in The
Dial for November and December, 1924 and January, 1925.
2 The Travel Diary of a Philosopher, by Count Hermann Keyserling, trans-
lated by J. Holroyd Reece (2 vols., 744 pages; Harcourt, Brace: $10).


COMMENT
355
vital Westerner, becomes more and more apparent. “Spirituality
appears generally more spiritual in the East than in the West, but
it does not follow necessarily that the former is really nearer to the
spirit: it need only follow that its body is more meagre. ... The
Chinese . . . are the only [Asiatic] people whom I know whose
psychic bodies can stand the comparison with our own.”
And America where everything is Western, only more so this
too must be admired, at least in its potentialities, for it is what all
are coming to. Except for the one black moment, the one cry of
personal despair: “Chicago is awful,” he is sympathetic through-
out, admiring especially the high standard of comfort. “Pros-
perity is regarded as normal in America. This signifies something
absolutely positive. Why is it that here and only here this solu-
tion of the problem of life has been found which implies the
absolutely best solution for us Westerners? No matter how
strange this may sound it has been due to religion. ... American
Christianity lacks every form of animosity against the wealthy."
After tracing the growth of worldliness in religion from the time
of Calvin, he goes on to qualify his statements with a distinction
which could be made only by the most sympathetic observer: “It
is not true that wealth means the summum bonum to the better
Americans, no matter how much this may apply to many of them:
it means the exponent of the best which is very different.”
When I had read this I suddenly understood what had seemed
to me an incomprehensible piece of hair-splitting on the part of
an otherwise straight-forward American woman. “I should re-
spect my husband's money more,” she said, “if he had made it
himself.” “You mean you would respect him more?” “No,
his money.” She regretted to see him dressed in the old clothes
of his grandfather, but realized that clothes do not make the
man.
It is from the uncorrupted heart of vigorous American Chris-
tianity that the attack on the evolutionary theory proceeds. Odd
that the most progressive-minded of churches should be the most
eager to attack the theory which was considered at one time the
foundation of the idea of progress. The poisoned essence of the
evolutionary theory would have been, from the church's point of
view, this very idea of man's perfectibility by education and breed-


356
COMMENT
ing. Why then so much futile anger against a bottle from which
the poison has escaped, against a theory, once splendid, but now
only a garbled news item? I think the uselessness of it must be
irritating. Unlike the much less tenable theory that alcohol is a
race poison, the evolutionary theory has proved incapable so far
of being put to work.



THE DIAL
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Entrée en Vence Oil
Jean Marchand
The New Song
Arthur Schnitzler 355
Chanson Equivoque
Scofield Thayer 369
The Hudson Memorial
Roger Fry 370
The Hudson Memorial Stone
Jacob Epstein
The Summer Sea
George H. Dillon 374
Three Drawings Pen and Ink
Clement Wilenchick
A View of Modern Music
Paul Rosenfeld 375
Insects
Isidor Schneider 396
Kersta
Count Eduard von Keyserling 397
Elegy
Joseph Auslander 412
Three Paintings
Early American
The Dandyism of Wallace Stevens Gorham B. Munson 413
Lullaby for a Tired Lady
Robert L. Wolf 417
Book Reviews:
An Adherent of the Actual
Charles K. Trueblood 418
Social Earth
G. R. Elliott 422
An Illustrious Doctor
Marianne Moore 425
Codifying Milton
Kenneth Burke 429
Briefer Mention
431
The Theatre
Gilbert Seldes 435
Musical Chronicle
Paul Rosenfeld 439
Comment
The Editors 443
VOLUME LXXIX NUMBER 5
50 cents a copy


THE DIAL
SCOFIELD THAYER
Editor
MARIANNE MOORE
Acting Editor
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
GEORGE H. Dillon, whose work has appeared in a number of
magazines, was born in Jacksonville, Florida, on November 12,
1906, and is an associate editor of Poetry. He has recently
been awarded the John Billings Fiske Prize by the University
of Chicago where he is now a student and an editor of the univer-
sity magazine, The Forge.
CLEMENT WILENCHICK was born in New York of Russian parents
in 1900. He is a graduate of the Ethical Culture School, and
has studied art in New York and Philadelphia. His work was
exhibited by Stephen Schlesinger in New York in 1924.
ISIDOR SCHNEIDER was born in Ruthenia in 1896. He received.
his education at the College of the City of New York and has
contributed to Reedy's Mirror, The Little Review, The Forum,
and other magazines. A novel, Doctor Transit, published under
his initials, has just appeared.
Joseph AUSLANDER was born in Philadelphia on October 19, 1897.
He is a graduate of Harvard, has studied at the Sorbonne, and
has taught at Harvard and at Radcliffe. His work has appeared
in The Atlantic Monthly, The Bookman, The American Mer-
cury, and elsewhere; Sunrise Trumpets, a first volume of his
poems, was published in 1924.
The three Early American paintings which are reproduced in this
number of The Dial were among those shown under the
auspices of the Whitney Studio Club in its exhibition of Early
American Art held in February, 1925.
G. R. ELLIOTT was born in London, Ontario, in 1883. A graduate
of the University of Toronto, he has studied in England and in
Germany, receiving the degree of doctor of philosophy from
Jena. He taught for five years in the University of Wisconsin,
and since 1913 has occupied the chair of English Literature at
Bowdoin College.
VOL. LXXIX. No. 5. NOVEMBER, 1925
The Dial (founded in 1880 by Francis F. Browne) is published monthly at Camden,
New Jersey, by The Dial Publishing Company, Inc.-J. S. Watson, Jr., President-
Lincoln MacVeagh, Secretary-Treasurer. Entered as second-class matter at Post
Office, Camden, N. J. Publication Office, 19th and Federal Streets, Camden, N. J.
Editorial and Business Offices at 152 West 13th Street, New York, N. Y. Copyright,
1925, by The Dial Publishing Company, Inc.
$5 a year
Foreign Postage 60 cents. 50 cents a copy



THE OXXII
IV
VI
!
I
NDIAL
IM
NOVEMBER 1925
THE NEW SONG
BY ARTHUR SCHNITZLER
Translated From the German by Kenneth Burke
“T AM not to blame for that, Herr von Breiteneder . . . if you
I will allow me, no one can say that!” Karl Breiteneder heard
these words as though from a long distance, and yet he knew well
enough that the man who spoke them was walking along right
here beside him-yes, he even caught the fumes of wine that the
words were wrapped in. But he made no answer. It wouldn't do
for him to get involved in explanations. He was too tired and
shaken up by the frightful experience of last night, and he just
wanted to be left alone in the fresh air. For this reason he had
not gone home, but preferred to walk the breezy, deserted streets
in the morning, out into the open country, towards the wooded
hills towering above the light May mists. But one shudder after
another ran through him from head to foot, and he felt none of
the exhilarating freshness which had in the past set him tingling
in the spring air after a sleepless night. He kept continually seeing
the horrible picture that he had fled from.
The man beside him must have just caught up with him. What
did he want of him? Why was he defending himself ? He had
had no thought of openly accusing old Rebay, even though he was
perfectly aware that this man was chiefly responsible for what had
happened. He gave him a sidelong glance. The black overcoat
was rumpled and spotted; one button was missing, th: others were
nicked. A dead flower was hanging by its stem from one button-
hole. Last evening Karl had seen this flower when it was still


356
THE NEW SONG
fresh. Adorned with this same arnation, the band-master Rebay
had sat at the jangling piano and ground out the music for the
various productions of the Ladenbauer Company, just as he had
been doing for the last thirty years. The little inn had been
packed; the tables and chairs extended even to the garden-for
to-day, as it said on large yellow posters with black and red let-
ters, was the “first reappearance, after her recovery, of Fräulein
Maria Ladenbauer, known as the 'white blackbird.'”
Karl took a deep breath. It had become quite light; for some
time now others had been on the street besides him and the band-
master. Pedestrians approached from behind, or came in from the
side-streets, or even down towards them from the woods. For the
first time it occurred to Karl that this was Sunday. He was glad
that he had no engagements to take him back to the city, although
his father would have overlooked his absence on a week day too,
as he had often done before. The old machine shop in the Alser-
strasse was for the present getting along without him; and his
father knew from experience that the Breiteneders always settled
down when the time came. But the affair with Marie Ladenbauer
had never seemed to him quite right. “You can do as you please,”
he once said quietly to Karl. “I was young once . . . but I never
had anything to do with my girls' families! I thought too much
of myself for that.”
If he had listened to his father-Karl thought now—then he
would have been spared many things. But he had been very fond
of Marie. She was a good-natured creature, she clung to him, she
was not talkative; and when she went for a walk with him arm in
arm, no one would have taken her for a person who had been
through so much. Besides, everything was just as respectable at
her parents' as in any middle-class home. The house was kept
clean, books stood on the shelves; often old Ladenbauer's brother,
who was a city official, came for a visit, and then very serious
matters were discussed: politics, elections, and local conditions.
Frequently on Sunday Karl played tarots upstairs with old Laden-
bauer and crazy Jedek, this same Jedek who in the evenings
executed waltzes and marches on the edges of glasses and plates.
And if he won, his money was paid out to him on the spot, which
was certainly not always the case at the café. In the alcove by
the window, before which hung crystallotypes with Swiss land.
Yd
e


ARTHUR SCHNITZLER
357
scapes, sat the pale lanky Frau Jedek who in the evening on the
stage recited tiresome poems; she would chat with Marie and
keep nodding almost continually. But Marie would glance across
at Karl, wave at him playfully, or sit down next him and look
into his cards. Her brother was employed by a large firm; and
when Karl gave him a cigar he would come right back with an-
other. Also, occasionally he would bring something to eat from a
downtown confectioner's for his sister, whom he adored. And
when he was about to leave, he would say with his eyes half
closed, “Unfortunately I have another engagement. ..." Of
course, Karl preferred most to be alone with Marie. And he
thought of the morning when he had gone with her over the same
road which he was now taking, out towards the softly rustling
forest that began up there on the hill. They had both grown
tired, for they came straight from the café where they had sat
with the entire singing club until dawn; they lay down under a
beech on the edge of a sloping meadow, and fell asleep. They
awoke at noon, in the hot summer stillness, went further back into
the woods, chattered and laughed the whole day without knowing
why; and it was late in the evening before he brought her back
to the city again for the performance. ... There were many
lovely things like this to remember; and the two lived very con-
tentedly without thinking of the future. At the beginning of the
winter Marie suddenly became ill. The doctor had strictly for-
bidden all visits; for the illness was an inflammation of the brain
or something similar, and every excitement should be avoided. At
first Karl went to the Ladenbauers' every day to enquire about her,
but later, as the thing drew along, he cut his visits to every two
or three days. Once Frau Ladenbauer said to him at the door:
“To-day you may come in, Herr von Breiteneder, but please be
careful not to give yourself away."— “How could I give myself
away ?" Karl asked. “What has happened?” — “Yes, I am
afraid there is no more hope for her eyes.”— "How is that?"-
"She can hardly see any more. Alas! this is left over from her
sickness. But she doesn't know yet that it is incurable. Pull
yourself together, so that she won't notice anything." Then Karl
stammered a few words and left. He was suddenly uneasy at the
thought of seeing Marie again. It seemed to him as though he
had liked nothing about her so much as her eyes: they had been


358
THE NEW SONG
so bright, and she had always laughed with them. He would
come to-morrow. But he didn't come, nor on the next day, nor
the day following. And he always kept putting the visit farther
ahead. He did not want to see her, he explained to himself, until
she had become inured to her fate. Then it happened that he had
to go on a business trip which his father had been pressing him to
take for some time. He travelled considerably, was in Berlin,
Dresden, Cologne, Leipzig, Prague. Once he sent old Frau Laden-
bauer a card saying that he would turn up as soon as he got back,
and to please give Marie his best wishes. He came back in the
spring, but he did not go to the Ladenbauers'. He could not bring
himself to go. ... Naturally he thought of her less from day to
day, and made up his mind to forget her entirely. He hadn't
been the first and only one. He heard nothing at all about her,
became more and more at ease, and for some reason often imagined
that Marie was living in the country with some relatives he had
often heard her mention.
Then yesterday evening—he was going to visit acquaintances
who lived in the neighbourhood—he happened to be passing the
inn where the performances of the Ladenbauer Company used to
be given. Absorbed in his own thoughts, he was about to go on
when the yellow poster struck his eye: he knew where he was, and
he felt a shock even before he had read a word. Then he saw the
black and red letters in front of him: “Maria Ladenbauer, known
as the 'white blackbird'—first appearance after her recovery,”
and he stood still as though paralyzed. At the same moment
Rebay appeared at his side, as if he had grown out of the ground,
his white dishevelled hair uncovered, the black shabby top-hat in
his hand, and a fresh flower in his button-hole. He greeted Karl:
"Herr Breiteneder-well, the idea! And surely you will honour
us again this evening! Miss Marie will go wild with delight when
she hears that her old-time friends are coming around to see her.
Poor thing! We've stood a lot for her, Herr von Breiteneder;
but now she has pulled through.” He talked on for quite a while,
and Karl did not move, although he wished he were far away from
here. But suddenly he took hope, and he asked Rebay if Marie
couldn't see anything at all, if she didn't at least get a glimmer of
light. "A glimmer of light," the other man answered. “What
are you thinking of, Herr von Breiteneder! She sees nothing,
10


ARTHUR SCHNITZLER
359
absolutely nothing!” He exclaimed with a peculiar elation,
“Everything coal black in front of her. . . . But you will soon
convince yourself, Herr von Breiteneder, that everything has its
good side, if one dare say that—and the girl has a voice, more
beautiful than ever! ... And she is good, good all the way
through. Even more friendly than she used to be. Well, you
know her, of course—ha ha! - Ah, to-day a great many are com-
ing who know her ... naturally not so well as you, Herr von
Breiteneder; for naturally certain things are over with now. But
that will come again! I knew one who was blind and had twins-
ha ha ! Look who is there," he said suddenly, and Karl was
standing with him in front of the ticket window where Frau Laden-
bauer was sitting. She was bloated and pale, and looked at him
without saying a word. She gave him a ticket; he paid, hardly
knowing what was happening to him. But suddenly he blurted
out, “Don't tell Marie, for God's sake, Frau Ladenbauer ...
don't tell Marie that I am here! ... Herr Rebay, don't tell her
anything about it!"
"All right, then," Frau Ladenbauer said, and turned her atten-
tion to the other people who were waiting for tickets.
"Not a word out of me,” Rebay said. “But afterwards, that
will be a surprise! Then you will join in? A big time-ho ho!
But I must go now, Herr von Breiteneder.” And he had disap-
peared. Karl walked through the crowded room; and in the garden
immediately adjoining, he sat down far to the rear, at a table where
an elderly couple had taken places in front of him. They said
nothing, examined the new guest in silence, and nodded to each
other mournfully. Karl sat there and waited. The performance
began, and Karl heard the old familiar things again; except that
it all seemed peculiarly changed to him, since he had never sat so
far back from the stage. First the band-master Rebay played a
so-called overture, only a few harsh isolated chords reaching Karl.
Then as the curtain rose, Ilka, the Hungarian, appeared in a
bright red dress and spurred boots; she sang Hungarian songs and
danced czardas. After her was a humorous lecture by the comedian
Wiegel-Wagel. He entered in siskin-green evening dress, an-
nounced that he had just returned from Africa, and reported all
sorts of nonsensical adventures which had culminated in his mar-
riage to an old widow. Then came a duet by Herr and Frau


360
THE NEW SONG
Ladenbauer; both wore Tyrolean costumes. After them, in a dirty
white clown's outfit, followed crazy little Jedek. First he showed
his skill at juggling, while his gigantic eyes wandered among the
audience, as though he were hunting for someone. Then he lined
up some plates in front of him, and pounded a march on them
with a wooden staff; he ordered glasses, and played a melancholy
waltz tune with moist fingers, all the while looking at the floor
and smiling soulfully. He walked off, and Rebay attacked the
keys imposingly. A whisper passed through the room into the
garden, people put their heads together—and suddenly Marie was
standing on the stage. Her father who had led her up here had
dropped down again immediately, and she stood alone. And Karl
saw her standing there, with the sightless eyes in the sweet pale
face; he saw her quite plainly, how at first she simply moved her
lips and smiled a little. Without knowing it, he had leaped up
from his chair, was leaning against the green lamp, and could have
almost shrieked with misery and pity. And now she began to
sing. In an entirely strange voice, soft, much softer than before.
It was a song that she had always sung; Karl had heard it at least
fifty times. But the voice remained peculiar and strange to him.
He could not recognize the quality of this voice until she came to
the refrain, with its lines, "they call me the white blackbird, at
home and where I work.” She sang all three stanzas, with Rebay
accompanying; and, as he always had done, he frequently looked
up at her severely. When she had ended, applause broke out, loud
and thunderous. Marie smiled and bowed. Her mother came up
the three steps to the stage, Marie reached out her arms as though
she were feeling for her mother's hands; but the applause was so
great that she had to sing her second song immediately, and this
one too Karl had heard for the fiftieth time or more. It began,
"My love and I go to the country to-day ..." and Marie tossed
back her head with as much enjoyment, and swayed as lightly, as
though she really were going out into the country with her love,
and could see the blue sky and the green meadows, and could
dance out in the open, the way it said in the song. And then she
sang her third song, the new one.-
"Here's a little garden,” Herr Rebay said, and Karl gave a
start. The sunlight was now brilliant. The street gleamed in the
distance, everything was bright and living. "We could sit down
el
> So


ARTHUR SCHNITZLER
361
there,” Rebay went on, “to a glass of wine. I am thirsty already.
It is going to be a hot day.”
"Hot, did you say!” said someone behind them. Breiteneder
turned around. ... What, this chap had run after him too?
What did he want with him? ... It was crazy Jedek; he had
never been called anything else, but it was evident that he would
soon really go completely insane. A few days ago he had threat-
ened to kill his pale lanky wife; and it was hard to explain why
he was allowed to run at large. Now, in his dwarf-like smallness,
he slunk along next to Karl. Two wide-open unexplainably cheer-
ful eyes stared out of a yellowish face; on his head sat his notorious
little soft grey hat with the worn-out feather; he was carrying in
his hand a slender walking-stick. And now, suddenly ahead of
the others, he had taken a seat on a wooden bench which leaned
against the little low house; he beat his stick heavily against the
green painted table, and called for the waiter. The two others
followed him. The street wound on up past the green wooden
lattice-work, past sorry little villas, and lost itself in the woods.
The waiter brought wine. Rebay laid his top-hat on the table,
ran his fingers through his white hair, made his usual gesture of
rubbing his smooth cheeks with his two hands, shoved Jedek's glass
aside, and bent over the table towards Karl. ... "I haven't gone
out of my head yet, Herr Breiteneder! I know what I am doing!
... Just why should I be to blame? ... Do you know whom I
used to write songs for when I was young? ... For Matras!
That's no small matter! And they attracted attention! Words
and music by me! And many of them were taken over into other
plays!”
"Let the glass stay there,” Jedek said, and sniggered to himself.
“Come, Herr von Breiteneder,” Rebay went on, and pushed the
glass away again. “You know me, and you know that I am a
respectable man! And there is never anything indecent in my
songs, never anything smutty! . . . And the song that old Laden-
bauer was prosecuted for that time was written by someone else!
... And to-day I am sixty-eight, Herr von Breiteneder—and
that's getting up in years. And do you know how long I have
been with the Ladenbauer Company? ... Eduard Ladenbauer
was still living then, the man who started the company. And I
have known Marie from the time she was born. I have been with


362
THE NEW SONG
the Ladenbauers for twenty-nine years—next March is my thirtieth
anniversary. ... And I didn't steal my melodiesthey are by
me, all by me! And do you know how many of them altogether
have been played on the hurdy-gurdy? Eighteen! Isn't that so,
Jedek ?”
Jedek continued laughing silently, with his eyes wide open.
Now he had slid all three glasses over in front of him, and began
stroking their edges lightly with his fingers. The sound was deli-
cate, and somewhat plaintive, like the notes of far-off oboes and
clarinets. Breiteneder had always greatly admired the trick,
but just now he could not stand these sounds at all. People at
the other tables began listening; some people nodded their satis-
faction; a fat gentleman clapped his hands. Suddenly Jedek
shoved all three glasses away again, crossed his arms, and stared
out at the white street where more and more people kept wander-
ing up towards the woods. Things were hazy before Karl's eyes;
it seemed to him as though people were dancing and floating be-
hind spider webs. He rubbed his forehead and his eyelids, he
wanted to think clearly. ... He couldn't help it! It was a
frightful misfortune—but he was not to blame for it! And sud-
denly he stood up; for as he thought of how it ended, his breast
was almost bursting. “Let's go,” he said.
“Yes, fresh air is the main thing,” Rebay answered.
Jedek had suddenly become nasty, for no evident reason. He
stopped in front of a table where a harmless couple was sitting,
brandished his walking-stick, and shouted in a loud voice. The
two harmless people were embarrassed and tried to hush him up;
the others laughed and thought he was drunk.
Breiteneder and Rebay were already out on the white street;
and Jedek, who had become quiet again, came prancing after them.
He took off his small grey hat, hung it on his walking-stick, and
held the stick with the hat over his shoulder like a gun, while
with the other hand he waved vigorous greetings up towards the
sky.
“You don't need to think that I am going to make excuses,"
Rebay said, with his teeth chattering. “Oho, I don't have any
reason to! None at all! I had the best intentions, and any one
will grant me that. Didn't I myself help her rehearse the song?
... Come; I did! Yes, when she was still sitting in the room


