after-season. In
a rough-and-tumble way it is amusing, and in the first act the
parallel elements of horror and fun are neatly fitted together. But
after that, the author or the producer seemed to be unable to keep
out a single gag, and the fun stopped coming out of the material
of the play and began to kill the action. There was also a superb
chance to bring down the curtain on an unexplained, but thor-
oughly satisfactory ending, which was muffed by introducing the
ancient SEVEN KEYS TO BALDPATE device without any variation.
Among the other plays I cite the names of Flesh, Thrills, and
ALOMA OF THE SOUTH SEAS.
The production of THE MIKADO has revived all the variants
of all the Gilbert and Sullivan disputations. It ought to be
evident that with the lamentable, but inevitable, disappearance of
the old Savoy players, the precise reduplication of the original per-
formances must eventually come to an end. Even Frau Cosima is
not immortal, and Wagner has been given, at least in Russia, as
if he were an interesting composer of opera, and not a relic. Mr
Stokowski has always impressed me, when instead of a traditional
ancien régime rendering of Beethoven, he brought to bear on the
subject all the intensity of a modern mind; and the same process
was applied to Shakespeare, not without success, in the Hopkins
productions. So I see no reason why THE MIKADO should not be


GILBERT SELDES
81
e
produced with all the available talent at our disposal. It has
sufficient quality to bear the treatment.
In the particular instance I found my chief displeasure in the
unnecessarily operatic atmosphere. Miss Namara, in particular,
hardly sang a note, for she was too busy vocalizing, and the words
which in IL TROVATORE happen to be drivel, in The MIKADO
can be a source of pleasure if both their vowels and their con-
sonants are pronounced. Treated as the text of light opera, or
reduced to musical comedy, those words are extremely easy to sing;
it is sheer criminal negligence to use them as a sort of la-la-la
medium for vocalization.
The thing reverts to the tiresome subject of style. It reverts,
even farther back, to the subject of intelligence, in a sense in which
the word is not now too often used. If you have intelligence of a
thing and know its quality, if you know that The QUEEN OF THE
Convicts is not a tragedy and that the MEDEA is not a melo-
drama, you are in a fair way to find the proper manner in which
to produce these works. If you have no feeling about qualities,
if it doesn't matter to you what the nature of a thing is, you have,
of course, no business to produce at all. It is quite possible, as
the contemporary theatre has discovered, to try certain plays in a
style to which they are not accustomed. HAMLET played in Soviet
Russia as "a study in Danish Imperialism" must have been such
an experiment; and the current Wild Duck, played as a wry
tragi-comedy instead of a study of neuroses, is a singularly suc-
cessful other one. You can play Shakespeare for the poetry and
for the drama, or melodrama, which the poetry conceals or ex-
presses; but in every case you must know what is the essential
character you want to express.
The Mikado is not opera, and the operatic tone was wrong;
nor is it exactly musical comedy, since so much of its quality de-
pends on intellectual diversion, so the wooden Nanki-Poo and
the characteristic Shubert choruses seemed a little out of place. I
see no reason why Lupino Lane should not do steps not done
before, and acrobatics, too, so long as they are expressive. I even
follow De Wolf Hopper in believing that the substitution of a
local, contemporary word, is occasionally justifiable when the word
in the text is utterly meaningless to us (but no one must change


82
THE THEATRE
the name of Captain Shaw in Iolanthe) because Gilbert and
Sullivan seem to me to be alive, and not museum pieces. What I
object to is the mixture of wrong styles when the simple right
style is so obvious at hand.
Wherefore I was better pleased with PRINCESS IDA.
The cast of THE LOVES OF LULU ought really to see one per-
formance of RosMERSHOLM as The Stagers are giving it. In
addition to other virtues this ROSMERSHOLM has the distinction of
being spoken in superb English. In Lulu I easily forgive Mr
Ullrich Haupt his accent, although I hope he is doing his best
to overcome it, as he impresses me more and more as an actor. It
is not a question of accent, but of enunciation, of merely knowing
what the words are supposed to sound like, and of making them
sound that way. An asthmatic cast so belaboured the not too well
rendered text of ERDGEIST that the audience heard only part of
the words and that part was funny. It happens that ERDGEIST
isn't funny; it is sombre and terrifying, and it is the function of
the director to keep from it any suggestion of the ridiculous. The
foreignness of the play is extreme; its lack of sympathy for any
one, its brutal emphasis on the beast of sex, its terrible swiftness
of action, and its early use of a kind of expressionism in the
dialogue—all these make it offensive to our well-trained ears. But
the direction could have avoided the moving picture chase around
the studio which at once gave a reluctant audience grounds for
giggling. A great deal should have been done about the voices,
too; and much more in the way of figuring out what the
whole play was intended to mean. It was a stroke of absolute
rightness to have Lulu posing for her picture after Félicien Rops's
Pornocratie, for that is exactly what Lulu represents. And in spite
of some very bad things, Margot Kelly occasionally fell into
attitudes and gestures which created the character. On the whole,
a bad business, which will be effective only in keeping this mordant
play for a long time from our boards.
ROSMERSHOLM is almost as well directed as The Wild Duck-
perhaps as well, for the only objection I have to it is that it
seemed, in parts, a little dull, and that may be in the nature of
the play. The political radicalism and the awed hush over the
-


GILBERT SELDES
words "free love” are a little ineffective, now, as vehicles for the
great emotions which Ibsen makes them carry. But the emotions
come to us, in spite of all. It was astonishing to watch them rise,
in the later part of the play, from the most unlikely material
and to believe in them, until the bitter end. I have held off from
Ibsen a long time, and I am afraid I may have sneered at him.
His interests and his temperament, as shown in his work, still do
not enchant me. But when he is presented as a dramatist and not
as a philosopher—which has been his fortune twice this year-I
yield entirely and pray Heaven that my stupidity was not too
publicly made known.
GILBERT SELDES
те
was


MODERN ART
UT
TITH pencil poised in the air ready to write down the art
season just past as the dullest within my recollection, my
telephone rang with an invitation to the private view of the last
show on the calendar; and when I had gone back to my pencil
after taking part in this festivity, behold, my anathemas had
withered on my hands, and I felt inclined to look at the New
York winter from a different angle. I had had a very good time
at the private view. I found myself liking pictures once more.
I liked these particular pictures better than any new pictures I
had seen in a year; and what's more, all the other people present
seemed to be liking them, too, and there was the general and
unmistakable feeling in the atmosphere that art, after all, was not
so bad, and that it could still give pleasure. It was the private
view of the Whitney Studio Club's members' exhibition, given,
this year, in the Anderson Galleries.
The Whitney Studio Club, it seems, is ten years old. This is
its tenth annual exhibition. The organization was founded by
Gertrude Whitney in an effort to aid young artists, and during
its first years there was sometimes a doubt as to whether the right
young artists were being helped. It is not so easy to help young
artists as it seems. It is not so easy in a big city to find out where
the real young artists are. They are surprisingly shy—and dis-
trust institutions, which is not surprising, life being what it is.
The present one, however, won the confidence of enough choice
spirits to begin to figure upon the map a few years ago as a definite
stepping-stone for young talents. The exhibitions at the Whitney
Studio Club last year had to be seen, at least, by critics. The
one this year will have to be seen by everybody. How this de-
sirable situation has been brought about I am not quite sure. It
is probably not the work of some one strong individual working
in the background, but can be explained perhaps by the fact that
the said young persons of talent already inveigled into the fold
are beginning to grow a little older, are beginning, in fact, to
blossom. It can be remarked, for instance, that there is a distinct
connexion between this exhibition and that earlier in the year of
е


HENRY MCBRIDE
85
another institution of more and shadier history—that celebrating
the Art Students' League's fiftieth anniversary. This exhibition-
the next best of the local events—startled by the unexpected but
unmistakable revolt of the younger artists against the teachings
of the League itself. A whiff of fresh air was let into the stuffy
parlours usually occupied by the Academicians, and the group that
did the trick could be recognized and was recognized as the
Whitney Studio crowd. Cheered by that success and reinforced
by the entire personnel of the company, they now put forward an
excellent claim to be the genuine and only purveyors of the
New Stuff.
As a society, I mean. There has been a real need for a banding
together of the up-and-coming, and an urgent necessity for an
annual exhibition that shall answer the public's desire, plaintively
expressed, to see the art of to-day. The Whitney Studio Club is
too big to be considered an élite, but there are enough of the élite
in it to put a glamour over the whole. The effect of the rooms
was such that at first I was inclined to think all the pictures were
good. Even to the end I persisted in the feeling that I should
like to possess about fifty of them. I am always forming imaginary
collections and so I bought, tentatively, Thomas Hunt's Sketch
for Tapestry, “Peace,” Elizabeth Clark's Bacchante, both Louis
Bouché water-colours though one of them happened to be “lent”
for the occasion, Peggy Bacon's Self-Portrait, George C. Ault's
Houses in Brittany, Bill Lescaze's Exercise No. I, Reginald
Marsh's Hard Hearted Hannah, Boardman Robinson's Portrait,
Niles Spencer's Down the Hill, Charles Sheeler's Still Life, Stuart
Davis' Painting, Agnes Tait's Portrait, Henry Schnakenberg's
Landscape, Jan Matulka's Painting, Elizabeth Burroughs' Garden
at Flushing, Alexander Brook's Compote with Fruit, Glenn Cole-
man's Fourth Street, Lucile Branch's Decoration Day, Claggett
Wilson's Eros in the Storm, Leon Hartl's Landscape with Tree,
Yasuo Kuniyoshi's Young Bather with Cigarette, John Sloan's
Making Faces, Thomas Benton's Pocahontas Interceding for Cap-
tain John, and so on, until fifty.
At the same time I scarcely persuaded myself that any of my
fifty purchases were great. When I was younger and first con-
fronted with pictures, I had no doubt whatever as to what was
great, and accepted but that. Even in poetry I denied what were
01


86
MODERN ART
called minor poets. This was because I had been brought up on
Emerson. Emerson nowhere specifically belittles democratic
standards, but he talks so constantly of the great that his followers
end in becoming a bit exclusive. Mr Hunt's allegory to peace
looks not unlike an old-fashioned theatre curtain, and is painted
in the manner of Currier & Ives prints. The wonderful Miss
Clark, I'm told, paints only from photographs. Even in the case
of portraits, she first has the victim photographed and then paints
from that. To have asked Ralph Emerson and Margaret Fuller,
who adored Raphael and Leonardo, to accept such productions as
art, would have puzzled them sadly. But what does it signify
save that the time changes, and with it, our ideas! Since their
day the world has been made safe for democracy, and believe me,
democracy knows it. Years ago I knew definitely that Manet's
Woman With a Parrot, Degas' ballet girls, Renoir's Canotiers, and
Whistler's White Girl were great pictures, and used to deplore the
fact that they hung mutely on the walls at Durand-Ruels, priced
at nothing at all, and with no takers. I would have induced my
dearest friend to purchase them confident that I was making a
fortune for him, had it not been that my dearest friend's pockets,
like my own, lacked the pittance necessary for the start. To-day,
among contemporary pictures, such opportunities do not stare one
in the face. The best that I dare swear of my new canvases at
the Whitney Studio Club is that they would look well around the
house. I don't think of them as future money-makers. But un-
questionably they have the present-day accent. They have that
value. They are full of contagious gaiety. They have pep. And
with that we get back to Ralph Waldo. He could see no sense
in trying to evade one's own period. “The Genius of the Hour
always sets his ineffaceable seal on the work and gives it an inex-
pressible charm for the imagination," et cetera.
So I don't say good-bye to the season in a state of complete
pessimism, as a few days ago, I thought I might. To discover a
whole group of young people in the liveliest state of satisfaction
with paint as a means of expression, offsets my discouragement
considerably. Their present attainments may not be tremendous;
but at least, they have an outlook.
HENRY MCBRIDE


COMMENT
W H EN writers of plays or of novels create plots which are
similar, the possibility of imitation occurs to one-of what
was in Poe's time called plagiarism. Reflection might easily per-
suade one that neither author has been aware of the work of the
other and that neither piece of work is invaluably original. Simi-
larly, in the work of poets, resemblances in performance sometimes
lead one to attribute to an author, dependence upon sources of
which he knows nothing. It is apparent, however, that among
poets, aesthetic consanguinity is frequent. The fire, the restraint,
the devout paganism of H. D. are unequivocally Greek. Wallace
Stevens' morosely ecstatic, trembling yet defiant, multifarious
plumage of thought and word is to be found, also, in France. By
no means a chameleon, Ezra Pound wears sometimes with splen-
dour, the cloak of mediaeval romance. Employing diction which
is not infrequently as decorous as it is instructed, E. E. Cummings
shares with certain writers of the fourteenth and sixteenth cen-
turies, a manner as courtly and decisive as it is sometimes shabby.
T. S. Eliot often recalls to us, the verbal parquetry of Donne,
exemplifying that wit which he defines as "a tough reasonableness
under . . . lyric grace."
Amy Lowell most conspicuously provides an illustration of this
generic sharing of tradition. Unequivocally paying tribute to
Keats in her first book, A Dome of Many-coloured Glass, she has
to some readers appeared to be now an imagist, now a vorticist,
now a writer of polyphonic prose. Granting a various method,
one discerns in all that she has written, pre-eminently a love for
the author whom she commemorates in her last work. One cannot
but find in her imagination, an analogy to the "violets,” the "night-
ingale,” the "tiger-moth," the "rich attire” of Keats. When she
says:
“I have no broad and blowing plain to link
And loop with aqueducts, no golden mine
To crest my pillars, no bright twisted vine
Which I can train about a fountain's brink ..."


88
COMMENT
when as a pointillist she says of trees after a storm:
“They are blue,
And mauve,
And emerald.
They are amber,
And jade,
And sardonyx.
They are silver fretted to flame
And startled to stillness ..."
one is in the world of “chimes,” of “perfume,” and of “falling
leaves”—Endymion's world of “poppies," of
"... visions all about my sight
Of colours, wings, and bursts of spangly light.”
Nor is the atmosphere of sentiment, of hospitality, and leisure, at
variance with the character of this self-dependently American,
sometimes modern American writer. The death of Amy Lowell
but emphasizes the force of her personality. Cosmopolitan yet iso-
lated, essentially distinct from “the imagist group,” of which she
has been called “the recognized spokesman,” she has by a mislead-
ingly armoured self-reliance, sometimes obscured a generosity, a
love of romance, the lustre of a chivalry which was essentially hers.


THE DIAL
Why Not Avoid
The Risk?
REFORE investing your surplus funds, take
D the precaution against loss by seeking the
expert and conservative advice of your local or
investment banker who will gladly serve you.
Guard Against Loss
In Investments
For after all good investment opportunities pre-
dominate. Caution, Care, Investigation will re-
veal safe and profitable channels for your surplus
funds.
The Financial Article that appears
in the July issue of Harper's
Magazine will help solve your
investment problems.
Form the habit of reading the financial article in
every issue. You will find them profitable. All
advertisements carefully censored.
HARPER'S MAGAZINE
49 East 33rd Street, New York, N. Y.
The Important Foreign
Book of the Year
When Count Keyserling travels, he
takes along his soul and mind.
His prodigious diary is the record
of spiritual and mental, as well as
physical, travels.
The Travel Diary of
a Philosopher
By Count Hermann Keyserling
2 vols., $8.94
STREET Floor, MIDDLE BLDG.
MACY'S
34th Street and Broadway
New York City
OBSERVATIONS
By MARIANNE MOORE
The Dial Award for 1924.
Second Edition. $2.00
Under the Black Flag
By DON C. SEITZ, author of "Paul
Jones? Expeditions in the British Seas,”
“The Buccaneers' Story” and “ Joseph
Pulitzer, Life and Letters.”
XLI POEMS
By E. E. CUMMINGS
A leader among the Ameri-
can poets with a rare sense of
the beautiful and a fine power
of sensuous expression. $2.co
MEN SEEN
By Paul ROSENFELD
Essays on twenty-four pres-
ent-day literary figures of all
countries.
$2.50
The high lights of piracy in rapid-fire
chapters packed with incident. This is
no leisurely, voluminous “History of the
Pirates," it is a book for the general
reader who loves adventure—short stories
strung on the thread of the past, dealing
with careers whose truth is stranger than
the wildest fiction.
$4.00
Lincoln MacVEAGH
152 West Thirteenth
THE DIAL PRESS
Street, New York
MAD! BY THE NAT. C
OME'N AT


THE DIAL
At the SIGN of the CUPID & LION
New Writings by
William Hazlitt
Collected by P. P. HOWE
THE ART OF
THE THEATRE
By SARAH BERNHARDT
The great actress treats of the division
of the actor's art-voice, gesture, make-
up and the like-priceless hints to all in-
terested in the stage.
$3.00
VAUBAN: BUILDER OF Thirty-three pieces, ranging from "Tabletalks" to
FORTRESSES
“leaders,” reprinted for the first time.
By DANIEL HALEVY
“They give Hazlitt at the height of his powers."
A biography of a marshal of France, the
-The Spectator.
greatest master of the art of fortification.
A skilful portrayal of the most glorious age
of French history.
“A real enrichment of the body of English
$2.75
prose.”—The Star.
HOW TO SEE
"The ring is true and unmistakable."-York-
MODERN PICTURES shire Post.
$2.50
By RALPH M. PEARSON
A guide for the amateur in art. $2.50
MEMOIRS OF A
From a Pitman's Note Book
NAPOLEONIC OFFICER
By ROGER DATALLER
By JEAN-BAPTISTE BARRES
A remarkable find for all interested in Another find comparable to The Journal of
Napoleon. The diary of the grandfather
of Maurice Barrès, who enlisted in the Nicholas Cresswell and Memoirs of the Notorious
Guard under the Consulate.
$4.00
Stephen Burroughs! The diary of this human mole,
ASPECTS OF THE
the son of generations of coal miners, is one of the
MODERN SHORT STORY
most remarkable recent productions of its kind.
By ALFRED C. WARD
Written with broad sympathy, understanding and
An analytical survey of representative
perception, it ranks with the great diaries of liter-
short stories by certain modern writers
ature. The frank relation of the adventures of a
who have combined literary merit with
popular appeal.
Illustrated. $2.50 sensitive spirit in an environment of the humblest.
$2.50
Sixty-Four, Ninety-Four! THE STORY OF
By R. H. MOTTRAM
A NOVEL
By MAXIM GORKY
Author of “The Spanish Farm”
Vivid and surprising
The Spanish Farm, recipient of the Hawthornden Prize,
stories by the most fa-
mous of living Russian
was hailed by American critics as a “stunning book," "an writers. Including Story
almost perfect piece of work.” In “64-94" Mr. Mottram
of a Novel, An Incident,
A Sky-Blue Life, The
has told the story of Madeleine's English lover, and again
Rehearsal, and The Her-
we have the marvelous Madeleine and her “Spanish mit.
$2.50
Farm,” but from an Englishman's point of view. $2.50
LINCOLN MACVEAGH
152 West Thirteenth
THE DIAL PRESS
Street, New York



JUL 23 1925
THE
DIAL
AUGUST 1925
The Party Oil
Marie Laurencin
Lieutenant Gustl
Arthur Schnitzler 89
Dawn From a Railway Day-Coach
Scofield Thayer 117
Joie de Vivre
Edwin Muir 118
Alligator Pear Oil
Georgia O'Keeffe
The Woman Who Rode Away
D. H. Lawrence 121
Two Poster Portraits Tempera
Charles Demuth
The Wild Goat's Kid
Liam O'Flaherty 137
The Cock
Joseph Campbell 144
Storm-Clouds in Silver Oil
Arthur G. Dove
Memories of a Self-Taught Man
Elie Faure 145
Three Portraits Pen and Ink
Jean Cocteau
Book Reviews:
A Humanistic Critic
John Peale Bishop 157
Spring Flight
Gilbert Seldes 162
On Re and Dis
Kenneth Burke 165
“The Bright Immortal Olive"
Marianne Moore 170
Briefer Mention
Comment
The Editors 177
VOLUME LXXIX NUMBER 2
50 cents a copy
173


THE DIAL
SCOFIELD THAYER
Editor . ".
SOS
MARIANNE MOORE
Acting Editor
So NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
John Peale Bishop' was born in 1892, in Charlestown, West
Virginia. He was educated in various public and private schools
preparatory to entering Princeton, from which he was graduated
in the class of 1917, and has served in the army during the years
1917 to“ 1919. He has recently retürned to this country after
two years on the Continent, spent for the most part in Paris and
in Sorrento, Italy.' Prior to this he was Managing Editor of
Vanity Fair. The publication of a book of his poems, Green
Fruit, has been followed by a second volume, The Undertaker's
Garland, written in collaboration with Mr Edmund Wilson. .
VOL. LXXIX. No. 2. AUGUST, 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






SR
The Dial Collection
THE PARTY. BY MARIE LAURENCIN


THE
OXXIIC
WA
DIAL
EE2EO

AUGUST 1925
LIEUTENANT GUSTL
BY ARTHUR SCHNITZLER
Translated From the German by Kenneth Burke
T UST how long is this to keep up? I must look at the time
... but that's certainly the wrong thing at such a serious
concert. But who will see me? If any one sees me, then he is
paying no more attention than I, and I don't need to be em-
barrassed by him. ... Only a quarter to ten? ... I feel as
though I had been sitting at the concert for three hours already.
I'm simply not used to such things. . . . Just what is it? I must
look at the programme. ... Yes, yes: oratorio? I thought so:
mass. Such things belong only in church. And the church also
has the advantage that you can leave at any time. . . . If only I
had a corner seat! ... Patience now, patience! Even oratorios
must come to an end! Perhaps it's very beautiful, and I'm just
not in the mood. But why should I be in the mood? When I
think that I came here for amusement. . . . Wish I had given
the ticket to Benedek; he likes such stuff; he plays the violin him-
self. But then Kopetzsky's feelings would have been hurt. It
was very good of him; or at least he meant well. A fine chap,
that Kopetzsky! The only man you can rely on. ... His sister
is singing up there with the rest. At least a hundred girls, all
dressed in black; how shall I pick her out? Since she's part of
the singing, he had the ticket-Kopetzsky did. . . . Then why
didn't he go himself? . . . Besides, they sing very well. It is very
uplifting- Sure! bravo! bravo! ... Yes, let's join in the ap-
plause. That man next to me is clapping like mad. Does he


