C. CALIF VERSITAT 1. VNIVE FORNIA SIGILLA IENSIS T MDCCC EX LIBRIS - THE THE DIAL CMS w OXXXIII - VOLUME LXXIX July to December, 1925 THE DIAL PUBLISHING COMPANY NEW YORK CITY Index INDEX VOLUME LXXIX " . . 170 510 PAGE AIKEN, CONRAD . . . . The Dead “Novel” . . . . . 60 ARUNDEL, E. Drew, and Amy Wessel- - HOEFT VON ERDBERG, translators . Kersta (Fiction) . Aersta (riction) . . . . . . . 397 BISHOP, JOHN PEALE . . . . . A Humanistic Critic . . . . 157 BURKE, KENNETH . . . . . . Codifying Milton .:. . On Re and Dis . . . . 165 Psychology and Form . . 34 BURKE, KENNETH, translator. . . Lieutenant Gustl (Fiction) . . . 89 The New Song (Fiction) . . . 355 COPPARD, A. E. . . . . . . . The Field of Mustard .. COWLEY, MALCOLM . . . . . . The Orange Moth . . . . . 507 CRAVEN, THOMAS . . A Master in Water-Colour . . . 495 Photography and Painting . . 195 DOSTOEVSKY, FEODOR.. A Christmas Story (Fiction) DRAKE, WILLIAM A. . The Notorious Stephen Burroughs . 64 ELLIOTT, G. R. . . . . . . . . . Social Earth . . . . . . . 422 FAURE, Elie . . . . . . Memories of a Self-Taught Man : 145 FRANK, WALDO . . . . . . . Laughter and Light . . . . . Mr Kreymborg Woos America . . The Spaniard . . . . . . 211 FRY, ROGER . . . . . . . . The Hudson Memorial . . . . 370 London Statues . . . . . . The Religion of Culture . . . . 305 GRAND, C. M., translator . . . . A Christmas Story (Fiction) . . GREGG, FRANCES The Hunch-back (Fiction) . . . GREGORY, ALYSE · · · A Mendicant of Sorrow . . . . A Superb Brief . . . . . . 235 JEREMY-LEE, J... Other Men's Eyes (Fiction). . . 499 LAWRENCE, D. H. . . The Woman Who Rode Away (Fic- tion) . . . . . . . 1, 121 Luhan, Mabel Dodge . Southwest (Fiction) . . . . . 477 McBRIDE, HENRY . . . . . To Be Baroque . . . . 342 MANN, THOMAS . . . . . . . German Letter . . . . . . 333 MOORE, MARIANNE . . . . . . “The Bright Immortal Olive" . . 170 An Illustrious Doctor “Literature, the Noblest of the Arts" 345 MORAND, PAUL . . . . . . . Paris Lettet . . . . 55, 231, 329 MUIR, EDWIN . . . . . . . Joie de Vivre . . . . . . 118 Munson, GORHAM B. . . . . . The Dandyism of Wallace Stevens . 413 72 468 179 31 . 348 . . . . . . . : : 425 IV INDEX : ... PAGE O'FLAHERTY, LIAM . . . . . . Milking Time (Fiction). . . . 491 The Wild Goat's Kid (Fiction). . 137 PARSONS, ALICE BEAŁ . . . . . Love at 42 Altgeld Avenue (Fiction) 221 ROBIN, MAX. . . . . . . Unconquered (Fiction) . . . . . 311 ROSENFELD, Paul . . . Greco's Portrait of Himself . . . 485 The Letters of Madame . . . . 248 A View of Modern Music. . . 375 RUSSELL, BERTRAND The Dogmas of Naturalism . . . 255 SCHNITZLER, ARTHUR . . . . . Lieutenant Gustl (Fiction) . . . 89 The New Song (Fiction) . . . 355 Seldes. GILBERT . . . . . . Spring Flight . . . . . . . 162 Smith, Logan PEARSALL .... Madame de Sévigné in the Country. 22 Preaching to Butterflies . . . . 188 TRUEBLOOD, CHARLES K.. An Adherent of the Actual. . . Mythological Satire . . . . . 504 A Pagan Chorale . . . . . von ERDBERG, Amy WESSELHOEFT, translator . . . . . . . ., Harmony (Fiction) · ... · 267 von ERDBERG, AMY Wesselhoeft, and E. DREW ARUNDEL, translators . . Kersta (Fiction) . . . . . . 397 von KEYSERLING, COUNT EDUARD - Harmony (Fiction) . . 267 Kersta (Fiction) . . . 397 WASSERMANN, JAKOB . . . . . Adam Urbas (Fiction) . . . . 445 WEIGALL, Marian, translator. . . Adam Urbas (Fiction) .. WescoTT, GLENWAY . . . . . . A Courtly Poet . . . A Monument . . . . . . . 246 WRIGHT, CUTHBERT . . . . . . De Senectute . . . . . . 68 The Great God Pan . . . . . 239 WRYNN, ANTHONY . . . . . . The Equinox (Fiction) . . . . 203 418 339 · · · 445 501 · INDEX VERSE PAGE . . · . · 46 . · · . . · · . . . . · . . · AUSLANDER, Joseph . . . . . . Elegy . . . . . . . . . 412 CAMPBELL, JOSEPH . . . . . . The Cock . . . . . . . The Star . . . . . . . . COWLEY, MALCOLM . . . . . . Those of Lucifer . . CUMMINGS, E. E. . . A Poem . . . . . 304 DILLON, GEORGE H. . . . . . The Summer Sea . . .. 374 HERALD, LEON SERABIAN . . . . Ballad . . . . 475 The Beggar . . . 474 A Dancer . . . 474 HILLYER, ROBERT . . . . . . Remote . . . O'Neil, GEORGE . . . . . . .. Earth's Admonition 500 SCHNEIDER, ISIDOR . . . . . . Insects . . . . . SIMPSON, MABEL . . . . .. Rest . . . . . . . . . 194 THAYER, SCOFIELD . . . . . . Chanson Banale . . . . . . 310 Chanson Equivoque . . . . . 369 Counsel to a Young Man . . . 21 Dawn from a Railway Day-Coach . 117 On the Mask of a Painter . . . 186 The Poet Takes Leave . . . . 467 WOLF, ROBERT L. . ., Lullaby for a Tired Lady . . . 417 328 . . · . · 396 · · VI INDEX ART · · · · · · BENTON, THOMAS H. . . . . . Landscape with Cow . . . . . July Thomas Craven . . . . September The Tunnel . . . . . . . July BONNARD, PIERRE . . . . . Le Port à Saint-Lopez . . . . July BURROUGHS, BRYSON . . . . . The Well of Merlin . . . December CANADÈ, VINCENT . . . . . . Landscape with Poplars . . . · July Portrait . . . . . . : July COCTEAU, JEAN · · · · · · · M Georges Auric . . . . . August Hommage à Paul Morand . . . July Jean V. Hugo . . . . . August Raymond Radiguet . . . . August CORINTH, Lovis . . . . . . .. Count Eduard oon Keyserling . October CUMMINGS, E. E. . . . . . . Two Drawings . . . . . October DEMUTH, CHARLES . . . . . . . Poster Portrait of Arthur G. Dove August Poster Portrait of Georgia O'Keeffe August Derain, ANDRÉ . . . . . . . Landscape . . . . . . October Dove, ARTHUR G. . . . . . . Sto Storm-Clouds in Silver . . . August EARLY AMERICAN . . . . . . Beneath a Willow-Tree . . November Portsmouth Harbor... November Whittier's Home . . . . November EL GRECO . . . . . . . .. Portrait . . . . . . December EPSTEIN, JACOB . . . . . . . The Hudson Memorial . . November GEIGER, WILLI . . . . . . . . Heinrich Mann . . . . . October KUBIN, ALFRED . . . Niederbayer . . . December LACHAISE, GASTON . . . . . . Bust of Woman .. December Calligari . . . . . December Woman . . . December LAURENCIN, MARIE . . . . . . The Party . . . August LEHMBRUCK, WILHELM . . . . . Das Einsame Weib .. October Reclining Nude . . . October MARCHAND, JEAN . . . . . Entrée en Vence . . November Matisse, HeNRI . . . . Buste de Femme . . · September Le Chapeau . . . . . September Etude de Nu . . . September Tête de Femme . . . . September NAGLE, EDWARD . . . . . . . A Drawing . . . . . . October O'KEEFFE, GEORGIA . . . . . Alligator Pear . . . . August Picasso, PABLO . . . . . .. Arlequin . . . . . . December ROENNEBECK, ARNOLD . . . . . Bust of Charles Henry Demuth September SCHIELE, EGON . . . . . . . A Drawing . . July A Drawing . . . . . . . July Portrait . . . . . . . . July SLOAN, JOHN . · · · · · · · Scene from Patience . . . September Snow Storm in the Village : September VUILLARD, EDOUARD . . . . . At Table . . . . . September WILENCHICK, CLEMENT . . . . . Drawing . . . . . . November Portrait . . . . . . November A Young Actor . . . . November YEATS, JACK B. . . . . . . . The Bather . . . . . December Market Day, Mayo . .. December · · · · · · · INDEX VII BOOKS REVIEWED 176 173 418 118 Authors and Titles PAGE ABÉLARD, PETER. Henry Adams Bellows, translator. Introduction by RALPH Adams CRAM. Historia Calamitatum: An Autobiography. . . . . . . . 425 AIKEN, CONRAD. Bring! Bring! and Other Stories . . . . . . . . . . . 507 ANDERSON, SHERWOOD. Dark Laughter . . . . . . 510 AUSTIN, WALTER, collector and editor. William Austin, The Creator of Peter Rugg, Being a Biographical Sketch of William Austin, together with the best of his Short Stories, collected and edited by his grandson Walter Austin . . . BALDWIN, CHARLES SEARs. Ancient Rhetoric and Poetic, Interpreted from Repre- sentative Works . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . BARRÈS, JEAN-BAPTISTE. BERNARD MIALL, translator. Edited and with an introduc- tion by Maurice BARRÈs. Memoirs of a Napoleonic Officer . . . . . . . 176 BARRÈS, MAURICE, edited and with an introduction by. BERNARD MIALL, translator. Memoirs of a Napoleonic Officer, by Jean-Baptiste BARRÈS BECKER, MAY LAMBERTON. With foreword by Henry Seidel Canby. A Reader's Guide Book . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Bellows, Henry Adams, translator. Introduction by Ralph Adams Cram. Historia Calamitatum: An Autobiography, by Peter ABÉLARD . 425 BENÈT, WILLIAM Rose, compiled with preface and introduction by. Poems for Youth, an American Anthology. ... BENNETT, ARNOLD, introduction by. Little Karoo, by Pauline SMITH . . . . . Bewick, Thomas. Introduction by Selwyn Image. Memoir of Thomas Bewick. Written by Himself . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. BLANCHE, J. E. Masters of Modern Art: Manet . . . . . . 518 Bodde, C. B., translator. Introduction by HENDRIK WILLEM Van Loon. Drawings by Anton Pieck. Pallieter, by Felix TIMMERMANS " . . . . . . . . . . . . . Bok, EDWARD W. Twice Thirty . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 263 BOYD, Ernest. Studies from Ten Literatures . . . . S aimiri. ... · 433 Boyd, Ernest, introduction by. The Newer Spirit, A Sociological Criticism of Litera- ture, by V. F. CALVERTON ... BOYD, ERNEST, translator. The Diaboliques, by BARBEY D'AUREVILLY . . . . . BOYD, THOMAS. The Dark Cloud . . . . . . . . . . . . . . BRENNECKE, ERNEST, JR. The Life of Thomas Hardy . . . . . BROOKS, Van Wyck. The Pilgrimage of Henry James . . Brown, Rollo Walter. The Creative Spirit, an Inquiry into American Life . . . Bruce, HAROLD. William Blake in This World . . . . . . . . . . . 353 BRUSH, ALBERT. The Dark Tower . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 174 BURDETT, Osbert. The Beardsley Period, an Essay in Perspective . . BURROUGHS, STEPHEN. Preface by Robert Frost. Memoirs of the Notorious Stephen Burroughs of New Hampshire . . BURTT, Edwin ARTHUR. The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science: A Historical and Critical Essay . . . . . CALVERTON, V. F. Introduction by Ernest Boyd. The Newer Spirit, A Sociological Criticism of Literature . . . . ::.:.:.:,n iiie' s Canby, Henry Seidel, foreword by. A Reader's Guide Book, by MAY LAMBERTON BECKER . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 176 CAREY, Henry. Decorations by Robert GIBBINGS. Songs & Poems ... CARNEVALI, EMMANUEL. A Hurried Man . . . CATHER, Willa, selected and arranged with a preface by. The Best Stories of Sarah Orne Jewett . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . CAUTELA, GUISEPPE. Moon Harvest . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 431 Chase, George Henry, and CHANDLER RAThron Post. A History of Sculpture . . 353 CHATER, ARTHUR J., translator. The Tree of the Folkungs, by VERNER Von Heiden- STAM . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 351 VIII INDEX 425 515 PAGE Cole, G. D. H. The Life of William Cobbett . . . . . . . . . . . . 79 CONRAD, JosepH. Tales of Hearsay : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : 350 COPPARD, A. E. Fishmonger's Fiddle, Tales by A. E. Coppard . . . . . . 432 COUPERus, Louis. J. Menzies-Wilson and C. C. CRISPIN, translators. Eastward. 351 Cram, Ralph Adams, introduction by. HENRY Adams Bellows, translator. Historia Calamitatum: An Autobiography, by PeTER ABÉLARD . . . . . . . . . CRISPIN, C. C., and J. Menzies-Wilson, translators. Eastward, by Louis COUPERUS 351 CUNARD, NANCY. Parallax . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 510 D., H. Collected Poems of H. D. . EVILLY, BARBEY. Ernest Boyd, translator. The Diaboliques ..... 173 Davies, W. H. Selected Poems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 174 Dawes, RUFUS C. The Dawes Plan in the Making in the Making . . . . . . . . . . . 518 DE CASSERES, BENJAMIN. Mirrors of New York . . . . . . . . . . . 175 DE LACRETELLE, Jacques. La Bonifas . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 233 DE UNAMUNO, Miguel. See UNAMUNO. Douglas, DONALD. The Grand Inquisitor . . . . . . 351 DRINKWATER, JOHN. New Poems . . 174 DUBUISSON, A. C. E. Hughes, translator and annotator. Richard Parkes Bonington: His Life and Work . . . . . 495 DUDDINGTON, NATHALIE A., translator. December the Fourteenth, by DMITRI MEREZH- KOVSKY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Eastman, Max. Leon Trotsky: The Portrait of a Youth . . . . . . 353 ELIZABETH-CHARLOTTE OF Bavaria. GERTRUDE Scott Stevenson, translator and editor. The Letters of Madame, The Correspondence of Elizabeth-Charlotte of Bavaria, Princess Palatine, Duchess of Orleans, called “Madame" at the Court of King Louis XIV . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 248 Emanuel, V. R. The Selmans . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 516 FARJEON, J. JeffERSON. Uninvited Guests. .. FAUSSET, HUGH I'ANSON. John Donne, A Study in Discord . . . . . . . . 79 FITZGERALD, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby . . . . . . FLETCHER, FRANCES. The Banquet and Other Poems . . FLITCH, J. E. CRAWFORD, translation and introduction by. Essays and Soliloquies, by MIGUEL DE UNAMUNO . . . . . . . . . . . FRANK, Waldo, translator. Lucienne, by Jules Romains . . Frost, Robert. New Hampshire: A Poem with Notes and Grace Notes. Frost, Robert, preface by. Memoirs of the Notorious Stephen Burroughs of Hampshire . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . GALSWORTHY, John, preface by. Sixty-Four Ninety-Four! by R. H. MOTTRAM . : 350 GALSWORTHY, John, preface by. The Spanish Farm, by R. H. MOTTRAM . . . . 246 GIBBINGS, Robert, decorations by. Songs & Poems, by Henry Carey . . . 433 Glasgow, ELLEN. Barren Ground . . . . 260 Gorky, Maxim. Marie Zakrevsky, translator. The Story of a Novel and Other Stories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . GORMAN, Herbert S. Gold by Gold . . . . . . . . . . . . . 432 GRUENING, Ernest, edited by. These United States, Second Series . . . . . 353 H. D. See D., H. HACKETT, FRANCIS. That Nice Young Couple . . . . . . . . . . . 432 Hamsun, Knut. J. S. Scott, translator. Segelfoss Town ... . . 259 HAUPTMANN, GERHART. BAYARD QUINCY Morgan, translator. The Heretic of Soana 339 HAUPTMANN, GERHART. Willa and Edwin Muir, translators. The Island of the Great Mother . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 534 Hazlitt, William. P. P. Howe, collector. New Writings . . . . . . . . 516 Hecht, Ben. Humpty Dumpty . . . . . . · · · · 76 HÉMON, Louis. ARTHUR RICHMOND, translator. Blind Man's Buff . . . HENDERSON, ARCHIBALD. Table-Talk of G. B. S., Conversations on Things in General wei.77 . . 60 64 ir! by R. H. Mimi: : 348 : : 259 between George Bernard Shaw and his Biographer . . . . . . . . . HENRY THE EIGHTH. Edited and with a preface by Francis Macnamara. Miscel- laneous Writings of Henry the Eighth . . . . . . . . . . . . . 434 HODGSON, RALPH. Poems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 352 • 433 INDEX IX PAGE 516 495 259 478 260 . . 422 431 76 516 352 Hoover, Ellison, illustrator. SIGMUND SPAETH, editor. Foreword by Ring LARDNER. Barber Shop Ballads, A Book of Close Harmony . . . . . . . . . . 517 Howe, P. P., collector. New Writings, by William HaZLITT . . . Hughes, C. E., translator and annotator. Richard Parkes Bonington: His Life and Work, by A. DUBUISSON . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . HUXLEY, ALDOUS. Those Barren Leaves . . . . . . . . . . . . . I. S. See S., I. Image, Selwyn, introduction by. Memoir of Thomas Bewick. Written by Himself. JEWETT, Sarah ORNE. Selected and arranged with a preface by Willa CATHER. The Best Stories of Sarah Orne Jewett . . . JOHNSON, R. BRIMLEY, selected and with an introduction by. The Letters of Mary Russell Mitford . . . :inii · 518 JUSSERAND, J. J. The School for Ambassadors and Other Essays ::: · · · · · · 434 KAYE-SMITH, SHEILA. The George and the Crown . . . . . . . . . . 350 KENNEDY, MARGARET. The Constant Nymph . . . . . . . . . . . . KREYMBORG, ALFRED. Troubadour ... 72 LANKES, J. J., woodcuts by. New Hampshire: A Poem with Notes and Grace Notes, by ROBERT FROST : : : : :i coni Frison HOOVER. illustrator. LARDNER, Ring, foreword by. SIGMUND SPAETH, editor. Ellison Hoover, illustrator. Barber Shop Ballads, A Book of Close Harmony . . . . . . . . . 517 LAWRENCE, D. H. St. Mawr . . . . . . :.:.:.: . :.: : : : : : : : : : LAWRENCE, D. H., translator. Little Novels of Sicily, by GiovanNI VERGA . . . LEWIS, Michael. The Brand of the Beast . . . . . . . . . . . . LOEB, HAROLD A. Doodab . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 516 Lovett, ROBERT MORSS. Edith Wharton .. 517 LYND, ROBERT. The Peal of Bells . McBride, Henry, JOHN WEICHSEL, CHARLES VILDRAC, and WILLARD HUNTINGTON WRIGHT, introductions by. One Hundred Drawings, by ABRAHAM WALKOWITZ. MACAULAY, ROSE. Orphan Island . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . MacLeish, ARCHIBALD. The Pot of Earth. MACNAMARA, FRANCIS, edited and with a preface by. Miscellaneous Writings of Henry the Eighth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . MacVEAGH, LINCOLN, editor. Poetry from the Bible . . . . . . . . . . MAUGHAM, W. SOMERSET. The Painted Veil . . . . . . . . . . . . MAYNE, ETHEL COLBURN. Byron . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Mayne, Ethel COLBURN. Inner Circle . . . . . . . . . . MENZIES-Wilson, J., and C. C. CRISPIN, translators. Eastward, by Louis COUPERUS MEREZHKOVSKY, DMITRI. NATHALIE A. DUDDINGTON, translator. December the Fourteenth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . MEYNELL, VIOLA. Young Mrs Cruse . . MIALL, BERNARD, translator. Edited and with an introduction by Maurice BARRÈS. Memoirs of a Napoleonic Officer, by Jean-Baptiste BARRÈS . . . . . . . 176 MITFORD, MARY Russell. Selected and with an introduction by R. BRIMLEY JOHNSON. The Letters of Mary Russell Mitford . . en mittora. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 518 Moore, GEORGE, edited and with an introduction by. An Anthology of Pure Poetry 78 MORGAN, BAYARD QUINCY, translator. The Heretic of Soana, by GERHART HAUPT- MANN . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 339 MOTTRAM, R. H. Preface by John GALSWORTHY. Sixty-Four Ninety-Four! . . . 350 MOTTRAM, R. H. Preface by John GalsWORTHY. The Spanish Farm ... MUIR, EDWIN. First Poems . . . :.: : : Muir, Edwin and Willa, translators. The Island of the Great Mother, by Gerhart HAUPTMANN : : : : : ... . . . 504 MURABAKI, Lady. The Tale of Genji . .. .:.:.:. . · · 515 MURRAY, MARGARET ALICE. The Witch Cult in Western Europe . . . . NEWMAN, ERNEST. Wagner as Man and Artist . . . . . . . . . . . 175 Phelps, William Lyon. As I Like It, Second Series . . . 262 Pieck, Anton, drawings by. C. B. Bodde, translator. Introduction by HENDRIK WILLEM Van Loon. Pallieter, by Felix TIMMERMANS . . . . . . . . 118 174 239 INDEX 79 261 345 259 342 PAGE Post, CHANDLER RATHFON, and George Henry Chase. A History of Sculpture . 353 POUND, Ezra. A Draft of Sixteen Cantos. For the Beginning of a Poem of Some Length . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 501 Powys, LLEWELYN. Skin for Skin . . . 517 Powys, T. F. Mr Tasker's Gods . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76 PUTNAM, publisher. Georgian Stories, 1925 . . . . . 431 Reilly, Joseph J. Newman as a Man of Letters. . . . 434 RICHARDS, I. A. Principles of Literary Criticism . RICHMOND, ARTHUR, translator. Blind Man's Buff, by Louis HÉMON . . . . . 259 ROBINSON, EDWIN ARLINGTON. Dionysus in Doubt, a Book of Poems. ROMAINS, JULES. Waldo FRANK, translator. Lucienne . . . . . . . . . Rosenfeld, Paul. Men Seen . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 157 S., I. Doctor Transit. - .. . . . . . . . 515 SAINTSBURY, GEORGE The Collected Essays and Papers of George Saintsbury, 1875-1920 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Saurat, Denis. Milton, Man and Thinker . . 429 SCHERMERHORN, Elizabeth. Benjamin Constant, His Private Life and His Contri- bution to the Cause of Liberal Government in France, 1767-1830 . . SCHNITZLER, ARTHUR. Paul BLOOMFIELD ZEISLER, translator. Doctor Graesler . . 68 Scott, Evelyn. The Golden Door . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Scott, J. S., translator. Segelfoss Town, by KNUT HAMSUN . . . SEDGWICK, Anne DOUGLAS. Franklin Winslow Kane . . . . . . . 350 SINCLAIR, May. The Rector of Wyck . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 259 SINCLAIR, UPTON. Mammonart. . . . . . . . . . SITWELL, SACHEVERELL. Southern Baroque Art . . Sitwell, Sacheverell. The Thirteenth Caesar, and Other Poems . SMEDLEY, CONSTANCE. The Unholy Experiment . . SMITH, PAULINE. Introduction by ARNOLD Bennett. Little Karoo SPAETH, SIGMUND, editor. ELLISON Hoover, illustrator. Foreword by Ring LARD- NER. Barber Shop Ballads, A Book of Close Harmony . . . . . . . . 517 SQUIRE, J. C., editor. Songs from the Elizabethans . . . . . . . . . . STEVENSON, GERTRUDE SCOTT, translator and editor. The Letters of Madame, the Correspondence of Elizabeth-Charlotte of Bavaria, Princess Palatine, Duchess of Orleans, called “Madame” at the Court of King Louis XIV . . . . . . 248 TABARANT, A. Masters of Modern Art: Pissarro . . . . . TIMMERMANs, Felix. C. B. Bodde, translator. Introduction by Hendrik Willem Van Loon. Drawings by Anton Pieck. Pallieter . . . . . . . . . 110 TRAPIER, ELIZABETH Du Gue. El Greco . . . . . . . . . . . . . 518 Tuell, Anne KIMBALL. Mrs Meynell and Her Literary Generation . . . . . 78 UNAMUNO, Miguel de. Translated with an introduction by J. E. CRAWFORD FLITCH. Essays and Soliloquies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 176 Van Doren, Carl. James Branch Cabell. . . . . . . . . . Van Doren, Carl and MARK. American and British Literature Since 1890 . . Van Loon, HENDRIK Willem, introduction by. C. B. Bodde, translator. Drawings by Anton Pieck. Pallieter, by Felix TIMMERMANS . . . . . . . Verga, GIOVANNI. D. H. LAWRENCE, translator. Little Novels of Sicily . . . . 76 VilDRAC, Charles, Henry McBride, John Weichsel, and Willard HUNTINGTON Wright, introductions by. One Hundred Drawings, by ABRAHAM WALKOWITZ. 262 VINAL, HAROLD. Nor Youth Nor Age . . . . . . . . 174 Von Heidenstam, VERNER. ARTHUR J. CHater, translator. The Tree of the Folk- ungs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 351 Walkowitz, ABRAHAM. Introductions by Henry McBride, John Weichsel, CHARLES VILDRAC, and WillARD HUNTINGTON Wright. One Hundred Drawings 262 Weichsel, John, Henry McBride, CHARLES VildraC, and WillarD HUNTINGTON Wright, introductions by. One Hundred Drawings, by ABRAHAM Walkowitz. 262 Wells, H. G. A Year of Prophesying . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78 WHARTON, EDITH. The Mother's Recompense . . . . . . . . . . . . 431 Wood, CLEMENT. Poets of America . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 352 Woolf, VIRGINIA. Mrs Dalloway . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 352 516 18 INDEX XI PAGB WOOLLCOTT, ALEXANDER. The Story of Irving Berlin . . . . . . . . . . 78 WRIGHT, WILLARD HUNTINGTON, Henry McBride, JOHN WEIchsel, and CHARLES VilDRAC, introductions by. One Hundred Drawings, by ABRAHAM WALKOWITZ. 262 Zakrevsky, Marie, translator. The Story of a Novel and Other Stories, by MAXIM GORKY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 348 ZEISLER, PAUL BLOOMFIELD, translator. Doctor Graesler, by ARTHUR SCANITZLER 68 COMMENT LICS LAIDILIUL . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 177 Anderson Galleries Exhibition. Children, Worcester Art Museum Exhibition of Drawings by . . . . . . . . 264 Educators . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 443 Letter from the Editor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 529 Lowell, Amy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87 . . . von Keyserling, Count Eduard . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 354 THE THEATRE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 520 . 519 . 521 . 435 · · 520 . .. · · 82 521 · · . . 00 · American Born . . . Arms and the Man - . Call of Life, The . . . Cohan, George M. . . Craig's Wife . . . . Erdgeist . . . . . Gold Rush, The . Gorilla, The . . . Haupt, Ullrich Ibsen, Henrik 1, Henrik . . . . . . Kelly, Margot . . . Loves of Lulu, The . . Mikado, The . . . . Outside Looking In . . Phantom Rival, The . Rosermsholm . . . . Shaw, Bernard . . . Technique, Dramatic . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . · · · . . . 80 · 521 . · · . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 519 : 82 . 437 . 82 435 Wild Duck. The . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . MODERN ART de Fiori .. . ..: : Public Valuation of Art. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 523 523 Whitney Studio Club Exhibition, The . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 84 & MUSICAL CHRONICLE Rudhyar, Dane . Wagner . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 527 439 XII INDEX MISCELLANEOUS PAGE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 393 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42 . . 390 . . 153 . . 58 . . 149 . 147, 523 . . 148 . . . 471 . . . 380 . . 28 . . 231 . . 153 . . 185 . . 196 234 . . 329 . . 333 . . . . . . . . · · . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 378 Bartók, Béla .. Baudelaire, Femmes Damnées . . . . . . Bloch, Ernest . . . . . . . . . . Bonnard, Pierre . . . . . . . . . Boyd, Ernest . . . . . . . . . . . Carrière, Eugène . . . . . . . . . . Cézanne, Paul . . Clémenceau, Georges . . Dalou, Jules . . . . . . . . . . Debussy, Claude . . . . . . . . . . de Grignan, Madame . . . . . . . . Delteil, Joseph . . . . . . . . . . Derain, Andre . . . . . . . . . Expressionism. . . . . . . . . . . Futurists, The . . . . . . . . . Gide, André . . International Exhibition of Decorative Arts, The International Kulturwoche, The. . . . . . Mahler, Gustav . . . . . . . . . Mann, Heinrich . . . . . Moussorgsky, Modest Petrovitch . . . . . Picasso, Pablo . . . . . . . . . . R. U. R. . . . . . . . . . . . Renoir, Auguste . . . . . . . . . . . Rimsky-Korsakoff Nico; . Rimsky-Korsakoff, Nicolai . . . . . . . Romanticism in France . . . . . . . Russia, The Condition of Culture in . . . . Satie, Eric . . . . . . . Schnitzler, Arthur . . . . . . . . . Schoenberg, Arnold . . . . . . Scriabine, Alexander Nicolai .. Shaw, Bernard, in France. . Strauss, Richard . . . . . . . Strawinsky, Igor . . . . .. Unanimisme . . . . . . Varèse, Edgar . . . . . . Wagner and Modern Music . . . . . . Wagner, Facsimile Editions of . . . . . Waste Land, The . