Alden Jewell (i2mo, 282 pages; Knopf:
$2) impels one to the hope that the flapper, with "a heart flung out to-let
in the public street," will soon take down her sign and fade from contem-
porary fiction. As a social phenomenon, she is supposed to be a symbol of
emancipation, but she is not a particularly liberating influence for young
novelists. Tarkington's competent scrutiny and Scott Fitzgerald's well-
documented explorations have, in any event, exhausted the subject, and
Mr Jewell's complete novel devoted to twenty-four hours of her young
life is perilously pale, his writer's skill being insufficient to rouge his
anaemic subject.
Broken Barriers, by Meredith Nicholson (i2mo, 402 pages; Scribner: $2)
is an essay into realism by an author, most of whose previous novels have
been pleasantly and conventionally romantic. Mr Nicholson is a good
journalist in thus writing a semi-realistic novel about that favourite sub-
ject of the day, the girl who would revolt. But alas, his realism is not so
convincing as his romanticism. His picture of the drab home life that
furthers Grace's determination to "have a good time" as a Nina Wilcox
Putnam shop-girl is only a photograph in which the details have not been
previously arranged. The minor characters have the interest that accrues
to types, rather new ones, it is true, but still types. In the love scenes Mr
Nicholson shows the skill that makes him a Cosmopolitan author. Grace,
as the average American girl, having mental and moral struggles, will be
interesting to her intellectual equals. The moral of the book may be sum-
marized as "Don't break barriers because, having become used to them
you will be unhappy without their protection." Werry true.


i04 BRIEFER MENTION
Love Conquers All, by Robert C. Benchley, illustrated by Gluyas Williams
(i2mo, 3i0 pages; Holt: $2) and Perfect Behavior, by Donald Ogden
Stewart, with pictures by Ralph Barton (i2mo, 227 pages; Doran: $2)
have similar claims on the attention of the intelligent reader who can be
amused. Each is a second volume better than the first and each is, in itself,
entertaining. It is obvious that a whole book as a parody of etiquette
books is unnecessary and disproportionate; Mr Stewart's affair is a satiri-
cal commentary on American social customs—exaggerated and absurd and
comic. Mr Benchley gets along without any framework and seems quite
incapable of being imposed upon by what is roughly known as the bunk.
There are still a few pieces of the "how to eat roast beef" school; but the
characteristic work is What to do While the Family is Away, in which
Mr Benchley indicates that he mastered the bunk before he saw through it.
The mild bitterness which he constantly employs is apparently forgiven by
his readers because he so patently confesses to making a fool of himself—a
slightly bigger one, he pretends, than the people he writes about.
The Print of My Remembrance, by Augustus Thomas (illus., 8vo. 477
pages; Scribner: $4) and My Years on the Stage, by John Drew (illus.,
8vo, 242 pages; Dutton: $5) are thick, well-bound volumes, with primer
type and plenty of pictures; in externals they are substantial, and thus
they admirably reflect the institution which they jointly celebrate. The
"czar of the American theatre" insists that all actors—and presumably all
playwrights—should be taught to box; Mr Thomas has written sixty
dramas with gloves. Mr Drew's book is the cream of a ransacked scrapbook.
John Ruskin's Letters to William Ward (illus., i2mo, i76 pages; Mar-
shall Jones: $2.50) is a meticulous garnering of the choicest ineptitudes
extant of the famous Victorian painter-pedant. How far the recipient of a
letter determines the vivacity of its writer's style it is impossible in this
instance to determine, since the replies (perhaps fortunately) are not in-
cluded. It is sufficient to record that in the one hundred and forty odd
examples given, there is not one incisive observation on painting or litera-
ture or life. The discussions of economic and social problems, glowingly
alluded to on the jacket, upon internal examination become remarks that he
is sending Ward a cheque for some copying, or is trusting to see him very
soon. A short biography of his father, by William C. Ward, and an intro-
duction by Alfred Mansfield Brooks, make a weak thickening for this vol-
ume of posthumous gruel.
Mr. Dickens Goes to the Play, by Alexander Woollcott (illus., 8vo, 239
pages; Putnam: $2.50) is a pleasing bit of patchwork wherein the author
brings together whatever material is obtainable to prove that a certain
novelist of note had a hankering to be what he was not. Mr Woollcott
lays it to the thwarted actor in Dickens that he went about in England and
America reading his manuscripts, though the box office could not exactly
be said to have frowned upon his project. At any rate, if thwarted vanity
is any claim to Thespian potentialities, as Mr Woollcott's thesis would seem
to assume, Dickens is not the only individual who deserves a book written
about him.


BRIEFER MENTION
Penguin Persons and Peppermints, by Walter Prichard Eaton (i2mo, 25i
pages; Wilde: $i.50) contains, among its amiable reflections, a mild indict-
ment of imagist poetry because it has trampled upon something precious—
the lingering line. The new poets are handicapped for immortality, says
Mr Eaton, because their rhythms are not easy to remember; whereupon he
cites—and quotes from memory—Tennyson's famous fragment The Eagle,
with its "Flaubertian precision of epithet that even Amy Lowell could not
criticize." The force of the argument is sadly weakened, however, when
the essayist out-laureates the poet by substituting "distant lands" for
"lonely lands" and turning "The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls" into
"Beneath, the wrinkled ocean crawls." Mr Eaton admits that his "copy
of Tennyson is in storage," and it might not be unwise for his theory to
try to squeeze in beside it. The other essays in the book are equally pleas-
ant; fortunately not all of them are equally porous.
On English Poetry, by Robert Graves (i2mo, i49 pages; Knopf: $2) is a
poet's note-book. He quotes his own verses and others; he tells how they
were written or makes a shrewd guess at it; he jots his opinions without
much method, but with a sort of impromptu charm. "Art of every sort is
an attempt to rationalize some emotional conflict in the artist's mind."
"Poetry is a form of psychotherapy." "The art of poetry consists in know-
ing exactly how to manipulate the letter S."
Youth Grows Old, by Robert Nathan (i2mo, 54 pages; McBride: $1.50)
is slight and charming, as the author evidently intends; it makes few pre-
sumptions and justifies those few. The verse is skilful and fluent; the
mood a whimsical resignation. In the life of every poet there is a danger-
ous age when he discovers that he is not quite Shakespeare; this is the
period of Mr Nathan's title. He has survived it himself; he has attained
for has claimed) the serene humility of middle life, but he asserts this
humility so often that it becomes a sort of arrogance, the necessary arro-
gance without which no poet can continue writing.
The Black Panther, by John Hall Wheelock (i2mo, 97 pages; Scribner:
$i.50). The hand is quicker than the eye; intuition moves more rapidly
than logic, but misses its goal more often; the poet has need of both and
Mr Wheelock's verse is too purely intuitive. He has the imagination, but
no fantasy. He appeals always to the sentiments, but to the intellect almost
never. One likes or dislikes his poems, but finds it hard to judge them
critically, for he buries the reader in waves of emotion that are as rhythmic
as sea waves and hardly more stimulating to the intelligence.
The Shepherd, by Edmund Blunden (i2mo, 86 pages; Knopf: $2) consists
of poems of war and peace, of which the latter are far more valuable.
Pompous iambics which scan for the eye, but not always for the ear; an
exact enumeration of the phenomena of nature; a poetry as traditional and
as changing as the four seasons. Blunden does not write like Goldsmith
or like Gray, but he is vaguely a contemporary of theirs who has strayed
away through time; he has the same charm of a forgotten age. When he
treats a subject as recent as the war he is a complete anachronism.


io6
BRIEFER MENTION
The Barcarole of James Smith, by Herbert S. Gorman (i2mo; i23
pages; Putnam: $i.75) might rather be called James Smith's Anthology:
it contains poems of such various moods and excellences that they could be
taken easily for the work of several men. One cannot generalize about the
half-dozen imaginary poets who sign themselves Herbert Gorman. They
are adolescent or mature; good or bad workmen; passionate, whimsical, or
intelligent. They possess a common fault, which is rhetoric, but their
virtues are inconsistent. One of them, that one specifically who wrote the
title poem, comes nearer than most of us to being a genius. He has good
eyes and a vocabulary which is poetic because it has not been abused by
poets; he keeps his strong emotions under control; he has studied his Eliot.
If Prufrock himself, when he wore white flannel trousers and walked upon
the beach: if Prufrock had been enticed to sea in a rowboat, he might have
written The Barcarole of James Smith, and he would not have been
ashamed of it.
Verse, by Adelaide Crapsey (i2mo, i07 pages; Knopf: i.50) is the fortu-
nate second edition of a volume which was originally printed in i9i5,
shortly after the author's death. Her poems will never be popular and they
will never lack intelligent admirers. The emotion is delicate and the metre
impeccable; the quality of these poems is to be small and perfect. One
likes some of them better than others, but would change a word in none.
Krindlesyke, by Wilfrid Wilson Gibson (i2mo, i39 pages; Macmillan:
$i.75) is a stark and dismal tragedy whose grim outlines are relieved only
by an occasional and uncertain colouring of light. The play is essentially
lacking in dramatic unity; it is composed in a rough-hewn, prosy blank
verse that brings reminders of Robert Frost both in style and in subject-
matter; it abounds in long conversations that are occasionally illuminating,
occasionally monotonous and dreary; but it presents a vivid if gruesome
picture, and probes down into dark and rarely fathomed caverns of char-
acter.
The Outline of Science, edited by J. Arthur Thomson (4 vols, illus.,
8vo, i220 pages; Putnam: $4.50 each) is evolution romanticized in order
that the layman may run and read and be enlightened. Professor Thom-
son carries Darwinism to an exalted infinity: instead of an epistemological
summary of organic development, he presents life as a spiritual chemistry,
an exciting miracle. The editor seems to regard science as an essentially
English habit of mind; he gives far too much attention to natural history,
pre-eminently his own department, and unlike that master biologist, Hux-
ley, is unable to write simple exposition without appealing to the sensa-
tional instincts of the popular mind. Nothwithstanding, the Outline is
astonishingly readable, convincingly accurate, abreast of the latest dis-
coveries, and comprehensive enough to satisfy the graduate of an American
university. "The Romance of the Heavens" is brilliantly set forth, and
the recent atomic theories are treated with exceptional lucidity, but psycho-
logical science is hastily passed over. Most of the illustrations—there are
more than 800—are excellent, though there is a tendency to emphasize
spectacular phenomena.


COMMENT
WE begin the seventh volume and the fourth year of The
Dial as a journal of art and letters with something like
elation. The mathematical experts collaborating with our statis-
ticians in the business office assure us that if our circulation keeps
on doubling we shall shortly have quite a number of readers; and
deep in the most secret editorial file we have letters of encourage-
ment from the most discriminating of our readers.
It had never been our intention to die suddenly, and even when
we noted in others the fear (or the hope) that our course would
soon be run, we dismissed the idea as pure scandal. To-day our
actuaries inform us that the heaviest mortality among periodicals
like ours is between the fifteenth and twentieth month; having
passed the danger point we look forward to a year or so of activity,
and recognize that our permanence (or the acceptance of us as a
more or less permanent irritation) has become one of the fixed
ideas of American life. We have not yet reached that longed-for
state of being entirely self-supporting; and the increase of payment
to our contributors which, it has been announced, will follow on
that financial position and agreeably dispose of our possible profits,
lies yet in the future. But the acceleration in our rate of increase
is marked—it includes a growth of some fifty per cent in the past
four months—and we commend ourselves trustfully to the cumu-
lative processes of nature.
Even during the first year, when light-minded friends composed
imaginary valedictories for us, all contemptuous of the American
reading public, we felt fairly certain that our destiny was not to
be a "studio magazine." The assumption was that there existed in
this country a number of people who cared enough for the arts to
read a journal which presented the arts to them, instead of gossip
about artists or substitutes for the thing itself. We were told that
we had overestimated the American public and that our willingness
to publish work which was unconventional in form would make us
permanently unacceptable to conservative American taste. Some of
our unconventionalities of i920 we now note in magazines with
ten times our circulation, and although the American public oc-
casionally returns to us such a picture as M Jean Marchand's


io8
COMMENT
Maternite on the grounds of its indecency, we have reason to be-
lieve that we were not exactly rash in our early assumptions.
For all that, we are unable to follow the lead of a respectable
contemporary and announce that such as we are, we shall continue
to be for ever and for ever. A hundred separate circumstances de-
feat our intentions—from a typographical error which last month
made nonsense of a paragraph to the dire necessity of making only
one award annually, when we would prefer to make two or three.
We feel a growing control over the things in our path and a grow-
ing certainty that The Dial is not fixed in any definite formula. It
amused us, a few months ago, to read that one of the local gossips
knew in advance what one of the minor members of our staff was
going to put into The Dial each month—amused us, we mean,
because that knowledge was exactly what we ourselves notably
lacked. We assure our readers that even they are not half so sur-
prised at the contents of any number of The Dial as we are—
only our surprise precedes theirs by about a month. We haven't,
so far, discovered any reason to vary the simple programme with
which we began; we still propose to publish the best work we can
discover without considering those external items—the age of the
artist or his school or the precise degree in which his form coin-
cides with contemporary notions of what is right—which seem to
us wholly irrelevant.
The advantage of rejecting these external measurements of value
is that one learns to be very little dejected when a degree of popu-
larity arrives. If the creative artist has a place in our society, and
the magazine which publishes his work is the medium of communi-
cation between him and his audience, there should be theoretically
no limit to its circulation. In practice there is. Because we are liv-
ing in a society almost wholly careless of the creative powers and
almost wholly concerned with the contriving faculty. The unsym-
pathetic account of Oswald Spengler which Thomas Mann con-
tributed to our pages recently, expresses to perfection what the artist
himself must feel when he is told that there is no place in the mod-
ern world for him, that the capacity for creating and the capacity
for receiving a work of art are equally passing, and that the artist
had better turn to mechanics or politics—or anything not creative.
It is to our interest, of course, to respect this view. We express, now,
our gratitude to those who have supported us.


\
THE THEATRE
TWO years ago, despairing of standing alone against the massed
cohorts of Mr John Barrymore's admirers, I fell back on
Bernard Shaw and discovered that like Tiresias he had foresuffered
all that mattered in regard to Richard III. I am not nearly so much
at odds with the present acclaim for Mr Barrymore's Hamlet,
because nothing he did made me unwilling to see it a second time,
and the second time Hamlet was restored to me as an interesting
and puzzling play. Yet one passage in Shaw's review of Forbes-
Robertson's Hamlet was worth everything I have seen about Bar-
rymore's. He says that Forbes-Robertson played Hamlet in the
classic manner; that is he made Hamlet such a person as could be
responsible for the art and philosophy of the world, and not merely
for its suicides and scandals. Now on any theory of the play, that
is precisely the character Shakespeare created, the most obvious
explanation of the "tragedy" being that Hamlet was destined by
his nature for the one and by his circumstance to the other. Yet
it goes almost without saying that that is not the sort of character
Mr Barrymore played. He was diverse, complicated, divided—it
was all interesting to the mind; but the seriousness of Hamlet
lacked almost entirely.
It was, of course, an ideal Hamlet for those critics to whom
the character and not the play is of first importance. For whenever
Hamlet is made flesh in the theatre all our speculations and interests
revive and the whole pernicious literature of "Hamlet the man"
acquires again its fascination. But those of us who have had recent
instruction have been made aware of what an earlier century knew,
that the play is what must be looked out for in any production of
Hamlet and that the greatest actor will be the one who gives us a
sustained play-Hamlet, whatever the man-Hamlet may be. Not
that Mr Barrymore did not see this. The nunnery scene with
Ophelia was exactly the right thing, for the struggle between Ham-
let's desire for Ophelia (it was a more predatory passion than
usual) and his distaste for the world, had relevance to all that had
gone before in the play and to all that came after. So, in spite of
an epileptic fit, the scene in the Queen's closet made revelation


no
THE THEATRE
after revelation affecting the play, until one caught positive indica-
tions of what is always concealed—that she was accomplice to the
murder of Hamlet's father, or at least that Hamlet suspected her.
Multiply these things any number of times, the fact remains that
Mr Barrymore and the producer both seemed to think it their
duty to produce the character and not the play; and the casting
and direction showed it. Mr Jones built a setting for the play, a
setting, it seemed to me, before which any great Hamlet might have
appeared, but not, like his Macbeth, a setting which helped to
create the play in addition to creating the mood of the play. He
has fallen back pour mieux sauter, and it was interesting to note
that in scene after scene the audience understood those very things
in the production which the critics said were baffling and impos-
sible. Mr Hopkins has been gravely advised to disembarrass him-
self of Mr Jones, and we would join in the suggestion if we were
sure of the psychological dictum that you have to master a thing
before you can be rid of it. I mean in all good faith that Mr Hop-
kins has not yet, in Shakespeare, given Mr Jones a suitable pro-
duction. Whether any one else could do nearly as well I do not
propose to inquire.
Merton of the Movies has great advantages, not least the
condensation of Mr Wilson's one tedious episode into a few lines;
the adaptation is excellent, the additions in good taste, and the
sense of unhappiness which sets off its humour is remarkably sug-
gested. Mr Glenn Hunter is more than admirable—it will become
obvious to say of him as he progresses in comedy that he would be
a fine tragic actor. He has, in other words, poetry.
The habit of disliking a play because you do not like its "philos-
ophy" is seriously jolted in Molnar's Fashions for Men. Be-
cause when the play turns seemingly-sentimental there occurs an
act of superb comedy, for which something more vicious than sen-
timentality would be condoned. Mr Clark Silvernail is vastly
entertaining.
G. S.


MOVING PICTURES
LET it be admitted that the progress of a mechanism or of a
popular art can be measured by the average. One flyer and
a hundred jerkwater trains constitute an evil railway service in a
country; a handful of intelligent plays intelligently produced and
fifty dramas of drivel mean that the stage is in a fairly bad way.
Applied to the moving picture, the standard is nearly fatal. I
speak of the run of feature films, of course; I speak as one who on
occasion dines too late for the theatre and thinks of seeing a picture.
In no sense is this a commentary on the spectacular films of the
moment, although Heaven knows they are bad enough.
The remarkable thing to one who is neither a regular patron of
the pictures nor a student of their ways, is that they seem to be at
a standstill. Just what the progress has been since i9i4 is hard
to discover—for refinements of mechanism were to be expected and
are not in themselves sufficient to give one courage to go on. The
talents now employed in the pictures are a cut higher than those
who laboured then; they are men and women who had become
famous as stage-directors, novelists, dramatists; and the total effect
they give is that their shortcomings are more visible in the new art
than in the old. Historical reconstructions are more carefully made;
and a few designers of settings have made it possible to tolerate
bad acting and stupid fictions because the eye was not simultaneous-
ly offended. Here and there an actor or an actress has done excel-
lent work; more exciting has been the occasional discovery of an
unheralded and even eventually unsung artist in a small part.
It is regrettable that just when another invention, a further step
removed from the arts, begins to threaten the popularity of the pic-
tures by making it possible for people to remain at home and listen
to stupidities instead of being forced to read them out loud from
the screen—it is regrettable that just then the picture should
apparently have given itself away to the producers of expensive
spectacles and to have abandoned entirely that commonness and
nearness which were its great claims in the past. For these great
spectacles have singularly little effect on the smaller pictures. In-
deed, in the case of Mr Griffith's early work we well know that
small pictures on the same subject preceded the big ones—and this


ii2
MOVING PICTURES
is true even of Mr Chaplin's The Kid. The big picture exhausts
itself in bigness—it lias nothing essential to teach the small one.
The one possible source of instruction has been rejected. I refer
to the German pictures which eighteen months or so ago came here
and with far less of the technical feeling of the picture, with far
less command of material and mechanism, had definitely something
to teach us. Without a knowledge of the Reinhardt spectacles one
cannot say whether the producers had learned much from that
source—it is likely. They had, intuitively or by long study, learned
something about the responses of the human eye; they had used
architectural devices; they had used space in relation to crowds, in-
stead of depending wholly upon movement in relation to crowds.
And finally they produced and sent us for inspection The Cabinet of
Dr Caligari. In all of these things appeared the results of an
inner intelligence, not necessarily of the highest order, but far
above the intelligence of most of our directors and producers. The
intelligence of the German spectacle films, moreover, was of the
sort which could affect the business of the pictures in general; there
were ten spots in Deception which were compendiums of instruc-
tion to producers of six-reel films and five minutes of Caligari
ought to have been enough to show any director that he need not
imitate that film, but could do whatever he desired even with his
realistic settings to make them effective.
Further, in Egypt, France, England, and the wild realm of Cali-
gari these pictures had a delicate sense of tempo, and no one who
has seen ten average feature films here can doubt that tempo is one
thing which the American director needs to study. We have all
seen climaxes played without a single variation of pace, and that
emotional intensity can be projected by contrast of pace, rather than
by mere increase, has not yet been shown on our screen. A consum-
ing flatness and dulness lies on them, and even the tricks of the
camera are neglected because they aren't, it would seem, "artistic."
One begins to wonder whether the moving picture must actually
cease to be a paying industry before it can become a good enter-
tainment. One begins to be sure that radio would never have threat-
ened us if those who had the movies in hand had not been unutter-
ably stupid and careless. It will do no good to remember a few
spectacles on Broadway—for to many of us the picture ceases to be
when it ceases to be popular.
Vivian Shaw


MODERN ART

PHILIPPE SOUPAULT writes concerning my remarks
on Dada in the November Dial:
Paris le iy Novembre iq22.
Monsieur,
Je lis dans le dernier numéro du Dial votre intéressante chronique
sur l'art moderne, je tiens à vous écrire aussitôt car il importe que
je précise certains points relatifs au mouvement Dada. Vous savez
sans doute que, en France et en "Europe ce mouvement a fait couler
des flots d'encre et suscité des colères invraisemblables.
Nous proposons un problème qui s'il n'était pas tragique était au
moins passionnant. Il est plus facile de crier des injures que d'ap-
porter une solution. Le moment n'est pas encore venu de discuter et
de commenter ce mouvement et ses conséquences. Il faut que le
temps passe et que tous les hommes louches s'écartent enfin de lui.
Avez-vous remarqué, Monsieur, comme les insectes et les mouches
aiment à se poser sur les chevaux? Quand tout sera purifié on pourra
peut-être juger et voir.
En Amérique, aux Etats-Unis surtout, il vous appartient de voir
plus clair et de séparer l'ivraie du bon grain. C'est pourquoi je me
permets de vous écrire au sujet de votre chronique. Vous faites
état d'un livre écrit par un petit intrigant, Pierre de Massot ami du
peintre Francis Picabia, personnage assoiffé, dévoré de réclame (je
vous autorise bien volontiers à leur communiquer cette lettre).
Sans doute je conviens que ces personnalités ne vous intéressent pas
beaucoup mais il importe, à mon avis et sans doute au vôtre, de
choisir les sources de ces informations.
Ni Pierre de Massot, ni Picabia ne pourraient vous renseigner.
Ils n'ont jamais réellement pris part au mouvement Dada; de-
mandez à Paul Eluard, à Hans Arp, à Benjamin Péret, à Max
Ernst, à Tristan Tzara, à Théodore Frankel, à Georges Ribemont-
Dessaignes, qui furent les vrais promoteurs et qui surent exprimer
ce que nous voulions, ce que nous sentions.
Dada, comme vous pourriez le croire d'après le livre qui est tombé
entre vos mains, ne découle pas de Tennui. Nous étions tous jeunes
et nous avions les yeux fixés sur tout ce qui se passait autour de nous.


ii4
MODERN ART
Notre activité était intense et notre désir de critique sans limite.
Pouvions-nous nous ennuyer? Tous les journaux, les revues, les
livres que nous publiions, toutes les manifestations musicales,
théâtrales, poétiques, picturales que nous organision: ne nous per-
mettaient pas, je vous assure, cet ennui.
Ne croyez pas non plus qu'il puisse y avoir un art Dada. Dada
en effet n'est pas une école et n'a jamais été une école à quelque titre
que ce soit. Dada est un état d'esprit celui-là même qui nous faisait
regarder toutes choses en face, celui qui nous éloignait de tout parti
pris, de tout préjugé. Nous posions la question à tous les écrivains:
Pourquoi écrivez-vous? et nous cherchions à le savoir nous-mêmes.
Nous étions poussés par Dada à détruire ce qui nous semblait inutile,
à nier ce qu'on affirmait sans raison, à nous moquer de la logique
traditionnelle.
Je passe. Excusez-moi de vous écrire si longuement. Quelques-
uns de mes amis et moi nous pensons qu'il ne faut pas dénaturer ce
que nous avons fait. Beaucoup de gens se sont servis de Dada pour
se faire de la réclame. Tant pis pour eux. Nous voyons aujourd'hui
ce qu'ils sont devenus.
Croyez, Monsieur, à l'assurance de mes meilleurs sentiments.
Philippe Soupault
■
Thanks for putting us right. We have good eyes in America, I
think, too, but not good enough yet, I fear, to detect Dada wheat
from Dada chaff. Then too we feel it is not our rightful wheat.
That leaves us cool. We may not see more clearly; but at least,
our property interests not being involved, we are unimpassioned.
By "unimpassioned" you must not infer indifferent. Oh, far from
that. It is our quick interest, indeed, that leads us to bolt whole
any bit of propagandism that comes our way—and of course it
must have been the propaganders who induced us to believe that M
Francis Picabia was the chief nigger in the Dada woodpile—to use
a localism that you will doubtless understand. Immense quantities
of information did reach us, chiefly via the cables, in regard to his
Dadaistic activities, and it is disconcerting, at this late date, to be
obliged to reindex him. But it shall be done. Your letter is too
authoritative to be denied.
Upon another point you also inform us. You deny the assertion
of the petit intrigant, whose name shall never cross our lips again,


