the procedure
resolves the Quinn Collection into money and nothing else. It
leaves the modern art situation in America precisely where it was
and Mr Quinn might just as well have dabbled in stocks or dry-
goods as in art. A public auction, on the other hand, would have
been a magnificent gesture, compelling professional attention, and
awakening the public conscience as nothing else that can be thought
of. It would have been as much of an eye-opener as the celebrated
Mary J. Morgan sale of years ago which first taught the American
public what a peachbloom vase was, only this time the lessons
would have concerned themselves with Henri Rousseau, Picasso,
and Derain. Since Europe has been so quick to buy examples of
these men—the pick of the collection, it is said, having been made
by a Parisian dealer-it is absurd to contend that Europe would
not have competed in the auction; but had that event occurred,
you may be sure those connoisseurs would have had competition
from unexpected sources. It is a discouraging thought that I have
harboured for a long time that it takes a dramatic occasion to fix the
eye of our lethargic noblesse; and to realize that we have missed
our great educational chance in the Quinn affair is doubly tragic
for nowhere on the horizon is there another collection that could
do so effectually the job. It is part of the immense advantage that
Paris has, and which I continually resent, that there, periodically,
the Hôtel Druot clears the air. The Quinn Collection contained
many sure-fire hits but much also that was debatable, and a public
instead of a private appraisal of it would have been a great help.
It is the part of philosophy to accept what benefits accrue even
DI


HENRY MCBRIDE
261
from mishaps, so it is time to acknowledge that the portion of
the Quinn Collection that was shown had all the old electrifying
powers and drew a steady attendance of the "best people” who
made valiant efforts "to understand.” No doubt some of them
succeeded. An immense amount of water has passed beneath the
Brooklyn Bridge since the days of the Armory Show when aspiring
amateurs shocked by such aspects of modern life as they caught
from the mirrors being held aloft by the new painters could think
of nothing better to shriek than the words “degenerate" and "im-
posture.” The attitude now is certainly calmer, though here and
there an unregenerate still thinks it necessary to insult an artist
for being truthful. I have, for instance, just finished reading a
rather dull satire by Mr Hilaire Belloc who attempts to burlesque
the modern frenzy for quick finance and tells of a lady who made
a dubious coup on the Stock Exchange and was thereby enabled
to repaper her Georgian house and hang her drawing-room with
pictures painted apparently “by lunatics in hell.” This is the only
witty phrase, I hasten to say, in a book I have no desire to recom-
mend. Mr Belloc spends all his energy in contriving a picture
of modern society that any visitor from Mars would consider
hellish, but turns in a fury to rend the artists who are saying the
same thing he does. The wonderful difference between the two
points of view is simply that Mr Belloc looks on life with scorn
and our painters with sympathy.
My finest moment in Mr Quinn's Inferno-for I don't care
what Mr Belloc calls it, modern life is the only life I have known
and the only kind I enjoy-came with the discovery of his amazing
Henri Rousseau, La Bohémienne Endormie. This certainly must
be one of the great imaginative pictures of the era. How explain
it, how measure its peculiarly psychic force? Luckily there are
no vulgar chemicals to rob it of its secret, which will mystify, I
hope, for many years to come. Like music it may be interpreted
variously and all interpretations shall be correct. Is it a dream lion
more terrible than a real one? Is it a dream gypsy sleeping in
a desert that never was? You can take your choice but in either
choice there is the same stab at your vitals or you are not susceptible
to poetry. I am always quoting Emily Dickinson's definition of
poetry but it has not yet staled in repetition: “If I read a book
and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I


262
MODERN ART
know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my
head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only ways
I know it. Is there any other way?" . . . In this picture, as in
most works that seem struck straight from the soul without any
intermediary parleyings with the intellect, I am thrilled again by
such details as the moon and stars which shimmer fatefully but
positively as they never do in the night-scenes of the so-called
realists. This Bohémienne, I understand, is part of the immense
loot from the Quinn Collection that Mr Rosenberg is taking back
to Paris, but the circumstance to me is not sad. I am resigned,
also, to the departure of Seurat's Cirque. In fact, I am more and
more persuaded, as time goes on, that the correct lodging for a
masterpiece is the country that produced it.
Not, however, being anywhere near the period when exact
justice is administered or even understood, I find myself in a posi-
tion to register the arrival in this land of another group of French
masterpieces, a group that will go far in assuaging the grief
occasioned by our divorce from the Quinn Picassos, Derains,
Matisses, et cetera. This is the superb collection of Maillol sculp-
tures belonging to Mr A. C. Goodyear, of Buffalo. This includes
the gilt bronze Torso of a Young Woman that has been worked over
by the sculptor until every inch of the thing has a vibrant quality of
its own, the armless figure called Summer, the relief, Désir; and
fifteen other torsos and reclining figures, all bafflingly beautiful.
Here at last is an art that confidently challenges the antique. The
highest standard is usually attached to slenderly athletic types
and it is usual to consider it a drop in taste when the cult for the
overly muscular comes in. Maillol is certainly not ascetic but
neither does he seek Amazons. His ideal woman is simply capable,
free to meet on equal terms all the demands of nature. Mr
Augustus John calls her "fecund.” So she is, among other things.
Chiefly, to Maillol, she is something magnificently alive. It is
a never-ending surprise to feel the possibilities in movement that
his figures possess. But of course the chief surprise of all is the
fact that such un-nervous ideals were realized in the middle of
the Speed Age. Has Mr Hilaire Belloc, do you suppose, ever seen
a Maillol?
HENRY MCBRIDE


MUSICAL CHRONICLE
THE day was shod with bronze. A period of positiveness had
come again, kneeding the landscape to robust dignity and
weight. Solidity and lightness informed the quivering mass within,
greeting extended shapes and lines and growths as friendliest
partners. Firmly the invisible Kurwenal chanted "im echten
Land, im Heimatland, auf eig’ner Weid und Wonne, im Schein
der alten Sonne.” Feeling of all genuine things across the times
was clear: Bach making his dense gilded music in spiritual vigour;
peasants and "little kids” sporting in abandon and co-ordinate joy;
strength and fecundity of rough earth letting sharp teeth bite into
the real. Gleaming snowpeaks of Alps hovered near as clouds.
In the pure hay-valley, thick soles were beating the ground in
dance, and the cool Swiss beer foamed high. Yes, the simplest,
most positive material. No spicing, no sensationalism. The de-
cision that dares allow pressure in the biceps and resolution in the
grit of jaws. And serenity floated aloft above all personal “I,”
prestige, and failure. So much alone with earth and her grief and
graves! So much upon her wide and corn-sweet breast! So much
apart from her, too, in regions where pure form plays free in its
own air, and fugues end à la chinoise if they will! And still, so
much with ribald mankind everywhere. Alors, arrivait un vieux
paysan, ivre, qui chantait comment, autrefois sur la montagne, il
avait baisé une jeune fille.
In this robustious mood, the meaning of Bloch's Concerto Grosso
seems to lie. The short archaicizing work for string orchestra
with piano obligato is positive, rich weighted music simple in sub-
stance, muscularly rhythmed and net of outline, and impersonally
grave and impersonally breezy. Thrust from within the foursquare
little movements march. Prime music, the small suite is not. Its
line was not born of sharpest sensation, nor did a great emotional
charge deliver the form. Bloch's vigour and vehement convulsive
stroke shape every bar, and alternately contract and amplify the
lightly modernized, eighteenth-century mould; yet the idiom is
never arrestingly fresh. Many of the ideas, round as they are
and magistrally put to use, appear either slight and undistinguished