ARTHUR SCHNITZLER
363
O
with her eyes in bandages, I rehearsed it with her. . . . And do
you know how I got the idea? It is a misfortune, I thought to
myself, but everything isn't lost. She still has her voice, and her
beautiful face. . . . And I told her mother this too, when she was
half out of her mind. 'Frau Ladenbauer,' I said, ‘nothing is lost
yet-please listen to me!' And then to-day with all these insti-
tutions for the blind, where after a time they can even learn to
read and write. ... And then I knew onea young man who
had been blind for twenty years. Every night he dreamed of
the most beautiful fireworks, of all possible kinds of lights—”.
Breiteneder broke out laughing. “Are you talking in earnest ?”
he asked him.
“Ach!” Rebay answered gruffly. “What do you want then?
Do you want me to kill myself, is that what you want? ...
Why? My soul, I've had enough bad luck in this world - Or
do you think it isn't enough for one life, Herr von Breiteneder, if
a person once wrote pieces for the theatre the way I did as a young
man, and if at sixty-eight he has to accompany hoarse-voiced hams
on a rickety old tin pan for a few dirty kreutzer, and write songs
for them? ... Do you know how much I get for a song? ...
You would be surprised, Herr von Breiteneder!”
“But they are played on the hurdy-gurdy,” said Jedek, who was
now walking along beside them seriously and correctly, even
elegantly.
"What do you want of me?”' Breiteneder said. It seemed to
him suddenly as though the two were persecuting him, and he did
not know why. What had he to do with these people? ... But
Rebay went on talking: “I wanted to start the girl on a career!
... Do you understand, a new career! ... And with this same
new song! ... With the same one! ... And maybe it isn't
pretty? ... Maybe it isn't touching? ..."
Little Jedek suddenly held Breiteneder back by the sleeve, raised
the index finger of his left hand to command attention, set his lips,
and whistled. He whistled the melody of the new song which
Marie Ladenbauer, known as the "white blackbird,” had sung last
night. And he whistled it very well, for that was another of his
tricks.
"The melody had nothing to do with it,” Breiteneder said.
"How is that?” Rebay shouted. They were all walking
new
as a


364
THE NEW SONG
swiftly, almost running, although the road was mounting consid-
erably. "How is that, Herr von Breiteneder? ... The text is
to blame, you think? ... Yes, for God's sake, is there anything
in the text, then, that Marie herself didn't know about? ...
And in her room, when I was studying it with her, she didn't cry
a single time. She said, “That's a sad song, Herr Rebay, but it is
beautiful! ... It's beautiful,' she said. ... Yes, of course it's
a sad song, Herr von Breiteneder—and it's a sad lot, too, that's
fallen to her. And you don't expect me to write her a cheerful
song? ..."
The street was lost in the forest. The sun gleamed through
the branches; out from the bushes came the sounds of calling and
laughter. They were all three walking abreast, as swiftly as
though each were trying to get ahead of the others. Suddenly
Rebay began again, “And the people—I'll be damned if they didn't
applaud like mad. ... I knew beforehand that she would make
a big hit with that song :- And it made her happy too . . . she
was fairly laughing all over, and the last stanza she had to repeat.
And it's a touching stanza too! When it first occurred to me
there were tears in my own eyes—you know, on account of the
way it hinted back to the other song which she always sings. ..."
And he sang, or rather spoke, except that he brought out each
rhyme like an organ note:
V
S
Cros
"How wonderful and beautiful the world once was to me,
When I could see the sun shine on every field and tree,
When on Sundays with my sweetheart I would walk across the
land,
And just because he loved me he would lead me by the hand;
But now no stars can shine for me again, nor any sun-
And happiness and love for me such things are done.”
“Stop!” Breiteneder shouted. “I heard it before, didn't I!"
"Maybe it isn't beautiful ?'' Rebay said, waving his top-hat.
"There aren't many who can make songs like that these days.
Five gulden old Ladenbauer gave me ... that is my honorarium,
Herr von Breiteneder. And besides, I helped her rehearse for it."
And Jedek raised his index finger again, and sang softly the
refrain:


ARTHUR SCHNITZLER
365
“O God, how bitter now is everything,
Since I shall never never see the spring."
“Why then, I ask you?” Rebay shouted. “Why? ... I was
in there with her right afterwards ... isn't that so, Jedek? ...
And she was sitting there with a happy smile, and drinking her
glass of wine, and I stroked her hair and said to her, 'Well, Marie,
do you see how people liked it? Now people are sure to come out
to us from the city too; the song will attract attention. . . . And
you sing it magnificently . . .' And so on, the sort of thing you
say in situations like that. . . . And the proprietor came in, too,
and congratulated her. And she received flowers—they weren't
from you, Herr von Breiteneder. . . . And everything was in per-
fect order. . . . So why should my song be to blame? That is
all nonsense!"
Suddenly Breiteneder stopped and grasped Rebay by the shoul-
ders. “Why did you tell her I was there? ... Just why? ...
Didn't I beg you not to tell her anything?"
"Let me go. I didn't say anything to her! She must have heard
it from the old woman!"
"No," Jedek said obligingly, and bowed, "I took the liberty,
Herr von Breiteneder—I took the liberty. Since I knew that you
were there, I told her that you were there. And since she often
asked after you when she was sick, I told her, 'Herr Breiteneder
is there ... he was standing in the rear next to the lamp,' I told
her, 'and has been having a splendid time!'”
"So?" Breiteneder said. He felt a lump rise in his throat,
and he had to turn his eyes away from the hard stare that Jedek
had fixed on him. Tired out, he dropped down on a bench which
they happened to be passing, and closed his eyes. Suddenly he
saw himself sitting in the garden again, and old Frau Ladenbauer's
voice was ringing in his ear: “Marie sends you her best. Wouldn't
you care to come along with us after the performance ?” He remem-
bered how he had suddenly felt at this, as serenely at ease as though
Marie had pardoned him everything. He finished his wine and
had a better brand brought to him. He drank so much that every-
thing in life seemed much simpler to him. He immediately began
paying attention to the remainder of the programme contentedly,
he clapped like the others, and when the performance was over
sav


366
THE NEW SONG
son
he went in the best of humour through the garden and the hall
into the private room, to the round corner-table where the company
usually gathered after the performance. Some were already there:
Wiegel-Wagel, Jedek and his wife, somebody or other with glasses
whom Karl did not know at all-everyone greeted him, and no one
was especially astonished at seeing him again. Suddenly he heard
Marie's voice behind him: “I am getting along all right, mother,
I know the way." He did not dare turn around; but there she was,
already sitting beside him and saying, “Good evening, Herr
Breiteneder—and how are you?' And at this moment he remem-
bered that in his time she had always used "Herr” in addressing
some young man who had once been her lover. And then she
ate her supper; everything had been placed before her already cut,
and the whole party was as cheerful and satisfied as though there
had been no change whatsoever. "It went well,” old Ladenbauer
said. "Now better times are coming again.” Frau Jedek told
how everyone had found Marie's voice much more beautiful than
before, and Herr Wiegel-Wagel raised his glass and exclaimed,
“To the health of the convalescent!” Marie held up her glass,
all the others clinked their glasses with hers, Karl too touched it
with his own. Then he felt as though her dead eyes would sink
into his own, and as though she could look deep down within him.
Also, her brother was there, very fashionably dressed, and he
offered Karl a cigar. But Ilka was the most hilarious of all; her
admirer, a fat young man with a strained expression in his eyes,
sat opposite her and conversed animatedly with Herr Ladenbauer.
But Frau Jedek had not taken off her yellow rain-coat, and was
always peering into a corner where there was nothing to see. Two
or three times people came over from a neighbouring table and
congratulated Marie. She answered in her usual quiet manner,
as though nothing had been altered in the least. And suddenly she
said to Karl, “But why so silent?'' Now for the first time he
noticed that he had been sitting there the whole time without open-
ing his mouth. He now became more vivacious than the others,
joining in the conversation; except that he spoke no word to Marie.
Rebay told of the good old days when he had written songs for
Matras, recited a farce that he had written thirty-five years ago,
and even acted out the rôles himself to some extent. Especially
as a Bohemian musician he aroused much laughter. About one the
party broke up. Frau Ladenbauer took her daughter's arm. Every-


ARTHUR SCHNITZLER
367
one was laughing, shouting ... it was quite strange, nobody
found anything exceptional in the fact that the world around Marie
was all in blackness. Karl walked beside her. Her mother asked
him harmlessly about this or that: how things were getting along
at home, whether he had had a good time on his trip—and Karl
talked hurriedly of various things he had seen, especially the
theatres and music halls that he had been to, and he kept wonder-
ing at how securely Marie kept to her path, led by her mother,
and how contented and cheerful she seemed. Then they were all
sitting in the café, a smoky old place which was already empty by
this time. And the fat friend of the Hungarian Ilka treated the
company. And now, in the midst of all the noise and commotion,
Marie had shifted quite near to Karl, just as in earlier times, so
that he could notice the warmth of her body. And suddenly he
felt her hand touch and stroke his own, although she did not speak.
Now he would gladly have said something to her . . . something
sweet and reassuring—but he could not. . . . He gave her a side-
long glance, and it seemed to him as though something were watch-
ing him out of her eyes; yet it was not the look of a human being,
but something uncanny, strange, which he had never known before
-he shuddered as though a ghost were sitting next to him. ...
Her hand trembled and was gently withdrawn, and she said softly,
"Why are you uneasy? I am just the same as I always was.”
Again he was unable to answer, and he talked to the others. A
little while later a voice suddenly exclaimed, "Where is Marie ?”
It was Frau Ladenbauer. Now it occurred to them all that Marie
had disappeared. “Where is Marie ?” others exclaimed. Some
arose, old Ladenbauer stood at the door of the café and called out
into the street, “Marie!” They were all excited, they began talk-
ing to one another. Someone said, “But how could a person let any
one like that get up and leave by herself ?" Suddenly a shout came
up from the court, “Bring some candles! ... Bring a light!"
And a woman shrieked, “Jesus Mary!” That was old Frau Laden-
bauer's voice again. They all rushed through the little kitchen
of the café into the court. Dawn was already creeping over the
roofs. The court of the old one-storied house was encircled by a
wooden passage-way; up above, a man in his shirt-sleeves leaned
against the railing and looked down, holding a candlestick with a
lighted candle in his hand. Two women in night-gowns appeared
behind him. Another man was running down the creaking steps.
ero


368
THE NEW SONG
nov
me
That is what Karl saw first. Then he saw something gleaming
faintly in front of him; someone held up a white lace shawl and
let it fall again. He heard words near him: "Nothing can be done
now ... she doesn't move. ... Get a doctor! ... What is
the matter with the ambulance. ... A policeman! A policeman!
..." People were all talking together, some hurried out to the
street, mechanically Karl followed the one figure with his eyes: it
was the lanky Frau Jedek in her yellow coat; she held both hands
against her forehead in despair, hurried away and did not return.
... People were pressing behind Karl. He had to push back
with his elbows in order not to fall over Frau Ladenbauer, who
was kneeling on the ground, holding Marie's two hands in hers,
rocking them back and forth and crying, "Say something . . . say
something! ..." At last someone was coming with a lantern,
the janitor, in a brown dressing-gown and old slippers; he threw
the light into the face of the prostrate woman. Then he said, “But
such a pity! And she must have fallen with her head right there
against the wall.” And now Karl saw that Marie lay stretched
out alongside the coping of the well. Suddenly the man in his
shirt-sleeves on the passage-way spoke up: “I heard a noise of some
kind; it hasn't been five minutes!” And everyone looked up at
him, but he only went on repeating, “It hasn't been five minutes
since I heard the noise ..."- "How did she get out there?”
someone whispered behind Karl. “But I tell you," another person
answered, "she was familiar with the house. She felt her way
through the kitchen, then up the wooden stairs, and then down over
the railing—it is too bad!" So the whispering went on around
Karl, but he did not know any of the voices, although the people
who were talking were certainly acquaintances of his. But he
did not turn around. Somewhere in the neighbourhood a cock
crowed. Karl felt as though he were dreaming. The janitor
placed the lantern on the edge of the well. The mother cried,
“Isn't there a doctor coming soon?” Old Ladenbauer held up
Marie's head so that the light of the lantern fell full on her face.
Now Karl saw plainly how the nostrils dilated, the lips quivered,
and the dead open eyes looked out the same as before. He saw
too that it was red and wet in the spot from which Marie's head
had been lifted. He called, “Marie! Marie!” But no one heard
him, and he did not hear himself. The man up above on the pas-
sage-way was still standing there, leaning over the railing, with
S


SCOFIELD THAYER
369
the two women beside him, as though they were watching a play.
The candle was out. An early violet twilight lay over the court.
Frau Ladenbauer had folded the white lace shawl and laid Marie's
head against it; Karl stood motionless, staring into space. Of a
sudden it was light enough. He saw now that everything about
Marie's face was completely quiet and nothing was moving but
the drops of blood which ran down on the moist pavement from
her forehead, from her hair, across her cheeks and neck. And he
knew now that Marie was dead. ...
Karl opened his eyes as if to drive away a bad dream. He
sat alone on the bench by the road-side, and he saw band-master
Rebay and crazy Jedek hurrying down the same street as they had
all come up together. The two seemed to be talking heatedly
together, gesticulating violently. Jedek's walking-stick stood out
like a fine line against the horizon. They went faster and faster,
accompanied by a light cloud of dust, but their words were lost
in the wind. On all sides the landscape sparkled; and far below,
in the heat of noon, lay the hazy, quivering city.
CHANSON EQUIVOQUE
BY SCOFIELD THAYER
Say not the ways of love are young
And that the earth is very free
For all the songs we sang are sung
And ancient is the changing sea,
For all the hearts we thought were broken
Have taken on new leaves again
And this their youth is a sure token
That love is but a slip of pain,
That love is but a way of ending
What better had not e'er begun
And that for such there is no mending
Beneath the shadow of the sun.


A
THE HUDSON MEMORIAL
BY ROGER FRY
SO
TO
YO
sen
Crn
D ROM a sociological point of view the controversy over the
T Hudson Memorial is full of interest. It shows us what we
had almost come to forget—that the Philistines are always with
us. (My thanks to A. B. W. for his timely revival of the word.)
The Philistine has been quiet for many years, and questions of
art have come rather to be quarrels between different groups of
artists, or at least of people owing some allegiance to art, and
now suddenly the Philistines have woken up and found a voice.
It would be extremely interesting to find, if one could, the causes
which have thus stimulated to renewed self-confidence and vocal
expression that vast mass of people who generally acquiesce silently
in what is done for them. Is it Mr Sickert joining the Academy?
Is it the presence of an amateur painter in the Government? Is
it one sign of a general wave of obscurantism and reaction of which
one feels the effect in many quarters? I cannot say; I would
consult those who are weather-wise in the spiritual atmosphere
did I know such.
But there is the fact—the Philistines are upon us, and we have
to close up our ranks. I have not spared my criticisms of Mr
Epstein's sculpture in the past. He aims at something which has
for me only a minor interest, but he attains his ends with a mas-
tery to which I have always paid tribute. What he feels he
expresses with a virile directness and energy which are admirable
qualities. So against a common enemy he must accept me as an
ally, as once before over the nude statues on a Strand building
We can settle our quarrels elsewhere and at another time; for
the moment all who care for art of whatever shade must face the
common foe and stop once for all his arrogant attempt to lay
down the law out of the abundance of his ignorance and insen-
sibility. I say once for all, but I recognize alas that this is pure
rhetoric, for his voice will never be completely silent; only, from
time to time, the Philistine can be made to see that as he has
always made a fool of himself in the past, the probabilities are
that he always will.



NA
:
THE HUDSON MEMORIAL. BY JACOB EPSTEIN





ROGER FRY
371
C
And what of the sculpture itself? I am not going to pretend
that it has converted me into an enthusiastic admirer of Mr
Epstein's sculpture, or that it causes me any profound emotional
reaction, but it has certain qualities which are almost always
absent from our public sculpture. As a decorative arrangement
of forms within a rectangle it shows a real inventive ingenuity
and sense of proportion. The quantities of relief and hollow,
the relative proportions of light and shade are admirably balanced,
and the linear rhythm of the design is well carried through. By
an extremely ingenious placing of the forms of the birds so as
to fit almost exactly (but not too mechanically) around the form
of the nude figure of Rima, Mr Epstein has been able to give
to the restricted surface a richness of light and shade, a density
and weight which enable it to tell at a distance even in the full
sunlight of a summer's day. This just estimate of scale and of
the intensity of relief necessary for a given situation, particularly
out of doors, is hardly ever attained in our public monuments,
and merely to have achieved this should entitle Mr Epstein to
high praise. Whether you like this or not it is a legible design,
whereas our sculptors nearly always mumble and blur their state-
ments from timidity and want of conviction.
Besides this patent decorative quality we can recognize a definite
imaginative purpose, a clear personal attitude in the conception
of the figure of Rima. She is imagined as a human being with
something of the haggard shyness and strangeness of wild things.
This is certainly no tired repetition of a conventional formula,
but a vivid and individual creation. To me the effort to convey
by such emphatic illustration a poetic idea is unsympathetic, but
no one can deny that the sculptor has achieved his intention. It
is thus a work primarily governed by a poetical idea and expressed
in vigorously decorative forms. What I regret is that among
those, to me, minor concerns the distinctively plastic imagination
has not found any place.
There is a poetic idea and a decorative idea, and these are
thoroughly fused; there is not, so far as I can see, a plastic idea.
The general design of the sanctuary seems to me successful. The
long rectangle of stone which brackets the sculpture and the two
plain rectangles on either side is well proportioned to the space
of lawn in front of the long stone-bordered pools. But this com-
mendable elevation has not received any adequate plastic execu-


372
THE HUDSON MEMORIAL
tion. The stone rectangles are too thinly and smoothly finished,
the edges are too mechanical and abstract. What was needed was
either some surface treatment, some blunting of edges, or even
some play of light and shade which would have given a density
and volume to the stonework sufficient to carry the richness and
weight of the sculptured slab. The usual mistake of our men
of taste is here shown, the mistake, namely, of thinking that sim-
plicity can be achieved by mere abstraction and negativity. True
aesthetic simplicity can only be achieved by a rich and fervid sen-
sibility working through the complexity of the matter to an ultimate
unity. Such dead and mechanical simplicity as is shown here is
less offensive, but no more moving to the sensual imagination than
mechanical enrichment. I wish Mr Epstein himself had cut these
plain rectangles straight from the rough stone. Then they might
fittingly have enshrined his relief, for the whole would have had
a truly related surface quality. This would well have repaid the
extra labour and cost.
So much for the sculpture itself. A word more about its
vociferous critics. What fascinates me about the Philistine is his
extraordinary sensitiveness, the ease with which the slightest sur-
prise puts him off his balance and out of temper. One may almost
say that whenever a work of art has sufficient accent for him to
become aware of it, he sees red. It is not so much certain kinds
of art that he hates. He hates any art of which he becomes aware.
He is only contented and peaceful when, as he jogs his way, he
can pass public monuments and statues without having any sen-
sation at all. He has a blind traditional feeling that monuments
have got to be there, they are part of the age-long prescription of
public ritual, but, since they must be there, let them be as nearly
as possible invisible, let them in no way rouse him from the day-
dreams of his instinctive life. Then, and then only, is he content.
But the expression of any idea of which he becomes aware rouses
him to a passionate fury of denunciation. The Royal Academy
has evolved in response to this feeling on the part of the average
man. It attends to this inexplicable but apparently inevitable con-
vention of art, but it keeps it well out of the way of any real
interest, it produces something entirely anodyne and innocuous.
And so the Philistine is a pampered being. Would that he could
reflect for a moment, if such an effort of sympathetic imagination
were possible to him, on the hard fate of those of us who have had


ROGER FRY
373
Our
the misfortune to be born with certain susceptibilities which, in
our madness, we have cultivated by years of study to a consider-
able acuity, and imagine what heroic self-control is ours, as we
walk about the streets of London, as we pass the statues in Par-
liament Square, or gaze on the ruined surface of Westminster
Abbey, or dodge a taxi behind the Edith Cavell monstrosity, or
contemplate the outside of the Victoria and Albert Museum, or
see any one of the hundred thousand horrors to which the streets
of London expose us.
We do not stamp with rage, we do not cry and shriek, we do
not accuse the authors of these things of Fascism or unnatural vice,
we behave with exemplary calm and patience, and yet we suffer far
·more in our sensations of discord and disharmony than it is
possible for those who have never trained their senses in such
matters. But watch the Philistine in his intemperate rage. There
has just closed a show of some of the finest modern French pictures
which have ever been seen in London at the Independent Gallery.
It was a selection of picked masterpieces by the men whose work
is acclaimed all over the civilized world, and yet there were to be
seen there respectable old gentlemen stamping like naughty chil-
dren on their catalogues, invading the private offices of the gallery
to insult the proprietor, and carrying on like an hysterical woman
in the lift. Really, before asking the artists to mend their morals,
we have some right to ask our censors to look a little more to their
manners.
Decidedly the modern Philistine is a pampered being. There
have been times when his feelings were rudely disregarded by
tyrannous gentlemen of taste and education. But in the fullness
of time he has come by his own. We now bow to his power, we
admit that being in so huge a majority he has a right to have nearly
everything arranged to his taste-look at the lounge of any big
hotel and see how carefully his whims are consulted. We admit
that ninety-nine out of every hundred public buildings and
memorials should be of the requisite ineptitude. But has the
Philistine no compassion? He has in London hundreds, perhaps
thousands, of pieces of sculpture totally devoid of all significance;
cannot he allow us one little corner of Hyde Park, past which
his daily business does not take him, where we can, in leisure
moments, contemplate something which is, to put it at the least,
decorous, intelligible, and respectful of past tradition?
е
I


THE SUMMER SEA
BY GEORGE H. DILLON
Not yet the earth has answered me
And I have come upon the sea:
A wall of water, and a shore.
Here halted other feet before.
In pools of shadow on the sand
Their empty indentations stand.
Now I shall ask of sea and sky.
I asked of them who with earth lie
But they have given no reply.
They have no word, no source of sound
Save their soft merging with the ground.
O unimprinted blazing sea,
Earth has no answer. Answer me.