HENRY McBRIDE ii5
that Dada was born of the general ennui and your letter breathes
throughout its entire length such a sense of speed and still more
speed, that again you convince us. Speed and ennui are incom-
patible. The idea prevailed here, and you may gauge the general
state of darkness by the fact that many rejoiced in it, that Dadaism
was a diminishing force. They had been vastly afraid of it and
they said, these deluded ones, that art had drifted into an impasse,
that nothing further was possible and that clearly the end of the
world was indicated. They held, you see, to the theory that Dada
was an art and had no faintest notion that it was merely an etat
d'esprit. Your words will console them. Even though you do, at
this distance, appear to be dynamiting the placid into sensibility—
your words must console them.
Our art shops have at last assumed their pre-war, international
status. The season has but just begun, yet we have had French and
English expositions of a more or less official character and a long
list of individual foreign aspirants, among whom may be cited:
Leon Bakst, the Russian; Numa Patlagean, the French sculptor;
Arthur Rackham and William Walcott, Englishmen; and Cap-
piello, the Italian poster maker. Against these were pitted, by
way of home brew, a more than usual negligible Winter Academy
and the offering of the New Mexican group of painters.
The British exhibition was undertaken by the Brooklyn Museum
and was well done. It doubly astonished, first by being truly rep-
resentative and second, by the fact that it was chiefly recruited here.
Our amateurs seem avid for Muirhead Bones, Orpens, and Augustus
Johns. In that they go quite beyond any museum in the land,
which seems curious. Curious, I mean, that museums should lag
so far behind amateur opinion, and shirk entirely the business of
setting an example. It is a situation, however, that must remain
until we acquire separate galleries for the work of the living men.
The Bones, Johns, and Orpens in this collection do not go beyond
things by them we have previously seen, but the quantities of
drawings they sign call attention anew to a thoroughness of execu-
tion that ought to be the envy of our men. We have no such
draughtsmen in America. Twenty-one paintings by Wilson Steer
are included, but the uproar in their praise is not so vehement as
doubtless Mr MacColl expected. There is a blend of both Con-


n6
MODERN ART
stable and Turner in Steer, but compared with either he is fussy.
He is, it is greatly to be feared, not of the type to make Americans
sit up.
One who does, is Numa Patlagean, whose sculpture is being
shown by Mrs Albert Sterner. Patlagean is a Frenchman who came
here unheralded. It is strange that so finished a style could have
been developed without the aid of publicity, without our publicity,
I mean, for though France beats the world in sculpture and there
seems to be as many sculptors in Paris as leaves in Vallombrosa,
nevertheless the cables are constantly occupied with less than he.
The secret doubtless is, that though fine he cannot be popular. His
art is not for the hoi polloi. He is in constant spiritual protest
against the world, against the flesh, and against the devil that is
within himself. Some men jump out of seventh-story windows,
but M Patlagean puts it into sculpture. His Pierrots—he has
achieved a long line of Pierrots—are surely autobiographical and
betray all the martyrdoms the artist has passed through. He puts
in plastic form the psychology of He Who Gets Slapped. The
workmanship in these heads is excessively subtle. They are carv-
ings, in stone and wood, and into these rebellious materials he has
put a quivering something that defies analysis. The touch that
some men sometimes get in clay and that is afterwards lost in the
bronze or stone is his in the finished result. And with it there is no
smallness. The Patlagean portraits and Pierrots have structure
and never seem more structural and living than when seen in the
simplifying shadows of dusk.
Henry McBride


MUSICAL CHRONICLE
THE music of Cesar Franck is primarily a soliloquy of the heart.
It is a fugue of bitter, of despairing, of penitent and imploring,
of consoling and thanksgiving inner voices; a dialogue of the tender
quick of life stirred by the vital battle for the harmony and the paci-
fication of its elements. The material of the exterior universe enters
into this music muffled and transmuted only. The crying and chant-
ing of the tender inner voices seems to remove and silence all other
tones. The single protagonist speaks now with the curved angry
lips of the Satan of pride and revolt; now through the parched
mouth of some being out of whom a choking, deadening dryness
will not pass; now with the ecstatic lips of a seraph in bliss. And the
intense contradiction continues, till finally one accent comes to
dominate the others, and the struggle resolves itself in sorrowful
hopeless resignation, or in stilly patient faith, or in exuberant pranc-
ing love of the world.
It is an art essentially different from that of the great sympho-
nist of classic times. The musics of Bach, of Haydn, Mozart, and
of Beethoven, seem to belong to a world from which Franck was
turned away. They seem to be parcels of the outer, objective cos-
mos. They seem to have some vital relationship with the sun; and
we know that, could we but take them in our hands and place them
out in some open space of nature, they would consort well with the
roughness of the stubble and the assaults of the windstorm and the
iron and blue of turbulent skies. They come to us as though they
had been born the expressions of men who felt themselves somehow
present in the elemental things they saw; who perceived their
own sap mount in the writhing tree and their own lust chase through
the wind-swept sky; and in their music dramatized the battle of the
elements, the combat of man and nature, the war of man with man.
Bach seems to have made organ toccatas in a kind of dionysiac
sympathy with the roaring cosmos. Haydn seems to have been in
the peasants when they danced under their Austrian trees; to have
moved in music much as they swung and hopped on the grass.
Beethoven felt himself in all his rude strength in the forest, the
waters, in the crashing of the thunder and the falling of timber; the
Waldstein sonata tells us that he felt himself both in formless


u8
MUSICAL CHRONICLE
nature and man's metaphysical mind, and knew vain the hope of
ultimate reconciliation. Something male and aggressive and active
seeems in these men to have been moved on to a spiritual from a
physical plane: and to have returned again as the disembodied
breath of captains and pioneers and seafarers into the primitive
battle of men and things.
Franck's music brings us into the beam of another light; to the
world of a sunken sun. It is into an interior that we tread with him,
into a warm enclosed place; and the light that suffuses the space
between the walls is like to the mild glow of the stilly lamp. The
outer world has become quiet and far in this room. It is present;
all the gigantic shapes that Bach and Beethoven saw are here, too;
but they have been changed in their nature, become of a different
substance. They have become, miraculously, subject; they have be-
come of the stuff of the human soul. It is as though Franck, instead
of feeling himself out in things, had felt them all, earth and winds
and waters, enclosed, contained within his own breast; and had felt
the battle place, the ultimate fighting ground of the universe, to be
the terrain of his own heart. It was there and not outside, as it
seemed, that all things took place. Franck is essentially subjective
when he is most fine. What utters itself in his music resembles al-
most always the plaintive human tone. The clarinets, the English
horn, the broad bass, sing with an accent curiously close to the
human. He is lyrical where others have been most objective: in the
framework of the symphony. Always, it is an individual life; the
grief, the tragical abasement, the breaking of the personal will,
of the little organist of Ste Clothilde that speaks to us from orches-
tra and string quartet. He brings us midmost into his own life,
reveals to us the long periods of acute moral suffering that were his;
the march of pain through the mind, the sudden welling of tears in
the baked waste lands of the heart, the bowing of the head before
the divine will, the sweetness of peace retasted. His expression
is essentially contemplative, feminine, and Christian. His strength
is the strength of passive endurance, of humility and gentleness.
The pile Franck raised opposes to the great masculine monu-
ments of his predecessors a nobility not much smaller than theirs.
The works of his last period record vision of the world rooted in a
great heart, and expressed with all the serenity and tenderness
stored there. Franck's understanding of life came at last to tran-


ii9
PAUL ROSENFELD
scend utterly the conventional Catholicism of his day. Rolland is
right: Franck saw the Christ, saw him in the light of his own expe-
rience. His saviour is the Christ of the humble; pitiful of those who
in this world suffer for the sake of justice and truth; a tender,
childlike, almost oriental apparition. And, since he was so truth-
ful of his own life, Franck's music expresses something of what is
in all men. He is the singer of the inward agonists; of those who
wrestle with God daily for their peace. True, the stream of his
life did not move as rapidly as did those of the symphonists, his
masters. The number of significant works left by him is small when
compared to the numbers left by them. It was only when he was
fifty years of age that he became the free creative spirit, the master
of his mottled, rich, incessantly modulating style. He was not well
educated; his point of departure was not the world of Beethoven,
but that of the shallow virtuosity and operatic tinsel of his day;
and authorities of various sorts, paternal and priestly, seem to have
rested long on his spirit. A kind of pompousness, of vulgarity, even;
a habit of thinking things without really experiencing them; spoils
a good deal of his earlier music. And even in some of the later, it
intrudes. We hear it in the interlude of the oratorio La Redemp-
tion; in the stretti of some of the earlier Beatitudes; in spots of
Prelude, Aria et Finale.
It was only during the wonderful last twenty years of his life,
that Franck's art became firm and mature. But in those last years
he gave another grand man to music. His luminous and tender
style came to have an austerity, a loftiness and hardness greater
than that of any musician of the romantic age, Brahms himself not
excepted. One is forced to go back to Bach to find another com-
poser who has uttered accents as severe and pure as those attained
by Franck in a few of his masterworks, in the string quartet, the
piano-fugue, the chorales for organ. He has moments of seraphic
sweetness that are like nothing in music; one goes to the frescos of
Angelico and Luini to find their like.
He came at the close of his career to practise a marvellous econ-
omy; to recognize the exact quantity of notes necessary to plot the
curve of his emotion; and to reject everything that wasn't skele-
ton and essential speech. The power of linear organization, of
clear and solid and elegant construction, which he finally achieved,
has been equalled by no symphonist since Beethoven. His themes


120
MUSICAL CHRONICLE
are athletic and elegantly phrased. His symphony is at once a
subtle piece of chiaroscuro, and a nude line which moves forward
unswervingly. The movements, quite dissimilar in character, flower
out of each other. The unifying thematic material lends itself
miraculously to the flow; instead of weighing the work as certain of
Wagner's scores are weighed by the cyclic themes, it carries it for-
ward. Not even the recapitulation of the introduction of the first
movement stops it. For by suppressing a few measures here and
there at the time of the recapitulation, Franck seems to have man-
aged to make the second hearing a new experience.
It is now a hundred years since Franck's birth. And since the
December day of i822 when he was born, the world has produced
not another musical impulse as rounded and as potent as that which
brought him high. The best work done since Franck's day has been,
like his, subjective and lyrical. What has had a more masculine, a
more objective and universal complexion, has not been accompanied
with the maturing power which he possessed. Those men who have
shown something male in the character of their work have mysteri-
ously broken off early in their careers. Moussorgsky collapsed
young; at the moment when it was beginning to dawn upon him that
there was a science of music. Strauss's objectivity is counterfeit;
it is not expressed through musical means. Strawinsky, after a bril-
liant opening, seems for the moment to be spending his talents in the
acrobatics of a not very certain wit. It is a little as though the world
were impotent to bring forth a great male musical impulse; as
though the music of Cesar Franck might remain a long while the
most noble of all the great musical expressions close to our day. We
hear it to-day with mixed feelings of sadness and wonder. Near as
it is to us, it is not the sort of expression we want most. And still, it
brings us into the presence of a loftiness we glimpse only rarely in
the music of our own hour; and wakes in us to brightest health again
a sense of human beauty for want of which we languish.
Paul Rosenfeld








THE
DIAL

FEBRUARY i923
THE POOR MAN
BY A. E. COPPARD
ONE of the commonest sights in the vale was a certain man on a
bicycle carrying a bag full of newspapers. He was as much a
sound as a sight, for what distinguished him from all other men to
be encountered there on bicycles was not his appearance, though that
was noticeable; it was his sweet tenor voice, heard as he rode along
singing each morning from Cobbs Mill, through Kezzal Predy
Peter, Thasper and Buzzlebury, and so on to Trinkel and Nuncton.
All sorts of things he sang, ballads, chanties, bits of glees, airs from
operas, hymns, and sacred anthems—he was leader of Thasper
Church choir—but he seemed to observe some sort of rotation in
their rendering. In the forepart of the week it was hymns and an-
thems; on Wednesday he usually turned to modestly secular tunes;
he was rolling on Thursday and Friday through a gamut of love
songs and ballads undoubtedly secular and not necessarily modest,
while on Saturday—particular at eve, spent in the tap of The
White Hart—his programme was entirely ribald and often a little
improper. But always on Sunday he was the most decorous of men,
no questionable liquor passed his lips, and his comportment was a
credit to the church, a model even for soberer men.
Dan Pavey was about thirty-five years old, of medium height
and of medium appearance except as to his hat (a hard black bowler
which seemed never to belong to him though he had worn it for
years) and as to his nose. It was an ugly nose, big as a baby's el-
bow; he had been born thus, it had not been broken or maltreated,
though it might have engaged in some pre-natal conflict when it
was malleable, since when nature had healed, but had not restored


122
THE POOR MAN
it. But there was ever a soft smile that covered his ugliness which
made it genial and said or seemed to say: Don't make a fool of me,
I am a friendly man, this is really my hat, and as for my nose—God
made it so.
The six hamlets that he supplied with newspapers lie along the
Icknield Vale close under the ridge of woody hills, and the inhabi-
tants adjacent to the woods fell the beech timber and in their own
homes turn it into rungs or stretchers for chair manufacturers, who
somewhere out of sight beyond the hills endlessly make chair and
nothing but chair. Sometimes in a wood itself there may be seen a
shanty built of faggots in which sits a man turning pieces of chair
on a treadle-lathe. Tall, hollow, and greenly dim are the woods,
very solemn places, and they survey the six little towns as a man
might look at six tiny pebbles lying on a green rug at his feet.
One August morning the newspaper man was riding back to
Thasper. The day was sparkling like a diamond, but he was not
singing; he was thinking of Scroope, the new rector of Thasper
parish, and the thought of Scroope annoyed him. It was not only
the tone of the sermon he had preached on Sunday, "The poor we
have always with us," though that was in bad taste from a man
reputed rich and with a heart—people said—as hard as a door-
knocker; it was something more vital, a congenital difference be-
tween them as profound as it was disagreeable. The Rev. Faudel
Scroope was wealthy, he seemed to have complete confidence in
his ability to remain so, and he was the kind of man with whom
Dan Pavey would never be able to agree. As for Mrs Scroope,
gloom pattered upon him in a strong sighing shower at the least
thought of her.
At Larkspur Lane he came suddenly upon the rector talking to
an oldish man, Eli Bond, who was hacking away at a hedge.
Scroope never wore a hat, he had a curly bush of dull hair. Though
his face was shaven clean it remained a regular plantation of ridges
and wrinkles; there was a stoop in his shoulders, a lurch in his gait,
and he had a voice that howled.
"Just a moment, Pavey," he bellowed, and Dan dismounted.
"All those years," the parson went on talking to the hedger;
"all those years, dear me!"
"I were born in Thasper sixty-six year ago, come the twenty-
third of October, sir, the same day—but two years before—as Lady


A. E. COPPARD
i23
Hesseltine eloped with Rudolf Moxley. I was reared here and I
worked here sin' I were six year old. Twalve children I have had
(though five on 'em come to naught and two be in the army) and I
never knowed what was to be out of work for one single day in all
that sixty year. I can't thank my blessed master enough for it."
"Isn't that splendidly feudal," murmured the priest. "Who is
your good master?"
The old man solemnly touched his hat and said, "God."
"Oh, I see, yes, yes," cried the Rev. Scroope. "Well, good
health and constant, and good work and plenty of it, are glorious
things. The man who has never done a day's work is a dog, and the
man who deceives his master is a dog, too."
"I never donn that, sir."
"And you've had happy days in Thasper, I'm sure?"
"Right-a-many, sir."
"Splendid. Well . . . urn . . . what a heavy rain
we had in the night."
"Ah, that was heavy! At five o'clock this morning I daren't let
my ducks out—they'd a bin drownded, sir."
"Ha, now, now, now!" warbled the rector as he turned away with
Dan.
"Capital old fellow, happy and contented. I wish there were
more of the same breed. I wish ..." The parson sighed
pleasantly as he and Dan walked on together until they came to
the village street where swallows were darting and flashing very
low. A small boy stood about, trying to catch them in his hands
as they swooped close to him. Dan's own dog pranced up to his
master for a greeting. It was black, somewhat like a greyhound, but
stouter. Its tail curled right over its back and it was cocky as a bird,
for it was young; it could fight like a tiger and run like the wind—
many a hare had had proof of that.
Said Mr Scroope, eyeing the dog, "Is there much poaching goes
on here?"
"Poaching, sir?"
"I am told there is. I hope it isn't true, for I have rented most of
the shooting myself."
"I never heard tell of it, sir; years ago, maybe. The Buzzlebury
chaps one time were rare hands at taking a few birds, so I've heard,
but I shouldn't think there's an onlicensed gun for miles around."


124
THE POOR MAN
"I'm not thinking so much of guns. Farmer Prescott had his
warren netted by some one last week and lost fifty or sixty rabbits.
There's scarcely a hare to be seen, and I find wires wherever I go.
It's a crime like anything else, you know," Scroope's voice was loud
and strident, "and I shall deal very severely with poaching of any
kind. Oh, yes, you have to, you know, Pavey. Oh, yes. There was
a man in my last parish was a poacher, cunning scoundrel of the
worst type, never did a stroke of work, and he had a dog, it wasn't
unlike your dog—this is your dog, isn't it? You haven't got your
name on its collar, you should have your name on a dog's collar—
well, he had a perfect brute of a dog, carried off my pheasants by
the dozen; as for hares, he exterminated them. Man never did any-
thing else, but we laid him by the heels and in the end I shot the
dog myself."
"Shot it?" said Dan. "No, I couldn't tell a poacher if I was to see
one. I know no more about 'em than a bone in the earth."
"We shall be," continued Scroope, "very severe with them. Let
me see—are you singing the Purcell on Sunday evening?"
"He Shall Feed His Flock—sir—like a Shepherd."
"Splendid! Good day, Pavey."
Dan, followed by his bounding, barking dog, pedalled home to
a little cottage that seemed to sag under the burden of its own
thatch; it had eaves a yard wide, and birds' nests in the roof at least
ten years old. Here Dan lived with his mother, Meg Pavey, for he
had never married. She kept an absurd little shop for the sale of
sweets, vinegar, bootbuttons, and such things, and was a very excel-
lent old dame, but as naive as she was vague. If you went in to her
counter for a newspaper and banged down a half crown she would
as likely as not give you change for sixpence—until you mentioned
the discrepancy, when she would smilingly give you back your half
crown again.
Dan passed into the back room where Meg was preparing dinner,
threw off his bag, and sat down without speaking. His mother was
making a heavy succession of journeys between the table and a
larder.
"Mrs Scroope's been here," said Meg, bringing a loaf to the table.
"What did she want?"
"She wanted to reprimand me."
"And what have vou been doing?"


A. E. COPPARD
i25
Meg was in the larder again. "'Tis not me, 'tis you."
"What do you mean, mother?"
"She's been a-hinting." Here Meg pushed a dish of potatoes to
the right of the bread, and a salt-cellar to the left of the yawning
remains of a rabbit pie, "about your not being a teetotal. She says
the boozing do give the choir a bad name and I was to persuade you
to give it up."
"I should like to persuade her it was time she is dead. I don't go
for to take any pattern from that rich trash. Are we the grass under
their feet? And can you tell me why parsons' wives are always so
much more awful than the parsons themselves? I shall never under-
stand that if I lives a thousand years. Name o' God, what next?"
"Well, 'tis as she says. Drink is no good to any man, and she
can't say as I ain't reprimanded you."
"Name 0' God," he replied, "do you think I booze just for the
sake o' the booze, because I like booze? No man does that. He
drinks so that he shan't be thought a fool, or rank himself better
than his mates—though he knows in his heart he might be if he
weren't so poor or so timid. Not that one would mind to be poor
if it warn't preached to him that he must be contented. How can
the poor be contented as long as there's the rich to serve. The rich
we have always with us, that's our responsibility; we are the grass
under their feet. Why should we be proud of that? When a man's
poor the only thing left him is hope—for something better; and
that's called envy. If you don't like your riches you can always give
it up, but poverty you can't desert, nor it won't desert you."
"It's no good flying in the face of everything like that, Dan, it's
folly."
"If I had my way I'd be an independent man and live by myself
a hundred miles from anywheres or anybody. But that's madness,
that's madness; the world don't expect you to go on like that so I do
as other folks do, not because I want to, but because I a'nt the pluck
to be different. You taught me a good deal, mother, but you never
taught me courage and I wasn't born with any, so I drinks with a
lot of fools who drink with me for much the same reason, I expect.
It's the same with other things besides drink."
His indignation lasted throughout the afternoon as he sat in the
shed in his yard turning out his usual quantity of chair. He sang
not one note, he but muttered and mumbled over all his anger.


126
THE POOR MAN
Towards evening he recovered his amiability and began to sing with
a gusto that astonished even his mother. He went out into the dusk
humming like a bee, taking his dog with him. In the morning the
Rev. Scroope found a dead hare tied by the neck to his own door
knocker, and at night (it being Saturday) Dan Pavey was merrier
than ever in The White Hart. If he was not drunk he was what
Thasper calls "tightish," and had never before sung so many of
those ribald songs (generally of his own composition) for which
he was noted.
A few evenings later Dan attended a meeting of the Churchmen's
Guild. A group of very mute countrymen who sat in the village
hall and were goaded into speech by the rector.
"Thasper," declared Mr Scroope, "has a great name for its sing-
ing. All over the six hamlets there is surprising musical talent.
There's the Buzzlebury band—it is a capital band."
"It is that," interrupted a maroon-faced butcher from Buzzle-
bury; "It can play as well at nine o'clock in the morning as it can
at nine o'clock at night, and that's a good band as can do it."
"Now I want our choir to compete at the county musical festival
next year. There's the question of travelling expenses I know, but
I think that difficulty can be overcome. Thasper is going to show
these highly trained choristers what a native choir is capable of.
Yes, and I'm sure our friend Pavey can win the tenor's solo compe-
tition. Let us all put our backs into it and work agreeably and con-
sistently. Those are the two main springs of good human conduct—
consistency and agreeability. The consistent man will always attain
his legitimate ends, always. I remember a man in my last parish,
Tom Turkem, known and loved throughout the county; he was not
only the best cricketer in our village—he was the best for miles
around. He revelled in cricket and cricket only, he played cricket
and lived for cricket. The years went on and he got old, but he
never dreamed of giving up cricket. His bowling average got larger
every year and his batting average got smaller, but he still went on
consistent as ever. His order of going in dropped down to No. 6
and he seldom bowled; then he got down to No. 8 and never bowled.
For a season or two the once famous Tom Turkem was really the
last man in. After that he became umpire, then scorer, and then he
died. He had got a little money, very little, just enough to live com-
fortably on. No, he never married. He was a very happy hearty


A. E. COPPARD
i27
hale old man. So you see? Now there is a cricket club at Buzzle-
bury and one at Trinkel. Why not a cricket club at Thasper?
Shall we do that? . . . Good!"
The parson went on outlining his projects, and although it was
plain to Dan that the Rev. Scroope had very little (if any) com-
passion for the weaknesses natural to mortal flesh, and attached an
extravagant value to the virtues of decency, sobriety, consistency,
and above all loyalty to all sorts of incomprehensible notions, yet
his intentions were undeniably agreeable and the Guild was consist-
ently grateful.
"One thing, Pavey," said Scroope when the meeting had dis-
persed, "one thing I will not tolerate in this parish and that is gam-
bling."
"Gambling? I have never gambled in my life, sir. I couldn't
tell you hardly the difference between spades and clubs."
"I am speaking of horse-racing, Pavey."
"Now that's a thing I never see in my life, Mr Scroope."
"You need not go to the races to back a horse. The slips of
paper and money can be collected by a man who is agent for a racing
bookmaker. That is going on to an alarming extent all round the
six hamlets and the man who does the collecting, even if he does not
bet himself, is a social and moral danger, he is a criminal, he is
against the law. Whoever he is," said the vicar, moderating his
voice, but confidently beaming and patting Dan's shoulder, "I shall
stamp him out mercilessly. Good night, Pavey."
Dan went away with murder in his heart. Timid strangers here
and there had fancied that a man with such a mis-shapen face would
be capable of committing a crime, not a mere peccadillo—you
wouldn't take notice of that, of course—but a solid substantial
misdemeanour like murder. And it was true, he was capable of mur-
der—just as everybody else is, or ought to be. But he was also
capable of curbing that distressing tendency in the usual way, and
in point of fact he never did commit a murder.
These rectorial denunciations troubled the air but momentarily
and he still sang as gaily and as beautifully on his daily ride from
Cobbs Mill along the little roads to Trinkel and Nuncton. The
hanging richness of the long woods yellowing on the fringe of
autumn, the long solemn hills themselves, cold sunlight, coloured
berries in briary loops, the brown small leaves of hawthorn that


128
THE POOR MAN
had begun to drop from the hedge and flutter in the road like dying
moths, teams of horses sturdily ploughing, sheep-folds already
thatched into little nooks where the ewes could lie—Dan said—as
warm as a pudding: these things filled him with tiny ecstasies too
incoherent for him to transcribe—he could only sing.
On Bonfire Night the lads of the village lit a great fire on the
space opposite The White Hart. Snow was falling; it was not
freezing weather, but the snow lay in a soft thin mat upon the road.
Dan was returning on his bicycle from a long journey and the light
from the bonfire was cheering. It lit up the courtyard of the inn
genially and curiously, for the recumbent Hart upon the balcony
had a pad of snow upon its wooden nose which somehow made it
look like a camel in spite of the huddled snow on its back which
gave it the resemblance of a sheep. A few boys stood with bemused
wrinkled faces before the roaring warmth. Dan dismounted very
carefully opposite the blaze, for a tiny boy rode on the back of the
bicycle, wrapped up and tied to the frame by a long scarf; very
small, very silent, about five years old. A red wool wrap was bound
round his head and ears and chin and a green scarf encircled his
neck and waist almost hiding his jacket; gaiters of grey wool were
drawn up over his knickerbockers. Dan lifted him down and stood
him in the road, but he was so cumbered with clothing that he could
scarcely walk. He was shy; he may have thought it ridiculous; he
moved a few paces and turned to stare at his foot-marks in the snow.
"Cold?" asked Dan.
The child shook its head solemnly at him and then put one hand
in Dan's and gazed at the fire that was bringing a brightness into the
long-lashed dark eyes and tenderly flushing the pale face.
"Hungry?"
The child did not reply. It only silently smiled when the boys
brought him a lighted stick from the faggots. Dan caught him up
into his arms and pushed the cycle across the way into his own
home.
Plump Meg had just shredded up two or three red cabbages and
rammed them into a crock with a shower of peppercorns and some
terrible knots of ginger. There was a bright fire and a sharp odour
of vinegar—always some strange pleasant smell in Meg Pavey's
home—she had covered the top of the crock with a shield of brown
pnper, pinioned that with string, licked a label "Cabege Novembr


A. E. COPPARD
129
5t" and smoothed it on the crock, when the latch lifted and Dan
carried in his little tiny boy.
"Here he is, mother."
Where Dan stood him there the child remained; he did not seem
to see Mother Pavey, his glance had happened to fall on the big
crock with the white label—and he kept it there.
"Whoever's that?" asked the astonished Meg with her arms
akimbo as Dan began to unwrap the child.
"That's mine," said her son, brushing a few flakes of snow from
the curls on its forehead.
"Yours! How long have it been yours?"
"Since 'twas born. No, let him alone, I'll undo him, he's full up
wi' pins and hooks. I'll undo him."
Meg stood apart while Dan unravelled his offspring.
"But it is not your child, surely, Dan?"
"Ay, I've brought him home for keeps. He can sleep wi' me."
"Who's its mother?"
"'Tis no matter about that. Dan Cupid did it."
"You're making a mock of me. Who is his mother? Where is
she? You're fooling, Dan, you're fooling!"
"I'm making no mock of any one. There, there's a bonny grand-
son for you!"
Meg gathered the child into her arms, peering into its face, per-
haps to find some answer to the riddle, perhaps to divine a familiar
likeness. But there was nothing in its soft smooth features that at
all resembled her rugged Dan's.
"Who are you? What's your little name?"
The child whispered, "Martin."
"It's a pretty pretty thing, Dan."
"Ah!" said her son, "that's his mother. We were rare fond of
each other—once. Now she's wedd'n another chap and I've took
the boy, for it's best that way. He's five year old. Don't ask me
about her, it's our secret and always has been. It was a good secret
and a grand secret, and it was well kept. That's her ring."
The child's thumb had a ring upon it, a golden ring with a small
green stone. The thumb was crooked, and he clasped the ring
safely.
For a while Meg asked no more questions about the child. She
pressed it tenderly to her bosom.


