The plunge into the vague immensity of Europe immediately
diminishes the size of America and makes it amenable; far more
than that, you become aware for the first time of the certainty of
America, its safeness and trustworthiness. For an American, to be


COMMENT
317
sure. I met, five years ago, an Australian who was going "Home"
—to London which he had never seen—and his emotions about
America might legitimately have differed from mine. But for me,
Americano, the sense of security in my country passes beyond the
recognition that it is the only major nation to have still a more
than fighting chance of physical well-being. It may be compara-
tively trivial to feel that your country is safe, but the 'fabric of
society' which provides the artist with his sense of life exists by that
assurance. It is only a safe society that can become an intelligent
and sophisticated one, and it is only a comparatively simple and
healthy one which can be safe.
"A writer or painter who has never felt himself outside the Euro-
pean artistic tradition has now the incalculable advantage of being
associated with a social and political tradition which is not fall-
ing to pieces. It is meagre and a little uninteresting; it has its
stupidities and some aspects are madly incongruous; it is not yet
solid. But it is composed of the material from which civilizations
are made, and they are so far incorruptible. When we are op-
pressed with our present worries we feel certain that our halcyon
days were in the proconsulship of Garfield and Arthur; but we can-
not push the analogy very far, for the Heliogabalian portents simply
do not occur. The energy we exploit is still under control and we
have shoddy Latin Quarters because we haven't a real classical age
to turn from. We have just enough of a past to fall back on and
more than enough strength to go on with.
"The one thing we haven't is continuity. It isn't possible to re-
member while one is in the Loop or in Wall Street that ours is the
country of the Abolitionists and the Free Silverites and the Ger-
man Forty-eighters and the pioneer Forty-niners; the interaction
of pioneer and emigrant remains a thesis-subject, not a relation
present in living memory. One may find to-day a noted New Eng-
land name in the anti-lynching crusade and be shocked to remem-
ber that the same name was known in 1850 in favour of Free Soil;
shocked because anything which carries over from generation to
generation is largely foreign to us.
"I do not know how this feeling of a continuous American life
which no inflow of foreigners can disrupt will ever become com-
mon—although I am sure that to be useful to the artist it must be
common. It is possible that we must go on another hundred years
before we begin to be aware of the Revolution, and perhaps a


COMMENT
thousand before our connexion with European culture ceases to
bore or frighten us. I should fancy that our creative artists will
do more for us in this matter—and not by writing costume novels
or painting Washington Crossing the Delaware—than our busi-
ness men or those moving pictures which prove to us that histori-
cally America is largely Anglo-Saxon and entirely anti-Bolshevist.
For it is not an interest in the past that is chiefly wanted, but a
recognition of the past in the present.
"The terrible thing is that if any part of this be true, the posi-
tion of our artists is bettered, but their power is more than ever
questioned. We haven't as a nation cared a hang for them, and the
fact that they must keep alive, and had better keep alive without
trying to work for money, we haven't at all faced. One doesn't at
this date feel that Whistler and James let us down by going
abroad, nor does one recall all the details of Poe's life with actual
pride in the America of before the Civil War. But one isn't so
sure that the unhappiness of hundreds of our creative artists hasn't
been as much due to their feeling of impotence as to their lack of
contact with the favourable environment. If Whitman could
create a past and a nation to which he could relate himself, why
could not another? If our artists, in short, haven't fulfilled them-
selves, haven't we given them too many excuses for failure?
"Haven't we, anyhow, taken away the last excuse for failure
now? If the world is going to damnation, we are going more slowly
than others; among the great nations it is quite probable that Rus-
sia alone has as much material and perhaps China as much solidity,
as we have. Neither of these things makes it possible for us to
produce a Recherche du Temps Perdu—but it happens that that
sort of Recherche is not the one which most of our artists care
about, and it is part of their work to discover exactly what they
do care for. If what they want to do has relevance to the Ameri-
can situation, they have the benefit of being not cut off from the
European—and that for example is all one ever needs to say about
James. If it has to do with America it will not be easy. But the
fact that America isn't favourable to it is, I should say, quite
secondary. You see that arrogance is the first thing one experiences
in looking back."
It impresses us as a most mystical argument; but we are always
interested in young America, so we print it.


THE THEATRE
TO say that the Moscow Art Theatre is "naturalistic" is likely
to be misleading. Since the advent in the theatre of Expres-
sionism we have come to make a sort of bugbear of naturalism and
to associate it with everything that is prosaic, laboured, and dreary
in the drama. We think, at least, of Hindle Wakes and The Weav-
ers and all the drama of the proletariate and the middle class which
corresponded to the novel of Arnold Bennett and Zola and Dreiser.
But the Art Theatre represents something different from this: it
represents the higher reaches of the realistic movement. It consti-
tutes perhaps the only successful attempt to put on the stage the
aesthetic ideal, not of the men I have mentioned, but of the school
which produced Flaubert and Turgenev, Anatole France and Henry
James—that is, of the school which went beyond notation and
merely conveying the impression of life and, accepting the conven-
tion of plausibility, aimed to produce not merely something real,
but something beautiful—something valid as art.
It is this extremely difficult formula which the Russians have
brought to perfection in the theatre. They are as subtle, as selective,
as full of glamour as any of the great novelists whom I have men-
tioned above. They present a surface so perfectly convincing as
realism that we can scarcely believe when we leave the theatre that
we have not been actual visitors in a Russian household and stood
watching the family go about its business; but at the same time
they bring out a whole set of aesthetic values to which we are not
accustomed in the realistic theatre: the beauty and poignancy of an
atmosphere, of an idea, a person, a moment are caught and put before
us without emphasis, without anything which we recognize as the-
atrical, but with the brightness of the highest art. In The Cherry
Orchard, for example—not only is a whole complex of social
relations presented with the most convincing exactitude, but The
Cherry Orchard itself, the sort of beauty which Mme Ranevskaya
represents, the charm which hangs about the Russian gentry even
in decay is somehow put upon the stage in such a way that their
futility is never dreary, but moving, their ineptitude touched with
the tragedy of all human failure.
It is true that the Art Theatre sometimes appears a little too har-


THE THEATRE
monious and smooth. One feels that life is a little more violent and
surprising than anything to be seen on their stage—even in Gorky's
The Lower Depths; but it seems to be inevitable for this form of
art to eliminate the violent and the surprising. There are no earth-
quakes in Henry James; nor do any accidents occur in Flaubert. It
is an art of underemphasis and deliberately unfolded effects.
By the time these notes appear both Hamlet and Romeo and
Juliet will be off, but it is perhaps worth while to say something
in general about Mr Arthur Hopkins' productions of Shakespeare.
We have now had four of these and they have on the whole been
pretty bad. The trouble is that Mr Hopkins is not a producer. He
has the taste to select plays and the courage to put them on, but
not the sort of genius to make anything of them. He seems to ex-
pect them to produce themselves. You have the feeling that there
has been no unifying force at work to dominate the material at his
disposal—that Mr Jones has been allowed to follow his own va-
garies and the Barrymores theirs and the rest of the members of the
cast to do pretty much as they please. There appears to be no co-
herent, concerted idea as to what any given play is about.
In so far as these productions are impressed with any consistent
character which is identifiable as Mr Hopkins', it is a tendency
toward the natural, the casual—the sort of thing which was so
charming and so refreshing when we first had it in the Clare Kum-
mer comedies, but which is hopelessly inappropriate to Shakespeare.
After all, Shakespeare is poetic drama and should be acted like
poetic drama, not like a naturalistic tragedy by Galsworthy. There
is an element of declamation in Shakespeare which has to be recog-
nized and allowed for; it requires a different convention from Clare
Kummer. But Mr Hopkins tries to pare down Hamlet till it sounds
like the staccato dialogue of Loyalties. He has accomplished
the depressing feat of completely divesting Shakespeare of music.
The tremendous rhythm of English blank verse has given place to
a colloquial flatness. Mr Winthrop Ames, in Will Shakespeare,
has produced the inferior blank verse of Clemence Dane so that it
is actually a great deal more effective than Hopkins' version of
the greatest blank verse ever written. In Will Shakespeare the
rhythm pervades the whole performance; the speakers catch it from
each other. In Romeo and Juliet it is broken into a thousand bits.
Edmund Wilson, Jr.


MODERN ART
TOULOUSE-LAUTREC, Felicien Rops, Constantin Guys
could not have lived in this country. You will not have heard
their names perhaps? Degas could not have lived in this country.
Ah, that gets you! I wonder why. Because of the price? A Degas
once brought a huge sum in a Paris auction; eighty thousand dollars
or something like that. But Degas was a bad lot, I assure you. He
could not possibly have belonged to our Sunday School class as a
young man and when he grew up he painted pictures of a kind of
woman who is never glowingly described in any literature we get
a chance at except the Bible and who never really received a square
deal since history began to be recorded save at the hands of the
First Christian of them all.
Only to-day I was looking at a photograph of Degas' witty mono-
type, La Fete de la Patronne, and instead of moaning that such
things could be or rather that such things could be painted, I sud-
denly found myself laughing heartily and saying to myself, "I won-
der what Mr Tripp would say to that!" Mr Tripp is the New Bed-
ford public librarian who has banished The Dial from his library
because he thinks The Dial's illustrations constitute a danger for
the young. Mr Tripp, I fancy, is one of those riotously imaginous
persons who sees things he shouldn't in nudes, even in "good" nudes.
What would he not do and say were he informed that there were
such things as "bad" nudes in art, and that art had sanctified the
badness out of them! What would he not do if he saw the things of
Toulouse-Lautrec, Felicien Rops, Constantin Guys, or even those
of Jules Pascin now viewable in the Brummer Galleries and which
inspire this article? He would probably die. Theoretically he
ought to die, if he actually was shocked by past Dial drawings.
And when he gets to Heaven he will meet face to face the Indi-
vidual who took such a very different view of things during His
short sojourn on earth, from Mr Tripp. What a curious encounter
that will be!
Then only, of course, will Mr Tripp become educated in art.
On earth it is not for him. I don't know that I care a pin for Mr
Tripp's artistic salvation aside from the fact that he seems to repre-


322
MODERN ART
sent so beautifully an incredible number of my countrymen. The
futility of talking to them personally is self-evident. Art is not for
them. But there are so many of them and they present such a stolid,
immovable front against the things of the spirit, that there is always
the recurring necessity for the few to state what stupidity costs the
many.
It certainly costs us Degases. Degas, Renoir, Rodin, Cezanne,
Van Gogh, Gauguin could not have lived here. They would have
been strangled at birth. Such types exist and flourish only in free
atmospheres. The rules of pedants and strict moralists do not apply.
Genius is above such systems and supplies moralities of its own.
It proves morality rather than is proved by morality—and that is
the whole point which cannot be too loudly proclaimed. A moralist
is a specialist and therefore not a whole person. He is deaf to the
language of painting and has no clue to the emotions it awakens.
How can he judge a thing of which he is ignorant? A "trial by
one's peers" is the demand of law and artists alone may judge of
the "morality" of a work of art. To do them justice, though, I
never hear them mention the word. They ask, rightly, whether it
be a work of genius, and let it go at that. In settling that point
they settle everything.
At the present moment there is an exhibition of drawings and
paintings by Jules Pascin in town. Jules Pascin is a man of genius,
the equal of Toulouse-Lautrec, Felicien Rops, and Constantin Guys.
The dealer who shows them does not show all the Pascin drawings
he now possesses. He asked me about several that he showed to
me in private. "It would be all right in Paris," he said. "No," I
advised him, somewhat wearily, "They would irritate Mr Tripp.
Hide them in your darkest closet." And he did so.
There was nothing naughtier in the drawings than a rather sly
apprehension upon the part of the artist of feelings in the model
that the model herself was unaware of. But they could not possibly
be shown in New York. We lead a too constricted life and haven't
enough elasticity of mind to meet an artist half-way.
Mr Pascin didn't like us during the few years he spent here. He
didn't say so, but it was surmisable from the haste with which he
quitted us for his beloved Paris so soon as the war permitted
Croatians to live there. He thought New York cold, by the book
and by the candle and every other way. Perhaps six people appre-


HENRY McBRIDE
323
ciated his talent, certainly not more. But it was not lack of appre-
ciation that drove him to Miami one winter and to Havana for the
next, but the impossible straight-laced hypocrisy that de-humanized
the people he saw and froze the artist in him. To the negroes of
Florida and the half-breeds of Cuba he melted. "One does not have
to draw prostitutes down there," he confided to me naively. Do I
have to explain that remark? Oh, no, that would be too great an
accusation against the intelligence of Mr Tripp; and besides I am
not writing to him, but to the half dozen who understand.
Pascin's art is not necessarily for the closet, although I allow
Felicien Rops' is. I am not a destroyer of society and ask nothing
unreasonable of it. On the contrary it is merely reason I ask. There
was a time when artists spoke as men to men. I suppose the Rev.
Laurence Sterne thought he was writing only for men. Then came
the jeune fille and at the general disquietude over the apparition
one by one our artists fumbled. It was not I fear a question of
morality so much as of finance. There seemed to be more money in
purveying emasculated products. But the jeune fille epoch seems
to be about over. The vote or the war or something seems to have
finished her. She really reads and sees everything there is to be
seen and may no longer be considered a menace to the artist.
. . . The essential to him, as I have said before, is unquestioned
liberty. There must be no forbidding this and forbidding that to
Shakespeares. An Elizabethan Tripp's spasms over the Venus and
Adonis might have prevented Hamlet. The problem of Venus and
Adonis and Rops' drawings is a minor one and their supposed, but
to me negligible, dangers to the young may safely be left to take
care of themselves.
Henry McBride


MUSICAL CHRONICLE
THE bouquet sets Milhaud's music apart from that of the other
members of his Group. The wine is older; of a mellower,
smoother, drier flavour. The grapes which secreted it may not, it is
possible, have grown in a soil as fat as that which nourished the
fruit from which Poulenc and Auric distil. Milhaud's composi-
tions record nothing quite as distinctive and personal as Poulenc's
effortless wit and charm, and foetus-like gaiety; nothing as arresting
and sharp as the directness, the relentlessness of attack which makes
of Auric at once the most insolent and the most expressive of The
Six. His work is more eccentric and external than theirs. Still, the
grapes which gave this drink were riper when pressed. The liquor
was permitted to stand sealed a longer while and exchange its vio-
lence for softness of texture. A felicity of touch which the others
of the group do not as yet possess has played into the mould of
many of Milhaud's fantastically various works; and given the most
of them, at least seductive shapeliness and elaboration of surface.
Through all the studied vulgarity and hardness there breathes the
subtle scent of refined old worlds.
Milhaud is indeed an older musician than are the rest. Honegger
was born some months before him, it is true. But Milhaud had
gained his direction before any of the others were afoot. He was
up and known before the war commenced; he was the only one who
brought a growing reputation and cast it into the common pot. It
is probable that something of the comparative warmth and vi-
brancy of his music is due his larger experience. His skill is very
evident. He has learned to write for orchestra in such a manner
that under his treatment small bands of instruments give forth
volumes and sonorities which we commonly refer to the large size
of the bands themselves. The music composed by him for L'Homme
et Son Desir has a most vigorous throat; and yet, the number of
instruments demanded by the score, if we except the battery, which
is fairly large, and the singing-voices, does not exceed fourteen. He
has acquired a freedom with the percussion-pieces which constitutes
a little science. Like Satie and the rest of The Six, he has studied
the noisemakers of the jazz bands for effects; and his orchestral
works, the ballet and the ballade in particular, are brilliant with


PAUL ROSENFELD
3^5
colour produced by tambourines, cymbals, bass-drums, triangles,
celestas, sandpaper, clap-boards, whistles, and other profane appa-
ratus. His music, as a whole, is well written. With what elegance
and quietude and humour has he not transcribed those jazzy tangos
and Brazilian music-hall tunes! He has kept the melodic lines iron
and clear among the dissonances; and still softened the banalities.
The conflicts of rhythms, of tonalities, are managed with utmost
economy of emphasis. The elegant little vulgarisms cross races with
real success; combine the artistry and delicacy of the French with
the vigorous coarseness of the Spanish and Latin-American popular
rhythms in most agreeable form.
Some principle older and less sharp of edge and more soaked with
the sun than that present in the other members of The Six must be
in this composer, creating a terrain favourable to intellectual and
acquired culture. Suavity and sensuousness and liquor-like richness
must be in the plasm itself. Hence, even within the limits of the
conventional group-expression; even in the circle of external and
assumed ideas, Milhaud achieves a density and weight which dis-
tinguishes his work. Auric, and Poulenc in a lesser degree, may
both of them be more true to themselves within the limits of the
common mannerisms of the group; Milhaud's hand remains the hap-
pier, more delicate and gratifying. It may be the refinement is
present in his personality as something like an unwelcome guest;
as something which the possessor would gladly exchange for the
lighter, tougher, and harder entrails of his two fellows. Neverthe-
less, the denseness, the brownness of blood stands him in good stead,
and signals him despite his defects as the artist.
Variety of mood further sets the work of Milhaud apart from
that of the others. To be sure, he remains the faithful partisan in
whatever form he attempts. The common baggage of the move-
ment, diatonic passages, little cocky-doodle-doo's for orchestra, ex-
cruciatingly dissonant contrapuntal effects, jazz-rasps and jerks,
strutting march-rhythms, are carried through the range of his com-
positions. The hardness of edge, legacy of Berlioz, affected by
him; the mordant irony; the broad grin with which much of the
stuff is presented, are not his alone. But the Latin-American dance-
hall tunes which he utilizes extensively are his own trouvaille. He
appears to have become familiar with them during his sojourn as
attache in Brazil; and to have conceived the hope of doing with
them what Chabrier and Bizet did with their Spanish forbears.


326
MUSICAL CHRONICLE
And the range of forms to which he has set hand, is unusually wide.
He has written for piano, for voice and piano, for violin and piano,
for flute, clarinet, oboe, and piano, for large and chamber orchestras.
The music composed by him for the theatre includes a strictly oper-
atic setting of the Eumenides of Aeschylus; incidental music for
the Choephores and the satyr-play of Claudel; ballet-music and the
accompaniment to a sort of glorified vaudeville act. He has made
songs on fragments of the tender and anguished letters of Eugenie
de Guerin and on the sneering little Soirees de Petrograd of Rene
Chalupt. The list of his compositions includes sonatas and sona-
tines, symphonies, and serenades classical in intention; a neuras-
thenic "Psalm" for men's chorus; and a "shimmy" for jazz band, a
tango for the clowns of the Cirque Medrano, a "romance and rag-
caprice," and a collection of Brazilian dances. And, to a certain
extent, he has entered all these different subjects. The incidental
music for Protee has Gallic verve and salt. There is something of
real hysterical overwroughtness in L'Homme et Son Desir and in
the song La Limousine. And the ballade for orchestra, and Le
Boeuf sur le Toit and the Saudades do Brazil show genuine feeling
for the character of the popular musical expressions of the day.
But although the ground-plan of Milhaud's work is vaster than
Poulenc's and Auric's, the building seems somewhat shaky. His com-
positions exhibit musicianly tact of a superior sort, and marvel-
lously alert sensibilities; they also exhibit power in a state of la-
tency. It is seldom one of them thoroughly compels the interest on
second hearing. What they have in them of reality, the smell of
the crowd, the grinding of steely polyphonies, the nervous sudden
unprepared contrasts of louds and softs, the iron contours and free-
dom from romantic exaltation and the jewellery of the impres-
sionists, evaporates too quickly. The rich colour of the instruments
has too little body. The pungence grows thin. On first acquaintance,
L'Homme et Son Desir was poisonous and terrible. The human
voices crying as they cry out of nightmares; the savage banging of
the percussion; the whistles and wan monotonous flutes and brutal
blaring of the horns, seemed to be carrying the insomnia of fierce
tropical nights, the states of utter dejection when the whole force
of nature seems bent on dissolving the character in slime and no
doorway offers escape, the mad dance of inhuman rejected in-
stincts, the depleted morning hours. One felt the music miasmal,
suffocating as dead August nights, and stagnant-green; the instru-


PAUL ROSENFELD
327
mentation the very edge of to-day. But on second acquaintance, the
baleful potency was out of it. The score was wearing sheer. It
seemed the scratching of a surface, not the penetration of the sub-
ject-matter. The nerves only had been touched. The music wanted
suspense and cumulative effect. A third hearing intensified the im-
pression given by the second. The flute-gurgling music which ac-
companied the gyrations of the two women about the helplessly
winding man; and the music of final exhaustion, seemed a little in-
sipid. Indeed, the interpolated Brazilian tunes began to appear
the most vital substance in the work.
The Six are clever; and it is precisely this cleverness which stands
in the path of Milhaud, as it stands in the way of all of them. None
of them are sufficiently attentive to the formless stuff of life. They
are too conscious of unimportant matters. Satie has said of Ravel
that his mouth rejects the cordon of the legion of honour, though
his music demands it. Far truer is it that The Six outwardly reject
the seriousness, the responsibility, and the priestly dignity main-
tained by certain musicians of the past, but inwardly persist in the
sort of self-conceit which their lips deny. These young Frenchmen
are somewhat over-concerned about their place among composers.
They are somewhat over-eager to have us perceive in them the in-
heritors of Bizet and Chabrier; the representatives of the French
genius for music; the pure Latin spirit amid the machinery and the
jazz of the advancing century; the sole conservers of the classic
proportions of Mozart and Mendelssohn. Milhaud would have us
believe his compositions as innocent of programme as the dances of
Bach. But the movement in which he plays a not unillustrious part
is burdened with excess of literature. There is too much Cocteau
in the practice of these musicians; too many of his theories concern-
ing the future of the art. This is the distinctly unmodern aspect of
The Six; for the sort of dry aestheticism by which they are pos-
sessed, although it is just coming to life in America, and seems to
promise a few years of drought for us, is dying with great rapidity
in the Europe about them. They themselves, in their intellectual-
ism, represent a decadence far more than a new force. Retrospective
theories tower dreadful above them like the demon-poles of an
Alaskan tribe. The theories are often contradictory, as those of
intellectualists often are. Milhaud will have it that the musicians
of one nation do not learn from those of another. The indebtedness
of the Russian Five to Liszt; of Chabrier to Wagner; of Debussy


328
MUSICAL CHRONICLE
to Moussorgsky; and of his own group to Strawinsky, to search no
farther into musical history, seems of no importance to him. And
still, we find him justifying his own form by the practice of P. E.
Bach; and protesting that the proportions of his Serenade are those
of Mozart.
In consequence, Milhaud is not sufficiently concentrated upon the
formless spaces wherein his very self resides. He cannot lose him-
self to gain the everliving part. He is not free. It is as something
of a Don Juan among the sheets of music-paper that he appears to
us; finished too quickly with each of his compositions; over-ready
to chase off and attack a new subject before he has really mastered
the old. The fish is not more prolific than he; but of the eggs he
scatters upon the flood few hatch completely free-swimming organ-
isms. The person who declared that each composition of Milhaud
contains at least one interesting idea spoke an almost final word.
Sometimes, as in the sonata for flute, oboe, clarinet, and piano, he
will achieve whole sections strong of line and exciting in rhythmic
interplay; and then lose himself in a sort of "modern" acrid and
empty classicizing. The sonata for piano solo, the serenade, the
second sinfonietta, have each a solid middle-movement; but the
outer two, in each case, with their strutting military rhythms, like
to the one to which the French must have marched their troups into
the Ruhr, after some futile canonic imitations, get nowhere. Some-
times, as in the Poemes Juifs, Milhaud will achieve one or two set-
tings that are incisive and nervous; and then, as he has done in this
series, place by the side of songs like Le Laboureur and Le Forgeron
lyrics full of Massenet, or Duparc-like yodelling. Indeed, it is
chiefly in the compositions in which the idiom is not his own, com-
positions of the sort of Le Boeuf sur le Toit and the Saudades, that
he is entirely successful. These arrangements, and not his more
personal expressions; not the reed and piano sonata, not the inci-
dental music to Protee, not even the charming Printemps, consti-
tute his completely satisfactory achievement. Doubtless, the power
of concentration, of rigorous exclusion once acquired, rounded
compositions of an entire personality would quickly give their
weight to his fame. But, unless it is soon acquired, the transcrip-
tions will for a long while retain the pre-eminence which to-day
they enjoy.
Paul Rosenfeld


-


LUCRETIA. BY LUKAS CRANACH THE ELDER



DIAL
APRIL 1923
THE HERETIC OF SOANA
BY GERHART HAUPTMANN
Translated from the German by Bayard Quincy Morgan
TRAVELLERS can set out for the summit of Monte Gcneroso
from Mendrisio, or by the cog-road from Capolago, or from
Melide via Soana, where the road is most arduous. The entire dis-
trict belongs to Ticino, a Swiss canton of Italian population.
At a great height, mountain climbers not infrequently came upon
the figure of a bespectacled goatherd, whose exterior was striking in
still other respects. The face indicated a man of education, despite
the tanned skin. He looked much like the bronze statue of John
the Baptist by Donatello in the cathedral at Siena. His hair was
dark, and fell in curls over his brown shoulders. His clothing
consisted of goatskin.
When a troop of strangers approached this man, the guides
would immediately begin to laugh. Then when the tourists saw
him, they often burst out into unmannerly guffaws or made provo-
cative remarks: they felt justified by the strangeness of the sight.
The herdsman paid no attention. He did not even turn his head.
All the guides really seemed to be on good terms with him. Often
they would clamber up to him and have long confidential talks with
him. When they returned and were asked by the tourists what sort
of strange saint that was, they would mostly observe a mysterious
silence until he was out of ear-shot. But those travellers whose curi-
osity was still active would then find that this person had an
obscure history, and, popularly designated as The Heretic of Soana,
enjoyed a dubious esteem mingled with superstitious fear.
THE