PORTRAIT. BY CLEMENT WILENCHICK





A YOUNG ACTOR. BY CLEMENT





.
DRAWING. BY CLEMENT WILEŃCHick".





A VIEW OF MODERN MUSIC
BY PAUL ROSENFELD
OV
THERE is a blood in all music since Wagner that descends
1 from him. A good measure of the principles of expression of
the period now closing about us was developed from his. He
might not allow the derivation, so individually has life evolved
the inherited elements, so wildly intensified them. His new force-
fulness of utterance, kin to the literary naturalists'; his new refine-
ment, which had analogies in the poetry of the symbolist and
other exquisite movements of the time, have become two giants,
Primitive and Exquisite, the one stamping, roaring, dancing with
all the relentless fury and blind insistence of machinery; the other
whispering the powerlike tenderness, the almost unbearable sensi-
tivity, of the East. His new sonorities, new combinations of
notes, new instruments, restless chromaticism, once so daring and
harsh and penetrating, now appear to lie within the very first of
a series of concentric circles, beyond which the ever increasing
atonality, shrillness, stridency, and closeness of harmony of the
contemporary music spreads ever greater rings. The scattering
of sharp penetrating sounds among the soft euphonious ones, by
which he corrected the over-smoothness of the romanticists, has
become the feeling for fine acridity of sound threatening the place
of the violin and the remaining strings. He had a rare art of the
orchestra, a science of filling in the inner voices and creating un-
wonted richnesses, of writing figures that were not so much a
music imposed upon instruments as one evoked from them and
declarative of their quality. But the new men produce prismatic
opulencies and delicacies of orchestral effect, crying densities of
sound that make the Götterdämmerung orchestra begin to wear
thin. They have grown so expert in the chemistry of instruments
that their writing moves ever nearer a pure interplay of instru-
mental sonorities. The comparatively gradual and extended
climaxes of the Lohengrin and Tristan preludes have become the
more elusive, vaguer culminations of the Debussy poems. The
relatively simple humour and irony of the Meistersinger score has
verS


376
A VIEW OF MODERN MUSIC
become the multiform thematic and instrumental sarcasm, comedy,
slapstick of Strauss and the group around Strawinsky. In place
of the noble tides that swept through Tristan und Isolde, we have
the Sacre with its piston-like dance of human bacteria. None the
less, the relations between these swiftly moving contemporary ex-
pressions and Wagner's relatively slower ones is undeniable: the
two so incessantly help interpret one another. Poet and philos-
opher in a living sense as well as musician, Wagner was a focal
point of his age, clarifying its feelings and crystallizing its im-
pulses; and the expression of a time begets offspring. It impels
succeeding times to assert themselves and readjust the balance.
Yet the principles evolved from Wagner are only partially
characteristic of modern music. A feeling radically opposed to
the old German's informs the latest period. The split is wider
than those normally occurring from the reactions of succeeding
generations to preceding ones. It opposes to the spirit of a civiliza-
tion one in all its beauty fundamentally foreign to it. Rebel
that he was and man of the theatre, Wagner was filled with the
particular genius which has elemented Western music since its
rise in the early renaissance. This is a positive relationship to
life, equally positive in form and feeling. In the shape of sound-
relations, and within the material limits of his age, Wagner ex-
pressed the characteristic Western "active avidity of life," the
fullness of desire and intensity of will, and their inseparable com-
panions, faith, "scepticism free of pessimism and mysticism devoid
of resignation,” with which the diatonically-spirited music of
Josquin as well as of Bach, of Palestrina and Haydn and Bee-
thoven alike, is suffused. Tragedy was as well known to him as
to the older men, and gave meaning to the great portion of his
work, too; but as in them, fear was lost in love, and doubt com-
pleted in faith. Undeniably, a germ of passive feeling and world-
weariness unfolds luxuriously in Parsifal. But even this work
of his decline mounts to a positive conclusion. In all its weari-
ness it affirms; and the body of Wagner stands a very monu-
ment to passionate abundance. In all its theatricalism, the mass
of his music is self-determined, the deepest intention of the ges-
ture and the word. It is this relationship to life which has found
no root among his immediate followers. Possibly there was a dis-
integration in the West itself in which the old direction was lost.
The conflict and the degeneration are manifest in Richard Strauss.


PAUL ROSENFELD
377
SUI
Strauss was determined the successor to Wagner. He had a
native abundance, not very select indeed, but young and vibrant.
The Western approach was in his blood, the beginning of a posi-
tive feeling. He had a broad attack, an ambitious grasp; he
showed the relentless curiosity and daring of the born experimenter;
and his germinal ideas, witness the opening pages of Heldenleben,
of Also Sprach Zarathustra, and of Salomé, are good grand man-.
ner. But the creative power itself was recalcitrant. Strauss never
developed his melodic vein to any degree of purity. He began
as a common if breezily abundant musician; it is doubtful whether
there are a dozen measures of good music in the whole of Tod und
Verklärung; and although his style has grown somewhat more
refined with the years, his ideas have never attained first water.
It is probable that much of the vogue of his tone-poems flows from
the fact that he gives people who enjoy commonplace musical ideas
an opportunity of breathing peacefully in the severe concert hall.
Strauss has never produced a positive form. Heldenleben, his
classic attempt to continue the heroic tradition, demonstrates the
incapacity. Like the rest of his tone-poems, it leans heavily upon
literature. It is true that most romantic music has descriptive
elements, but Strauss's programme music differs from Wagner's
and Berlioz's and Liszt's in this: that while theirs has a self-suffi-
ciency, much of his has no value apart from the significance arbi-
trarily assigned to it. Forget the intended portraiture of the solo
violin in Heldenleben, forget that the great development section
represents a battle, forget that the baby is being bathed in the open-
ing section of the Symphonia Domestica, and you have some quite
empty music. You have it, in any case. It is chiefly as an orches-
tral virtuosity that Strauss's creative force became positive. His
characterizations and creations of mood have increased the ex-
pressivity of instrumental music. The inherent comedy of certain
of his ideas, particularly those in Til Eulenspiegel, constitutes him
discoverer of a great field of contemporary exploration. Strauss
has gotten great magnificence of effect with polyphonic writing
The middle section of the Symphonia Domestica is a golden tapes-
try of sound of a density scarcely ever previously achieved in
music. Yet not even Strauss's orchestral virtuosity is impeccable.
The sonority of his tone-poems is not invariably distinguished. It
is often coarse and blurred, far below the fine standard of either
Wagner, Debussy, or Strawinsky. A much clearer, crisper sonority
so


378 A VIEW OF MODERN MUSIC
is to be gotten from the symphonies of Strauss's contemporary,
Gustav Mahler, like himself a pretender to the kingly crown.
Mahler's structures are sparer and more athletic than Strauss's.
All the instruments of his orchestra sound. His effects are much
more precise and his tone is pleasantly sharp. The harps for
example which go lost in Strauss's orchestration are treated by
Mahler with a frank satisfying stroke. Unfortunately Mahler was
even less free a force than Strauss, and his work still more em-
phatically than the latter's evidences the collapse of a great
tradition.
It was a little as though Western life had secretly beckoned to
the alien feeling that was now to become its own, and given it
the confidence to assert itself. In the middle of the century, im-
pelled by the oriental elements in Liszt, and guided by the Slavic
folk song and the barbaric colour of the East, a national school
of musicians cropped up in Russia and conducted its experiments
in defiance of the elegant westernizing school led by Rubenstein
and Tschaikowsky. Coincident with Wagner's decline the move-
ment found its universal expression in the stark, primitive,
passively inflected music of Moussorgsky. It was the spirit of
the immense helpless Orient, wise in patient submissions which
spoke with the apparatus of Western music through this rare
genius. Possibly that was the response of life to Western mechani-
zation. The passive attitude is present in the very form of his
characteristic grim themes, in the sudden apathetic falls of the
melodic line. The motive developed from the famous Volga boat-
song, with which Boris Goudonov begins, is a classic example. It
plots the line of a profound impulse which lifts itself towards
passionate, painful assertion, but, impotent to sustain itself, sinks
nervelessly downward as if in submission to a fate against which
it revolted without great hope. The Western men had consented
in their destinies and embraced their fates; but this music comes
from the depths of a life iron with material power, nevertheless
aware before all action that its revolt will be futile and that it
has no will to free itself. With Moussorgsky we stand in the
snow and twilight among the helpless, the ignorant, and the brutal,
with the “rude, lame, unmade” masses condemned by life to imme-
dicable suffering; and over us there seem to tread symbols of
conquering force wrong as well as right making cruel proud ges-
tures we cannot comprehend. The release Moussorgsky brings is
ICS


PAUL ROSENFELD
379
the release of the submission to the inevitable and boundless pity
for man's helpless lot. A seraphic purity of feeling had thrown
the bridge. Moussorgsky had the utter simplicity and clarity of
impulse of both the small child and the great sage. He intuitively
adjusted musical means to his inner necessity. Self-taught he
found his way with absolute certainty through musical forms.
Since there was an immediate relationship between his way of
feeling and the modes preserved in the liturgical chants of the
Greek church, the old flat pentatonic scale got a parity in his work
with the seven-tone European one, and brought with it a Russian
oriental gorgeousness of harmony and melody. Neither pompous-
ness nor grandiloquence had any part in him; he sat composing his
easy, homely, sometimes humorous pieces as one might write a
letter; and on first acquaintance they appear slight as folk-lyrics.
His forms are so curiously kin to the Russian folk-song and the
chants of the church that specimens of both fitted with a minimum
of adjustment, and without injuring the style, into his music
dramas. His rhythms have a nervousness, an irregularity, and a
monotonousness new to European music. He developed a stark
primitive expression, a cry of hoarse rough throats not alone in his
folk-dramas. It is in his piano songs with their resonance of bronze.
Scarce anything in European music since Bach has a tenderness
more ethereal than his child-lyrics. And if Moussorgsky gave the
universal expression to the movement, other members of his group,
Borodin and Balakirew, genially helped him bring the feeling born
of Kremlin mosques and minarets, dreary snowfields and limitless
steppes, into music. The most practical member was Rimsky-
Korsakoff. A brilliant nature though not an ardent one, a keenly
musicianly intelligence despite an incapacity for thematic develop-
ment, Rimsky had a living eye for the exotic and unusual line,
for the curious and piquant shape and rhythm; and in his orches-
tration gave a genuine if somewhat sugary equivalent for the inven-
tions of his deeper companions.
To the men on critical watch-towers, Europe might have ap-
peared becoming once again a Western promontory of the mother
continent. The music of the Russian Five was merely the first
sign of reunion. A second was given a generation later in time;
significantly on what had long been declared by its prophets the
classic ground of Europe, successor to Greece and Roman Italy,
and nurse of all modern culture. The essentially Western attitude


380
A VIEW OF MODERN MUSIC
as
had become as impossible in France as it had in Germany. Roughly
contemporary with Wagner, César Franck, a Belgian resident in
Paris, had created a symphonic art which, a strong tincture of
Jesuitical unction notwithstanding, unites something of the affirma-
tive spirit of the great musical tradition with Latin precision. But
the French symphonic school initiated by this broad music parallels
on a selecter plane the work of Mahler and of Strauss. Its present
leader, d’Indy, leans more heavily on Wagner and on Schumann
than Franck did in his least inspired hours. His goldsmith works
manship and the edge and scintillance of his orchestra are com-
promised by a vein of banality and occasional cheapness which
spots even the most solid and intricate of his works, the B-flat
symphony and the piano sonata in B-minor; and the austerity of
spirit and dignity of presentation of his permanent pages wears
on others the aspect of an over-determination. When music was
actually freshly coined in France as it was by Debussy at the
close of the century, it reappeared as an art of gemlike edge
inscribed not with the characters of the aggressive active West, but
with distinctly feminine oriental ones. The music of Debussy is
a changeling peri rocked in the snug French cradle. Qualities of
the magic silken creature attest her indebtedness to the very old
French culture; she has benefited by an aristocratic education.
Indeed, few artists have brought more finely into play the harmoni-
ous combination of faculties bred by the temperate climate and
fertile soil of France, and prized and cultivated by her intellectual
directors, than Claude Debussy. Across the span of century this
musician touches hands not only with Rameau, but with Claude
Le Jeune as well. His Parisian peri has the style, born of the
centuries of integrated life in France, which Wagner's Saxon
valkyrie ignored. She maintains a sensible moderation, an exquisite
reserve in her most intense and poignant moments, and she is as
infrequently boring as she is pompous and grandiose. In all her
sensuousness she remains elegant and precise. Yet the beat of
her veins, her way of feeling, are entirely unrelated to the genius
which posed the solid, majestically extended masonries of Ver-
sailles. It was an emotional Pyrrhonism which conditioned
Debussy's Auid form, a complete, partly joyous scepticism of the
possibility of either knowledge or truth of being and phenomena,
a half-poignant sense of the utter uncertainty of the testimony of
the senses and of consciousness. Those senses, that consciousness,


PAUL ROSENFELD
381
n
were alert, fastidious, and sharp to a hitherto unknown degree, and
brought Debussy visual and auditory sensations of a new delicacy,
a new tenderness, a new intense voluptuousness; made him hear
elusive harmonies and subtle timbres drowsy with passion and
reverie. But this world of singing flesh was dark as an inconstant
dream. It was the sudden incomprehensible unclosure of magic
flowers which wilted as suddenly again at the breath of an invisible
fire; a region rich in tragic possibilities, but permanently suspend-
ing all judgement. One might inhabit these golden moods as long
as one recognized them as nomad palaces, like to vanish into air.
Indeed the recognition of their unsubstantiality intensified their
loveliness with deep pathos. Hence the movement of sounds which
came to him resembled the fantastic unpredictable play of light
and spray, the sibilation of rustling grasses and leaves. The melo-
dies were completely removed from the old set figures, merely the
elusive asymmetrical line of incessantly modulating harmonies
The orchestral timbres and combinations were all iridescence and
flicks of delicate luminous colour. To express this half delicious,
half painful sense of ceaseless ineluctable flow, he found his way
to L'Après-midi d'un Faune, to Pelléas et Mélisande, and to the
restless pageants of the sky and sea. The inconstancy of aim and
purpose in all this sweet desire, the passivity and languorousness
of the passion itself, authors of this changeful magic-lantern show
of objects, lights, and sounds, made Moussorgsky a revelation to
him, made him take the Russian's idiom, his pentatonic scale, his
little moujik, and adopt them to the precise and fastidious spirit
of France. And like the Russians, Debussy found his way to the
music of the Iberian peninsula; there to further feed with the
somnolent arabesque elements of the Spanish folk-song his own
profoundly Eastern soul.
That spirit has possessed with intensity the quarter century
which has elapsed since a bewildered and enchanted world heard
the Proses Lyriques, the Nocturnes, the Pelléas. Debussy stands
actually the centre and point of extreme incandescence of a musical
epoch, quite as Moussorgsky stands its initiation, and the music
produced since the war its evident conclusion. It is a period cer-
tain to remain one of the rewarding passages of Western music,
rich in works of art, vibrant with experiment and daring, liberal
in its conception of its material, full of new voices and blood
poured from many sources hitherto sealed; but essentially feminine,


382
A VIEW OF MODERN MUSIC
passive, and oriental in temper. A stream of reaction has been
gathering power during the last fifteen years; Schoenberg, Strawin-
sky, and Bloch have diverged from Debussy much as Debussy
diverged from Wagner, and possibly in a direction closer to the
classical Westerner's than to that of the French composer. Again,
well before the war, there seems to have been an integration or an
attempt at integration of the spirit which brought Europe high.
But as yet the reaction appears to constitute more of an exciting
progress toward a new positiveness of form and feeling than a
veritable conquest of it, although new developments may correct
that view. The spirit of opposition appeared somewhat timidly
among French musicians themselves. Ravel, early identified with
Debussy, began composing in a style which, while retaining his
preciosity and exquisiteness, has more rigidness of character than
Debussy's, and seemed moving toward a reintegration of the exces-
sively fluid style with the classical tradition. Yet it was, it is
odd, in holy Russia, wedge of so much Asiatic spirit, that the reac-
tion gathered its greatest force. Toward 1910 both the Russian
schools, the elegant westernizing school of Rubenstein and Tschai-
kowsky, and the nationalistic school of Moussorgsky and Rimsky-
Korsakoff, received new births, the one in Scriabine, the other in
Strawinsky. The first man died too young, and in the first stages
of a great career. He might have been the ultra-modern man.
Beginning as a coolly aristocratic pianoforte composer of Chop-
inesque imprint, possibly smaller in scope than his great example,
but freer and more economical of form, Scriabine evolved an in-
tensely concentrated tragic style of his own. If his orchestral
poems are somewhat overblown, too precious and too exalted, his
later piano sonatas, poems, and preludes are delicate without
jewellery, powerful without exaltation, and combine a strange
elusiveness of movement with great emotional depth. The will to
make a merely beautiful thing had long since been lost; the ninth
sonata is tragic and agonizing in the antique, active sense. It
struggles; it resolves. Even though these works constitute but the
first few strides through a great field into which Scriabine was
come, they have a permanency and have begun to exert an impor-
tant influence: Szymanowsky and Miaskowsky have attempted
music in Scriabine's freshly elegant spirit; and the Frenchman,
Rudhyar, has commenced building out beyond them somewhat as
2
CO
Tmane


PAUL ROSENFELD
383
Scriabine himself built out from Chopin. It was to Strawinsky
there fell the brilliant revolutionary rôle, the dramatic leadership
in the new movement of European feeling as expressed through
music. Strawinsky is only one of several revolutionaries and per-
haps ultimately not even the weightiest of them. But he is the
combination of artist and fighter, or propagandist which focuses
interest. Both his revolt and his present deviation possess spec-
tacularity. His own work has a quality of intense stylistic time-
liness, and the struggle, the direction, the partial achievement and
present entanglement in French formalism of the general reaction
are evident in it as in that of none of his companions.
The musical origins of the young Strawinsky are in Debussy as
well as in Rimsky and Moussorgsky. Russian music which had
so vitally influenced the French was now in turn fecundated by
them; and while all Strawinsky's music is folky in the spirit of his
nationalistic antecedents, the opening of the Le Rossignol derives
very directly from Nuages, the opening of Petrouchka recalls the
Image for piano entitled Movement. The development of an
original biting acrobatic genius has terminated this dependency.
Even the stronger oriental flavour of the Strawinsky before the
war and during it, has gradually been modified, and replaced by a
sterner language. None the less an element of Strawinsky's basic
feeling closely related to Debussy's and Moussorgsky's has not
changed. The mechanistic view of life, the vision of a universe
almost emptied of human energy and moving with relentless pre-
cision, so determinative in his choice of clock-work, machine-like
rhythm, and in his characteristic unfailing interest in the swarm-
ing of insects and the mystical participation of the individual in
his herd, has an origin in the prodigies of the age of steel, in the
deterministic theories of late nineteenth-century science, and in
modern civilization's mechanical application of the preferred indi-
vidual function. But was it not a profound fatalism, a passive
and will-less attitude that made Strawinsky so peculiarly receptive
to these suggestions? A less acquiescent attitude, a smaller gift
of fear, we are assured, would not have presented so favourable a
ground to them. Yet with this mechanistic conception of life
and these depressive feelings there have existed from the very first
in Strawinsky certain of a very different complexion, colouring his
expression with a vigorous character: a feeling of elemental power,
SIC
erse
varm-


384
A VIEW OF MODERN MUSIC
robustness, and hardihood, free diabolic harlequin-like movement,
a gaiety and coolness, a thrust of earth. A free Whitmanish
spirit inhabits his work, moving unconstrainedly among the ma-
terials of life, using creatively vulgar motifs, the rhythms of
machinery, the sounds and cries of fairs and peasant puppet-
theatres, cheap waltzes, ragtime, and the dance of the American
cold potato, which is jazz. Something approximating a manifesto
of independence from his immediate forbears exists, quite unde-
liberately, of course, in a setting of the old Volga boat-song once
used as a sorrowful standard by Moussorgsky. The rude, nasal
setting for woodwind and percussion takes from the tune all soft-
ness, hopelessness, and submission. It produces the expression of
strength, determination, and endurance inherent in the line, and
symbolizes the toughness and humour of the rough millions who
have fought for life beside the mighty stream. In the quality of
that brief piece lies the whole of Strawinsky's protest and the
symbol of his reform. He has invariably replaced Debussy's
preciosity, shimmer, and silk with a crisp, machine-like angular
edge, with a sonority in which not the vibrance of violins, but the
shrilling of the woodwind, the sounds of struck pianos, of percus-
sion dominate. And in both of these feelings the more oriental and
the more westerly, he belongs to his day; through them, bringing
to this day an immediate release, and happy infectious awareness.
The history of the artist in Strawinsky and to a certain extent
of the artist and the other modern composers is the history of a
combination of these two conflicting emotional attitudes. They
have not often lain down together, the lamb and the lion. Had
they, Strawinsky might have been as astoundingly successful in
producing extended form as he has been in producing original
themes, inventions, and colourations. He is a brilliant, a daring
and suggestive musician rather than a solid one. The resemblance
to Schumann is startling. The immense penetration of material
which is form, is identical with the unification of the artist; and
Strawinsky's compositions are usually mosaic-like: juxtapositions
of small pieces savoursome and ferociously humorous in quality;
successions of arresting polyrhythmical and polyharmonic passages
full of the feel, the beat, and the excitement of the day. The
first portion of the Sacre upon which we are carried as on the
back of a mountain range, remains almost single among his com-
ore !
wareness.
tist in d. and her through