264
MUSICAL CHRONICLE
variations of certain in Bloch's earlier more Hebraic works, or of
little intrinsic significance. The material of the Pastorale and
Rustic Dances is deliberately popular, of course; the entire scheme
is remarkably simple and conservative; Bloch has chosen to abide
within long-established limits of harmony and uses shrill, piercing,
and "dissonant” effects with extreme reserve; but all one can say
for the material itself is that it is generally better in quality than
Strauss's. The chords, built of fourths and fifths, which close the
broad third movement, like some otherwhere employed by Bloch,
recall Puccini.
Within these bounds, the Concerto grandly satisfies. Bloch's
power and control impose afresh at each encounter; not only for
the reason we are unused to finding construction and cumulative
forms equal to his in the music of the day. Bloch's capacity for
developing and sustaining his ideas is second to no composer's
since Beethoven. Dignity and weight enter what he touches. His
music moves on firmest legs. The new piece seems to show the
forceful modern observing the diddling of others with eighteenth-
century forms, fugues and pastorales, and archaic turns of style,
and then rolling up his sleeve-linen and saying “Since they insist
on classicizing ..." setting about the business thoroughly. Each
of the lusty movements: prelude, dirge, pastorale, and fugue, is
conducted by an impulse flowing unbroken to culmination. A
light and iron hand controls the rich mass of string and piano
sound, summoning soft thunders of precisely cut sonority. So rich,
so golden was the sound that one spied to see whether M Kousse-
vitzky (the sole modern music society now operating in New
York) had not concealed a horn in the forest of strings. Here,
in the desert of the recent, was earth to stand on, a house to re-
pose in, a loaf to eat. Novelties had teemed all month. With the
exception of Bartók's Dance Suite, none had new life. The Italians
contributed musical equivalents of the Victor Emanuel monument
in Rome. Bloch's work alone stirred the depths, and bronzed the
day. Necessity remains the parent of invention.
10yen
PAUL ROSENFELD


COMMENT
I am sure there is a common Spirit that plays within
us, yet makes no part of us.
Sir Thomas BROWNE
are I
THE brittle, brilliant character of life to-day is varyingly
I exposited. Speed and sport are, it would seem, indigenous
to this country. We have the canoe, but ignore the punt and
one could inspect the craft belonging to any American yacht-
club without finding as a name, the continentally approved
Pas Pressé. We are accustomed in America to admitting that
"the prosperous, good-looking, domineering woman is a very at-
tractive being.” Our most presentable young people seem to
share in the attitude of haste, and are accused of irreverence, in-
gratitude, and flippancy. We are, however, encouraged to suspect
beneath the mannerism of quick self-sufficiency, a root of serious-
ness. In a recent book, The Religion of Undergraduates,' opinions
are revealed which have been expressed in private conclave and
in answer to questionnaires. In apparent contrast with the in-
sobriety of the present day, these opinions involving moral issues,
could not, one suspects, have been heard on the campus or in
undergraduate meetings during the early days of American colleges,
despite the recorded circumspect bearing of those times. In few
novels is the mystical,” the “mediaevally intense” atmosphere of
the university, so prepossessingly and so exactly suggested as in-
cidentally in these impressions of “the silent quadrangle suddenly
filled with color and purposeful movement resembling some sedate
folk-dance of processional figures on the green.” No subjects
of enquiry seem more living than those skeletons and scientific
queries brought forth by students in unembarrassed freedom of
discussion: Is there a truly desirable profession? In how far has
one responsibility for others? What place has sex in one's life?
What is immortality?
1 The Religion of Undergraduates. By Cyril Harris. 12mo. 87 pages.
Charles Scribner's Sons. $1.25.


266.,.
COMMENT
.
: "We, it seems, are critical,” says Emerson in The American
Scholar. -"We cannot enjoy anything for hankering to know
whereof the pleasure consists; we are lined with eyes; we see with
our feet; the time is infected with Hamlet's unhappiness.”
.Prompted by those perennial “two selves, one actual; the other,
ideal,” various questions are asked: “Is one's conduct ethical be-
cause good ethics have been found to be good for the race and
because one has the habit?” “How good must one be to be good ?”
“What am I?” “I seem to be at war with myself. Two forces
fight for possession of me. Sometimes I take sides with one, some-
times with the other. More often I merely look on.” “I feel a
sort of cheerless pity for myself. I am an animal, not a brain
or a soul.” These not complacent statements and enquiries point
to the fact that there is in an age of lightness, a desire for the
essential—that “the unstable estimates of men crowd to him whose
mind is filled with a truth, as the heaped waves of the Atlantic
follow the moon.” It would seem that "in an age of wonders"
there is "room for wonder.” One is pleased to maintain an illusion
of the university as “a grove of everbearing trees,” and recalls, not
in irony, a much read non-academic student's concept of the under-
graduate as a Myron's Discobolus descending marble steps between
ivory pillars.






NO
A CRUCIFIX. TWELFTH CENTURY



THE | OXXIO
WIX
IVO
NDIAL
55
MI
APRIL 1926
ON A CRUCIFIX
BY SCOFIELD THAYER
ROMAN FRIDAY
Rome fut tout le monde, et tout
le monde est Rome.
JOACHIM DU BELLAY.
O face well-pared of dross and bracken,
Concision of a flame gone stone,
The torture of that will shall slacken
Only with that tired bone.
Only when that tired skull has sunken
Shall will and flesh be Rome's,
Only when that tried flame has shrunken
Shall carcass, quiet, be Rome's.
Nor flower nor tree nor fronded bracken
Can grow upon a star,
Nor clouds can veil nor dust can blacken
The madness that You are.
O mad and sane, pared-perfect Spirit,
Illuminant of our Night! ...
Come crucify the unclothed Spirit!
Come crucify the Light!