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . · · ..... · · · · · . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 334 . . 378 . . 153 . . 41 . 153, 523 . . 379 . . 26 . . 56 . . · · . . . 387 . . . . . . . . . . · · 334 391 . · . · 382 231 . · 376 . · · · · ...... · · · · . . · 384 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 370 338 42 . . DEPARTMENTS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76, 173, 259, 350, 431, 515 87, 177, 264, 354, 443, 529 Do c . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 333 Briefer Mention . Comment . . . German Letter . Modern Art. . Musical Chronicle Paris Letter . . Theatre, The . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ····· . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . : . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 84, 522 . . . . 439, 525 . . . 55, 231, 329 . . . 80, 435, 519 THE JUN 25 1925 DIAL JULY 1925 Le Port à Saint-Lopez Oil Pierre Bonnard The Woman Who Rode Away D. H. Lawrence Hommage à Paul Morand Pen and Ink Jean Cocteau Counsel to a Young Man Scofield Thayer 21 Madame de Sévigné in the Country Logan Pearsall Smith 22 Two Drawings Charcoal Thomas H. Benton The Hunch-back Frances Gregg 31 Psychology and Form Kenneth Burke 34 Those of Lucifer Malcolm Cowley 46 Two Oil Paintings Vincent Canade The Field of Mustard A. E. Coppard 47 Three Drawings Lithographic Crayon Egon Schiele Paris Letter Paul Morand 55 Book Reviews: The Dead "Novel" Conrad Aiken 60 The Notorious Stephen Burroughs William A. Drake 64 De Senectute Cuthbert Wright 68 Mr Kreymborg Woos America Waldo Frank 72 Briefer Mention The Theatre Gilbert Seldes 80 Modern Art Henry McBride 84 Comment The Editors 87 VOLUME LXXIX NUMBER 1 50 cents a copy 76 THE DIAL SCOFIELD THAYER Editor MARIANNE MOORE Acting Editor NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS THOMAS H. BENTON was born in Nersho, Missouri, in 1889. He studied art for two years in Chicago and for five years in Paris, and has been working in New York since 1912. He is at present engaged on a series of paintings a symbolical history of the United States—which presents in a sequence of composi- tions the development of man from an age of barbarism to one of mechanics. The first two chapters of these works, comprising ten canvases, have already been exhibited in New York. FRANCES GREGG was born in Hartford, Connecticut. She received her early education in Philadelphia, studied for ten years in various art schools, and now devotes herself to literature. She left America a few years ago and has lived until recently in France. Her prose and verse have appeared in The Egoist, Poetry, Others, The Forum, and elsewhere. She now resides in England. VINCENT CANADÈ was born in Albanese, Italy, in 1882. For the last thirty years he has been living in Brooklyn. At the Weyhe Gallery this spring, there has been a first one-man exhibition of his work. EGON SCHIELE, the son of a railway official, was born June 12, 1890, in Tulln on the Danube. At an early age he came to the Kunstakademie in Vienna, where he studied until the divergences between his own methods and those of the Academy led to his withdrawal from this organization. He travelled extensively, and was greatly interested in the art of primitive peoples and of the mediaeval period in Europe. Subsequent to the year 1909, his work was exhibited annually until his death on August 22, 1919. The publication of Me Henry McBride's Modern Art and of MR GILBERT SELDES' The Theatre has been discontinued during the summer. These departments will be resumed in the autumn. VOL. LXXIX. No. 1. July, 1925. The DIAL (founded in 1880 by Francis F. Browne) is published monthly at Camden, New Jersey, by The Dial Publishing Company, Inc.-J. S. Watson, Jr., President- Lincoln MacVeagh, Secretary-Treasurer. Entered as second class matter at Post Office, Camden, N. J. Publication Office, 19th and Federal Streets, Camden, N. J. Editorial and Business Offices at 152 West 13th Street, New York, N. Y. Copyright, 1925, by The Dial Publishing Company, Inc. $5 a year Foreign Postage 60 cents. 50 cents a copy THE OXX TUO 2 DIAL JULY 1925 THE WOMAN WHO RODE AWAY BY D. H. LAWRENCE . CHE had thought that this marriage, of all marriages, would be an adventure. Not that the man himself was exactly magical to her. A little, wiry, twisted fellow, twenty years older than herself, with brown eyes and greying hair, who had come to Amer- ica a scrap of a wastrel, from Holland, years ago, as a tiny boy, and from the gold mines of the West had been kicked south into Mexico, and now was more or less rich, owning silver mines in the wilds of the Sierra Madre: it was obvious that the adventure lay in his circumstances, rather than his person. But he was still a little dynamo of energy, in spite of accidents survived, and what he had accomplished he had accomplished alone. One of those human oddments there is no accounting for. When she actually saw what he had accomplished, her heart quailed. Great green-covered, unbroken mountain-hills, and in the midst of the lifeless isolation, the sharp pinkish mounds of the dried mud from the silver-works. Under the nakedness of the works, the walled-in, one-story adobe house, with its garden inside, and its deep inner verandah with tropical climbers on the sides. And when you looked up from this shut-in flowered patio, you saw the huge pink cone of the silver-mud refuse, and the machinery of the extracting plant, against heaven above. No more. To be sure, the great wooden doors were often open. And then she could stand outside, in the vast open world. And see great, void, tree-clad hills piling behind one another, from nowhere into nowhere. They were green in autumn time. For the rest, pinkish-stark, dry, and abstract. And in his battered Ford car her husband would take her into 587844 2 THE WOMAN WHO RODE AWAY the dead, thrice-dead little Spanish town forgotten among the mountains. The great, sun-dried dead church, the dead portales, the hopeless covered market-place, where, the first time she went, she saw a dead dog lying between the meat stalls and the vegetable array, stretched out as if for ever, nobody troubling to throw it away. Deadness within deadness. Everybody feebly talking silver, and showing bits of ore. But silver was at a standstill. The great war came and went. Silver was a dead market. Her husband's mines were closed down. But she and he lived on in the adobe house under the works, among the flowers that were never very flowery to her. She had two children, a boy and a girl. And her eldest, the boy, was nearly ten years old before she aroused from her stupor of subjected amazement. She was now thirty-three; a large, blue- eyed, dazed woman, beginning to grow stout. Her little, wiry, tough, twisted, brown-eyed husband was fifty-three, a man as tough as wire, tenacious as wire, still full of energy, but dimmed by the lapse of silver from the market, and by some curious in- accessibility on his wife's part. He was a man of principles, and a good husband. In a way, he doted on her. He never quite got over his dazzled admiration of her. But essentially, he was still a bachelor. He had been thrown out on the world, a little bachelor, at the age of ten. When he married he was over forty, and had enough money to marry on. But his capital was all a bachelor's. He was boss of his own works, and marriage was the last and most intimate bit of his own works. He admired his wife intensely, he admired her body, all her points. And she was to him always the rather dazzling Californian girl from Berkeley, whom he had first known. Like any Sheik, he kept her guarded among those mountains of Chihuahua. He was jealous of her as he was of his silver mine: and that is saying a lot. At thirty-three she really was still the girl from Berkeley, in all but physique. Her conscious development had stopped mys- teriously with her marriage, completely arrested. Her husband had never become real to her, neither mentally nor physically. In spite of his late sort of passion for her, he never meant anything to her, physically. Only morally he swayed her, downed her, kept her in an invincible slavery. So the years went by, in the adobe house strung round the D. H. LAWRENCE ma Vas en sunny patio, with the silver-works overhead. Her husband was never still. When the silver went dead, he ran a ranch lower down, some twenty miles away, and raised pure-bred hogs, splen- did creatures. At the same time, he hated pigs. He was a squeamish waif of an idealist, and really hated the physical side of life. He loved work, work, work, and making things. His marriage, his children, were something he was making, part of his business, but with a sentimental income this time. Gradually her nerves began to go wrong: she must get out. She must get out. So he took her to El Paso for three months. And at least it was the United States. But he kept his spell over her. The three months ended: back she was, just the same, in her adobe house among those eternal green or pinky-brown hills, void as only the undiscovered is void. She taught her children, she supervised the Mexican boys who were her servants. And sometimes her husband brought visitors, Spaniards or Mexicans or occasionally white men. He really loved to have white men staying on the place. Yet he had not a moment's peace when they were there. It was as if his wife were some peculiar secret vein of ore in his mines, which no one must be aware of except himself. And she was fascinated by the young gentlemen, mining engineers, who were his guests at times. He, too, was fascinated by a real gentleman. But he was an old-timer bachelor with a wife, and if a gentleman looked at his wife, he felt as if his mine were being looted, the secrets of it pried out. It was one of these young gentlemen who put the idea into her mind. They were all standing outside the great wooden doors of the patio, looking at the outer world. The eternal, motionless hills were all green, it was September, after the rains. There was no sign of anything, save the deserted mine, the deserted works, and a bunch of half-deserted miners' dwellings. "I wonder," said the young man, "what there is behind those great blank hills.” "More hills,” said Lederman. “If you go that way, Sonora and the coast. This way is the desert—you came from there- and the other way, hills and mountains.” “Yes, but what lives in the hills and the mountains? Surely there is something wonderful! It looks so like nowhere on earth: like being on the moon.” Wo THE WOMAN WHO RODE AWAY “There's plenty of game, if you want to shoot. And Indians, if you call them wonderful.” “Wild ones?" “Wild enough.” “But friendly?!! "It depends. Some of them are quite wild, and they don't let anybody near. They kill a missionary at sight. And where a missionary can't get, nobody can.” “But what does the government say?". “They're so far from everywhere, the government leaves 'em alone. And they're wily, if they think there'll be trouble, they send a delegation to Chihuahua and make a formal submission. The government is glad to leave it at that." “And do they live quite wild, with their own savage customs and religion ?” “Oh, yes. They use nothing but bows and arrows. I've seen them in town, in the Plaza, with funny sorts of hats with flowers round them, and a bow in one hand, quite naked except for a sort of shirt, even in cold weather-striding round with their savages' bare legs." "But don't you suppose it's wonderful, up there in their secret villages ?” "No. What would there be wonderful about it? Savages are savages, and all savages behave more or less alike: rather low down and dirty, unsanitary, with a few cunning tricks, and strug- gling to get enough to eat.” "But surely they have old, old religions and mysteries—it must be wonderful, surely it must.” "I don't know about mysteries—howling and heathen practices, more or less indecent. No, I see nothing wonderful in that kind of stuff. And I wonder that you should, when you have lived in London or Paris or New York " “Ah, everybody lives in London or Paris or New York—” said the young man, as if this were an argument. And his peculiar vague enthusiasm for unknown Indians found a full echo in the woman's heart. She was overcome by a foolish romanticism more unreal than a girl's. She felt it was her destiny to wander into the secret haunts of these timeless, mysterious, marvellous Indians of the mountains. She kept her secret. The young man was departing, her hus- D. H. LAWRENCE band was going with him down to Torreón, on business: would be away for some days. But before the departure, she made her husband talk about the Indians: about the wandering tribes, re- sembling the Navajo, who were still wandering free; and the Yaquis of Sonora: and the different groups in the different valleys of Chihuahua State. There was supposed to be one tribe, the Chilchuis, living in a high valley to the south, who were the sacred tribe of all the Indians. The descendants of Montezuma and of the old Aztec or Totonac kings still lived among them, and the old priests still kept up the ancient religion, and offered human sacrifices—so it was said. Some scientists had been to the Chilchui country, and had come back gaunt and exhausted with hunger and bitter priva- tion, bringing various curious, barbaric objects of worship, but having seen nothing extraordinary in the hungry, stark village of savages. Though Lederman talked in this off-hand way, it was obvious he was really touched by the vulgar marvel of mysterious savages. "How far away are they?" she asked. "Oh-three days on horseback-past Cuchitee and a little lake there is up there." Her husband and the young man departed. The woman made her crazy plans. Of late, to break the monotony of her life, she had harassed her husband into letting her go riding with him occa- sionally, on horseback. She was never allowed to go out alone. The country truly was not safe, it was lawless and crude. But she had her own horse, and she dreamed of being free as she had been as a girl, among the hills of California. Her daughter, nine years old, was now in a tiny convent in the little half-deserted Spanish mining-town five miles away. “Manuel,” said the woman to her house-servant, “I'm going to ride to the convent to see Margarita, and take her a few things. Perhaps I shall stay the night in the convent. You look after Freddy and see everything is all right till I come back.” "Shall I ride with you on the master's horse, or shall Juan?” asked the servant. "Neither of you. I shall go alone.” The young man looked her in the eyes, in protest. Absolutely impossible that the woman should ride alone! "I shall go alone,” the large, placid-seeming, fair-complexioned 6 THE WOMAN WHO RODE AWAY woman repeated with peculiar overbearing emphasis. And the man silently, unhappily yielded. "Why are you going alone, Mother ?” asked her son, as she made up parcels of food. "Am I never to be let alone? Not one moment of my life?” she cried, with sudden explosion of energy. And the child, like the servant, shrank into silence. She set off without a qualm, riding astride on her strong roan horse, and wearing a riding suit of coarse linen, a riding skirt over her linen breeches, a scarlet neck-tie over her white blouse, and a black felt hat on her head. She had food in her saddle-bags, an army canteen with water, and a large, native blanket tied on behind the saddle. Peering into the distance, she set off from her home. Manuel and the little boy stood in the gateway to watch her go. She did not even turn to wave them farewell. But when she had ridden about a mile, she left the wild road and took a small trail to the right, that led into another valley, over steep places and past great trees, and through another de- serted mining settlement. It was September, the water was run- ning freely in the little stream that had fed the now-abandoned mine. She got down to drink, and let the horse drink too. She saw natives coming through the trees, away up the slope. They had seen her, and were watching her closely. She watched in turn. The three people, two women and a youth, were making a wide detour, so as not to come too close to her. She did not care. Mounting, she trotted ahead up the silent valley, beyond the silver-works, beyond any trace of mining. There was still a rough trail, that led over rocks and loose stones into the valley beyond. This trail she had already ridden, with her husband. Beyond that, she knew she must go south. Curiously, she was not afraid, although it was a frightening country, the silent, fatal-seeming mountain slopes, the occasional distant, suspicious, elusive natives among the trees, the great carrion birds occasionally hovering, like great flies, in the distance, over carrion or a ranch house or a group of huts. As she climbed, the trees shrank and the path ran through a thorny scrub, that was trailed over with blue convolvulus and an occasional pink creeper. Then these flowers lapsed. She was nearing the pine-trees. She was over the crest, and before her another silent, void, D. H. LAWRENCE CT green-clad valley. It was past midday. Her horse turned to a little runlet of water, so she got down to eat her midday meal. She sat in silence looking at the motionless unliving valley, and at the sharp-peaked hills, rising higher to rock and pine-trees, southwards. She rested two hours in the heat of the day, while the horse cropped around her. Curious that she was neither afraid nor lonely. Indeed the lone- liness was like a drink of cold water to one who is very thirsty. And a strange elation sustained her from within. She travelled on, and camped at night in a valley beside a stream, deep among the bushes. She had seen cattle and had crossed several trails. There must be a ranch not far off. She heard the strange wailing shriek of a mountain lion, and the an- swer of dogs. But she sat by her small camp fire in a secret hollow place and was not really afraid. She was buoyed up always by the curious, bubbling elation within her. It was very cold before dawn. She lay wrapped in her blanket looking at the stars, listening to her horse shivering, and feeling like a woman who has died and passed beyond. She was not sure that she had not heard, during the night, a great crash at the centre of herself, which was the crash of her own death. Or else it was a crash at the centre of the earth, and meant something big and mysterious. With the first peep of light she got up, numb with cold, and made a fire. She ate hastily, gave her horse some pieces of oil- seed cake, and set off again. She avoided any meeting—and since she met nobody, it was evident that she in turn was avoided. She came at last in sight of the village of Cuchitee, with its black houses with their reddish roofs, a sombre, dreary little cluster be- low another silent, long-abandoned mine. And beyond, a long, great mountainside, rising up green and light to the darker, shag- gier green of pine-trees. And beyond the pine-trees stretches of naked rock against the sky, rock slashed already and brindled with white stripes of snow. High up, the new snow had already begun to fall. And now, as she neared, more or less, her destination, she began to grow vague and disheartened. She had passed the little lake among yellowing aspen trees whose white trunks were round and suave like the white round arms of a woman. What a lovely place! In California she would have raved about it. But here ca THE WOMAN WHO RODE AWAY she looked and saw that it was lovely, but she didn't care. She was weary and spent with her two nights in the open, and afraid of the coming night. She didn't know where she was going, or what she was going for. Her horse plodded dejectedly on, to- wards that immense and forbidding mountain slope, following a stony little trail. And if she had had any will of her own left, she would have turned back, to the village, to be protected and sent home to her husband. But she had no will of her own. Her horse splashed through a brook, and turned up a valley, under immense yellowing cotton- wood trees. She must have been nearly nine thousand feet above sea-level, and her head was light with the altitude and with weari- ness. Beyond the cotton-wood trees she could see, on each side, the steep sides of mountain slopes hemming her in, sharp-plumaged with overlapping aspen, and higher up, with sprouting, pointed spruce and pine-trees. Her horse went on automatically. In this tight valley, on this slight trail, there was nowhere to go but ahead, climbing Suddenly her horse jumped, and three men in dark blankets were on the trail before her. “Adios!" came the greeting, in the full, restrained Indian voice. “Adios!” she replied, in her assured, American woman's voice. “Where are you going?” came the quiet question, in Spanish. The men in the dark serapes had come closer, and were looking up at her. "On ahead," she replied coolly, in her hard, Saxon Spanish. These were just natives to her: dark-faced, strongly-built men in dark serapes and straw hats. They would have been the same as the men who worked for her husband, except, strangely, for the long black hair that fell over their shoulders. She noted this long black hair with a certain distaste. These must be the wild Indians she had come to see. "Where do you come from?" the same man asked. It was always the one man who spoke. He was young, with quick, large, bright black eyes that glanced sideways at her. He had a soft black moustache on his dark face, and a sparse tuft of beard, loose hairs on his chin. His long black hair, full of life, hung unre- strained on his shoulders. Dark as he was, he did not look as if he had washed lately. His two companions were the same, but older men, powerful en de le mai was D. H. LAWRENCE and silent. One had a thin black line of moustache, but was beardless. The other had the smooth cheeks and the sparse dark hairs marking the lines of his chin with the beard characteristic of the Indians. "'I come from far away,” she replied, with half-jocular evasion. This was received in silence. “But where do you live ?” asked the young man, with that same quiet insistence. "In the north,” she replied airily. Again there was a moment's silence. The young man conversed quietly, in Indian, with his two companions. "Where do you want to go, up this way?” he asked suddenly, with challenge and authority, pointing briefly up the trail. "To the Chilchui Indians," answered the woman laconically. The young man looked at her. His eyes were quick and black, and inhuman. He saw, in the full evening light, the faint sub- smile of assurance on her rather large, calm, fresh-complexioned face: the weary, bluish lines under her large blue eyes: and in her eyes, as she looked down at him, a half-childish, half-arrogant confidence in her own female power. But in her eyes also, a curious look of trance. “Usted es Señora? You are a married lady ?” the Indian said. “Yes I am a lady,” she replied complacently. “With a family?" "With a husband and two children, boy and girl," she said. The Indian turned to his companions and translated, in the low, gurgling speech, like hidden water running. They were evidently at a loss. “Where is your husband?" asked the young man. "Who knows?" she replied airily. "He has gone away on business for a week.” The black eyes watched her shrewdly. She, for all her weari- ness, smiled faintly in the pride of her own adventure and the assurance of her own womanhood, and the spell of the madness that was on her. "And what do you want to do?" the Indian asked her. "I want to visit the Chilchui Indians—to see their houses and to know their Gods," she replied. The young man turned and translated quickly, and there was a silence almost of consternation. The grave elder men were assu wn W On 10 THE WOMAN WHO RODE AWAY glancing at her sideways, with strange looks, from under their decorated hats. And they said something to the young man, in deep chest voices. The latter still hesitated. Then he turned to the woman. “Good!” he said. “Let us go. But we cannot arrive until to-morrow. We shall have to make a camp to-night.” “Good!” she said, “I can make a camp.” Without more ado, they set off at a fair speed up the stony trail. The young Indian ran alongside her horse's head, the other two ran behind. One of them had taken a thick stick, and occa- sionally he struck her horse a resounding blow on the haunch, to urge him forward. This made the horse jump, and threw her against the saddle horn, which, tired as she was, made her angry. "Don't do that!” she cried, looking round angrily at the fellow. She met his black, large, bright eyes, and for the first time her spirit really quailed. The man's eyes were not human to her, and they did not see her as a beautiful white woman. He looked at her with a black, bright inhuman look, and saw no woman in her at all. As if she were some strange, unaccountable thing, in- comprehensible to him, but inimical. She sat in her saddle in wonder, feeling once more as if she had died. And again he struck her horse, and jerked her badly in the saddle. All the passionate anger of the spoilt white woman rose in her. She pulled her horse to a standstill, and turned with blazing eyes to the man at her bridle. “Tell that fellow not to touch my horse again,” she cried. She met the eyes of the young man, and in their bright black inscrutability she saw a fine spark, as in a snake's eyes, of derision. He spoke to his companion in the rear, in the low tones of the Indian. The man with the stick listened without looking. Then, giving a strange low cry to the horse, he struck it again on the rear, so that it leaped forward spasmodically up the stony trail, scattering the stones, pitching the weary woman in her seat. The anger flew like a madness into her eyes, she went white