130 THE POOR MAN
But the long kept secret, as Dan soon discovered, began to bristle
with complications. The boy was his, of course it was his—he
seemed to rejoice in his paternity of the quiet pretty illegitimate
creature. As if that brazen turpitude was not enough to confound
him he was taken a week later in the act of receiving betting com-
missions and heavily fined in the police court, although it was quite
true that he himself did not bet and was merely a collecting agent
for a bookmaker who remained discreetly in the background and
who promptly paid his fine.
There was naturally a great racket in the vestry about these things
—there is no more Rhadamanthine formation than that which can
mount the ornamental forehead of a deacon—and Dan was bidden
to an interview at the "Scroopery." After some hesitation he visited
it.
"Ah, Pavey," said the rector, not at all minatory, but very sub-
dued and unhappy. "So the blow has fallen in spite of my warning.
I am more sorry than I can express, for it means an end to a very
long connexion. It is very difficult and very disagreeable for me to
deal with the situation, but there is no help for it now; you must
understand that. I offer no judgement upon these unfortunate
events, no judgement at all, but I can find no way of avoiding my
clear duty. Your course of life is incompatible with your position
in the choir, and I sadly fear it reveals not only a social misdemean-
our, but a religious one—it is a mockery, a mockery of God."
The rector sat at a table with his head pressed on his hands.
Pavey sat opposite him and in his hands he dangled his bowler hat.
"You may be right enough in your way, sir, but I've never mocked
God. For the betting, I grant you. It may be a dirty job, but I
never ate the dirt myself, I never betted in my life. It's a way of
life, a poor man has but little chance of earning more than a bare
living, and there's many a dirty job there's no prosecution for,
leastways not in this world."
"Let me say, Pavey, that the betting counts less heavily with me
than the question of this unfortunate little boy. I offer no judge-
ment upon the matter, your acknowledgement of him is only right
and proper. But the fact of his existence at all cannot be dis-
regarded; that at least is flagrant, and as far as concerns your posi-
tion in my church it is a mockery of God."
"You may be right, sir, as far as your judgement goes, or you


A. E. COPPARD
may not be. I beg your pardon for that, but we can only measure
other people by our own scales, and as we can never understand one
another entirely so we can't ever judge them rightly, for they all
differ from us and from each other in some special ways. But as
for being a mocker of God, why it looks to me as if you was trying
to teach the Almighty how to judge me."
"Pavey," said the rector with solemnity, "I pity you from the
bottom of my heart. We won't continue this painful discussion,
we should both regret it. There was a man in the parish where I
came from who was an atheist and mocked God. He subsequendy
became deaf. Was he convinced? No, he was not—because the
punishment came a long time after his offence. He mocked God
and became blind—not at once: God has eternity to work in. Still
he was not convinced. That," said the rector ponderously, "is what
the church has to contend with; a failure to read the most obvious
signs, and an indisposition even to remedy that failure. Klopstock
was that poor man's name. His sister—you know her well, Jane
Klopstock—is now my cook."
The rector arose and held out his hand. "God bless you, Pavey."
"I thank you sir," said Dan. "I quite understand."
He went home moodily reflecting. Nobody else in the village
minded his misdeeds, they did not care a button, and none con-
demned him. On the contrary, indeed. But the blow had fallen,
there was nothing that he could now do, the shock of it had been
anticipated, but it was severe. And the pang would last, for he was
deprived of his chiefest opportunity for singing, that art in which
he excelled, in that perfect quiet setting he so loved. Rancour grew
upon him and on Saturday he had a roaring audacious evening at
The White Hart where to the tune of The British Grenadiers he
sang a doggerel:
"Our parson loves his motor car
His garden and his mansion,
And he loves his beef for I've remarked
His belly's brave expansion;
He loves all mortal mundane things
As he loved his beer at college,
And so he loves his housemaid (Not
With Mrs parson's knowledge).


THE POOR MAN
Our parson lies both hot and strong,
It does not suit his station,
But still his rev. soul delights
In much dissimulation;
Both in and out and roundabout
He practises distortion,
And he lies with a public sinner when
Grass widowhood's his portion."
All of which was a savage libel on a very worthy man, composed
in anger and regretted as soon as sung.
From that time forward Dan gave up his boozing and devoted
himself to the boy, little Martin, who a Thasper joker suggested
might have some kinship with the notorious Betty of that name.
But Dan's voice was now seldom heard singing upon the roads he
travelled. They were icy wintry roads, but that was not the cause
of his muteness. It was severance from the choir, not from its con-
noted spirit of religion—there was little enough of that in Dan
Pavey—but from the solemn impressive beauty of the chorale,
which it was his unique gift to adorn and in which he had shared
with eagerness and pride since his boyhood. To be cast out from
that was to be cast from something he held most dear, the oppor-
tunity of expression in an art which he had made triumphantly his
own.
With the coming of spring he repaired one evening to a town
some miles away and interviewed a choirmaster. Thereafter Dan
Pavey journeyed to and fro twice every Sunday to sing in a church
that lay seven or eight miles off, and he kept it all a profound se-
cret from Thasper until his appearance at the county musical festi-
val where he won the treasured prize for tenor soloists. Then Dan
was himself again. To his crude apprehension he had been vindi-
cated, and he was heard once more carolling in the lanes of the Vale
as he had been heard any time for these twenty years.
The child began its schooling, but though he was free to go about
the village little Martin did not wander far. The tidy cluster of
hair about his poll was of deep chestnut colour. His skin—Meg
said—was like "ollobarster." It was soft and unfreckled, always
pale. His eyes were two wet damsons—so Meg declared: they were
dark and ever questioning. As for his nose, his lips, his cheeks, his


A. E. COPPARD
i33
chin, Meg could do no other than call it the face of a blessed saint;
and indeed, he had some of the bearing of a saint, so quiet, so
gentle, so shy. The golden ring he no longer wore; it hung from a
tin tack on the bedroom wall.
Old John who lived next door became a friend of his. He was
very aged—in the Vale you got to be a hundred before you knew
where you were—and he was very bent; he resembled a sickle stand-
ing upon its handle. Very bald, too, and so very sharp.
Martin was staring up at the roof of John's cottage.
"What you looking at, my boy?"
"Chimbley," whispered the child.
"O ah! that's crooked, a'nt it?"
"Yes, crooked."
"I know 'tis, but I can't help it; my chimney's crooked, and I
can't putt it straight, neither, I can't putt it right. My chimney's
crooked, a'nt it, ah, and I'm crooked, too."
"Yes," said Martin.
"I know, but I can't help it. It is crooked, a'nt it!" said the old
man also staring up at a red pot tilted at an angle suggestive of
conviviality.
"Yes."
"That chimney's crooked. But you come along and look at my
beautiful bird."
A cock thrush inhabited a cage in the old gaffer's kitchen. Martin
stood before it.
"There's a beautiful bird. Hoicks!" cried old John, tapping the
bars of the cage with his terrible finger-nail. "But he won't sing."
"Won't he sing?"
"He donn make hisself at home. He donn make hisself at home
at all, do 'ee, my beautiful bird. No, he donn't. So I'm a-going to
chop his head off," said the laughing old man, "and then I shall bile
him."
Afterwards Martin went every day to see if the thrush was still
there. And it was.
Martin grew. Almost before Dan was aware of it the child had
grown into a boy. At school he excelled nobody in anything except
perhaps behaviour, but he had a strange little gift for unobtrusively
not doing the things he did not care for, and these were rather many
unless his father was concerned in them. Even so the affection be-


i34
THE POOR MAN
tween them was seldom tangibly expressed, their alliance was some*
thing far deeper than its expression. Dan talked with him as if he
were a grown man, and perhaps he often regarded him as one; he
was the only being to whom he ever opened his mind. As they sat
together in the evening while Dan put in a spell at turning chair—
at which he was astoundingly adept—the father would talk to his
son, or rather he would heap upon him all the unuttered thoughts
that had accumulated in his mind during his adult years. The dog
would loll with its head on Martin's knees; the boy would sit nod-
ding gravely, though seldom speaking: he was an untiring listener.
"Like sire, like son," thought Dan. "He will always coop his
thoughts up within himself." It was the one characteristic of th«
boy that caused him anxiety.
"Never take pattern by me," he would adjure him, "not by me.
I'm a fool, a failure, just grass, and I'm trying to instruct you, but
you've no call to follow in my fashion; I'm a weak man. There's
been thoughts in my mind that I daren't let out. I wanted to do
things that other men don't seem to do and don't want to do. They
were not evil things—and what they were I've nigh forgotten now.
I never had much ambition, I wasn't clever, I wanted to live a sim-
ple life, in a simple way, the way I had a mind to—I can't remem-
ber that, either. But I did not do any of those things because I had
a fear of what other people might think of me. I walked in the
ruck with the rest of my mates and did the things I didn't ever want
to do—and now I can only wonder why I did them. I sung them
the silly songs they liked and not the ones I cherished. I agreed
with most everybody, and all agreed with me. I'm a friendly man,
too friendly, and I went back on my life, I made nought of my life,
you see, I just sat over the job like a snob codgering an old boot."
The boy would sit regarding him as if he already understood.
Perhaps that curious little mind did glean some flavour of his
father's tragedy.
"You've no call to follow me, you'll be a scholar. Of course I
know some of those long words at school take a bit of licking to-
gether—like elephant and saucepan. You get about half-way
through 'em and then you're done, you're mastered. I was just the
same (like sire, like son) and I'm no better now. If you and me was
to go to yon school together and set on the same stool together I
warrant you would win the prize and I should wear the dunce's cap


A. E. COPPARD
i35
—all except sums and there I should beat ye. You'd have all the
candy and I'd have all the cane, you'd be king and I'd be the dirty
rascal, and so you've no call to follow me. What you want is
courage, and to do the things you've a mind to. I never had any and
I didn't."
Dan seldom kissed his son, neither of them sought that tender
expression, though Meg was for ever ruffling the boy for these
pledges of affection, and he was always gracious to the old woman.
There was a small mole in the centre of her chin, and in the centre
of the mole grew one short stiff hair. It was a surprise to Martin
when he first kissed her.
Twice a week father and son bathed in the shed devoted to
chair. The tub was the half of a wooden barrel. Dan would roll
up two or three buckets of water from the well, they would both
strip to the skin, the boy would kneel in the tub and dash the water
about his body for a few moments. While Martin towelled himself
Dan stepped into the tub and after laving his face and hands and
legs he would sit down in it. "Ready?" Martin would ask, and
scooping up the water in an iron basin he would pour it over his
father's head.
"Name o' God, that's sharpish this morning," Dan would say.
"It would strip the bark off a crocodile. Broo-o-o-oh! But there:
winter and summer I go up and down the land and there's not—
Broo-o-oh!—a mighty difference between 'em, it's mostly fancy.
Come day, go day, frost or fair doings, all alike I go about the land
and there's little in winter I haven't the heart to rejoice in. (On
with your breeches or I'll be at the porridge pot afore you're clad.)
All their talk about winter and their dread of it shows poor spirit.
Nothing's prettier than a fall of snow, nothing more grand than
the storms upending the woods. There's no more rain in winter
than in summer, you can be shod for it, and there's a heart back of
your ribs that's proof against any blast. Is this my shirt or yours?
(Dashed if they buttons a'nt the plague of my life.) Country is
grand year's end to year's end, whether or no. I onee lived in Lon-
don—only a few weeks—and for noise, and for terror, and for filth
—name o' God, there was bugs in the butter there, once there was!"
But the boy's chosen season was that time of year when the
plums ripened. Pavey's garden was then a tiny paradise.
"You put a spell on these trees," Dan would declare to his son


i36
THE POOR MAN
every year when they gathered the fruit. "I planted them nearly
twenty years ago, two gages and one magny bonum, but they never
growed enough to make a pudden. They always bloomed well and
looked well. I propped 'em and I dunged 'em, but they wouldn't
beer at all, and I'm a-going to cut 'em down—when along comes
you."
Well, hadn't those trees borne remarkable ever since he'd come
there?
"Of course good luck's deceiving and it's never bothered our
family overmuch. Still bad luck is one thing and bad life's another.
And yet—I dunno—they come to much the same in the end, there's
very little difference. There's so much misunderstanding, half the
folks don't know their own good intentions nor all the love that's
sunk deep in their own minds."
But nothing in the world gave (or could give) Dan such flatter-
ing joy as his son's sweet treble voice. Martin could sing! In the
dark months no evening passed without some instruction by the
proud father. The living-room at the back of the shop was the
tiniest of rooms, and its smallness was not lessened (nor its tidiness
increased) by the stacks of merchandise that had strayed from
Meg's emporium into every corner and overflowed every shelf in
packages, piles, and bundles. The metalliferous categories—iron
nails, lead pencils, tin tacks, zinc ointment, and brass hinges—were
there. Platoons of bottles were there, bottles of Blue Black Writ-
ing Fluid, bottles of Scarlet—and presumably plebeian—Ink, bot-
tles of lollipops and of oil (both hair and castor). Balls of string,
of blue, of peppermint, and balls to bounce were adjacent to an
assortment of prim-looking books—account, memorandum, exercise,
and note. But the room was cozy, and if its inhabitants fitted it
almost as closely as birds fit their nests they were as happy as birds,
few of whom (save the swallows) sing in their nests. With pitch-
pipe to hand and a bundle of music before them Dan and Martin
would begin. The dog would snooze on the rug before the fire;
Meg would snooze amply in her arm-chair until roused by the sud-
den terrific tinkling of her shop-bell. She would waddle off to her
dim little shop—every step she took rattling the paraffin lamp on
the table, the coal in the scuttle, and sometimes the very panes in the
window—and the dog would clamber into her chair. Having sup-
plied an aged gaffer with an ounce of carraway seed or some gay


A. E. COPPARD
i37
lad with a packet of cigarettes, Meg would waddle back and sink
down upon the dog, whereupon its awful indignation would sound
to the very heavens, drowning the voices even of Dan and his son.
"What shall we wind up with?" Dan would ask at the close of
the lesson, and as often as not Martin would say: "You must sing
Timmie."
This was Timmie, and it had a tune something like the chorus
to Father O'Flynn:
"O Timmie my brother,
Best son of our mother,
Our labour it prospers, the mowing is done;
A holiday take you,
The loss it won't break you,
A day's never lost if a holiday's won.
We'll go with clean faces
To see the horse-races,
And if the luck chances we'll gather some gear;
But never a jockey
Will win it, my cocky,
Who catches one glance from a girl I know there.
There's lords and there's ladies
Wi' pretty sunshadies,
And farmers and jossers and fat men and small;
But the pride of these trips is
The scallywag gipsies
Wi' not a whole rag to the backs of 'em all.
There's cokenut shying,
And devil defying,
And a racket and babble to hear and to see,
Wi' boxing and shooting,
And fine highfaluting
From chaps wi' a table and thimble and pea.
My Nancy will be there,
The best thing to see there,


i38
THE POOR MAN
She'll win all the praises wi' ne'er a rebuke;
And she has a sister—
I wonder you've missed her—
As sweet as the daisies and fit for a duke.
Come along, brother Timmie,
Don't linger, but gimme
My hat and my purse and your company there;
For sporting and courting,
The cream of resorting,
And nothing much worse, Timmie—Come to the fair."
On the third anniversary of Martin's home-coming Dan rose up
very early in the dark morn and leaving his son sleeping he crept
out of the house followed by his dog. They went away from
Thasper though the darkness was profound and the grass filled
with dew—out upon the hills towards Chapel Cheary. The night
was starless, but Dan knew every trick and turn of the paths and
after an hour's walk he met a man waiting by a signpost. They
conversed for a few minutes and then went off together, the dog
at their heels, until they came to a field gate. Upon this they
fastened a net and then sent the dog into the darkness upon his
errand while they waited for the hare which the dog would drive
into the net. They waited so long that it was clear the dog had
not drawn its quarry. Dan whistled softly, but the dog did not
return. Dan opened the gate and went down the fields himself
scouring the hedges for a long time, but he could not find the dog.
The murk of the night had begun to lift, but the valley was filled
with mist. He went back to the gate: the net had been taken down,
his friend had departed—perhaps he had been disturbed'? The dog
had now been missing for an hour. Dan still hung about, but neither
friend nor dog came back. It grew grey and more grey, though
little could be distinguished; the raw mist obscured everything that
the dawn uncovered. He shivered with gloom and dampness, his
boots were now as pliable as gloves, his eyebrows had grey drops
upon them, so had his moustache and the backs of his hands. His
dark coat looked as if it were made of grey wool, it was tightly but-
toned around his throat and he stood with his chin crumpled, un-
consciously holding his breath until it burst forth in a gasp. But


A. E. COPPARD
i39
he could not abandon his dog, and he roamed once more down
into the misty valley towards woods that he knew well, whistling
softly and with great caution a repetition of two notes.
And he found his dog. It was lying on a heap of dead sodden
leaves. It just whimpered. It could not rise, it could not move, it
seemed paralysed. Dawn was now really upon him. Dan wanted to
get the dog away, quickly, it was a dangerous quarter, but when he
lifted it to its feet the dog collapsed like a scarecrow. In a flash
Dan knew he was poisoned, he had probably picked up some piece
of dainty flesh that a farmer had baited for the foxes. He seized a
knob of chalk that lay thereby, grated some of it into his hands,
and forced it down the dog's throat. Then he tied the lead to its
neck. He was going to drag the dog to its feet and force it to
walk. But the dog was past all energy, it was limp and mute. Dan
dragged him by the neck for some yards as a man draws behind
him a heavy sack. It must have weighed three stone, but Dan lifted
him on to his own shoulders and staggered back up the hill. He
carried it thus for half a mile, but then he was still four miles from
home, and it was daylight, at any moment he might meet somebody
he would not care to meet. He entered a ride opening into some
coverts, and bending down slipped the dog over his head to rest
upon the ground. He was exhausted and felt giddy, his brains were
swirling round—trying to slop out of his skull—and—yes—the
dog was dead, his old dog was dead. When he looked up he saw a
keeper with a gun standing a few yards off.
"Good morning," said Dan. All his weariness was suddenly
gone from him.
"I'll have your name and address," replied the keeper, a giant of
a man with a sort of contemptuous affability.
"What for?"
"You'll hear about what for," the giant grinned. "I'll be sure
to let ye know, in doo coorse." He laid his gun upon the ground
and began searching in his pockets while Dan stood up with rage
in his heart and confusion in his mind. So the old imp was at him
again!
"Humph!" said the keeper. "I've alost my note-book some-
wheres. Have you got a bit of paper on ye?"
The culprit searched his pockets and produced a folded fragment.
"Thanks." The giant did not cease to grin. "What is it?"


i40
THE POOR MAN
"What?" queried Dan.
"Your name and address."
"Ah, but what do you want it for? What do you think I'm
doing?" protested Dan.
"I've a net in my pocket which I took from a gate about an hour
ago. I saw summat was afoot and me and a friend o' mine have
been looking for 'ee. Now let's have your name and no nonsense."
"My name," said Dan, "my name? Well, it is . . . Piper."
"Piper, is it ah! Was you baptized ever?"
"Peter," said Dan savagely.
"Peter Piper! Well, you've picked a tidy peppercorn this time."
Again he was searching his pockets. There was a frown on his
face. At last he said: "You'd better lend me a bit o' pencil, too."
Dan produced a stump of lead pencil and the gamekeeper
smoothing the paper on his lifted knee, wrote down the name of
Peter Piper.
"And where might you come from?" He peered up at the mis-
erable man who replied, "From Leasington," naming a village sev-
eral miles to the west of his real home.
"Leasington!" commented the other. "You must know John
Eustace, then?" John Eustace was a sporting farmer famed for
his stock and his riches.
"Know him!" exclaimed Dan. "He's my uncle!"
"O ah!" said the other and carefully folded the paper and put it
into his breast pocket. 'Well you can trot along home now, my
lad."
Dan knelt down and unbuckled the collar from his dead dog's
neck. He was fond of his dog, it looked piteous now. And kneel-
ing there it suddenly came upon Dan that he had been a coward
again, he had told nothing but lies, foolish lies, and he had let a
great hulking flunkey walk roughshod over him. In one astonishing
moment the reproving face of his little son seemed to loom up be-
side the dog, the blood flamed in his brain.
"I'll take charge of that," said the keeper, snatching the collar
from his hand.
"Blast you!" Dan sprang to his feet and suddenly screaming
like a madman; "I'm Dan Pavey of Thasper," he leapt at the
keeper with a fury that shook even that calm stalwart.
"You would, would ye?" he yapped, darting for his gun. Dan


A. E. COPPARD
i4i
also seized it and in their struggle the gun was fired off harmlessly
between them. Dan let go.
"My God!" roared the keeper, "You'd murder me, would ye!
Wi' me own gun, would ye!" He struck Dan a swinging blow with
the butt of it, yelling, "Would ye! Would ye! Would ye!" And
he did not cease striking until Dan stumbled senseless and bloody
across the body of the dog.
Soon another keeper came hurrying through the trees.
"Tried to murder me—wi' me own gun, he did," declared the
big man, "wi' me own gun!"
They revived the stricken Pavey after a while and then conveyed
him to a policeman, who conveyed him to a gaol.
The magistrates took a grave view of the case and sent it for
trial at the Assizes. They were soon held, he had not long to
wait, and before the end of November he was condemned. The
Assize Court was a place of intolerable gloom, intolerable formal-
ity, intolerable pain, but the public seemed to enjoy it. The keeper
swore Dan had tried to shoot him, and the prisoner contested this.
He did not deny that he was the aggressor. The jury found him
guilty. What had he to say? He had nothing to say, but he was
deeply moved by the spectacle of the Rev. Scroope standing up and
testifying to his sobriety, his honesty, his general good repute, and
pleading for a lenient sentence because he was a man of consider-
able force of character, misguided no doubt, a little unfortunate,
and prone to recklessness.
Said the judge, examining the papers of the indictment, "I see
there is a previous conviction—for betting offences."
"That was three years ago, my lord. There has been nothing of
the kind since, my lord, of that I am sure, quite sure."
Scroope showed none of his old-time confident aspect, he was
perspiring and trembling. The clerk of the Assize leaned up and
held a whispered colloquy with the judge, who then addressed the
rector.
"Apparently he is still a betting agent. He gave a false name
and address which was taken down by the keeper on a piece of
paper furnished by the prisoner. Here it is, on one side the name of
Peter Pope (Piper, sir!) Piper; and on the other side this is written:
'3 o/c race. Pretty Dear. 5/- to win. J Klopstock.' Are there any
Klopstocks in your parish?"


i42
THE POOR MAN
"Klopstock!" murmured the parson. "It is the name of my own
cook."
What had the prisoner to say about that? The prisoner had
nothing to say, and he was sentenced to twelve months' imprison-
ment with hard labour.
So Dan was taken away. He was a tough man, an amenable
man, and the mere rigours of the prison did not unduly afflict him.
His behaviour was good and he looked forward to gaining the max-
imum remission of his sentence. Meg his mother went to see him
once, alone, but she did not repeat the visit. The prison chaplain
paid him special attention. He too was a Scroope, a huge fellow,
not long from Oxford, and Pavey learned that he was related to
the Thasper rector. The new year came, February came, March
came, and Dan was afforded some privileges. His singing in chapel
was much admired and occasionally he was allowed to sing to the
prisoners. April came, May came, and then his son Martin was
drowned in a boating accident, on a lake, in a park. The Thasper
children had been taken there for a holiday. On hearing it Pavey
sank limply to the floor of his cell. The warders sat him up, but
they could make nothing of him; he was dazed and he could not
speak. He was taken to the hospital wing. "This man has had a
stroke, he is gone dumb," said the doctor. On the following day
he appeared to be well enough, but still he could not speak. He
went about the ward doing hospital duty, dumb as a ladder; he
could not even mourn, but a jig kept flickering through his voice-
less mind:
"In a park there was a lake
On the lake there was a boat
In the boat there was a boy."
Hour after hour the stupid jingle flowed through his consciousness.
Perhaps it kept him from going mad, but it did not bring him back
his speech; he was dumb, dumb. And he remembered a man who
had been stricken deaf, and then blind—Scroope knew him too, it
was some man who had mocked God.
"In a park there was a lake
On the lake there was a boat
In the boat there was a boy."