33°
THE HERETIC OF SOANA
When the writer of these pages was still young in years and often
had the good fortune to spend glorious weeks in beautiful Soana, it
was inevitable that he should ascend Generoso now and then, and
that he, too, should get a view one day of the so-called Heretic of
Soana. He did not forget the man's appearance. And after he had
collected all sorts of contradictory information about him, there
ripened within him the resolve to see him again, even to visit him
outright.
The writer was strengthened in his purpose by a German Swiss,
the physician of Soana, who assured him that the eccentric fellow
was not averse to receiving visits from educated persons. He him-
self had once called on him. "I really ought to be angry at him," he
said, "because the fellow encroaches on my preserves. But he lives
so high up, so far away, and is only consulted, thank heavens, in
secret by those few who would not object to being cured by the
devil." The physician continued, "You must know that the people
believe he has sold himself to the devil: a view which is not con-
tested by the clergy, because they originated it. Originally, they say,
the man fell a prey to an evil spell, until he himself became an obsti-
nate villain and a hellish sorcerer. As for me, I could not notice any
talons or horns on him."
The writer still clearly remembers his visits to this strange man.
The manner of the first meeting was remarkable. A special circum-
stance gave it the character of an accident. For the visitor found
himself by a steep wayside face to face with a helpless mother goat,
which had just dropped one kid and was about to give birth to a
second. The lonely creature in her distress, looking fearlessly at him
as if she had expected his help, the deep mystery of any sort of birth
there amid the tremendous rocky wilds, made the profoundest im-
pression upon him. But he hastened his steps, for he concluded that
this animal must belong to the herd of the eccentric, and wished to
summon him to help. He encountered him among his goats and
cattle, told him what he had observed, and led him to the labouring
mother, behind which the second little kid, damp and covered with
blood, was already lying in the grass.
With the assurance of a physician, with the tender love of the
compassionate Samaritan, the animal was now cared for by its
owner. After he had waited a certain time, he took one of the new-


GERHART HAUPTMANN
33i
born kids under each arm and set out slowly, followed by the
mother, her heavy udder almost scraping the ground, on the way to
his dwelling. The visitor was not only favoured with the friendliest
thanks, but was invited in an irresistible manner to accompany the
herdsman.
The hermit had erected several buildings on the alp which he
owned. One of them resembled outwardly a rude heap of stones.
Inside it contained warm dry stabling. The goat and her kids were
housed here, while the visitor was conducted higher up the mountain
to a square white-washed hut which, leaning against the wall of
Generoso, stood on a vine-covered terrace. Not far from the little
gate there shot out of the mountain a stream of water as thick as an
arm, filling an immense stone basin that had been hewn out of the
rock. Beside this basin an iron-bound door opened into a mountain
cave, which soon turned out to be a vaulted cellar.
From this spot, which when viewed from the valley seemed to
hang at an inaccessible height, one had a glorious view, of which
however the author does not intend to speak. On that occasion, to
be sure, when he enjoyed it for the first time, he passed from speech-
less astonishment into loud cries of enthusiasm and back again into
speechless astonishment. Just at this moment, however, his host
stepped out into the open again from the dwelling, where he had
been looking for something; he seemed all at once to be walking
with quieter feet. The way he acted, indeed the entire calm, tran-
quil bearing of the man—the visitor did not allow this to escape
him. It served him as an admonition to be sparing of words, chary
of questions. He was already too fond of the strange herdsman
to run the risk of alienating him by even a hint of curiosity or
obtrusiveness.
The visitor of that day can still see, standing on the terrace, the
round stone table with its circle of benches. He sees it with all the
good things which The Heretic of Soana spread out upon it: the
most glorious stracchino di Lecco, delicious Italian wheat bread,
salami sausage, olives, figs, and medlars, and then a jug of red wine
which he had drawn fresh from the grotto. When they sat down,
the long-haired, bearded host, with his goatskin garments, looked
warmly into the visitor's eyes, and at the same time clasped his right
hand, as if wishing to intimate an affection for him.


332
THE HERETIC OF SOANA
Of all that was said at this first meeting, the writer remembers
only a little. The mountain herdsman wished to be called Ludovico.
He related some things about Argentina. Once, when the tinkle of
the angelus came up from far below, he made a remark about this
"provoking noise." The name of Seneca was mentioned. There was
also some superficial talk about Swiss politics. Finally the host
wished to know a number of things about Germany, because it was
the visitor's home. When the visitor was ready to leave, the hermit
said, "You will always be welcome here."
Although the writer of these pages, as he will not conceal, was
greedy for the history of this man, even on his renewed visits he
avoided betraying any interest in it. People had communicated to
him a few external facts in conversations which he had had in Soana
—facts which were said to be responsible for Ludovico's being called
The Heretic of Soana; but he took far more interest in finding out
in what sense this designation was correct, and in what peculiar
internal experiences, what special philosophy, the form of Ludo-
vico's life had its roots. Yet he reserved his questions, and was
richly rewarded for it.
Mostly he found Ludovico alone, either among the animals of his
herds or in his cell. A few times he came upon him as he, like Robin-
son, was milking the goats with his own hand, or as he was putting
kids to a rebellious mother. Then he seemed wholly absorbed in the
herdsman's calling: he was delighted with the female that dragged
her swelling udder on the ground, with the male when he was in
heat and at work. Of one he would say, "Does he not look like the
evil one himself? Just see his eyes. What power, what sparkling
rage, fury, maliciousness. And at the same time what sacred fire."
But to the author it seemed as if the eyes of the speaker held the
same devilish flame as that which he had called a "sacred fire." His
smile would take on a rigid and fierce character, he would show his
splendid white teeth, and at the same time fall into a state of dream-
ing, as he observed with the glance of an expert one of his demo-
niacal matadors at his useful labour.
Sometimes The Heretic played the Pan-pipe, and the visitor
would hear its simple scales as he drew near. On such an occasion
the conversation naturally turned to music, and the herdsman un-
folded strange views. Never, when he was among his flocks, did
Ludovico speak of anything but the animals and their habits, of the


GERHART HAUPTMANN
333
herdsman's calling and its usages. Often he would trace the psychol-
ogy of the animals, the mode of life of the herders, back into the
remotest past, thus betraying an education of no common scope.
He was speaking of Apollo, telling how the latter tended the herds
of Laomedon and Admetus, and was a servant and herdsman; "I
should like to know with what instrument he used to make music for
his flocks." And as if he were speaking of something real, he fin-
ished, "By heaven, I should have liked to listen to him." Those were
the moments when the shaggy recluse might perhaps cause one to
suspect that his powers of understanding were not quite undamaged.
On the other hand, the idea gained a certain justification when he
proved in how many ways a flock may be influenced and guided by
music. With one note he chased them to their feet, with others he
calmed them down. With certain notes he brought them from the
distance, with others he induced the animals to scatter or to trail
along behind him, close at his heels.
There were also visits when almost nothing was said. Once, when
the oppressive heat of a June afternoon had ascended even to the
pastures of Generoso, Ludovico, surrounded by his recumbent, cud-
chewing flocks, was found likewise outstretched in a state of blissful
somnolence. He only blinked at the visitor and motioned him to
stretch out in the grass likewise. After this had been done and both
had lain a while in silence, he suddenly began, in a trailing voice:
"You know that Eros is older than Cronus, and mightier too.—
Do you feel this silent glow about us? Eros!—Do you hear how
the cricket is chirping? Eros!" At this moment two lizards, chasing
each other, darted like a flash across him as he lay there. He re-
peated, "Eros, Eros!" And as if he had given the command for it,
two strong bucks now arose and attacked each other with their
curved horns. He let them go, although the combat grew more and
more heated. The clash of the blows rang louder, and their number
kept increasing. And again he said, "Eros, Eros!"
And now there came to the ears of the visitor, for the first time,
words that made him particularly attentive, because they shed or at
least seemed to shed some light on the question as to why Ludovico
was called The Heretic by the people. "I had rather," he said, "wor-
ship a live he-goat or a live bull than a hanged man on a gallows. I
do not live in an age that does that. I hate, I abhor it. Jupiter
Ammon was represented with ram's horns. Pan has the legs of a


334
THE HERETIC OF SOANA
goat, Bacchus the horns of a bull. I mean the Bacchus Tauriformis
or Tauricornis of the Romans. Mithra, the sun-god, is represented
as a bull. All peoples used to revere the bull, the he-goat, the ram,
and to shed their sacred blood in sacrifices. That I can understand
—for the procreative power is the creative power, procreation and
creation are the same thing. To be sure, the cult of that power is no
cool whimpering of monks and nuns. Once I dreamt of Sita, the
wife of Vishnu, who assumed human form under the name of Rama.
The priests died in her embrace. Then I knew for a moment some-
thing of all sorts of mysteries. Of the mystery of the black procrea-
tion in the green grass; of lust, coloured mother of pearl; of ecstasies
and torpors; of the secret of the yellow maize-kernels; of all fruits,
all swellings, all colours of every kind. I could have bellowed in a
frenzy of pain when I caught sight of the pitiless, all-powerful
Sita. I thought I should die of desire."
During this revelation, the writer of these lines felt like an invol-
untary eavesdropper. He arose with a few words designed to give
the impression that he had not heard the monologue, that he had
been thinking of other matters. He started to leave, but Ludovico
would not hear of it. Then another banquet began on the mountain
terrace; and what happened this time was significant and unfor-
gettable.
Directly upon his arrival the visitor was ushered into the dwell-
ing, the hut which has already been described. It was square, neat,
had a fire-place, and resembled the simple study of a scholar. It
contained ink, pen, paper, and a small library, principally of Greek
and Latin authors. "Why should I conceal from you," said the
herdsman, "that I am of good family, and that I had a misguided
youth and a good education. You will of course wish to know how
I turned from an unnatural person into a natural one, from a captive
into a freeman, from a warped and morose man into a happy and
contented one? Or how I shut myself out of society and Christi-
anity?" He laughed loudly. "Perhaps I shall write some day the
story of my conversion." The visitor, whose suspense had reached
a climax, once more found himself suddenly driven far from the
goal. And he did not progress much when his host wound up by
declaring that the cause of his rebirth was this: he worshipped
natural symbols.
In the shade of the rock, on the terrace, by the brim of the over-


GERHART HAUPTMANN
335
flowing basin, in delicious coolness, they had supped more richly
than the first time: smoked ham, cheese and wheat bread, figs, fresh
medlars, and wine. They had chatted about many things, not bois-
terously, but with quiet gaiety. But now there came a moment
which is as present to the writer as if it had just passed.
The bronzed herdsman, with the long, unkempt curls of his hair
and beard, and with his goatskin clothing, gave an impression of
savagery. He has been compared to a John by Donatello. And in-
deed his face and the features of that John had much similarity in
the fineness of the lines. Ludovico was really handsome, on closer
inspection, provided one could set aside the distorting eye-glasses.
On the other hand, to be sure, it was through them that the en-
tire figure gained, aside from a slightly comic effect, its puzzlingly
strange and arresting character. At the moment of which we are
speaking, the entire person underwent an alteration. Since the
bronze-like aspect of his body had also found expression in a certain
immobility of the features, it disappeared as they became animated
and rejuvenated. He smiled, one might say, under the impact of a
boyish embarrassment. "What I am going to ask of you now," he
said, "I have not yet proposed to any man. Where I have suddenly
found the courage I really don't know myself. From the old habit
of past days I still read occasionally, and still handle pen and ink,
too. So I have written down in idle winter hours a plain story of
events which are said to have taken place here, in and about Soana,
long before my time. You will find it extremely simple, but it
attracted me for all sorts of reasons, which I will not discuss now.
Tell me briefly and frankly: will you go into the house with me once
more, and do you feel inclined to lose some of your time in hearing
this story, which has cost me, too, and without profit, many an
hour? I should not like to urge you; I should rather dissuade you.
Moreover, if you say so, I will take the pages of my manuscript even
now and throw them down into the abyss."
Of course this did not happen. He took the jug of wine, went
into the house with the visitor, and the two sat facing each other.
The mountain herdsman had unrolled from the finest goat's leather
a manuscript written in a monkish hand on strong paper. As if to
give himself courage, he drank the visitor's health once more before
pushing off from the shore, as it were, to plunge into the stream of
the narrative, and then began in a melodious voice.


336 THE HERETIC OF SOANA
THE NARRATIVE OF THE MOUNTAIN HERDSMAN
On a mountain slope above the Lake of Lugano there is to be
found, among many others, a little nest in the mountains, which one
can reach from the shore of the lake on a steep, serpentine mountain
road in about an hour. The houses of the village, which, like those
in most of the Italian places of that region, consist of one jumbled
grey ruin made of stone and mortar, turn their fronts towards a
gorge-like valley. This valley is formed by the meadows and ter-
races of the hamlet, and on the other side by an immense slope of the
overtowering mountain giant, Monte Generoso.
Into this valley, and at the very spot where it really comes to an
end as a narrow gorge, a waterfall pours down from a valley that
lies perhaps a hundred yards higher. The roar of it, varying with
the time of the day and the year, and with the prevailing currents of
the air, whether strong or weak, supplies the hamlet with continual
music.
A long time ago a priest named Raffaele Francesco, about twenty-
five years of age, was transferred to this parish. He had been bom
in Ligornetto, hence in Ticino, and could boast of being a member
of the same family, long resident there, which had produced the
greatest sculptor of all Italy—who was likewise born in Ligornetto,
and finally died there as well.
The young priest had spent his childhood with relatives in Milan,
and had been educated at various seminaries in Switzerland and
Italy. From his mother, who was of noble stock, he derived the
serious trend of his character, which impelled him at an early age
and without any vacillation into the arms of a religious calling.
Francesco, who always wore glasses, made himself conspicuous in
the company of his fellow-pupils by exemplary industry, strict liv-
ing, and piety. Even his mother had to delicately suggest to him
that as a future secular priest he might well indulge in a little pleas-
ure, and that he was not really bound by the strictest monastic rules.
As soon as he had been ordained, however, it was his sole desire to
find a parish as remote as possible, where as a sort of hermit he could
consecrate himself unreservedly, and more than ever before to the
service of God, His Son, and the sainted Mother.


GERHART HAUPTMANN
337
Now, when he had come to the little hamlet of Soana, and had
taken possession of the parsonage, which was built on to the church,
the mountain-dwellers soon observed that he was of a totally dif-
ferent stamp from his predecessor: even in appearance, for the latter
had been a massive, bull-like peasant, who kept the pretty women
and girls of the place under his control with the aid of wholly other
means than ecclesiastical penances and penalties. Francesco, on the
other hand, was pale and delicate. His eyes were deep set. Hectic
spots glowed on the clouded skin over his cheek-bones. Then too
there were his glasses, to this day in the eyes of simple folk a symbol
of preceptorial severity and learning. At first the wives and daugh-
ters of the village had resisted him somewhat; but after the lapse
of four or six weeks, he too had got them into his power, after his
own fashion and to a greater extent, in fact, than the other priest.
As soon as Francesco stepped out into the street through the little
door of the tiny parsonage, nestling up against the church, he would
have children and women thronging about him, kissing his hand
with true veneration. And the number of times in the day he was
called to the confessional by the little bell on the church mounted
up so by evening that his newly appointed housekeeper, who was
nearly seventy years old, was forced to exclaim she had never known
before how many angels had been concealed in what used to be the
rather corrupt village of Soana. In short, the name of the young
pastor, Francesco Vela, spread far and wide through the country-
side, and he very soon came to be reputed a Saint.
Francesco did not allow himself to be disturbed by all this, and
was far from cultivating within himself any other consciousness
than that he was tolerably fulfilling his duties. He said his masses,
maintained his enthusiasm in performing all the church functions of
divine service, and—since the little schoolroom was in the parson-
age—attended besides to the duties of secular instruction.
One evening, at the beginning of March, there was a very violent
pull at the bell of the little parsonage; and when the housekeeper
came to open the door, and threw the light of her lantern out into
the dismal weather, there stood before the door a somewhat uncouth
fellow who wished to see the pastor. After the housekeeper had
closed the door again, she went to her young master's room, and
announced with noticeable anxiety that there was a visitor at this


338
THE HERETIC OF SOANA
late hour. But Francesco, who had made it one of his duties to turn
away nobody that needed him, whoever it might be, merely said
shortly, looking up from the pages of some Church Father, "Go,
Petronilla, show him in."
Soon afterwards a man of about forty was standing before the
pastor's table. His outward appearance was that of the peasants in
that region, only far more neglected, indeed wholly uncared for. He
was barefooted. Ragged, rain-soaked trousers were held up by a
strap above the hips. His shirt was open. The brown, hairy breast
had for its continuation a shaggy throat and a face densely over-
grown with black hair and whiskers, in the midst of which flamed
two darkly glowing eyes.
The man had thrown, shepherd-fashion, over his left shoulder, a
jacket which consisted of patches and was soaked with rain; while
he was excitedly turning around in his brown hard fists a little felt
hat, shrunken and discoloured by the wind and weather of many
years. He had set down a long cudgel in front of the entrance.
When asked what he wanted, the man poured out, with wild
grimaces, an incomprehensible flood of rude sounds and words; they
did belong to the dialect of that region, but to a special variety of it
which seemed like a foreign tongue even to the housekeeper, though
she was born in Soana.
The young priest, who had attentively observed his visitor along-
side the small lamp, endeavoured in vain to fathom the sense of his
request. With much patience and by means of numerous questions,
he was finally able to get this much out of him: that he was the
father of seven children, some of whom he would like to enroll in
the young priest's school. Francesco asked, "Where do you come
from?" And when the answer came sputtering, "I am from Soana,"
the priest was astonished and said instantly, "That is not possible.
I know everybody in this place, but I don't know you and your
family."
The herdsman, farmer, or whatever he was, then gave a passionate
description of where he lived. He accompanied this by many ges-
tures, out of which, however, Francesco could make no sense. He
only said, "If you are an inhabitant of Soana, and your children
have reached the age fixed by law, they would have had to be in my
school long before this, in any case. And I must surely have seen
you or your wife or children in church, at mass or confession."


GERHART HAUPTMANN
339
Here the man opened his eyes wide and pressed his lips together.
Instead of any answer he expelled his breath as from an outraged
and burdened breast.
"Well, then I will write down your name. I think it good of you
to come yourself and take steps to see that your children may not
remain ignorant and perhaps godless." At these words of the young
priest the ragged visitor began to groan in a strange, almost animal
fashion, so that his brown, sinewy, and almost athletic body was
shaken by it. "Yes, indeed," repeated Francesco, taken aback, "I
will write down your name and make inquiries into the matter."
One could see how tear after tear ran from the stranger's reddened
eyelids down over his unkempt face.
"Very well," said Francesco, who could not explain to himself the
agitated conduct of his visitor, and besides was disturbed by him
rather than touched, "Very well, your case will be investigated.
Just tell me your name, my good man, and send me your children
to-morrow." At these words the man was silent, and looked for a
long time at Francesco with a helpless and tortured expression.
The latter asked again, "What is )rour name? Tell me your name."
The priest had been struck from the very beginning by some ele-
ment of fear, something hunted, in the movements of his guest.
Now that he was to give his name, and when at the same time the
footstep of Petronilla was heard outside on the stone floor, he
ducked, and revealed in other ways a terror such as is usually found
only in lunatics or criminals. He seemed persecuted. He seemed
to be fleeing from the police.
Nevertheless he seized a piece of paper and the priest's pen,
stepped into the darkness, strangely enough, away from the light
and over to the window. The sound reached them from a near-by
brook; and from a greater distance came the roar of the waterfall of
Soana. He traced with difficulty, but legibly, something which he
handed to the priest with an effort of the will. The latter said, "All
right," and, making the sign of the cross, "Go in peace." The un-
couth fellow departed, leaving behind him a cloud of vapours which
were redolent of salami, onions, wood-smoke, he-goats, and cow-
stables. As soon as he was gone, Francesco threw the window open.
The next morning Francesco had said mass as always, then rested
a little, then eaten his frugal breakfast, and soon afterwards was on


34°
THE HERETIC OF SOANA
his way to see the Sindaco, who must be visited early if he was to be
found at home. For he rode daily from a railroad station far below
on the lake shore into Lugano, where he conducted on one of the
busiest streets a wholesale and retail business in Ticino cheese.
The sun was shining on the little square set with chestnut trees
which were still bare. The square lay close by the church and con-
stituted a sort of agora for the village. Upon some stone benches
children were sitting and playing about, while the mothers and older
daughters were gathered around an antique marble sarcophagus
which was pouring out a copious supply of cold mountain water.
They were washing clothes or carrying them away in baskets to dry.
The ground was wet, for rain mingled with snow-flakes had fallen
the day before; and indeed it was under new-fallen snow that the
tremendous rocky slope of Monte Generoso, with its inaccessible
crags, towered up beyond the gorge in its own shadow and wafted
fresh, snow-laden air across to Soana.
The young priest walked with downcast eyes past the laundresses,
whose loud greeting he answered with a nod. Looking over his
glasses, like an old man, at the children who thronged about him, he
gave them his hand for a moment; they all touched their lips to it
eagerly and hastily. The part of the village which lay behind the
square was made accessible by some few narrow lanes. But even the
main street could be used only by small vehicles, and only the first
stretch of that. Towards the end of the village it narrowed, and
became so steep that one could get through it and up it with a laden
mule at best. On this little street stood a small shop and the Swiss
post-office.
The post-master, who had been on terms of the greatest comrade-
ship with Francesco's predecessor, greeted him and was greeted in
return, but yet in such a way as to keep the full distance between
the seriousness of the consecrated priest and the trivial friendliness
of the layman. Not far from the post-office the priest turned into a
pitiful little side-alley, which descended in breakneck fashion by
means of big and little flights of steps, past open goat-stables and
all sorts of dirty, windowless, cellar-like cavities. Chickens cackled,
cats perched on rotten galleries amid bunches of suspended ears of
corn. Here and there a goat bleated or a cow lowed, having for some
reason or other not been taken out to pasture.
It was astonishing when you issued from this environment, and


GERHART HAUPTMANN
34i
entering the house of the burgomaster through a narrow portal,
found yourself in a flight of small vaulted chambers, the ceilings of
which had been profusely covered with figures painted in the
style of Tiepolo. High windows and French doors, adorned with
long red curtains, led from these sunny rooms out on to an equally
sunny, open terrace, which was set off by wonderful laurel and cone-
shaped box-trees of great age. Here too you heard the beautiful roar
of the waterfall, as you did everywhere, and had the wild mountain-
side facing you across the valley.
The Sindaco, Sor Domenico, was a well-dressed, quiet man, about
in the mid-forties, who had married for the second time scarcely
three months before. His beautiful, blooming, twenty-two-year-old
wife, whom Francesco had encountered in the kitchen, busied with
the preparation of the breakfast, led him in to see her husband.
When the latter had heard the priest tell of the visit which he had
received the evening before, and had read the slip which bore in
awkward characters the name of the uncouth visitor, a smile passed
over his features. He compelled the young sacerdote to take a seat;
then, in a perfectly matter-of-fact way, and with the mask-like in-
difference of his features undisturbed at any time, he began to give
the desired information about the mysterious visitor, who actually
was a citizen of Soana although he had hitherto remained unknown
to the pastor.
"Luchino Scarabota," said the Sindaco—it was the name which
the pastor's visitor had scribbled on the paper—"is by no means a
poor man, but for years now his domestic affairs have been giving
me and the entire parish the utmost concern; and there is really no
telling where the whole thing will ultimately end. He belongs to an
ancient family, and it is very probable that he has in him some of
the blood of the famous Luchino Scarabota da Milano, who built
during the fifteenth century the nave of the cathedral down in Como.
We have a number of such famous old names in our small district,
Father, as you know."
While he spoke, the Sindaco had opened the French doors and
led the pastor out on the terrace, where he pointed out to him
with slightly raised hand, in the steep funnel-shaped watershed of
the cataract, one of those huts, hewn out of rough stone, such as the
peasants of that district inhabited. But this farm, lying at a great
height, far above all the others, was distinguished from them not


342
THE HERETIC OF SOANA
only by its isolated, seemingly inaccessible situation, but also by
its smallness and shabbiness.
"Look where I am pointing my finger; that is where this Scara-
bota lives," said the Sindaco.
"I am surprised, Father," the speaker continued, "that you should
not have heard anything as yet about that mountain and its inhabi-
tants. Those people have been causing the most hateful scandal all
over the country-side for a decade and more. Unfortunately, we can
get no hold on them. The woman has been brought into court and
has claimed that the seven children she has born—is there anything
more absurd—are not those of the man she lives with, but of sum-
mer tourists from Switzerland, who have to go past that montain
when they climb Monte Generoso. And mind you, the jade is lousy
and crusted with dirt, and moreover as repulsively ugly as sin.
"No, it is common knowledge that the man who visited you yes-
terday, and with whom she lives, is the father of her children. But
that is the point: this man is at the same time her blood-brother."
The young priest turned pale.
"Of course this incestuous couple is avoided and outlawed by
everybody. In this respect the vox populi rarely errs." With this
explanation the Sindaco continued his account. "As often as one of
the children has shown itself here, say in Arogno or Melano, it has
been stoned nearly to death. Wherever these people are known, any
church which the notorious couple enters is regarded as desecrated;
and the two outlaws were made to feel it in so terrible a way, when
they once thought they might make the attempt, that for years they
have lost all inclination to go to church. And should it be permitted,
do you think, that such children, such accursed creatures, who are a
horror and a dread to everyone, should come down here to our
school and sit on the same bench with the children of good Chris-
tians? Can it be fairly asked of us that we should permit our en-
tire village, big and little, to be tainted by these products of moral
infamy, these wicked, mangy beasts?"
The pale face of the priest Francesco betrayed by no change of
expression what impression the narrative of Sor Domenico had made
on him. He thanked him and went away, showing in his whole
bearing the same dignified seriousness as when he had come.
Soon after his conference with the Sindaco, Francesco had made
a report to his bishop on the Scarabota case. A week later the an-