90
LIEUTENANT GUSTL
really like it as much as all that? The girl up in the box is very
pretty. Is she looking at me, or at that gentleman there with
the blond beard? . . . Ah, a solo! Who is it? Alto, Fräulein
Walker; soprano, Fräulein Michelek ... that one's probably the
soprano. ... I haven't been to the opera for a long time. I al-
ways have a good time at the opera, even when it's dull. I could
go again the day after to-morrow, to La Traviata. Yes, by the
day after to-morrow perhaps I'll be stone dead! Ah, nonsense;
I don't believe that myself! Just wait, Mr Doctor-you'll get
over making remarks like that! I'll rap you on the end of the
nose. ...
If I could just see her plainly in the box! I might borrow the
opera-glasses from the man next to me; but he'd eat me up if I
broke in on his meditations. ... Where is Kopetzsky's sister
standing? Wonder if I could recognize her. I've only seen her
two or three times—the last time at the officers' club. ...
Wonder if they are all decent girls, the whole hundred. Oh,
Lord! ... “Assisted by the Singing Club!” Singing Club ...
comic! I always thought that meant something like the Vienna
Song Belles. Or rather, I knew it was anything but that! ...
Pleasant memories! That time at the Green Gate. ... What was
her name now? And then she sent me a picture post card once,
from Belgrade . . . another nice place! ... Kopetzsky's well
fixed; he's been sitting in the café now for a long time, having
a smoke. ...
Why is that chap always gaping at me? He must have noticed
that I'm bored and don't belong here. ... I should like to advise
you not to look so fresh, or I'll tend to you later on in the foyer!
... He's looking away already! ... They all get fidgety when
I look at them. ... "You have the most beautiful eyes that I
ever saw!” Steffi said to me recently. ... Oh, Steffi, Steffi, Steffi!
... Steffi's really to blame for me sitting here and wailing to
myself by the hour. . . . Oh, this endless literary business of
Steffi's is really getting on my nerves! What a fine evening this
could have been. I'd like a great deal to read Steffi's little note.
· Yes, here it is. But if I take out my pocket-book that chap next
to me will eat me up! ... I know all that's in it: She cannot
come because she must take supper with “him.” ... Ah, that was
comic eight days ago, when she was with him at the horticultural
society, and me opposite with Kopetzsky. And she gave me the
Cc


ARTHUR SCHNITZLER
91
1
sign with her dear little eyes, which said no. He didn't notice a
thing—incredible! Besides, he must be a Jew! Of course; he
works in a bank; and the black moustache ... probably a lieu-
tenant in the reserves, too! Well, he wouldn't drill in my regi-
ment! On the whole, they are making officers of so many Jews
now—but I don't care that for all your anti-Semitism! The other
day at the society where this business with the doctor took place
... the Mannheimers are probably Jews, too; baptized, naturally
... but you can't tell by looking at them ... especially her
... so blonde, her face as pretty as a picture. ... An all-around
good time. Capital meal, marvellous cigarettes. Oh, yes, but
which one has the money? ...
Bravo, bravo! Now it will soon be over? Yes, up there every-
one's getting up. ... Looks very well ... imposing! ... or-
gan too? ... I like the organ a lot. . . . So, now I like that,
very fine! It really is true I ought to go oftener to concerts. ...
It was exquisite, I'll tell Kopetzsky. ... Will I meet him at the
café to-day? ... Oh, I don't want to go to the café; I got enough
of it yesterday! A hundred and sixty guldens lost at one throw-
too stupid! And who won it all? That Ballert chap, the one
person who doesn't need it. It's Ballert's fault that I had to go
to this dull concert. Oh, yes; otherwise I could have played again
to-day and maybe won back something. But it was very good
for me to give myself my word of honour not to touch a card for
a whole month. ... Mamma will make a face when she gets my
letter! Ah, let her go to Uncle; he's loaded with money—he'd
never notice a couple of hundred guldens. If I could only manage
to have him give me a regular allowance . .. but no, you have
to beg for every single kreutzer. Then the old story begins: last
year the harvest was poor! ... How about going back to Uncle's
this summer for fourteen days or so? Of course, you get bored
to death there. If I could—just what was her name? ... It's
strange, I simply can't remember names! ... Oh yes: Etelka!
... She couldn't understand a word of German, but that wasn't
necessary anyhow; we didn't have to talk! ... Yes, it would be
quite nice: fourteen days of the country air and fourteen nights
of Etelka or someone. . . . But I ought to be with Papa and
Mamma for another eight days. . . . She looked pretty bad this
Christmas. ... Well, she has probably gotten over her vexation
by now. If I were in her place I'd be glad that Papa had retired


92
LIEUTENANT GUSTL
IS
on a pension. And Klara is due to get a husband. Uncle can
give something. ... Twenty-eight, that isn't so old. Surely Steffi
isn't any younger. . . . But it's remarkable: women always stay
young longer. Just stop to think: Maretti recently in Madame
Sans-Gêne—not a day under thirty-seven, and she looks . . . well,
I wouldn't have said no! ... Too bad she didn't ask me.
It's hot! Not over yet? Ah, I enjoy the fresh air so much!
I'll take a bit of a walk, across the Ring. Programme for to-day:
early to bed—to be fresh for to-morrow afternoon! Comic, how
little I think of that, it means so little to me. Yet I was a bit
excited at first. Not that I was afraid; but I got nervous the night
before. . . . First Lieutenant Bisanz was an opponent to be
reckoned with. And yet nothing happened to me. A whole year
and a half since then. How time passes! And if Bisanz couldn't
do anything to me, then the doctor surely won't do anything!
Although it's often these untrained fighters who are the most
dangerous. Doschintzky told me that a chap who had a saber in
his hand for the first time just missed stabbing him by a hair's
breadth. And Doschintzky is now a fencing teacher in the militia.
Of course—the question is whether he was as good at that time.
... The important thing is: keep cool. I never get really angry,
and yet it was a piece of insolence-incredible! He wouldn't
have had the courage if he hadn't drunk champagne beforehand.
... Such insolence! No doubt a Socialist! Now all the enemies
of law and order are Socialists! What a crew ... they'd like
nothing better than to do away with the whole army; but where
would they be if the Chinese came at them; they don't think of
that. The asses! ... Once in a while you must set an example.
I was quite right. I am glad that I didn't let him go after that
remark. When I think of it I get absolutely wild! But I acted
famously; the colonel, too, said it was absolutely correct. Be-
sides, the affair will be to my credit. I know many a man who
would have let the chap off. Müller certainly; he would have
looked at it "objectively,” or something of the sort. This looking
at things objectively makes everyone ridiculous. ... “Lieuten-
ant!”—Even the way he said “Lieutenant" was impudent—"You
must at least admit,” Just how did we get to this? How did I
ever start a discussion with the Socialist? Just how did it begin?
... I believe the dark-complexioned lady I was accompanying to
the buffet was there too ... and then this young man who paints


ARTHUR SCHNITZLER
93
the hunting pictures—what is his name? . . . My soul, he was
responsible for the whole business! He was talking of the man-
Quvres; and then this doctor came up and said something I
didn't like, about playing at war, or something of the sort—but I
couldn't say anything then. ... Yes, and then there was some
talk of the military academies ... yes, that's how it was ...
and I told of a patriotic celebration ... and then the doctor said
-not immediately, although it did come out of the celebration,
"Lieutenant, you will at least grant me that not all your comrades
have joined the army exclusively for the purpose of defending the
fatherland! Such a piece of insolence! That a man should dare
say that to an officer right to his face! If I could only remember
what I answered. . . . Ah yes, something about people who med-
dle with things they don't understand. ... Yes, quite right. ...
And then someone was there who wanted to smoothe over the
whole thing, an elderly man with a cold in the head. ... But I
was too aroused! The doctor absolutely said that in a way as
though he meant me directly. He would only have had to add
that they threw me out of college and that's why I was put in
the military academy. . . . People simply can't understand our
type; they are too stupid for that. . . . Last year at the man-
cuvres—I would have given a lot if it had suddenly been in
earnest. ... And Mirovic told me he felt the same way. And
then, when His Highness rode along the front ... and the ad-
dress of the colonel—a man would have to be a common lout for
his heart not to beat faster. . . . And now here comes this cuttle-
fish along, who has done nothing all his life but sit behind books,
and permits himself an insolent remark! ... Ah, just wait, my
good man-until disabled ... yes sir, that's how disabled you'll
be-
What's going on now? It will soon be over? ... "Ye, His
Angels, praise the Lord.” ... Surely, that is the closing chorus.
... Exquisite; that's all you can say. Exquisite! Here I have
forgotten all about her in the box, the one who began to flirt with
me a while ago. Where is she? Gone already. That one there
seems very pretty, too. How stupid that I haven't any opera
glasses with me! Brunnthaler is quite clever: he always leaves his
glass with the cash at the café, then nothing can happen to a
person. ... If that little dear in front of me would turn around
just once! She has been sitting there so good the whole time. The
ea


94
LIEUTENANT GUSTL
one next to her is probably her mother. ... Isn't it about time
for me to be thinking seriously about marriage? Willy was no
older than I when he took the leap. He has already made some-
thing of himself, and besides has a little wife waiting for him at
home. . . . How stupid that Steffi didn't have any time to-day!
If I just knew where she is, I would take a seat facing her again.
That would be a pretty business if he happened to find her out;
and then she'd be hanging on my neck. ... When I think how
much it costs Fliess for that affair with the Winterfeld woman!
And at that she deceives him coming and going. That will come
to a frightful ending yet. ... “Bravo, bravo!" Ah, over! ...
So; that feels good, to be able to stand up, and move about. ...
Well, maybe . . . How long is it going to take him to get that
glass in the case? “Pardon. Will you please let me through ?”
This is a jam. It's better to let the others pass. ... A high-
class person—wonder whether they're real diamonds. . .. That
one there is quite spruce. ... The way she looks at me! Oh, yes,
miss, I'd be glad to! ... Oh, the nose !-Jewess. . . . Another.
... It is almost unbelievable, but half of them are Jews. A
person can't even enjoy an oratorio in peace any more. Now then,
we'll join in. ... Why is that idiot pushing behind me? I'll
get him out of that habit. ... Ugh, an old man! ... Who is
nodding to me from up there? ... Pleased to meet you, pleased
to meet you! I haven't the least idea who that is. ... The
simplest thing would be for me to go straight for supper ... or
shall I go to the horticultural society? Will it turn out that Steffi
is there, after all? Why didn't she write me where she was going
with him? Probably she didn't know herself. Really terrible
... such a tied-down life ... poor thing! ... So, that is the
exit. . . . Ah! she is as pretty as a picture! All alone? How
she is smiling at me. I'll go after her; that would be an idea! ...
So, now down the steps. . . . Oh, a major of the Ninety-Fifth.
He acknowledged my salute very pleasantly. ... Then I was not
the only officer here. ... Where is the pretty girl now? Ah,
there . . . she is on the landing. . . . So, now to the wardrobe.
... I mustn't lose the little dear. ... What a wicked little
devil! There she is, waiting for one man, and now smiling across
at me!-None of them are worth it, though! ... Great heavens,
what a push by the wardrobe! ... We had better wait a bit
longer. . . . So! Will the ass take my number? ....


ARTHUR SCHNITZLER
95
"You, two hundred and twenty-four! There it hangs! Well,
don't you have eyes? There it hangs! Well, thank the Lord!
... If you please!" ... That fat fellow is taking up the whole
wardrobe. ... "If you please!" ...
“Patience, patience!
What's that chap saying?
“Just a little patience!"
I must answer him. ... “Make a little room!"
“Ah, you'll get there in time.”
What's he saying? Is he saying that to me? That's pretty
strong! I can't stand for that! "Be quiet!"
"What did you say ?!!
Ah, such a tone. That's the last straw!
“Don't shove!"
"Keep your mouth shut, you!" I shouldn't have said that; I
was too blunt. . . . Well, it's done now!
“What did you say?"
Now he is turning around. ... Why, I know him. The devil!
he is that baker who is always coming to the café. ... What's
he doing here? He probably has a daughter or something at the
singing academy. ... What is that? What is he doing there?
It looks as though . . . yes, my soul, he has laid his hand on the
hilt of my sword. Is the fellow mad? ... "You, Sir" ...
“You, Lieutenant, just hold still now."
What is he saying? For God's sake, has any one else heard
him? No, he is speaking very low. ... Yes, why is he taking
my sword out? ... Great God. . . . Ah, he must be out of his
head. ... I won't take his hand off the hilt ... no scandal now!
... Besides, isn't the major behind me? Can any one see that
he is holding the hilt of my sword? He is talking to me! What
is he saying?
"Lieutenant, if you make the least disturbance, I will draw your
sword from the sheath, snap it, and send the pieces to the com-
mander of your regiment. Do you understand, you stupid ass ?''
What did he say? I feel as though I were dreaming! Is he
really talking to me? I ought to answer something. . . . But
the fellow is in earnest—he really is drawing the sword. Great
God-he is doing it! ... I feel it; he is already pulling on it.
What is he saying? . . . In God's name, if only there is no scan-
dal. ... What is he saying now?
scan-


96
LIEUTENANT GUSTL
"But I won't ruin your career for you. So, just be good! Don't
be uneasy, no one has been listening . . . everything is all right
... So! And so that no one will think we have been having any
trouble, I am going to be friendly with you!—Pleased to have
seen you, Lieutenant; pleased to have seen you—most delighted!”
In God's name; was I dreaming? ... Did he really say that?
... Where is he? ... There he goes. . . . I ought to draw my
sword and cut him down. . . . In God's name; was any one
listening? No, he spoke very quietly, in my ear. . . . Why don't
I go after him and lay his brain open? ... No, that doesn't go,
that doesn't go at all. ... I should have done it immediately.
... Why didn't I do it immediately? ... I wasn't able ...
he wouldn't let go the hilt, and he is ten times stronger than I.
... If I had said one word, he would really have broken my
sword. ... I ought to be glad he didn't speak in a loud voice!
If a single person had heard it, I should have had to shoot myself
stante pede. ... Perhaps it was only a dream. ... Why is that
man by the pillar looking at me that way? Did he hear anything?
I'll ask him. ... Ask? I am certainly crazy! How do I look?
Can people notice anything? I must be quite pale. Where is the
cur? ... I must finish him! ... He is gone. . . . Where is
my coat? ... I have put it on already. ... I didn't notice it
at all. . . . Who helped me with it? . . . Ah, that one there
... I must give him six pfennigs. ... So! ... But what was
it? Did it really happen? Did someone really talk to me that
way? Did someone really call me a "stupid ass”? And I didn't
cut him down on the spot? ... But I wasn't able . . . he had
a fist like iron ... I stood as though I were nailed there. ...
No, I must have lost my senses, or else I could have used the
other hand—but then he really would have drawn my sword and
broken it, and it would have been all over with me! And after-
wards, when he had gone away, it was too late ... I couldn't
have stabbed him from behind.
What, I am already on the street? How did I get out? It is
so cool; ah, the wind—that feels good. . . . Who is that over
there? Why are they looking across at me? Then they heard
something, after all. ... No, no one could have heard anything.
... But he said it, even if no one did hear him; he said it any-
way. And I stood there and took it, as though someone had hit
me on the head! ... But I couldn't do anything, couldn't say
W
a


ARTHUR SCHNITZLER
97
anything! It was all that was left for me: be quiet, be quiet! ...
It's frightful; it is unbearable; I must strike him dead, whenever
I meet him! ... Someone say that to me! A chap like that, a
cur like that, say that to me! And he knows me. . . . Great God,
he knows me, he knows who I am! He can tell everybody he has
said that to me! ... No, no, he won't do that; else he wouldn't
have spoken so quietly . . . he wanted just me to hear! ... But
how can I be sure that to-day or to-morrow he won't tell it to his
wife, or his daughter, or to his acquaintances at the café.—For
God's sake, to-morrow I shall see him again! When I come to
the café to-morrow, he will be sitting there as usual, playing his
hand with Herr Schlesinger and that man who sells artificial
flowers. . . . No, no; that won't do, that won't do. ... When
I see him, I'll cut him down. ... No, I can't do that I should
have done it immediately, immediately! ... If only that had
happened! I'll go to the colonel. ... The colonel has always
been very friendly—and I will tell him: Colonel, I respectfully
inform you that he held the hilt, he wouldn't let go; it was just
as though I had been without a weapon. . . . But what will the
colonel say? ... What will he say? ... There is only one
thing: leave the service in disgrace, leave the service! ... Are
they volunteers over there? ... Revolting: at night they look
like officers. . . . They are saluting !—If they only knew, if they
only knew!... There is the Café Hochleitner. ... A few of
our officers are in there now, surely ... perhaps one or another
whom I know. ... If I could tell my pal, but just as though
it had happened to someone else? ... I must be quite crazy.
... Where am I going? What am I doing on the street? Yes,
but where should I go? Didn't I intend going to the Leidinger?
Ha ha, sit down among people . .. I would feel as though
everyone were looking at me. ... Yes, but something must
happen. ... What shall happen then? ... Nothing, noth-
ing—no one heard, no one knows, at this moment no one knows
anything. ... What if I went to his rooms and made him swear
that he would never tell any one?-Ah, I'd rather put a bullet
through my head than anything like that! ... That would be
wisest! ... Wisest? Wisest? ... There is absolutely nothing
else to do ... nothing else to do. . . . If I might ask the colonel,
or Kopetzsky—or Blany—or Friedmair.. Each one would say:
there is nothing else for you to do! ... How about talking with


98
LIEUTENANT GUSTL
01
Kopetzsky? ... Yes, that would be the most sensible thing ...
for to-morrow. ... Yes, naturally, for to-morrow ... about
four o'clock, in the cavalry barracks . . . I shall fight a duel to-
morrow at four ... and I am not allowed, I am not qualified.
... Nonsense! Nonsense! Not a single man knows a thing;
not a single man knows a thing! ... Many a person is running
around who had worse happen to him than I did. What all don't
they say of Deckener, and the way he fought a pistol duel with
Rederow ... and the court of honour decided that the duel might
take place. But how would the court of honour decide in my case ?
Stupid ass, stupid ass—and I stood there! Great heavens, it doesn't
matter whether any one else knows of it. I know it, and that is
the main thing! I feel that now I am someone else than I was
an hour ago. I know that I am not qualified to fight, and that I
ought to shoot myself. . . . I wouldn't have another peaceful mo-
ment left in my life ... I would always be anxious lest someone
or other might find out, and that he would up and tell me to my
face what happened this evening. ... What a happy man I was
an hour ago. Kopetzsky just had to give me the ticket—and Steffi
just had to put me off, the wench! Things like that mean every-
thing. In the afternoon all was fine and dandy, and now I must
shoot myself. ... Why am I in such a hurry? I am not going
to miss anything. ... What time is it striking? ... One, two,
three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven-eleven, eleven;
I ought to take supper! In the end I have to go somewhere. I
could sit in some common place where nobody knows me. After
all a man must eat, even if he does shoot himself immediately
afterwards. ... Ha, ha; death is no child's play . .. who said
that only just recently . . . but it doesn't matter. ...
I'd like to know who would be most sorry. Mamma or Steffi.
... Steffi; God, Steffi couldn't even dare to show it, or "he"
would put her out. Poor girl! ... At the regiment; not a single
soul would have the least idea why I did it. They would all break
their heads trying to figure out why Gustl had killed himself. And
it would never occur to any one that I had to shoot myself because
a mean scoundrel of a baker who happened to have a stronger fist
... it's just too stupid, too stupid! ... Is that any reason why
a fellow like me, a snappy young man ... yes, afterwards they
would all be sure to say: he oughtn't to have done it on such a
stupid provocation, it is too bad! . . . But if I asked any one now,


ARTHUR SCHNITZLER
99
I would always get the same answer ... and me, too, if I asked
myself ... it is a devil of a thing ... we are completely de-
fenceless against civilians. People think we are better because we
have swords ... and if one of us makes use of a weapon we are
treated as though we all were born murderers. Also, it would be
in the newspapers: "Suicide of a young officer.” ... How do they
always put it? ... "the motives are hidden in mystery." ...
Ha, ha! ... "the body of the deceased ..." But it is true. ...
I always keep thinking I am making up a story . . . but it is true.
... I must kill myself; there is nothing else left for me to do. I
simply can't let it come to a point where to-morrow morning
Kopetzsky and Blany would bring the decision and say to me,
“We cannot be your seconds!" ... I'd be a scoundrel even to
expect it of them ... a chap like me who stands there and lets
himself be called a stupid ass. ... To-morrow everyone is sure
to know of it ... it is too stupid of me to imagine for a moment
that such a man won't hand the story on ... he'll tell it every-
where . . . his wife knows it already ... to-morrow the whole
café will know about it ... the waiters will know it ... Herr
Schlesinger . . . the cashier. And even if he does intend to say
nothing about it, he'll mention it the day after to-morrow, and if
not the day after to-morrow, then in a week. And if he gets a
stroke to-night, I know it . .. I know it ... and I am not the
man who would go on wearing a uniform and carrying a sword
when he is under such a disgrace! ... So, I must do it, and that's
the end of it. ... What more is there? ... To-morrow after-
noon the doctor might touch me fatally with the sword . . . such
things have happened before this . . . and Bauer, the poor devil,
he got an inflammation of the brain and was gone in three days
... and Brenitsch fell off his horse and broke his neck ... and
finally and last of all—there is nothing else for me to do, nothing
else for me, nothing else for me! ... Of course, there are people
who would take it more lightly. God, what sort of men there are!
When Ringeiner was caught with the wife of a man named
Fleischselcher, he got his ears boxed; and he quit the service, and
is living somewhere in the country now, and is married. ... That
there are women who would marry such a man! ... My soul, I
wouldn't shake hands with him if he came back to Vienna! ...
So, you have heard it, Gustl: your life is over with, over with! A
period and blotting paper to that! ... So, now I know it; the


100
LIEUTENANT GUSTL
as
whole business is quite simple. So! I am really quite composed.
Besides, I always knew that: when it really came to a show-down,
I would be composed, quite composed ... but I never thought
that it would end this way ... that I should have to kill myself
because such a ... perhaps I didn't understand him. At the
end he said something very different. I was quite stupid from
the singing and the heat ... perhaps I was out of my head, and
all this was not so. . . . Not so, ha ha, not so! I can still hear
it. It is still ringing in my ears. And I can feel it in my fingers
how I tried to take his hand from the hilt. ... He is a Titan, a
whale of a man. I am no weakling myself. Franziski is the only
man in the regiment who is stronger than I am. ...
The Aspern Bridge. How far am I going? If I keep up at this
rate, I'll be in Kagran by midnight. ... Ha ha! ... Great
God, we were glad last September when we reached there. Two
hours more, and Vienna ... I was dead tired when we arrived
... I slept like a log all afternoon, and by evening we were al-
ready at Ronacher's. ... Kopetzsky, Ladinser, and ... who
else was with us? ... Oh, yes, of course, the volunteer who told
us the Jewish jokes on the march. ... They are often very good
fellows, the one-year men ... but they all ought to become sim-
ply substitutes. For what sense is there to that: we must grind
along for years, and a chap like that serves for one year and has
exactly the same distinction as we ... it is an injustice! ...
But what does all that have to do with me? Why should I bother
with such things? The lowest man in the hospital corps is now
more than I am ... I am nothing to this world any more ...
it is all over with me . . . when honour is lost, all is lost! ... I
have nothing left to do but load my revolver and . . . Gustl,
Gustl, it seems to me that you really don't believe that yet. Come
to your senses . . . there is nothing else ... even if you are
wracking your brain, there is nothing else! ... From now on the
thing is to act decently at the last moment, to be a man, to be an
officer, so that the colonel will say, “He was a brave chap; we will
keep his memory green! ..." How many companies are there in
the funeral procession of a lieutenant? I really ought to know
that. Ha ha! if the whole battalion turns out, or the whole garri-
son, and they fire twenty salutes, and not even that will wake me
up! ... In front of the café. I was sitting there once last sum-
mer with Herr von Engel, after the Army Steeple-Chase ...


