the staggering
ships," the boat that “climbs—hesitates-drops-climbs-hesi-
tates-crawls back," the cliff temple, "white against white," "the
serpent-spotted shell” of the swan's egg,
“the broken hulk of a ship
hung with shreds of rope,
pallid under the cracked pitch.”
We have the “stiff ivory and white fire” of cyclamen flowers,
"a petal,
with light equal
on leaf and under-leaf,"
the illusory behaviour of the marine creature,
“this sea-gliding creature,
this strange creature like a weed,"
the unanticipated, unforgettable mutations of aquatic colour,
"where rollers shot with blue
cut under deeper blue,"


MARIANNE MOORE
171
and
"as the tide crept, the land
burned with a lizard-blue
where the dark sea met the sand.”
As the verisimilitude of this outer world remains with one, no
more is the author's emotional intensity to be evaded-in which
“flesh shudders,” and the mind waits "as a wave-line may wait to
fall”—that intensity in which pleasure is painful and pain is
painful, in which emotion can, like beauty, "crowd madness upon
madness.”
Since form and content corroborate each other, it is not sur-
prising to find that the technique of these poems should, like the
substance, present a fastidious prodigality-an apparent starkness
which is opulence. One resists, mistakenly perhaps, what seems a
too consistently insisted-upon avoidance of the small glib particle,
the climax in certain instances submerged in a lesser climax, a
sometimes distracting long digression. Yet, in the never monoton-
ous, ever recurring device of the alternate repeated word—"torture
me not with this or that or this”—in a careful mosaic of rhymes
such as we have in Lais:
SON
“Lais is now no lover of the glass,
seeing no more the face as once it was,
wishing to see that face and finding this”;
we have the verbal continuity, the controlled ardour, the balanced
speech of poetry. The sensitive advancing rhetoric of Sitalkas,
of Pygmalion, of Sea Gods, suggests by its momentum, water
inundating cove after cove of an irregular coast:
"you will curl between sand-hills-
you will thunder along the cliff-
break-retreat-get fresh strength,
gather and pour weight upon the beach.”
There is present the sense of honey and salt, an ever implied
query:


172
“THE BRIGHT IMMORTAL OLIVE”
"... which is more sweet,
the sweetness
or the bitterness ?”
the suggestion of paean, plaint, and madrigal that we associate
with Swinburne, as in We Two:
"have we two met within
this maze of daedal paths
in-wound mid grievous stone,
where once I stood alone ?"
Yet on each page of original verse or of translation, a personal
spirit manifests itself. In the making of classic personages or
situations, symbols of present ones; in the concept of colour and
form, as in the rhetoric, we find, intensive, unmixed, and unim-
peded, the white fire of the poet-of one who, repudiating mis-
cellany, is immemorially garlanded, not with orange flowers nor
cyclamen, but as H. D. has said of Sappho, with “the frail silver
leaf of the bright scentless and immortal olive.”
MARIANNE MOORE


BRIEFER MENTION
THEhe defects of Mister and situation to livelier sensored
The Golden Door, by Evelyn Scott (12mo, 275 pages; Seltzer: $2.50).
The defects of Mrs Scott's latest novel seem to derive from her having
apprehended character and situation too well with the intellect and not
well enough with the imagination. A livelier sense of humour than is
here evinced, is needed to make these desperate or tired radicals interest-
ing to the world that has outgrown the kind of romantic feeling which
influences negatively or positively, all of Mrs Scott's characters. One
suspects that the author herself is in a centre of indifference between two
phases of romance, between the demoded revolutionary radicalism of
yesterday and the fashionable “mysticism” of the moment. The style is
staccato and marked with the Joycean ellipsis. It is very smartly of the
latest model. What a pity that Mrs Scott does not always write in her
own way, as in her descriptive passages, which carry so effectively and
legitimately into prose the best qualities of poetry!
The Painted Veil, by W. Somerset Maugham (12mo, 289 pages; Doran:
$2). The horror of the action recalls the pleasure of the most exciting
fairy tales. Yet the thought keeps well enough apace with the plot to
lead us to mature reflection. The characters are superficially drawn and
the theme is pulled awry by a husband who is a little too bad himself
to point a moral for his wife, but barbarous action together with Mr
Maugham's power to employ and entertain our intelligence results in a
grown-up midnight tale of terror.
LITTLE Karoo, by Pauline Smith, introduction by Arnold Bennett (12mo,
168 pages; Doran: $2). In Little Karoo Miss Pauline Smith shows
that she can write of the South African Dutch with a firm and unsen-
timental hand. The first story in the collection entitled The Pain affects
the reader almost as if he himself were an impotent spectator of one of
those "natural sorrows" so often the most heart-rending of all. Miss
Smith's style has about it a truly biblical simplicity, and if all the stories
in this volume were as beautiful as The Pain we would feel no hesita-
tion in sharing Mr Arnold Bennett's confidence as to her future. Alas!
They are far from being so good; and we fear, therefore, that we must
still withhold our complete allegiance.
The DIABOLIQUES, by Barbey d'Aurevilly, translated by Ernest Boyd (12mo,
279 pages; Knopf: $3). A gorgeously entertaining book. It is distinctly
not for the jeune fille, but it is curious, just the same, that these highly
coloured and truly aesthetic, though blood-and-thunderish and Stendhalian
tales, had to wait until the modern victory over the jeune fille was com-
pletely established. The translation by Mr Ernest Boyd is excellent
though there is an almost undue relish for plumping out the word that
has been hitherto défendu.


174
BRIEFER MENTION
FIRST POEMS, by Edwin Muir (16mo, 75 pages; Huebsch: $1.50). These
quietly wistful and plaintively stoical rhymes are one more decisive evi-
dence that it is possible to derive quite definite poetic pleasure from an
inspiration that is obviously literary and imitative. One wishes that other
illuminating and suggestive critics would use their native-born receptivity
to such unassuming purpose ; in place of straining it in quest of what is a
false bizarrerie. The best of the poems in this volume bring us many
charming reminders of Wordsworth and Matthew Arnold, the best of
the ballads contain phrases most happily reminiscent of Samuel Taylor
Coleridge. Of the two genres one is tempted to prefer the former, as
containing more of the natural tendencies of the author's mind.
The Dark Tower, by Albert Brush (12mo, 41 pages; Flying Stag Press:
$2.50). The author of these lyrics, perhaps without knowing it, stands
in the direct line of a remote and famous tradition, that of those
trouvères of the early Middle Age, Bertrand de Born, Sordello, and the
like, who chose to disguise their sometimes intense passions in the
Romanesque equivalent of a banjo. An armed mask, polished obscurity,
occasional flashes of exultation, were truly characteristic of certain twelfth-
century poets; therefore we think these poems mediaeval, and not for
any accidental apparatus of arras and incense, pages and flambeaux. The
mask is perfectly adjusted in the short lyrics which we prefer to the
sonnets—in the exquisite fragment, He Who Takes Lightly-in Anno
Domini, the most poignant poem in this attractively presented volume
which is not half so attractive as the poetry it contains.
Nor Youth Nor Age, by Harold Vinal (12mo, 48 pages; Harold Vinal:
$2) is a collection of distinctly minor poems by a minor poet. Mr Vinal
is stranger to the poetic imagination; he never rises above fancy. This
fancy is whimsical and pleasing, though sometimes forced and never
luminous. Of Mr Vinal it must be said that his talent is slight, but that
within its narrow confines he seeks perfection in the delicate thought, the
neatly-turned line, the mincing cadence: and this is, after all, the art of
minor poetry.
New Poems, by John Drinkwater (12mo, 64 pages; Houghton Mifflin:
$1.25) adds little to an established reputation. The volume consists for
the most part of Albumblätter: graceful lyrics to be recited over a spinet
and applauded with the tapping of a fan. The volume closes with seven-
teen translations from the German. These are in much the same mood,
and though several were more robust in the original, the translation
softens them into salon pieces, hardly to be distinguished from Drink-
water's own.
SELECTED Poems, by W. H. Davies (12mo, 75 pages; Harcourt Brace: $2).
There is an early morning quality about these poems, as though the writer
were awake before the rest of the world, to the freshness and mystery of
living things. There is no sustained philosophy, but the impressions
are poignant, and the effects clear-cut and delightful.


BRIEFER MENTION
175
JAMES BRANCH CABELL, by Carl Van Doren (12mo, 83 pages; McBride:
$1). Though the lines entitled, “But Wisdom is justified of Her Chil-
dren,” are considered Mr Cabell's happiest, nevertheless, adds Mr Van
Doren, they are "a little thin, a little derivative." His prose style is
thought to have a silken texture, but it "purrs to a degree that now and
then begets monotony." Upon the whole, Mr Van Doren may scarcely be
considered the perfect log-roller.
WAGNER AS MAN AND ARTIST, by Ernest Newman (8vo, 399 pages; Knopf:
$5). Not a first book for students of Wagner. The writer presupposes
you to believe already in the heroic qualities of the composer and then
does his utmost to destroy that faith. Every bit of scandal that was ever
whispered in European couloirs is here endlessly rehearsed and generally
believed in. The "life" is a long series of littlenesses. In fact it becomes
clear that so mesquin a Wagner could not have written the masterpieces
that conquered a world and it seems odd that Mr Newman does not in
the end set up some Baconian pretender to the honours. Valet-biography
seems overdone of late. What is interesting in geniuses, after all, is their
genius.
MIRRORS OF New York, by Benjamin de Casseres (8vo, 221 pages; Joseph
Lawren: $3). No literary initiates can glance over these sad pages with-
out desiring to make some signs of furtive recognition to their author.
There seems to be some sort of merciless psychic law that demands of
any abnormally sensitive imagination that it should either make the
chaos of its environment a wharf of escape to the Fortunate Islands or
"a bank and shoal of time" against all that is merely à la mode. De
Casseres in this unhappy book does neither of these things. Suborned
by some grim perverse reaction, he throws down both weapons and tools
and rushes with bare hands into the ranks of the enemy; making wild
sport—too reckless to be even called ironic—for the entertainment of the
worshippers of the featureless god Dagon.
THE BEARDSLEY Period, an Essay in Perspective, by Osbert Burdett (12mo,
290 pages; Boni & Liveright: $2.50). The excuse for this sensible and
well-written book on the Nineties is the fact that the period therein
analysed is by no means extinct among us. Every well-read young man
of literary promise in our universities undergoes an attack of them. Con-
sequently he might as properly be well-informed regarding the era of his
idols by Mr Burdett, as ill-informed by some handsomely mounted but
inadequate showman of the type of Mr Holbrook Jackson. Mr Burdett's
book, though beautifully gotten-up, completely lacks the wealth of external
decoration which makes up much of the value of the average book on the
Yellow Age; in return it possesses a fine critical value usually lacking
from the average volume. Thus it is the more curious that Mr Burdett
has chosen to waste paper on men of such small talent as Henry Harland,
Hubert Crackenthorpe, and Richard Le Gallienne, while he says nothing of
Arthur Machen who is, in many respects, a typical and lonely survival
from an age as dead as that of Queen Anne.


176
BRIEFER MENTION
MEMOIRS OF A NAPOLEONIC OFFICER, by Jean-Baptiste Barrès, edited and
with an introduction by his Grandson Maurice Barrès, translated by
Bernard Miall (8vo, 309 pages; Lincoln Mac Veagh, The Dial Press:
$4). As a direct, straight-forward, but not particularly vivid or lively
account of a well-behaved French soldier's career under Eagle, Tricolour,
Fleur de Lis, and White Flag, for thirty-one years, from the Napoleonic
victories to the July Monarchy, this book does not lack historic interest;
but that his grandfather's sedate narrative of French invasions should
supply Maurice Barrès with "plain and tangible evidence of the eternal
peril to which France is exposed and the necessity of maintaining our
ancient ideal of honour" strikes us as perhaps more significant than
touching. The book, however, will doubtless retain its place among others
of its kind; though one regrets that the translator has seen fit to translate
cets What the bless Tetailhats planchamonganishare
the familiar "Vive l'Armée!” as “Up the Army!"
A READER'S GUIDE Book, by May Lamberton Becker, with foreword by
Henry Seidel Canby (12mo, 374 pages; Holt: $2.75). These bibliog-
raphies with advice, and informative forays into ground other than that
of reference books, present to the intellectually curious, cosmic riches.
Certain omissions, and a sometimes too trustful hazarding of humour, of
diction, and of critical approval, are negligible when compared with the
alluring classified information afforded the enquirer, about writers and
writing, printing, music, economics, education, history, biography, travel,
plays, poetry, novels, and many other subjects; the author's ingenuity
in making fiction an adjunct to the study of history, of art, of certain
professions, of specific cities and localities, projecting itself as by an
extension Utopian scaling-ladder, far beyond the achievements of most
library experts—to whom the book is graciously inscribed.
ESSAYS AND SOLILOQUIES, by Miguel de Unamuno, translated with an intro-
duction by J. E. Crawford Flitch (12mo, 244 pages; Knopf: $3). What
his people bring to their bull-fights, Unamuno brings to his wrestlings
with the soul. The result is a gory spirituality, in keeping with his in-
verted creed that martyrdom creates faith. Frequently in Unamuno the
accent of St Augustine is unmistakable, the Augustine who said of time,
“If you ask me what it is, I know not; if you ask me not, I know." He
has that type of mind which finds release in such antiformularistic
formulas as the “credo quia absurdum" or the “I believe, help Thou mine
unbelief." He is concerned with spiritual, rather than biological, fitness,
and sees no reason for striving to define one in terms of the other :
opposing love and contentment, he unhesitatingly champions the former.
His sincerity always commands our respect for him as a man; and fre-
quently our admiration for him as a writer, as when he says, “Vices and
virtues proceed from the same stock and a single passion may be turned
to good or evil,” or when, in talking of a continued groaning heard from
a neighbouring bedroom, he says, “It produced upon me the illusion of
coming out of the night itself, as if it were the silence or the night that
lamented, and there was even a moment when I dreamt that that gentle
lament rose to the surface from the depths of my own soul.”


COMMENT
"ACTION, business, adventure, discovery,” are not prerogatives
exclusively. American; and obversely, creative power is not
the prerogative of every country other than America. That it is
not, moreover, we have had abundant evidence during March, in
Room 303 of The Anderson Galleries—a brief, memorable "de-
pository” for the work of John Marin, Arthur G. Dove, Marsden
Hartley, Paul Strand, Alfred Stieglitz, Charles Demuth, and
Georgia O'Keeffe.
We are pleased that Marin has conceived the possibility of "a
wind blowing pigment," the more rather than less that Boticelli
and Turner observed the metamorphosis of clothes and water by
the wind. We are consciously indulgent, perhaps, towards cer-
tain of Arthur Dove's idiosyncrasies—towards 10-Cent-Store Still-
Life and Mary Goes to Italy; examining his Storm-Clouds in Silver
and his Garden, Rose, Gold, Green, however, we agree that we'd
“rather have the impossible than the possible,” that we'd "rather
have truth than beauty,” that we'd “rather have a soul than a
shape”; the soul and the truth sometimes conveniently as in this
case, having "beauty” and a “shape.” Wary, yet eager snap-
pers-up of the uninsistent masterpiece, like certain fish, we some-
times pre-empt something that we may afterward reject; and nearly
always prefer precisely those works for which the author himself,
cares least. Although certain of Marsden Hartley's stark aus-
terities not here, are preferred by us to some that are, his tessellated
representations of landscape and still-life correct the jocund Amer-
ican tendency to guess rather than to know. Canaletto and the
charts of seventeenth-century botanists have but prepared our
vision for the reredos of buildings, for the architecture of weeds,
for the machinery of Paul Strand, than which nothing is more
veracious. We welcome the power-house in the drawing-room
when we examine his orientally perfect combining of discs, para-
bolas, and verticals—when we perceive the silver flexibility of
skin or the depth of tone upon the anaconda-like curves of cen-
tral bearings. We agree with Gaston Lachaise that "person-
ality is expressed by Alfred Stieglitz in a profound and pene-


178
COMMENT
trating comprehension of character, as by daguerreotypes in their
enchanting manner": here, by his clouds-his Equivalents, char-
acteristically interrogatory. Charles Demuth's jewellery of apples
reinforced by pieces of green glass or black, pleases us as well as
their Chinese counterparts-mandarins and insects painted upon
silk. Certain of Miss O'Keeffe's petunias and Portraits of a Day
check the impact of precursory consent. The unvariegated burn-
ing brass of her autumn leaves, however, assures us as an inter-
preter of her work has said, that she "wears no poisoned emeralds."
Her calla lilies, gladiolas, and alligator pears, have upon them, the
lustre of mosques, of lotus flowers, of cypress-bordered pools.
They have the involute security of Central African, of Singhalese
and Javanese experienced adornment.
Doubtless there are admirers of American aesthetic performance
who would revert to Whistler's Mother; to the grasshopper
weather-vane of gilded copper with glass eye, made by an Amer-
ican for Faneuil Hall in 1742; to the silk embroidered lady in an
empire dress, half kneeling under a willow tree by George Wash-
ington's tomb; to the early American kitten held by an early
American child—or to the work of John Singer Sargent, admira-
tion for whose portraits has now honouringly, in the year of his
death, assumed "patriotic proportions." Yet obviously, past and
present, creative effort is here-conscious of which, we participate
in that for which Yeats pleads: the old culture that came to man
at his work, which was not at the expense of life, but an exaltation
of life itself.”


THE DIAL
At the. SIGN of the CUPID & LION
PORTRAITS
IN OIL AND
VINEGAR
MEMOIR
OF THOMAS
BEWICK,
1822-1828
With an Introduction by
: SELWYN IMAGE
By
JAMES LAVER
Studies of twenty-five
contemporary artists
from right to left in
modern art. In no sense
an exposition of any
particular system of
aesthetics, “but only a
bundle of Inconsistent
Appreciation" of such
figures as John Sargent,
Wyndham Lewis, Ep-
stein, Roger Fry, Orpen,
Pissarro and John.
$3.50
Under the
Black Flag
..:. By Don C. Sertz •
The lives of forty gallant pirates,
what they did and what was done
to them on the high seas. A book
of astonishing people, notable
rogues and their impossible deeds.
"The best, most vivid, most
authoritative portraits of these
daredevils of the deep yet writ-
ten."--New York World.
"A necessary addition to the
library of anyone who has an in-
terest in the doings of the scoun-
drels under discussion. ...
Written history in the most ex-
act sense of the word.”—Chicago
Post.
$4.00
A classic of autobiog
raphy, a "golden book,"
the story of the revival
of the art of wood-
engraving in England,
profusely illustrated by
reproductions of the au-
thor's best known work.
$4.00
HOW TO
SEE MODERN
PICTURES
THE
LETTERS OF
MARY RUSSELL
MITFORD
The
Autobiography
of a Crook
By
RALPH M. PEARSON
Selected,
with an Introduction by
R. BRIMLBY JOHNSON
As told by NETLEY LUCAS
A guide for the amateur
in art, explaining the
principles of design.
“To learn to look at
modern pictures is to
learn to look at all pic-
tures. ... A truly valu-
able book."--Brooklyn
Daily Eagle. $2.50
An extraordinary life-story, a tale
of villainy, sentimentalism, pluck,
repulsive dishonor, a study in the
real psychology of the criminal
of the upper classes.
Ready shortly. $2.50
“What is most attraco
tive about her private
letters, as about her in-
comparable 'Our Vil.
lage,' is the gusto with
which she approached
life, letters, politics,
sport-anything, indeed,
that was going." - J. St.
Loe Sirachey. $2.50
Lincoln MacVEAGH
152 West Thirteenth
THE DIAL PRESS
Street, New York


THE DIAL
By the Author of “The Divine Lady"
Lord Byron
greatest of romantics
lives again his picturesque

career
in this masterly novel
by the author of "The Divine Lady"
E. BARRINGTON'S
romantic story of Byron,
his life and his loves
Glorious Apollo
E. Barrington's genius for biographical romance,
which made “The Divine Lady" a best seller
for two seasons, reaches the summit of its art
in this story of the famous poet. Byron's ex-
traordinary beauty, coupled with his inspired
talent, made him a figure unique in history. The
romance of his eventful career, his strange
amours, his glamorous and amazing experiences
with life, and the characteristic gallantry with
which he invited death make a rare and memor-
able tale.
Two huge printings before publication indicate
the tremendous advance demand for “Glorious
Apollo.”
Photogravure frontispiece and end papers. Uni-
form with «The Divine Lady” and “The Chaste
Diana.” $2.50 at all booksellers. Limited edition
of 500 numbered copies, beautifully made. $5.00
per copy, boxed.
DODD, MEAD & COMPANY, Publishers
443 Fourth Avenue
New York
-
By the Author of “The Chaste Diana"


12 deste
AUG 31 1925
V

THE
DIAL
SEPTEMBER 1925
At Table Oil
Edouard Vuillard
A Christmas Story
Feodor Dostoevsky 179
On The Mask of a Painter
Scofield Thayer 186
Preaching to Butterflies
Logan Pearsall Smith 188
Rest
Mabel Simpson 194
Thomas Craven Oil
Thomas H. Benton
Photography and Painting
Thomas Craven 195
The Equinox
Anthony Wrynn 203
Two Etchings
John Sloan
The Spaniard
Waldo Frank 211
Four Drawings Pen and Ink
Henri Matisse
Love at 42 Altgeld Avenue
Alice Beal Parsons 221
Bust of Charles Henry Demuth Bronze Arnold Roennebeck
Paris Letter
Paul Morand 231
Book Reviews:
A Superb Brief
Alyse Gregory 235
The Great God Pan
Cuthbert Wright 239
A Monument
Glenway Wescott 246
The Letters of Madame
Paul Rosenfeld 248
The Dogmas of Naturalism
Bertrand Russell 255
Briefer Mention
259
Comment
The Editors 264
VOLUME LXXIX NUMBER 3
50 cents a copy