268
ON A CRUCIFIX
Rome is the world and Rome the foison
Of all things born of death:
O Kingly Flask! O Kingly Poison!
Shall abrogate Rome's breath.
O face most drained of all but loving!
O Poison of chased truth!
O close, true flesh. O amorous gloving
Of that emaciate ruth!
O ribs of service! Hairs of anguish!
O ear of noble heart!
O hard-pinned soul, not wove to languish,
Snail-slow at dying's art.
O nose of light! O cheeks of glory!
O lips of hopeless hope!
O hands well-nailed! O sumptuous story
Of bitter and intemperate scope.
I fall upon my knees and wander
In gradual flames around your feet.
O grow upon me that wild candour
You flowered and flowed in Roman street!
II
IN WHICH THE WAVES OF THE SEA, BEING OF A GENTLE
NATURE, INVITE OUR LORD TO FORGET BOTH HEAVEN
AND EARTH.
Weep not, O comely lover,
Nor droop your golden head;
The waves shall give you cover
When you are gently dead.
The waves shall beckon dearly
When Earth's grey pastures flee,
The waves shall trust you nearly
When you shall trust the sea.


SCOFIELD THAYER
269
When those apparelled creatures
Whose wings are broken light
Shall wash your starry features
And kiss your lips good-night,
When they shall bear you gently
Among their games away-
O keep your heart intently
Where we toss back the Day!
Let not the harp or cymbal
Deprive you of our might:
Angelic feet be nimble-
But not to steal the light!
If you remembering April
Slip off your golden crown,
If you remembering April
But gently dwindle down!
Stay not among Earth's children,
Button your heart from them:
Their ways are too bewildering
For such gay stratagem.
But travel gently seaward,
Climb down the sea-pink air,
And if you keep to seaward
Our hands shall touch you there.
Our feet shall dance you gaily,
Our songs shall toss you sleep,
Our smooth white fogs shall greyly
Amend you of the Deep.
But trust us gently, Lover,
And we will love you back:
The waves shall not discover
A gentle recreant track.
va


270
ON A CRUCIFIX
And if you tire of greenness
Go sit upon a beach,
For there a gentle keenness
Shall gentle happenings teach.
If there you weep and ponder
Upon Earth's tested showers.
Accosting watery wonder
A child shall give you flowers!
III
IN WHICH IS NOTED THAT FAMOUS AND INVINCIBLE OVER-
THROW SUFFERED BY THE ARMIES OF IMPERIAL ROME,
UPON THE HILL CALLED GOLGOTHA, NEAR BY THE CITY
CALLED JERUSALEM.
How odd that on a common hill
Beyond a rabble town,
That there a felon cross should spill
The Roman Empire down.
How odd that an enduring heart
Well-rooted in rich soil,
How odd that such could spend a smart
An Empire to despoil.
How odd that from a race of men
Unversed in crowns and flowers,
How odd that from small Mary's ken
Should leap Ten Thousand towers.
How odd that all their flowery summits
Attacking the gold sun,
That with nor saws nor planes nor plummets
One Carpenter has run.
How odd that he should grow to be
The centuried King of Kings:
How odd when an earth-rooted tree
Its shadow Moonward flings!


SCOFIELD THAYER
271
How odd that on a certain day,
When men got up to work,
When infants turned to infant play,
When shopmen turned to smirk,
That He was nailed upon a cross,
And stood upon a hill,
That not a shopman counted loss
That evening in his till.
How odd that he who pushed a plane
And smelled of wood and nails,
How odd that thumb did give the stain
Whereat Rome's purple pales.
That he upon a well-planed cross
Which smelt of wood and nails,
That He should teach the Stars a loss
Whereat the Great Sun quails.
That he who spoke as children speak
And kept his mother's knee,
That He should make the Heavens creak,
And turn the Heavy sea.
How odd that this Maid Mary's son
Who was a simple boy,
That he should teach Great Kings to run
This Earth's unsimple toy.
That he should cancel Roman hope
And build a lordlier crown,
That he with but a heart's bare scope
Should touch an Empire down.
That He about whose gleaming feet
Our hearts in darkness cling,
That he once trod a rubbish street
Unbuttoned to the Spring!


272
ON A CRUCIFIX
IV
IN WHICH, THE CRUCIFIX BEING AGAIN REGARDED, OUR
LORD IS AGAIN ADDRESSED AS A STAR; AND IN WHICH THE .
CROSS UPON WHICH HE DIED IS NOTICED FOR FIDELITY
TO THOSE LAWS AND FORCES OF WHICH IT HAD BY
NATURE COGNIZANCE.
O travelled heart! O travailled seeing!
O feet that cry no more!
Ah, squeezed-out Expletive of Being;
Expostulated Core.
You had no quarrel with the mountains
Nor parley with a star:
You are the hoed, spondaic mountains;
Unconjugated Star!
O hammered excellence of madness!
Cruel flower of writhen death!
O spent is all the twisted madness,
And spent the flower's breath.
Your eyelids close for a long silence;
The show is out for You.
But in men's hearts there is no silence
And seldom falls there dew.
In Galilee the fish are crying
For feet that trod on them;
And in Samaria women lying
Along Your Memory's hem.
O cross that stays dramatic heaven!
O business shortly done!
Whence will ye purchase us new leaven
When this Fare's term is run?
Ah sturdy cross! Ah faithful servant
To such power as you know.
Ah would I were as close a servant
To Him you cannot know!


TECHNIQUE
BY GEORGE SAINTSBURY
COT long ago, in an English newspaper, the present writer
saw some remarks, incidental but not uninteresting, on the
ancient three-volume novel—the "Old Three-decker" of Mr Kip-
ling's not least charming poem. Two reasons were, I think, alleged
for its unsuitableness to present days. One was that the twentieth
century had not time to read it—a common but mistaken view
as far as the novel, if not the century, is concerned. The average
three-volume novel was by no means so long as it looked. The
volumes were not very thick, and the binding was substantial for
circulating library use; the print was large and largely spaced
and margined. You could, in reviewing such things, not by mere
“dipping and skipping" but by honest if skilled reading, despatch a
couple of novels between dinner and bedtime without dining very
early, or outwatching any Bear of decent and domestic habits. But
if I remember rightly, the journalist in question rather preferred
his second reason that our recent advance in the technique of
novel-writing made the three-decker inconvenient and obsolete.
Of that beloved old craft-for even after having to do with some
hundreds of specimens of her and discharging broadsides into not
a few of them, the memory of the whole fleet is kindly-it will not
be necessary to say much more now, though we may return to her
towards the end of this article. It is on the question of the "ad-
vance in technique" alleged, and of the character and value of
technique itself in the arts generally, in literature especially, and
in prose fiction most of all, that the spirit has moved me to say a
few words. The subject ought not to lack interest in America
for the first writer on it who occurs to me is my old acquaintance:
the late Mr Henry James, and the next the (I hope) living Mrs
Edith Wharton. Not that I propose, directly or even indirectly,
to support or attack the notions of either, but their names which
of course might be largely reinforced, are enough to shew that
Columbia has not been indifferent to the matter.
Now even to hint or hesitate doubt, dislike, or distrust of such a
thing or such a word as technique may seem to argue either mere