A. E. COPPARD
H3
On the day of the funeral Pavey imagined that he had been let
out of prison, he dreamed that someone had been kind and set him
free for an hour or two to bury his dead boy. He seemed to arrive
at Thasper when the ceremony was already begun, the coffin was
already in the church. Pavey knelt down beside his mother. The
rector intoned the office, the child was taken to its grave. Dumb
dreaming Pavey turned his eyes from it. The day was too bright
for death, it was a stainless day. The wind seemed to flow in soft
streams, rolling the lilac blooms. A small white feather blown
from a pigeon on the church gable whirled about like a butterfly.
"We give thee hearty thanks," the priest was saying, "for that it
hath pleased thee to deliver this our brother out of the miseries of
this sinful world." At the end of it all Pavey kissed his mother
and saw himself turn back to his prison. He went by the field
paths away to the railway junction. The country had begun to look
a little parched, for rain was wanted—vividly he could see all this
—but things were growing, corn was thriving greenly, the bean-
fields smelled sweet. A frill of yellow kilk and wild white carrot
spray lined every hedge. Cattle dreamed in the grass, the colt
stretched itself unregarded in front of its mother. Larks, wrens,
yellowhammers. There were the great beech trees and the great
hills, calm and confident, overlooking Cobbs and Peter, Thasper
and Trinkel, Buzzlebury and Nuncton. He sees the summer is
coming on, he is going back to prison. "Courage is vain," he thinks,
"we are like the grass under foot, a blade that excels is quickly
shorn. In this sort of a world the poor have no call to be proud
they had only need be penitent."
"In the park there was a lake
In the boat . . .
On the lake . . . boat"


INDIANS AND AN ENGLISHMAN
BY D. H. LAWRENCE
SUPPOSING one fell on to the moon, and found them talking
English, it would be something the same as falling out of the
open world plump down here in the middle of America. "Here"
means New Mexico, the Southwest, wild and woolly and artistic
and sage-brush desert.
It is all rather like comic opera played with solemn intensity.
All the wildness and woolliness and westernity and motor cars and
art and sage and savage are so mixed up, so incongruous, that it is
a farce, and everybody knows it. But they refuse to play it as
farce. The wild and woolly section insists on being heavily dra-
matic, bold and bad on purpose; the art insists on being real Ameri-
can and artistic; motor cars insist on being thrilled, moved to the
marrow; highbrows insist on being ecstatic, Mexicans insist on be-
ing Mexicans, squeezing the last black drop of macabre joy out of
life, and Indians wind themselves in white cotton sheets like Ham-
let's father's ghost, with a lurking smile.
And here am I, a lone lorn Englishman, tumbled out of the
known world of the British Empire on to this stage: for it persists
in seeming like a stage to me, and not like the proper world.
Whatever makes a proper world, I don't know. But surely two
elements are necessary: a common purpose and a common sympathy.
I can't see any common purpose. The Indians and Mexicans don't
even seem very keen on dollars. That full moon of a silver dollar
doesn't strike me as overwhelmingly hypnotic out here. As for a
common sympathy or understanding, that's beyond imagining.
West is wild and woolly and bad-on-purpose, commerce is a little
self-conscious about its own pioneering importance—Pioneers, Oh,
Pioneers!—highbrow is bent on getting to the bottom of everything
and saving the lost soul down there in the depths, Mexican is bent
on being Mexican and not gringo, and the Indian is all the things
that all the others aren't. And so everybody smirks at everybody
else, and says tacitly, "Go on, you do your little stunt, and I'll do
mine," and they're like the various troupes in a circus, all perform-
ing at once, with nobody for Master of Ceremonies.



D. H. LAWREKCE. BY JAN C. JUTA





D. H. LAWRENCE
H5
It seems to me, in this country, everything is taken so damn seri-
ously that nothing remains serious. Nothing is so farcical as in-
sistent drama. Everybody is lurkingly conscious of this. Each sec-
tion or troupe is quite willing to admit that all the other sections
are buffoon stunts. But it itself is the real thing, solemnly bad in
its badness, good in its goodness, wild in its wildness, woolly in its
woolliness, arty in its artiness, deep in its depths—in a word,
earnest.
In such a masquerade of earnestness, a bewildered straggler out
of the far-flung British Empire, myself! Don't let me for a mo-
ment pretend to know anything. I know less than nothing. I simply
gasp like a bumpkin in a circus ring, with the horse-lady leaping
over my head, the Apache war-whooping in my ear, the Mexican
staggering under crosses and bumping me as he goes by, the artist
whirling colours across my dazzled vision, the highbrows solemnly
declaiming at me from all the cross-roads. If, dear reader, you,
being the audience who has paid to come in, feel that you must take
up an attitude to me, let it be one of amused pity.
One has to take sides. First, one must be either pro-Mexican or
pro-Indian; then, either art or intellect; then, Republican or Demo-
crat, and so on. But as for me, poor lamb, if I bleat at all in the
circus-ring, it will be my own shorn lonely bleat of a lamb who's
lost his mother.
The first Indians I really saw were the Apaches in the Apache
Reservation of this state. We drove in a motor car, across desert
and mesa, down canyons and up divides and along arroyos and so
forth, two days, till at afternoon our two Indian men ran the car
aside from the trail and sat under the pine tree to comb their long
black hair and roll it into the two roll-plaits that hang in front
of their shoulders, and put on all their silver-and-turquoise jewel-
lery and their best blankets: because we were nearly there. On the
trail were horsemen passing, and wagons with Ute Indians and
Navajos.
"Da donde viene, listed?" . . .
We came at dusk from the high shallows and saw on a low crest
the points of Indian tents, the tepees, and smoke, and silhouettes
of tethered horses and blanketed figures moving. In the shadow a
rider was following a flock of white goats that flowed like water.
The car ran to the top of the crest, and there was a hollow basin
with a lake in the distance, pale in the dying light. And this shal-


146 INDIANS AND AN ENGLISHMAN
low upland basin, dotted with Indian tents, and the fires flickering
in front, and crouching blanketed figures, and horsemen crossing
the dusk from tent to tent, horsemen in big steeple hats sitting glued
on their ponies, and bells tinkling, and dogs yapping, and tilted
wagons trailing in on the trail below, and a smell of wood-smoke
and of cooking, and wagons coming in from far off, and tents
pricking on the ridge of the round vallum, and horsemen dipping
down and emerging again, and more red sparks of fires glittering,
and crouching bundles of women's figures squatting at a fire before
a little tent made of boughs, and little girls in full petticoats hover-
ing, and wild barefoot boys throwing bones at thin-tailed dogs, and
tents away in the distance, in the growing dark, on the slopes, and
the trail crossing the floor of the hollows in the low dusk.
There you had it all, as in the hollow of your hand. And to my
heart, born in England and kindled with Fenimore Cooper, it
wasn't the wild and woolly West, it was the nomad nations gather-
ing still in the continent of hemlock trees and prairies. The Apaches
came and talked to us, in their steeple black hats, and plaits
wrapped with beaver fur, and their silver and beads and turquoise.
Some talked strong American, and some talked only Spanish. And
they had strange lines in their faces.
The two kivas, the rings of cut aspen trees stuck in the ground
like the walls of a big hut of living trees, were on the plain, at either
end of the race-track. And as the sun went down, the drums began
to beat, the drums with their strong-weak, strong-weak pulse that
beat on the plasm of one's tissue. The car slid down to the south
kiva. Two elderly men held the drum, and danced the pat-pat, pat-
pat quick beat on flat feet, like birds that move from the feet only,
and sang with wide mouths, Hie! Hie! Hie! Hy-a!Hy-a! Hy-a!
Hie! Hie! Hie! Ay-away-away!! Strange dark faces with wide,
shouting mouths and rows of small, close-set teeth, and strange lines
on the faces, part ecstasy, part mockery, part humorous, part devil-
ish, and the strange, calling, summoning sound in a wild song-
shout, to the thud-thud of the drum. Answer of the same from the
other kiva, as of a challenge accepted. And from the gathering
darkness around, men drifting slowly in, each carrying an aspen
twig, each joining to cluster close in two rows upon the drum, hold-
ing each his aspen twig inwards, their faces all together, mouths all
open in the song-shout, and all of them all the time going on the


D. H. LAWRENCE
H7
two feet, pat-pat, pat-pat, pat-pat, to the thud-thud of the drum
and the strange, plangent yell of the chant, edging inch by inch,
pat-pat, pat-pat, pat-pat, sideways in a cluster along the track,
towards the distant cluster of the challengers from the other kiva,
who were sing-shouting and edging onwards, sideways in the dusk,
their faces all together, their leaves all inwards, towards the drum,
and their feet going pat-pat, pat-pat, on the dust, with their but-
tocks stuck out a little, faces all inwards, shouting open-mouthed
to the drum, and half laughing, half mocking, half devilment, half
fun. Hie! Hie! Hie! Hie-away-awaya! The strange yell, song,
shout rising so lonely in the dusk, as if pine trees could suddenly,
shaggily sing. Almost a pre-animal sound, full of triumph in life,
and devilment against other life, and mockery, and humorousness,
and the pat-pat, pat-pat of the rhythm. Sometimes more youths
coming up, and as they draw near laughing they give the war-
whoop, like a turkey giving a startled shriek and then gobble-gob-
bling with laughter—Ugh!—the shriek half laughter, then the
gobble-gobble-gobble like a great demoniac chuckle. The chuckle
in the war-whoop.—They produce the gobble from the deeps of
the stomach, and say it makes them feel good.
Listening, an acute sadness, and a nostalgia, unbearable yearning
for something, and a sickness of the soul came over me. The gobble-
gobble chuckle in the whoop surprised me in my very tissues. Then
I got used to it, and could hear in it the humanness, the playfulness,
and then, beyond that, the mockery and the diabolical, pre-human,
pine-tree fun of cutting dusky throats and letting the blood spurt
out unconfined. Gobble-agobble-agobble, the unconfined loose
blood, gobble-agobble, the dead, mutilated lump, gobble-agobble-
agobble, the fun, the greatest man-fun. The war-whoop!
So I felt. I may have been all wrong, and other folk may feel
much more natural and reasonable things. But so I felt. And the
sadness and the nostalgia of the song-calling, and the resinous
continent of pine trees and turkeys, the feet of birds treading a
dance, far off, when man was dusky and not individualized.
I am no ethnologist. The point is, what is the feeling that passes
from an Indian to me, when we meet? We are both men, but how
do we feel together? I shall never forget that first evening when I
first came into contact with Red Men, away in the Apache country.
It was not what I had thought it would be. It was something of a


148 INDIANS AND AN ENGLISHMAN
shock. Again something in my soul broke down, letting in a bitterer
dark, a pungent awakening to the lost past, old darkness, new ter-
ror, new root-griefs, old root-richnesses.
The Apaches have a cult of water-hatred; they never wash flesh
or rag. So never in my life have I smelt such an unbearable sulphur-
human smell as comes from them when they cluster: a smell that
takes the breath from the nostrils.
We drove the car away half a mile or more, back from the
Apache hollow, to a lonely ridge, where we pitched camp under
pine trees. Our two Indians made the fire, dragged in wood, then
wrapped themselves in their best blankets and went off to the
tepees of their friends. The night was cold and starry.
After supper I wrapped myself in a red serape up to the nose,
and went down alone to the Apache encampment. It is good, on
a chilly night in a strange country, to be wrapped almost to the eyes
in a good Navajo blanket. Then you feel warm inside yourself, and
as good as invisible, and the dark air thick with enemies. So I stum-
bled on, startling the hobbled horses that jerked aside from me.
Reaching the rim-crest one saw many fires burning in red spots
round the slopes of the hollow, and against the fires, many crouch-
ing figures. Dogs barked, a baby cried from a bough shelter, there
was a queer low crackle of voices. So I stumbled alone over the
ditches and past the tents, down to the kiva. Just near was a shelter
with a big fire in front, and a man, an Indian, selling drinks, no
doubt Budweiser beer and grape juice, non-intoxicants. Cow-boys
in chaps and big hats were drinking too, and one screechy, ungentle
cow-girl in khaki. So I went on in the dark up the opposite slope.
The dark Indians passing in the night peered at me. The air was
full of a sort of sportiveness, playfulness, that had a jeering,
malevolent vibration in it, to my fancy. As if this play were an-
other kind of harmless-harmful warfare, overbearing. Just the an-
tithesis of what I understand by jolliness: ridicule. Comic sort of
bullying. No jolly, free laughter. Yet a great deal of laughter.
But with a sort of gibe in it.
This, of course, may just be the limitation of my European fancy.
But that was my feeling. One felt a stress of will, of human wills,
in the dark air, gibing even in the comic laughter. And a sort of
unconscious animosity.
Again a sound of a drum down below, so again I stumbled down


D. H. LAWRENCE
i49
to the kiva. A bunch of young men were clustered—seven or eight
round a drum, and standing with their faces together loudly and
mockingly singing the song-yells, some of them treading the pat-
pat, some not bothering. Just behind was the blazing fire and the
open shelter of the drink tent, with Indians in tall black hats and
long plaits in front of their shoulders, and bead-braided waistcoats,
and hands in their pockets; some swathed in sheets, some in bril-
liant blankets, and all grinning, laughing. The cow-boys with big
spurs still there, horses' bridles trailing, and cow-girl screeching her
laugh. One felt an inevitable silent gibing, animosity in each group,
one for the other. At the same time, an absolute avoidance of any
evidence of this.
The young men round the drum died out and started again. As
they died out, the strange uplifted voice in the kiva was heard. It
seemed to me the outside drumming and singing served to cover the
voice within the kiva.
The kiva of young green trees was just near, two paces only. On
the ground outside, boughs and twigs were strewn round to prevent
any one's coming close to the enclosure. Within was the firelight.
And one could see through the green of the leaf-screen, men round
a fire inside there, and one old man, the same old man always facing
the open entrance, the fire between him and it. Other Indians sat in
a circle, of which he was the key. The old man had his dark face
lifted, his head bare, his two plaits falling on his shoulders. His
close-shutting Indian lips were drawn open, his eyes were as if half-
veiled, as he went on and on, on and on, in a distinct, plangent, reci-
tative voice, male and yet strangely far-off and plaintive, reciting,
reciting, reciting like a somnambulist, telling, no doubt, the history
of the tribe interwoven with the gods. Other Apaches sat round the
fire. Those nearest the old teller were stationary, though one
chewed gum all the time and one ate bread cake and others lit ciga-
rettes. Those nearer the entrance rose after a time, restless. At
first some strolled in, stood a minute, then strolled out, desultory.
But as the night went on, the ring round the fire inside the wall of
green young trees was complete, all squatting on the ground, the
old man with the lifted face and parted lips and half-unseeing eyes
going on and on, across the fire. Some men stood lounging with the
half self-conscious ease of the Indian behind the seated men. They
lit cigarettes. Some drifted out. Another filtered in. I stood


i so INDIANS AND AN ENGLISHMAN
wrapped in my blanket in the cold night, at some little distance
from the entrance, looking on.
A big young Indian came and pushed his face under my hat to
see who or what I was.
"Buenos!"
'•Buenos.'"
"Que quiere?"
"No hablo espanol"
"Oh, only English, eh?—You can't come in here."
"I don't want to."
"This Indian Church."
"Is it?"
"I don't let people come, only Apache, only Indian."
"You keep watch?"
"I keep watch, yes; Indian church, eh?"
"And the old man preaches?"
"Yes, he preaches."
After which I stood quite still and uncommunicative. He waited
for a further development. There was none. So, after giving me
another look, he went to talk to other Indians, sotto voce, by the
door. The circle was complete, groups stood behind the squatting
ring, some men were huddled in blankets, some sitting just in trou-
sers and shirt, in the warmth near the fire, some wrapped close in
white cotton sheets. The firelight shone on the dark, unconcerned
faces of the listeners, as they chewed gum, or ate bread, or smoked a
cigarette. Some had big silver ear-rings swinging, and necklaces of
turquoise. Some had waistcoats all bead braids. Some wore store
shirts and store trousers, like Americans. From time to time one
man pushed another piece of wood on the fire.
They seemed to be paying no attention, it all had a very perfunc-
tory appearance. But they kept silent, and the voice of the old re-
citer went on blindly, from his lifted, bronze mask of a face with
its wide-opened lips. They furl back their teeth as they speak, and
they use a sort of resonant tenor voice, that has a plangent half-sad,
twanging sound, vibrating deep from the chest. The old man went
on and on, for hours, in that urgent, far-off voice. His hair was
grey, and parted, and his two round plaits hung in front of his
shoulders on his shirt. From his ears dangled pieces of blue tur-
quoise, tied with string. An old green blanket was wrapped round


D. H. LAWRENCE
above his waist, and his feet in old moccasins were crossed before
the fire. There was a deep pathos, for me, in the old, mask-like,
virile figure, with its metallic courage of persistence, old memory,
and its twanging male voice. So far, so great a memory. So daunt-
less a persistence in the piece of living red earth seated on the naked
earth, before the fire; this old, bronze-resonant man with his eyes
as if glazed in old memory, and his voice issuing in endless plangent
monotony from the wide, unfurled mouth.
And the young men, who chewed chewing gum and listened with-
out listening. The voice no doubt registered on their under-con-
sciousness, as they looked around, and lit a cigarette, and spat some-
times aside. With their day-consciousness they hardly attended.
As for me, standing outside, beyond the open entrance, I was
no enemy of theirs; far from it. The voice out of the far-off time
was not for my ears. Its language was unknown to me. And I did
not wish to know. It was enough to hear the sound issuing plangent
from the bristling darkness of the far past, to see the bronze mask
of the face lifted, the white, small, close-packed teeth showing all
the time. It was not for me, and I knew it. Nor had I any curiosity
to understand. The soul is as old as the oldest day, and has its own
hushed echoes, its own far-off tribal understandings sunk and in-
corporated. We do not need to live the past over again. Our dark-
est tissues are twisted in this old tribal experience, our warmest
blood came out of the old tribal fire. And they vibrate still in an-
swer, our blood, our tissue. But me, the conscious me, I have gone
a long road since then. And as I look back, like memory terrible as
bloodshed, the dark faces round the fire in the night, and one blood
bleating in me and them. But I don't want to go back to them, ah,
never. I never want to deny them or break with them. But there
is no going back. Always onward, still further. The great devious
onward-flowing stream of conscious human blood. From them to
me, and from me on.
I don't want to live again the tribal mysteries my blood has lived
long since. I don't want to know as I have known, in the tribal
exclusiveness. But every drop of me trembles still alive to the old
sound, every thread in my body quivers to the frenzy of the old
mystery. I know my derivation. I was born of no virgin, of no
Holy Ghost. Ah, no, these old men telling the tribal tale were my
fathers. I have a dark-faced, bronze-voiced father far back in the


152
EXCURSION
resinous ages. My mother was no virgin. She lay in her hour with
this dusky-lipped tribe-father. And I have not forgotten him. But
he, like many an old father with a changeling son, he would like to
deny me. But I stand on the far edge of their firelight and am
neither denied nor accepted. My way is my own, old red father;
I can't cluster at the drum any more.
EXCURSION
BY PEARL ANDELSON
I went from there:
that place where
I walked long grey streets
as one speaks of food, dress,
down other streets with less elation
than turning in the conversation
to other casual conversation.
Gay cottages, bloom on hillsides
of sand near Tamarack.
Below on the octoroon beach
clustering like grapes the bathers:
purple, orange, and maroon.
In the sand woods inland a spotted antelope stands
and waits,
and fluctuates,
among his spots.
The vertical waters flowing
horizontally with sky
and hills and into this my
going.
Sun
and moon, one.



BOXERS CLINCHING. BY WILLIAM ZORACH











FREEDOM IN EDUCATION: A PROTEST
AGAINST MECHANISM
BY BERTRAND RUSSELL
THE difference between the age in which we live and all pre-
vious ages is mainly due to the invention of machinery. It has
been found that machines will make satisfactory pins much more
easily than they could be made before. It has been inferred that
human beings also should be made by machinery, and that those
who do not like the machine-made product are old fossils who have
no place in the modern world. This view is influencing education
increasingly in all industrially advanced countries. The evils which
it entails are by no means confined to education, but it is the educa-
tional aspects that I propose to deal with on this occasion.
I believe that everything really valuable in the life of the mind
will be crushed out among the white races if the attempt to assimi-
late men to machines continues. Machines are admirable servants,
but until we have made them mere servants we shall not reap the
benefit of their services. At present they threaten to become our
masters, spiritually and materially. Against this tendency it is very
necessary to be on our guard, particularly as it shows itself in the
education to which the leading democracies of the world are sub-
jected.
There are two aims which an educational system may endeavour
to realize: to make good citizens, or to make good human beings.
Conceived broadly and philosophically, these two aims do not con-
flict; but conceived narrowly, as administrators are likely to con-
ceive them, they conflict very seriously. The man who is imbued
with the mechanistic outlook will try to make good citizens rather
than good men, and will conceive good citizenship in a way which
almost excludes good humanity. In the notion of good citizenship
as conceived by governments I see three disastrous errors:
First, each man or woman is conceived as the citizen of a single
State, not of the world;
Secondly, the State or the community is supposed to have a good
other and higher than that of its several citizens;


154
FREEDOM IN EDUCATION
Thirdly, the good is conceived as something which can be real-
ized by purely mechanical means, not as something dependent upon
the mental quality of individuals.
The first of these errors, namely nationalism, has no intrinsic
connexion with mechanism, but has been enormously strengthened
by the way in which industrialism has been developed nationally,
so that the connexion is very close in fact, if not in logic.
Of course the basis of any public educational system must be the
imparting of that necessary minimum without which a man cannot
play his part in a modern community. It is necessary that every-
body should be able to read and write, add up a column of figures,
and so on. As time goes on, the State increases the minimum of
knowledge, which may come gradually to be quite considerable.
But I am not concerned to discuss this basis, important as it is, since
it may be taken as agreed. I am concerned rather to discuss those
things as to which disagreement is possible.
In the course of instruction, a school-master has the opportunity
to instil certain mental habits. It is here that disagreement begins:
what mental habits shall he teach? There are all sorts of possi-
bilities. Jesuits, in the process of giving admirable instruction,
taught their pupils to accept unquestioningly the dogmas of the
Catholic Church. American elementary schools teach the children
to become i00 per cent Americans, i. e., to believe that America is
God's own country, its constitution divinely inspired, and its mil-
lionaires models of Sunday-school virtue. English elementary
schools teach that our Empire is great and beneficent, that it has
never oppressed India or forced opium on China, that it has been
invariably humanitarian in Africa, and that all Germans are
wicked. Russian elementary schools teach that communists are vir-
tuous, anarchists wicked, and the bourgeois misguided; that the
social revolution is imminent throughout Europe; and that there
cannot be any imperialism in the communist party because all im-
perialism is due to capitalism. The Japanese teach that the Mikado
is a divine being descended from the Sun Goddess; that Japan was
created earlier than other parts of the earth; and that it is therefore
the duty of the Chinese to submit meekly to whatever commands
the Japanese may lay upon them. I have no doubt that similar
doctrines are taught in Uruguay, Paraguay, and San Marino—each
of which is specially favoured by Heaven, and vastly more virtuous