THE DIAL
SCOFIELD THAYER
Editor
MARIANNE MOORE
Acting Editor
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
EDOUARD VUILLARD was born on November 11, 1868, at Cuiseaux,
Saone et Loire. He has studied at the Louvre, the Académie
Julian, and the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, and is at present working
in Paris. His paintings have been exhibited at the Salon des
Indépendants, the Salon d'Automne, and at Bernheim Jeune.
FEODOR DOSTOEVSKY was a political exile in Siberia during the
years 1849-1855. Originally part of his reminiscences of those
years, A Christmas Story, which is published in this issue of The
Dial, was to have been included in his House of the Dead,
but was excised by the Russian Censor. The story then came
into the possession of the present translator's family, and appears
now for the first time.
Mrs C. M. GRAND, the Princess Catherine Radziwill, was born
in Petrograd, educated at the Sorbonne, and is now living in
New York. She is the author of several books, among which
are Rasputine and the Russian Revolution, Germany Under
Three Emperors, and The Firebrand of Bolchewism. Articles
and essays by her have appeared in various American, French,
and English magazines.
VOL. LXXIX. No. 3. SEPTEMBER, 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






AT TABLE. BY EDOUARD VUILLARD



THE OXX ITO
DIAL
SEPTEM
SEPTEMBER 1925
A CHRISTMAS STORY
BY FEODOR DOSTOEVSKY
Translated From the Russian by C. M. Grand
Luse
INICO
TT was Christmas Day, the second Christmas after I had been
I brought to the Dead House. The convicts had been granted
a holiday in honour of the occasion, and dispensed from work,
which after all is not such a great favour, because it is better to
work than to think, and what can one do but think when one's
hands are not busy, and what can be more dreadful than thinking,
when this means the remembrance of other times and other days,
and what tormentor has ever been able to evade the agony of
thought, when it presses with all its dead weight upon a human
creature?
On that Christmas Day, the prison was very still and quiet,
while its inmates were whispering to each other in hushed tones,
as if afraid to break this silence and this calm otherwise than by
the noise of their chains which clinked whenever they made a
movement—these chains which were there to remind the poor
wretches who wore them that their misery was still going on, and
would go on ... for how long ... none could tell or remember.
But for some, this was certain, until death came to release them
from the burden of their doomed existences.
The prisoners had as usual received gifts from kind people in
the town who had wanted them to share some of their own Christ-
mas gladness, and they had been taken to Church, and given a
better dinner than on other days. And after this meal had been
partaken of, there remained nothing more for them to do but come


180
A CHRISTMAS STORY
together to cheer each other as well as they could in the big hall
which served them when not out of doors, as a sleeping place and
spot of reunion. Save for the flickering of a lantern left by one
of the guards next to the door leading into the yard, darkness had
fallen upon them, a weird unearthly kind of darkness which re-
minded one of all the evil thoughts kept hidden in the souls of all
these men, so many among whom were criminals but in name.
The convicts, free for a few moments from the perpetual watch
kept over their movements, were lying or sitting on the large
wooden platform on which they slept at night; and while one of
them was playing softly on a violin, half of the strings of which
were either broken or missing, another was relating Christmas tales
to his comrades whose attention was riveted upon his words. This
was Timofey, the Thief, as he was called, who declared that he
had never been so happy as in prison, because there at least he
had food, and clothes, and had a roof over his head, luxuries which
at times during the course of his adventurous and criminal life he
had often been without. This Timofey was considered as some-
thing like a hero in the prison. He had not killed anybody, but
he had taken a part in so many hold-ups and robberies that his
reputation had preceded his arrival in the penal settlement, where
he had immediately assumed a preponderant position by virtue of
his past misdeeds. He was always jovial and pleasant, and ready
to oblige others, and he had ever so many amusing stories to relate
about his past life, before he had been arrested and sent to
prison for several years, the number of which he had already
forgotten, so satisfied did he feel with his present lot. The guards
all liked him, because he had never been caught in an act of dis-
obedience or insubordination; and yet there was a general feeling
all around, among the convicts as well as among the turnkeys, that
Timofey had better be left alone, and not be interfered with,
because if aroused, he might ... well he might turn out dis-
agreeable, and we all know what this word means in a prison.
I was looking at all the shaved heads around me, and wonder-
ing what I could do next, when a deep sigh aroused my attention.
It came from a fellow sitting a little apart from the other pris-
oners, all by himself, a fellow who was known by the name of
Illia the Fool. He was a new-comer, and it was his first Christmas
in the prison. His nickname had come to him, because of the


FEODOR DOSTOEVSKY
181
complete indifference which he displayed in regard to everything
that was going on around him, and of his dumb docility not only
before the guards, but also in complying with the many require-
ments of the other convicts, who tyrannized over him, and used him
as a kind of man of all work, saddling upon him those tasks of the
prison which no one cared to perform, such as to carry out the
pails, and so forth. He was about thirty years old, a short, rather
stout fellow, blind in one eye, with a face deeply scarred by small-
pox. He had committed murder, and was serving a life sentence,
but he had never been heard to complain about it, nor to imply that
his sentence had not been a just one, but seemed to have accepted
it, as something that was due him, and this was what had earned
for him, at least partly, his nickname of "Fool," which Timofey
had been the first one to give him. As you know, nicknames are
very frequent in penal settlements, liked as a rule by convicts,
perhaps because their guards invariably call them by their num-
bers. Illia was no exception, and always grinned when he heard
them call out, “Fool, where are you?”
But on this Christmas afternoon, Illia the Fool, appeared to
me to be different from what he was on other days. For one
thing he had sighed, and this I had never heard him do before.
There was such bitter sorrow in the sound of that sigh, moreover,
that it struck a soft cord in my heart, and made it ache as it had
not done for a long while. I drew nearer to the man and ven-
tured to ask him of what he had been thinking, that made him
so particularly sad.
“Oh, my little Pigeon, you could not understand it,” he replied,
"I was only thinking of my small Wassia, of my little goat. What
has happened to Wassia, where is Wassia? This is the only thing
I would like to know. Oh, if anybody could just tell me where
is Wassia and whether Wassia is happy and well cared for, I
would ask nothing further from God, or from His Saints!”
"Who is Wassia, will you not tell me?" I enquired, expecting
that he would mention the name of a brother or of a sweetheart.
He looked at me, replying with an accent of surprise, “Why, I
have just told you, Wassia was my little goat.”
I still did not understand, but not wishing to grieve the poor
fellow, who was in real misery, I asked him if he would not relate
to me the history of Wassia.


182
A CHRISTMAS STORY
"It is Christmas Day, and perhaps it would soothe your grief
if you told your story to someone who could sympathize with you,”
I added.
He sighed again.
“Ah! Little Pigeon, how could you understand it? But you
are right all the same; perhaps it will do me good to tell you!"
And as he spoke, I saw a tear drop from his one eye and roll
down his cheek.
"I will tell you, Little Pigeon," he said at last, "I will tell you,
although I have never yet told it to any one before; there are
days when one must speak or one will die. You see, Little Pigeon,
I never had a mother. I was found lying in a basket-a baby just
a few days old-by the grave-digger of our village in the church-
yard, when he went to dig a grave for a woman who had died
that morning. The grave-digger was a good man and he took
me to his home. The same afternoon, the priest baptized me and
they gave me the name of Illia because it had been on the day of
Illia the Prophet that I had been found. Since no one knew who
were my parents, of course people thought that my mother had
never been married, and had abandoned me out of shame. As I
grew up, the other boys laughed at me and taunted me with my dis-
grace, until I used to think sometimes I hated them all. But still
I was not unhappy; you must not think that I was unhappy, Little
Pigeon, because it would not be true. The grave-digger was a
good man, his wife, also, was a good woman who cared for me,
gave me food, made me some clothes, and did not beat me too
much or too often. Then when I was about ten years old, God sent
them a little daughter. I loved that child so much, so much.
Anisia she was called, and I used to watch over Anisia while her
mother was out in the fields working. I rocked her in my arms,
drove the flies away from her face, and led her by the hand when
she began to walk. Then one day when a big dog wanted to bite
her because she had teased it, I threw myself before her; you can
see here, Little Pigeon, where that dog bit me instead of her,"
and as he spoke, he raised the sleeve of his shirt, and made me
look at a deep scar on his arm. “Anisia was all the world to
me; when I was twenty years old and she was ten, I used to take
her on my knee, and to tell her that when she was grown up,
I would marry her. A neighbour heard me one day, and told my


FEODOR DOSTOEVSKY
183
was
foster mother, who scolded me and said that I must not say such
things to Anisia because it was putting wrong ideas into her head,
because she could never become my wife. But still I went on
saying them to her, only I took care that no one should hear me.
I really thought then that Anisia loved me and would always
care for me.
"Well, Little Pigeon, one day after I had worked hard in the
fields and got very wet from the rain that surprised us on our way
home, I became ill, and the feldscher who was called to see me
said that I had caught smallpox. He took me away to the hos-
pital in the district town. After I had recovered, my face was
what you see it to-day, and I had lost the sight of my right eye.
I was not an object for any girl to like to look upon, and was
wise enough to know it. So when I returned home, I did not
say any more to Anisia that I wanted to marry her; I only tried
to please her, and to make myself useful to her. After I had
scraped a little money together, I bought her a present for Christ-
mas—a little goat she had admired one morning when she had
seen it in the village. It was such a pretty little white thing,
we called it Wassia. I used to take care of it and to feed it, so
that Anisia had no trouble whatever with it, but only played with
it when she liked.”
He stopped for a moment, the tears gathering in his one eye,
then asked me, "Are you sure I do not bore you, Little Pigeon ?"
"No, no, go on," I replied, because by that time I had become
intensely interested.
"Well, time went on; at last Anisia was grown up; the boys
began to hang around her, and the women to say that she would
soon be married. She was the beauty of the place, and Foma, the
innkeeper, who was reputed to be the richest man in the whole
village, was constantly seen with her and danced with her at all
the harvest festivals to which she was bidden. This did not please
me, because I knew that Foma was a good-for-nothing fellow who
had been in many scrapes with girls, always coming out of them
by some trick or other. I tried to warn Anisia, but she refused
to listen to me, and at last became very angry with me, saying
that she would never speak to me again unless I stopped talk-
ing about Foma. I could see that she was quite changed. She
did not care any more for Wassia and ceased to caress or play


184
A CHRISTMAS STORY
with it. So that poor Wassia, who by this time was quite an old
goat, seemed to feel it, looking so sad when unable to attract
her attention that I had to take it in my arms to comfort it. Then
we would weep together, and I thought that at least there remained
one being in the world who cared for me, to whom I could be
useful.
"It is dreadful, Little Pigeon, to feel quite alone in the world.
This was my case; and when one day, Anisia came to tell me that
she was going to marry Foma after lent, I felt that if Wassia
had not been there, I would just have gone down to the river and
thrown myself in it.
"Well, time passed, the summer was over, and the harvest had
all been taken in. Then Anisia and Foma were married. Anisia
came to show herself to me in all her bridal finery, with quantities
of red beads around her neck, and a nice red handkerchief tied
around her throat. Foma had a new pair of boots bought for the
occasion, and a new pink shirt; and everybody said that they were
a comely pair. Before she went away to her husband's isba, Anisia
came to me again, and told me that she would leave me Wassia to
take care of; and in saying so, seemed to imply that she was con-
ferring a great favour upon me. Perhaps she was. Who knows!
“Well, Little Pigeon, I hardly ever saw her afterwards, and
Wassia was all that was left to me. My little goat! It did not
mind my one eye and scarred face. We used to sleep together
on the straw in the barn; it would put its head upon my shoulder,
and lick my face with its tongue. I was happy then, Little Pigeon,
because I could imagine that it was Anisia who was kissing me.
“Well, this did not last long," he went on, his voice trembling
a little, “there came a day when Anisia returned, and told me
that she wanted to have Wassia back, to take it to her own cottage
to play with as she used to do when she was a little girl. By that
time I knew that she was not as happy as she had expected to be
with Foma, but this was not a reason why she should want to take
Wassia away from me, who had nothing else but this little animal
to make me happy. I begged her to leave me the goat, I said that
she would not know how to take care of it, that Wassia was an
old goat requiring more attention than she would have the time
or the patience to give. I said everything I could think of to induce
her to leave me the animal, but she refused to listen to me. She
IIIC.


FEODOR DOSTOEVSKY
185
laughed when I told her that Wassia was all I had left in the
world to remind me of her. She laughed and said that her husband
wanted Wassia, and that she was going to take it away with her
and give it to her husband!
“Then, Little Pigeon, something went over me I had never felt
before. I happened to have an axe in my hand with which I
had been chopping wood and—and I killed Anisia!"
And a deep sob shook his strong frame.
"Fool, oh, you Fool, where are you?” called a voice from the
other end of the room, where the convicts were all talking as loud
as they could now that their attention had been diverted from the
sadness of their own lot by the stories Timofey had been telling
them.
"Fool, Fool, where are you?” one of the prisoners cried out
again. “Come over here, you are wanted to empty the parascha.”
"I am coming, I am coming,” responded Illia as he rushed to
obey, murmuring between his teeth, “Wassia—who can tell me
what has become of her! Where is Wassia!"
UT


ON THE MASK OF A PAINTER
RECENTLY YOUNG
BY SCOFIELD THAYER
So this the face the sculptor saw
On him who had been young
Not many years gone by. The claw
Of Time had not yet strung
His entries here. No ledger this.
Nor chart of suns and seas
Imperative to mar. Dismiss
The years: they wrought not these.
Who then accuse of devastation?
What hand wrought these wrongs?
Wherefore and to what grim oblation
Was Youth's quick bound by thongs?
It was not bound. No wrong was done.
It grew as flowers grow.
Their nature takes them to the sun:
His to a shrewder glow.
A smithy is no garden plot,
Nor steel a petalled thing:
What though the forge be black-begot?
Coals there be finding wing.
And thence shall bloom the rapid line,
The purged and salient wit,
The temper of an arch design
Wherein a fame is writ.
Thereout shall flicker, gay and nice,
What flames alone anneal;
Thereout shall tongue, gay and concise,
The salutary steel.


SCOFIELD THAYER
187
Wish not a smithy to a flower
Nor chide that noble din:
Tall be the flames, and swart the power
Which writhes and works within.
Will not a smithy to a flower
Nor to a nest a bin:
These also birds, and God's the power
Shall pulse and beat therein.
Trail not the seas from pole to pole
To document this case:
For hard as cinders that burnt soul
Whereof the socket was this face.


PREACHING TO BUTTERFLIES
BY LOGAN PEARSALL SMITH
VER since I took a peep, not many months ago, into the
V world of fishers for great fish, a taste for this kind of dis-
covery has been growing on me. I have begun—too late, I fear-
to wonder whether I may not have missed my true vocation;
whether I was not meant, perhaps, to be one of the great explorers
of this age. And yet, is it after all too late? Though I am
ambitious no longer of climbing mountains, or hewing my way
through jungles in the tropics, are there not strange worlds at
home-worlds within worlds—that still await investigation;
exotic races, whose customs and whose costumes no one has ever
yet described? This thought, this hope of home adventure, was
suggested to me, the other day, by the sight, above a book-stall,
of a row of fashion papers. My eye was caught by the fair, un-
earthly figures displayed upon their open pages; why not explore,
I asked myself, the world inhabited by these extraordinary beings?
The gleam of that gold medal which is the explorer's glory began
to shine before my eyes. I hurriedly bought a bundle of those
papers and took them home; and then, following up the clues they
gave me, I started boldly out to explore the streets of fashionable
shops. I gazed in at hairdressers' windows; I stood in wonder
before those groups of elegant wax figures which pose behind the
plate-glass walls of Oxford Street, and of the crowded thorough-
fare of Kensington.
My first impression of the realm of these lovely Queens was
altogether charming. A bright Utopia it seemed, a kind of El
Dorado, a Garden of Eden for the display of feminine limbs and
underwear-innocent as in Paradise before the fall. A world,
too, of elegant coiffures, incredible hats, and fairylands of foot-
wear, of jewels and furs and splendid tissues and unlimited
expense.
Grim Feminists deplore most bitterly, I believe, the rage of
their sex for personal adornment, and acrid economists have de-
nounced the waste it all involves. I, however, for my part, could


LOGAN PEARSALL SMITH
189
not but rejoice that the poor earth had anything to show so fair;
that life could blossom into so rainbow-hued a flower; that sylph-
like forms like these should float in the air about us, for ever gay
and in the fashion, untroubled for ever by fear and want and
care.
That was my first impression. ... The soft Anglo-French
idiom of the fashion papers is full of euphemisms and veiled allu-
sions; I did not understand at first the meaning of “transforma-
tion," "tinting," "colour restoration”; but the ever-recurring
phrase, “superfluous tissue,” began to make me uneasy; it was
my first intimation that all was not perhaps as it should be in
this Paradise, that there might be a canker, so to speak, within
the rose, an ache beneath the smile—that some evil (though I do
not like to name the thing I guessed at) might be lurking there.
The well-known American female prophet, Mrs Mary Baker Eddy,
tells us that obesity (there! the word is out, but she must bear
the blame)—"Obesity," she says, “is an adipose belief in one--
self as a substance"; and it is only too dreadfully clear that,
diaphanous as they seem, these floating forms are horribly haunted
by this adipose belief. From the advertisements in these papers,
it pursues them, I gather, like a spectre day and night. The adver-
tisers, however, are prompt to reassure their readers; there are
simple “slenderizing" treatments, there are means and mechan-
isms by which that monster of swollen arms and ankles, great
hips, and reduplicated chins, can be exorcized and promptly put to
flight. But is that loathly worm the only serpent in this Para-
dise? Did I not catch a glimpse there of a wrinkled, time-worn
shadow, with lack-lustre eyes and hollow cheeks?
Philosophers have noted, in the general scheme of things, a per-
sistent tendency towards evanescence, decay, and dissolution. Em-
pires fall, institutions perish, ambitious schemes of thought crumble
away, they tell us, with mountains and pyramids of granite-it
seems a universal law. How then with this rage, as the poet has
pertinently asked, can Beauty hold a plea? But here, again, our
advertisers give a most reassuring answer. Modern science, they
tell us, has rushed like Perseus, to the rescue of Beauty threatened
by the jaws of Time. The scythe of the old Enemy has been
blunted; his hour-glass rendered of no avail. There are chemists'
laboratories, Research Societies, Beauty Parlours, Jeunesse Salons,


190 PREACHING TO BUTTERFLIES
where staffs of cosmeticians, recolouration experts, eyebrow spe-
cialists, and other men of science, can promptly repair the injuries
of Time. Modern Beauty, for the preservation of her loveliness,
need fall back no longer on the poor makeshift of eternal sonnets;
and even Grandmother, they confidently assure us, can regain her
former graces, reassert her sway over her old admirers, and fill
her life, for uncounted years, with "happy, girlish fun.”
With these spectres banished of obesity and decay, with these
two serpents crushed beneath the high-heeled shoe of Eve, was
all well with her in her pretty Paradise? There, as in a horrid
dream, I seemed to see another, and more modern, reptile, un-
known to Eden, raise its crest and coil its coils about a recent
tree of much more dreadful knowledge: at the word it hissed-
a word which sounded to my ears like “dowdy"!- Eve was un-
Adamed and unparadised at once; poor Grandmother took up her
cross again, fed along a rocky path from her adorers, with no manly
hand to comfort her and guide her tottering steps.
• What I believe to be the true, though anti-Freudian, interpre-
tation of that dream is this. Superficial male thinkers have sup-
posed, in their fatuity, that the enchantment of the male sex is
the aim of feminine adornment; that all its rites are performed
in the service of the God of Love. My studies, however, had
convinced me that the part men play in this matter is almost
negligible. These devotees are banded together, I believe, in the
worship of a sterner deity than Venus, a goddess as cruel and un-
voluptuous as Diana, as frigid, and inconstant, as the moon. Any
hoyden, in her milkmaid's frock, can inspire the tenderest longing;
but the subtle, cold distinction of high fashion eludes the appre-
hension of the grosser sex: it can be judged and discriminated by
female eyes alone. Look at the wax figures in the windows of
the fashionable shops; they fill the streets and block the traffic
with crowds of feminine gazers; but do they retard the footsteps
or stir the senses of male passers-by? Do not men turn, rather,
and flee from their fixed, fashionable smiles? Ah, no! gentle
are the ways of Love, and all his paths are pleasant compared with
the service of this savage goddess, this female Moloch, whose
delight is in the maceration, the deformation, the derangement of
the internal organs of her victims; and who, in her scorn of the
most amiable of passions, has recently decreed from her throne
macer


LOGAN PEARSALL SMITH
191
ess
in Paris that her devotees, boldly, almost suicidally discarding the
characteristics of their sex, must transform themselves into short-
haired, sexless striplings, or lithe Amazons with long legs. Alas,
poor Grandmother! What avail her now, her recaptured graces ?
Those rounded contours, those rich tresses, that opulent bust and
cushioned back which were her glory in the age of bustles, have
become to her now a source of acute self-consciousness. Where is
the fig-leaf adequate to hide her shame? She must change her sil-
houette; she must confine her form within the rigid outlines of
a factory chimney, or a stylographic pen. And to achieve the
indispensable flat back of present fashion, she must reduce all
localized tissue on that region. She must, in fact, utterly do away
with what she has sat on, throned among her adorers, for so many
years. Now, for the elimination of this feature (though my trav-
eller's tales may seem incredible, they are, believe me, absolutely
true) Grandmother must, like the other Queens of Fashion, roll
for hours on her bedroom floor—best for her, though more excruciat-
ing, if she can procure a corrugated surface upon which to perform
this daily ritual. How far, indeed, has civilization progressed from
the broad ideal of Africa, the Callipygian Venus, and those derrières
de bénédiction so applauded in the Arabian Nights! And when
she has accomplished this fundamental change; when she has en-
cased her macerated but now boyish figure in one of those tube-
like casings she has longed for in the windows of the shops,
it is only then that the last great wave of her calamity rolls over
her. She knows—her taste of the bitter fruit of knowledge tells
her—that what she has been feeding on is but the shadow and
false image of French chic; that up-to-dateness is out of date
before it reaches the shores of England; that its patterns are not
laid up in an abiding heaven, but are shifting gleams from the
kaleidoscope of Paris, as beautiful, as evanescent, as uncapturable
as a summer's cloud. And there we must leave the doomed old
lady, as she is borne away along Oxford Street, for ever out of
fashion, and lost in bottomless despair amid the throngs.
Whether on account of the mutable nature of Fashion's ideal,
or because its object is not beauty but exclusiveness, and is dis-
carded as soon as others can attain it; or whether because it aims
at adorning the body, rather than the soul (which some hold the
better part); for these reasons, or perhaps because they cut so


192
PREACHING TO BUTTERFLIES
poor a figure in it, our moral essayists are unanimous in their repro-
bation of Vanity Fair, and have no words strong enough to con-
demn its goings on. Hazlitt has devoted one of his most indignant
essays to the subject. “Fashion,” he declaims, “is the abortive issue
of vain ostentation and exclusive egotism: it is haughty, trifling,
servile, despotic, mean—" Oh, come, Mr Hazlitt, what a way
is this of talking to these Fairies? St Francis preached to the birds,
but he did not, I believe, trouble the butterflies with his sermons.
If there be need for their enlightenment, much more do I com-
“mend the amity of a group of our modern and most fastidious
writers, who, in missionary zeal, and pity for the benighted state
of fashion's victims, have condescended to shed their lustre on its
journals, nor deem it beneath the dignity of letters to insert,
between articles on cosmetics, and advertisements of exclusive un-
derwear, little exclusive snippets and butterfly dishes of Art and
Culture. And their fluttering beneficiaries, thus enabled to echo
in their tiny voices the latest cries of the most superior circles,
have, in gratitude to their instructors, erected an exquisite Temple
of Fame for them in their fairy kingdom. To this the chosen ones
send in their photographs, with modest and manly statements of
their claims to immortality: and these are printed in the fashion
papers, and thus given the widest publicity. Nothing could be
more dignified, more in accordance with the high traditions of our
literature; and, while those of us who are excluded may gnash
our teeth in fury (as I am now gnashing my remaining molars)
still, we must not, or we should not, disparage, carp at, or try to
trouble this felicitous entente.
And yet I wonder. Though meant in kindness (and it is im-
possible to imagine any other motive) is it really a kindness to
perplex these butterflies with the obstinate questionings and dark
dilemmas of the mind? For they, too, have their troubles; their
world, like ours, is not exempt from sorrow, and the fear of change;
and that awful heart-ache which is all their own, that undying
dread of being out of fashion, adds to their lives a deep under-
current of new-found sadness which Sophocles never heard,
long ago, on the shores of the Aegean. There seems, indeed, to
be a kind of fairy curse upon this world of Fairies. It is not safe,
perhaps, for our sex to know too much about it. For what was
Dandyism but the same pursuit of the variable and exclusive glory


LOGAN PEARSALL SMITH
193
of fashionable appearance-a pursuit, to the shame of man be
it spoken, never ennobled by the fastings, tortures, macerations of
its feminine martyrs? Are there now no portents of the return of
the day of dandies? Stands England's manhood where it stood ?
Strange rumours from the Universities have lately reached me of
a new generation of young men with powdered noses. . . . And I
myself? Have I returned from my perilous expedition to the
high thinking of my Chelsea garret quite unscathed? Since
“Truth” and “Courage” were the watchwords which I inscribed
upon my banner when I started out; since the Royal Geographical
Society's gold medal can never be pinned on a coward's breast, I
must now in honesty admit that I have of late, on more than one
occasion, caught myself out in unseasonable, in detestable, little
day-dreams of eyelash creams and tinted locks, of skipping with
slenderized ankles after Grandmother in the race of appearances,
and joining with her, between those corrugated rollings, in her
heartless, fashionable fun.