ARTHUR SCHNITZLER
:::::101
..
he
an again sinä
comic, I have never seen the man again since. ...
have his left eye bound up? I always wanted to ask him about
it, but that wouldn't have been right. ... There go two artillery-
men. . . . They certainly think I am following up that person
... and then she has to look at me. . . . Ah, horrible! I would
just like to know how such as that make their living ... I'd
much rather ... still, when a person is hard up he will do any-
thing ... in Przemysl—I was so scared afterwards that I thought
I would never touch a woman again. ... That was a frightful
time up there in Galicia ... a piece of real genuine luck that we
came to Vienna. Bokonny is still sitting in Sambor and can sit
there ten years more and become old and grey. ... But if I had
stayed there I shouldn't have gone through what I have gone
through to-day ... and I'd much rather get old and grey in
Galicia than ... than what? than what? Yes, what is it, then?
What is it? Am I really out of my head, that I am always for-
getting? Yes, my soul, I keep forgetting it every minute ...
has it ever been heard of before, that a man is going to send a
bullet chasing through his head in a few hours, and he thinks of all
possible sorts of things that don't have anything to do with him?
My soul, I feel exactly as though I were drunk. Ha ha! superbly
drunk, raving drunk, dead drunk! ... Ha! I am making
jokes: that is very good! Yes, I am in very good trim-a per-
son must be born to that. . . . Really, if I were to tell it to
any one, he wouldn't believe it. I feel as though, if I had the
thing with me, I would pull the trigger now. In one second every-
thing is over. Everyone is not so well off-others must be in
misery for months. My poor cousin; she was on her back for two
years, was not able to move, had the most terrible pains—what
a pity! Isn't it better for a man to take these things into his own
hands? The main thing is simply to be careful, aim well, so that
something doesn't go wrong at the last, as with the cadet substi-
tute last year. ... The poor devil, he didn't die, but he went
blind. What has happened to him? Where is he living now?
Terrible, to be running around like him or rather, he can't run
around; he must be led. ... Such a young man; can't be a day
over twenty ... he was a better shot with his mistress . . . she
was dead immediately. ... Incredible, the reasons people have
for shooting themselves. Just how can a person be jealous? As
long as I have lived I have never known what it was. Steffi is
am


LIEUTENANT GUSTL
sitting comfortably at the horticultural society; then she will go
home with “him.” That doesn't bother me in the least; not in the
least. . . . A pretty place she has—the little bath-room with the
red light. The way she came in the other day in the green silk
dressing-gown ... I'll never see the green dressing-gown again
... I'll never see any of Steffi again ... and I'll never go up
those beautiful broad steps in the Gusshausstrasse. Fräulein Steffi
will go on being cheerful, just as though nothing had happened;
she wouldn't even be able to say to any one that dear old Gustl
has killed himself. But she'll cry all right-oh, yes, she'll cry.
Besides, quite a number of people will cry. . . . For God's sake,
Mamma! No, no, I don't dare think of that. Ah, no; that simply
mustn't be thought about. Mustn't think of the folks, Gustl, do
you understand? Not the tiniest thought. ...
That is not bad. Now I am in the Prater ... in the middle
of the night. I never thought this morning that I'd be walking
in the Prater to-night. . . . What's that guard thinking? ...
Well, let's keep going. It is very beautiful. It is all up with sup-
per; and with the café, too. The air is pleasant, and restful ...
very. ... Indeed, I'll soon be restful enough, as restful as I could
want to be. Ha ha! But I am completely out of breath ... I
have been racing along like mad. Slower, slower, Gustl; you won't
miss anything; there is nothing you have to do nothing at all,
absolutely nothing. ... I believe I am getting chilly. It is
probably just the excitement ... and I haven't eaten anything.
... What is that smelling so peculiar? Surely nothing can be
in bloom? What day is to-day? The fourth of April. Really, it
has rained a lot the last few days ... but the trees are still
almost completely bare, and it is dark. Whew! a person could
almost feel uneasy! ... That is really the only time in my life
when I was afraid; as a little boy, that time in the forest. But I
wasn't so little ... fourteen or fifteen. How long ago was that?
Nine years ... really. At eighteen I was a substitute; at twenty
a lieutenant ... and next year I'll be ... what will I be next
year? And what does it mean: next year? What does it mean:
next week? What does it mean: the day after to-morrow? ...
How? Teeth chattering? Oh, ho! Well, we'll just let them
chatter a bit. . . . Lieutenant, you are alone now; you don't need
to be putting on any airs now. . . . It is bitter . . . it is
bitter. ...


ARTHUR SCHNITZLER
103
I will sit down on a bench. Ah! how far have I gone? Such
a darkness! That behind me, that must be the second café. ...
I was there once last summer when our band was giving a concert
... with Kopetzsky and Rüttner-and a couple of others. ...
But I am tired. No, I am tired, as if I had been on the march for
ten hours. Yes, what if I went to sleep here. Ha! a tramp lieu-
tenant . .. yes, I really ought to go home ... but what would
I do at home? . .. but what am I doing in the Prater? ... Ah,
what I would like most would be if I never had to get up ... go
to sleep here and never waken ... that would be just right! No,
things are not made to suit you that way, Lieutenant. ... But
how and when? Now I could finally stop and think out the whole
matter properly ... yes, everything must be thought out ...it
was that way once before in my life. Let us think it out, then.
But what? ... The air is good here. A person ought to take
walks oftener in the Prater at night. ... Yes, I should have
thought of that before. Now it's all up with the Prater, and the
air, and taking walks. ... Yes; then how do things stand? Ah,
off with this cap; I feel as though it were pressing down on my
brain . . . I really can't think properly . . . ah! ... so!...
now pull your wits together, Gustl ... make your final arrange-
ments! So then, the finish will come to-morrow morning ...
to-morrow morning at seven o'clock . . . seven o'clock is a fine
time. Ha ha! and at eight o'clock, when school opens, everything
will be over. Kopetzsky won't be able to take his classes because
he will be too shaken up. But perhaps he won't know yet ...
people aren't sure to hear ... they didn't find Max Lippay until
afternoon, and he shot himself in the morning, and no one heard
of it. . . . But what is it to me, whether Kopetzsky takes his
classes or not? Ha! So then, at seven o'clock! Yes ... well,
what about it? There is nothing more to think out. I'll shoot
myself dead in my room, and then curtain! Monday the corpse
will . . . I know one man who will be happy: that is the doctor.
... Duel cannot take place owing to the suicide of one com-
batant. ... What will they say at the Mannheimers? Well, he
won't make much of it ... but the wife, the pretty blonde ...
there was something to be done with her ... oh, yes, I believe I
would have had a chance if I had just taken the trouble ... yes,
she would have been quite different from Steffi, the wench ...
but you have to keep on the go ... there you have to go through


104
LIEUTENANT GUSTL
10
W
100
never
a regular courtship, send flowers, talk proper ... it doesn't go
if you say “Come visit me to-morrow afternoon at the barracks!"
... Yes, a respectable woman like that, that would really have
been something. The wife of my captain in Przemysl . . . she
wasn't a respectable woman. I could swear: Libitzsky and Wer-
mutek . . . and the shabby substitute, he had her too. But Frau
Mannheimer ... yes, that would be something different, that
would have been a complete change, that could almost have made
a new man of a person—that would give him a new coat of paint
—then he could have some respect for himself. ... But always
these semi-professionals ... and I began so young ... I was
nothing but a kid when I got my first furlough and was home
with my parents in Graz ... Riedl was there too ... it was a
Bohemian girl . . . she must have been twice as old as I was ...
I didn't get home until the next morning ... the way my father
looked at me . . . and Klara ... I was most ashamed before
Klara. . . . She was engaged then; why didn't something come
of it? I never worried myself much about that. Poor thing, she
never had much luck; and now she is going to lose her only
brother. ... Yes, you will never see me again, Klara—that's
settled! Well, you never thought, little sister, when you went
with me to the station on New Year's Day, that you would never
see me again? And Mamma, Great God, Mamma ... no, I
don't dare think of that ... when I think of that, I am half
minded to do something vulgar. . . . Ah, if I could just go home
first . .. say it was a one day's leave . . . see Papa and Mamma
and Klara once more before I finish things up. Yes, I can leave
for Graz at seven on the first train, and be there at one. Greetings,
Mamma ... at your service, Klara! Well, and how are you all ?
This is a surprise! . . . But they might notice something ...
Klara, if no one else . . . certainly Klara. . . . Klara is such a
sensible girl ... what a sweet letter she wrote me lately, and I
still owe her an answer. And the good advice she always gives
me . . . such a whole-hearted creature. ... Wouldn't every-
thing have turned out differently if I had stayed at home? I would
have studied economy, would have gone to live with my uncle
... they all wanted me to do that, when I was still nothing but
a kid. By now I would have married, some good likable girl ...
perhaps Anna, she cared so much for me . .. I noticed it again
ima


ARTHUR SCHNITZLER
105
the last time I was home, although she has a husband and two
children now ... I could tell from the way she looked at me.
And she still says "Gustl” to me the way she used to. It will hit
her hard when she learns how I ended up but her husband will
say, “I always expected that; such a no-account. They will all
think it is because I had debts ... and yet that is not so at all;
everything is paid; except the last hundred and sixty guldens ...
well, they will be here to-morrow. ... Yes, I must see to it that
Ballert gets his hundred and sixty guldens ... I must write that
down before I shoot myself. . . . It is dreadful; it is dreadful!
... If I could up and get out instead ... to America, where no
one knows me ... in America no man knows what has taken
place here this evening ... there no one is bothering his head
about it. ... There was an account in the paper recently about a
Count Runge who had to go away because of some shady affair,
and now he has a hotel over there and doesn't give a snap of his
finger for the whole scandal. . . . And in a few years I could
come back again . . . not to Vienna, naturally ... not to Graz
either ... but I could go out to the farm . . . and Mamma and
Papa and Klara would prefer a thousand times that I went on
living. . . . And what do other people have to do with me? Who
is wasting any good intentions on me? None of them except
Kopetzsky would ever miss me ... Kopetzsky is the only one
... and yet he had to be the one to give me the ticket to-day
... and the ticket is to blame for everything ... without the
ticket I shouldn't have gone to the concert, and all that wouldn't
have happened. . . . Just what did happen? It is as though a
hundred years had passed since then, and it can't be two hours yet.
Two hours ago someone called me a “stupid ass” and was going
to break my sword. Great God, I'll soon be shouting in the mid-
dle of the night! Why did all that happen? Couldn't I have
waited a while longer, until the wardrobe was empty? And why
did I say, “Keep your mouth shut”? How did that ever slip
out of me? I am usually a polite person ... I am never as
abrupt as that even with my orderly . . . but naturally, I was
nervous everything coming at once, the hard luck gambling, and
Steffi's eternal stalling; and the duel to-morrow afternoon; and I
haven't been getting enough sleep lately; and the to-do at the
barracks ... a man can't hold up under that for ever. Yes,
as


106
LIEUTENANT GUSTL
sooner or later I would have gotten sick—would have had to get
a furlough. But now that's no longer necessary ... now comes a
long furlough ... without pay ... ha ha! ....
How long will I keep on sitting here. It must be past midnight
... didn't I hear it striking a while ago? What is that? A
carriage is passing? At this time? Rubber tires . . . I can al-
ready imagine. ... They are better off than I. Perhaps it is
Ballert with Berta. But just why should it be Ballert? ...
Drive on! . . . His Highness in Przemysl had a pretty carriage
... used to ride down to the city to Rosenberg in it. ... Very
sociable, His Highness was a real pal, thick with everybody.
... Those were fine times ... although ... the section was
desolate and you nearly died in summer . . . three were pros-
trated with sunstroke in one afternoon ... a corporal of my
squad, too—such a handy man. ... In the afternoon we lay
down naked on the bed. Suddenly Wiesner came in to me. I
must have been dreaming; and I stood up and drew out my sword,
which was lying next to me ... I must have made a good
picture ... Wiesner nearly killed himself laughing. He is rid-
ing-master already. Too bad I didn't go into the cavalry ...
but the old man was unwilling ... that would have been too
much of a good thing. . . . But now it's all the same. Why?
Yes, I know: I must die, that is why it's all the same—I must die.
... How then? Look, Gustl; you made a special trip down to
the Prater in the middle of the night ... where not a single soul
can disturb you . . . now you can think over everything in peace.
That is plain simple nonsense about America and leaving the
service, and you don't have enough brains to take up something
else, and if you live to be a hundred and think of the time when
someone was going to break your sword and called you a stupid
ass, and you stood there and couldn't do a thing—no, there is
nothing there to think over—what has happened has happened.
And that about Mamma and Klara is nonsense. They will get
over it-people get over everything. The way Mamma cried when
her brother died; and a month afterwards she hardly thought of
it. She used to drive out to the cemetery ... every week at
first, then every month ... and now only on the anniversary of
his death. . . . I die to-morrow—April the fifth. I wonder
whether they will remove me to Graz. Ha ha! then the worms in
Graz will be happy. But that isn't any concern of mine-let
n was
er-
nma


ARTHUR SCHNITZLER
107
others bother their heads about that. ... What is any concern
of mine, then? Yes, the hundred and sixty guldens for Ballert-
that is all—I don't have to make any arrangements besides that.
... Write letters? Where? To whom? . . . Say good-bye?
Yes, like the devil; it's plain enough when a man shoots himself.
Then people will notice that someone has said good-bye. If they
only knew how little I care about the whole business, they wouldn't
be sorry for me; I am really not to be pitied.... Just what have
I had of life? There is one thing I still wish I could have gone
through: a war. But I might have waited a long while. . . . And
I know everything else. Whether a person is called Steffi or
Kunigunde, that doesn't matter. . . . And I know the prettiest
operettas, too. And Lohengrin, I've been to that twelve times.
And just to-day I was at an oratorio. And a master-baker called
me a stupid ass. My soul, that is surely enough! And I am not
at all curious. . . . So, let's go home, slowly, very slowly. I
am really in no hurry. Rest for a few minutes more in the Prater
-like a tramp. I will not lie down in a bed. I'll have enough
time for sleeping.-Ah! the air.—There won't be any air ...
What is the matter? Heigh, Johann, bring me a glass of cold
water. What's the matter? Where? I am dreaming, yes? ...
My head ... oh, heavens ... I'm not seeing straight ... I
am all dressed! Where am I sitting? Great heavens, I fell
asleep! How could I sleep; it is already getting light! How
long have I been sleeping? Must look at the time. I can't see.
Where are my matches? Well, won't any of them burn? ...
Three, and I am to fight a duel at four. No, not a duel—I am to
shoot myself! The duel doesn't matter; I must shoot myself,
because a master-baker called me a stupid ass. ... Really, did
that actually happen? My head feels so strange ... my neck
feels as though it were in a vice . .. I can't move ... my right
leg has gone to sleep. Get up, get up! Ah, it is better that
way! ... It is getting lighter already. And the air ... just
like that morning when I was on picket duty and was camping in
the forest. . . . That was another kind of waking up—then there
was another day ahead of me. ... It seems that I still don't
realize everything. There lies the street, grey, empty. Surely I
am the only man in the Prater now. I was down here once
before at four in the morning, with Pansinger. We rode . . . I
was


108
LIEUTENANT GUSTL
ase
Wn
on Captain Mirovic's horse and Pansinger on his own nag ...
that was in May, last year. Everything was growing then; every-
thing was green. Now it is still cold; but spring is coming soon-
in a few days it will be here. Lilies of the valley, violets-
what a shame I'll never see them again. Every boob will see as
much of them as he wants, and I must die! It is simply a crying
shame! And people will be sitting down to dinner in the Wein-
garten as though nothing had happened—just as we all sat in
the Weingarten the evening of the day they put away Lippay.
And Lippay was so well liked ... they liked him better than
me, in the regiment. So why shouldn't they sit in the Weingarten
when I kick off? . . . It is quite warm ... much warmer than
yesterday . . . and such a balmy breeze . . . things will soon
begin to bud. ... I wonder whether Steffi will bring me flowers.
But don't get that idea into your head. She won't stop for that
... Really, if it were still Adele. No, Adele! I don't believe
I have thought of her for two years. All my life long I never
saw a girl cry like that. That was really the prettiest thing I
ever lived through. She was so modest, so unassuming-she cared
for me, I could swear to that. ... She was something quite dif-
ferent from Steffi. I should like to know why I threw her over
... such a stupid trick! It got too tame for me. Yes, that
was the whole thing ... go out every evening with one and the
same person. Then I was afraid that I would get tied down.
Such a whimperer ... Well, Gustl, you could have waited a
while . . . she was the only one who cared for you. What is
she doing now? Well, what must she be doing? Now she must
have someone else. ... Of course, this with Steffi is more con-
venient ... when a person is only engaged now and then, and
someone else has all the unpleasantness and I have just the pleas-
ure. ... Really, in that case a person can't expect her to come out
to the cemetery. Besides, who would go if he didn't have to?
Perhaps Kopetzsky, and that's all. But it is sad, to have no
one. ...
But what nonsense! Papa and Mamma and Klara. Yes, I am
son and brother ... but what else is there between us? Of
course, they care for me—but what do they know of me? That
I am in the service, that I play cards, and that I run around with
fast women ... but what else? That I often get sick of my-
self, I never wrote that to them-well, it seems that I never quite
e
1


ARTHUR SCHNITZLER
109
ers
knew that myself. . . . Ah, what is all this you are getting into,
Gustl ? It is about time for you to begin crying. The devil ...
step up . . . so! Whether a man is going to a rendezvous, or
on duty, or into battle ... just who said that? ... Ah, yes,
Major Lederer, in the canteen when they were telling about Wing-
leder who became so pale before his first duel, and vomited ...
yes: whether a man is going to a rendezvous or to sure death,
the true officer never lets you know which from his step or his
face! Now then, Gustl! Major Lederer has said so! Ha! ...
Still lighter ... it's light enough to read already. ... What
is that whistle? Ah, there is the North Station up there. The
Tegetthoffsäule ... it never looked so long before. . . . Car-
riages are standing over there. . . . But nothing but street cleaners
on the street ... my last street cleaners . . . ha! I always
have to laugh when I think of it ... I don't understand it at all.
. . . Is that the way all people feel, once they know for certain?
Half past three by the North Station clock. Now the only ques-
tion is, whether I shoot myself at seven by railroad time or by
Vienna time. . . . Seven . . . really just why seven? ... as
though it couldn't be some other time. ... I am hungry ...
my soul, I am hungry. No wonder . . . how long has it been
since I ate? Not since since yesterday evening at six o'clock in
the café. Actually! When Kopetzsky gave me the ticketcafé
au lait and two rolls. ... What will the baker say when he finds
out? The damned hound! Ah, he will know why; he will sud-
denly understand what it means to be an officer! A chap like
that can get a beating on the public street, and nothing comes of
it; but let one of us be insulted in secret and he is a dead man.
If such a scoundrel might fight a duel, at least—but no, then he
would be more careful, then he wouldn't take any chances. And
the fellow goes on living, goes on living in peace, while -I
must cash in! ... He has brought about my death. . . . Really,
Gust), do you understand? He is the one who has brought about
your death! But he shall not get off so smoothly as all that.
No, no, no! I will write Kopetzsky a letter with all this in it;
I will write down the whole story. Or better: I will write the
colonel, I will make a report to the officer in command ... just
like an official report. Yes, wait; you think that a thing like this
can remain a secret? You are mistaken; it will be written down
to be remembered into eternity, and then I'd like to see whether


110
LIEUTENANT GUSTL
you dare to come into the café. Ha! "I'd like to see” is good!
I'd like to see many things, but unfortunately it won't be pos-
sible ... it's all over! ...
Now Johann is coming into the room; now he is noticing that
the Lieutenant didn't sleep at home. Well, he will think all
sorts of things. But that the Lieutenant spent the night in the
Prater ... that, on my soul, he'll never think that. . . . Ah,
the Forty-Fourth! They are marching out to target practice.
We'll let them pass . . . So, we'll stand here. ... A window
is being opened over there-pretty woman. Well, I'd want to
put something around me, at least, if I went to a window. Last
Sunday was the last time. I never dreamed for a moment that
Steffi would be the last. ... Oh, God, that is the only real
pleasure. . . . Two hours from now the colonel will ride out
grandly after them ... the big men have it easy—yes, yes, eyes
right! Very good. If you knew how little I care about you all!
Ah, that is not bad: Katzer-since when has he been transferred
to the Forty-Fourth? At your service, at your service! What
kind of a face is he making? Why is he pointing to his head?
My dear man, your skull interests me mighty little. Ah, so!
No, my friend, you are wrong: I spent the night in the Prater
... you will read it in this evening's paper. . . . "Impossible!”
he will say; "this morning, when we were going out to target
practice, I met him on the Praterstrasse!” Who will get my
squad? I wonder whether they will give it to Walterer. Well,
that would be a pretty sight-a chap without any style; he should
have been a shoemaker by rights. ... What, is the sun rising
already? This is going to be a beautiful day, a real spring day.
... That's a devil of a note. The cabman will be up and about
at eight in the morning, and I ... well, what about it. Ho,
that is—a notion—to get aroused at the last minute on account
of a cabman. ... What is it that gives me this heart thumping
all of a sudden? It isn't for that reason. No, oh no. It is
“because I haven't eaten for so long." . . . But Gustl, be frank
with yourself: you are uneasy, uneasy because you were never
tested out before. But that won't help you at all; being uneasy
has never helped any one. Everyone must go through it once,
some sooner and some later, and you are just coming sooner.
... You never have been worth much, so at least conduct your-
self decently at the very last. I demand that of you! ... So,