BERTRAND RUSSELL
i55
than its neighbours. In short, wherever a sovereign government
exists, it uses its monopoly of the teaching of writing and reading
to force upon the young a set of ridiculous beliefs of which the pur-
pose is to increase their willingness to commit homicide. And for
the sake of these beliefs, mental habits of a peculiar kind are also
encouraged: credulity, blind prejudice, and group ferocity—all of
them characteristics natural to primitive man, which education
might have been expected to soften.
The governors of the world believe, and have always believed,
that virtue can only be taught by teaching falsehood, and that any
man who knew the truth would be wicked. I disbelieve this, abso-
lutely and entirely. I believe that love of truth is the basis of all
real virtue, and that virtues based upon lies can only do harm. Per-
haps I should in any case believe this as an article of faith, but in
fact there is abundant evidence of it. The case of nationalism is
admirable as an illustration. The text-books out of which history
is taught are known by every Education Minister in the world to
be deliberately and intentionally misleading owing to patriotic bias.
It is not merely that the history taught is false; the really bad
thing is that its falsehood is of a sort to make wars more likely.
Much is said by socialists, very justly, about the importance of in-
ternationalism in the economic sphere; but internationalism in the
educational sphere is at least as important. If children in all civi-
lized countries were taught the same history, different countries
would hate each other less, and no country would feel so confident
of victory in an appeal to arms. Text-books ought to be drawn up
by an international authority, which should direct the training of
historical teachers. The present practice increases each nation's be-
lief in its own righteousness and power and therefore its willing-
ness to go to war. Indeed this appears to be the reason for which
the present mendacious teaching exists. So great is this evil that it
may well be found, in the end, to outweigh all the good that is done
by instruction. The illiterate peasant in Russia or China is not a
nationalist, because he cannot realize anything so large or abstract
as his nation; when his country is at war, he regards it as an affair
of the government, in which his part is limited to reluctantly obey-
ing orders. This is the reason why Russia and China cannot do so
much harm to other countries as is done by England or France, or
was done by Germany. If Russia and China develop elementary


156 FREEDOM IN EDUCATION
education on the lines which Western nations have made familiar,
they will be able to rely upon their vast populations for the degree
of patriotic blindness which made the late war possible; and when
that happens the little nations of Western Europe will be sorry
that, like Macbeth, they taught
"Bloody instructions, which being taught return
To plague the inventor."
All the accumulation of horror which lies before us through the
growing virulence of nationalism would be prevented if education
aimed at teaching facts instead of fictions, or if education authori-
ties could conceive of boys and girls as future citizens of the world,
not only of the particular geographical area in which they happen
to live.
It would of course be unfair to put down the whole pugnacious
nationalism of our time to faulty education. Loyalty to one's
group, pride in its achievements (real or imaginary) and hostility
to rival groups, are all part of the instinctive apparatus of man.
All that has been done by education is to appeal to this instinct, and
to direct it into a certain channel. The men who direct education
are themselves subject to it, and do not consciously or deliberately
go against what they believe to be right. It is quite possible that,
when they come to realize the imminent collapse of Western civi-
lization as a result of their yielding to instinct, they may come to
understand that, in this respect as in many others, education ought
to aim at the control of crude instinct by a rational prevision of
consequences, and at the training of instinctive passions so as to
help rather than hinder the life of the world. At present, in private
life, very few of us are murderers, though in a savage community
of head-hunters most men are, and sometimes public opinion does
not allow a man to marry until he can produce at least one head
as a proof of his manly prowess. In such communities, everything
is done to strengthen the instinct towards private homicide, which
among ourselves is successfully repressed except in unusually vio-
lent people. But as regards public homicide, in war, the line taken
among ourselves is exactly analogous to that which head-hunters
take as regards private homicide. The methods which have enabled
us to overcome the instinct of private murder would enable us to


BERTRAND RUSSELL
»57
overcome the same instinct when it takes the form of love of war.
Such methods ought to be used in education, instead of the present
methods, which nourish the little seed of instinct until it grows into
the vast tree of national armament and international suspicion.
The feeling that mankind are all one family, and that the
division into nations is a trivial folly, could very easily be produced
in the average boy or girl if education were directed to that end. A
book like Wells' history of the world, which begins with the geo-
logical and biological antecedents of the human species, and treats
human progress always as a single movement to which many na-
tions have contributed, is likely to produce a far broader and more
humane outlook than chauvinistic teaching about Agincourt and
Trafalgar, or Lexington and Saratoga. Perhaps it may be necessary
to the due exercise of all our instincts to have some object of hatred.
In the middle ages, the Devil could be hated without harm to
human beings; but in our time few people have any vivid belief
in his existence, in spite of the war and the peace. We must there-
fore find some other non-human object of hatred, if men are to be
prevented from hating their neighbours in other countries. One
might hate matter, like the Manichaeans, or ignorance, or disease.
To hate these things would do good; and by a little symbolism it
could be made to satisfy our instinctive craving for hatred. But to
hate other groups of human beings can only do harm, and it is
monstrous that education should aim at instilling such hatred by
means of lies and suppressions. Yet such is the case in every one
of the great nations, except China, which is bullied and despised
in consequence.
I come now to the second error which, as I think, mechanism has
encouraged in our education: the error of imagining that the State,
or the community as a whole, is capable of some different kind of
good from that which exists in individuals, and that this collective
good is somehow higher than that which is realized in individuals.
This belief constitutes what I should propose to call the "adminis-
trator's fallacy." It is, of course, by no means a fallacy to suppose
that an individual can only enjoy the best life when he lives in a
community having certain qualities; I do not suggest that Robinson
Crusoe could have as good an existence as (say) an Athenian citizen
in the age of Pericles. (Perhaps the age of Pericles was really no
better than our own, but it is correct to suppose that it was good,


158
FREEDOM IN EDUCATION
and I accept the supposition for the sake of illustration.) The fal-
lacy that I am attacking is not the obvious truism that certain kinds
of communities are a means to good things in the lives of their citi-
zens, but the quite different proposition that, when account has been
taken of all the good things in individual lives, there remains some-
thing good or bad belonging to the State or community as a personi-
fied entity. This doctrine was preached by Hegel, and adopted by
his British disciples. It has an elaborate logical foundation, which
I believe to be wholly erroneous, for reasons which I have often
set forth. On the present occasion, it is its consequences, not its
premises, that I wish to examine.
Those who accept this theory of the peculiar value attaching to
States or communities as such call their theory the "organic" view
of society. This name is somewhat misleading, for it is of course
an obvious truism that a society is more or less organic, in the sense
that it has interrelated parts which minister to common ends, as the
parts of an animal's body minister to the life of the whole. The
obviousness of this fact makes people willing to accept without
much scrutiny a view which says that it is only asserting the organic
nature of society. But in fact the sociologists in question use the
word "organic" in a peculiar philosophical sense of their own.
They mean that a society is a single entity with a life of its own,
not merely a number of more or less co-operating interrelated per-
sons. They would argue that a person enjoys good things which
belong neither to his head nor to his arms nor to his great toe, but
to him as a single whole, and that, in like manner, the State enjoys
good things which are not to be found in the lives of single citizens.
And they generally contend also that the highest function of the citi-
zens is to minister to the life of the State, just as the highest func-
tion of the various organs of a man's body is to minister to the life
of the man. Thus our duty to the State becomes something more
imperative than our duty to our neighbour, and the good of the
State might conceivably have to be pursued by measures involving
injury to the great majority of its citizens.
In practice, this view leads to the advocacy of an aristocratic and
mechanical society. "The good of the State" is, in practice, "the
good of the statesman." I do not mean this in a crude sense: by the
"good of the statesman" I do not mean merely his wealth, or any
of the things which conventionally constitute the aims of self-in-


BERTRAND RUSSELL
i59
terested people. These things may, of course, be involved, but a
high-minded man will be on his guard against them. There are
other subtler forms of selfishness against which men are much less
on their guard, and to which they are likely to succumb uncon-
sciously. A man who is in the habit of thinking about the State finds
pleasure in contemplating a certain kind of State, and almost in-
evitably falls into the habit of thinking that this kind of State is
good. A man of administrative temperament finds pleasure in con-
templating a State in which there is a great deal of administration,
where there is a tidy system, and every person has his place as a cog
in the machinery. Such a State will be intolerable to men of dif-
ferent temperament, for instance to artists. But such men, just
because of their temperament, will not become politicians or civil
servants or captains of industry. Thus one kind of temperament,
and that not a very common one, is, in practice, alone concerned in
establishing what it considers the "good of the State." This kind
of temperament, so long as the "good of the State" is believed in,
will feel free to force its tastes upon the community, since they are
supposed to be the tastes of the personified State. This means a
persecution of decent people by busy-bodies, and a gradual crush-
ing out of art and thought and simple enjoyment of life.
Men who advocate what they call the "organic" view of the State
always imagine that what they believe in is an antithesis to mech-
anism. This is a most curious delusion. A machine is essentially
organic, in the sense that it has parts which co-operate to produce a
single useful result, and that these separate parts have no value on
their own account. A machine may not be so perfect an example of
an organism as an animal is, but we can make machines and we
cannot make animals. Therefore when we are exhorted to make
society "organic," it is from machinery that we shall necessarily
derive our imaginative models, since we do not know how to make
society a living animal. Moreover, nothing has done so much to
make communities organic as the introduction of mechanical indus-
trial processes, which have necessitated the co-operation of vast
organizations in great enterprises such as railways, and have made
men, through the need of commerce, far more dependent on other
men than they were in simpler times. Thus mechanism, in the con-
crete form of machinery, ministers to the belief in the "good of the
State," and in turn dictates the form which that belief is to take.


i6o
FREEDOM IN EDUCATION
The good of the State consists in having as much machinery as
possible, regardless of what it produces, whether useful commodi-
ties or poison gases.
It is interesting to note that the Bolsheviks, who, as disciples of
Marx, have retained what Marx retained of Hegel's teaching, are
among the most ardent believers in the good of the State as op-
posed to the good of the citizens. Their aim—I speak of those who
are public-spirited and not self-seeking—is to produce a certain
type of society, which they believe to be good in itself, quite regard-
less of the question whether it will bring happiness to those who
have to live in it. One cannot but observe (though they themselves
are unconscious of the fact) that the society they aim at would
bring happiness to vigorous administrators having a good position
in the official hierarchy, and probably to no one else. Similarly the
Kaiser and the Junkers sought the good of "Germany," as opposed
to the good of Germans; but it happened that the good of "Ger-
many," as they conceived it, coincided with that of the Kaiser and
the Junkers. And to come nearer home, those who glory in the
British Empire are willing that for its sake all its citizens should
suffer—excepting, of course, those who govern it, who will have
the pleasure of contemplating the sort of Empire that suits their
tastes. One might say the same of the industrial and financial mag-
nates in America, and of governing persons generally. All such
persons, unless they are very much on their guard against the ad-
ministrator's fallacy, will have a conception of the public good
which is unconsciously biased so as to secure their own good.
It is not merely the injustice of this view that constitutes its
harmfulness; it is still more (which was my third point) the second-
rate and mechanical quality of the goods valued by the ordinary
administrative temperament. The great artists, the great thinkers,
and the great religious teachers of the world have had quite other
standards: they have valued the individual, they have praised
spontaneous impulse, they have conceived the good life as one lived
from within, not forced into conformity to an external mechanism.
They have not sought to make men convenient material for the
manipulations of rulers, but to make them spiritually free to pur-
sue what they believed to be good, regardless of law and public
opinion. This was the teaching of Christ, of Buddha, of Lao-Tze;
in another form, the same emphasis on the individual is to be found


BERTRAND RUSSELL
i61
in Shakespeare, and in Galileo's resistance to the Inquisition. All
that is best in human life depends upon a certain kind of self-
respect, of self-determination; a man who has allowed outside pres-
sure to dictate the ends for which he shall live can never be more
than a slave.
Our modern State education is mainly designed to produce con-
venient citizens, and therefore dare not encourage spontaneity,
since all spontaneity interferes with system. There is a tendency to
uniformity, to the suppression of private judgement, to the produc-
tion of populations which are tame towards their rulers and fero-
cious towards "the enemy." Even if our civilization escapes de-
struction in great wars, this tendency of State education to produce
mental slavery will, if it is not checked, kill out everything of value
in the way of art and thought and even ultimately of human affec-
tion. And it inevitably kills the joy of life, which cannot exist
where spontaneity is dead.
It must not be supposed that democracy, by itself, offers any
cure for these evils, which come from the intensity of government
and are independent of its form. Wherever there is great intensity
of government, effective power is in the hands of officials, and the
bias of officials (apart from rare exceptions) is always towards
mechanism. A majority may be quite as oppressive as a minority;
and the champions of any new good thing will hardly ever be a
majority. £Room for individual initiative, absence of uniformity,
are essential conditions of progress; without them, society must
rapidly become stereotyped. The tyranny which threatens us in
the future is not so much that of any privileged class, as that of
the energetic people who like politics and administration. Formerly,
the power of such people was very limited; now, owing to in-
dustrialism and the consequent destructiveness of wars, the power
of the State is enormously greater than ever before in the history of
mankind. If there were only one world-wide State, the danger
would still exist, but would be easier to combat. Owing, however,
to the existence of many States, the main purpose of every great
State is success in war, and it is to this end that the immense power
of the State is chiefly devoted. This end is not served by the
preservation of individual initiative, and thus the tendencies to a
mechanical enslavement of ordinary men and women are enor-
mously strengthened by the need of preparing for war. It is impos-


l62
FREEDOM IN EDUCATION
sible to exaggerate the harmful influence of these tendencies upon
education in all the leading countries of the world.
It may be thought that I have strayed rather far from the subject
of education in the course of these remarks. But a system of educa-
tion embodies the ideals of the society which establishes it, and can-
not be radically reformed except by a reform of ideals. If I had to
direct the training of teachers, there are two things that I should
specially impress upon them:
First, that a man's public duty is towards mankind as a whole,
not towards any subordinate group such as a nation or class;
Second, that a good community is a community of good men and
women—of men and women, that is to say, who live freely, but not
destructively or oppressively.
As to the first point, I should try to bring about a realization of
the disaster which faces our civilization if science invents continu-
ally new means of destruction without being counteracted by a
simultaneous ethical advance. Many people see the danger, but few
are willing to dissociate themselves from the governmental and
popular forces which are making for new wars, and few are willing
to face the fact that patriotism, in its commoner forms, is the worst
vice of which a modern man can be guilty. To bring a realization
of these things should be part of the business of every educator; he
should try to teach impartiality of judgement, the habit of search-
ing for impersonal truth, and distrust of party catchwords. He
should try also to counteract the natural tendency to believe that
men belonging to opposing groups or nations are specially wicked.
Under the influence of skilful propaganda, our impulse to moral
indignation is exploited to make us hate those whom our masters
wish us to hate; and under the influence of the resulting hatred, we
do things which rouse the moral indignation of those whom we hate.
Thus moral indignation has become a source evil in the world.
Punishment is seldom the best way to deal with men's imperfec-
tions, and there is hardly any one so blameless as to have a right to
administer it. As things stand we know the sins of our enemies, but
not our own sins; thus indignation produces merely an increase of
mutual enmity. Americans, for example, know the atrocities of
which Japan has been guilty in Korea, which are unknown to nine
Japanese out of ten; Japanese, on the other hand, know the worst
that is to be said about the lynching of negros in America far better


BERTRAND RUSSELL i63
than Americans do. Thus hatred is stimulated on both sides, and
nothing is done on either side to check the evils. Indignation against
the criminal is seldom useful; what is useful is compassion for the
victim, and willingness to face the fact that it is not only our ene-
mies who make victims. I think, however, that in education it
would be more useful to dwell upon the interconnexion of different
parts of the world than upon what may be called humanitarian
arguments. It is easy to see and to teach that we cannot ruin our
enemies without ruining ourselves, and that, from mere self-
preservation, enmities between nations cannot continue if the world
is to maintain its present population.
As to the second point—the freedom of the individual—this is
quite peculiarly a matter for the educator, because the freedom that
we can hope to preserve is rather mental and spiritual than economic
or material. Industrialism has made it necessary that, in what con-
cerns the material side of life, men should co-operate in vast organ-
izations. It is just that the community should exact from every
able-bodied adult an amount of productive work corresponding to
what he or she consumes. It seems inevitable that, as regards this
necessary minimum of labour, there shall be less freedom in the
future than has been enjoyed hitherto by the fortunate minority.
But if we could abolish wars and armaments and advertisement
and the waste of commercial competition, we could all subsist com-
fortably on four hours' work a day. The rest of our time ought to
be free, and education ought to prepare us for an intelligent use of
the twenty hours a day during which we should be left to our own
initiative. In the future, as in the past, whatever form of socialism
or communism may be instituted, we must expect that all the best
work will be done voluntarily, without reward, owing to an im-
pulse from within. Given equal opportunity for all, we may hope
that there will be much more of such work than there has hitherto
been. But there will be none at all if the State, in its schools, sets
to work to mould the minds of the young according to a uniform
plan. There must be the utmost encouragement to freedom of
thought, even when it is inconvenient to bureaucrats. There must
be opportunities for voluntary teachers—especially after childhood
is past—who will teach because they wish to do so, and not merely
for a livelihood.
In everything that lies outside the provision of the necessaries of


i64
MOOD FOR PIANISTE
life, there must be individualism, personal initiative, variety. The
fight for freedom is not to be won by any mere change in our eco-
nomic system. It is to be won only by a constant resistance to the
tyranny of officials, and a constant realization that mental freedom
is the most precious of all goods. Mechanism has its place: its
place is the material side of life, the provision of the food and
clothes and houses without which we cannot live. But it has no
place in what makes life worth preserving, in art and thought, in
friendship and love, or in simple enjoyment. These things demand
freedom—not only outward freedom, but freedom in our minds and
hearts. Such freedom is too little respected in our schools and in
the schemes of our economic reformers. It is in danger of being lost
through the tyranny of purely material aims. But no perfection of
organization can ever compensate for its loss; and nothing can pre-
vent its loss unless we can remember that man cannot live by bread
alone.
MOOD FOR PIANISTE
BY CHARLES CHRISTOPH
In crazy mockery of brittle counterpoint
The master tosses his mischief into the long tops
Of the sycamores.
You will not let me rest?
I was young, I was young, and you wanted me to stay
Under the green garden-sky, never to lose the birds,
Never to sing except wild-bird ballads,
Ever to splash in the river like a bloated bullfrog.
I was young, I was young, but the time is done quickly—
Jingle of a scale glissando.


MANY MARRIAGES
BY SHERWOOD ANDERSON
VI
IN the semi-darkness of the room, as the man talked to his daugh-
ter trying to make her understand an intangible thing, the woman
who had been his wife for so many years and out of whose body had
come the younger woman who now sat close to her husband, began
also to try to understand. After a time, and being unable to stand
longer, she managed, without attracting the attention of the others,
to slip to the floor. She let her back slip down along the frame of
the door and her legs turned sideways under her heavy body. In
the position into which she had got she was uncomfortable and her
knees hurt, but she did not mind. There was in fact a kind of satis-
faction to be got from physical discomfort.
One had lived for so many years in a world that was now and
before one's very eyes being destroyed. There was something wicked
and ungodly in this business of defining life too sharply. Certain
things should not be spoken of. One moved dimly through a dim
world not asking too many questions. If there was death in silence,
then one accepted death. What was the use of denial? One's body
got old and heavy. When one sat on the floor the knees hurt. There
was something unbearable in this notion that a man, with whom
one had lived so many years of life and whom one had accepted
quite definitely as a part of the machinery of life, should suddenly
become something else, should become this terrible questioner, this
raker-up of forgotten things.
If one lived behind a wall one preferred life behind the wall.
Behind the wall the light was dim and did not hurt the eyes. Mem-
ories were shut out. The sounds of life grew faint and indistinct in
the distance. There was something barbaric and savage in all this
business of breaking down walls, making cracks and gaps in the wall
of life.
There was a struggle going on within the woman, Mary Webster,
also. A queer sort of new life came and went in her eyes. Had a


i66
MANY MARRIAGES
fourth person at that moment come into the room he might have
been more conscious of her than of the others.
There was something terrible in the way her husband John Web-
ster had set the stage for the battle that was now to go on within
her. The man was after all a dramatist. The business of buying the
picture of the Virgin and the candles, the making of this little stage
upon which a drama was to be played out; there was an unconscious
art expression in all this.
Perhaps he had outwardly intended nothing of the sort, but with
what devilish certainty he had worked. The woman now sat in a
half-darkness on the floor. Between her and the burning candles
was the bed on which the two others sat, one talking, the other listen-
ing. All the floor of the room, near where she sat was in heavy black
shadows. She had put one hand out against the door frame to help
support herself.
The candles on their high place flickered as they burned. The
light fell only on her shoulders, her head, and her upraised arm
and hand.
She was almost submerged in a sea of darkness. Now and then,
from sheer weariness her head fell forward and there was an effect
of sinking completely into the sea.
Still her arm was upraised and her head came back again to the
surface of the sea. There was a slight rocking movement to her
body. She was like an old boat, half waterlogged, lying in the sea.
Little fluttering waves of light seemed playing over her heavy white
upraised face.
Breathing was somewhat difficult. Thinking was somewhat diffi-
cult. One had gone along for years without thinking. It was better
to lie quietly in a sea of silence. The world was quite right in ex-
communicating those who disturbed the sea of silence. Mary Web-
ster's body quivered a little. One might kill, but had not the
strength to kill, did not know how to kill. Killing was a business
one had to learn too.
It was unbearable, but one had at times to think. Things hap-
pened. A woman married a man and then found, quite suddenly,
she had not married him. The world was getting strange unac-
ceptable notions about marriage. Daughters should not be told such
things as her husband was now telling their daughter. Could the
mind of a young virginal girl be raped by her own father, into


SHERWOOD ANDERSON
i67
consciousness of unspeakable things in life? If such things were
permitted what would become of all decent orderly living of lives?
Virginal girls should find out nothing about life until the time came
to live the things they must, being women, finally accept.
In every human body there is a great well of silent thinking al-
ways going on. Outwardly certain words are said, but there are
other words being said at the same time down in the deep hidden
places. There is a deposit of thoughts, of unexpressed emotions.
How many things thrown down into the deep well, hidden away
in the deep well.
There is a heavy iron lid clamped over the mouth of the well.
When the lid is safely in place one gets on all right. One goes about
saying words, eating food, meeting people, conducting affairs, accu-
mulating moneys, wearing clothes, one lives an ordered life.
Sometimes at night, in dreams, the lid trembles, but no one knows
about that.
Why should there be those who desire to tear the lids off the wells,
to break through the walls? Things had better be left as they are.
Those who disturb the heavy iron lids should be killed.
The heavy iron lid over the deep well that was within the body
of Mary Webster was trembling violently. It danced up and down.
The dancing light from the candles was like the little playful waves
on the surface of a calm sea. It met in her eyes another kind of
dancing light.
On the couch John Webster talked freely and easily. If he had
set the stage he had also given himself the talking role in the drama
that was to be played out upon it. His own thought had been that
everything that happened on that evening was directed towards his
daughter. He had even dared to think he might be able to rechan-
nel her life. Her young life was like a river that was still small
and made but a slight murmuring sound as it ran through quiet
fields. One might still step across the stream that was later,
when it had taken other streams into itself, to become a river. One
might venture to throw a log across the stream, to start it off in a
quite different direction. The whole thing was a daring, a quite
reckless thing to do, but one could not quite escape some such action.
Now he had dismissed from his mind the other woman, his former


168 MANY MARRIAGES
wife, Mary Webster. He had thought when she went out of the
bedroom she had finally walked off the stage. There had been satis-
faction in seeing her go. He had really, in all their life together,
never made a contact with her. When he thought her gone from
the field of his own life he felt relieved. One could breathe more
deeply, talk more freely.
He thought of her as having gone off the stage, but she had come
back. He still had her to deal with too.
In Mary Webster's mind memories were awakening. Her hus-
band was telling the story of his marriage, but she did not hear his
words. A story began to tell itself within her, beginning far back on
a day of her own young womanhood.
She had heard the cry of love for a man come out of her daugh-
ter's throat and the cry had stirred something within her so deeply
that she had come back into the room where her husband and daugh-
ter sat together on the bed. Once there had been that same cry with-
in another young woman, but for some reason it had never got itself
out, past her lips. At the moment when it might have come from
her, at that moment long ago when she lay naked on a bed and
looked into the eyes of a young naked man something, a thing
people called shame, had come between her and the getting of that
glad ery past her lips.
Her mind now wearily went back over the details of the scene. -
An old railroad journey was retravelled.
Things were tangled. First she lived in one place and then, as
though pushed into the act by a hand she could not see, she went on
a visit to another place.
The journey there was taken in the middle of the night and, as
there were no sleeping-cars on the train, she had to sit in a day-
coach through several hours of darkness.
Outside the car window there was darkness, broken now and then
when the train stopped for a few minutes at some town in Western
Illinois or Southern Wisconsin. There was a station building with
a lamp fastened to the outer wall and sometimes but a solitary man,
bundled in a coat and perhaps pushing a truck piled with trunks
and boxes along a station platform. At some of the towns people got
aboard the train and at others people got off and went away into
the darkness.