at the gills. Fiercely she reined in her horse. But before she could turn, the young Indian had caught the reins under the horse's throat, jerked them forward, and was trotting ahead rapidly, lead- ing the horse. The woman was powerless. And along with her supreme anger there came a slight thrill of exultation. She knew she was dead. D. H. LAWRENCE 11 The sun was setting, a great yellow light flooded the last of the aspens, flared on the trunks of the pine-trees, the pine-needles bristled and stood out with dark lustre, the rocks glowed with unearthly glamour. And through this effulgence the Indian at her horse's head trotted unweariedly on, his dark blanket swinging, his bare legs glowing with a strange transfigured ruddiness, in the powerful light, and his straw hat with its half-absurd decorations of flowers and feathers shining showily above his river of long black hair. At times he would utter a low call to the horse, and then the other Indian, behind, would fetch the beast a whack with the stick. The wonder-light faded off the mountains, the world began to grow dark, a cold air breathed down. In the sky, half a moon was struggling against the glow in the west. Huge shadows came down from steep rocky slopes. Water was rushing. The woman was conscious only of her fatigue, her unspeakable fatigue, and the cold wind from the heights. She was not aware how moon- light replaced daylight. It happened while she travelled uncon- scious with weariness. For some hours they travelled by moonlight. Then suddenly they came to a standstill. The men conversed in low tones for a moment. "We camp here,” said the young man. She waited for him to help her down. He merely stood hold- ing the horse's bridle. She almost fell from the saddle, so fatigued. They had chosen a place at the foot of rocks that still gave off a little warmth of the sun. One man cut pine-boughs, another erected little screens of pine-boughs against the rock, for shelter, and put boughs of balsam pine, for beds. The third made a small fire, to heat tortillas. They worked in silence. The woman drank water. She did not want to eat-only to lie down. "Where do I sleep?" she asked. The young man pointed to one of the shelters. She crept in and lay inert. She did not care what happened to her, she was so weary, and so beyond everything. Through the twigs of spruce she could see the three men squatting round the fire on their hams, chewing the tortillas they picked from the ashes with their dark fingers, and drinking water from a gourd. They talked in low, muttering tones, with long intervals of silence. Her saddle and 12 THE WOMAN WHO RODE AWAY CO saddle-bags lay not far from the fire, unopened, untouched. The men were not interested in her nor her belongings. There they squatted with their hats on their heads, eating, eating mechanically, like animals, the dark serape with its fringe falling to the ground before and behind, the powerful dark legs naked and squatting like an animal's, showing the dirty white shirt and the sort of loin-cloth which was the only other garment, underneath. And they showed no more sign of interest in her than if she had been a piece of venison they were bringing home from the hunt, and had hung inside a shelter. After a while they carefully extinguished the fire, and went inside their own shelter. Watching through the screen of boughs, she had a moment's thrill of fear and anxiety, seeing the dark forms cross and pass silently in the moonlight. Would they attack her now? But no! They were as if oblivious of her. Her horse was hobbled: she could hear it hopping wearily. All was silent, moun- tain-silent, cold, deathly. She slept and woke, and slept in a semi- conscious numbness of cold and fatigue. A long, long night, icy and eternal, and she aware that she had died. Yet when there was a stirring, and a clink of fint and steel, and the form of a man crouching like a dog over a bone, at a red splutter of fire, and she knew it was morning coming, it seemed to her the night had passed too soon. When the fire was going, she came out of her shelter with one real desire left: for coffee. The men were warming more tortillas. “Can we make coffee ?" she asked. The young man looked at her, and she imagined the same faint spark of derision in his eyes. He shook his head. "We don't take it,” he said. “There is no time.” And the elder men, squatting on their haunches, looked up at her in the terrible paling dawn, and there was not even derision in their eyes. Only that intense, yet remote, inhuman glitter which was terrible to her. They were inaccessible. They could not see her as a woman at all. As if she were not a woman. As if, per- haps, her whiteness took away all her womanhood, and left her as some giant, female, white ant. That was all they could see in her. Before the sun was up, she was in the saddle again, and they were climbing steeply, in the icy air. The sun came, and soon an ds Some was D. H. LAWRENCE 13 she was very hot, exposed to the glare in the bare places. It seemed to her they were climbing to the roof of the world. Beyond against heaven were slashes of snow. During the course of the morning, they came to a place where the horse could not go further. They rested for a time with a great slant of living rock in front of them, like the glossy breast of some earth-beast. Across this rock, along a wavering crack, they had to go. It seemed to her that for hours she went in torment, on her hands and knees, from crack to crevice, along the slanting face of this pure rock-mountain. An Indian in front and an Indian behind walked slowly erect, shod with sandals of braided leather. But she in her riding-boots dared not stand erect. Yet why, she wondered all the time, did she persist in clinging and crawling along these mile-long sheets of rock? Why did she not hurl herself down, and have done! The world was below her. When they emerged at last on a stony slope, she looked back, and saw the third Indian coming carrying her saddle and saddle- bags on his back, the whole hung from a band across his forehead. And he had his hat in his hand, as he stepped slowly, with the slow, soft, heavy tread of the Indian, unwavering in the chinks of rock, as if along a scratch in the mountain's iron shield. The stony slope led downwards. The Indians seemed to grow excited. One ran ahead at a slow trot, disappearing round the curve of stones. And the track curved round and down, till at last in the full blaze of the mid-morning sun, they could see a valley below them, between walls of rock, as in a great wide chasm let in the mountains. A green valley, with a river, and trees, and clusters of low flat sparkling houses. It was all tiny and perfect, three thousand feet below. Even the flat bridge over the stream, and the square with the houses around it, the bigger buildings piled up at opposite ends of the square, the tall cotton-wood trees, the pastures and stretches of yellow-sere maize, the patches of brown sheep or goats on the slopes, in the distance, the railed enclosures by the stream-side. There it was, all small and perfect, looking magical, as any place will look magical, seen from the mountains above. The unusual thing was that the low houses glittered white, whitewashed, looking like crystals of salt, or silver. This frightened her. They began the long, winding descent at the head of the bar- ranca, following the stream that rushed and fell. At first it was 14 THE WOMAN WHO RODE AWAY all rocks: then the pine-trees began, and soon, the silver-limbed aspens. The flowers of autumn, big pink daisy-like flowers, and white ones, and many yellow flowers, were in profusion. But she had to sit down and rest, she was so weary. And she saw the bright flowers shadowily, as pale shadows hovering, as one who is dead must see them. At length came grass and pasture-slopes between mingled aspen and pine-trees. A shepherd, naked in the sun save for his hat and his cotton loin-cloth, was driving his brown sheep away. In a grove of trees they sat and waited, she and the young Indian. The one with the saddle had also gone forward. They heard a sound of someone coming. It was three men, in fine serapes of red and orange and yellow and black, and with brilliant feather head-dresses. The oldest had his grey hair braided with fur, and his red and orange-yellow serape was covered with curious black markings, like a leopard-skin. The other two were not grey-haired, but they were elders too. Their blankets were in stripes, and their head-dresses not so elaborate. The young Indian addressed the elders in a few quiet words. They listened without answering or looking at him or at the woman, keeping their faces averted and their eyes turned to the ground, only listening. And at length they turned and looked at the woman. The old chief, or medicine-man, whatever he was, had a deeply wrinkled and lined face of dark bronze, with a few sparse grey hairs round the mouth. Two long braids of grey hair, braided with fur and coloured feathers, hung on his shoulders. And yet, it was only his eyes that mattered. They were black and of extraordinary piercing strength, without a qualm of misgiving in their demonic, dauntless power. He looked into the eyes of the white woman with a long, piercing look, seeking she knew not what. She summoned all her strength to meet his eyes and keep up her guard. But it was no good. He was not looking at her as one human being looks at another. He never even perceived her resistance or her challenge, but looked past them both, into she knew not what. She could see it was hopeless to expect any human communica- tion with this old being. He turned and said a few words to the young Indian. “He asks, what do you seek here ?'' said the young man in Spanish. D. H. LAWRENCE 15 W Id “I? Nothing! I only came to see what it was like.” This was again translated, and the old man turned his eyes on her once more. Then he spoke again, in his low muttering tone, to the young Indian. “He says, why does she leave her house with the white man? Does she want to bring the white man's God to the Chilchui ?” “No," she replied, foolhardy. “I came away from the white man's God myself. I came to look for the God of the Chilchui.” Profound silence followed, when this was translated. Then the old man spoke again, in a small voice almost of weariness. “Does the white woman seek the gods of the Chilchui because she is weary of her own God?" came the question. “Yes, she does. She is tired of the white man's God," she replied, thinking that was what they wanted her to say. “She would like to serve the gods of the Chilchui.” She was aware of an extraordinary thrill of triumph and exul- tation passing through the Indians, in the tense silence that fol- lowed when this was translated. Then they all looked at her with piercing black eyes, in which a steely covetous intent glittered incomprehensible. She was the more puzzled, as there was noth- ing sensual or sexual in the look. It had a terrible glittering purity that was beyond her. She was afraid, she would have been paralysed with fear, had not something died within her, leaving her with a cold, watchful wonder only. The elders talked a little while, then the two went away, leaving her with the young man and the oldest chief. The old man now looked at her with a certain solicitude. "He says, are you tired ?” asked the young man. "Very tired,” she said. “The men will bring you a carriage,” said the young Indian. The carriage, when it came, proved to be a litter consisting of a sort of hammock of dark woollen frieze, slung on to a pole which was borne on the shoulders of two long-haired Indians. The woollen hammock was spread on the ground, she sat down on it, and the two men raised the pole to their shoulders. Swinging rather as if she were in a sack, she was carried out of the grove of trees, following the old Chief, whose leopard-spotted blanket moved curiously in the sunlight. They had emerged in the valley-head. Just in front were the maize fields, with ripe ears. The corn was not very tall in this CD vas 16 THE WOMAN WHO RODE AWAY was high altitude. The well-worn path went between it, and all she could see was the erect form of the old chief, in the flame and black serape, stepping soft and heavy and swift, his head forward, looking neither to right nor left. Her bearers followed, stepping rhythmically, the long blue-black hair glistening like a river down the naked shoulders of the man in front. They passed the maize, and came to a big wall or earthwork made of earth and adobe bricks. The wooden doors were open. Passing on, they were in a network of small gardens, full of flowers and herbs and fruit trees, each garden watered by a tiny ditch of running water. Among each cluster of trees and flowers was a small, glittering white house, windowless, and with closed door. The place was a network of little paths, small streams, and little bridges among square, flowering gardens. Following the broadest path—a soft narrow track between leaves and grass, a path worn smooth by centuries of human feet, no hoof of horse nor any wheel to disfigure it—they came to the little river of swift bright water, and crossed on a log bridge. Everything was silent—there was no human being anywhere. The road went on under magnificent cotton-wood trees. It emerged suddenly outside the central plaza or square of the village. This was a long oblong of low white houses with flat roofs; and two bigger buildings, having as it were little square huts piled on top of bigger long huts, stood at either end of the oblong, facing each other rather askew. Every little house was a dazzling white, save for the great round beam-ends which projected under the flat eaves, and for the flat roofs. Round each of the bigger buildings, on the outside of the square, was a stockyard fence, inside which was a garden with trees and flowers, and various small houses. Not a soul was in sight. They passed silently between the houses into the central square. This was quite bare and arid, the earth trodden smooth by endless generations of passing feet, passing across from door to door. All the doors of the windowless houses gave on to this blank square, but all the doors were closed. The firewood lay near the threshold, a clay oven was still smoking, but there was no sign of moving life. The old man walked straight across the square to the big house at the end, where the two upper storys, as in a house of D. H. LAWRENCE 17 toy bricks, stood each one smaller than the lower one. A stone staircase, outside, led up to the roof of the first story. At the foot of this staircase the litter-bearers stood still, and lowered the woman to the ground. “You will come up,” said the young Indian who spoke Spanish. She mounted the stone stairs to the earthen roof of the first house, which formed a platform around the wall of the second story. She followed around this platform to the back of the big house. There they descended again, into the garden at the rear. So far they had seen no one. But now two men appeared, bare-headed, with long braided hair, wearing a sort of white shirt gathered into a loin-cloth. These went along with the three new- comers, across the garden where red flowers and yellow flowers were blooming, to a long, low white house. There they entered without knocking. It was dark inside. There was a low murmur of men's voices. Several men were present, their white shirts showing in the gloom, their dark faces invisible. ... They were sitting on a great log of smooth old wood, that lay along the far wall. And save for this log, the room seemed empty. But no, in the dark at one end was a couch, a sort of bed, and someone lying there, covered with furs. The old Indian in the spotted serape, who had accompanied the woman, now took off his hat and his blanket and his sandals. Laying them aside, he approached the couch, and spoke in a low voice. For some moments there was no answer. Then an old man with snow-white hair hanging round his darkly-visible face, roused himself like a vision, and leaned on one elbow, looking vaguely at the company, in tense silence. The grey-haired Indian spoke again, and then the young Indian, · taking the woman's hand, led her forward. In her linen riding habit, and black boots and hat, and her pathetic bit of a red tie, she stood there beside the fur-covered bed of the old, old man, who sat reared up, leaning on one elbow, remote as a ghost, his white hair streaming in disorder, his face almost black, yet with a far-off intentness, not of this world, leaning forward to look at her. His face was so old, it was like dark glass, and the few curling hairs that sprang white from his lips and chin were quite incredible. 18 THE WOMAN WHO RODE AWAY The long white locks fell unbraided and disorderly on either side of the glassy, dark face. And under a faint powder of white eyebrows, the black eyes of the old chief looked at her as if from the far, far dead, seeing something that was never to be seen. At last he spoke a few deep, hollow words, as if to the dark air. "He says, do you bring your heart to the god of the Chilchui?" translated the young Indian. "Tell him yes,” she said, automatically. There was a pause. The old Indian spoke again, as if to the air. One of the men present went out. There was a silence as if of eternity, in the dim room that was lighted only through the open door. The woman looked round. Four old men with grey hair sat on the log by the wall facing the door. Two other men, powerful and impassive, stood near the door. They all had long hair, and wore white shirts gathered into a loin-cloth. Their powerful legs were naked and dark. There was a silence like eternity. At length the man returned, with white and black clothing on his arm. The young Indian took them, and holding them in front of the woman, said: "You must take off your clothes, and put these on.” “If all you men will go out,” she said. “No one will hurt you,” he said quietly. “Not while you men are here,” she said. He looked at the two men by the door. They came quickly forward, and suddenly gripped her arms as she stood, without hurting her, but with great power. Then two of the old men came, and with curious skill slit her boots down with keen knives, and drew them off, and slit her clothing so that it came away from her. In a few moments she stood there white and uncov- ered. The old man on the bed spoke, and they turned her round for him to see. He spoke again, and the young Indian deftly took the pins and comb from her fair hair, so that it fell over her shoulders in a bunchy tangle. Then the old man spoke again. The Indian led her to the bedside. The white-haired, glassy-dark old man moistened his finger-tips at his mouth, and most delicately touched her on the breasts and on the body, then on the back. And she winced D. H. LAWRENCE strangely each time, as the finger-tips drew along her skin, as if Death itself were touching her. And she wondered, almost sadly, why she did not feel ashamed in her nakedness. She only felt sad and lost. Because nobody felt ashamed. The elder men were all dark and tense with some other deep, gloomy, incomprehensible emotion, which suspended all her agitation, while the young Indian had a strange look of ecstasy on his face. And she, she was only utterly strange and beyond herself, as if her body were not her own. They gave her the new clothing: a long white cotton shift, that came to her knees: then a tunic of thick blue woollen stuff, em- broidered with scarlet and green flowers. It was fastened over one shoulder only, and belted with a braided sash of scarlet and black wool. When she was thus dressed, they took her away, barefoot, to a little house in the stockaded garden. The young Indian told her she might have what she wanted. She asked for water to wash herself. He brought it in a jar, together with a long wooden bowl. Then he fastened the gate-door of her house, and left her a prisoner. She could see through the bars of the gate-door of her house the red flowers of the garden, and a humming bird. Then from the roof of the big house she heard the long, heavy sound of a drum, unearthly to her in its summons, and an uplifted voice calling from the housetop in a strange language, with a far-away emotionless intonation, delivering some speech or message. And she listened as if from the dead. But she was very tired. She lay down on a couch of skins, pulling over her the blanket of dark wool, and she slept, giving up everything. When she woke it was late afternoon, and the young Indian was entering with a basket-tray containing food, tortillas, and corn-mush with bits of meat, probably mutton, and a drink made of honey, and some fresh plums. He brought her also a long garland of red and yellow flowers with knots of blue buds at the end. He sprinkled the garland with water from a jar, then offered it to her, with a smile. He seemed very gentle and thoughtful, and on his face and in his dark eyes was a curious look of triumph and ecstasy, that frightened her a little. The glitter had gone from the black eyes, with their curving dark lashes, and he would 20 THE WOMAN WHO RODE AWAY look at her with this strange soft glow of ecstasy that was not quite human, and terribly impersonal, and which made her uneasy. "Is there anything you want?” he said, in his low, slow, melodi- ous voice, that always seemed withheld, as if he were speaking aside, to somebody else, or as if he did not want to let the sound come out to her. “Am I going to be kept a prisoner here?" she asked. “No, you can walk in the garden to-morrow," he said softly. Always this curious solicitude. “Do you like that drink?" he said, offering her a little earthen- ware cup. “It is very refreshing." She sipped the liquor curiously. It was made with herbs and sweetened with honey, and had a strange, lingering flavour. The young man watched her with gratification. "It has a peculiar taste," she said. "It is very refreshing,” he replied, his black eyes resting on her always with that look of gratified ecstasy. Then he went away. And presently she began to be sick, and to vomit violently, as if she had no control over herself. Afterwards she felt a great soothing languor steal over her, her limbs felt strong and loose and full of languor, and she lay on her couch listening to the sounds of the village, watching the yellowing sky, smelling the scent of burning cedar-wood, or pine- wood. So distinctly she heard the yapping of tiny dogs, the shuffle of far-off feet, the murmur of voices, so keenly she detected the smell of smoke, and flowers, and evening falling, so vividly she saw the one bright star infinitely remote, stirring above the sunset, that she felt as if all her senses were diffused on the air, that she could distinguish the sound of evening flowers unfolding, and the actual crystal sound of the heavens, as the vast belts of the world- atmospheres slid past one another, and as if the moisture ascending and the moisture descending in the air resounded like some harp in the cosmos. To be concluded Inulinur PAUL MORAND YI HOMMAGE À PAUL MORAND. BY JEAN COCTEAU COUNSEL TO A YOUNG MAN BY SCOFIELD THAYER Clasp not the ankle of the cursive moon Nor agitate the stars with your despair: They know you not; and singularly soon Their beauty shall not be your nightly care. Impose your will upon the transient earth And order the divergent ways of man, Let East Wind know your spirit's mounting worth, Let cities know which way you will, and can. Join not with dogs in barking a dead moon, Increase not mountainous rivers with your grief, Granite and dumb, outface the raucous noon, Granite and dumb, hold yet yourself in fief. Assert the heart, and count not loss or gain In other metal than the heart allows; Assert the heart, and know not other pain Than that wherein a heart may nobly house: The pain that stars are stars, that earth is earth, That man is man, and that hearts, too, shall die. Though multitudinously you prove your worth, When Death confronts you, you will not reply. MADAME DE SEVIGNE IN THE COUNTRY BY LOGAN PEARSALL SMITH IN travelling across France the train sometimes passes a formal 1 park, through which a great avenue, opening its vista for a second, reveals at the end of that perspective the mansard roofs and stately façade of some seventeenth-century château; and in the imagination of the traveller this little glimpse may awaken the thought of the great age of French history—that vainglorious reign, so famous in arts and arms, of Louis XIV, the Roi-Soleil. To an American or English traveller at least there may be some- thing pompous and cold in the vision, thus suddenly evoked, of this vanished France; he may not be able easily to imagine what the personages were really like for whom these parks were laid out and these stately houses erected. But, on the other hand, it is possible that our traveller may feel himself curiously at home in this period —more at home there, indeed, than in the democratic France of the date of his railway journey. Many of the inhabitants may seem to him like long-acquainted friends, with the very texture of whose minds he has become familiar, learning in long days of delightful conversation the things they liked and laughed at, the problems they puzzled over, and with what fears and hopes their thoughts travelled along those avenues to the Court and the wars. Thus to reverse the time-process, thus to be transported back into the actual life of a bygone epoch, requires a spell, a necro- mancy we might call it, more potent than that of history: the chroniclers, the historians, and even the memoir-writers of the Grand Siècle, can at most enable us to see it, so to speak, from without—to look in, as through gates of gilded iron, upon that formal region. If then our Anglo-Saxon traveller can enter there at ease, can feel himself happy and at home in that society, it must be because a more intimate access, a more personal introduc- tion, has been his privilege: he must have made the acquaintance, and have won the friendship, we may safely