REST
BY MABEL SIMPSON
No song, no song
From far or near
Has come to break
The silence here.
Where all day long
The dust lies deep,
And tree and hedge
Are lost in sleep.
Pale, pale the Willow
Where she swings,
And wan the Wind,
Beneath his wings
The folded rose
With drowsy breath
Shares in the tender
Dream of death.
No voice, no song,
No sigh, no word
From bush or bough
Or bed is heard,
But each alone
His secret keeps,
And each alone
In silence sleeps.



THOMAS CRAVEN. BY THOMAS H. BENTON





PHOTOGRAPHY AND PAINTING
BY THOMAS CRAVEN
mera
as
VROM the remote beginnings of aesthetics, the relation between
T art and nature has been a contentious subject. Looking back
into the great periods of art, we find that when a creative wave
has reached its crest, the imitators come forward—the opportunists
who capitalize the ideas of the masters and divert the prevailing
expressive force into the field of naturalism. Thus art becomes
"popular," and more often than not, profitable. Nor have these
counter-currents been wanting in theoretic support: indeed, in most
cases, the exponents of imitation have seized upon the philosophy
of the moment and have ingeniously adapted it to their own aims
and ends. Something of this sort has happened since the rise of
the abstract element in painting, and the perfection of the camera
as an instrument for recording pure sensations. To regard pho-
tography as a genuine form of art expression is not a new idea,
but in its present aspect, it may be directly attributed to the great
vogue of Expressionism. But Expressionism is a large word con-
noting many conflicting beliefs. Excepting the highly logical and
systematic intuitivism of Croce, it has never arrived at the dignity
of complete formulation and in the main has been an ill-defined
theory to justify chaos and experiment, and as such has appeared
in the theatre, continental manifestos, forewords to catalogues of
exhibitions, and journalistic criticism. The term as used by
advanced photographers who dabble in philosophy, is only a re-
statement of the old doctrine of Empiricism with an admixture
of modern psychology. In fact it was none other than Locke who
made this prophetic observation:
IS
"Sensation is the window by which light is let into the dark
room of knowledge: for methinks the understanding is not much
unlike a closet wholly shut from light with only some little open-
ing left to let in external visible resemblances. Would the pic-
tures coming into such a dark room but stay there, and lie so
orderly as to be found upon occasion, it would very much resemble


196
PHOTOGRAPHY AND PAINTING
the understanding of a man, in reference to all objects of sight,
and the ideas of them.”
In the present paper I shall define Expressionism as it has become
widely known and effective in the world of art. The phenomenal
importance attached to the value of direct sensations in painting
originated with Monet, Pissarro, and kindred students of atmos-
phere—a curious origin when one considers the indirectness of
Impressionist methods—and round the investigations of these men,
a mass of theory has accreted forming the basis of what is known,
in a general way, as Expressionism. It is difficult to analyse with
any concision its practitioners and tendencies, but under cover of
a far-fetched aesthetics, both metaphysical and psychological, there
is ground for a fairly simple and intelligible creed. In plain
language it is this:
Our contacts with nature, with the facts of the visible world,
are, for creative purposes, more important than any amount of
learning or traditional knowledge. Given a genuine insight into
the world of every-day experience, it is possible for the artist to
dispense with all old forms and to create directly, trusting simply
to the pull of such impulses as follow his sensations. By working
in this manner new forms are inevitable. The burden of dead learn-
ing which stultifies academic production is overthrown by an earnest
and truthful expression of experience.
The Futurists, as well as the Teutonic and Slavic branches of
Parisian modernism, have repudiated all past performance, and
have engaged to step full-blown into a new world of pure sensa-
tions. The inspiring nature of such a theory, which at first glance
seems wholly reasonable and practicable, has won the sympathy
of legions of students. I am sure that everyone has felt-
especially the artist and amateur who have been unable to order
the apparent chaos of the conflicting past—that it would be a
luxurious thing to strip oneself of tradition, and, like a child,
emerge in a land of perfect freedom. A few years ago "the purity
of direct sensation" was on everyone's lips; and dissenters who set
much store by knowledge, or were caught delving into the master-
pieces of history, were immediately labelled old-fashioned, unorig.
inal, and academic. With characteristic enthusiasm, the young
American swallowed this nostrum. It was skilfully compounded,
and it rendered amazingly simple the process of assimilating the


THOMAS CRAVEN
197
significant factors of creative precedent. Furthermore, it lent
authority to that sort of self-satisfaction which is paraded as
predestined and inevitable genius, and which esteems artistic insight
as a super-quality of the soul-quite distinguishable from the
qualities found in the souls of ordinary people. And it gave
credence to the boast that the individual, as artist, stands apart,
unique and unapproachable, and that his thoughts and tendencies
could be, and in truth are, based only upon his direct and unadul-
terated experiences with life and nature.
The pressure of the foregoing theories led to a conception of
self-glorification which completely overlooked the fact that the
individual is largely the sum of influences and tendencies in oper-
ation during his life, but conditioned by the whole of the accepted
past. As Havelock Ellis puts it: “The self that he thus expresses,
is a bundle of inherited tendencies that came the man himself can
never entirely know whence.” It overlooked the fact that our
mental habits are, on the whole, conventional, and that we are
permitted to see and construct only through and by the corpus of
these conventions. What is called originality is but a slight addi-
tion to the mass of accepted and habitual opinions composing the
ego. Our private experiences play only a minor part in form-
ing the sum total of our personalities. Hear Bernard Shaw on
this point:
9
"What actually happens is that your geniuses are for the most
part keeping step and marking time with the rest, an occasional
stumble forward being the utmost they can accomplish, often
visibly against their own notions of propriety. The greatest possible
difference in conduct between a genius and his contemporaries is
so small that it is always difficult to persuade the people who are in
daily contact with the gifted one that he is anybody in particu-
lar. . . . In really contemporary situations, your genius is ever
one part genius and ninety-nine parts Tory.”
These deductions, however, do not lead to a denial of indi-
viduality, or preclude the existence of unique vision. They simply
mean that individuality develops through convention and the
heritage of accumulated knowledge, and that unless we passed our
lives totally isolated from a social milieu—which would result in
savage ignorance—we are obliged to see, feel, and act on the basis


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PHOTOGRAPHY AND PAINTING
of established conduct. The psychology of Expressionism is there-
fore untenable. But many systems of ideas have been untenable,
and yet productive of excellent practical achievement. Blake's
notions of chiaroscuro, and of Flemish and Dutch painting in
general, were nothing more than rationalized preferences, thor-
oughly unsound and unreasonable, but by virtue of increasing his
faith in the "hard, wiry outline,” instrumental in the development
of his own curious art. But I doubt if many of the artists who
call themselves Expressionists have ever analysed the implications
of the cult. Certainly none has succeeded in breaking completely
with the past. Even Kandinsky, who has cast out of his painting
every vestige of natural appearance, has fallen back on tradition
in his use of colour and linear relationships. And with him, one
feels that virtuosity and the will to be free have had more to do
with the matter than an unconscious yielding to impulse.
Notwithstanding its fallacies, Expressionism has accomplished
a valuable end: it has voiced the universal dissatisfaction with
academic methods, and has fortified its position with a truly
immense burst of vitality. Though it is impossible to abolish con-
ventions, we can reorganize our conventions to meet new situations.
There is but one choice—the material at hand, the accepted stuff
which makes us what we are—and the artist uses this material to
give colour and form to his experience. To create by means of
"pure sensations” would imply miraculous power; the best that
we can hope for is that our contacts with life may be sharp
enough to affect our habits and to stamp our efforts with indi-
viduality. The mainspring of Expressionism, as I have pointed
out, is that immediate contacts with the world are more important
than theoretical knowledge, an idea difficult to deny, and one that
I am willing to grant, provided certain qualifications be added.
Theoretical knowledge exists in more or less precise form in every
mature mind, and one's approach to nature invariably follows the
pattern made by such knowledge. It is all very well to insist
that direct contacts are more stimulating and creatively more
valuable than tradition, but such impressions would be utterly
worthless without the mass of organized past experience, knowl-
edge, and theory—worthless because they would have nothing to
build on, and hence could produce only infantile conceptions.
Consequently it is absurd to preach against the study of historical
expressions. The richer the background, if it remains plastic, the
ce


THOMAS CRAVEN
199
more definite and clear the judgement of new situations and the
more poignant the activities founded upon it.
Those seeking to raise photography to the realm of the fine
arts have argued the creative value of direct impressions, and have
made the theory of Expressionism the pivotal centre of all their
claims. Were it true that the immediate sensational effect of an
object is the wholly important element in creative activity, then
the position of the camera-aesthetes would be impregnable, and we
should have to allocate them to the highest pitch of artistic
supremacy. Indubitably the camera reproduces a retinal sensa-
tion with an accuracy that no other medium can approach. The
most soulless and meticulous painter, having the advantage of
colour, cannot compete with a machine, for even the mind of such
a painter is stored with conventions and preconceptions which
affect his vision the instant he is confronted with an object. His
reds and yellows are not the reds and yellows of nature, but pig-
ments, the specific properties of which he is bound to consider.
When reflection begins, the purity of his feeling is lost, and he
is no longer capable of rendering a literal image. Our retinal
sensations are composed of combinations of lines and colours, or
of contours and colours, some sharp and intense, others merely
adumbrated. We construct the visible world upon our feeling-
combinations, with the assistance perhaps of the vaguer feeling
of extension. Precisely at what point the simple sensation ends
and perception begins, it is impossible to say. Sir Isaac Newton
went into this very problem years ago when pondering the differ-
ence between his own universe and that of his dog, "an incredible
difference; for the painting on the optical retinas was the same.”
It was not the same—the dog also had a mind. No one is ever
conscious of a simple retinal sensation; to all practical purposes,
nature is felt and perceived simultaneously, and it is quite prob-
able that Expressionists really mean perception when they use
the term sensation.
That every perception is coloured and transformed by past
experience is a psychological commonplace, and for this reason an
absolutely pure experience does not exist. Thus it follows that
perfectly original expression is equally impossible. The camera,
on the other hand, has no memory of experience and no organized
ideas or predilections to alter its vision; it has no prejudices and
no yearning to turn objects into special shapes; as a totally detached


200
PHOTOGRAPHY AND PAINTING
agent, it simply registers the fact of sensation. The camera, of
course, is a limited vehicle-it sees with only one eye and therefore
distorts objects in an illogical and senseless fashion, and at present
its range is confined to lines and tones—but all things considered,
it accomplishes more in its own sphere than its most inventive
human rivals.
Not long ago the current of modernist painting ran precipitately
into pure abstraction—the proper course, it was believed, for the
pure expression of plastic experience—and at that time the advo-
cates of photography confessed the mechanically abstract nature of
their craft. They did more—they revelled in it. At one stroke
they rose not only to the level of the artist, but considerably higher.
Any one who compared a photograph with the most abstract and
meaningless of paintings, could not fail to see that the photograph
was the more objective and purer affair. It had not suffered from
the meddling wrong-headedness of human desire. It was nakedly
clean. Painters obsessed with the idea of reducing nature to a
vapid geometry, and purging their art of all context, turned to
the more expert records of the camera with a feeling of envy. Cer-
tainly they professed to admire the photograph. And there
are many to-day who still profess that admiration. Analogies
were drawn between the print and the canvas, the painters boast-
ing of the rapidity with which they had thrown off representa-
tion and sentimentality, the photographers insisting on the virginity
of the camera.
But it happened that Expressionism was too unsubstantial a
theory to last for ever, and one by one the more intelligent artists
drifted back into human channels. The wholesale purification of
painting did not seem altogether desirable—it began to seem a
little ridiculous. The spectacle of a trained artist willing to sac-
rifice his life to a maze of lines and colours, the sole value of whose
pattern lay in its "abstract beauty” was a theme for the humorist.
Accordingly an attempt was made to defend non-representative
painting in terms of subjective meaning. Those painters who had
"advanced” into the sacred ground where they were entitled to
the distinction of "artists in abstraction," could not afford suddenly
to turn back to representation. It was more seemly to read a con-
tent into their work, to project extrinsic meanings into their lines
and colours. A few arbitrary lines, a few swirls of colour, and
they had produced a subjective cryptogram which was called
C


THOMAS CRAVEN
201
Psychic Portrait, Symphony in Blue-Green, Centripetal Force, or
something equally preposterous.
Now here we arrive at the most interesting point in the aesthetics
of photography, a point which reveals its pretentiousness and its
instability. Instead of remaining on assured ground and upholding
its peculiar position as an abstract art, it must needs run after
painting again. The moment artists began to discover esoteric
meanings in their canvases, spiritual photographers discovered sim-
ilar profundities in their prints, and long symbolical explanations
attended every camera-snapping orgy that took place. The expert
and legitimate craftsman capable of reproducing interesting facts
in the world of pure vision, disguised his subjects and presented
them as soul-states! The cheap sentimentalism of those English
photographers who snapped some agonized actress drooping over
a lily, or who blurred a contre soleil exposure of a flock of sheep,
was repeated on another plane. The defence offered by the camera-
man for his change of front leads to the heart of the relation
between photography and painting.
In changing from the "pure sensation" of the Expressionists to
a belief in a reflective attitude toward the creative process, the
photographers unconsciously placed the idea of our "immediate con-
tacts” in its rightful position. These contacts are but links added
to the long chain of past experiences—impressions indispensable to
our development. With this irrefutable fact, which involves the
painter's mental processes in the same psychological complexities
found in every human effort at construction, with this fact which
makes spontaneity an impossibility, the photographers have tried
to reconcile their craft, despite the reliance of the camera on simple
exposure to impressions. They reason as follows: the camera is
a tool analogous to the painter's palette and brushes; it is sub-
servient to the mind in exactly the same way as the tools of the
painter; the photographer can direct his instrument in accordance
with his desires, and as proof of his power to individualize his
process, calls our attention to the personal characteristics of the
prints of various craftsmen. On the face of it, this seems plausible.
Undoubtedly the photographer's psychological mechanism is sim-
ilar to those of other men, painters included. But there is a great
and fundamental difference that cannot be disregarded. This
difference is not to be found in the relation of the man to his tools,
but in the ability of the man to use his tools to reorganize his mate-


202
PHOTOGRAPHY AND PAINTING
rial. The profound meaning of art lies in the fact that it is a
reorganization of the elements of experience into a new whole with
a different meaning from that of nature. It is not a reproduc-
tion of natural facts, but a re-presentation of such facts, after
human insight and will have discovered and established a sequence
of new relationships.
As noted above, the most imitative painter cannot present nature
as she really is—he reorders according to his wit and insight, in
spite of himself. If any one doubts this, let him examine the
canvases of three or four of the most slavish literalists who have
undertaken to copy a given scene. The artist does not use his tools
merely to record what his mind has selected as interesting; his
tools are part of an active mental process demanding change and
distribution in the placement and values of actual objects. The
camera is a passive agent—by no conceivable method of direction
can it reorganize selected material. It records what is before it,
and however skilful and mysterious the manipulation of the exposed
plate, the most that can happen is only a slight change of surface.
The individuality of different prints is identical with the per-
sonal touch common to all human activity. It is neither significant
nor constructive—it is merely a manifestation of preferences for
certain mechanical effects. These minute variations occur in every
display of energy into which idiosyncrasy may enter: witness, for
instance, the "styles” of barbers and tailors and the “form” of
athletes. To the initiate, the methods of carpenters, gardeners,
and coppersmiths are radically different.
The material selected for the camera may be unique and interest-
ing, but only so by virtue of its physical appearance, and not by
anything infused into it by the photographer himself. Aesthetically,
the photographer, as I have said, is a passive figure: in the rôle of
explorer and recorder of the facts of the visible world he becomes
an active and intelligent force. But in looking at the best of prints,
one always feels that the fact itself is far more interesting than
the reproduction. The camera cannot produce living form. It is
an engine for transcribing visual notations; and even though it
capture the image of organic matter, this image when developed,
turns out to be immobile, and dead as a mask. Artistic life issues
from the creative process of reorganization, an activity from which
the camera, I fear, is destined to be permanently excluded. Pho-
tography is manifestly not an art, but a craft.
mera C


THE EQUINOX
BY ANTHONY WRYNN
nn
OV
TASTER EVE, Mrs Pritchard set her morning's purchase of
U lilies in cool china pots along the window shelf of the draw-
ing-room. She had removed the dark indoor-like ferns across
which she had seen three months of snow cover and cover again
the manured strips of garden beyond the court and work a pattern
over the wall-vine spread up a side wing of the house. In her
occasional wanderings about the velour-muffled rooms and halls
when she, Evelyn, had seen the formal Mrs Pritchard hung safely
in her wardrobe, this fern-fringed aspect of the outer world suffer-
ing a prolonged obliteration by snow had offered her frequent re-
course. The aspect had been bleak, she had known how bleak,
but unlike those offered by the other seasons with their drifting
signs of fulfilment, it had not, somehow, been alien to her.
The window was braced open, for the first time since autumn,
in the thin sunlight reflected from the flagstones below. Her
hands moved carefully among the long narrow leaves of the lilies
and the cold petals, disentangling, arranging, and generally re-
moving the impersonal contour of the “bought” plant. Mrs
Pritchard was deft at dispersing the stiff or glaring, having, in
her time, applied herself to many and less palpable newnesses,
less palpable than a vernal consignment from the florist's—Mr
Pritchard for instance. She was thirty-nine. Yet if entering at
the opposite end of the room you had seen her stooping there above
her plants, drawn from throat to foot as Botticelli would have
drawn her, with full eyes and deep, black, evenly rippled hair, you
would have said that she was exactly twenty-nine.
A gentle cyclone of wind from which the suggestion of frost
had not been completely burnt eddied against the outswung win-
dow, shifting the reflections on the little panes. “Adrian," she
called from the lilies, “John is coming for over Easter—this
afternoon.”
“Worse luck!" rose softly from the court. “All out at the
wrists."