PAUL ROSENFELD
385
1
as
positions; the second portion, extraordinary in its feelings of old
blood-passions seeking an outlet and filling the darkness with
shapes of fear, with voluptuous melancholy, and penetrating desire,
is less intensely spanned, more dependent for a full suspense upon
the pantomime. What assures the ballets and purely instrumental
pieces of Strawinsky an abiding interest, besides the prime quality
of the themes and the colouration, are, first the homogeneity of
the material assembled for the single pieces: Petrouchka, Renard,
L'Histoire du Soldat are ideas; and second the classical quality of
the musical line itself. Strawinsky, particularly the later, post-
wartime, less primitive Strawinsky, offers the senses a kind of
prismatic edge without intellectual association, a sort of abstract
music. It is true the recent compositions appear to have greater
cohesion and continuity than most of the earlier, to show a victory
of the less over the more oriental characteristics, and to make the
positive gesture. Strawinsky has been studying Bach, and is try-
ing to write music in his sense. But the emotional effect without
which there can be no pitch, no relation, no art, and which was
so positive in Petrouchka, in the Sacre, and in Renard, is signally
diminished. Of these later works only the Symphonies For Wind
Instruments satisfy, and this piece is half a dozen years of age.
Development in purely musical power has continued: the rhythmic
play of L'Histoire du Soldat makes that of Petrouchka with
its glorified dance-measures appear relatively simple. Strawinsky
is learning to write a very telling counterpoint. Yet the newer
classicizing pieces, entirely undescriptive in character and archi-
tectural in intention; particularly the Octuor and the piano con-
certo with their stirringly gemlike cutting, are distinctly literary.
They are not only reminiscent of classical music. They want the
strong exteriorizing push which produces natural transitions; they
lean too largely for meaning on the classical forms they strive to
fill. The suggestion is inevitable that for the sake of hurrying
the recalcitrant process of resolution, of complete revolution and
occidentalization, Strawinsky has taken temporarily to influencing
his emotions with his conscious will, and has listened to the cajole-
ments of a depressing spirit very much abroad since the war and
original in the Paris by which he has pitched his tent.
It spreads abroad in all times of exhaustion, the spirit of French
formalism, slackening the experimental, the loosening processes,
ce-measu
ITC


386
A VIEW OF MODERN MUSIC
S
and weighing upon the remnants of the world feelings which give
artistic forms their life. To such periods of self-doubt, discourage-
ment, and regression, often highly keyed in the ability to see,
weakened in the power to do, it offers plenary indulgence and
comfort in the shape of sanctions to emotional niggardliness, to
the replacement of feeling by surface feelings, and to the abnega-
tion of personality. Its language is subtly ingratiating, for it uses
the words of the high classic idea, repeating that “the artist must
be present in his work like God in creation, invisible and almighty,
everywhere felt but nowhere seen," insisting that perfect work of
art consists "exclusively of the artist's subject and style without
an emotion, an idiosyncrasy, which is not utterly transmuted.” But
what it actually abets is the very opposite from the grand style
which enables the perfect work to live, free from the artist, by its
own life. It is much closer to a pseudo-style, to mannerism, and
to the formula: for the reason that the precept of impersonality
works very dissimilarly in a discouraged and exhausted age than
in an abundant one. Where the feelings are strong and decided,
broad to timelessness and spaciousness, the counsel of imper-
sonality brings an incentive to freedom, calm, and maturity, if
freedom, calm, and maturity by chance are not already present.
But where the feelings are basically weak and the outgoing im-
pulses wounded and crushed, where a yearning for the security of
authority and traditional sanctions already exists, and where it is
the example of Montaigne and not that of Racine which is needed,
it makes timid and binds. It sets up absolutes, and thereby relates
art not to the totality of human resources, but to a kind of en-
feebled intellectuality. It produces the imitative style, the man-
nerism. Possibly French formalism might have had a resurrection
similar to its present one had there been no war and no after.
Traditionalism, ancestor-worship, is strong among our Gallic
friends. Together with their electric alertness something of the
Chinaman is always present in them. There are times when their
Jesuitical education for life which no longer exists renders the
Mongolian resemblance striking. And possibly without a war
formalism might have proven epidemic. Debussy had well-nigh
made music speak in French and given unwonted kudos to French
culture. The need of escaping from orientalism might have cleared
the way for it. It is nevertheless highly questionable whether


PAUL ROSENFELD
387
without the war and the general attendant exhaustion-particu-
larly without the comical American overestimation of France and
French things—it would have prevailed as widely as it has come
to do. American sentimentality, American feeling of inferiority
which insisted upon finding a heroine among foreign nations,
American insensibility which discovered a secret ally in French
formalism, could not but increase the self-conceit of French artists
and help prepare not only America, but all the world, for the
French dispensation.
To-day formalism has its stupidly constricting grasp not alone
on music, where it has temporarily produced an unengaging situa-
tion, but on art and literature throughout the world. It has an
hundred names: intellectualism and aestheticism are the more
popular ones; and aesthetic hypotheses, Byzantine preoccupation
with questions of form, and glorification of automatic writing as
a creative method are a few of the more amusing of its masks.
Behind its hundred rationalizations it remains recognizably the
force seeking to narrow and restrict the interests of the artist, to
keep him from using the totality of his resources by cutting him
off from the source of power in personality and feeling, to impose
as absolutes upon him the material limits of other times and other
conditions. Part of the comedy of the situation in music is the
prophetic rôle assigned to Eric Satie, a function which decorates
this modest musician somewhat as his grandfather's pantaloons the
proverbial small boy. That the good and irresponsible master of
Arcueil had a thin original vein of music is evident. He com-
menced as something of a clown in music, cute in his burlesque of
the oriental, the arabesque, and the descriptive; and as in so many
clowns, the burlesque existed thanks to a subtle art. He had a
refined sensuous melodic gift; his little piano compositions, sorts
of modern mazurkas, possess a gentle and haunting loveliness, a
pricking subtlety of line. In all his thinness Satie belongs among
the men Debussy, Schoenberg, Scriabine, Webern, who have
brought new fineness of expression into music since Wagner. His
aesthetic has certain virtues dear to modern artists. His music
is modest in expression, product of the taste which abhors any
discharge of fireworks from the breast. Quite as the modern man
of letters commences not with the feeling alone, but with the word,
and the modern painter with shape and line, so Satie conceived his


388
A VIEW OF MODERN MUSIC
problem as a relation of musical masses and periods, a play of
sonorities. Yet the good Satie makes a signal contrast to Racine,
to Ingres, and to Flaubert among whom his friends delight to place
him. His virtues are largely negative: he is important chiefly for
what he refrains from doing; and it is again slowly dawning upon
the world that a work of art is valuable not because of the absence
of flaws, but because of the presence of positive qualities. It was
by style that the classicists gave independence and impersonality
to their works, and Satie was abjectly deficient in style. His music
is without the imprint of a decided personality and filled with
unamalgamated elements, classical, impressionistic, popular, even
oriental. Nor had Satie any real projective power. He could not
construct, nor produce a form; and the best that can be said of
innumerable of his pieces is that they leave off just in time
The very smallness of Satie's scope became a recommendation.
Formalism found in him its man for the reason that both his limi-
tation and his achievement appeared to justify its attitude. He
was proclaimed a European personage by Milhaud, placed by
Cocteau among the masters, and enshrined the patron and prophet
of the association of five young Parisians called the Group of Six.
That dignity, at least, was proper; for in the best of the number,
Milhaud, Auric, and Poulenc, one part of daring, of freshness,
of genius, even, is compounded with several of pure literature,
stylelessness, surface cleverness, and traditionalism leaning upon
the most conflicting authorities. Their gesture is modest, their
technical demands simple, their inspiration quasi-popular and
humorous; but the music produced by them remains undesirably
personal. Formalism obtained by no means only in the new-
comers. It worked backwards also; diverted from their courses
men who had found them before the war; and Strawinsky stands
by no means a solitary figure. Ravel, too, has made friends with
the creature. In La Valse and Tzigane he has produced two
brilliant pieces of mannerism, two assemblages of characteristic
fragments of other men and other ages very adroitly patched to-
gether, formed into amusing concert pieces, but trivial and perverse
at the heart of them. Formalism is coming to dominate quite as
unlimitedly in Italy as in France. The modern Italian school
led by Casella, Pizzetti, and Malipiero had begun partly in oppo-
sition to the brutality of Italian operatic music, partly with Straw-


PAUL ROSENFELD
389
ac
insky in opposition to French smoothness and preciosity. Expres-
sion of a feeling of inferiority toward France is present in the
bravado of all Italian artistic manifestos and was evident in
theirs. Save in Malipiero talent was fresh in none of these men;
yet the direction of their movement was aristocratic, contem-
poraneous, toward the large, toward the new limits which every
healthy generation sets for itself and which constitutes its absolute.
To-day, the direction is befogged. Again it appears that a sense
of inferiority felt toward an object conceals an intense admiration
directed toward it. The modern Italian school has more than sec-
onded the French. Through Casella, its spokesman, we learn that
it is the great privilege of the Italian school to lead in a Fascistic
reaction against the music of the last years, and to turn to the
limits and forms of the past. "Give us back tonality!” That is
the tune! Tonality? The new diatonic feeling, equivalent to the
old, filled with the Western genius, but inclusive of the great
experience of orientalization ? Not so. The old C-major scale!
Order is to be restored. Order? Ah yes indeed, order. In the
sense of the Russian general who telegraphed his master, “L'ordre
règne à Varsovie!”
And over the surface of the globe, many tired voices take up
the song. The world is very weary. Music feels the depression.
Sometimes, when we compare the confidence, the enthusiasm of
yesterday with the shrunken faith of so much of the advance guard
of to-day, it seems the procession of music has halted. A minute
ago it was still surging up the thoroughfare underneath our avenue
windows. Now people in stream cross over from curb to curb
before the slackened body of march. Some few strands still press
ahead through the wall of intercepting contrary motion. It never
completely stops, the life of musical art. We have not yet heard
the stillness left by the failure of all voices, the dormance of all
instruments. And we will not deny that in its very disorganiza-
tion the musical procession makes an exciting brilliant pool there
at the head of the block, a wide bewildering play of conflicting
emotions, gay costumes, mottled colour. An old market-fair visited
in throngs by merchants from every land with strange rich gaudy
wares and surcharged with modern excitement, one would say!
Never so much experimentation and daring! New voices: South
American, Negroid, Mexican, American, Magyar, Finnish, Rou-
W


390
A VIEW OF MODERN MUSIC
manian, English, Hindu! But the body of it is nearly static. Its
main movement is lost in circlings and hesitation, in cross and
counter currents. The great world-feeling is shrunken. And one
returns with relief to painting, to literature even. They too have
been affected by the failure of confidence. But not as seriously,
as yet.
Familiar voices will not fail to take advantage of the situation
and declare the pseudo-classic reaction an expression of the Western
will, the Western unconscious, and an effort of the Western in-
tellectuals to protect their heritage from destruction at the hands of
a certain sower of anarchism and sapper of the big blond and
beastly soul. They will not be silenced by the truth that at least
three of the leaders of the formalistic movement, Milhaud, Casella,
and Ravel, and perhaps more, are not of distinctly "Nordic" blood;
that the composers who first bridged a way for the hieratic East
to move westward were not Jewish; and that eminent among those
who continue the unconsciously motivated pilgrimage towards a
new genuinely Western attitude, at least toward a balance of the
two principles begun by their generation, stand Bloch and Schoen-
berg. For still it moves, and if energy has been slackened in all
living composers, in certain, the essential direction has not been
lost; and the modern orientation has been particularly inviting to
the Jewish temperament. If the orientalism of Moussorgsky and
Debussy awoke a corresponding orientalism in the Jewish breast,
it awoke together with that superficial orientalism the particular
affirmative, stubborn, aggressive spirit which has always united the
Jewish race with Europe, made its culture an integral part of the
strictly Mediterranean one, brought its Bible to port in the West,
and made its modes reverberate in the choirs of Gothic cathedrals.
In the rich, sombre, turgid machine which is the music of Bloch
one feels the traditional attitude of the race, now become curiously
identical with the ultra-Western one. The living element con-
tributed by Bloch to music as Debussy left it is the overwhelming
feeling of avoirdupois. The feeling of mass and volume is strong
in Strawinsky's music too. But Bloch's has it much more continu-
ously. The architectural sense is developed in him as in perhaps
no other living composer. There are respects in which Bloch be-
longs to a time before ours. He has a sumptuosity and pathos
which go far back into a more romantic age. His instrumentation


PAUL ROSENFELD
391
remains the offspring of Debussy's, for though it is darker in colour
and harsher in tone, brunette as compared to the Parisian blonde,
it is essentially scintillant and velvety and vibrant with string
tone. His orientalism is even extremer, spicier, and wilder than
Debussy's or Rimsky's: at once intensely voluptuous and melan-
choly, rich and cruel; and what is marvellously original in his
melodic line, and his manner of writing for the voice, issues from
it. Yet a relatively immaterial and cloud-like, contemplative and
elusively defiling music does not satisfy this composer. His own
is filled with rough bold strokes and sharp attacks, with sudden im-
pulsive starts, evident force and thrust and positive ponderous
movement. He constructs, he rounds out volumes of sound, he
develops his material with unflagging power. His ability to evolve
and extend his ideas is second to none seen by the world since
Beethoven's day. Occasionally, the forcefulness and swelling
movement are too unrelieved to please entirely, too exaggerated;
and the storming progressions of hollow fourths and fifths weary
the nerves. But the 'cello rhapsody Schelomo, the quartette and
the quintette and parts of the first violin sonata, and the symphony
Israel are positive expressions, architectural forms in the spirit of
great classic music. Assuredly a great deal of Bloch is not solid
construction “like the art of the museums." There is an exaltation
in his music that is over-hectic. And if he never indulges in the
Jewish wail to the degree in which certain other Jewish artists
wallow in it, one could wish it even further behind him. Bloch's
greatest weakness is his want of self-criticism. By the side of
the most extraordinary concentrated personal ideas, he lets appear
others wanting in profile to the verge of commonness. The grave
and rounded first two movements of the first violin sonata, are
succeeded by a bombastic finale. One suspects another form of
the conflict between two ways of feeling present in Strawinsky.
Recently Bloch has been dissipating his energies in popular pieces.
His second violin sonata is weightless and wandering. Doubtless
that is the effect of the general imbroglio. One looks back on
the fairly recent quintette as to the capes of a possibly vanishing
continent.
Schoenberg creates in the same large intention as Bloch at his
fiercest and most powerful, although in a manner somewhat dis-
similar. His rapturous, grotesque, excessively compressed music is


392 A VIEW OF MODERN MUSIC
even more centrally in the great tradition than Bloch's. The living,
the poetic Schoenberg in his form and feeling stands in the posi-
tion of very heir to the direct and believing Europeans who made
the Western musical art, the classical and romantical both. The
line of his music is directly related to both Wagner's and Brahms's.
The relation is both matter of blood and of spirit. It moves, it
heaves, it falls much as theirs does. It has their broad accent. It
is full of the yearning, the striving, the profound effect of theirs,
and stands immovable as iron. There is a definite Hebraic element
in Schoenberg's music which was not present, it is true, in that of
either of his artistic forbears. The poignant, clamant germinal
theme of the D-minor quartette issues directly from the grey air
of the synagogue. And Schoenberg's sensuous instinct has made
him a man of his time, and distinguished his music from that of
the tradition itself. His form is submitted to intensest concen-
tration and pulses with the tempo of his age. He hears relations
between far and close-lying tones where others perceive dissonances.
His rhythm is more complex than Strawinsky's and not so pre-
dominantly based upon dance forms. He repeats fewer notes than
Strawinsky does. Scarcely a living musician is so relentless in
his truthfulness to self. There is no compromise in Schoenberg;
a pity at times, for he is somewhat wrong-headed. And since his
age is a shattered column, a broken and weary day condemning its
members to relative loneliness, incommunication, and semi-mystical
adventure, there is a ghostliness, a smothered anguish, a gossamer
quality in his music infinitely beyond any similar traits in Wagner
or Brahms. Even the uncreative spirit in his music is timely, for
the theoretical and abstract spirit, mother of so much that is dry
and unliving in it, is formalistic as well as Talmudic. But there
is a Schoenberg who escapes formalism and theory entirely, who
creates directly from intense passionate feeling religious in the
sense of the old masters', and lets his feeling determine his form.
He is primarily the truth-seeker, ardent and disinterested in his
insatiable curiosity, happily compact of imagination and logical
rigour, actively avid. Hence, a high-blooded spirit lives in what
he drives to the condition of form. And hence the name Romantic;
derogatorily imposed, but complimentary in spite of the wishes of
the speakers. It was Stendhal, the classic, who declared that all
art is romantic when it is produced and classical when it is
accepted.


PAUL ROSENFELD
393
It is probable that beside Bloch's and Schoenberg's there will
eventually be set the name of Ornstein. In his first period of
production the young Russian-American composer instantaneously
placed himself in the company of Moussorgsky and Strauss,
Strawinsky, Bloch, and Varèse, and the others who have developed
and are developing the force of musical expression beyond the
limits of Wagner's naturalistic day. Temporarily, the habit of a
sugary orientalism, and a restriction in range of ideas sets him
somewhat below the order of men working on the basis of the entire
past experience toward a new positiveness of form and feeling.
Ornstein's double sonata, rich in sonority and ideas, in machine-
like power and passionateness of expression, stands too solitary
among his recent productions. He keeps the shape of gigantic
foetus of the age of steel. Actually, there exists work by two living
composers more closely approximating the term our period has set
its development, than even that of Bloch and Schoenberg. Possibly
neither Bartók nor Varèse are so completely developed upon the
rung of musical evolution on which they are found, as the two
others upon theirs; not so accomplished as artists. Certainly, this
latest kind of music is minute in sum by the side of that of the
past, and a tentative bit of life. This nevertheless is certain: that
both the Hungarian and the Italo-Frenchman have produced a
music freer of oriental form and feeling, more positive in both,
than the rest upon whom the musical art of the affirmative future
seems like to grow. Bartók's idiom with its piquant intervals has
an un-European base. It points back to the Magyar folk-song and
that, we know, is remotely Asiatic. Yet with Liszt and his oriental
gipsy music this little upstart fungus has no kinship. It is not
sinuous, sliding, and suggestive. It is possible that without the ex-
ample of Moussorgsky and his folk-born Slavic style Bartók's style
and compositions might not have appeared. His are homely,
strong, and savoursome much as Moussorgsky's are. Under a sur-
face of original silvery sensuousness, vaguely like the French, but
free of preciosity, they bring a little tribe of fresh, puckish, and
grotesque rhythms to European music. Yet there is this essential
difference: that just as this music is without the characteristic
oriental undulation, so too in its emotional effect it is melancholy,
grim, and pessimistic at moments, nevertheless devoid of resigna-
tion and submission. There is the tone of tragedy in the simul-
taneously rich and gnomelike violin sonata, string quartette, and


394
A VIEW OF MODERN MUSIC
sa
Esquisses and Bagatelles for piano; but in the robust, the passionate
sense. It is a talent autochthonous, humorous, and profoundly
spontaneous, perhaps the freshest of our time, and positive in its
expression. Bartók's violin sonata, recitative-like in quality, ap-
proximates an absolute self-determining music without verging on
formalism. In Bloch and Schoenberg there is a dramatic element
of which Bartók is free. True, there is a strain of the univer-
sal formality in Bartók as in his neighbour, Schoenberg. He, too,
is occasionally guilty of a brain-spun music, little atonal and poly-
tonal pieces without much inner necessity, showing his Budapest
near neighbour to Schoenberg's Vienna. But there is an inspired
playful Bartók above the theoretical planes—and in the last two
movements of his string quartette as in the whole of his violin
sonata he has created a music which has style, which is a play of
sonorities, of musical shapes and lines, and also free, affecting, and
personal. It marks an important return, and is strongly potential.
Equally positive in form and feeling is the music of Varèse, the
latest prodigious addition to the company of composers. His ultra-
strident brassy cubical tone-poems are if possible even more dar-
ingly conceived as a pure interplay of sonorities. With Varèse
music becomes a thrilling opposition of volumes of sound, piercing,
highly keyed, sharp as edges of brass and steel, a series of blunt,
stubborn, stuttering masses rigidly held, even in moments of climax
and stress, in a cubical shape. If the music of Varèse so extraor-
dinarily retains the character of mass, it is undoubtedly largely be-
cause of his use of brief intervals of silence between the pronounce-
ments of his blaring orchestras of woodwind and brass supported
by fantastic arrays of percussion, sirens, and rattles; a technic
corresponding to the suppression of connectives by certain con-
temporary poets in their poetry. There is a profound emotional
tension in Varèse, a feeling of overwhelming pressure overcome, of
human feeling taking the shape of the ponderous architectural
piles of New York, a wild sense of material power. Varèse's idiom
is even freer of oriental sinuosity than Bartók's; perhaps freer than
that of any of the progressive unformalistic band. It is French,
yet completely free of preciosity and jewellery. It is of a France
older than Debussy's. It derives from the style of Berlioz, hard
of edge and of substance both. And it is modern world, tele-
graphic in its terseness and compression, exquisitely permeated by