274
TECHNIQUE
stupidity or idle paradox. What is just a little more, it would
also argue-in the case of a critic who for more than half a century
has done his little best to accentuate the importance of treatment
over that of mere subject—something like impertinent incon-
sistency. You look at your Greek Dictionary and you find (sup-
posing that you did not know it before) that techne means "the
way or means by which a thing is gained or done”: and as all arts,
coarse and fine, are concerned with the gaining or doing of things,
art is a good way of translating techne into English. And all the
arts, from cookery to architecture and from poetry to schoolbook-
writing, require a large collection of detailed ways and means to
produce and warrant their results—details of material, details of
procedure, details of object, et cetera. Now the mass of these ways
and means may be justly called "technique,” and be separated, if
you like, into selection of object, process, and material respectively.
In point of process perhaps the arts of design require most
elaborate technique: and accordingly there has always been more
dispute about this with them than with others. As to music I
shall say nothing because I have no technical knowledge myself.
I merely judge it by the gross results on my ear which is tolerably
catholic, but quite uneducated. It is of the technique of literature
alone that I can undertake to speak with some expertise, if not of
production, of valuation and judgement; so to literature let us come.
Even in this one art—if you can call it one where the diversity
in its unity is so great—the importance of technique varies greatly
in different departments. In poetry it is of course, if not of greater,
of more obvious importance than in prose: for even "free" verse
is by no means free from a prosody of its own, and prose, metrical
verse, and free verse alike have, at their peril, to obey or rebel
against certain as yet very imperfectly discovered and perhaps
never quite exhaustively discoverable laws of rhythm. Inde-
pendently of this, which we may call the arrangement of words,
there is the selection of the words themselves; and independently
again of the form altogether there is infinite possibility for tech-
nique in selection and treatment of subject.
Now let us go back, for a moment, to our Greek Dictionary. We
shall find there a subsidiary definition of techne "A set of rules: a
system or method of making or doing a thing." Now, beyond all
doubt, this was the special meaning of the word, or rather of its


GEORGE SAINTSBURY
275
as
derivative "technique," of which our anonymous authority was
thinking when he said that advance in it was adverse to the ex-
istence or revival of the Old Three-decker.
Please observe that in assuming an attitude of at least dubiety
in respect of the value of such technique, I am not at the moment
intending to attack any set of rules, any system, in particular. My
scepticism is of a much wider and deeper kind. It extends to
questioning the value of, and to denying the advance attainable
by, such “systems” in literature generally; and in novel-writing
more than in any other department. Of course this is heresy: and
save at very few periods (when even at these it was rather tri-
umphantly heretical than orthodox) it always has been heresy.
Mankind has always hankered after prescription, positive and nega-
tive: and has perhaps scarcely ever shewn its hankering more
than in times and at occasions of apparent rebellion and revolu-
tion. Adam and Eve were to eat the apple not because it was
nice but because it was to give them instantaneous and extensive
education in good and evil; murder, robbery, et cetera, are justifi-
able and justified to-day because "class-war” is such an excellent
theory. Now every kind of technique is a collection of prescrip-
tions negative and prescriptions positive, resting more or less on
theory. Sometimes they are absurd in the unconscious infantile
manner, as when the excellent Alison pointed out that every princi-
ple of taste forbade the depicting of a Bandit with a Grecian nose;
sometimes they are, if not ridiculous, purely arbitrary as when
the Right Honourable John Wilson Croker laid it down that every
couplet of heroic verse must contain a completed sense, if not
exactly a completed sentence. Often they are not at all absurd in
themselves: but they are rarely free from more or less arbitrariness
Even when at their very best—that is to say, when they are in-
telligent and obedient generalizations from the best works of the
past—they risk, if they do not positively deny, the two greatest
properties (for these are something more than mere qualities of
Art-its Infiniteness and its Individuality. In mere mechanism you
must have technique; you may, in the beginning of things have to
learn it by practice but if you neglect it or are rash in experi-
Inenting for it, you will have various unpleasant results, from
pinching your fingers to exploding something and destroying half
a city. In Science as that word is commonly understood, you


276
TECHNIQUE
need a good deal of it. But in Art, after the merest preliminaries;
-colour-mixing, perspective, construction of musical instruments,
voice-production, grammar, prosody, et cetera—technique will be
of little use to you and of no little danger. “Save your own soul
you have no star”; and if you are starless in that respect, the most
cunningly and correctly built craft will only carry you at your
peril.
Now whether novel-writing be, as some have claimed for it
since its coming of age, after being long in embryo and not a very
short time in nonage, comparatively recently the-or at least a-
supreme form of literary art, there is neither room nor need to
discuss here. But there are certain points about it which make
it the most closely human of the divisions of the most essentially
human of arts—literature. It may not command the heights and
depths as Poetry does, or sway the multitude as is done by Drama.
But then Poetry borrows a good deal, while making this its own
as it borrows, from Music; and Drama from the arts of colour,
design, and action; the novelist grips (if he does grip) his reader
without the aid of any such accessories. He at once represents and
appeals to that infinity and individuality of passion, manners,
thought, and in short life which characterizes and constitutes
humanity and which characterizes and constitutes Art.
It will surely follow from this that Technique, except of the
most rudimentary kind-technique equally necessary to novels
whether they be in twenty volumes or in three or in one-is rather
unnecessary to them, and may be rather more than dangerous. A
curious example of this strikes me as I write. Perhaps there is no
technical warning of modern times which has received, nay de-
served, more praise (for its neglect has often brought disaster)
than Matthew Arnold's famous one in the Preface to his Poems
as to the danger of situations in which "suffering finds no vent
in action,” in which "everything is to be endured, nothing to be
done,” et cetera. Whether the critic-artist's own Empedocles which
he condemned on this score, deserved the condemnation does not
here matter in the least; it is enough that the caution or rule seems
eminently reasonable and that it has sometimes justified itself.
But—and this is the important point-at the very moment when
it was written there had been written, and not long after it was
published there was published, one of the most remarkable novels