GERHART HAUPTMANN
343
swer of the bishop was in his hand, commissioning the young priest
to inform himself in person with regard to the general state of things
on the so-called alp of Santa Croce. At the same time, the bishop
praised the spiritual zeal of the young man, and confirmed him in
the feeling that he had every reason to feel his conscience oppressed
on account of these erring and outlawed souls, and to be concerned
for their salvation. From the blessings and consolations of the
Mother Church one must exclude no sinner, however far astray.
Not till about the end of March did official duties and also the
condition of the snow on Monte Generoso permit the young clergy-
man of Soana, with a farmer as guide, to undertake the ascent to
the alp of Santa Croce. Easter was close at hand, and although
along the steep side of the gigantic mountain avalanches were
constantly rolling with hollow thunder down into the gorge below
the waterfall, yet wherever the sun had been able to work un-
checked, spring had set in with full power.
Unlike his namesake of Assisi, Francesco was not a great lover of
nature; still all the tender, sap-laden things which were sprouting,
leafing, and blooming about him could not but affect him. Without
the young man's needing to be clearly conscious of it, he had the fine
fermentation of spring in his blood, and enjoyed his share of that
inward swelling and urgency of all nature, which is of heavenly
origin, and which, despite its rapturously sensuous earthly manifes-
tations, is heavenly too in all the joys that blossom out of it.
On the square, over which the priest first had to walk with his
guide, the chestnut-trees had stretched out delicate green little hands
from brown, sticky buds. The children were noisy, and the spar-
rows no less, nesting under the church-roof and in countless nooks
and crannies of the many-cornered village. The first swallows were
executing their broad loops from Soana across the abyss of the
gorge, where they seemed to swerve aside close to the fantastically
turreted, inaccessible rocky masses of the mountain-wall. High up
on ledges and in holes of the rocks, where no human foot had ever
gone, eagles had built their eyries. The great brown couples un-
dertook glorious cruises and floated, merely for the sake of floating,
for hours in endurance-flights above the mountain-peaks, circling
ever higher and higher, as if they desired, in self-forgetting
majesty, to soar out into the untrammeled infinity of space.
Everywhere, not only in the air, not only in the earth, upturned


344
THE HERETIC OF SOANA
and brown or robed with grass and narcissus, not only in all that the
earth sent upward through stems and trunks into leaves and blos-
soms, but also in man, there was a festal feeling; and the brown
faces of the farmers, working on the terraces between the rows of
vines with hoe or curved knife, glistened as though they were in
their Sunday best; for most of them had already slaughtered the so-
called Easter-lamb—that is, a young kid—and hung it up on the
door-post at home, with its legs tied together.
The women grouped about the overflowing marble sarcophagus,
especially numerous and noisy to-day with their heaping wash-bas-
kets, interrupted their clamorous merriment as the priest and his
guide went by. There were also washerwomen standing at the exit
from the village, where a stream of water gushed out of the rocks
under a small image of the Virgin and flowed into another sarcoph-
agus. Both this and the one that stood on the square had been
taken out of the ground some time before in an orchard full of
thousand-year holm-oaks and chestnuts, where they had stood since
time immemorial, barely sticking up out of the ground and hidden
under ivy and wild laurel.
In passing, Francesco crossed himself—indeed, he interrupted his
walk for a moment—to render homage with a genuflexion to the
Madonetta above the sarcophagus, prettily surrounded with the wild
flowers brought by the peasants. It was the first time he had seen
this lovely little shrine, with the bees humming about it, for he had
never yet visited this upper part of the village. The lower part of
Soana was of almost middle-class prosperity, with its church, its
public square of chestnuts, lined with pretty little green-shuttered
houses and held by terrace-like walls; and gardens of all sizes dis-
played blossoming almond and orange-trees and tall cypresses; in
short, the vegetation was more southern. But up here, a few hun-
dred paces higher, it was nothing but an impoverished Alpine village
of herders, smelling of goats and cow-stables. Then, too, an ex-
cessively steep mountain-road began here; it was paved with slabs
of trap-rock, tramped smooth by the outgoing and incoming of the
great communal flock of goats at morning and evening; for it led
up and out to the village common in the kettle-shaped district that
fed the brook Savaglia, which forms farther down the glorious
waterfall of Soana, and after a short roaring passage through a deep
gorge sinks into the Lake of Lugano.


GERHART HAUPTMANN 345
After the priest had climbed up a short time on this mountain-
road, always under the guidance of his companion, he stood still to
take breath. Taking his big black plate-shaped hat from his head
with his left hand, he had drawn with his right a large gay-coloured
kerchief from his cassock, and was dabbing the beads of sweat from
his forehead. In general, the love of nature in an Italian priest, his
feeling for the beauty of the landscape, is not great. But the distant
view from a great height, a so-called bird's-eye view, does have a
charm which seizes at times even the most naive and wrests from him
a certain astonishment. Far below him Francesco spied his church
with its surrounding village, even now no bigger than a miniature,
while round about him the titanic mountain world seemed to tower
higher and higher into the heavens. His awareness of spring was
mingled now with a consciousness of the sublime; this may perhaps
originate in a comparison of our own pettiness with the oppressively
monstrous works of nature and their mute threatening nearness,
while this is combined with a partial realization of the fact that we
too, after all, have some sort of a share in this super-might. In short,
Francesco felt sublimely great and infinitesimally small at one and
the same instant; and this led him to make his accustomed gesture
across forehead and breast: the sign of the cross that shields from
errors and demons.
As he continued the ascent, religious problems and the practical
ecclesiastical details of his parish had soon taken possession of the
eager young cleric once more. And as he again stood still and
turned around, this time at the entrance to a rocky mountain val-
ley, the sight of a sadly neglected stone-work shrine, erected here
for the herders, gave him the idea of going to see all the existing
shrines of his parish, though they were ever so remote, and putting
them into a condition worthy of their sacred purpose. He began
looking around him, searching for a point of vantage which might
command a view of all the existing shrines.
He took his own church with its attached parsonage as his start-
ing-point. As has been said before, it stood on the level of the
village square, and its outer walls were continued downward in the
steep sides of its foundation-rocks, along the bottom of which a
mountain brook tumbled cheerfully. This brook, flowing through
a channel underneath the Soana square, came out into the light
through a stone arch, where it watered orchards and flowery mead-


346
THE HERETIC OF SOANA
ows, though to be sure, seriously fouled by waste-water. Beyond the
church and a little higher—though that was not ascertainable from
this point—the oldest sanctuary in the neighbourhood stood on a
round, flat terrace. It was a small chapel consecrated to the Virgin
Mary, whose dusty image on the altar was over-arched by a Byzan-
tine mosaic in the apse. This mosaic, its gold ground and design
well preserved despite its thousand and more years, represented
Christus Pantokrator. The distance from the main church to this
shrine was not more than thrice a stone's throw. Another pretty
chapel consecrated to St Ann stood at the same distance from
it. Over and behind Soana rose a sharply pointed mountain-peak,
which of course was encircled by broad valley-lands and the flanks
of the overtowering chain of Monte Generoso. This mountain,
almost like a sugar-loaf in shape, seemingly inaccessible, but green
to the top, was called St Agatha, because it housed on its peak a
little chapel of that saint, to be used in emergencies. This made one
church and three chapels, in the immediate vicinity of the village;
in addition there were three or four chapels on the outskirts. On
every hill, at every pretty turn of the road, upon every peak with a
view into the distance, here and there by picturesque rocky prec-
ipices, far and near over gorge and lake, pious centuries had affixed
houses of God; so that in this respect the deep and universal piety
of heathendom, which in the course of past millenniums had origi-
nally consecrated all these spots, was still to be felt, and thus created
for itself divine allies against the threatening, terrible powers of
that savage nature.
The young zealot looked with satisfaction upon all these institu-
tions of Roman Catholic Christianity, such as distinguish the entire
canton of Ticino. To be sure, he also had to admit, with the pain of
the true champion of God, that they did not always command an
active, living, and pure faith, nor even enough love and concern on
the part of his associates for them to preserve all these scattered
heavenly dwelling-places from neglect and forgetfulness.
After some time they turned off into the narrow foot-path which
leads in three hours of laborious ascent to the summit of Generoso.
They soon had to cross the bed of the Savaglia on a tumble-down
bridge, in whose immediate proximity was the reservoir of the little
brook, which plunged downward a hundred yards and more in the
fissure made by its own erosion. Here Francesco heard from various


GERHART HAUPTMANN
347
heights, depths, and directions, together with the rushing of the
mountain-waters hastening down to their reservoir, the tinkle of the
goat-bells, and saw a man of rude exterior—it was the communal
herder of Soana—who, stretched at full length on the ground, sup-
porting himself on the bank with his hands, his head bent down to
the water's level, was quenching his thirst like an animal. Behind
him were grazing some she-goats with their kids, while a wolf-hound
was waiting with pricked-up ears for orders and for the moment
when his lord and master should be done with drinking. "I too am
a herder," thought Francesco. The man rose from the ground; he
whistled shrilly through his fingers, the sound re-echoing from
the rock-walls; and he threw stones off into the distance, trying to
frighten some of his widely scattered animals, to drive others on-
ward, or to call back still others, in order to save them from the
danger of falling over the ledge. Francesco thought what a labor-
ious and responsible task this was, even with animals, to say nothing
of men, who were at all times exposed to the temptation of Satan.
The priest now resumed the ascent with redoubled zeal as though
there were danger that the Devil might perhaps be swifter than he
on this road to his straying sheep. He had been mounting labor-
iously for an hour or more, ever higher and higher into the rocky
wilds of Generoso, guided all the while by his escort whom Fran-
cesco did not find it worth his while to talk with; then, suddenly, he
saw the alp of Santa Croce lying fifty paces before him.
He would not believe that that heap of stones and the masonry
in the midst of it, built up without mortar out of flat stone slabs,
was the place which, the guide had assured him, he was seeking.
What he had expected, after the words of the Sindaco, was a certain
prosperity, whereas this dwelling could at most pass for a sort of
shelter for sheep and goats in a sudden storm. Since it stood on a
steep slope composed of rocky debris and jagged boulders, and since
the zigzag course of the path to it was concealed, the accursed spot
seemed to be without access. The young priest fought down his
astonishment and a certain feeling of horror; he moved closer; and
now for the first time the sight of this avoided and outlawed abode
took on a somewhat more pleasing aspect.
Indeed, the ruined pile became actually transformed before the
eyes of the approaching priest into sheer loveliness: for it seemed as
•


34»
THE HERETIC OF SOANA
if the avalanche of boulders and debris, let loose at a great height,
were dammed and restrained by the rough-hewn square dwelling,
so that beneath it there remained a stoneless slope of lush green, on
which yellow cowslips, of the most delicate beauty, climbed in de-
lightful profusion up to the platform in front of the house-door and,
as if they were inquisitive, crossed the platform and literally passed
through the house-door into the outlawed cave itself.
At this sight Francesco started. This charge of yellow meadow-
flowers up against the ill-reputed threshold, this blooming ascent of
luxuriant processions of long-stemmed forget-me-nots, under which
veins of mountain-water seeped away, and which likewise sought to
take possession of the door with their blue reflection of the sky
. . . this seemed to him almost an open protest against human
bans, excommunications, and law courts. In his astonishment, which
was followed by a certain confusion, Francesco had to seat himself
in his black cassock on a sun-warmed boulder. He had spent his
youth in the lowlands, for the most part pent up in rooms, in church,
auditorium, or study. His feeling for nature had not been aroused.
He had never before gone on an expedition like this, into the stem
exalted loveliness of the high mountains; and perhaps he never
would have done it if this combination of chance and duty had not
urged the mountain-trip upon him. Now he was overwhelmed by
the novelty and grandeur of his impressions.
For the first time the young priest Francesco Vela felt the clear,
full sensation of existence surging through him, making him com-
pletely forget at times that he was a priest, and why he had come.
All his concepts of piety, which were intertwined with a quantity of
church rules and dogmas, were not only displaced by this sensation,
but extinguished. At this point he even forgot to cross himself.
Below him lay the beautiful Lugano district of the upper Italian
Alps, St Agatha with its pilgrim-sought chapel, over which the
brown ospreys were still circling, and the mountain of San Giorgio;
there rose up the peak of Mt San Salvatore; and finally there lay
below him, so far below as to make one giddy, carefully fitted into
the valleys of the mountain-relief like an elongated sheet of glass,
the arm of the Lake of Lugano known as Capolago, on it the sailing-
�oat of a fisher, which looked like a tiny moth on a hand-mirror.
Back of all this, the white peaks of the High Alps seemed to have
climbed higher and higher with Francesco. From among them rose


GERHART HAUPTMANN
349
the white Monte Rosa, with seven white peaks before it; it glistened
against the soft blue of the sky like a diadem, or a mirage.
If one may justly speak of a mountain sickness, so one may speak
with no less justification of a condition which befalls men on moun-
tain-heights, and which one may best designate as incomparable
health. The young priest now experienced this feeling of health in
his own blood, like a rejuvenation. Beside him, between stones and
among the still barren heather, stood a little flower the like of which
Francesco had never seen in his life. It was an excessively lovely
species of blue gentian, whose petals were painted with a surpris-
ingly delicious flaming blue. In the first enthusiasm of his discovery,
the young man in the black cassock had started to pluck the floweret;
but instead he left it standing unmolested in its modest place,
and merely pushed the heather-plants aside, in order to study this
charming miracle. On all sides the young, light-green leaves of the
dwarf-beech were pushing up between the stones. And from a cer-
tain distance, across the slopes of hard grey rubble and tender green,
the flocks of the wretched Luchino Scarabota announced themselves
by their tinkling bells. This entire mountain world had a primitive
strangeness, the youthful charm of bygone human ages, of which
there was no longer any trace left in the low valleys.
Francesco had sent his guide home, as he wished to make the re-
turn trip undisturbed by the presence of any one; and further, he
could not desire any witness of what he was planning to do at the
hearth of Luchino. In the meantime he had already been observed;
and a number of dirty children's heads, with matted hair, were
thrust out again and again in curiosity from the smoke-blackened
hole that served as door to Scarabota's stone citadel.
Slowly the priest began to approach it, and entered the circle of
buildings. Here he could see the great extent of the owner's live-
stock; the ground was befouled by the droppings of a great herd of
cattle and goats. Stronger and stronger in the invigorating moun-
tain air the smell of swine and goats struck Francesco's nostrils.
But as he approached the entrance to the dwelling the increasing
pungency was made bearable by the charcoal smoke forcing its way
out. When he appeared in the frame of the door, cutting off the
light with his black cassock, the children retreated into the darkness,
where they met with silence the greeting and all the other saluta-


35°
THE HERETIC OF SOANA
tions of the priest, who did not see them. Only an old she-goat
came up, bleated softly, and sniffed at him.
Gradually to the eye of God's messenger it had become lighter
in the interior of the room. He saw a stable; it was filled with a
high pile of manure, and deepened at the rear into a natural cavern,
which had been originally present in the gompholite, or whatever
rock it was. In a rude stone partition at the right, a passage had
been opened, through which the priest cast a glance at the family
hearth: now forsaken, a mountain of ashes, the centre still full of
coals, and heaped up on the rock-floor which lay exposed in its
natural state. On a chain thickly coated with soot, an equally sooty
bossed copper kettle hung above the hearth. By this fireplace of
stone-age man stood a backless bench, whose broad seat, as thick as
your fist, rested on two equally broad posts fastened in the rock; for
a century and more it had been smoothed and polished by genera-
tions of tired herdsmen and their wives and children. The wood no
longer seemed to be wood, but rather a polished yellow marble or
soap-stone, though with countless scars and cuts. The foursquare
room, with its naturally untrimmed walls, built up of rough boul-
ders and slabs of slate, resembled a cave; and the smoke passed
from it through the door into the stable and from there into the
open, because it had no other outlet, unless perhaps through some
leaks in the walls. This room was blackened by the smoke and
soot of decades, so that one might almost get the impression of
being in the interior of a chimney thickly coated with soot.
Francesco was just noting the peculiar gleam of eyes that were
shining from out a corner, when a rolling and sliding of rubble
became audible outside, and immediately afterward the form of
Luchino Scarabota stepped like a noiseless shadow into the door-
way; it shut out the sun, so that the room was still more heavily
darkened.
To be continued



MOTHER AND DAUGHTER. BY ADOLPH DEHN






DAUGHTER SEULE. BY ADOLPH DEHN





MARIGOLD PENDULUM
BY DUDLEY POORE
I
Dear, with this tawny marigold
I send you Ophir,
I send you Spain,
high galleons from Peru
wallowing slow in parrot green water,
I send you the gold house of Nero on the Aventine,
the throne of Babur, the bed of Semiramis,
I send you the dromedaries of Zenobia,
the beryl jaguars of Domitian,
the yellow desert beyond Baalbek,
fresh minted drachmae of Heliopolis,
rugs of Sultanabad, amber and green.
Love, look with favour on the gift
and the rest of my wealth shall be yours
by the next caravan.
II
Will no one deliver me from the haunted moon?
When I lie abed thinking chaste thoughts
she crosses the floor, slips under the sheet,
and cuddles her icy flank against mine.
If I move to another room she is there before me.
If I flee to the other side of the house
she looks at me from a neighbour's window,
or stands on a rain barrel to wink at me.
Now I am always listening for her step.


MARIGOLD PENDULUM
On dark nights I fancy her hiding in the garret.
In the cellar I look to find her flushed and tipsy,
sitting cross-legged on a claret cask.
She is faithful as an unloved wife.
Once when her scattered hair lay on my pillow
I threatened to kill her. In derision
she drew a cloud over her breasts
and hid in the water jug on my washstand.
My thirsty knife severed only a long tress.
For a week now I have not seen her.
One of these summer nights I must find the way
to slip a knotted cord under her ears.
m
All night the wind ran round the house
hugging his sides with laughter.
Thunder tramped clumsily to and fro in the garret
dragging trunks and old bookcases over the ceiling.
The women folk pattered up stairs and down,
closing draughty doors, seeking each other's beds
to mix their long undone hair
and gibber like bats in cavernous twilight
when lightning thrust a yellow paw
in at the window.
I alone was glad of the tumult,
glad of the storm that kept me awake
to put my arm round the lightning's neck,
and clasping the tawny leopard against me,
to hear once more overhead,
through the hiss and crackle of rain
on the smouldering world,
the apple tree's gnarled hands
caressing the weathered shingles
on a night when I held
in the circle of two arms
all the sun's hoarded gold.


DUDLEY POORE
IV
Who tethered that white balloon
to the hilltop grainfield?
How it bellies and tugs,
whipping the guy ropes,
bending the oak tree pegs,
swelling rounder and higher,
crowding the very swallows out of heaven.
Knee deep in the hayrick
the sun at rest on his pitchfork,
in overalls stitched from a double breadth
of blue sky denim,
watches the glistening bag of silk
that fills and fills
with mounting vapour of ripe meadows.
Oh, love, to climb with you
into the wicker basket of the wheatfield.
Oh, to loose the straining ropes of twisted sunlight
that tie the white cloud to the hillcrest,
and rise and sail
dazzlingly over houses and steeples,
to see red barns and zigzag fences,
pastures shouldering green elm parasols,
rumbling carts that yellow dust clouds lope behind,
dangling thirsty tongues,
chugging engines that pant
sweating up long hills in nodding bonnets
of curled ostrich or aigrette,
snaky rivers striped with bridges
writhing across the haze of level plains
till the sea sets an icy green heel
on their envenomed heads,
while swarming houses run to crowd the wharves
and dabble their toes in the surf,
where the sailing ships


354
MARIGOLD PENDULUM
clap shining hands on the horizon
and steamers toss dark windy hair.
Then at evening to rise yet higher,
rung after rung up the laddered atmosphere,
through emptiness like a hollow dish
to the highest shelf of thunder,
and there above cockcrow, above canon,
peeping over the world's tanned shoulder
down the pale abyss where the sun stables at night
to brighten his rusting harness,
and the stars polish their silver cups by day,
to loose a pigeon of lightning
from a hamper of storm.
V
On the barn's peak the moon sits washing her whiskers.
Now she blinks a green eye, slowly arches her back,
and walking along the gable on satin pads
glares at me hungrily.
All day she looked so demure.
When I lay on my back in the deep grass,
watching her prowl the sky eaves, and leap
over fences of blue
I never guessed she could show so thirsty a tooth.
To-night I am afraid of her.
I wish she had not seen me here at the window
observing her antics.
She is not nearly so attractive as by day,
sly creature, rusted with mange,
and one ear gone, I see, in the fight she had
with the orange leopard that owns the morning.
VI
Thunder hops on the garret roof,
rain scampers over the shingles,
old father God with a flash of his testy eye


DUDLEY POORE
slams the gold window of Paradise,
pulls a torn shade across eternal splendour.
On these rotted silks
where the moths' scissors slashed and snipped,
the years have wiped their yellow brushes.
Fold them away, dear, with the wasp-waisted spoons
in their flannel dressing gowns.
Let us wonder no more to whom they belonged.
It is enough to remember they will still be here
when we and our love are dust.
But let us sit with an open book on our knees
turning pages the pedantic worms have annotated
with crabbed wisdom and obscure geometry,
where mildew inscribes with a blue pencil
poems in forgotten alphabets,
and when the storm pauses
to shake the dank hair from his eyes
and resin the bow of his cracked fiddle,
we shall hear through the green humming of rain
as it lays a cold cheek on the cobwebbed glass,
all those curious noises that the dust makes
gently settling
on the cracked furniture of discarded lives.
VII
Summer's gold pendulum slowlier swinging
gleams through the fog-dimmed glass
of the year's tall clock.
Come with me, love, wrap your bright shoulders
warm in the swallow's cloak, and fly with me
over the brown stubble of reaped fields,
to rest side by side on a telephone wire
watching the loaded hay carts crawl important
like fat caterpillars down a leafblade of road,
or at evening to bend against the silver trance
of still pools where the sunset holds
long and long


MARIGOLD PENDULUM
the print of our wing tips,
till we find a lost blue key
that winds the intricate spring
behind a red pumpkin moon
and a nipped marigold sun.
VIII
They are all yours:
images plucked with the wild Turk's-cap lily
in deep reedy meadows guarded
by the darting regiment
of dragonflies in burnished cuirass.
Yours the songs I make
when weary with searching
I come with the tang of salt winds on my lips
and the beating of moth wings in my blood,
to hold my joy in the blue leaping world
and the tall dancing sun with yellow hair
against the wheel of my mind,
as the Greek cutter wrought
in the hard translucence
of sard or of jasper
the body of Eros.
Yours because all loveliness
is a polished shield in whose hollow
I see your eyes.
And my poems are a fire
lighted on the brink of night and death
where I hurl like driftwood
moon, stars, and sun,
kingdoms, galleons, caravans,
with hell and god and the four archangels,
the better to see your face.



Courtesy of the Galerie Paul Rosenberg, Paris
A PORTRAIT. BY MARIE LAURENCIN












Courtesy of the Galerie Paul Rosenberg, Paris
TWO YOUNG WOMEN. BY MARIE LAURENCIN





THE PROGRESS OF PAINTING
BY THOMAS CRAVEN
THE MODERN BACKGROUND
IN writing the summary of modern art, I shall present the sub-
ject in three divisions: the relation of painting to contemporary
life; its affiliation with the great tradition; and its individual ten-
dencies and deviations. The old question of limitations, as pro-
pounded by Lessing, I have disregarded. To me any attempt to
constrict an art to an absolute sphere of activity is sheer waste of
time. Lessing's theory has no place in modern philosophy or, for
that matter, in any aesthetic. All that may be asked legitimately
of a work of art is simply this, "Is it true to itself?". Painting
may be sculpturesque, or sculpture in low relief may be pictorial
—both are perfectly valid artistic conceptions. When an artist
employs his materials creatively, that is, when he selects from the
field of his experience those things which are essential to a new
order, then I have no quarrel with the character of these elements
if they are consistently related, if the completed work has its own
coherent vitality.
Modern life with its arid complexities, its intense cruelties,
and its cheap haste, affords the spirit but little nourishment. The
artist is forced into loneliness and insecurity—often into a deadly
poverty—he paints canvases for which there is no true destination;
he is at the mercy of that unenlightened intermediary known as the
dealer; in rare instances he wins the suffrage of a wealthy collector
to whom art is no more than a symbol of vanity—the general pub-
lic remains unaffected, and seems to have no need whatever for
pictures. It is popularly supposed, from these conditions, that
the artist has nothing in common with the life of to-day, that he
is a curiously independent being producing a strange and useless
commodity to satisfy the caprices of a disordered soul. The fash-
ionable magazines find it expedient to publish eccentricities; there
is a cry of surprise or a shudder of disgust, and the public wonders
what it is all about.