SHERWOOD ANDERSON
i69
An old woman who carried a basket in which there was a black
and white cat came to sit in the seat with her and after she had got
off at one of the stations an old man took her place.
The old man did not look at her, but kept muttering words she
'could not catch. He had a ragged grey moustache that hung down
over his shrunken lips and he continually stroked it with a bony old
hand. The words he said in an undertone were muttered behind
the hand.
The young woman of that railroad journey, taken long ago, had,
after a time, fallen into a half-waking, half-sleeping state. Her
mind had run ahead of her body to her journey's end. A girl she
had known at school had invited her for a visit and there had been
several letters written back and forth. Two young men would be in
the house all during the time of the visit. —
One of the young men she had already seen. He was her friend's
brother and had once come on a visit to the school where the two
girls were students.
What would the other young man be like? It was curious how
many times she had already asked herself that question. Now her
mind was making fanciful pictures of him.
The train ran through a country of low hills. Dawn was com-
ing. It would be a day of grey cold clouds. Snow threatened. The
muttering old man of the grey moustache and the bony hand had
got off the train.
The half-awake eyes of the tall slender young woman looked out
over low hills and long stretches of flat land. The train crossed a
bridge over a river. She slipped into sleep and was jerked out again
by the starting or stopping of the train. Across a distant field a
young man was walking in the grey morning light.
Had she dreamed there was a young man going across a field be-
side the train or had she actually seen such a man? In what way
was he connected with the young man she was to meet at her jour-
ney's end?
It was a little absurd to think the young man in the field could be
of flesh and blood. He walked at the same pace the train was going,
stepping lightly over fences, going swiftly through the streets of
towns, passing like a shadow through strips of dark woodland.
When the train stopped he also stopped and stood looking at her
and smiling. One almost felt he could go into one's body and come


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MANY MARRIAGES
out smiling thus. The idea was strangely sweet too. Now he walked
for a long time on the surface of the waters of a river alongside
which the train was running.
And all the time he looked into her eyes, darkly, when the train
passed through a forest and it was dark inside the train, with a smile
in his eyes when they came out again into the open country. There
was something in his eyes that invited, called to her. Her body
grew warm and she stirred uneasily in the car seat.
The trainmen had built a fire in a stove at the end of the car
and all the doors and windows were closed. Evidently it was not
going to be such a cold day after all. It was unbearably hot in the
car.
She got out of her seat and, clutching at the edges of other seats,
made her way to the end of the car where she opened a door and
stood for a time looking at the flying landscape.
The train came to the station where she was to get off and there,
on the station platform, was her girl friend, come to the station on
the odd chance she would come on that train.
And then she had gone with her friend into the strange house and
her friend's mother had insisted she go to bed and sleep until even-
ing. The two women kept asking how it had happened she had
come on that train and as she could not explain she became a little
embarrassed. It was true there was another and faster train she
might have taken and had the entire ride in the day-time.
There had just been a kind of feverish desire to get out of her
own town and her mother's house. She had been unable to explain
that to her own people. One couldn't tell one's mother and father
she just wanted to get out. In her own home there had been a con-
fusion of questions about the whole matter. Well, there she was,
being driven into a corner and asked questions that couldn't be
answered. She had a hope that her girl friend would understand and
kept hopefully saying to her what she had said over and over rather
senselessly at home. "I just wanted to do it. I don't know, I just
wanted to do it."
In the strange house she had got into bed to sleep, glad to escape
the annoying question. When she awoke they would have forgotten
the whole matter. Her friend had come into the room with her and
she wanted to dismiss her quickly, to be alone for a time. "I'll not


SHERWOOD ANDERSON
i7i
unpack my bag now. I think I'll just undress and crawl in between
the sheets. It's going to be warm anyway," she explained. It was
absurd. Well she had looked forward to something quite different
on her arrival, laughter, young men standing about and looking a
little self-conscious. Now she only felt uncomfortable. Why did
people keep asking why she had got up at midnight and taken a slow
train instead of waiting until morning? One wanted sometimes just
to be a fool about little things, and not to have to give explana-
tions. When her friend went out of the room she threw off all her
clothes and got quickly into bed and closed her eyes. It was another
foolish notion she had, her wanting to be naked. Had she not taken
the slow uncomfortable train she would not have had the fancy
about the young man walking beside the train in the fields, through
the streets of towns, through forests.
It was good to be naked sometimes. There was the feel of things
against one's skin. If one could only have the joyful feeling of that
more often. One could sink into a clean bed, sometimes, when one
was tired and sleepy and it was like getting into the firm warm arms
of someone who could love and understand one's foolish impulses.
The young woman in the bed slept and in her sleep was again
being carried swiftly along through the darkness. The woman with
the cat and the old man who muttered words did not appear again,
but many other people came and went through her dream-world.
There was a swift tangled march of strange events. She went for-
ward, always forward towards something she wanted. Now it ap-
proached. A great eagerness took possession of her.
It was strange that she wore no clothes. The young man who
walked so swiftly through fields had reappeared, but she had not
noticed before that he also did not wear clothes.
The world had grown dark. There was a dusky darkness.
And now the young man had stopped going swiftly forward and
like herself was silent. They both hung suspended in a sea of si-
lence. He was standing and looking directly into her eyes. He could
go within her and come out again. The thought was infinitely sweet.
She lay in a soft warm darkness and her flesh was hot, too hot.
"Someone has foolishly built a fire and has forgotten to open the
doors and windows," she thought vaguely.
The young man, who was now so close to her, who was standing
silently so close to her and looking directly into her eyes, could


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MANY MARRIAGES
make everything all right. His hands were within a few inches of
her body. In a moment they would touch, bring cool peace into her
body, into herself too.
There was a sweet peace to be got by looking directly into the
young man's eyes. They were glowing in the darkness like little
pools into which one could cast oneself. A final and infinite peace
and joy could be got by casting oneself into the pools.
VII
John Webster was telling a story. There was a thing he himself
wanted to understand. Wanting to understand things was a new
passion, come to him. What a world he had lived in always and
how little he had wanted to understand it. Children were being born
in towns and on farms. They grew up to be men and women. Some
of them went to colleges, others, after a few years in the town or
country schools, got out into life, married perhaps, got jobs in fac-
tories or shops, went to church on Sundays or to a ball game, became
parents of children.
Everyone told things, talked of things they thought interested
them, but no one told truths. At school there was no attention paid
to truth. What a tangle of other and unimportant things. "Two
and two make four. If a merchant sell three oranges and two apples
to a man and oranges are to be sold at twenty-four cents per dozen j
and apples at sixteen how much does the man owe the merchant?"
An important matter indeed. Where is the fellow going with the
three oranges and two apples1? He is a small man in brown boots
and has his cap stuck on the side of his head. There is a peculiar
smile playing about his mouth. The sleeve of his coat is torn. What
did that? The cuss is singing a song under his breath. Listen:
"Diddle de di do,
Diddle de di do,
Chinaberries grow on a Chinaberry tree.
Diddle de di do."
What in the name of the bearded men, who came into the queen's,
bed-chamber when the king of Rome was born, does he mean by
that? What is a Chinaberry tree?


SHERWOOD ANDERSON
i73
John Webster talked to his daughter, sat with his arm about her
talking, and back of him, and unseen, his wife struggled and fought
to put back into its place the iron lid one should always keep tightly
clamped down on the opening of the well of unexpressed thoughts
within oneself.
There was a man who had come naked into her naked presence in
the dusk of the late afternoon of a day long ago. He had come in to
her and had done a thing to her. There had been a rape of the un-
conscious self. That had been in time forgotten or forgiven, but
now he was doing it again. He was talking now. Of what was he
talking? Were there not things of which one never talked? For
what purpose the deep well within oneself except that it be a place
into which one could put the things that must not be talked about?
Now John Webster was trying to tell the whole story of his at-
tempt at love-making with the woman he had married.
The writing of letters containing the word "love" had come to
something. After a time, and when he had sent off several such let-
ters written in the hotel writing-rooms, and just when he was begin-
ning to think he would never get an answer to one of them and
might as well give the whole matter up, an answer had come. Then
there had burst from him a flood of letters.
He was still then going about from town to town trying to sell
washing machines to merchants, but that only took a part of each
day. There was left the late afternoons, mornings when he arose
early and sometimes went for a walk along the streets of one of the
towns before breakfast, the long evenings and the Sundays.
He was full of unaccountable energy all through that time. It
must have been because he was in love. If one were not in love one
could not feel so alive. In the early mornings, and in the evenings
as he walked about, looking at houses and people, everyone suddenly
seemed close to him. Men and women came out of houses and went
along the streets, factory whistles blew, men and boys went in and
out at the doors of factories.
He was standing by a tree on a strange street of a strange town in
the evening. In a nearby house a child cried and a woman's voice
talked to it in low tones. His fingers gripped the bark of the tree.
He wanted to run into the house where the child was crying, to take
the child out of its mother's arms and quiet it, to kiss the mother


i74
MANY MARRIAGES
perhaps. What a thing it would be if he could only go along a
street shaking men by the hand, putting his arms about the shoul-
ders of young girls.
He had extravagant fancies. There might be a world in which
there were new and marvellous cities. He went along imagining
such cities. For one thing the doors to all the houses were wide open.
Everything was clean and neat. The sills to the doors of the houses
had been washed. He walked into one of the houses. Well, the
people had gone out, but on the chance some such fellow as himself
would wander in they had set out a little feast on a table in one of
the rooms down stairs. There was a loaf of white bread with a carv-
ing-knife lying beside it so that one could cut off slices, cold meats,
little squares of cheese, a decanter of wine.
He sat alone at the table to eat, feeling very happy, and after his
hunger had been satisfied carefully brushed away the crumbs and
fixed everything nicely. Some other fellow might come along later
and wander into the same house.
The fancies young Webster had during that period of his life
filled him with delight. Sometimes he stopped in his night walks
along dark residence streets and stood looking up at the sky and
laughing.
There he was in a world of fancies, in a place of dreams. His
mind plunged him back into the house he had visited in his dream-
world. What curiosity there was in him in regard to the people
who lived there. It was night, but the place was lighted. There
were little lamps one could pick up and carry about. There was a
city, wherein each house was a feasting place and this was one of
the houses and in its sweet depths things other than the belly could
be fed.
One went through the house feeding all the senses. The walls
had been painted with strong colours that had now faded and be-
come soft and mellow with age. The time had passed in America
when people continually built new houses. They built houses
strongly and then stayed in them, beautified them slowly and with
a sure touch. One would perhaps rather be in such a house in the
day-time when the owners were at home, but it was fine to be there
alone and at night too.
The lamp held above one's head threw dancing shadows on the
walls. One went up a stairway into bedrooms, wandered in halls,


SHERWOOD ANDERSON
i75
came down the stairs again, and putting the lamp back into its place
passed out at the open front door.
How sweet to linger on the front steps for a moment, having more
dreams. What of the people who lived in the house? In one of the
bedrooms up stairs he had fancied he knew that a young woman
slept. Had she been in the bed and asleep when he came into the
house and wandered about and had he walked in on her, what would
have happened?
Might there be in the world, well, one might as well say in some
world of the fancy—perhaps it would take too much time for an
actual people to create such a world—but might there not be a
people, in the world of one's fancy, a people who had really devel-
oped the senses, people who really smelled, saw, tasted, felt things
with their fingers, heard things with their ears? One could dream of
such a world. It was early evening and for several hours one did not
have to go back to the little dirty town hotel.
Some day there might be a world inhabited by people who lived.
There would be, then, an end of continual mouthings about death.
People would take life up firmly like a filled cup and carry it until
the time came to throw it away over the shoulder with a gesture.
They would realize that wine was made to drink, food to eat and
nourish the body, the ears to hear all manner of sounds, the eyes to
see things.
Within the bodies of such people what unknown senses might
there not be developed. Well, it might very well be that a young
woman, such as John Webster was trying to fancify into existence,
that on such evenings such a young woman might be lying quietly in
a bed in an upper chamber of one of the houses along the dark street.
One went in at the open door of the house and taking up the lamp
went to her. One could fancy the lamp itself as a thing of beauty
too. There was a small ring-like arrangement through which one
slipped the finger. One wore the lamp like a ring on the finger. The
little flame of it was like a jewel shining in the darkness.
One went up the stairs and into the room where the woman was
lying on the bed. The light, held swinging slightly in the quiet air,
shone into the eyes of the woman. There was a long slow time when
the two people looked quietly at each other.
There was a question being asked. "Are you for me? Am I for
you?" People had developed a new sense, many new senses. People


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MANY MARRIAGES
saw with their eyes, smelled with their nostrils, heard with their ears.
The deeper-lying, buried away senses of the body had been devel-
oped too. Now people could accept or dismiss one another with a
gesture. There was no more slow starvation of men and women.
Long lives did not have to be lived during which one knew, and
then but faintly, a few half-golden moments.
There was something about all this having fancies closely con-
nected with his marriage and with his life since his marriage. He
was trying to make that clear to his daughter, but it was difficult.
There had been that moment once, when he had gone into the
upper room of a house and had found a woman lying before him.
There had been a question come suddenly and unexpectedly into his
own eyes and it had found a quick eager answer in hers.
And then, the devil, it was hard to get things straight. In some
way a lie had been told. By whom? There had been a poison he
and the woman had breathed together. Who had blown the cloud
of poison vapour into the air of that upper bed-chamber?
The moment had kept coming back and back into the mind of
the young man. He walked in streets of strange towns having
thoughts of coming into the upper bed-chamber of a new kind of
womanhood.
Then later he went to the hotel and sat for hours writing letters.
To be sure he did not write out the fancies he had been having.
Oh, had he but had the courage to do that. Had he but known
enough to do that.
What he did was to write the word "love," over and over rather
stupidly. "I went walking and I thought of you and I loved you so.
I saw a house I liked and I thought of you and me living in it as
man and wife. I am sorry I was so stupid and blundering when I
saw you that other time. Give me another chance and I will prove
my 'love' to you."
What a betrayal! It was John Webster himself who had, in the
end, poisoned the wells of truth at which he and the woman would
have to drink as they went along the road towards happiness.
He hadn't been thinking of her at all. He had been thinking of
the strange mysterious woman lying in the upper bed-chamber in
the city of the land of his fancy.
Everything got started wrong and then nothing could be set


SHERWOOD ANDERSON
i77
straight again. One day a letter came from her and then, after writ-
ing a great many other letters, he went to her town to see her.
There was a time of embarrassment and then the past was ap-
parently forgotten. They went to walk together under the trees in
a strange town. Later he wrote more letters and came to see her
again. One night he asked her to marry him.
The very devil! He didn't even take her into his arms when he
asked her. There was a kind of fear involved in the whole matter.
"I'd better not after what happened before. I'll wait until we're
married. Things will be different then." One had a notion. It was
that after marriage one became something quite different from what
one had been before and that the beloved one also became some-
thing quite different.
And so he had managed to get married, having that notion; and
he and the woman had set out together upon a wedding trip.
John Webster held his daughter's body closely against his own
and trembled a little. "I had some notion in my head that I had
better go slow," he said. "You see, I had already frightened her
once. We'll go slow here,' I kept saying to myself, 'well, she doesn't
know much about life, I'd better go pretty slow.'"
The memory of the moment of his marriage stirred John Web-
ster profoundly.
The bride was coming down a stairway. Strange people stood
about. All the time, down inside the strange people, down inside all
people everywhere, there was thinking going on of which no one
seemed aware.
"Now you look at me, Jane. I'm your father. I was that way.
All these years, while I've been your father, I've been just like that.
"Something happened to me. A lid was jerked off something
somewhere in me. Now, you see, I stand, as though on a high hill
and look down into a valley where all my former life has been lived.
Quite suddenly, you understand, I know all the thoughts I've been
having all of my life.
"You'll hear it said. Well, you'll read it in books and stories
people write about death. 'At the moment of death he looked back
and saw all his life spread out before him.'
"Ha! That's all right, but what about life? What about the mo-
ment when, having been dead, one comes back into life?"


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MANY MARRIAGES
John Webster had got himself excited again. He took his arm
from about his daughter's shoulder and rubbed his hands together.
A slight shivering sensation ran through his body and through the
body of his daughter. She did not understand what he was saying,
but in a queer sense that did not matter. They were at the moment
deeply in accord. This having one's whole being suddenly become
alive, after years of a kind of partial death, was a strain. One had
to get a kind of new balance to the body and mind. One felt very
young and strong and then suddenly old and tired. Now one was
carrying his life forward as one might carry a filled cup through a
crowded street. All the time one had to remember, to keep in mind,
that there must be a certain relaxation to the body. One must give
and swing with things a little. That must always be borne in mind.
If one became rigid and intense at any time, except at the moment
when one cast one's body into the body of his beloved, one's foot
stumbled or one knocked against things and the filled cup one carried
was emptied with an awkward gesture.
Strange thoughts kept coming into the mind of the man as he
sat there on the bed trying to get himself in hand. One might so
very easily become one of the kind of people one saw everywhere
about, one of the kind of people whose empty bodies went walking
everywhere in towns and cities and on farms, "one of the kind of
people whose life is an empty cup," he thought and then a more
majestic thought came and steadied him. There was something he
had heard or read about sometime. What was it? "Arouse not up
or awaken my love 'til he please," a voice within him said.
Again he began the telling of the story of his marriage.
"We went off on our wedding trip to a farm-house in Kentucky,
went there in the sleeping car of a train at night. I kept thinking
about going slow with her, kept telling myself all the time I'd better
go slow so that night she slept in a lower berth while I crept into
the one above. We were going on a visit to a farm owned by
her uncle, by her father's brother, and we got to the town, where
we were to get off the train, before breakfast in the morning.
"Her uncle was waiting with a carriage at the station and we
drove off at once to this place in the country where we were to
visit."
John Webster told with great attention to details the story of


SHERWOOD ANDERSON
i79
the arrival of the two people at the little town. He had slept but
little during the night and was very aware of everything going on
about him. There was a row of wooden store buildings that led
up from the station and, within a few hundred yards, it became a
residence street and then a country road. A man in his shirt sleeves
walked along the sidewalk on one side the street. He was smok-
ing a pipe, but as the carriage passed he took the pipe out of his
mouth and laughed. He called to another man who stood before
the open door of a store on the opposite side of the street. What
strange words he was saying. What did they mean? "Make it
fancy, Eddie," he called.
The carriage containing the three people drove quickly along.
John Webster had not slept during the night and there was a kind
of straining at something within him. He was all alive, eager. Her
uncle on the front seat was a large man, like her father, but living
as he did out of doors had made the skin of his face brown. He also
had a grey moustache. Could one get acquainted with him? Would
one ever be able to say intimate confidential things to him?
For that matter would one ever be able to say intimate confiden-
tial things to the woman one had married? The truth was that all
night his body had been aching with anticipation of a coming love-
making. How odd that one did not speak of such matters when one
had married women out of respectable families in respectable Illi-
nois manufacturing towns. At the wedding everyone must have
known. That was no doubt what the young married men and
women were smiling and laughing about, behind the walls, as it
were.
There were two horses hitched to the carriage and they went
soberly and steadily along. Now the woman who had become John
Webster's bride, was sitting up, very straight and tall on the seat
beside him and she had her hands folded in her lap. They were
nearing the edge of town and a boy came out at the front door of
a house and stood on a little porch staring at them with blank
questioning eyes. There was a large dog asleep beneath a cherry
tree beside another house a little further along. He let the carriage
get almost past before he moved. John Webster watched the dog.
"Shall I get up from this comfortable place and make a fuss about
that carriage or shall I not?" the dog seemed to be asking himself.
Then he sprang up and racing madly along the road began barking


i8o
MANY MARRIAGES
at the horses. The man on the front seat struck at him with the
whip. "I suppose he made up his mind he had to do it, that it was
the proper thing to do," John Webster said. His bride and her
uncle both looked at him with questioning eyes. "Eh, what's that?
What'd you say?" the uncle asked, but got no answer. John Web-
ster felt suddenly embarrassed. "I was only speaking of the dog,"
he said presently. One had to make some kind of explanation. The
rest of the ride was taken in silence.
It was late on that same afternoon that the thing to which he had
been looking forward with so much hope and doubt came to a kind
of consummation.
Her uncle's farm-house, a large comfortable white frame build-
ing, stood on the bank of a river in a narrow green valley and hills
rose up before and behind it. In the afternoon young Webster and
his bride walked past the barn, back of the house, and got into a lane
that ran beside an orchard. Then they crawled over a fence and
crossing a field got into a wood that led up the hillside. There was
another meadow above and then another wood that covered the top
of the hill quite completely.
It was a warm day and they tried to talk as they went along, but
did not succeed very well. Now and then she looked at him shyly,
as though to say, "The road we are thinking of taking in life is very
dangerous. Are you quite sure you are a safe guide?"
Well he had felt her questioning and was in doubt about the
answer to be made. It would have been better no doubt had the
question been asked and answered long ago. When they came to a
narrow path in the wood, he let her walk ahead and then he could
look at her quite boldly. There was fear in him too. "Our self-
consciousness is going to make us muddle everything," he thought.
It was hard to remember whether he really had thought anything
so definite at that time. He was afraid. Her back was very straight
and once when she stooped to pass under the limb of an overhang-
ing tree, her long slender body going down and up made a very
lovely gesture. A lump came into his throat.
He tried to keep his mind fixed on little things. There had been
rain a day or two before and little mushrooms grew beside the path.
In one spot there was a whole army of them, very graceful and with
their caps touched with tender splashes of colour. He picked one of
them. How strangely pungent to the nostrils. He wanted to eat it,


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181
but she was frightened and protested. "Don't," she said. "It may
be a poison one." For a moment it seemed they might, after all, get
acquainted. She looked directly at him. It was odd. They had
not yet called each other endearing names. They did not address
each other by any name at all. "Don't eat it," she said. "All right,
but isn't it tempting and lovely," he answered. They looked at each
other for a moment and then she blushed, after which they went on
again along the path.
They had got out upon the hill where they could look back over
the valley and she sat with her back against a tree. Spring had
passed, but, as they walked through the wood, there had been, on all
sides, a sense of new growth springing up. Little green, pale green
things were just pushing their way up from among the dead brown
leaves and out of the black ground and on trees and bushes there
was a sense of new growth too. Were new leaves coming or had
the old leaves but begun to stand up a little straighter and more
firmly because they had been refreshed? It was a thing to think
about too, when one was puzzled and had before him a question
wanting answering and that he could not answer.
They were on the hill now and as he lay at her feet he did not
need to look at her, but could look down across the valley. She
might be looking at him and having thoughts just as he was, but
that was her own affair. One did well enough to have one's own
thoughts, straighten out one's own matters. The rain that had fresh-
ened everything had stirred up many new smells in the wood. How
fortunate there was no wind. The smells were not blown away, but
were lying low, like a soft blanket over everything. The ground had
a fragrance of its own and with it was blended the fragrance of de-
caying leaves and of animals too. There was a path along the top
of the hill along which sheep sometimes went. Little piles of sheep-
droppings were lying in the hard path back of the tree where she
sat. He did not turn to look, but knew they were there. The sheep-
droppings were like marbles. It was good to feel that within the
compass of his love of smells he could include all life, even the ex-
cretions of life. Somewhere in the wood there was a kind of flower-
ing tree. It couldn't be far away. The fragrance from it mingled
with all the other smells floating over the hillside. The tree was
calling to the bees and insects who were answering with mad eager-
ness. They flew swiftly along, in the air over John Webster's head,
over her head too. One put off other things to play with thoughts.


l82
MANY MARRIAGES
One pitched little thoughts into the air idly, like boys at play,
pitched and then caught them again. After a while, when the proper
time came, there would be a crisis come into the lives of John Web-
ster and the woman he had married, but now one played with
thoughts. One pitched them into the air and caught them again.
People went about knowing the fragrance of flowers and a few
other things, spices and the like, they had been told by the poets
were fragrant. Could walls be erected about smells too? Was there
not a Frenchman once who wrote a poem regarding the fragrance of
the arm-pits of women? Was that something he had heard talked
about among the young men at school or was it just a fool idea that
had come into his own head?
The thing was to get the sense of the fragrance of all things, of
earth plants peoples animals birds insects, all together in the mind.
One could weave a golden mantle to spread over the earth and over
people. The strong animal smells, taken with the smell of pine
trees and all such heavy odours, would give the mantle strength to
wear well. Then upon the basis of that strength one could turn his
fancy loose. Now was the time for all the minor poets to come run-
ning. On the solid basis John Webster's fancy had built, they could
weave all manner of designs, using all the smells their less sturdy
nostrils dare receive, the smell of violets beside woodland paths, of
little fragile mushrooms, of honey dripping from the sacks under the
bellies of insects, of the hair of maidens fresh come from the bath.
After all John Webster, a man of the middle age, was sitting on
a bed with his daughter talking of an experience of his youth. In
spite of himself he was giving the tale of that experience a curiously
perverted twist. No doubt he was lying to his daughter. Had that
young man on the hillside, in the long ago, had the many and com-
plicated feelings with which he was now endowing him?
Now and then he stopped talking and shook his head while a
smile played across his face.
How firmly now things were arranged between himself and his
daughter. There was no doubt a miracle had been wrought.
He even fancied she knew he was lying, that he was throwing a
certain mantle of romance over the experience of his young man-
hood, but he fancied she knew also that it was only by lying to the
limit he could come at truth.
To be concluded


NOVICES
BY MARIANNE MOORE
anatomize their work, like Will Wimble who was jilted by a
duchess,
the little assumptions of the scared ego confusing the issue
so that they do not know "whether it is the buyer or the seller who
gives the money"—
an abstruse idea plain to none but the artist,
the only seller who both buys, and holds on to the money.
Because one expresses oneself and entitles it wisdom, one is not a
fool. What an idea!
Dracontine cockatrices, "perfect and poisonous from the beginning,"
they present themselves as a contrast to seaserpented regions "unlit
by the half-lights of more conscious art."
Acquiring at thirty what at sixty they will be trying to forget,
blind to the right word, deaf to satire
which like "the smell of the cypress strengthens the nerves of the
brain,"
averse to the antique
with "that tinge of sadness about it which a reflective mind always
feels,
it is so little and so much,"
they write the sort of thing that would in their judgement interest a
lady—
curious to know if we do not adore each letter of the alphabet that
goes to make a word of it—
according to the Act of Congress, the sworn statement of the treas-
urer and all the rest of it—
the counterpart to what we are:
stupid man; men are strong and no one pays any attention:
stupid woman; women have charm and how annoying they can be.
Yes, "the authors are wonderful people, particularly those that
write the most,"
the masters of all languages, the supertadpoles of expression.
Accustomed to the recurring phosphorescence of antiquity,


i84
NOVICES
the "much noble vagueness and indefinite jargon" of Plato,
the lucid movements of the royal yacht upon the learned scenery of
Egypt-
king, steward, and harper seated amidships while the jade and the
rock crystal course about in solution,
their suavity surmounts the surf—
the willowy wit, the transparent equation of Isaiah, Jeremiah,
Ezekiel, Daniel.
Bored by "the detailless perspective of the sea," reiterative and
naive,
and its chaos of rocks—the stuffy remarks of the Hebrews—
the good and alive young men demonstrate the assertion
that it is not necessary to be associated with that which has bored
one;
they have never made a statement which they found so easy to
prove—
"split like a glass against a wall"
in this "precipitate of dazzling impressions,
the spontaneous unforced passion of the Hebrew language—
an abyss of verbs full of reverberation and tempestuous energy,"
in which action perpetuates action and angle is at variance with
angle
till submerged by the general action;
obscured by fathomless suggestions of colour,
by incessantly panting lines of green, white with concussion,
in this drama of water against rocks—this "ocean of hurrying con-
sonants"
with its "great livid stains like long slabs of green marble,"
its "flashing lances of perpendicular lightning" and "molten fires
swallowed up,"
"with foam on its barriers,"
"crashing itself out in one long hiss of spray."