GEORGE SAINTSBURY
277
if not of the very highest class only a little below that—Fromentin's
Dominique: which its warmest admirer would find it very difficult
to free wholly from the operation of Matthew's rule. The rule
operates but the result escapes.
Nor in this case can that most misunderstood of all sayings,
“the exception proves the rule," be urged with its usual misunder-
standing. The rule fails, not because of the exception in this case
or in any case: but because it is a rule and the kind admits none.
I believe it is hardly an exaggeration to say that there is not a great
novel in the world in which a sufficiently acute and practised
critic could not detect a breach—nay a number of breaches-of
technical rules by no means of the ridiculous or the excessively
arbitrary type. "Women are rum creeturs” though Mr Snodgrass
did so indignantly deny it (I fancy Emily Wardle taught him
better later). Men are creeturs perhaps less obviously but not
much less decidedly rum: and the novel which should deal with
both, including of course their circumstances and experiences, their
wills and ways—is a rum creetur too. Now technique presupposes
that its creeturs will not be too rum; that they will be at any rate
orderly and obedient in their rumness; that even if they go in for
complexes and inhibitions these can be in a manner foreseen and
provided against. They cannot.
That is to say, of course, they can: but you will do it at the
expense of taking the life out of them. Nay more; you can, if
you possess certain powers not wholly of the right kind, educate and
breed up a public which will enjoy or think it enjoys your technical
or Frankenstein-made creations. But theirs is a diseased appetite:
and you are pandering to it. No one of the very great novels of
the world (as has been said already) subjects itself to any tech-
nique; the exception which used to be made in the case of Tom
Jones has been impartially disproved by objectors who had no idea
at all of attacking technique in itself. Perhaps the greatest and
surest rule of apparent technique ever formulated at any time is the
old Aristotelian doctrine of the superiority of plausible-probable
impossibilities, over possibilities not rendered plausible or probable.
Yet if you consider this you will see that it annihilates technique
altogether. The next greatest text, with a huge expanse of time
between but so close in sense as to be almost identical is Coleridge's
“suspension of disbelief.” Sovereign of course. But how you are


278
TECHNIQUE
to suspend disbelief? how you are to make impossibilities plausible?
“God bless us all, that's quite another thing." I have read as
much criticism, technical and other, as most of my fellow creatures
I believe. I haven't found many effectual receipts or directions for
the production of these little morphological changes
A friend of mine once received one of those curious uncom-
plimentary compliments which are perhaps the sincerest, from
somebody who said to him, “You have a wonderful way of telling
a story. I don't mean as a novelist would tell it.”
Now the novelist must of course have the gift of telling a
story as a novelist tells it and there certainly is a difference. I
once heard a novelist (and one of no mean class too) tell a story
just as it had occurred to him, walking up and down the room and
gesticulating the while. He printed it afterwards: but it was by
no means the same thing. "Ah!" you say, “the technique came in
after all.” Possibly; but it was not the technique we have been
talking of, the technique of rule and scheme-of sidemarked
analysis of motive and the like.
The only real prescription that I know of-after critically read-
ing thousands of novels and reading for pleasure at least scores of
them over and over again-is something like the famous one of an
older art, perhaps the oldest of all, Cookery. “First catch your
story (whether by head or tail does not much matter). Then catch
characters which will enable it to work out. Catch words to put
in their mouths, that will in the best sense 'accompany the action.
Catch description et cetera to garnish with at pleasure." But
exactly how you are to do the catching no one can tell you to any
good purpose, and the people who pretend to tell you will probably
tell you, if not to bad purpose, to bad result. Practice may help
to make you perfect: but by no means certainly. There are more
“single-speech”—at least "single-success”—novelists, from the
author of Manon Lescaut downwards, than there are single-success
artificers in any other craft. To put the conclusion of the whole
matter you will write good novels if you are a good novelist: but
exactly how you become a good novelist and how you write good
novels probably you do not yourself know, certainly no other
human being can tell you.


Courtesy of the Flechtheim Gallery, Berlin
PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST. BY RENEE SINTENIS





TWO POEMS
BY GEORGE H. DILLON
BIOGRAPHY
The silver stars, the golden sun
Are strangers to this alien one.
He would converse with them, but he
Is silenced by their secrecy.
To sorrow he will come, I fear,
Not having learned the language here.
He hails from the unhearing ground
And will not be beguiled by sound.
The noiseless tumult of the spring
Invades him. Therefore he must sing.
His sudden heart is nearly broken
With strange words urgent to be spoken.
He seeks a peace he will not find
Save in the land he left behind,
This homesick vagabond from dust.
At last, I think, his lonely lust
With earth's undreaming lust is one,
And he forgets the golden sun.
And still the sun bestows the day.
And the stars keep their voiceless way.


280
TWO POEMS
SERENADE
Your pallor is no rose that blooms
And no white bird with glassy plumes.
More pale than pear trees blowing white
Your body trembles on the night.
The music of your motion is
Least dubious of mysteries
For so I sense you from afar.
Like bird and bloom and song you are.
These things I loved, but they are lost.
The bird is broken on the gust.
The bloom is given to the dust.
A song is never always new
And is forgot. And you, and you ...


5
SI
5
22
.
LE LAVOIR A CASTEL GANDOLFO. BY ANDRE DERAIN





THE YAQUI
BY MARGARET ADELAIDE WILSON
NO ONE knew Mr and Mrs Robbins intimately. They were
TV comparative newcomers in the valley and kept much to them-
selves, farming their five-acre apricot orchard with the help of a fat
black pony. When the fruit season was on and the ranchers had to
wait in line before the scales of the co-operative cannery,. Mrs
Robbins and the single wagon were always somewhere in the queue.
Generally she was alone on the high seat, but on cooler days her
husband sometimes came with her, his milky purblind eyes roving
wistfully in search of some object distinct enough to fix his
attention.
It was old Robbins' blindness, Johnny Carr contended, that
had made it possible for Mrs Robbins to catch him, yet when one
looked at that impassive woman one could not imagine her trying
to capture any man. She must have been thirty years younger
than her husband, but one did not associate her with youth. Her
smooth round face and slanting eyes gave her the look of a con-
templative Buddha, and her immaculate grey gingham outlined
massive shoulders and massive knees. Only her hands had feminine
grace. Plump and tapering, with almond-shaped nails that had re-
sisted the effect of hard work and exposure, they looked singularly
out of place clinging to the shabby reins of the old harness.
The Robbins' place in the queue of waiting ranchers was marked
by constant and uneasy motion. The black pony had a dash of
bronco in him, and when he wasn't trying to back into the load
behind him or cramping the wheels in an attempt to squirm out of
line, he would be pushing the shafts into the boxes ahead, in an
effort to snatch a mouthful of fruit. Mrs Robbins seemed undis-
turbed by his antics. It was the unfortunate ranchers who suf-
fered, and the pony soon became hated by all who had had a taste
of his meanness.
"Why don't the woman show some spine about that horse ?"
Johnny Carr demanded indignantly, as he picked up two shattered
са.