PAUL ROSENFELD
395
the quality of the cosmopolis. Varèse has done with the auditory
phenomena of the great modern city and the port something
analagous to what Picasso has done with the visual ones, and as
little in the intention of description. Both have used the elfin and
the brutal motifs of modern citified nature in building up subjective
pictures which are alike relaxed and pulsant with the beat and the
excitement of the present hour. If Varèse's constructive power
eventually comes to equal his capacity for registering the most
elusive auditory sensations, one will have to place him very high.
For his sense of tone relations is as greatly in advance over Strawin-
sky's as Strawinsky's is over Debussy's.
Varèse, like Ernest Bloch, has come to the United States to
work, not, we believe, without deep reason. America is the crucial
point; it is in America the decision will arrive and the ancient
European and Western feeling either reassert itself or perish, and
with it the classical musical art. Positive feeling, fullness of
desire and intensity of will and their inseparable companions, faith,
"scepticism free of pessimism and mysticism devoid of resignation,”
are germane to the American. They helped build his land, and in
fragmentary and disconnected form they wander through his out-
wardly vibrant, inwardly motionless world. Only, pioneering and
puritanism and the republic for business only have buried them
and have kept them buried and continue to bury them every day.
What obtains is the very opposite of positive feeling. It is a
feeling uncertain, impatient, fickle, a weakest consciousness of what
exists outside and is called nature and an hundred other names, and
is owned by no man, and is the life of all men taken in unison.
It is the European equivalent to this American insensibility that
America helped nourish in the old world, and continues to feed.
In 1917 the United States became an integral portion of the old
continent, adding to Europe's condition of doubt a new dissolvent,
and corroborating the “no” of the formalistic spirit. Perhaps
simultaneously an older European spark was passed across to it.
Some belief in life actually stirring several years before vividly
intensified its struggle for establishment. The last decade has seen
warm potential talents appear not only in American plastic and
literary, but in musical art as well; and music is the most slowly
evolving, the most social of them all. If Sessions, Copland, and
the other important native-born composers as yet remain some-
wa
sers as
emain some-


396
INSECTS
al
thing of candidates and participate in certain of the less positive
attitudes of the contemporary European musical world, their ap-
pearance is gigantic proof of the rebirth of veritable feeling in
America. Even when it is not yet positive, feeling contains the
potential of positiveness. Hence the career of American music
together with that of all American art is identified with the career
of music and of art in general. It is doubtful whether musical life
can attain its objective independently of American artistic, spiritual
life. In watching either of them, or both of them, we are actually
watching one thing, for the love of "music" and of “life.”
T
0
INSECTS
BY ISIDOR SCHNEIDER
Clockwork beings, winding out their lives—
souls would kill them as machines kill us.
They are not stranger to us. Their shellacked
and felted bodies built in sections, grooved
to make elastic their wire-tendoned strength,
we too have made with rougher metals
and with coarser cloth. Clanging, they fill
the booming Summer, fill the grass, the air,
an exposition of well geared machines.
They whirr and hammer; the sun's rays
dart power to them on glittering rails;
and through the pastoral night, the stationed stars
now seem a swarm of midges. Trembling on
the unseen eaves of space, the milky way,
swings a rumpled spider web, where guttering,
the captured stars exert their dim,
funereal, phosphorescent light.
er


KERSTA
BY COUNT EDUARD VON KEYSERLING
Translated From the German by Amy Wesselhoeft von Erdberg
and E. Drew Arundel
Common as light is love
-Shelley.
IT had begun to thaw a little. The November snow on the road
T to the church was very wet and the heavy sleigh jerked and
jolted. Four women, wives of recruits, sat in it—Marri, Katte,
Ilse, and Kersta, the daughter of the cottager Annlise. They had
just been married in the church. To-morrow their husbands would
have to leave them for the barracks. They had tied big blue
kerchiefs over their bridal crowns and sat there in the sleigh-four
blue pointed cones nodding with every jolt. Reuben Jehze was
driving. He was very drunk and lashed the shaggy little horses
unmercifully. The husbands followed close behind-two to a
sleigh. They had been drinking heavily and sang with loud, hoarse
voices. The women, silent and patient, jolted back and forth in
their blue kerchiefs. Kersta was the smallest. With her round
rosy face, round light blue eyes, and round nose, she looked like a
child; her mouth, on the other hand, with its drooping corners
was the rather careworn mouth of the Lithuanian peasant woman.
She stared dully out into the grey mist that hung over the plain.
The juniper bushes and the crows looked strangely black against all
this grey, and the bare reddish alders seemed mere blotches on
the heath. The whole colourless picture swayed gently before
Kersta's eyes—as though she were slowly rocked to and fro in a
swing at the Easter festival.
They had stopped at every public-house on the road and Kersta's
tall Thome had lurched over to the women's sledge. “Frozen
stiff, little woman, eh ?" and he held out the brandy bottle. Kersta
smiled stiffly with her frozen lips and drank. The brandy made
you warm and comfortable; besides, it made you stop thinking,


398
KERSTA
TOι
which was nice too. The whole misty world before her grew more
and more vague for Kersta, even Jehze's broad back seemed to be
getting further and further away. The day's impressions on the
other hand kept coming back to her like vivid dreams, the same
ones, again and again, like people passing you on the merry-go-
round at the Schoden fair. Wedding! Wedding! In the morning,
the putting on of the fine white linen bridal chemise, so fine and
cold that it made Kersta shiver from head to foot; the bridal crown
that was pressed down so hard on her forehead that it hurt. There
must be a red line on her forehead now. Then the church, chilly
and solemn. Kersta's new shoes made a fine clattering on the
stone-paved aisle. She had to take care not to slip as if on ice.
The pastor had a round red face and smacked his lips when he
spoke, as if he were eating something good; but, dear me! he did
preach beautifully—about the men going away, about being faith-
ful, and about the Word of God. Kersta had cried, of course.
Soldiers' wives always cry at their weddings—and besides, it's
good to cry—to cry till your face gets warm and wet and
to heave such big sighs that the hooks on your bodice creak. She
had cried harder than the other women, that she could certainly
say when they discussed it later. Afterwards, in the public-house
by the church, they had had a drink and the men had begun to
quarrel. Everything had been just as it should be at a wedding.
Wedding! Wedding! jingled the bells on Jehze's little horses
and Kersta began her dream all over again with the fine cold bridal
chemise. The three other women were silent, staring out into the
mist with the same fixed look that seemed to see nothing. Only
when a hare ran from a field across the road they all four cried
out, “Look, a hare!" and smiled stiffly with their frozen lips.
They drew up before the village inn. There stood the wedding
guests in their best clothes and shouted. Pale women's and chil-
dren's faces pressed close to the dim windows of the huts; every-
body wanted to see the brides. That gave Kersta a nice festive
feeling. A young wife coming back from the marriage ceremony
is an important person and the wedding day is the happiest of
your life.
At the door of the public-house Kersta waited for Thome;
they would have to go in together. She stood there very gravely
and talked with the old women across the street. Even the vil-


COUNT EDUARD VON KEYSERLING
399
S
OV
lage elder spoke to her and the girls stared curiously at the bridal
crown. Kersta, the daughter of the cottager Annlise, was not
used to being treated by everyone with so much friendliness and
respect. She was small, poor, had only one goat, and had so
far not counted; but when you're married, you're somebody.
Sheer pride made Kersta's round childish face red and shiny like
an apple.
Now the men drove up, singing and shouting. Thome lurched
over to Kersta, took her round the waist, and lifted her up in
the air: "Not very big, but heavy as a bag of flour," said he.
Everybody laughed. Kersta Aushed with pleasure, and was very
grateful to Thome.
In the big room of the inn the wedding party sat down to the
white board tables. They were all very silent and solemn and
fell to on the milk and noodle soup. For a time the only sound
to be heard was a loud monotonous gulping. Then came the
pork, then mutton, and then pork again. The steam from the food
filled the room with a thick warm mist. Kersta ate eagerly, ate
so much that at last she leaned back exhausted and managed
somehow to undo the lower hooks of her bodice. "Now this is a
real wedding—it's fine," she said to herself. She stroked Thome's
sleeve gently. Now she had a man of her own, he belonged to
her. It's good to have a husband. "Drink, little wife, drink!”
said Thome.
Outside it began to grow dark. Lights were brought into the
room, tallow candles stuck in beer bottles. The little yellow
flames had shining rings of coloured light about them in the steamy
room. The band, a fiddle, a clarionet, and an accordion, began
a polka. "Ah! now comes the dancing!” Kersta sighed with
deep content. She stepped outside the door for a moment. It
was dark, a damp wind swept across the snow, and the clouds,
grey as unbleached linen, hung low in the heavens. “To-morrow
it'll snow,” thought Kersta.
Down the silent village street the little cottages huddled to-
gether; here and there a light burnt dimly in a window, a child
cried, a woman sang a lullaby, always the same weary dragging
tune. And that silent, ugly, little black thing down there at the
end of the street was Annlise's cottage. To-morrow everything
would be over as if it had never happened. Kersta would be down
TO


400
KERSTA
More
there again living with her mother and — She drew her sleeve
across her eyes. Why did she want to cry? To-morrow would be
time enough for that!
She went inside and danced. That was fine. When a man's
strong arm turns you round and round and you feel his great hot
hand burning on your back, you just stop thinking altogether.
There's nothing left of you but your body with its hot blood
and thumping heart. The scene grew more and more vague and
dreamlike for Kersta. The heavy figures spun solemnly round
in the thick tobacco smoke, the men beat time with their heels;
it sounded like the busy fall of flails on the threshing floor.
“That's good,” thought Kersta. “I'll never have as good a time
again.” Later a row began and the men came to blows. Kersta
joined in with the other women, but this time with the proud
feeling of screaming for her own husband as she grabbed the other
men by the hair. Finally, singing loudly, the young men and
girls led the pair to the end of the village street to Annlise's hut,
where the bridal bed was prepared.
While Kersta lit the candle in the little room, Thome threw
himself heavily onto the bed. He was very drunk and fell asleep
at once. Kersta pulled off his boots for him, straightened the pil-
low, and lay down herself. Her limbs ached with weariness.
When she shut her eyes, the bed seemed to rock like a boat. Still
she could not really sleep. Every time when the dream began
again, where she was in the church or spinning round in the public-
house till the ribbons of her bridal crown flew out like whip-lashes,
something seemed to startle her awake. She stared into the dark-
ness and thought; something dreadful was waiting for her, what
could it be? Oh! yes-to-morrow her husband would be gone and
the old life would go on as before—the wedding was over and
there would be nothing, nothing nice for a long, long time.
Outside the morning dawned, the window panes grew blue.
Kersta sat up and looked down at Thome. He was sleeping
heavily; his fair hair lay damp and untidy on his forehead, his
face was very red and from his half open mouth came a deep
regular snoring. Kersta slowly stroked his breast, his arms. “Sh!
Sh!” she said as to a child. Her husband belonged to her like
her chemise, her knitting, her goat, more even than the goat, for
that belonged to her mother too. That was as it should be. Now
Ims.


COUNT EDUARD VON KEYSERLING
401
she had what every girl wants and prays for, a man; and he
was big, too, and strong. But what was the good of it if she had
to give him right up again? Heavens! what a mean shame,
better not think about it at all. Kersta got out of bed and took
the milk pail. She would go and milk the goat.
Outside a strong wind was blowing and damp snow fell. The
plain lay grey-blue in the early dawn. On the horizon, above the
black line of the distant wood stretched a dim white light. Kersta
stood still as usual, shaded her eyes with her hand, screwed up
her nose, and stared out sulkily into the growing daylight. Down
the village street, in front of the little grey houses stood other
women with their milk pails. Shading their eyes with their hands
like Kersta, they too looked sulkily into the grey dawn as if they
expected no good from the coming day.
Kersta shivered. She ran into the barn, a low shed, where
the goat, pig, and hens lived. The air was warm and heavy here.
The hens flapped their wings on the perch. The pig grunted
comfortably to itself. Kersta crouched down beside the goat and
began to milk. The milk ran pleasantly warm over her fingers.
A comfortable drowsiness overcame the little woman. She leaned
her head on the goat's back and cried, not the loud official crying
of the wedding, nor as she would cry to-day in the town when
her husband went away; this time she just cried like a child. The
tears came easily and bathed her face as if she were washing it in
warm water, and she was very, very sorry for herself. Crying, she
fell into a quiet, dreamless sleep. The goat stood quite still, only
turning its head to cast a motherly glance at the sleeping girl
with its calm yellow eyes.
Kersta woke up, hearing her mother say at her side, “Good
heavens! she's fallen asleep milking! What are you milking for
to-day, anyway?"
"Somebody's got to," answered Kersta half asleep.
“Yes, do it and go to sleep over it!” said Annlise. The old
woman spoke roughly as usual, but for all that Kersta thought
she heard an undertone of satisfaction and respect. But, of
course you would speak differently to a married woman from the
way you would to a girl.
“Go along, and make the fire, your husband must be off early."
Kersta jumped up. Why! of course; to-day was no ordinary day;


402
KERSTA
was some
to-day she could put on her best clothes and drive to town; to-day
she would be noticed and pitied by everyone. There was some
comfort in that.
The village elder was to drive the recruits to town in a big
sleigh. The mothers, fathers, and wives were to follow to say
good-bye at the station.
During breakfast Thome talked of nothing but the law-suit
and gave his wife instructions. Peter Ruze had taken possession
of the little holding of Dundur, on the left of the village towards
the wood; this belonged by rights to Kersta, she being the nearest
blood relation of the late owner, while Peter was only his step-
daughter's husband. In Kersta Thome had married the claim
to the farm and it was her duty to prove her rights in his absence.
“Go to Lawyer Jakobsohn, the Jews are always the sharp ones,
and besides he's cheap. Don't let them do you." Kersta put on
a wise look. She was well aware of her responsibility. "I'll
manage all right,” she said. “I'm no fool.”
"If you'd been a fool, I shouldn't have married you," and with
that Thome wound up.
With much shouting and joking the recruits climbed into their
sleigh. The women and children stood round and cried. The
four young wives drove together again in one sleigh. It was snow-
ing faster now. The blue pointed cones nodding opposite each
other as yesterday, grew white with it.
When they reached the woods, Marri said, “What good do we
get out of it anyway? To-morrow things 'll go on the same as
ever.” “Well, there's no changing that,” said the other three and
sighed. Later, as they came out on to the road by the sea, Ilse
said, “If we don't have some frost soon, the rye will rot."
The others sighed and groaned, “Times are hard enough as it
is.” Nothing more was said during the drive.
In the town they had scarcely time to be sad. They had so
much to look at everywhere. Then there was the long wait before
the town-hall until the men came out, the meal in the public-
house, the brandy and cakes, and finally the parting at the station
and the loud wailing. Thome slapped Kersta on the back, “Cheer
up, we're not going to die there, you know. Send along money
sometimes, food's generally short."
“Yes! yes!"
we
W
.


COUNT EDUARD VON KEYSERLING 403
“Remember the law-suit. Go to the lawyer."
“Yes! yes!”
“Keep your wits about you or I'll find myself fooled when I
come back.”
"Yes! yes!"
When the train had gone, the women still stood on the platform
and moaned softly, “Oh! Lord! Oh! Lord!"
Kersta was the first to stop. She had to go to the lawyer's.
She waited there in a nice warm room. The lawyer was a
friendly little man, who listened to her patiently and held out
hopes of success. He even joked, chucked Kersta under the chin,
and said, "Such a pretty little soldier's wife and she's got to do
without a husband for such a long time, dear! dear!” That was
a good omen for the law-suit.
It was already getting dark, when the long line of sleighs set
out for home. Huge stripes of fiery cloud reached across the pale
sky. The sun, red as a raspberry and as though flattened by the
sea, was slowly disappearing. The crinkled, grey sea was tinged
with crimson. The waves rustled softly like silk.
The soldiers' wives were worn out with all the walking and
standing and drinking and crying. They sat there, dull and
patient, staring blankly into the fading sunset. In the wood as
it grew dark and the moon rose over the black shaggy tops of the
pines, the hearts of the lonely women grew heavy. They could
not cry any more, so they sang, the first song that came into their
heads, sending the plaintive notes far out into the wood:
as
TOSCO
“Come home early, darling, early.
Late you must not stay,
Your flutt'ring kerchief else will tear
The thorn bush by the way."
What had been the good of this marrying anyway? Life in
Annlise's cottage went on just as before. Kersta milked the goat,
gathered sticks in the wood, went on with her weaving. In De-
cember, when it was dark by three in the afternoon, she crept into
the narrow little bed of her girlhood at six. They had not troubled
to get another, what was the good? At two in the morning, she
had had enough sleep and seated herself shivering at the loom


404
KERSTA
again. Day in, day out, the same dull and joyless life: like the
shuttle that shoots to and fro through the grey woollen threads.
Kersta could only tell that she was married by the fact that she
wore her braids bound round her head now, instead of hanging
down her back. On holidays she did not go to dance in the public-
house and on Saturday nights no boy stole softly in to see her.
The chief part of a girl's life was gone for her; thinking about
the boys, waiting for the boys, crying over the boys. Who was
there for her to talk to anyway? The girls talked about their
young men, the women about their children, their husbands, and
their housekeeping. Kersta had none of these. She grew silent
and sulky. There were bad times when she could not sleep at
night and tossed from one side to the other. All around her deep
silence. The winter stars twinkled brightly through the tiny win-
dow-panes. She could hear every sound in the neighbouring huts..
Bille's baby cried. Jehze came home--he was drunk and stum-
bled over the threshold. Now he beat Bille; she screamed and
scolded. Kersta felt very lonely. Why had not she all that?
She wanted her husband, her Thome. The tears ran down her
cheeks and she bit into the bed-clothes.
But there was the law-suit. That filled her life, gave her dignity
and importance. Once a week she took the four hour walk to town
to consult her lawyer. She knew every tree, every stone on the long
road. She knew them in every sort of weather; if it were not so
cold that her fingers froze, she knitted a stocking as she went.
Everyone knew the little woman with the red kerchief, the knitting,
and the big law-suit. The wood-cutters on the way called out to
her, “Hullo! soldier's Kersta, what's it like without a husband?”
Kersta stopped and wiped her hot face with her sleeve, “All right,
of course. Why not?"
"Thome can stay away six years more, eh?”
“Let him for all I care!"
The men's laughter rang through the wood: "Ha! ha! she likes
being alone! Well, and how goes the law-suit?"
"Finely! If you've got right on you're side, you don't have
to worry.”
"You don't say!"
She often met the assistant forester, a fine young gentleman,
with a black moustache, shiny brown eyes, a green coat collar, and
WS


COUNT EDUARD VON KEYSERLING 405
a silver watch chain. He stopped Kersta each time and joked
with her.
"Well, little soldier's wife, how are you?”
Kersta fushed a little and bent back her head so as to look at
him, “All right, of course.”
"And Thome still gets on all right without a wife?"
"Oh! he's got plenty of Poles and Jewesses where he is!"
"Oh! and you've got enough young men here, eh?”
“There's enough of them about.”
"Goodness, if I were a little woman like you, rosy as an apple,
you wouldn't catch me sitting round waiting for one of those old
soldier men to come back.”
"Well, who's waiting?” Kersta laughed loudly, as you do when
a fellow makes a joke.
“Oh! aren't you? We should make a good pair. You're like
a little sparrow and I'm so tall.”
"Fine!" called back Kersta, as she walked on. "We'll make a
contract at the next festival.” Oh, she knew well enough how to
joke with the boys. One day the forester seized her to kiss her
and throw her to the ground, but she broke away and ran off.
She laughed all day at the thought of it. At home in bed the
forester's eyes were always before her, and when she heard the
boys tapping gently at the girls' windows, she grew restless and
could not sleep.
When the spring came, these walks into town were easier. She
could take her time on the way home, the evenings were so light.
She often walked very slowly, just step by step, as though she
could not make up her mind to leave the wood. “It's queer,” she
said to herself, “these spring evenings make you feel so lazy, so
lazy you can't even think of the law-suit. It's funny!"
Among the tall firs stood birches in their fresh young leaves,
looking as if someone had hung a thin green veil over them; or
something white shines through the wood, like someone wrapped
in a white sheet; that is a wild cherry in full bloom and you can
smell it a verst away. In the meadow by the wood, stand deer,
black and silent in the mist as in a pool of milk; and everywhere,
from the hills and pastures ring the songs of the girls, the songs
Kersta knows so well. On such nights a girl's half mad and it's
no use trying to sleep. Kersta knew that too. She, too, had sat
ca


406
KERSTA
out all night long, her hands clasped round her knees, and had
sung and sung, sending the notes far out into the night, and then
had waited: Will someone answer? Will someone come? Will
not a fair moustache soon be pressed closely to her lips? Kersta
went over all this again as she loitered on the road listening into
the wood.
One night Kersta heard a crackling in the wood. A stag was
startled from its covert and called loudly; again there was a
crackling and the forester stood before her.
"Little little soldier's wife," he said. The moon was high in
the heavens and made his eyes and his broad white teeth shine
brightly. "You on the road again ?".
Kersta stopped and looked up at him. Yes, she had been to
town again, of course. What else did he expect?
“It's a good night for walking.”
“Yes, very good.”
The forester laughed, looked at Kersta, and was silent. She
too, was silent and waited. At last he put his arm round her
shoulders and said, “You and I, you and I, come!"
"Why, what's got you?” said Kersta. She tried to say it in
the rough joking voice that you use with boys, but it sounded rather
gentle and uncertain; and she let herself be led away from the
road into the wood. When they were under the trees and the
forester stroked her cheek and breast with his great, hot hand, she
knew she would do whatever he wanted
The morning dawned, the grouse had already come out into the
meadow and were drumming as Kersta walked hurriedly towards
her village.
“Oh, well,” she thought, "if you spend the night in the woods
with a fellow, things are bound to happen, and there you are.”
After this the forester often met Kersta on her way home from
town. Mother Annlise scolded, “What are you home so late for ?"
“The law-suit,” said Kersta. “Lord bless you, a law-suit's not
finished as quickly as a boiled egg." The girls' singing and the
boys' tapping at the windows no longer excited Kersta.
About hay time Kersta found she was going to have a child.
That was bad. What was she to do now? She went into the
barn to the goat, where no one could see her, and cried for an
hour; then she went quietly back to work. When she met the


