fired by a travesty like Meilhac-Offenbach's
Orpheus in the Underworld; and it argues an astoundingly broad
theatrical ability in a director when we can expect him to build up
a
either the last act of King Lear out of its very own elements or a
finale of Offenbach's with its wind-up in a cancan. As I have said,
Reinhardt is returning to Vienna, in the former imperial Redouten-
saal. The repertoire chosen for the first season-and it is well fitted
to a small and intimate theatre like this hall-shows, in its expres-
sion of the many-sidedness of his theatrical tastes, just how well
these tastes fit in with the older tradition of the Viennese theatre.
He will produce the Clavigo of Goethe, one of Molière's comedies
(l'Ecole des Femmes) and a Carlo Gozzi; this last will be in the
style of the commedia dell'arte, with the masks or comic figures,
Pantalone, Truffaldino, et cetera, parts for which the text is not de-
termined, but is improvised by the actor. Of the moderns there will
be a drama by Chekhov and, I believe, a comedy of my own, Der


HUGO VON HOFMANNSTHAL
213
Schwierige. I am as a matter of fact very closely associated with all
these people and enterprises, both with Reinhardt's theatre and with
a great deal of Richard Strauss's activities; I do not think this a
cause for being ceremonious, however, but all the more reason to
believe that I can speak with perfect freedom and authenticity.
As you probably know, Richard Strauss has been the director of
Vienna's grand opera for the last three years. He is working in con-
junction with Franz Schalk, one of the most earnest and cultivated
musicians and orchestra leaders on the continent. But Schalk, as the
actual permanent head of this large institution, is too conscientious
to do much directing elsewhere with the one exception of Rome,
where he gives a few concerts each year. As a consquence he is
much less widely known in other countries, including America, than
many who are vastly inferior to him in the soundness of their musi-
cal knowledge. As in Berlin, Munich, and Dresden, the Vienna
opera will be a repertoire house after the old European model. The
complete works of Richard Wagner are on its programme, and over
against this the major part of Mozart, constant works by Gluck,
Weber, Meyerbeer, Rossini, a great deal of Verdi, naturally Carmen
and Gounod's Faust, and much of the moderns, Pfitzner and De-
bussy as well as Puccini. Out of all this enormous repertoire Strauss
has cut himself one separate section on which to specialize: the
operas of Mozart, for which he is not only an incomparable con-
ductor, but also a very sensitive and skilful stage-manager, and his
own operas, which are all in the repertoire. He has recently added
to these the Josefslegende, a ballet he composed for Diaghilev's
company and which they produced in Paris and London just before
the great war, with Fokine as choreographer and Bakst as painter.
The last London performance was on the first or second of August,
1914. Diaghilev—how far off they seem to me now, those May days
of 1913 when we all sat together at the Crillon in Paris discussing
these things and a thousand more plans for pantomimes, ballets, and
other dumb-shows!-Diaghilev had asked me to find a subject for
a ballet-pantomime of a somewhat serious nature which would give
Strauss the opportunity for a broadly-limned, rather decorative kind
of music; the treatment should unite the talents of Strauss, Bakst,
and Fokine, who was at that time still a ballet-master. It was soon
clear to me that I should choose a Biblical subject; but I was vacil-
lating between old David with the wife of Uriah and young Joseph
with the wife of Potiphar when the thought of Nijinsky lent more
>
a
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214
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weight to the second. I had also decided to remove my subject from
the pathetic and psychological sphere into the fantastic and dec-
orative by prescribing costumes of the late Renaissance, after Tin-
toretto or Paolo Veronese. With Swinburne and Aubrey Beardsley
I consider anachronism an excellent element of later-day art; al-
though I am perfectly aware that the painters at the end of the
sixteenth century were prompted by naïveté to dress their Biblical
characters in contemporary costumes, and that when we do this the
process is anything in the world but naïve. Still, it seems to me in-
finitely more charming and important to attain a certain internal
consistency of the theatrical art-product than to satisfy the literally
historical requirements of some Philistines in the audience. And
just such an internal consistency actually does connect the music
of Richard Strauss—which is plainly the last magnificent expres-
sion of a great musical epoch—with the painting of those Venetians
who, on their own score, give us a magnificent, over-ripe finale to a
very great age. I recall some words Strauss said to me, not before
a Veronese, but before a Solimena, in other words before one of the
greatest painters of the seventeenth century, where this element of
the over-ripe stands out with even stronger emphasis. I know the
picture, in the gallery of Count Harrach in Vienna, truly the most
beautiful Solimena in existence. I know the season; we stepped out
into a raw day of early spring. But I no longer have the faintest idea
of the year of this conversation. After standing before the picture
for a long time—he has a marked feeling for painting and architec-
ture; and the old inimical opposition of the German music-maker to
"ocular art" seems in him, characteristically, to be broken down or
even converted into love—Strauss said to me, “Isn't that like my
Salomé ? Very beautiful and full of contrasts, but the instrumenta-
tion a bit overdone!” In any case, the work acquired something
colourfully sonorous and representative by the stressing of this in-
ternal consistency; to which one might add as an even deeper har-
mony the atmosphere of Vienna which, with its showy palaces, has
no closer affinity to any period than the genuinely and pompously
baroque. This work is representative in the same sense that Stra-
winsky's Sacre du Printemps is representative, in the highest degree,
of diametrically opposite attitudes and forces in European art. It
has affected the public considerably both here and in other big cities,
and has met with great success.
HUGO VON HOFMANNSTHAL
a