ARTHUR SCHNITZLER
111
III
now to think it all over—but what? I always want to be think-
ing something over; but it is quite simple: it is lying in the
drawer of your night table; it is loaded; all that's left is to pull
the trigger . . . that doesn't require much skill! ...
She is already going to work . . . the poor girls! Adele had
some kind of a job, too. I went to get her a couple of times
in the evening. When they have a job, they don't play around
so much with the men. ... If Steffi would only listen to me,
I would have her become a modiste or something like that. ...
How will she find out about it? In the paper! She will be
angry because I didn't write of it to her. ... I believe I am
getting a bit out of my head. What concern is it of mine whether
she gets angry. ... How long has the whole business lasted?
Since January? Ah, no, it must have been before Christmas
... I brought her candy from Graz, and at New Year's she sent
me a note. . . . Right; the letters I have at home—aren't there
any there which I ought to burn? Hm, the one from Fall-
steiner-if that letter is found the lad could get into difficulties.
... What does that have to do with me? Well, that is no
great trouble ... but I can't hunt out that scribble. The best
thing would be for me to burn the whole lot. Who needs them?
It is pure junk. . . . And my few books I can make over to
Blany. Through Night and Ice—too bad I can never finish read-
ing it ... I've done very little reading lately. . . . Organ-
ah, from the church .. . early mass ... I have not been to
one for a long time . . . the last time in February when my squad
was ordered to go. . . . But that did no good-I was paying
attention to my men, to see that they were religious and con-
ducted themselves properly. ... I should like to go to church
... besides, there is some point to that. . . . Well, after eat-
ing to-day I will know all about it ... ah, "after eating” is
very good! ... Well then, shall I go in? I believe it would
be a comfort to Mamma if she knew that! It doesn't mean so
much to Klara. . . . Well, let's go in; it can't do any harm!
Organ—singing—hm-what is the matter? I feel quite giddy.
...O God, O God, O God, I wish I had somebody I could
exchange a few words with beforehand! ... What if I went
to confession! The Father would open his eyes, if I said at the
end, “I have the honour, Reverend Father; now I am going to
shoot myself!" ... I'd like best to lie down on the stone floor


112
LIEUTENANT GUSTL
and wail ... ah, no, I dare not do that! But often it feels
so good to cry. ... Let us sit down a moment—but not fall
asleep again like in the Prater! ... People who have a religion
are all the better for it. ... Well, now my hands are begin-
ning to tremble! If it goes on this way, I'll be so disgusted
with myself at the last that I'll kill myself from pure shame!
... The old lady there—what is she praying about? It would
be an idea if I'd say to her, “Include me, too” ... I never
learned just how to do it. . . . Ha! it seems that dying makes
you stupid! ... Stand up! ... What does that melody re-
mind me of? ... Great Heavens! yesterday evening! ... Out,
out, I can't put up with that! ... Pst! not so much noise; don't
let your sword drag—don't disturb people in their devotions!
So much better out in the open . .. light ... ah, it is grow-
ing nearer—if only it were over already! ...I should have
done it immediately–in the Prater ... a man should never go
out without his revolver ... if I had had one yesterday evening
... good Lord !-I could go get breakfast in the café. I am
hungry. It used always to seem strange to me that people who
were sentenced, took their coffee in the morning and smoked their
cigar ... the devil! I haven't smoked at all-no desire to
smoke. . . . It is comic: that I should want to go to my café.
Yes, it is already open and none of our crowd is there yet ...
and if I did ... it would certainly be a sign of cool-headedness.
"He had breakfast at six in the café, and shot himself at seven.”
... I am quite calm again ... walking is so pleasant ...
and the best of it is that nobody is compelling me. . . . If I
wanted to, I could chuck over the whole business . . . America.
... What is that "whole business”? What is a "whole busi-
ness”? I believe I have a sun stroke! ...0 ho, perhaps I am
so calm because I keep imagining that I don't have to? ... I
do have to, I do! No, I want to! Can't you really imagine your-
self, Gustl, taking off your uniform and absconding? And that
damned cur laughing his head off—and Kopetzsky himself would
never offer you his hand again. I feel flushed; I must be as red
as a beet. . . . The watchman is greeting me ... I must
answer ... "At your service!" . . . Now I have said, “At your
service.” That always pleases a poor devil like him. ... Well,
no one has any complaints to make about me ... off duty I
was always affable. When we were having field practice I let


ARTHUR SCHNITZLER
113
ne
off the officers of the Kompagnie Britannika. Once at drill I
heard a man behind me say something about "damned drudgery,"
and I didn't make him report—I just said to him, “You, be care-
ful, someone else might hear you, and you would get in wrong!"
... The Burghof. ... Who is on guard to-day? The Bosniacs.
They make a good appearance. The Lieutenant-colonel said re-
cently, "When we were down there in '78, no one would have
thought that they would match us the way they did!” . . . Good
Lord, I wish I could have been in something like that. They are
all rising from the bench. At your service, at your service! It
is too bad that someone like us can't come to that. . . . It would
have been much finer-on the field of honour, for the Fatherland
-than this way. ... Yes, Doctor, you are getting off really
quite well! ... Couldn't someone take it over for me? My soul,
I should leave word for Kopetzsky or Wymetal to duel with the
fellow in my place. Ah, he oughtn't to come off so easily! Ah,
what? Isn't it all the same what happens afterwards? I shall
never find out! ... There the trees are beginning to bud. ...
I picked up one once in the Volksgarten; she had a red dress;
she lived in the Strozzigasse ... later Rochlitz took her over. I
believe he still has her, but he never speaks of it any more-
he is probably ashamed. ... Steffi is still asleep . . . she looks
so dear when she is asleep ... as though she couldn't count up
to five! ... Well, when they are asleep they all look that way!
I ought to write her one more note . . . why not? Everyone
does it, writes letters just before. . . . I ought to write Klara,
too, telling her to console Mamma and Papa—and whatever else
you say! And Kopetzsky. My soul, I believe it would have
been much easier to go and say good-bye to a few people. And
the announcement to the officers of the regiment ... and the
hundred and sixty guldens for Ballert . . . really too much to
do. ... Well, no one is making me do it at seven ... from
eight on there is still time enough for being deceased! ... De-
ceased—that is the word—then a person can't do a thing.
Ringstrasse-I'll soon be in my café now. I feel as though
I am going to enjoy my breakfast ... it is unbelievable. ...
Yes, after breakfast I'll light a cigar, and then I'll go home and
write . . . yes, first of all I'll make the announcement to the
staff. Then comes the letter to Klara, then to Kopetzsky, then
to Steffi. What shall I write to Luder? ... "My dear child,


114
LIEUTENANT GUSTL
you did not think—"ah, what nonsense! "My dear child, I thank
you very much—” “My dear child, before I take my departure
I must not forget to—” Well, letter-writing was never my strong
point. “My dear child, a last farewell from your Gustl.” ...
What eyes she will make! It is lucky that I was not in love with
her ... it must be sad when a person cares a lot for some woman,
and then ... well Gustl, all right; it's sad enough as it is.
Many more would have come after Steffi, and finally one who
is worth something a young girl of a good substantial family-
it would have been very beautiful. ... I must write Klara in
detail how I couldn't do otherwise. “You must forgive me, dear
sister, and please console my dear parents. I know that I have
caused you all many worries and a good deal of pain. But believe
me, I have always loved you all very much, and I hope that you
will be happy once again, my dear Klara, and not wholly forget
your unfortunate brother.” Ah, I'd rather not write her at all!
No, it's enough to cry about ... I feel my eyes smarting al-
ready when I think of it. . . . At the most I'll write to Kopetzsky
-a good-fellow sort of farewell; and he shall transmit it to the
others. . . . Is it six already? Ah, no; five-thirty—a quarter to.
... Isn't that a pretty business! The little cut-up with the
black eyes ... the one I meet so often in the Florianigasse !
What will she say! But she doesn't even know who I am. She
will simply wonder why she never sees me any more. The day
before yesterday I decided that I would speak to her the very
next time. She has flirted enough ... young as she was, she
was no angel when you come down to it! ... Yes, Gustl! Never
put off till to-morrow what you can do to-day! ... That man
there has probably been up all night, too. Well, now he will go
comfortably home and lie down—me too! Ha ha! now it is get-
ting serious, Gustl, really! Well, if there weren't a little bit of
fear, there would be nothing to it—and on the whole, if I do say
it myself, I am holding up well. . . . Ah, where now? There
is my café . . . they are still sweeping ... well, let's go in. ...
Back there is the table where they always play tarots. ...
Strange: I simply can't imagine that the fellow who always sits
back there against the wall, that he will be the same one from
whom I ... No one is here yet . . . where is the waiter? ...
Hey! There he comes out of the kitchen.
"I have the honour, Lieutenant!"


ARTHUR SCHNITZLER
115
7 Soi
“Good morning."
"So early to-day, Lieutenant?”
"Ah, don't bother I don't have much time; I can sit there with
my cloak.”
“And your order, Lieutenant ?''
“Café au lait.”
"Thank you, Lieutenant."
Ah, the newspapers are lying there . . . to-day's papers al-
ready? ... I wonder if there is anything in them.' What? ...
I believe I will look to see if it says that I have killed myself!
Ha ha! ... Why am I still standing up? Let's sit down by
the window. He has already brought me the coffee. . . . So, I'll
pull the curtain shut; I don't like people to be gaping in. ...
But no one is passing at all. ... Ah, the coffee tastes good.
That wasn't a stupid idea, this breakfast! ... Ah, it makes a
new man of you—the nonsense of it was that I didn't have sup-
per. ... Why is the fellow standing there again? Ah, he has
brought my rolls.
"Have you heard the news, Lieutenant ?"
What is that? Really, for God's sake, does he know something
already? But nonsense, that is not possible!
"Herr Habetswallner—"
What? That is the name of the baker . . . what is he going
to say? Was he here after all? Was he here yesterday after
all, and did he tell? ... Why doesn't he go on? Ah, he is
talking ...
"—had a stroke last night at twelve o'clock."
"What?" ... I mustn't shout like that. No, I mustn't give
myself away ... but maybe I am dreaming ... I must ask
him again. "Who had a stroke?'' Perfect, perfect! I said that
quite innocently! .
"The baker, Lieutenant! ... You will remember him ...
the heavy-set man who used to take a hand at tarots with the
officers every afternoon ... opposite Herr Schlesinger and Herr
Wasner of the artificial flower shop.”
I am completely awake-everything fits together—and yet I
can't believe it-I must ask him once again—but quite inno-
cently ...
"He had a stroke? ... Really, how was that? How do you
come to know of it?”


116
LIEUTENANT GUSTL
“But, Lieutenant, who should know of it sooner than we? The
rolls you are eating there they come from Herr Habetswallner.
The boy told us who brings us the things from the bakery at half
past four in the morning."
For heaven's sake, I must not give myself away ... I feel
like shouting ... I feel like laughing ... I feel like giving
Rudolf a kiss. ... But I must ask him something else! To get
a stroke doesn't mean to be dead ... but quite calmly, for what
does the baker have to do with me, I must be looking at the paper
while I ask the waiter. ...
"Is he dead?”
“Why, yes, Lieutenant. He died on the spot."
Oh, splendid, splendid! And it's all because I went to
church. ...
"He was at the theatre in the evening. He fell on the stairs.
The janitor heard the fall . . . well, and then they carried him
into his apartment, and when the doctor arrived he was already
gone.”
OV
"That's too bad. He was in the prime of life.” ... I said
that handsomely~no one could suspect anything ... and I must
really hold myself back, to keep from shouting or jumping on the
billiard table. ....
“Yes, Lieutenant, too bad; he was a pleasant man, and has been
coming here with us for twenty years . . . he was a good friend
of our boss. And his poor wife ..."
I don't believe I was ever so happy before in my whole life.
He is dead,he is dead! No one knows a thing, and nothing has
happened! ... And what sheer luck that I came to the café ...
otherwise I should have shot myself for no reason at all. It is
like a dispensation of fate. ... Where is Rudolf? Ah, he is
talking with the fire-tender. ... Then, he is dead—he is dead-
I can hardly believe it! I'd like most to go and see for myself.
... Finally he had a stroke, from his rage, from holding in his
anger. Ah, it makes no difference to me why. The main thing
is: he is dead, and I can live, and the world belongs to me again!
. . . Comic: how I have kept breaking up in my coffee the roll
which Herr Habetswallner baked for me! It tastes very good,
Herr von Habetswallner! Excellent! So, now I'd like to smoke
a cigar. . ::


SCOFIELD THAYER
117
"Rudolf! You, Rudolf! Let the fire-tender alone for a while!"
“What is it, Lieutenant?"
"A Trabucco." ... I am so happy, so happy!... What shall
I do, what shall I do? Something must happen, or else I'll get a
stroke from pure joy! ... In half an hour I'll go to the barracks
and let John give me a cold rub-down ... at half-past seven we
have drill, and at half-past nine exercises. ... And I'll write
Steffi that she must leave this evening open for me, at all events.
And this afternoon at four ... well, wait, my boy, wait, my boy!
I am in very good trim. I'll make a hash of you!
DAWN FROM A RAILWAY DAY-COACH
BY SCOFIELD THAYER
En route Frankfort-Hamburg
The nickeled orb Apollo
Brays.
The disarticulated limbs of life
Assemble.
And Time walks.
Across lymphatic fields
Thin shadows are spun out
Tubercular.
The heavens adulterate
Crows blond.
And the immediate noise
Of myriad such planets
Wandering derelict,
Like leagues on leagues of tolerantly-winding whales
Not easily to be not,
Against insensible light
Sickens.


JOIE DE VIVRE
BY EDWIN MUIR
IT is a long time since we have had news in a work of art of
1 what used to be called—the very phrase sounds unreal to-day-
"the joy of living.” Long ago, in Mr Shaw's first plays, there
used to be a great deal of talk about it. But to Mr Shaw it
became a problem, as everything does; it was desired, it would
be possessed in the future, but it was not in fact possessed. Later,
Mr Wells for a little possessed it. As for us, we no longer believe
in it. There is joy in Mr Lawrence's novels, more than there was
in Mr Shaw's plays, but to Mr Lawrence, too, joy is a problem;
indeed, almost a fight. Why this change should have happened,
nobody can say. There are a hundred explanations, all of them
plausible, but the embarrassing fact is that we have no means of
telling whether they are true.
There is a certain incongruity, therefore, in the appearance, in
a small corner of Europe and in the little-known Flemish tongue,
of Pallieter,' by Felix Timmermans, a very remarkable book
crammed down and overflowing with the joy of living. This joy,
as far as one can see, is neither a pose nor a sermon, and it is
almost completely devoid of pathos. It asks nothing of us except
that sympathy with whatever enjoys itself, which we find so diffi-
cult to accord. It is not a book for the sad; only those who are
as happy as Mr Timmermans himself, will completely enjoy it.
What has it to give us? At first sight very little, certainly far
less than it would have given the generation which began to flourish
twenty years ago. But it throws out a few hints—by which we
may or may not be able to profit-on the general problem of
artistic creation.
To begin with, it demonstrates strikingly of what great im-
portance to the artist is the possession of an unspoiled sensuality.
Pallieter is a natural sensualist through and through. He enjoys
i Pallieter. By Felix Timmermans. Translated by C. B. Bodde. Intro-
duction by Hendrick Willem Van Loon. Drawings by Anton Pieck.
12mo. 246 pages. Harper and Brothers. $2.50.


EDWIN MUIR
119
CU
everything, colours, scents, women, religion, himself, food, drink,
sleep; and it is the exuberance of his physical enjoyment which
gives the story of his year its remarkable beauty. He can see
nothing without desiring to take it in his hands and enjoy it; and
nature, strangely enough, seems to respond to this treatment, be-
coming more beautiful the more she is desired. In Pallieter we
feel very vividly the physical source of the aesthetic emotion, and
in feeling that, discover the inexhaustibility of art. Enjoying
all the physical sensations to which one can give a name, Mr
Timmermans has naturally an alert eye for physical appearances :
“They opened the stable door and led out Beiaard, the white
mare. It was an enormous horse; the veins on its body were as
thick as a man's finger. She shook her great head and the thick
matted mane that hung on both sides of her neck waved like a
flag. Thrills of pleasure quivered through her hide, and the
heavy feet stamped into the ground and the long tail waved to
and fro. Her neigh rang over the fields like a pleasant laugh. ...
"Pressing her snorting nostrils against her massive chest, Beiaard
stepped on to the river path; her great feet struck into the red
sand like heavy flat hammers. The beast enjoyed it all, too,
snuffing up the clear morning air, playing like a foal, tossing her
head, lifting up her hind legs, and neighing continuously.”
10
An identification with everything that enjoys itself, makes Pal-
lieter fresh. Its beauty seems to be new-minted continuously out
of physical sensation.
Another thing which the book shows us is the true use of de-
scription in fiction. Pallieter is crammed with description, yet
it contains none of the set descriptions which are the plague of
the novel. Nature, eating, drinking, the changes of the seasons,
are described minutely, it is true, but that is because Pallieter's
exuberant gusto for them can be conveyed in no other way. They
are not background, they are substance of experience, the real
matter of the story. When Pallieter eats until grease and sweat
run down his chin, when, in a really magnificent chapter, he
rides on a cart-horse through thunder and lightning, he is doing
something which the plan of the book makes important. To have
described these things less fully would have been artistically wrong,
so


120
JOIE DE VIVRE
for the inexhaustible thirst for nature, wine, food, beauty, which
is the theme, could only be set forth by an unweariable minuteness,
almost a garrulity, of description. The book is in reality a sort
of epic of physical life, in which the smallest physical detail is
therefore important.
Yet in spite of his many and great merits Mr Timmermans
finally becomes wearisome. He becomes wearisome because his
beauty is not only the beauty of desire, but of continuously satis-
fied desire. This beauty is new, it is given to us with both hands,
but we do not know after a while what to do with it. We begin
to look out for a touch of sorrow to give all this happiness value,
to make it less cheap than, two-thirds through the book, it becomes.
We begin to realize that a man so eager for life as Pallieter, was
bound to be eager, too, for what in life is unattainable, and was
fated, therefore, to unhappiness as well as happiness. And to-
wards the end, we can find no reason for this continual flow of
spirits, and we wonder if Pallieter's joie de vivre is not occasionally
a burden to him. But the beauty and vigour of Mr Timmermans'
picture of common life remain. The translation is truly admirable.



Permission of Alfred Stieglits
ALLIGATOR PEAR. BY GEORGIA O'KEEFFE





THE WOMAN WHO RODE AWAY
BY D. H. LAWRENCE
11
men
CHE was a prisoner in her house and in the stockaded garden,
but she scarcely minded. And it was days before she realized
that she never saw another woman. Only the men, the elderly
men of the big house that she imagined must be some sort of
temple, and the men priests of some sort. For they always had
the same colours, red, orange, yellow, and black, and the same
grave, abstracted demeanour.
Sometimes an old man would come and sit in her room with
her, in absolute silence. None spoke any language but Indian,
save the one younger man. The older men would smile at her,
and sit with her for an hour at a time, sometimes smiling at her,
when she spoke in Spanish, but never answering save with this
slow, benevolent-seeming smile. And they gave off a feeling of
almost fatherly solicitude. Yet their dark eyes, brooding over
her, had something away in their depths that was awesomely
ferocious and relentless. They would cover it with a smile, at
once, if they felt her looking. But she had seen it.
Always they treated her with this curious impersonal solicitude,
this utterly impersonal gentleness, as an old man treats a child.
But underneath it she felt there was something else, something
terrible. When her old visitor had gone away, in his silent,
insidious, fatherly fashion, a shock of fear would come over her;
though of what she knew not.
The young Indian would sit and talk with her freely, as if with
great candour. But with him too she felt that everything real
was unsaid. Perhaps it was unspeakable. His big dark eyes would
rest on her almost cherishingly, touched with ecstasy, and his beau-
tiful, slow, languorous voice would trail out its simple, ungram-
matical Spanish. He told her he was the grandson of the old,
old man, son of the man in the spotted serape: and they were
caciques, kings from the old days, before even the Spaniards


122
THE WOMAN WHO RODE AWAY
came. But he himself had been in Mexico City, and also in the
United States. He had worked as a labourer, building the roads
in Los Angeles. He had travelled as far as Chicago.
"Don't you speak English, then ?" she asked.
His eyes rested on her with a curious look of duplicity and
conflict, and he mutely shook his head.
"What did you do with your long hair, when you were in the
United States ?" she asked. “Did you cut it off ?”
Again, with the look of torment in his eyes, he shook his head.
"No," he said, in the low, subdued voice, “I wore a hat, and
a handkerchief tied round my head.”
And he relapsed into silence, as if of tormented memories.
“Are you the only man of your people who has been to the
United States ?" she asked him.
“Yes. I am the only one who has been away from here for
a long time. The others come back soon, in one week. They don't
stay away. The old men don't let them.”
"And why did you go?"
“The old men want me to go because I shall be the Cacique.”
He talked always with the same naïveté, an almost childish
candour. But she felt that this was perhaps just the effect of his
Spanish. Or perhaps speech altogether was unreal to him. Any-
how, she felt that all the real things were kept back.
He came and sat with her a good deal-sometimes more than
she wished—as if he wanted to be near her. She asked him if
he was married. He said he was—with two children.
"I should like to see your children,” she said.
But he answered only with that smile, a sweet, almost ecstatic
smile, above which the dark eyes hardly changed from their
enigmatic abstraction.
It was curious, he would sit with her by the hour, without ever
making her self-conscious, or sex-conscious. He seemed to have no
sex, as he sat there so still and gentle and apparently submissive,
with his head bent a little forward, and the river of glistening
black hair streaming maidenly over his shoulders.
Yet when she looked again, she saw his shoulders broad and
powerful, his eyebrows black and level, the short, curved, obstinate
black lashes over his lowered eyes, the small, fur-like line of
moustache above his blackish, heavy lips, and the strong chin;