358 THE PROGRESS OF PAINTING
Despite indifference and insensitive scorn, art, somehow, has
flourished. But the revolutionary spirit which gave the death-
blow to Impressionism, and ripened the genius of Cezanne, has
subsided. It must be apparent even to the most uncritical observer
that the new movement, while it has gained in stability and in uni-
formity of accomplishment, has rapidly acquired a set of manner-
isms not altogether advantageous to its original expressive purpose.
The growth is bigger than a list of names; its study involves more
than a perusal of illustrated catalogues or an inventory of collec-
tions. It is a speculum of a complicated modernity, revealing not
only the dignity and grandeur of a few minds, but also much of the
base cleverness and shabby thinking of our society. The parvenu,
the politician, and the virtuoso are numbered with the deluded
visionary, with the failure, who, obsessed by an overwrought ideal-
ism, sees a new world where there is only chaos. But art is not
merely a reflection: inevitably linked to its environment by the
expression of experience, it is, in its genuine manifestations, cre-
ative; it moulds assimilated material into forms, and in this re-
spect, like all theoretic endeavour, is above temporary circum-
stances. Large or small, it presents a scheme of relationships, the
objectification of which demands work, reason, and imagination.
Art confers permanence on life; through it man reduplicates his
existence, robs the outer world of its stubborn strangeness, and
builds up a convincing reality.
Modern plastic expression, by denying the value of literal re-
production, strips the artist naked—it exposes him ruthlessly for
what he is, and forces him to the consideration of form. The
rendition of form—form undisguised by the allurements of natu-
ralism, as in primitive art—lays bare the whole creative skeleton,
and exemplifies the artist's ability to co-ordinate his reactions and
ideas. It also witnesses the character of his mind, his habits of
thought, and his opinions; and by sweeping aside the sensational
display of technical skill, reveals the source and nature of his real
tendencies. The study of form enables us to get at the fundamen-
tal truth of art, and to distinguish works of dignity and design
from the idiosyncrasies and impertinences of modern exhibitions.
In a society with no solidarity of purpose, where the powerful
unifying effect of a general religion has long since passed away,
where arbitrary prohibitions and nervous inhibitions are rules


THOMAS CRAVEN
359
rather than exceptions, where intelligent communistic will is ar-
rested by the manias of crass individualism, there is a tremendous
amount of encouragement given to pretence and factitious achieve-
ment, in truth, to anything that looks important; and it must be
emphasized again that modern art is a reflection of this society,
that it is neither pure nor perfect, and as an authentic expression
of our time it is contaminated by pretence, snobbery, and commer-
cial cunning. The glory of the movement rests with examples
of individual nobility. Post-Impressionism has given the world
genuine artists, men with intelligence and creative wisdom; and
to separate serious work from the mass of imitative trumpery, I
shall analyse the special tendencies and mental attitudes which
modern art so clearly brings to light.
HISTORICAL SURVEY
Pre-Renaissance painting of the Occident, in a general sense,
was a religious iconography in two dimensions, a symbolical art
of flat surfaces addressed to an unsophisticated imagination. Pro-
ceeding from Byzantine influences through Cimabue and Giotto to
Masaccio, its course was toward a greater and more intense relief
of objects in space—toward realism. Now the word realism, in
this connexion and throughout the review, is employed with rig-
orous care: the term bears no relation to photographic naturalism;
it refers to a unified abstraction of experience and not to literal
representation; it is based upon an imaginative conception of life,
creating a new reality by means of new combinations, and strength-
ening the emotional appeal of two-dimensional art by the addition
of solidity and depth. The early painters were concerned with
perspective, anatomy, light and shade, et cetera, as properties to
insure a greater reality, and these properties were significant in the
development of painting only so far as they were regarded as
means. When any one of them was pursued for itself, as in some
of the Italian perspective painters, the vigour of true art was
buried in mere procedure. Design, the foundation of the decora-
tive art before Giotto, was intellectualized, was conceived as
running back and forth through a sequence of recessive planes,
as well as laterally. With the inception of depth, painting be-


360 THE PROGRESS OF PAINTING
came sculptural in its use of detail, that is, forms were modelled.
Instead of the tangible reality of sculpture which, of course,
could never be approached, painting extended solid form far be-
yond the limits of true sculpture, and opened up a new and
voluminous world of ordered space.
The loss of surface, the liberation of objects from a background,
first became a positive fact in Masaccio. This austere genius
was the progenitor of a movement, which, before its degeneration,
was destined to include veritable giants of art, some of the great-
est men of all time.
The new order, by releasing objects from a single plane,
brought an extraordinary impetus to art, but at the same time
imposed upon painters the most difficult problems. To attain
unity of design, to control insurgent forces operating in three
dimensions, demanded the superior intelligence of the masters of
composition. For a long and magnificent period the genius of
the artist was concentrated on the study of form, and on the se-
quences of line and mass necessary to hold together groups of
objects presented as existent in the unencumbered depths of actual
space. Pure form, as delineated from Masaccio to Michael An-
gelo, was an artistic reality. It was not imitation. It imparted
to the substance of the fleeting world a permanent beauty in-
finitely surpassing anything merely phenomenal; it embodied
the higher reality born of mind. In the culmination of the
Renaissance men were supremely conscious of this reality; they
were not concerned with the supra-sensuous world—their aim
was definite and concrete. Nor were they mechanics experiment-
ing with barren processes. Technical devices were subordinated
to one prevailing idea—and that idea was reality.
No sooner had the formal art taken root than painters began
to introduce textures into their designs, always, let it be observed,
with the intention of making their forms more convincing. An
examination of the abundant productivity from Giotto to Titian
will disclose the increasing tendency toward adornment; the glit-
ter of armour, silks, and shining fabrics was utilized to relieve
the stiffness of objects. It is undeniable that a certain richness
of detail and a voluptuous surface charm were laid upon art,
but the advantages thus gained were more than counterbalanced
by the weakening of a far more important item. The purity of


THOMAS CRAVEN 36i
form was lost. Form in painting cannot be reconciled with daz-
zling reflections and superficial sheen. Even sculpture cast in
polished bronze does not allow an unadulterated response to its
form, but inasmuch as its tactility can be demonstrated by actual
handling, its lustre is not so damaging as the analogous effect in
painting. But the interpolation of textures was not immediately
ruinous: when applied solely as compositional ornament, the
qualitative appeal of gleaming appearances was legitimate
enough. No one, I fancy, could justly complain of the textural
work of Giorgione—it is too finely governed by imaginative
genius to be obtrusive; in fact, it enhances the gorgeous beauty of
his form. Eventually, however, the interest in surfaces became
an end in itself; painters were slaves to their models; drawing
and formal composition were superseded; and we behold the de-
gradation of Renaissance classicism.
When painters, in their quest for a more intense realism, fell
into the evil practice of copying natural surfaces from a model,
an element hitherto unknown came into art. This was the imi-
tated value or tone. The illusion of surface engendered by the
expert representation of natural light and dark was so captivat-
ing that, ere long, it had undermined the foundation of plastic
art, that solid structure erected by the ancients on a knowledge of
actual form as distinguished from merely visible appearance.
Technically the rendition of natural surfaces is a problem of
visual mechanics; it depends upon accuracy of values and tones,
and is wholly uncreative. It is purely a matter of concentrated
observation. One looks at nature, watches the fall of light and
shade, notes carefully the gradation in atmospheric density from
the highest light to the deepest dark; and then, taking brushes and
pigment, translates the array of appearances into an equivalent
scale of colours. An artist gyved to an objectivity of this sort has
neither strength nor time for creative thought; an artist who meti-
culously copies natural values has no energy for the intricacies
of true composition. The mysteries of religion, the grave philos-
ophies of those old painters who had to live and labour and spec-
ulate for their interpretation of the world, could not be reduced
to so shallow a formula as the play of light and shade on flesh
and flower and silk. As a result the spirit, as well as the form it
inspired, dwindled away.


362 THE PROGRESS OF PAINTING
Painting, as a creative art, is the revelation through colour of
form more extended in its space than sculpture. Form ranges
from a decorative linear arrangement to a modelled structure in
three dimensions, and the ways in which it may be presented are
illimitable. It should be remembered at this point that painting
may be flat or solid: men of the profoundest critical authority
have preferred the rhythmical silhouettes of the Chinese; but in
general the Western mind is more powerfully excited by the opu-
lence and robustness of recessive design. The realization of form,
even in its rudimentary aspects, is not a simple visual experience,
but an exceedingly complex product of memory and imagination.
It follows, then, that concentration on visual appearances with a
view to a faithful transcript of natural values kills the imagina-
tion and ends in imitation. Aesthetics recognizes but one basal
creative act—composition—the establishment of definite relations
between formal perceptions. Composition fashions the dis-
parate elements of experience into one single organic totality; it
has no existence in nature, and cannot by the most painstaking
arrangements of objects be more than suggested. An illustration
will make this obvious. Take the raw material for a still-life—a fig-
ured cloth, some fruit, and a vase of flowers; have it photographed
by the best camera-man on earth; and then employ a naturalistic
painter to make his version. What is the result? The camera
gives us a perfect reproduction, an absolutely identical range of
black and white tones. The imitative painter, by a few tricks of
perspective, adds a suggestion of depth to the accuracy of the nega-
tive, but otherwise he has attempted to do what the camera does
much more successfully. So far we have only a simulacrum of
life, and not art. But if the mind of Cezanne were set to work
upon this material, all thoughts of visual accuracy would be cast
aside; and instead of the fragmentary and diffuse appearances
of actual life, we should have in the completed picture a new
structure, powerful, palpable, and closely knit. Certainly com-
position is an act of imagination.
So long as the tradition of design continued in force art re-
mained healthy. Rubens is a great designer in spite of the fact
that the brilliancy of his textures often distracts the eye from the
underlying form. But as painters became expert craftsmen in the
handling of natural light, as they grew to depend more and more


THOMAS CRAVEN
363
on the surface attributes of their motifs, mere taste in arrange-
ment usurped the place of true design. The salons of Europe were
filled with images endowed with no more artistic merit than tinted
photographs.
Rembrandt was the last of the giants, and it is significant that
the greatest master of tone in the history of art should have been
absorbed in the ordering and spacing of his lights and darks, and
not in their objective accuracy. He makes us feel the synthetic
form of a world bathed in an envelope of marvellous tone. His
heads are truly constructed; one and all are quite startling de-
partures from anatomical fidelity. It was Rembrandt's rare un-
derstanding of the architectural value of light and dark masses,
of the order of the planes receiving light, and of composed form,
that lifted his art of tone above the amorphous canvases of his
contemporaries and followers.
It must not be supposed from the foregoing account that beauti-
ful values, and all that they imply, are incompatible with fine
painting. The man who restored form to art, Cezanne, was a
product of Impressionism, a movement devoted entirely to the
exploration of real light. As a matter of truth, values, that is,
the relative intensity of tones according to their constituent
amounts of light and dark, accompany all harmony of colour, and
determine the areas of all colours used in the modelling of form.
Painting declined when values were directed toward imitation,
and when, for the sake of spurious surface charm and naturalistic
effects, they impoverished the imagination and debased design.
There is a sharp distinction between the imitation of natural at-
mospheric values and the creation of tone, or fine values, by per-
fectly harmonized colours.
The history of painting from the death of Rembrandt to the
advent of Impressionism is a curious void. The classical tradition,
save in an academic sense, seemed irreparably broken. Not that
this long period was destitute of names and talent—there was no
end of both—but in no other art do we find so little of eminence
and so much of the artificial and lifeless. Under the stimulus of
the intimate Dutch schools painting pursued the path of tone and
terminated in a sort of descriptive scenery. In Spain we can point
to one isolated figure of importance—Goya—a man who ap-
proached the heights, but never reached them. Goya could not


364 THE PROGRESS OF PAINTING
deliver himself from the tyranny of the model; he threw his un-
paralleled vitality into portraiture and the grotesque; his draw-
ing is stressed by the trenchant accent of illustrative brutality;
his design is never independent of theatrical subject-matter. He
is one of the main sources of modern naturalism—he exerted a
spell upon Manet, and by so doing, hastened the decline of cre-
ative art. Manet was more literal than the Spaniard, and re-
garded his chosen occupation as a highly perfected craft. Four
men stand out conspicuously in a land whose annals are character-
ized by good taste rather than by originality—Ingres, Delacroix,
Courbet, and Daumier, artists of sufficient stature to understand
reality, and to feel genuinely, if not completely, the tradition of
Renaissance form. The naturalistic stream divided, the main
stem running through Whistler, Sargent, and Zuloaga down to
the abominable portraitists who exhibit in the fashionable salons
of Paris and Fifth Avenue, the other, a collateral current ending
in Impressionism.
The Impressionists aimed their shafts of sunlight at the pallid
effigies of several generations of sterile art, and though only
technically radical, were responsible for a revolutionary era in
painting. Headed by Monet, Sisley, and Pissarro, these men left
the validity of a formless art uncontested, and in their enthusiastic
rebellion against dulness, made no inquiry into the aesthetics of
design; they considered atmospheric tone a necessity, reduced cre-
ative activity to a chromatic formula, and endeavoured through
a new process to increase the sensational quality of values. When
all is said, disregarding individual deviations, the purpose of the
movement was the intensification of tone. The old method of
analysing an object into sharp outlines covered with a uniform
colour lightened or darkened in places was abandoned. Having
discovered that the values of natural light, when literally copied,
lose their original life and brilliancy in a shell of murky pigment,
the Impressionists strove to enliven the canvas by injecting large
amounts of complementary tints into the shadows. This was fol-
lowed by a more advanced step of indicating, not only the shad-
ows, but also the local colours by facets of pure pigment varying
in tint and hue, which, when blended by the eye at a short dis-
tance, gave the idea of the vibrant animation of nature itself.
Such a process seduced painters into the novel, close, and absorb-


THOMAS CRAVEN
365
ing investigation of light, a study so minute and concentrated as
to blind its devotees to all thoughts of art as an expressive me-
dium. The profound problems of painting were completely forgot-
ten: the selection of dispersed facts of experience, and their incor-
poration as units of structure into a complex and limited form
where all the parts tend to sequential relationship; the everlasting
human need for finding kinship and meaning in the details of the
external world; the concrete manifestation of imaginative power
—these were discarded for a playful mechanics.
The good bequeathed by Impressionism can be quickly sum-
marized. The drab palette of former periods was supplanted by
a clean, light, exciting gamut which lent to pictures a range of
sharp contrasts equivalent in intensity to those of nature; the re-
lation of light-values to colour was fully and scientifically probed;
but in actual accomplishment the movement flourished for forty
years and brought forth nothing more vital than a number of very
real and convincing representations of sunlight. It was an art
that inveigled the pictorial interest through arrangements and
through scenic characteristics of subject-matter, being in this par-
ticular a sort of chromatic photography equipped with an elabo-
rate technique. Its energies were focussed, not on the rehabilita-
tion of form, but on the invention of a new means of reduplica-
tion; it was utterly subservient to appearances—the model was
painted exactly as seen and not studied as a motif for creation—
and all form disintegrated into floating veils of atmospheric iri-
descence. To-day it seems incredible that an uprising with so
little to recommend it could have enlisted the sympathies of so
many men of talent.
The Impressionists paid scant attention to drawing, and plastic
creation without drawing is an impossibility. Form in painting
and sculpture is presented by sequences in line and mass, by draw-
ing; and an art which neglects this factor is chaotic and meaning-
less. Drawing is thus a constructive element absorbed by the mass
of a completed work—in itself it is linear expression. Etchings,
lithography, mezzo-tints, and all branches of art employing tonal
areas, are really paintings in line and must be appraised as such
aesthetically. Drawing may be divided into two departments.
First, it is a sculptor's notation of form, a summary of experienced
prominences and depressions, a shorthand method of setting down


366 THE PROGRESS OF PAINTING
the artist's feeling for palpability. Second, it is a rhythmical ad-
justment of compositional lines to suggest the pictorial expansion
of form. In both cases it may be complete expression; but it
must be understood that drawing, in its very essence a frame-
work, cannot provoke the emotional responses of colour and mass.
Leonardo da Vinci frequently made abstractions of his paintings,
but these drafts, remarkable as they are, impress us as only sketches
when placed beside the full-bodied splendour of his colour and
form. The great charm of work in contour lies in its suggestion—
the observer must use his imagination to fill in the bounded planes.
Pure linear expression reached its highest development in the
art of China. Conceiving the pictorial world as fiat, the early
masters produced compositions which, though apparently simple,
are amazingly complex in their delicate balance of curved lines.
The Western painter had had to fight a different and more dif-
ficult battle. He would have us feel the third dimension, and to
arouse this feeling has gone beyond linear perspective and colour
into superpositions, defining one form against the other until a
final plane far back of the frame is recorded. When any form is
isolated in space, when it neither relieves nor is relieved by another
form, it ceases to function as an element of the third dimension.
Line in this type of painting is not only a mark of delimitation,
but also an indication of direction passing through the centre of
volumes to the background; and it is this imaginary line that is
constructive.
To make an artistic drawing in contour demands the brains of
a master. Michael Angelo's are probably the best in Occidental
art—and for the very good reason that he knew everything con-
tained within the figure before he set out to reduce it to an out-
line. One of the curses of Modernism is its plethora of line draw-
ings. Those of Picasso are extraordinarily good; but Picasso is
a superlative draughtsman and a sculptor of ability. Little can
be said in favour of the childish distortions of the imitators. In
successful expression there is no such thing as distortion or defor-
mation. An artist is at liberty to exaggerate to the limit of his
imaginative strength—if his forms are perfectly related there is
no dissonance; but if a form has no place in his order, if it stands
out falsely, then the designer is guilty of distortion.
One of El Greco's figures lifted from its context would appear


THOMAS CRAVEN
367
grossly deformed; Cezanne's characters would be monsters if let
loose in the flesh, but as I have repeated, art has its own life.
There is, of course, a human limit to exaggeration. I have seen
drawings where the biceps was swollen into a balloon. This is
unpardonable distortion. A composition in which a biceps could
harmoniously take its place as a balloon is inconceivable. After
all, the basis of drawing is experience; and the brain is habituated
to anatomical images that cannot be entirely disregarded. We
must bear in mind, however, that the average person, grounded in
the belief that art is imitation, is likely to take offense at both
good and bad modern drawing. He can stand simplification and
abstraction in the Chinese and the Persians, or even in the pre-
Renaissance painters, but he will raise a cry of horror if a modern
artist undertakes it.


DECADENT CRY
BY MAXWELL BODENHEIM
Hill-flowers salute his feet
Upon the upward slant of a path.
His destination does not matter:
His legs divide the spacious tragedy
Of distance into the small translation
Of steps, and with their aid he reaches
The fraudulent temple of a pause or end.
Hill-flowers, important and unprejudiced,
Bow to this monster-clown.
His feet, ridiculous and neat,
Do not stop, for they must ape
A certainty and hasten to attack
Or praise fixed idols made by flesh and mind.
Hill-flowers, trimly polished
Devices hailing preciosity,
Rumpled by the wind
To scores of original caprices,
Bearing the transfigured skirmish
Of spiritual moods that men call colour,
Swiftly and unassumingly
Deaf to lusts and traditions—
They are not regarded
By the men who walk, flat-footed
Or with scholarly exactitude,
In chase of an ardent chicanery
Known as flesh and elderly
Quibbles of mind and emotion.
Only an intellect clad in sprightly chiffon
Can spy the importance of flowers on a hill.


SMITH AND JONES
BY CONRAD AIKEN
SMITH and Jones, as far as one could tell in the darkness,
looked almost exactly alike. Their names might have been
interchangeable. So might their clothes, which were apparently
rather shabby, though, as they walked quickly and the night was
cloudy, it was difficult to be sure. Both of them were extraordi-
narily articulate. They were walking along the muddy road that
led away from a large city and they talked as they went.
"As far as I'm concerned," said Smith, "it's all over. No more
women for me. There's nothing in it. It's a damned swindle.
Walk right up, gentlemen, and make your bets! The hand is
quicker than the eye. Where is the elusive little pea? Ha ha!
Both ends against the middle."
He struck a match and lit his pipe: his pale large unshaven face
started out of the night.
Jones grumbled to himself. Then turning his head slightly to-
ward Smith, in a somewhat aggressive way, as if he were showing
a fang, he began to laugh in a peculiar soft insolent manner.
"Jesus! One would think you were an adolescent. No more
women! If there aren't it'll be because you're dead. You were
born to be made a fool of by women. You'll buzz around the
honey-pot all your days. You have no sense in these matters,
you've never had the courage or the intelligence once and for all to
realize a woman. Look! here's a parable for you. There are an
infinite number of little white clouds stretching one after another
across blue space, just like sweet little stepping stones. To each
of them is tethered a different-coloured child's balloon—I know
that would rather badly fracture the spectrum, but never mind.
And behold, our angel-child, beautiful and trustful, flies to the first
little cloud-island and seizes the first balloon, enraptured. It's
pink. But then he sees the next island, and the next balloon, which
is orange. So he lets the first one go, which sails away, and flies
vigorously to the next little island. From there he catches sight of
a different shade of pink—sublime! intoxicating! and again dashes


37©
SMITH AND JONES
across an abyss. . . . This lovely process goes on for ever. It
will never stop."
Smith splashed into a puddle and swore.
"Don't be so damned patronizing, with your little angel-child
and toy balloons. I know what I'm talking about. Adolescent?
Of course I am—who isn't? The point is, exactly, that I have at
last realized a woman. That's more, I'll bet, than you've done—
you, with your damned negativism!"
"Negativism!—how? But never mind that. Tell me about
your woman."
"It must be experienced to be understood."
"Of course—so must death."
"What can I tell you then?—You, who have always made it a
principle to experience as little as possible! Your language doesn't,
therefore, extend to the present subject. You are still crawling on
your hands and knees, bumping into chairs, and mistaking your
feet for a part of the floor or your hands for a part of the ceiling.
Stand up! Be a man! It's glorious."
"Was she blonde or brunette?"
"If you insist, she was a negress tatooed with gold and silver.
Instead of ear-rings, she wore brass alarm-clocks in her ears, and
for some unexplained reason she had an ivory thimble in her left
nostril."
Jones laughed: there was a shade of annoyance in his laughter.
"I see. . . I forgot to mention, by the way, that when the
angel-child flew so vigorously from cloud to cloud his wings made
a kind of whimpering sound. . . . But go on."
"No, she was neither blonde nor brunette, but, as you suggested,
imaginary. She didn't really exist. I thought she did, of course—
I had seen her several times quite clearly. She had a voice, hands,
eyes, feet—in short, the usual equipment In point of size she was
colossal; in point of speed totally incommensurable. She walked,
like Fama, with her head knocking about among the stars. She
stepped casually, with one step, from town to town, making with
the swish of her skirts so violent a whirlwind that men everywhere
were sucked out of houses."
"I recognize the lady. It was Helen of Troy."
"Not at all. Her name, as it happened, was Gleason."
Jones sighed. The two men walked rapidly for some time in
silence. The moon, like a pale crab, pulled clouds over itself,


CONRAD AIKEN
37i
buried itself in clouds with a sort of awkward precision, and a few
drops of rain fell.
"Rain!" said Jones, putting up one hand.
"To put out the fires of conscience."
"Gleason? She must be—if your description is accurate—in
the theatrical profession? A lady acrobat, a trapeze artist, or a
Pullman porteress?"
"Wrong again, Jones—if error were, as it ought to be, punishable
by death, you'd be a corpse. . . . Suffice it to say that Gleason
loved me. It was like being loved by a planet."
"Venus?"
"Mars. She crushed me, consumed me. Her love was a pro-
founder and more fiery abyss than the inferno which Dante, in the
same sense, explored. It took me days of circuitous descent, blaz-
ing torments, to get even within sight of the bottom; and then, as
there were no ladders provided, I plunged headlong. I was at once
ignited, and became a tiny luminous spark, which, on being cast
forth to the upper world again on a fiery exhalation, became an
undistinguished cinder."
"To think a person named Gleason could do all that!"
"Yes, it's a good deal, certainly. I feel disinclined for further
explorations of the sort."
"Temporarily, you mean. . . . You disliked the adventure?"
"Oh no—not altogether! Does one dislike life altogether? Do
we hate this walk, this road, the rain, ourselves, the current of
blood which, as we walk and talk, our hearts keep pumping and
pumping? We like and dislike at the same time. It's like an
organism with a malignant, fetid cancer growing in it. Cut out the
cancer, which has interlaced its treacherous fibres throughout every
part, and you extinguish life. What's to be done? In birth, love,
and death, in all acts of violence, all abrupt beginnings and abrupt
cessations, one can detect the very essence of the business—there
one sees, in all its ambiguous nakedness, the beautiful obscene."
Jones reflected: one could make out that his head was bowed.
Smith walked beside him with happy alacrity. It began to rain
harder, the trees dripped loudly, but the two men paid no attention.
"The beautiful obscene!" said Jones, suddenly lifting his head.
"Certainly that's something to have learned chez Gleason! . . .
It suggests a good deal. It's like this road—it's dark, but it cer-
tainly leads somewhere."


