he rule that musicians discovered their points of departure in the
unconsciously apprehended tones of the voice, painters more in


442
MUSICAL CHRONICLE
gestures and facial expressions; all of them relating the whole of
life as known to them to the new body and returning to it again.
A new approach to the study of the psychogenesis of form seemed
to open before me, most auspicious for the commencement of a
new season of chronicling! Form conditioned by the looks of
living people, born of the body of the composer, poet, painter,
critic, and its ideal complement: a dainty dish to set before one's
friends! My enthusiasm was somewhat dampened by the recollec-
tion of the Frenchman's plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
But not for human beings on the high seas of life, another moment
told me. For them the situation is always new and wonderful
and terrible. And great artists seem to find their native motion
only where the Atlantic raves and swells are mightiest.
Paul ROSENFELD


COMMENT
A voluntary descent from the dignity of science is per-
haps the hardest lesson which humility can teach.
Doctor Johnson
OCTOR ELIOT, the President Emeritus of Harvard, regards
as our foremost educators during the last 2300 years, Aris-
totle, Galen, Leonardo da Vinci, Sir Francis Bacon, Milton,
Shakespeare, John Locke, Immanuel Kant, Sir Isaac Newton, and
Ralph Waldo Emerson. Advantaged by his fearlessness to choose,
one acknowledges that one might choose similarly, and is reluctant
to remember that one's predilection for these justly celebrated per-
sons has in some measure been instructed.
Shakespeare perhaps must be excepted. One may not have
known him before having seen his plays acted and may yet be
sure that from the time one is able to read, to have evaded his
intoxicating sovereignty would be impossible. For the most part,
however, has not the domination of these ten sages been implicit
in that of lesser sages? Has the compactness of Aristotle who,
as a schoolmaster, “goeth for the best author," been more allur-
ingly succinct than Roger Ascham's motto, "He who teaches,
learns”—Qui docet, discit? Emerson's altitude of friendship has
seemed to one surely, not less a platitude than the devout firmness
of Maria Edgeworth in The Parent's Assistant. In Kate Greena-
way—a writer and a painter too, like Leonardo da Vinci-one has
found an indelible simplicity:
“The King said he liked apples,
The Queen said she liked pears,
And what shall we do to the blackbird
Who listens unawares?”
Has one consciously been more in debt to Galen's subtlety than to
Doctor Goldsmith's therapy of man and dog, or less in debt to
Luther Burbank whose witchcraft we are told is merely the sun-
craft of an observer, than to Sir Isaac Newton? Since, having


444
COMMENT
been made to understand how five hundred kinds of fruit may be
produced on one tree, how white blackberries, stoneless plums,
spineless cactus, and sweet lemons may be successfully "designed,”
one cannot but understand somewhat of the water, of the air, and
of the sun which contributed to produce these curiosities. Admir-
ing in The Adventures of Mr Verdant Green, Cuthbert Bede's in-
fectious plea for learning, one has become aware of the classic
cosmos of Sir Francis Bacon-of "those influences which possess
the mind almost imperceptibly and are yet of primary importance
in the formation of character," surrounded by which Mr Verdant
Green “had to bear contradictions and reproof, progressing in that
knowledge of himself which has been found to be about the most
useful of all knowledge.” Ever within the range of our vision,
yet distant-a kind of poetic Mt Everest-Milton's greatness has
in certain instances, been less to us than the great simplicity of
Isaac Watts; one agrees with Doctor Johnson that, “Every man
acquainted with the common principles of human action will look
with veneration on the writer who is at one time combating Locke
and at another time making a catechism for children in their
fourth year.” Jacob Abbott's ethical deductions “About Right
and Wrong” are perhaps the most potent preparation for Kant's
crabbed insistence that “if there is in an act, the least admixture
of any motive other than the moral, it loses its moral worth,” and
general acceptance of the educational ideal, “a sound mind in a
sound body,” may be attributed as much to the influence of The
Compleat Angler as to the influence of Locke.
Unmenaced as is the greatness of Doctor Eliot's decemvirs, the
unbookish are intimidated by greatness so inclusive. Indeed it is
perhaps an imaginary America which pores over either a pre-
eminent or a miniature greatness. Rabbi Israel Goldstein deplores
the “characterless Apollos and cynical Minervas of our metropolis,
whose attitude toward parents is arrogant, toward moral standards
flippant, towards duty as such, recalcitrant,” and one wishes
that our disgracing juniors might exemplify, if not the simplicity
of art, the simplicity of artlessness.



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DEC9 9995
THE
DIAL
DECEMBER 1925
Arlequin Gouache
Pablo Picasso
Adam Urbas
Jakob Wassermann 445
The Poet Takes Leave
Scofield Thayer 467
London Statues
Roger Fry 468
Three Poems
Leon Serabian Herald 474
The Well of Merlin Oil
Bryson Burroughs
Southwest
Mabel Dodge Luhan 477
Niederbayer Pen and Ink
Alfred Kubin
Greco's Portrait of Himself
Paul Rosenfeld 485
Portrait Oil
El Greco
Milking Time
Liam O'Flaherty 491
The Star
Joseph Campbell 494
Three Crayon Drawings
Gaston Lachaise
A Master in Water-Colour
Thomas Craven 495
Other Men's Eyes
J. Jeremy-Lee 499
Earth's Admonition
George O'Neil 500
Two Oil Paintings
Jack B. Yeats
Book Reviews:
A Courtly Poet
Glenway Wescott 501
Mythological Satire
Charles K. Trueblood 504
The Orange Moth
Malcolm Cowley 507
Laughter and Light
Waldo Frank 510
Briefer Mention
515
The Theatre
Gilbert Seldes 519
Modern Art
Henry McBride 522
Musical Chronicle
Paul Rosenfeld 525
A Letter
The Editor 529
VOLUME LXXIX NUMBER 6
50 cents a copy


THE DIAL
Scofield THAYER
Editor
MARIANNE MOORE
Acting Editor
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
JAKOB WASSERMANN was born in Fürth, Bavaria, on March 10,
1873, and now resides in Altaussee, Austria. His works include
besides The World's Illusion, The Gooseman, and Gold, many
poems, stories, critical essays, and novels, which have not been
translated into English.
MARIAN WEIGALL was born in Hobart, Tasmania. She has contrib-
uted verse and prose to various English and Australian journals.
Leon SERABIAN HERALD, who came to America in 1912, was born
in Armenia. His work has appeared in Poetry, The Nation,
The Commonweal, and other magazines. A book of his poems
entitled The Waking Hour has just been published.
BRYSON BURROUGHS, examples of whose work are in the pos-
session of many galleries in America, was born in Massachusetts
in 1869. He studied at the Art Students' League in New York,
in Paris, and in Florence, and is Curator of Paintings at The
Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Mabel Dodge Luhan was born in Buffalo, New York. She now
lives in Taos, New Mexico.
ALFRED KUBIN, painter and illustrator, was born on April 10,
1877, at Leitmeritz in Bohemia. He studied art in Munich at
the Kunstgewerbeschule and at the Kunstakademie, and now
lives in Wernstein, Austria.
DOMENICO TheoTOCOPULI, known as El Greco, was born in
Candia, Crete, in the last part of the sixteenth century. The
greater part of his life was spent in Spain in the painting of
portraits and in the depicting of religious themes.
J. JEREMY-LEE was born in November 1904 in New Haven,
Connecticut. She is now studying art in Washington, D. C.
George O'Neil was born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1897. He
is the author of a book of poems, The Cobbler in Willow Street,
which was published in 1921.
VOL. LXXIX. No. 6 DECEMBER, 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
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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 Dial Collection
ARLEQUIN. BY PABLO PICASSO



THE NDIAL
OXXIII
DECEMBER 1925
ADAM URBAS
BY JAKOB WASSERMANN
Translated From the German by Marian Weigall
FOUND the following story among the records of Chief
I Justice Diesterweg, a clever criminal expert of the type of
the famous Anselm Feuerbach.
lar
At a late hour one October evening, there came to the police sta-
tion in Gunzenhausen one Adam Urbas, a peasant from the Bavar-
ian village of Aha, and deposed that on that very day he had cut
the throat of his son Simon, aged eighteen. He said the boy lay
dead in his room at home. The knife with which he had done the
deed he had with him, and produced. It was still blood-stained.
This confession, made in a quiet tone and in the fewest possible
words, was taken down in writing. To any further questioning by
the police officer Urbas refused to reply. The official inspection of
the scene of the crime was held that evening, and confirmed his
statements. They found his wife half mad with grief and horror,
and the farm hands standing about terrified.
Adam Urbas was brought to the jail at Ansbach.
w
V
I had been appointed magistrate of this district just a few weeks
before, and as a young and ambitious lawyer I was delighted to
have charge of the investigation of this matter.
At the beginning the case seemed as clear as day. A peasant of
limited intelligence, hide-bound by all the prejudices of his class,
had simply got rid of a degenerate son from whom he had suffered


446
ADAM URBAS
wa
nothing but shame and misery; thus not only executing just punish-
ment upon him, but also avoiding still further troubles which were
already brewing.
According to the unanimous testimony of the witnesses, young
Urbas had been a completely worthless individual, an idler, never
at work, always to be found hanging round inns and at all the coun-
try fairs. He had needed a good deal of money for this way of
living; and whatever his mother, whom he understood only too
well how to terrorize, either did not or could not give him, he knew
how to procure by other means. Thus in August he had, without
authority, called on the produce merchant Kohn in Weissenburg
for eight hundred marks on account of barley delivered, and had
kept the money for himself and spent and wasted,'all. In Nörd-
lingen he had let himself get caught by a notorious woman, who
then declared herself to be with child by him. One day he enticed
her to a lonely place and tried to strangle her. Her screams alarmed
some passers-by, and she escaped him. The enquiry into this affair
was still going on when Adam Urbas himself apparently took the
law into his own hands.
Habits and characteristics of Simon's youth were also brought
forward, which showed his character in the worst possible light.
The wild spirits of childhood led to nothing good. Everything he
did was full of evil and cunning. For instance, once the servant
bought herself six new linen chemises in the town, and showed her
purchases joyfully to her mistress and the others. Then she had to
go to Mass, and left the flower-white garments on the table in the
kitchen. When she came back, there were the white chemises, so
smeared with axle grease that not one of them would ever be wear-
able again. That Simon was the culprit no one doubted, though it
could never be proved, any more than could that other affair with
Scharf, the carter. Scharf had pulled up his wagon, laden with
sacks of flour, before the inn. When he started to drive on, the
flour began to run out in streams along the road; ten or twelve bags
had been slashed open by somebody. Of course it was Simon Urbas
and no other; but it could never be proved.
To all sorts of dishonest and underhand ways were later added
both impudence and brutality; so that all right-minded persons
agreed that here was indeed a wild, uncanny weed growing up, so
high that no clippers could prune it, so deep-rooted that no hoe
on
W
e
ons


JAKOB WASSERMANN
447
could dig it out. I could have done without half the wealth of
evidence that was offered. There was no problem here, no com-
plication, nothing hidden; everything pointed one way, roughly
and plainly, as far as the murdered boy was concerned.
The last act of the village tragedy had played itself out on
Gunzenhausen's Fair Sunday. Two peasants from Windsbach,
talking in the inn at Aha, discussed the fact that a summons had
been issued against Simon Urbas. Unnoticed by them, Adam
Urbas was sitting at the next table. The landlord and others in
the room cast anxious glances at him, for from the way in which
he set down his glass and rose from his chair, it was clear that he
had not previously heard what had happened in Nördlingen. Si-
mon's shamefu' deeds were, as a matter of fact, always withheld
as long as possibl, fiom his knowledge. His peculiarly silent ways,
his dignified bearing, and not least the great liking felt for him in
the district, helped to create a kind of sheltering wall round him.
All these years his wife had always managed to intercept the evil
tidings and soften them for his ears. If people imagined from
that that he lived in ignorance, or in voluntary half-ignorance, they
were mistaken. But he knew exactly how to leave them in doubt
as to how much he saw, and what went on in his mind.
His wife had heard of the threatening trouble from a talkative
servant-girl, while making the butter. When Urbas came home she
went to the window, so as not to have to look into his face. It was
already nearly evening, and the bricklayer Franz Schieferer was
going by. He called out to her that Simon was down in Gunzen-
hausen at the White Hart, treating everybody, men and women,
and throwing money about like water. “But,” he added, laughing,
for he was excited, "they'll soon catch the bird all right, the police
are already on the way.” This was not the case, however, as she
learned later; nor at that time was the news of the summons itself
anything more than a rumour.
The servants had all gone to the fair. Urbas' wife sank down
on the bench against the wall. Urbas was walking up and down
the room with heavy tread. Then they heard stumbling steps com-
ing up from the road, and there was a rattling at the door-bell.
Fists hammered on the massive door, then came resounding curses.
The woman sprang up and wanted to go out. Urbas lifted his
finger-nothing more; she stood rooted to the spot. And now


448
ADAM URBAS
Simon's face showed itself at the window, red from drinking, with
eyes full of evil. The woman cried out and signed to him to go
away. He disappeared; there was silence for a time; then there
was a noise in the outer room. He had got into the house by the
door from the courtyard. In the dark he was bumping against the
farm tools stored there. There was a crash. The woman tore the
door open, and in the sudden flood of lamplight she saw the way
the drunken fellow wearily lifted himself up from the floor.
Stretching out his arms towards the two in the room, he let out a
torrent of horrible insults and abuse.
Perhaps this was a decisive moment for Urbas. She saw him
tremble from head to foot. In the meantime Simon had found his
way to his room. He slammed the door threateningly behind him;
then all was still again. Urbas stood looking into the dark outer
room, the woman behind him, her apron pressed to her eyes. For
five minutes they remained like this. Then Urbas left the room
and went upstairs to Simon's attic.
The woman said afterwards that she suspected and feared what
was about to happen, but that her limbs seemed to be frozen and
she felt herself powerless the whole time. Whether Simon W. BU
befuddled that he fell asleep the moment he threw himself on his
bed, or whether they first talked to each other, the father and son,
could not be ascertained. Once she said that everything was quiet;
then again, that they had talked to each other, even at some length.
But the two doors were shut, and since, according to her own ac-
count, she was sitting in the corner by the stove, the sound of voices
could not possibly have reached her, as was shown afterwards by
experiments. Her statements also about the length of time Urbas
remained in the attic were noticeably uncertain. At one time she
said it could not have been more than a quarter of an hour; then,
again, that it must have been more than an hour. The knife the
deed was committed with had not belonged to Urbas, but to his
son. Whether the latter had had it on him, or whether it was lying
somewhere in the room, it was also impossible to discover. Urbas
refused to give any information as to this, and important though
the point was, it remained at first obscure.
I must confess that all these incidents, in spite of their gruesome-
ness, did not arouse much interest in me. They were typical ac-
companiments of such a crime. There was the father, ruthlessly
co


JAKOB WASSERMANN
449
obstinate, his peasant's pride wounded, his peasant arrogance recog-
nizing no higher authority than himself; the son, a rogue, whose
untimely and violent end one could scarcely regret; and the mother,
hesitating between the two. It was the usual constellation, and
justice could take its course without coming against any particu-
larly mysterious obstructions.
Gradually, however, by dint of studying closely both the events
of the past and the character of Adam Urbas himself, I found my
attention being more and more held. It was as if, when walking
beside a wall which looked just like all other walls, one presently
became aware of certain signs on the stones, at first hardly distin.
guishable, then clearer and clearer-strange signs and words which
somehow compelled one to try to decipher them; so that one went
on and on and at last could not stop, passing from one to another
and at length acquiring the most unexpected information as to the
hidden territory which lay behind the wall.
The marriage of Urbas and his wife had been childless for thir-
teen years. The wife, acquiescent, had accepted her destiny; the
husband, however, had rebelled against Nature's decree. He was
the last of an ancient peasant stock; the name of Urbas is men-
tioned even in the Frankish chronicles of the fourteenth century.
His pride took it as a disgrace that he should have no heir of his
body. What was the use of making and saving, sowing and reap-
ing? What was the house for, with its full chests and bins ? Why
were there beasts in the stable, why was there fodder in the barns ?
What were the fields and the meadows for, or the river, the woods,
and the mill?
He did not express himself aloud, either to his wife or to any one.
He betrayed no feeling when conversation turned on the subject.
No hard word or harsh question fell from him all the year round.
But once every month he turned his gaze on his wife; and there
was a power in this gaze which came there without intention on
his part, which took possession of him, looked forth in spite of him-
self. It might happen in the fields; then he would stop binding
the sheaves, and gaze at her. Or it might be at supper time; he
would let the spoon fall on his plate, and gaze at her. Or in the
night she would wake up and see him lying there, propped on his
arm, and gazing at her. Or in the square before the church she
would be standing talking with the other women and suddenly fall


450
ADAM URBAS
silent, as he came up to within three steps of her and then stood
gazing at her. All without anger, without threats, without re-
proaches; only as if seeking something with those deep, bushy-
browed eyes of his, earnestly and long.
Once in every month it happened, and was to be awaited with
certainty. At first he did not go near her then. She took this to
be a whim. She did not seek to discover what he meant by it. She
laughed, she forced herself to make some cheerful remark. Later
on she tried to take no notice. But there came hours, and at last
whole days, when she fell to endless wondering; and the question
she did not dare to put to her husband she put in imagination to
his haunting shadow.
Couldn't people speak out to each other, she wondered vaguely;
why has one a tongue in one's mouth, if not to say what one wants
to? She determined to tackle her husband. Yet when she got
to the point of approaching him, her courage failed her. A sense
of guilt grew up in her. A voice urged her to speak out; she did
not speak out; she felt that she was not guilty, and yet that Some-
thing was guilty, and that that Something was in her.
The change of occupations during the spring and summer months
brought a certain distraction, but as years went on this seemed to
last a shorter and shorter time. Her fear of the peasant's penetrat-
ing look each time the blood-sign accentuated her guilt began to
numb her thoughts. In winter, from November till February, the
stones and beams of the house seemed to contract and press upon
her. The air of the rooms was heavy; the sky seemed to be right
against the window; evening struck a chill to her heart. The cows
lay in a warm rosy vapour, and through the cleft dug in the snow
to the byre, in a circle of light from the swaying lantern she car-
ried, went the heavy-footed maid, big with child, to and fro.
She was all body, all dread. The twenty-eight days and nights
passed without differentiation one from another. Urbas sat by
the stove, his pipe between his teeth; went to the inn; came back
in the evening; sat by the stove again and read the paper; got up
when the pot of meat and cabbage was brought in; said grace;
listened while the others talked. There was nothing secretive in
his demeanour; it was not as if he were cherishing a grievance; he
was simply silent.
But then came the hour. The woman felt it ahead in every part


JAKOB WASSERMANN
451
of her, even in her hair. A door would open, and he would be
standing there—in the morning, or in the evening, in the parlour,
or in the barn, it was all the same. There he stood, with that in-
scrutable look. No sound in his throat, no gesture, no word—only
that look, saying "Why not? Why everyone else, and not you?
Why does your field lie barren?” Twelve years went by like this,
and then the woman's strength gave out. Her temper became
gloomy. At night she lay sleepless. She thought she saw the peas-
ant's eyes burning in the dark, even while he slept. When she heard
his step during the day, she crept into a corner of the barn and
cowered, trembling, till calls for her echoed from all sides. She
let her hold of household things relax; the servants grew slacker.
She denied herself to him. She shuddered before his embrace.
It seemed to her darkened senses that if she did not give herself
to him he could not demand anything. She became cold to the
touch, cold in the blood; the woman in her froze. Then, however,
Urbas began to woo her. It was something she had never known
before. Not with words did he woo her, but rather with shy ser-
vice. Often there was something suppressed about him, as if she
had hidden herself and he was seeking her and could not find her.
He was like a suffering animal. For a year or longer this went
on, and then in time the woman's dread of him disappeared, as she
saw that she was not to him merely a creature to be caressed and
fed after her day's work was done, but that she represented some-
thing else, worthy of being consulted and honoured. Her flesh
melted towards him again. A month later she was with child.
As soon as there was no doubt about this, her whole being
changed. She hastened about the house with youthful steps, drove
the lazy laughingly to work, and helped with everything herself,
chattering, bright, expansive. Everyone was amazed. Urbas him-
self wondered. She did not want to tell him straight away what
was in store; she wanted to do it solemnly in some way, as if she
were bringing him a gift. On Good Friday she put on her best
dress, and the big black silk head-dress with the silver pins; then
she called Urbas into the upper room where the old cupboards
were, full of the family silver and china, the inheritance of cen-
turies. She sat down solemnly in the arm-chair, folded her hands
on her lap, and told what she had to tell, shortly and simply.
A shudder ran through Urbas' powerful frame. (When she