282
THE YAQUI
boxes of fruit which the Robbins' pony had shoved off the back of
his wagon. "Sitting there like a Chinese idol letting him raise Ned!
She don't act bright.”
"Women mostly don't act bright about horses,” remarked his
hearer indulgently. “Look at her now, snakin' up to the scales
out of her turn. If she don't look out someone's going to object.”
He had scarcely spoken before someone did object. Mrs
Robbins was just slipping on the vacant scales when there was an
angry shout from a youth with a Ford truck whose turn she had
taken.
"Hey, wait!” he shouted, cranking his Ford furiously. Mrs
Robbins glanced back at him but made no move to get off the
scales. Instead she tapped her whip for the doorman and when
he had swung off her ten boxes and handed her the weights, she
picked up her reins and turned back down the line, the red and
white cotton umbrella wobbling above her, her broad hat blowing
rakishly back from her forehead.
"Some crust, I'll tell the world,” growled the youth with the
Ford.
"Ought to have kept your motor running, son,” Johnny Carr
grinned. “She's unloaded and gone while you were starting up."
"But it wasn't her turn,” insisted the boy. "If old Robbins
is on the wagon to-morrow I'm going to speak to him about it. I
sure am.”
But old Robbins was not on the wagon the next day or the
next, and once again after friendly hands had extricated the pony
from a tangle of his own making, Mrs Robbins took advantage of
the clear space ahead to drive up and squeeze in just back of the
scales.
I had noticed the heads of Johnny Carr's bays tossing behind
my trailer, and leaning out to say what I thought of this fresh
outrage I saw that a strange Indian was driving Johnny's wagon.
He was a lithe, coppery young fellow with the straight bang of
old Mexico across his forehead. His brilliant eyes met mine with
friendly interest, then he glanced beyond me to Mrs Robbins.
She had unloaded and was trying to drive away, but seemed to be
hopelessly blocked in the press about the cannery door.
Ordinarily the men would have made way for her, but she had


MARGARET ADELAIDE WILSON 283
evidently strained the courtesy of the tired ranchers to the break-
ing point and they were letting her extricate herself as best she
might.
The pony pushed and bit his way through till he came to Olaf
Hansen's greys. Whether by chance or by intention one could
not tell, but at that moment the greys swerved out of line just
enough to block his path. He squealed and bit at the greys, and
the greys retaliated. Mrs Robbins' face lost its oriental calm and
her slanting eyes took on a beady look. She jerked spasmodically
at the reins as the pony reared and threatened to come back on the
wagon.
Someone flashed by me. It was the Indian from Johnny Carr's
wagon; he ran as if on feathered feet, plunged through a narrow
opening, and caught the bridle of the black pony.
That slim brown hand must have held some strange authority,
for the little brute came down on all fours and stood trembling.
The Indian gave his ears a light caress, then turned with an
imperious gesture and waved Olaf Hansen back into line. Olaf
obeyed, his small blue eyes bewildered. The Indian led the pony
down the narrow lane while Mrs Robbins sat with limp reins. She
scarcely glanced at the slender figure by the horse's head, seeming
to receive his help as hers by right. There was no hint of feminine
coyness in her assumption; it went deeper than any claim of sex.
Yet as the man strode past my car with that deerlike step I saw
that his brilliant eyes were on Mrs Robbins' face and I could hear
him murmuring a single word in English, as if it were a charm.
The word was "pretty.” “Pretty, pretty, pretty,” he said in his
liquid melancholy voice, “Pretty, pretty, pretty."
By Johnny Carr's wagon he dropped the bridle and Mrs Robbins
drove off. A veil fell over those shining eyes when the trees
finally hid her from sight. The Indian slipped up to the bay colts
and rubbed his cheek against their soft noses and gazed into their
eyes. Then he stood, one hand upon his hip, waiting for the line
to move up.
"He's a Yaqui from across the border,” Johnny Carr explained
when I questioned him next day about the Indian. “Only knows
a dozen words of English, but work! Tireless as a watch-spring.
Good with horses, too. Only man on the place I allow to handle
my bays."


284
THE YAQUI
ma
ne
a
I related the episode of Mrs Robbins' rescue. "No!" said
Johnny. “Mrs Robbins! I never thought of Agostino as a ladies'
man. He doesn't look at any of those pretty Chemehuevi girls in
the pitting-shed, though Lord knows they smile at him enough.”
A few minutes before when a group of Indian girls strolled
past, I'd had a chance to observe this indifference on the part of
the Yaqui toward the women of his own race. Yet as the days
went by he developed toward the rest of us, men and women alike,
an engaging friendliness. He was quick to help with a tottering
load, a restive horse, a car whose starter had gone dead. Some-
times a smile flashed with childlike abandon over his dark face,
dissipating for the moment its look of veiled melancholy.
Only when Mrs Robbins appeared, however, did he become a
vivid, brilliant creature; and men with time hanging heavy on
their hands amused themselves by speculating on the secret of
her attraction for him.
"About as lively as a bolster and no prettier," observed one
with a touch of exasperation. “It sure is queer.”
"Yah, let old Robbins catch him looking at Mrs Robbins,"
Olaf Hansen snarled, then grinned sourly at his own absurdity.
Robbins, half blind and wholly discouraged, was no more to be
feared than a rabbit. Hansen's little eyes travelled furtively to
Mrs Robbins and I fancied him discomfited because he could catch
no hint of consciousness in her face. I thought I understood
what was working in him. He remembered how the Yaqui had
brushed him out of the way of Mrs Robbins' horse, and in his
stolid mind resentment was smouldering.
Yet there was trouble too in his face as he watched the Yaqui.
Something in the man's dark, alien grace disturbed him, and his
gaze brooded upon the Indian till the sound of a truck getting
under way recalled him to the fact that the scales were empty.
"Get a move on!” he shouted to the Yaqui and clicked to his
own team. The Yaqui did not move and Hansen saw, as we all
did, that again Mrs Robbins was driving up to the vacant scales.
As one looks back to what happened next one thinks of it as
an illusion in brains made delirious by the morning's heat. We
saw Hansen jerk his team out across Mrs Robbins' path, heard his
angry roar of "No, you don't!” There was a squeal, the sound
of kicking, of splintering wood, in clouds of dust. Men jumped
OV