204
THE EQUINOX
Adrian, sitting in an angle of sunlight, a small rug drawn across
his knees on which there was a text- and note-book, did not raise
his head as he offered this impression of his cousin and continued
his remarks to his mother as though he threw out phrases of his
study aloud. “How has he the presumption to leave the furrows ?''
"A taste of the country wouldn't harm you any, Mr Impossible.”
Nevertheless Mrs Pritchard was pleased with the sheen of her
son's suavely brushed hair and the smartness of his full tweed
coat. How well, and perhaps she smiled, that rug was drawn
across his knees!
The remnants of straw that she had picked from around the
roots of the plants she blew off the shelf onto the carpet. Her
manner was more ample than that of her son and husband, as
were her emotions more pliant, only, however, in that they were
more accessible, and though she was never more untidy than that,
a few straws on the deep plush-she was frequently so. A slight
carelessness enhances, just as it is usually a part of, personal
beauty, she had once said to her husband, and he merely yawned
with a far away but inspecting glance down his freshly tailored
trouser-leg.
"Remember, John hasn't been here in months and you must
treat him decently."
“Naturally." His indifference overcame the audibleness of
Adrian's retort.
“What?"
“Nothing. Oh yes-naturally.”
"And you needn't trouble yourself while he is here with your
boring engagements.” Mrs Pritchard framed “boring" in the
flowered casement and pulled to the window. Adrian did not
respond and took his mother's intimation that he should stay
at home for John's diversion as a beneficent reminder of a theatre
engagement, which he had quite forgotten, for that evening.
The Pritchards' drawing-room wore the distinct mark of Mr
Pritchard; the intricate and formally coloured schooner under
glass, its sails and pennons wired in imitation of the wind as it
sailed motionlessly across the high mantel; the three sprucely
framed prints hanging in steps over the book chest where you saw
the small caped figures always just emerging from the branch-
less foliage, their little red feathers blown back with speed as
they bent above the necks of their horses; then the bitch's reared


ANTHONY WRYNN
205
head with a rag of a bird in its teeth, the markings of the grain
of the wood-block like streaked fur between the ears; and the
small figures again, stripped of their accoutrements, leaning on
each other's familiar shoulders at twilight supper under a little
criss-crossed window. The storied tobacco-box was not wanting,
nor the trumpet-muzzled gun that gleamed in shadow above the
divan with a lustre that belied its use. Though Mr Pritchard
was, at the moment, conferring with many another Mr Pritchard
in the salon-offices of the west, he might have been said to be
“at home” almost anywhere you turned in the drawing-room.
Mrs Pritchard at one time had liked this. She had called it
"male and childish.” She still liked the heavy childishness of
men, even that of her son. We might say that she liked it too
well. Now, however, she had a tendency to call her husband's
silly.
Affluent and voluble, and commodiously silent in respect to
her sudden languors and elations of heart, Mrs Pritchard was
an excellent wife for the conservatively boutonnièred Mr
Pritchard, and her beauty was a choice complement to his
seniority of some twelve or fifteen years. The lichen that had
slowly and cunningly fastened itself in the angles of his prime
was unobserved by her except, and then unconsciously, when she
would remark to almost any one, not always when there was occa-
sion to, “I'm so glad that Mr Pritchard's business permits him to
travel,” notwithstanding Mr Pritchard's failure to have ever ex-
pressed the desire to. Her faithfulness to him, even in thought,
was so without flaw that when a gentleman would draw his fingers
softly back across the cape that he had lifted onto her shoulders
or, with eyes gone curiously dark, prolong the pressure of his hand
at parting, he would quite give her a start.
She put a last touch to the lilies and walked slowly down the
room, the long thin folds of her dressing-gown winding and un-
winding about her ankles. Her dressing-gown was a genteel de-
bauchery with her—“Oh, call me a lady and think you've caged
me!” But she would never have said that, never have thought
it- she would, in fact, have faltered over her tea if she thought
any one else had.
An aimless hand drifted to her hair and she leaned over the
console-table, gazing into the mirror that hung between the two
dark portières of the front windows. She watched the still, silent
O


206
THE EQUINOX
wa
features, the two faint, very faint lines on either side of her mouth,
and her glance slipped rapidly, curiously elated, to the explicit
folds of her hair and the full, light-ridged eyes. “Evelyn,” she
said softly, and touched the mirror.
At five o'clock, the windows filled with a bare, immobile twi-
light, a folio lay open in the quiet pool of light beneath a study
lamp. At intervals a new page was turned and the tissue-paper
was blown softly back from the succeeding engraving. Adrian,
who dipped into the cultural more from a sense of the elegant than
a desire for learning, was tranquilly astray in an earlier century
when the house bell dimly whirred in the kitchen. He knew whom
to expect. He stood up and, with a smiling despair, announced
his cousin before the maid arrived to do so. John was close upon
the maid.
"Johnny, now!” Adrian shot his hand briskly and lightly into
his cousin's slow, warm, absolutely barbarous grip. He ran his
gaze over the whole man, taller than he ... God . . . all
wrists . . . and cordially laughed—“You're looking immense.
That's the country, what?” Adrian was nineteen, his cousin three
months younger. John thought Adrian talked like an actor, and
didn't like the way he looked blithely through him at the opposite
wall.
"How d’you do, Adrian ?”
When Adrian finally recovered his hand he turned to the hearth,
pointed to a drawn up chair with the poker and pretended an
arrangement of the coals.
And how had the winter in the country been? Adrian had no
recollection of the home of his father's sister in winter, nor indeed
in any other season, but that wasn't because he hadn't been there
in all of them. When, under family pressure, he visited there, he
would beforehand carefully select a book from which it would be
impossible to be distracted, thus insuring the invisibility of his kins-
folk when he should be among them, since he might not, by his
absence, retain his own.
The winter had been unpleasant? Unfortunate! Adrian con-
fided to the coals. But one would think that with the skiing ...
No? No skiing? Not even skating? No time? Adrian was
apparently confronted with a miracle. Chores, you say? What
was that? Oh yes, yes. It must be difficult. Yes, and tiresome.
John stepped heavily back through the snow and the ice-gnarled


ANTHONY WRYNN
207
W
0
woods. It seemed as hard for him to find a word as to find a
footing in a December swamp. The farm was not so bad when
you could get out for the spring clearing or after the sowing, and
then in the warmer months there was a lot of travelling about to
be done and you were always meeting some nice folks from the
city who were always lost and, funny, seemed to enjoy it. They
talked to you and asked questions and marvelled at nothing at all.
And sometimes, that is, once or twice, they really hoped to meet
you again. Adrian cleared his throat, "Indeed!” And those
people from the city made you feel that you weren't washed up
so far from what was going on in the world and that you might
not be just another tree or stone. Was it Adrian's imagination
that gave an equivocal emphasis to— those”? “But it's mean in
winter,” John concluded; “Checkers and bed.”
As he sat there in the frail rose light that spread up from the
grate, his strong sun-darkened fingers clasped evenly on either arm
of the chair, his eyes, clear and black as ice, resting now on
Adrian's cheek, now on the fire, John did not realize that sum-
mering strangers were not “lost” to every native of the bright wild-
smelling hills, that they did not always so graciously marvel or,
even if but once or twice, really hope to meet again and shake
cane or handkerchief in parting.
Adrian, absently pressing his head back into the silken land-
scape on the back of his winged chair, was not a little relieved at
the announcement of dinner. “And your mother said she'd join
you and your cousin in the dining-room.” Was John's aunt, also,
raising her brows, if secretly, diminishing his visit to her by at
least one meeting before dinner?
The young men passed through the wide doorway to the hall,
leaving the shadowed, heavily-carpeted room like a deserted stage,
silent but for the fitful shifting of the coals in the deep hearth as
they settled themselves to their final consummation.
Mrs Pritchard, unsteadily radiant under the futtering candles,
drooped musing among the embroidered vistas of the winged chair
which was now, after dinner, drawn up by the black open window
above the court, her gleaming head and throat curved back on
the shadowy cushion that John, his senses momentarily drowned
as he stooped in the smell of her hair, had placed behind her.
The lilies looked different, chill and spectral, set in the night.
Now they stirred in the wind that rose slack with incipient rain


208
THE EQUINOX
over the casement, and now they stood silent. She watched the
faint dark masses in the sky beyond them, turning, bending, pass-
ing above the imperceptible trees which divided the garden from
a sudden hill that trailed down into the heavier parts of the city,
and she half sang, half murmured, as if involuntarily-
“Soon shall the night
Curl in your eyes,
Soon shall you sleep
Under the garden.”
“What ?'' John, standing waist-high to the lilies, turned his
face away from the night as away from a mournful curtain, yet
his question was matter-of-fact enough. He had been thinking,
somewhat hurt, of Adrian's leaving for the theatre so abruptly
after dinner. But he was pleased to be alone with his aunt. Then
she talked to him, she didn't just talk. And now and again she
even softly asked his opinion, no matter that her slender voice
drifted on before he could master the fush at his breast to answer,
or that frequently she didn't pause at all for reply. She was so
new to him, he felt it that way, after the women at home-his
mother and his other aunt. Her crossed shining knee strangely
stirred him. However, he did not think of her other than as
another aunt. She was simply a nicer one.
Mrs Pritchard, for her part, though kind to a nephew and
solicitous of a guest, was really a bit bored with his lack of aplomb,
and with the absolute coma that she or her house or something
seemed to induce in him. He had sat over his coffee as over a
cup of hemlock. And now, as she dreamed on the distant clouds,
his “What?" It was too typical. She looked up, annoyed, to
tell him to sit down, a cushion was at her feet, to tell him he was
a young boor—but he looked so strange there, his face a cloudy
bronze in that cool light, his eyes hanging on hers, his dark lips
slightly ajar. “Quaint,” she thought, “I hadn't noticed before
quite a Greek.” And she softly drew the cushion in under her
chair with her foot. Perhaps he had better stay by the flowers.
“That's a song,” she said.
He seemingly heard what she had first thought to say, or he
may only have wanted to be at an easier talking distance from his
aunt; at any rate he did sit down, on the floor, by her silvery


ANTHONY WRYNN
209
knees. He might have fallen there the way her heart jerked, but
her instinctive fingers found a yawn that was merely a parting of
the lips.
"You have a nice voice, Aunt Evelyn.” Her nephew's delivery
was such that Aunt Evelyn might have considered herself in-
formed rather than felicitated, but generally aware of his timidity
she could be immediately aware of his tribute.
“Child,” she fluttered her fingers at him, "your aunt is an old
woman. Scraping where once was music. I'd be good for call-
ing your cows or shooing the chickens from the porch—"
"Oh, don't!" To picture her thus, with the sordidness of his
life around her, jolted him, yet unaccountably enticed him. “You
seem younger and prettier than any of the young girls in the
country. They don't talk so much.” ... That didn't sound ex-
actly right.
“Dear John!” In saving him she almost lost herself, her hand
having impetuously travelled the distance between them, yet suc-
cessfully, and on consideration, returning without contact. “But
tell me," and she laughed in an endeavour to break the spell of
his savage comeliness rather than with ease, “what of those girls?
Isn't there one that is dearer to you than the rest—a flower in the
brambles? Isn't there one that you like to draw apart from the
others, to talk to, or to take a walk with ?”
He shook his head. “You don't know them. If a fellow talked
to them about something he wouldn't tell other people, about,
well, about how beautiful the spring is, or about a big wind like
a waterfall up in the gulch, they'd run and tell each other, and
laugh. They'd say you were ‘off.' And I wouldn't want to tell
them anyway." His aunt's having rippled the conversation into
the sedge of his emotions, only, however, by way of avoiding a
stir in her own, seemed somewhat to have overcome his taciturnity.
His voice even grew a shade tender.
"It's hateful, Aunt Evelyn. If you were there you'd be such
a friend. We could go up in the fields and take long walks back
through the woods. And we could read.” ... The lilies sud-
denly spoke all together in the wind and tossed their perfume
across Mrs Pritchard's cheek. There was a single tap of rain on
the outswung window.
As he continued, Mrs Pritchard silently watched her nephew,
by whom perhaps she had been taken less unawares than by her-


210
THE EQUINOX
self, her eyelids faintly drawn, her hands apart and curled in
her dress. She saw them together in the high fields, all the skies
to be had at a turn of the head. Surely Mr Pritchard would be
pleased to hear that she had gone to his sister's. He was always
requesting her to “pack off" for a rest, for a change. Her face
went warmer than her hands.
fascinated by this prelude her nephew gave to his sug-
gested visit from her, so awkward and without intentions in his
rendering, so insinuating and glamorous in her ear. She watched
them wandering in the wide sunlight. She watched them sink out
of the glare into the half-light of the forest, a finger of sun on
a fern, a stone, the dark undergrowth smelling sharp and wild as
he lay stretched on the moss above their book. She became
strangely both tired and exalted.
His hand came flying to her knee. “Maybe you would come
Aunt Evelyn-a little while . . . Easter over ... the trees
... the long walks . . . the long ..." His hand burnt her.
How close his eyes—his hair—the crisp taste of his hair ... the
... under, under—the terrible hooves of his heart! ... "Maybe
you would come ?”
What? What? Maybe? ... Lightning shot sudden day
into the room. She struck him in the face with her cold hand. He
sat motionless, his face fastened to her dreadful eyes.
Swift, glistening, like a shadow of the lightning, she passed
across the muffled floor. She found herself before the mirror.
The boy did not stir. She watched a twist of hair that was
unlooped on her cheek in the bare reflection as though she could
see nothing else in the world. There was only that.
Then she turned slowly toward the other end of the room. The
fire had drifted from her features and she looked grieved and
weakened, her hands hanging by her bright dress. Her stillness,
perhaps, resuscitated the boy's numbed mind as he sat there on the
floor staring at the back of the chair where she had been sitting,
and he turned also, leaning on his hand. His gaze did not quite
reach hers. She kept looking at him as though she was preparing
to say something to him, something that might have been stark
and passionate, something that might have been simple, apologetic,
evasive. ...
There was a first faint whisper of thunder as he saw the portière
swing slowly back where she had passed out of the room.



1
12
SCENE FROM PATIENCE. BY JOHN SLOAN


"(
تا به
نابه ت ا ت
•



WA
ZINA
SNOW STORM IN THE VILLAGE. BY JOHN SLOAN





THE SPANIARD
BY WALDO FRANK
D ROM Spain's will for unity rises a galaxy of individual forces
so various and great as to make Spain great. Cortés and
Pizarro, anarchic seekers of gold, collaborate with Loyola, snarer
of souls and with Vitoria, first creator of international law;
Santa Teresa de Jesús collaborates with La Celestina, immortal
procuress; Lazarillo the rascal collaborates with San Juan de la
Cruz, Don Juan the lover with Fray Luis de León, Cristobal
Colón with Don Quixote, Góngora with Velásquez. They are
all Spain: the impulses which they typify were inchoate in Spain's
nature. And now Spain's will precipitates them, gives each of
them a body. The saint, the picaro, the explorer, and the poet
rise like stratifications of the soul of Spain: and are great and
make Spain great because in each of them lives Spain's entire will,
her rounded energy of life.
Isabel may rest in peace. She is having her will, although she
would not recognize its way. In this period of Spain's greatness,
the elements of her chaotic nature confront each other in antith-
esis. It is indeed a period of transition. First, there was the
chaos of solution: now the various parts live separate and sheer.
The final step is that in which these confronting traits will fuse
to equilibrium—will be negated into the Unity which Spain desires.
Isabel's conscious will becomes the unconscious temper of every
Spaniard. The concept of Spain grows individual, becomes a
state of mind. Here was Spain, this sea of tossing elements, form-
less and titanic. Here was the Spaniard pressed by the amorphous
world in which he lived, to establish a unity within himself: to
become a person in reaction from the chaos that was Spain. In
his will to create Spain, he could not change the theatre of his
action. He must create Spain within himself. The first stage of
his endeavour was that of the intense crystallizations which make
Spain's siglos de oro. These saints and sinners are not fragments:
they are entire forms of Spanish energy. And the elements which
they personify existed in every Spanish soul. If, therefore, Spain


212
THE SPANIARD
ces
was to be unified within each Spaniard, La Celestina must be
equated with Santa Teresa, Quixote and Amadís with Lazarillo
and the Cid. ... Although the energic sum of all these forces
might in each individual soul add up to zero!
To the intensely individual Spaniard, Spain became more and
more subjective: until at last the boundary to the outer world was
lost. Politics, war, and church became subjective. He saw the
world only in terms of himself. This is why he strove to make
the State the mentor of conscience: this is why he strove to make
the domains of the State a sort of spiritual body. To inculcate
faith by Inquisition; to establish truth by the sword; to drive
dissenters in spirit from the soil—these were the mad and logical
acts of a man who beheld the world in his own image. Desiring
to create Spain, each Spaniard remained the anarchic personal
creature whose separatism Strabo had noted and Rome endured.
The tragedy of Spain—her reaching of success! First her energy
broke up into dominant forms of will: then she equated these
forms into the equilibrium she wanted. And no energy was left!
All of the opponent tensions merge into rest, in every Spanish
soul. The titanic efforts toward conquest, toward art, toward God
which have made Spain great, balance each other at the end. The
energy is not gone, not weakened: it is equated. And the result
is sleep.
The energy of a people is the sum of its personal propulsions.
The dynamic race is that in which the individual as an individual
is incomplete. Consider the United States. The immigrant in
losing his old land loses the completion which he achieved in his
own share of its life. As an American he espouses America's in-
completion. He injects his restlessness into America; and con-
versely America's lack of final form becomes his lack and his need.
The result is a social body moving toward completion, and energetic
in so far as it is barred from completion save in the act of moving.
In Russia, the incompleteness of the individual soul is a para-
doxical result of its consonance with the land. Russia is vast,
uncharted, indefinite. The Russian spirit, identified with the soil,
becomes imbued with a symbolic sense of vastitude and longing.
Spirit is therefore national in Russia: and spiritual energy floods
the land, precisely because the land is an incomplete experience
in each Russian mind.


WALDO FRANK
213
There are indeed permanent forms of spiritual incompleteness,
and one of these exists in every energetic people. The French
individual soul, for instance, is part of a social soul. The
Frenchman is organically incomplete, in so far as his mind and
sense know themselves integral components of the race. From
this knowledge comes the automatic flow of individual energy into
social channels: this is balanced by the impersonal character of
the French nation which receives the energy it requires, and dis-
charges back into the individual life a transformed power: the
protection and unity of the enveloping organism. This perpetual
interplay between the Frenchman and his group is an equilibrium
in incompleteness: it makes permanent the impermanent achieve-
ment of individual and nation, the need of each for the other, the
flow of energy between them. The Jew possesses another form
of stable incompleteness. His Jewish soul yearns for Zion and
for God. His intelligence successfully places both Zion and God
beyond his reach. His incompleteness is, hence, perennial: and the
Jewish energy has not ebbed.
But the Spaniard elected a form of achievement and a form
of truth which he could reach: and as he reached it, he stopped
moving. Truth became the Church of Rome: he attained that
truth and rejected every other. His ideal of unity was homo-
geneous: the simple fusion in every Spaniard of thought and faith,
according to a fixed ideal. To this end he impoverished the ele-
ments of his psychic world into sharp antitheses: these he balanced
against each other: the result was indeed simplicity and homo-
geneity, a neutralization of psychic pressures summing up to zero.
The Spaniard is not decadent: neither is he weak. There is
as great force in him as in the days when his still unfused powers
conquered half Europe, discovered America, and poured the vision
of Cervantes, Rojas, Calderón, and Velásquez upon the world.
But now, all this energy is locked in its own willed equation. Its
original dualisms are not dead, but they are controlled and neu-
tralized. The equilibrium is complete: and what energy is left
from it the Spaniard must expend in holding the equation. There
is no energy unemployed: and it is precisely the excess energy
of man, the energy that is unable to find its goal within the
organism, which creates intellect and which creates creation.
Had he been less heroic in his will, or more objective in his


214
THE SPANIARD
re
way to it, the Spaniard would not be this cripple: this giant
shattered by his success, this giant imprisoned in the reality of
his ideal.
The most wilful of men, he appears will-less. For his power
of will goes to dominate himself—and to hold his dominion. So
that no power is left wherewith to dominate the world. The
unity of Spain exists, subjectively and multiplied by millions. In
consequence the Spaniard is not adhesive: he is too complete: the
motive toward adhesiveness is the sense of incompletion. The
most secret impulse of the Frenchman or the Jew has its social
dimension. No Jew can people Zion in solitude. No French
mystic or philosopher is an anchorite. Pascal and Descartes are
Catholic: Paul Cézanne strives to create a new museum art. The
rebel in France is a rebel against monarchs—against exclusive gods.
But the Spaniard is an empire and a god unto himself. The
perfected Spanish person makes permanent the social Spanish
chaos.
The most intellectual of men, he appears unintelligent. He
lives so wholly within his idea, that no energy is left for further
ideation. Creative intelligence is the birth of conflict between
the personal will and life: it is born of the pause between impulse
and response and of the excess energy which remains after the
instinctive action. In the Spaniard, this excess energy is small:
he is too self-sufficient to know richly the pauses between will and
deed; and in the relativity of values which springs from a chaotic
or incompleted conscience, he is poor. Having achieved his idea,
he is weak in thought: having created his imagined world, he is
weak in imagination: having made to converge his will and his
world, he is weakly self-conscious, since self-consciousness is but
awareness of alien limits to oneself.
Therefore he understands vaguely the causes of his incompe-
tence, and struggles feebly against them. His contemporary
literature is strong in plaint: it is wanting in self-knowledge and
constructiveness. It is weak, also, in creative imagination: even
as it is strong in fantasy. The Spanish mind has become like the
mind of a child. The child's intellect is not inferior to the man's,
it is merely too preoccupied within itself to have achieved the
power of association and of objective experience which comes with
maturity—which begets analysis and imagination. The child is
credulous, because its belief is subjective fantasy and finds no


WALDO FRANK
215
opponent in the real world. Also, the child is cruel because it
cannot imagine pain in others; it is anti-social because it has not
associated its life with the life around it. The Spaniard is still
the victim of the infantile beliefs of mediaeval Europe. He ac-
cepts the literal Heaven and Hell, having no imagination strong
enough to make them real, and in consequence to reject them. He
is cruel. And his separatism, his want of the adhesive impulse,
makes him a ready victim to tyranny in government. Unable to
organize a social body, he accepts the simple body of the King or
the alien body of the Church of Rome.
He has the virtues of his state. His personal development
brings him a personal integrity, a true personal pride unknown in
Europe. He has natural dignity. Whatever his rank, he is a
caballero: a true microcosm of the Spanish nation. There is no
artifice in him. He is clean, self-controlled, and independent. In
his veins lives the impulse of heroism; in his mind is the knowledge
and the acceptance of the price. Cowardice, compromise, hypocrisy
are traits more common in more social races. And cant requires
no word in castellano. Even the Spanish thief is sincere: the tra-
dition of the picaro has not died. And the power of endurance,
of sacrifice, of devotion is developed in the average Spaniard be-
yond the dream of the romantic north.
The once furious and unleashed elements of the Spanish soul
have been woven into this counterpoint of rest: they make a quiet
song. It is natural that the Spaniard's love of music and gift
for music should be supreme. An art of vigorous abstracted bal-
ance, so subjective, so ruthlessly legal, is the symbol of the
Spanish nature. And in Spain's classic canto hondo, the effect
of counterpoise and control is almost that of silence. By the same
token the Spaniard is a dancer: his dance is a synthesis of move-
ments equated to rest. And he loves the drama: a drama wherein
the torrential forces of mankind are fused to unitary form. The
archetype of the Spanish play is, of course, La Vida es Sueño, of
Calderón: a prophetic picture of the synthesis of sleep in which
Spain's turmoiled passions were at last to merge.
The world nurses two myths concerning Spain. The first, that
she is decadent, Spain believes herself, and thereby proves, if other
proof were lacking, her failure in self-knowledge. The other myth
is that Spain is romantic.
The first myth rests upon ignorance of psychological mechanics.