COUNT EDUARD VON KEYSERLING 407
forester, she was very cross and scolded. But what good did
that do?
Silent, pale, with tight lips she went about her duties. She did
all the heavy summer work, was very short with her mother, struck
the goat when she milked, and went to town oftener than ever to
carry on the law-suit. If she should lose the law-suit, then she
herself was lost, then Thome would beat her and the child to death.
How about the child anyway? Oh, well, a child gets born and dies
and Thome wouldn't be home for a long time yet. For all that,
she could not help thinking of the child, of its cradle, the linen for
the sheets, and what it would be like to have something so little,
warm and soft, pressed to her and moving and putting its lips to
her breast: “Oh! bother! we'll hope to goodness it won't live.”
When the potato harvest came round Kersta could no longer
conceal her condition. She went straight along her furrow slowly,
with bent back gathering the potatoes into her skirt. She heard
Bille say behind her, “Kersta 'll have a present ready for Thome,
when he comes home. My! won't he be pleased!” The other
women laughed loudly and the laughter spread over the whole
field. “I knew it would have to come and now I've got it,” thought
Kersta. Her knees shook and her potatoes fell to the ground again.
She straightened up and looked at the women with the angry help-
less look of an animal at bay. Then she bent over her furrow
again and went on working in silence. There was no end to the
gibes now. When Kersta went across the field to put her potatoes
into the cart, she had to go under fire; “Say, Kersta, where'd you
have the present made? In town? You can get 'em cheap there.
Comes, I s'pose from having a law-suit, or did Thome send it by
post?” Kersta was silent. They'll get through with their jeering
sometime and then there'll be peace. She had a bad time with her
mother too, who grumbled and scolded all day long. What good
did that do? “You might as well take things as they come,” Kersta
said to herself. “Life's hard enough anyway.” This helped her;
and she took things less to heart.
One day in the winter, when Kersta had gone into the wood
for faggots, she was seized with the pains. The women put her
on the sledge and, screaming with laughter, dragged her back to
the village. Kersta gave birth to a girl. So the child was there
and it wasn't going to die either; it was a sturdy thing with brown


408
KERSTA
war
shiny eyes in its careworn infant's face. The people in the village
had got used to the fact that Kersta had a child. Nobody thought
of any more jokes. But Kersta herself now had something more
to live for than the law-suit. The law-suit was the most important
of course, but a baby needs you all day long; you rock it, you nurse
it, on warm evenings you sit with it on the doorstep and sing,
"Rai, rai, raa—ra—ta—."
“Dear Kersta," wrote Thome, “I'm writing to tell you that
things have gone badly. I've been sick. Now they're sending
me home. I shall be back next week. Keep well. Your hus-
band Thome.”
Kersta had read the letter with difficulty by the fire light.
“What does he say?" asked her mother.
"Oh! what should he say?" answered Kersta. She sat down
on the bench by the fire, for she felt rather shaky. "Is he all
right?” asked her mother again. Kersta did not answer, but stared
into the fire.
“Why don't you answer? Tell me.”
"He's coming back," said Kersta, in a quiet dry voice.
“If he only won't hurt the child,” thought Kersta. This must
have been in her mother's mind too, for she said, “You'll have to
put the cradle where it won't be always under his nose.” Yes,
she would see to that. They sat silent for a time beside each
other, then sighed and got up to go to bed. In bed her mother
called out, “Is the law-suit going all right?”'
"How else should it go ?”
“Oh, well, then!”
On a Saturday afternoon Kersta stood in front of the inn wait-
ing for the sleigh which was to bring the discharged soldiers from
the town. It was bitterly cold. The sun was setting red in a
glass-clear sky. All the women of the village had collected before
the public-house. They wrapped their hands in their aprons and,
screwing up their noses, looked down the road. There were the
soldiers! They shouted and waved their caps.
"Well! you're still pretty small, but you're alive all right,” said
Thome, as he stood before Kersta. Kersta blushed; she had almost
forgotten that Thome was so big. She felt shy and confused.
“Why shouldn't I be alive?” she said half laughing, but the
tears filled her eyes and she stroked Thome's sleeve.
"Come,” she said, "supper's ready."


COUNT EDUARD VON KEYSERLING 409
“Supper-hm-hm.” Thome laughed light-heartedly. “She
wants to feed me up, I'm too thin for her.” So home they went,
Thome ahead, Kersta trotting after.
The cottage room, trimmed with evergreens, was lighted by two
tallow candles. The table was set with a white cloth and the floor
strewn with pine needles. Mother Annlise stood at the fire and
stirred the pot.
"Well, Mother, you still about? Old bones still holding to-
gether, eh?” cried Thome.
“They'll hold out awhile yet,” said Annlise. "It's good to see
you back again.”
Thome sat down to the table and the pork was served him. He
ate slowly, chewing each morsel carefully and attentively, and,
looking at Kersta, said, with his mouth full, “Landowner, land-
owner of Dundur.” Kersta sat opposite to him, her hands folded
in her lap. “Funny,” she thought, “how good-looking a man can
be!" His face was so burnt that his fair moustache looked almost
white, but just look at those shoulders, those arms, that neck! It's
good to have a strong husband.
Thome had satisfied the worst of his hunger. He wiped his
moustache with the back of his hand and leaned back in his chair.
“Now, let's hear about the law-suit,” he said. Kersta put on an
air of great importance, as she began her account. There seemed
no end to the clever things the lawyer had said, and that she her-
self had said and done. The farm was as good as hers. Thome
listened, all attention and respect. “My! what a lot of brains for
such a little woman!” That spurred Kersta on. From the further
corner came a faint whimpering. Kersta, without stopping her
tale, rose mechanically, went over to the cradle, opened her jacket,
took the child, and began to nurse it. She raised her voice a little
to be heard from the other end of the room. Then, suddenly, she
stopped in the middle of a sentence. Mother Annlise quietly left
the room. “Now I'm in for it," thought Kersta. Thome was
coming towards her, slowly, with his head thrust forward, as if he
wanted to catch something. She put the child quickly back into
the cradle and planted herself in front of it. She grew very
pale, and stuck out her underlip; her round eyes opened wide and
grew glassy like those of a frightened animal. Her hands trem-
bled so, that she folded them tight on her stomach. Thus she
stood waiting; "Now it's coming as it had to.”
e


410
KERSTA
"What's that?” Thome's voice was low as if he were being
strangled.
"Well, what do you suppose ?”
"Where-where did that child come from?”
“The child-well-where should it come from?”
She brought this out fiercely and defiantly, but now she put
the knuckles of both hands into her eyes and began to cry loudly
with her mouth wide open, like a child who has been caught doing
something wrong.
"So that's the sort you are!" Thome spat it out. He seized
her by the wrist and dragged her into the middle of the room;
“You'd deceive your husband, would you, you bitch, you! I'll
kill you and the brat too!"
He began to beat Kersta unmercifully. She howled, defended
herself. "His fist's like iron, oh! oh!” she thought. "He's so
strong. Heavens! he'll kill me." How it hurt—and yet-and yet
-somehow it satisfied something in her. She felt through it all
that she had a husband.
Thome was out of breath. He Aung his wife from him with a
curse, spat, and sat down at the table again. Kersta lay motionless
on the floor, smarting all over. She looked at Thome sideways.
Had he finished? She would almost rather have him go on than
have him sit there and pay no attention to her. Thome, his head
on his hand, sat there brooding. Kersta got up painfully, sat down
on the bench by the fire, rubbed her aching limbs, and cried softly
to herself. “Poor man!” she thought.
The candles had burned very low and had long black noses.
Little hard grains of snow tapped outside on the window panes.
A cricket began to chirp briskly on the hearth. “What's he going
to do?” thought Kersta; “Will he beat me again to-night?” Thome
drank some brandy, yawned, and began to pull off his boots.
Kersta got up and pulled them off for him. Then he undressed
and threw himself on to the bed; it creaked as if it would break.
Kersta could not help smiling. “He is a heavy man!” She put
out the candles and sat down again by the hearth. The glowing
embers threw a faint rosy light on to the bare feet of the little
woman, who sat there, anxious and motionless, listening to every
breath her husband drew.
“You,” came suddenly from the bed. Kersta started up


COUNT EDUARD VON KEYSERLING 411
frightened. “What are you sitting there for? Aren't you coming
to bed ?"
"What else should I do?" answered Kersta in her gruffest voice;
but as she went over to the bed, her heart grew warm within her.
Now, she too, was like other wives.
For a time, life was hard in the little hut. Thome's rage at
the wrong done him flared up again and again; then there were
blows and screams. At the public-house he vowed he would beat
both wife and child to death. The child had to be continually
hidden from him. "He'll get used to it,” said Kersta calmly,
"men-folks are all that way, and there's no changing that.” And,
in fact, as time went on, Thome spoke less and less of the child
and more and more of the law-suit. They discussed how many
cows, how many pigs they would keep on the little farm; there
was plenty to talk about. He forgot the child, ceased to notice
it, no longer spat when he passed the cradle. Kersta could nurse
the baby without having to hide.
Thome decided to go to town himself to look after things. For
a woman Kersta was bright, but when it comes to real brains you
want a man.
“That's sure,” said Kersta, "who else should have 'em ?”
So off he drove. Late in the evening he came back rather drunk
and very jovial. The law-suit was won.
“Come here, young farmer's wife," he called out, “here's some-
thing for you.” He put a red silk kerchief on Kersta's head. “A
farmer's wife must be fine!”
"A kerchief? What did you do that for?” asked Kersta, and
laughed.
"Oh, because—” and half turning away, as if embarrassed,
Thome tossed a fine white roll on the table; "and that-there-I
bought for—for the ”
"For what?”
"Well, for the brat."
Kersta took the roll and pressed it gently against her breast.
Now, perhaps, after all, a little better time was coming for
her, too.


ELEGY
BY JOSEPH AUSLANDER
Fled is the swiftness of all the white-footed ones
Who had a great cry in them and the wrath of speed:
They are no more among us: they and their sons
Are dead indeed.
vera
So the river-mews twist in long loops over the river,
Wheeling and shifting with the wind's and the tide's shift,
And pass in a black night—and nothing is left but a shiver
To show they were swift.
Whenever I hear the gull's throat throb in a fog,
Watch the owl's velvet swoop, the high hawk's lonely paces,
I think on the heels of him who lies like a log
And his friends under turf and the rain creeping down on
their faces.
a 108
And my heart goes sick and the hell in my heart could break
To the edge of my eyes for the mates I shall not be knowing
Anywhere now though the ice booms loud in the lake
And the geese honk north again and the heron's going.



Property of Aileen Dresser
BENEATH A WILLOW-TREE. EARLY AMERICAN






Property of Alice Newton
WHITTIER'S HOME. EARLY AMERICAN






Property of Frank C. Osborn
PORTSMOUTH HARBOR. EARLY AMERICAN





THE DANDYISM OF WALLACE STEVENS
BY GORHAM B. MUNSON
THE impeccability of the dandy resolves itself into two ele-
ments: correctness and elegance. Both elements transcend
merely good taste, for correctness implies a knowledge of the rules
governing the modes of expression, feeling, thinking, conduct; and
elegance is, of course, good taste that has been polished.
Until the advent of Wallace Stevens, American literature has
lacked a dandy. Of swaggering macaronis there have been a-plenty,
but the grace and ceremony, the appropriate nimbleness of the
dandy, have been lacking. Certainly as a craftsman, he has
absorbed the teachings of the academy; at any rate he can trust
himself to the musical risks of poetry-making use of allitera-
tion, assonance, free rhymes, irregular stanzaic forms, and vers
libre—and can be counted on to overcome them. The effective
use of exclamation in poetry is exceedingly difficult, because the
accent must be carefully prepared for and must coincide with a
real rise in the material. He has many times run the risk of over-
exclamation, always winning, and perhaps most handsomely in
Bantams in Pine Woods:
TS
“Chieftain Iffucan of Azcan in caftan
Of tan with henna hackles, halt!
Damned universal cock, as if the sun
Was blackamoor to bear your blazing tail.
Fat! Fat! Fat! Fat! I am the personal.
Your world is you. I am my world.
You ten-foot poet among inchlings. Fat!
Begone! An inchling bristles in these pines,
Bristles, and points their Appalachian tangs,
And fears not portly Azcan nor his hoos."


414
THE DANDYISM OF WALLACE STEVENS
Elegance he attains in his fastidious vocabulary—in the sur-
prising aplomb and blandness of his images. He will say
"harmonium" instead of "small organ," "lacustrine" instead of
"lakeside," "sequin” instead of "spangle”; he will speak of
“hibiscus," "panache," "fabliau," and "poor buffo.” The whole
tendency of his vocabulary is, in fact, toward the lightness and
coolness and transparency of French. As for his images, they are
frequently surprising in themselves, yet they always produce the
effect of naturalness—an effect which is cool, bland, transparent,
natural, and gracefully mobile.
In the dandy of letters, impeccability is primarily achieved by
adding elegance to correctness. Yet life is disturbing and horrify-
ing as well as interesting and delightful: one is inevitably tossed
by the “torments of confusion”; and the dandy, if he would main-
tain his urbane demeanour, must adopt protective measures. The
safeguards employed by Mr Stevens against “the torments of con-
fusion” are three: wit, speculation, and reticence. As an antidote
to love-sick quandary, to the fear of decrepitude, to the disturbing
vastness of the ocean, there is wit—that self-mockery which we
įhave in Le Monocle de Mon Oncle, and The Comedian As The
Letter C. Doubt of reality must be admitted as a purely specula-
tive doubt, "as a calm darkens among water-lights." Let specula-
tive doubt play gently across the surface of a steadfast materialism.
And finally, let us be reticent, for reticence is becoming in its im-
plication that one is aware of enigmatic miseries, and yet too proud
to wear one's heart upon one's sleeve.
Mr Stevens possesses an imagination that is ordered. "Imagina-
tion,” he says, “is the will of things.” It is "the magnificent cause
of being ... the one reality in this imagined world.” By its aid
at least, one may invent a literary cosmos, moving according to cal-
culations, subject to its own laws and hierarchies, consistent with
itself, a minute but sustained harmony floating above the chaos of
life. It is whole and understandable and therefore a refuge in a
life that is fragmentary and perplexing. It, in being form, is a
polite answer to the hugeness which we cannot form.
Upon what, may we ask, is this imaginative order of Wallace
Stevens based? It is not humanism, for the humanist searches for
unifying standards of general human experience. Needless to say,
it is not religion, for the religious man strives for a knowledge
of the absolute. It is discipline—the discipline of one who is a


GORHAM B. MUNSON
415
connoisseur of the senses and the emotions. Mr Stevens' imagina-
tion comes to rest on them; it is at their service, it veils them in
splendour. The integration achieved is one of feeling; in the final
analysis, it is a temperate romanticism.
Wallace Stevens has a quality, however, which is rarely asso-
ciated with romanticism, a quality that his illustrious predecessor,
Baudelaire, lacked to complete his dandyism. Baudelaire's dandy-
ism might be called a metallic shell secreted by a restless man
against a despised shifting social order. It cannot be called a
placid dandyism, whereas tranquillity enfolds Mr Stevens. This
same lack of tranquillity impairs the dandyism of T. S. Eliot in
those respects in which he is a dandy—turning his promenade
through the alleged barrenness of modern life into bitter melan-
choly. Mr Stevens, however, appears to sit comfortably in the
age, to enjoy a sense of security, to be conscious of no need of
fighting the times. The world is a gay and bright phenomenon,
and he gives the impression of feasting on it without misgiving.
Here in Gubbinal is his answer to those who repine because the
world is blasted and its people are miserable:
“That strange flower, the sun,
Is just what you say.
Have it your way.
The world is ugly,
And the people are sad.
ure S
That tuft of jungle feathers,
That animal eye,
Is just what you say.
That savage of fire,
That seed,
Have it your way.
The world is ugly,
And the people are sad.”
Because of this tranquillity, this well-fed and well-booted dandy-
ism of contentment, Mr Stevens has been called Chinese. Unde-


416 THE DANDYISM OF WALLACE STEVENS
IS.
niably, he has been influenced by Chinese verse as he has been by
French verse, but one must not force the comparison For Chinese
poetry as a whole rests upon great humanistic and religious tradi-
tions: its quiet strength and peace are often simply by-products
of a profound understanding; its epicureanism is less an end, more
a function, than the tranquillity—may I say—the decidedly Amer-
ican tranquillity of Wallace Stevens.
The American nation drives passionately toward comfort. The
aim of the frenzied practical life in which it engages is to attain
material ease, and the symbols of its paradise are significant. They
are wide, accurately barbered lawns, white yachts with bright
awnings, the silvered motor-car, the small regiment of obsequious
servants. Naturally, in paradise one would not wish to be annoyed
by a suspicion that all was a brilliant fake, a magnificent evan-
escent dream, but rather, to refine upon one's luxurious means of
existence. This is where in America the artistic intelligence may
enter and play, elaborating, colouring, bedecking, adding splen-
dour to the circumstances of one's comfort. Is there not funda-
mentally a kinship between the sensory discriminations and com-
fortable tranquillity of Wallace Stevens' poetry and the America
that owns baronial estates?
Growing more reckless, we might say that if Dr Jung is correct
in asserting that in American psychology there is a unique alliance
of wildness and restraint, then Wallace Stevens would seem in
another respect to be at one with his country. I do not discover
in him the ferocity that some critics have remarked upon, but there
is at least a fair for bright savagery, for "that tuft of jungle
feathers, that animal eye, that savage fire.” In the case of certain
romanticists, such symbols would betray insatiable longing, the
desire for a nature that never existed. In his case, they are purely
spectacular. The Old World Romantic, restless amid the stratifi-
cations of his culture, yearns for the untamed: the New World
Romantic assumes the easy posture of an audience.
American readers may well rejoice in this artist who is so gifted
in depicting sea-surfaces full of clouds. No American poet excels
him in the sensory delights that a spick-and-span craft can stimu-
late: none is more skilful in arranging his music, his figures, and
his design. None else, monocled and gloved, can cut so faultless
a figure standing in his box at the circus of life.


ROBERT L. WOLF
417
There are masters of art and art-masters. Seldom has an artist
been more canny and more definite in distinguishing between major
and minor than Wallace Stevens. No one has more carefully
observed to the letter the restrictions of the art-master, or more
perfectly exemplified to us the virtue of impeccable form.
LULLABY FOR A TIRED LADY
BY ROBERT L. WOLF
Is there any need so deep?
Sleep, I think, only sleep.
Only sleep and music move
Bosoms travel-stained with love.
Only they relax the brow,
Weary now, weary now-
Wash in even rhythms—flow
Over Time's "I told you so,"
While the pageant past becomes
So much noise of dying drums,
Like the rumble of a storm-
Distant, sober, uniform.