BOOK REVIEWS
THE MOVEMENT
Since CÉZANNE. By Clive Bell. Illustrated. 12m0.
230 pages. Harcourt, Brace and Company. $2.50.
M.
a
R CLIVE BELL is so deliberately personal in his writings
that any attempt at reviewing his work impartially and im-
personally must be an affectation. We will therefore drop that pre-
rogative of critics and kings, the majestic plural, and I will start by
proclaiming in the singular that I find Mr Bell's writing enormously
stimulating, and that I consider that if you have any pretension to
an interest in painting, you must read his latest book. You may
hate it. You are certain to disagree with some of it. But you can
neither neglect it, nor be bored by it.
It is a collection of papers dealing with visual art in France and
England since the superlative genius of Cézanne set in action the
modern movement. In it Mr Bell confirms and partially modifies
the conclusions of his former book (entitled with a gesture very
typical of him, Art, tout court). This I assume has been read by
every English-speaking amateur.
In art-criticism theory and practice are apt to be far removed, so
that there are three separate aspects of this book: the manner of
writing which Mr Bell adopts, the taste he shows in discriminating
between particular painters, and the theorizing in which he rather
splutteringly indulges.
I (still in the singular) enjoy his manner, a sort of masterful but
bonhomous button-holing. Like a schoolmaster, he whips his doc-
trine into you, and gives his orders in the guise of reasoning. But,
unlike most schoolmasters, he is never hypocritical or dull, and can
combine enthusiasm with a sense of humour. He proffers the most
controversial statments as "notorious facts,” and, in his attempt to
dun into you a few simple ideas, he pretends to credit you with
greater knowledge than Macaulay's school-boy ever had. In fact
he advocates his aesthetic contentions with wiles that have before


216
THE MOVEMENT
only been used for the boosting of public men
men and patent medicines.
The terribly refined will vote him vulgar: to be a vulgarisateur is
his pride.
He is usually wise, and always epigrammatic. Behind his most
outrageous dogmatism, you can detect the modesty of the worldling;
Mr Bell is no fanatic. If he is autocratic, it is to goad you into
standing on your own legs. And he is the best of company for that
class who, as he well points out, need to be infected with enthusiasm,
and to have their sensibility occasionally given a serviceable jog. It
is a class to which most of us belong. His gusto succeeds in being
contagious, because you feel that he enjoys a picture as naturally
,
as if it were a bottle of Château-Yquem or the good looks of a witty
woman.
I consider his taste in paintings excellent; Crome, David,
Whistler, Modigliani, and Derain are put into their proper places,
and given the appropriate number of marks with an assurance at
which I gasp, while I confess its approximate justice. But the lists
of names with which he baits the ignorant in his first paper are too
reminiscent of Baedeker, and my extreme admiration for the work
of that delicate and various artist, Duncan Grant, cannot be in-
creased by the tireless praises of him which keep bobbing up. Surely
the one paper devoted to him had been enough. As it is, I have the
incongruous vision of a maquerelle importuning me with commen-
dations of her latest primeur. And, as a lover, I naturally resent it.
But after all it is impossible to say more than a little that is
profitable about particular painters: the Paterian or impressionistic
school of critics is as dead as—as Ruskin, and a criticism based on
the new psychology has hardly yet appeared. So that Mr Bell is at
his best when he is discussing more general topics, such as the func-
tions of criticism and the love of authority ingrained in the French
character. It was he who invented that graceless but useful phrase
"significant form,” and this time he has enriched our critical vocab-
ulary with a new term, "Wilcoxism." There is much in Since
Cézanne to interest those who know little of painting, and find aes-
thetic a bore.
Perhaps it is a bore; though its influence on modern painting has
been prodigious. Anyhow it is impracticable in a review to discuss
it. I can do no more than throw out a few heretical suggestions. On
the one hand, we have the purism of Mr Bell, on the other, those
a