452
ADAM URBAS
spoke of this hour nineteen years later, and thought of this confes-
sion and of how Urbas had taken it, one could see her experiencing
again the same trembling sensation she had felt at the time.) His
earth-brown face became as red as a poppy. He let out a great
hoarse laugh. Then tears streamed from his eyes. He went over
to her-pressed her so roughly to his breast that she cried out. Dis-
tressed that she did not take as a caress what was meant as such,
he patted her on the back, tenderly, almost reverently, and made a
melodious murmur in his throat.
He gave the strictest orders that she should take care of herself.
He went secretly to the doctor and asked for advice. He hired an
extra servant to save her from having to work. He waited on her
and moved things out of her way. When the baby-clothes were
being sewn he sometimes sat looking on with wondering eyes, nod-
ding his big head.
Everything came to pass in due course, even the hour that ended
the nine months of waiting. Long Urbas held the new-born child
in his hands, and long he looked at the miserable formless thing,
joy and apprehension struggling for mastery in his face.
Simon grew up like other country children. Things were not
made specially easy for him. They did not want him to know how
long and eagerly they had waited for him. Anyhow, an acute ob-
server could have perceived an uneasy tension in Urbas then, as if
he were trying to listen to the very circulation of the boy's blood.
The listening look remained with him. It engraved itself in deep
wrinkles on his face. Though it might seem that he paid no atten-
tion to what Simon did or said, this was not so. No one who knew
him realized with what exactitude he saw everything. But I learned
it. I learned it in a way which is to me unforgettable, and yet not
easy to pass on to others with the poor words at my command.
Part of Adam Urbas' very being was a high idea of the relation
of father and son. He felt himself a peasant to the core, which
means that he felt himself a king. The earth was his earth, the
labourer his labourer. The seasons were created for him and for
his fields and for his harvest. He knew himself lord over the land.
His eye took it all in, up to the boundary-stone which had stood
for generations unmoved. There was no blade of grass which did
not grow up in his name. Property was a sacred thing, and prop-
erty demanded a master to guard it and rule over it, concerned with
Sunmov
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JAKOB WASSERMANN
453
every penny and with every sack of corn. A son inherited it from
his father, a father gave it to his son, through all the ages. Such
was the natural order of things; the world would be incomprehensi-
ble otherwise.
But I am going too fast, and must not lose my thread.
The formal cross-examination which I had to give Urbas in the
course of my duty led to no result. His answers were all the same,
and to have to keep repeating them was evidently strange and bur-
densome to him. He confined himself to the bare facts; he would
explain nothing. He disdained to defend himself, and would hear
nothing of taking legal counsel. To suggestions or advice he op-
posed an obstinate indifference. When I put it to him that he
could obtain considerable amelioration of his punishment by a
voluntary confession of the motive of his crime, he answered lacon-
ically, "That is not the point.” I decided to give up this fruitless
interrogation, particularly as the statements of the witnesses, and
what I myself knew of the characters of the murdered boy and the
accused, had already supplied me with a complete chain of motives.
There were, however, two uncertain points which so far had not
been cleared up. One was the doctor's verdict on the corpse as
found on the scene of the murder. The way the body lay showed
not the slightest trace of force having been used, either in the posi-
tion in which the limbs had stiffened or in the clothing or in the
expression of the face. If it had not been for the peasant's own
confession it would have been very hard to prove murder at all.
The second point was in connexion with the undisputed fact that
the knife had belonged to Simon. The peasant stated that it was
in Simon's belt, and that he had simply drawn it out; but
this admission he only made after a long time and under pressure.
It did not bear the stamp of truth, and as a matter of fact the next
day he revoked it and said that the knife lay bare on the table, and
that Simon had been cutting bread with it in the morning. When
I could not refrain from expressing my surprise that his statements
on such an important point should vary, he looked uncomfortably
at the ground. It was the only time I thought I perceived him dis-
concerted in any way.
I felt an imperative call to force this rigid silence. My thoughts
were occupied almost unceasingly with the man. The apparent
clearness of the case, and the obstinacy with which it haunted me,


454
ADAM URBAS
a
tortured me. A voice was continually saying in my ear, “This man
is no murderer; this is not a man who went in to another and cut
his throat as one would slaughter an animal, or who with horrify-
ing brutality made himself into the executioner of his own son.”
Yet there it remained. What was it that had really happened? To
the question as to how long he had stayed in the room he had al-
ways kept silence, or at the most shrugged his shoulders. Only at
the last cross-examination did it slip from him, almost as though
against his will, that he thought it might have been half an hour.
What had happened in this half hour? He divined my thoughts,
and his brow darkened.
I saw no way of escape from this state of tension and anxiety
but to leave the scene of justice and go to him squarely as man
to man. I fancied that I had won from him a certain trust in me.
When I showed that I was anxious not to handle a delicate point
roughly, I thought I detected a sort of gratitude in him. The only
thing that made me still hesitate was the consideration that per-
haps the inborn distrust of an intruder from an outside sphere
might so operate that from the outset there would be no means of
our getting into natural communication with each other. But I
felt encouraged when I thought of the man's personality. Adam
Urbas was not the ordinary sort of peasant. He belonged to our
peasant aristocracy, his mere bearing betrayed intelligence and no-
bility of mind; and I hoped therefore that I would not try to ap-
proach him in vain. I debated with myself no longer. It was a
December evening when I went at length to the prison and got
them to unlock the cell where Urbas was.
I had procured certain favours for him in the prison. The room
was bearable, decently furnished with a wash-stand, bed, and mir-
ror, and comfortably warm. He was sitting by the lamp, and had
the Bible open before him. I said good evening, took off my coat,
hung it on the door, and sat down opposite Urbas at the table.
Each time I saw him his look struck me afresh. It did so now.
He was as massively built as a bull. His head had the bullet-
roundness of the native South-German; but his skull showed, es-
pecially in the formation of the temples, the signs of ancient breed-
ing, for the bones there were strikingly thin and the skin parch-
ment-like and almost transparent. The mouth was broad, with
firm thin lips, and the nose aquiline, with a high bridge. The


JAKOB WASSERMANN
455
carefully shaved face was like that of some old actor. The hands
were those of a giant. The heavy-lidded eyes seldom opened very
wide, but when they did their gaze had a surprisingly piercing qual-
ity which even I found it not easy to endure.
To lead up to the conversation, I said I had felt for a long time
that I wanted to seek him out, only not in my official capacity;
that I came, if he would let me, just as a friend who had somehow
been allowed to visit him. He had, as a fact, I said, been con-
fided to my care and I was responsible for his welfare.
He looked at me in silence. After some time he said, “Very kind
of you.”
"I don't want you to take it like that,” I said, with a gesture of
protest; “I would like you not to go on being mistrustful of me.
One is mistrustful of a magistrate involuntarily. You think, well,
if he isn't coming as an official to get the papers filled in, he is
coming out of curiosity, simply to pry. But my purpose is neither
of these. The papers are practically finished with. We are ready
now for the trial. There is not much room for curiosity on my
part; it seems to me that I know everything already. I don't quite
know myself why I've come, but I had to, I felt it was my duty."
Again Urbas did not answer for a long time. Then he said, “I
believe you."
I seized on this. “If you believe me, then,” I said, "we can talk
over what has happened like good friends."
Urbas considered. Then he said, “What is the use of talking
about it? It's bad enough that it had to happen.”
“That's just the question," I broke in; "Did it have to happen?
Have to ?”
He lifted his head, though his eyes remained downcast. “It
would be presumption,” he said, “to question that.”
"But not only is there doubt about it," I persisted, “but society
disclaims your deed and is horrified at it. If everyone wanted to
decide what was right in such a case according to his own idea, there
would be no end to horrors, we would be living like wild beasts.
How you will justify yourself to your own conscience, and to the
highest judge of all, is not my affair. But your obligation to society
remains.”
Urbas shook his head. “What can talking do to alter any-
thing?” he murmured indifferently.


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“Things must be set straight between you and your fellow men,”
I said; “and as long as you persist in this obstinate silence, every-
thing is still a wretched muddle.”
"But if one can't find words for things ?”
“Can't one really, or does one perhaps refuse to, out of defiance,
or out of pride ?" I retorted; “Ask yourself that.”
He said, "I am awkward at talking, I'm not used to it."
His brow had clouded. I saw that I might not probe further.
I waited. At length something came in a mutter from the depths
of his chest—“It was I who made the boy." His gaze was fixed
on the floor. “If I made him, hadn't I the right to destroy him?"
he asked, with a strange sort of angry cunning. “You people can
argue that as much as you like," he went on; “but if someone
brings a person to life, then he has the right to destroy him again,
if it turns out to be only a misery that he was ever born. I was
determined to have him; I dragged him, forced him, out of his
mother's body. Other women bear their fruit for nine months
within them. Of her you might say that she bore hers thirteen
years. I demanded him from her, I demanded him from God. I
made him mine before he was ever here. All this, and this, I
thought, you will be to me. Like a lump of clay that one takes
out of the ground and kneads and moulds according to one's own
wish! Suddenly you see that you have nothing but vain dirt in
your hands; then you throw it away again, back to the earth you
took it from.”
That angry, cunning note grew stronger. He appraised me
through half-closed eyelids. “But it only became clear by de-
grees,” I said, “that it was fated to come to no good.”
He interrupted with a lordly gesture. "It went wrong from the
beginning, the whole thing. His blood was wrong. I smelt it
even with my nose. Others, even of bad stock, they grow up with-
out any one taking much trouble about them, they don't go wrong.
If they are bent a little crooked at the start, time straightens them
out. But with him, whatever was crooked grew crookeder. I soon
saw that disaster was bound to come of it. And so it did. A grain
of corn every day—in the long run, a mountain. I stood and asked
myself, what was this growing into? If you dug it up in one place,
it grew twice as high in another; if you seized it, it slipped through
your fingers. There was nothing to be done."
on


JAKOB WASSERMANN.
457
“But couldn't poor seed be made to thrive through careful tend-
ing ?” I suggested. “Did you ever try to awake his conscience? Did
you try seriously to discipline him?”
Urbas raised his heavy eyelids for the first time, and in his eyes
there was a distracted look. "Sir," he answered roughly, “one can't
control the elements. If you can't do it by looks, you can't do it
by words, I said to myself; if example does nothing, beating won't
do anything either. In the way you mean, the wife did her part.
A woman understands that best. But if he didn't see that my
voice was speaking there too, what was the use of it? If he
couldn't hear what I conveyed to him without speech, the words
of the prophet himself would have been empty sound for him.
That's what I said to myself. Where I went ahead, he could surely
have followed; when I went behind, he could have turned round.
But no, he didn't see me, didn't hear me. It would revolt me to
grab hold of someone and shout at him, 'Be good! Behave your-
self!' How can that make any one better, when goodness isn't in
his nature? Discipline can only be of use where the worm is not
already at the root.”
“But how could you know that for certain ?” I asked-with
some hesitancy, for his words and voice had a sinister power; “Were
you then so absolutely convinced of your own infallibility ?”
He stretched his hand across the table and answered, breathing
heavily, “When my own flesh and blood rises up against me, can
I argue with him as I would with a cheating tradesman? When
from the seed that I sowed a brood of serpents spring up, that come
hissing at me with their poisoned tongues, can I go for them with
a stick like a schoolmaster? There's no sense in that, no human
dignity. When someone on whom one has staked one's whole fu-
ture turns out rotten all through, incurably, so that he brings noth-
ing but ruin to house and home, what is one to do? Can one give
him new bones, or breathe new brains into him, or a new heart ?”
His whole powerful face trembled and flamed. This man who
for so long, for a lifetime perhaps, had refrained from expressing
himself in speech, was now tearing his heart open before my eyes,
and had at his command words, tones, and metaphors which amazed
me, filled me almost with fear. Yet I had suddenly an unavoid-
able impression that it was not to me he was addressing himself;
that what he was really doing was to defend himself, not for the
an


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ADAM URBAS
first time, against the reproaches of some insistent, unseen pres-
ence. I felt as if everything he was saying in answer to me had
been heaped up for a long time like glowing embers within him,
and that now the fire was bursting forth, pouring itself out of him.
He could not prevent it; and while this mighty force, so long sup-
pressed, got itself uttered, he seemed to be sitting by, grim and
troubled, dully listening.
His voice rang more quietly however, as with bent head and
chin set he continued: “It might be asked, When did I begin to
know everything, and when did I first give up hope? You might
as well ask a leper, When did you first know that your skin was
beginning to fester? Of course he knows it on the first day, but
he only believes it when he is confined to his bed. I lay awake,
night after night; I thought, and thought; I looked closely at my-
self, I looked closely at him. I considered this, considered that. I
peered and peered, seeing where the leprosy had eaten its way in.
I tortured my very soul, wondering how the evil was to be got hold
of. Discipline! Discipline is always one step too late, since the
evil that calls for it is always one step ahead. If I had beaten him
black and blue the rod would have broken in my hand, and the
wales on his back would only have hardened him. Should I have
laid down rules for him? What rules, then? Are there any rules
that we can really trust to? Should I have chained him up like a
dog? Everything that I was fighting against in him was mine
really; I was the tree, he the branch; I was the wick, he the flame;
I was the ground, and he the spring that wells from it. How can
the tree accuse the branch? The same sap runs in both. Or the
wick the flame? The flame only exists through it. Or the soil the
water, when that springs from its very self? And where does evil
come from, then? There it is, spreading like fire in dry wood;
but whence? What a pitiless course it takes! First the little lie,
then the big; first a penny stolen, then a shilling; first an animal
maltreated, then a human being; from idler to criminal, from good-
for-nothing to profligate. No respect, or faith, or sincerity, or love.
Well, where did he get all this? From me? It can only be so.
And then I asked myself, Urbas, out of what stuff of darkness
were your own soul and body created, that you could bring forth
this rotten, misbegotten thing into the world? Is man then really
US
ne
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JAKOB WASSERMANN
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mes
WA
nothing but worthless vermin, that can only reproduce vermin in
its turn?”
He stared at me with a fixed look, like one choking under an im-
possibly heavy burden. There was silence. He drew his arm
across his forehead, wiping the moisture from his brow. I was
aware of his emotion, and shared it; but at the same time I re-
proached him for his presumption, and this I could not refrain from
expressing.
"To ascribe such immense responsibility to oneself seems to me
to go too far,” I said; “Even at the call of duty one can take too
much upon oneself and overstep man's right. You have referred
everything to yourself alone—as man and as father, always only
to yourself. Where does the mother come in, though? She has
an equal claim on the child, a greater, even. She would not ap-
prove of your reasoning, and certainly not of your deed, for the
sake of which you have had to break every family tie.”
"We can't argue that,” answered Urbas, unmoved. “There comes
a point where one has to leave off thinking. Whether she approves
of my reasoning I don't know. She has come off badly, but I have,
too. Her suffering may be great, but mine is the torture of the
damned. If there is nothing left for her in life, still, my life was
poisoned already years and years ago. It was as though her body
gave up its fruit unwillingly and then took revenge on my foolish
impatience and pride. We have only just to understand Nature;
but that of course is exactly what we fail to do. We want to im-
prove upon her, and are always beating against barred gates like
butting rams. A woman should never have only one child; too
much hangs upon it. My mother had nine; seven of them died
anyway. My grandmother had sixteen, and eight of these died
young too. There is no bitterness in such deaths. Not every seed
germinates of the corn sown in the fields. One should not have an
only child. It's like staking everything on a lottery-only no,
that's no comparison, for here one is scorched by a fire that leaves
a burning pain for ever. If her one and only treasure is despised
by gods and men, a mother is sad, perhaps, her life is clouded;
nevertheless she is for ever and aye so wrapped up in him, that
even if he approached her with an uplifted ax in his hand, his
life would still seem to her of more value than her own. She


460
ADAM URBAS
doesn't care about good or evil; her blood cries out to her louder
than any such distinctions. While I... Father,' the creature
called me. What does that word 'Father' mean? I have tried
and tried to think what it really means. If I had gone in to the
servant in the night and begotten a son from her, it would have
called me 'Father,' too. Would it have been the same? It would
not have been the same. It might even have been all right then,
that might have been the son I longed for, honourable and decent.
But the law forbids it, and the law is holy. And would that have
made the woman my woman? No. I will say this: a man aspires
farther than a woman, reaches up and out farther than she does.
I'll say this too: the father's share of responsibility is greater than
the mother's. The mother sits at our Lord's feet, and she may not
be harmed. It's from the father that the reckoning is asked. The
father is the bearer of the race; he is the link in the chain, to which
all his ancestors have led up and from which all his descendants
will spring. He has not only himself to please, by tenderness and
caresses, for out of his son's eyes the country is looking at him, the
king is looking at him, his ancestors are looking at him; besides all
who come after, to the third and fourth generation. His son is lent
to him as a pledge, one might say, that he has to give back to the
world when the time falls due. Woe unto him who must come
with empty hands and say, I have betrayed the trust!"
He stared into space, got up from his chair, and repeated loudly,
“I have betrayed the trust!” Then he sat down again.
I did not dare to disturb the heavy silence into which he fell after
that. I ransacked my brain for a way that would lead us further.
Every minute I was growing surer of my case, but I was afraid.
There was now such a conviction within me that incidents of the
past which had hitherto only borne out vague guesses and supposi-
tions were beginning to acquire the force of certainty, and picture
fitted itself to picture in a clearer and clearer light. Without doubt,
some subtle emanation from the man himself who sat before me
contributed to this, and also to my fear. In spite of long experi-
ence as a lawyer and judge—or possibly by reason of this—I have
seen much of the power that lies in abnormal emotion to impart
itself to others. I cannot deny that the intensified capacity I now
felt within myself seemed to arise from this cause. There was
something great about the man. I felt I had scarcely the right to
see
SOI


JAKOB WASSERMANN
461
make myself master of his secrets; I hesitated; I could not find the
right words. At length however I broke the deep silence, and, lean-
ing across the table, I asked, “You went up to the attic in order
to make an end of things ?”
He did not answer. His closely shut lips seemed to be refusing
to let any further words through. Yet to me this fierce brow was
becoming clear as a book, and I was seeing into what lay behind.
"You were twice in the room," I suddenly began, at a venture-
or perhaps that is not so, perhaps it was not quite at a venture, but
under the impression of a vivid vision which the moment brought
me. “Twice," I repeated; "when you left the room the first time,
Simon was still alive; when you went in the second time, he was
already lying a corpse on his bed.”
I should never have thought that this peasant's face, which was
by nature brown as seasoned wood, could ever grow so white. The
pallor seemed actually to come out of the pores and overflow the
skin as with a film of chalky white. He stared at me with wide
eyes, his cheeks quivered, and he seized his throat with both hands.
Now there was no uncertainty left in my mind. I forced myself
to speak calmly, and went on, “You went to him to bring him
money. On the Sunday you had had no money in the house, and
borrowed two thousand marks from your neighbour Stephen Buch-
ner, directly after dinner. Isn't that so? The money was to be
for getting Simon away. He was to go to a seaport that very even-
ing, and from there to America. Isn't that so? You offered him
the money, you explained your plan to him, and you expected him
to obey without hesitation. But not only would he not obey, he
even rejected the money. You questioned him, and then he began
to speak. What he said at first was muddled and incoherent, for
he was still dazed with drink. Then the sense became clear, at any
rate to you, frightfully clear. You stood before him and said
nothing. You didn't even take it amiss that he lay there in bed
and talked into the air, because you knew that he would not have
had the courage to speak if he had had to look into your face. You
listened, simply listened; and everything else arose out of this. Did
it happen like that, or not ?”
Urbas turned his agonized gaze for one second from my face.
“You must have been there as a ghost in the house,” he stammered,
utterly bewildered.


462
ADAM URBAS
ices
"No," I answered, “these are simple conclusions drawn from
facts. The most improbable facts leave often the clearest traces
behind them. Don't think there's any magic in it. In every direc-
tion, the consequences of a man's action follow inscrutable natural
laws. When one throws a stone into water, the circles it makes
widen out and disappear, but movement can still be detected in the
water long after the eye has ceased to be aware of it. .No one can
escape this fact. Every step he takes, in any direction, or what-
ever he touches with his hand or breathes upon with his breath,
winds the net more closely round him. I possess one piece of evi-
dence which I did not lay much value on at first; only now, in the
course of time, I see its importance. There is a painter in Eichstadt
called Kiessling, a friend and accomplice of Simon's, a lazy, de-
generate fellow, not without a certain rough honesty. He told me
a good deal. As you will remember, one of the pretty old painted
china coffee-pots disappeared from your house last winter. You
and your wife both thought that Simon had appropriated it and
sold it to a dealer in the town, for it was a fairly valuable thing.
Your wife even expressed the suspicion that Kiessling had played
his part in this as receiver. Well, it is true that Simon took the
pot; equally true that Kiessling was concerned and would certainly
not have despised his share of the booty, if there had been any
question of that. But it never came to that. Simon smashed that
pot before his friend's eyes. They were together in the latter's
room, there in the Pleinfelder Chaussée. Simon had brought the
pot to Kiessling, who took hold of it to examine it and was about
to express his satisfaction when Simon wrenched it from him and
with all his force threw it on the floor. Of course it broke into a
thousand pieces. The other reproached him angrily; but Simon,
after staring darkly before him for a while, suddenly burst out, 'I
should like to do him some real hurt, once and for all, that he
would feel to his very bones!' Kiessling didn't know against whom
this outburst was directed; his acquaintance with Simon was at
that time of quite recent date. Later things grew clear to him.
He says he had never before seen any young person obsessed with
such a violent hatred for his own father. From time to time similar
attacks repeated themselves. An irresistible fury would come over
him, an impulse to destroy; or at another time it would be a fit of
utter misery, of melancholy brooding. Often it seemed to be not
hate, but fear; often not fear, but something much less definite.