216
THE SPANIARD
The second is a confusion of words. The philology of the term
Romance is clear. In the formative eras of modern Europe, the
Latin dialects which were to become French, Italian, Castilian,
Portuguese, Galician, Provençal, et cetera, were lumped as the
Romance to distinguish them from the pure tongue of Latin.
They were popular vernaculars, and despite the early instance of
such men as Dante and Petrarch, or the Arcipreste de Hita, they
were not deemed worthy vehicles of exalted thought. As late as
the sixteenth century in Spain, the noble Luis de León was severely
reprimanded for writing of Christ (Los Nombres de Cristo) in
Castilian: and one of the misdeeds for which he was tried and
tortured by the Inquisition was the translating into Romance of
the Song of Songs. The writer whose ideas were holy or philo-
sophic was supposed to clothe them in Latin. Only if he treated
of such vulgar subjects as earthly love, might he employ the vulgar
language. By association, Romance was transferred from the
tongue to the subject for which it was disposed: a story of profane
love or profane adventure became Romance; and becoming so, re-
mained trivial and vulgar. The essential attitude of the Spaniard
toward the subjects of romance was, therefore, the very contrary
of what we mean by romantic. The topics of sexual love and
human sentiment were to the Spaniard unserious: their mood of
treatment was the converse of romantic: and ever has remained so.
Now came the hour of confusion. The knights of Portugal
and Spain fought for God, for Mohammed, for the King: for
anything but what we call romantic reasons. The Iberian north
is Celt and is contiguous with the Celtic cultures of Britain and
of France. The Iberian knight went northward out of Spain;
and when he returned he had become what to-day we call a
"Nordic.” He was sentimental, tender, monogamous, and chaste.
He was the very converse of the old Spanish knight, Arab or
pagan-Christian, whose canny materialism speaks so clear in the
Poema del Cid. He was, indeed, Tristan, Arthur, Lancelot, or
Amadís de Gaula. The books that were written about him were
published in Romance: so that the qualities of passionate devotion
which in Spain had been confined to the religious—to subjects too
high for the Romance-became romantic.
The Romance, therefore, is of the south: the romantic is of the
north; and they negate each other. It is the German meta-
physicians who invented the romanticism of Calderón; it is Byron
verse


WALDO FRANK
217
and the French aesthetes who created romantic Spain. But the
best efforts of Schlegel, Goethe, Mérimée, Gautier, Byron have
failed to make the Spanish man or woman in the least romantic.
The Spanish woman is a pragmatist in love. Love to her is
the means of raising children in the grace of Christ. No less
sensual, no less amorous woman exists in Europe. As a girl she
is lovely: a crisp expectancy makes her flesh sweet and rounds her
darkling eyes. She looks to marriage as the highest and most
powerful career. Once she is mated, the natural coquetry of spring
falls from her like a season: shë is instantly sedate, full-fleshed,
maternal. She has no instinct for the game of love. Sexual
virtuosity in woman is a slow process nurtured at the expense of
the maternal passion. This diversion is rare in Spain. The
French or American woman's sexual science is an undeciphered,
an irrelevant perversion to the woman of Spain who wears upon
her head an invisible crown of matriarchal power.
For she is powerful: this discreet female in a land of furiously
dreaming males! Events have sobered her and made her worldly-
wise. Her man is the theatre of opponent passions, ideals, hungers
equating into nothing. She is the compensatory act. She is steady,
unemotional, unmystical, canny. She distrusts excess—even of
maternal service. Her man has made magic of such words as
State, God, Honour. Hers the task to materialize these words,
which in his mouth bespeak inaction. The family, the garden,
the morrow: these become her answers.
The woman of Spain leans on the Church of Rome. No small
part this, of her dominance in a land incapable of social institu-
tions. Spain with her separatist nature, her inadhesiveness, could
never have created Rome: but Rome has gone far toward giving
Spain that minimum of organic body which the millions of indi-
vidual “Spains”-her men—required. The Spanish woman by
her massed support makes the church Spanish.
If the Church belongs to the woman, ruling Spain through her,
she has remained outside the exhaustive activities of her husband.
The Spanish woman has been untouched by metaphysics: her
heroine, Santa Teresa de Jesús, is an ennobled house-cleaner, a
glorified matron of Christ. The Spaniard's wife has not, like him,
been split into intricate traits of will and of expression: nor in
the sequel need she spend herself to win back unity from an inner
chaos. She is naturally whole: she is the foe of even the fairest
Woma


218
THE SPANIARD
anarchies of the spirit. There is in her an heroic amplitude that
recalls the poised women of the Hebrews. She is the saviour of
Spain, for she is the Responder to Spain's excesses of action and
inaction.
The land has become a matriarchy—by default. The Spaniard
has been too busy establishing theodicy on earth to rule Spain well:
or at last too involved in the equating of his embattled impulse
to rule Spain at all. Imperceptibly, unofficially, woman has taken
hold. She allows man many liberties—trivial liberties of the
sort she would call romantic, if she knew the word. He may
"govern,” vote, own; he may fight; he may drink and gamble.
He may act, indeed, the perfect child, thinking himself the centre
of the world because of his exultant vices (of which politics and
journalism are the most absurd). Meantime, she with her com-
pass, Christ, and her wheel, the priest, steers the slow ship of
Spain. In her disposal are the education of her children, intellec-
tual and moral, the moulding of those customs which go deeper
than statute. In her hands is the family, and the family is Spain.
She is the true controller of finance. It is a common thing in
Spain for the man to own the money of his wife, and for the
wife to distribute the money of her husband. In the peasant
classes, she is arbiter of culture: in the middle classes she is eco-
nomic judge: in the noble classes, the lineage descends through her
in equality with her husband.
She is serene and she is incurious. Her Anglo-Saxon sister
would call her inactive, even as the Parisienne would find her dull.
Since sexual adventurousness is normally the result of intellectual
curiosity—the sensory stimulation of ideas—she is chaste and dis-
passionate. But if her lack of amorousness is due to her lack of
thinking, her serenity and her external inactivity are due to her
tremendous power. Women are most clamorous for "rights” in
lands where culturally they have counted least. Witness England
or the United States where for all her liberties, woman is spiritually
sterile. In contrast, witness France whose women are the subtle
partners of all deep events: or matriarchal Spain in which suf-
fragists are as rare as they would be superfluous.?
1 In the winter of 1924 the Dictator of Spain, Primo de Rivera, on his own
initiative conferred the municipal suffrage upon women. They did not
agitate for it and it seems clear that if they exercise this new privilege it
will be in the same spirit of compliance with which they accede to all the
demands of men.


WALDO FRANK
219
VOUTO
The nature of Spain calls imperatively for the dominance of
woman. Her mind is individualistic, and Spain is a congeries of
constant parts rather than an organism. Woman builds her
familial molecule from the Spanish atoms: she erects a great sim-
plicity in which her man can dwell.
In Spain there are two kinds of women: the mother and the
prostitute. And both are mothers. The land is sensuous in its
air, its flowers. The Spaniard is not sensuous at all. In the
nineteenth century, a group of romantic Spanish poets endeavoured
to sing of Spain as had the Germans and the English. No more
frustrate coldness exists in all the literature of failure. "Kennst
du das Land wo die Citronen blühen” could never have been
written by a Spaniard about Spain. For the Spaniard is as ab-
stract in his bodily lusts as he is concrete in his ideals. Of his
wife, he seeks the haven of morale: of his prostitute, he seeks the
peace of respite. The Spanish prostitute with her Cross lying
within her breasts is the least mercenary, the most womanly of
her class. She is mellow and maternal. She bears with her a
great sense of sin: and the man who touches her lips touches pity.
From man she receives two treasures, bread and shame: she is
eager to give, in return, humility and comfort. She has no de-
lights of subtle sense to barter: but he who comes to her, weary
and broken, will find her arms mysteriously soothing, as if her
acceptance of sin were a Christian solace, as if her acceptance of
shame were heartening to his pride.
And the Spanish wife knows of the prostitute and suffers her.
She furnishes for her husband an escape from the chaste rigours
of family and church into the anarchy of unorganized affection
and of Christian pity. She makes the work of the wife less
arduous.
LC
10
Human happiness is the full deep flow of human energy. It
has many ways, nor is it rare. The madman is happy when all
of his thought and sense falls into the pattern of his will. The
lover is happy. Children are happy, eating or at play. Soldiers
are happy in battle. And everyone is happy in dream.
There are happy nations: nations at war, nations in the madness
of any enterprise, whether it be of growth or dissolution. But
Spain is not happy. Her energy does not flow. It stands locked
in a diapason of pause.


220
THE SPANIARD
Nor is Spain unhappy. Unhappiness is the thwarted need of
energy to flow. Spain's energy is not thwarted. It does not flow:
it does not need to flow. It is absorbed in its own perpetual
balance.
Spain is a dark soul. Sun is a flame in her land, and her land
is a storm of colour. But the soul of Spain is neither sun nor
storm. It is neither gaiety nor grief. It is a dark contentment,
midway held between ecstasy and sleep.
Outside all tremor and traffic of spiritual movement, Spain
moves like a somnambulant. Her body moves: but within her
shut eyes there is a vision truer than her stirring: a vision stirless
and composed.
Yet her dark mood is pleasant, and its pain moves whole within
the harmony of acceptance. Her soul is caressed passively by this
rhythmic swing between the extremes of action. It is as if the
long ages of Spain's turbulence and issue had bred this sensuous
delight in their denial.
Within her heroic memory, within her heroic land, Spain wan-
ders unobtrusively and scatheless. She does not suffer, neither
does she rejoice. She does not repine, nor is she moved by pride.
She does not forget nor remember. Upon the surface of her life,
intellect pricks, passion stirs, action clamours. But her depths
are limpid in a dark and dreamless slumber.


Courtesy of the Weyhe Gallery
LE CHAPEAU. BY HENRI MATISSE






Courtesy of the Wegne- Gallery
TETE DE FEMME BY HENRI MATISSE






Courtesy of the Weyhe Gallery
ETUDE DE NU. BY HENRI MATISSE





unon enim ne
li{~
arcanmalminen
mnoho
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Courtesy of the Weyhe Gallery
BUSTE DE FEMME.
BY HENRI MATISSE





LOVE AT 42 ALTGELD AVENUE
BY ALICE BEAL PARSONS
YC
I WILL never, she had said that morning when she first turned
T over in bed and put out a hand to touch the spray of apple
blossoms that brushed her window sill, for although they had
to get their water from a pump in the back yard, and although the
house was homely and inconvenient, it had apple trees on one side
and a lane of cherry trees on the other, and raspberries, currants,
and grapes at the back, I will never marry him. He is not the
sort of man I have ever thought when I have watched him pass-
ing or when I've talked with him, that I could marry. And
as she thought this, faces began to float through her mind, like
leaves floating and swirling on a rapid river, faces she had seen
in the street, or in pictures, or at the theatre, looking out at her
as they passed swirling away through eyes that were passionately
aware of life. Bruce's face was not among them. He was not
a man she had ever thought that she could love.
Yet although in the morning she had said that she would never
marry him, here she was at ten minutes of eight in the alcove
pretending to read a book, but really listening for his step.
Her Aunt Hortense in the sitting-room ten feet away, sitting
in the midst of the wall-paper, the rocking-chairs, the old square
piano, the potted plants, the rather musty, rather dusty air of faded
gentility, her Aunt Hortense, nodding her large head, weathered
and seamed like the trunk of a tree and talking in a deep contralto
tone to her Aunt Marie and her Aunt Josephine, was listening too,
and glancing with jealous anxiety into the alcove at Madeline's
beautiful face bent over her book to see if she were listening as
eagerly as she should. All the Aunts were listening, although they
were talking in their vivacious family way and making their stock
family jokes, their gallant, lovable, so funny family jokes, but
Hortense was listening with every nerve in her body, because she
loved him. She did not love him Platonically, but she had a cast
in her left eye and forty years' experience had shown her that men
do not look at a woman with a cast in her eye as if she were a
ma


222
LOVE AT 42 ALTGELD AVENUE
woman, so she loved him quite without expectation, as the air might
have loved him, or the sunshine. And because she loved him, she
watched jealously to see if other people realized how lovable he
was. She could be very indignant if they did not. She could be
particularly indignant with Madeline, because Madeline was to
her like her own daughter and was guilty of being young and beau-
tiful, though her beauty was quiet, dark, the beauty of tired
Madonnas, of black earth, and though her youth was damped.
Her Aunt Hortense who could be unsparing of Madeline, but who
forgave her her youth and her beauty, rocked nervously in the
sitting-room ten feet away.
When at last, at exactly one minute of eight, his step creaked
on the porch outside, Madeline was telling herself that since she
had let him come she ought to begin to be pleased to see him,
though as usual his coming interrupted the placid routine of her
evening. But instead of being able to think about how pleased she
ought to be, she found that she could think of nothing but the
old walnut book-case that reached to the ceiling, and of how that
bulky piece of furniture had been brought all the way from Massa-
chusetts in a prairie schooner. Her father, whose chief pride it
was that he looked like Rutherford B. Hayes, had been a small
boy then, small enough to have curled up and gone to sleep on one
of its substantial shelves, her gallant, improvident, rakish father
who had made them all so solemn by contrast, and so poor that
she could even think of marrying Bruce.
Slowly she put down her copy of Dostoevsky's Letters on the
marble-topped table beside her, and was slowly getting up from her
chair and crossing the room, the languid grace of her walk marred
by a slight side swing of both body and left arm, remnant of the
intense self-consciousness of a shy childhood. She was crossing
the room too slowly for her Aunt Hortense who was gesticulating
at the door, and too slowly for her Aunt Marie who had given her
pretty grey hair a pat on this side and a tug on that and gone
bustling out into the kitchen to see if there were enough grape
juice to go around.
But Bruce, it seemed, wanted to go out. He usually wanted to
go out, in order, Hortense suspected, to get Madeline among people
they didn't know, or quite alone, so that they presumably might
have their own atmosphere; and that atmosphere being entirely


ALICE BEAL PARSONS
223
their own might then become electrical. And it is difficult, even
in a largish city like Dalton, to find a spot to be alone in-one must
go to Chicago or to New York for that—he wanted to go to a
movie.
He stood in the doorway, with his head tilted back a little as
usual, explaining that he wanted to go to a movie, and Madeline
stood facing him two feet away, and the three Aunts stood
around in the background, disappointed, but smiling and talking
vivaciously.
Yes, she would go, Madeline said, raising to his face large
eyes that were both reflective and docile, obstinate and generous.
The fire in them smouldered, as it smoulders in damp straw. She
was beautiful, but the chances of life, poverty, and the isolation
it brings, had shut her off from many things, so that even her
loves had been only a passionate dreaming over the mystery of
faces seen in a crowd, eyes that had curiously left their trace on
her, and that she had never seen again. Her fire was damped.
There was a smear over her beauty. But her eyes looked out at
people through this smear that was rubbed over her, with languid,
unassertive confidence.
When she had said, “Yes I will go,” she had been thinking that
the fact that he was half-bald emphasized the flatness of his head
on top. Though after all it wasn't any flatter than W. H. Hud-
son's. His eyes were almost immodestly exposed in his fair
rather dry face because of the light colour of brows and lashes;
and his forehead, wrinkled from eye strain and weather-he had
tramped his way about Europe and America—made him look all
of thirty-five. Yet there was no denying that, as Hortense insisted,
he had a certain air about him, even though he was only a printer.
Probably because he was not too conscious of his environment.
He was not obsequious to it, and yet he was not aggressive in the
face of it. He had something of the casual self-sufficient air of a
city man. Yet he had never reached the point of reading in bed
in the morning with a clear conscience. All night, yes, when the
mood took him. But not in the morning. Though for the matter
of that, neither had she. He took life easily, but to pay his debts
he would even give up an all-day chess game and go to work for
a while.
"Yes, I'd rather like to,” Madeline said half defiantly and half
100


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LOVE AT 42 ALTGELD AVENUE
apologetically. For though she didn't look at them, she knew
that the Aunts were disappointed that they wouldn't be sitting
around in a semi-circle that evening agreeing with each other and
with Bruce in their likes and dislikes, and reading out loud from
a book or a newspaper an occasional sentence that they'd liked very
much or that had made them too indignant for words. Bruce was
eccentric enough and emphatic enough in his likes and dislikes
even for them.
"But do sit down while Madeline puts on her things,” her Aunt
Marie insisted as she began to arrange the chairs comfortably to-
gether. And so Bruce sat down among them, among the three
quickly rising and falling feminine breasts, and told about what
a fool the foreman of their printing shop was, how he hardly knew
a linotype machine from a monotype and was always playing
favourites. For like many printers Bruce had inherited the
philosophy of social criticism from Henry George, and like many
social critics he had acquired so much momentum that he could
not stop. And while he told about what a fool his shop foreman
was, the three middle-aged intelligent Aunts sat rocking and
nodding sympathetic heads. For they were dissenters too. They
and Bruce were comrades in dissent. They dissented from the
way the Mayor ran the town, they dissented from fundamentalism
in religion, they dissented from the theory of innoculation for
typhoid fever. They dissented from many other things, for dis-
sent was their chief excitement in life. It took the place of travel
and luxuries and vices and indulgence generally. It took the
place of love, perhaps, and children, and Bruce was their comrade
in dissent. They were disappointed therefore when Madeline
came back into the room looking too pretty in her last year's
retrimmed hat.
She and Bruce were walking to the movie. It was pleasant
after being cooped up in a schoolroom all day to feel one's body
moving through fresh cool air. The other houses on Altgeld Avenue
were as homely and as inconvenient as their own, but there were
wide gaps between them because they were part of a "subdivision”
that hadn't developed as people thought it would, and so between
them, behind the thin haze of blossoming fruit trees there were
luminous waves of greyish blue, that was the prairie lying level
under the cool evening sky, as if it were the sea.
Cr
W
conver


ALICE BEAL PARSONS
225
It was pleasant to smell the moist richness of upturned earth
in neighbours' gardens, the spicy aromatic tang that must come
from newly swelling buds, the wine-like fragrance of the apple
blossoms, the exciting lust-arousing, death-recalling smell of burn-
ing leaves and brush. It was pleasant to see the unreal, almost
discordant jade green of new grass under the delicate, mauve, rose-
tinted sky against which at intervals topaz street lights were
hanging. Strawinsky and Corot striving together in the same spring
evening.
When they reached the theatre the movie of course was half
over. A distinguished member of the Hollywood millionaire
colony was personating a grand lady of the Renaissance, and to
make the illusion complete she was wearing a wistful dairy-maid
expression. The Duchess of Dewlap. Could Bruce be addicted
to wistful females? He was evidently excited. More excited
than the spring night had made him. He hadn't smelled any-
thing in particular, he had said as they came through the streets,
except a damp spring evening that might bring on her neuralgia.
Now he was excited. His breathing kept getting quicker and
quicker, and he kept looking at his watch. At last he leaned close
to Madeline and whispered, “It's just time. I want to show you
something. We'll have to hurry.” And without asking what or
where, she got up from her seat and followed his back up the dark
aisle, hoping that whatever he had to show her wouldn't be too
stupid and that it wouldn't involve talking to people she didn't
want to talk to, because then her facial muscles would get
so tired of being forced into expressions of attention and pleas-
ure and surprise and general agreement that her head would ache
afterwards.
At one end of the lobby he opened a door into a long, closed
passage-way that seemed to be leading in the direction of the stage.
“I've often wanted,” he was saying, breathing unaccountably hard
and getting red behind the ears, "to take you to a spiritist meet-
ing. Don't say it's silly beforehand. Sir Oliver Lodge and Conan
Doyle both—” His face was very red, and he looked awkward
and boyish and rather likable. "I've wanted to take you," he
was saying, “because I've wanted you to know me as I am, just
as I want to know you as you are. You couldn't know me without
going to a spiritist meeting because I go to one every week. It's


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LOVE AT 42 ALTGELD AVENUE
only the fake ones that are silly. Every week I talk to a girl
who died fifteen years ago, a girl I was going to marry. This,”
he said, in a very matter-of-fact way, as he put his hand on the
knob of a door, “isn't a regular medium. But that doesn't matter.”
The room, she saw, was full of musical instruments piled up
on chairs. It was a square high-ceilinged room with unpainted
white plaster walls, having in the middle of it a table around which
five people were sitting. Some of these people seemed to nod at
Bruce, and one of them, a solemn, dark, thin young man with a
long face and a bow tie, said “Draw up two chairs, Rugg," but
without moving his hands from the table or turning his head.
"No, I'll sit and watch,” Madeline protested quickly, and Bruce
agreed, "Yes, she wants to sit and watch.”
The tall solemn man she knew was the 'cellist, the leader of
the orchestra. She might have expected this of him, but not of
Bruce or of the others. Outside, the organ was playing Gounod's
Ave Maria, and so she knew that the movie was getting into deep
water.
She wouldn't have expected spiritualist leanings of Blanche
McCarthy, a precociously worldly person who'd worn high heels
when she was ten, had painted her cheeks when she was a fresh-
man in High School, and had been the first in High School to
enhance her pompadour with a stocking. Next her was a tall,
gentle, shy, grey-haired man with an effective Boston beard. And
across the table a round-faced German boy with curly hair. And
then a girl with high cheek-bones and intelligent, introspective
eyes, who looked as if she might divide her time between petting
parties and reading Hebrew or Greek in the original.
The six people sitting around the table in the tall square white
room were as unlike each other as they could be, but as they sat
there with their finger tips touching each other and the pointer,
they were all thinking the same thought, they were all intent on
breaking down the wall between the living and the dead. Out-
side, the organ was playing something black and sultry and ominous
that showed the movie was getting into deeper water still, and a
great many people were having a great many emotions, which
beat noisily at times against the white walls of the room.
The girl with high cheek-bones, Madeline was thinking, looked
like a seraph who was acquainted with sin, like a seraph who