RAYMOND MORTIMER
217
more ordinary theories which he says dare be expressed by no in-
telligent man under sixty who is careful of his reputation. Is it not
possible that the best hypothesis lies somewhere in the middle? Mr
Bell, in his righteous contempt of merely literary painting, insists
that no quality is essential to a work of visual art except significant
form. He is right. But when he adds that other qualities (of de-
scription, for instance) are not only unessential, but always irrele-
vant, I suggest that his enthusiasm is better than his logic. Some
works of art which are independent-of-descriptive-content are good.
Therefore, he seems to say, all good works of art are independent-of-
descriptive-content. Mr Bell is guilty of what I fancy I was taught
I
to call an undistributed middle.
I am not over sixty, nor, I hope (what is worse!) careless of my
reputation. But I have the effrontery to suggest that the descriptive
content of a painting is not mere surplusage, always; and that the
dramatic element in Giotto, the characterization in Rembrandt, and
the romantic staging in Watteau, so far from being irrelevant, do
combine almost inextricably with form, and do enhance the purely
artistic value of the pictures. It is impossible to repeat too often
that all these things are subsidiary to form, and that form is enough
in itself—though most of us, I think legitimately, prefer some
traces of representation to help as it were to canalize our attention.
The principal function of visual art is the massage of the eye by the
rhythm of shapes. And it is only when this function is fulfilled,
that the criticism of phenomena, which is implicit in most pictures,
can become aesthetically valuable. But on this condition, I do sug-
gest that even our purest appreciation of art does in many cases de-
pend for its full intensity on the artist's individual description of
some aspect of the visible world, and that additional horse-power
can be given by this means to the picture as a machine-à-émouvoir.
That is to say, form alone can rouse emotion, content can heighten
it.
Further, when an artist makes a distortion, he is seeking, not only
to strengthen the design, but often also, to emphasize the impres-
sion that the appearance of the original in nature made upon him;
and our pleasure in the new form is increased by our inclination un-
consciously to correct the distortion in our mind, or at least to com-
pare it (to its advantage) with the undistorted form which inspired
it. We enjoy the difference because it stimulates the imagination.


218
THE MOVEMENT
1
Similarly a line can be significant or beautiful in two ways—for its
purely formal relation to other lines, and for the economy with
which it suggests to the imagination more than it actually describes.
In both instances the emotion of the spectator is excited firstly by
the work of art in itself, secondly in its relation to its original. I
suggest therefore (in contradiction of Mr Bell) that many works
of visual art are definitely dependent for part of their value upon
our knowledge of the outside world.
But Mr Bell has the honesty to be inconsistent; he discovered, ap-
parently when the book was half finished, that “it is in the French
tradition to believe that there is a beauty common to life and art”;
and, it seems, we are now allowed to enjoy a picture of a kitten partly
for the kitten's sake, as long as we don't see in it a symbol of human
aspiration or feminine instability. And we are not likely to do that.
The illustrations to Since Cézanne are admirable, but too few.
Also I wish Mr Bell had discussed the later developments of cubism,
the theories of André Lhote, and the tremendous art of Seurat more
thoroughly. But that would mean another book, which I hope he
will soon give us. In the meanwhile I shall read this one again.
a
RAYMOND MORTIMER
1