BOOK REVIEWS
AN ADHERENT OF THE ACTUAL
MEMOIR Of Thomas BewICK. Written by Himself.
Introduction by Selwyn Image. 8vo. 274 pages.
Lincoln MacVeagh. The Dial Press. $4.
M HE reader of Thomas Bewick's story of himself will be im-
I pressed with a certain justice of mind in the writer, and an
easy and mature originality in his narrative. The reason may
lie in the fact that this excellent writing was the occupation of
his leisure, as he was six years in composing what a modern
novelist, so far as length goes, would readily produce in six weeks.
Or it may be because his faculties had put on a last ripeness by
the time he began to write, which was in 1822, his sixty-ninth
year; so that the effect is that of an old man, once active, but
now quietly and brightly ruminating in the chimney corner. An
Indian-summer air is in his pages, and their tranquillity takes
nothing away, but rather sets off this unconscious picture of stout-
ness of character, and energy of parts—the picture of a man who
was warmly a man, an artist who took his art (wood-engraving)
simply, but with a certain enjoying seriousness.
But one has not long to read to discover that the effect is not
so readily accountable; that there is something not ordinary about
him. Yet the narrative is not particularly stirring, although the
times were unquiet enough, for he lived through the years that
saw the coming and going of the "American War,” the French
Revolution, and the Napoleonic empire. The perception arrives
with perhaps a shade of surprise that a great part of his effect lives
in his modesty. We learn that, in his artistic attainments, he was
almost wholly self-taught, for he never had a drawing master, he
tells us, or even lessons in drawing. But among self-taught men,
one with his evident sense of what would be appropriate in his
bearing, is remarkable indeed. It seemed that he knew unusually
well, where his place was in the world; and without ostentation,
ter
U
MUS
e Was


CHARLES K. TRUEBLOOD
419
CI
was
but firmly, and self-respectingly, kept his solid legs planted there.
From this stout vantage-point he turned an intent eye upon
his world. It was evidently with active thinking and the greatest
seriousness that he turned over in his mind everything he saw,
everything that came across his path. Yet he was far from solemn,
though perhaps the shy rustic in him straightened his face a little,
and somewhat abashed his edged and robust humour, for when it
appears, as in his vignettes of country life, it is surprisingly, though
with the effect of having been there unnoticed all the while, like
Cyrano in the famous opening scene of Cyrano de Bergerac. He
was, in fact, of bounding spirit, with a stomach for living. He
did not overflow with love-it was his study to be contained;
but he was really and rarely filled with it: the love of nature,
the love of life, the love of men. He had sometimes-oddly for
him—the effect of a visionary, so imbued was he with genuine
humanitarian sentiment, and schemes for the public welfare and
comity.
But after all the reader will readily remark that he was not
a doting lover. He had an entrenched habit of taking observa-
tions, and seemed, like other minds of strength and symmetry, not
to lose his awareness of where the north star lies. Such sense of
mental directions was perhaps derivative, as were possibly his other
qualities, from his evident master virtue, which was an invincible
habit of trying to see through things as they are apparently, or as
they are generally accepted to be, to things as they are actually.
It is not enough, he tells you, in effect, with his tranquil and manly
air, that a thing should be generally accepted; for the world is
made of men, knaves, and fools. And a thing may pass for being
generally accepted, when it is only accepted by fools and inter-
ested knaves. A man, therefore, he considers, must strictly estab-
lish for himself the grounds of his every belief, must strictly satisfy
himself as to actuality of premise in his every mental structure,
acquired or evolved. Thus the reader will find that he could be
full of reverence, and of searching, at the same time—and also full
of perspicacity.
His zeal for the actual was equalled only by the satisfaction
he took when he succeeded in setting his thinking and feeling
parallel to it. And in this practised activity of his mind seem to
reside not only the sinews of his honest sense, but the means, or


420 AN ADHERENT OF THE ACTUAL
the expression, of his artistic powers. Commentators remark the
truth of his line and shade to the deeply humorous or pathetic
meanings in his art, as something rather apart, which separately
had the effect of elevating the rusticity of country scenes. Such a
trait seems, however, to be organically the product of the choice
observation, and the fidelity to significant fact, which arise directly
from a love of the subject, from the thought that its remarkability
deserves the artist's best vision. He himself speaks with some
unconscious illumination of this characteristic, when he mentions
the dissatisfaction he experienced when obliged to sketch some of
his studies for the British Birds from stuffed specimens, and how
he promptly discarded such studies when he was so situated that he
could make others more accurate of life. Or take him at another
matter, the profession of painting:
"Had I been a painter, I never would have copied the works
of the ‘old masters,' however highly they might be esteemed. I
would have gone to nature for all my patterns.”
This, evidently, he did, so far as he could, in his engraving; and
one would think it an important factor of his eminence in the
art, though that is said to rest to a considerable extent on his
technical development of the so-called white line.
But his zeal for the actual is more than an axiom of art. He
made it, as one might judge, not only his chief principle of think-
ing, but the thing he most lived by; and that he lived solidly, and
with a sincerity which is true bullion, no one will be disposed to
deny who gives the tranquil manliness of his book the attention
it will repay. The mental fruits of this bias of his, give him in
some respects a modern air, though he is rather too pleasant to be
called a realist. He antedated sociology in the suggestions he
recorded for the regenerative treatment of criminals; this at a time
when plain blunt brutality was largely the mode. And—what
must have sounded odd in the ears of his contemporaries, so long
used to stuffiness and an impressionistic hygiene—he held that
fresh air and a rigorous personal regimen were the only sound
basis of hardihood and wholesome energy. He had the boldness,
even, to recommend (and the last third of his advice still blooms
with largely unheeded originality) to great and lesser ladies that


CHARLES K. TRUEBLOOD
421
they leave off being "mewed up in close rooms,” live in the open,
and become practical florists and horticulturalists.
But perhaps his application to the actual is better shown in the
fact that while full of religious feeling, he was scornful of creed;
or in his view, temperately expounded, but too long for quotation,
of biblical fables not as literal, utter truth, but as allegories,
pabulum for simple and puerile understandings, used with some
deliberateness, by Moses and the other great biblical rulers, as
governing and teaching devices, for the restraint and upbringing
of their peoples.
CHARLES K. TRUEBLOOD


SOCIAL EARTH
NEW HAMPSHIRE: A Poem With Notes and Grace
Notes. By Robert Frost. With woodcuts by J. J.
Lankes. 12mo. 113 pages. Henry Holt and Com-
pany. $2.50.
IN this volume Mr Frost's humour is at once more pungent
I and more adumbrative than ever. The title-poem is excep-
tionally racy. At first it might seem exceptionally explicit, as
though the poet had here determined to unsheathe his views on
American life. But soon we find New Hampshire is mere intro-
duction-a tangy series of adumbrative instances, bunches of
sweetfern at the edge of a field to tempt the tramper inward. The
true odour of the field is not sharp and referable, but composite
and pervasive. It comes only to the patient stroller-through who
breathes naturally, without plucking and snuffing.
Mr Frost is so close to earth, and earth is for him so social, that
vehement love and fear of it seem to him out of focus.
“The woods are lovely, dark and deep;
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep ...".
He tosses half of a laugh at a certain "runaway from nature"
for whom the wood's in flux”-
“He knew too well for any earthly use
The line where man leaves off and nature starts,
And never over-stepped it save in dreams”—
ever OV
ei
V
1
ns.
and the other half at “the new school of the pseudo-phallic,
mewling and puking in the public arms." He points comically
toward the real-phallic in Two Look at Two, where, over a broken
wall on a mountainside, a pair of human lovers come face to face
with a buck and doe, each couple looking questions at the other.
He notes how commercialism is loosening our American hold of the


G. R. ELLIOTT
423
soil. He can't be fully at ease with a boyhood friend who had
grown so rich that “His farm was 'grounds' and not a farm at
all”; and a certain brook smothered by a city becomes for him
a feverish human symbol. He loves New Hampshire (a state of
mind rather than a state) for all the things she doesn't sell. He
gives to her wild grapes a poem reminiscent of Birches in Moun-
tain Interval; and remarks, with casual wild loveliness, that
"Her unpruned grapes are flung like lariats
Far up the birches out of reach of man.”
In summers he wants her mountain-tops higher,
“To tap the upper sky and draw a flow
Of frosty night air on the vale below.”
(
Winter, indeed, spreads through this book, with fringes of chill
spring and late autumn. On the other hand the poet rejects
(page 12) the kind of gloom that so many realists are aiming at
nowadays, and sets over against it “the need of being versed in
country things": "For them there is really nothing sad.” He cul-
tivates cold and meagre soil, not to get a dark emotion out of it,
but from a humorous-creative delight in whatever can manage to
live there. His birds, for instance, neither assemble in lovely
chanting groves, as of old, nor warble in bleak solitude like Hardy's
thrush "upon the growing gloom.” They gather quite naturally
on a muddy road when a snowstorm has driven them from every
other foothold. For the ordinary person nothing can be less
inspiriting than the heavy snowstorm that brings winter back upon
the middle spring of New England, breaking branches and check-
ing shoots that are late enough already: it seems the very distilla-
tion of all that is aimless in life. This time, however,
“The road became a channel running flocks
Of glossy birds like ripples over rocks ...
Well, something for the snowstorm to have shown
The country's singing strength thus brought together,
That though repressed and moody with the weather
Was none the less there ready to be freed
And sing the wildflowers up from root and seed.”


424
SOCIAL EARTH
Yet the reader who finds a deliberate cheerfulness in Our Sing-
ing Strength is as far from the Frostian humour as when he finds
deliberate depression in Place for a Third. The neighbourhood in
this poem' is indeed a drab "product of life's ironing-out.” Here
death seems life's main interest—if one is looking at New England
life from the viewpoint, for instance, of Miss Amy Lowell's Over-
grown Pasture. The community seems mainly interested in getting
itself decently buried; its dutifulness and economy are ironically
exercised together in the question of proper graves and grief. But,
catching aright the humour of the poem, one soon sees that Laban's
procedure in regard to his dead wife is more convincingly romantic
than bereaved Romeo's. The whole blank neighbourhood wins
a real stir of poetic life from its “glimpse of lingering person in
Eliza.” This glimpse (which the poet might well have developed
a little more fully) broadens down into the region of rich social
humour, between laughter and sadness, from which Mr Frost's
"singing strength” comes. More intense and closely woven than
this poem are The Census-taker and The Witch of Coös, which
seem to me the masterpieces, for art, in this volume.
G. R. ELLIOTT
0
1
1 It recalls to my memory a gaunt and patched Maine farmer whom I once
stopped to talk with beside the road. When I tried to find out what leisure
time he had and what he did with it, he pointed with interest to the family
graveplot on a nearby slope (the least unkempt spot on the farm that a
passerby could see) and said: “I shan't get rest worth speakin' of till
I'll lie up yonder.”


AN ILLUSTRIOUS DOCTOR ADMIRABLE
FOR EVERYTHING
HISTORIA CALAMITATUM: An Autobiography. By
Peter Abélard. Translated by Henry Adams Bellows.
With introduction by Ralph Adams Cram. Svo. 96
pages. Thomas A. Boyd. $10.
W HOSE who find modern autobiographic fiction disenchant-
I ing and unreal, may acclaim perfection in Henry Adams
Bellows' recent translation of Abélard's autobiographic letter, The
Story of My Misfortunes. Not everyone, however, has agreed
with John of Salisbury that Abélard was “an illustrious doctor
admirable for everything." In his Historical Sketches, Cardinal
Newman observes: “Supposing Abélard to be the first master
of scholastic philosophy, as many seem to hold, we shall have st
no difficulty in condemning the author, while we honour the work."
“Abélard was not a great character," says Henry Osborn Taylor,
"apart from his intellect. He was vain and inconsiderate, a man
who delighted in confounding and supplanting his teachers, and
in being a thorn in the flesh of all opponents." Ralph Adams
Cram, furthermore, in introducing The Story of My Misfortunes,
says with temerarious fluency, “We know that during his early
years in Paris Abélard was a bold and daring champion in the
lists of dialectics; brilliant, persuasive, masculine to a degree; yet
this self-portrait is of a man timid, suspicious, frightened of
realities,” and Dr Maurice De Wulf speaks of him as "challenging
all and sundry to philosophical controversies in which he always
boasted of victory in advance.” In the statement, “I pitched the
camp of my school outside the city," it is obvious that the wisdom
suggested is "gladiatorial wisdom," nor does one doubt the appro-
priateness of the assertion that Abélard was, when confronted by
the tribunal who accused him of heretical belief in three separate
gods, as "a bound wild rhinoceros.” But why not? Under such
circumstances, surely it is inevitable that one's “natural prompt-
ness" should assert itself, rather than the gentleman's talent of


426
AN ILLUSTRIOUS DOCTOR
AS
“not offending.” In an age of "savants' cockfights,” when men
"preferred new and hazardous doctrines to those that were truer,
but appeared superannuated,” and “scorned what seemed too
clear”; when it was said by a disgusted contemporary that the
subtleties of dialectics were "like a fine and minute dust blinding
the eyes of those who stir it up,” Abélard's clear vigour separates
itself from the manner of the times, and nicely florescent writers
might well refresh their faculties in an examination of his pliant,
severely careful methods.
We have in the Historia Calamitatum, throughout, the natural-
ness of the literary genius with a native orderliness and an enticing
gift of subordination and emphasis, which in combination would
seem to constitute the essence of good story-telling; the instinct for
method which is the animating principle of suspense, being
especially conspicuous in such statements as the following:
VS
ens
“First I was punished for my sensuality, and then for my pride;
... now it is my desire that you should know the stories of these
two happenings ... the very facts ... and the order in which
they came about.”
Although Abélard is said to have been "greatly in love with his
own discernment,” and innate humility is not to be observed in
the statement, “It was my wont to win success, not by routine but
by ability," the manner of the Historia is striking in its utter
simplicity with a kind of laconic despair—whether combined with
arrogance or pruned of it. Of the sentimental preoccupation which
insulated him from philosophical research, he wearily remarks:
"It became loathsome to me to go to the school or to linger
there. . . . I had become nothing more than a reciter of my for-
mer discoveries,”
and although he had said of William of Champeaux,
“the more his envy pursued me, the greater was the authority it
conferred upon me. Even so held the poet, ‘Jealousy aims at the
peaks,'”
he repudiates his own hauteur, observing:


MARIANNE MOORE
427
“But prosperity puffs up the foolish. . . . Thus, I, who by this
time had come to regard myself as the only philosopher remaining
in the whole world, ... I departed alike from the practice of the
philosophers and the spirit of the divines,”
and says of his failure to inculcate sobriety in the monks of
St Gildas:
“I considered how of old I had been of some service to the
clerics whom I had now abandoned for the sake of these monks,
so that I was no longer able to be of use to either; how incapable
I had proved myself in everything I had undertaken or attempted,
so that above all others I deserved the reproach, “This man began
to build, and was not able to finish.'”.
Abélard was not perhaps, “the first philosopher of his time,”
in the body of thought which he bequeathed to us, but his methods
"emancipated reason by giving it confidence in its own forces,” and
although a boast of priority is self-adulatory no doubt, one values
the intelligence of the critic who remarks in quoting what Abélard
so unselfprotectively said of himself, “If he was wrong to say it,
perhaps he was right in thinking it.”
The arresting combination of explicitness with aloofness em-
phasizes in the Historia Calamitatum, the contrast in literary skill
between the mawkish accounts by untalented writers, of the author's
relationship with Héloïse, and his own magisterial candour. The
Story of My Misfortunes, far from being as one might infer from
allusions to it, The Story of My Misfortune—the mere record
of a sentimental tragedy—is rather, a many-angled record of a
life of multiform hardship.
For the "peevishness” to which Mr Cram refers in the introduc-
tion to this letter, one looks in vain. We do perceive a desperate
melancholy in the statement:
ain.
Гce1
“The only way of escape seemed for me to seek refuge with
Christ among the enemies of Christ.”
Abélard speaks of being “horrified," "stunned by fear," but does
it not at all fearfully; it is suffering rather than fear that is em-
phasized when he says:


428
AN ILLUSTRIOUS DOCTOR
"I am driven hither and yon, a fugitive and a vagabond even
as the accursed Cain. ... Without were fightings, within were
fears,'"
and
"amid the dreadful roar of the waves of the sea, where the land's
end left me no further refuge in flight, I was like one who
in terror of the sword that threatens him dashes headlong over a
precipice, and to shun one death for a moment rushes to another.”
In writing this letter as a specific for another's despair-of
whose we cannot be sure—Abélard has bequeathed to us a master-
stroke of sensibility and understanding. He has narrated simply,
with many graces of exactness, the particulars of his experience and
he has done it with incomparable éclat.
MARIANNE MOORE


CODIFYING MILTON
Milton, MAN AND THINKER. By Denis Saurat.
8vo. 363 pages. Lincoln MacVeagh. The Dial
Press. $4.
R SAURAT'S book on Milton, despite the total orthodoxy
TV of its treatment, is a very difficult work to approach. On
first reading I felt it to be an assembling of disjecta membra; yet
further examination disclosed that the subject had been parcelled
out with perfect logic and clarity. The opening section is devoted
to Milton, The Man. It is in turn sub-divided into The Elements
of Milton's Character in Youth, and The Man of Action and
Passion, the latter sub-division astutely including the polemical
pamphlets as a phase of Milton's “action.” The other three parts
—again sub-divided, while the sub-divisions are sub-divided in
turn—deal respectively with Milton's "system,” the reflection (and
occasionally deflection) of this system in his major poems, and the
"sources” of his thought. Having gone so far in the laying out
of his book, I suspect Mr Saurat of simply reversing his process,
taking the various notes which he had collected and sorting them
into their proper bins. The result is too often a mere sequence
of data, a loose mosaic of quotations paralleled by repetitions in
Mr Saurat's own words, or introduced by some such barely serv-
iceable remarks as: "And he concludes in this masterly fashion”;
“The praise of books is famous”; “Here is his opinion of con-
temporary Italy”; “But here is his opinion of England.” The
work, which originally served as a doctor's thesis, has not wholly
lifted itself above its type.
In his introduction Mr Saurat writes that “Milton's thought is
most attractive when studied in connection with its intimate sources
in his character and emotional experience.” One might begin by
challenging this statement in itself. Indeed, Mr Saurat's own
book may be taken as added evidence that Milton's thought is,
on the contrary, most attractive when it is left embedded and
obscured among Milton's own stylistic specifications. A poet's
“thoughts” are not those fat answers to questionnaires which can


430
CODIFYING MILTON
Tid
nor
be extracted, in the form of propositions, from some intricate piece
of rhetoric constructed around these thoughts.” Ibsen's "thoughts”
on the freedom of women, for instance, are not certain sentences
taken from his Doll's House. His thoughts on this subject are
the Doll's House. The "thoughts" on the subject-as Mr Saurat
understands the word—are, like the thoughts of Milton which Mr
Saurat so carefully outlines, perfectly capable of suggesting them-
selves to persons of rich or low vitality, and to powerful and
niggardly brains alike.
But even allowing Mr Saurat his assumption, I feel that his
book still remains a disappointment. For he possesses only the
most antiquated and unwieldy of mechanisms for disclosing to us
the "intimate sources” in Milton's "character and emotional expe-
rience.” In view of the increasing accuracy of psychological
nomenclature during recent years, the reader will be nonplussed
at a method of investigation which confines itself to talk of "im-
perious will," "penetrating and systematic intellect," "fullest self-
consciousness of a tremendous individuality,” “noble humility in
his pride.” Mr Saurat tends always to discuss Milton's character
in an ethical, rather than a psychological, vocabulary.
A similar objection might be made to Mr Saurat's treatment
of theology in Milton. He does hardly more than cull or rear-
range Milton's theological prose, and—by seeing it purely in the
terms current in its heyday—restates rather than interprets. (He
does, however, draw certain parallels between Milton's system and
that of some nineteenth-century philosophy.) As to his appendix
on Milton's blindness, and his somewhat loose yet possibly cor-
rect reasoning to prove that it derived from hereditary syphilis, this
is a fact which—if thoroughly established-might be useful to
those savants who keep turning up with the desire to connect genius
with disease. In Mr Saurat's volume it is merely constated, a
thesis without an application, left in vacuo.
In summary I should say that Mr Saurat's concerns are decidedly
peripheral to those aspects of Milton's poetry which recommend
it to modern readers; but in this peripheral territory his work has
been extensive, and should prove of most value to students and
producing scholars, all those for whom Milton is less a poet than
a task.
есот
KENNETH BURKE


BRIEFER MENTION
Georgian STORIES, 1925 (illus., 12mo, 339 pages; Putnam: $2.50). This
volume, the third in the series, is notable for the inclusion of a story by
F. Tennyson Jesse. Miss Jesse's story, Baker's Fury, is directly in the
tradition of Thomas Hardy. It displays a vigorous originality, a rugged
strength of narrative, an intimate knowledge of the values of pity and
terror. The Little Mexican, a reminiscence by Aldous Huxley, is written
with considerable charm, and freedom from that artificiality which is the
calculated grace of Osbert Sitwell's The Greeting. To Americans it
might be of interest to trace the relation between L. P. Hartley's The
Island and Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher. It may be said in
general that the writers of the various stories that make up the present
volume are capable in manipulating the formal elements of the short
story.
e with uncerned, Mi nopf: $2
St. Mawr, by D. H. Lawrence (12mo, 222 pages; Knopf: $2). Like the
stallion about which this story is concerned, Mr Lawrence stamps, and
snorts, and tosses his mane with unbridled spirit. If one had not read
him before, one would be startled into thought by his vehement sincerity,
alienated by a vulgar superficiality in his depicting of character, and
led on from page to page by such poetic phrases as "the hawks sat
motionless like dark fists clenched under heaven.” But all Mr Lawrence's
later work trumpets out in changing cadences the same injunction, an
injunction which one finds more artistically expressed in The Fox, or
even in The Lost Girl, than in the present somewhat headlong exposition.
Moon Harvest, by Guiseppe Cautela (12mo, 253 pages; Lincoln MacVeagh,
Dial Press: $2) might be as vulnerable as a watch in the hands of a
curious schoolboy, if one chose to take its story apart to discover what
makes it tick, yet there is something in the ingenuous sincerity with which
it is composed which arrests one's impulse. The author writes with an
artless ardour which is a grace in itself; the thought flows quietly and
the climax comes as though it were unavoidable rather than something
sought after and contrived. The simple tragedy of two Italian immigrants,
separated by the tide of American life which catches one up while it
leaves the other behind, is set down imaginatively, and—what is even
more important—understandingly.
The Mother's RECOMPENSE, by Edith Wharton (12mo, 342 pages; Apple-
ton : $2) is written with the indulgent perceptive irony of a refined woman
of the world whose insight remains pure and light and whose intellect
carries with perfect ease its somewhat familiar burden. The respect one
continues to feel for Mrs Wharton's lucidity and skill can no longer
compensate one, however, for a certain quality of thinness increasingly
evident in each of her successive volumes.