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463
One expression he once used, testified to by a third person also, was
somewhat as follows, 'If I could only just say it straight out to
him, then I should feel all right! What could he have meant by
this? Not only Kiessling, but other people who knew him, speak
of him as not altogether bad. They are mostly people whose un-
prejudiced judgement can be trusted. They describe him as a weak
character, easily led, like a person with no roots; indulging in all
sorts of excesses, like someone who wants to numb himself; and
avoiding work, like someone continually in Aight from something
and feeling himself followed. It was as if he turned to crime as an
escape from inward desolation, without being by any means wholly
bad. And I myself judge him to have been like this, now. But
by whom then did he feel himself followed? Whom was he defy-
ing? What was he trying to numb within himself ? Urbas, I
think we both know what it was. Even if the whole world were
still in doubt about it, you and I would be sure. Till that evening
in his attic you didn't know it. But you learned it there."
He drew a deep breath; his face twitched, as if from a blow
within; he seemed to want to say something, and to be unable.
But the lights and shades of his angular, agitated face spoke of
themselves. The dark horror, the almost superstitious amazement
over the sudden unveiling of that which he had thought to be an
inviolable, ever-guarded secret, had fallen away from him; and
now, since he no longer had the secret to guard, his soul was re-
lieved of a heavy burden, and expressed itself by that deep breath
in a moving way. I felt myself bound to help him over the last
remaining difficulties. I said, “When you come to think of it, men
have a much worse time of it than animals have. Men misunder-
stand one another in both thought and action: brother, brother;
friend, friend; father, son. Everyone lives within his own mis-
understanding as if in a black cellar, but is so strangely blind as to
think his cellar a brightly lighted room. And when he thinks that
God has taken note of him and chosen him out to be His mouth-
piece, it turns out as a rule to have been the devil after all. For
thirteen long years your whole aspiration was centred on your son;
then, when he was actually there, it took you eighteen years to
understand him. Isn't that rather a poor showing for human wis-
dom? Why hide yourself any longer, Urbas? What good can it
do, to take the blame for a crime which you didn't commit? To
call yourself a murderer to the very man who is trying to show you


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ADAM URBAS
the final way plainly? Why this impious playing with earthly
justice? Oh, why, man, why?”
“I'll tell you why,” said Urbas, “since now the whole game is
lost. I'll tell you about it, but have patience with me, it's hard
for me." His glance seemed to seek within, and his fingers moved
as if they too were seeking the briefest and exactest words to which
to entrust his thought. Haltingly, he began. “It is true, I went
in to him to give him the money. I didn't think of America, I only
thought, let him get away as quickly as possible, and as far as
possible, so that we should at least be spared the police in the
house. I went in to him, and because it was dark in the room I
had first to light the candle, and there he was lying on his bed,
looking at me. It's true that he wouldn't take the money. He
turned his face to the wall and ground his teeth and said that
couldn't help him any more. I stood by the bed and said, 'Get up,
when your father is standing before you.' Then he turned his face
towards me again, and because mockery and contempt were in it,
anger welled up in me, and I said, 'Get up, when your father is
standing before you.' But he answered, Why should I get up,
when it is you who have thrown me down? My fists clenched
themselves of their own accord, and I asked, 'How then, you vil-
lain, how can I have thrown you down?' And again came from
his lips that “You!' Nothing more. You!' he said. I looked at
him, and he looked at me, and time passed, and then again he said
‘You! There was so much spite and rancour and menace in the
word, that the saliva in my mouth turned bitter as I heard it.
What do you mean by you? What do you mean?' I cried. 'Oh,
you,' he said through his teeth, you have had your whole weight
on my chest ever since I was born.' Then I was silent. It is all
very well for you to stand there and glare at me with those eyes of
yours,' he went on. “So it's never going to end, then, that standing
and glaring at me with those eyes? It has always been like that
with you, always. Looking and looking, and never saying a word;
sitting day after day at table, and knowing all about a fellow,
and never saying a word. A long way you've brought me, with
your looking and looking! Why didn't you take me and talk to
me? Never said a single word to me. Of course that would drive
any one to despair! Wouldn't it just force him to turn to harlots
and drinkers, people who talk and laugh and have a friendly word
for a fellow, who say Hullo there! so that one knows where one
Ore.


JAKOB WASSERMANN
465
stands with them. But you! Have I ever known where I stood
with you? There he is again on the watch, I was always think-
ing; he has planned something against me, I was always thinking.
Even when I was still only a child, the food I was swallowing
would stop in my throat and choke me when you came in at the
door. Hundreds and hundreds of times I wanted to go to you,
but fear of you prevented me. What have I done wrong? I was
always thinking; and when I thought of something I felt better, be-
cause then at least I knew what it was all about. So I never had any
peace until I had found something wrong to do, and made every-
body angry. Yes, I've gone all wrong; but I don't know whether
I was really wrong from birth. I've turned out a failure, a good-
for-nothing; but that's no reason for you to set yourself up there
like the Holy Ghost before me, you ought rather to ask yourself
where you've failed towards me. For it might have been quite dif-
ferent. I might have honoured you, as it says in the Ten Com-
mandments, and been as tame as a pet bird. It might have been
like that, because it was in me, and simply got driven out. I've
grown into a useless wretch, and life is a misery to me, and wenches
and drinking are a misery to me, and nothing at all is any good
to me any more.' That's what he said, and more yet, I've for-
gotten what; and tossed himself about on the bed, and ground his
teeth, and cried, and gave a bitter laugh; and at last turned again
to the wall and was silent. I thought to myself, Urbas, that is a
lost soul, but it may be that your own is too. I hadn't a word to
say. What use would it have been to have whined to my own
son? I hadn't a word to say. I went out. I walked across the
yard as far as the fence. Everything was as peaceful as it is in
spring nights, when the sap begins to form in the roots under the
earth. I looked up at the stars, but they could not help me. I
opened the stable door and sniffed the sour, warm air, and one of
the oxen lifted its head, going on chewing. Then a shudder of
horror overran me, and I thought, Urbas, you must go back into
his room, and even if you don't find the right words straight away,
surely something will come of it. Then I went back, and as I
came in, he was already lying there in his blood. I stood there a
long time, and then I said to myself, Well, if that is how it was,
you are the murderer, Urbas, and the debt is yours to pay. That's
all I have to tell.”
He folded his hands over the open Bible, and went on in a quiet
C


466
ADAM URBAS
as
tone and with a curiously overshadowed look. “One thing more,”
he said, “I had a dream which I want to tell you about. It was
the night before that happened. The farm servant came into the
parlour and said, “Farmer, the horses are harnessed, we must start.'
I went out. There was deep snow lying. The horses were standing
harnessed to the wagon, and I drove off. All at once we lost the
road, and the horses were wading in water up to their bellies. I
jumped down and walked beside them, holding the reins. Then I
suddenly saw the farm behind me burning, and the snow-field
gleaming with the red reflected light. The horses began to run,
and dragged me after them, so that I lost my breath. I couldn't
let go of the reins, they were twisted round my hand; and as we
came to the old mill, down there by the railway bridge, where the
river is sixty ells wide and more than ten deep, the horses began
to gallop more wildly than ever, and the glare from the fire lit up
the whole sky. The river was frozen over, the horses ran on to it,
and I thought in my fear, Will it bear the weight of the wagon and
horses? The heavy draught horses rushed down the bank and on
to the ice with the wagon, but the ice held. There stood Simon on
the other bank, and as the beasts were rushing on down the frozen
roadway, I called across to him, 'Help, Simon!' He answered, 'I
must go home, the stable and the house are burning.' And I, I
couldn't jump into the wagon, and the horses were dragging me off
my feet. I cried out in direst need, 'Help, Simon, loosen me from
the reins!' He answered, 'You must loosen yourself from the reins,
the ice won't bear us both.' Then I called to him, ‘Everything will
be yours, horses and wagon and all, only help me, for God's sake!'
Then he turned round, and as he turned, the horses stood still.
When he took the first step, however, the ice cracked, and as he
seized the panting leader by the bridle, the ice broke, and wagon
and horses and myself and Simon crashed into the water. And
while I was sinking, I awoke.”
He ceased. He did not expect any further reply, and I had none
to make. I noticed with surprise how in the course of a few min-
utes his whole appearance had grown years older, his chin become
sharp, his eyes dull, his neck thin, his hands withered, his bearing
weak and helpless. The striving, powerful being, asking so much
out of life, who had been sitting before me, had suddenly become
a shrunken old man. When I took my leave he did not look up
and seemed hardly to notice. The stony silence in which all his
m


SCOFIELD THAYER
467
former life had been passed seemed to spread itself about him
again, impenetrable, and almost like the first breath of Death. For
on the next morning, when he was to be set free, the warder found
his lifeless body hanging to the window-bar.
THE POET TAKES LEAVE
BY SCOFIELD THAYER
Written at Atlantic City
The stars are mine; and the inalienable sea.
They may expunge me from their continent, and be
As I were not. Deliberate deformation here
Has turned the centuried earth as milk is turned. The mere
Rotation of this day addles the heart. O wry
The morning, wry the noon, and wry the eve and night!
Wrenched from their natural course they do but underwrite
Man's infamy. The stars alone hold true, and are
The asylum of my self. And the most stooping star
Yet gleams untrammelled. These they shall not bend
To their unholy uses; nor to-morrow vend
Their goings. They shall move unsullied when man dies;
And all his evil with him; for the last time dies.
The sea is also mine. Across his heart they ride,
And shall to-morrow curb his inmost pulse and tide,
And turn his salt to sweetness. Yet I know him friend.
There is that in him which may nowise mix or blend
With their sweet horrors. He is ribbed and coarse and true.
And party to that salt-good scheme whereof hearts firstly grew.


LONDON STATUES
BY ROGER FRY
оге
S fundamentalism has driven men to the study of evolution,
A the row over Mr Epstein's relief of which I wrote recently
has prompted me to look more curiously at London's statues.
There can be no doubt that on the whole the Philistine lords have
arranged things very skilfully so as to avoid any disquieting
artistic impressions occurring in the streets and spaces of their
capital city, and I should hardly venture to disturb the reign-
ing harmony by calling attention to the few statues which have
some artistic purpose, did I not know that they are too familiar
to the Londoner ever to be seriously regarded. The present
moment is propitious, too, for any enquiries, since it is the one
season when one may stand and gape at a statue and only pass
for an American visitor instead of being suspected of lunacy.
Most cultured Londoners when challenged to mention one good
statue in their metropolis point to Charles I in Trafalgar Square.
The seventeenth-century pedestal of this monument is one of the
few exquisitely proportioned structures in London. The baroque
decoration of the two rounded ends is also very happy, owing to a
good original design which has been singularly improved by the
curious accidental enrichment wrought by the acid smoke of Lon-
don on Portland stone. By this chance the original plastic idea
has been enormously enriched and emphasized, and it has gained
a rare variety of surface quality. The statue of the unfortunate
king is, however, hardly worthy of this splendid pedestal. It
has of course something of the decorative quality which was tradi-
tional in all renaissance bronze work. The sculptor has made use
of the creases in the leather jack-boots, the details of the mane and
tail, and even the veins of the horse, not to mention the details of
the armour, but all these are treated in a tight and literal manner
and are imposed on a feeble and uncertain plastic theme without
any consistent or well-held rhythmic idea. On a small scale it
might make a charming bibelot for the mantelpiece. As it is, the
feeblest of Italian renaissance sculptures would make it look
foolish.
a
ra
rse
nze


ROGER FRY
469
Far better as an example of the peculiar decorative effect of
bronze which the renaissance evolved is Grinling Gibbons' statue
of James II behind the Admiralty. The pseudo-classic pomposity
of the imperial pose and the affectation of the Roman costume are
easily forgiven for the sake of the exquisite clarity and incisiveness
of the imbricated corselet, and the various graven and modelled
ornament for which that costume provided an excuse. But the
head and bare limbs have also a nervous precision and accent
which no other English sculptor has quite equalled. The general
effect resembles that of the Italianizing French sculptors of the
later seventeenth century, but I doubt if any of Louis XIV's
artists had quite the refinement of taste that Gibbons shows.
Far less decorative than either of these, but more convincing
as a plastic idea, is the George III in Cockspur Street done by
Wyatt in 1836. It is a matter-of-fact affair enlivened by the
rather conventional rhetorical pose given to the horse, but it is an
honest and capable piece of sculpture. Wyatt has made happy
use of the king's ridiculously small bullet-head. By means of the
peruke he has joined this knob to the rounded shoulders by an
unbroken curve which counters and contains the strong opposing
diagonals given by the horse's checked movement. One guesses
that Wyatt for the purposes of sculptural design has under-
estimated the cubic capacity even of that royal head.
Another respectable equestrian statue of a purely conventional
type is the William III erected in 1808. Placed as it is among the
beautiful plane-trees of St James's Square, this is certainly a pleas-
ing object. Then there is Rodin's group of the Burghers of Calais.
This of course makes a bid for something much more impressive
and asks to be judged by higher standards than its decorative
amenity. I must leave out for the present the discussion of how far
it succeeds. All these are at least passable works, they are not
artistically scandalous or disgraceful, but with the possible excep-
tion of the Rodin, they are hardly capable of arousing more than
a feeling of mild approbation. As far as I know, there is only
one outdoor statue in London that can lay claim to real distinc-
tion or that can give to those who love the expression of an idea
in plastic form a genuine emotion.
The situation and aspect of this statue are so comically incon-
gruous and unexpected, it has so much the air of a meteoric intru-
al


470
LONDON STATUES
sion from other worlds, that a mythical explanation has to be
found for its appearance. It all began, it is said, with one of the
many occasions when “the Lord waxed exceeding wroth with
his people, the people of London.” But it so happened that being
also “exceeding wroth” with a number of other people in dif-
ferent parts of the world, it did not suit his purposes to hurt them
in their most sensitive spot by a financial crisis. He therefore.
considered in what way he could punish them most severely and
continuously without interfering with the general course of events,
and in the end he condemned them to possess and expose per-
petually to the public gaze one work of genuine sculptural design.
The people of London were at first staggered by this verdict, but
they are an ingenious and resourceful people and they had often
played the game of hiding an object in a clearly visible situation
and they knew that the best results were obtained when it was
placed in so conspicuous a spot that everyone overlooked it. So
they found a place in the very heart of Philistia where more
Philistines would pass within a few feet of it every day than
in any other position in the whole of London town and where it
would yet remain completely unknown.
So far I think the Philistines were playing the game with as
much fairness as success, but I regret to add that they cheated a
little over the question of mounting the statue. They erected it
on one of those granite drinking-fountains where you press a knob
and a little water trickles into a tin mug. About sixty years ago
benevolent people were very fond of erecting these objects. They
apparently believed that it really was thirst that drove people
into the Public House. So far all was quite correct. Where the
cheating came in was in getting a certain J. Edmeson Archt. to
design a canopy in elaborately convoluted cast-iron of quite sur-
passingly hideous form and decorated with very cast-iron patterns,
and in making the said canopy fit so closely over the head of the
statue as to obscure it considerably, not to mention the tiresome
interruptions to the view which the supporting columns interpose.
So there, on a triangle of pavement behind the Royal Exchange
and a few feet from Threadneedle Street, inside its cast-iron cage
and on top of the red polished granite fountain where no stock-
broker ever drinks, sits London's one really good, I might almost
say first-rate, statue.


ROGER FRY
471
An inscription runs as follows on a granite slab below it:-
"Erected 1878 at the expense of John Whittaker Ellis, Alder-
man, William Hartridge, Esq., Deputy, supplemented by a vote
in Wardmote, also by donations from the Drapers' Company and
the Merchant Taylors' Company."
ers.
I do not know whether Mr Ellis, Mr Hartridge, or Wardmote
dictated the subject to the sculptor, but it was one that any sculptor
might justly accept and it was peculiarly adapted to bring out all
the qualities of Dalou's genius. For the figure of Maternity suck-
ling a baby and holding an older child to her knee with a protecting
gesture is signed Dalou 1879.
Here at least we are in the presence of genuine sculpture.
There is nothing the least curious or interesting or decorative or
in any way striking about it. The treatment is as traditional as
the subject. This is just a mother like hundreds and thousands
of mothers. There is no marked poetic or dramatic idea to help
us out. We can get no pleasure here from anything but the
special quality of sculpture, the harmonious counterplay of a com-
plex system of planes and movements. It is only when, as here,
the sculptor has himself felt intensely the continuity of the move-
ment throughout every part, that he can communicate this special
effect to our imagination. It is just because this group of three
figures with all their complicated and corresponding movements
depends entirely for its effect on realizing continuity, that the
actual setting of the statue is so unfortunate. In trying to appre-
hend the inevitable relation of the woman's back to the movement
of the arms, we are continually disturbed both by the excessive
shadow in which the upper part is lost, and by the columns which
cut across the forms. But with a little patience the rhythmic
scheme becomes evident and we can feel the specific exhilaration
which this clear sense of a vital order permeating a complex of
volumes and planes arouses.
There is of course a further quality in sculpture which it is
difficult to explain or analyse, namely that of surface quality.
The question to be solved is, if we consider a bronze statue: how
far the surface should suggest the sudden and complete resistance
to touch of actual bronze, and how far it should suggest the quality
C
'SC


472
LONDON STATUES
of flesh or drapery. The power to imitate in bronze a totally dif-
ferent substance is one of the stock marvels of sculpture to the
unsophisticated. The imitation almost to the point of illusion
of flesh, lace, velvet, or hair produce in the mind of the barbarian
of modern civilization a vivid shock of wondering admiration,
but this can hardly be counted an aesthetic quality.
From the aesthetic point of view, the determining factor must
rather be some intimate correspondence between the larger rhythmic
movements and the minute changes of direction which are due to
the "handling” of the material, and which arouse in the mind the
idea of some particular kind of surface. With certain hieratic and
rigid movements we might almost require to be reminded of the
unyielding resistance of the actual metal, with other rhythmic
systems such a surface might arrest the movement too sharply.
When, as in most renaissance bronzes—as for instance in the
James II already mentioned—the decorative aspect of the material
is exploited, we also need the sharpness of edge and the flat-
ness of facets to which bronze specially lends itself; but in general
we may say that for the richer and more complex rhythmic ideas,
a rigid unbroken surface tends to be too schematic and abstract.
A certain suggestion of play in the surface is almost as neces-
sary as the "nervous” line in a drawing. But the exact degree of
this play or "atmosphere” of the surface must depend on the
general rhythmic feeling and the type of curvature of the
modelling.
Dalou's treatment of surface is evidently deliberate and con-
sistent. He chooses for his drapery a thick soft material which
takes full rounded folds, and this is in accord with his feeling for
flesh. Here, too, full rounded forms predominate, but they are
never flaccid or inflated. One may perhaps compare his treatment
to that of della Quercia among the Italians of the renaissance, but
he is a della Quercia become aware of what the eighteenth century
contributed—its variety of surface quality, its more conscious and
nervous sensuality. But that is all that Dalou has borrowed,
there is no eighteenth-century mièvrerie in this; it has the frank-
ness and candour of an earlier art with that subtlety superadded.
More and more as time goes on Dalou begins to stand out from
the ruck of nineteenth-century sculpture. How poor beside his
generous and ample manner do the brilliant, stylized, photographic
we
ore


ROGER FRY
473
effects of Carpeaux show. How genuine he is beside the conscious
stylistic borrowings of Alfred Stevens.
Dalou was an exile in London during and after the war of 1870
and it is to that fact that we owe this one really moving piece of
public sculpture. He left here, too, the admirable tondo of a
bacchanal scene in the Victoria and Albert Museum. But the
Maternity of the City of London is a more impressive work. It
is indeed one of the best of his that I know. Perhaps one day the
iron tabernacle which disfigures and conceals our one masterpiece
might be removed by a vote in wardmote.
I had hoped to have supplied photographs for this article, but it appears
that no photographer has yet thought it worth while to place photographs
of our statues on the market. This is disappointing, but throws a curious
light on the psychology of the Londoner. There is one statue, however, of
which photographs abound; it is a nauseating horror representing Peter
Pan.


THREE POEMS
BY LEON SERABIAN HERALD
THE BEGGAR
His hand is lean.
He stretches his shaky hand
from an unseen place,
nor does he see the face
of his alms-giver,
nor what he has been offered.
He could have sat in a corner
where a short arm would do
for the alms coming from a short distance,
but a street is too narrow a place
for a master beggar;
so he sits in a vast place
vastness obscured.
In his slender and shaky hand
blood-beats assume sound,
his hand is light as shadow
because of the light burden
of words spent in the long distance,
bartered with refusal.
A DANCER
A shining marine animal
trapped in the transparence
of its blue sea gown-
your body!
Your arms
phosphorescent gills
bridling the waves—
waves faithful as Arabian horses !


LEON SERABIAN HERALD
-
475
475
Naught but a foam
clinging to your body,
already become part of it-
your face!
Two enraged tides
to the shore—your thighs
tending to the shore
to be dissolved upon the sand!
My sea-dwelling soul
following, following, following,
falling, twisting, rising, following
your shadow!
BALLAD
My rich uncle in Egypt,
wishing to have a son
to whom to give an education,
called upon my father,
who supplied him with the worst
of all he had, and I shall not return;
because the son already knew
more than the father.
us
W
From Cairo I went home to visit,
without letting them know of my journey;
but my mother must have heard
that I was coming
(it is possible to hear unuttered things)
and thinking that she was too good
for me to see again,
died, and was buried
almost as I was entering the house.
And I was told by the sententious villagers
that it was my iron absence
that had hammered her to death.