NELSON ANTRIM CRAWFORD
221
а
put edification (as the editor sees it) first and truth second. Mr
Lippmann emphasizes perhaps too strongly the theory of direct rela-
tion between the certainty of news and the system of record. He
lays stress on the fact that reformers attack the press mainly in rela-
tion to matter on which precise data are lacking. This is due partly,
however, to the interest of reformers in this material, rather than the
invulnerability of the press in other respects. There lies on my desk
a newspaper generally considered one of the best in America. The
heading of a human-interest story asserts that a litter of kittens was
drowned. The story itself is absolutely contrary to this statement.
Nobody is writing a Brass Check about these kittens, but precisely
the same sort of stupidity and carelessness that inspired the copy-
reader of this story inspires the garbling and misrepresentation char-
acteristic of many an article on more important subjects. One of the
principal faults of journalism is a lazy attitude towards the facts.
The reporter or editor is full of confidence instead of information.
From this fault Mr Lippmann himself is not free. He quotes his
newspaper statistics from a book eight years old. In Liberty and
the News he raises the question whether schools of journalism are
trade schools. In Public Opinion, his more recent work, he asserts
definitely that they are such, without offering any evidence for his
statement. Some of his analogies from the fine arts are dubious.
There are a few hardly excusable errors in grammar.
Moreover, though he recognizes the psychopathological factors
involved in public opinion, Mr Lippmann does not, in my estima-
tion, attribute enough significance to pathological fear as a cause
for substituting subjective opinions for objective facts. The Ameri-
can citizen is intellectually the timidest soul that ever peeped from
a rabbit hole. He is willing to stand up and be shot at, but an un-
pleasant fact fills him with vague dismay while a really disturbing
fact gives him the symptoms of hydrophobia.
Nevertheless, Liberty and the News is a volume of great useful-
ness to any student of journalism, and Public Opinion is one of the
few real contributions to political science in recent years. The
author is a keen diagnostician. I have confidence, too, in his pre-
scription: the ascertaining of the facts on public matters by un-
biased experts. I have not so much confidence that the public will
use the prescription. There is too keen a demand for political as
well as physical patent medicine.
NELSON ANTRIM CRAWFORD


THE COMMON LAW FOR LAYMEN
The SPIRIT OF THE COMMON Law. By Roscoe Pound.
12mo. 224 pages. Marshall Jones Company. $2.50.
Clectu
TOLLEGE commencements are not ordinarily sources of intel-
lectual inspiration. Indeed, students of anthropology might
plausibly conjecture that under the guise of a return to the foun-
tains of knowledge, university graduates are obtaining the modern
equivalent of those saturnalia and bacchanalia during which the
populations of antiquity sought in complete unrestraint a welcome
relief from the monotonous duties of daily life. And yet this
thronging of thousands of educated men to homes of learning at
the crowning season of the year affords an unmatched opportunity
for a renewal of that contact with fundamental ideas for which
most of us have small time in the rush of earning a livelihood.
Dartmouth has seized this opportunity. Through the generosity of
Mr Henry Lynn Moore, she can now persuade her alumni to remain
in the cherished haunts of youth for a few days after the tumult
and the shouting dies, there to replenish their intellectual reserves
from the minds of leaders of thought. The lectureships founded by
him mark a significant step towards some widespread continuing
education by which adult Americans may adapt themselves to the
perplexing problems that have arisen since they left school and
college.
Law was wisely chosen for one of the opening series of Moore
Lectures. Astonishingly little has been written about it in English,
except for lawyers. The intelligent manufacturer, trade unionist, or
farmer with a longing to understand the world about him, has been
abundantly supplied with scholarly and readable books on the Old
Stone Age, Einstein, the inside of the atom, the South Sea Islands,
Victorian politics, Athenian drama, and the complexities of Freud.
But if he is interested in the principles and growth of the system of
rules which regulate the controversies and affairs of American citi-
zens, he is largely relegated to technical treatises about as intelligi-
ble to a layman as the mathematical articles in the Encyclopaedia
Britannica. This is especially undesirable in an age when taxation