hazard, of the lady of genius who stands ready with her golden key to open that escutcheoned gate to those who love her. This magic instrument, LOGAN PEARSALL SMITH 23 the wand which this enchantress wielded (though without the slightest consciousness of its power) was nothing more than the feathered quill with which Mme de Sévigné scribbled her almost countless letters to her daughter-letters which, in spite of their old dates and spellings, come to us across the centuries like con- temporary documents, and read indeed as if they had been written hardly more than a day or two ago. With almost all the uphol- stered figures of past epochs it is a constant effort to believe that they once actually existed, did once indubitably breathe the air and walk in the sunshine of this earthly scene; but with Mme de Sévigné, so limpid is the sound of her voice, so lively her glance, so inextinguishable the spirit of life that shines and sparkles in her letters, that we find it hard to believe we cannot really be- lieve that she has been, for more than two centuries, dead. When we get to know her best, at the beginning of her corre- spondence with her daughter, Mme de Sévigné was approaching the age of fifty, but her face still retained the colouring of girl- hood; she enjoyed, she said, the fine blood that ran so agreeably and lightly through her veins, almost believing that she had dis- covered some fountain of perpetual youth—for how otherwise could she account for her splendid and triumphant health? This divine Marquise, with her fair complexion, her blue eyes and golden hair, was a lady of rank and high distinction, who was famous for her wit and grace and beauty. She played no insig- nificant part in the society of her time, and her biographers have for the most part written of her as a woman of the world, a great lady of Parisian society, a wit and raconteuse of worldly gossip The temptation, indeed, to write of this aspect of her life is a strong one: she loved the world, and appreciated in a curiously conscious way all that was magnificent in the stately age she lived in—the rejoicings for victories, the pomp of great mar- riages, and the splendour of Versailles as it shone new-built and brilliant in contemporary eyes; the torches and gold costumes of the fêtes there, the confusion without confusion of the courtiers and music, the stately figure of the Grand Monarch, and the triumphant beauty of his mistresses, with their thousand ringlets, their lace and pearls. How diversified everything was, how gay and gallant; and surely, she said, writing before its disastrous eclipse, never had there been a star so brilliant as the King's! as 24 MADAME DE SEVIGNE IN THE COUNTRY TOU But interesting as is Mme de Sévigné's account of the Court and fashion, she herself is more delightful than any good society- the "fine creature," as her English lover, Edward FitzGerald, called her, was, as he said, all genuine, “all Truth and Daylight”; and it is the picture she unconsciously gives us of her own frank, generous-hearted nature, her “good Sense” (to quote FitzGerald once more) “Good Feeling, Humour, Love of Books and Country Life,” which is the greatest charm of this correspondence. “Rien n'est bon,” she wrote, “que d'avoir une belle et bonne âme; on la voit en toute chose comme à travers d'un cæur de cristal”; and this sentence might form the best motto for the many volumes of her correspondence. We see into this crystal heart perhaps most clearly in the long letters written in the solitude and leisure of her country days. Although her home was in Paris, she had a retreat at Livry, in the midst of a forest not many miles away. Sometimes in the spring she would drive thither in her coach and six, merely for the afternoon, to refresh her spirit with the young green of the trees and the songs of the nightingales; and often she would live for weeks or months there, especially in the autumn, finding in that autumnal forest a solitude, a melancholy, and a silence which, she often felt, she loved better than anything else in the world. But much the greater number of her country letters were written from the family estate in far-off Brittany, where long periods of her life were spent. First of all she describes the journey from Paris, partly in her coach by road, and partly with the coach on board a sailing boat and floating down the Loire; and these jour- neys are so vividly reflected in the magic glass she carries with her that we remember them almost as intimately as if they had been journeys of our own. Sometimes she would travel alone in the company of her uncle, the old Abbé, with whom she lived, some- times with friends who were making the same journey; and she often recounts the conversations with which they filled the long hot days of driving. Often, too, she would stop at the country houses of friends on the way, and, with her coach drawn into the coach-house, her horses resting in the stables, she would pay long visits at these great châteaux, with their avenues and terraces and fountains, bored or pleased, according to the company she found in them. But sooner or later these journeys, with all their fatigues, and with their accidents, for her coach would sometimes upset LOGAN PEARSALL SMITH 25 ven and land her in a ditch—they were strange things, long journeys, and if one remembered them one would never travel, but God made one forget-she would arrive on her own estates and drive up the avenue to her own château, where she would find awaiting her the business affairs and social duties which belonged to her position as an important territorial personage and the mistress of a great estate. The château of Les Rochers lies about four miles from the town of Vitry, and no great distance from Mont St Michel. The house, the formal gardens, the woods with their great avenues, remain as they were when she lived there; the orange trees in their tubs are her orange trees; the clipped limes are the limes she planted; and the room in which she wrote her letters, with its table, its portraits, the bed of yellow satin, embroidered by her daughter, is now as she describes it in her letters, fresh and gay, and almost untouched by time. We are familiar not only with Les Rochers, but with the society of the neighbourhood—a society, as she regarded it, of tiresome and pretentious people, whom she was always trying to avoid. Some critics have greatly blamed her for her contempt of the provincial noblesse, which was, they say, so superior in moral qualities to the high and fashionable society of Paris and the Court in which she delighted; but posterity can hardly reprehend with much enthusiasm the aristocratic dis- dain to which we owe so amusing a picture-gallery of provincial bores, each of them touched off with a light and witty malice which makes us understand why her intimates found such a delight in her company that, as one of them declared, he at least would hardly care to go on living without her, ne sachant avec qui rire finement. She was much beset by these unwelcome neighbours, who would come to call so often, or even to stay in the house for longer visits; but she consoled herself with the philosophic thought that bad company was after all better than good-it was so delightful to have it go! The departure of tiresome guests— what could be a greater pleasure ? she would ask her daughter: "Je me ménage les délices d'un adieu charmant,” she writes of some visitors staying in the house, describing later on how exquis- itely the sound of their departing coach-wheels had refreshed her blood. But a great part of the time Mme de Sévigné was more or less 26 MADAME DE SEVIGNE IN THE COUNTRY alone at Les Rochers with her uncle, the old Abbé, who helped her manage her affairs. One of their main occupations was the improvement of the property: each of them had a band of work- men; the Abbé loved to build, and was always wandering out to look at the chapel he was erecting, while his niece had a passion for planting trees. She would be sometimes out, early in the mornings, up to her knees in dew, marking out new plantations; and each time when, after an absence, she arrived again in Brit- tany, she would hurry out to see her avenues, marvelling at the growth of the trees she had planted, the long shadows they cast, and how much greener they were than the trees near Paris. Was it their nature to be so green, she wondered, or was it the freshness of the Breton rains? There is indeed a charming breath of the forest in these old letters, and it is somewhat surprising to see this fine lady, who so dearly loved all that was gay and amusing and brilliant in the elegant and opulent society of Paris, suddenly transformed into a kind of woodland creature, spending, even in the winter, long days in the silence and solitude of her forest paths; to see her looking like a loup-garou, as she said, and dressed in an old coat and an old straw hat, planting with her workmen oak-trees in the rain. That love of wild nature which we regard as a modern passion, that blending of mood and landscape which so deeply colours our modern consciousness, is generally supposed—and supposed with much truth—to date from the time when sunsets and lakes and woods and mountains first mirrored themselves, with all the splen- dour and richness of their colouring, in the romantic eyes of Jean- Jacques Rousseau. But Rousseau had his predecessors: there were lovers of nature before his birth, and among them Mme de Sévigné, with her passion for trees, must be counted; for although, like her contemporaries, she was blind to the beauty of lakes and moors and mountains, and although her woods were not the savage and dark forests in which Chateaubriand entombed his inexplicable despair, but arranged plantations, with mottoes on the trees, and dry and pleasant walks, and labyrinths, and artificial echoes; yet her melancholy delight in the solitude, the mystery, the sainte horreur, as she called it, of these lofty groves, her passion for wandering at night in their dark recesses, were moods of roman- tisme avant la lettre, as the French call it. Nor have any romantic en LOGAN PEARSALL SMITH 27 SW IMI writers of a later period noted with greater sensitiveness the chang- ing aspects and hours of forest scenery; the frosty stillness of winter days, with faint sunlight making the distance dim and misty; the beauty of the leafless trees in March, with a confused noise of birds that foretold the spring; the triumph of May with the nightingales; the coolness of the woods in torrid weather, the sweetness of the summer nights there, with their soft and gracious air; the beauty of the sunsets at the ends of the great avenues, or the enchantment of the moon, silvering the shadowy spaces of their long perspectives. "Nous avions entendu un cor dans le fond de cette forêt-we rub our eyes: can this haunting sentence have been penned, so long before Alfred de Vigny's birth, by a lady of fashion in the bewigged reign of Louis the Fourteenth? A foreigner who might attempt to define for himself the charm of these seventeenth-century letters, although he might not be able to analyse into its elements this liquid and harmonious French, flowing on through volume after volume with the inexhaustible vivacity of a fountain of clear water, could not but note the felicity of the many translucent phrases which mirror with such limpidity the woodland lights and shadows, as they coloured Mme de Sévigné's meditations and tinged her varying moods, while she paced those avenues, hour after hour and day after day. Heaven only knew, she said, what thoughts she didn't think in that Breton forest: there were pleasant memories and hopes and day dreams; and there was a great spectacle of contemporary history, which she watched from her woods, and over which she moralized with un- failing interest. She liked great events, great changes of fortune pleased her; and there were certain strokes of Providence which, although they took her breath away, delighted her with their suddenness and grandeur. But the general conclusion of all her thoughts was a sad one; almost all her meditations led to a melancholy moral. Kings, and the lovely mistresses of kings, princes, and courtiers, as she thought of them in her sombre forest, all seemed to her examples of human misery and weakness. And none of these actors, playing their parts, great or small, on the world's stage, was contented; and not one of them-and she found in the thought a melancholy kind of consolation-was really happy. And she herself? For her too there were many black thoughts lurking in the forest which she 28 MADAME DE SEVIGNE IN THE COUNTRY Wa was & no TE aso tried to hurry past without regarding. Her humour was indeed a happy one; she was easily amused, and could accommodate herself, she said, to almost anything that happened; and all that was essentially cruel in human conditions, the mockery of hope, the swift passing of time—the very shadows of the great trees she had planted reminding her that she too was growing old-even the nearness of hideous and degrading old age, and of death, which she feared and hated—all this she could bear without repining; it was the common lot. But thus to be growing old and perishing so far from the person she loved with so strange a passion—this was a thought to which neither religion nor philosophy could reconcile her; nothing could cure her bitter tears. Mme de Sévigné's letters to the daughter she loved with this vehemence of passion have so much the character of love-letters that many readers have been repelled from them by the tiresome monotony which seems inseparable from effusions of this kind. There is indeed in all extreme affection an element of unreason- a divine madness, it may be, but still a madness—which discon- certs us: the elixir of love is a divine potation, but it is most serviceable for literature after it has been tempered and transfused by art-decanted, it may be, into the crystal chalice of a lyric, or cooled in the ornamented jars of a sonnet-sequence; and im- petuous love-letters, fervid with the ebullitions of unmoderated feeling, are apt to pall, in the end, upon the unenamoured reader. Even Edward FitzGerald, who in his latter years became so devoted to his "blessed Sévigné” that he composed, as a labour of love, a big dictionary of the places and persons mentioned in her letters, confesses that he had been kept aloof from them for many years by “that eternal daughter of hers”; and others of her admirers cannot but be wearied at times by her praises of Mme de Grignan's perfections and her laments over their ever-recurring separations, especially since posterity has enviously, and perhaps unjustly, agreed to look upon this Countess as an unamiable and sophisticated prig, who was by no means a worthy object of so ardent a maternal passion. But then they remind themselves that this fine excess has after all its pathetic beauty, and that without its inspiration Mme de Sévigné would never have written these golden letters, in which she made use of all her resources to amuse and entertain not only ons 1 ca ver LOGAN PEARSALL SMITH 29 her daughter, but posterity as well-gathering the pick, as she said, of all the baskets, the flower of her wit and thoughts and eyes and pen. And after all, they remember, the poor lady, unlike most lovers, was more or less aware of her own folly, and tried to moderate its vehemence and vary its expression in a hundred humorous and graceful ways. Still it was her song, as inevitable and natural to her as the nightingale's descant; and she repeats its phrases over and over with the musical reiteration of that wood- land chorister. “Ah! la jolie chose qu'une feuille qui chante!" she wrote of the nightingale in a phrase which has become famous; and as she reiterates her longing for the being whose image was her inseparable companion, her voice echoes from the formal forests of seventeenth-century France with something of the pathos and beauty of that fabled parent's musical lament. For the thought of Mme de Grignan was, she said, the centre and depth of all her meditations; around it everything else slid and vanished; and should ever, by some miracle, that thought desert her, it would leave her like a wax figure, hollow and empty and with nothing within. So all day long, and day after day, her imagination, out-distancing the swift couriers who were carrying her letters to the South, would wing its way across the breadth of France to the terraces and triumphant view of that great moun- tain castle in Provence, where, amid an uproar of music and guests and servants, and a perpetual storm of wind, the lovely philosophic Countess lived and reigned. Mme de Grignan piqued herself upon her mastery of the mod- ern and fashionable philosophy of Descartes; her mother was of the older, more human, and homely school of Montaigne, whose essays she was so fond of reading; and curiously enough she remains, with Montaigne, one of the human beings of the past with whom posterity is most intimately acquainted-being indeed, as FitzGerald said of her, much more living to us than most of the living people whom we see about us. Writing long ago those hasty epistles to which she attached not the slightest importance, letting her pen gallop at its will with the reins upon its neck, as she set down amid her woods her meditations on mortality and on the cruel lapse of time, which was bearing her away, with all she loved, so swiftly upon its resistless stream, yet in her very com- plaints of his invincible power she was, though she had no notion ern n m 30 MADAME DE SEVIGNE IN THE COUNTRY of it, splendidly triumphing over this old enemy. And indeed Time himself, busied as always with his great work of ruin and obliteration, has for once proved himself a chivalrous opponent, turning away his scythe to preserve with delicate care the slightest records of Mme de Sévigné's moods and fancies. Many writers have longed for durable renown, labouring with no success to win an immortality in the thoughts of succeeeding ages; but this splendid gift of Fame was vouchsafed to Mme de Sévigné in answer to no request of hers. That easy, graceful, smiling defeat of oblivion, that effortless and unconscious victory, we might almost call it, over Death, which is the magic and marvel and the ultimate interest of her writing, was the outcome of a genius she never knew she possessed; nor had she indeed the slightest notion that, in a life in which nothing happened, she was turning into immortality everything she touched, weaving out of her ephemeral thoughts a delicate but enduring tissue which has proved untarnishable by time. And amid the destruction of so much of ancient France, the scene and background of her country medita- tions still remains, with its formal gardens, its architecture, and the great avenues of its environing forests, so inviolate, so unblem- ished by the ineffectual and defeated years, that the tourist from another age who makes a pilgrimage to Les Rochers will almost ask himself at last, with a kind of eerie wonder, whether he may not be himself more of a ghost than the spirit he has come to visit-an evanescent shadow or revenant out of the chaos of a future much more doubtful than the immortality of that lifetime which is destined to outlast his own—that golden past which shines in these unfading letters, and seems indeed actually to gleam before his eyes, illuminating the circle of sunny space within the enclosure of those Breton woods. LANDSCAPE WITH COW. BY THOMAS H. BENTON OK2 * THE TUNNEL. BY THOMAS H. BENTON THE HUNCH-BACK BY FRANCES GREGG TT was while waiting for the little steamer that plies between 1 the mainland and Cap Ferret that I first saw the creature who was to project me, by a single glance, into a new plane of consciousness. The usual people were drifting past. All these French water- ing-places have the same barber-pole gaiety. Sashed and tam-o'- shantered boatmen were soliciting trade. Women too. Then some young girls passed, looking like figures out of a Greek frieze: sleeveless tunics, bare feet in sandals, and filleted short hair. They walked against the wind, with that stiff archaic grace that is authentic youth. It was when they had passed that I caught sight of the dwarf, and in his eyes was a look of creative appreciation such as one catches occasionally from some passer before the Elgin marbles, or before the entrance blocks of some Egyptian tomb. The whole process of art was in his glance—the immediate crea- tion of a spiritual equivalent: the making of them symbolic; a re-creation of them in the abstract relating them to that mysteri- ous and infinite something that we call Beauty. But it was an approach to Beauty of a specific and peculiar kind. There is, in a certain type of the art of all civilizations, but perhaps more especially in all primitives, an immediate preoccupa- tion with the reluctant and hidden beauty of existence: a beauty that has no relation to the actual material world, to what is known as “reality”; that is like the sound that lies in the air from the inadvertent touching of a stringed instrument, or like a flame that leaps into the air and is gone-a promise, a hope, a myth. From age to age there are artists whose work gives out this haunt- ing note, who make the same gesture, a gesture at once exultant and exhausted. Botticelli, perhaps, most nearly made the thing finite and tangible in the tranquil ecstasy of his Venus rising from the waves, and in his Primavera. Dante breathes his credo doubly shrouded from the lips of Beatrice. And Leonardo, in treacher- 32 THE HUNCH-BACK ous fealty, like one who kissed a blood-drained cheek, speaks from the smiling eyes and lips of his St John and his Mona Lisa, oddly combining both love and betrayal. This dwarf was such as these. He knew that ecstasy. He knew too that melancholy, that blight, that withdrawn, rejected yearn- ing, that proud, unbitter, loss of hope. There was in him a mad purity of receptivity, and a stark loneliness that were best hidden. He had so much that I did not dare to pity him, though his body was so extraordinarily hunched and broken. He strode about, seeming to flaunt his deformity as though he had achieved it in some monstrous rites. His head was beautiful, as is often the case with hunch-backs, and wonderfully fair. So far south, where there is a swarthiness shadowing the people, it was odd to see a coppery head and lancing blue eyes. I was pondering upon this when suddenly he looked toward me. For an instant our eyes met in an appalling intimacy. There is a strange and miraculous thing that can happen with the meeting of eyes, as though some ethereal fluid went from brain to brain, bathing them in a sure and sudden comprehension. Our eyes had fled from the encounter almost as I realized that I had started back with an obvious and vulgar recoil, with some swift repulsion. It would be hard to say what had happened. There are certain decencies, certain reserves that one has even with one's own spirit, certain hurts that must be dissembled, certain laments too pitiful to be acknowledged. This all-knowing face had peered in upon my solitude. If a mummy had spoken out of its glass show-case, if eyes that had gone to dust had raised their parchment lids, if the stretched lips of death had spoken, I should not have been more startled, nor more outraged. Sometimes one seems to fly back upon oneself in wild disorder, hurtling back through aeons to some fastness of innocence. But I found no refuge. So worlds hurled themselves down through a steep darkness. The season was over when I saw him next on the jetty where the fishing smacks come in. Fish are always to be had cheap there. People come with newspapers and carry away great packages for fifty centimes or a franc. The dwarf was there, swaggering in his hip-boots, making over- FRANCES GREGG 33 long steps that lurched his ridiculous body. A little leering smile flickered upon the firm and sensual lips, but he looked thin and pinched by hunger. He had no newspaper and took what they gave him without money, headless trodden scraps, in bare hands. That he had brought no newspaper was like a cry to me. If no one should choose to give to him, well, he had not come pre- pared. Thus he kept ahead of humiliation. A sailor, with a jerk of his shoulders, indicated a heap of scraps that he might have. The hunch-back gave a single, quick, calculating stare, then gath- ered them together, and began scooping the entrails out with his fingers. All the while he kept me in surveillance. We made each other uncomfortable. So I left and drifted on to the next town, and then further. I thought to evade his gaze, but all the world is not space enough. PSYCHOLOGY AND FORM BY KENNETH BURKE IT is not, one will recall, until the fourth scene of the first act I that Hamlet confronts the ghost of his father. As soon as the situation has been made clear, the audience has been, consciously or unconsciously, waiting for this ghost to appear, while in the fourth scene this moment has been definitely promised. For earlier in the play Hamlet had arranged to come to the platform at night with Horatio to meet the ghost, and it is now night, he is with Horatio and Marcellus, and they are standing on the platform. Hamlet asks Horatio the hour. "Hor. I think it lacks of twelve. Mar. No, it is struck. Hor. Indeed? I heard it not: then it draws near the season Wherein the spirit held his wont to walk.” T Promptly hereafter there is a sound off-stage. “A flourish of trumpets, and ordnance shot off within.” Hamlet's friends have established the hour as twelve. It is time for the ghost. Sounds off-stage, and of course it is not the ghost. It is, rather, the sound of the king's carousal, for the king "keeps wassail.” A tricky, and effective detail. We have been waiting for a ghost, and get, startlingly, a blare of trumpets. And again, once the trumpets are silent, we feel all the more just how desolate are these three men waiting for a ghost, on a bare "platform,” feel it by this sud- den juxtaposition of an imagined scene of lights and merriment. But the trumpets announcing a carousal have suggested a subject of conversation. In the darkness Hamlet discusses the excessive drinking of his countrymen. He points out that it tends to harm their reputation abroad, since, he argues, this one showy vice makes their virtues “in the general censure take corruption.” And for this reason, although he himself is a native of this place, he does not approve of the custom. Indeed, there in the gloom he is talk- ing very intelligently on these matters, and Horatio answers, “Look, KENNETH BURKE 35 my Lord, it comes.” All this time we had been waiting for a ghost, and it comes at the one moment which was not pointing towards it. This ghost, so assiduously prepared for, is yet a surprise. And now that the ghost has come, we are waiting for something further. Programme: a speech from Hamlet. Hamlet must confront the ghost. Here again Shakespeare can feed well upon the use of contrast for his effects. Hamlet has just been talking in a sober, rather argumentative manner-but now the flood-gates are unloosed : “Angels and ministers of grace defend us! Be thou a spirit of health or goblin damn'd, Bring with thee airs from heaven or blasts from hell ..." and the transition from the matter-of-fact to the grandiose, the full-throated and full-vowelled, is a second burst of trumpets, per- haps even more effective than the first, since it is the rich fulfilment of a promise. Yet this satisfaction in turn becomes an allurement, an itch for further developments. At first desiring solely to see Hamlet confront the ghost, we now want Hamlet to learn from the ghost the details—which are, however, with shrewdness and husbandry, reserved for "Scene V.