476
THREE POEMS
My eldest brother who was in America,
went home and shot my father.
He must somehow have heard
that there would be much killing;
something must have told him
that our father was too good
to be killed by another hand.
In America I am the baby
of the pleasure-loving family.
They all go out, forgetting me.
Then I begin to cry;
I fall out of my crib and bruise my soul.
That's best; no one will notice it.
When I had grown to manhood
I loved a college girl,
whose name as you would know, was Mary.
One night she said she loved me
and I took her to the house of a rich friend,
not knowing that she never before that,
had seen a mansion.
My twenty-one-year-old sweetheart, dazzled,
fell in love with my fifty-seven-year-old
Casanova friend.
My Casanova friend!
Disliking watchman's duty,
I resigned from my position
although I still could hold it;
they have told me
I may have it if I wish.
And now I am a person in retirement,
with life's riches in my hands-
about my neck,
my father's gift of long ago,
a rosary.



Courtesy of the Montross Gallery
THE WELL OF MERLIN. BY BRYSON BURROUGHS





SOUTHWEST
BY MABEL DODGE LUHAN
AS Silverbird opened his eyes, the morning star moved past his
I open door. It moved slowly—a drop of white fire in the
pale green sky, and the air from the canyon was an icy breath.
He stretched himself, tied his blanket around his loins, and made
a fire of cedar branches in the little horseshoe-shaped corner fire-
place. After he had set the old black coffee-pot between the small
upright sticks of wood, he walked a few yards down to the edge
of the creek, to wash and drink from the water that sparkled like
liquid ice as it rushed down the mountain from the springs around
Blue Lake, hastening southward to the Gulf of Mexico.
Silverbird was tall and lean. There was perpetually a look of
amusement on his face as though he were laughing at something.
Yet to his friends in the pueblo, he did not seem to have much to
laugh at, for he was all alone in his house. Nearly every Indian
has a mother or a wife, but his mother had died when he was
twelve years old—when he had been for a long time apart from
her at the time of learning," and he had nobody. Every day
she would come with his corn-bread to the entrance of the room
which he shared with the two other boys who were passing with
him the year of initiation before entering the tribe. As their
mothers did, she brought him his corn-meal mush or loaf of corn-
bread; but after a few weeks, she did not come, and in her place,
his old aunt brought him his food. When the men in the Kiva
had told him that his mother was dead, he had taken it very
strangely; he had not said a word, but that look of laughter had
fallen upon his face and he had carried it ever after. He had
not married, nor had the old men, vigilant in conserving the tribe
and in convicting youth of indiscretion, caught him in any of those
wild, careless pranks which are usual with young men. Silverbird
went his path in silence with a smile upon his face. He worked his
powers, the Indians said-worked his powers as they worked their
buckskin hides, and the medicine-men worked their medicines.
At dawn that morning at the creek, he had met a couple of his


478
SOUTHWEST
mo
rose
friends. These two, Eagle Star and Stonepath, were going up the
mountain that day-one for a load of wood, the other to hunt
grouse. Simultaneously they dashed the cold water of the creek
to their faces and with both hands wet, smoothed down their hair.
Each, as he knelt on the bank and tossed a stream of water to his
mouth by a succession of swift movements, made it seem to rise
to him in a little column.
“What you up so early for, friend?" asked Eagle Star as they
rose and together faced the east in which the pale green of the
sky was deepening to a warmer colour.
"Oh, I'm going to Prado. Our compadre, Josesito, is marrying
off his girl to-day. “They will need someone to work maybe, and
I will chop wood for them to keep the fires burning in the oven
and the stove. There will be mucho baking in that house before
night-time.”
"Hey! Cakes and pies and bread!” exclaimed Stonepath.
"Some Indians are lucky.”
"Well, friend, when you come back to-night with those birds,
come to my house and we will eat together,” replied Silverbird,
the habitual smile lighting his thin face
“And I will come too,” said Eagle Star, adding, with a sly
glint in his eye, “Maybe I will find something to-day besides my
wood.”
"Bueno, friends. We will wait for each other. Whoever comes
first, from east, north, or west, will watch for the others from the
roof top. Let us be off. Good hunting, brothers.”
Returning to his house, Silverbird drank a bowl of the coffee
which bubbled on the embers. It had been made from old grounds,
but like all Indians he was used to the thin flavour and drank
with enjoyment. He set the pot to one side, cherishing the grains
for one more drenching, rolled his bed of skins into a packet which
he placed against the wall, flung his blanket over his head, locked
the door, and started to Prado by a short cut through the fields.
Long white reefs of cloud tinged with pink, lay across the tops
of the mountains in a sky which had become translucent coral.
Groups of horses and a drove of small cows grazed here and there.
The fields stretched out green and suave like so many dark woolen
blankets as Silverbird moved quickly along, his inscrutable smile
directed upon Prado.
As


MABEL DODGE LUHAN
479
men
When he had come to the village, he heard a great barking
of dogs and saw smoke rising from the two chimneys of Josesito's
house and from the adobe oven by the kitchen door. He looked
in, and oh, what bustle! What a lot was going on! The women
were preparing food for the wedding feast. The bride's mother
was rolling out piecrust, her aunt was kneading dough for bread,
and the bride herself-her face powdered with flour to protect it
from the sun—was about to draw the ashes from the adobe oven
in which fire had been kept for an hour to heat it through.
"Hello, friends,” said Silverbird to the women, who knew him
well. Although antipathy may exist between Indians and Mexi-
cans, as between Indians and white people, there are always excep-
tions to the general antagonism, and each Mexican family has its
own friends among the Indians. As young girls, Silverbird's
mother and Josesito's wife had swapped chickens for beadwork and
beans for pottery. He was an old friend and his occasional visits
were taken for granted. Josesito, himself, came strolling from
behind the house and held out his hand with a singularly sweet
smile. He was a good man; it was as though he had honey in his
veins, so good and kind and easy was he.
"Bueno, amigo,” he purred. “We have much going on in our
house. This afternoon, Domingo Martines comes from Secco to
marry my Rosita. All our friends will be here. I have just killed
a sheep; come, you, and help me clean him.” And the two men
disappeared. They worked all morning, prepared the meat,
chopped wood to replenish the stoves, and then tidied up the old
shed near the corral—a prodigious undertaking, this. Only a
tuneral can start things in an easy-going land. The
women meanwhile cooked and struggled to put the house in order;
they boiled and roasted meat, they made cakes, and swept-break-
ing every dead leaf from the geraniums in the south windows.
The day grew hot. The wild plum hedges between the fields
were white with blossoms which made the air sweet, for it was
May, and there was snow on the tops of the mountains. And
yet the sun steadily, almost overbearingly beat down, as if gazing
consciously at what went on that day.
The shelves in the kitchen were filled with pies and cakes. Great
loaves of bread covered with white cloths stood on the recently
scrubbed kitchen table. An immense black pot filled with mutton,


480
SOUTHWEST
0
simmered on the stove beside another filled with red chiles. In
the oven, the sheep's ribs were roasting.
By three o'clock, the company had begun to arrive. After lying
like dead all forenoon, the dogs came suddenly to life and barked
frantically, their front legs braced, their ears laid back, tails level.
Josesito, wearing a white shirt and a vest with a black satin back,
greeted each wagon-load of friends; and Silverbird, who was
motioned to help him, turned the horses into the corral as Josesito
led the guests into the house. The front room—the bedroom-
was soon full of people. In their black fringed shawls, they stood
about, or sat on the enormous white iron bed with its two ruffled
pillow-cases and white cover—both pillow-cases and coverlet em-
broidered with thin red cotton thread, in a design of birds and
flowers. The women, black figures against the whitewashed walls,
resembled the small painted Santos that hung behind them. Their
faces all expressed a kind of patient acquiescence. Some were
pale, some sombre, others sweet and smiling.
Several young girls giggled in a corner. They wore ready-made
muslin dresses, pink or blue; and big straw hats over their black
eyes, covered with bunches of fast fading ribbon or with wild
flowers—wild indeed. Hands in pockets, their sombreros tipped
over their eyes—the men loitered about outside the house, smok-
ing cigarettes, smiling uncertainly toward the front room where
the women were.
Josesito was now busier than ever, hauling water from the well
for his thirsty friends, exchanging a few words with them, seeing
that the horses were cared for.
Silverbird moved to and fro quietly helpful, smiling, watching
everything. When a horse kicked at its unfamiliar neighbour,
Silverbird was off first to separate them. As each wagon came up,
he was at Josesito's elbow to assist in unharnessing and leading
the animals to the corral. He said little.
The bridegroom was a good-looking boy with red cheeks, and
bright hair made flat with lard. He strove to appear at ease, but
his black eyebrows twitched, his mouth was a tight line, and he
could hardly wait for this day of festivity to be over-the marriage
service, the feast, the dance. After that, he could withdraw Rosita
from the gathering and drive her in his buggy to his mother's house
ten miles away. His mother and father had come and would go
back, in a wagon.
as


MABEL DODGE LUHAN
481
vere
A fat, severe woman, Rosita's mother was none too glad to lose
her daughter, who was helpful to her, baking, weaving blankets,
and all that. She knew Rosita was lucky to get Domingo; just the
same it was going to be hard. Between vivacious greetings, arti-
ficial smiles and cackles, she threw a hard look at poor Domingo
a figure of strong light and shade in the blazing sun as he non-
chalantly strolled past the door in his effort to catch a glimpse of
Rosita who was sitting on a carved bench inside, with two girls.
She was a shrew and everybody knew it—"La Chiquita.” Josesito
had begun to call her that twenty years ago when she had looked
like Rosita. .
"She'll be a grand mother-in-law,” whispered one of Domingo's
friends, blowing smoke rings in the direction of the large, severe
dame as her glance fell on them from the dim room.
"Oh, shut up,” growled Domingo. Didn't he know it? He
walked over to his father to get the sense of reassurance. His
father, Enrico Martines, was a tiny man with a most fiery dispo-
sition. No one had a worse temper than he when he was put out.
Domingo had none of this fighting spirit; he had only a strong
heart for work and a strong fear of women—although he was
drawn to them too. He felt, half consciously, that his father would
be on his side when they had become all one family, together,
linked by the priest. The old man smiled quizzically and sniffed
in the direction of the front room. Instinctive as an animal, he
knew the fears that were coursing through his son.
“Come, friend,” said Josesito, laying his hand on Silverbird's
arm. “It is all over; now we will eat together.” They stood by the
kitchen door, drying their hands on a cloth. The sun had crossed
the sky and was now in the west. The wedding had taken place
and the guests were together again for the great moment of the
day—the feast of chile con carne, of bread, meat, cakes, and coffee.
Sweat stood in beads on Josesito's brow, but Silverbird was calm.
He seemed to feel none of the fatigue, the anger, the fear, which
moved the others. There was merely that look of amazement,
that lurking humour in his eyes.
La Chiquita saw them. For the first time that day, Silverbird
appeared to stand out from his surroundings as someone, as some-
thing, separate. She was tired. She felt like giving that Domingo
a box on the ears and telling him to clear out, but she must remain
polite and smiling. But Silverbird—that Indian-was not a part
Ic


482
SOUTHWEST
of this game she had to play—no part of this life at all. She need
not smile at him if she did not feel like smiling. She need not be
polite to Silverbird. As she moved toward the two friends who
stood wiping their hands on the same cloth, she was a fine figure of
a woman in a most exceedingly bad temper.
“Now what you doing 'round here, Silverbird?” she asked in a
low, harsh voice. "I thought you gone home long ago. We got
lots of people here to-day, so you better go home. No time to feed
you—no place!”
Josesito looked up quickly at the sound of her voice, which was
pitched to wound, to deliver a blow. It eased her to speak so—
one could see it as she stood there. Silverbird looked at her and
smiled. There was no flicker of any feeling other than amusement
in his face-of surprise or sorriness or anger—as he said, “All right,
señora. I go now. . . . Adios, amigos,” he added and turned at
once toward the pueblo.
“That's pretty mean,” said Josesito. He spat.
"I can't help it,” replied La Chiquita, turning to feed her
guests.
Silverbird walked home across the pasture lands, moving quickly
over the dark cropped grass—behind him the sun which had that
morning risen behind him. He walked as lightly on the firm
yet spongy turf, he wore as satisfied, as intent an expression as
he had worn at sunrise. Stonepath was a tiny speck, identified by
his green and white blanket, sitting high on the housetop as Silver-
bird approached. He had noted the grey lilting figure as it crossed
the fields and simultaneously each waved to the other. The sun
had set; a rose light had tinged the tip of the great mountain and
faded. Two figures now watched Silverbird. Stonepath and Eagle
Star, who had wrapped themselves from head to foot in white
sheets, sat side by side, motionless, waiting. Only their eyes
showed—two dark triangles in two pillars of salt as the cool night
air poured down upon them from the canyon. They met him at
his door and all three entered. With a careless gesture that masked
his pride, one of them threw half a dozen birds on the floor; the
other lowered a great lump of honey from beneath his white sheet.
Only Silverbird brought nothing-nothing but a smile. They
quickly made a fire as Indians do in the early morning or evening:
"for company-for more life," they say. Silverbird's voice then


MABEL DODGE LUHAN
483
In UI
rose in narrative-musical, gentle, restrained, and sensitive. Look-
ing into the fire—not listening with their eyes—his friends absorbed
the sound of his voice as they absorbed the heat. When he had
ended, they made gentle sounds of affirmation, of agreement. They
showed no emotion, no excitement; but rather, a kind of patient
resignation; not the resignation of the Mexican women, but an
unyielding, indomitable firmness. They accepted an unending
struggle as if they knew they could not win.
Hanging the birds on a nail, and placing the honey on the edge
of the chimney, they glided from the house, Silverbird leading
the way, back in the direction from which he had just come—to
Prado. Once out of sight of the pueblo, they untied their long
hair and flung it loose; it was like dark water shimmering in the
dusk, as arm in arm they began to dance in a curious jog-trot,
towards Prado, chanting in a low sing-song, raising their knees,
swinging along in a kind of inverted goose-step. Their eyes were
fixed. They were one moving shadow-passing backward under
the stars to Prado where the wedding feast was in progress.
Never a break in the movement or in the song as back, back,
they danced, their hair swinging at their waists like dark water-
falls. No stumbling in the short grass, never a collision with a
tree or shrub. As with clairvoyant single intention they came at
last to Prado, the barking of dogs and the sound of fiddles was
heard on the quiet air. Then unaccountably, the barking stopped.
The three-fold dancing figure backed into the patch of light from
the open door. There was for an instant a discordant clash. The
squeaking of fiddle-strings, excited voices, and laughter were met
by an invincible harmony. The mild, united song of the Indians
had overpowered the disjointed utterance that had poured from
the big room, and there was silence.
Preceding his companions, Silverbird entered the house. What
a sight! The wedding-guests had sunk to the floor. With eyes
closed, some sat against the wall, some against the bed; the fiddler
lay with his head pillowed on his violin. Silverbird had worked
his powers.
“Now we eat,” said Silverbird, gently leading his friends be-
tween the wedding-guests who strewed the floor. Out to the
kitchen went the three, where they found the loaves of bread, pies,
chiles, and cold mutton. In silence, seated on the floor, they ate


484
SOUTHWEST
in dignity, and drank great bowls of coffee. Then when they had
returned to the front room, Silverbird said, as they gazed upon
the helpless bridal party:
“The señora was cross to me for no cause. I think now we give
a good reason to be mad.”
Stooping, they drew the guests into a pattern, arranging them
by pairs. With lips parted and a timid frown upon his face,
Domingo lay beside his mother-in-law, La Chiquita, who was like
a fat monk in her shawl. The bride was by her father-in-law, her
brown hands folded on her white sash, a vacant look upon her face.
That tiny man, even in his slumbers, wore a prodigiously fierce
look. In couples, like enemies made friends by death, the company
lay sleeping.
Silverbird went to the door, and facing the east, seemed to speak
a few words to the sky.
“Come, friends," he said to Eagle Star and Stonepath, "the sun
will wake them. I have told him to do it. Now we go and leave
them to be cross with each other, not with Silverbird.”
CROSS



ho
19129
2
SUN
VA
IM
T5
NIEDERBAYER. BY ALFRED KUBIN





GRECO'S PORTRAIT OF HIMSELF
BY PAUL ROSENFELD
ovel
M HE movement of the ears unlocks his life to you, letting the
I world slip with a precipitous gesture of falling shoulders,
erecting the seeing head solitary as a lighthouse in the night. It
brings the vehement thrust of iron against which he held his quiet
and his equilibrium where no hand might touch it. All in this life
was not gentleness of inclination nor keen penetration of the truth
of human existence through walls of steel and stone, nor spiritual
growth not yet complete in him but mounting toward a point!
The rose thorns of the flesh were there. Forces within the man
like those out in the world pressed upon his strength and filled his
days with conflict. Driven by their quality of warm colour, the
twin pink devils of ears spike the high-domed sallow skull between
them, accenting the resistance, the counterpressure of the long mass
they pin. Other shapes upon the canvas continue the sharp motion
and shake with a feeling of keen nervous tension. Pointed shapes
of livid light, elongated, extended in lozenge-like, pyramidal forms
play against each other. The slender head resembles two pyramids
opposed base to base. The nose is a tiny pyramid, broad and
sensual at the base and tapered upward to a delicate apex. The
two pieces of the ruff oppose two small lozenges twisted in convex
shape, and each shoulder with its arm constitutes a pyramid. In
their sum they form an organization itself a tall spike, pent in by
the vise of ominous background pressed heavily upon it, and un-
broken in its upward and counter thrust. We recognize the creator
of the strong art of El Greco, the art of fire and grace and pain
shaken by tension, by anxiety and excitement, and streaming
upward with the aspiration of the great Gothic churches.
He wished to point the reference, to make us conscious of him-
self. Ego-expression could have had little interest for him, whose
every work was self-portraiture, a psychic form, an individual state
felt in terms of the whole of life, a person, a struggle, a cry re-
1 Recently acquired by The Metropolitan Museum of Art.


486
GRECO'S PORTRAIT OF HIMSELF
ds
united with the all. Altar-pieces, allegories, the landscape, and the
portraits, each one of them was self-expressive. The very rhythm
of the formal autoportrait exists in numerous pieces of his work.
The number of the canvases not built by him upon its plastic
principle is small. Two irresistible forces pin in position the nobly,
wistfully consenting figure of the kneeling Christ in the Geth-
semanes in London and in Paris. ... Two greenish spikes thrust
from below upon the curving mass of rose that forms the Christ.
The immovable rock-like pyramidal mass which surrounds him is
hemmed in by two areas, the one of oppressive black spotted with
ghastly white which holds the approaching soldiers, the other of
pearl, fine yellow, and light grey, in which the chalice-bearing angel
kneels; the while itself towers upward to perfection. In the
miraculous Pentecost in the Prado, the central form, the Virgin,
is similarly borne in upon by the excited flanking masses of jewelled
light and colour, and given ecstatic upward and outward motion.
In relatively few paintings of the maturer Greco is the rhythm
gentle, the constriction light and tender, the shape pressed in upon
quiet in its counterthrust.
He had—as clearly few painters have possessed it—the power
of abstraction and universalization, of automatically feeling life
in subjective terms. Feelings about human life and destiny in
Greco, states of oppression, of deathwardness, of rapture and exal-
tation, were experienced as poignant shapes and exciting rhythms
born of his body's and the general human body's half-conscious
knowledge of itself. In Schopenhauer's genial phrase, he "ob-
jectified the idea of the human form.” No painting is more pene-
tratingly corporeal, more "sexual,” even. One moves through
tides of flesh, through tissue, membrane, and ligament, before these
mighty canvases. No painting is more divinely spiritual. The
flesh is touched with a gracious and exalted feeling of life. It
presents the utmost of materiality penetrated by the fire of the
ghost and made a new element embracing both. El Greco was the
healthy human being in a sick world. His age like ours was rotten
with sex, permeated by fear, mysticism, cruelty, flagellation,
and other symptoms of the natural life repressed, perverted, and
turned hideous. Yet amid the denial of Toledo and of Spain, the
Greek's desires must have gone directly toward their object. The
body gave him a point of contact with the vasty regions of human
na


PAUL ROSENFELD
487
experience. In recognizing its grand rôle, in allowing its cen-
trality in life, perhaps slightly exaggerating its function because
the others so stubbornly refused to see, he liberated and sublimated
his spirit. The limbs, breasts, and flanks became units of a neutral
universal medium; shapes and integers of a material which, since
Greco was a painter and a visualist, was the material of light.
He actually created in terms of light. In the history of art, in
the very Venetian painting from which he derived, light had never
played as superior, as independent a rôle as that he assigned to it.
He worked entirely in the terms of his medium. In Titian,' light
remains a secondary factor, constrained to illuminate the chief
figures of the composition and to subordinate the rest. In Tin-
toretto, light is en route toward the condition of form. It takes
perspective up into itself and creates tridimensionality. But in
El Greco, light is form. His shapes are penetrated completely by
it. The light takes them up into itself and reissues them as light.
The riper, greater Greco models in a rich and tawny, vibrant and
solemn colour as others model in clay, running the Auid immaterial
masses through his crook'd fingers and rigid palms. Are these
clouds, one asks, or solid shapes with all the rooted strength of
mountains? Centuries after, a French painter with an imagina-
tion, a feeling for the identity of his material related in all its
peasant-like heaviness to Greco's wirier, more nervous and aristo-
cratic one, saw in the Cretan's painting a corroboration of his own
idea, made careful copies of certain figures, and was pressed toward
the revolutionary painting we associate with the name Cézanne.
The shapes themselves in the great votive pictures, the forms
of clouds and people, rocks and cloths and trees, were closely
related to Greco as though he had found them in himself in paint-
ing his own image. We cannot be positive, even in the face
of his self-portrait, that elongated forms composed his proper per-
son, although the possibility suggested by Maurice Barrès, that
Greco was a Murano returned to his ancestral home, renders the
assumption even less hazardous. But we know he sought them
out, and was satisfied and made to increase in life through contact
with them. Before coming to Spain and Toledo the painter must
have had an inward relation to, a secret preparation for, the harsh
1 See Hugo Kehrer: Die Kunst des Greco.
mas