372
SMITH AND JONES
"Where?"
"That's what we'll discover. Is it centrifugal or centripetal?
The road is the former, of course. It leads, as we know, away from
civilization into the wilderness, the unknown. But that's no reason
for supposing the same to be true of your diagnosis—is it? And yet
I wonder."
He wondered visibly, holding his coat-collar about his throat
with one hand, and showed a disposition to slacken his pace. But
Smith goaded him.
"Look here, we've got to keep moving, you know."
"Yes, we've got to keep moving."
They walked for a mile in complete silence. The rain kept up
a steady murmur among the leav(es of trees, the vague heaving
shoulders of which they could see at right and left, and they heard
the tinkling of water in a ditch. Their shoes bubbled and squelched,
but they seemed to be indifferent to matters so unimportant. How-
ever, from time to time they inclined their heads forward and al-
lowed small reservoirs of rain to slide heavily off their felt hats.
It was Jones, finally, who began talking again. After a preliminary
mutter or two, and a hostile covert glance at his companion, he said:
"Like all very great discoveries, this discovery of yours affords
opportunities for a new principle of behaviour. You are not a
particularly intelligent man, as I've often told you, and as you
yourself admit; so you probably don't at all see the implications of
your casual observation. As often occurs to you, in the course of
your foolish, violent, undirected activity, you have accidentally
bumped your head and seen a star. You would never think, how-
ever, of hitching your wagon to such a star—which is what I pro-
pose to do."
Smith glanced sharply at his companion, and then began laugh-
ing on a low meditative note which gradually became shrill and
derisive: he even lifted one knee and slapped it. It was obviously
a tremendous joke.
"Just like you, Jones! You're all brain to the soles of your feet.
What do you propose to do?"
"Don't be a simpleton, or I'll begin by murdering you—instead
of ending by doing so."
This peculiar remark was delivered, and received, with the ut-
most sobriety.
"Of course," said Smith. "You needn't dwell on that, as it's an


CONRAD AIKEN
373
unpleasant necessity which is fully recognized between us. It
doesn't in the least matter whether the event is early or late, does
it?"
"What I mean is, that if you are right, and the beautiful obscene
is the essence of the business, then obviously one should pursue that
course of life which would give one the maximum number of—what
shall I say'?—perfumed baths of that description. . . . You
say that this essence is most clearly to be detected in the simpler
violences. In love, birth, death, all abrupt cessations and begin-
nings. Very good. Then if one is to live completely, to realize life
in the last shred of one's consciousness, to become properly incan-
descent, or identical with life, one must put oneself in contact
with the strongest currents. One should love savagely, kill fre-
quently, eat the raw, and even, I suppose, be born as often as pos-
sible."
"A good idea!"
"I propose to do all these things. It has long been tacitly under-
stood that sooner or later I will murder you, so, as you tactfully
suggest, I won't dwell on that. But I shall be glad to have Glea-
son's address . . . beforehand."
"Certainly: whenever you like. Telephone Main 220-W (I
always liked that W) and ask for Mary."
"The question is: what's to be done about thought? . . .
You see, this road of reflection is, after all, centripetal. It involves
inevitably a return to the centre, an identification of one's self with
the All, with the unconscious primum mobile. But thought, in its
very nature, involves a separation of one's self from the—from
the—"
"Unconscious?"
"From the unconscious. . . . We must be careful not to go
astray at this point. One shouldn't begin by trying to be uncon-
scious—not at all! One might as well be dead. What one should
try to get rid of is consciousness of self. Isn't that it?"
Smith gave a short laugh, at the same time tilting his head to let
the rain run off onto his feet. "Anything you say, professor. I
trust you blindly. Anyway, I know that my pleasantest mo-
ments with Gleason were those in which I most completely lost
my awareness of personality, of personal identity. Yes, its
beautiful and horrible, the way one loses, at such moments, every-
thing but a feeling of animal force. . . . Analogously, one


374
SMITH AND JONES
should never permit conversation at meals. And it was decidedly
decadent of Cyrano to carry on an elaborate monologue in couplets
while committing a murder—oh, decidedly. Quite the wrong thing.
One's awareness, on such occasions, should be of nothing, nothing
but murder—there should be no overlapping fringe which could
busy itself with such boyisms as poetry or epigram. One should,
in short, be a murder. . . . Do I interpret you correctly?"
Jones, at this, looked at Smith with a quick uneasiness. Smith
appeared to be unconscious of this regard, and was as usual walk-
ing with jaunty alacrity. The way he threw out his feet was ex-
tremely provocative—the angle of his elbows was offensive. His
whole bearing was a deliberate, a calculated insult.
"Quite correctly," said Jones sharply, keeping his eye on Smith.
"Here's a haystack," replied the latter, equably, but also a little
sneeringly. "Shall we begin with arson? We can go on, by de-
grees, to murder."
"By all means."
The two men could be seen jumping the ditch, and laboriously
climbing over a slippery stone wall. Several matches sputtered
and went out, and then a little blaze lighted the outstretched
hands and solemn intent faces of Jones and Smith. They drew
out and spread the dry hay over the blaze, the flames fed eagerly,
and the stone wall and the black trunk of an elm tree appeared to
stagger toward them out of the darkness.
"I think that will do," observed Smith cheerfully.
They climbed back over the wall and resumed their walk. The
rain had become a drizzle, and the moon, in a crack between the
clouds, showed for a second the white of an eye. Behind them
the fire began to spout, and they observed that they were preceded,
on the puddled road, by oblique drunken shadows. They walked
rapidly.
"A mere bagatelle," Smith went on, after a time. "But there's
a farm at the top of the hill, so we can, as it were, build more state-
ly mansions. . . . Were you aware, at the moment of igni-
tion, of a kind of co-awareness with the infinite?"
"Don't be frivolous."
"Personally, I found it a little disappointing ... I don't
like these deliberate actions. Give me the spontaneous, every time.
That's one thing I particularly like about Gleason. The dear thing
hasn't the least idea what's she's doing, or what she's going to do


CONRAD AIKEN
375
next. If she decided to kill you, you'd never know it, because
you'd be dead. . . . Not at all like you, Jones. You've got
a devil of a lot to unlearn!"
Jones reflected. He took off his hat and shook it. His air was
profoundly philosophical.
"True. I have. I'll put off a decision about the farm till we
get to it. I suppose, by the same token, you'd like me to give up
my habit of strict meditation on the subject of your death?"
"Oh, just as you like about that!" . . . Smith laughed
pleasantly. "I assure you it's not of the smallest consequence.
. . . It occurs to me, by the way, somewhat irrelevantly, that
in your philosophy of incandescent sensation one must allow a place
for the merely horrible. I never, I swear, felt more brilliantly alive
than when I saw, once, a negro sitting in a cab with his throat cut.
He unwound a bloody towel for the doctor, and I saw, in the choco-
late colour, three parallel red smiles—no, gills. It was amazing."
"A domestic scene? . . . Crime passionnelle?"
"No—a trifling misunderstanding in a barber-shop. This chap
started to take out a handkerchief; the other chap thought it was a
revolver; and the razor was quicker than the handkerchief.
. . . The safety razor ought to be abolished, don't you think'?"
Jones, without answer, jumped the ditch and disappeared in the
direction of the farm. Smith leaned against the wall, laughing
softly to himself. After a while there were six little spurts of light
one after another in the darkness, hinting each time at a nose and
fingers, and then four more. Nothing further happened. The
darkness remained self-possessed, and presently Jones reappeared,
muttering.
"No use! It's too wet, and I couldn't find any kindling."
"Don't let that balk you, my dear Jones! Ring the door-bell
and ask for a little kerosene. Why not kill the old man, ravish his
daughter, and then burn up the lot? It would be a good night's
work."
"Damn you! You've done enough harm already."
There was something a little menacing in this, but Smith was
unperturbed.
"What the devil do you mean?" he answered. "Intellectually
I'm a child by comparison with you. I'm an adolescent."
"You know perfectly well what I mean—all this," and Jones
gave a short ugly sweep of his arm toward the blazing haystack and,


37&
SMITH AND JONES
beyond that, the city. The moon came out, resting her perfect chin
on a tawny cloud. The two men regarded each other strangely.
"Nonsense!" Smith then exclaimed. "Besides you'll have the
satisfaction of killing me. That ought to compensate. And Glea-
son! think of Gleason! She'll be glad to see you. She'll revel in
the details of my death."
"Will she1?"
"Of course she will. . . . She's a kind of sadist, or something
of the sort. . . . How, by the way, do you propose to do it?
We've never—come to think of it-—had an understanding on that
point. Would you mind telling me, or do you regard it as a sort
of trade secret? . . . Just as you like!"
Jones seemed to be breathing a little quickly.
"No trouble at all—but I don't know! I shall simply, as you
suggest, wait for an inspiration."
"How damned disquieting! Also, Jones, it's wholly out of
character, and you'll have to forgive me if, for once, I refuse to
believe you. What the deuce is this walk for, if not for your op-
portunity? You're bound to admit that I was most compliant. I
accepted your suggestion without so much as a twitter—didn't I?
Very unselfish of me, I think! . . . But of course, it had to
come."
The two men were walking, by tacit agreement, at opposite sides
of the road; they had to raise their voices. Still, one would not
have said that it was a quarrel.
"Oh yes, it had to come. It was clearly impossible that both of
us should live!"
"Quite. ... At the same time, this is an affair so exquisite-
ly complex, and so dislocated, if I may put it so, into the world of
the fourth dimension, that I'm bound to admit that while I recog-
nize the necessity, I don't quite grasp the cause . . ."
"You're vulgar, Smith."
"Am I? . . . Ah, so that's it—I'm vulgar, I seize life by
the forelock! . . . I go about fornicating, thieving, card-
cheating, and murdering, in my persistent unreflective low-grade
sort of way, and it makes life insupportable for you. Here, now,
is Gleason. How that must simply infuriate you! Three days in
town, and I have a magnificent planetary love-affair like that—
burnt to a crisp! Ha ha! And you, all the while, drinking tea and
reading Willard Gibbs. I must say it's damned funny."


CONRAD AIKEN
377
Jones made no reply. His head was thrust forward—he seemed
to be brooding. His heavy breathing was quite audible, and
Smith, after an amused glance toward him, went on talking.
"Lots of lights suddenly occur to me—lights on this extraordi-
nary, impenetrable subject—take down my words, Jones, this is
my death-bed speech! . . . I spoke, didn't I, of the beautiful
obscene, and of the inextricable manner in which the two qualities
are everywhere bound up together? The beautiful and the ob-
scene. The desirable and the disgusting. I also compared this
state of things with an organism in which a cancer was growing—
which one tries to excise. . . . Well, Jones, you're the beauti-
ful and I'm the obscene: you're the desirable and I'm the disgusting:
and in some rotten way we've got tangled up together. . . .
You, being the healthy organism, insist on having the cancer re-
moved. But remember: I warned you! If you do so, it's at your
own peril. . . . However, it's silly to warn you, for of course
you have no more control over the situation than I have, or Gleason
has. The bloody conclusion lies there, and we walk soberly
towards it. . . . Are you sorry?"
"No!"
"Well then, neither am I. Let's move a little faster! . . .
Damn it all, I would like to see Gleason again! You were perfectly
right about that. . . . Do you know what she said to me?'
Smith, at this point, suddenly stopped, as if to enjoy the recol-
lection at leisure. He opened his mouth and stared before him,
in the moonlight, with an odd bright fixity. Jones, with the scan-
tiest turn of his head, plodded on, so that Smith had, perforce, to
follow.
"She said she'd like to live with me—that she'd support me. By
George! What do you think of that? . . . 'You're a dear
boy,' she said, 'you fascinate me!' 'Fascinate!' That's the best
thing I do. Don't I fascinate you, Jones? Look at my eyes! Don't
I fascinate you? . . . Ha ha! . . . Yes, I have the morals
of a snake. I'm graceful, I'm all curves, there's nothing straight
about me. Gleason got dizzy looking at me, her head swayed
from side to side, her eyes were lost in a sort of mist, and then she
fell clutching at me like a paralytic, and talking the wildest non-
sense. Could you do that, Jones, do you think? . . . Never!
It's all a joke to think of your going to see Gleason. And if you
told her what had happened she'd kill you. Yes, you'd look like


378
SMITH AND JONES
St Sebastian when Gleason got through with you. . . . Say
something! Don't be so damned glum. Anybody'd suppose it
was your funeral."
"Oh, go on talking! I like the sound of your voice."
"And then to think of your pitiful attempts to set that barn on
fire! Good Lord, with a half dozen matches. . . . That's
what comes of studying symbolic logic and the rule of phase.
. . . Really, I don't know what you'll do without me, Jones!
You're like a child, and when I'm dead, who's going to show you,
as the wit said, how to greet the obscene with a cheer? . . .
However, I wouldn't bother about that rock if I were you—aren't
you premature?"
This last observation sounded a little sharp.
Jones had certainly appeared to be stooping toward a small
loose fragment of rock by the road-side, but he straightened up
with smiling alacrity.
"My shoe-lace," he said, cynically. "It's loose. I think I'll re-
tie it."
"Pray do! Why not?"
"Very well! If you don't mind waiting!"
Jones gave a little laugh. He stooped again, fumbled for a
second at his shoe, then suddenly shot out a snake-like hand
toward the rock. But Smith meanwhile had made a gleaming
gesture which seemed to involve Jones's back.
"Ah!" said Jones, and slid softly forward into a puddle.
"Are you there?"
Smith's query was almost humorous. As it received no reply,
and Jones lay motionless in his puddle, Smith took him by the
coat-collar, dragged him to the edge of the ditch, and rolled him in.
The moon poured a clear green light on this singular occurrence.
It showed Smith examining his hands with care, and then wiping
them repeatedly on the wet grass and rank jewel-weed. It showed
him relighting his pipe—which had gone out during the rain—with
infinite leisure. One would have said, at the moment, that he looked
like a tramp. And, finally, it showed him turning back in the direc-
tion he had come from, and setting off cheerfully toward the city:
alone, but with an amazing air, somehow, of having always been
alone.



AMERICAN PEASANT. BY ART YOUNG





TO TRAVEL OR NOT TO TRAVEL
BY NATALIE CLIFFORD BARNEY
Departure a method, a practice,
An awakening process, imitating the world's looping the loop,
To find oneself on one's feet, strangely elsewhere,
Uprooted, free to be otherwise!
In a new shaped room, before varying mirrors
Unrecognized—Unrecognizable?
After the thought-matured packing of forgotten clothes,
This harvesting of "all we may need."
The arrival, followed up by every-day disguisements
Assorted to the hourly masquerade, of some ill-befitting event?
Arrival, after the feverish tearing and breaking of nails
And choice of books and bottles—
After the usual series of annoyances:
The watch that stops, or jumps hours, on the last evening:
—Over-responsible Time, panic-stricken even to its mechanical
heart!
And all this to get to London
To smell another wet smoke,
Exciting as the scent of a new mistress!
To be estranged and amused by little differences—
To eat food, less good, seemingly better?
To lose that familiar dissatisfied sense of taste,
Lest, through faithfulness, we make excellence insignificant
And take adventure for a dream!
Better to stand on the head and hands
Than proceed automatically
For further advancement into crystallization!
Than know the paralysis of stagnation
With its succession of "idées fixes."
Better the fits and starts
The nervous trepidation, physical and mechanical,
To support changes, infractions from without?
. . . Yet equivalent the fates: to Remain, to Leave or Return!


38o
TO TRAVEL OR NOT TO TRAVEL
—The outfaring ships, the homing ships cut alike reflections:
Disturbing images, reforming images.
Which lures and enriches most surely:
The sirens heard from afar, or the inner voices?
Nearness, where nothing happens,
Where happiness is repetition?
Distance, where may be discovered another self—another other?
Free not to be oneself: a resume of habits,
To open one's senses and breathe, see, hear, and be dazed otherwise 1?
Keen, over-vitalized—
Or stay changeless through change: the immobile centre of rotation!
Or else to spin about a fixed point, tied to an invisible picket,
Though an animal ill-made for the short rope,
But rather to nibble at random at the green plots of the world
. . . Disintoxicated—unasphyxiated?
To rouse the automaton, set the mechanism agoing
To adjust to new environments this divorcee from the dead,
Who suffers equally from change and changelessness?
If it be to fall, at the first outgoing step into a love malady!
To walk on unfamiliar paths, or on the roof-edge of one's own house
—With cats and the half moon—
In the unconscious depth of a new vision.
Stealthily approaching the unreal reality!
Heedless of peril, with the mad balance of the sleep-walker.
Is this rich, ripe, pendulating moment, before choice,
The only living—life?
—Even the killed, spring forward before they drop,
But the standing sleeper wavers and hesitates
For in hesitation there is a double dream, a double choice!


A WEDDING FEAST
BY MANUEL KOMROFF
AT last Terenieff was to marry off his daughter.
Early in the spring, while it was still bleak and cold, the
Terenieff household removed itself from Moscow to their country
home, which consisted of a large stone house of modern construction
on a tract of land that allowed the horses a hundred acres of grazing
pasture.
From the first day of their arrival preparations were begun. Invi-
tations were scattered broadcast, large stores of provisions were
ordered, extra servants taken on, additional stalls built in the barn,
and a double-sized flower bed cultivated by the arbor.
Every day there was something to do. The house was painted
fresh from top to bottom. New carpets were added and the old
moved back into the servants' wing.
The month directly preceding the wedding was indeed an active
one, but the servants only bent under the yoke and groaned. Luba
the fat cook established herself as Czarina of the kitchen. She issued
orders, banged her copper pots, thumped baking pans into her oven,
and flipped them out again. At one time she had all three stable
boys on the kitchen floor pounding and grinding poppy seed for her
tarts. Then she would yell at the top of her voice, a dozen times a
day, "More wood for the fire—where are all the lazy boys? Hey,
more wood—I am running an inferno of my own!"
She bossed the coachman, yelled at the farm-hands, ordered the
boys around; sent the servants on errands, scolded the gardener,
threw a plate at the porter, and shooed off the dogs. All because of
her cakes.
Then the provisions began to arrive; enough for a small army.
The house could not store them all, but Terenieff himself saw that
the wines were securely locked in the cellar.
A week before the day set for the wedding, guests began to arrive;
and they continued to do so up till the very morning of the cere-
mony. The good-natured, blue-eyed priest engaged for the occasion
began to feel nervous and came every day to ask some question or


A WEDDING FEAST
other and incidentally to remain for dinner. Every day fresh deco-
rations were added to the hall and lower rooms. Several chairs were
broken by people standing upon them, but it did not matter. Only
Luba eyed it all from the doorway of her inferno and remarked,
"What a lot of dirt there will be!"
The guests brought their children and servants and the children's
servants and the servants' children. And the children brought their
dogs, cats, rabbits, parrots, pet turtles, fish, and canaries, not to
mention pop-guns, balloons, mousetraps, and other contraptions so
dear to young hearts.
Luba fed them all from her inferno. She had special food for the
babies, roasted seeds for the birds, cabbage for the rabbits, crumbs
for the fish, bones for the dogs, and insides for the cats. Only the
pet turtles she refused to notice. "I won't cook for reptiles!"
Now the porter kept well out of the kitchen and became sort of
sergeant-at-arms and general separator. He separated the dogs from
the cats, the cats from the rabbits, the children from fruit trees, and
the horses from the grain bins.
On the morning before the wedding the carriages were wheeled
out of the open shed and a long table built, the boards of which
extended from one end to the other. In the afternoon the groom and
four of his best friends all in sparkling uniforms and varnished
boots arrived, and immediately started a game of cards. And now
Terenieff himself unlocked the wine cellar, and Luba's cakes were
released from the kitchen in mountainlike loads on large metal
trays. Towards evening the good-natured priest again arrived to
acquaint himself with the groom and incidentally remained for sup-
per. After the evening meal the children grew fretful, quarrelled
with one another, and had to be sent to bed.
Early the next morning one could hear Luba's voice pierce and
hasten on the coming dawn as she cried for more wood. She awoke
the roosters who started crowing with such zeal that one would
imagine that they had overslept and were apologizing. The gardener
came limping along the yard waking up his stiffened leg. The sleepy
stable boys pretended to busy themselves with the harnesses, but
only succeeded in entangling the traces. Then the device for raising
water from the well started groaning and creaking, and the horses
hearing this kicked at the sides of their stalls. A donkey in the pas-
ture brayed and soon the children were all awake and had started


MANUEL KOMROFF
383
the day with an activity so intense that there could be no rest for the
weary.
While the bridal party were eating their breakfast a slight com-
motion occurred in the yard. To the joy and pleasure of the children
one of the guests' horses was teamed by mistake to an old mare be-
fore an unfamiliar carriage. The horse shied, broke the strap of his
collar, and sprinted off with flying tails of loose traces behind him.
Soon, however, the grand assortment of vehicles stood before the
house and everyone rode off with noise, cheers, and clatter to church.
Even the stable boys went along hanging on to the rear of the last
wagon.
Only fat Luba remained behind in her inferno, and for want of
society, from sheer monotony, she yelled and ordered herself about.
The church was filled, and the gentle priest so occupied that he
almost forgot where he was. The village girls had proud bright rib-
bons to hold their tightly braided hair from unravelling. During the
ceremony one of the children suddenly grew frightened at the spec-
tacle, which to their minds must ever seem queer, and began crying
in terrible shrieks until she was removed from the building. The
mother was greatly annoyed, but the wilful child refused to re-
enter the church.
The party returned to the house, the bride and groom leading on
at a gallop in the first carriage escorted by four officers on horseback
with sabres drawn in parade fashion. When the gate of the estate
was reached the escorting officers allowed the bridal carriage to enter
first while they saluted with their quivering sabres.
On the lawn before the house, however, already camped a small
regiment of youths who had invited themselves and must have
passed the church while the ceremony was in progress, but had not
felt it worth their while to stop. They had also refused to stop at a
village inn three miles before their destination although the induce-
ments were strong. It was while passing this inn that they met with
a group of twenty Caucasian soldiers in native dress on horseback
and turned down their strong recommendation of the apple wine.
The Caucasians, realizing the seriousness of the refusal, decided
to accompany the determined soldiers lest any harm befall them; and
in this manner the galloping troop, avoiding the mud puddles due
to a recent rain, rode up upon the lawn of the house before the wed-


384
A WEDDING FEAST
ding party had returned. The delicious odours that sprang from the
kitchen door and windows were indeed an attraction, but Luba held
off the soldiers by throwing out a handful of hard crackers and
threatening them with a kettle of boiling water.
When the party arrived the Caucasians started dancing as a sign
of peace and goodwill. They formed themselves in a large circle
before the house and in their centre a young lad bursting with life
stood jumping about while the rest marked time with their hands
and yelled wild cries of joy. The lad wore a long wine-coloured coat
with a wasplike waist belted with silver from which dangled a dag-
ger with an ivory handle. The cartridge tubes lined across his breast
were also tipped with ivory and his bright red boots sparkled from
under his dancing figure like the split tongue of a teased garden
snake.
The children immediately invaded the long table beneath the shed
and were about to remove the cakes and divide them with the Cau-
casians when the porter suddenly appeared and separated the chil-
dren from future trouble. The servants now hurried back and forth
between Luba's inferno and the shed piling food, plates, dishes,
relishes, fruit, jams, and wines upon the boards until they creaked
and sagged under the load.
In the meantime congratulations were being received in the hall
and the village folk hung into the open windows from without in
order to enjoy the spectacle. At one time Terenieff called a servant
aside and ordered him to tell Luba not to make so much noise in the
kitchen. But as soon as her banging and shouting eased off, a new
racket began. The children, it seems, driven from the table hap-
pened upon the grazing donkey and with a rope around the poor
beast's neck they were attempting to induce the animal to enter the
house through a rear door. In fact after a good deal of pushing and
pulling they had already succeeded in placing the donkey's fore legs
across the door-sill before their adventure was discovered.
With this fresh disturbance the guests now turned their attention
to food. The blue-eyed priest and his colleagues, whom he had taken
the liberty to invite, were already waiting in the shed when the
crowd arrived. But the table was not quite big enough, so the leader
of the Caucasians called his men aside and proposed to Terenieff
that they be served on the lawn. Accordingly two large table-cloths
were spread upon the grass, their corners and sides held down by


MANUEL KOMROFF
385
bottles of wine—and here they were served, and from here they
shouted their toasts in reply to those from the shed.
The bride did not eat very much, but soon retired to the house
to change her dress. Some minutes later the groom with Terenieff
also left the shed. A small carriage hitched to three spirited horses
stood waiting at the door. Now attired in travelling clothes, but
still holding her small bridal bouquet, the bride hesitated a moment
before she flung herself into her father's arms and received three
parting kisses. Then they were off; Terenieff whipped out his
pocket handkerchief and waved after them before wiping away a
salty tear from the corner of his eyes, and returning to his guests.
In the orchard the children were now taking turns at the gardener's
cornet and their wet mournful tones were heard at the gate by the
departing couple.
In the afternoon the men started several tables of cards in the
hall and the women drank tea and spoke about precious gems in
the dining-room.
The poor priest walked sadly between both centres of activity.
The tea was with the women, the wine with the men. It was in-
deed hard to combine both, but he did well.
The soldiers now started singing and dancing with the aid of an
accordion and a guitar. This lasted until evening when the young
dancer suddenly grew frisky, and running his pony at a gallop
jumped upon the saddle, making a gesture as though he were cap-
turing a bride for himself in primitive fashion. Then a little acci-
dent happened, for while he was standing on the saddle with his
bright red boots the horse ran \oo near a tree and the branches
brushed off the rider.
The soldiers ran to the spot and lifted him from the ground, but
he was soon upon his own feet. He was more shaken up than
actually hurt and disinclined for any further dancing.
Then the leader of the troop, after a brief conference with two
of his men, walked over to the house and asked for Terenieff.
The priest was in the hallway between the two rooms as Terenieff
came to the door.
"An accident has happened, Master," said the Caucasian.
"Nothing serious in any way, only it seems to us—a bad omen.
The horse stumbled, the rider fell ... a bad omen."
"A bad omen!" repeated Terenieff.


386
A WEDDING FEAST
"Yes, it's a bad omen and we must sacrifice a lamb. The lamb
can wash it clean."
"A lamb?" asked Terenieff surprised. "But surely that is a
heathen custom," he appealed to the priest.
The priest, however, saw more food in view and replied, "No, no
it is not heathen at all—the man is right, for was it not the sacri-
ficed lamb that alone could open the sealed book?"
A fire was built while the chief of the Caucasians and the priest
went to sacrifice a lamb. Soon they returned with a good-sized
sheep properly slaughtered, and set it on a pole over the open fire
that now blazed, a gap in the darkening sky. In the kitchen Luba
shouted, "What a lot of dirt there will be!" A fresh keg of wine
was donated by Terenieff to help wash clean the bad omen.
The bridal carriage rolled on. The driver cracked his whip over
the three galloping horses' flanks as the groom seated beside his
bride called to him, "Don't spare the horses, driver!"
The bride sat motionless gazing blankly at the swift moving
road beneath her. Now the ground seemed yellow, now dark brown
with pools of a recent rain and again there were places that in the
setting sun glowed red. Red, as though the rust of cast off chains
had stained the soil.
Her arm holding the bouquet hung limply out of the side of the
carriage and a flower or two rubbed against the spokes of the
wheel.
Presently she glanced up to see the road ahead, watched for the
next approaching puddle and, when the horses struck with a splash,
she let fall her flowers . . . into the mud.