ZECHARIAH CHAFEE, JR.
223
and government regulation are continually bringing new human
activities within the scope of law. Laymen will probably always
need legal advice before entering upon litigation or important trans-
actions, but that is an entirely different question. What I object
to, is that the general principles of law, although a predominant
element in American life, should remain esoteric mysteries to the
man in the street. It is not so in other countries. The demi-mon-
daines in Balzac can quote the Code Napoléon in jest.
Good exposition of legal fundamentals to the public brings much
of value besides the gratification of curiosity. Laymen possess the
ultimate control over law-making through the election of legislators
who enact statutes and fix judicial salaries; in most States the judges
themselves are elected. Ignorance of the judicial task causes a super-
stition that any honest and earnest politician, once he is on the
bench, will become a perfect automatic reasoning machine. Often
enough this false reverence is succeeded by the disillusioned belief
that every judge is the creature of bias and corruption. If the voters
realized the difficult nature of a judge's work, they would be more
anxious to put experts on the bench, give them more power, and
pay them salaries that would not render the loss of a successful prac-
tice an impossible sacrifice for most lawyers. Moreover, if the
people could be shown the really defective portions of the existing
law, they would give hearty support to law reformers, who now
labour in a sort of emotional vacuum for lack of public interest in
their aims. A century ago the wide circulation of Bentham's writ-
ings among intelligent laymen stimulated the sweeping improve-
ments of English law by the reformed Parliament.
Fortunately, a few books on law for American citizens have been
written during recent years. E. V. Abbot's Justice and the Mod-
ern Law discusses general problems, and such particular aspects
as rate regulation and anti-trust regulation. Dean Stone of Colum-
bia in Law and Its Administration treats some of the fundamen-
tal notions which underlie our legal system. Problems of Law
by Dean Wigmore of Northwestern University presents special
questions of the evolution and mechanism of law. The Reform of
Legal Procedure by Moorfield Storey tells how lawyers hope to
remedy the law's delays. Other helpful books are Reginald H.
Smith's Justice and the Poor, Frederic R. Coudert's Certainty and
Justice, and the new edition of the best work on jurisprudence in


224
THE COMMON LAW FOR LAYMEN
English, John C. Gray's Nature and Sources of the Law. None of
these, however, touches the field covered by Dean Pound of Har-
vard. They expound either general principles or the contemporary
situation. He unfolds the gradual development through history, of
the national law.
No one could be better qualified for the task. Law in books has
been ground into him by years of study, law in action by the rough
and tumble of Nebraska practice. His exposition of an abstract
legal theory is brought home by a remark of Huck Finn's or a racy
anecdote from the "short-grass country.” To this equipment is
added a mastery of Roman and modern Continental law with the
underlying philosophic thought, so that the unfailing ability to
check one legal system by another frees him from the instinctive
conviction of many jurists that their own law necessarily embodies
universal human conceptions, and enables him to distinguish with a
sure eye the accidental and purely historical portions of American
law from those elements which are permanent and inborn.
Amid the enervated discouragement which has succeeded the
overstrain of the war years, Dean Pound still retains faith in the
efficacy of effort and the belief that the administration of justice
may be improved by conscious, intelligent action. This faith in-
spired many members of the bar in the early years of the twentieth
century before their valuable reforms of our law were cut short by
the summons to Washington or overseas. The issue now is whether
that productive attitude shall be revived or whether the work shall
be left unfinished and the old confusion allowed to remain unreme-
died by the bar until an indignant populace takes matters into its
own hands. The author forcibly points out the dangers from a re-
crudescence of juristic pessimism.
“At the end of the nineteenth century lawyers thought attempt
at conscious improvement was futile. Now many of them think it
is dangerous. In the same way the complacent nothing-needs-to-
be-done attitude of Blackstone, who in the spirit of the end of a
period of growth, thought the law little short of a state of perfec-
tion, was followed by the timorous juristic pessimism of Lord Eldon
who feared that law reform would subvert the constitution. Not a
little in the legislative reform movement which followed might have
proceeded on more conservative lines if he had been willing to fur-
ther needed changes instead of obstructing all change. The real