488
GRECO'S PORTRAIT OF HIMSELF
soil and sinister clouds, the tragic people, the flaming sunlight and
moonlight, and the spirit of life created by them. Although he was
well received in Italy and lodged in a cardinal's palace in Rome,
the environment at the very pitch of the puritanic counter-reforma-
tion did not release him. A principle in Greco must have re-
sponded to austerity of shape. For his steepness of sense, pas-
sionateness and sombreness of temperament, and aggressiveness of
attitude, Italy even under Spanish dominion was too easy and
voluptuous. That ardour, that seriousness and sternness required
a more strenuous and exacting environment. So he came to and
remained lifelong in stony Toledo, where travellers even to-day
see riding their donkeys up the granite lanes and digging the tufa
of the surrounding plain, men, women, and children with attenu-
ated carven skulls and long spare and swollen limbs which might
have been assembled from the canvases of the painter; and where
upon the horizon the clouds form “gloomy metallic lakes.” Pos-
sibly Philip II's passion for Venetian art suggested a generous
patron. But Philip's heavy gaze preferred the opulencies of Titian.
Grandees, churches, and convents gave Greco orders occasionally;
but when he died his property consisted of an hundred and fifteen
of his paintings for which there were no purchasers. Yet from
that stone and that dramatic sky he never went again. Between
the alien, austere, and yet strangely kindred outer world and the
dark and ardent inner life of the painter there came to exist a
body of broad, deep, and accurate relationships. The things before
the man grew upon him in the fullness of their identities. He had
arrived in Toledo filled with memories of the paintings of his
master Tintoretto and of Michael Angelo; but his art rapidly
individualized under the effect of an ever-growing freedom, ele-
gance, and poignancy in the usage of living shapes synthesized by
his inner states from Spanish life. These motives, forms, move-
ments, colourations he selected ever more daringly and apprecia-
tively, applying them in all their relative exaggeration and
abnormality. They came to embody more and more copiously the
values of life itself, and to accent its pathos and immedicable
anguish, its inexplicable wonder and grace. Degraded and brutal
expressions forced themselves upon him only early in his stay, and
in scattered instances. As he grew into middle life they disap-
peared entirely in the stream of the admirable ones filled with


PAUL ROSENFELD
489
suffering and ecstasy, exquisitely declarative of the beauty, pain,
and unfathomable depth of the heart. Perhaps no painter has got-
ten more poignant suggestions from the life of hands. Greco
appears to have seen in their shapes and poses the gamut of human
existence, tenderness, weariness, hesitation, tragic consent, service-
ableness, devotion, and the cry of intolerable joy. He and the
things before him had become as one.
It was the deep, the ultimate expression of Greco's own relation-
ship to life which in the form of rhythm finally drove to geomet-
rical sharpness and combined the shapes so simply presented to
us in the self-portrait, so elaborately in the great votive canvases.
That rhythm, adjusted to the requirements of space and subject,
is usually tense and nervous, passionate and ecstatic, built of violent
pressures and stubborn resistances of colour and shape, rapid writh-
ing light, vehement earthward strokes, noblest elongations, and
spiritual attenuations. The elongations of the flecks, opening,
swelling sharply out and tapering again; the rapid modulations of
colour from deepest black through lustrous red and green, orange
and yellow, to sharpest white, then back again from white through
lustrous colour to black, create violent ecstatic motion over
the canvases. There is a continuous nervous snapping of radiance,
sudden flashes, and equally sudden dwindlings. In picture upon
picture the integers appear to reel in disequilibrium, thrusting
violently outward in contrary directions, threatening to fall en-
tirely asunder. The rhythm of the glorious Pentecost shoots
upward to a corner of the canvas, falls precipitously downward
to the lower foreground, to mount again in a series of contractions
and expansions toward the tongues of fire and the unearthly yellow
dome. The great pieces are very conflagrations of racing, twitch-
ing, plunging, bursting ruby, topaz, and chrysoprase. That was
the time, filled with enthusiasm, excitement, and religious fervour,
anxiety, cruelty, and death; bestial and delicate at once; sumptuous
in its appointments and bloody in its passions; the time of the
ferocious soldier, the fanatical inquisitor, the précieux, and the
gracious saint; of Alva and Góngora, Cervantes, Guevara, and
Theresa of Avila. It was a time curiously like our own; yet the
art of El Greco possesses an element common neither to our time
nor to the one in which he lived. In his pictures, the turmoil and
disequilibrium are caught and held in marvellous balance. There
vases.
VI
um are
marve


490
GRECO'S PORTRAIT OF HIMSELF
is triumphant final equipoise in all of Greco. There is no weight
of violently projected form that is not counterweighed. In all
its stress, torture, and extremity, life circles in great, satisfying,
never-ending motion. The two great movements of penetration
and hollowing, the masculine and feminine of movement, in all
the intensity of their war equalize one another. Light and dark,
universal and particular, the stern and the tender, the bitter and
the divine, are held in a form during those sovereign moments, and
felt as single. Life moves upward to fulfilment. That too may
have been the time. More likely, it was the man Theotocopuli.
· That was what he had found in life, and what made him live.
There was in him the strange power, sanity, and balance which
makes all things "work together for good.” Overwhelming
external pressure, bitter conflict of man and of environment, of
light and darkness, of life and death, are the conditions of its
existence. It obligates struggle and tragedy and pain. It re-
quires an ideal opponent, a stern challenge, a hopeless fight.
Because of it El Greco sought out the fire where it was hottest and
stubbornly held steadfast amid the flames. Even at the cost of life,
life grew intense and fine and gracious so. Then perhaps one day
in gazing into a mirror he perceived in his own features and
forms the action of the whole, the fearful ravages, and the re-
sultant work; the enemies without himself and in the flesh driving
him to drop the world, and lift the seeing head, and grow in inner
strength. And taking up his material he made a play of two
powers: the one pressing downward as a vise, the other a sharp
slender pyramid thrusting upward to perfection, and termed it the
Portrait of Himself.



Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art
PORTRAIT. BY EL GRECO





MILKING TIME
BY LIAM O'FLAHERTY
COFTLY, softly the milk flowed from the taut tapering teats
D into its own white upward heaving froth. It flowed in two
white columns, shooting, crossing, and descending with a soft
swirling sound through the billowing froth.
There is no soft cadence as soothing as its sound, no scent as
pure as its warm smell, cow smell, blood smell, milk smell, mingling
with the thousand soft smells of a summer evening.
The cow stood on the summit of a grassy knoll. Behind her
there was a rock-strewn ridge, making a grey horizon against the
sky. In front there was a vast expanse of falling land, falling
in flat terraces to the distant sea. Close by, the land was green
bright under the rays of the setting sun, but in the distance it
was covered with white mist, as if it rolled, dust raising, to the sea.
The cow chewed her cud, looking through half-closed luminous
eyes downward at the mist-covered falling land. Her red flanks
shivered with content, the pleasure of being milked by a sweet-
smelling crooning woman, the pressure of whose soft fingers against
her teats was gentler than the pressure of a calf's gums.
And the woman milking the cow was in an ecstasy of happiness.
It was her first time milking her husband's cow, her cow hence-
forth. They had been married on Thursday. It was now Sunday:
evening and they had come together to milk the cow, as was the
custom among the people.
Her husband lay on the grass watching her as she milked,
listening to her crooning voice and to the many voices of the
birds; thinking.
“Isn't it wonderful how your little fingers can milk so quickly?"
he said.
She turned her head and shook her towering mass of black
hair proudly, smooth-combed winding tresses of black hair gleam-
ing in the twilight, red lips smiling as they crooned, a full white
throat swelling with soft words; crooning meaningless words of
joy as she looked at him.
mea
W


492
MILKING TIME
as
He looked at her happily and smiled, swallowing his breath.
"Wasn't it lovely to-day, Kitty,” he said, “coming from Mass ?''
She bowed her head dreamily.
“Everybody was looking at us as we came out of the chapel
together. We are the tallest couple in the parish, and I heard
many talking about us in whispers as we passed along the road
between the men sitting on the stone walls. Were you shy?"
"I was. I put my shawl out over my head so they couldn't see
my face. I thought I'd never get out of sight of the people.”
“After all it's a great thing," he said.
"What's a great thing, Michael ?”
His freckled face became serious. He looked away into the
distance over the mist-covered falling land to where the dim
horizon of the sea dwindled into a pale emptiness.
"How tall he is,” she thought, “and although his arms are as
hard as iron he touches me gently. . . . What's a great thing,
Michael ?" she said again.
"Well, it's hard to say what it is, but we are here together
now and there is nothing else, is there?”
“How ?"
“Before, on a Sunday evening, I always wanted to go off some-
where and maybe get drunk; but now I don't want to do anything
at all, only just to lie here and watch you milking the cow.”
She did not reply. She fushed slightly and bent her head
against the cow's warm side, thinking of other Sundays when she
sat among the village women on the green hill above the beach
singing songs as they knitted. Then she used to dream of love and
of some strange man, formless, unknown, who would take her
gently in strong arms and kiss her.
But she just said, “Men are queer,” and changing her hands
she drew at the hind teats, wetting them first with the froth and
pressing slowly until two fresh white streams flowed downwards.
The cow raised a hoof languidly and stamped, swinging her tail.
Michael laughed.
“Maybe they are," he said.
There was silence.
"Michael.”
"What?!


LIAM O'FLAHERTY
493
Sum
“Sure you won't be going off again on Sunday evenings to get
drunk when you get tired of me?"
“I'll never get tired of you, Kitty.”
"Ah, yes, it's very easy to say that now when we are only a
few days married, but maybe"
“No, Kitty, there's going to be no maybe with us. We'll have
too much work to do to get tired of one another. It's only people
who have nothing to do that get tired of one another.”
“It will be lovely working together, Michael. I love pulling
the potato stalks in autumn and then picking the potatoes off the
ridge, and at dinner time we'll roast a few in the ground with a
fire of stalks.”
“The two of us.”
“Yes.”
“But we have all summer before that. There isn't much work
in summer, only fishing. I'm going fishing to-morrow.”
"Then you'll be away all day, and I'll be lonely with nobody in
the house."
“You won't feel it until I come back again with a lot of fish.
It would be grand to take you with me in the boat, but people
would be laughing at us."
They became silent as she finished milking, drawing the dregs,
the richest of the milk, carefully. It was like a ceremony, their
first milking together, and both their minds were awed at the
new strange knowledge that had come to their simple natures,
something that belonged to them both, twining their souls, con-
scious of their present happiness, with a dim realization of the
great struggle that was to come, struggling with the earth and
with the sea for food. This dim realization tinged their happiness
with a gentle sadness, without which happiness is always coarse
and vulgar.
She finished milking. Michael rose and spilt half the milk into
a bucket for the calf.
“You take it to him,” he said, “so that he'll get used to you.”
The cow lowed, lazily looking at them with great eyes. Then
she walked with heavy hoofs to the fence beyond which her calf
was waiting for his milk in a little field. Putting her head over
the fence, she licked his upraised snout.


494
THE STAR
They pushed aside the cow's head and lowered the bucket to
the calf. He dashed at it, sank his nozzle into the white froth,
and began to drink greedily, his red curly back trembling with
eagerness.
Kitty rubbed his forehead as he drank.
Then they walked home silently, hand in hand, in the twilight.
THE STAR
BY JOSEPH CAMPBELL
Thro' the roaring boughs of sin
Burns a solitary star.
It is of the cherubin,
It has all the joys that are;
Burning, thro' the roaring boughs,
On the horn of heaven's house.
Black the boughs against the air;
White the star, and cherub-fair.
Hooded owls make ceaseless moan
Thro' the sin-excited boughs.
On the golden finial-stone
Crowning heaven's purple house
Burns the star—remote, unstirred,
Steadfast-beacon of the Word.


be
CALIGARI. BY GASTON LACHAISE





29
SWARA
BUST OF WOMAN. BY GASTON LACHAISE





WOMAN. BY GASTON LACHAISE





A MASTER IN WATER-COLOUR
BY THOMAS CRAVEN
M HE truth about Bonington has at last been written. Since
I his death a hundred years ago, this remarkable painter has
been the victim of collectors, forgers, and romancers, and his life
has been converted into a golden legend. Brilliant in all depart-
ments of art, amazingly precocious, and cut off by a consumption
in his youth after a career of mature achievement unapproached
by any painter at the age of twenty-five, it is little wonder that
such a man should have become fabulous. To the artists Boning-
ton has always been a master, especially in water-colour; the
forgers, profiting by the eagerness of collectors to pay a thousand
guineas for a scrap of a drawing, have passed off innumerable
imitations; and the romancers, taking it for granted that a painter
of such dazzling parts must have been cast in the Byronic mould,
have manufactured all sorts of appetizing myths out of prac-
tically no evidence. It is recorded, for instance, by Allan Cunning-
ham, his first biographer, that Bonington, when three years old,
was drawing with skill and ease, and that at the age of ten he
evolved by the process of divination the appearance of things he
had never seen-realistic studies of ships and the moods of the
sea. Another writer makes him the hero of Bohemian Paris, and
colours a rather prosaic liaison with a certain Mlle Rose, a model,
into a romance of the same name; a third would have us believe
that his days and nights in Venice were worthy of his wicked con-
temporary, Childe Harold. It has remained for a Frenchman 1 to
sift the legendary nonsense and to present, not only the painter,
but the man, who turns out to be a hard-working Britisher, in-
variably composed, more often than not phlegmatic and melan-
choly, and driven on to unexampled productivity by the premoni-
tions of a fatal disease. M Dubuisson, artist as well as critic,
1 Richard Parkes Bonington: His Life and Work. By A. Dubuisson.
Translated with annotations by C. E. Hughes. Illustrated. 4to. 217
pages. The Bodley Head. 635.


496
A MASTER IN WATER-COLOUR
has told the story with fine sympathy and grace, and has concluded
the account with a critical examination of Bonington's art, a study
distinguished for historical understanding and aesthetic sense. He
has also traced the destiny of the artist's works, an extraordinary
piece of diligence, and has chosen the illustrations with scrupulous
care.
At the age of fifteen Bonington was taken by his father to
Paris, and with the exception of several excursions into the prov-
inces and one into Italy, spent the rest of his short life in the
French capital. From the very beginning he seemed to be con
scious of his powers and to have them under perfect control; he
hurried from triumph to triumph, swiftly making himself supreme
in water-colour, mastering lithography as if by instinct, and
at the time of his death proving himself in oils, not only in land-
scape, but in historical composition, a field in which his
companion Delacroix was to attain the greatest eminence. Recog-
nition came in his seventeenth year. Resenting the pedantic in-
struction of Gros, Bonington broke loose in an exhibition of water-
colours which became the talk of Paris. He was famous at a
single stroke; he sold every picture in the gallery, and before he
was twenty the collectors were on his trail. In the epochal Salon
of 1824, an event which struck at the very roots of Davidian
tyranny and which was to affect the course of art throughout the
next century, he was represented along with his fellow-countrymen,
Lawrence, Constable, and Copley Fielding, and was awarded a
gold medal. Bonington was then twenty-two years old, and the
gallant Delacroix praised his genius in these words: “You are
king of your domain, and Raphael could not do what you have
done.” And Corot, who at this date had never held a brush
though Bonington's senior by six years, saw in the young man's
work a vision of nature akin to his own, and determined there-
upon to become a painter. Only a little of life was left to him
and he made the most of it. He rushed off to Italy to study
Veronese, and while at Venice, in less than a month, executed
fifteen oils, as many water-colours, and a quantity of drawings,
surely a prolific display for one reputed to have a taste for riotous
living. Incessant activity aggravated his malady, and two years
later he returned to his native land to die.
There is no need to speculate on what Bonington might have
wa


THOMAS CRAVEN
497
done had his life been prolonged. He was a man marked by
destiny, and being spared the long groping struggle of most
painters, bequeathed the world an astonishing number of pictures-
not experimental studies, but finished works. Unfortunately for
the public most of these works are dispersed in private collections
and very few have found their way into America. M Dubuisson
unhesitatingly places him among the great artists of the nine-
teenth century, an opinion shared, I think, by the majority of
discerning critics. The work of the man has stood the test of time,
and the movement to which he gave the strongest initial impetus
was of a more enduring nature than the recent upheavals emanating
from Cézanne. Bonington was primarily a painter: the world
to him was only so much material for the artist. Nothing else
mattered; and as a consequence, his vision, penetrating and indi-
vidual as it unquestionably was, never impelled him into the deeper
human conflicts which were to claim Delacroix, Daumier, and
Courbet. In water-colour, the medium of his most magnificent
victories, his poetic strain falls somewhat in line with the English
school of Old Crome, Cotman, Constable, and Turner, but his
plastic statement is entirely his own. He may be said to have intro-
duced the medium to the French, and seeking truth, freshness, and
reality, as opposed to the sterile classicism of his age, went directly
to nature. The same qualities characterize his oils: lightness of
execution, a dazzling colour gamut of diffused gold and amber,
faint underlaid blues, and flashes of red and green, and an unsur-
passed command of tone, all combining, as Delacroix said, “to
make his work seem like diamonds by which the eye is charmed
and delighted independently of all subject and imitation.” He
was a romantic through and through: he made no attempt to
acquire classic depth and solidity, nor did he build up his world,
like Seurat, from the harmonious aggregate of many selected
experiences. He seized upon nature, cast out forthwith all irrele-
vant shapes and objects, arranged his forms as if guided by the
sense of inevitable placement, never crowding his figures or forcing
a rhythm, and bound the conception together by a marvellous
envelope of tone. His method of composing was exceedingly
simple, and when employed by lesser hands exceedingly monot-
onous: an immense background of glowing sky, a stretch of sea
with a few boats, or a strip of land with clusters of figures or
mm
ma


498
A MASTER IN WATER-COLOUR
trees. But the convincing element of reality is there, and one
feels that his pictures are actual transcripts, not of the world as the
ordinary eye sees it, but of a serene golden world, perfectly poised
and beautifully distributed, the world of a visionary who subdued
his frenzies to an intelligible human scheme.
In the sweeping romantic revolt of the nineteenth century,
Bonington was the bond of union between English and French art.
He did not live to see the magnitude of the movement, nor was
he indeed the greatest of the new school, but he was one of the
leaders and gave to painting the authority of genius and the in-
spiration of new ideas. After him came Géricault, Delacroix, Corot,
Daumier, Courbet, the Impressionists, and then Cézanne and the
modernists. And now that modernism has wandered from human
issues into the barren province of abstraction, it is not unreasonable
to expect a return to historic subject-matter, or more happily, a new
romanticism in the form of dramatic murals and vivid decoration.


OTHER MEN'S EYES
BY J. JEREMY-LEE
as
mour
HAVE some fish in my conservatory at Hapinstan. The sun
shines on them through the glass roof as they swim hither
and yon around the edge of the pool.
I have three black fish from the seas of China. They have
sharp jaws, but beautiful tails like the leaves of the weeping
willow that swish and glide through the water. They cast on
the tiled floor of the pool, a deep black shadow.
I have also three red fish-three red fish as small as a lady's
hand, and when the sun shines on them through the glass roof, it
hurts one's eyes to look at them.
Four white fish I have—my beauties, my albinos. At night when
it is dark in my conservatory, there are no fish in the pool but my
white fish gleaming through the darkness.
And three of gold I have, with plates of gold armour in which
they swim along the bottom of the pool as though they could not
rise.
Old, very old, always the same, my fish are known throughout
the land. Everyone who comes to Hapinstan comes to look at
them, and all those who have seen them say that they are beau-
tiful. All but one man who had just come from the South Seas-
who gazed on my fish and said, “Pah! They are hideous! Those
white ones—they shine like leprosy; and those red—they are red
like the lips of a courtesan. The yellow are like the gold she
takes, and the black—the black are as the lies she tells. Pah, they
are hideous.” He walked away and I never saw him again.
One day there came a little English girl of ten with her gover-
ness to see my fish. The little girl clapped her hands and cried,
“Aren't they beauties! They sparkle like Mother's jewels-like
rubies, onyx, and diamonds.”
In November as I was basking in the sun beside my pool, an
adventurer who had travelled the world over, came to see my
fish. After gazing at them a long time, he turned to me and said,
C


500
EARTH'S ADMONITION
"Your fish are truly cosmopolitan. The black are like the negroes
in the Congo; the white, like the cliffs of dear old Dover; the
yellow are like the golden corn of the West; and the red-are like
the poppies of Cathay.”
My fish are always the same; those who see them are never the
same; and to all who see them they are different.
EARTH'S ADMONITION
BY GEORGE O'NEIL
The one whose body is of antler-bone,
With rocky wrists and agate feet
And thongs of weed upon her forehead grown,
Go search-go meet.
On one whose flesh is like the plume of grain,
Whose throat beneath your palm is wave-soaked sand,
Encroach and thrash until the sheaf is lain,
Till water fills your hand.
By you these creatures will be overtaken,
And what their beds need, you must learn.
And my deep body shall awaken
When you return.