Courtesy of Bcrnhcim Jeunc, Paris
A HEAD. BY ANDRE DERAIN





HUNGARIAN LETTER
March,
THIS seems to need some justification: that I am to inform
vast America of little Hungary, inform a circle of readers em-
bracing five continents, of the literature of the least known idiom in
Europe. Of what interest can this be to a person who is not a pe-
dantic specialist in world literature? Precisely that insight into the
inner organism of a cultural movement which is not afforded by the
"great literatures." For the history, and especially the cultural his-
tory, of a small people is more significant, more illustrative, than
that of a large people. It is like an experiment in the laboratory:
a reduced and simplified natural phenomenon which, by its lessen-
ing and clarifying of motives, demonstrates the working of the
laws more effectively. When a country of nine million inhabi-
tants possesses one single centre of culture in its one single metrop-
olis in which the various intellectual currents can be plainly dif-
ferentiated in accordance with the five or six coffee houses where
their representatives have special tables reserved . . . this
affords a strange, grotesque anatomical chart of a culture's spirit-
ual body; and here one can see on the surface the trembling of every
muscle and the throb of every pulse. Now, if the forces and
humours of all European and American intellectual tendencies
flow through this small highly sensitive, and warmly living body
(which is the case in Hungary) then they have an effect like the
injections which physicians give to little dogs to test the results
of a medicine. Indeed, Hungary presents the fantastic but vastly
instructive picture of a biological laboratory for the cultural life
of Europe. But the convulsions of this small, injected body are
all the more interesting and instructive because the Hungarians
are not to this day "simply a European people." European cul-
ture does not come natural to them; it is not self-evident and un-
conscious. But (as with the Russians also) it has been a definite
task for centuries, a deeply vexing problem, a question of destiny,
an ideal which was fought for and against, and is still being
treated with endless disputes. This comes from the fact that this


388
HUNGARIAN LETTER
small people which has been living in the middle of Europe for a
thousand years (while its obscure Asiatic origin is sung only in
legends which cannot be investigated) in frequent instances still
remains foreign to the European mind. And this foreignness, as
might be expected, has its attracting and repelling phases simul-
taneously. Just as with the Russians, it is not manifested solely
in an occasional opposition, but in a greater sensitivity to European
peculiarities. There are things which seem so natural to an
Anglo-Saxon, a Frenchman, or a German that they would escape
attention; and yet the Hungarian would do these intentionally,
as a conscious "European style" traced down to the last detail.
Further, it becomes a profitable laboratory method for observing
the European mentality against the background of this differently
coloured temperament, since its specific character appears here in
sharper outlines than in its own atmosphere. Only in Asia could
one completely realize what America or Europe stands for.
But the Asiatic origin of the Hungarian is a highly mysterious
phenomenon. Indeed, it is quite abstract, one might say meta-
physical. It consists in an Asiatic consciousness without the least
Asiatic tradition, in an Asiatic temperament without a shred of
Asiatic culture, in an Asiatic soul without an Asiatic mind. For a
thousand years this people has been consciously wearing European
civilization like an outer cloak, without having beneath this cloak
anything positively different except a dull nostalgia and discontent.
"Hungary is the ferry between Asia and Europe," Ady, the great-
est Hungarian lyricist, once wrote. In its history it plies back
and forth from one shore to the other. And when a generation
thinks it is standing on European ground, and kindles its soul
from the European mind with the happy enthusiasm of the "new,"
then suddenly the darkly incomprehensible Hungarian earth be-
gins to move. The ferry floats steadily back to Asia, and a whole
generation remains orphaned and uprooted in Europe. These
strange passages are repeated every fifty years. They are the rhythm
and the meaning of Hungary's cultural history. And they also be-
come the tragic destiny of the youngest spiritual generation of this
unusual people.
The most famous arrival of the Hungarian ferry at the Euro-
pean dock occurred in the flaming revolutionary year of i848.
The profound participation in the bourgeois revolution for "free-
dom and democracy" was the binding factor, the common spirit,


BELA BALAZS
389
which transformed this newly arrived people into Europeans
within a few years. Thereby Hungary was discovered to the
civilized world. And the memory of Hungary's battles for free-
dom in '48, the names of Kossuth and Petofi . . . these
things are still recalled even in America. Just how did this Euro-
pean "injection" affect the spiritual body of Hungarian culture?
Hungarian literature displayed immediately four clearly differen-
tiated elements which were intricately interwoven in the Europe
of that time and had never before been so distinct. The first was the
folk romance of the revolutionary democracy. There arose an
effusive poetry of village idylls. The "simple peasant" was made
the ideal of pure, natural, spiritual beauty. Yet in Hungary
the false sentimentality of this poetry soon betrayed itself (as this
poetry had no more real contact with the poor people than, say, the
disporting shepherds of the rococo). Petofi, who with the passion
and clear-sightedness of genius wanted to draw all the democratic
consequences out of this enthusiasm of the common people, was
nearly beaten at the first parliamentary election. Nevertheless it
was a decisive factor in the entire future of Hungarian art that it
became European at a time when Europe was national and popu-
lar-minded. The spirit of folk art, which at that time in Europe
was carrying off the victory over the erudite poetry of the academy,
stood godfather to the newborn poetry of Hungary. Eventually
this has decided its destiny and defined its character. That is, in
the works of the first really great poets of European significance,
in the works of Alexander Petofi and Johann Arany, the common
language became the language of literature. The academic jargon
of the scholars, which had prevailed but a few decades before in
Hungary as in all other countries, disappeared completely. In
Hungary since then the language of good literature does not differ
from the idiom of the peasants—as it does in France and Germany.
On the contrary, to this day it has remained the highest aesthetic
norm, as in Russia.
Strangely enough, this became evident immediately at the
start of the second "European injection" which Hungarian litera-
ture received: I refer to the art-cult of the Parnassians. Johann
Arany, the great representative of this style, shows up as a "folk
academician," a paradox which is not possible anywhere else in
Europe. Son of a peasant, provincial lawyer, going all his life
in boots, he is the most refined virtuoso of form, the erudite trans-


39°
HUNGARIAN LETTER
lator, the artist of the studio and of Yart pour Vart. He is a
Parnassian of folk poetry. Consequently, a popular character
was given to the three styles of European lyric dominating that
period: the dithyrambic and ecstatic (Petofi) the artistic and ob-
jective (Arany) and the passionate (both). But this peculiarity,
which is certainly the highest quality of Hungarian literature,
marks at the same time its tragically hopeless exclusion from the
rest of Europe. For the most intimate note of a people is un-
translatable. A melody can be transcribed; but the sensuous
beauty of the singing voice is lost unless the melody is heard.
The beauty of the best Hungarian literature has up to the present
remained of this sort.
The third European influence brought in the spiritual current
of philosophic pessimism which was prevailing at the time. In
Hungary the poet of the phase is Michael Vorosmarty. A sullen
volcano glowing with colours of dark purple and gold; he is a
poet of an heroic, tragic viewpoint—without a philosophy; and
he lives in a philosophic attitude—without depth. This does not
impair in the least the worth of the rhetorical lyricist, the strong
elementary artist. But, even in his greatness, he is indicative of
a predominant trait in the Hungarian character, which does not
know "depth" in the Germanic sense. Naturally, this is not an
aesthetic judgement. Hungarian poetry has fashioned to com-
pleteness the surfaces of the soul: the surface of the temperament
(from Petofi to the recently deceased Ady, the greatest poet of
all) the surface of decorative plasticity (from Arany to the crafts-
man of language, Babies, who is still living) and the surface of a
general mood of philosophic melancholy (from Vorosmarty to
the present-day representatives of "decadence," writers who are
not worth mentioning). As an evidence of this quite indigenous
tendency of the Magyar mentality to shy off from the ecstatic,
there is the fact that until its most recent generation Hungarian
culture had no mystics, no philosophers, and no musicians. (The
last generation manifests a deep reversal in this matter also.)
The fourth motive of Hungarian literature of that time is the
most peculiar of all, and the development most interesting to
Occidental culture. It is the great epoch and is represented by
the works of Maurus Jokai, which comprise over a hundred vol-
umes. They are not "novels" in the Western sense. He does
not put down social types, like Dickens; he is not a psychologist,


BELA BALAZS
391
like Stendhal or Flaubert; he does not depict society, like Balzac.
He is an Asiatic story teller, with an Oriental vividness of colour,
and an imaginative naivete. He is the new arrival who reacts to
Western civilization as though it were something fabulous and
miraculous. Jokai tells stories like a Scheherazade beginning her
thousand and second tale on her return to Bagdad after a trip
through Europe. In Jokai's novels (he has also written great
Hungarian epics utilizing the Turkish and Tartar inheritances)
the strange exotic fantasy of European civilization is seen
through the naive eyes of an Asiatic immigrant. This small people
has opened great windows and doors to the West, and its spirit is
celebrating its junction with the spirit of America and Europe;
this is done with the heated frenzy of youth, as in an Oriental
marriage feast.
But the democratic, national rebellion of '48 was quelled by
the Hapsburgs; and this time Europe itself pushed the Hungarian
ferry back towards Asia. This shows up despairingly in the litera-
ture of the next generations. In the lyrics of the epigons, Petofi's
universality is split in two by this division from Europe. On one
side there is a misplaced and exorbitant cult of the people, the
ethnographic, without the vitalizing idea of Western democratic
civilization (which applies to those who went back with the
ferry). On the other side there were the uprooted cosmopolites
with their sickly hankering after the West, no longer possessing
a background of natural resources from their own people (the
waifs and the orphans left on European ground). Such was the
character of the Jewish journalism growing up in Budapest, which
had since become a metropolis. This attitude of the Jewish lit-
terateurs, which would have been absorbed to advantage by a
European Hungary, occasioned in Asiatic Hungary a special jar-
gon which was un-national in its frivolous superficiality without
being European in any sound cultural sense. And yet it was pre-
cisely this generally mundane, clever, and aggressive "art" which,
when it was finally thinning out, won over the Western world,
and in the plays of Lengyel and Franz Molnar has compromised
Hungarian literature on the stage throughout Europe, and also
America.
In the epic as well, all windows and doors open to the West
were closed. Out of the fantastic and universal experiences of
Jokai there grew a petty literature of the landed gentry, and—


392 HUNGARIAN LETTER
in spite of all its skill in presentation—a restricted provincial
poetry of the office-holding nobility. The "people" (in the mean-
time serfdom had been abolished, on paper at least) still figured
in this literature, being looked upon with well-meaning humour or
flat sentimentality as the slaves of the nobles (Koloman Miks-
zath). Or as the effusive stock character of the ethnographic
idylls, seen through the eyes of the village schoolmaster (Geza
Gardonyi). But the hero of the bourgeois epic became the Kraut-
junker, the noble officer, a completely un-European figure, narrow
and stupid, and with none of the mystic colour of the Orient: the
most unpalatable Balkan type (Franz Herczog).
But slowly the ferry came back to Europe. Again it was a
social and political current which drove it to the European shore.
This has begun within the last twenty-five years, at the time of the
newly awakened progressive democratic spirit in Europe. It
was brought about by the bourgeois liberalism of modern inter-
national capitalism and the social ferment among the proletariate.
It was this spirit which even the wall of Hungary could not with-
stand. And just as this new progressive democratic spirit in the
literatures of Western European nations manifested itself in
naturalism, in the unadorned discovery of reality, likewise in Hun-
garian art naturalism was the new European "injection." At this
the dull Asiatic dream was shattered. In place of the romantic,
sentimentalized stock character of the peasant as he existed in the
literature of the landed proprietors, there arose the sullen, intract-
able, hungering farm worker in the novels of Sigmund Moricz,
who is now nearly fifty years old and is far and away the most
significant representative of the Hungarian epic.
In place of the provincial nobles' sporting and society verse,
there arose the dark, bitter depictions of life in the metropolis
(Kober, Brody). Up to this time Hungarian music had consisted
merely of shallow gipsy songs, a species of "light music" to go
with the booze parties of the Hungarian gentry. But with the
advent of naturalism a new and great era dawned. Thanks to
this, for the first time the real folk tunes, the previously neglected
melodic treasure of the Magyar peasant, were collected in their
genuine unadulterated form. Made fruitful by the spirit of these
melodies, the collectors Bela Bartok and Zoltan Kodaly then
created a music of which the great individuality and international
significance has already been honoured throughout the world.


BELA BALAZS
393
Nevertheless, the most significant feature of naturalism does
not lie in its aesthetic and artistic accomplishments. In the coun-
tries of the West also, it did not produce the highest aesthetic
values. The most significant feature of literary naturalism in
Western civilization consisted in the moral urge which it con-
tained, in the fanatic will to truth. It was this very will to truth,
acting on the spiritual currents of the new intellectual Europe,
which tore the deceptive romantic veil of lies from the social con-
ditions of capitalistic society and produced an effect thereby which
reached far beyond the aesthetic and the artistic. Then, when
once the naked truth is visible, it exerts its power to compel the
carrying out of the consequences. Naturalistic, realistic literature,
which sprang from social and political sources, became in turn
the source of new social movements. And just as the great French
Revolution had its first roots in the literature of enlightenment
written by Voltaire, Rousseau, and the Encyclopedists, in the
same way one can find in naturalism the first agitation of the
revolutionary spirit which was to come in the years after the war.
This can be seen with an uncanny clarity in the fate of Hun-
gary's last literary generation. Here the losing of the war leads also
to revolution, to collapse, for a time even to communism. But in
this agrarian country, which possesses only a very slight industrial
proletariate, and where the peasants look on with a passive resis-
tance, this revolution was clearly a matter of the intelligentsia
which had again "turned European"; it was partly a revolution of
literary men, as its quick and tragic end further testifies. This injec-
tion of the new European spirit brought forth in Hungary a whole
array of powerful talents. It is of symbolic significance that the
periodical which this generation founded ten years before the out-
break of the war as an organ of the Hungaro-European renaissance,
should bear the name Nyugat, which means The West. It intended
simply to be a select magazine of modern literature, as the Neue
Deutsche Rundschau, or the Nouvelle Revue Franchise, or The
Dial itself. But in Hungary it became the focus of that sensitive-
ness to European influences which, for the first time since the years
of '48, had shocked into activity the cultural body of this tragic
people. This was not the work of the insipid cosmopolitanism of
Jewish journalists. Neither Sigmund Moricz, the harsh realistic
writer of peasant epics, nor Margit Kaffka (she is the relentless
painter of the fall and decay of the Hungarian gentry) nor Michael


394
HUNGARIAN LETTER
Babies, an aesthete in the most modern European style, nor the
greatest of all, Andreas Ady, are Jews. This time it was mostly
full-blooded Magyars who, by their tragic and inspired efforts and
their inexhaustible energies, created that new European culture in
Hungary, and introduced new values of profundity whereas they
had been completely lacking before: in music (Bartok and Kodaly)
in philosophy (Georg Lukacz) and also in religious mysticism
(Anna Losznai).
Exigencies of space prevent my going into details. By sketch-
ing briefly the history of this generation's greatest representative,
the incomparable lyricist Andreas Ady, I can illustrate at the same
time the history of the whole generation; since his life is symboli-
cal, as is true of every great individual. It contains the entire
paradox of the European Asiatic. Offspring of an old Hungarian
provincial noble family, he was driven by his hatred for "the
smell of Tartars" to leave his home for Paris. He lived here a
good many years, acquiring every subtlety of the European mind
. but after the manner of a powerful barbarian conqueror
in the great migration, pillaging the treasures of Western culture.
He "possessed" all the values of this culture, and yet remained
the savage singer for a nomadic race of horsemen. His stormy
melodies are hopelessly untranslatable, for they are the rays of
the Hungarian language broken into the splendour of a rainbow
by the prism of his genius. He came back to his "dear damned
country of the Tartars" as a socialist, having been kindled at the
flame of Jean Jaures. Like his spiritual forbear, Petofi, he was
a passionate revolutionary, and the idol of the young radicals.
His songs threw the spark into the powder of revolution; and
when the revolution raised its flags triumphantly in October i9i8,
on the very first day it had to lower them again before his coffin.
Ady is dead. But the entire young generation of Hungary for
whom he was lighting the way to Europe must live to see how
the Hungarian ferry was driven back by the counter-revolution
of the reaction, and moved off again towards Asia. Once more
a whole generation remained uprooted, betrayed, abandoned on
the European shore. But this time in a much more accurate sense
of the word. Driven out of their country by the dark reaction
of the nobles, a whole generation of Hungary's creative intelli-
gence is now living as homeless emigres. For at present Hungary
has returned to Asia.
Bela Balazs


BOOK REVIEWS
ANGLO-IRISH LITERATURE
Ireland's Literary Renaissance. By Ernest A.
Boyd. 8vo. 456 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. New Re-
vised Edition. $4.
ACOMPARISON of the first edition of Ireland's Literary
Renaissance with this new one, proves how sound were the
principles on which Mr Boyd's first survey was carried out. No star
has shot madly from its sphere since he took his first observation of
the Irish literary heavens. A few have gained in brightness, a few
perhaps have waned a little: but except for one luminary which has
appeared in a quarter of the heavens fortunately still unoccupied,
and which sheds, as I have ventured to suggest in previous numbers
of The Dial, a somewhat baleful light on the conditions and pros-
pects of Irish literature, Mr Boyd's chart is still as accurate and
exhaustive as when it was drawn up in that memorable year for
Ireland, i9i6. Regarded as the story of a particular movement, Mr
Boyd's sketch is a complete one, and will not be superseded, for that
movement has certainly come to an end. Ireland is now stooping
under a "dark tremendous sea of cloud," from which, like Paracel-
sus, it will no doubt "emerge some day." But the conditions which
made that movement possible—the temporary lack of interest in
politics and the desire to vindicate the national existence in liter-
ature and in the world of ideas—have been transformed, and
literature, when it remakes itself in Ireland, will be accidental and
temperamental, as it is in countries whose everyday business it is to
compete politically and commercially with other countries. The
prosperity of that literature will depend as absolutely on political
success as did the literary movement, of which Mr Boyd tells the
story, on the shelter involuntarily given by England to Ireland's
national aspirations. Will Ireland be able to retain its Bernard
Shaws and George Moores, its Kelvins and Leckys, even its Harms-
worths and T. P. O'Connors? If this should now begin to happen,
it is only reasonable to expect that the literature and thought of


396 ANGLO-IRISH LITERATURE
Ireland will have expanded after another century into a considerable
theme for the historian; for the contribution of Ireland to the intel-
lectual energies of Great Britain has been" a large one. Meanwhile
Mr Boyd's book will stand.
It is natural, though of course inexcusable, to assume that because
a historian has been able to make a good story out of his material,
he has got hold of that material by the right end. J. A. Froude, for
example, wrote the only readable account of the political history of
Ireland, and though it causes intense irritation to most Irishmen
who have read it (these perhaps are not so very many) and even a
good many qualms to any one with an historical conscience, one
cannot but be impressed after reading it by his vision of the Irish
destiny, and convinced at least to some extent by the sense of inexo-
rable fatality which it conveys. People say it is a glorification of
bullies written by a bully, and in fact its outrageous candour helped
as much as Lecky's calm and judicial review of the same subject to
make England ashamed of itself: but as God has made us, I fear
that we conceive that we understand the truth of a subject, whether
it be the history of the universe or the history of Ireland, only when
it is presented to us as a story; and Irish history is a story as Froude
tells it, and nowhere else. Similarly, though a considerable number
of Irish readers may cavil at the Froudacious assumption of Mr
Boyd's opening sentence: "The nineteenth century saw the definite
eclipse of the Irish language, and, consequently, the beginnings of a
genuine Anglo-Irish literature," the story of the Irish literary move-
ment will be found once for all in his book. No one, however, can
accuse him, I think, of wresting facts out of their natural signifi-
cance to suit his purpose. He is exact and thorough, and where a
little special knowledge has disposed me to scrutinize portions of his
narrative with special attention, I have not failed to be impressed
by painstaking accuracy. The happy point of view which has en-
abled him to see his subject as a story has also enabled him to make
heroes out of his characters. Much as I have always admired Mr
Yeats and A. E., their figures dilate upon the mind after reading Mr
Boyd, and this is true even of the subordinate characters. I will
even confess, with regard to some pages devoted to my own humble
efforts, that I have risen from their perusal with the conviction that
after all I am rather a fine fellow.
I must say, however, that some of us get more than our share of
attention, even in proportion to our importance in that little move-


JOHN EGLINTON
397
ment of which Mr W. B. Yeats was the acknowledged Goethe. And
Mr Boyd has not altogether the freedom of the ideal critic from
personal prepossessions and antipathies. A literary historian should
not hate any of his characters any more than should a novelist: it is
a great part of the charm of such works as this that the author has
the art of taking each writer on his own terms and yet of tactfully
putting each in his place. Mr Boyd admits some of his guests into
this company with manifest dislike, while to others (for example,
the admirable author of The Real Charlotte) his manner is un-
comfortable. And one or two deserving figures are missing: the long
services to Irish literature of Mr Stephen Gwynn, for instance,
should have received some acknowledgement. Mr George Moore is
present; but one feels that if Mr Bernard Shaw, in consideration of
the influence he has exerted on the history of the Irish dramatic
movement, had received an invitation, he would have made himself
quite agreeable.
Briefly, the theoretic framework of Mr Boyd's history is this: he
admits that English must be the language of modern Ireland, but
holds that no escape from provinciality was possible until, with
Mangan, Ferguson, and above all Standish O'Grady, literature be-
gan to return to the ancient Celtic sources. Then ensued a literary
movement to which the early literature of the Irish was in the same
relation as the Greek and Roman classics to the modern European
literatures. Irish literature in English began to have a conscious
national tradition. The analogy is fairly exact, when we admit that
the sphere of this literature is a small one; and just as there were
writers who seemed to owe little to the Greek and Roman classics,
yet would never have found speech except in a world into which the
new ferment had entered, so Mr Boyd is able to bring Irish writers
who appear to owe little to Celtic sources, into the general move-
ment. The account of the way in which Synge's style was elaborated
through the influence of Douglas Hyde and other workers in
Gaelic, is a notable instance of this. But was it only through a "re-
turn to the ancient sources" that a genuinely national Irish literature
could have originated? Ireland being what it is, probably such a
literature could not have originated otherwise. Yet it is possible to
imagine another way, and that an unchallengeably national literature
might have originated through the awakening of thought in Ireland.
It is true that it is difficult to imagine a movement of thought origi-
nating in any distinctively Irish way: still, a mild and serene sage


398 ANGLO-IRISH LITERATURE
who by some whim of destiny had found his sphere in Ireland might
have been an astonishing rallying-point for Irish talent. Perhaps a
more highly individualized if less docile company might have as-
sembled round such a leader than that which has assembled round
Mr Yeats. Unfortunately, the most highly developed intelligences
are not as a rule animated by patriotic motives, and no philosophic
intelligence of the first order has felt it "up to him" to "fill the
breach." What is it that we lack? Probably some congenial and
vital tradition. The tradition which eventually flowered in Emer-
son, Thoreau, and Hawthorne had been guarded and secured for
generations by all the stern precautions of civil and religious au-
thority, and it had produced Jonathan Edwards. In Ireland we
have not got as far as Jonathan Edwards. I have sometimes fancied
that in that Catholic puritanism which finds little favour with Mr
Boyd, the fateful tradition might be found eventually to reside. For
I am of opinion that nothing is granted to mortals without being
purchased beforehand, and that privation precedes fruition.
For the present it looks as if Ireland has had its chance and has
forfeited it—at all events for a long time. For a long time it is
likely to find politics more exciting than literature. National litera-
ture does not grow out of an abnormal political situation, and Irish
literature in English must for some time feel itself to be in an abnor-
mal situation. I should think that an orthodox Sinn Feiner would
be of the opinion that a successful literature in the English language
would be a serious hindrance to the shaping of Irish nationality.
James Stephens, for instance, says that he does not want a literature
in the language in which, nevertheless, he writes! Ireland was cer-
tainly in the way of doing something in literature, but now every-
thing depends on accident. Tradition has to be reconstituted. For
these reasons I think that Mr Boyd's history of Ireland's Literary
Renaissance is likely to prove a more complete and final one than
when he first published it in i9i6. Of course Anglo-Irish literature
will go on. Mr James Stephens's masterpiece, already mostly writ-
ten, I believe, is still to come. But I fear that for some time Anglo-
Irish literature will be a half-hearted affair. The next Bernard
Shaw, after hanging about in Dublin for a little, will probably drift
over to London like his forerunner. Perhaps the next one after
that—? But all roads may not then lead to London.
John Eglinton


MANY MARRIAGES
Many Marriages. By Sherwood Anderson. i2mo.
264 pages. B. W. Huebsch. $2.
ICANNOT regard Mr Sherwood Anderson's Many Marriages
as a quite worthy successor to The Triumph of the Egg. It
takes the subjective method of the last story in that book, Out of
Nowhere Into Nothing—which was already rather too long—
and applies it on an even more elaborate scale. It may be that I
have not been able to give the book quite a fair chance, because
before I read it the story had already been told me in some detail
—so that my first thrill at the really fine things in it had already
been exhausted; but I am not sure that this fact in itself does not
constitute something of an indictment against the author's treat-
ment of his material. When I heard the story briefly told, I was
stirred by the freshness of its visions, those severe and lovely vis-
ions of Anderson which make him often rather a poet than a
novelist. But when I read it in its extended form I found it
tedious and sometimes flat. It is as if Mr Anderson had diluted
his ideas until they had lost a great deal of their force. The inci-
dent of the meeting between the girl and boy, for example, when
both are free for the moment from the sense of shame, when she
swims to him out of sleep like a diver from profound waters, is ex-
traordinarily fine; but one hears too much about it—or rather,
what one hears adds too little to what one has already heard. Mr
Anderson's repetitions, which are intended to, and which do at
their best, give a certain rhythm to his work, in this last book be-
come terribly boring. We have, for example, to listen twice to a
complete description of the finding of the little green stone which
is to stand as a symbol of life, and every time we hear about it
afterwards we have a part of this description repeated. It is like
The House That Jack Built.
Furthermore, Mr Anderson's habit of stripping his characters
of their incidentals—their clothes, their furniture, and their social
relations—which in his best stories produces a sort of classic sim-
plicity, in Many Marriages leaves them strangely pale, as if they
had been stripped of their personalities, too. Can any one imagine


4oo
MANY MARRIAGES
the hero's wife as a human being? She presents the blank visage
of a phantom. When her husband tells her he is going to leave
her she poisons herself without a word. She does not even seem
to exist as such a woman might be supposed to exist: if not very
strongly as a sexual being, then at least as a housekeeper and a
mother. She relinquishes her daughter to the husband without a
protest or a struggle. It is all a little infantile and reminds one
rather of the behaviour of the people in the comic strips, who fall
dead amid a galaxy of stars at some catastrophic "wise-crack." We
seem to see Mrs Webster clasp her hand to her forehead and shoot
up several feet into the air. It is true, of course, that Mrs Webster
is intended to be dull and dead; but I can scarcely recognize her
even as a corpse. And this excuse cannot apply to the mistress,
Natalie Swartz, who is played off against the wife. We are re-
peatedly told how strong she is, but she, too, is a voiceless phantom.
We have somehow an irritated feeling that the hero has deserted
one lay figure for another.
Yet, for all the feebleness, even flabbiness, of the texture of
Many Marriages, it is not wholly devoid of the strange impres-
siveness which one feels in all Mr Anderson's work. Here, as
elsewhere, we are at once disturbed and soothed by the feeling of
hands thrust down among the deepest bowels of life—hands deli-
cate and clean but still pitiless in their explorations. My only
quarrel with Mr Anderson is that he has not gone down so far as
usual. He takes the already sufficiently familiar theme of some-
one who prefers someone else to his wife and leaves it much more
nearly where he found it than it has been his wont to do. His
awakening husband and inhibited wife are not quite different enough
from the people in One of Ours or Cytherea. Yet even here we
feel that Mr Anderson has the advantage that his banality is not
derived from the banality of other people. It is something he has
arrived at by himself. At his best, he functions with a strange ease
and beauty in a world at the roots of life—as if in a diving-bell of
the human soul—which makes the world of the ordinary novelist
seem a painted literary convention; and at his worst, in Many Mar-
riages, one feels as one can do in the case of almost none of his
contemporaries, that he is at least making his own mistakes in the
pursuit of his own authentic ideal and not merely failing from an
imperfect attempt to imitate someone else's.
Edmund Wilson, Jr.