-Another Part of the Platform.” I have gone into this scene at some length, since it illustrates so perfectly the relationship between psychology and form, and so aptly indicates how the one is to be defined in terms of the other. That is, the psychology here is not the psychology of the hero, but the psychology of the audience. And by that distinction, form would be the psychology of the audience. Or, seen from another angle, form is the creation of an appetite in the mind of the audi- tor, and the adequate satisfying of that appetite. This satisfac- tion—so complicated is the human mechanism-at times involves a temporary set of frustrations, but in the end these frustrations prove to be simply a more involved kind of satisfaction, and fur- thermore serve to make the satisfaction of fulfilment more intense. If, in a work of art, the poet says something, let us say, about a meeting, writes in such a way that we desire to observe that meet- ing, and then, if he places that meeting before us—that is form. While obviously, that is also the psychology of the audience, since it involves desires and their appeasements. > 2 36 PSYCHOLOGY AND FORM The seeming breach between form and subject-matter, between technique and psychology, which has taken place in the last cen- tury is the result, it seems to me, of scientific criteria being uncon- sciously introduced into matters of purely aesthetic judgement. The flourishing of science has been so vigorous that we have not yet had time to make a spiritual readjustment adequate to the changes in our resources of material and knowledge. There are disorders of the social system which are caused solely by our undigested wealth (the basic disorder being, perhaps, the phe- nomenon of overproduction: to remedy this, instead of having all workers employed on half time, we have half working full time and the other half idle, so that whereas overproduction could be the greatest reward of applied science, it has been, up to now, the most menacing condition our modern civilization has had to face). It would be absurd to suppose that such social disorders would not be paralleled by disorders of culture and taste, espe- cially since science is so pronouncedly a spiritual factor. So that we are, owing to the sudden wealth science has thrown upon us, all nouveaux-riches in matters of culture, and most poignantly in that field where lack of native firmness is most readily exposed, in matters of aesthetic judgement. One of the most striking derangements of taste which science has temporarily thrown upon us involves the understanding of psychology in art. Psychology has become a body of information (which is precisely what psychology in science should be, or must be). And similarly, in art, we tend to look for psychology as the purveying of information. Thus, a contemporary writer has objected to Joyce's Ulysses on the ground that there are more psychoanalytic data available in Freud. (How much more dras- tically he might, by the same system, have destroyed Homer's Odyssey!) To his objection it was answered that one might, similarly, denounce Cézanne's trees in favour of state forestry bulletins. Yet are not Cézanne's landscapes themselves tainted with the psychology of information? Has he not, by perception, pointed out how one object lies against another, indicated what takes place between two colours (which is the psychology of science, and is less successful in the medium of art than in that of science, since in art such processes are at best implicit, whereas in science they are so readily made explicit)? Is Cézanne not, to KENNETH BURKE 37 that extent, a state forestry bulletin, except that he tells what goes on in the eye instead of on the tree? And do not the true values of his work lie elsewhere—and precisely in what I dis- tinguish as the psychology of form? Thus, the great influx of information has led the artist also to lay his emphasis on the giving of information—with the result that art tends more and more to substitute the psychology of the hero (the subject) for the psychology of the audience. Under such an attitude, when form is preserved it is preserved as an annex, a luxury, or, as some feel, a downright affectation. It remains, though sluggish, like the human appendix, for occasional demands are still made upon it; but its true vigour is gone, since it is no longer organically required. Proposition: The hypertrophy of the psychology of information is accompanied by the corresponding atrophy of the psychology of form. In information, the matter is intrinsically interesting. And by intrinsically interesting I do not necessarily mean intrinsically valuable, as to witness the intrinsic interest of backyard gossip or the most casual newspaper items. In art, at least the art of the great ages (Aeschylus, Shakespeare, Racine) the matter is inter- esting by means of an extrinsic use, a function. Consider, for instance, the speech of Mark Anthony, the “Brutus is an honourable man.” Imagine in the same place a very intelligently developed thesis on human conduct, with statistics, intelligence tests, defini- tions; imagine it as the finest thing of the sort ever written, and as really being at the roots of an understanding of Brutus. Obvi- ously, the play would simply stop until Anthony had finished. For in the case of Anthony's speech, the value lies in the fact that his words are shaping the future of the audience's desire, not the desires of the Roman populace, but the desires of the pit. This is the psychology of form as distinguished from the psychology of in- formation. The distinction is, of course, absolutely true only in its non- existent extremes. Hamlet's advice to the players, for instance, has little of the quality which distinguishes Anthony's speech. It is, rather, intrinsically interesting, although one could very easily prove how the play would benefit by some such delay at this point, and that anything which made this delay possible without violating the consistency of the subject would have, in this, its formal justi- 38 PSYCHOLOGY AND FORM e d fication. While it would, furthermore, be absurd to rule intrinsic interest out of literature. I wish simply to have it restored to its properly minor position, seen as merely one out of many possible elements of style. Goethe's prose, often poorly imagined, or neu- tral, in its line-for-line texture, especially in the treatment of ro- mantic episode—perhaps he felt that the romantic episode in itself was enough?-is strengthened into a style possessing affirmative virtues by his rich use of aphorism. But this is, after all, but one of many possible facets of appeal. In some places, notably in Wilhelm Meister's Lehrjahre when Wilhelm's friends disclose the documents they have been collecting about his life unbeknown to him, the aphorisms are almost rousing in their efficacy, since they involve the story. But as a rule the appeal of aphorism is in- trinsic: that is, it satisfies without being functionally related to the context. . . . Also, to return to the matter of Hamlet, it must be observed that the style in this passage is no mere “information- giving” style; in its alacrity, its development, it really makes this one fragment into a kind of miniature plot. One reason why music can stand repetition so much more sturdily than correspondingly good prose is because music, of all the arts, is by its nature least suited to the psychology of information, and has remained closer to the psychology of form. Here form cannot atrophy. Every dissonant chord cries for its solution, and whether the musician resolves or refuses to resolve this dissonance into the chord which the body cries for, he is dealing in human appetites. Correspondingly good prose, however, more prone to the tempta- tions of pure information, cannot so much bear repetition since the aesthetic value of information is lost once that information is im- parted. If one returns to such a work again it is purely because, in the chaos of modern life, he has been caused to forget it. With a desire, on the other hand, its recovery is as agreeable as its dis- covery. One can memorize the dialogue between Hamlet and Guildenstern, where Hamlet gives Guildenstern the pipe to play 1 Similarly, the epigram of Racine is "pure art," because it usually serves to formulate or clarify some situation within the play itself. In Goethe the epigram is most often of independent validity, as in Die Wahlver- wandtschaften, where the ideas of Ottilie's diary are obviously carried over boldly from the author's notebook. In Shakespeare we have the union of extrinsic and intrinsic epigram, the epigram growing out of its context and yet valuable independent of its context. the" of independenthin the play itsit usually: KENNETH BURKE 39 on. For, once the speech is known, its repetition adds a new ele- ment to compensate for the loss of novelty. We cannot take a recurrent pleasure in the new (in information) but we can in the natural (in form). Already, at the moment when Hamlet is hold- ing out the pipe to Guildenstern and asking him to play upon it, we "gloat over” Hamlet's triumphal descent upon Guildenstern, when, after Guildenstern has, under increasing embarrassment, pro- tested three times that he cannot play the instrument, Hamlet launches the retort for which all this was preparation: "Why, look you now, how unworthy a thing you make of me. You would play upon me, you would seem to know my stops; you would pluck out the heart of my mystery; you would sound me from my lowest note to the top of my compass; and there is much music, excellent voice, in this little organ, yet cannot you make it speak. 'Sblood, do you think I am easier to be played on than a pipe? Call me what instrument you will, though you can fret me, you cannot play upon me.” 1 In the opening lines we hear the promise of the close, and thus feel the emotional curve even more keenly than at first reading. Whereas in most modern art this element is underemphasized. It gives us the gossip of a plot, a plot which too often has for its value the mere fact that we do not know its outcome.” Music, then, fitted less than any other art for imparting infor- mation, deals minutely in frustrations and fulfilments of desire, and for that reason more often gives us those curves of emotion 1 One might indicate still further appropriateness here. As Hamlet finishes his speech, Polonius enters, and Hamlet turns to him, “God bless you, sir !” Thus, the plot is continued (for Polonius is always the promise of action) and a full stop is avoided : the embarrassment laid upon Rosen- crantz and Guildenstern is not laid upon the audience. 2 Yet modern music has gone far in the attempt to renounce this aspect of itself. Its dissonances become static, demanding no particular resolution. And whereas an unfinished modulation by a classic musician occasions positive dissatisfaction, the refusal to resolve a dissonance in modern music does not dissatisfy us, but irritates or stimulates. Thus, “energy" takes the place of style. Suspense is the least complex kind of anticipation, as surprise is the least complex kind of fulfilment. 40 PSYCHOLOGY AND FORM which, because they are natural, can bear repetition without loss. It is for this reason that music, like folk tales, is most capable of lulling us to sleep. A lullaby is a melody which comes quickly to rest, where the obstacles are easily overcome and this is pre- cisely the parallel to those waking dreams of struggle and conquest which (especially during childhood) we permit ourselves when falling asleep or when trying to induce sleep. Folk tales are just such waking dreams. Thus it is right that art should be called a "waking dream.” The only difficulty with this definition (indi- cated by Charles Baudouin in his Psychoanalysis and Aesthetics, a very valuable study of Verhaeren) is that to-day we understand it to mean art as a waking dream for the artist. Modern criticism, and psychoanalysis in particular, is too prone to define the essence of art in terms of the artist's weaknesses. It is, rather, the audience which dreams, while the artist oversees the conditions which deter- mine this dream. He is the manipulator of blood, brains, heart, and bowels which, while we sleep, dictate the mould of our desires. This is, of course, the real meaning of artistic felicity—an exalta- tion at the correctness of the procedure, so that we enjoy the steady march of doom in a Racinian tragedy with exactly the same equip- ment as that which produces our delight with Benedick's “Peace! I'll stop your mouth. (Kisses her)” which terminates the im- broglio of Much Ado About Nothing. The methods of maintaining interest which are most natural to the psychology of information (as it is applied to works of pure art) are surprise and suspense. The method most natural to the psychology of form is eloquence. For this reason the great ages of Aeschylus, Shakespeare, and Racine, dealing as they did with ma- terial which was more or less a matter of common knowledge so that the broad outlines of the plot were known in advance (while it is the broad outlines which are usually exploited to secure sur- prise and suspense) developed formal excellence, or eloquence, as the basis of appeal in their work. inv difference in kind between the classic method and the method of the cheapest contemporary melodrama. The drama, more than any other form, must never lose sight of its audience: here the failure to satisfy the proper requirements is most disastrous. And since certain contemporary work is suc- cessful, it follows that rudimentary laws of composition are being na- KENNETH BURKE 41 101 complied with. The distinction is one of intensity rather than of kind. The contemporary audience hears the lines of a play or novel with the same equipment as it brings to reading the lines of its daily paper. It is content to have facts placed before it in some more or less adequate sequence. Eloquence is the minimizing of this interest in fact, per se, so that the "more or less adequate sequence” of their presentation must be relied on to a much greater extent. Thus, those elements of surprise and suspense are sub- tilized, carried down into the writing of a line or a sentence, until in all its smallest details the work bristles with disclosures, con- trasts, restatements with a difference, ellipses, images, aphorism, volume, sound-values, in short all that complex wealth of minutiae which in their line-for-line aspect we call style and in their broader outlines we call form. As a striking instance of a modern play with potentialities in which the intensity of eloquence is missing, I might cite a recent success, Capek's R. U. R. Here, in a melodrama which was often astonishing in the rightness of its technical procedure, when the author was finished he had written nothing but the scenario for a play by Shakespeare. It was a play in which the author produced time and again the opportunity, the demand, for eloquence, only to move on. (At other times, the most successful moments, he utilized the modern discovery of silence, writing moments wherein words could not possibly serve but to detract from the effect: this we might call the "flowering” of information.) The Adam and Eve scene of the last act, a “commission” which the Shakespeare of the comedies would have loved to fill, was in the verbal barren- ness of Capek's play something shameless to the point of blushing. The Robot, turned human, prompted by the dawn of love to see his first sunrise, or hear the first bird-call, and forced merely to say “Oh, see the sunrise," or "Hear the pretty birds”-here one could do nothing but wring his hands at the absence of that aesthetic mould which produced the overslung "speeches” of Romeo and Juliet. Suspense is the concern over the possible outcome of some specific detail of plot rather than for general qualities. Thus, "Will A marry B or C?' is suspense. In Macbeth, the turn from the murder scene to the porter scene is a much less literal channel of development. Here the presence of one quality calls forth the 42 PSYCHOLOGY AND FORM demand for another, rather than one tangible incident of plot awak- ing an interest in some other possible tangible incident of plot. To illustrate more fully, if an author managed over a certain number of his pages to produce a feeling of sultriness, or oppression, in the reader, this would unconsciously awaken in the reader the desire for a cold, fresh northwind—and thus some aspect of a northwind would be effective if called forth by some aspect of stuffiness. A good example of this is to be found in a contemporary poem, T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, where the vulgar, oppressively trivial conversation in the public house calls forth in the poet a memory of a line from Shakespeare. These slobs in a public house, after a desolately low-visioned conversation, are now forced by closing time to leave the saloon. They say good-night. And suddenly the poet, feeling his release, drops into another good-night, a good- night with désinvolture, a good-night out of what was, within the conditions of the poem at least, a graceful and irrecoverable past. "Well that Sunday Albert was home, they had a hot gammon, And they asked me in to dinner, to get the beauty of it hot” -[at this point the bartender interrupts: it is closing time) “Goonight Bill. Goonight Lou. Goonight May. Goonight. Ta ta. Goonight. Goonight. Good-night, ladies, good-night, sweet ladies, good-night, good- night.” SOI There is much more to be said on these lines, which I have shortened somewhat in quotation to make my issue clearer. But I simply wish to point out here that this transition is a bold juxtaposition of one quality created by another, an association in ideas which, if not logical, is nevertheless emotionally natural. In the case of Macbeth, similarly, it would be absurd to say that the audience, after the murder scene, wants a porter scene. But the audience does want the quality which this porter particularizes. The dramatist might, conceivably, have introduced some entirely dif- ferent character or event in this place, provided only that the event produced the same quality of relationship and contrast (grotesque seriousness followed by grotesque buffoonery). . . . One of the most beautiful and satisfactory "forms” of this sort is to be found in Baudelaire's Femmes Damnées, where the poet, after describing KENNETH BURKE 43 the business of a Lesbian seduction, turns to the full oratory of his apostrophe: “Descendez, descendez, lamentables victimes, Descendez le chemin de l'enfer éternel ..." SS while the stylistic efficacy of this transition contains a richness which transcends all moral (or unmoral) sophistication: the efficacy of appropriateness, of exactly the natural curve in treatment. Here is morality even for the godless, since it is a morality of art, being justified, if for no other reason, by its paralleling of that stale- ness, that disquieting loss of purpose, which must have followed the procedure of the two characters, the femmes damnées them- selves, a remorse which, perhaps only physical in its origin, never- theless become psychic." But to return, we have made three terms synonymous: form, psychology, and eloquence. And eloquence thereby becomes the essence of art, while pity, tragedy, sweetness, humour, in short all the emotions which we experience in life proper, as non-artists, are simply the material on which eloquence may feed. The arous- ing of pity, for instance, is not the central purpose of art, although it may be an adjunct of artistic effectiveness. One can feel pity much more keenly at the sight of some actual misfortune—and it would be a great mistake to see art merely as a weak representa- tion of some actual experience. That artists to-day are content to write under such an aesthetic accounts in part for the inferior position which art holds in the community. Art, at least in the great periods when it has flowered, was the conversion, or tran- scendance, of emotion into eloquence, and was thus a factor added 1 As another aspect of the same subject, I could cite many examples from the fairy tale. Consider, for instance, when the hero is to spend the night in a bewitched castle. Obviously, as darkness descends, weird adventures must befall him. His bed rides him through the castle; two halves of a man challenge him to a game of nine-pins played with thigh bones and skulls. Or entirely different incidents may serve instead of these. The quality comes first, the particularization follows. Could not the Greek public's resistance to Euripides be accounted for in the fact that he, of the three great writers of Greek tragedy, betrayed his art, was guilty of aesthetic impiety, in that he paid more attention to the arousing of emotion per se than to the sublimation of emotion into eloquence ? 44 PSYCHOLOGY AND FORM as to life. I am reminded of St Augustine's caricature of the theatre: that whereas we do not dare to wish people unhappy, we do want to feel sorry for them, and therefore turn to plays so that we can feel sorry although no real misery is involved. One might apply the parallel interpretation to the modern delight in happy endings, and say that we turn to art to indulge our humanitarianism in a well-wishing which we do not permit ourselves towards our actual neighbours. Surely the catharsis of art is more complicated than this, and more reputable. Eloquence itself, as I hope to have established in the instance from Hamlet which I have analysed, is no mere plaster added to a framework of more stable qualities. Eloquence is simply the end of art, and is thus its essence. Even the poorest art is eloquent, but in a sorry manner, with less intensity, until this aspect is obscured by others fattening upon its leanness. Eloquence is not showiness; it is, rather, the result of that desire in the artist to make a work perfect by adapting it in every minute detail to the racial appetites. The distinction between the psychology of information and the psychology of form involves a definition of aesthetic truth. It is here precisely, to combat the deflection which the strength of science has caused to our tastes, that we must examine the essential breach between scientific and artistic truth. Truth in art is not the discovery of facts, not an addition to human knowledge in the scientific sense of the word.' It is, rather, the exercise of human 1 One of the most striking examples of the encroachment of scientific truth into art is the doctrine of "truth by distortion," whereby one aspect of an object is suppressed the better to emphasize some other aspect; this is, obviously, an attempt to indicate by art some fact of knowledge, to make some implicit aspect of an object as explicit as one can by means of the comparatively dumb method of art (dumb, that is, as compared to the perfect case with which science can indicate its discoveries). Yet science has already made discoveries in the realm of this "factual truth,” this "truth by distortion” which must put to shame any artist who relies on such matter for his effects. Consider, for instance, the motion-picture of a man vaulting. By photographing this process very rapidly, and running the reel very slowly, one has upon the screen the most striking set of factual truths to aid in our understanding of an athlete vaulting. Here, at our leisure, we can observe the contortions of four legs, a head, and a butt. This squirming thing we saw upon the screen showed us an infinity of factual truths anent the balances of an athlete vaulting. We can, from this, observe the marvellous system of balancing which the body provides for itself in the adjustments of moving. Yet, so far as KENNETH BURKE 45 a n propriety, the formulation of symbols which rigidify our sense of poise and rhythm. Artistic truth is the externalization of taste. I sometimes wonder, for instance, whether the “artificial” speech of John Lyly might perhaps be "truer” than the revelations of Dos- toevsky. Certainly at its best, in its feeling for a statement which returns upon itself, which attempts the systole to a diastole, it could be much truer than Dostoevsky. And if it is not, it fails not through a mistake of Lyly's aesthetic, but because Lyly was a man poor in character whereas Dostoevsky was rich and complex. When Swift, making the women of Brobdingnag enormous, de- duces from this discrepancy between their size and Gulliver's that Gulliver could sit astride their nipples, he has written something which is aesthetically true, which is, if I may be pardoned, pro- foundly “proper,” as correct in its Euclidean deduction as any corollary in geometry. Given the companions of Ulysses in the cave of Polyphemus, it is true that they would escape clinging to the bellies of the herd let out to pasture. St Ambrose, detailing the habits of God's creatures, and drawing from them moral maxims for the good of mankind, St Ambrose in his limping natural history rich in scientific inaccuracies that are at the very heart of emotional rightness, St Ambrose writes “Of night-birds, especially of the nightingale which hatches her eggs by song; of the owl, the bat, and the cock at cock-crow; in what wise these may apply to the guidance of our habits,” and in the sheer right- ness of that programme there is the truth of art. In introducing this talk of night-birds, after many pages devoted to other of God's creatures, he says, of the act itself; displaying everreen was not ar “What now! While we have been talking, you will notice how the aesthetic truth is concerned, this on the screen was not an athlete, but a squirming thing, a horror, displaying every fact of vaulting except the exhilaration of the act itself. 