12
NINA
BE
TAS
SOLID
2012
AVON
UM
VW
RES
ARTE
ETTATI
DELET
R
OOM
THE BATHER. BY JACK B. YEATS






MARKET DAY, MAYO. BY JACK B. YEATS





BOOK REVIEWS
A COURTLY POET
A Draft of SIXTEEN Cantos. For the Beginning of
a Poem of Some Length. By Ezra Pound. 8vo. 65
pages. Three Mountains Press. $25.
N OT long ago Mr. Pound galloped up and down the frontier
of criticism like an early American general, cursing the
enemy, firing his recruits, and embarrassing the fearless with decora-
tions of praise. The gallant fighter appears to have withdrawn
from the hubbub; precocious children now mature in black ignor-
ance, the makers of plaster casts grow rich, uncursed. He devotes
his retirement no less than his notoriety to music and verse; the
music is composed in forgotten modes, for the flute, and the poems
have all been cantos.
From time to time a canto, like a block of cumbersome, streaked
marble, has appeared in one of the few brave magazines, as if
on a pedestal of temporary stucco and obscured by scaffolding.
Hearsay has numbered them by the hundred; sixteen are here
assembled, with pseudo-childish drawings by Mr Henry Strater,
in an awkwardly ostentatious volume. Singly, they astounded the
reader with tough magnificence; the group is an almost impene-
trable mass, for they give each other little aid. The structure
of the individual cantos is too subtle to be enjoyed; or perhaps
there is no structure, perhaps this is a rag-bag like Sordello. Mr
Pound has never been a narrator; as a critic he was rarely able to
give an orderly account of an idea; and if they are to multiply
until they form an epic, it seems likely to be a labyrinth with a
fine, half-materialized ghost for Ariadne.
The epic subject appears to be the birth or births of art; the
brevity of perfection; Golden Ages and a present hell. The canto
in which Odysseus raises ghosts and that in which the ship's passen-
ger turns into God ("Safe with my lynxes, feeding grapes to my
leopards”) are very suitably the first; for the whole work's power is


502
A COURTLY POET
that of an hallucination. The civilized Italian brigands quarrel
and erect monuments through several cantos: the rudest diction
moving in the most royal processions. Kung utters the principles
of Mr Pound's passion in a flawless canto:
“Without character you will be unable to play on that instru-
ment." ... "When the prince has gathered about him all the
savants and artists, his riches will be fully employed.”
те (
There follows an intimate hell, more horrid than Dante's, and
intolerably up to date, full of names from Who's Who spelled
with asterisks. It is a bird's-eye view; there is nothing poignant
in the spectacle; the mention of death gives refreshment. The
horror is redundant, but verbally sonorous.
The common reader is confused by the names of people (Greek,
Chinese, Provençal, and fantastic), by the names of places, by
a Tower of Babel medley. Row on row of chiselled heads; ex-
ploits and emotions of centuries, all having an air of contem-
poraneity by comparison with which a newspaper is written in a
dead language; dates of first editions mingled with dates of suicides
from balconies. In between Tuscans and Greeks drift husks of
modern men, husks of their voices, and restless Mongolians “using
the long moon for a churn-stick.” Mr Pound's scholarship does
not leave one prostrate with faith, but it is unimpeachable. Pro-
fessors may complain, professors have complained; we still prefer
living sculpture to the genuine, dead, stuffed animal. He is not
quietly erudite—the pedant approaches knowledge with deference;
he is knowledge's lover, speaking of it and to it an intimate idiom
which is sometimes gibberish. The slurs and telescopic compres-
sions are like those of one man's memory: reminiscences of a poet
who has never died, comparing the courts where civilizations were
born as confusedly as a true traveller talks of hotels and views.
Though only a “draft” of a fragment, the Cantos are one of
the most glorious of those long poems in whose construction com-
mon sense takes no part, those poems like cities in a vision, swarm-
ing and burning and smoky, which are the glory and affliction of
this period. The rhythm is breathless and breath-takingly beauti-
ful. Flaubert was not content until he could deliver his para-
graphs at the top of his voice; Mr Pound has perfected a cadence
which can only be whispered: Southern music reinforced by hard,
mon
en
Tarm-
as
a-


GLENWAY WESCOTT
503
hyphenated nouns and consonants roughly repeated. A sense of
intimate gods:
"Salmon-pink wings of the fish-hawk
cast grey shadows in the water,
The tower like a one-eyed great goose
cranes up out of the olive-grove,
And we have heard the fauns chiding Proteus
in the smell of hay under the olive-trees,
And the frogs singing against the fauns
in the half-light.”
An account of evocations which is evocation. A lovely animation
among old clothes of “museum quality":
"With pheasant tails upright on their forelocks,
The small white horses, the
Twelve girls riding in order, green satin in pannier'd habits;
Under the baldachino silver'd with heavy stitches ...
Boats drawn on the sand, red-orange sails in the creek's mouth.”
Immortal souls with profiles of well-blown glass:
"Eternal watcher of things,
Of things, of men, of passions.
Eyes floating in dry, dark air."
An old wisdom in tears. These are his gifts. His early middle-
age may be his youth as a poet; and as a civilizer and defender
of the arts, he has already a life-time's ardour behind him. “The
blossoms of the apricot blow from the east to the west”; he has
“tried to keep them from falling."
GLENWAY WESCOTT


MYTHOLOGICAL SATIRE
LAND OF THE
EA
"HER
THE ISLAND OF THE GREAT MOTHER. By Gerhart
Hauptmann. Translated by Willa and Edwin Muir.
12mo. 328 pages. B. W. Huebsch and The Viking
Press. $2.50.
M HE Island of the Great Mother is so entirely an entity that
we cannot readily recognize its germ idea, or exactly trace
the joining of its elements, or their relative contributions to the
whole. In some respects it appears a rather devouring sarcasm on
the feminist dogma that man is negligible in the developed feminine
life. Indeed the ironic accomplishments of the tale, taken with
the comeliness of its representation, will doubtless remind many
readers of Anatole France; though the telling has not quite, per-
haps, the Anatolian celerity. Again, these elements of irony and
beauty seem, in other lights, to be parts of an enquiry in collective
moral psychology, an examination, aside from sardonic intent,
into the origin of mythologies. And not least emphatic in the story
is its unitary exhibition of the amorous instinct. Competing in-
stincts, such as hunger and self-preservation, have been eliminated
in the removal of their occasions. The beautiful society which is
pictured here is situated on a commodious island in the tropical
Pacific, amid paradisian serenity, healthfulness, and abundance;
and it embodies—at least so the founders thought—the finest com-
ponents of modern civilization.
Diverse as are its aspects, however, the story is organically com-
posed, around a well-placed centre of structure; and it proceeds
by the simultaneous and orderly realization of opposed forces,
the outer and inner actions. The outer action is concerned with
the physical occurrence of this unique island society, and with
its debonair exteriors, and the rich novelty of its surfaces, vistas,
contours, and events. The inner contains the less debonair psycho-
analytical realities, and the criticism; it is the logical implication,
the ironic hidden half, that awaits the over-emphasis of the outer
action.
In staple, the outer action consists in a series of alleged ma-
ternity-miracles, and their results in the collective psychology of


CHARLES K. TRUEBLOOD
505
the one hundred shipwrecked women among whom they occur.
For deliberate reasons on the part of the two judicious women who
head the colony, paternity of the children by the god, Mukalinda,
is accepted as official dogma; and on that basis rises the matriarchal
state, with all devices of priesthood, mythology, and taboo; and
with, besides—in the megalomania of the extreme high mother
party among the women—a great derogation of the masculine
principle and an equal aggrandizement of the feminine. It is the
intense arrogance of these lovely and reverend mothers that
eventually wrecks the matriarchy.
In this outer action, as well as the inner, we seem to have what
can scarcely be described except as ironic myth, though it has so
unmistakably the evidence of sound conception and competent
realization, that we feel such things would happen in this way
if they were to happen at all. Or if we call it novel or romance,
as it is advertised, it must be as one written in an immense hand,
crowded down not easily into the small, sedate pages of usual
fiction. The potent stir of this pen seems to demand a greater
amplitude than is to be had in fiction; and here and there we find
causticism which is like that in ancient satire, and shrewd, enor-
mous touches in the analysis of universal woman. Aside from
accomplishments of mind, however, one is bound to remark in
Hauptmann a temperament of rather epic magnificence, given to
large movements in simple ways. Perhaps the mere thought of
his theme, implicit with so much irony and comeliness, set his feel-
ing into a ground-swell, in which he could no more avoid lavishing
poeticisms on the outer lustres of his subject, than one can avoid
the beating of one's heart. The choice of a tropical island for the
setting of his action proved, no doubt, the irresistible invitation
to those immense scene-poems that seem always to be dwelling
in his mind; at any rate they appear in this instance to have been
active in the great heightening of the narrative. And a hardly
less sovereign poetry of depiction is heaped upon the passages
wherein, as the hearts and persons of his characters flower fully
amid the magnificence of his scene, he pictures the exuberance of
amorous charm in flesh and blood. Much credit is due the trans-
lators for the excellence of their rendering.
The inner action, a psychological consequent of the outer, is
the reverse in tendency, and finally overwhelms it. It is to be
seen coming into agency in the person of the twelve-year-old Phaon
Vers
SA
seen
-


506
MYTHOLOGICAL SATIRE
Stradmann, son of a distinguished architect, and, in the colony, the
sole representative of the masculine principle. This rather difficult
figure of adolescence is pictured as personally scarcely less than
an Adonis, and is also represented, with success, as growing rapidly
into maturity and discernment. Though his importance is at first
obscured, doubtless with purpose, and he almost disappears from
the foreground of attention, we are increasingly aware that his
growth into the individuality of a man typifies the growth in force
of the inner action, and the impending stalemate of the feminist
aggressive.
On his entrance into manhood, the extreme high mother party
had succeeded in forcing the annual removal of all boys who have
reached the age of five years, from the precincts of the matriarchate.
These children were quartered in another part of the island, where
Phaon, it is implied, took up their education and governance. With
their growth into an adolescent, but emphatically and intelligently
male society, is to be discerned the issue of the inner action from
anonymity into a formidable counter-crescendo. And the catas-
trophe is soon reached. The high mother party grows so powerful
in derogation of everything masculine but Mukalinda, their puppet
divinity, that they finally, and despite the opposition of the more
rational and realistic women, effect an egregious public slight upon
all Aesh and blood masculinity of the island, including even the
twelve chosen light-bringers, ordained sons and vicars of Muka-
linda, without whom—however the mothers might grudge to admit
it—there would be no furtherance of the matriarchate into the
future.
When all the men withdraw to an inaccessible part of the island,
and the miracles cease, it becomes apparent even to the most
dunder-headed of the mothers, in the impending débâcle of
matriarchal morale, that the worlds of men and women are indis-
solubly intersphered, and derogation of either turns out to be at
the expense of both. But the grasp of this truth comes too late,
for bacchantism and hysteria, the dooms of the cherished mat-
riarchy, have come swiftly into being through the frustration, by
doltish arrogance, of the great amorous instinct, which was the
real, if unrecognized, primum mobile of the society.
Charles K. TRUEBLOOD


THE ORANGE MOTH
BRING! Bring! and Other Stories. By Conrad Aiken.
12mo. 240 pages. Boni and Liveright. $2.50.
DEALLY considered, the short story is a plot which contains
I four elements. There is a situation (or event); an emotion
which the event calls forth; an idea crystallized from the emotion;
finally an action. Most stories follow this outline with surprising
fidelity; it is even the standard of the popular magazines, although
they have a tendency to emphasize the fourth element at the ex-
pense of the other three. In Bring! Bring! the action is almost
negligible. A boy comes to realize, slowly, the fact of his play-
mate's death. A man receives a letter from a stranger, who is
dying. Or a drunken woman goes wandering through the rain,
crawls into a taxi-cab, and falls asleep. There is no climax, no
real conclusion; a chain of, obscure causes leads to an emotion
which is almost disembodied.
In still another story, Marie Schley visits her dying grand-
mother and there, at the bedside, remembers her own childhood.
She steals away to meet her lover. That evening, in the electric
dusk of a theatre, listening to a singer with gold teeth and a cork-
blackened face, she feels the ecstasy of abstract surrender. “A
delicious feeling of weakness, of dissolution, came over her. Life
seemed to her extraordinarily complex, beautiful and miserable.”
Imagine the same story as written by another author. Marie,
at her grandmother's death-bed, would be overcome with pity, re-
morse, a sudden respect for the family gods. These emotions
would crystallize into the idea of giving up her lover; she would
act on the idea. The story would end perhaps in a grim parting, per-
haps in a reconciliation with her husband. In Mr Aiken's handling,
the idea (third element in the ideal plot) is omitted like the
action. Marie is left with a purposeless emotion, unexpressed,
drowned in her mind as in a pool of standing water. It is perhaps
not difficult to understand why most of Mr Aiken's characters
are tormented by the sense of futility and defeat.
They are people who live in boarding-houses and speak in the


508
THE ORANGE MOTH
tim
terms of a rag melody. They have an income, but forget their
antecedents. Their life is one of pure physical sensation. At
times they refer to Fichte or Spinoza; they make elegant allu-
sions to Venus “rising out of Duxbury Bay on a good-sized clam
shell,” but these are only the tarnished last-souvenirs of their
classical education. They study and think no longer. Instead they
feel, dream, passively accept.
This dangerous passivity, the neglect of logical thought, the
distaste for action (growing into a contempt for action): all
these are symptoms of the malady which afflicts the more intelli-
gent writers of our time. Their books are concerned with people
who drift, accept, surrender to their passions. A strain of in-
herited agnosticism, applied first to God, then to society, has finally
centred in the self. They are palsied with doubt; afflicted, char-
acters and authors, with an atrophy of the will.
And correspondingly the emotions are exalted. Every other ele-
ment in Mr Aiken's stories becomes subordinate. The first of the
elements, even—the situation or event—is altered into something
less definite. It becomes a background for emotion: a park where
robins sing louder and larger than life, where ducks stand on their
heads and trees are green as verdigris. Or observe the city of
maggots: “their heads are small and wedge-shaped, and glow
with a faint bluish light.” Every detail is magnified, distorted by
feeling. The story itself becomes a lyric poem, a brief threnody
of suffering and delight, almost a chemically pure emotion.
These are a poet's stories. In a world of neat plots, made by
experienced mechanics, they have an unprofessional air which does
not detract from their effect. They are better, indeed, than Mr
Aiken's poems. It has always seemed to me that heretofore his
published work has been something less than a measure of the
man. The writing was distinguished, the emotions profound,
but there was a gap between the two, perhaps a mechanical failure,
a failure in the mechanics of expression rather than in those of
verse. I can't point to line and stanza, but I might quote from
Conrad Aiken's own caricature of a poet who suffered from the
same disability in a far more exaggerated manner.
Young Cooke, the hero of The Orange Moth, was always trying
to write like Pater or De Quincey; to stimulate his talents with
yellow or blue paper, with pads and blank books of many shapes,
vas
1S


MALCOLM COWLEY
509
were
with red or violet inks. A ridiculous figure; still, his emotions
were delicate, his vision clear. He liked to ride on the Elevated
and stare through the open tenement windows, where he could
see "people moving there, inside, folding newspapers, taking pots
from stoves, turning back bed covers, reaching up arms to light the
gas. He liked the heavy Jewesses leaning out into the evening,
apathetic, their massive breasts spread out on the cool stone, their
faces like the faces of oxen. ... There it was, so close to him, so
immediate, yet he could do nothing with it. Some poison in his
brain turned it all to dullness, to mud—no, worse than that, to
a kind of lifeless simulacrum, a mechanical formula—as soon as
he tried to touch it. Oh, God, if he could only get hold of beauty."
He decided, one glutinous summer night, that he was a failure.
De Quincey couldn't help him; neither could Pater. He crawled
into bed, pulled the sheet over him, and dreamed. “An orange-
coloured moth few heavily in through the window, and settled
with wide velvet wings on the opened pages of the blank book.
The orange wings covered the two pages completely. He sprang
up, shut the book, and the beautiful thing was caught. When he
opened the book, he found that the pages were soft orange moth
wings; and incredibly fine, indecipherable, in purple, a poem of
cxtraordinary beauty was written there."
Of course the humour of the story is that anybody should try
to set a trap for beauty, in blank books of any special shape. Impos-
sible, ridiculous, and yet—would it be too much to say that in
this volume, with its atmosphere of drowned emotions, “complex,
beautiful and miserable,” Conrad Aiken has captured the orange
moth?
MALCOLM COWLEY


LAUGHTER AND LIGHT
Dark LAUGHTER. By Sherwood Anderson, 12mo.
319 pages. Boni and Liveright. $2.50.
are
M R ANDERSON'S Dark Laughter is more than merely his
IVT most recent novel. Had it appeared prior to A Story Tel-
ler's Story one might have looked on it as a résumé in fictional
form of the epoch closed by that autobiography. But since it fol-
lows the summary and is yet a definitive recasting of the identical
stuffs, one is tempted to believe that it expresses more than an
era in the author's life: that it sums Mr Anderson, himself.
The time is perhaps ripe for such a summing. Long, long past
are the years when this luminous mid-American was hailed by The
Little Review, The Seven Arts, The Masses. Distant even are
the days when Mr Mencken began to thump his tub for him.
Sherwood Anderson has been accepted. It is right that some of ..
the energy which went to beating the door open should now,
measure what came in.
The materials of his art are well known and well praised; they
are assuredly the most authentic to have found their way into our
contemporary western novel. What they were in Poor White, in
the early chapters of the Memoir, in the short stories, they are
again in Dark Laughter. There is no change for better or for
worse. Such new matter as the scenes of post-war Paris is so
shrewdly rendered into the reminiscence of Americans that it is
not new. Even the Quat'z Arts Ball loses its nature of carnaval
gaulois and becomes the occasion for a Puritan morality. And the
heroine, Aline, diverges from earlier heroines of Mr Anderson in
naught more essential than the greater number of shoes in her
wardrobe and the fact that her father, instead of mining or farm-
ing, practises law in Chicago.
On the other hand, there is change in method. Mr Anderson
has learned a good deal about the technique of the novel since he
wrote Many Marriages, his deepest aesthetic effort. Already in
Winesburg, he had achieved a form for the short story. It was a
lambency like slow flame about some stick of action. The episode
of the tale was a typical fact of our life; the flame of the tale
as
ne


WALDO FRANK
511
was a transposition, into the open, of the flame hidden within that
life. And the effect was the thrill of the displacement. In the
earlier novels, Mr Anderson expanded directness of telling—the
aesthetic fallacy of cumulation: his narrative became a drawl in
which the characters floundered and were lost. In Many Mar-
riages, he tried his hand at an organic complexity beyond him. He
has learned his lesson. Dark Laughter has a limited set of char-
acters and the same knot of action of his shorter tales, with the
author's lyric ruminance to smoulder all about it. The flame never
quite lyrically jets from the immediate scene, being either an inter-
position of the author's mood or a kindling of some memory of
the hero. But at least technically, it is always there.
The book opens with a preparation for a meeting between a man
in a factory window and a woman, his employer's wife, waiting
below for her husband in the street. The man's "conditions pre-
cedent” carry us through the first third of the volume; those of
the woman, through a second third; the last hundred pages accom-
plish the meeting, the coupling, the elopement. The form is a
rigid, simple symmetry. At times, the substance goes almost
gaseous in the too wide container. But the prose has a meditative
rhythm which supports the almost entirely meditative stuff: for
this expanse of "conditions precedent” is given not narratively, but
in the haphazard retrospect of the man and woman. The prose
saves the book; saves the reader from falling through the rather
vacuous interstices of the book's psychic action; and at the end
eases the reader off, not too exhilarated by so thin a music, yet
aware that it has been consistent.
In craft, then, Mr Anderson shows advance; shows indeed ma-
turity. The stuff of this novel is not more than that of many of
his ten-page stories. To have given it so wide an adumbration
shows that even if Mr Anderson cannot compose a novel, he can
sing one. This is an achievement. And it adds to the entire sense
of definitiveness urged by the book. Whatever stuff he has for
us, Mr Anderson as artist is immature no longer. Whatever the
stuffs of his soul, that configuration of them known as Sherwood
Anderson is formed.
What, then, have we? What nurture have these ten years of
digesting Sherwood Anderson obtained us? If Dark Laughter is
the best embodiment of all his books, we need not go back for an
answer: nor is it probable that we need go forward. The hero,