ALICE BEAL PARSONS
227
an
had eaten of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil.
But neither she nor any of the five others looked at Madeline sitting
in a corner. They were all very excited and very concentrated.
They all breathed more quickly when the pointer began to move.
It moved slowly from letter to letter on the board spelling out
words that the six people thought came from the spirit world. Of
course they were making it move. They were deluding them-
selves. Long ago psychologists had pointed out how they deluded
themselves. Their faces were pale, she saw, and intent on that
ghostly world that was breaking in upon them, but of course they
were deluding themselves. Bruce still looked boyish and awkward
and excited, more excited than she had thought he could be. And
for the first time she could see in his face the boy that it had grown
up around. The pointer was moving from letter to letter, and the
six people at the table looked more concentrated and excited.
Blanche McCarthy wanted to know what had happened to a
medium-sized dark man who had a mole on his neck and had
done a vaudeville act. He had been lost to all his friends, it
seemed, for two years. But the medium didn't know. The tall,
shy, oldish man with the perfect Boston beard talked with a dead
brother in a way that seemed satisfactory. This dead brother still
played the violin in heaven and had very congenial friends. He
approved of the way the gentle, shy, oldish man played the violin
in the movie theatre. He was pleased to hear that they were
going to run in Schubert's Unfinished Symphony between the trash
they had to play for the Herd.
The pointer kept moving mysteriously from letter to letter, and
the faces of the six people around the table were excited and solemn.
And now Bruce was asking questions, thinking that he was asking
them of the girl who had died fifteen years ago. She was happy,
this girl said through the pointer spelling out words. She knew
what he had been doing every day this week, and she knew what
he had been thinking. Yes, everything. Bruce was getting redder
and redder behind the ears. Did she approve, he was asking, of
the new project he had in mind, the very significant new project?
And the pointer, spelling out words through the finger tips of the
six concentrated excited people all thinking of the spirit world,
said yes, she approved.
Outside, the organ was putting the finishing touches to the


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LOVE AT 42 ALTGELD AVENUE
villain, and the 'cellist who was the leader of the orchestra regret-
fully took his polished nails off the pointer and shrugged his sloping
excellently tailored thin shoulders. “Our turn,” he said regret-
fully. And the five people took their instruments and went hurrying
away.
Sweat was standing out on Bruce's face and his hands trembled
as he faced Madeline in the empty room. So he had brought her,
she was thinking, for the spirit of the girl who had died fifteen
years ago to see. He had sought the spirit's approval of her as
his future wife. Behind the closed door the orchestra began to play
jazz. “Let's go home now," he said.
All the town seemed walking in the spring air in the streets.
It was pleasant to be in a crowd, to be part of a crowd, and at
the same time to be alone together. But he was not the sort of
man she had ever thought of marrying. He was a homely, pleasant,
undistinguished, spottily intelligent man, with something of an
air about him. But he wasn't her equal. He didn't know lots of
the things she knew. He came of working people. He hadn't
gone to college. He wasn't her equal, as the saying is.
It was pleasant to be walking together through the crowd in
the lighted downtown streets. And it was pleasanter to be walk-
ing together through the quiet residence streets. Behind the walls
of the houses men and women were loving each other in just as
matter-of-fact a way, perhaps, as they slept and ate. And behind
other walls were other men and women, but not so many men,
who had never loved anybody in their lives. Women who were
desperately hungry for love, but who had never loved. The animals
were luckier. Human beings had been luckier in other ages. This
grisly joke that kept some women alive and prisoners from life,
was modern. Love was an ecstasy. Love coloured the sky. Love
changed the very air one breathed. If she hadn't known what
love could be, she might have thought of marrying him. Behind
the quiet walls of the houses men and women were loving each
other. Without love they would wish to die, as she had wished
to die.
Bruce was talking. He had been talking some minutes in a
low excited voice. And his talking had run along pleasantly in
her mind, though she had not disentangled the words. Now the
word “love” fitted in with her own thinking, and she stopped to
es


ALICE BEAL PARSONS
229
as
listen. He could say the word, she observed, though his face
was probably turning red in the dark. Unlike most men, he could
say the word. “Love,” he was saying, stumbling over his words
because his breathing tripped them up, "doesn't necessarily come all
at once. If you wait for it to come all at once to you it may never
come at all. It may come at first,” he kept trying to explain, "only
like a gentle rain falling on parched earth which drinks it in in
relief.”
He was not the sort of man she had thought she could love,
though he had an understanding mind of a sort. But if he were
cleverer he would not spend so much time railing at his foreman
and things. Still it was pleasant for an evening to be one with
the life about her, instead of a spectator looking on. It would be
pleasant to be loving when other people loved. Though it was
hard to forget that love could be a wind on the mountains falling
on oaks. But perhaps with that girl of fifteen years ago he too had
known the mountain wind. And she was twenty-seven and not
married yet. She was looking on at life, but she wasn't living.
Life was slipping past her and often she wanted to die. Never
before civilization had there been animals condemned to look at
life and not to live
“Will you perhaps,” he said, when they turned into 42 Altgeld
Avenue and stood waiting on the rickety porch, shifting from
foot to foot and hanging their arms limply, conscious of the night
about them, but shifting from foot to foot; "will you take a chance
on its coming a little at a time, and then a little more?" And
without looking at him, and without thinking, separating her
words carefully from each other, she said yes, she would take a
chance.
Her Aunt Hortense was sitting up for them, a large square
heavy woman with an unleavened, wistful face. She had been
sitting up for them, but when she saw Bruce's face she trembled
and went hurrying out of the room. It was fifteen minutes or more
before she came back; and when she came she brought a pitcher
of grape juice and some cakes she had made, explaining that she
had had a dizzy spell, but she was quite all right now. Yes, quite
all right. And then she smiled and talked more vivaciously than
usual. They all talked vivaciously until Bruce went home.
Madeline did not read in bed that night. She leaned out of


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LOVE AT 42 ALTGELD AVENUE
the window in the darkness to find the spray of apple blossoms.
Their odour was in the room. The room was heady with their
sweetness. Most of her life was in the room. Behind her in the
darkness were the books and pictures that kept her sense of her-
self and of the world. Beside her was the rocking-chair in which
she would sit alone and look out at the blue grey waves of the
prairie between the homely houses across the street. In a box
under her cot bed were the pictures of her college friends, and the
dusty letters they had written her. Most of her life was in this
room, and it was heady with the sweetness of apple blossoms.
He was not the sort of man she had ever thought she could marry.
Love is a wind on the mountains falling on oaks. He was a homely,
undistinguished, spottily intelligent man who had loved a dead
girl fifteen years. He was not a man she had ever dreamed of
marrying. But life too is a wind. And now at last, without know-
ing where it would take her, she would let herself be caught up
into life. She would let life carry her away.



-
-
BUST OF CHARLES HENRY DEMUTH.
BY ARNOLD ROENNEBECK





PARIS LETTER
August, 1925
THIS spring in France, men of letters have participated in
I the festivals in honour of Joan of Arc. Thanks to the
Saint-and it is no less than a miracle that she ever became one-
Bernard Shaw has received at last the fame that France has so
long denied him. Until now, obscured by his translators and
by the insular nature of his talent, Shaw has had in Paris nothing
but failure or slight success. To tell the truth, Shaw will never
be strictly European. It is impossible to imagine a modern dra-
matic literature without Ibsen, whereas such a literature would be
in no way changed if Shaw had not existed. The author of
Major Barbara will remain a brilliant personality, but at the same
time, local, provincial, Irish. His success was due to the new,
brutal method by which he forced well-fed gentlemen of 1900
to think and to think scandalously. It was this very resistance
to Victorian environment that raised him so high; just as a bullet
derives its force solely from the resistance offered by the barrel.
In Paris, Shaw's more active wit, scepticisms, and paradoxes failed
to tell. I am happier for bearing witness to the reconciliation.
In his Saint Joan, Shaw has made a noteworthy effort toward his-
torical synthesis and toward the renewing and enriching of his
whole style. He has attempted, if not to construct a drama, at
least to organize historical scenes; he has curbed his fondness for
abruptness and paradox, except that Joan's "protestantism” is a
bit exaggerated; and, finally, his central figure was so real and
convincing that it earned him a triumph and the support of all
Paris—the Paris of the elect and of the general public. I may
add by the way that Shaw's thrusts at British imperialism have
not failed to contribute in France to the play's success.
The young French novelist, Joseph Delteil, presents us likewise
with a Joan of Arc, a saint gross and naïve, like a figure in prim-
itive peasant art. The novel is of Cubist cut and the story savours
much of Surréaliste methods and of cinema epics. It leaves room
for disapproval, but fortunately, not of the kind so often pro-
voked by the reading of an edifying book; it shows no trace of the


232
PARIS LETTER
conventional, the bigoted, or the palely academic. Delteil's Joan
of Arc is lively, modern, very much a woman, and so thoroughly
human as to be in love with the king of France. The book indeed,
has shocked certain Catholics.
As for me, on the occasion of the festival of Joan of Arc I visited
in Rouen the Place du Vieux Marché where she was burned and
where her soul rose in smoke to a heaven burdened with Normandy
clouds. I took a walk through the market-place where the Eng-
lish faggots had once lain heaped. Fresh fish, crabs, and Rouen
poultry were displayed there; and as in a Dutch painting, my
dog with raised paw appeared in the foreground to sniff at the
leg of a butchered lamb, first victim of the spring. It was noon
and, prompted by hunger, I went to a hotel that dates from the
fourteenth century; here, from the windows one might have seen
the Saint burned. I now supplement literature with a gastronomic
annex, imprudently advising my readers (as a gourmand should
never do) to go also to the Hôtel de la Couronne, consigning the
other hotels to ignorant tourists. Relying upon my long experi-
ence they will order sole à la crème, an unbled Rouen duck, and
an apple soufflé done in old Calvados brandy. Then they should
return straight to Paris by the winding road that skirts the Seine
which the Normans used in the ninth century whenever they came
to burn Paris—and that was often enough.
ans
Joan of Arc drove the English from France. The Exposition
of Decorative Arts, which has just opened, brings them back-
together with Scandinavians, Chinese, Russians, and Germans.
Americans are, it would seem, less numerous than usual. It
is much to be regretted that neither they nor the Germans are
exhibiting in Paris. A thus inevitable falsifying of values makes
it difficult to appraise the exhibits as a whole. I shall devote
one of my letters in The Dial entirely to this exposition, which
is at the present moment not quite ready.
There are now in progress three other expositions, which, though
of limited scope, are among the best ever seen in Paris.
One is the Exposition of French Landscapes From Poussin to
Corot, the collection last assembled by H. Lapanze before his
death. It constitutes a remarkable whole, to which the Prado,
the Holland Museum, English collectors (an admirable Poussin
sent by Lord Derby) and the museums of northern France have


PAUL MORAND
233
contributed. Here is further confirmation of the truth that, in
painting as well as in literature, nature, with French artists, is
never more than a decorative theme subordinate to man, the unique
measure. In this respect, we are truly the inheritors of the Greeks.
Not until the nineteenth century, not until the advent of the
influence of Constable and the English romanticists, does nature,
loved at last for her own sake, appear on a French canvas.
The Exposition of Oriental Art, Rue la Ville l'Evêque, brings
together a perfectly chosen group of Persian, Chinese, and so-
called "Scythian" objects, lent by divers collectors of London,
Brussels, New York, and France. Among the latter I might name
M Jacques Doucet, M C. Gillet, M A. Saint, M Vever, and
M Viguier.
Lastly, at the Bibliothèque Nationale, there is an exposition of
oriental manuscripts such as is rarely to be seen, the items having
been assembled chiefly from old French ecclesiastical and royal
collections. I think in particular of an amazing Koran of the
thirteenth century from Granada, lettered in gold on purple
parchment.
After three years of silence, M Jacques de Lacretelle, whose
Silbermann was a universal success, now gives us La Bonifas.
It is a novel of but one character, exceedingly thorough, and
written with that care for clarity, for orderly composition in the
telling, that is characteristic of his books. The chief character
is a woman-one of those women whom the chance of birth has
made women, when they should have been men, and whose entire
lives are put out of tune by their inability to adapt their qualities
and defects to exterior conditions. Toward the middle of the
book the advent of the war and the changes in the morals and
manners of the day, transform to virtue, in Mlle Bonifas, all that
has hitherto been considered vice; in the language of the Freudians,
with which the book is somewhat overcharged, the story told by
Lacretelle is that of the sublimation of a suppressed perverse
desire.
Les Cahiers Du Mois has just published a special number devoted
to the Orient and entitled Les Appels de l'Orient. It has aroused
much comment, containing as it does interesting statements by a
great number of prominent Europeans and Frenchmen concerning
the Oriental problems now under discussion.


234
PARIS LETTER
In his Eloge de la Folie M Jean Cassou gives us a first and
charming novel that has attracted much notice in Paris. By folie
he means youth, pleasure, and high spirits. While the modes of
love presented are ultra-modern, M Cassou has preserved to an
infinite degree the quality of grace. It may even be said that that
quality, so deliberately excluded from the works of the younger
generation, has been rehabilitated by him.
Another very young author, M Léon P. Quint, is about to pub-
lish a study of Marcel Proust. It will be the first book to be
devoted entirely to Proust. I shall return to it subsequently.
Collections of stories continue to be much the fashion. After
two series of Jewish stories and one of stories for children, I would
draw attention to the Marseilles Stories collected by M Ed.
Ramond. These stories, which have for centuries been transmitted
by word of mouth, becoming thus a veritable cycle, are now in-
sured against oblivion. The best of them, obscene tales of a gross
Latin vulgarity that have come in a direct line from the Atellanae
and that strike a truly Mediterranean note, are not included in
the collection. Following these we are promised hunting stories,
stories about the theatre, and political stories.
Book-collecting has always seemed to me a mediocre “indoor
sport” and a rather poor pastime, and I usually make no mention
of it. However, the sale at which André Gide liquidated certain
of his contemporaries and disposed of the books of former friends
against whom he had cause for complaint, has caused the flow
of so much ink that it cannot be passed over in silence. A first
edition of Leaves of Grass brought 4,800 francs, or about 250
dollars. Goncourt and Maeterlinck books went at low prices, a
reassuring proof of the good taste of our time. A copy of Chrysis
on which Pierre Louys had poured perfume, brought only ten
dollars. The perfume, it is true, had evaporated. With the pro-
ceeds of the sale André Gide will undertake a journey to the Congo.
Thanks to the sale of a great many bad books we are at last
going to have one good one-a book that will open to us vast
horizons: the book that André Gide will bring back from Africa.
That is why I am diverted by a sale which others have belittled.
S.
Paul MORAND


BOOK REVIEWS
A SUPERB BRIEF
THE PILGRIMAGE OF HENRY JAMES. By Van Wyck
Brooks. E. P. Dutton and Company. Price $2.50.
M R VAN WYCK BROOKS is always driving the same
I jaunty brightly polished trap up to our door; and—like
some trim, punctual, somewhat sly guardian of an aged relative
who is both a disgrace and an honour to his family—he helps to
descend, the latest victim of his penetrating concern. Our emotions
felt no stirring of protest when Mark Twain downcast, but still
able to jest, lean and jocular, appeared before us, but when Henry
James a little ponderous, yet so very, very soft of foot is pro-
duced in order to be closed away in some obscure niche of partial
failures we are decidedly put out. For do we not recall our old
boundless gratitude in those early days when his pen created for
us a sophistication of intercourse we had never dreamed could exist;
when the haunting miasma of provincialism in which we unresist-
ingly moved was for once inconceivably dispersed and the pulse
of our thought beat with an odd new tension and insight, the
effects of which could never again be lost or forgotten, as also
the inadequacy of our environment could never again quite blot out
for us the compensating perception of our predicament, with its
most subtle implications mirrored back to us in artistic utterance?
So we recall with fresh assurance the unique debt we owe our
favourite American author, and we regard Mr Brooks with intrepid
scepticism. Yet we listen, and as we listen we become involved in
his argument, then we become amused, and finally we smile a light,
somewhat ironical, yet wholly admiring smile; for Mr Brooks,
besides being nimble, is persuasive, and all the little bits of evidence
he so ingeniously gathers, so sedulously and absorbedly picks out
from the writings of the great man himself, with the sharp, nipping,
unwearied eagerness of a woodpecker, a woodpecker whose red
cap flashes in the sun as it draws reluctant booty from under the


236
A SUPERB BRIEF
crinkled bark of some solid delicately blossoming locust tree, are
made in the end to form a pattern which, if dubious in intention,
is at least brilliant in design.
The predicament of Henry James as seen by Mr Brooks is as
follows. Nourished by his parents on stories about the graces of
the old world, James absorbed even as a small boy a distrust of
the barbaric crudity of his own native land, and together with this
distrust a desire to ally himself securely with the ancient, more
exclusive, more engaging traditions of European culture, a desire
sustained and fortified given his first opportunity of testing the
response of his senses in the European scene, a desire which, indeed,
hardening finally into a somewhat affrighted purpose as the years
progressed, led finally to his becoming a stranger stranded in a
society in which he could never feel wholly at home and alienated
for ever from the only environment which might, since it was
his native air, have helped to sustain his intensity and to fructify
his genius. Thus Mr Brooks traces in James's writings the rise and
decay of his inspiration, marking it as at its highest expression
during that period of his life when his knowledge of his country
was most emphatic and as at its lowest in those later years when his
memories of it had become dimmer and dimmer in permanent
expatriation.
And it is just here that one feels a weakness in Mr Brooks's
argument. For in the interests of his thesis he shifts and classifies
James's disparate works with the unsleeping unillumined eye of
the social scientist rather than with the nervous conjuring fingers
of the artist to whose gentlest pressure innumerable doors swing
soundlessly back to reveal incomparable treasures within. For
how can Mr Brooks see as unreal or sterile that later novel of
Henry James in which his matured technical skill was rendered
so willing a handmaiden to his harvested and mellowed intensity ?
And though the present writer admired so much Mr Edmund
Wilson's admirable essay in The New Republic on Mr Brooks's
work, yet she must beg to disagree with both Mr Brooks and Mr
Wilson in this matter of The Wings of the Dove. For surely
the dramatic motif which actuates the story is just that malevolent
cynicism and base duplicity which Mr Wilson denies; and yet
at the same time Merton Densher does remain throughout the
"gentleman” which James has established him at the outset of the
SO


ALYSE GREGORY
237
novel, more conspired against than conspiring, and explained with
so lucid an adequacy that one shares with him at every step the
embarrassment of his plight; while Milly, the innocent "cat's
paw,” though dead, wins a lasting victory over the crafty Kate
who must view her lover initiated into some deep and tender secret,
the soft energy of which will separate them for ever. Thus evil
is irretrievably overcome by good and Mr Brooks's estimate of this
book is shown as biased in the interests of his theory.
But one feels throughout this study that Mr Brooks in some
subtle way is allying himself with the Philistines, and one expe-
riences a curious kind of gratitude that Henry James was after all
able to escape out of that deadening Cambridge society set in its
"box of sky lavender” from the centre of which his brother once
complained that the name of Bernard Shaw was banned. And is
there not something peculiarly irritating in the attitude of this
same brother who after visiting Henry James in his English home
refers to him thus in a letter to Mrs James: “... the same dear,
old, good innocent and at bottom very powerless-feeling Harry
... caring for little but his writing, and full of dutifulness and
affection for all gentle things”? “Powerless-feeling Harry' and
“dutifulness and affection”; are these not the very phrases that
Cambridge would most applaud and that Mr Brooks seems not
to disapprove? And again he writes, this time directly to his
brother: “For gleams and innuendoes and felicitous verbal in-
sinuations you are unapproachable, but the rare perfume of things
will not support existence, and the effect of solidity you reach is
but perfume and simulacrum.” Pray, one feels like asking, what
else, if not the bare perfume of things, will support existence ?
How often this kind of observation is made with a sort of patroniz-
ing finality by the moralist to the poet, the social reformer to the
artist; and what a wealth of provincialism it denotes in the present
instance, of lack of understanding of the peculiar genius of Henry
James. Indeed one begins at last to feel glad that this wary and
sensitive American should have been made to spend so many painful
hours, finicky and attentive, knocking vainly at the stupid impreg-
nable portals of English society or assuaging his confusion in his
dim, well regulated, solitary habitation. One begins to surmise
that these ignominious postures were important contributing fac-
tors toward those artful insights of his which are our especial


238
A SUPERB BRIEF
an
delight; and surely if one is to judge him by most of the Amer-
icans who have stayed at home, one's gratitude increases that this
velvet-footed thief of perfect phrases should have made so felicitous
an escape. One permits one's fancy even further scope, and
wonders whether the genius of William James would not too have
flowered more nobly and with more delicate an imagination had
he likewise turned his back squarely and for ever on his native
shores.
It is true that one is conscious at times of a certain confined
sterility in Henry James's writings, but one can imagine the kind
of exhaustive and convincing treatise Freud might devote to an
explanation of this weakness, tracing its cause ultimately to some
deep fissure in the sex life of his subject, or one could quite simply
say that some insufficiency of passion was native to his tempera-
ment and that with the vanishing excitation of his youth and early
manhood his writing did become more and more mechanical. Yet
to the present writer James's later period, with certain few excep-
tions, remains the period which has given her the greatest pleasure.
If one can bring to the reading of Mr Brooks's study, however,
a mind purged of preconceptions, washed quite clean indeed of
any previous knowledge of the subject, one's admiration will
remain unshaken to the end. How well one can visualize this
neat attorney of letters in a crowded court room, unflustered and
precise, the patriot of American culture, amidst his dry infestive
enemies, unrolling his immaculate brief and with pungent direct-
ness and a limpid grace of style, presenting his case to the judge
in such a manner as to bewilder and to charm him into immediate
acquiescence. And with the judge we too must needs bow low to
this eloquent sentry of our inclement shores, grateful that those of us
who are inclined to succumb perhaps a little too easily to Europe's
perilous appeal can be sure of leaving at home so constant and
honourable a custodian of our intellectual heritage.
ALYSE GREGORY