ART BOOKS IN AMERICA
Younger Artists' Series. Edited by William Murrell.
Vol. I: Ernest Fiene. Vol. II: Alexander Brook.
Vol. Ill: Peggy Bacon. Vol. IV: Yasuo Kuniyoshi.
8vo. William M. Fisher, Woodstock, New York. $0.75
each volume.
DURING the past decade the younger painters of this country,
in the face of constant hostility, ignorance, indifference, and
ridicule, have produced a body of creative work which outweighs, in
originality and significance, the output of any European nation,
with the one exception of France; and even that nation need not be
excepted if we bar four or five pre-eminent names such as Cezanne,
Renoir, Matisse, and Picasso. Indeed, modern American painting
to-day reveals, on the whole, a firmer grasp of the new experimental
means, a profounder concept of the essential principles of form and
organization, and a more satisfying and advanced statement of
plastic beauty, than does the painting of any other nation.
One of the chief reasons why these facts are not more generally
recognized in America, is that for years there has been a constant
influx into this country of beautiful and impressive art books (both
pictorial and critical) blazoning forth the accomplishments and ex-
tolling the merits of the modernist painters of Europe; whereas
there have been comparatively few authoritative publications set-
ting forth the work of American modernists. The fact is that
fewer books dealing with the new painting have been issued in
America than in any of the larger European countries.
The inevitable result of this neglect on our part of one of the
most vital manifestations in the history of aesthetic evolution, is
that recognition and fame have been accorded certain European
painters whose achievements are inferior to those of American art-
ists; and that modern European painting in general has acquired
in this country a reputation which, by every authentic aesthetic
standard, should attach to our own art. One of the greatest pub-
lishing desiderata in America to-day is a series of books dealing ade-
quately, in both a critical and expositional manner, with the work
of the foremost modern American painters.


4-02
ART BOOKS IN AMERICA
It was, no doubt, with the idea of remedying—in some degree, at
least—the unwarrantable deficiency of such books in this country,
that Mr William M. Fisher, of Woodstock, New York, recently put
upon the market the first four volumes of The Younger Artists'
Series.
In considering a pioneer enterprise of this kind, undertaken by a
man who is not an established and experienced publisher, it is per-
haps fairer to judge it from the standpoint of its idealism and its
potentialities, than from the standpoint of its actual fulfilment.
For, whatever its faults and shortcomings, it is a much needed step
in the right direction; and the very boldness and courage of Mr
Fisher's venture may result in some of our larger and more timid
publishers emulating his example.
Regarded from its purely physical and documentary side The
Younger Artists' Series leaves much to be desired. Indeed, its in-
trinsic merits are somewhat dubious, and unless these volumes are
approached with a certain charitable consideration, they may, quite
conceivably, do harm to the very cause they are intended to help.
Therefore, lest the uninitiated reader attempt to gauge the actual
quality and progress of the modern art movement in this country by
the contents of these booklets, I feel it my duty to point out wherein
they fail to reflect the true status of modern American painting.
At the outset I am somewhat mystified by the four names—Ernest
Fiene, Alexander Brook, Peggy Bacon, and Yasuo Kuniyoshi—
chosen to inaugurate the Series. I am handicapped by not knowing
exactly what motive animated Mr Fisher when he made his selec-
tion; for the General Introduction concerns itself chiefly with his
intellectual and emotional approach to art, and does not explain the
purpose underlying his project as a whole. Since there is no name
in this first group which represents the most advanced or accom-
plished of our younger painters, one would be naturally led to sur-
mise that the publisher considers that the score or more of artists
who stand in the front rank of contemporary graphic modernism
in America, are well enough known, through exhibitions and cri-
tiques, to be omitted from the Series—temporarily, at least; and
that he desires primarily to bring before the public a group of paint-
ers who, though as yet experimental and comparatively obscure,
possess sufficient promise to warrant more general recognition.
However, among the four artists to whom, it is announced, Vol-
umes V, VI, VII, and VIII will be devoted, we encounter at least two


WILLARD HUNTINGTON WRIGHT 403
who have long held positions of eminence in the modern movement;
and consequently we are forced to abandon the theory that Mr
Fisher is actuated solely by the spirit of the trail-blazer. One is
almost tempted to accuse Mr Fisher of faulty judgement; and yet
it does not seem wholly credible that a publisher sufficiently inter-
ested to undertake so daring and specialized a series of art books,
could be so ignorant of the relative merits of present-day American
painters, and so unfamiliar with the manifestations of modern aes-
thetic research, as to believe that the artists selected for this Series
have as yet attained results which could possibly be classed, either
aesthetically, theoretically, or technically, in the foremost rank of
American graphic endeavour.
The principal complaint, therefore, I have against The Younger
Artists' Series is that it is not revelatory of our best, and that,
consequently, it gives a false impression of the really significant
accomplishments of our younger painters.
Furthermore, I would gravely question the adequacy of the brief
critical and appreciative introductions which Mr William Murrell,
as editor, contributes to the Series. There are in America several
highly capable and even profound critics of modern painting; but
unfortunately Mr Murrell is not one of them. He has abundant en-
thusiasm; but apparently he is without a grasp of the complicated
problems of modern aesthetic research; and he lacks the discriminat-
ing insight which would give such introductions their informative
value. Moreover, his inability to write competent English—his
grammatical errors, mis-spellings, illogical punctuation, and dic-
tional crudities—confer an air of amateurishness on the entire work,
and markedly detract from the authority and solidity which such an
enterprise should possess if it is to render the highest service to the
cause it espouses.
Physically, also, these four volumes fail to reflect the dignity of
their subject matter. Although the reproductions are well printed in
fine screen on good paper, and although the frontispieces in colour
are distinct and brilliant, the typography and make-up of the books
reveal a decided tendency toward the outre and bizarre. The text-
paper has a strong yellow tint, and even the cut-off lines are shaded.
Furthermore, the covers are of limp blue boards with glossy patch-
titles of varying hues.
These matters may seem trivial and even irrelevant; but it must
be remembered that the most persistent charge which the defenders


404
ART BOOKS IN AMERICA
of the modern art movement have to meet is that of dilettantism.
Academicians and Philistines alike are constantly acusing the mod-
ernists of insincerity and "freakishness," and of a superficial and
ostentatious desire to be "different" and "arresting." And, not only
is it inconsistent with the intellectual seriousness of the modern
painting to clothe its products in eccentric and "art-nouveau" attire,
but it actually retards appreciation by adding fuel to the fires of the
opposition.
Lest my remarks give the impression that I am unsympathetic to
Mr Fisher's enterprise, I wish to explain that whatever strictures I
have voiced have been actuated solely by my enthusiasm. It is,
indeed, my whole-hearted sympathy with his basic idea, and my
genuine desire to see his undertaking succeed, that have made me
perhaps more painstakingly critical than if my interest had been less
keen. Almost simultaneously with the appearance of The Younger
Artists' Series came the publication of the first two volumes of the
Distinguished American Artists series, dealing with the work of
Childe Hassam and Robert Henri; and, notwithstanding the fact
that these latter books are free from all the faults to which I
have called attention in Mr Fisher's volumes, I regard The Younger
Artists' Series—with all its shortcomings—of far greater importance,
and therefore far more deserving of support. A few more publishers
of Mr Fisher's bravery and vision would go far toward counteract-
ing the injustice and neglect which have been the portion of the
modern painter in America.
The value of a series like Mr Fisher's, lies, not so much in the
recognition it gives to any one group of artists, as in its general
effect upon public interest in modern aesthetic effort as a whole.
Therefore, a critical examination of the individual painters chosen
to introduce this Series, need not concern us here. The important
thing is that the modern art innovator should have an opportunity
to speak directly to the public; and by the issuance of this Series
Mr Fisher has established a vital point of contact between the two.
In justice, however, to those younger American artists who have
actually accomplished results of an exalted and permanent nature,
it is to be hoped that the selection of painters for the future volumes
of this Series, will be more representative, and that the volumes
themselves will possess a dignity more commensurate with the true
character of the modern art movement in this country.
Willard Huntington Wright


PESSIMISM AND PROSE POETRY
Ebony and Ivory. By Llewelyn Powys. i2mo. 223
pages. American Library Service. $2.
TO those who have followed with appreciation the writings of
Mr Llewelyn Powys which have appeared from time to time
in literary magazines and periodicals it will be a satisfaction to
know that a selection of his African and English essays and short
stories are now published under the title of Ebony and Ivory.
One willingly concurs with Mr Theodore Dreiser who in a preface
to this book designates its contents as "so serious, so pathetic, so,
—in the main,—sombre, and so beautiful."
In this subtly dioristic writing one comes little by little to detect
a pursuing, almost febrile prepossession in the mind of the author.
Death—the bitter impermanence of life—here is the theme that
furtively abeyant, or boldly advancing for battle, moves in and
out of these shrewdly speculative pages. In the opening essay,
Black Gods, one finds it presented with an almost liturgical vision,
disillusioned, yet with that note of grave meditation which dis-
tinguishes much of the great poetry of the past.
"Under the spell of this merciless sun the country, yes, the whole
Universe, seems damned and throttled by the inevitable sequence
of destiny; and all man's fondly cherished beliefs are as impalpa-
ble and unreal as the mirages by Lake Obolosat. Africa, like one
of her own black-maned lions, laps up the life-blood of all the
delicate illusions that have for so long danced before the eyes of
men and made them happy. Truth alone is left alive. What
was suspected in Europe is made plain here: at the bottom of the
well of life there is no hope. Under Scorpio, under the Southern
Cross, and in the clear light of this passionless, tropical sunshine,
the hollow emptiness of the world's soul is made certain: the sur-
face is everything, below there is nothing."
In A Sheepman's Diary the theme becomes more incidental yet
remains alert; in The Brown Satyr it is elusive, but still challeng-


406 PESSIMISM AND PROSE POETRY
ing; in Threnody freighted with a delicate retrospect; and in the
last essay, Death, it emerges sharp and emphatic—a fully defined
philosophy.
Although the thoughts of Mr Powys hesitate with a pensive
wariness over the irreparably fugitive moment, the piquancy and
thrill of life are for him enhanced by its very brevity. Indeed,
the words which Mr Strachey uses as so peculiarly not applying
to Madame du Deffand are entirely apposite in the case of this
author, for everywhere one detects in Llewelyn Powys's writing
"that spiritual gusto which lends a savour to the meanest act of
living." In his own words, as expressed in A Sheepman's Diary,
the attitude is thus denned:
"At twilight an Arab came on to the roof opposite, and cried to
the sun as it went down over Africa. I was thrilled. I had no
idea the house opposite was a mosque, and this calling to the sink-
ing sun seemed to coincide so exactly with my obsession as to the
importance, the almost sacred significance, of each separate day.
From where I stood I could see spread out before me the white
roofs of the old town, with here and there a palm tree, grown up
out of some far-away, delicious court. I could see the fine coloured
tropical sky, cut and cut again by swift gliding sister swallows;
and over and above all was the voice of this priest, resonant as a
bell, passionately registering the passing of each consecrated hour."
It is, so one perceives, with the present, explicit world, the
world of tangible disturbing spectacles—mean, fantastic, slyly
ironic, malevolent, merciless; of proud and covert animals of
primeval savagery, or of animals dumb-mouthed under oppression;
the world of English fields in wintry desolation, or with their
summer foison of fruit, corn, and fodder; the world of men and
women, debased and purblind with vulgar egoism, or exposed to
cruelty and exploitation by their helplessness, that Mr Powys's
imagination is concerned.
Here is no great interest in ideas, no modern reticulation of
words provoking one to a tense or amused consideration of their
meaning—but a restraint, wholly tough—yet strangely, even
hauntingly vulnerable—artless, perhaps, yet with the subtle art-
lessness of complete sophistication.


ALYSE GREGORY
407
In the stories the construction is simple and solid, the subjects
realistically and usually movingly presented. Yet here and there
one feels as in The Wryneck that the framework should have been
more amply and subtly filled in, the psychology of the characters
more convincingly exposed, for although the story is interesting,
and its bereft "milieu" realized, yet one remains incredulous and
unstirred by the final ghastly denouement.
Such is not the case with The Stunner, which is one of the finest
accomplishments in the book. Here one is carried directly into the
story and can clearly visualize The Stunner, whether in the fields
where "he would swallow the ochre-coloured cider with all an
animal's insatiable drought, standing motionless and monumental
among the corn, with his little shining diminutive barrel that we
called his 'owl' sealed to his lips" or remaining "aloof, as the silent
self-absorbed mole is aloof, or the deep digging badger."
Yet how, one wonders, did so satiric and philosophic a sensualist
as Mr Powys permit a story of almost pure propaganda such as
How It Happens to creep in and mar this distinguished collection?
It is, we venture to say, in Black Gods, A Sheepman's Diary, A
Leopard by Lake Elmenteita, Dead Matter in Africa, The Stun-
ner, and Threnody that Mr Powys is at his best. And his best is
so imaginative, so full of rustic wisdom and inured scepticism
that one is pleased to note that two more books of his are an-
nounced for early publication.
Alyse Gregory


ENGINEERING WITH WORDS
Geography and Plays. By Gertrude Stein. In-
troduction by Sherwood Anderson. i2mo. 4i9 pages.
The Four Seas Company. $3.50.
PERHAPS, by way of a show-down, I should begin an ap*
proach to Miss Stein's new volume, Geography and Plays, by
admitting that I find in parts of Milton pretty much the flowering
of certain modern aesthetic worries. Milton writes, for instance,
"Where He now sits at the right hand of God"
and the beauty of the line lies precisely in its "significant form."
I say this in spite of the fact that Mr Clive Bell finds significant
form a quite negligible factor in determining literary excellence.
The significant form in this instance (the structural framework
which appeals to us over and above the "message" of the line) is
to be found in the fact that the two words "now" and "right" are
unaccented in scansion, but accented in sense, so that a complexity
of movement and counter-movement results. Incidentally, both
of these normally unaccented words are further brought into per-
verse relief by the violent prominence of the "ow" and "i" sounds.
But this is no doubt in the versification books, so I pass hastily on
to a quotation from Miss Stein:
"Point, face, canvas, toy, struck off, sense or, weigh coach, soon
beak on, so suck in, and an iron."
Here, too, we have the appeal of significant form. The sentence
is structurally contenting; it begins with a group of four isolated
words, follows with three groups of two words, then two groups
of three words, and finally a curt swing to a close. I quote one
more instance, where the appeal is just as spontaneous, although
more complex and difficult to analyse:
"Lie on this, show sup the boon that nick the basting thread


KENNETH BURKE
409
thinly and night night gown and pit wet kit. Loom down the
thorough narrow."
Surely one does not have to be persuaded into liking the happy
chunks of verbalism Miss Stein has given us here, the sharp tick-
ing off of the words, with a plunge at the end like a boat ground-
ing on thick mud. In all three of these instances we have those
purely formal elements which go to make up the appeal of nursery
rhymes. Here, after all the varnish, is the return to the primitive.
But Milton's line has something more than Miss Stein's. The
significant form is backed by subject matter, and this backing pro-
duces a heightened emotion. For, as Mr Raymond Mortimer once
said in these pages, if form is sufficient to produce an emotion, sub-
ject matter is required to heighten it. Art, that is, is a process of
individualization; form is general, subject matter is specific. To
illustrate, if I speak of a crescendo, the reader knows what I am
driving at, but the crescendo does not live for him until I play one
specific assemblage of notes which forms a crescendo. Similarly,
I get climax by one specific set of circumstances which fall into a
climax. Which is to say, by the individualizing process of sub-
ject matter.
Now, in Milton's case, the subject matter actually contributes
to the formal element, and gives it a satisfaction beyond the mere
arrangement of the vowels and the fluxes. In Miss Stein's case the
satisfaction stops with the form itself. Even the nursery rhyme,
by its semblance of a "message," goes farther in this particular
than the quotations from Miss Stein.
We find, then, that Miss Stein's method is one of subtraction.
She has deliberately limited her equipment so that she has less
than Milton to begin with. In this matter I should say that she
had ignored the inherent property of words: that quality in the
literary man's medium which makes him start out with a definite-
ness that the other arts do not possess. That is, if the musician
plays G-sharp he has prescribed no definitions; but if the literary
man writes "boy" he has already laid down certain demarcations.
Now, obviously, any literary artist who sets out to begin his work
in a primary search for music or rhythm, and attempts to get this
at the expense of this "inherent property of words" ... ob-
viously this artist is not going to exploit the full potentialities of


4io ENGINEERING WITH WORDS
his medium. He is getting an art by subtraction; he is violating
his genre. One might, in a pious moment, name this the "fallacy
of subtraction." The formula would apply to a great deal of
modern art.
Miss Stein continually utilizes this violation of the genre. The-
oretically at least, the result has its studio value. If the academies
were at all alive, they would teach the arts in precisely this man-
ner. By approaching the art-work from these exorbitant angles
one is suddenly able to rediscover organically those eternal prin-
ciples of art which are, painful as it may be to admit it, preserved
in all the standard textbooks. Similarly, as Severini has shown us
recently, cubism is (or can be) simply the first glue-eyed nosing
around for the teat of classicism. The musician has always run
his scales, has had his counterpoint; the student of writing, on the
other hand, begins with stories or poems about something. It is
exclusively outside the accepted channels of education that all
technical research has been done in letters since God knows when.
What a pity that Mallarme was so supersensitive; for he was the
man to found a really vital literary Academy.
Perhaps it has been noted with resentment that up to this
point I have avoided discussing Miss Stein's use of associated
ideas. I have done so because associated ideas per se are of no
more value than are the Ozark mountains per se. Their encroach-
ment into art is justified only when some sound aesthetic value is
acquired thereby. And their value, it seems to me, lies precisely
in the opportunity they offer for throwing into relief the functions
of the art-work (as in the above quotations from Miss Stein's new
book). A logical sequence (the perfectly lubricated novel, for
instance) moves with a minimum of relief; the purpose is to con-
ceal the form beneath the matter; the form is used to "sell' the
matter. But if I wanted to emphasize, say, a transition; not try
to sneak across a transition, but to throw it into relief so that the
reader knew that at this moment he was going through a transition;
I could get this by a chain of associated ideas, used like steps go-
ing in one direction. I should move from point to point by a
psychological sequence rather than a logical sequence. To illus-
trate rather bluntly; let us suppose a series of nouns, running from
ideas of complete stability, into ideas of inceptive motion, then
gentle motion, then accelerated motion, speed, precipitancy, and
finally ending in some violent cataclysm or explosion.


KENNETH BURKE
4ii
But this, obviously, would bring in the need of the taboo. To
produce this art-form, I should have to rule out ideas of precipi-
tancy at the beginning, and ideas of stability towards the end.
The work of art, then, implies the erection of a temporary set of
values, true at least for the particular problem at hand. But in
the first flush of our "freedom," certain artists like Miss Stein
refuse to recognize even these temporary taboos. Here is the
absurdity of romanticism, or individualism; here we see carried to
the extreme the tendency to take the personality of the individual
as a virtue in itself; for the only unity of these associations is the
unity of their having been written by one person—which is the
absurdity of Dadaism. Such material may be excellent data for
the psychologists; but its aesthetic value is nil, unless some further
use is made of it. This further use, I maintain, is to emphasize
the functional values in a work of art; and we are at least entitled
to this view until someone cares to suggest another use.
At any rate, Miss Stein does get this aesthetic value at times
into her sentences. And at such times they have a raison d'etre
not merely as fever charts, but also as bits of art. But here again
the choppiness of her subject matter limits her achievements enor-
mously. I think of Lycidas, and of the "programme" in the stanza
sequence: the change in flux, for instance, which is acquired by the
slight deviation from the stanza of
"Weep no more, woeful shepherds, weep no more"
to the stanza of
"And now the lun had stretched out all the hills,
And now had dropped into the western bay."
Miss Stein, by her short sparrow-pecks, can get a certain analy-
tic form, the form of her sentences. But the synthetic form of
paragraph or stanza, or beyond, of the art-work in toto, is denied
her. While even her analytic form is seldom brilliant, and shows
beyond a doubt that the focus of her attention is elsewhere. This,
of course, results in her being diffuse. And her method leaves us
with too little to feed on. One might almost say that it argues
for the insignificance of significant form. Further, her book is a
continual rebeginning. No sentence advances us beyond the sen-


412
ENGINEERING WITH WORDS
tence preceding. For such advances involve this synthetic form,
and this synthetic form can be brought out only by a greater
stability of subject matter.
(Mr Eliot, in The Waste Land, goes as far as the poet can go
without falling into this "fallacy of subtraction." The sudden
elevation from "Ta ta Goonight, goonight" into "Good night,
ladies, good night, sweet ladies" is psychological rather than logi-
cal, makes a step forward, that is, by means of an association of
ideas; and it is one of the finest examples of the functioning art-
work in modern poetry.)
It is, perhaps, egregious to have pursued Miss Stein with Milton
throughout this review. But, at least, it is not mal a propos. For
I have wished to bring out exactly what is sacrificed by an under-
emphasis on the selection of subject matter, and how little is
gained. For if there is significant form in letters, this form can
only be brought out to its fullest beauty by the most cautious
deviations from the norm, the logical. Which probably explains
why Mallarme, seeing one of his young admirers produce a piece
of excessive violation, remarked grimly that the man had gone
farther than he himself had dared after twenty years of concentra-
tion on this very problem.
Kenneth Burke


BRIEFER MENTION
The Gentleman From San Francisco and Other Stories, by I. A.
Bunin, translated by D. H. Lawrence, S. S. Koteliansky, and Leonard
Woolf (l2mo, i35 pages; Seltzer: $i.50) is work of the first order, and
has evidently been lucky in its translators. The book surrounds its ob-
ject, letting none of it escape, instead of brilliantly playing up, one aspect,
in the manner of the English satirists. Yet in place of the dull Gorky fog,
the luminous Chekhov fog, we find here a white lucidity of intention and
phrase. It is possible that the book marks another step in advance in the
history of Russian prose. The Gentleman From San Francisco makes one
seek English comparisons, back all the way to Swift, and The Son sends
one in search of French, but without any definite illumination. The work
is new, individual, authentic.
The Voice in the Wilderness, by Richard Blaker (i2mo, 342 pages;
Doran: $2) displays the invention indispensable to a good novel. Simple
conversations having to do with tea-making, tea-drinking, music lessons
are so devised as to project the various characters more effectively than
the most subtle analysis could. After this it seems contradictory to add
that the book is too clever, altogether too neat. Mr Blaker made the mis-
take of starting out with a thesis, and in the development of his thesis
his inventiveness becomes an end instead of a means. The book makes
good reading. There are excellent Shavian passages (perhaps the ex-
planation of the thesis) as well as many naivetes.
The New Decameron (i2mo, 23i pages; Brentano's: $2.50). In the
third volume of this engaging hash of current short stories, D. H. Law-
rence's Wintry Peacock is to be found in queer company. Perhaps that
is why the publishers omitted Mr Lawrence's name from the cover, geni-
ally lumping him in with "and others." The modern short story is here
shown at its highest pitch of artificiality and trumped up detail.
A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago, by Ben Hecht (illus.,
8vo, 289 pages, Covici-McGee: $2.50) contains an introduction by Henry
Justin Smith, author of Deadlines (i2mo, 249 pages; Covici-McGee:
$i.75). Both books are the work of Chicago newspapermen of what
might be designated the Loop school; the elevated roar provides the
overtones. Hecht discloses a series of highly-coloured city life sketches
—swift and intensive at their best, garish and slightly mawkish on
occasions. When one takes into account that they represent a day-by-day
output, however, one must concede the high competence of the average.
Deadlines is a more rounded piece of work, and undoubtedly is a most
successful attempt to get the complex existence of a modern newspaper
plant between book covers. Mr Smith writes from the inside, but he is
essentially a humanist; his style is unaffected and direct, with something
of the substantial candour of Dreiser.