MARGARET ADELAIDE WILSON
285
Cross
as
from their cars and ran, but the Yaqui was ahead of them. Like
light he had reached Hansen and was dragging him to the ground.
A knife gleamed in the sun, and Hansen would have spoken no
more if the pony in his lunging had not struck the Yaqui's up-
lifted arm. The knife clattered from his fingers, pinning a bit
of Hansen's skin to the ground. The Indian dropped across his
intended victim and lay still.
I remember glancing at Mrs Robbins in the uproar and wonder-
ing what emotion it was that made of her face a grinning mask.
She kept jerking the reins, her eyes on the figure stretched across
the burly and groaning Hansen.
Then everyone suddenly waked up and as the Yaqui showed
signs of returning consciousness, he was caught by half a dozen
strong hands and pulled to his feet. He paid no attention to
pushings and shovings, but looked in a daze at the woman on the
wagon; and having read no orders there suddenly became docile
and walked away between his captors.
"Gentle as a child," said one of the men afterwards. “Come
to think of it, he didn't show up so bad, that Yaqui. He was
trying to defend a woman, you know.”
But there was no getting around the fact that the Yaqui had
attempted assault with a deadly weapon, and Olaf Hansen was
not going to let him off. Johnny Carr came to the help of his man
and engaged a lawyer at the county seat to defend him.
"Finest workman I ever had on the place, and the bays dote on
him,” said soft-hearted Johnny. “Can't be really dangerous when
he's so kind to horses."
"I'm afraid that won't weigh much with the modern jury,"
my father retorted drily. “Remember that this is an age of auto-
mobiles, my friend.”
No one knew how Mrs Robbins felt about being summoned as
a witness. I am glad to say, however, that without meaning to
she gave Hansen a bad half hour. She told in her impassive voice
how long she had been waiting in the fruit line and how anxious
she had been. "Mr Robbins has dizzy spells and I don't like for
him to be alone long,” she explained. “I can only haul a few
boxes at a time, the horse being so small, and it don't take but a
minute to unload them, so I slip in anywhere I see a chance. It
ain't as if I hindered anybody else by going ahead of my turn."


286
THE YAQUI
Hansen reddened and began to squirm, but Mrs Robbins was
not looking at him.
"This Indian here,” she went on, "he looked back at me when
the truck got off the scales, and I thought he meant me to come on.
I was just driving up when Mr Hansen's team turned out square
in front of me. It almost turned my wagon over and this Indian
-well, I guess others can tell what happened better than I can.
I was too busy minding my horse.”
That was the affair as Mrs Robbins saw it; and while she told
her story the prisoner sat with his arm in a sling, his brilliant
eyes brooding on her face, the picture of wild beauty caught. One
felt the dusty courtroom alive and magical, just to see him there.
"Pretty, pretty, pretty,” he murmured as Mrs Robbins sat down.
I followed his glance, suddenly afire to know what it was that
charmed him; and then I thought I saw. When Mrs Robbins
sat down it was to a repose that was like nothing in our life.
She somehow suggested dusky pagodas, with those slanting, down-
ward-looking eyes, those massive knees, that smooth round chin.
The Yaqui, a child of fire and passion, perhaps saw dimly here a
better way, the way of passionless repose. He worshipped as at
the shrine of one of those elder goddesses known by his people
in Asia before a chance storm had swept them away to this crude
new world.
Mr Robbins was called, and as Mrs Robbins helped him to his
feet the prisoner made a sharp movement.
"Quien?” he asked aloud of Johnny Carr, and Johnny looking
at him in mild surprise answered in Spanish, “Her husband.”
A cry rang out such as I suppose that room had never heard
before. Inarticulate, yes, if you analyse it by the symbols we
have devised to cloak emotion. But every man in that room felt
a clapping-to of his heart at the cry, and in the after silence
every man looked away from his neighbour as if fearful of read-
ing his naked heart.
Mr and Mrs Robbins alone stood unmoved, Mr Robbins staring
with his pale eyes to find the source of the interruption, Mrs
Robbins pushing his cane into his hand, dusting the sleeve of his
alpaca coat.
"Well, did ye want to ask me something ?” said Mr Robbins
querulously. He tapped his cane, but no one heeded. The


MARGARET ADELAIDE WILSON
287
W
ca
lawyers bent to confer with Hansen and then in most irregular
fashion the court announced that the charge was to be changed
to one of simple assault. The prisoner was fined twenty-five dollars
and allowed to go.
Johnny Carr paid the fine and put his hand on the Yaqui's
shoulder.
"All right, Agostino,” he said kindly. "You're free, but I'm
going to keep your knife for you."
The Yaqui turned like a man struggling out of a dream. The
black bang on his brow was damp with sweat and his eyes were
strained. “Mañana, patrón," he said clinging to the knife.
“Look here,” said Johnny, “don't touch Hansen. I stand instead
of you, amigo, and if you hurt Hansen they blame me. Sabe?”
The Yaqui looked at him. “Si,” he muttered with a weary
gesture. “Hansen no me importa nada-no matter now."
Outside the courthouse people were getting into their cars and
they eyed the Yaqui curiously as he went to the single wagon
where Mrs Robbins was helping her husband to the seat. He
watched motionless until with a first sign of disturbance Mrs
Robbins scowled at him. He slipped up to the fat pony and laid
his cheek against that wilful cheek, then looked once more at the
woman on the seat and we who were near heard that liquid plaint
of "pretty, pretty, pretty.”
"Get ap!” said Mrs Robbins and jerked the reins. The pony
moved away by angry jumps and the Yaqui stood alone, bare-
headed in the sun. The dusty road was back of him, running
straight and white to the shouldering ranges; a sharp primitive
landscape of violent colours and brooding shadows.
It was barely light next morning when Johnny Carr drove into
our place and called my father, who had just come home from a
night's vigil beside a sick baby and was making himself coffee
in the kitchen.
“Want you at the Robbins place," I heard him say. “My Yaqui
_” he lowered his voice so that I heard no more, and before I could
dress and come down, my father had jumped in with Johnny
Carr and they were gone..
I conjured up terrible pictures of a savage run amok and killing
right and left; and dressing hurriedly I took our own car and
followed to the Robbins ranch.
W