IMAGINARY PORTRAIT. BY STUART DAVIS






THE PHILOSOPHERS. BY STUART DAVIS





LONDON LETTER
January^ iQ23
HE peculiar flavour of London is probably fully perceptible
A only to foreigners. Their descriptions of it are always surpris-
ing to those of us who are indigenous, but a fish is no judge of the
saltness of the sea, and perhaps no Londoner is properly equipped
to write a London Letter. Still a short sojourn abroad will always
render one's eye more appreciative for the moment of those charac-
teristics which make London londonien. And if we use our eyes, in-
stead of taking all for granted, we perceive a strange spiritual
atmosphere, and the correspondences that it bears with the material
city. We see the grey or golden haze that softens every contour,
and stains and patches the London stone to its particular beauty;
and the absence of all plan that we English cherish so fondly as "a
sweet disorder." So that our architecture is the unblended mixture
of four ages. The Age of Brick, which dignified the town with well-
proportioned and beautifully unadorned houses; the Age of Stucco
which began with the delightful Regency, and did not spend its
force till it had covered all Bayswater with genteel Terraces, and
all Belgravia with well-bred Squares; the Age of Terra-cotta which
mottled the town with railway stations that masquerade as mediae-
val Cloth-Halls, and mansions that sport the dress of mediaeval
Utrecht or Nuremberg; and, now, the Age of Steel, which buries its
strength and dignity skin-deep, beneath the dullest and most
thoughtless perversions of Palladio. And this same genius of dis-
order makes England in the other arts the least academic of all
countries. In painting we have an Academy, but its only tradition
is one of chaos. Literature and the Theatre make their way without
Authority attempting to subsidize, co-ordinate, encourage, govern,
or even condemn, them. The result is a City which has much
squalor, and some charm; and a population of which the cleverer
part are, I think, very decently individual, and the stupider part,
the least intelligent in Europe.
But the destroyers are always at work, and London becomes
monthly less like itself, and more like Berlin or Madrid. What


i86
LONDON LETTER
remains from the agreeable Past is rapidly disappearing, and we
are not allowed in its stead the buildings which make New York a
vision of distinction and towered grace (at least to those unhappy
ones of us who have never been there). The buildings designed by
Nash to beautify London and please the Regent, a hundred years
or so back, are going, and much of London's domestic character goes
with them. Mr Max Beerbohm alone could fitly sing their dirge.
Our Mermaid Tavern is going too, they say. For how many years
I cannot say, more than thirty, the Cafe Royal has been one of the
pivots of London life. In its restaurant is to be found the best food
in London; and in its smoke-room, with its tarnished, shameless,
bare-breasted Cariatides; its painted ceiling, its garish mirrors, and
its red plush banquettes, you can imagine yourself anywhere on the
Continent of Europe—Munich or Milan, Barcelona or Toulouse.
"The Cafe" has always been the General Headquarters of the Bo-
hemian Staff in their wars against Philistia—the place where the
English could forget that they were in London, where they could
feel alien; and disreputable; and artistic. There Wilde and Harris,
Douglas and Bernard Shaw enacted once a dramatic scene; there
Enoch Soames sipped his quotinoctial absinthe; there, later, Augus-
tus John resorted; and there, too, modern painters go. It has been
described by a hundred novelists, and if it is now to be rebuilt we
may yet be respected in our old age, if for nothing else, because we
can describe to posterity, how we too were once in this Arcadia.
For "The Cafe" has symbolized all the richness that life may have
in store for the young, all the memories that bring vicarious pleas-
ure to the old. "The affected and the disaffected" made it their
meeting-ground. It was the Montmartre of London, where Rodolfo
met his Mimi, and Julien led his Louise. It has been ridiculous,
perhaps, but never contemptible. For it has fed that hunger for the
strange and foreign which affects most Anglo-Saxons, which drove
into exile Landor and Shelley, Byron and the Brownings, and
which, had it been stronger in Tennyson, might have made him
greater than he was.
The Autumn was not interesting. It brought a new volume of
Georgian Poetry which grows, I won't say duller, but less widely
representative, and more the organ, like Wheels, of a highly tal-
ented group. It brought from Mr A. E. Housman, after twenty-five
years of silence, his second book of poems, subtler in rhythm than


RAYMOND MORTIMER
i87
The Shropshire Lad, and equally provocative of curiosity. Perhaps
some American psychologist will try to solve this riddle? It brought
a virtuoso translation of the first volume of the incomparable and
never sufficiently to be lamented Proust. It brought from Virginia
Woolf a new and exciting novel. It brought Lady Into Fox, with
which Mr David Garnet has established himself as one of the few
writers to whose next book it is possible to look forward. And it
brought The Criterion, a new quarterly, the high qualities of which
I presume are already known to readers of The Dial. But it did
not bring from The London Mercury its long awaited opinion of
the merits or faults of Ulysses.
In the Theatre there have been various revivals; Marlowe and
Massinger have been played again with success; and so has Pinero.
Mrs Patrick Campbell has drawn us to the outer suburbs with her
strange but beautiful idea of Hedda Gabler. But the finest theatri-
cal company in the world has not thought it worth while to come
here on its way from Paris to New York. It is, I suppose, not sur-
prising that our managers have not had the enterprise to bring to
London the Moscow Art Theatre, since the most brilliant of Stan-
islawsky's pupils and rivals, Theodore Komisarjevsky, was allowed
by them to leave London and go to New York. Since the Theatre
Guild has, I understand, been enterprising enough to secure his
services, may I suggest that they get him to produce The Cenci? It
was obvious that it contained some of Shelley's finest poetry; now a
London performance of it, for which we were grateful, in spite of
the unnecessary vulgarity of the production, has revealed how in-
tensely effective it is upon the stage, and what superb acting parts
it contains. Every line is highly charged, though here it needed an
amateur (who played the Count) to extract all their meaning from
his lines. Most of the professionals spouted their lines by rote, in-
telligently as school-children. It seems clear that the only chance
for the London theatre is some development of an amateur society.
We envy New York its Theatre Guild even more than its sky-
scrapers.
Raymond Mortimer


DUBLIN LETTER
January, i923
SEVERAL interesting additions have been made to Anglo-Irish
literature since my last letter, the most important being perhaps
Mr Yeats' The Trembling of the Veil, already known to readers of
The Dial, and possibly destined on account of its extreme care for
style no less than of its subject-matter—especially its literary por-
traits—to a distinguished place of its own in the history of the
Silver Age of English Literature. Another work in which there is a
like Silvery regard for style is Mr George Moore's In Single Strict-
ness, which deserves a study all to itself. Mr Moore is accomplish-
ing a memorable feat in his Collected Edition: he is assembling
around him his spiritual offspring, begotten of various moods and
influences, and installing them in the mansion of that new art which
he has elaborated for himself late in life. The prevailing character-
istic of that art is a certain cold recollectedness, and some of the
family will I think rebel against wearing the garb of uniformity
which he insists they shall assume, and will refuse or be refused
admission: for example, I think he will have trouble with A Mum-
mer's Wife, and will find the individuality of that most stirring
of his creations too refractory to conform. But Celibates obeys
beautifully, and is baptized into a new life and transformed into
an entirely new set of stories, with only a few pages clinging to it
of its old unregenerate days. It is, the more one thinks of it, a won-
derful feat. Another important accession to Irish literature is The
Interpreters by A. E. Then, from the other side of the Atlantic,
comes Mr Padraic Colum's second collection of his poetic work.
Also, there is a novel, Wet Clay, by the late Seumas O'Kelly, whost
Weaver's Grave is among Irish short stories what Synge's Playboy
is among Irish plays. Lastly, there is the new edition of Ireland's
Literary Renaissance, in which Mr Boyd has to find a place in his
scheme for some rather disconcerting new material—I refer to that
monument of Mr James Joyce's sardonic industry, Ulysses.
The conception of A. E.'s work is grandiose. He imagines a re-
volt of the Workers of the World in a coming age in which all men


JOHN EGLINTON
i89
"sought for the source and justification of their own activities
in that divine element in which matter, energy and consciousness
when analysed disappeared. It was an era of arcane speculation,
for science and philosophy had become esoteric after the visible uni-
verse had been ransacked and the secret of its being had eluded the
thinkers. Heyt was high in the councils of the world state. On
such men as upon deities converged all the forces of protest, and
to them also came all that was to be said in support of state policy
by the thinkers who, as priesthoods have always done, supported
established authority."
A. E. contrives that in an attempt to quell this revolt, which fills
the skies with aerial armaments, certain of its leaders, representing
different theories of society—and amongst them, through a charac-
teristically stupid mistake of military authority, Heyt himself—
are thrust into a cell together, and in the expectation of immediate
death call upon one another to render an account of the faith that
is in them. For A. E.'s ability to perform the task he has set himself
we have Mr Yeats' testimony in The Trembling of the Veil, that
Russell has "beyond any man he has ever known," the power of pre-
senting opposite opinions with perfect fairness. And in fact, like
Milton, A. E. has inadvertently made something of a hero of his
diabolic character Heyt, the Imperialist, into whose mouth he has
put an excellent statement of the case for the conquering races.
But if A. E.'s nationalists are to be taken as the exponents of
Irish political idealism, a foreign reader might be excused for
thinking that we are so dreadfully serious here in Ireland that we
have forgotten how to live. True seriousness, above all in philo-
sophical dialogue, should be debonair, sympathetic, ironic, and so
more convincing than when it is declamatory and hierophantic; and
in reading A. E., one has the feeling—for want, no doubt, of some
preliminary and smiling Socratic examination of the meaning of
the terms employed—that it is an attempt to grapple with problems
which do not exist. "What relation have the politics of time to the
politics of eternity?" it asks. The latter term of the question jars a
little: we should aspire, surely, to contemplate the divine order
of the City of God rather than to study its politics. But A. E. pre-
supposes that God, or the gods, control the destinies of mankind
through the agency of divinely constituted races and nations, cer-


190
DUBLIN LETTER
tain of which—in particular one island race in the west of Europe
whose name has appeared much in the newspapers of late—retain
the tradition of their divine origin. The politics of eternity, we
are given to understand, are those which ensure the free develop
ment of nations, and within nations of individuals, according to
their pre-ordained and separate destinies. Imperialism—repre-
sented especially by another notorious neighbouring island—is dia-
bolic, because it obliterates these divinely appointed race-distinc-
tions. Unfortunately, all races and nations conceive themselves to
have received a peculiar divine mandate to increase and multiply,
and are we to suppose that the very fruition of the divine blessing
turns into a curse? Do the gods (be it asked without irreverence)
never make a success of any of their proteges? Do those whom the
gods love always die? Even if we admit that Ireland, in so far as
it remembers its ancient language and culture, goes back in mem-
ory to the gods, what has become of the Anglo-Saxon divinities
(who by the way still give their names to the days of the week for
half the world)? A. E.'s real problem is whether national ideals
can be reconciled with the ideal of a world-state, which he thinks
prefigured in the growth of armaments and mechanical contrivances.
I certainly agree with him in holding that they cannot, and that
nationality is sacrosanct: though when it comes to claiming that one
nation is nearer the gods than another, I feel it to be no more than
to say that a taller man than myself is nearer the sun.
The question of the value to general culture of race and nation-
ality is as complicated as any question of economics, and it must be
remembered that if the world seems poorer through the loss of some
old culture like the Gaelic, the capital value which that culture
represents may not really be diminished: for are we to suppose that
if a nation changes its language, the fountains of national expres-
sion are necessarily sealed up? On the contrary, a thousand new
springs may be called into play, and this is, I believe, what has
happened in Ireland as a result of the general adoption of the
English language. In fact, such causes as the revival of the Gaelic
language and culture would probably have a good deal less to fear
from the institution of a world-state, which by relieving small
countries of political responsibility might leave them free to attend
exclusively to spiritual ideals, than from that Revolt of the


JOHN EGLINTON
i9i
Workers of the World, which A. E. seems to expect will bring the
Ideal everywhere into its kingdom.
Ireland is in many respects a little Russia: what will realized
ideals bring to both these countries intellectually and spiritually?
I happen to have been reading a life of the marvellous Dostoevsky,
and I have been impressed not only by the divine resilience of
human nature to human injustice exhibited in his story, but by the
impossibility of conceiving him in any more favourable mundane
circumstances. Will Russian idealism make a discovery like that
which we commonly make about the hated years of discipline in a
public school in boyhood, that after all that was our experience of
pure happiness? Political independence, which after all is only
adult national responsibility, when represented as an ideal, has a
symbolic value chiefly: or rather, its ideal value lies in the fact that
it is supposed to include spiritual fulfilments. But the spirit which
fostered these is precisely that which is most likely to be forfeited:
the spirit of submissiveness to some kind of authority, enforced in
boyhood, but seldom maintained in maturity, least of all deliber-
ately adopted. This is the spirit of Dostoevsky, a writer who, it is
said, has fallen out of favour in emancipated Russia because of the
Christian submissiveness which adapted itself in an almost servile
manner to the iniquities of the old regime in Russia. But happy are
those nations which in their period of youthful discipline have
communed with their true ideals, and expressed them! Happy
would Ireland now be if in the period of the penal laws or later, it
had produced its Dostoevsky! Then political liberty would have
had its true symbolic value: as it is, the symbol has the place in
Ireland of the thing signified.
There is a symbolic interest in the appointment of Mr W. B.
Yeats as a Senator under the new government. Plato said that his
ideal republic would have a real existence only when philosophers
became kings: in Ireland it is the poet who should be crowned, as
long ago Yeats indicated in his play of Seanchan Torpeist, in
which that poet insisted on his right to take precedence of "bishops,
soldiers and makers of the law," and even to the bestowal of the
crown itself. Anyhow, the acceptance by Mr Yeats of senatorial
dignity indicates that Irish idealism is now so far satisfied. Kath-
leen ni Houlihan is at last in possession again of three of her "four


192
DUBLIN LETTER
beautiful green fields," and I hope that the fourth will not begin
to take in her mind a disproportionate poetic and symbolic value,
merely because it remains for the present in the hands of a some-
what surly kinsman. At present there is every sign that Kathleen
will soon be bustling about her house like any good housewife, and
will even learn to shrug her shoulders when reminded of the bad
old days, in which perhaps she was not really so unhappy as she
thought. And I hope that she will in time speak sharply enough to
those of her poets and dreamers who would still keep Ireland a
land of mockery and forlorn idealism.
John Eglinton


BOOK REVIEWS
CHINA AND THE WEST
The Problem of China. By Bertrand Russell. i2mo.
260 pages. The Century Company. $2.
"DEFORE his visit to China Mr Russell had been in Russia.
While journeying on the Volga he realized how "profound is
the disease in our Western mentality"—a mentality which even
then the Rolsheviks were trying to force upon an essentially Asiatic
population. The disease springs from excess of energy and its ra-
tionalizations. "Our industrialism, our militarism, our love of
progress, our missionary zeal, our imperialism, our passion for domi-
nating and organizing, all spring from a superflux of the itch for
activity." The company on the Volga boat was "noisy, quarrelsome,
full of facile theories, with glib explanations of everything." Yet
one of the company lay at death's door, and "all around us lay a
great silence, strong as death, unfathomable as the heavens. It
seemed that none had the leisure to hear the silence, yet it called to
me so insistently that I grew deaf to the harangues of propagandists
and the information of the well-informed."
One night while the vocal and futile arguing was going on, the
boat stopped and Mr Russell went ashore, and in the silence found
"on the sand a strange assemblage of human beings. . . . The
flickering flames lighted up gnarled, bearded faces of wild men;
strong, patient, primitive women, and children as slow and sedate
as their parents. . . . To me they seemed to typify the very
soul of Russia, unexpressive, inactive from despair, unheeded by the
little set of westernizers who make up all the parties of progress or
reaction. . . . Something of the patient silence was commu-
nicated to me, something lonely and unspoken remained in my heart
all through the comfortable familiar intellectual talk. And at last
I began to feel that all politics are inspired by a grinning devil,
teaching the energetic and quick witted to torture submissive popu-


i94
CHINA AND THE WEST
lations for the profit of pocket or power or theory. . . . From
time to time I heard sad songs or the haunting music of the bala-
laika; but the sound mingled with the great silence of the steppes,
and left me with a terrible questioning pain in which Occidental
hopefulness grew pale. It was in this mood that I set out for China
to seek a new hope."
The passage gives more than the background of Mr Russell's
experience in China of which this book is a fruit. It is a symbol of
the Problem of China, which in Mr Russell's treatment becomes the
problem of our Western civilization. The noisy, doctrinaire, assert-
ive, cocksure, propagandizing set of passengers is Western mentality
going headlong to destruction. China is the brooding silence of
nature, calm—indolent perhaps, but still tranquil in soul—tolerant,
possessed of an unbroken instinctive sympathy with nature and
power to draw consolation and happiness from simple things, con-
tent with death as with life because free from the corroding egotism
of the West.
The book, of course, is more than an expatiation on this philo-
sophic theme. It is a remarkably clear and condensed account of
the historical forces and factors which have led up to the present
situation in the Far East together with an analysis of the present
situation. The report supplements his personal experience with a
judicious and discriminating use of secondary sources. As a result,
the book is to me the most enlightening, as a matter of information
and comment, of all the many works which have been recently writ-
ten to put Western readers in touch with the issues of the Far East.
It is extraordinarily well done; so well done in fact that only those
who by some personal experience recognize the difficulties which
have been overcome, will perceive how well it is done.
But those who extract information from the book will miss its
chief significance if they do not find on almost every page the haunt-
ing refrain of the note sounded in the passage quoted. Through
"industrialism and the high pressure at which most of us live" we
have lost that "instinctive happiness and joy of living" which
China has retained. "Our prosperity can be obtained only by wide-
spread oppression and exploitation of weaker nations, while the
Chinese are not strong enough to injure other countries, and they
secure whatever they enjoy by means of their own merits and exer-


JOHN DEWEY
195
tions alone. . . . By valuing progress and efficiency we have
secured power and wealth; by ignoring them, the Chinese, until we
brought disturbance, secured upon the whole a peaceable existence
and a life full of enjoyment. . . . The Chinese have discov-
ered, and have practised for many centuries, a way of life which, if
it could be adopted by all the world, would make all the world
happy. We Europeans have not. Our way of life demands strife,
exploitation, restless change, discontent and destruction." And
America, it should be added, is Europe at its worst because it is
Europe at its peak of energy, efficiency, and proselytizing intoler-
ance, plus a complacent and impenetrable self-righteousness which
in Europe is beginning to crumble. America presents the acme of
the mechanistic outlook, "something which exists equally in impe-
rialism, Bolshevism and the Y. M. C. A. . . . the habit of
regarding mankind as raw material, to be molded by our scientific
manipulation into whatever form may happen to suit our fancy
. . . the cultivation of will at the expense of perception." It
is belief in government, in a life against nature, in the desirability
of conversion to one's own point of view and creed that Chinese
culture has escaped.
Discriminating Chinese would probably be the first to admit that
Mr Russell has idealized their civilization, slighted its defects and
exaggerated its excellences. China tends to become an angel of light
to show up the darkness of Western civilization. Chinese virtues
are made a whip of scorpions with which to lash the backs of com-
placent Westerners. I do not regard this fact, however, as a serious
defect. For my own experience in China convinces me that Mr
Russell has justly stated the direction in which Chinese excellence
exists, even though, in his soul's revulsion against the stupidities of
the West, he has overstated its degree of attainment. And I do not
find it in me to differ with Mr Russell as to the extent and urgency
of the need in the West to pause and to learn from the Orient. A
ground of complaint lies elsewhere, I think. His method permits
Mr Russell to make a lucid exposition of the external, or political
and economic, problem of China—with a lucidity which, emerging
in an obscure world, must always be close, as it is with Mr Russell,
to irony. For, of course, it is precisely the restless predatory energy
of the Occident which in itself and as communicated to Japan has
created the present political and industrial problems of China.


i96
CHINA AND THE WEST
With biting precision and his accustomed artistry of selection and
elimination Mr Russell has depicted this situation to all who still
have eyes to see.
But the internal and deeper problem of China, that of the trans-
formation of its own culture and institutions, Mr Russell hardly
seems to touch. He mentions indeed some of the bad consequences
of their family system, the lack of science in their tradition, their
callousness. But he appears content to dismiss them with the re-
mark that they have not brought in their train consequences as
tragic as the defects of the Western mind have brought to the
Western world. This may be quite true; and for one who is chiefly
interested in the West perhaps it suffices. I cannot see however
that it throws much light upon the problem of China as that exists
for the Chinese. A sense of the deepest problem of China as it
exists in the consciousness of thoughtful Chinese is what one misses
in Mr Russell's pages. As a good European, he is perhaps chiefly
interested in European culture and what Europe has to learn from
Asia; in comparison the stupendous and marvellous problem of the
intrinsic remaking of the oldest, thickest, and most extensive civi-
lization of the world does not attract his attention.
It would be churlish to quarrel with Mr Russell for what he has
not done, in the view of what he has done so well. But the world
still needs, although probably no one but a Chinese can give it to
the world, a picture of the most wonderful drama now enacting
anywhere in the world, and, I sometimes think, the most wonderful
as well as the most difficult to bring to conclusion of any that human
history has yet witnessed. Contact with the West has induced in
China a ferment of reawakening, a true Renaissance. I rarely met
a Chinese who, with all his sense of the unjust and cruel problems
which the exploiting, aggressive West had forced upon China, who
with all his sense of the evils of Western materialism, nationalism,
and egotistic individualism, was without a grateful recognition of
an awakening due to Western influence—an awakening which
seemed necessary to prevent further decay of what was good in old
culture as well as necessary to a new and richer life. The ultimate
"Problem of China" concerns, it seems to me, the question of what
is to win in the present turmoil of change: the harsh and destructive
impact of the West, or the internal re-creation of Chinese culture in-
spired by intercourse with the West.
John Dewey


A PROFESSIONAL NOVELIST
Anne Severn and the Fieldings. By May Sinclair.
i2mo. 320 pages. The Macmillan Company. $2.
MISS SINCLAIR practises the profession of novelist as if it
were any other profession, and that at once distinguishes her
from her contemporaries. For her there exists a corpus of known
facts, as in any science; for her, and almost for her alone, every
discovery, every development, every variation is of importance,
and she no more hesitates to use them than a reputable bacteriologist
would hesitate to take advantage of the discoveries of a confrere.
The result might be shocking if Miss Sinclair hadn't, in the first
place, mastered nearly everything that mattered in the tradition;
her intelligence is so active that she understands all the new meth-
ods of treating fiction almost as soon as the methods are put into
operation by their creators, and her feeling for the technical side of
her work—the same feeling which makes a house-painter reach for
the brush in the hands of an amateur—is so keen that she must try
everything at least once. It is this that led Mr Mortimer, when he
reviewed Harriett Frean, to say that whenever a n«w book by Miss
Sinclair appears "we wonder what it will be like this time; or rather
whom." Miss Sinclair encourages us to wonder, and this time grati-
fies our curiosity with quite a surprise: Mr D. H. Lawrence.
If this be damning with faint praise, the enemies of Miss Sin-
clair may make the most of it. For myself I see nothing reprehensi-
ble in the series of parallels which the reader must draw between
her work and the work of Dorothy Richardson or Miss Mansfield or
Mr Lawrence. For she has learned everything and has forgotten
nothing of importance. It remains for her to see that all she has
learned is eventually integrated, and some signs of this process are
visible in Anne Severn and the Fieldings.
A none too subtle sign of this integration is the reappearance of
the locale of Mr Waddington of Wyck and of some of the charac-
ters of The Romantic. The new novel is built on the relations be-
tween a girl and a family; it is in theme far more definite and far
more extensive than the work Mr Lawrence has recently done, and
only in one episode, the crucial one of the book, does Mr Law-


198 A PROFESSIONAL NOVELIST
rence's influence appear. Each of the eighteen chapters develops,
through conversation, action, description, analysis, or a combina-
tion of these methods, the relation between Anne and one or more
of the others—the three sons of the house, their father and mother,
the two wives brought into the circle—and nothing could be more
skilful than the choice of method, the change from one to the other,
the variation of gravity, tempo, atmosphere. A little less delicate is
the series of parallels in the book. As in Doctor Graesler, each
woman serves only as a level from which the protagonist ap-
proaches the next one, so here the death of a pet animal is a level
from which the death of the father is reached; and the false rumour
of a liaison between Anne and Colin is an approach to the actual
liaison between her and Jerrold; it is the art of preparation almost
as practised in a play, and one feels it isn't quite necessary—the
drama of the love-affair between Anne and Jerrold has actually
been prepared long before when Jerrold married another woman
because of his suspicions of Anne.
It is possible that a good deal of the dislike for Ulysses is due to
this: that the path of civilization is the way of increasing complex-
ity of human relationships; and Ulysses—the same thing is true
of some of Mr Lawrence's later work and may explain the com-
parative popularity of Aaron's Rod where relations are varied and
complex—is fiercely a book of isolated individuals, with a hidden
relationship difficult to arrive at and to understand. However lov-
ingly Henry James treated his characters, it was their relationships
which interested him most, of A to B, and of C, aware of B, to A,
and so on. No one who has read them thinks of the later works as
problems in arrangements—they were that to the author alone.
And Miss Sinclair has attempted a similar problem and very nearly
brought it off. The entrain of the action let her forget Colin entirely
when his function as an actor was over; the incidence of passion
she treats for itself, at times, more than for its effect upon the way
in which its victims regard each other. But in the main the book is
a success—and to it contribute those elements which one takes for
granted in Miss Sinclair's work—a decency, a brightness, a dignity,
and the acute observation of human beings. One could wish that she
would not allow herself to use phrases which, fatally one knows it,
will be cliches in a year or two; it is true one respects them in her
pages—but she has the honour of the profession, as the only expert
professional, in her hands.
Vivian Shaw


BAROJA MUZZLED
The Quest. By Pio Baroja. Translated by Isaac
Goldberg. i2mo. joo pages. Alfred A. Knopf. $2.50.
NO European literature suffered more than the Spanish from the
rigid optimist grin that overspread the novel in the nineteenth
century. From the time when the Byronic outburst that had fol-
lowed the failure of the first revolution had evaporated in tears and
pistol shots to the late 'nineties, everything was good humour, taste,
and gentility. A writer was a well-bred person in a stock who hurt
no one's feelings and told comical stories enlivened with an occa-
sional tear for the benefit of prosperous merchants and their clerks
and wives. Facetiousness and genre were the keynotes. The genial
fatuity of the novels of Valdes and Juan Valera is almost incredi-
ble. A tremendous epic sense of events hardly saved Galdos from
the same doldrums. It took the entire police court docket of murder,
rape, and lunacy to wipe the smile off the face of Echegaray. Fun-
nily enough it was the sugar trust and "Remember the Maine" that
first shattered the complacent dream of order and progress. The
jolt of the disasters of the war brought a new generation into con-
sciousness. This was the famous generation of '98, men who read
German and English and forgot to go to mass, and who started
about everything that is going on in thought and writing in Spain
to-day. A half a dozen of Baroja's novels will probably remain
their most solid and typical expression.
Baroja was of a hardheaded seagoing race, studied medicine, read
Dickens, Dostoevsky, Stendhal, Nietzsche, scorned the pomp and
rhetoric of the professional literary man, and admired scientific
thought above everything. He felt intensely the restlessness and
disruption of the world about him in which the middle classes,
dazed and bloated by the tremendous power and riches a century's
industrial growth had brought them, were already losing control.
An era was speeding to a climax. The early twentieth century was
to bring decisive and sublime events. In all this there was no time
for urbanity or literary punctilio. Writing should be colloquial,
sarcastic, acid. A novelist was an advance agent of revolution who
measured out and described what was to be. destroyed.