D. H. LAWRENCE
123
and she knew that in some other mysterious way he was darkly
and powerfully male. And he, feeling her watching him, would
glance up at her swiftly with a dark, lurking look in his eyes, which
immediately he veiled with that half-sad smile.
The days and the weeks went by, in a vague kind of content-
ment. She was uneasy sometimes, feeling she had lost power over
herself. She was not in her own power, she was under the spell
of some other power. And at times she had moments of terror
and horror. But then these Indians would come and sit with her,
casting their insidious spell over her by their very silent presence,
their silent, sexless, powerful physical presence. As they sat they
seemed to take her will away, leaving her will-less and victim to
her own indifference. And the young man would bring her a
sweetened drink, often the same emetic drink, but sometimes other
kinds. And after drinking, the languor filled her heavy limbs,
her senses seemed to float in the air, listening, hearing. They had
brought her a little female dog, which she called Flora. And
once, in the trance of her senses, she felt she heard the little dog
conceive, in her tiny womb, and begin to be complex, with young.
And another day she could hear the vast sound of the earth going
round, like some immense arrow-string booming.
But as the days grew shorter and colder, when she was cold,
she would get a sudden revival of her will, and a desire to go out,
to go away. And she insisted to the young man, she wanted to
go out.
So one day, they let her climb to the topmost roof of the big
house where she was, and look down the square. It was the day of
the big dance, but not everybody was dancing. Women with
babies in their arms stood in their doorways, watching. Opposite,
at the other end of the square, there was a throng before the other
big house, and a small, brilliant group on the terrace-roof of the
first story, in front of wide-open doors of the upper story. Through
these wide-open doors she could see fire glinting in darkness; and
priests in head-dresses of black and yellow and scarlet feathers,
wearing robe-like blankets of black and red and yellow, with long
green fringe, were moving about. A big drum was beating slowly
and regularly, in the dense, Indian silence. The crowd below
waited.
Then a drum started on a high beat, and there came the deep,


124 THE WOMAN WHO RODE AWAY
powerful burst of men singing a heavy, savage music, like a wind
roaring in some timeless forest, many mature men singing in one
breath, like the wind; and long lines of dancers walked out from
under the big house. Men with naked, golden-bronze bodies and
streaming black hair, tufts of red and yellow feathers on their
arms, and kilts of white frieze with a bar of heavy red and
black and green embroidery round their waists, bending slightly
forward and stamping the earth in their absorbed, monotonous
stamp of the dance, a fox-fur, hung by the nose from their belt
behind, swaying with the sumptuous swaying of a beautiful fox-
fur, the tip of the tail writhing above the dancer's heels. And
after each man, a woman with a strange elaborate head-dress of
feathers and seashells, and wearing a short black tunic, moving
erect, holding up tufts of feathers in each hand, swaying her wrists
rhythmically, and subtly beating the earth with her bare feet.
So, the long line of the dance unfurling from the big house
opposite. And from the big house beneath her, strange scent of
incense, strange tense silence, then the answering burst of inhuman
male singing, and the long line of the dance unfurling.
It went on all day, the insistence of the drum, the cavernous,
roaring, storm-like sound of male singing, the incessant swinging
of the fox-skins behind the powerful, gold-bronze, stamping legs
of the men, the autumn sun from a perfect blue heaven pouring
on the rivers of black hair, men's and women's, the valley all still,
the walls of rock beyond, the awful huge bulking of the mountain
against the pure sky, its snow seething with sheer whiteness.
For hours and hours she watched, spellbound, and as if drugged.
And in all the terrible persistence of the drumming and the
primeval, rushing deep singing, and the endless stamping of the
dance of fox-tailed men, the tread of heavy, bird-erect women
in their black tunics, she seemed at last to feel her own death, her
own obliteration. As if she were to be obliterated from the field
of life again. In the strange towering symbols on the heads of
the changeless, absorbed women she seemed to read once more the
Mene Mene Tekel U pharsin. Her kind of womanhood, intensely
personal and individual, was to be obliterated again, and the great
primeval symbols were to tower once more over the fallen indi-
vidual independence of woman. The sharpness and the quivering
nervous consciousness of the highly-bred white woman was to be


D. H. LAWRENCE
125
destroyed again, womanhood was to be cast once more into the
great stream of impersonal sex and impersonal passion. Strangely,
as if clairvoyant, she saw the immense sacrifice prepared. And she
went back to her little house in a trance of agony.
After this, there was always a certain agony when she heard
the drums at evening, and the strange uplifted savage sound of
men singing round the drum, like wild creatures howling to the
invisible gods of the moon and the vanished sun. Something of
the chuckling sobbing cry of the coyote, something of the exultant
bark of the fox, the far-off wild melancholy exultance of the howl-
ing wolf, the torment of the puma's scream, and the insistence of
the ancient, fierce human male, with his lapses of tenderness and
his abiding ferocity.
Sometimes she would climb the high roof after nightfall, and
listen to the dim cluster of young men round the drum on the
bridge just beyond the square, singing by the hour. Sometimes
there would be a fire, and in the fire-glow, dark men wearing white
shirts or naked save for a loin-cloth, would be dancing and stamp-
ing like spectres, hour after hour in the dark cold air, within the
fire-glow, for ever dancing and stamping like turkeys, or dropping
squatting by the fire to rest, throwing their blankets round them.
"Why do you all have the same colours ?” she asked the young
Indian. "Why do you all have red and yellow and black, over
your white shirts? And the women have black tunics ?”
He looked into her eyes, curiously, and the faint, evasive
smile came on to his face. Behind the smile lay a soft, strange
malignancy.
"Because our men are the fire and the daytime, and our women
are the spaces between the stars at night,” he said.
"Aren't the women even stars?” she said.
"No. We say they are the spaces between the stars, that keep
the stars apart.”
He looked at her oddly, and again the touch of derision came
into his eyes.
"White people,” he said, “they know nothing. They are like
children, always with toys. We know the sun, and we know the
moon. And we say, when a white woman give herself to our gods,
then our gods will begin to make the world again, and the white
man's gods will fall to pieces."


126
THE WOMAN WHO RODE AWAY
“How give herself ?" she asked quickly.
And he, as quickly, covered himself with a subtle smile.
“She leave her own gods and come to our gods, I mean that,"
he said, soothingly.
But she was not reassured. An icy pang of fear and certainty
was at her heart.
"The sun he is alive at one end of the sky," he continued, "and
the moon lives at the other end. And the man all the time have
to keep the sun happy in his side of the sky, and the woman have
to keep the moon quiet at her side of the sky. All the time she
have to work at this. And the sun can't ever go into the house
of the moon, and the moon can't ever go into the house of the
sun, in the sky. So the woman, she asks the moon to come into
her cave, inside her. And the man, he draws the sun down till he
has the power of the sun. All the time he do this. Then when
the man gets a woman, the sun goes into the cave of the moon,
and that is how everything in the world starts."
She listened watching him closely, as one enemy watches another
when he is speaking with double meanings.
"Then,” she said, "why aren't you Indians masters of the white
men ?"
"Because," he said, "the Indian got weak, and lost his power
with the sun, so the white men stole the sun. But they can't keep
him—they don't know how. They got him, but they don't know
what to do with him, like a boy who catch a big grizzly bear,
and can't kill him, and can't run away from him. The grizzly
bear eats the boy that catch him, when he want to run away from
him. White men don't know what they are doing with the sun,
and white women don't know what they do with the moon. The
moon she got angry with white women, like a puma when someone
kills her little ones. The moon, she bites white women-here
inside” and he pressed his side. "The moon, she is angry in
a white woman's cave. The Indian can see it. . . . And soon,"
he added, “the Indian woman get the moon back and keep her
quiet in their house. And the Indian men get the sun, and the
power over all the world. White men don't know what the sun
is. They never know.”
He subsided into a curious exultant silence.
W
ULI


D. H. LAWRENCE
127
0
n
"But,” she faltered, “why do you hate us so? Why do you
hate me?"
He looked up suddenly with a light on his face, and a startling
flame of a smile.
“No, we don't hate,” he said softly, looking with a curious glitter
into her face.
"You do,” she said, forlorn and hopeless.
And after a moment's silence, he rose and went away.
Winter had now come, in the high valley, with snow that melted
in the day's sun, and nights that were bitter cold. She lived on,
in a kind of daze, feeling her power ebbing more and more away
from her, as if her will were leaving her. She felt always in the
same relaxed, confused victimized state, unless the sweetened herb
drinks would numb her mind altogether, and release her senses
into a sort of heightened, mystic acuteness and a feeling as if she
were diffusing out deliciously into the harmony of things. This
at length became the only state of consciousness she really recog-
nized: this exquisite sense of bleeding out into the higher beauty
and harmony of things. Then she could actually hear the great
stars in heaven, which she saw through her door, speaking from
their motion and brightness, saying things perfectly to the cosmos,
as they trod in perfect ripples, like bells on the floor of heaven,
passing one another and grouping in the timeless dance, with spaces
of dark between. And she could hear the snow on a cold, cloudy
day twittering and faintly whistling in the sky, like birds that
flock and fy away in autumn, suddenly calling farewell to the in-
visible moon, and slipping out of the plains of the air, releasing
peaceful warmth. She herself would call to the arrested snow to
fall from the upper air. She would call to the unseen moon to
cease to be angry, to make peace again with the unseen sun like
a woman who ceases to be angry in her house. And she would
smell the sweetness of the moon relaxing to the sun in the wintry
heaven, when the snow fell in a faint, cold-perfumed relaxation,
as the peace of the sun mingled again in a sort of unison with the
peace of the moon.
She was aware too of the sort of shadow that was on the Indians
of the valley, a deep, stoical disconsolation, almost religious in
its depth.


128 THE WOMAN WHO RODE AWAY
"We have lost our power over the sun, and we are trying to
get him back. But he is wild with us, and shy like a horse that
has got away. We have to go through a lot.”
So the young Indian said to her, looking into her eyes with a
strained meaning. And she, as if bewitched, replied:
"'I hope you will get him back.”
The smile of triumph flew over his face.
“Do you hope it?" he said.
"I do,” she answered, fatally.
"Then all right,” he said. "We shall get him.”
And he went away in exultance.
She felt she was drifting on some consummation, which she
had no will to avoid, yet which seemed heavy and finally terrible
to her.
It must have been almost December, for the days were short,
when she was taken again before the aged man, and stripped of
her clothing, and touched with the old finger-tips.
The aged cacique looked her in the eyes, with his eyes of lonely,
far-off, black intentness, and murmured something to her.
"He wants you to make the sign of peace," the young man
translated, showing her the gesture. “Peace and farewell to him."
She was fascinated by the black, glass-like, intent eyes of the
old cacique, that watched her without blinking, like a basilisk's,
overpowering her. In their depths also she saw a certain fatherly
compassion, and pleading. She put her hand before her face,
in the required manner, making the sign of peace and farewell. He
made the sign of peace back again to her, then sank among his
furs. She thought he was going to die, and that he knew it.
There followed a day of ceremonial, when she was brought out
before all the people, in a blue cloak with white fringe, and holding
blue feathers in her hands. Before an altar of one House, she
was perfumed with incense and sprinkled with ash. Before the
altar of the opposite House she was fumigated again with incense
by the gorgeous, terrifying priests in yellow and scarlet and black,
their faces painted with scarlet paint. And then they threw water
on her. Meanwhile she was faintly aware of the fire on the
altar, the heavy, heavy sound of a drum, the heavy sound of men
beginning powerfully, deeply, savagely to sing, the swaying of
the crowd of faces in the plaza below, and the formation for a
sacred dance.


D. H. LAWRENCE
129
was
But at this time her commonplace consciousness was numb, she
was aware of her immediate surroundings as shadows, almost im-
material. With refined and heightened senses she could hear the
sound of the earth winging on its journey, like a shot arrow, the
ripple-rustling of the air, and the boom of the great arrow-string.
And it seemed to her there were two great influences in the upper
air, one golden towards the sun, and one invisible silver; the first
travelling like rain ascending to the gold presence sunwards, the
second like rain descending silverily the ladders of space towards
the hovering, lurking clouds over the snowy mountain top. Then
between them, another presence, waiting to shake himself free
of moisture, or of heavy white snow that had mysteriously collected
about him. And in summer, like a scorched eagle, he would wait
to shake himself clean of the weight of heavy sunbeams. And he
was coloured like fire. And he was always shaking himself clear,
of snow or of heavy heat, like an eagle rustling.
Then there was a still stranger presence, standing watching from
the blue distance: always watching. Sometimes running in upon
the wind, or shimmering in the heat-waves. The blue wind itself,
rushing as it were out of the holes of the earth into the sky,
rushing out of the sky down upon the earth. The blue wind, the
go-between, the invisible ghost that belonged to two worlds, play-
ing upon the ascending and the descending chords of the rain.
More and more her ordinary personal consciousness had left her,
she had gone into that other state of passional cosmic conscious-
ness, like one who is drugged. The Indians, with their heavily
religious natures, had made her succumb to their vision.
Only one personal question she asked the young Indian:
"Why am I the only one that wears blue ?"
"It is the colour of the wind. It is the colour of what goes away
and is never coming back, but which is always here, waiting like
death among us. It is the colour of the dead. And it is the
colour that stands away off, looking at us from the distance, that
cannot be near to us. When we go near, it goes further. It can't
come near. We are all brown and yellow and black here, and white
teeth and red blood. We are the ones that are here. You with
blue eyes, you are the messengers from the far-away, you cannot
stay, and now it is time for you to go back.”
"Where to?" she asked.
"To the way-off things like the sun and the blue mother of
eve


130
THE WOMAN WHO RODE AWAY
rain, and tell them that we are the people on the world again,
and we can bring the sun to the moon again, like a red horse to
a blue mare; we are the people. The white women have stayed
too long on the earth, the moon and the sun are waiting for her
to go. Everything stands still. The moon is like a white she-goat,
all the time shut up in a corral, and angry and butting. She want
to get out. The white woman got to let her out.”
"How?” she said.
“The white woman got to die and go like a wind to the sun,
tell him the Indians will open the gate to him. And the Indian
women will open the gate to the moon. The white woman don't
let the moon come down out of the blue corral. The moon used
to come down among the Indian women, like a white goat among
iris flowers. And the sun want to come down to the Indian men,
like an eagle to the pine-trees. The sun, he is shut out behind the
white man, and the moon, she is shut out behind the white woman,
and they can't get away. They are angry, everything in the world
gets angrier. The Indian says, he will give the white woman to
the sun, so the sun will leap over the white men and come to the
Indian again. And the moon will be surprised; she will see the
gate open, and she not know which way to go. But the Indian
woman will call to the moon, Come! Come! Come back into my
grass-lands. The wicked white woman can't harm you any more.
Then the sun will look over the heads of the White Men, and
see the moon in the pastures of our women, with the Red Men
standing around like pine-trees. Then he will leap over the heads
of the White Men, and come running fast to the Indians, through
the spruce trees. And we, who are red and black and yellow, we
who stay, we shall have the sun on our right hand and the moon
on our left. So we can bring the rain down out of the blue
meadows, and up out of the black. And we can call the wind
that tells the corn to grow, when we ask him, and we shall make
the clouds to break, and the sheep to have twin lambs. And we
shall be full of power, like a spring day. But the white people
will be a hard winter, without snow-
"But,” said the white woman, “I don't shut out the moon—how
can I?"
"Yes,” he said, "you shut the gate, and then laugh, think you
have it all your own way.”


D. H. LAWRENCE
131
wa
were
She could never quite understand the way he looked at her. He
was always so curiously gentle, and his smile was so soft. Yet
there was such a glitter in his eyes, and an unrelenting sort of hate
came out of his words, a strange, profound, impersonal hate. Per-
sonally he liked her, she was sure. He was gentle with her,
attracted by her in some strange, soft, passionless way. But im-
personally he hated her with a mystic hatred. He would smile
at her winningly. Yet if, the next moment, she glanced round at
him unawares, she would catch that gleam of pure after-hate in
his eyes.
"Have I got to die and be given to the sun ?" she asked.
"Sometime,” he said, laughing evasively. “Sometime we all
die.”
They were gentle with her, and very considerate with her.
Strange men, the old priests and the young cacique alike, they
watched over her and cared for her like women. In their soft,
insidious understanding, there was something womanly. Yet their
eyes, with that strange glitter, and their dark, shut mouths that
would open to the broad jaw, the small, strong, white teeth, had
something very primitively male, and cruel.
One wintry day, when snow was falling, they took her to a
great dark chamber in the big House. The fire was burning in
a corner on a high raised dais under a sort of hood or canopy of
adobe-work. She saw in the fire-glow, the glowing bodies of the
almost naked priests, and strange symbols on the roof and walls
of the chamber. There was no door or window in the chamber,
they had descended by a ladder from the roof. And the fire of
pine-wood danced continually, showing walls painted with strange
devices, which she could not understand, and a ceiling of poles
making a curious pattern of black and red and yellow, and alcoves
or niches in which were curious objects she could not discern.
The older priests were going through some ceremony near the
fire, in silence, intense Indian silence. She was seated on a low
projection of the wall, opposite the fire, two men seated beside her.
Presently they gave her a drink from a cup, which she took gladly,
because of the semi-trance it would induce.
In the darkness and in the silence she was accurately aware of
everything that happened to her, how they took off her clothes, and
standing her before a great, weird device on the wall, coloured blue


132
THE WOMAN WHO RODE AWAY
and white and black, washed her all over with water and the amole
infusion, washed even her hair, softly, carefully, and dried it on
white cloths, till it was soft and glistening. Then they laid her
on a couch under another great indecipherable image of red and
black and yellow, and now rubbed all her body with sweet-scented
oil, and massaged all her limbs, and her back, and her sides, with
a long, strange, hypnotic massage. Their dark hands were incred-
ibly powerful, yet soft with a watery softness she could not under-
stand. And the dark faces, leaning near her white body, she saw
were darkened with red pigment, with lines of yellow round the
cheeks. And the dark eyes glittered absorbed, as the hands worked
upon the soft white body of the woman.
They were so impersonal, absorbed in something that was beyond
her. They never saw her as a personal woman: she could tell
that. She was some mystic object to them, some vehicle of passions
too remote for her to grasp. Herself in a state of trance, she
watched their faces bending over her, dark, strangely glistening
with the transparent red paint, and lined with bars of yellow.
And in this weird, luminous-dark mask of living face, the eyes were
fixed with an unchanging steadfast gleam, and the purplish-pig-
mented lips were closed in a full, sinister, sad grimness. The
immense fundamental sadness, the grimness of ultimate decision,
the fixity of revenge, and the nascent exultance of those that are
going to triumph—these things she could read in their faces, as she
lay and was rubbed into a misty glow by their uncanny dark
hands. Her limbs, her flesh, her very bones at last seemed to be
diffusing into a roseate sort of mist, in which her consciousness
hovered like some sun-gleam in a flushed cloud.
She knew the gleam would fade, the cloud would go grey. But
at present she did not believe it. She knew she was a victim: that
all this elaborate work upon her was the work of victimizing her.
But she did not mind. She wanted it.
Later, they put a short blue tunic on her and took her to the
upper terrace, and presented her to the people. She saw the plaza
below her full of dark faces and of glittering eyes. There was no
pity: only the curious hard exultance. The people gave a sub-
dued cry when they saw her, and she shuddered. But she hardly
cared.
Next day was the last. She slept in a chamber of the big House.
e was no


D. H. LAWRENCE
133
At dawn they put on her a big blue blanket with a fringe, and
led her out into the plaza, among the throng of silent, dark-
blanketed people. There was pure white snow on the ground, and
the dark people in their dark-brown blankets looked like inhabitants
of another world.
A large drum was slowly pounding, and an old priest was
declaiming from a housetop. But it was not till noon that a litter
came forth, and the people gave that low, animal cry which was
so moving. In the sack-like litter sat the old, old cacique, his
white hair braided with black braid and large turquoise stones. His
face was like a piece of obsidian. He lifted his hand in token,
and the litter stopped in front of her. Fixing her with his old
eyes, he spoke to her for a few moments, in his hollow voice. No
one translated.
Another litter came, and she was placed in it. Four priests
moved ahead, in their scarlet and yellow and black, with plumed
head-dresses. Then came the litter of the old cacique. Then the
light drums began, and two groups of singers burst simultaneously
into song, male and wild. And the golden-red, almost naked men,
adorned with ceremonial feathers and kilts, the rivers of black
hair down their backs, formed into two files and began to tread the
dance. So they threaded out of the snowy plaza, in two long,
sumptuous lines of dark red-gold and black and fur, swaying with
a faint tinkle of bits of shell and flint, winding over the snow
between the two bee-clusters of men who sang around the drum.
Slowly they moved out, and her litter, with its attendance of
feathered, lurid, dancing priests, moved after. Everybody danced
the tread of the dance-step, even, subtly, the litter-bearers. And
out of the plaza they went, past smoking ovens, on the trail to
the great cotton-wood trees, that stood like grey-silver lace against
the blue sky, bare and exquisite above the snow. The river,
diminished, rushed among fangs of ice. The chequer-squares of
gardens within fences were all snowy, and the white houses now
looked yellowish. The whole valley glittered intolerably with
pure snow, away to the walls of the standing rock. And across
the flat cradle of snow-bed wound the long thread of the dance,
shaking slowly and sumptuously in its orange and black motion.
The high drums thudded quickly, and on the crystalline frozen air
the swell and roar of the chant of savages was like an obsession.
то
SS


134 THE WOMAN WHO RODE AWAY
acro
She sat looking out of her litter with big, transfixed blue eyes,
under which were the wan markings of her drugged weariness.
She knew she was going to die, among the glisten of this snow,
at the hands of this savage, sumptuous people. And as she stared
at the blaze of blue sky above the slashed and ponderous moun-
tain, she thought: “I am dead already. What difference does
it make, the transition from the dead I am, to the dead I shall be,
very soon!" Yet her soul sickened and felt wan.
The strange procession trailed on, in perpetual dance, slowly
across the plain of snow, and then entered the slopes between the
pine-trees. She saw the copper-dark men dancing the dance-tread,
onwards, between the copper-pale tree-trunks. And at last she
too, in her swaying litter, entered the pine-trees.
They were travelling on and on, upwards, across the snow under
the trees, past the superb shafts of pale, flaked copper, the rustle
and shake and tread of the threading dance, penetrating into the
forest, into the mountain. They were following a stream-bed:
but the stream was dry, like summer, dried up by the frozenness
of the head-waters. There were dark, red-bronze willow bushes
with osiers like wild hair, and pallid aspen trees looking like
cold flesh against the snow. Then jutting dark rocks.
At last she could tell that the dancers were moving forward
no more. Nearer and nearer she came upon the drums, as to a lair
of mysterious animals. Then through the bushes she emerged into
a strange amphitheatre. Facing was a great wall of hollow rock,
down the front of which hung a great, dripping, fang-like spoke
of ice. The ice came pouring over from the precipice above, and
then stood arrested, dripping out of high heaven, almost down to
the hollow stones where the stream-pool should be below. But
the pool was dry.
On either side the dry pool, the lines of dancers had formed, and
the dance was continuing without intermission, against a back-
ground of bushes.
But what she felt was that fanged inverted pinnacle of ice,
hanging from the lip of the dark precipice above. And behind the
great rope of ice, she saw the leopard-like figures of priests climb-
ing the hollow cliff face, to the cave that like a dark socket bored
a cavity, an orifice, half-way up the crag.
Before she could realize, her litter-bearers were staggering in


D. H. LAWRENCE
135
the footholds, climbing the rock. She too was behind the ice.
There it hung, like a curtain that is not spread, but hangs like
a great fang. And near above her was the orifice of the cave
sinking dark into the rock. She watched it as she swayed upwards.
On the platform of the cave stood the priests, waiting in all
their gorgeousness of feathers and fringed robes, watching her
ascent. Two of them stooped to help her litter-bearers. And at
length she was on the platform of the cave, far in behind the shaft
of ice, above the hollow amphitheatre among the bushes below,
where men were dancing, and the whole populace of the village was
clustered in silence.
The sun was sloping down the afternoon sky, on the left. She
knew that this was the shortest day of the year, and the last day
of her life. They stood her facing the iridescent column of ice,
which fell down marvellously arrested, away in front of her.
Some signal was given, and the dance below stopped. There
was now absolute silence. She was given a little to drink, then
two priests took off her mantle and her tunic, and in her strange
pallor she stood there, between the lurid robes of the priests,
beyond the pillar of ice, beyond and above the dark-faced people.
The throng below gave the low, wild cry. Then the priests turned
her round, so she stood with her back to the open world, her long
blond hair to the people below. And they cried again.
She was facing the cave, inwards. A fire was burning and ficker-
ering in the depths. Four priests had taken off their robes, and
were almost as naked as she was. They were powerful men in
the prime of life, and they kept their dark, painted faces lowered.
From the fire came the old, old priest, with an incense-pan. He
was naked and in a state of barbaric ecstasy. He fumigated his
victim, reciting at the same time in a hollow voice. Behind him
came another robeless priest, with two flint knives.
When she was fumigated, they laid her on a large flat stone,
the four powerful men holding her by the outstretched arms and
legs. Behind stood the aged man, like a skeleton covered with
dark glass, holding a knife and transfixedly watching the sun: and
behind him again was another naked priest, with a knife.
She felt little sensation, though she knew all that was happen-
ing. Turning to the sky, she looked at the yellow sun. It was
sinking. The shaft of ice was like a shadow between her and it.