4H
BRIEFER MENTION
Like many recent American novels written to a thesis rather than to a
form, Being Respectable, by Grace H. Flandrau (i2mo, 336 pages;
Harcourt Brace: $2) is useful to the artist, not for study, but as an
agent for educating his milieu up to a certain point after which, if re-
tained, it becomes miseducation. The thesis is the Middle-Western cult
of respectability built by a first generation who have the dignity of cre-
ators, and distorted into an empty merry-go-round rhythm by a second
generation who neither believe in it nor have the strength to reject it.
Another group of characters despise the cult, but are too crippled by it
to create something anew. The disintegration of respectability by the
secret springs of conduct is shrewdly depicted. Being Respectable, then,
narrates a problem of life in terms of facts; it makes no pretensions to
those superior satisfactions: an aesthetic problem utilizing the facts of
life, or the problem of life projected by an aesthetic.
Confessions of a Book-Lover, by Maurice Francis Egan (i2010, 249
pages; Doubleday Page: $2.50). Writings about books shuffle easily
into three classes: the review (which summarizes and describes) the
essay (which handles subsidiary properties of literature) and the criticism
(which seeks to disentangle the central problems of writing). Dr Egan's
book, as his title indicates, belongs to the overstocked essay class, very
personal commentary subdivision. "I speak, not as a critic, but as a man
who loves only the poetry that appeals to him," he writes. His major
quality is an amiable tone, and those who esteem that above illuminations,
profundities, or stimuli are accepting a non-literary merit in default of
literary virtue. Others may feel that not even mellow manners excuse
the weariness inflicted by "I have never read any good book that was not
related intimately to at least a score of other books. It is true that in a
measure a book gives to us what we take to it."
Books Reviewed, by J. C. Squire (i2mo, 293 pages; Doran: $2). A
division of advertising copy, which appeals to the sentimentalities, is
called "human interest copy." This copy lures the reader to the article,
not by an exact description of the article's make-up and properties, but
by representing the article as providing a merry Christmas or fattening
a jolly baby or comforting a tired fisherman. Much that passes for
criticism is simply "human interest copy" of a more subtle sort, or to
use a less offensive title, it is criticism as persuasion. Thus, Mr Squire,
instead of reaching the centre of Andrew Marvell's work and making
precise statements on that centre, detaches and holds out as bait the facts
of Marvell's life, the tenderness, pastoral quiet, and humour of his
verses, and a few quotations, while technique is summed up in a blanket
adjective. Mr Squire's method and that of most "human interest" critics
may be stated thus: I, a normal and engaging person, enjoy this normal
and engaging book, and therefore you, a normal and engaging person,
will also enjoy this normal and engaging book. This is certainly not
criticism as statement, but very polite salesmanship. In Essays at
Large, by Solomon Eagle (i2mo, 2ii pages; Doran: $2) we are frankly
on the playfields of literature. Here Mr Squire's suppleness is amus-
ing without irritating by its lack of grip.


BRIEFER MENTION
4i5
Occasions, by Holbrook Jackson (i2mo, i97 pages; Scribner: $2) con-
fonns in manner to that tradition of the essay fathered by Montaigne; in
spirit it would be modern, but for its happy leisuredness and lack of
blatancy. Content to write only of what pleases him, Mr Jackson yet
assumes advocacy for none of his subjects; and, since he does not seek
to advertise, he has no need of a garish style. His epigrams are concen-
trations of judicious reflection tempered by humour, his prose is the un-
forced and well-modulated expression of his thoughts. He commemorates
those idylls rarely pursued except in words—joys of the fireside, gardens,
and spring-fever—as well as the mental adventures especially dear to
philosophers. Philosophy to him is not experience systematized into
logic, but experience cajoled into pastime. His essays incorporate his
delight and—oh miracle!—communicate it to his readers.
Sonnets of a Portrait Painter, and Other Sonnets, by Arthur Davison
Ficke (i2mo, i05 pages; Kennerley: $2). Although they occasionally
bring echoes of the masters, these sonnets are characterized by vividness
and beauty. They bear the signature of sincere thought and feeling;
and are all written deftly and with emotional restraint. Many of them
are testimony to the author's understanding of the hidden wheels and
levers of human nature.
Preludes and Symphonies, by John Gould Fletcher (i2mo, 99 pages;
Houghton Mifflin: $i.50) is a reissue in one fortunate volume of Ir-
radiations; Sand and Spray (i9i5) and Goblins and Pagodas (i9i6).
These early books contain some of Fletcher's best work; they experiment
bravely; if they are uneven, they reach heights. They never sold widely
or received, with one or two exceptions, more than the small coin of
praise, and this lack of recognition had an unfortunate effect on much
of Fletcher's later verse, driving it into the misty aloofness of the clouds.
Collected Poems, i907-i922, by John Erskine (i2mo, i75 pages; Duf-
field: $i.50). This book is marked not so much by the fitful beauty of
one to whom poetry is the substance of life as by the academic evenness
of tone of one who takes poetry calmly and with deep seriousness. Mr
Erskine frequently seems to be seeking the land beyond the rainbow's
end, and is sometimes not without success in the search; though many of
the poems are marred not only by their prolixity but by the too-ostensible
influence of the classics, by a diction and a manner that might too easily
be mistaken for that of Tennyson or others of the masters.
Shoes of the Wind, by Hilda Conkling (i2mo, i70 pages; Stokes: $1.60)
is a child's garden of images and flowers; the flowers are real and the
images nicely conceived: "Lilies of the valley, bell-shaped moments clus-
tered, doves of time, little white doves." "I have buried my thoughts in
the sand: it would take a water-creature to find them." "His wings are
barred with frost, his snow-dusty feet are like dull crystal." In the
verse of Hilda Conkling there is a sensitiveness, an open-eyed charm
which can rarely be found in the work of the elder Imagists, her uncon-
scious imitators.


BRIEFER MENTION
The Life of Antonio Fogazzaro, by Tommaso Gallarati-Scotti, trans-
lated by Mary Prichard Agnetti (8vo, 3i4 pages; Doran: $4) is a bio-
graphy of great warmth and discernment. Fogazzaro's zeal for the life
of the spirit made his novels a somewhat collateral product, but that same
zeal found its flowering, if not its fruition, in the clear lilt of his pas-
sion as an artist. A number of hitherto unpublished letters and extracts
from his private note-books fortify this sensitive study of a soul on the
Index; and the translation adds a real breath of the exquisite.
Catherine de Medicis, by Paul Van Dyke (2 vols., 8vo, 835 pages; Scrib-
ner: $9). The author offers 2,626 citations (27i from memoirs of Cather-
ine's contemporaries) to support a narrative written without any bias save
that of historical accuracy. He tells his story in a direct, decidedly read-
able fashion and a wealth of detail, without any endeavour to disculpate
Catherine from the responsibility of the St Bartholomew Massacre. So in-
separable is the figure of the Italianate French queen from the social and
political history of her day as Professor Van Dyke presents her, that his
work is as much a history of France from the time of Henry II to that of
Henry IV as a biography.
Forty Years of Diplomacy, by Baron Rosen (2 vols., 8vo, 630 pages;
Knopf: $7.50) is a readable record of the life-experiences of an old-school
European diplomat. In the interim of service at European and Asiatic
courts, the late Baron Rosen was Russian Consul-General to New York,
Minister to Mexico, Ambassador to the United States, and a popular figure
in Washington society during the first Cleveland and Roosevelt administra-
tions. Allowing for natural inhibitions of training and conviction, he
writes with sincerity. Czardom finds in him an able advocate because his
views are plausibly and moderately expressed. The political standpoint
of memoirs which praise the Romanoff government as "a fairly efficient
beaurocracy," calls for no comment.
In the title of Eminent Europeans, by Eugene S. Bagger (illus., 8vo,
283 pages; Putnam: $2.50) tribute is paid to Lytton Strachey; a brightly,
intelligently, frequently brilliantly written book such as this, is in effect
the best tribute. In a series of biographical sketches which includes all
the outstanding figures of the Balkans Mr Bagger has managed actually
to disentangle a "case" much more complicated, much less subtle, than
the case of the Victorians. One receives the impression that the Balkans
are still so primitive that anything can happen there if any personality is
strong enough or any character unscrupulous enough to make it happen.
This justifies the biographical method of presenting history. It is done
in this instance with an amusing malice (French sense) which plays im-
partially upon Venizelos and Constantine and all the other partisans
alike. It is wicked, European, civilized, and without pretensions to being
in the noble vein; it seems to have nothing to do with the "behind the
mirror"—or is it "behind the counter" school of biography. The infor-
mation on which the book is based is accurate and voluminous; and the
intelligent marshalling of information makes the book as good reading
as the easy manner makes it pleasant.


COMMENT
SPORT, our readers are well aware, is a passion with us, and
we trust that the absence of serial reports on the major league
games has never been taken to indicate a lack of interest in the
proceedings. It is true that we find the actual games rather dreary,
but that they should be played, and that regarding them from the
grandstands should also be considered sport intrigues the intellect
far more than the spectacle can interest the mind or stir the imagi-
nation. We recall, in fact, seeing Mr Ruth hit two of his highly
advertised home runs in one game, the second being most psycho-
logically right and winning a game already conceded and fore-
sworn to the enemy. But what impressed us was the lack of grace
and vigour in the action, the trajectory of the ball alone posses-
sing any appeal to the senses, and the consequent overflow of the
spectators into the field being rather a tame version of events wit-
nessed by us in New Haven and Cambridge and Princeton, New
Jersey. However, people who like that sort of thing like it im-
mensely and have a rather choice collection of phrases to describe
people who don't.
For us, therefore, baseball is a closet drama, and we get most of
our fun from the reports the next morning. That these reports and
the editorial comments on the games are the brightest and best
written columns in the papers is generally taken for granted; dur-
ing the summer months when literary composition lags in other
fields, it flourishes there; and in October when poets and essayists
are ready to resume, the months of practice have put the sport-
writer far ahead, and the account of the World Series is a master-
piece. To our mind, and with our confessedly limited experience,
Mr Grantland Rice is the best of the sport-writers, and if any one
has doubts about the seriousness or the validity of the more surpris-
ing proposition we are about to defend, we suggest that he refer
back to Mr Rice's accounts of the World Series last year.
The proposition which we are nailing to the door of the acad-
emies is that these writings about sport are far better critical writ-
ing than nine tenths of the criticism of art and letters published in
our daily papers. Brightness, lightness, interest, and vigour they


4i8
COMMENT
possess—they must possess or they will not be read, for there is no
tradition of dulness about sport-writing. But they possess what is
far more important, and what is more important even than the fact
that the writer usually knows what he is talking about—and this
great and significant thing is the critical attitude, is in essence
knowing what criticism is.
The major portion of this reporting is comparable to book-
reviewing. It gives the action and the plot, and in this department
the two arts are about equal. But it is usually demanded of a base-
ball or football reporter that he criticise the game, and he usually
does it. He does it with his eye on the object—on what has been
set before him to work with. The finances of the magnates, the
private lives of the players, the complexes of the umpires, are all
left for other columns, for chit-chat in pica or blazing denuncia-
tions in bold-face. The critic of sports is positively Aristotelian
in his disregard of the inessential. He knows that the execution of
a manoeuvre succeeded because the amount of pressure brought to
bear at a certain point was equal to the square of the opposition,
and he explains this; and he disentangles from another proceeding
the elements of form which, being faultily conceived, precipitated
disaster. Tactics and strategy, technique and art, compose his one
passionate interest; he does reveal the inner meaning, illuminates
what had been obscure, and instructs the spectator and the artist
both by his intelligent appraisals. Compare the book-page any
day with this!
We are inclined to think that the clarity and interest of most of
the writing about sport is not so much due to the superior talents
of the writers as it is to the accuracy of their focus. As far as tal-
ents go Mr Heywood Broun on sports is endowed with exactly
the same ones as Mr Heywood Broun on books; his taste in sports
may be better than his taste in letters, or vice versa. The difference
in practice is that when Mr Broun bets on a football team he does
it (except when he is misled by the accidents of his education)
because he thinks the team can play good football; and when he
bets on a book (which usually gives him the position of cheer-
leader ex-officio) he does so not because it is a good book, but be-
cause the author doesn't believe in chivalry or does believe that
children ought to call their parents by their surnames alone. Mr
Broun's prejudices are so attractive and his humour so engaging


COMMENT
4i9
that he is a natural example of this sort of criticism, although for
all we know he may believe himself not a critic at all, but an
essayist on Life who uses books as a springboard. In that case, and
since his example is followed, since it isn't anything specially new
in the world, we have to consider how superior again is baseball to
books, for baseball is by its critics regarded as an end in itself, and
not as a clue to something else.
Mr Broun is, to tell the truth, an incorrigible, for he moralizes
on football at times; but he is never wholly failing in apprecia-
tion of the game itself. But as we read him on books—our readers
may do as much in the New York World and in Seeing Things at
Night (Putnams) and Pieces of Hate (Harcourt, Brace)—we
often wonder whether he knows that it is possible to appreciate a
book for what it is, apart from its "ideas." He gave the case away
rather badly once when, ecstatic as is his wont over a marvellous
catch in the outfield, he declared that no book had ever moved him
to the same degree of wonder, to saying, "No! It is impossible that
any human being should have done that!" We were therefore
moved to wonder whether he had ever read Pickwick or Ulysses;
and to wonder no less why one who cares so little about books
should care to care at all.
At the moment we do not recall the name of the American
critic of letters who corresponds precisely to Mr Rice. Mr Broun
has the good fortune in his versatility to correspond to himself and
what he loses on the swings he gains on the roundabouts.


THE THEATRE
ROGER BLOOMER, by John Howard Lawson—in spite of
i occasional gleams of wit or beauty—fails, it seems to me,
chiefly for two reasons. In the first place, it is the tragedy of
adolescence written from the point of view of the adolescent—
that is, we have to accept the boy in his teens as a helpless martyr
and everybody else as a beast. And in the second place, it col-
lapses inward upon itself by reason of the feebleness of the cen-
tral character. You cannot have much of a drama with a pro-
tagonist who is always passive. Roger Bloomer never reacts upon
the circumstances about him; he is always acted upon by them.
We hear much about a "struggle," but we never see any struggle
take place. Roger's positive deeds are limited to his running
away from home and, after suffering the insults of years from a
villainous fellow from Yale, to finally challenging the man to a
fight, which never seems to come to anything. In the end, it is
not his own will, of which we also hear much, but his father's inter-
vention and money which saves him from the mess in which he
finds himself. My point is not that there may not exist tragic
figures like Roger Bloomer, but that it would take an extreme
virtuosity to make one supply motive power for a drama.
The God of Vengeance and Peer Gynt offer an excellent
opportunity for contrasting the abilities of the older and the
younger Schildkraut. In the former—an effective Yiddish natural-
istic drama on what we have now come to regard as rather an an-
tique model—Schildkraut pere gives a performance marked by an
under-emphasis which has the strength of great power controlled;
in the latter, Schildkraut fils has to work hard for such vivacity and
force as he is able to convey. He has his excellent moments, to be
sure—for a second after Ase's death, for example, and in the scenes
where Peer has lost his poet's fire and settled down into a cynical
adventurer. But, with all the good will in the world, he has no
such reservoir to tap as his father's.
For the rest, Peer Gynt, rather to one's surprise, is brilliant
and moving on the stage. Even the fourth act proves to act well.



RUDOLPH SCHILDKRAUT. BY DJUNA BARNES





THE THEATRE
42i
Though they rather spoil the scene with the Great Boyg by having
Peer lie flat on the stage instead of wrestling with the invisible crea-
ture (a procedure which—with the bad delivery it involves—has
led many of those unfamiliar with the text to suppose that Peer is
bawling out "Oh boy!" in the throes of some ecstatic dream)—
all the Troll scenes are magnificently done, with extraordinary
sympathy and imagination. The Messrs Eastman, who designed
the Troll costumes, show a wide knowledge of demonology: I ob-
served one Troll unmistakably modelled on the Devil in Diirer's
Knight, Death, and the Devil. Yet for all their rich diversity of
types, the Trolls belong plainly to the same race. Long-snouted,
pulpy and green, they are instantly recognizable as the goblins of
Hans Andersen and of the other Scandinavian fairy-tales—the hol-
low people of the northern hills. Miss Helen Westley and Mr Dud-
ley Digges, in the two chief goblin roles, catch the Troll spirit to
perfection. Nothing could be better than Miss Westley when she
comes to remind Peer of his sins or than Mr Digges in the last act,
as the Troll-King fallen from his state. I shall never forget his
cold "Good-bye," as of a creature something less than human.
It may seem late to write about the Follies—almost at the end
of their season—but the Follies is really a sort of institution, like
the Government or the Church, and comments on it are always in
order. Mr Ziegfeld has now Glorified the American Girl in a very
real sense. He has made a study of the American ideal of woman-
hood and put it on the stage: in general, his girls have not only
the Anglo-Saxon straightness—straight backs, straight brows, and
straight noses—but also the peculiar purity and frigidity, the frank
high-school-girlishness which Americans like. He does not aim
to make them as sexually attractive as possible, as the Folies-Ber-
geres does, for example. He aims to make them appeal to Ameri-
can idealism and then, when the American man is all intent on
his chaste vision, to seduce him on the same plane by discreetly dis-
robing his village goddess. Furthermore, he tries to represent in
dancing, not the movement and abandon of the emotions, but what
the American really regards as beautiful: the stiff efficiency of
mechanical movement. The ballet at the Ziegfeld Follies is be-
coming more and more like military drill: to see a row of girls
descend a flight of stairs in a deliberate and rigid goose-step is not


422
THE THEATRE
my idea of what ballet ought to be; it is like watching setting-up
exercises.
Yet there is still something wonderful about the Follies. It has
the vitality as well as the stupidity of an institution. Among
those green peacocks and gold panels, in the luxurious haze of the
New Amsterdam, there comes to life a glittering vision which
rises straight from the soul of New York. It is such harlequinade
as the rich New Yorker has been able to make of his life. It is
stiff, punctual, and expensive, and it moves with the speed of an
express train. It has in it something of Riverside Drive, of the
Plaza, of Scott Fitzgerald's novels—though it differs radically
from these latter in that it is almost devoid of wit. In spite of
the efforts of Mr Lardner and Mr Rogers, in spite of Mr Tynan's
admirable impersonation of Belasco, there is still something for-
mal about the jokes at the Follies: a signal is given and everybody
laughs. The actor who made the joke is as serious as the beauties
drilling on the Grand Stair-Case and there is no trace of mirth in
the metallic laughter set in motion by the stimuli from the stage.
I myself, for example, was much entertained some weeks ago by
a skit called Koo-Koo Nell, the Pride of the Depot, but when I
last saw the Follies it appeared that Koo-Koo Nell had been
taken off. There had been substituted a deafening farce of the
Jarr Family school—one of those domestic scenes in which hus-
band, wife, and children break dishes and bawl at each other.
And as each cartridge of abuse is exploded, the audience roars
automatically in reply. I am told that Koo-Koo Nell was taken
off because there were "no laughs in it."
Yet, as I say, there is a splendour about the Follies. It has
both intensity and distinction. At the Follies, the girls are always
young—the mise-en-scene nearly always beautiful. And there is
always one first-rate person. Just now it is Gilda Gray. She is
not the official American Girl, but she embodies an American ideal
of jazz womanhood. She is the obverse of Mary Eaton—the Bac-
chante of Main Street. And, like all Bacchantes, when the cymbals
crash, she is inspired after her fashion.
Edmund Wilson. Jr.


MODERN ART
SO far, more people have asked me what I thought of Joseph
Stella's new work at the Societe Anonyme than have inquired
into any other event of the season: and I have been more puzzled
by the inquiries and have been more evasive in my replies than
usual. I had set myself, upon first seeing the pictures, to the task
of having a clear opinion of them, but without first-rate results;
and it occurred to me that others had some uncertainties, too, and
hence the questioning. There was no insinuation anywhere of op-
position. Upon the contrary, Joseph Stella has already been
adopted into the general affection, everyone wishes him well and
everyone feels that something will come out of him that will credit
all of us. The mere fact that he was standing up to New York,
doing us, "the big city," predisposed the public—I mean, of course,
the small public that follows the younger men—in his favour; but
in spite of all this yearning, no loud shout of joy reached the
heavens when the pictures were shown. They were impressive,
they were interesting, they were undoubtedly sincere, but—were
they what we were all waiting for?
Maybe they were. Perhaps we'll simply have to get used to
them. But part of the yearning, when we heard that Stella was
doing a big New York picture, was that it might be a crashing suc-
cess; and this it cannot truthfully be said to have been. When
asked, I have generally said, I liked them very much. There is an
enormous amount of aspiration, an enormous amount of intellec-
tual energy in them and generalship in the execution—but also a
lot that offends.
The thing has a ferocious amount of parallelism. The tall
towers appearing behind each other are razor-edged. I get the
effect that Stella's New York is all strung upon wires. My friend
usually replies, "Yes, I feel all that, too; but don't you think New
York is like that?"
Perhaps it is. Certainly, no city on earth seems so cruel to the
individual who is not a part of it. Even the dyed-in-the-wool New
Yorker returning from a month or two's touring in Europe is in-
variably seized by panic as he gazes at the relentless structures
that loom over the waters at Battery Park. Once ensconced at his


424 MODERN ART
city desk the feeling promptly disappears; but even the most boast-
ful New Yorker, if approached tactfully, will admit having been
crushed at moments. However, there is nothing in all that that
unfits the city for art. Nobody will blame Stella if he makes us
terrible. In fact, we rather like being terrible. The fear is, at least
my fear is, that he has made us ineffectual and thin. There is not
the robustiousness that made his first Brooklyn Bridge so accepta-
ble, nor the ingratiating suggestiveness of so many of his land-
scape abstractions. If he intended his New York to be so very
wiry, then why not have done it in wires a la Marcel Duchamp'?
But I see I am venturing into criticism, which was not my intention,
for, as I meant to have explained earlier, I feel that criticism should
wait until these panels are shown elsewhere. The Societe Ano-
nyme's rooms are thoroughly charming, and generally helpful to
all modern manifestations, but this time Mr Stella is quite out of
scale. His immense compositions quite swamp the Societe Ano-
nyme and are not only too close together, but too close to the spec-
tator.
Undoubtedly, too, there has been considerable debate upon the
merits of Max Weber's newer paintings, shown in the Montross
Gallery, but unfortunately I have heard none of it. My lines,
during the past few weeks, have been cast in exclusively with the
Philistines and they, of course, detest Max Weber, but their de-
testations, at this late date, are not particularly amusing. As far
as I can make out, they unite in thinking that Mr Weber's nymphs'
feet are too big—and perhaps they are in the right as to that—but
since it was evident that they were blind to the authority of
Weber's composition and the extraordinary richness of his colour,
I did not attempt to combat their prejudices.
It seems that this artist has been in retirement for some time, has
shunned the public places and the disputes in the studios, and has
been living alone in the country. The new pictures prove the wis-
dom of the course. Weber is not unsusceptible to influences and
years ago when he first came back from Paris fresh from the con-
tact with Rousseau le Douanier and Henri Matisse there was evi-
dence of those encounters in his work and he was criticized for it.
But not by me. In his first big exhibition he included his Woman
and Tents, Chinese Restaurant, and another large panel, the title
of which I forget, that portrayed a man wading in a stream; a St
Christopher or St John the Baptist, perhaps. There were six or


HENRY McBRIDE
425
eight canvases so fine that I instantly forgot the forty that were
of the Ecole Rousseau and proclaimed Weber the best of the
American moderns. Since then, and some years have elapsed, he
has done nothing to justify the estimate, until the present exhibi-
tion, and now again he emerges strong, and more consecutively
himself than before. However, in the meantime, John Marin,
Charles Demuth, and Joseph Stella have also been emerging, and
it is now more difficult to give precise ratings than it was; and
unnecessary, since each individual of the quartette is significant,
and, as they say of Vesuvius, "in active eruption."
In retirement, Weber's art has become Jewish. In another pub-
lication I already so qualified it hesitatingly, not becaus