ZECHARIAH CHAFEE, JR.
225
danger to administration of justice according to law is in timid re-
sistance to rational improvement and obstinate persistence in legal
paths which have become impossible in the heterogeneous, urban,
industrial America of today.
When the lawyer refuses
to act intelligently, unintelligent application of the legislative
steam-roller by the layman is the alternative."
In The Mind in the Making, James Harvey Robinson has shown
that our reasoning machinery is not, and cannot be, the product of
the twentieth century, but has been built up stage by stage, through
periods of time very different from ours, each of which has left in-
delible traces. Dean Pound tells how a similar process has created
our law. This fact presents a fatal obstacle to the wish of H. G.
Wells in his Outline of History, who is persuaded "that a time will
come when the whole theory and practice of law will be recast in
the light of a well-developed science of social psychology in ac-
cordance with a scientific conception of human society as one devel-
oping organization and in definite relationship to a system of moral
and intellectual education.” We may succeed in getting rid of
many of the "conventions, arbitrary assumptions and working fic-
tions” which cause Wells to "contemplate the law and lawyers of
today with a temperamental lack of appreciation,” but for a long
time to come, future development must follow the general direction
of past development, and must feel the effect of several powerful
influences which have successively moulded the common law.
This book distinguishes seven such factors, each of which with
one exception receives a separate chapter. At the bottom is an origi-
nal substratum of Germanic legal institutions and ideas, impreg-
nated with barbarian individualism and insistent after the manner
of primitive law upon full and exact performance of carefully de-
fined duties. Every man must stand upon his own feet and play
the game as a man, without squealing. Something of this spirit may
be recognized to-day in the doctrine of contributory negligence and
in the severe penalties imposed upon mistakes in the conduct of
litigation. The minute Anglo-Saxon codes, which assess a payment
of so many pence or shillings for the loss of a finger or hand or eye
in a mediaeval brawl, find their counterpart in modern Workmen's
Compensation Acts with their elaborate schedules of the amount
which the employer must pay for every conceivable type of injury
in an industrial accident.
a


226
THE COMMON LAW FOR LAYMEN
a
This Germanic individualism has, it will be seen, been reinforced
by almost all the other factors which have shaped our law. We have
had more of it than has been good for an age when the interlocking
complexities of society demand a greater subordination of indi-
vidual activity to the good of the community than was thought
necessary in a sparse frontier population. Fortunately, one element
in the common law, feudalism, contributed precedents for the oppo-
site attitude—the duty of a man to render affirmative acts of service
to others, whereas individualism simply requires him to avoid caus-
ing them injury. It is indeed remarkable that feudalism, so long
relegated to a dusty antiquity, should furnish exactly the remedies
needed by the twentieth century. The obligations which were im-
posed upon men to avoid the disintegration of society in the tur-
bulent violence of the Middle Ages have been revived to preserve in-
tact the noisy, overcrowded, sensitively organized communities of
to-day. Thus the recurrence of William Morris to the institutions
of the fourteenth century was not altogether the dream of a ro-
mantic imagination. In The Dream of John Ball he sees that the
law which controlled the forestallers and regraters of those days
must cope with the modern monopolist. The principles which en-
able us to regulate the rates of public service companies, such as
railroads, are foreshadowed in the duties of carter and bargeman
under the Plantagenets. Indeed, mediaeval law affords a still more
sweeping analogy. Edward Adler, of Boston, has proved (28 Har-
vard Law Review, 135) that the old-time regulation was not lim-
ited to a few peculiar trades. It was not alone the common carrier
who was obliged to serve all at a reasonable price. Black-letter
books and recently unearthed manuscripts tell of the common sur-
geon, common baker, common builder, and common grist-mill, so
that all business was controlled by the community so far as was
necessary to maintain the imperilled society of that day.
After a very interesting discussion of Puritanism in our law, the
vexed question of the power of judges to declare statutes unconstitu-
tional is raised by the next two factors, the struggle between the
courts and the crown in the seventeenth century, and conceptions of
the natural rights of man in the eighteenth century. Pound shows
that the contemporary controversy is only the latest phase of a re-
curring conflict between two stubborn theories which have both
struck deep roots into English and American minds—the political
theory of an absolute sovereign, whether king, legislature, or people,
a