200
BAROJA MUZZLED
This novel, The Quest, is the first of a trilogy called La Lucha
por la Vida (The Struggle for Existence) that follows the history
of a servant-girl's son through stratum after stratum of work and
poverty. The narrative rambles with the casualness of a rogue ro-
mance of the seventeenth century through the slums and back lanes
and cheap eating houses of Madrid. Manuel, the central figure,
first helps his mother in the boarding-house where she works, is
thrown out of there for flirting with the landlady's daughter, is put
to work for a shoemaker, falls in with all sorts of hobos and raga-
muffins, is apprenticed to a greengrocer, is a baker's assistant, tries
a hand at burglary, joins the claque at a theatre, is befriended by
an elderly rag-picker and his wife, and is finally driven out of the
last refuge of their house by the teasing fury of his love for their
daughter who won't look at him. At the end he is completely down
and out.
These novels are written in a language wilfully casual and un-
literary. They are full of slang and racy talk. Baroja, like Dos-
toevsky, must one time have read much Dickens, for there appear
the strangest echoes, as in the description of the boarding-house
clock in the beginning of The Quest. But Dickens could never have
told such a plain unvarnished tale.
It is a shame that, at a time when American writing could gain
a great deal from the impact of Baroja's tart simplicity, his work
should be foisted on us in such a muddy disguise. When some thou-
sand years from now Americanologists try to decipher the incon-
ceivable mass of print they will find in the ruins of Mr Carnegie's
libraries they will be much puzzled by the curious language in
which certain books purporting to be translations from other tongues
are written. A lively translation, however incorrect, into English,
Yiddish, American, or any other language spoken in these United
States, would have been worth while. This one is disastrously
clumsy and insensitive, written in no language ever heard on land
or sea. We can only hope that Baroja's vitriol is crude and searing
enough to eat its way through this pulpiest of mediums and line out
its swift etchings in spite of the translator and his dictionary. What
we need, in this flood of muffled foreign literature that's overwhelm-
ing us, is someone to translate the translations.
John Dos Passos


CARDUCCI IN TRANSLATION
A Selection from the Poems of Giosue Carducci.
Translated and annotated, with a biographical intro-
duction, by Emily A. Tribe. 8vo. 346 pages. Long-
mans, Green and Company. $5.
IT must be apparent to the most confident that there are poets
whose genius does not lend itself to translation into another
language. Carducci is one of these. The difficulties which confront
the translator of his work are stupendous. I refer particularly to
the technical difficulties encountered in rendering the Odi Barbare.
The metrical form which Carducci adopted in his later work is
sufficiently difficult even in the Italian, and the degree of his own
success in it has frequently been brought to question.
The truth is that the metres of the Barbarian Odes—so called,
as Carducci apologizes, because "they would so sound to the ears
and judgement of the Greeks and Romans, although I have wished
to compose them in the metrical forms belonging to those nations;
and because they will, too truly, so sound to very many Italians,
although they are composed and harmonized in Italian verses and
accents"—these metres depend upon a perception of the quantity,
or time value, of syllables which the modern ear, Italian as well as
English, has completely forgotten. Carducci himself recognized
this in determining as the basis of his ictus the familiar measure of
speech accent, rather than a quantitive rigour which would leave
this unavoidable factor out of account.
Although we may not here undertake any discussion of the semi-
classical prosody which is so important a part of Carducci's achieve-
ment, we may pause to commend to those who are sufficiently in-
terested Stampini's excellent volume on Le Odi Barbare di Giosue
Carducci e la Metrica Latina. Carducci, of course, was not strictly
original in this revival, but his innovations are unique to the point
of creative triumph. Since the Renaissance many attempts had been
made to restore the metres of classical lyricism to common usage;
but most of the experimenters were merely pedants, defeated by
their perverse disregard of the habitual rhythmical selection of the
modern ear. Carducci, no less great a scholar than he was a poet,


202 CARDUCCI IN TRANSLATION
turned all these failures to advantage in designing his technique,
entirely discarding the complicated time notations of Greek prosody
for the more liberal versification of Horace, basing his efforts
largely upon those of Chiabrera and Fantoni, and eventually per-
fecting a system which is perhaps as nearly ideal as any modern
attempt can be. Always the poet before the metrical experimenter,
he seldom scrupled to give his vivid spirit free license, even to the
occasional confusion of his too stable prosody. This, and the fact
that he sought rather to create a new form than slavishly to imitate
one which time had discarded, are the chief factors in his greatness.
The same difficulties which confronted Carducci in designing the
Barbarian Odes operate to the despair of his translators, who are
unfortunately less felicitously equipped to cope with them than
was the master. It is understood that he himself was by no means
assured of the success of his experiments, and it is certain that the
form will never be popular, despite the imitations of D'Annunzio,
Mazzoni, Pascoli, and others; for it imposes upon the poet a tech-
nical preoccupation that is devastating to the creative intellect, and
its nature prescribes a degree of poetic intensity and finished ele-
gance that few can sustain. It is also at this point that Carducci's
translators are most often found wanting.
Miss Tribe, perhaps, approaches adequacy as closely as any of
Carducci's translators, though for technical reasons I am inclined
to prefer the version of Mr G. L. Bickersteth (Longmans, Green
and Company, i9i3). The first translation, that of the American,
Frank Sewell (i892) remains the most poetical. In most of the
poems which she attempts, Miss Tribe is at least moderately suc-
cessful, in some really exemplary; but it is apparent that her under-
standing of Carducci's technique is superficial, and that she often
completely fails to interpret the poet's mood, while rendering his
phraseology with scrupulous nicety. This is the most treacherous
characteristic of Carducci: few Italians have written so simply and
compactly as he, yet few have impregnated their verses with
spiritual undercurrents so elusive. Again, Miss Tribe does not
always discover the mot juste: for example, in the celebrated son-
net II Bove, she translates "V amo, o pio bove" as "I love thee,
kindly ox," when the simple grace of imagination would have sug-
gested "pious"; similarly, she avoids transposition by rendering
"grave occhio" as "sombre eye"; and ends rather flatly in an effort


WILLIAM A. DRAKE
203
to make the noble line "77 divino del pian silenzio verde" to rhyme
with "air." The uninspired stolidity of her rendering of the lovely
Funere Mersit Acerbo is positively irreligious; for the concluding
lines:
"Oh, giu ne Padre
sedi accoglilo tu, che al dolce sole
ei volge il capo ed a chiamar la madre"
she phlegmatically records:
"Receive him thou, for he must dwell
In the dark seats; the sweet sun to behold
He turns, and to his mother cries for aid."
I dwell upon these infelicities because, while we are prepared to
forgive much more than we find necessary in the rendering of the
Barbarian Odes—which she really does surprisingly well—it is
difficult to condone such lack of invention in the short lyrical pieces,
which are unembarrassed by complicated technique and frequently
possess an exceptional beauty. Yet, to be just with Miss Tribe, we
must admit that her book is unquestionably a valuable contribution
to our rapidly accumulating Carducci bibliography in English, and
that a supplementary work of this nature from her pen would
be more than welcome.
The translations that we have of Carducci by no means cover the
field. Miss Tribe includes only forty-eight poems, Mr Bickersteth
only sixty-eight; other translators have done little more than
anticipate portions of these labours. It would be obviously futile
to translate all of Carducci's verse, most of which is of slight
interest, but a veritable treasure-hoard remains to reward the trans-
lator who will one day seek his voluminous critical prose. The grati-
fying stimulation of interest in the work of Benedetto Croce leads
us to hope that the introduction of Carducci's critical work, in excel-
lence second only to that of the great disciple of De Sanctis, may
not be long deferred.
William A. Drake


THE SULTAN'S TURRET
Continental Stagecraft. By Kenneth Macgowan
and Robert Edmond Jones. Illustrated. 8vo. 233
pages. Harcourt, Brace and Company. $5.
IN his earlier book, The Theatre of Tomorrow, Mr Macgowan
was as much concerned with the theatre in terms of space as he
is now with the theatre in terms of mass. The superior interest of
the second book derives from this change of focus. In the first the
problem of the artist of the stage was conceived as something which
could be solved if the relations of space around the stage were cor-
rect, and if the space occupied by the stage were properly propor-
tioned to the space of the auditorium. (There were much enthu-
siasm and much desirable information besides; it is for comparison
with Continental Stagecraft that I stress this one point.) Even ten
weeks of Europe were enough to correct the errors of emphasis. We
come much closer to the theatre when we consider the proper rela-
tion of the unit to the mass, and in this relation we may conceive
the stage as the unit with the audience as the mass; or the actor and
the audience; or the ensemble of the players and the audience; or
the stage-artist and the actors; or the stage-artist and the audience.
The problem is not in proportion, but in spiritual attitude, and it
involves the greatest of all problems—that of making the audience
participate in the play.
Mr Macgowan's contribution to the last point is limited; the
physical disposition of the audience he treats with discretion and
detail, and one suspects that he will not begin to do his duty by the
greater part—the spiritual disposition—until he writes a book of
pure theory and lets data and mechanics go hang. He is aware of
the problem and he is aware—which is both important and amus-
ing—that the machinery and inventions of the modern stage have
done very little to solve it. Neither he nor, to judge from his work
in the theatre, Mr Jones is aware of the attitude of the playgoer,
the scepticism so different from the affirmation with which an
average audience goes to hear music played. The will to undergo
illusion is still strong, but it has been imposed upon, and the artist


GILBERT SELDES
205
of the theatre must analyse the state of mind of the audience, must
restore a certain trustfulness, before plays can be produced again
with the collaboration of the audience.
Mr Macgowan is not wholly to blame for the chaotic effect of his
chapters. The theatre has been a little too lively for him, and in
the same breath he must speak of the discarded ideas of Gordon
Craig and the resurrection of ridiculous flats and distorted per-
spectives. He puts his finger on one of the essential truths of the
theatre when he says that the only tricks the theatre can use are the
successful ones—and it happens that use and wont make tricks
ineffective in the theatre much more quickly than bad theory. It is,
I regret to say, conceivable that a Belasco production will charm
our grandchildren as much as it bores us now; it is all too conceiv-
able that the new art of the theatre, for most of which I am grateful,
will bore ourselves before we are ten years older.
Take a fragment of a line of poetry—"strikes The Sultan's turret
with a shaft of light"—and you have the whole problem of the
artist-director. Mr Clive Bell has noted the Victorian heresy
which forced the producer to make us see a recognizable turret and
a recognizable light, more or less recognizably striking it. The
modern artist of the theatre would attempt to make us feel it and
would concentrate possibly on one word—shaft—to give us the
elation, the movement, the imagery. Mr Macgowan's most assured
theory is that the artist will not be able to do it until he is the mas-
ter of the theatre, until he has the producer as firmly in hand as the
producer now has the stage-carpenter. He is almost as certain that
the new stage-craft will have very little to do in the whole business
and that the Linnebach projector has contributed to the theatre only
a little more than the Otis elevator.
I am myself not convinced that the audience will be won to par-
ticipate in the emotions of the play by dissolving the distinction
between spectator and actor; I should go to the opposite extreme,
on the ground that it is only because the kingdom of Heaven is
irremediably not within us that it is worth entering. Mr Jones'
illustrations have some of the quality of the theatre's Heaven and
Mr Macgowan is his harsh evangel; I am inclined to believe that he
will win us over after we have stopped caring how the ladder is
dropped from the flies.
Gilbert Seldes


MAX BEERBOHM'S ROSSETTI
Rossetti and His Circle. By Max Beerbohm. 8vo.
Unnumbered. Doubleday, Page and Company. $4.
SPARING you the documentary evidence, for which you will be
duly grateful, I must nevertheless confess that I have wasted
two perfectly good days in fruitless effort to concoct a brilliant
opening sentence for a simple little review of Max Beerbohm's
latest book of cartoons, and it only now occurs to me tardily on the
third day that the yearning for a brilliant opening sentence or a bit
of brilliancy anywhere in the review is but one more instance of
the fatal asininity that overtakes any American in the presence
of European perfection. Max is brilliant, ergo, I, his reviewer,
must be brilliant, or at least palely Maxian. As if it followed!
As if it would please Max! Or serve him in any way—service being
the only thing left, in this case, for mere mortals.
Mr Beerbohm, then, is at it again. This time he takes whacks
out of Gabriel Rossetti, Algernon, Elizabeth, dear Alfred Tenny-
son, R. Browning, Esqre., Benjamin Jowett, and in fact, the whole
blamed shooting match of i860. He calls it Rossetti and His
Circle, and he whacks every member of the circle for love. He ex-
presses love with whacks. It is the true way with your true carica-
turist. He says they are the best ever and defines Byron, Disraeli,
and Rossetti as "the three most interesting men that England had
in the nineteenth century." Possibly they were, but why drag in
Byron and Disraeli? They have nothing to do with this book. And
then he adds with mock-seriousness, which is, after all, still serious-
ness; "On se moque de ce qu'on aime!"
This phrase, doubtless, would have been engraved in letters of
gold upon the cover of the album, had it not become such a platitude
in Europe—and especially upon the Continent where Max now
lives—but it is so far from being a platitude in this country—where
satire is little understood and never practised—that the mere casual
use of it, even with quotation marks, is liable to fetch down the
avalanche at any time. It is all very well to preach, as I have, time
out of mind, that a caricature is the sincerest form of compliment
the heart of man has devised—my countrymen will have none of it.


HENRY McBRIDE
207
I have even gone so far as to hint, borrowing the hint from George
Meredith, that an individual or a nation cannot be said to exist, to
be worthy of any attention whatever, until a little caricature has
happened to it, and with the on-se-moque-de-ce-qu'on-aime theory
in mind, this is only another way of saying that an individual or a
nation is not worth noticing until he or it has been loved.
And, oh, how Max Beerbohm does love the eighteen sixties! He
has flirted with other periods. He implied somewhere once that if
he had had a choice he would have lived in the 'eighties when Wilde
and Whistler were opening the eyes of the extremely well brought-
up public of that day to the serious worth of the pre-Raphaelites,
but now that he has grown older and wiser, and has also discovered
his own vocation, he sees very clearly and emphatically that, though
peering through the door at humour be fine, "close-ups" of humour
are finer yet. And when was there ever so much embodied humour
stalking abroad as in England in the 'sixties? He tried quite man-
fully to do something for the present era, but though no one dared
to say so, and certainly I would not dare to say so, he must have
felt a certain futility in the effort. People in England nowadays, if
left alone, caricature themselves. Margot and Ballington Booth
praying together in the railway carriage, what is there in that for
Max? Absolutely nothing. Even the wonderful Mr Lloyd George
takes himself so lightly there are no light touches left for the
artists. The age is wonderful, we say it over and over again to give
ourselves courage, and we add that future ages will be frightfully
intrigued with every detail of us. But will the enthusiasm extend
to analyses of Mr Filson Young, Sir Claude Phillips, Lord Spencer,
Mr Philip Guedalla, and the lengthy et cetera upon whom Mr
Beerbohm expended his skill in A Survey (i92i)? It does not seem
certain. Now, truly, does it? And it is, I feel uncomfortably sure,
with the will of a desperate and seasoned caricaturist to make him-
self at least a little more certain for posterity that our artist now
turns his attention to the solider figures that surrounded and re-
flected Rossetti.
He does them proud. Really! I was shocked stiff for just an
instant by the Rossetti's Courtship, with a heavy and befuddled
Gabriel leaning upon the mantelpiece of a fireless fireplace and
Elizabeth Siddal mooning stiffly about upon a floor carefully lit-
tered with manuscripts; but aside from that I had no bad moments.
Later on I came quite to love the fit of Gabriel's coat and his heel-


2o8 MAX BEERBOHM'S ROSSETTI
less slippers. Particularly the heelless slippers! It is a stupendous
and fine art that can make a part represent an whole; and when only
the slippers show, as they only do, when the elegant Frederick
Leighton beseeches Gabriel to become an Academician, you never-
theless, and sufficiently, as Henry James says, know that He lies
there. "He lies there" a great deal, as he did, a great deal, towards
the end, in real life, and the sharers in Max's love for the eighteen
sixties will scarcely know whether to laugh or cry at the remem-
brance; especially when the odious Hall Caine butts into one of the
reclining scenes only to be called down by Shields and Theodore
Watts. I used to think that they would have been quite justified in
murdering him, but that, like "Lord Byron and Disraeli," is an-
other matter. Gabriel reclines quite wonderfully and most wonder-
fully in The Small Hours at 16, Cheyne Walk when the little Al-
gernon reads to him and his brother William from the Anactoria.
This drawing, I think, shares the honours, as the honours go, with
the naughty courtship picture, although the Benjamin Jowett epi-
sode and the Miss Cornforth being "very pleased to meet Mr Rus-
kin" would look mighty well upon a wall.
Just why Algernon should be allowed within the charmed circle
of the caricaturable and the Margot and the Lloyd George of the
present barred from it, it is not for me to say. He was as extrava-
gant as they are. I read a life of him by a gentleman who met him
first at an evening party during a time when Gabriel and the Ford
Madox Browns were endeavouring to introduce "spontaneity of
behaviour" into London Society and he recounts that Algernon dur-
ing the while he conversed with him flitted lightly from the carpet
to a sofa several times without remark from any one. It is of course
the surest sign of Max Beerbohm's genius that he shunned such a
ready-made subject in a life where there were many such. He did
indeed venture perilously near forbidden ground whilst showing
Algernon Swinburne Taking His Great New Friend Gosse To See
Gabriel Rossetti—the said Algernon, with his great shock of cop-
per-coloured hair, skipping along in advance of Gosse like an agi-
tated little bird. The "why" he remains meat for Max may be felt
by the sensitive, but not explained. I once read through M Henri
Bergson's Le Rire thinking I should be fortified for ever with the
reasons for laughter, but about all I acquired was a headache. I find
more and more as I progress into life that the "whys" of art are
negligible.
Henry McBride


BRIEFER MENTION
Rough-Hewn, by Dorothy Canfield (l2mo, 504 pages; Harcourt, Brace:
$2) is a crab-fashion extension of The Brimming Cup, concerned with the
earlier life of the two characters around whom the preceding novel was
written. It is, in several respects, a finer piece of writing than The Brim-
ming Cup, chiefly because it deals with materials which may be developed
for their own sake and not in relation to each other. Miss Canfield baked
her cake first, and it was good, but now that one observes her in the act of
mixing the ingredients, one feels that the result might have been even bet-
ter. For Rough-Hewn has a sensitiveness, a delicacy of touch, and a
strength, which, while they were present in The Brimming Cup, were not
so unfailingly at her command as they have now become.
Goat Alley, by Ernest Howard Culbertson (8vo, i55 pages; Stewart Kidd:
$i.75) presents the sinister problem of a negro woman, beautiful and good,
destroyed by the undisciplined passions and manner of life of her race. The
negro world is still, in literature, almost unexplored: its characters may be
mere types without losing their individuality thereby; the emotions they
voice, while universal, gain strength by their unequivocalness and the ab-
sence of concomitant thought processes; and a story that, laid in another
and more familiar scene, might seem sordid, is here glamorous. The negro
dialect will disturb the reader who in his mind enunciates words read; but
on the stage the play would be effective without alloy, melodramatic in
action, truly dramatic in psychology.
Roland Whately, by Alec Waugh (i2mo, 342 pages; Macmillan: $2) dis-
plays that glibness of words which is proverbially a gift of the popular
novel writer; but it lacks a corresponding facility of invention. Without
much thought, the reader slips from one page to the next as the hero slips
from one adventitious love-affair into another, interested for the moment,
but wondering all the while why he goes on. He is very like the Average
Man, this hero; but the Average Man is not interesting, as a species, save
as a subject for satire or humour. Roland Whately's father, however, is a
character reminiscent of Dickens: doddering, laughable, pathetic, con-
vincing. The rest of the book, in theme and treatment, is middle class—
not quite upper middle class.
Some Distinguished Americans, by Harvey O'Higgens (i2mo, 336 pages;
Harpers: $2) contains studies of seven imaginary characters, each one of
which has been created for the embodiment of a particular complex, all of
them produced by the application of one psychoanalytic formula to the
purposes of fiction. Mr O'Higgens invariably shows his character in
action, and then, like a good analyst, reaches back into his character's past
for the explanation of action. It is an interesting method, but it has been
employed too frequently, and with too little variation, within the compass
of a single volume.


210
BRIEFER MENTION
Quest, by Helen R. Hull (i2mo, 353 pages; Macmillan: $2) is the story of
a girl's childhood and adolescence, written with disproportionate serious-
ness. One feels that the author has known her heroine very intimately in-
deed and has taken her too much to heart. The girl and her environment
are authentic, but monotonous and repetitiously detailed. The composition,
from chapter divisions to sentence structure, is an unwavering imitation of
die first part of Mary Olivier—an imitation saved from impudence only be-
cause the author's sincerity and inexperience are almost equally evident.
Nevertheless, the book indicates a fineness of feeling, a power of thought,
and an ease in writing, which make it likely that Miss Hull will one day
give us a piece of original and truly creative work.
Breath of Life, by Arthur Tuckerman (i2mo, 347 pages; Putnam: $i.75)
reminds one of the darkey's criticism of the merry-go-round: "Yoh pays
yoh money; yoh travels, but whar yoh bin V In next to the last chapter,
the hero is made "vaguely happy" by a Coney Island scenic railway ride
with a girl; in the final chapter, he is thrown into "an ecstasy of content-
ment" by a toboggan ride with another girl. Mr Tuckerman is a great
believer in sheer motion, with an utter indifference to destinations.
Stubble, by George Loomis (i2mo, 296 pages; Doubleday Page: $i.75)
makes no great attack upon the complexities of temperament and person-
ality. It is more effective in its panorama and scene study than in its dra-
matic effort; less an action than the materials of an action; its author's
eye at present is chiefly for the pictorial. The promises of the writing
are such, however, that more important action may