136
THE WOMAN WHO RODE AWAY
And she realized that the yellow rays were filling half the cave,
though they had not reached the altar where the fire was, at the
far end of the funnel-shaped cavity.
Yes, the rays were creeping round slowly. As they grew
ruddier, they penetrated further. When the red sun was about
to sink, he would shine full through the shaft of ice deep into the
hollow of the cave, to the innermost.
She understood now that this was what the men were waiting
for. Even those that held her down were bent and twisted round,
their black eyes watching the sun with glittering eagerness, and
awe, and craving. The black eyes of the aged cacique were fixed
like black mirrors on the sun, as if sightless, yet containing some
terrible answer to the reddening winter planet. And all the eyes
of the priests were fixed and glittering on the sinking orb, in the
reddening, icy silence of the winter afternoon.
They were anxious, terribly anxious, and fierce. Their ferocity
wanted something, and they were waiting the moment. And their
ferocity was ready to leap out into a mystic exultance, of triumph.
But still they were anxious.
Only the eyes of that oldest man were not anxious. Black, and
fixed, and as if sightless, they watched the sun, seeing beyond
the sun. And in their black, empty concentration there was power,
power intensely abstract and remote, but deep, deep to the heart
of the earth, and the heart of the sun. In absolute motionlessness
he watched till the red sun should send his ray through the column
of ice. Then the old man would strike, and strike home, accom-
plish the sacrifice and achieve the power.
The mastery that man must hold, and that passes from race
to race.
The End



Permission of Alfred Stieglitz
POSTER PORTRAIT OF GEORGIA O'KEEFFE. BY CHARLES DEMUTH






DOVE
Permission of Alfred Stieglita
POSTER PORTRAIT OF ARTHUR G. DOVE. BY CHARLES DEMUTH





THE WILD GOAT'S KID
BY LIAM O'FLAHERTY
US1
as
LJER nimble hoofs made music on the crags all winter as she
11 roamed along the cliff tops over the sea.
During the previous autumn, when goats were mating, she had
wandered away, one of a small herd that trotted gaily after a
handsome fellow with grey-black hide and winding horns. It was
her first mating. Then with the end of autumn the herd was
broken up. Peasant boys came looking for their goats. The gal-
lant buck was captured and slain by two hungry dogs from the
village of Drumranny. The white goat alone remained. She had
wandered too far away from her master's village. He couldn't
find her. She was given up for lost.
So that she became a wild one of the cliffs, where the seagulls
and the cormorants were lords and the great eagle of Moher soared
high over the thundering sea. Her big, soft, yellow eyes became
wild, from looking down often at the sea, with her long chin
whiskers swaying gracefully in the wind. She was a long slender
thing, with short straight horns and ringlets of matted hair trail-
ing far down on either haunch.
With her tail in the air, snorting, tossing her horns, she fled
when anybody approached. Her hoofs would patter over the
crags until she was far away. Then she would stand on some
eminence and turn about to survey the person who had disturbed
her, calmly, confident in the power of her slender legs to carry her
beyond pursuit.
She roamed at will. No stone fence however high could with-
stand her long leap, as she sprang on muscular thighs that bent
like new silk. She was so supple that she could trot on the top of
a thin stone fence, without a sound except the gentle tapping of
her delicate hoofs. She hardly ever left the cliff tops. There was
plenty of food there, for the winter was mild and the leaves and
grasses that grew between the crevices of the crags were flavoured
by the strong salt taste of the brine that was carried up on the
wind. She grew sleek and comely.


138
THE WILD GOAT'S KID
Towards the end of winter a subtle change came over her. Her
hearing became more acute. She took fright at the least sound.
She began to shun the sea except on very calm days when it did
not roar. She ate less. She was very particular about what she
ate. She hunted around a long time before she chose a morsel.
She often went on her knees, reaching down into the bottom of a
crevice to nibble at a briar that was inferior to the more accessible
ones. She became corpulent. Her udder increased.
Winter passed. Green leaves began to sprout. Larks sang in
the morning. There was sweetness in the air and a great urge of
life. The white goat, one morning a little after dawn, gave birth
to a grey-black kid.
The kid was born in a tiny glen, under an overhanging ledge
of low rock that sheltered it from the wind. It was a male kid,
an exquisite, fragile thing, tinted delicately with many colours.
His slender belly was milky white. The insides of his thighs were
of the same colour. He had deep rings of grey, like bracelets,
above his hoofs. He had black knee caps on his forelegs, like pads,
to protect him when he knelt to take his mother's teats into his
silky black mouth. His back and sides were grey-black. His ears
were black, long and drooping with the weakness of infancy.
The white goat bleated over him, with soft eyes and quivering
flanks, gloating over the exquisite thing that had been created
within her by the miraculous power of life. And she had this
delicate creature all to herself, in the wild solitude of the beautiful
little glen, within earshot of the murmuring sea, with little birds
whistling their spring songs round about her and the winds coming
with their slow whispers over the crags. The first tender hours
of her first motherhood were undisturbed by any restraint, not even
by the restraint of a mate's presence. In absolute freedom and
peace she watched with her young.
How she manquvred to make him stand!
She breathed on him to warm him. She raised him gently with
her forehead, uttering strange soft sounds to encourage him. Then
he stood up, trembling, staggering, swaying on his curiously long
legs. She became very excited, rushing around him, bleating nerv-
ously, afraid that he should fall again. He fell. She was in
agony. Bitter wails came from her distended jaws and she
crunched her teeth. But she renewed her efforts, urging the kid
to rise, to rise and live ... to live, live, live.


LIAM O'FLAHERTY
139
He rose again. Now he was steadier. He shook his head. He
wagged his long ears as his mother breathed into them. He took
a few staggering steps, came to his padded knees and rose again
immediately. Slowly, gently, gradually, she pushed him towards
her udder with her horns. At last he took the teat within his
mouth, he pushed joyously, sank to his knees, and began to drink.
She stayed with him all day in the tiny glen, just nibbling a few
mouthfuls of the short grass that grew about. Most of the time
she spent exercising the kid. With a great show of anxiety and
importance, she brought him on little expeditions across the glen
to the opposite rock, three yards away, and back again. At first
he staggered clumsily against her flanks and his tiny hoofs often
lost their balance on tufts of grass, such was his weakness. But
he gained strength with amazing speed and the goat's joy and
pride increased in consequence. She suckled and caressed him after
each tiny journey.
When the sun had set, he was able to walk steadily, to take little
short runs, to toss his head. They lay all night beneath the shelter
of the ledge, with the kid between his mother's legs, against her
warm udder.
Next morning she hid him securely in a crevice of the neigh-
bouring crag, in a small groove between two flags that were covered
with a withered growth of wild grass and ferns. The kid crawled
instinctively into the hole without any resistance to the gentle push
of his mother's horns. He lay down with his head towards his
doubled hind legs and closed his eyes. Then the goat scraped
the grass and fern stalks over the entrance hole with her forefeet
and she hurried away to graze, as carelessly as if she had no kid
hidden.
All the morning, as she grazed hurriedly and fiercely around the
crag, she took great pains to pretend that she was not aware of
the kid's nearness. Even when she grazed almost beside the hiding
place, she never noticed him, by look or by cry. But still, she
pricked her little ears at every distant sound.
At noon she took him out and gave him suck. She played with
him on a grassy knoll and watched him prance about. She taught
him how to rear on his hind legs and fight the air with his forehead.
Then she put him back into his hiding place and returned to graze.
She continued to graze until nightfall.
Just when she was about to fetch him from his hole to the


140
THE WILD GOAT'S KID
me
overhanging ledge, to rest for the night, a startling sound reached
her ears. It came from afar, from the south, from beyond a low
fence that ran across the crag on the sky line. It was indistinct,
barely audible, a deep, purring sound. But to the ears of the
mother goat it was loud and ominous as a thunderclap. It was the
heavy breathing of a dog sniffing the wind.
She listened stock still, with her head in the air and her short
tail lying stiff along her back, twitching one ear. The sound came
again. It was nearer. There was a patter of feet. Then a clumsy,
black figure hurtled over the fence and dropped onto the crag with
awkward secrecy. The goat saw a black dog, a large curly fellow,
standing by the fence in the dim twilight, with his forepaw raised
and his long red tongue hanging. Then he shut his mouth suddenly
and raising his snout upwards, sniffed several times, contracting
his nostrils as he did so, as if in pain. He whined savagely and
trotted towards the goat sideways.
She snorted. It was a sharp dull thud, like a blow from a rub-
ber sledge. Then she rapped the crag three times with her left
fore foot loudly and sharply. The dog stood still and raised his
forepaw again. He lowered his head and looked at her with
narrowed eyes. Then he licked his breast and began to run swiftly
to the left. He was running towards the kid's hiding place, with
his tail stretched out straight and his snout to the wind.
With another fierce snort the goat charged him at full speed,
in order to cut him off from his advance on the kid's hiding place.
He stopped immediately when she charged. The goat halted too,
five yards from the hiding place, between it and the dog, facing
the dog.
The dog stood still. His eyes wandered around in all directions
with the bashfulness of a sly brute caught suddenly in an awkward
position. Then he raised his bloodshot eyes slowly to the goat.
He bared his fangs. His mane rose like a fan. His tail shot out.
Picking his steps like a lazy cat, he approached her without a sound.
The goat shivered along her left flank and she snorted twice in
rapid succession.
When he was within six yards of her, he uttered a ferocious
roar that came from his throat with a deep rumbling sound. He
raced towards her and leaped clean into the air, as if she were a
fence that he was trying to vault. She parried him subtly with


LIAM O'FLAHERTY
141
her horns without moving her fore feet. Her sharp straight horns
just grazed his belly as he whizzed past her head. The slight blow
deflected his course. Instead of falling on his feet, between her
and the kid as he had intended cunningly to do, he was thrown
to the left and fell on his side, with a thud. The goat whirled
about and charged him.
But he had arisen immediately and jerked himself away, with
his haunches low down, making a devilish scraping and yelping
and growling noise. He wanted to terrify the kid out of his hiding
place. Then it would be easy to overpower the goat, hampered
by the task of hiding the kid between her legs.
The kid uttered a faint querulous cry, but the goat immediately
replied with a sharp low cry. The kid muttered something indis-
tinct. Then he remained silent. There was a crunching sound
among the ferns that covered him. He was settling himself down
farther. The goat trotted rigidly to the opposite side of the hole
to face the dog again.
The dog had run away some distance and lay on his belly licking
his paws. Now he meant to settle himself down properly to the
prolonged attack after the failure of his first onslaught. He
yawned lazily and made peculiar mournful noises, thrusting his
head into the air and twitching his snout. The goat watched every
single movement and sound, with her ears thrust forward past her
horns. Her great soft eyes were very wild and timorous in spite
of the valiant posture of her body and the terrific force of the
blows she delivered occasionally on the hard crag with her little
hoofs.
The dog remained lying for half an hour or so, continuing his
weird pantomime. The night fell completely. Everything be-
came unreal and ghostly under the light of the distant myriads of
stars. An infant moon had arisen. The sharp rushing wind and
the thunder of the sea only made the silent loneliness of the night
more menacing to the white goat, as she stood bravely on the lime-
stone crag defending her young. On all sides the horizon was a
tumultuous line of crag, dented with shallow glens and seamed
with low stone fences, that hung like tattered curtains against the
rim of the sky.
Then the dog attacked again. Rising suddenly, he set off at a
long swinging pace, with his head turned sideways towards the


142
THE WILD GOAT'S KID
S
.
goat, whining as he ran. He ran around the goat in a wide circle,
gradually increasing his speed. A white spot on his breast flashed
and vanished as he rose and fell in the undulating stretches of his
flight. The goat watched him, fiercely rigid from tail to snout.
She pawed the crag methodically, turning around on her own
ground slowly to face him.
When he passed his starting point, he was flying at full speed,
a black ball shooting along the gloomy surface of the crag, with
a sharp rattle of claws. The rattle of his claws, his whining, and
the sharp tapping of the goat's hoofs as she turned about, were the
only sounds that rose into the night from this sinister encounter.
He sped round and round the goat, approaching her impercep-
tibly each round, until he was so close that she could see his glit-
tering eyes and the white lather of rage on his half open jaws.
She became slightly dizzy and confused, turning about so methodi-
cally in a confined space, confused and amazed by the subtle
strategy of the horrid beast. His whining grew louder and more
savage. The rattle of his claws was like the clamour of hailstones
driven by a wind. He came.
He came in a whirl on her flank. He came with a savage roar
that deafened her. She shivered. Then she stiffened in rigid
silence to receive him. The kid uttered a shrill cry. Then the
black dog hurtled through the air, close up, with hot breathing,
snarling, with reddened fangs and . . . smash.
He had dived for her left flank. As he went past her head she
turned like lightning and met him again with her horns. This
time she grazed his side, to the rear of the shoulder. He yelped
and tumbled sideways, rolling over twice. With a savage snort
she was upon him. He was on his haunches rising, when her horns
thudded into his head. He went down again with another yelp.
He rolled over and swept to his feet with amazing speed. He
whirled about on swinging tail and dived for her flank once more.
The goat uttered a shriek of terror. He had passed her horns.
His fangs had embedded themselves in the matted ringlet that
trailed along her right flank. The dog's flying weight, swinging
onto the ringlet as he fell, brought her to her haunches.
She was in the jaws of death. But it was not for nothing that
she had roamed all the winter along the cliff tops, listening to the
wild music of the thundering sea, where the seagulls and the


LIAM O'FLAHERTY
143
cormorants were lords and the great eagle of Moher stared from
the vast sky at the splendid desolation of his towering cliffs. She
was ferocious like the dog himself, ferocious and fearless defending
her young.
She wriggled to her feet beside the rolling dog that gripped her
flank. She wrenched herself around and gored him savagely in
the belly. He yelled and loosed his hold. She rose on her hind
legs in a flash and she gored him again with a snort. Her sharp
horns penetrated his side between the ribs. He gasped and shook
his four feet in the air. Then she pounded him with her forefeet.
Her little hoofs pattered with tremendous speed for almost a
minute.
Then she stopped suddenly. Her eyes were dazed. She bleated
slightly. She looked down. The dog was still. She shivered. He
was dead. For a moment or two she stood shivering and sniffing
at him.
Then she lifted her right forefoot and shook it with a curious
movement. She uttered a wild joyous cry and bounded towards
her kid's hiding place.
Night passed into a glorious dawn that came over a rippling sea
from the east. A wild, sweet dawn, scented with dew and the
many perfumes of the germinating earth. The sleepy sun rose
brooding from the sea, golden and soft, searching far horizons with
its concave shafts of light. The dawn was still. Still and soft and
pure.
The white goat and her kid were travelling eastwards along
the cliff tops over the sea. They had travelled all night, flying
from the horrid carcass of the beast that lay stretched on the crag
beside the little glen. Now they were far away, on the summit of
the giant white precipice of Cahir. The white goat rested to give
suck to her kid and to look out over the cliff-top at the rising sun.
Then she continued her flight eastwards, pushing her kid before
her gently with her horns,


THE COCK
BY JOSEPH CAMPBELL
A winter night. The gasflare was blown out
Repeatedly by sudden, whirling gusts;
And in my brain there raged a psychic storm,
Wilder than that wild troop that shook the gloom
Beyond the prison wall. I did not sleep:
How could I sleep in such a time of death?
The city bells struck twelve-one-two-three-four;
And from that hour a Cattle Market cock,
Clapping green wings on some black middenheap,
Crew like archangel Michael come to judgement.
I said a prayer, I blessed brave chanticleer.
His clarion (as ’twere a country fute
Lulling my fever) brought to me sweet thoughts
Of home: the summer peace of Wicklow fields,
Of mountain liberties, of dew-wet ewes,
Of old men, pipe a-mouth, in windrowed hay,
Of horses whinnying across deep glens,
Of rocks, with newts sunning themselves thereon,
Of amber rivers glassing silver rowans,
Of fishes leaping in a moon-tranced lake,
Of brooding haggards and blue cabin smoke.
-The storm grew faint, the darkness thinned; I slept.


ES
VODI

Permission of Alfred Stieglitz
STORM CLOUDS IN SILVER. BY ARTHUR G. DOVE





MEMORIES OF A SELF-TAUGHT MAN
BY ELIE FAURE
Translated From the French by William A. Drake
vince
TIKE all children, I have had, from a very early age, a passion
U for pictures. A tyrannous passion, which cost my father's
library several more or less interesting works. I would cut the
illustrations out of the books, or colour them, or modify them,
or draw in new figures. The arrival at the house of the Figaro-
Salon, which used to furnish the provinces with the most important
pictures of the Paris Exhibition, was a major event for me; at
the age of ten I imagined Bouguereau, Maignan, Carolus-Duran,
Roll, Bonnat, J. P. Laurens, Tattegrain, all with laurels, palms,
medals, and decorations, like very exalted personages: for I did
not yet know enough to discriminate between something and some-
one. The bad education of the eye is easiest of all, easier than
that of the ear. One acknowledges so quickly the rhythms and
the gestures that chance to be fashionable, especially when the
subject helps: battles, popular scenes, mythological pictures illus-
trating one's lessons, historical anecdotes, tiresome love-stories.
Confusion arrives: art is no longer what it has always been during
its great periods, the glorification of form for its own sake, and for
the sentiments of lasting humanity which it arouses and develops
in us, but a wretched handmaid of elementary teaching and cur-
rent morality. And one has considerable difficulty, unless one feels
a devouring passion for painting and sculpture, in climbing back
up that slope.
From the time of my arrival in Paris, I was not yet fifteen-
shock upon shock. To be sure, I found once more at the Luxem-
bourg the subjects and rhythms, sometimes even the very canvases,
of the Figaro-Salon. But the Louvre! The Louvre, where no
one, except transient tourists, ever goes! Here, then, were "the
divine Raphael,” Titian "the painter of Kings," Poussin "the
father of French painting''? I perceived in them hideous cari-
catures. I especially remember the young girl with a black and


146
MEMORIES OF A SELF-TAUGHT MAN
a
white bodice by Velasquez, with her long neck, stiff hair, and
pointed red nose. Later, a painter published some indictment of
the masterpieces of the Louvre, and I recognized all my first
encounters so clearly that, even having learned to love them, I had
great difficulty in not sharing his point of view, which was cer-
tainly the point of view of the general public. A deep bewilder-
ment, an immense confusion in which shapes and colours fought
in a comic and irreducible chaos, remained with me after all my
visits and often just failed to discourage me. I was on the point
of forsaking the Louvre, forsaking painting, or of returning to
my former loves and coming to no good. Delacroix saved me.
Then it was Courbet. The Venetians did the rest.
Here was the second stage: as I see it, a decisive one. If I were
to teach young people painting, I should not begin with the primi-
tives, nor with the moderns. To awaken in children a taste for
fruit, I should not give them what is either green or rotten. The
mysterious harmony between sensuality, sensitiveness, and intelli-
gence; the complex orchestration into which colour, form, and
space enter as it were naturally: it is all this that imparts meaning
to a great painting. Having seen which, one can go backward to
discover little by little the charming innocence and character of
the primitives; or, on the contrary, yielding oneself to the stream,
approach the blazing power of the full-blown masters, Rubens,
Rembrandt, Velasquez. The Venetians are the centre, the only
one from which to radiate. I have been made aware of this by
another phenomenon. The sensuous appeal of the Venetians led
me fairly quickly to discriminate them from their precursors and
their successors; but it was at first impossible for me to differentiate
among the others, Titian, Veronese, and Tintoretto. When I was
able to do so, I perceived that I knew more about them than I
had myself realized, for Raphael and his precursors, Rubens,
Rembrandt, Velasquez, the little Dutch masters, Poussin, Claude
Lorrain, Watteau, were thenceforth in a class by themselves. I have
never had to open a didactic book to come into contact with them.
This progression brought me to the Luxembourg in an entirely
different spirit. To be sure, I still resisted Manet, though I con-
fusedly felt something in his Olympia, before which visitors would
meet each other to laugh, but which was nevertheless nearer to
classic painting than the false masters and authentic impostors
ner


ELIE FAURE
147
whose worship the Figaro-Salon had imposed on me. Impression-
ism, on the other hand, completely captivated me: it was that
which was “real," "grasped in a flash,” and which brought to my
mind the more, by the quality of the colouring, if not Courbet, at
least Delacroix and the masters of Venice. Monet, Sisley, Pissarro
very quickly became my gods, and I was intoxicated to learn that
they still lived. There were, then, gods, breathing the same air,
eating the same food as I. I still resisted Renoir, with his trans-
parent and coloured shadows, his spots of sun on naked flesh
which seemed to me leprous. But the Estaque of Cézanne appeared
to me like something unique, apart, striking me with a rude
strength and not to be neglected: since 1893, or a little earlier, I
had experienced the beginning of a revelation of his formidable
painting. Unfortunately, one did not see anything of his else-
where, particularly if one were a poor medical student, without
connexions among writers or artists, timid moreover, almost wild,
and in any case very lonely. I had arrived at the conviction that
this Cézanne had perhaps painted only one picture, and had for-
gotten him, to have the joy, five or six years later, of rediscovering
him. In the meanwhile, I read a great deal-Balzac, Flaubert,
Baudelaire, and especially Dostoevsky, and Zola, whose L'Oeuvre
initiated me, a little heavily, into the life of painters. What
delight I would have had if I had known that Cézanne was his
model for this book! I had been told Manet, and at that time it
seemed to me probable. I was moreover somewhat credulous,
above all when people talked to me with sympathy, if not with
intelligence, of the things and the people I loved. Taine I
thought admirable, because he had written about Delacroix and
had spoken so well of my dear masters of Venice, and I adopted
his system in its entirety. The dedication of his Philosophie de
l'Art to Léon Bonnat, in a period when Corot, Daumier, Puvis de
Chavannes, Courbet, and Manet still lived, seemed to me, it is
true, shocking. But I thought no more about it, saying to myself
that, after all, he had perhaps thus dedicated his book to thank
him for having painted his portrait. It might have been worse,
certainly. But I was too ingenuous, then, to doubt.
Between 1894 and 1900, eclipse. I saw hardly any painting.
One year of military service. Five years of medical studies.
Married, very young. Children. Boredom. Sickness. Death.