2 The procedure of science involves the elimination of taste, employing as a substitute the corrective norm of the pragmatic test, the empirical experi- ment, which is entirely intellectual. Those who oppose the “intellectual- ism” of critics like Matthew Arnold are involved in an hilarious blunder, for Arnold's entire approach to the appreciation of art is through delica- cies of taste intensified to the extent almost of squeamishness. 8 As for instance, the "conceit” of Endymion's awakening, when he forgets his own name, yet recalls that of his beloved. 86 THOSE OF LUCIFER the birds of night have already started fluttering about you, and, in this same fact of warning us to leave off with our discussion, suggest thereby a further topic”- and this seems to me to contain the best wisdom of which the human frame is capable, an address, a discourse, which can make our material life seem blatant almost to the point of despair. And when the cock crows, and the thief abandons his traps, and the sun lights up, and we are in every way called back to God by the well- meaning admonition of this bird, here the very blindnesses of re- ligion become the deepest truths of art. THOSE OF LUCIFER BY MALCOLM COWLEY Out of an empty sky the dust of hours a word was spoken and a folk obeyed an island uttered incandescent towers like frozen simultaneous hymns to trade Here, in their lonely multitude of powers thrones, virtues, archangelic cavalcade they rise proclaiming Sea and sky are ours and yours O man the shadow of our shade Or did a poet crazed with dignity rear them upon an island to prolong his furious contempt for sky and sea re To what emaciated hands belong these index fingers of infinity O towers of intolerable song Courtesy of the Weyhe Gallery PORTRAIT. BY VINCENT CANADÈ Courtesy of the Weyhe Gallery LANDSCAPE WITH POPLARS. BY VINCENT CANADÈ THE FIELD OF MUSTARD BY A. E. COPPARD N a windy afternoon in November they were gathering kin- dling in the Black Wood—Dinah Lock, Amy Hardwick, and Rose Olliver—three sere disvirgined women from Pollock's Cross. Mrs Lock wore clothes of dull butcher's blue, with a short jacket that affirmed her plumpness, but Rose and Amy had on long grey ulsters. All of them were about forty years old, and the wind and twigs had tousled their gaunt locks for none had a hat upon her head. They did not go far beyond the margin of the wood, for the forest ahead of them swept high over a hill and was gloomy; behind them the slim trunks of beech, set in a sweet ruin of leaf hoar and scattered, and green briar nimbly fluttering, made a sort of palisade against the light of the open, which was grey, and a wide field of mustard which was yellow. The three woman peered up into the trees for dead branches, and when they found any, Dinah Lock, the vivacious woman full of shrill laughter, with a bosom as massive as her haunches, would heave up a rope with an iron bolt tied to one end. The bolted end would twine itself around the dead branch, the three women would tug, and after a sharp crack the quarry would fall; as often as not the women would topple over too. By and by they met an old hedger with a round belly belted low, and thin legs tied at each knee, who told them the time by his ancient watch, a stout timepiece which the women sportively admired. “Come Christmas I'll have me a watch like that!” Mrs Lock called out. The old man looked a little dazed as he fumblingly replaced his chronometer. "I will,” she continued, “if the Lord spares me and the pig don't pine.” "You ... you don't know what you're talking about,” he said. “That watch was my uncle's watch.” “Who was he? I'd like one like it.” "Was a sergeant-major in the lancers, fought under Sir Garnet Wolseley, and it was given to him." "What for?" The hedger stopped and turned on them: “Doing of his duty.” ICO 48 THE FIELD OF MUSTARD ne YC "That all ?” cried Dinah Lock. "Well, I never got no watch for that a-much. Do you know what I see when I went to Lon- don? I see'd a watch in a bowl of water, it was glass, and there was a fish swimming round it ...". "I don't believe it.” “There was a fish swimming round it. ..." “I tell you I don't believe it. ..." “And the little hand was going on like Clackford Mill. That's the sort of watch I'll have me; none of your Sir Garney Wolsey's!" "He was a noble Christian man, that was.” “Ah! I suppose he slept wid Jesus?" yawped Dinah. "No, he didn't," the old man disdainfully spluttered. "He never did. What a God's the matter wid ye?” Dinah cackled with laughter. “Pah!” he cried, going away, “Great fat thing! Can't tell your guts from your elbows." Fifty yards further on he turned and shouted some obscenity back at them, but they did not heed him; they had begun to make three faggots of the wood they had collected, so he put his fingers to his nose at them and shambled out to the road. By the time Rose and Dinah were ready Amy Hardwick, a small slow silent woman, had not finished bundling her faggot together. "Come on, Amy," urged Rose. "Come on," Dinah said. “All right, wait a minute,” she replied listlessly. "O God, that's death!” cried Dinah Lock, and heaving a great faggot to her shoulders she trudged off followed by Rose with a like burden. Soon they were out of the wood, and crossing a highway they entered a footpath that strayed in a diagonal wriggle to the far corner of the field of mustard. In silence they journeyed until they came to that far corner, where there was a hedged bank. Here they flung their faggots down and sat upon them to wait for Amy Hardwick. In front of them lay the field they had crossed, a sour scent ris- ing faintly from its yellow blooms that quivered in the wind. Day was dull, the air chill, and the place most solitary. Beyond the field of mustard the eye could see little but forest. There were hills there, a vast curving trunk, but the Black Wood heaved itself effortlessly upon them and lay like a dark pall over the outline of a corpse. Huge and gloomy, the purple woods draped vere A. E. COPPARD 49 SOUT it all completely. A white necklace of a road curved below, where a score of telegraph poles, each crossed with a multitude of white florets, were dwarfed by the hugeness to effigies that resembled hyacinths. Dinah Lock gazed upon this scene whose melancholy, and not its grandeur, had suddenly invaded her; with elbows sunk in her fat thighs, and nursing her cheeks in her hands, she puffed the gloomy air, saying: "O God, cradle and grave is all there is for we.” "Where's Amy got to?" asked Rose. "I could never make a companion of her, you know," Dinah declared. "Nor I,” said Rose, “she's too sour and slow.” "Her disposition's too serious. Of course, your friends are never what you want them to be, Rose. Sometimes they're better-most often they're worse. But it's such a mercy to have a friend at all; I like you, Rose; I wish you was a man.” "I might just as well ha' been,” returned the other woman. ter; but if you had a tidy little family like me you'd wish you hadn't got 'em.” "And if you'd never had 'em you'd ha' wished you had.” "Rose, that's the cussedness of nature, it makes a mock of you, I don't believe it's the Almighty at all, Rose. I'm sure it's the devil, Rose. Dear heart, my corn's a-giving me what-for; I won- der what that bodes?” “It's restless weather,” said Rose. She was dark, tall, and not unbeautiful still, though her skin was harsh and her limbs angular. “Get another month or two over—there's so many of these long dreary hours.” "Ah, your time's too long, or it's too short, or it's just right, but you're too old. Cradle and grave's my portion. Fat old thing! he called me." Dinah's brown hair was ruffled across her pleasant face and she looked a little forlorn, but corpulence dispossessed her of tragedy. “I be thin enough a-summertimes for I lives light and sweats like a bridesmaid, but winters I'm fat as a hog." "What all have you to grumble at then?” asked Rose, who had slid to the ground and lay on her stomach staring up at her friend. "My heart's young, Rose.” “You've your husband.” “He's no man at all since he was ill. A long time ill, he was. Over o 5o THE FIELD OF MUSTARD When he coughed, you know, his insides come up out of him like coffee grouts. Can you ever understand the meaning of that? Coffee! I'm growing old, but my heart's young.” “So is mine, too; but you got a family, four children grown or growing.” Rose had snapped off a sprig of the mustard flower and was pressing and pulling the bloom in and out of her mouth. “I've none, and never will have.” Suddenly she sat up, fumbled in her pocket, and produced her purse. She slipped the elastic band from it and it gaped open. There were a few coins there and a scrap of paper folded. Rose took out the paper and smoothed it open under Dinah's curious gaze. "I found something lying about at home the other day, and I cut this bit out of it.” In soft tones she began to read: “The day was void, vapid; time itself seemed empty. Come evening it rained softly. I sat by my fire turning over the leaves of a book, and I was dejected, until I came upon a little old- fashioned engraving at the bottom of a page. It imaged a pro- cession of some angelic children in a garden, little placidly-naked substantial babes, with tiny bird-wings. One carried a bow, others a horn of plenty, or a hamper of fruit, or a set of reed-pipes. They were garlanded and full of grave joys. And at the sight of them a strange bliss flowed into me such as I had never known, and I thought this world was all a garden, though its light was hidden and its children not yet born.” Rose did not fold the paper up, she crushed it in her hand and lay down again without a word. "Huh, I tell you, Rose, a family's a torment. I never wanted mine. God love, Rose, I'd lay down my life for 'em; I'd cut my- self into fourpenny pieces so they shouldn't come to harm; if one of 'em was to die I'd sorrow to my grave. But I know, I know, I know I never wanted 'em, they were not for me, I was just an excuse for their blundering into the world. Somehow I've been duped, and every woman born is duped so, one ways or another in the end. I had my sport with my man, but I ought never to have married. Now I'd love to begin all over again, and as God's my maker, if it weren't for those children, I'd be gone off out into the world again to-morrow, Rose. But I dunno what 'ud become o'me." A. E. COPPARD 51 o man The wind blew strongly athwart the yellow field, and the odour of mustard rushed upon the brooding women. Protestingly the breeze flung itself upon the forest; there was a gliding cry among the rocking pinions as of some lost wave seeking a forgotten shore. The angular faggot under Dinah Lock had begun to vex her; she too sank to the ground and lay beside Rose Olliver, who asked: “And what 'ud become of your old man?” For a few moments Dinah Lock paused. She, too, took a sprig of the mustard and fondled it with her lips. "He's no man now, the illness feebled him, and the virtue's gone; no man at all since two years, and bald as a piece of cheese-I like a hairy man, like ... do you remember Rufus Blackthorn, used to be gamekeeper here?” Rose stopped playing with her flower. "Yes, I knew Rufus Blackthorn." "A fine bold man that was! Never another like him hereabouts, nor in England neither; not in the whole world—though I've heard some queer talk of those foreigners, Australians, Chinymen. Well!" "Well?” said Rose. "He was a devil.” Dinah Lock began to whisper. “A perfect devil; I can't say no fairer than that, I wish I could, but I can't.” "O come,” protested Rose, “he was a kind man. He'd never see anybody want for a thing.” "No," there was playful scorn in Dinah's voice, “he'd shut his eyes first!" “Not to a woman he wouldn't, Dinah.” “Ah! Well—perhaps—he was good to women.” “I could tell you things as would surprise you,” murmured Rose. “You! But—well—no, no. I could tell you things as you wouldn't believe. Me and Rufus! We was—0 my—yes!” "He was handsome.” "Oh, a pretty man!” Dinah acceded warmly. "Black as coal and bold as a fox. I'd been married nigh on ten years when he first set foot in these parts. I'd got three children then. He used to give me a saucy word whenever he saw me, for I liked him and he knew it. One Whitsun Monday I was home all alone, the children were gone somewheres, and Tom was away boozing. I was putting some plants in our garden-I loved a good flower in 52 THE FIELD OF MUSTARD evo those days—I wish the world was all a garden, but now my Tom he digs 'em up, digs everything up proper and never puts 'em ba Why, we had a crocus, once! And as I was doing that planting someone walked by the garden, in such a hurry. I looked up and there was Rufus, all dressed up to the nines, and something made me call out to him. Where be you off to in that flaming hurry,' I says. “Going to a wedding,' says he. 'Shall I come with 'ee?' I says. “Ah yes,' he says, very glad, “but hurry up for I be sharp set and all.' So I run in-a-doors and popped on my things and off we went to Jim Pickering's wedding over at Clackford Mill. When Jim brought the bride home from church that Rufus got hold of a gun and fired it off up chimney, and down come soot, the bushels of it! All over the room, and a chimney pot burst and rattled down the tiles into a prambulator. What a rumbullion that was! But no one got angry—there was plenty of drink and we danced all the afternoon. Then we come home together again through the woods. O Lord—I said to myself—I shan't come out with you ever again, and that's what I said to Rufus Blackthorn. But I did, you know! I woke up in bed that night and the moon shone on me dreadful—I thought the place was afire. But there was Tom snoring, and I lay and thought of me and Rufus in the wood, till I could have jumped out into the moonlight, stark, and flown over the chimney. I didn't sleep any more. And I saw Rufus the next night, and the night after that, often, often. When- ever I went out I left Tom the cupboardful—that's all he troubled about. I was mad after Rufus, and while that caper was on I couldn't love my husband. No.” “No?” queried Rose. "Well, I pretended I was ill, and I took my young Katey to sleep with me, and give Tom her bed. He didn't seem to mind, but after a while I found he was gallavanting after other women. Course, I soon put a stopper on that. And then-what do you think? Bless me if Rufus weren't up to the same tricks! Deep as the sea, that man. Faithless, you know, but such a bold one.” Rose lay silent, plucking wisps of grass; there was a wry smile on her face. “Did ever he tell you the story of the man who was drowned ?” she asked at length. Dinah shook her head. Rose continued. “Before he came here he was keeper over in that Oxfordshire, where A. E. COPPARD 53 the river goes right through the woods, and he slept in a boathouse moored to the bank. Some gentleman was drowned near there, an accident it was, but they couldn't find the body. So they offered a reward of ten pounds for it to be found ..." “Ten, ten pounds!”. “Yes. Well all the watermen said the body wouldn't come up for ten days ..." "No more they do." "It didn't. And so late one night-it was moonlight-some men in a boat kept on hauling and poking round the house where Rufus was, and he heard 'em say 'It must be here, it must be here,' and Rufus shouts out to them, 'Course he's here! I got him in bed with me!" "Aw!” chuckled Dinah. “Yes, and next day he got the ten pounds, because he had found the body and hidden it away." "Feared nothing,” said Dinah, “nothing at all, he'd have been rude to Satan. But he was very delicate with his hands, sewing and things like that. I used to say to him, 'Come let me mend your coat,' or whatever it was, but he never would, always did such things of himself. 'I don't allow no female to patch my clothes,' he'd say, “'cos they works with a red-hot needle and a burning thread.' And he used to make fine little slippers, out of reeds." “Yes,” Rose concurred, “he made me a pair.” "You!" Dinah cried. “What-were you ... ?" Rose turned her head away. “We was all cheap to him," she said softly, “cheap as old rags; we was like chaff before him.” Dinah Lock lay still, very still, ruminating; but whether in old grief or new rancour Rose was not aware, and she probed no fur- ther. Both were quiet, voiceless, recalling the past delirium. They shivered, but did not rise. The wind increased in the forest, its hoarse breath sorrowed in the yellow field, and swift masses of cloud flowed and twirled in a sky without end and full of gloom. "Hallo!” cried a voice, and there was Amy beside them, with a faggot almost overwhelming her. "Shan't stop now,” she said, "for I've got this faggot perched just right, and I shouldn't ever get it up again. I found a shilling in the 'ood, you," she continued shrilly and gleefully. “Come along to my house after tea and we'll have a quart of stout.” O 54 THE FIELD OF MUSTARD “A shilling, Amy!” cried Rose. “Yes,” called Mrs Hardwick, trudging steadily on. “I tried to find the fellow to it, but no more luck. Come and wet it after tea!” CU "Rose,” said Dinah, “come on.” She and Rose with much cir- cumstance heaved up their faggots and tottered after, but by then Amy was turned out of sight down the little lane to Pollock's Cross. "Your children will be home,” said Rose as they went along, "they'll be looking out for you." "Ah, they'll want their bellies filling!” "It must be lovely a-winter's nights, you setting round your fire with 'em, telling tales, and brushing their hair.” "Ain't you got a fire of your own indoors,” grumbled Dinah. “Yes.” “Well, why don't you set by it then! Dinah's faggot caught the briars of a hedge that overhung, and she tilted round with a mild oath. A covey of partridges feeding beyond scurried away with ruckling cries. One foolish bird dashed into the telegraph wires and dropped dead. “They're good children, Dinah, yours are. And they make you a valentine, and give you a ribbon on your birthday, I expect?” "They're naught but a racket from cockcrow till the old man snores—and then it's worse!” “Oh, but the creatures, Dinah!” "You . . . you got your quiet trim house, and only your man to look after, a kind man, and you'll set with him in the evenings and play your dominoes or your draughts, and he'll look at you- the nice man-over the board, and stroke your hand now and again.” The wind hustled the two women closer together, and as they stumbled under their burdens Dinah Lock stretched out a hand and touched the other woman's arm. "I like you, Rose, I wish you was a man.” Rose did not reply. Again they were quiet, voiceless, and thus in fading light they came to their homes. But how windy, dis- possessed, and ravaged, roved the darkening world! Clouds were borne frantically across the heavens, as if in a rout of battle, and the lovely earth seemed to sigh in grief at some calamity all un- known to men. dalam PORTRAIT. BY EGON SCHIELE INDON A DRAWING. BY EGON SCHIELE A DRAWING. BY EGON SCHIELE PARIS LETTER June, 1925 an SPENT ten days in Russia last month, and this will be, after I a fashion, a Moscow letter. Modern Russia is a kind of American Asia. It is certainly no longer Europe. Besides, the word Eurasia, to designate a new continent, born after the deluge, is in fashion there. Among the elementary facts which must be told at the start: There is no closer relation between the capitalist world and the communist world than there is between day and night. There are boots and clothing typically communist just as there are looks, voices, and gestures typically capitalist. The man who works to earn money, to pass it on to his children, to invest it or spend it as he likes, obviously does not have the same eye, nor within that eye the same thoughts, as the man who labours for a daily wage. Let this be said with all impartiality. A story- teller must be engaged by all the differences he notes upon the earth, since his work grows so much the richer for them. Here, then, are some reflections on Russia, written down as they oc- curred-haphazard. I have observed that the United States enjoys great prestige in Russia, a prestige of modern power and of material order. Next, France, in the realm of the arts, is the object of a lively attention on the part of the Soviets. Certainly, the cultivated and bourgeois generations for which French was a second language have disap- peared; but Paris, to the Soviet painters and musicians, remains nevertheless the great city for the initiation of talent. The most interesting art in Russia appears to me to be sculp- ture. In painting, there is the good and the very bad. But West- ern painting has progressed since 1914 in a manner which the Russians seem to ignore, for they are not yet beyond cubism. Picasso, Braque, Léger are best known by work of theirs which dates from 1914. The old private collections, like those of the two mill-owners of Moscow, Morosov and Stchukine, known under the name of Museums of Occidental Painting, contain the essen- tials (except Manet) of French art since 1870. Our Luxembourg 56 PARIS LETTER ness Museum cannot be compared with them in distinction and rich- ness. The collections of the Hermitage, at Leningrad, are in a perfect state of preservation, enriched by the collections of the Czar and the grand dukes, especially in porcelains, pottery, and jewellery; at Moscow the Museum of Gifts to the Emperor, learnedly directed by M Ivanoff, contains primitive Russian and Byzantine textiles of perfect freshness, as well as Asiatic arms of incomparable value. Finally, the restorations of architecture, and particularly of frescos and icons, are undertaken with the most modern technique and the most infallible taste. The icons cease to be bits of charcoal smudged by tapers, and become admirable miniatures worthy of the Persians. Almost everywhere in the Kremlin, beneath the oil wash of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, there are frescos of the greatest beauty dating from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The Museums are much frequented by a population very eager for instruction, and it is difficult to get about in them on a Sunday. The art of the theatre has preserved all its prestige in Soviet Russia. This is well known. All the Russians go to the theatre several times a week. The shows are widely varied_from the Grand Opera of Moscow, where the ballet is remarkable, to the advanced theatres, like that of Meyerhold, or the theatres of propaganda, like that of the Revolution or the Atheist Theatre (The Kamerny Theatre is too well known in New York for me to speak of it); but they do not differ perceptibly from those one can see at Paris or at Milan. Theatrical technique continues to parallel that of Reinhardt and of Craig. Scenes on different planes, lighting with search-lights or tubes, simultaneous scenes, the influence of the motion picture-all is made use of without one's recoiling before any audacity. The plays themselves ap- peared to me second-rate. Many adaptations from the French, or modernized classical revivals. The actors are usually excellent, or much superior to Western actors in equipment, intensity of per- formance, a feeling for their rôles, and their skill at make-up. The houses are always full. No one dresses. The women wear the blouse and scarf of the lower classes, the men sweaters or khaki shirts. They listen attentively, seldom applaud, and do not laugh. All this public is very young. There are hardly any old PAUL MORAND people in Russia. I have often asked where the old people have gone. No one is able to answer me. Political life, which begins at eighteen, is prepared for in various technical classes, where the attention is devoted to the trades, the applied arts, military life, and—always-propaganda. One can say that disinterested art, art considered as an occupation of leisure, already condemned by the sociological schools of our countries, is in Russia considered as an appendage of bourgeois culture and irrevocably condemned. Every artist must serve the cause of the proletariate. An exceed- ingly strict censorship of works of art and literature allows no latitude in this respect. I have been told that the utilization of cubism by the ruling Bolshevists, which was sufficiently accentuated in the first periods of the Revolution, is diminishing perceptibly. Nevertheless, there still exist trains of propaganda painted by hand, and also anti-religious propaganda in the street-cars. The results of the latter must be fruitful, for the churches are empty; at least, those were which I saw in the towns. The arts of the poster, of