512
LAUGHTER AND LIGHT
W
V
who changes his name to Bruce Dudley, leaves an “intellectual,"
“story-writing" wife, a "high-brow world,” a reporter's job in
Chicago, to become for a while a wanderer and a worker. He
encounters the dark laughter of the southern negro-an indif-
ferentiate earth call; he encounters such other primitives as the
labourer Sponge Martin, good trencherman and pungent lover;
finally he meets Aline. She is wedded to the heir of a wheel-fac-
tory in Indiana, and they have met in the chaos of France where
he has served as a soldier. She is unhappy with her brittle, suc-
cessful man, who has given her no child. Dudley's state is not
sharply enough defined for pain. It is pictured as spreading like
a vapour over the western plains where he has lived. The sharpest
precipitates in his vagrant mood are memories of his mother and
the Mississippi; of his mother stirring to the glance of unknown
men, of the Mississippi flowing to the song of turfy niggers. Now,
he and Aline-two clouds of inarticulation-merge. The merger
is neither human mystery nor passion. It is rather the inorganic,
gravitational shift of two unhinged nebulae upon each other.
It is impressive as some mute stellar scene might be impressive,
afloat in the vagueness of aeons. As a result of it the ineffectual
manufacturer husband is broken. The coloured servants of his
house, whom he blanches to face, laugh the high shrill laughter
of the negress: “I knowed it, I knowed it, all the time I knowed
it.”... All this couched in a lovely, shuffling prose, with a few
brief gleams of faces and of nature, gives you the book perhaps
not more unfairly than any résumé must give a lyric.
Two intentions focus it. The coupling and going off of the
two gaseously substanced lovers, together with the defeat of the
manufacturer of wheels, is presented as a resolution. And the
laughter of negroes serves not as a character within a drama, but
as chorus, as moral, and, since at the end it chimes with the elope-
ment, as conclusion. The book indeed is emphatically moral in
the sense that its action and tone are throughout made to converge
into a generalized judgement of the author. An instance is the
rendering of the life of the negroes into choral laughter. But ere
we get to the moral, let us examine further the event.
It has a resolution, then: a bare sexual resolution, with a bare
biological sequel—the promise that Aline at last will have her
child. A man and woman, in the slough of inactivity, in the
pathos of abulia, couple. There is this altogether carnal let for


WALDO FRANK
513
the bewilderment of the two human souls. And, as item, there is
the husband's propriety and wealth whimmering off in despair.
The liaison is not aesthetically treated as a design of lines and
forms connoting beauty; nor is it mystically resolved into a glimpse
of a real Absolute. It is a physical release for psychic elements:
a logically false conclusion. And the negro, watching the tri-
angular dumb-play of his masters, laughs at it; when it resolves,
as we have seen, laughs with it. The intimation is forced on us
that the white man and woman have at the end reached the
negro's level—or, rather, reached an act in harmony with it. And
the author's intent is as clearly-here comes the moral—that, high
or low, this is the one true level to be reached, the good one. The
laughing negro is not a negro at all; he is the healing and resolving
norm within the white man's soul.
So Mr Anderson's book steps from its lyric envelope in all the
dubious splendour of the romantic plea: it is again the call of
"back to the beginning” which for a hundred years has accom-
panied the débâcle of sublimations in our modern world. The
difference is merely one of counters. Here the negro is roman-
ticized, as was once the Natur of the Germans, the Peau-Rouge of
the French or, more recently, the "cow-boy" of Dada and the
“Hindu” of Los Angeles. Mr Anderson of Chicago and New
Orleans exploits the negro as subjectively as if he lived in Munich
or were reminting Chateaubriand from red to black. He is not
employed as a co-ordinate element of the tale: he is made into a
moral atmosphere. Symbol of rebuking loam and song, he is of
course the negro of a white man paled by his dizziness upon the
"heights of culture” and brewing colour for forgetfulness.
The tenuous connexion of this negro with the tragic aspiring
black American need not here hold us: nor the fact that this dark
laughter is so manifestly white. This is not earth laughing after
all: it is too reedy and remote a music. This is a white man's
longing for such laughter, his visioning it from deprivation. And
its very dimness in the book should prompt us, in our climax of
confusion, to know that we cannot “go back.” We may dissipate
our present confrontations in weak nostalgias that are neither yes-
terday nor now: or we can go forward.
Such solemn matters the book forces upon us. Mr Anderson is
so clearly not writing a genre story of Old Harbor, Indiana, or a
love-story about a man and a woman. He has given his prose


514
LAUGHTER AND LIGHT
the testamental accent. He has employed the music of a race, the
life of a nation, the strain of a great river to teach a lesson. Dark
Laughter is as vaticinative as The Book of Jonah.
Earlier in his career, Mr Anderson discovered that life in our
world dwelt within confusion; that the strait forms of our inherited
past were an exclusion of life, and dead. This discovery in aesthe-
tic guise won him his rightful place as an American artist and made
a generation, gasping for breath, rally to his defence. Pregnant
chaos was better than dead order. But Mr Anderson's conclusion
seems to be to glorify the chaos. Dark Laughter is an apologia for
the confusion revealed in Winesburg. It is a resolution downward
through such channels as sexual release to which a mythic negro
chorus, representing Earth, can laugh approval; or backward to
the simple purity of a tool-age symbolized by the old craftsman,
Martin.
Europe has been expressing the same impotence for a hundred
years. Romanticism sprang from the Kantian critique of the
mediaeval, that last true European order. Legitimately, it pro-
posed that new elements of consciousness be naturalized in human
unity. This required a return to self. And hence, illegitimately,
came the romantic plea for human unity in regression. This was
as intelligent as it would be to argue, from the cultural necessity
of mining underground, that underground was the right place to
dwell. And in this sense, the atomism of Benjamin Constant, of the
German expressionists, of M Aragon, and of Mr Anderson, based
upon a nucleus of self-feeling beneath distinctions, must be rigor-
ously opposed to the synthetic atomism of Stendhal, Dostoevsky,
Nietzsche, Gide, whose nuclear unity is an essence of all preceding
human values.
We grant with Mr Anderson, of course, that our inherited cul-
ture lies in shards about us. We admire him for his elegiac song
among the lovely ruins. We understand the comfort of his
laughter. But we submit that if we must begin again-grow in
that sense primitive again-our new barbarism shall be upon a
level which departs from the powers of the dying world. This
dark laughter is a call, not to such “higher primitivism," but to the
old one; these bare emotional releases represent exclusion of the
elements of our chaos, not synthesis of them into a truer order.
Mr Anderson's wholeness is a unity by subtraction; our health
must be a unity by controlled expansion.
WALDO FRANK


BRIEFER MENTION
The Tale Of Genji, by Lady Murasaki (8vo, 300 pages; Houghton
Mifflin: $3). Written in the eleventh century, Lady Murasaki's prose
classic is marked by a freedom of theme and style like that which has
caused Marcel Proust to be accounted bold in the twentieth. Genji marches
with Gil Blas and Casanova. As one reads, wonder grows that so honour.
able an ancestor of the psychological novel has until now remained
untranslated.
DECEMBER THE FOURTEENTH, by Dmitri Merezhkovsky, translated by
Nathalie A. Duddington (12mo, 319 pages; International Publishers : $2)
is an historical novel of the lofty and abortive Russian revolution of
1825. Merezhkovsky has the rare faculty of making history dynamic,
never permitting it to become a mere backdrop against which the actors
in the story strut absurdly. In its primitive vigour and poetically visioned
reality, December the Fourteenth is, as a tale and as literature, a most
satisfactory novel.
Doctor TRANSIT, by I. S. (12mo, 285 pages; Boni & Liveright: $2) is a
conventional novel only in appearance. Essentially it is an attempt to
create a new mythology, the mythology of science, personified in the
hyperbolical figure of Transit himself. He changes iron into gold,
transmutes the sexes, restores lost youth “by an astonishing process of
accelerating metabolism." After his death a new religion is formed in his
name. ... The book is remarkable for its metaphors, for its opulent
rhythms, and for its revolt, more in action than in precept, against the
contemporary "atmosphere of jaded allright.”
UNINVITED Guests, by J. Jefferson Farjeon (12mo, 362 pages; Lincoln
MacVeagh, Dial Press: $2) has a fresh idea in mystery stories, a good
detective, and is neatly written. It plays fair with the reader throughout
and the solution is logical and exciting. It is to Mr Farjeon's credit
that he refuses to write mystery stories as if they were altogether trash,
and his are not.
A Hurried Man, by Emanuel Carnevali (16mo, 268 pages; Three Moun-
tains Press: $3). Poems, essays, stories, and book reviews : practically
everything that Emanuel Carnevali wrote is contained in this slender
volume. His critical prose is curiously his best; curiously, one says, be-
cause he expresses a profound contempt for critics. He writes ex-
traordinary stories; lyrical, uneven, and occasionally superb. As for his
verse, it is disappointing. He has the sensitive equipment of a great poet,
but something is lacking. He says, “It is form which assimilates the artist,"
but does not add that the process of being assimilated is more active than
passive. Without the activity of conscious labour, nothing remains but
brute emotion : violent, tragical, and incomplete.


516
BRIEFER MENTION
The BRAND OF The Beast, by Michael Lewis (12mo, 300 pages; Lincoln
MacVeagh, Dial Press: $2) is as horrifying as its title suggests, "a story
which thrills” and which, within the limits of its conventional style,
is terse and vivid.
Doodab, by Harold A. Loeb (12mo, 287 pages; Boni & Liveright: $2).
From this well-meaning, meaningless book which is not a novel or even a
story, one infers that the typical unresourceful man has been discarded
by his employers, turned adrift by his wife, and killed by a locomotive.
Named in this instance, Henry Doodab, he has dreamed self-exalting
dreams of life in the jungle and has been killed; but he has never lived.
The Selmans, by V. R. Emanuel (12mo, 372 pages; Lincoln MacVeagh,
Dial Press: $2) presents what purports to be a cross section of Jewish
social life in London. Reportorial in style, kaleidoscopic in approach,
in so far as it is as tiresome as the particular people it involves, this novel
may be said to attain verisimilitude.
PARALLAX, by Nancy Cunard (8vo, 24 pages; Hogarth Press). London
and Aix-en-Provence; Paris and Genoa, with breakfast on the Orient
Express; philosophy, to the poets of our generation, means changing
one's city often, changing one's city in the effort to "thread doubt with
belief,” while "earth drives on his feet, behind imperious rains.” In
Florence, Benozzo may be inspected, "with his embroidered princely
cavalcades.” London is "gulls nailed to the wind above discreet waters."
Everywhere the eyes “look deep and see but the eyes again”; the search
is futile. As for the poem, it is distinguished by beauty of phrase and
a rarer quality which might be called the sense of culture. It lacks
organization, but the fault is one of philosophy rather than of technique;
how could one organize so blind a pilgrimage toward a grail so nebulous ?
SONGS FROM THE ELIZABETHANS, edited by J. C. Squire (16mo, 307 pages ;
Lincoln MacVeagh, Dial Press : $1.50). If nothing more, it would mark
some height of service to bring together compactly the songs of those
who can so choicely fill the ear as Campion, Shakespeare, Marlowe, Ben
Jonson, and Nicolas Breton. But besides these the present collection
possesses some scores of others, some lesser and many anonymous, it is true,
but of nearly all whose singing no more can be said than that it sings
most Elizabethanly, and visits the reader with something of the mag-
nificence of heart and voice which is the substance of Elizabethan renown.
New Writings, by William Hazlitt, collected by P. P. Howe (12mo, 201
pages; Lincoln MacVeagh, Dial Press : $2.50). One is grateful to Haz-
litt's biographer for presenting with characteristically precise foot-notes
and an index, these new later writings in which, resist it as one may, one
recognizes a spirit as authoritative as it is unbusinesslike. “Underlit by
unquenchable fire,” ironically and prepossessingly yet unjustly abusive
in his miniature scholasticism, Hazlitt does persuade one, uniformly and
with powerful inconsistency, that “all impediments in fancy's course are
motives of more fancy."


BRIEFER MENTION
517
AMERICAN AND British LITERATURE SINCE 1890, by Carl and Mark Van
Doren (8vo, 350 pages; Century: $2.50) is a methodical treatise on
contemporary writers, with index and suggestions for study: a textbook,
in brief, designed for women's clubs and the few colleges which study
literature as it has developed since the death of Browning. There are
twelve chapters, dealing respectively with the poets, playwrights, novelists,
and essayists of America, England, and Ireland. The chapters are further
divided into sections, each with a name, a date, a summary, and a judge-
ment. The summaries are capable; the judgements cautious and un-
important. Sometimes the authors carry understatement to the point
of falsehood, as when they say of Yeats, “There is perhaps a touch of
artificiality and affectation ... though on the whole he is an excellent
artist, and one of the best of the poets who have to be considered in the
present book.”
Edith WHARTON, by Robert Morss Lovett (12mo, 87 pages; McBride:
$1) is the second of a series of monographs intended to acquaint the
general reader with the lives and writings of certain important living
American authors. Mr Lovett's knowledge of contemporary literature, as
well as the historical prospective he has always so eminently at his com-
mand, fit him admirably for the present task. With the civility, explicit-
ness, and lucidity of the most advanced and liberated university professor,
he places Mrs Wharton in the niche in which one feels she is ultimately
to remain.
SKIN FOR Skin, by Llewelyn Powys (12mo, 147 pages; Harcourt, Brace:
$2). This unabashed little book, full of quaint delights, "woven close,
both matter, form, and style," displays that particular kind of wanton
gravity, interlarded with quips and cranks and Chaucerian humours,
such as shows the “mettle” of many centuries of English "pastures.”
Exploiting his personal struggle for life to shrewd literary purpose, the
writer of these sly autobiographical pages philosophizes upon his wind-
blown straws with such artless-artful charm that it is difficult not
to feel that such candid shamelessness, for all its tough banked-up tradi-
tionalism, is really a new contribution to English Letters.
Barber Shop BALLADS, A Book of Close Harmony, edited by Sigmund
Spaeth, illustrated by Ellison Hoover, foreword by Ring Lardner, with
two double-faced phonograph records (16mo, 61 pages; Simon and
Shuster: $2). A collection--with words and music and instructions for
singing—of twelve such back-alley favourites as Sweet Adeline, In the
Evening, and Down Mobile. The joyousness of this volume, while oc-
casionally it becomes a bit dutiful, is none the less genuine at the core, and
testifies that the collaborators, in their talk of "swells, softenings, bursts
and hushes,” are treating of authentic experiences. There is a kind of
homely humanism here, the opportunity for much harmless activity, much
energy deflected into blissful yet innocuous channels. But we do not un-
derstand how men of such obvious endurance in these matters could have
overlooked the coda to Some Folks Say, the gloomy narrative about the
bee (the bee) the bee (the be-ee) the little bumble bee.


518
BRIEFER MENTION
EL GRECO, by Elizabeth Du Gue Trapier (12mo, 186 pages; Hispanic
Society of America : $375) is a chronological record embellished by reli-
gious passion and balanced by cautious scholarship. The author's liturgical
descriptions of El Greco's canvases are not wholly unnecessary, but her
attempt to define the artist's bewildering vision as a compound of Spanish
mysticism and Byzantine decoration is far too unsubstantial to satisfy
the enquiring student. In no instance does she penetrate the actual work-
ing vision of the painter—but this is not a matter for those who interpret
the old Greek's elongated figures as symbols leading to heaven.
The LETTERS OF Mary RusseLL MITFORD, by R. Brimley Johnson (12mo,
236 pages; Lincoln MacVeagh, Dial Press: $2). Surely the most
pleasing of Miss Mitford's writings, are her letters, in which with de-
lightful freedom she appraises her contemporaries from Coleridge to
Mrs Opie. It is difficult in them, to find the woman who seriously wrote
such tragedies as Charles the First, Rienzi, and Julian. Her letters, in
which her eye is firmly fixed on the substantial side of life, are the
ambered Ay of this “lady novelist.” To paraphrase her own criticism
of Anna Seward, one might say that irrespective of the names of the
correspondents, one is content that all the letters should bear the signature
of Mary Russell Mitford.
MASTERS OF Modern Art: PISSARRO, by A. Tabarant; MANET, by J. E.
Blanche (illus., 12mo, 63 pages; Dodd, Mead: $1.75 each volume).
Again we are reminded that France-according to her own authorities-
has produced all the modern art worth mentioning. This is an admirable
series in every particular, in format, text, price, and illustrations, and
it is for American publishers to do as well by native painters. M
Blanche, an artist and critic who is never quite at home among the more
modern men, finds in Manet a rare and congenial spirit, an aristocrat
of the lineage of Velasquez, and though he fails to persuade us that his
subject is the great painter he believes him to be, nevertheless he has
written more brilliantly of Manet than has any one else, not excepting
Zola or George Moore.
The Dawes PLAN IN THE MAKING, by Rufus C. Dawes (12mo, 525 pages;
Bobbs-Merrill: $6) is a detailed account, largely in diary form, of the
research and gradual agreement between nations as to a plan for re-
storing financial harmony in Europe. Mr Dawes served as chief of
staff of eight economic experts accompanying the delegates from America;
his book is not a presentation merely of statistics, though he does give a
staggering amount of them, but it is a very human account of an effort
to lay aside old issues and to compromise between “ought" and "can"
in the matter of reparations. One realizes, in reading this book, that
Germany, under expert guidance, is going to profit immensely by the care
with which these experts build up her manufactures and her market,
and that a like care will have to be taken in the countries who ask the
payment of their war bills thus, to keep trade balanced in the future.
Such a committee as this, with a super-national standpoint, will go far
towards establishing balance and good feeling.
realizes, between count of an opera


THE THEATRE
Co many plays have opened and closed since my return to
active duty, that I have not been able to catch up with those
I missed before. I can, therefore, give no report on the major
activities of Messrs Arlen and Coward, although the whole world
seems divided between those who think their plays worth seeing
once and those who think them worth seeing a dozen times. What
I have seen in a steady attendance of several weeks has not given
me too much pleasure. My greatest satisfaction of the month has
been outside the theatre strictly conceived-in The Gold Rush.
Of plays, OUTSIDE LOOKING IN and The Call of Life have had
savour and poignance and expert production.
S
A
The miracles wrought by bad production are various. The
success of ARMS AND THE Man and the failure of The TALE OF
THE Wolf both come under this head. I am not a finished
Shavian, but I do like ARMS AND THE MAN, and I do like a thing
to be done well if it is done at all. The Guild production is
based on the most superficial conception of what ARMS AND THE
Man is about, and the critics were justified in calling the play a
rather outmoded satire on militarism, because that is how it is now
presented. But if the Guild or the critics had bothered to consult
Shaw on the subject, they would have learned that it is a satirical
study of the romantic temperament placed in dramatic contrast
to the realistic or Shavian temperament; they would have sus-
pected that the most interesting character is the fool, Sergius, and
that the relations between him and Raina are surpassingly impor-
tant. They would hardly have been satisfied with a production
in which the climax seemed to be the revelation of rather high
suspenders over the protruding stomach of the Major, and in
which the genuine intelligence and genuine passion of Shaw were
both sacrificed to his equally genuine, but not so significant, wit.
There is no certainty that THE TALE OF THE WOLF could have
been saved. As The PHANTOM RIVAL, which vulgarized the play,
it had a definite focus in the idea that a woman always remains
in love with her first lover, that the first image pressed upon the
wax is never really effaced, only overlaid. This idea did not


520
THE THEATRE
appear in the present version which is said to be much nearer the
original; it was left, therefore, as a study in masculine jealousy
and feminine dreams. The dream scene was without a thorough-
going element of unreality; only spots were grotesque or absurd;
and Phyllis Povah was as out of place in the dream as if some-
one else were dreaming it. Wallace Eddinger was a more attrac-
tive, a tidier comedian than I had known him to be; Roland
Young, the jealous husband, was extraordinarily good. He had
worked into the rôle until it had actual character; he gave it modu-
lation and sharpness and change of pace. But a languor, a loose-
ness of direction lay over the whole piece. It failed to crackle or
sparkle; it was not light in the Viennese manner, nor profound in
the German, nor falsely profound in the Molnar-Hungarian, nor
smart in the American. A good play gone wrong, scattered all
over the place, and wasting precious talent.
George M. Cohan chose to waste himself in an Anglo-American
version of Abie's Irish Rose. I suppose I will never cease to
be charmed by his manner on the stage, but I prefer to see him
acting, as in The SONG AND DANCE Man. In AMERICAN BORN
he walks through, casually; it is all the play needs to keep it going.
But what this world needs is more of Cohan at his best.
M10
To continue the list of let-downs: Craig's WIFE. Mr Kelly
is another of my admirations; in CRAIG's Wife he had a character
more interesting in motive and in power than he had in THE SHOW
OFF. He skilfully worked his drama in a sort of mystery-play
technique, without the actual elements of the detective play and
without sacrificing his own material. But I have never been so
much in a cloud of verbiage as in this play. It seemed to me that
middle-class Americans were always saying, “Things are only sus-
ceptible to interpretation by those whose comprehension is sus-
ceptible to comprehending.” It was turgid and awkward, and
the only person who spoke simply was supposed to be a professor
of romance languages at Smith.
As a foot-note, I should like to say that I have seldom been so
irritated as this year. The cause is a new fad: monotony. I mean
in the actual tone of the voice. Nearly every woman I have seen
on the stage uses one note all through the play. Thus while they


GILBERT SELDES
521
are all becoming Eva Le Galliennes, Miss Le Gallienne herself
breaks out a little from her charmless circle. The Call of LIFE
again seems to be an outmoded play about militarism; it is actually
nothing of the sort. It deals with the murderous hatred which
age has for youth, with the exultation of the old in sacrificing the
young. The last act falls to pieces, rather; but the first two are
intense and beautiful, and superbly directed by Dudley Digges.
TSIDE
OUTSIDE LOOKING IN is so loosely jointed that it cannot fall
apart. It is as casual as its tramp heroes; it is jumbled together
and it is excellent entertainment. It stops short of being profound;
the mock trial doesn't quite come off as a mockery of justice. But
perhaps for that reason the play has actually the sense of life,
wild and foolish and exciting.
Concerning The Gold Rush I am afraid to say much, not
because it can be overpraised, but because nothing seems quite
adequate to it. For a month I read intelligent reviews of it, and
coming then to see it, full of expectation and knowing so many
of the finest bits by report, I found it not only better, but different.
Judge from that fact that it is another of Chaplin's created works,
not a mechanical film. I am not enthusiastic about the run of the
plot, but I recognize its value. For the major scenes and for the
minor detail I am positively fanatical. It is full of emotion and
full of fun. Nowhere have I witnessed such a moving presentation
of loneliness as there is in the prospector's entrance to the dance
hall, when he stands peeping over the shoulders of the others, into
a festivity which is alien to him. You feel his desperate sensation
that all these people know and love each other, that he can never
be one of them. The fugitive, the wanderer, the lonely man-he
is Chaplin's hero, and close to tragedy. The comedy is compara-
tively delicate; it is amazingly certain, and all of it has the over-
tone of the imagination which no other film comic seems even to
aspire to. The Gold Rush is of the type of The Kid, and at
the moment I feel sure that it is better. There is no weakening
in invention, none whatever in proficiency, none in creative power.
There is a slowly definable change in direction; and much as I
shall miss the older touch, I cannot say that the new direction is
a wrong one.
GILBERT SELDES
2


MODERN ART
US
THE record ended last spring upon a note of optimism. The
1 last few exhibitions of the season brought forward an unsus-
pected number of young artists of the sort we label promising.
These young artists were not so astonishing in their methods as
they were indifferent to methods. What “teacher" taught was
forgot or deliberately abandoned, and the main effect of their
pictures was of something rollicking. If I understand be-
haviourism at all, it was lacking. Everything was genuine im-
provisation like the jokes and songs of a party of returning
picnickers. Light, of course. One doesn't expect profundities
from picnickers. But irresponsible gaiety is a charming thing
in itself, not too frequently met with in these States at present,
and indicative of health. The great Goethe, at least, was never
too much ashamed of the lyrical passages in his own early his-
tory. . . . So it is possible to start the winter in a hopeful frame
of mind. It is hardly likely that the unreceptive state of the
public at large has already crushed the spirits of these young
people, and it is safe to count upon a little more fun from them
later on. In the Iowan West, Miss Effie Cherry, once a notor-
iously bad actress, who played with her sisters, the Cherry Sisters,
behind a net in the vaudeville houses, is now running for political
office and declaiming against the arts. She actually hopes to
win votes by attacking the teaching of art in the public schools.
"What do we want to do, have a generation of artists?” she asks
with fine scorn. "I don't believe in spending so much time and
money teaching our young people a lot of things that will not
help them get along in the world.” From what I have seen of the
teaching of art in the public schools, I fear there is very little dan-
ger of our acquiring a generation of artists in that way, but putting
that aside as irrevelant, Miss Cherry, it must be allowed, voices
the public feeling nicely. All the Mr and Mrs Babbitts in the
land look askance upon art, and would view with more alarm
a tendency toward it upon the part of one of their offspring than
they would a propensity for crime. It might be all right if there
were any money in it—but is there? Ah, that's the question!