148 MEMORIES OF A SELF-TAUGHT MAN
nes
10-
Suffering. A precocious education in responsibility and unhappi-
ness. A profound upheaval of my inner world, at the very mo-
ment when the Dreyfus affair was engrossing people's minds and
making revelations to those that wanted to take the trouble to
meditate upon the existence of two sections of humanity, each
perhaps impenetrable to the other. This period appears to me
as the most dramatic of my thought and life. Also the most
decisive. Tragedy in the house. Tragedy in the street. Violent
public meetings; quarrels about the Zola trial; ardent polemics
in the newspapers, in which the readers intervened every day by
furnishing information and letters and exchanging objurgations.
I used to frequent the offices of L'Aurore, the most lively journal
of the time—the most lively journal, without doubt, of all time,
with its light, frenzied passion, its dash, and its joyous flight, all
of which it brought to the struggle. The articles, the poems, the
news which cluttered its pages were all concentrated on one object
alone, all eager to snatch from the military prisons an innocent
man whom almost an entire people were determined to keep there.
I then knew very intimately, Clémenceau who was leading the
battle with unparalleled vigour, drunk with the joy of fighting,
each morning renewing the miracle of the article directed towards
the same end, the point of his sword kept perpetually in line, but
vibrating and flying around that line, supple, feverish, full of
clash and sparkle, and, as it were, pregnant with thunderbolts.
The man was as attractive as one can be, still young—very young
for him, since he was not yet sixty—his speech brief, tart, and
cutting, but enveloping in irresistible suavity the hardest points
it inserted in your heart. He came, went, sat down suddenly, all
the while loosing his cruel words or cutting his paradoxes in your
very flesh: a marvellous figure, with the proud emphasis, the
straightforwardness, the generous or unjust impulses, the living,
active, capricious, bounding passion which modelled it from
within, hammering out his countenance like the mask of a Hun
with the head, the eye-sockets, the cheek-bones, carrying him away
in the tumult of carnage, as it were at the gallop of a small in-
visible horse, a truncated head at his saddle-bow, the wind of the
steppes flattening his temples, sweeping aside his big moustaches,
and dispersing drops of blood. I still see him discussing art with
Carrière, not at all considering the sentiments or the predilections
101


ELIE FAURE
149
sar
of the painter—more than he did those of any one else-and
speaking of Rembrandt or of Phidias with the same words, the
same fire often the same lack of respect—as of Claude Monet or
of President Félix-Faure.
This encounter with Eugène Carrière was an event for me, the
more so because at about the same time, without any preparation
or experience, never before having wielded a pen except for the
purpose of writing to my family or to take notes at the hospital,
I requested Vaughan, the editor of L'Aurore, to entrust me with
the art criticism of his journal. He acceded at once, without know-
ing me and without the influence of Clémenceau, who was en-
gaged elsewhere. It was then that, with the friendship and under
the influence of Carrière, at the age of twenty-seven, I entered upon
the "noble career” of letters. A little late, assuredly, but I had
replaced by struggle and trial the quarrels and the systems of the
café. Without skill, with very little learning, but perhaps with
goodwill and, in any case, with enthusiasm. Enthusiasm which
my affection for Carrière—who contrasted curiously with Clémen-
ceau, for he fought much more for what he believed to be the
truth than for the joy of the battle-was at first to exalt, then
to disturb, then to turn aside at certain points in its natural course.
For his influence over me, though badly digested, was profound,
full of contradictions and dangers, and perhaps more intoxicating
than salutary. He was by no means a cultivated man, but he
had a philosophical tendency whose synthetic judgements, ex-
pressed in striking aphorisms, flowed in rough gleams out of the
fog of his stammering words and his jerky laughter. It was en-
tirely like his painting, with its expressive summits emerging from
an eternal mist. Certainly, he diverted me from my course, caused
me almost to deny Impressionism, and to forget for the moment
my first meeting with Cézanne; but he taught me that painting is
a language, that it expresses first of all the inner man, and that it
has an excellent chance of expressing the outer world as well, pro-
vided the inner man is human and strong. Yes, I lost time in fol-
lowing this side road of painting proper. But when I came back
later to the main highway, it was with increased humanity and the
resolve to neglect details and anecdotes in order to attach myself
only to the great expressive entireties of that which is permanent
and essential in us all.


150
MEMORIES OF A SELF-TAUGHT MAN
I owed likewise to my affection for Carrière-an affection which
was ardent after a fashion and which bound me very deeply to
his life, to joint ideas and struggles shared during four or five
years, at his side an opportunity to approach and know some of
the conspicuous men of the epoch: Zola, whose writings had fed
my youth and whose heroic deed had taught me so much; Anatole
France, in whom I could never understand the dazzling contrast
which balanced his flowing, light prose and his amiable and disillu-
sioned thought against his solemn manner of speech which clothed
ideas perpetually artificial and very often elementary. Octave
Mirbeau, with a face like that of a surly dog, his grey eyes, his
ruddy moustache, his rough and exigent goodness, the wild sin-
cerity of his incessant and unforeseen contradictions, and his
literary vigour made up of brass and vitriol. It was in Carrière's
study that I met Metchnikov, the father of phagocytosis, a learned
man with a magnificent imagination, but with a childishness in
his philosophy which has made me very circumspect in my apprecia-
tion of the "values" of the intellect. It was through Carrière that
I knew Rodin, an extraordinary man, with the formidable genius
of a prophet of sex, stirring and moulding the rough flesh as if to
seize the spirit of it: a sort of Vulcan visited in his subterranean
smithy by excessively painted women and complex aesthetes, writ-
ing on his cuffs the ends of simple symbols that the first passer-by-
myself—rubbed out in the attempt to reach his summit, the height
of which the great sculptor was certainly very far from ignoring,
but which he strove to make smooth for himself, because he wished
it to be accessible to all the flatterers. Bourdelle, finally, who has
since succeeded him in universal glory, was likewise a strange and
disordered genius, overflowing with reminiscences, complicated,
confused, sick with an ambition which was moreover lofty, but the
only man fit to-day to attack, if not to resolve by means of stone
and bronze, the great, everlasting symbols.
It was certainly under the combined influence of the Dreyfus
affair and of Carrière, perhaps also of my contacts with the work-
ing classes of Paris with which my profession of physician put me
in daily contact, that I was led to take an interest in the move
ment of popular universities which aroused so much hope and re-
sulted in so much disillusionment. If those who attended them
do not owe much to them, so far as I am concerned I owe a great
deal to the lectures which I set myself to deliver there—the whole


ELIE FAURE
151
history of art, I beg you to believe-which were to continue for
seven or eight years. In order to teach, I saw myself constrained
to learn, to fix ideas in flux, to enclose in definite forms the
enormous chaos of movements and colours under which the epic
of universal man appeared to me. My Histoire de l'Art was
brought into being out of these discussions with the people of
Paris, and more especially with a half-dozen of the faithful, and
out of the journeys which, as far as the exigencies of the profession
by which I lived permitted it, I forced myself to make in order to
provide material for my lessons. It was not always easy, burdened
as I was with a family, having scarcely time to write between two
consultations or two visits, blackening pages in the subway or the
bus, stopping on the steps of a workman's house to put down an
idea in my medical note-book. However, I succeeded in going to
discover, in the fog of London, the Elgin marbles, and English
painting which I judged from that time on to be brilliant but
superficial-especially when one compares its spirit with the unique
grandeur of the English poets. I arranged, with Carrière, an un-
forgettable pilgrimage through the museums of Belgium, which I
have since imagined, even after other visits, as heaps of gems
caught in the opal of the Scheldt. I managed twice to visit Spain,
with its trembling grey spaces, where, in the dryness that is every-
where, clothing, rocks, and jewels take on the brilliance of flowers
under the morning dew. Twice I went to Greece, a fleshless skele-
ton, where the Parthenon rises alone like another skeleton of which
only a few bones remain, but these grouped with such purity that
they fix in one's soul a landmark which one can never again forget,
once one's heel has touched it. And twice I saw Holland and Ger-
many, and the lengthening in the delicate water-colour that the
former makes with its silvery clouds, its coloured mist, its flashing
canals, its winged windmills, its houses, its boats covered with
paintings; and the flow of molten metal in fusion coming from
the factories, the ironworks, the great harbours of the latter, a
confused force ready to submerge the charm and beauty of the
world, to destroy or to renew them. Once I saw the shore of
Morocco, once Constantinople and Brusa, the rough Orient sleepy
and fairylike in a western bureaucratic activity. Three times I
visited Italy, the great educator, which delivered me in part from
the clouds of sentimentality accumulated in me by the tyrannous
and furthermore often badly employed influence of Carrière and
ers


152 MEMORIES OF A SELF-TAUGHT MAN
le
my “Dreyfusian” surroundings. I cannot tell the effect produced on
me by my arrival at Bologna: the living throng spread forth, with
the tables of the restaurants and the musicians walking between
them on the Piazza Nettuno surrounded with gloomy palaces, so
much passion and charm set off by so much hardness, like a jewel
whose hue is changed by a bezel of iron. All the towns of Tus-
cany, clinging to the rocks like a natural emanation from the soil,
channelling their spirit between rectangular slopes, the acid and
transparent light, the black cypresses rising on every side; and,
quite near this, the Venetian autumn, heavy like a white grape;
Byzantine decadence quilted to San Marco, to Ravenna, like a
green and blue fly to the flanks of a noble animal; the fountains
of Rome, its bitter gardens, its immense ruins which the colossi
of Michael Angelo appear from the height of the Sistine, to de-
stroy, to reconstruct, to overwhelm. It is difficult to tell of all
the ideas of rhythm and order that an education thus fragmentary
and disordered can bring forth, by brusque shocks, in a sensibility
quickened by a premature apprenticeship in love, fatherhood, and
death. Every day I felt a little more sharply that art is a pro-
found human function; and not, as is too generally believed and
said, an intellectual game, the exclusive property of privileged
aristocracies. Neither the precipitous rush skyward of the pointed
arch, nor the immense tide of Hindu or Javanese art, nor the
rhythmic violence of Negro or Mexican art, nor the continuous
florescence of five-thousand-year-old Egyptian art, bringing with
it, in its cliffs and bastions of granite, the longest and purest
civilization in history, could be explained from this last point of
view.
Meanwhile, the famous Société des Indépendants, the unofficial
salon "without jury and without recompense,” pursued its humble
but fertile career. Almost from 1895 to 1905 all the painters who
had emerged from the Impressionist movement and who were
destined to maintain its conquests, to accumulate its insufficiencies,
or to combat its errors, exhibited there. While Bonnard or Vuil-
lard forsook its train in the search of pure sensation, more inde-
pendent than it or any system or any point of view; while Signac
and his group pushed their analysis to its farthest implications,
ending thus in an alley blind but all illuminated, Matisse laid
stress on his chromatic discoveries to rejoin the Orientals in the
systematic construction of colour. A movement of exceptional


ELIE FAURE
153
suggestive power, whence later, by that natural consequence which
makes reaction succeed action, Picasso, Cubism, and finally Derain
have emerged. I have tasted, in my infrequent meetings with
these men, delightful or serious moments of restlessness, or of cer-
tainty, or of revelation. I liken Bonnard to a bee heavy with pol-
len and honey, pillaging, jostling the flowers, building little by
little his humming hive, in the joy of painting for painting's sake.
Signac is like the comfortable ascetic of an esoteric religion;
Matisse like a marvellous workman who has little by little suc-
ceeded in constraining an academic spirit, squatting behind its gold-
rimmed spectacles, to accept the old instinct of the artistic multi-
tudes, completely disembarrassed of the necessity of abstractions
and demonstrations. Picasso is like a dazzling acrobat whose
vaults, dangerous leaps, and capers in space constantly give the im-
pression that he is about to break his spine, and cause one to look
on the ground to discover his corpse: but only to contemplate his
toe, on the point of which he turns smilingly. Derain is like a
calm colossus, who forges his thick metal with regular blows,
without caring for the sparks which burn the skin of his arms and
blind the apprentices and spectators around him. One thing
especially has struck me in the course of my conversations with
these painters, who are to-day drawn out in age between forty and
sixty years. All except the last two have set out from Impression-
ism and have undergone in their transition, the domination of
Cézanne, save Bonnard, it seems, who has been contented to love
him. All recognize the sovereignty of Renoir, whom Picasso used
to call "The Pope.” It is an evolution at which I have been too
clearly present within myself not to mark its passage. The love
of Cézanne, as much as my travels in Italy, removed me from the
too sentimental influence of Carrière, and established in my mind
the clean, though slightly defaced, architecture which carried the
plastic little by little into the intellectual plane—that tendency
which, as my friend Mr Walter Pach clearly demonstrates in his
Modern Art, is in all art to-day—a phenomenon which it is easy
to extend, by syndicalist order, as far as social territory. The love
of Renoir has solidified these synthetic masses, by the insensible
and twisting passages of his painting, for my instinctive joy of life
which is, after all, quite an achievement.
I would like it also to be taken into account that all the general
ideas of a man can have a plastic, and not a discursive, point of


154 MEMORIES OF A SELF-TAUGHT MAN
departure, and can lead him little by little to reunite in their
essential realms classical metaphysics under their most abstract
forms and the universality of their languages. I was little in-
clined, after turning towards literature and music. The plastic
arts have led me to understand, almost without preparation, mu-
sicians, poets, moralists, and philosophers, and even men of action.
It is not, in fact, without cause that I have written a book on
Napoleon. I have passed my time, these last thirty years, in re-
quiring of painting the control of my ideas and sentiments. From
this I have come to look upon the universe itself as an aesthetic
phenomenon, and God as an artist creating and retouching it in-
cessantly, in a kind of unconscious rapture and mechanical lyricism.
Consequently, after having written a Histoire de l'Art, I have
been led of late to interest myself in Montaigne and the three men
who, as I see it, have spread his spirit over Europe to model the
classical features of the West: Shakespeare, Cervantes, and Pascal.
This love of Renoir, and the benefits he showered upon me so
bountifully, had aroused in me an imperious desire to meet him.
It was my friend, the painter Albert André, who took me to his
studio in Montmartre, in 1907 or 1908, as I remember. His hands
were at that time beginning to be deformed, but he could still
move about in his studio and even walk in the streets. Together
we went down the rue Caulaincourt and, as we reached his door,
he asked me to come in to look at one of his children, who was ill-
asking me as a physician, which was what I wished to appear in
his eyes, for I had the fancy to conceal from him the fact that I
wrote, and this throughout the course of a relationship which lasted
ten years and often took me to Cagnes, his retreat on the Riviera.
I remember our entrance into a room covered from ceiling to floor
with large and small studies by himself, without mounts, without
frames, fixed to the wall by thumb-tacks, and in which red and
pink notes predominated. In the bed, on which rested a red
counterpane, was a child with red hair, its face swollen with
measles and its eyes almost shut. “What a beautiful Renoir !"
I exclaimed. Renoir did not contradict me.
How much I learned from being with him! Through Carrière,
I had come to know, certainly, that art is a profound human func-
tion. Through Renoir, I came to feel that that function can
and indeed must be as simple as the acts of breathing and eating.
The permanent control exercised for me by his conversation, so


ELIE FAURE
155
alive and impulsive, on the continued lyricism of his painting, re-
vealed to me the incomparable empire of instinct. He always
found the means of directing in his way an intelligence very clear
but hostile to abstractions, and of maintaining his understanding
with a good sense and moral equilibrium capable of elevating this
instinct, without perceptible effort, to the highes
which he always brought back, by the way, to an animal semblance.
I knew also by his example, the silence of that genuine heroism
which made him rejoice at the preservation of his eyesight, while
he never complained of having to have a brush attached to his
maimed hand, of being unable to lie down, to sit or rise without
assistance, of being a ruin each day more dilapidated as his pure
soul mounted, like a great flower, on the foundered body. I must
speak no more of it. His shade would be angered with me. Those
to whom it has been given to behold this noble spectacle know that
they have, for once in their lives, witnessed one of the most exalted
miracles known to humanity.
The war, in which two of his sons were mutilated, did not
wrench a complaint from him, but only a little sad sarcasm on the
stupidity of men. I have seen it too close at hand not to be
convinced of this stupidity: it, too, constituted an obvious sign of
the moral indifference of the player-god of whom I have spoken
before. This idea had taken root in me in the lower church at
Assisi, where the Crucifixion of Jesus and the Massacre of the Inno-
cents gave me the extraordinary impression of a supreme harmony
flowing without effort from slaughter and cruelty. Three of my
books, La Sainte-Face, La Roue, La Danse Sur le Feu et l'Eau,
were to spring from this source, of which even the assassination of
Jaurès, in spite of the admiration and affection which he had
always inspired in me, was to show me the richness from the first
day of the war, by proving to me that the emotions, and not reason,
rule the world. I cannot, however, describe the sorrow that the
imbecile murder of this great man caused me. I still see that
powerful face, lighted by very sweet blue eyes, that tender mouth,
that head round and firm on its massive shoulders, all that visible
incarnation of goodness in its most solid form, loaded with the
confounding of avalanche and thunder. I recall, as one of the
happiest hours of my life, the evening when, introduced by my
friend Charles Andler, I met him for the first time, at the end of
a lecture; and we went to sit together at the nearest café. I was


156 MEMORIES OF A SELF-TAUGHT MAN
certainly very flattered, but still more surprised, to learn that he
was among my own public, though I had at that time published
only three or four books, which had not aroused a clamour. And
I could not deny myself the pleasure of flattering and surprising
him myself. When he asked me, in the course of our discussion,
what I thought of Velasquez, I answered: "I see in him the king
of the air and of silence.” The blue eyes were astonished. The
talk turned to Rubens. “He is," I declared firmly, “the Jaurès
of painting.” Flattery, yes; but my reward was a charming smile.
But also the actual truth. The most eloquent-besides the most
rhetorical—of painters joins the most plastic of orators in this
secret centre of which I have already spoken and from which
radiate, like the blood from the heart, all our forms of expression.
The will and intellect of man seem to me to have no other
object than to carve him a path toward the possession of this
centre. I have returned from the war, and I enter upon the era
of peace with my pessimism increased if I consider the end of what
we call "life"; and an increasing optimism if I think of its means,
which are only a game destined to preserve its energy—that is to
say, existence itself. War must be one of these games, often ex-
cessive, thinning and sometimes killing the peoples who devote
themselves to it, but doubtless destined to call others to the splen-
did drama of living deeply. Perhaps America is marked to receive
its revelation, in which on the other hand an increasing dynamism
shares, which takes possession of a spiritual universe of whose
agony it is the principal inheritor and in which the classical ideas
of space and even of permanence, upset by the prodigious change
in methods of transportation, of relativity and the exchanges, are
modified from day to day. The cinema, which it employs so mas-
terfully, seems to me to symbolize its genius for action, which
renews its forms-a new art, in which are mingled painting, since
one of its realms is space; music, since another is time; the dance,
since another is motion; and the theatre, since another is the inward
tragedy which is inevitably expressed by its gesture. The lyrical
and plastic medium of a world in the making, of which it may be
the essential instrument of expression, and of which it is already
the symbol. ... We look to America.
O


de
.
ins
meo
me
vous
us
de cel
prolege
.
Planet
seyrelme
RAYMOND RADIGUET. BY JEAN COCTEAU