the motion picture, and of photography have reached a high degree of perfection. Russian photographic trickeries are astounding in their variety and invention. I have not space in which to speak of poetry and the novel. I shall try to speak of them at another time. In spite of great isolated talents, I think one can say that the Russian Revolution, as important an event in the history of the world as the French Revolution or the Reformation, has not yet yielded its harvest in art and literature. Yet there is talk of financial credit to the Soviets; is it not fitting, in this respect, to extend them moral credit also, and to be contented to wait ? My last letter to The Dial, in answer to the New York World, has brought me a reply from Mr Ernest Boyd. Nothing is more tiresome than polemic: readers are quick to forget what it is about, and they are not wrong. In short, the severity of Mr Ernest Boyd, whose antipathy for all post-war literature is well known, has now, after his encounter with Larbaud, been trained upon me. That Mr Boyd scarcely mentions Joyce in the first edition of his Ireland's Literary Renaissance, and considers him, as well as Proust, as a scandalous and second-rate writer, is his right and not 58 PARIS LETTER my quarrel. But when Mr Boyd, who prides himself on a pro- found knowledge of our literature, accuses me of devoting a dis- proportionate part of my articles in The Dial to the books of the Nouvelle Revue Française, I will reply that it is there, all the same, that most of the young talent is to be found—and that foreigners, particularly our most cultivated and attentive neigh- bours, the Germans, the Belgians, and the Swiss, do not deceive themselves in this matter (to the extent that certain libraries of Zurich and Brussels have no other books but those of the Nouvelle Revue Française, a periodical to which Mr Boyd appears to me, since February last, to be the best contributor. As for the personal argument which gives the impression that I reserve my praises for my own publisher, it is not in very good taste; and I may add that it is false, for I left the Nouvelle Revue Française two years ago. I recall moreover that the attacks of the journalist Béraud upon the Nouvelle Revue Française, to which Mr Boyd makes allusion as a present fact, go back equally more than two years, and that there is no longer any discussion of them in Paris. To be a prophet outside one's own country and literature is excellent, but one must at least keep up with the news. Mr Boyd is not so up-to-date as he thinks. ews. dris. I will cite among the new books, first of all (to enrage Mr Boyd) L'Honorable Partie de Campagne, by M Thomas Raucat, published by the Nouvelle Revue Française—the charming adven- ture of a Frenchman in Japan. By its freshness (it is a first book) and its knowledge of Japanese customs, it has achieved for the moment, a most lively success in Paris. The Jewish vogue to which I have previously drawn attention continues; M Pierre Benoit gives us an interesting Jewish novel in Le Puits de Jacob, the scene of which is laid in Palestine. M François Mauriac, in Le Désert de l'Amour, has written a novel and beautiful romance, in a grave and solemn tone, on the drama of a provincial French family. The poet Blaise Cendrars has published L'Or, an American story which is very remarkable. I note the first appearance of a young writer, M Henry Poulaille, in Ils Etaient Quatre, which will make him talked about. The publisher Kra issues, in addition to L'Orgie à St Pétersbourg, by ve PAUL MORAND 59 André Salmon, a very remarkable Anthologie de la Jeune Poésie Française. We observe with pleasure the increasing number of German artists and writers in Paris. After Fritz von Unruh, here are Hof- mannsthal and Annette Kolb. We have among us Rainer Maria Rilke, the greatest contemporary German lyric poet. It is to be hoped that this reconciliation between good Europeans is the prel- ude to normal and fertile intellectual relations between France and Germany, countries separated, after all, by nothing funda- mental in the realm of beauty and of truth. Paul MORAND BOOK REVIEWS THE DEAD “NOVEL” LUCIENNE. By Jules Romains. Translated by Waldo Frank. 12mo. 235 pages. Boni and Live- right. $2.50. IT has been, I think, a little too often and too lightly said, in 1 the last few years, that the novel, as a literary form, is about to be, or ought to be, or has been, exploded. When Mr Joyce's Ulysses appeared there was a particularly loud chorus of this sort. “What now,” cried the joyful critics, “is left of the novel? What now is left of naturalism?” It was suggested that no realistic novelist in his senses would presume, after a careful scrutiny of giant Leopold, to try his hand again at any mere painting of a full-length portrait. Well, giant Leopold is an astounding phe- nomenon, and Ulysses is a magnificent book; but I do not see why or how this should interdict the writing of novels. Is it urged that we must all (if indeed henceforth we use prose narrative at all) write satirical epics four hundred thousand words long, and that no other "form" can be, for the modern consciousness, adequate? The view is a little extreme. It is one thing to note a con- temporary disposition to experiment with the form and aim of prose narrative; and quite another to pronounce the novel dead. To those young critics who are always in such an Elizabethan hurry to make corpses and rush them off the stage, it might well be observed that the novel can with difficulty be called dead till we know what it is. What is it that Ulysses has slain? Is it The Old Wives' Tale? or Sons and Lovers? or The Death of a Nobody? or L'Ile des Pingouins? or Lord Jim? or The Brook Kerith? Per- haps our young critic had something less recent in mind. Perhaps he was thinking of such outworn and unpopular books as The Wings of the Dove or The Awkward Age. Or was it the old- fashioned works of Dostoevsky? But perhaps none of these are nou CONRAD AIKEN 61 quite what he meant by the novel. It may have been Thackeray or Dickens or Trollope; it may have been Fielding. Who knows? It may even have been Oroonoko or Don Quixote or The Golden Ass. The truth is, the term novel is practically useless as a definition -it marks no limits. The works just mentioned are all novels in the sense that they all, to some degree, purport to tell a story about fictitious persons; but beyond that, the likeness becomes faint. There are no canons for the novel. The novelist, so long as he remains interesting, can do what he likes. How much he can dispense, for example, with mere story, or narrative speed, Tristram Shandy and Ulysses equally and diversely testify. He can choose the orderly, precise, detached synthesis of Madame Bovary, or the “other world” beauty, the absolute music, of The Golden Bowl and The Idiot. Whatever mode he chooses he will impregnate deeply, if he is successful, with his own character. The novel is the novelist's inordinate and copious lyric: he explores himself, and sings while he explores, like the grave-digger. And what we get at, in all this, is simply the fact that at any given moment a hundred novels might be written, each of them in its way as indi- vidual as Ulysses, each as much a departure from the common denominator, and each therefore a "fatal blow” to the “novel.” Why not? Here, for example, is M Romains' Lucienne. It goes its own way, quite unruffled. It is not a great novel-it is not aimed at greatness. It is deliberately kept small, minor, and ex- quisite. Except for references to "interior monologue,” one would not guess that it was written in the shadow of so large a natural object as Leopold Bloom. Mr Waldo Frank, in the excellent preface to his excellent (but sometimes too mannered) translation, remarks that it belongs to the French "mystic” tradition; but this is pretty vague; and for the most part Lucienne shows no striking affinities with any particular tradition; its affinities are too general and dispersed. It does not date, like M Romains' Death of a Nobody. The latter, with its lightly conscious exploitation of cer- tain very modern scientific or pseudo-scientific ideas about crowd behaviour, belongs to its decade. It is also a more obviously original variation on, or departure from, the "story" tradition of the novel. Lucienne deviates less from—let us say loosely—the Turgenev tradition; it is, in essentials, an orderly and simple love- 62 THE DEAD “NOVEL” story. But it is as good an example as one could find of the fact that no tradition can ever be dead. Mr Frank speaks of the "terror and mystery" of M Romains' "vision,” and of his doctrine of unanimisme; the latter he calls a "mystical monism,” and declares to be “one of the truly great triumphs of modern literary art." Can a doctrine be said to be a triumph of literary art? This is not very precise, and I think also that Mr Frank takes unanimisme a shade too seriously. The French are very fond of selecting one little corner of a familiar truth, giving it a new name with a scientific tinge, and thus start- ing a "new movement.” A few good works may result from this naked application of an idea (like a recipe) and The Death of a Nobody is an exception of that sort. But I suspect that unan- imisme is little more than a trade-mark. One regrets that so able a writer as M Romains should find necessary that kind of mytho- poeia. In Lucienne, at all events, the unanimisme, or the "terror and mystery" of the “mystical monism,” amount simply to the fact that M Romains tells a love-story skilfully and directly, with a very exceptional degree of poetic insight and intensity. He is a first-rate psychologist; and his analysis, or synthesis, of mood, his awareness of all the fleeting sensory phenomena that precede or accompany it, as well as the hidden counterpoint of association, is often quite extraordinary. Without once stepping outside of Lucienne's mind, or once permitting Lucienne herself to be ex- plicitly conscious on the point, he gives us a young woman who is in that ecstatic state of passage from introversion to extraversion which marks (though in the absence of an object) the condition of "being about to fall in love." This is done with great beauty, and so is the account of Lucienne's slow interfusion with the Barbelenet family: the difference of impact is, with each per- sonality, subtly and exquisitely discovered. The description of the first meeting is, indeed, masterly. Looking back on that scene, after one has finished the book, one would swear that it consisted entirely of dialogue, so distinctly does one hear the echo of voices and see the whole shape and colour of the family discourse. Never- theless, there are only two brief speeches in the scene. M Romains does the thing simply by going under the dialogue, and giving the successive affective responses of his heroine. It will be said, rightly, that there is nothing new in this. The 20 CONRAD AIKEN 63 point to be emphasized is that M Romains makes this traditional method peculiarly his own. The moments, the scenes—or what James called the "joints”-of his story are very few, very simple. They are not calculated for any largeness of effect. They are suffi- cient, because M Romains brings to each of them an absorbed and exquisite consciousness. He occupies every corner of his heroine's awareness—and if he endows her sometimes with an awareness that amounts to genius, nevertheless he never makes her monologue improbable. The real beauty of the story is precisely in this flow- ing consciousness. Its quality is peculiarly exciting; it is intense and simple, it is at the same time deep and lucid; one is aston- ished that in a narrative stream so limpid, so much should be given. One has the sensation, now and then, of falling through plane below plane of reality, and of discovering new subliminal hierarchies in the order of things. The first meet- ing with the Barbelenets is a fine example of this quality of imagination, but even finer are the descriptions of the first music lesson and the playing of the duet. These passages, in sheer poetic intensity and immersion in the actual, are the best in the book, and rival, if they do not surpass, the scene in the diligence in The Death of a Nobody. The character, the life, of Marthe's hands is found with a prescience that makes one almost uncomfortable. And the subterranean mingling of the two personalities playing the duet is of that sharpness and richness in analysis of mood and sensation that gives one the illusion of having discovered a new mode of apprehension. That, of course, is a quality for which one goes to poetry. M Romains is above all a poet, and it is primarily for his lyric intensity of consciousness that one enjoys him. And we can also be grateful to him for reminding us that the "novel" is far from dead when the simplest of stories can thus, by a very slight altera- tion in the angle of light, become a new experience. CONRAD AIKEN THE NOTORIOUS STEPHEN BURROUGHS MEMOIRS OF The Notorious STEPHEN BURROUGHS of New HAMPSHIRE. With a Preface by Robert Frost. Svo. 367 pages. Lincoln Mac Veagh: The Dial Press. $4. M HE deadliest blight of Puritanism was its anxiety to save 1 its soul at all costs, and meanwhile to appear respectable in the eyes of its neighbours. The genius of Stephen Burroughs resides in his inclusion of these wholly personal ambitions in his general contempt for the prejudices current in his day. Born at Hanover, New Hampshire, about 1762, the son of a Presby- terian minister, he turned out a runaway, a pantheist, a marauder of bee-hives, a jailbird, a counterfeiter, a seducer, a hypocritical preacher, a vexation to the community and to God's indulgence: and ended, instead of on the gallows, in the comfortable bosom of the Holy Catholic Church. He was the scandal of his time, and if he indeed achieved redemption at the last, it may be sur- mised that his repentant soul winging to the Judgement Seat was greeted with more apprehension than jubilation by those sober New England souls that had preceded it within the Pearly Gates. Yet Stephen Burroughs, as he is projected after a century and a half against the milieu into which he was born, is seen to have been an original and daring spirit, a perfectly logical product of his environment, and in a sense a bitterly significant clinical case in American character. He was, moreover, amusing, irrepressibly vigorous, strangely thwarted, and not without nobility; and our appreciation of this perverse medley which was a man ascends, in the reading of his confessions, as the wrath of the good folk of New England becomes tumultuous against him and as his hopes of the Calvinist Paradise become remote. We have said that Stephen Burroughs was “strangely thwarted” in life, and in this malevolent circumstance we have the key to his perverse and extraordinary character. Born under a more indulgent star, in a more favourable land, he might have become great. But in any case he would have been a public nuisance, WILLLIAM A. DRAKE 65 for he was a born impostor, an instinctive protestant, an incorri- gible searcher-out of trouble, a "naïve hypocrite.” A more liberal society would have known better how to assimilate his prodigious energies, his inexhaustible invention, his passion for movement and excitement. But Puritan New England afforded him no out- let. “I was educated in all the rigour of that order (Presby- terianism), which illy suited my volatile, impatient temper of mind; this being the case, my first entrance on the stage of life was by no means agreeable.” At the age of fourteen he twice enlisted with the Revolutionary army, and twice his father obtained his discharge: the only occasion he had to turn his mountainous spleen to public good was squandered upon Greek verbs. At six- teen, after a succession of innocent enough pranks, he was obliged to quit Dartmouth College because of his differences with the excellent Ripley. Unable to content himself at home, within a year he had run away to sea on a packet carrying letters of marque. Being a provident and ambitious lad, he had taken the precaution of providing himself with an assortment of simple specifics, the curative properties of each being carefully noted; so he sailed, not as the cabin-boy of romance, but as ship's surgeon. On the voyage he participated in the capture of a merchant prize and in the defeat of a British lugger, whereafter he dressed the wounds of the victims. His patients survived; nevertheless, having incurred the enmity of the first mate, he returned in chains and was thrown into prison on a false charge. Thus Stephen Burroughs' acquaintance with adversity was begun. His was a character that irritated, that rubbed the com- munity against the grain; and his effrontery was beyond belief. He was possessed of a veritable genius for getting into trouble; and when he was not himself at fault, the tale-bearing animosity of his old neighbours was only too eager to pursue him and to make his offenses appear worse than they actually were. He became a school-teacher, to lose his position with public disgrace because of the theft of a bee-hive. He experienced a short and disillusion- ing love-affair with a married woman. Then, lacking a more imme- diate profession, he filched five of his father's sermons and turned preacher, only to become involved in the practice of fake alchemy and to be presently discountenanced. He tried counterfeiting, was apprehended, and spent three horrible years in prison. He was 66 THE NOTORIOUS STEPHEN BURROUGHS om tunnelled his way to liberty, but was discovered, horse-whipped, and confined in chains. He burned the jail to free himself, only to be recaptured, lashed almost to death, deprived of food and heat, and thrown into the dungeon. But even these atrocities failed to brutalize or intimidate him. Another attempt, and he was trans- ferred to the notorious military prison on Castle Island. Even in that bleak stronghold he renewed his efforts to escape; and finally, by overpowering a sentry, gained the mainland. Recap- tured, he plotted to liberate all the prisoners, overpower the gar- rison, and hold the island, which commands Boston Harbour. This plan likewise failed. More floggings. Further attempts. Floggings. Starvation. Systematic brutality. Then release, upon the expira- tion of his term. When he emerged from prison, Burroughs again attempted to live honestly. He wanted to study law or medicine: either would have been his salvation; but he had no money. He worked at manual labour and at school-teaching, and eventually married the daughter of his friendly uncle, Ebenezer Davis, of Charlton. All seemed well for a while, but again the enmity of his neighbours and of circumstance arose against him. An indiscretion committed before his marriage was magnified; he was accused of rape, and prosecuted with such excessive harshness that the very townsfolk of Worcester broke open the jail and set him at liberty. He rejoined his family on Long Island and again became a school- master, serving in that post for many years with great diligence and discretion. But he could not for ever appease the Philistines. An attempt to establish in his community a library consisting of works other than ecclesiastical proved the means of his making him- self more enemies and getting himself into further disgrace. Again the exhuming of the past. Again schemes. Again the complete abandonment of justice and the hand of every prating citizen turned against him. His school abandoned, his furniture sold out of the house where he lived with his wife and their two small children to satisfy a judgement, destitute, he left the community he had served so long, by request. Burroughs fared better in the South. He speculated in land on credit, earned a profit, was robbed, again became a schoolmaster and later a surveyor of Indian lands, opened a land office in Phila- delphia, and in that city conducted a prosperous business until he WILLIAM A. DRAKE 67 was once more ruined by the slander of his old-time neighbours. His father having advanced to a great age, he returned to Hanover, and the fortune which he had amassed in Philadelphia was sub- sequently lost through the dishonesty of his agent and his own naïveté. For three years, contentment. Here the memoir ends, but we know the rest. Presently the shadow of debt fell upon the old homestead; then ensued uneasiness and mutual crimina- tion. Burroughs went to Canada; and there being at that time no law in Canada forbidding the counterfeiting of the currency of the United States, the expatriate lived in immunity and plenty. We do not know the circumstances under which, in the fullness of his age, he embraced the Roman Catholic faith, but we can have no doubt of the sincerity of his conversion. Our last view of him is as an old man, reconciled with his God and with the angry God within his own heart, spending his last years in pious and scholarly pursuits, far from the wretched community whose im- placable resentment had driven him, hunted and homeless, through an unfriendly world. Such was the career of Stephen Burroughs, a man who might have become great under another star, the shame and reproach of his generation. A wasted life, if you will, but one full of courage and, in a deep sense, symbolical. One does not need to be told that the fault was not with this man, but with the community that bore him unwillingly and without love and pursued him through- out his life with that singularly vile, backbiting, relentless quality of hate that belongs to those whose conception of virtue is founded more upon moral cowardice and the fear of hell than upon the love and pleasure of God. Stephen Burroughs had good reason to hate his miserable neighbours; he did not: therefore he was noble. He fought a good fight against hopeless odds, without fear, with- out rancour, without vain tears. He was cast down only to rise again. The scapegoat of prejudice, the man who never had a chance, he died as he had lived, standing erect and facing the sun. His name deserves to be enrolled among the saints and heroes of American history. WILLIAM A. DRAKE DE SENECTUTE Doctor GRAESLER. By Arthur Schnitzler. Trans- lated by Paul Bloomfield Zeisler. 