HENRY MCBRIDE
523
However, I refuse to be depressed by Miss Cherry and her politi-
cal programmes. She may banish art from Des Moines, but she
can't from New York, not utterly, at least, for with all my proud
young acquaintances of last spring rampant, the metropolis of the
land will still be first in other things than money, and Des Moines
will be relegated to a low position among the cities that cannot
produce art.
Just the same, it is a bit irritating that all these western towns
should continue to wrap themselves in dullness. What on earth is
all their money for, if not to buy art, and to build memorable
buildings, and to give handsome rewards to poets? Somebody
should shoot Miss Cherry. Just by way of gesture, I mean.
The news of the summer concerned itself for the most part
with big business. Des Moines should know that however insig-
nificant the living artist's wage may be, the wretched fellow
doesn't have to be long dead before Sir Joseph Duveen is busy
with the remains. To be sure I did read somewhere that the great
Berlin museum bought a portrait bust in bronze of Mr Jack Demp-
sey by the Italian sculptor de Fiori, which I thought a great
triumph for all concerned, including Mr Dempsey, but not half
so much attention was attracted by this modest item as by the
cables announcing the results of the Sargent and Gangnat auctions,
in London and in Paris respectively. These were the real sensa-
tions of the year. The mere sweepings from the Sargent studio
brought eight hundred and fifty thousand dollars. The Gangnat
impressionist paintings fetched eleven million francs. Is it not
breath-taking? Eleven million francs is a considerable sum even
when translated into dollars, though there is no immediate need
to translate it, since the Yankees are still as blind as Miss Effie
Cherry to the merits of Cézanne, and Cézanne was the chief
Gangnat hero. One of his canvases sold for five hundred and
twenty-eight thousand francs, exceeding a Renoir which brought
five hundred and five thousand francs. This is to laugh, of
course. Everything connected with big business is apt to be
farcical. Young believers seem to have been thrilled by these
Renoir-Cézanne prices, finding in them the justification for their
enthusiasms, but cynics profess to see something incongruous in
this artificial rush to the Rembrandt heights. As in the game
that was played with the German marks after the war, it will
ncei
>


524
MODERN ART
be found that a limit can be reached, though ardent collectors
of art that has become classic apparently figure that it cannot.
Understand there is no scepticism as to Cézanne and Renoir. Their
merits are incontestable. But there is something revolting in the
modern necessity to prove virtue in dollars.
HENRY MCBRIDE


MUSICAL CHRONICLE
TN the first stages of a career, Dane Rudhyar stands with the
T composers pushing the enmired machine of music where the
weight lies heaviest. The majority of his tumultuous and mysteri-
ous piano Moments, the most recent of his works, release a
definite pathos. The feeling is strongly religious and legitimate in
the age of steel. Experiences of the great circling impersonal life
flash through the achieved pieces, "what was in the beginning, is
now, and ever shall be” seen in the painful, ecstatic, and fleeting
moments of birth into the vaster day. In instances, the quick
minutes take shape in expressions of barbaric and machine-like
power. In others, they come as gropings into darkness, stirrings
of blind hunger passive and submiss. Sometimes the quiet tides
of the abyss move stilly, the waters before the spirit brooded over
them. Sometimes fires stream upward with joyous vehemence
changing worlds in their fierce ascent. Occasionally, in a certain
number of the Moments, the spark is faint, the contact vague.
These inferior pieces irritate with the monotonous hysteric aspira-
tion and sick yearning characteristic of much unsuccessful "cosmic
poetry.” The failures are exceptional. The great number of
Rudhyar's preludes and poems are filled sufficiently with the power,
wild joy, and movement of the impersonal state to give it expres-
sion and float us on its tides. This new music qualifies as part
of the contemporary spiritual life.
The uncommonness of pathos of a similar intensity is the weak-
ness of the body of ultra-modern music. Without the pathetic,
music can have no force. The epochal change of sensibility in com-
bination with the general exhaustion having dried the source, the
incidental makeshifts-over-production of the ironic, the satiric,
and the grotesque; attempted substitution of surface feelings for
feeling; conception of music as a mechanism to be taken apart
and put together again upon a formula; introduction of facts of
personality and of transient emotions have not satisfied and in-
deed cannot satisfy the human need. Talent and audiences not
previously disaffected by the universal frost-bite have been dis-
affected by this poverty of expression. Rudhyar none the less has
n
ew
ar


526
MUSICAL CHRONICLE
found himself accepting creative responsibility. Affiliated by birth
and training with the generation of new French composers which
has discovered no frank pathos and loudly preferred ironic and
anti-lyric forms, he has met hours of clarity, and found himself in
the presence of positive forces since the beginning of his American
residence. The first of his personal pieces, Ravishments (1918),
Dithyrambs (1919), The Surge of Fire (1920), possess the musical
qualities provoking direct feeling. Scriabinesque and tinctured
with literature though they are, they sing and sustain an architecture
of tones. The tone is passionate, and the building generous. It
is significant that it was not Strawinsky, the great influence of the
young French school, but Scriabine who focused young Rudhyar's
creative impulse with his ritualistic poems. And the manuscript
of Moments merely reveals a success in registering the clear
periods more distinguished than any hitherto befallen the com-
poser. If other composers possibly maturer than Rudhyar are like-
wise producing a pathetic music, in aspects larger and more positive
even than his, neither their number nor their successes are suf-
ficiently overwhelming to keep this new recruit from an unfavour-
able part from rousing wonder; besides, the recent experiments of
the young Franco-American show much of the indissoluble com-
bination of the traditional, and the original, personal, and timely
which rouses wonder in very years of fecundity. They continue
a high line of music from where the past snapped it off.
Again a European has discovered a favourable environment in
America. Notwithstanding its inhabitants, the "mountains of my
native land” are strong! The original, personal, timely trans-
formation of the ecstatic Scriabinesque piano-style produced by
Rudhyar at the close of his first ten years of American residency,
wears certain characteristics ultimately American. The better of
the Moments, the unnamed second and third of the first cycle,
and Reaching Out, The Gift of Blood, Zodiacal Birth, King of
Kings, and Moon Ritual of the second cycle, bring together with
the traditional tender, shadowy, and sombre lyricism and flighted
beat, a sharpness of attack, a forceful spareness of utterance and
rigidity of ponderous volumes of sound uncommon to the aristo-
cratic expression from which they spring. Although a force and
nudity of utterance related to this austere machine-like edge exists
in the later Scriabine, it exists invariably softened by a comparative


PAUL ROSENFELD
527
opulence of harmony and sinuosity of movement. Rudhyar is to
be credited with a genuine innovation. Certainly, Ornstein's
earlier piano moods, impressions, and dances show similar qualities,
mixed as they are with turbulence of movement and turgidity of
sound. Contemporary orchestral writing fairly bristles with them:
Strawinsky and Varèse, and in second line Ruggles, Prokofieff, and
certain of the Six, have achieved shining pages with the “hard
gemlike cutting of the Greek.” The distinction of Rudhyar's
musical art flows from the achievement in the medium of the piano
of passages of a sonority at once slender and charged with force,
comparable to the significant pages of modern orchestration; and
from the earnest of a fluency in the modern style contained in it.
Limited in the range of his ideas, and burdened with literary and
theosophic conceptions, he nevertheless moves about in the spare,
rich, and metallic style with a naturalness and effortlessness that
show him at home. Within the small compass of his Moments,
there are strong accents at once rhythmical and precise and free
and full, and devoid of the mechanical quality of much of Strawin-
sky's. There are strong contrasts, nervous and perfectly legitimate
changes of mood, sonority, and beat: sudden necessary accelerations
and agitations, and equally sudden retardations and calmings.
There are full and prodigiously extended chords without thick-
ness; thunderous effects gotten from a single unsupported voice-
No. 2 of the first cycle has fine examples; extreme delicacies of
the melodic line twisting in mordant-like figures—the tense and
penetrating Reaching Out supplies a capital illustration. The
precise and bounding rhythms, the many staccato and martellato
notes call for gong-like and metallic sounds; Zodiacal Birth de-
mands piano roars to be gotten only by striking chords of black
keys with the entire forearm, after the manner of Rudhyar's Cali-
fornian neighbour, Henry Cowell.
It is not beside Ozymandias in the Egyptian sand, but beside
certain primitive American things made in the arid Southwest,
that the grandiose clangours and stony weight of such a Mo-
ment as King of Kings demand a place. There is excessive timidity
in refusing to recognize Rudhyar's momentary freedom on the
austere stylistic plane, and the rigid volumes and barbarous power
of his rich affecting music, as products of the American soil. The
spirit of the Amerind had the austerity. The Aztec had the rigid


528
MUSICAL CHRONICLE
barbarous power, before him. The very transplanted life we live
is permeated with both. The popular expressions, jazz and movies,
contain them in a rudimentary form. Under the lace of inorganic
borrowed ornamentation, the mountainous American architecture
shows them, and recently they have begun creating a painting, a
prose and poetry in their keen likeness. The American plains
awaken a kind of grandiosity which the Indians expressed in the
picturesque cosmic names they gave themselves; and poets of the
cast of Carl Sandburg are moved unconsciously by vague but
similar impulses. Doubtless, as Nietzsche noticed, the testimony
of composers concerning themselves and their works is not ex-
quisitely reliable. None the less, Rudhyar's personal feelings about
the potentialities of American life and the divinity of the land,
freely expressed in his letters, his talk, his essays and poems, are
worthy of scrutiny for their corroborative witness. To us, Dane
Rudhyar's work, in its form and the pathos exhaled by it, in its
weaknesses and strengths, bad literature and realizations alike,
presents itself quite simply as inspired with the unconscious reality
of America. It has analogies in the life of the Pacific seaboard,
where they look still further to the West and feel Buddha near. It
has analogies not only there. It has them wherever men feel the
presence of a new god that is being born, an American god; not the
old jealous, fighting, egotistical Jehovah and his suffering, expiat-
ing, self-sacrificing son; but a spirit of fire that opens all individual
forms, and purifies and merges all souls together, flushing the hills
to scarlet, bursting the earth with corn, dancing, and releasing
souls in dancing; the god of old American writers—Whitman with
his song of the open road, Melville with his wild laugh writing the
tragedy of the god of evil, hate, and retribution; the god of the
newcomers, too—warm Mr Anderson hearing hallucinating black
laughter and the throb of Dionysiac life beneath the stupid crust
of the republic; sad Mr Eliot freighted with a god periodically
mysteriously defunct; young Mr Cummings intoxicated with a
pussy-footed god who cannot quite get the step; the number grows
with every year. It is the intuition strong in these men that lives
in Rudhyar. His beauty and theirs flow from a common apprehen-
sion; and with theirs his art composes a single ritual.
val
Paul ROSENFELD
SENFELD


A LETTER
Prerow,
Germany.
October 14th, 1925.
The Editors of The Dial.
Mesdames et Messieurs:
I know not which one of your little covey of editors knocked
together your esteemed Comment for October. I do find, however,
startlingly, myself leading off:
“A gentleman who has lived abroad considers that the two
books most talked of in Germany since the war are The Downfall
of Western Civilization, by Oswald Spengler and Hermann Keyser-
ling's Travel Diary of a Philosopher-books, that is, written in
German and published recently—talked of, that is, by the public
'which corresponds to the American public of H. G. Wells.' In-
deed our informant has been heard to refer to Count Keyserling
as the German H. G. Wells, by which he meant perhaps that
Wells, brought up as a nobleman of Eastern Europe, could have
become Keyserling. On the other hand it seems unlikely that
Count Keyserling brought up in England would have become
as breezy as all that, and it would perhaps be more reasonable
to compare him to Havelock Ellis, with whom he shares not only
optimism and a complete indifference to the terrors of platitude,
but a wonderfully fluent habit of generalizing.”
When, on the occasion of my recent sojourn in your States, I
had the honour of being very kindly trapped into dinner and con-
versation at your Publication's offices in Thirteenth Street, New
York, I was not aware my well-meant informative chit-chat was to
be publicly quoted à propos two so wide-moving phenomena as
Oswald Spengler and Hermann Keyserling. The former was,
a year or two ago,' very justly put in his place by your own Ger-
man Correspondent, the always wholly laudable Thomas Mann.
1 The Dial, December 1922.


530
A LETTER
1ore
The latter I have myself heard (in the brilliant company of your
dramatic critic, Mr Gilbert Seldes) lecturing in an agreeably
svelte and Muscovite manner to an audience of (to judge by their
appearance) Cambridge, Massachusetts, fringed ladies and in-
nocent outdoor-smelling men of medicine from Boston in a
tapestried banquet-hall of the Burg, or Imperial Palace, Vienna,
Austria. One does not recall exactly what the Count said: one
recalls only that everything trotted out was, for a Count, pleasantly
forward-looking. And one recalls, more importantly, that Mr.
Gilbert Seldes was not pleased.
But to come to my, or rather your, point. When I spoke of this
Count Keyserling's social influence in Central Europe as making of
him a sort of "German H. G. Wells," I emphatically did not
mean “that Wells, brought up as a nobleman of Eastern Europe,
could have become Keyserling." No amount of bringing up could
have made Mr Wells anything but what he so enormously, an-
nually, is. Still less could one who has observed this burnished, if
peripatetic, Count from a front-row seat, and one who, to boot,
is not unacquainted with the works and genius of his cousin,' the
great Count Keyserling,—still less could such an one believe that
any one bearing that burnished name, that any one born to the
at once austere and sultry inheritance of the ancient masters of the
Baltic Provinces, that he, having been transplanted as an infant
to a Bromley cradle and "brought up in England," "would have
become as breezy as all that.” Men of the same breed, gentlemen
of the same quality of feather, as Uncle Thilo, Graf von Elmt,?
don't get, on howsoever early provocation, “breezy.” No Caesar,
and no Caesarling, is, even to-day, that.
1 On your funny page, the one where you print your Notes on Contributors,
you honour (in this Dial for October 1925) your new Contributor, Count
Eduard von Keyserling, with four lines. Apart from the dates of his
birth and death you find nothing so important to say about him as that
he was “a brother of the philosopher, Count Hermann von Keyserling."
May I be permitted to remind you that he wasn't? The fact is that the
contemporary writer Count Hermann von Keyserling possesses the dis-
tinction of being a first cousin to Count Eduard von Keyserling, the most
distinguished of all German writers of prose fiction, almost the only Ger-
man practiser of that art of a quality comparable to that of the supreme
masters of France and of Russia, and to that of Jacobsen the Dane.
So, as Mr Seldes would say, “That's that!"
2 The Dial, October 1925.


A LETTER
531
I meant merely what I said, that this proportion roughly 'holds:
that as Mr H. G. Wells is to the reading-public of America, so is
Count Hermann Keyserling to the more buttoned reading-public
of Germany. Now it does not require a very profound knowledge
of the occult science of mathematics to deduct from this proportion
that the quantity denominated “Count Hermann Keyserling" is
not equivalent to the quantity denominated “Mr H. G. Wells.”
Unless an editor of The Dial, with his head in the sand, assumes
the reading-public of America to be equivalent to the reading-
public of Germany. That it is not, I had myself taken for
axiomatic. . . . Nor when I say that Theodore Roosevelt occupied
socially the nearest American equivalent to the social position in
the late Germany of the late Kaiser, do I say that the in many ways
admirable Theodore Roosevelt brought up in Potsdam would have
become so boobish “as all that.” I say merely that his position
of energetic ascendancy among the more high-flying political and
social forces of his own time and people was our nearest democratic
equivalent to the energetic, if bastard, ascendancy of another, if
more buttoned, high-flyer.
By all means "compare him to Havelock Ellis" and be as
"reasonable” as, being a Dial editor, you oddly can. But when
you write that “he shares” with Havelock Ellis “not only optimism
and a complete indifference to the terrors of platitude, but a
wonderfully fluent habit of generalizing," don't imagine he doesn't
share these virtues also, and each in a highly exemplary degree,
with the brown derby-hat of Mr Herbert G. Wells of Bromley,
Kent. And don't kid yourself into thinking that Count Keyserling
is, like Havelock Ellis, a man capable of important intellectual
work; or, still less, that Count Keyserling, the School of Wisdom
pet of all Central Europe, thereby occupies a social position akin
to that of the aloof, ascetic, and indefatigable Havelock Ellis.
... And did it occur to you that if Count Keyserling (of Slavic
grandmother and physiognomy and manner, but of most benev-
olently German inclinations, culture, and fame)—that if he were
to be spoken of as “the German Havelock Ellis," then, as corollary
thereto, Havelock Ellis would have thrust upon him, willy-nilly,
the role of the “English Count Keyserling”? And where in the
1 Editor's Note: Very roughly, even for International Dial Chit-chat.


532
A LETTER
Lord's name would he get his English from? The bulging pockets
of Mr Herbert G. Wells? No, the author of Studies in the
Psychology of Sex is far too sublimated a being for handy use in
such international chit-chat as this.... Mr H. G. Wells, on the
other hand, while catering to the same modern hankerings as does
this widely-travelled and widely-read Count, this (if I may be
permitted to coin a phrase in his own deft language)—this polished
and aristocratic Reisender in Kulturangelegenheiten, Mr H. G.
Wells contrives to retain certain peculiar hirsute, low-browed, and
aggressively pragmatical moral and physical appendages which
make of him the amusing insular pendant to that bland, blond,
roaming Continental Figure. Or so at least it seems to me.
Might I venture, in closing, to observe that your last paragraph,
although as befits the paragraph of a young man (in my ignorance
as to which one of you editors the writer is, I grant the writer the
nobler sex)-of a young man apparently writing from Number
152 West Thirteenth Street,-although fairly bristling
"Bright shoots of everlastingness"
was yet, at first glance, to me, in this less electrical air of Europe,
not immediately consecutive in its illumination? The wiring
might have been more generous. But I do find that, like the run of
your editors, this young gentleman does write intelligently, if
not always, to us outsiders, to us Europeans, at first shock intelligi-
ble daylight.
Why refer to me as "a gentlemen who has lived abroad'?
Don't I?
I am, my intelligent mesdames et messieurs,
Your Obedient Servant,
The EDITOR
1 Editor's Note: This goes too far. But in the right direction.


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UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY
FORM NO. DD6, 60m, 12/80 BERKELEY, CA 94720
LD21-A30m-7,'73
(R2275810)476—A-32
General Library
University of California
Berkeley


COO8 357894
U.C. BERKELEY LIBRARIES

587844
AQ
179
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY




685