432
BRIEFER MENTION
entional marriage, he play light. If the marrias fossilized to
That Nice YOUNG COUPLE, by Francis Hackett (12mo, 383 pages; Boni &
Liveright: $2) is sharp and ironic-a novel built up analytically rather
than creatively. Armed with a geologist's hammer, Mr Hackett has
scaled the rocky mountain of middle-class Puritanism, and chipped off
a specimen for laboratory study. Having set out to show the break-down
in a conventional marriage, he plays no favourites; the novel gives off
no warmth and only a pale cold light. If the marriage which Mr
Hackett has chosen for his experiment were a little less fossilized to
start with, the flounderings and the ultimate futility in the relationship
of his nice young couple would be of deeper import. As it stands, the
author seems to hold his characters off in one direction and his reader
off in another; his detachment is perhaps too thoroughly insulated.
her, his first, ded, but the nor desirable ithe
GOLD BY GOLD, by Herbert S. Gorman (12mo, 380 pages; Boni & Live-
right: $2.50) Mr James Joyce achieves, at the hands of his first American
biographer, his first American novel. The title indicates that the indebt-
edness is acknowledged, but the novel does not prove that the methods
of Mr Joyce are either inevitable or desirable in the particular instance.
The same sensibility, the same erudition, and the same intellectual dis-
cipline (control of the form) are required in the writer who adopts all
of the Joycian methods and most of the tricks. Mr Gorman's sensibility
is, indeed, extraordinary, but he has not been successful in making a
third-rate poet, his hero, the medium of expression as Joyce was success-
ful in making the uncommon-common mind of Bloom his medium. The
story of this poet of small talents who aspires to and imitates the life
of a genius, and is broken by it, is not exceptionally interesting as nar-
rative; an unreal marriage at the beginning of the hero's career takes
the edge off the far more interesting relations into which he later enters,
the women being much more delicately and skilfully rendered than the
men. There is an exceptional intensity in the book, but it is not always
focused, and the creative vigour which would have taken this novel out of
the field of imitation is lacking. The honest, sound intelligence, the
excellence of nearly all the secondary qualities, make it all the more cer-
tain that tribute to even the greatest of novelists had best be done in one's
own manner, for this would be a better novel if Joyce had written it or
if Mr Gorman had never read Joyce.
FISHMONGER'S FIDDLE, Tales by A. E. Coppard (12mo, 320 pages; Knopf:
$2.50). One's admiration for the light reflective touch, the often deli-
cate and accurate observation of country types and scenes of this some-
what waggish Englishman is constantly retarded in the present collection
of short stories by expressions such as "his healthy shaven face looked
as if he washed in tomato soup," or "he was a widower, contemplating a
new marriage to a spinster who had five thousand pounds and a
moustache.” Mr Coppard has a slippery and accomplished intelligence
which comes to rest too easily on the surface things of life. Those
fortunate occasions, however, when he penetrates this surface, lead one
to hope that the facile winks and jests in which he often indulges, are
not wholly native to his talent and may in time disappear.


BRIEFER MENTION
433
Songs & Poems, by Henry Carey, decorations by Robert Gibbings (8vo,
64 pages; printed at the Golden Cockerel Press: $5). Verses from
Carey's plays were assembled in Poems on Several Occasions, a volume
issued in 1713 and twice revised during the twenty years which followed.
In 1740, three years before his death, he published a Musical Century
of 100 English Ballads. The present volume is composed of selections
from these almost forgotten sources. It is printed beautifully, contains the
music to many of the songs, and woodcuts which are only a shade too
quaint. As for the poems themselves, they have been too long neglected.
They are straightforward, graceful, and will prove the delight of any one
who prefers the real eighteenth century to the concoction of moonlight
and desire rendered so popular by the imitators of Verlaine.
THE THIRTEENTH CAESAR, and Other Poems, by Sacheverell Sitwell (8vo,
112 pages; Doran: $2). Archaic treatment of the modern is deftly bal-
anced by modern treatment of the archaic in these aesthetically intent,
precipitate, by no means "easy” poems. Although impact and clarity are
sometimes sacrificed to opulence of method and of content, the reader is
obdurate who can resist the charm-in this cosmography of Mr Sitwell's—
of the “salamander, safe and breathing," the snow "sliding slow," "turtle
shell” and “pearls,” “the music of the waves' glass bodies” “the sapling
grace and symmetry” of Greek statuary, “swans working with their
webbed oars,” and “dockyards full of boats a-building."
TABLE-TALK OF G.B.S., Conversations on Things in General between
George Bernard Shaw and his Biographer, Archibald Henderson (12mo,
162 pages, Harper: $2). The really noticeable quality of Mr Shaw's
talk is its flippancy. It seems quite as light as the dialogues in the novels
of the popular Mr Michael Arlen! There is an occasional amusing sally
and at long intervals, bits of sense, but the effect of the whole is cheap.
The thinnest portion of the book is Mr Shaw's defence of his conduct
during the war. At this late date, it appears that G.B.S. was both agin
the government and for it—a socialistic Vicar of Brae.
From the title of STUDIES From Ten LITERATURES, by Ernest Boyd (12mo,
317 pages; Scribner: $3) the words “no less than” were, it seems, omitted
before the numeral. The book is informative, but information, in Mr
Boyd's work, is not always illuminating. His study of Flaubert and
French Realism is excellent; it defines terms and gives character to
literary movements; but a great many of the studies are only book reviews
(d'Annunzio, les Tharaud) and some seem to be several book reviews
rolled into one, so that trivial facts are repeated in the same essay and
even on successive pages (147 and 148). The slurs at unimportant
people (138) and at important ones on unimportant matters (Eliot's
French) which were appropriate enough in newspapers, are regrettable,
because generally unrelated here. A following volume, Studies From Nine
Literatures, is announced. By continuing the descending scale, Mr Boyd
may give us, at least, a study in one, a, or no literature, which would
be interesting.


434
BRIEFER MENTION
NEWMAN AS A MAN OF LETTERS, by Joseph J. Reilly (12mo, 329 pages;
Macmillan: $2.50). Mr Reilly is far too worshipful to criticize the
literary eminence of the great Cardinal. His aesthetic appraisals consist
mainly of extravagant tributes, eloquent comparisons, and prolonged
enthusiasms. We learn, for instance, that Newman is a greater man
than Donne, that his Apologia is the third great autobiography, the other
two being the Confessions of St Augustine and Rousseau, and that he
is the literary brother of Carlyle and Browning. And we are told that
“Newman's chief endowment as a man of letters was threefold: a mas-
tery of rhetoric, a perfect style and psychological insight,” but of pene-
trating analysis there is little. The book, however, gives an intelligent
and absorbing account of the Cardinal's spiritual struggles, and is char-
acterized throughout by tolerance and the absence of sectarian bigotry.
BENJAMIN CONSTANT, His Private Life and His Contribution to the Cause
of Liberal Government in France, 1767-1830, by Elizabeth Schermerhorn
(illus., 8vo., 424 pages; Houghton, Mifflin: $5). An immensely detailed
study which, though readable and even entertaining, does not, upon the
whole, provide a very living portrait. There is a curious miscarriage
of effect in it, in which the authoress's hero, Benjamin, appears pallid, and
her villain, Mme de Staël, real enough. Mme de Staël dominates the
situation as she so often did in life and in spite of Miss Schermerhorn's
best efforts to subdue her. The ineffectiveness of Benjamin is due to the
too lengthy consideration of his callow youth. Three-fourths preparation
and one-fourth career is an error in proportion-in this case, at least.
The SCHOOL FOR AMBASSADORS and Other Essays, by J. J. Jusserand (12mo,
341 pages; Putnam: $3.50). One could be facetious, if it were worth
while, with M Jusserand's diplomacy. He admits delicately but dis-
tinctly that in the past diplomacy has been founded upon lies and over-
reaching, but insists nevertheless that the calling is honourable. He sees
what is called “open-diplomacy” looming up in the future, and says truth
in the end prevails, which it does undoubtedly, when no longer in the way
of business. As a scholar he has, naturally, a freer hand. His meditations
at the tomb of Petrarch, his analyses of Ben Jonson, Shakespeare, and
Chaucer, show a firm grasp upon the mediaeval point of view; and
provide agreeable stimuli for the modern student.
MISCELLANEOUS WRITINGS OF HENRY THE EIGHTH, edited by and with
preface by Francis Macnamara (8vo, 244 pages; Golden Cockerel Press:
$7.50). Fastidiously printed, with an ingeniously irrelevant preface, with
modernized spelling and in some instances, modernized grammar, these
writings confirm one's suspicion that The Defender of the Faith or
“Henry the hunter” as he styles himself, was, if a man of letters, essen-
tially a man of love letters. Green Groweth the Holly and Song VII-
"whoso loveth should love but one”—are perhaps with the letters to Anne
Boleyn, Henry the Eighth's most "congruous” and royal writings.


THE THEATRE
AFTER five seasons as commentator on the theatre for The
O Dial I am encouraged to continue by what I vaguely think
is a growing intelligence of theatrical matters. I seem, on occa-
sions and to myself, to know what I am talking about; whether
this gratifying sensation is shared by any one else, I cannot be sure.
I am aware of having been confused and having caused con-
fusion, largely because it is tiresome always to repeat simple and
essential things. The theatre does not appear in my mind as a
unit; there are several theatres, and the highest praise of one is
not nearly so rich a commendation as a moderately adverse report
on another—the best of the Shubert revues will still rank a little
below a competent production of Medea. This hierarchy of merit
is based not so much on intensity of pleasure, as on the quality
of pleasure; and the sources of our satisfactions are various.
I derive a vast satisfaction out of the average commercial theatre,
when a few conditions are met. It is a deplorable thing for our
notions of solemnity that competence can be shown as swiftly in
a farce as in a tragedy; George M. Cohan's mastery of his instru-
ment is as complete as Ibsen's of his. To over-appreciate this
mastery, to care nothing for the application of it, is almost a moral
fault; it certainly is intellectually as weak as not seeing that the
mastery itself is a desirable quality.
The highest degree of competence on the American stage is
generally associated with the lighter forms of entertainment. (It
is, by the way, extraordinary that the movies do not share in this,
but boggle their material and use their technical effects like
amateurs.) What happens to a fairly steady patron of the theatre
is, that he sees ten musical shows and farce-comedies and revues,
all produced with infinite care, so that everything clicks. He sees
half a dozen light comedies in which, within the limitations of the
subject, the author has thought his matter out completely. And
then he goes to a serious play and finds the author and the pro-
ducer far below the required level. His memory of mastery in
the other fields inevitably compels a slightly unfavourable reaction.
He knows that the problem is far harder, but he cannot help


436
THE THEATRE
wondering why the good things should not be as well done as
the trivial.
A few years of complete minor pleasures and interrupted major
satisfaction will produce an intellectual doubt. Can the theatre,
dependent upon such awkward interpreters as human beings, con-
vey such exaltation as words or marble or, to the initiated, mathe-
matical relations? A few years ago I was well on the way to
believing that the answer is no. I find, to my surprise, that I
now think the answer may be yes. Assurance is still lacking.
What I am sure of is that a considerable amount of funda-
mental brain work will have to be added to a powerful poetic
imagination before the great theatre is created. (I am thinking
now of the producer, not of the author.) This brain work will be
applied first of all to an enquiry into the nature of style. In the
exalted and in the frivolous theatres both, the prime defect is
an ignorance, or a lack of taste, which brings us an operetta pro-
duced as a revue (The MIKADO, last year) or a tragi-comedy
produced as a tragedy (all the Wild Ducks before the revival last
year). In general the light theatre has the easier time and makes
the fewer mistakes, because the classifications are broad and the
nuances few. How to get over the sentiment of The SONG AND
DANCE MAN was a minor problem in comparison with the task
of creating from the chaos of incidents in HE Who Gets SLAPPED
the precise quality of awe and pity and terror and madness which
the play had in it to give.
It is obvious that if a director knows exactly what a play is,
he will make a better production than if he suspects that it is
roughly a comedy or a tragedy. A director of genius will be able
to read a manuscript and “all gloriously soar" without bothering
his head about the category into which the play falls, and trusting
to his instinct to make everything right. For all except the genius,
the work of sorting, classifying, searching for the proper category,
is really the work of studying the internal nature of the play, and
of finding the proper style and tone for its production. The cate-
gory should be used as the instrument of discovery—as it originally
was in the minds of good critics. It is not a pigeon-hole; it is a
test of quality. When the director can identify a play—that is,
can comprehend its significance-he may usefully forget under
what name it is ticketed, if he will only remember to produce it
in the style its nature requires.


GILBERT SELDES
437
The zealot of the great theatre tends to forget that we have
on the contemporary stage two separate developments, from almost
entirely separate sources. There is the serious theatre developed
out of the religious drama (Greek or Miracle Play) and the light
theatre developed out of the make-up box (the commedia dell' arte,
according to Dr Winifred Smith). This second theatre is the
theatre of technique; it is the player's theatre as the other is the
playwright's; it does not deal in ideas, and it does not try to
exalt, but to divert. From it we get, if not genealogically, at least
in a spiritual descent, our vaudeville, and vaudeville to-day pene-
trates into all the other forms of light entertainment. As in the
Italian professional comedy, there is improvisation in vaudeville;
I have heard Joe Cook outline a brief scene to his company and
then watched the scene being made up on the stage in accordance
with the general scenario and leading up to the resumption of the
text. This whole theatre, divorced from emotion and almost free
of intellectual content, is supremely satisfactory in its form; it
has a grease-paint technique which often is superb. It is pure
theatre and depends for its success on its theatrical value, not on
the presentation of acceptable or startling ideas. That is why it
is so interesting aesthetically.
My devotion to the vaudeville side of the theatre has made me
a little ungrateful to high and noble thoughts in the drama,
because the vaudeville side has taught me to dissect plays a little
and to be interested in them as works of art, and not as vehicles
for ideas. Separate the ancient theme of THE MIRACLE from the
way it was presented, and you have left a mass of aesthetic faults
with only a few redeeming virtues; separate the ideas from the
manner in The Wild Duck and you have a self-justifying
aesthetic remainder, you are aware of a form which precisely allows
the ideas to develop, and which does not strain them beyond nature.
What Ibsen has passionately to say about human life, and espe-
cially about human relations, is to me more interesting and im-
portant than certain philosophical ideas about truth, and certain
scientific ideas about heredity, which he uses as the framework
exactly as he uses his plots as framework. The charge and sur-
charge of emotion he effects by being an artist in the theatre;
and fails rather dismally when the artist yields to the thinker.
Or, to take the most difficult example, Bernard Shaw. A technique


438
THE THEATRE
which always accomplishes the impossible is joined to a wit which
surprises us out of any preconceptions about the theatre; he does
present hundreds of ideas, about economics and politics and health,
and almost everything which ought to be uninteresting on the stage.
Rarely, as in HEARTBREAK House, he is an artist; but always he
has such a mastery of the dramatic and melodramatic elements,
that he succeeds. His wit and his religion survive his politics (as
in CANDIDA); his wit and his melodrama survive his ideas (as in
ARMS AND THE MAN).
RTBREA
Regrettably, one can theorize for ever about the theatre. It
must be clear by this time that I have not seen a play in five months.
As The Dial goes to press before my return to New York, I have
unfairly set forth these general ideas, but I cannot delude myself
into believing that they take the place of an acute comment on
THE GREEN HAT. But I have missed more than plays by my
absence. From Mr Woollcott's entertaining comments in the
New York World I learn that my fellow second-nighter, Mr John
Farrar, has on two occasions risen from his seat in the theatre and
protested against the goings-on to which he was a witness. Once
he protested against a travesty of “Now I lay me down to sleep"
and once to the remarks of a hard-boiled Captain of Marines con-
cerning the use of a college degree at the front. Of the first case
I know nothing and solemnly affirm that the lyric prayer holds no
sentimental interest for me. But the second is, again, a matter
of aesthetics. If the ideas of Captain Flagg in WHAT PRICE
Glory are morally offensive, that is one thing. But consider the
aesthetic offence if he had without irony said to the college youths,
"Your training in philosophy and economics and football will be
of invaluable service here; I trust you are both Phi Beta Kappa
men.” I am reminded of an incident in which two of our prom-
inent young actresses figured. It occurred at the first perform-
ance given here by the late Eleanora Duse. As Duse entered on
the scene (forgive me if I mention the obvious, she entered in
character, as Ellida Wrangel) one of the young women (imitated
instantly by her companion, a writer for the theatre) rose and stood
in the aisle, as a symbol of her veneration. The other actress,
sitting close by, said with a sharp opening hiss, “Sit down, you
damned fool.” Aesthetics, as I have suggested, have their place
in the theatre as well as in real life.
GILBERT SELDES
anc
hora


MUSICAL CHRONICLE
(HEN the opportunity was offered me of returning, mur-
dererwise, to the scene of so many of my crimes, the musical
appetite was unusually spry, and the discovery there was no two-
hand literature about, a sharp disappointment. The volumes in
the cabinet of the friends who had graciously loaned me their
piano for an afternoon, called relentlessly for the duet of violin
and piano. I dare say my friends believed I played by heart, I
who have never been able to visualize a phrase. Fortunately, I
remembered having come upon a score of Tannhäuser in the attic;
fetched it without much enthusiasm; and, turning the pages of
the old volume, began with the stringed passage in the second act
which follows immediately upon the triumphal entry of the Hof-
bräu guests. As I played, my delight at the recovery of some-
thing as good as the lyrical page growing with each bar, a curious
realization came to me. (Summers are truly fecund seasons for
musical scribes. Musical routine is far, and the interest free to
seize entirely upon each chance.)
Everyone has heard the graceful tune accompanying the entrance
of the minnesingers into the Landgraf's feudal hall. It moves at a
moderate speed with lyrical trills, through unexpected intervals
and sweet unpredictable harmonic progressions; its tones suffused
with fervour and lightly mystical aspiration. The small develop-
ment swings easily upward to the sudden chord of the dominant
seventh so effectively used by Wagner; then diminishes slowly in
the serene maintainance of the perfect moment, sustained, noble,
and relaxed as the gesture of a muse. And, if not all pianists,
many folk who play at the piano, know the experience of hearing,
while the fingers rest upon the keyboard, a voice speak out of the
polished case through the notes of the mechanism, a voice both
the sound of the instrument and of a human throat, a human speech
fading very quickly in the conscious moment, while the sound
becomes again the normal tone of flat ringing stones and struck
copper wires. It was this startling phenomenon which repeated
itself while I sat delighted by the unfamiliar sound of the instru-
ment and the recovered delicacy of the poignant bit. There it
2 aCO


440
MUSICAL CHRONICLE
was again, the strange apparition, the sudden plasticity of the
most impalpable of materials, the woman inside the black box
speaking low and distinctly through the melody! What brought
a particular realization upon the breath of the fleeting minute
was the unusual circumstance that the murmuring came so dis-
tinctly through the music that I thought to distinguish the look
of the person. It was a look simultaneously spiritual and pas-
sionate, tender and permeated by an ideal longing. From beneath
the eyelids came the blue light which thrills and at the same time
stabs; the wondrous searing expression of yearning for a thing
finer, more intense, more filled with the fire of the ghost than
anything to be found upon earth; moulding body and spirit single.
By the relation of the expression to the chromatic, aspiring
element of Wagner's style, by the incarnation of his characteristic
tone, I thought to recognize the regard which haunted and moved
Wagner throughout his life, the look of the waiting woman. It was
the expression of the woman whose spirit, presence, idea is felt in
all his art, waiting, her entire being spanned in tender, almost
painfully intense watchfulness for the unknown comer. Figured
in different instances as Senta and Sieglinde, the sleeping Brünn-
hilde and Kundry, her presence is felt not only when the curtain
is up upon the scene. When there is no scene, the music is full of
her. Certain interludes, the second in the first act of Götter-
dämmerung, evoke her bodily before the scene begins. Assuredly,
the composer was aware of her identity in all her different incarna-
tions; once he confessed that each of his actions embodied the
relations of the same single pair of people, endlessly continued.
Rigorous psychoanalysts will interpret this haunting image as
Wagner's mother-imago, fixed in the pose of attendance upon the
birth of the posthumous child. Is it not equally possible that it
was an idea older than the picture of a particular individual, into
which the mother of the child's experience merely happened to fit?
The ideal Wagnerian woman, awaiting a new element coming into
life-was she indeed anything other than the rib of the man, the
ideal opponent each brings with him into the world, and strives
to realize out of living material; calls to, struggles toward; and,
for the reason Wagner was a man of a particular time, envisaged
by him in the forms of Isolde and Mathilda Wesendonck, Eva
Pogner and Cosima Liszt? To perceive in this mystic object
as awa


PAUL ROSENFELD
441
voman
merely a sexual aim is completely to misunderstand it, so much
must it have been a spirit pervading all things, storms and moun-
tains, forest depths and midsummer nights, none the less taking as
final reference a particular feminine type. It must have been
everything seen and heard by him in terms of the phenomenal
and the evanescent, becoming not alone the action, but the music
of his operas; style, melody, harmony, orchestration; set down in
the half-conscious attempt to embody it in all the aspects in which
it appeared to him, and to express and satisfy his eternally reborn
desire of this true Platonic idea. “Now Eve," says the Old Testa-
ment, "was the mother of All the World,” the world as will and
idea, we take it; and Schopenhauer and Wagner both would have
understood it in that sense. In that divining moment at the un-
familiar instrument, there was an inevitable significance for me
in the circumstance that the piece of music which had revealed the
ideal Wagnerian woman so distinctly is performed, doubtless
for a reason not conscious to the composer, during the entrance of
the musician-poets, of whom he felt himself a member, and whose
dignity and vocation were strong in him. And in attempting to
create the atmosphere of their train, to set forth the impulse and
the matrix of the fine rivalry in song, the tournament of love, the
high poetic function, a musical inspiration brought out of himself
song filled with the animating gesture of his muse.
Again I fell to wondering whether all innovations, develop-
ments, and intensifications of artistic style of the revolutionary
nature of Wagner's, may not eventually be found resulting directly
from obscure mutations in the human plasm, registering them-
selves in new somatic expressions, new gestures, looks, and tones
of voice, and demanding new qualities of relationship, new sen-
sitivities, and acutenesses on the part of the sexes? It is certain
that sensitive, passionate, spiritual women of the ideal Wagnerian
type came into life about the composer and grew conscious of
themselves and their emotional forms through his music-dramas.
The music threw a kind of bridge; perhaps the need of such
bridges is one of the immediate producing causes of good art.
Might not D. H. Lawrence, of the men of to-day, be ready to sub-
scribe to this humble point of view? I wondered whether it was
t