THE GREAT GOD PAN
The Witch Cult in Western EUROPE. By Mar-
garet Alice Murray. 8vo. 303 pages. Oxford Uni-
versity Press. $5.35.
CUPPOSE that the elves of Shakespeare, the charming “Little
People” whom folk-lore and fancy saw sporting on the lawns
and among the flowers of old Britain were, in reality, dreaded
members of the stunted race once inhabiting that island, surviving
till the dawn of articulate history and the coming of the Legions.
Suppose that, lurking among the mounds and cumuli, in remote
and savage places, and coming in contact with the ruling classes
only rarely and under cover of darkness, they communicated to the
conqueror an awe of themselves and of their very old religion which
soon passed into imitation, and from imitation to an open cult
which survived through subsequent ages. The Roman would have
the best of reasons for revering such a rite since, in the shipload of
miscellaneous religions which he imported with his baggage, was
a precisely parallel tradition that had been practised for centuries
by his own people in the groves of his native land. When the
Christian bishop in his turn arrived in England he too had the best
reasons for persecuting such a cult since he and his spiritual for-
bears had already been engaged for generations in trying to root
it out of the old world. Suppose that although its adherents were
perennially persecuted under the names of witches and warlocks,
it survived; and that names which now are venerated were then
found in its chief ranks. Suppose that Jeanne d'Arc, for one,
now a beatified saint of the Catholic Church, had been quite
justifiably martyred as a plain witch, sworn enemy of the estab-
lished Church and its divine Head, the victim and protagonist of
the age-old cult of the groves and gardens, the worship of the
fiercely-procreative Powers. Suppose that the God Pan did not
die as the lying voice proclaimed on the Aegean; suppose that he
has never died. ...
These and similarly fascinating suggestions are found embodied
in Miss Murray's important book, and indicate something of its
lames
al
lre Vene
CI


240
THE GREAT GOD PAN
scope. It fills a place unoccupied, so far as I am aware, by any
other volume on the subject. Payne Knight's famous monograph
(1864) is fragmentary and badly-organized; out of print besides,
it is now extremely rare. Lea's History of the Inquisition, a
splendid work within its limits, deals almost wholly with the
judicial aspect of the witchcraft phenomenon without touching the
implications that underlie it. The books by Michelet and Jules
Bois are rather skilful vulgarizations that owe a great part of
their interest to the fancy or stylistic power of their authors. Miss
Murray's book is at once comprehensive and concise, and it is
assuredly not designed for those who desire a short cut to occult
information, nor for that rather numerous class of special reader
represented by the person in Harold Frederic's novel who bought
an expensive work on Serpent-Worship for its supposedly snappy
bits. To unearth the latter in Miss Murray's volume one has to
wade through quantities of original data in old English and old
French which is enough to discourage the type of reader above
named. Its tone is throughout as austere as the ideal Ph.D. thesis
which perhaps it originally was.
Miss Murray has performed at least one service to the study of
the science of history. She has opened out a new and compara-
tively untouched field of research where before there was a blind
alley of a priori assertion or wholesale denial. The whole question
of witchcraft has suffered, as she says herself, from the unscientific
attitude of two classes of commentators. On one side are the peo-
ple who believe implicitly in every bit of contemporary evidence,
and place upon it an entirely unwarranted supernatural construc-
tion; on the other are those who ascribe it all to hysteria and auto-
suggestion. It is a little startling to read that among the believers
are found Bacon, Raleigh, Sir Thomas Browne, Boyle, Selden, Dr
Henry More the Platonist, Sir George Mackenzie the celebrated
physician, while among the sceptics there are no names better
known than those of Reginald Scot, a country squire, the political
bigot Filmer, and Webster, a fanatical preacher. But it never
seems to have occurred to either class of contemporary observer that
the existence and power of witchcraft, throughout the Middle
Ages and much later, might be due not to any infra-natural
propaganda on the part of the demoniac powers, still less to any
abnormal capacity for illusion among the victims, but simply to an


CUTHBERT WRIGHT
241
as
IS
ancient and enduring organization which dared to hold its own
for centuries with the official Church. It is totally impossible
within the limits of an ordinary notice to give a comprehensive
review of Miss Murray's book; the most one can do is to add a
few notes which may be of interest as outlining and illuminating
a particularly tenebrous bypath of comparative religion.
Everyone knows that the mythology of the Greeks, which passed
over to and thoroughly permeated the Roman world, was simply
an elaboration, under a fanciful and popular form, of a very simple
metaphysic. The original principle, the Life-Force, as a modern
philosopher would say, was Eros-Love. He was the author of
all creation, "father of men and gods.” Only, since the popular
mind flees abstractions, this primordial principle quickly assumed
a variety of personifications and symbols. Among the former were
Pan, Priapus, the whole train of fauns and satyrs, manifestations
of the sexual instinct responsible for fertility. Among the symbols
were certain animals; for example, the bull, figured in primitive
art as breaking the egg of chaos with his horns and thus producing
life. Another symbolic animal was the calf, attribute of the same
unknown Eros, as the cow was of his feminine counterpart,
the multi-named Goddess of Love. Thus when the Israelites
momentarily forsook their leaders Moses and Aaron and "went
a-whoring” after strange gods in the wilderness, they paid their
devotions to a Golden Calf. In this they were simply reverting to
a primitive Love-Worship that they had learned in Egypt or in
the course of their wanderings near the coasts of the Mediterranean.
“They mounted on it and made merry,” say the Scriptures. The
original term is somewhat more explicit, and we cannot doubt that
the doings of the Israelites on the Golden Calf were the logical
conclusion of any sacrifice to the principle of love. But of all
the symbolic animals the most omnipresent was the goat, always
associated with Dionysus, one of the manifestations above named,
and with the satyrs, some of whom were represented as men only to
the waist.
For the principal attribute of the unknown Eros, the adorers
of one or another of the various manifestations of the Love-
Principle took the phallus as the most obvious of palpable symbols.
It is beside the point to trace the history of this fetishism up to
the time when millions of these objects were destroyed by the
TS


242
THE GREAT GOD PAN
indignant Christians. It is enough to state that a people as serious
as either the Egyptian or Roman did not attach to it in their wor-
ship the licentious and burlesque associations which it has since
assumed. What was it but the attribute of the oldest of the gods,
the principle of life itself, or the symbol of the chief of human
pleasures? The phallus was carried processionally in the streets
to the expressed disgust of St Augustine; it was worn like a
religious medal by women; carried as an amulet on the necks of
girls and boys. Its most elementary form, the letter T, was a
symbol of the ancient cult long before the Christian adopted it as
the sign of salvation.
Centuries elapsed, however, and the votaries of the pale
monotheist of Judea passed into power in the train of an Oriental
Caesar who saw that sign in the reddened sky on the eve of a
campaign, and so mistook its significance as to give us the Mediaeval
Church and the temporal power of the Popes. The ancient religion
fled to the woods and caverns, bearing all its vessels and sacred
improprieties; it became a rustic, a pagan thing, and this word gives
the key to its future character, that of obscure and democratic rival
to the proud young Church patronized by the hard-hearted baron
and the king. That silent, subterranean revolt was the one endur-
ing, the one really popular heresy wherewith the Mediaeval Church
had to contend. All the others were pets and prodigies of the
governing class, subtle and suspect religions born quite as much
from the pride of life as from the revolt of the flesh. The cult
of instinct and fertility has nothing to do with the Manichean
Church of Albi in the French Midi which so frightened the priests
and the Pope that they extinguished a beautiful and voluptuous
civilization in blood and fire. It has nothing to do with the secret
rites and perversions of the Templars, an aristocratic community
whose great God was the Order, and which perished like Lucifer
through its own pride. The inherited cult of fertility, springing
from the barren glebes and sterile uplands of the Middle Ages, was
simple like humility and suffering themselves. It was born from
the loneliness and desperation of the serf. Extenuated in the long
crucifixion of the feudal age, the peasant cried in the words of
Christ: "Why hast thou forsaken me?” to an absent god who did
not answer. He beat upon the doors of his Church; they were
closed by the Interdict, and the priest was carousing with the


CUTHBERT WRIGHT
243
as
baron. Then the serf went over frankly to the side of Satan, the
god of the crops on which hung his life; and of the poor. Those
mysterious Sabbats where he ate and danced with his neighbours,
where his God appeared to him, where he snatched the desperate
pleasure of the body under the indulgent darkness, were the only
Heaven that he knew, and it is natural that they came to embody
a religion for which he was willing to die.
The earliest appearance of the old cult, as recorded by Miss
Murray, was on an island near Jersey circa 500. Dionysus noted
that the rites of Bacchus were performed there by women crowned
with leaves; "they danced and made a great shouting,” he says.
Theodore of Tarsus, organizer of the Saxon Church in the next
century, forbade any one at the kalends of January to disguise
himself in the skins of animals such as the bull and goat. (Sic.)
In 1282 the priest of Inverkeithing was cited before his bishop for
leading a fertility dance around the phallic figure of an unknown
god. In the same century "witchcraft” was recognized as an offi-
cial sect by the Church, and the machinery of justice set against
it in certain places. Many of them went to the stake glorifying
their God who, they swore, had actually communicated to them
at the Sabbat and who was, we learn from Miss Murray, none other
than the Chief of the Coven or community. And in the very next
century Jeanne d'Arc was tried, condemned, and punished for com-
munications with just such a Chief, considered both by victims and
their judges to be the Demon in person.
This business of Jeanne d'Arc is evidently the bomb-shell of Miss
Murray's book though it is modestly consigned to an appendix
where it is exposed in a lucid and, it must be said, a plausible
fashion. Miss Murray's case is the stronger because it seems to
clear up the problem that has always troubled students of the
Pucelle. How could this wonderful child, who for two years led
the life of a man of action, performing under the most taxing con-
ditions feats of manifest strategy and cool good sense, be, by her
own confession, an hysterical creature haunted by visions and
voices, something like a degenerate nun? The explanation is very
simple, says Miss Murray coldly; the Pucelle was a witch. The
voices she heard on her campaigns, and later in her cell, reduce
themselves to those of the Coven. Others besides herself at the
Court of Charles VII were members of the cult, Gilles de Rais (also
COM-
P


244
THE GREAT GOD PAN
condemned as a witch) the beau duc Alençon, perhaps the king
himself. Just as the despairing peasant turned to the Lord of
Darkness for fertility in his field and a little happiness for himself,
so a whole nation in desperation accepted the aid of Satan, and by
His means booted out the English. Thus the Devil is the original
promoter of French nationalism. We must confess that ever since
1918 we have rather felt that way ourselves; but that is beside the
point. Our objection to Miss Murray's theory is that it is illogical
to place a few conjectures, however fascinating, in opposition to
everything we know of France in 1431, of the Pucelle's own words
and acts, recorded by the blood-hound clerks who were bent upon
convicting her. We have not the space, and feel besides that it
would be wearisome for the reader to refute step by step Miss
Murray's theory, but we feel that it would be easy to refute by
any one who studies attentively the records of the trial. It is
important to remember that the inspiration for the Pucelle's
martyrdom came not from the Inquisition or the French Church,
but from the army of occupation. The English were bent on
getting rid of her as a witch, because such a culmination would
neutralize the tremendously important effect of Charles the Sev-
enth's coronation at her hands. Her crime was first and foremost
political and unforgivable; she had beaten John Bull in open fight.
The testimony of the two monks who attended her: "We heard
her in the midst of the flames invoke several times her archangel,”
might indeed be equivocal were it not that the same witnesses
affirmed the last word that passed her lips to be the name of
Christ.
The other and last case of historic interest cited by Miss Murray
occurred in the seventeenth century, the epoch of dawning
scepticism and the Royal Society, under James VI of Scotland,
later first Stuart king of England. His cousin, Francis Stuart,
Earl of Bothwell, nephew of Mary Stuart's lover, was reputed to
be the great “Devil” of the Scottish Coven. One may remark that
Scotland has always been a fruitful field for the more terrifying
forms of mysticism; it was there that the last survivors of the
Temple withdrew, carrying with them the skull of the last Grand
Master, or, as some say, the head of their goat-god Baphomet
whose final resting place, strange to add, was said to be Charles-
town, S. C., care of the late General Pike. "The wisest fool in
nore


CUTHBERT WRIGHT
245
Christendom” had an extraordinary horror of his cousin. When
the latter was introduced unexpectedly into Holyrood Palace early
in the morning, the king, always undignified, was caught in the
middle of his toilet; he ran this way and that trying to escape, and
finally cried: “Take my life if you will—you will never have my
soul.” Such a cry is inexplicable on any other ground save that of
Bothwell's position as incarnate God of the Scottish Coven who
appeared to his neophytes at their meeting according to the im-
memorial tradition. Francis Stuart died in obscurity at Naples,
and was “in those parts famous for suspected negromancie.” The
Witchcraft tradition seems to have survived longer in the rural
districts of Britain than elsewhere, and I suppose that many could
be found to corroborate Arthur Machen's statement that stories,
implying the tradition which, however degraded it may have
become, was originally the consolation of the serf and the ancient
religion of the Greeks, may still be heard in many English
hampsteads.
Cuthbert Wright
ma
m
lal


A MONUMENT
THE SPANISH Farm. By R. H. Mottram. With a
preface by John Galsworthy. 12mo. 275 pages.
Lincoln Mac Veagh. The Dial Press. $2.50.
THE Flemish girl Madeleine symbolizes as heroine of The
1 Spanish Farm her invaded, defended, finally uncompensated
and resentful country; a peasantry stoic and parsimonious; female
inertia, afflicted by the whims of a male world and outlasting them;
the inertia of nature-trodden fields, storms and dog-days, inalter-
able horizons; in sum, the materialism of her race, her class, and
her sex. The narrative is direct, the style is homely, the episodes
are ordinary; the landscape has no subtlety, the faces have no char-
acter. And in the end, she seems to stand at the end of a street,
a little more than life-size, a little less than heroic, solid and
colourless like a monument.
The reader of pure narrative must always portion out praise
and blame, he must foresee the consequences if they are ever to be
seen. But in the case of Mr Mottram's work, he must identify the
more intimate motives as well, he must account for actions so
simply told that they seem to be unmotivated. The author has
refrained, as if by the dictates of good taste, from prying into
Madeleine's life; he appears not to have wished to know more
of its secrets than she knew; even the plain style, a style of denim
and khaki, reveals nothing that the stolid girl herself would not
have allowed one to see.
One reads the account of her life during the War with a sense
less of incompletion than of inadequacy, just as, looking at a
monument in a public square-a memorial less of character than
of prominence-one wants to see instead an intimate miniature
full of compact meanings, a bundle of letters, a book of memoirs.
The traditional novel attempted to satisfy this curiosity of the
reader, which is a latent friendliness toward innumerable persons
whom he does not know, to divide races and crowds into single,
no longer interchangeable characters, to expand the straitness of
experience, and dispel the intolerance of the incurably lonely


GLENWAY WESCOTT
247
mind. Fiction has been an affair of personalities, of confidences
which in life one dares not expect and scarcely dares to receive,
of answers to the "why" which the slightest human action pro-
vokes. The world of the traditional novel is a world of faces,
each of which, if seen in the street, would make one pause, and
wonder, and perhaps follow the stranger a little way in the direc-
tion of his unknown purpose. Its beauty lies in the uniqueness of
each object and each face, the precision of each colour, and the
radiance of each profile. The ideal novel, in this sense, would
be like a tree whose every twig lies on the boughs in full relief-
not even the smallest can unfold without rousing one's joy, or
break and fall without producing sadness. Mr Mottram offers
one instead a generalization, the idea of a tree, and all the leaves
are indistinct.
There is an imaginative world founded upon generalization,
which compels by other aspects than the interest of specific differ-
ences, a world not agitated by eccentricities, not obscured by a
mirage of moods, not illustrating superficial but illuminating pro-
found motives; in it any man is all men, any April or May is
springtime, any death is death itself, and any war is war; it is
the world of poetry as the ancients understood it. Mr Mottram
has conceived what is ostensibly a novel as if it were a poem; this
is the novelty by which it is distinguished, and perhaps the only
standard by which it fails. For his work is thoroughly prosaic:
classic reticence without mystery, simplicity without dexterity,
sobriety without serenity or grace. One feels regretfully that the
universalization which he seems to have intended might have been
realized with all the felicity and power of a coherent rhetoric,
and Madeleine might have moved across page after perfect page
with the intensity and stateliness of a ghost.
C
GLENWAY WESCOTT


THE LETTERS OF MADAME
THE LETTERS OF MADAME, The Correspondence of
Elizabeth-Charlotte of Bavaria, Princess Palatine,
Duchess of Orleans, called “Madame” at the Court
of King Louis XIV. Translated and edited by Ger-
trude Scott Stevenson. 2 vols. Tomo. 572 pages.
D. Appleton and Company. $10.
rre-
M H E editress of this new selection from the coarse, keen,
I diverting correspondence of Louis XIV's immortal German
sister-in-law, might have seen in a certain cheap German edition
of the letters, a type of composition somewhat preferable to that
followed in her own grander one. She has enriched her selection
with good biographical notes; the penny booklet sported none.
Inserted into the text crowded on the poor war-paper, brief criti-
cal pieces, paragraphs, and notes established at intervals the his-
torical and social background of France in its Age of Bronze,
described changing conditions and new forces brought into play
at Versailles, and helped innumerable expressions to the point and
meaning given them by Madame and her relatives and friends.
Through this fusion of historical data not presented in the form
of prefaces, and the miscellaneous, scandalous old-world corre-
spondence, a touching, picturesque, and humorous continuity estab-
lished itself. Louis XIV thinks that by winding the vines of the
electoral houses about his own family trunk, he will succeed in
placing the crown of the empire on his proudly flowing peruke.
The Elector Palatine thinks that by situating a daughter in Louis'
immediate family, he will gain the friendship and the indulgence
of arméd Gaul for his impoverished land, consecrated battling-
ground of western Europe. Elizabeth-Charlotte is promptly if not
quite decorously converted to Catholicism, and goes to France to
marry Monsieur, frère unique du roi. She finds her husband in
the power of certain corrupt things in swords and periwigs; finds
some consolation in the fraternal kindness of the king, but loses
it, perhaps because of a pride which occasionally misleads her
honesty, when Louis wastes her fatherland and the widow Scarron
IVE
Tron


PAUL ROSENFELD
249
rises to favour. The great part of her life she is deserted in the
midst of the most pompous, gallant, and stylish court in Europe,
persecuted by her impossible husband, humiliated in her children,
entirely without credit. She reads books; examines her medals;
writes letters. For upward of forty years she writes letters daily,
voluminous letters. Sundays she writes to her aunt the Electress
Sophie of Hanover and to her daughter the Duchess of Lorraine.
Mondays she writes to her stepdaughter the Queen of Sicily and
to the court of Spain. Tuesday the courier goes to Prussia,
Wednesday to Modena, Thursday to Hanover again, and Friday
again to Lorraine; and on Saturday, Elizabeth-Charlotte makes up
the arrears of the week. No letter leaves her before she has copied
it with her own hand. To Cardinal Dubois she remarks: "When
in a single day I have written twenty sheets to the Princess of
Wales, ten or twelve to my daughter and twenty to the Queen of
Sicily, I am a little tired.” And the running plinth of the evolving
life-story gave to the bodies and bits of letters themselves a rich-
ness of reference and an enjoyability the method of composition
used by Mrs Stevenson does not approximate.
The cheap German booklet exhibited another effect of art. No
dispute but Madame was the unabashed gossip and scandalmonger,
generous of surprising bedroom information, which the handsome
Appleton volumes so emphatically demonstrate. Her marriage be-
came a shell upon the birth of her daughter, and no serious charges
of infidelity were laid against her by any contemporary. She had
had the perfect Protestant upbringing. Hence her desolated nature
found a compensation in playing up and perhaps overplaying the
commonness of her husband's vice; and no doubt she found that
in those dull times her spicy dishes tasted of more. Yet she had
a depth greater than the new selection, in its effort "to include
everything of real interest and importance, and especially every-
thing bearing upon relations between England and France at the
period,” seems to reveal. In a court of neurotics, in a family in-
capable of seriously entertaining either love or grief, she was the
hearty human being, brusque, ironical, and proud, but inexhaus-
tibly warm, direct, and faithful in feeling. Her coarseness was
external largely, partly a matter of a time of velvet draperies,
gold festoons, and rankest smells between, partly a matter of up-
bringing, partly the expression of a certain masculinity uncon-


250
THE LETTERS OF MADAME
sciously produced by her domestic situation. It is true that Eliza-
beth-Charlotte doted upon lard-and-cabbage salad. Her favourite
nickname for Madame de Maintenon signified in plainest Rhenish
both the antiquity of the conscientious favourite's person and of
her profession. During zero weather at Versailles she used to
take a half dozen spaniels into bed with her to keep her warm.
But beneath the exquisite dignity and decorum of Louis XIV
there lay a strong strain of insensibility and hard concentration
upon self. Beneath the personal delicacy and intellectual sensi-
tiveness of Madame de Maintenon there was the dryness of the
heart which puts her for ever beneath the order of great women.
Monsieur and Monseigneur the Dauphin were august monstrosi-
ties; and even Philip V of Spain, most affectionate of the family,
he who during the absences of his queen fell into melancholy
stupors from which no other woman could rouse him, watched
his consort's funeral train disappear along the road and then re-
sumed the hunt interrupted by it.
Madame however respected and passionately loved all her life,
the aunt of Hanover who had educated her, her father and his
morganatic wife, her governess and the governess's husband, her
morganatic half-brethren, her friends, her son the Regent, her
daughter of Lorraine, the two daughters of Monsieur by his first
marriage. Saint-Simon mischievously says the walls of her high
cabinet at Saint-Cloud were banked with the counterfeits of the
princes palatine and other German potentates, their consorts, rela-
tives, offspring, and prime ministers, and that she spent her hours
regarding them. She fought for her children indifferent to her
own interest; saved her son from the minion d'Effiat, and her
daughter from a humiliating marriage with the lame bastard du
Maine at the cost of her remnants of favour. Personal letters
entreated the new Elector Palatine of the collateral branch in be-
half of her disinherited brothers and sisters. Stones were lifted
for the sake of Leibnitz whom the Hanoverians sent her, and it
was with sorrow that she discovered the pre-established harmony
did not provide her with influence, and that the best of all pos-
sible worlds was too poor to afford the philosopher a decent living.
She wept for the basely wasted Palatinate and the poor peasants
deceived by manifestos issued in her name, and denounced the
wantonness of Louis and Louvois in the Dauphin's chamber.
Doubtless the necessity of translating Elizabeth-Charlotte's crude,