ZECHARIAH CHAFEE, JR.
227
and the antagonistic judicial theory of a fundamental law which
binds even the sovereign. Three hundred years ago the progressives
wanted to give Charles I absolute power that he might use it
benevolently for the general good and they were enraged to see him
tied down by antiquated legal bonds discovered by lawyers in such
musty and dusty documents as Magna Carta. While Pound in-
clines to the judicial side of the contest and believes that the su-
premacy of law is a principle of permanent value, he condemns
many judges for construing the provisions of Bills of Rights as eter-
nal crystallizations of eighteenth century conceptions. His view is
that the courts should not always set themselves against the popu-
lar will in the interest of an abstract individual, but should stand
for the ultimate and more important social ideals of the age as
against the more immediately pressing, but less weighty interests of
the moment, by which will, unrestrained by reason, may be swayed.
After a fascinating chapter on the influence of the pioneers and a
discussion of the final factor of the past, the nineteenth century
philosophy of law, the book concludes with an examination of
pres-
ent tendencies which are remaking the law for the future. The na-
ture of these tendencies may best be stated by Dean Pound himself:
a
“Let us put the new point of view in terms of engineering; let
us speak of a change from a political or ethical idealistic interpreta-
tion to an engineering interpretation. Let us think of the problem
of the end of law in terms of a great task or great series of tasks of
social engineering. Let us say that the change consists in thinking
not of an abstract harmonizing of human wills but of a concrete se-
curing or realizing of human interests. From an earthly standpoint
the central tragedy of existence is that there are not enough of the
material goods of existence, as it were, to go round; that while indi-
vidual claims and wants and desires are infinite; that while, in com-
mon phrase, we all want the earth, there are many of us but there
is only one earth. Thus we may think of the task of the legal order
as one of precluding friction and eliminating waste; as one of con-
serving the goods of existence in order to make them go as far as
possible, and of precluding friction and eliminating waste in the
human use and enjoyment of them, so that where each may not
have all that he claims, he may at least have all that is possible.”
ZECHARIAH CHAFEE, JR.


NOT LITERARY
READERS AND WRITERS. By A. E. Orage. 12mo. 177
pages. Alfred A. Knopf. $1.75.
“MY
Y original design,” says Mr Orage, “was to treat literary
events from week to week with the continuity, consistency,
and policy ordinarily applied to comments on current political
events; that is to say, with equal seriousness and from a similarly
more or less fixed point of view as regards both means and end." It
is useless to pretend that with or without such a design most writers
of weekly causeries accomplish so much; and Mr Orage has ac-
complished it. The articles appeared in The New Age over the
initials R. H. C. They are interesting in themselves and they are
interesting as proof that the thing can be done.
Mr Orage hasn't outlined his policy and I shall not pretend to do
it for him; a few general ideas recur so frequently that they may be
accepted as dominant in his criticism. But the value of this re-
publication of scattered essays is greater than the value of his ideas
and is not seriously diminished by the extraordinary judgements
which Mr Orage occasionally sets down. It seems incredible that
any one could have called James Joyce a studio writer after The
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and nearly one third of
Ulysses had appeared; or that any one should have laughed, nothing
but laughed, at Mr Strachey's Eminent Victorians. To another
reader it may seem equally absurd to call Swift "the greatest Eng.
lish writer the world has yet seen”; to another the remarks about Mr
Clive Bell may seem trivial. I think that points of dissent ought not
to make it impossible for a reader to enjoy a critic; at least not until
the critic's whims, idiosyncrasies, tastes, and judgements seem to
erect themselves into a hostile system of ideas.
The idea to which Mr Orage returns with the fondest confidence
is that the perfect English style is still to be written. This does not
sound important, but it is important because it indicates that Mr
Orage is interested in the thing he is writing about; unlike many
others he is not using letters as a pretext for lectures or propaganda
on any subject whatever--with the possible exception of culture, of


VIVIAN SHAW
229
a
which letters are a part. It is this quality of disinterestedness which
makes him interested in good writing and clear thinking wherever
they occur. It makes him hospitable to undergraduates and ama-
teurs and foreigners; and at the same time it makes him merciless to
their faults. He analyses the cult of youth in almost the same words
as those of Benedetto Croce; he adds, “The once-born are creatures
of
pure circumstance, owing their youth to the accident of time
alone; but the twice-born are self-creations defying time; they never
grow old, though they are always growing up.” These are necessary
reflections in the course of a critical essay; it is impossible for Mr
Orage ever to take his eyes for long away from the created work to
worry about the youth or age of th