12mo. 180 pages. Thomas Seltzer. $2.50. M HE hero of Doctor Graesler is the antithesis of the cheery 1 person in Bunyan's couplet: "A man there was, tho' some did count him mad, The more he cast away the more he had.” nev Doctor Graesler, the genteel physician of small watering-places, never had much to cast away in the first place, and after he has cast away that which he had to the extent of some hundred- seventy-five delicately executed pages, he is completely plucked. It is partly the fault of temperament, but the real villain of Schnitzler's story is the subtle and sorry fortieth year. This is not the first time that Schnitzler has essayed the tragedy of senescence, of reluctantly turning forty, but in this short novel he has not to deal with an aging Chevalier de Seingalt, the very name and evocation of whom supplied a certain pictorial and at- mospheric advantage to Casanova's Homecoming. Doctor Graesler is just a timid, quickly used-up Don Juan who, at the outset of the story, lies comfortably enough between the two stools of his work, done ardently for its own sake, and a furtive, only half- enjoyed pleasure, consisting mainly of memories. On the surface, he is as dull and drab as any one of Ibsen's none the less internally exciting creations; the atmosphere of the story, apart from the overtones it completely lacks, is the atmosphere of Ibsen. The doctor is the archetype of honest, self-respecting, dignified medi- ocrity; the eternal man in a black coat, “always keeping his gig." And the setting of Doctor Graesler lacks even the faded charm of the settecento Italian towns in the former novel. As in Venice there is water, everywhere, but not a drop (spiritually speaking) to drink. It is a depressing little spa, placed vaguely on the Baltic Sea, and peopled by dull valetudinarians, male and female medi- CUTHBERT WRIGHT 69 ocrities unheroically growing old. Yet even in this discouraging atmosphere the delicate romanticism of the Viennese novelist mani- fests itself slyly. Over the flats and across this backwater of existence floats faintly the sound of a waltz by Strauss. Those bored chaste sands keep the impress of the cloven hoof. What a printer recently misspelled the erratic motive in modern literature trembles in the nervous and sensitized prose. It is so hard to grow old (the novelist seems to tell us so hard, and so exciting. Turn- ing forty plays strange tricks with the soul and the organism more stimulating than any which accompany the ready-made adventures of youth. Contemplate with the eyes of sympathy those dull sands, sprinkled with unromantic figures in black coats and wheeled chairs, and you discover that beneath the rigid fronts and chaste bosoms, beat the unvanquished instincts of centaurs and nymphs. This novel about an aging doctor is, in a spiritual, but none the less, real sense, the afternoon of a faun. Only like Mallarmé's faun, he chooses to go to sleep again in the clearing. A life's work has tired him prematurely, and he has become too much the man of umbrellas and coal-fires to love over- much the open air. Twice the little gods, who arrange these things somewhat in the air, offer him a supreme opportunity to live, and it is twice rejected. The first opportunity presents itself in the person of a girl, Sabine, whom he meets in a medical capacity at the spa. She is beautiful, pure, ardent, the sort of nice girl one meets in the excessively romantic pages of Mr Sinclair Lewis. He loves her; and while he is playing with the supreme hope and half- consciousness that at last he loves truly, ardently, appropriately, and is loved in return, he receives a letter in which she in effect gives herself to him: “Well then, dear Dr Graesler, dear friend, here I am writing ... to tell you that I should not take it amiss were you to ask me to be your wife. I feel a great cordial friendship for you such as I have not felt for any human being before. Not love ... not yet. But something akin to love, something which may well grow into love. During the last days, when you spoke of your impending journey, I had a strange feeling at my heart.” Here, at the point when an American novelette would probably 70 DE SENECTUTE end, Schnitzler's begins. The fear of being taken in, the eternal distrust of others, above all the distrust of self which sterilizes the activities of a good half of modern humanity, betrays the Doctor at this point. With an unerring psychology, Schnitzler shows him to us writing back that for the present he dare not accept this great gift ... in a few weeks perhaps ... that when he comes back he hopes to find everything unchanged ... · and so with a sense of frustration and sick at heart, taking the carriage and leaving the scene of his great gift-in the rain. Schnitzler is past-master at describing all the nuances which go to make up that pathological condition known in homely par- lance as "cutting off one's nose to spite one's face.” In his native town, where he goes to await letters from Sabine which never come, the little gods present Doctor Graesler with his second and last opportunity. She is a little shop-girl of humble origin and a not too immaculate past, but to the last degree en- gaging, sweet, and gay, the most enchanting creation to be found in all the author's gallery of girls. The Doctor (and the author) know all the fluctuations in that sweet tumult which accompanies an affair all the more absorbing for its ambiguity, its slight sense of guilt. ... “After a while she rose to get supper, and just then the door-bell rang. Graesler started. What could it be? Sabine ? He noticed Katharina's eyes upon him questioning but undisturbed. Too undisturbed it struck him. Perhaps she knew something about the visitor. ... A put-up job? Blackmail? ... Well, he wouldn't let himself be intimidated. It was not the first time he had been in similar danger.” After living with the shop-girl in a state of unprecedented hap- piness for over a fortnight, Graesler decides it is time to come to his senses and to take up Sabine like a book he has laid down. There is an affecting parting with the shop-girl, and he goes back. Of course Sabine, having taken his measure, will have none of him, and when, in a rage of desperation and re-stimulated love for the little proletarian, he returns to her, she is on her death-bed. So the poor aging faun has spent the last months of his awakened existence in rebounding back and forth between two experiences, both of which fail him because he had no trust in anything in life, not even in himself. The last pages of the book see him back again at the spa, descending the gangplank, a commonplace CUTHBERT WRIGHT 71 wife beside him, aging like himself, never again to see the white caps on that well-behaved sea taking the form of sirens, nor gleam- ing figures darting in and out among the dunes. The ultimate autumnal storm has effaced the cloven hoof. It is the complete triumph of Time. This little story speaks for itself, and if the reader happens to like the milieu and the people involved in it, he will have nothing with which to reproach the story. To say: This is not a good novel because aging doctors and invalids and shop-girls do not interest me, is nonsense, and yet, sometimes unconsciously, this is the attitude of nearly all readers and of a great many reviewers. It is comprehensible and human, but it is, none the less, not criti- cism. The possession of such an attitude toward contemporary fiction is what makes the large amount of current generalization about Russian or German or even American novels extremely dan- gerous and misleading. When a person says to me: I find the people of Floyd Dell or Waldo Frank or some Muscovite, stimu- lating and thrilling creations, and the people of Francis Carco and Ring Lardner and Gleason, the playwright, sordid and quotidian, I say: O do you? in the tone of one who has just heard pro- nounced a preference for boiled tripe and an utter detestation for red wine. Yet, in implying such preferences and rejections, I am putting myself wholly in their position, the position of the servant- girl who will read of nothing but duchesses. Let us then keep our preferences for social milieux and social types in the novel to ourselves, and confess that, within its limits, Doctor Graesler is a little work of capital excellence. 00 CuthbERT WRIGHT MR KREYMBORG WOOS AMERICA Troubadour. By Alfred Kreymborg. Tomo. 415 pages. Boni and Liveright. $3. ves SO ALFRED KREYMBORG deserves more than he has received, A of his country. An original craftsman in the aesthetic of the drama, he has been neglected by the American theatre of which he has more claim to be called a founder than Eugene O'Neill. A free, felicitous, versatile adventurer in the forms of the lyric, he has warmed up a public to smile upon such poets as E. E. Cummings. Wherefore one comes to the story of his life with something better than a neutrality of respect. Moreover, Mr Kreymborg's forty years have touched most of the artistic ferment of our epoch. Since the man is a poet and since his career spans what we hope will prove the preface to a significant age, we seek in Troubadour a portrait of growths and of excitements. The early chapters do not let us down. They depict by the good genre method a boyhood in the humbler levels of New York. To the reader who knows the Manhattan of the 'nineties or who cares to know it, these pages will have the appeal of a good novel in a perhaps unfortunately demoded manner: of the Victorian novel revived so well by William De Morgan, in which dark corners smile, ample old women glow, dinners smell invitingly, and young girls cast bewitching, inexplicable spells upon young boys. But Mr Kreymborg is not a novelist. One does not demand that he outdo Dickens: and properly grateful that he has done Dickens so well, one passes on. Mr Kreymborg became a poet; he edited magazines whose rise and fall belong to the history of letters; he produced plays; he trudged from town to town singing his wares at the provincial courts of club-women. He encountered in his pilgrimage other poets, other artists, a rich variance indeed of the men and women who personify America's travail to become spiritually other than it is. This is the stuff of Mr Kreymborg's life; this what one looks to be illumined in his book. Mr Kreymborg names many names, recounts many events. But - - - WALDO FRANK 73 TUI of the analyses that establish, of the distinctions that create, of the fertile pauses between impulse, act, and response whereby the values of experience emerge, his book has few. The historian of letters will find much data here. But no one will go to it to-mor- row, as do we to Saint-Simon or Goethe or Henry Adams, for the creation of the essence and temper of a day. Mr Kreymborg seems to have been inhibited by some force either inward or external, from a seizing or even a true confrontation of the rich events and of the persons who impact his world. We read of the making of magazines and anthologies, and receive no dynamic attitude whereby lists would be dimensionalized to life. We know that Mr Kreymborg wrote extraordinary plays; but of their psychic, intellectual, even social genesis we learn in his book no further. We are told that Van Wyck Brooks influenced Mr Kreymborg; but in what way, nothing: that Conrad Aiken and Louis Unter meyer were his adversaries and that the opponents argued; but for the ideas and delineated temperaments whose presence in the book would justify this published gloss to the already published poems of the authors, there is a final silence. We close Troubadour with the memory of a fine Dickensian threshold, and the sense of an admirable artist to whom the world has been not at all fair and who has been, in this book, not at all fair to himself. Did he venture perhaps too soon in medias res and in medias personas? Or is there some subtler reason for this failure as judged by the challenge of its author? Why was the book written at all? It is with the asking of such questions that Troubadour comes at the end, if obliquely, to justify its existence. We do not have in it a mature artist's response in concept and emotion to his world. But even in the book's shortcomings, we possess a document which is indeed a symptom of a significant state. Mr Kreymborg is a spiritual man whose poetry articulates a lack of contact with his world, and whose autobiography is above all an attempt to bridge that lack. Mr Kreymborg's life in com- munities of poets has not supplied him with a sufficing counter for his inability as a poet to take part in a more general social scheme. Mr Kreymborg, perhaps unconsciously moved by a persistent hunger, now woos America to take him in. There is naught impure or insincere about his suit; although 74 MR KREYMBORG WOOS AMERICA IA it may be ineffectual and assuredly has pathos. Nor is the chief subject for pathos Mr Kreymborg. A land which finds no use for the sensibilities of this fantastic lover, and provides him neither with satisfactory comrades in his isolation nor with sufficient nur- ture in himself to do without, is either a pathetic or a tragic land. Much as the social hunger of Mr Kreymborg capering so featly before a dropped lead curtain of inertia and indifference affects one, the imperviousness of our land behind the curtain is more moving. The book's title Troubadour is indeed in this poet's best ironic vein. Troubadour! One thinks of Guilhem, Comte de Poictiers, of Giraut de Bornelh—of the bright galaxy of well- provisioned nobles moving through lands that loved them. Rudel, singing his princesse lointaine, had at hand a too warm audience to warm him. His love lived beyond the sea, one feels, because of the fat surfeit of applause at home. But Alfred Kreymborg, neither a prince nor favoured, having made song in vain, is forced to turn to prose to win his people's ear. This is the dramatic kernel of the volume. It reveals the almost indefeasible mechanism of our land for making our poets over into prose; the modern alchemy whereby much gold is transmogrified to lead. Did not Whitman, even, who as a prophet was a true son of troubadours—a troubadour going ahead of his flock-enact prose after his ten years of song? But the process is more salient in our day. I think offhand of Ludwig Lewisohn's Up Stream, of Harry Kemp's Tramping on Life, of Sherwood Anderson's recent record. These are by men of varying talents. But each of these books marked an explanatory gesture: each, if I mistake not, was the best publisher's success of its respective author; each- and Troubadour along—was either a direct or an inverted wooing. Mr Anderson's address fared artistically well, since his direct expression is by a similar means of chronicle, and since the blind haze in which his maturity received events was a sort of aesthetic refrain for the glamorous litany of his groping childhood. The point is not lost, however. Mr Anderson has always had to struggle against recording as a substitute for creating: and here he is gloriously giving up the battle of the artist and being ap- plauded as his best tales were never! A strong world creates: a weak one records. A strong milieu would have impressed on Messrs Anderson and Kreymborg that WALDO FRANK 75 the autobiography of an artist must be a mature positive reaction- barring the sort of thing that one may write, grey-haired, in dotage. Similarly, a strong world would have employed Alfred Kreymborg so dynamically, so exhaustingly, in his rôle of dramatist and poet, that he would have had no time for these immature and casual relations. And this leads to the other revelatory symptom of such books. Mr Kreymborg, lacking contact qua creator with his land, is abashed into a hortatory and explanatory mood: and is moreover forced to telling his own tale out loud in order to establish himself to himself. Some violence in the hazards of their fate makes these men doubt themselves and count their fingers; makes them talk aloud in the dark silence which is the matrix of our electric noise; makes them talk as children rather than work as artists. No sure man would have ignored the challenge of his "life" to drop the kindliness of comment which mars Troubadour, and replace it with athletic analytic lines. Only a subjective immaturity can explain the sugared gruel of literary reminiscence which the last chapters of Troubadour pour down the public's throat. So the documents pile up. We are in a pre-scriptural age and must expect this. Troubadour is not of the first chapter in an American Genesis, as some of us hoped it might be. It is not incar- nate enough of conscious creative will. It is not of the lineage of The Education of Henry Adams. But it has words and drifts of spirit which the ultimate writers of our Bible will appropriate in their hour. WALDO FRANK BRIEFER MENTION in the win Branched. the stri Knopf: s MR Tasker's Gods, by T. F. Powys (12mo, 312 pages; Knopf: $2.50). For those fastidious connoisseurs, lovers of all the strange growths of certain gnarled tree-like minds, whose “branchéd thoughts new-grown with pleasant pain ... murmur in the wind,” Mr Tasker's Gods will be a veritable delight. For the book contains every one of those astringent bark-bitter juices that make up the curious sap of Mr Powys' inventions. It contains his loathing for the well-constituted; his chuckling goblinish humour, embodied, for instance in Mrs Fancy And Her Furniture; his ghoulish pryings in the hearts of the wicked; his sorrowful idealization of the hearts of the good; and, finally, that secretive, convoluted recogni- tion of certain kinds of brutality in the world, like a rumour of terrible ooze-monsters heard in the hollows of a twisted shell. ORPHAN ISLAND, by Rose Macaulay (12mo, 319 pages; Boni & Liveright: $2). The fragments of Queen Victoria left by Mr Lytton Strachey are here pounded into rather vulgar dust; there now seems nothing left of the once sainted figure. Miss Macaulay's fictitious island-community in the South Seas provides a mildly amusing burlesque of English society, but as it scratches only on the surface of life it cannot make a deep impression upon the mind. HUMPTY DUMPTY, by Ben Hecht (12mo, 383 pages ; Boni & Liveright: $2) is a Chicago excursion into the super-Mencken subconscious; to read it is like eating eggshells. Mr Hecht set out to chronicle the adventures of a pin-wheel among pin-heads, and by the time his hero is thirty, he has read everything, thought everything, and experienced everything—and Mr Hecht has said everything. A Simon Legree in cynical top-boots, he kicks the conventions into insensibility and continues to lash their inert bodies with the whip of a brilliant prose until the performance ceases to be cruel and becomes simply monotonous. No doubt the world needs to be laughed at, but to be effective, mockery should be administered in smaller doses. LITTLE Novels of Sicily, by Giovanni Verga, translated by D. H. Lawrence (12mo, 226 pages; Seltzer: $2) presents a veritable panorama of poverty. Individually, each tale has its own lights and shadows, but together they form a dun-coloured vista, like the vegetation along the dust-choked roads of southern Italy. Most of these sketches are believed to be drawn from the life of the village where Verga lived; they have been transcribed with no adornment save that of a biting irony. Ignorance and privation and superstition are the three graces who preside over the destinies of men and women and mules “in this world where one hand washes the other," and from their ministrations the author weaves minor Greek tragedies. Mr Lawrence's translation is good fortune for the reader no less than for the author. BRIEFER MENTION 77 THE CONSTANT NYMPH, by Margaret Kennedy (12mo, 344 pages; Double- day, Page: $2) is an adventure among masterpieces of characterization ; not a single figure is slighted and not one is sand-papered off by the author to make its rough edges more soothing to the touch of the conven- tional mind. Miss Kennedy's novel is about musicians who are inter- preted in the light of their own gifts, not as so many mountebanks endowed by the gods with talents which render them acceptable to the fashionable world which goes to concerts. Such talk-pungent, brilliant, and rich in observation has not been garnered within the covers of one book for a long time; its emotional and dramatic values are equally authentic. A novel head and shoulders above the ruck of fiction. ents which render the pungent, brillia one book for a The Dark Cloud, by Thomas Boyd (12mo, 267 pages; Scribner: $2) projects a picture of life with camera sharpness, and yet the outlines of it have been so softened by tones of understanding that the effect is in no sense photographic. Mr Boyd has sought and successfully recaptured the picturesque background of early steamboat days along the Mississippi ; he has written a narrative of incident rather than of sustained plot, done in flexible and vigorous prose. It is chiefly interesting as a prose pano- rama, sweeping from Quebec to Detroit, across to Cincinnati, and down the great waterway as it was in the enthralling fifties of the last century. Young Mrs CRUSE, by Viola Meynell (12mo, 272 pages; Harcourt, Brace: $2) turns the leaves of people's emotions reminiscently, like thumbing an album. Miss Meynell composes in a mood of warm tranquillity, avoiding rather than seeking climax, so that her stories are handled with an unvary- ing detachment. When occasion requires, she is sympathetic, but never partisan. She has, in a word, the faculty of seeming to involve the reader rather more closely with the lives of her characters than she allows herself to be—an art in itself. Each of the half-dozen tales in this volume has distinction. THE BANQUET AND OTHER Poems, by Frances Fletcher (12mo, 44 pages; Dorrance: $2). Presenting the paradox of the pond lily's whiteness blurred by shadows, the simplicity of the complex mood which is appre- ciative yet ardent in escape, aloof and alluring in their sleights of swift precision, these poems possess depth of experience, sensitiveness to thought, and power of observation, which are not contradicted by definite defects in thought and treatment. POETRY FROM THE BIBLE, edited by Lincoln MacVeagh (16mo, 180 pages; Lincoln MacVeagh, The Dial Press: $1.50). As Mr MacVeagh suggests, an anthology of the Bible is not the Bible. The twenty-fifth and the one-hundred-fourth psalms have in this instance been omitted, and some- times disassociation from the grandeur of the setting detracts from the essential magnitude of what is quoted. One must in every case be sensible, however, of the splendour of the famous passages assembled here, of the careful choice of version, of now a metrical, and now a prose arrange- ment, of the compact magnificence of this small volume. 78 BRIEFER MENTION AN ANTHOLOGY OF Pure Poetry, edited with an introduction by George Moore (12mo, 182 pages; Boni & Liveright: $2). In accordance with Mr Moore's definition of pure poetry as “something that the poet creates outside of his own personality,” we have in this anthology-abstinent in purport and exquisite in content-beauty that cannot be encountered too often. Some of the best work of the poets here represented is not without what Mr Moore has termed “subjective taint”; therefore, we must regard the anthologist's rigour as abundance, prefaced as it is by the poetically autobiographic prose of the introduction, which would in itself make the volume a valuable acquisition. ALL AND HER 1.57 $2.50). Sper here is solitut this book, me in Sussex, this autua he enough in itself to be from every page. Mrs Meynell AND HER LITERARY GENERATION, by Anne Kimball Tuell (12mo, 286 pages; Dutton : $2.50). Speaking of Mrs Meynell's country home in Sussex, this authoress says, “There is solitude without.” So unstylish a statement would be enough in itself to kill this book, but it dies of many wounds, for similar platitudes stab one from every page. Apparently Anne Kimball Truell is the last person in the world who should have attempted Mrs Meynell. She lacks an ear. THE STORY OF IRVING BERLIN, by Alexander Woollcott (illus., 10mo, 223 pages; Putnam: $2.50) provides the richest reading for one who, like the present reviewer, cares greatly for popular music and for the panoramic, many-faceted life of Manhattan Island. One objects, at moments, to certain strainings at the gnat of rhetoric, to phrases like "fire-tested," "excessive paternity,” (speaking of Eddie Foy) "the breath of his boy- hood on his neck," et cetera, and finally to a rather too arch and romantic journalism. But one great and saving grace Mr Woollcott possesses, and for this let him go down, forgiven and exalted, among the biographers of the Lively Arts. He has not found it necessary to write of a great popular artist in the Vanity Fair mode; he has simply written the intimate story of New York, of popular melody, of Irving Berlin himself, and in doing these things with approximate simplicity he has produced something brimming with humanity and music, resonant with half-forgotten glorious tunes. A YEAR OF PROPHESYING, by H. G. Wells (12mo, 352 pages; Macmillan: $2). This time in a series of fifty-four syndicated editorials, Mr Wells reiterates his serviceable ideas on contemporary disaster and his somewhat easily won, but no less consoling, faith in an ultimate "common Pax Mundi, a World Commonwealth, a federal suppression of armaments," et cetera. On reading these liberal manifestos against the maladjustments of the present economic system, one wishes that there were thousands of Mr Wellses; and then, recalling his vast public, one realizes that there are—which prompts the further observation that the true economic prophet will not be the man who codifies our attitudes, but the one who masters the system. In the meanwhile we may recognize Mr Wells's prominent position in the Old Testament of this matter; or better, look upon him as a leader in that preparatory barrage of opinion which, as the late war and the selling of soaps has taught us, is a necessary feature of every drive. BRIEFER MENTION 79 John DONNE, A STUDY IN DISCORD, by Hugh l'Anson Fausset (8vo, 318 pages; Harcourt, Brace: $3.50). Sometimes didactic, over-decorated, and carelessly familiaras Walton's "too devout miniature" is not—this accu- rately denominated study in discord, strives with Freudian energy to commemorate a man "compact of sensuality and sublime longings, fury and fastidiousness, morbidity and rapture, the gracious and the grotesque" -a "Dionysus” who "played the man by acknowledging the beast.” THE LIFE OF WILLIAM COBBETT, by G. D. H. Cole (8vo, 458 pages; Har- court, Brace: $4.50). A meticulous account of a pamphleteer and editor who was spokesman for the English working-classes during the acutest period of the transition from agriculture to industrialism. Cobbett was neither an heroic man nor an astute one, but was a political writer of much polemical vigour and an emotional conviction which overrode many ideological instabilities. His biographer here reconstructs, almost hour by hour, the details of his life and the political and economic minutiae out of which his writings arose. A Cheops of “ant labour," this book is valuable not only as a contribution to the archives, but also for its survey of a very grim and important era in the history of industrialism. ANCIENT RHETORIC AND POETIC, Interpreted from Representative Works by Charles Sears Baldwin (12mo, 261 pages; Macmillan: $2.10). Concen- trated pleasure as well as knowledge are to be found in this orderly and expertly compact book in which the author, "with complementary technical analysis of ancient achievement,” has allowed Greek and Latin writers themselves to be his spokesmen, this "way" seeming "surest toward recov- ering inductively the ancient artistic experience." We are indebted to Dr Baldwin for a bibliography at the head of each chapter, for a tabular index of Latin and Greek rhetorical terms, for a general index, for uniquely purposeful punctuation, for a retranslating of terms, for a “grave” and magnificently poetic translating of texts—and for memorable interpretations of Aristotle, Cicero, Virgil, Quintilian, Dio of Prusa, and others. It may surely be said of him as he says of Cicero, “Few men writing on style have shown in their own styles so much precision and charm." PRINCIPLES OF LITERARY CRITICISM, by I. A. Richards (12mo, 290 pages; Harcourt, Brace: $3.75). The author here undertakes to study art values in accordance with his contention that there is no "aesthetic emotion,” no experience in art different from experience outside of art "as, say, envy is from remembering, or as mathematical calculation is from eating cherries." By his analysis of the nature of communication he shows how any simple divorce between art and life is purely verbal, while the conception of beauty as a quality attached to objects is merely the result of a linguistic convenience being mistaken for some external denotable attribute. Mr Richards' doctrines are eclectic; they are arranged and applied with much deftness, his equipment including not only a keen sense of artistic values, but also a grasp of allied problems, a knowledge of the psychology laboratory, and a gratifying skill at definition. THE THEATRE NLY a half dozen or so of the plays I have seen in the last month are still current, and not all of them are of the highest order of interest. This is the time of year when strange producers put forth strange plays, in the hope of a summer run. Swift, and for the most part painless, is their passage; they represent, usually, ambitions without ideas, and intentions without skill. They are, however, a valuable part of the theatrical season, for the outsider has his chance, and can always meditate on his failures and try his next one. ror The GORILLA is probably the best bet of this