PAUL ROSENFELD
251
juicy German into the relatively colourless contemporary English
is somewhat responsible for the coldness of the picture given by
the Appleton edition: it is true a great number of the letters which
appeared in the German booklet reappear in this. But the Ger-
man editor had the grace to include a larger number of intimate
touching pieces: certain in which Elizabeth-Charlotte recalls to
her aunt passages from their common life; in particular certain
addressed to her beloved half-brother the Raugraf Carl Ludwig;
and these warm homely tones, coming early in the series, and at a
strategic point, fixed positively the writer's deep humanity, and
greatly increased the dramatic interest of all her matter.
It is the candy of the correspondence the new edition brings:
two volumes of tart sweets, queer-coloured crystals of life, witty
characterizations, piquancies given with astonishing literalness and
comedy and irony. The exhibition of selected aspects, the concen-
tration of special qualities, has rendered these more readily amus-
ing. Madame appears chiefly in the light rôle of entertainer, a
part she knew how vivaciously to fill! Here she is almost entirely
exhilaration, brusque of attack, in grand good humour, full of
good horse-sense, curious, sound with an inner health maintained
amid so much that was stale and theatrical and spoiled; above all,
notably free of any intellectual inhibition! The fun of her at all
times flows directly from this trait, for, unconcerned as an unbut-
toned infant, she lets every bareness out; enfant terrible of forty
and fifty and sixty, she is like to break into her enormities in the
midst of the most solemn company. That is doubly our fortune,
since it is never possible to find Elizabeth-Charlotte of the Rhine
anything but a wise, subjectively truthful, realistically minded
woman. Together with her seventeenth-century pride of birth and
her seventeenth-century resignation and stern melancholy, she pos-
sessed her epoch's ease and justice of expression: Saint-Simon re-
marks it, he whose verbal orchestra was enormous beside Madame's
fiddle, oboe, and drum. Even her ignorance was fruitful: she calls
someone, Dubois probably, "false as the gallows." Her descrip-
tion of her son shows how neatly, with means drawn in character-
istic German fashion from fairy-mythology, she is able to portray
a perplexing mixture:
“The sort of thing must have happened to him (the Regent]
that we read of in the fairy-tale, where the fairies are invited to


252
THE LETTERS OF MADAME
the baptism of a child. One, wishes that the baby may grow up
beautifully; another, that he shall be eloquent; the third, that he
shall be learned in all the arts; the fourth, that he shall excel in
all manly exercises, such as fencing, riding and dancing; the fifth,
wishes him skill in the art of war, the sixth, that he may outdo
all his comrades in valour. But the seventh fairy, whom they
had forgotten to invite to the baptism, says 'I cannot take away
from this child any of the gifts that my sisters have given him.
But I shall so oppose him all his life that the good gifts they
have given him will be of no use to him. For instance, I shall
make him walk so badly that people will think him lame and
hunchbacked. He shall grow a thick black beard and make such
hideous faces that he will be an object of ridicule. I shall make
him dislike all athletics, and I shall plant evil desires in his heart
which will make him lose his taste for all the arts, music, painting
and drawing. I shall give him a love of solitude and horror of all
good people, etc.'”
Besides, the drollery, the inescapable touch of clownery in the
very essence of her manner of apprehension! Was not existence a
harmless farce with herself as female comedian? She who was
so jealous of her "glorious” rank, and so strict in her conduct,
describes in this fashion the laying of the corner-stone of a church:
as
“I returned last night at ten o'clock from Paris, where I had
gone at eleven in the morning to take part in a long and boring
ceremony at a convent called l’Abbaye-aux-Bois. It was a matter
of laying the first stone of a church which is being built. I was
met with drums, fifes and trumpets, and had to go a long way.
It quite put me out of countenance. You can't imagine what a
large crowd had collected. After Mass, which was accompanied
by very fine music, we went to the place where the foundations
had been hollowed out. The priests sang psalms and chanted
prayers in Latin, of which I understand not a word. I was under
a canopy in a place covered with a carpet and I had an armchair.
As soon as I was seated, they brought me the stone, on which my
name was engraved, and in the middle of which was my medal.
Some mortar was thrown on it which nearly smothered me, then
they placed another stone on top of which I had to bestow my


PAUL ROSENFELD
253
blessing. I confess that the thought of it made me laugh. ...
Afterwards there was a great deal of music and it all finished with
a Te Deum. ... I was so tired that immediately I found myself
in a cool room I fell asleep like a dormouse.”
10C
UTC
Ultimately, it is Madame's piece of life which defies fragmen-
tation much as she herself in her superior-mindedness defied the
incompleteness of her existence. It was truly lived; it is too
closely interwoven with singular and important historical material
not to interest immediately in any form. Possibly in other times
life possessed a spectacularity as intense as that given it at Ver-
sailles within her own; but certainly in no other did the whole
of it go more entirely into grandiose staging of the daily gesture
of a single individual, his eating, hunting, evacuation, sleeping;
and it was Elizabeth-Charlotte's fortune or her fate to observe
the author and star of the performance, prime pattern of his age,
and his majestic family of hunchbacks, nymphs, and sodomites
not alone closely, but from the wings. Since she never doubted
her perfect parity with all of them, she viewed these historical
relatives and their environment without idealization white or
black; and it is this unceremoniousness of her picture of the human
comedy of Marly, Fontainebleau, and Saint-Cloud, which the
French have never forgiven her. How many accusations of un-
friendliness toward France, and incomprehension of its culture,
has it not cost her! But we who have no national preconceptions
about the court of the grand monarch, find her relentless indi-
viduality of great value. Her prejudices are more easily to be
discounted than Saint-Simon's, being emotional and personal
and uncomplicated by many-branched intellectual and social
considerations.
At least as permanently as her important historical contacts, it
is the strangeness and mustiness of the individual adventure re-
vealed that conducts the interest through her letters. So much
in her character makes a strong demonstration of the immutability
of racial modes; it is a curious pleasure to behold how unessen-
tially a princess born in Heidelberg Castle differs from a proper
German grandmother or coarse and virtuous German cook; and
one can match characteristics of staunch faithfulness and detesta-
tion of "die Pfaffen” out of one's own slender, transatlantic expe-


254
THE LETTERS OF MADAME
rience, with those of a person gone into her Bourbon vault these
odd two hundred years. Yet this specimen of “brave Frau” was
enmeshed in circumstances the most special and remote: made
party to a political match of a particularly humiliating kind; al-
most deprived of life in the classic scene of stateliness among
golden equipages, processions of smoking copious dishes, wolf-
hunts, theatricals, balls, and whispered excitement; robbed not
only of her dowry, but of coffers and chests, to find regiments for
her husband's friends. Even after Louis succumbed to his
gangrene, and her son became master of the state and she first
lady, Madame had no rich life. Convinced that women had too
long ruled in France, she rigorously refrained from influencing the
regent “lest people say her son was governed by his mother”; and
her fine feeling cost her one of her few satisfactions: for while
her son had spent much of his time with her before his government,
during it she saw him “perhaps a quarter of an hour every day.”
Yet life was ever strong in Prince Rupert's niece. She had her
books; she had her medals; she had her mind and humour. She
had her pen. Small wonder a packet of miscellaneous old letters
stands the whole gaff of time!
Paul RoseNFELD


THE DOGMAS OF NATURALISM
THE METAPHYSICAL FOUNDATIONS OF MODERN
PHYSICAL SCIENCE: A Historical and Critical Essay.
By Edwin Arthur Burtt. Kegan Paul. 145.
ve
THIS book deals with a profoundly interesting subject: the
uncritical assumptions which were made by the founders of
modern physics, and through them became part of the unques-
tioned apparatus of ordinary thought. The critical portion of
the book is admirable; the constructive part, by comparison, is
somewhat disappointing. The author traces, through Copernicus,
Kepler, Galileo, Descartes, and Newton, the amazing growth of
modern science—a progress to which there has been nothing com-
parable in the history of the human intellect except the Greek
discovery of geometry. He shows how irrational were many of
the beliefs which led to the most fruitful discoveries, and what
unwarranted prestige these beliefs acquired through their prag-
matic success. All this is most convincing; but the moral drawn
in conclusion seems hardly the right one. We are urged to revive
certain mediaeval dogmas, such as belief in final causes. The true
course seems rather that which the modern philosophy of physics
is adopting, namely, the creation and assimilation of radically new
ideas, such as space-time and the quantum, which refute both sides
equally in most of the time-honoured controversies with which the
seventeenth-century pioneers were concerned.
In regard to Copernicus and Kepler, one of the interesting his-
torical facts which the author makes clear is the dependence of
their discoveries upon the Italian renaissance. Copernicus went to
Italy in 1496, and stayed there six years. He was greatly in-
fluenced by the Platonic anti-Aristotelian movement, of which the
original motive was literary rather than philosophic or scientific.
The Platonists were at the same time Pythagoreans, and as such
assigned a more prominent place to number as the key to the uni-
verse than Aristotle had done. One of the prominent represen-
tatives of this school was Novara, Professor of Mathematics and
Astronomy at Bologna:


256
THE DOGMAS OF NATURALISM
"Novara was Copernicus's friend and teacher during the six
years of his stay in Italy, and among the important facts which
we know about him is this, that he was a free critic of the Ptolemaic
system of astronomy, partly because of some observations which did
not agree closely enough with deductions from it, but more espe-
cially because he was thoroughly caught in this Platonic-Pytha-
gorean current and felt that the whole cumbrous system violated
the postulate that the astronomical universe is an orderly mathe-
matical harmony."
As everyone now knows, certain of the Greeks had advocated
what we call the Copernican system. The discovery of this fact
emboldened Copernicus, who felt that in his innovations he could
still appeal to classical authority—a very vital matter in the atmos-
phere of the renaissance. Dr Burtt maintains that Copernicus had
no strictly scientific grounds for his theory, but only an aesthetic
preference. The scientific grounds, he says, were first supplied
by Galileo.
Kepler, we learn, made his living by astrology, as people would
not pay for astronomy. He remarked: “God gives every animal
the means of saving its life—why object if he gives astrology to
the astronomer?” (In spite of this observation, Dr Burtt main-
tains that he really believed in astrology.) It is interesting to
reflect that if he had lived in the present age the police would have
forbidden him to make a living in the only manner compatible
with his studies. Under the influence of democracy, we restrict
more and more the ways of transferring money from fools to clever
men, such as card-sharping, gambling, and fortune-telling; business
and politics are now almost the only legally tolerated methods, and
these are too strenuous to be the merely occasional occupations of
a hard-working astronomer. Who knows how many Keplers are
lost to the world in consequence of such interference?
Copernicus and Kepler were fortunate men who, on inadequate
grounds, advocated what afterwards proved to be important truths.
The real founder of modern science is Galileo. It was he who
· showed the way of eliciting mathematical laws from observations.
Greek mathematics was a priori (except in Archimedes): empiricism
before Galileo was non-mathematical. Mathematical empiricism
begins with Galileo: Galileo's experiments on falling bodies first
ce
OC
mo


BERTRAND RUSSELL
257
gave the world formulae for variable motions expressed in mathe-
matical terms. This was the really essential step in the creation
of modern scientific method; and for this reason I should myself
rank Galileo even above Newton.
Galileo never said "e pur si muove” any more than Wellington
said “Up, Guards, and at 'em.” But he evidently thought it.
Dr Burtt quotes a passage from a letter of his to Kepler:
"Oh, my dear Kepler, how I wish we could have one hearty
laugh together! Here at Padua is the principal Professor of
Philosophy, whom I have repeatedly and urgently requested to look
at the moon and planets through my glass, which he pertinaciously
refuses to do. Why are you not here? What shouts of laughter
we should have at this glorious folly! And to hear the Professor
of Philosophy at Pisa labouring before the Grand Duke with logical
arguments, as if with magical incantations, to charm the new
planets out of the sky!”
I incline to the belief that the souls of those professors now inhabit
the State Legislature of Tennessee.
Newton, it appears, believed in absolute space and time, not
so much on account of his rotating bucket, which gave a scientific
ground, as because he wanted to provide for the omnipresence
and everlastingness of God. Dr Burtt's discussion of this puzzling
topic is, however, far from adequate; the whole matter is more
difficult than he seems to realize.
The author is certainly justified in maintaining that we have
no right to assume that all phenomena can be explained by the
methods of mathematical physics. We have the right to try these
methods everywhere, but their success in certain fields does not
prove that they will be successful elsewhere. A metaphysic based
upon the assumption that mathematical physics must explain x
everything is, therefore, to be rightly condemned as a dogmatism.
This, however, affords no justification for the opposite dogma,
namely, the assumption that mathematical physics does not explain
everything. And mathematical physics itself has changed so
much in recent years that a criticism of Newton is no longer so
relevant as it was thirty years ago. We need new conceptions,
not a revival of old ones. The historical part of Dr Burtt's work


258
THE DOGMAS OF NATURALISM
is very interesting, as showing what absurd ideas may on occa-
sion prove fruitful. (The present reviewer has noticed only one
historical error, namely, that the solution of the cubic equation is
attributed to Cardan instead of to Tartaglia.) But the con-
structive philosophy which he suggests at the end of his book is
too retrospective to be of value in our present perplexities.
BERTRAND RUSSELL


BRIEFER MENTION
BLIND Man's BUFF, by Louis Hémon, translated by Arthur Richmond
(12mo, 244 pages; Macmillan : $2). A diet of soap-box Socialism and
settlement-house Christianity, with a paprika of West End uplift, is
not quite the thing upon which a young Irishman, labouring on the
docks in London, can nourish his soul. The author gives a deft and
vivid picture of the well-meant influences with which charity tries to
make the life of the labourer “praise the Lord”; Mike O'Brady stumbled
into a state of grace which possessed no meaning for him. The salvation
of the "pub" gives him his only release—and that ends in an outburst
of drunken violence. Although not comparable with Maria Chapdelaine,
this is a discerning study of life in London's East End.
The Rector OF Wyck, by May Sinclair (12mo, 258 pages; Macmillan:
$2.50) gives another spin to the old wheel—the boredom of the younger
generation with the life of the old, and the sad fruits thereof. As a
gambling device, this theme has lost most of the element of excitement;
one can usually guess the winning numbers. Miss Sinclair has clothed
it with her accustomed good talk and insight, but the novel is among her
minor efforts. The world war and another of those romantically accurate
German bullets which have since been so useful for novelists—“through
the heart”-help toward a solution.
ing electricity in talent of the document” illustoo pages ; Dora
Those BARREN LEAVES, by Aldous Huxley (12mo, 400 pages; Doran ; $2.50).
No more interesting "human document" illustrative of the disastrous
effect upon human talent of the drying up of imagination under the wither-
ing electricity of “cleverness” could possibly be found than this uncon-
vincing book. Mr Huxley were wise to give his days and nights to the
study of James Joyce! He would then discover that no genuine sardonic
"saeva indignatio” can exist without a certain sacrifice of the brighter layers
of superficial smartness. Mr Huxley has neither the reckless romantic
touch of Michael Arlen, nor a deadly enough “susurrus mortis.” The
blight of jeering sterility which he attributes to his age has its birth in
the poisoning of the springs of his own imaginative faculty under the
curse of intellectual “Smart-Aleckism.” Conditions that drive the author
of Ulysses into a divine madness form a not unpleasing environment for
this complacent scoffer.
Segelfoss Town, by Knut Hamsun, translated by J. S. Scott (12mo, 368
pages; Knopf: $2.50) while it does not possess the epic qualities of the
Growth of the Soil, is nevertheless a broadly conceived and a sustained
piece of work. Some of the characters of Children of the Age reappear
here; there is the same sturdy imaginative quality, the same deliberation
of pace, the same insight. Hamsun takes a group of people and manipu-
lates them into the pattern of his own deeply-felt observation of life.


260
BRIEFER MENTION
The UNHOLY EXPERIMENT, by Constance Smedley (12mo, 319 pages;
Lincoln Mac Veagh, Dial Press: $2) derives much of its interest from
its setting—a swath across America seen from a tourist train. This setting
is discussed by an English woman and an American editor who develops
from debater into suitor before the Grand Canyon is reached. The story
is well told, searching as to character creation, but ending in unrest for
most of the international caste, and in pure farce for the ingénue from
Kansas who had caused all the complications.
The Best STORIES OF Sarah Orne JEWETT, selected and arranged with a
preface by Willa Cather (2vols., 12mo, 612 pages; Houghton Mifflin : $4)
is a splendid collection of New England sketches as true of Maine to-day
as when they were written. The best point about this selection is that
it has omitted so little, and has arranged the tales so that favourite char.
acters can be followed easily through several rôles, leading man, deus ex
machina in the next story, and comic relief in the next. Mrs Blackett
and her son William of Green Island are easily the most attractive of
the delicately depicted characters, though The Queen's Twin and Betsey
Lane who took flight from Byfleet Poor-Farm are delightful. Regional
stories of this calibre are rare. Mary Wilkins in her early stories of
Massachusetts occasionally reaches as high a level, and Willa Cather
herself has been as faithful in her delineations of prairie life as these
stories are to the slender, potent charm of "the exquisite flower of New
England virtue."
Barren Ground, by Ellen Glasgow (12mo, 511 pages; Doubleday Page:
$2.50). This powerful story, sombre, grave, massive, and convincing,
lifts its author to that assured level of literary achievement, so satisfying
in its own peculiar genre, occupied just at present in England by the
kindred talent of Sheila Kaye-Smith. First love is seldom delineated with
such patient and tender penetration, nor has sex-disillusionment been often
so formidably portrayed. In this book a Virginian “growth of the soil"
rises obstinately to resist the opposing growth of the wilderness and
gathers up, as though upon the back of some dark non-human Centaur,
all the pitiable burden of human sorrow; remaining itself taciturn, re-
served, inscrutable; yet evocative of mysterious resignation for those
who are lucky enough to attain its secret.
INNER Circle, by Ethel Colburn Mayne (12mo, 208 pages; Harcourt
Brace: $2). The best stories in this collection are in our opinion The
Latchkey and Black Magic. The rest, with the exception of Still Life,
are of slighter texture. What one feels about this sensitive author is
that, like some Katharine Mansfield who has grown more experienced,
she exploits her peculiar feminine perceptions in regard to such things
as dresses, coiffures, furniture, et cetera, to an extent beyond what is
aesthetically justified by the proportions of her art. But her ears are
undoubtedly quick to catch those voices within voices of complicated human
souls, such as leave behind them, when they pass us by-as in this tale
of Still Life-such sick, perverse, malignant reverberations.


BRIEFER MENTION
261
DIONYSUS IN Doubt, a Book of Poems, by Edwin Arlington Robinson
(12mo, 117 pages; Macmillan: $1.75). By far the most characteristic
poetry in this volume has nothing to do with either Dionysus or Demos.
It is to be found in the two sets of Sonnets and in that sad enchanting
narrative which divides them, entitled Mortmain. Here, in the manner
we love, Mr Robinson refines upon and purges from all dross, his own
unique wistfulness. Here once more, under the shadowy elm-trees of
Tilbury Town, we touch those polished figurines which are his puppets,
cold, austere, unbreakable, like red and white chess-men, moved by hushed
fingers in puritan sleeves across a board of walnut-wood. For, although
he himself is only too apt to forget it, the poetic strain in this fine poet
which posterity will enjoy, will not be either philosophical or psychological.
It will be of a “Doric delicacy,” it will be airy, fantastic, imaginative,
arbitrary.
The Pot OF EARTH, by Archibald MacLeish (16mo, 45 pages; Houghton
Mifflin: $1.25) is a poem in three movements, describing the adolescence
of a girl, her early marriage, and her death in childbed. She is com-
pared to the gardens of Adonis which are described in The Golden
Bough. Seeds germinated rapidly in these shallow pots of earth; but
having no roots, the plants withered as rapidly away, and on the eighth
day they were carried out with images of the dead Adonis and Aung into
the sea. . . . Considered for its ideas or technique, the poem is a dilution
of The Waste Land, but it retains more blood than water. We have here
another example of Eliot's amazing power to influence other poets with-
out leading them to surrender their own personalities. · As for MacLeish,
there is much to be admired in his free handling of metres, the vigour
of his images, and his ability to write an intelligent narrative in this age
of numbskull lyrics. Few poets of his generation have achieved more
in their second volume.
The CREATIVE SPirit, an Inquiry into American Life, by Rollo Walter
Brown (12mo, 233 pages; Harpers: $2.50). Professor Brown's analysis
of modern life in America is sane and penetrating. His thesis is, in brief,
that the various inhibitions imposed by our methods in industry, the church,
the arts, literature, and education are stilling the individual pioneer spirit
without which life is devoid of enthusiasm. Such a theory, left unre-
lated to detailed facts, would be more interesting than valuable. The
value of Professor Brown's work lies in his careful summary of every
phase of life to which his theory applies, and in his constructive sugges-
tions, which are neither too conservative for the situation nor too radical
to be attempted. It may well be urged that such a work is useless, be-
cause no matter how enlightened it is, it will still reach only a small
minority, and, in general, a minority which has no power to effect a
change. We may more hopefully suppose, however, that a change must
come, and if it is to be an intelligent change, someone must first pre-
pare a survey of the entire situation with a plan of attack. This has
been Professor Brown's task. He has accomplished it with brilliant
success.


262
BRIEFER MENTION
ONE HUNDRED DRAWINGS, by Abraham Walkowitz, with introductions by
Henry McBride, John Weichsel, Charles Vildrac, and Willard Hunting-
ton Wright (8vo, 122 pages; Huebsch: $10) represents the mature achieve.
ment of an American artist who is not half so widely known as he deserves
to be. Walkowitz is an unclassifiable modernist who has managed to pre-
serve his personality amid a welter of distracting and transitory plastic
importations, and to go forward slowly, but steadily, toward the realiza-
tion o