Jean
Cocteau
1921
M GEORGES AURIC. BY JEAN COCTEAU





JEAN V. HUGO. BY JEAN COCTEAU





BOOK REVIEWS
A HUMANISTIC CRITIC
Men Seen. By Paul Rosenfeld. 12mo. 380 pages.
Lincoln Mac Veagh. The Dial Press. $2.50.
n
.
M EN SEEN, Paul Rosenfeld's latest collection of critical
T essays, is presented frankly as a miscellany. The various
essays have not, as in Port of New York, been remoulded to give
a formal shape to the book, nor have the subjects been chosen as
illustrative of a single tendency in American life. On the con-
trary, these are figures from eight literatures: the twenty-four
novelists, critics, and poets included in the title are so divergent
in aim, so disparate in quality, that their presence in a single
volume would seem to signify nothing unless Mr Rosenfeld's sen-
sitiveness to the most varied impressions, the generosity of his mind,
his passionate interest in every manifestation of the creative spirit
of his time. There is no effort to diminish the differences between
these writers; rather his aim has been to reproduce, in pigments of
his own, the very colour of each and his prevailing mood. And they
are judged in the end, not by a literary standard, nor even it would
seem always by their literary accomplishment, but by the extent
to which they suggest the possibility of a “life completely used,
exercised to the fullness of its capacity for tragedy and for delight,
and deprived by death of nothing of worth.”
This desire to discover among contemporary writers some stay
for the mind "stale and weary in its youth, dissonant, jumbled and
out of tune with the eternities as with itself,” this preoccupation
with an ideal of “lustiest living," not only determines the process
of judgement: it has also, though perhaps unconsciously, influenced
the critic in the selection of his material; and in the end it is seen
to have been strong enough to give to a volume frankly put for-
ward as a miscellany, and pretending to no other unity than that
of method, something very like a unity of purpose. In any case,
though these are literary studies, Mr Rosenfeld's concern is not


158
A HUMANISTIC CRITIC
entirely with literature. If it were, he could hardly have found a
place for Jean Toomer, who as yet remains “a writer experiment-
ing with a style”—a style, I gather, not his own. Nor would he
have devoted an essay to Edna Bryner, celebrating merely her fine
love of the American forests and her sane attitude on the Woman
Question. And yet it may be that Mr Rosenfeld did well to
include both among his Men Seen. For the book as a whole repre-
sents a continuous search for the poet—not for poetry but the
poet—who will “beat the rhythm of his age” and bring to it a
new “impulse toward freedom"; who will, like the youth of Isaiah's
prophecy, show himself an ensign of the people, and “give the
race the direction in which it has to go.” And each of the chap-
ters represents a pause in the adventure, and a looking around for
any one who might, even momentarily, be mistaken for this poet-
or else (with a bludgeon) for such critical scribes as possibly stand
in the way of his coming. It is significant that the book opens
with a portrait of D'Annunzio.
For aside from the fact that already he dates somewhat, Gabriele
D'Annunzio resembles the poet of the critic's search exactly as—if
I may borrow an image-a reproduction in plaster resembles its
original in marble. That is to say, in everything but authenticity.
The episode at Fiume is seen to be of the same stuff as the novels
and the poems, theatrical but dispiriting, grandiose and at the same
time insignificant. D'Annunzio has moved, as Mr Rosenfeld
would have his poet do, in the world of affairs without ceasing to
be a poet; but with him, self-assertion has never quite become self-
fulfilment. His bravery of exterior is only an antiquated piece
of body armour from Florentine workshops; its burnished surface
is intricate with mythologies, the bronze sonorous when struck; but
the uncomfortable fact remains that it is, now, empty of life and
useless except to curators. D'Annunzio is simply the man who has
never felt. And over his head Mr Rosenfeld sends his cry for the
true poet, who will come bringing life abundantly.
But if it is to be doubted that Mr Rosenfeld's concern is en-
tirely with literature, he is nevertheless an excellent literary critic.
By seeing literature constantly against a background of life, he
obtains in regard to literature itself, a completeness of vision hardly
to be found in the critic intent only upon formal excellence in
writing. There are certain valuations in art which cannot be made


JOHN PEALE BISHOP
159
by any reference to technical processes, and to prate too long of
“significant form” is usually to end in nonsense. For, as Mr Eliot,
a critic whose essential interest in literature cannot be questioned,
has remarked in comparing the characters of Shakespeare with
those of Jonson, the difference between Boabdil, say, and Falstaff
is not to be explained by a pretty theory of humours, but rather by
Shakespeare's “susceptibility to a greater range of emotion, and
emotion deeper and more obscure.” Mr Rosenfeld is perhaps less
interested in range of emotion than in depth and obscurity. Too
intelligent not to be aware of the necessity for structure, too sen-
sitive to ignore any felicity of line, he is ultimately concerned only
with one thing; and no "mystery of construction” can ever long
divert him from what is always the object of his search-emotion
at the core. The advantage of his method appears at once in his
essay on Wallace Stevens, a poet whom an aesthetic critic could
hardly have placed so boldly and so accurately. Possibly it is not
very important that a poet should be "placed”; it may be more
to the point to send us to his work with some assurance that there
is a particular enjoyment to be derived from it. But this also
Mr Rosenfeld has done.
No doubt something of the particular quality of a work of art
disappears under analysis, and it is just this quality which im-
pressionistic criticism is apt to impart. In so far as his labour
is one of definition, it is, whenever the subject is worth his pains,
admirably performed. And in any case the style is adroitly adapted
to the impression he intends to convey. At all times exuberant
and warm, it is perhaps too stiff-jointed to be properly called
flexible; and yet it passes easily from one manner to another, as
in the opening paragraph of the essay on Wallace Stevens:
“Lord, what instruments has he here? Small muffled drums?
Plucked wires ? The falsetto of an ecstatic eunuch? Upon delib-
erate examination it appears Stevens' matter is the perfectly gram-
matical arrangement of an English vocabulary not too abstract."
Within its own limits it has almost as great a range as all the
writers of the Old Testament put together: it can be rhapsodical
and epigrammatic at will; can stop for a grotesque turn or a jolly
bit of clowning, and proceed at once to a serious, even a pro-


160
A HUMANISTIC CRITIC
foundly sad, observation. There is an endless verbal invention,
and an originality which does not always appear effortless; a tend-
ency—which may also be observed in the popular coinages in this
country-to intensify an expression beyond all need, with a gain
in vigour and a more considerable loss of accuracy. And it is at
times unnecessarily awkward, a fault due, if I am not mistaken,
to Mr Rosenfeld's having a greater sense for the “feel” of words
than for their movement. But movement is there, and amazing
vitality. The critic hurries on, wrapped in his style as in a cum-
bersome overcoat, a little ponderously, but certain always just
where he is going. And always he arrives, scant of breath it may
be, but nevertheless at the exact point for which he started. And
in the meanwhile he has passed completely around a subject and
seen him, apart from himself, an individual having his own
existence.
If he does not come off so well with Joyce and Proust as with,
say, D. H. Lawrence, it is less that his sensibilities have failed
before works of such magnitude as theirs, as that neither Ulysses
nor A la Recherche du Temps Perdu can be understood simply
as an emotional experience. Some account must be taken of their
structure and of the extent to which the emotions they present
are modified by that structure. Both Joyce and Proust, differing
widely as they do in other respects, are both highly conscious artists
deliberately manipulating their material to impersonal ends. And
in treating Proust as though he were merely a neurasthenic writing
at all hours of the night to still some inner conflict-a descrip-
tion which I suspect would apply rather better to Robert Louis
Stevenson than to the creator of Swann-Mr Rosenfeld has
arrived at what seems to me the only serious misinterpretation in
the entire volume. “The recherche du temps perdu seems there-
fore to have been an attempt to give the present and the future
the fair chance which the backward flowing libido would deny
to it.” If Mr Rosenfeld will reread A l'Ombre des Jeunes Filles
en Fleur and read, as he does not yet appear to have done, La
Prisonnière, I think he will see that it is more profitable to regard
Proust as one who as a boy had immersed himself in Plato and
was his life long occupied with the relation of the actual world
to the real world of memory and desire, than to regard him as a
neurotic unable to free himself of a boyish attachment to his
PI
ory


JOHN PEALE BISHOP
161
mother. In Ulysses he has indeed pierced at once to the emotional
centre of gravity of the book: the relation between Dedalus and
Bloom. He has seen that their relation is essentially a meta-
physical one, but in minding only the direct lines between them, to
the neglect of those parallels which Joyce has placed throughout
Ulysses to establish Bloom's position in regard to Stephen and
his own dead son-such, for instance, as the discussion in the
library of Shakespeare's relation to Hamnet Shakespeare and to
Hamlet-he has failed to give a completely satisfactory account
of it. The analysis stops too soon. He has arrived at what appear
the most plausible reasons yet found for Joyce's having made
Bloom a Jew; but as he passes them by without comment, I am
not quite sure that he himself is aware of his discovery.
It is to Van Wyck Brooks that Mr Rosenfeld is indebted for
his conception of the poet as redeemer of the people, as well as
for one or two other ideas which have seriously influenced his
criticism-a debt which he has in a previous volume generously
acknowledged. Of the two, it is Mr Rosenfeld's poet who is the
more gracious and humane, as he is the more credible. But both,
I am inclined to think, enlarge upon the power of even the great
poet to influence living, as they certainly overestimate what the
poet can accomplish alone. Before there can be a Dante there
must be a Saint Thomas Aquinas to precede him. Joyce has
resumed the age as we know it; and for other knowledge and a
different apprehension of the universe, we shall have to wait upon
the scientists. But of one thing at least we may be certain; if the
poet does arrive in our time, either in America or elsewhere, Mr
Rosenfeld will be among the first to recognize him and praise him.
As for Mr Brooks, we cannot be so sure. It seems highly probable
that he will be too tightly shut in his library, tracking down the
literary failures of the last half-century, to be even faintly aware of
his existence.
John PEALE BISHOP


SPRING FLIGHT
THE GREAT GATSBY. By F. Scott Fitzgerald. 12m0.
218 pages. Charles Scribner's Sons. $2.
W HERE has never been any question of the talents of F. Scott
1 Fitzgerald; there has been, justifiably until the publication
of The Great Gatsby, a grave question as to what he was going
to do with his gifts. The question has been answered in one of
the finest of contemporary novels. Fitzgerald has more than
matured; he has mastered his talents and gone soaring in a beau-
tiful flight, leaving behind him everything dubious and tricky in
his earlier work, and leaving even farther behind all the men of
his own generation and most of his elders.
In all justice, let it be said that the talents are still his. The
book is even more interesting, superficially, than his others; it
has an intense life, it must be read, the first time, breathlessly;
it is vivid and glittering and entertaining. Scenes of incredible
difficulty are rendered with what seems an effortless precision,
crowds and conversation and action and retrospects—everything
comes naturally and persuasively. The minor people and events
are threads of colour and strength, holding the principal things
together. The technical virtuosity is extraordinary
All this was true of Fitzgerald's first two novels, and even of
those deplorable short stories which one feared were going to ruin
him. The Great Gatsby adds many things, and two above all:
the novel is composed as an artistic structure, and it exposes, again
for the first time, an interesting temperament. “The vast juvenile
intrigue” of This Side of Paradise is just as good subject-matter
as the intensely private intrigue of The Great Gatsby; but Fitz-
gerald racing over the country, jotting down whatever was current
in college circles, is not nearly as significant as Fitzgerald regarding
a tiny section of life and reporting it with irony and pity and
à consuming passion. The Great Gatsby is passionate as Some
Do Not is passionate, with such an abundance of feeling for the
characters (feeling their integral reality, not hating or loving them
objectively) that the most trivial of the actors in the drama
ns


GILBERT SELDES
163
are endowed with vitality. The concentration of the book is so
intense that the principal characters exist almost as essences, as
biting acids that find themselves in the same golden cup and have
no choice but to act upon each other. And the milieux which
are brought into such violent contact with each other are as full
of character, and as immitigably compelled to struggle and to
debase one another.
The book is written as a series of scenes, the method which
Fitzgerald derived from Henry James through Mrs Wharton,
and these scenes are reported by a narrator who was obviously
intended to be much more significant than he is. The author's
appetite for life is so violent that he found the personality of
the narrator an obstacle, and simply ignored it once his actual
people were in motion, but the narrator helps to give the feeling
of an intense unit which the various characters around Gatsby
form. Gatsby himself remains a mystery; you know him, but
not by knowing about him, and even at the end you can guess,
if you like, that he was a forger or a dealer in stolen bonds, or
a rather mean type of bootlegger. He had dedicated himself to
the accomplishment of a supreme object, to restore to himself an
illusion he had lost; he set about it, in a pathetic American way,
by becoming incredibly rich and spending his wealth in incredible
ways, so that he might win back the girl he loved; and a "foul
dust floated in the wake of his dreams.” Adultery and drunken-
ness and thievery and murder make up this dust, but Gatsby's
story remains poignant and beautiful.
This means that Fitzgerald has ceased to content himself with
a satiric report on the outside of American life and has with
considerable irony attacked the spirit underneath, and so has begun
to report on life in its most general terms. His tactile apprehen-
sion remains so fine that his people and his settings are specifically
of Long Island; but now he meditates upon their fate, and they
become universal also. He has now something of extreme im-
portance to say; and it is good fortune for us that he knows how
to say it.
The scenes are austere in their composition. There is one, the
tawdry afternoon of the satyr, Tom Buchanan, and his cheap and
"vital” mistress, which is alive by the strength of the lapses of
time; another, the meeting between Gatsby and his love, takes place


164
SPRING FLIGHT
literally behind closed doors, the narrator telling us only the be-
ginning and the end. The variety of treatment, the intermingling
of dialogue and narrative, the use of a snatch of significant detail
instead of a big scene, make the whole a superb impressionistic
painting, vivid in colour, and sparkling with meaning. And the
major composition is as just as the treatment of detail. There is
a brief curve before Gatsby himself enters; a longer one in which
he begins his movement toward Daisy; then a succession of care-
fully spaced shorter and longer movements until the climax is
reached. The plot works out not like a puzzle with odd bits
falling into place, but like a tragedy, with every part functioning
in the completed organism.
Even now, with The Great Gatsby before me, I cannot find
in the earlier Fitzgerald the artistic integrity and the passionate
feeling which this book possesses. And perhaps analysing the
one and praising the other, both fail to convey the sense of elation
which one has in reading his new novel. Would it be better to
say that even The Great Gatsby is full of faults, and that that
doesn't matter in the slightest degree? The cadences borrowed
| from Conrad, the occasional smartness, the frequently startling,
but ineffective adjective-at last they do not signify. Because for
the most part you know that Fitzgerald has consciously put these
bad and half-bad things behind him, that he trusts them no more
to make him the white-headed boy of The Saturday Evening Post,
and that he has recognized both his capacities and his obligations
as a novelist.
GILBERT SELDES


ON RE AND DIS
The NewER SPIRIT, A Sociological Criticism of Lit-
erature. By V. F. Calverton. With an introduction
by Ernest Boyd. 12mo. 284 pages. Boni and
Liveright. $2.50.
M R CALVERTON is a sociological critic. He believes that
V aesthetic values are the result of certain environmental
situations, and that our tastes in the style and substance of art
change in accordance with vicissitudes of social evolution. “Lit-
erature which fascinated one age,” he says, "suffices but to dull
and stupefy another.” And for such reasons he believes that we
must approach past art from an understanding of its conditions of
origin. In proof of his theory of causation, he cites three stages
of social evolution in European and American history, and shows
their counterpart in literature. The feudal system was accom-
panied by a system of values which held that artistic dignity was
confined to the depiction of the aristocracy, an attitude which Mr
Calverton finds notably exemplified in the tenets of tragedy. But
with the rise of the bourgeoisie, middle-class figures laid claim to
the tragic prerogative—a process which is carried still further as
the growing strength of the proletariate manifests itself in a cor-
responding growth of a proletarian aesthetic, so that we now have
even the "tragedy of the drab.” Thus, aesthetic standards are
impermanent, and one age approaches the art of another age with
a different frame of mind, a different set of judgements, the differ-
ence being caused by the difference in sociological conditions
between the two ages. In some way not specifically explained, the
sociological approach to art helps us to “understand” the art of
any given age. In order to exemplify the functions of the socio-
logical critic, Mr Calverton contributes an essay on Sherwood
Anderson, wherein the author's work is consistently understood in
terms of its setting. Some instances of the proletarian environ-
ment out of which the works arose are established by quotation
from the works themselves; and one feels that to this extent at
least the environmental approach would not be necessary to any
O-


166
ON RE AND DIS
reader at any future age, since the work itself would provide it.
(It is as though one were to read some helpful sociologist on the
conditions at Rouen in the time of Flaubert as a preparation for
the understanding of Madame Bovary.) However, Mr Calverton
also contributes facts of his own, giving us a kind of sociological
impressionism, telling in his way what Mr Anderson has told in
another-a method of illumination (so far as it is illumination)
which arises not from the placing of a work in its setting, but
from the addition of a new point of view (“The Man's Story is a
haunting study in schizophrenia”). Yet he does not by this same
testimony prove him either a good writer or a poor one, nor does
he show why we must know that the aesthetic has a "proletarian"
origin in order to enjoy its results. In fact, Mr Calverton's causal
theories are arrived at without much laboratory testing. After
showing that a change in social conditions accompanies a change
in aesthetic attitudes, he concludes that the conditions caused the
attitudes. If mere concurrence proves causation, why could not
an opponent assume from the same evidence that the attitudes
caused the conditions? We know, for example, that the feminist
"aesthetic” was a necessary preparation for the enfranchisement
of women: here is an obvious example of an attitude's causing a
change in social structure.
The standard genetic argument is well known; but for the sake
of clearness we may quote it in its purest form from Mr Calver-
ton's own text:
“The plain fact is that we appreciate the [Greek] tragedies in
an historical sense, just as we approach them in an historical
manner. To one acquainted with the brilliance and profundity
of Hellenic culture these tragedies have a meaning that is almost
entirely lost to the contemporary layman. It should be clear in
this alone, if no other evidence were offered, that appreciation or
criticism of Greek tragedy or Roman tragedy, or any ancient or
non-contemporary piece of art, cannot be legitimate if it disre-
gard the significance of the social element."
Thus, the work of art must be interpreted in terms of its
genesis—but genesis sometimes means environment and at others
causation. If Swift, for instance, makes a sly gibe in Gulliver's


KENNETH BURKE
167
Travels at some current political intrigue now forgotten, the
modern reader must have the relevant environmental facts of this
intrigue restored for him by editorial annotation if he is to appre-
ciate the "value” of the gibe. An element of Swift's social con-
text was involved in his meaning, the words themselves not being
an adequate statement of the situation. Here is genesis as environ-
ment. But were I to explain why some "complex” in Swift caused
him to write of giants and pigmies, or what sociological conditions
induced him to write Gulliver as an adventure story rather than as
a pamphlet, here genesis would be synonymous with cause. In
this second kind of genesis we have the discovery of a principle,
in the former we have the recovery of a fact. Whatever the argu-
ments in favour of discovery may be, let us be sure that the
superb one cited by Mr Calverton in support of recovery is not
allowed surreptitiously to help out. It in no way justifies his thesis
that we must understand the causal relation between proletarian
society and proletarian aesthetic in order to appreciate a pro-
letarian writer.
The ambiguity in Mr Calverton's use of such words as "under-
stand” and “appreciate” is troublesome. For although he talks
much of "understanding” the work of art, he never pauses to
understand the word itself. If a man says, “I am going down the
street," I understand him in so far as I know what he is referring
to. But if he says, “I am Napoleon," I understand him by adding
some causal interpretation to his words, as “he is a lunatic," or
“he is a liar,” or “he is joking." The aesthete usually under-
stands in the former sense, the genetist in the latter. While if
all artists were jokers, liars, and lunatics, such genetic understand-
ing by the discovery of a cause would be the only reasonable sort.
Thus, recovery provides us with understanding in the sense of
knowing what the artist is saying, while discovery, or causal
theories, provides us with understanding in the sense of knowing
why the artist is saying it. Some works need more recovery than
others. A knowledge of Plato's archetypes may be useful in read-
ing of Wordsworth's clouds of glory. The Divine Comedy utilizes
aspects of scholastic thinking which are no longer current and the
recovery of which is essential. When we read, "Speak to it,
Horatio, you are a scholar," we must know, or be able to infer,
that erudition was once supposed to enable its possessor to talk


168
ON RE AND DIS
with ghosts. In some cases the matter to be recovered is so remote
(involves a channel of thinking so different from our own) that
an editorial gloss explaining the former condition is not adequate.
This is always true in some degree—but the relativists make too
much of it; for after all, any reader surrounds each word and each
gesture in the art work with a unique set of his own previous
experiences (and therefore a unique set of imponderable emotional
reactions, or "values") and communication exists in the "margin
of overlap” between the writer's experiences and the reader's.
Awareness of this fact goes far towards clarifying fluctuations in
preferences; it need not be made the basis for the claim that each
of us is “imprisoned within the walls of his personality" (as the
subjectivists would interpret it) nor imprisoned within the walls
of his times, as the historians would interpret it. And while it is
dialectically true that two people of totally different experiences
must totally fail to communicate, it is also true that there are no
such two people, the "margin of overlap” always being extensive.
Absolute communication between ages is impossible in the same
way that absolute communication between contemporaries is im-
possible. Environmental recoveries help us to understand what
the author is saying, and generally—though not always, as ex-
plained above-to “feel” it. Causal discoveries lead to something
else.
Just what they do lead to is a strange form of "hitting below
the belt." If a man formulates, for instance, twenty reasons for
the superiority of the bourgeoisie, the non-genetic approach to a
judgement of these reasons would involve an examination of their
logic and cogency. The genetic approach would be to discover
that the author was himself a bourgeois, and that his twenty
reasons were a “rationalization" of his class prejudices. Obviously,
the same technique could be applied with equal profit to "explain-
ing” twenty good reasons or twenty poor ones: the fact that there
were reasons is the point of discussion. Spengler, the most thor-
ough-going adept of this method, realizes just what this process
is: it is to "understand” all creation as symbol, which is a more
friendly word for symptom. The criterion thus becomes not excel-
lence, but typicality, or intensity of characteristics. What will
come of this method (the farthest reach of inductive thinking)
remains to be seen; just now it is pretty much in its Dark Ages,


KENNETH BURKE
169
with almost any conjecture capable of statistical proof, and with
few corrective razors. Its principal danger of impoverishment lies
in the fact that it has the whole world to choose from. While in
the meanwhile the “pseudo-aesthete” may feel contented that there
is a way of “understanding,” say, the words "cold pastoral” with-
out the discovery that they were written on a warm day sublimated
by the poet into its mental negation.
KENNETH BURKE


“THE BRIGHT IMMORTAL OLIVE”
COLLECTED POEMS OF H. D. 12mo. 306 pages.
Boni and Liveright. $2.50.
W E have in these poems, an external world of commanding
✓ beauty—the erect, the fluent, the unaccountably brilliant.
Also, we have that inner world of interacting reason and unreason
in which are comprehended, the rigour, the succinctness of haz-
ardous emotion. And in the entire volume, one is conscious of a
secure, advancing exactness of thought and of speech. There is
here, an immortalizing of minutiae that is both personal and
cosmic, whereby we may observe, “the wind-indented snow," the
sea “painting the lintel of wet sand with froth,” “