288
THE YAQUI
The Robbins place was a flat bit a mile from the village, with a
shabby portable house guiltless of vines or flowers, set in a sandy
corner near the road. There were two or three cars drawn up by
the road-side and a group of ranchers stood by the steps, my
father with his surgeon's bag among them. No one seemed to
be doing anything. Mr Robbins sat on the steps, peering about
him like a bewildered mole. Mrs Robbins stood beside him, and
as I came near I saw a figure on the sand. It was the Yaqui, and
in his heart was the knife that had been the chief witness against
him the day before.
Mrs Robbins looked at me, and as if another woman's presence
had power to loose her tongue, she broke into slow speech.
"He'd taken some notion about me,” she offered, her tapering
fingers at her throat. “I hardly noticed till yesterday. . . . This
morning just as it was light I saw his face at the window. I guess
I screamed ... the next moment it was gone. I heard a fall
and a kind of sigh, and after a little I came out ... and he was
there."
She looked down at the dead man, then back at her husband,
and those deep-set slanting eyes suddenly darkened with a strange
gust of trouble. She threw her apron over her head and went swiftly
into the house.
"Enough to upset anybody,” murmured Johnny Carr. “I spose
we'd better not touch the body till the coroner comes, eh, Doc?”
"He'll be here in a few minutes now," said my father.
I looked again at the figure on the ground. He was more beauti-
ful than dreams, the pallor of death touching the fine-drawn cheek,
the faintly smiling lips. The living men about him seemed rough
and ill-formed in comparison yet it was as if each had caught
dignity from the dead.
"Queer!" muttered Olaf Hansen, looking and turning away,
then turning reluctantly to look again at the mystery before him.



GROUP OF MEXICAN BOYS. BY HENRY J. GLINTENKAMP






Plut
PEONS WASHING FEET AT FOUNTAIN. BY HENRY J. GLINTENKAMP





:
LAST PAGES
BY ANATOLE FRANCE
With Annotations by Michel Corday
Translated From the French by J. Lewis May
IV
In The White Stone which was published in 1907, "It will not be given
to us, even to the youngest of us,” wrote Anatole France, "to see the close
of the era of arms.” In the same book occur singularly prophetic state-
ments concerning the character of the coming conflicts.
Industrial violence breeds military violence. ... Trade rival-
ries kindle international hatreds that can be quenched only in
blood. Like the feudal state, the capitalist state is a war-like
state. Under the existing régime of nationalist production it is
the guns that fix tariffs, set up customs-barriers, open and close
markets. A war of extermination is inevitably fomented by the
economic conditions which control the civilized world to-day.
There must be created for the people, and by the people, a
mutual love of country. Let us preserve, respect, and uphold
those national organizations which, in the present stage of human
evolution, are the necessary forms of social life. Let us remem-
ber that the disintegration of the free peoples, the downfall of
the intellectual nations would, far from paving the way for the
union of free nations, swiftly subject the Latin races of Europe
to the domination of a barbarian autocracy. The free nations
must enter, not dead, but living, into the world-wide Federation.
When that day dawns, may it shine upon a France that has lost
neither her name, nor the memory of her glorious past; neither
her power, nor her genius. May it behold her standing firm, her
brow encircled with the crown of olive, proud of being a good
worker, striving not to be outstripped by any of her sisters in
the ascent to the shining peaks of Concord and Peace.


290
LAST PAGES
Detesting war, Anatole France shared with Alfred de Vigny a concept of
the army as a chosen body of devoted souls, isolated from their fellows, "a
monastery on the march,” and in paying tribute to Colonel Picquart, he com-
pared him with
one of those soldiers whom Alfred de Vigny had seen or imag-
ined, calm heroes of the daily round, who invest the performance
of the humblest duties with the nobility that is within them, for
whom the fulfilment of routine tasks constitutes the poetry of
everyday life.
Imbued as he was with the Latin spirit, he admired Rome and all things
Roman, especially the Roman concept of peace with victory; and was fond
of repeating the formula imposed finally upon the entire world: “They
desired that their vanquished foes should become their friends.” In a state-
ment made to the newspapers, during the first months of the war, he
paraphrased it as follows:
Our victory shall not be stained with crime. ... We pro-
claim that the French people will admit the vanquished foe to
their friendship.
Although seventy years of age, he offered himself for military service.
Yet truly a pacifist, he cherished the hope and expectation of the coming
of universal peace.
wa
In a word, every nation, white or yellow, deems itself the
greatest in the world. Every nation has a taste for war and
delights in carnage. When the carnage is organized, it is called
war and is held to be the finest, the noblest, and the most profit-
able occupation in the world.
But are we therefore to say that it will always be thus, and
that universal peace will never come to pass? Since its remote
beginnings, humanity has passed through many phases; surely
this present phase, in which one power is set up against another,
cannot endure for ever. And we may entertain the hope that,
following the successive associations which welded together the
family, the tribe, the nation, mankind will at length be joined
together in a United States of the World. In some distant future,
America or Japan will decide that matter, if, as Monsieur
Couchoud gives us to understand, the world must some day be
either American or Japanese.
Meanwhile let us make the coming of Peace the great desire of


ANATOLE FRANCE
291
our hearts. Let us desire it, because desire is creative force, the
sole creative force whose power is felt throughout the universe.
Let us write and write again the name of Peace, for after all, those
early Scandinavians who believed in the virtue of runes, had a
vague instinct of the power of ideas; a word traced on a wind-tossed
leaf may change the fate of the world.
The following words are taken from an address to the Congress of
Teachers assembled at Tours in August 1919:
La
In moulding the child, you are shaping the edifice of the future.
What a task it is, at this crisis of our history, when the world
is crumbling in pieces about us, when old social structures are
collapsing beneath the weight of their own misdeeds, and when
victors and vanquished are sinking side by side into a commo
slough of misery, gazing at each other with looks of mutual
abhorrence.
It is the teacher's duty to imbue the child with a love of peace
and the works of peace. He must instil hatred of war, and banish
from the pupil's tasks everything which could excite hatred of the
foreigner, hatred even of the foes of yesterday; not that we must
show indulgence to crime and absolve all those who are guilty,
but because in every nation the victims of wrongdoing far exceed
in number the actual perpetrators of disaster. My friends, see
to it that hate is hated.
In 1923 he addressed as follows American women who came "to take part
in the restoration of our war-stricken provinces":
Mesdames, I am given to understand that you will not dis-
dain the greeting of an old man who, after having espoused all
the political errors of his time, has come, at the close of his days,
to see that truth resides in government by the people, for the
people.
You come from a country that is both industrious and rich,
to a land oppressed by a glory fraught with disaster, a land which
suffers from that burden more cruelly than its pride will suffer
it to avow.
You are greatly welcome. Repairing the ravages of war is,
however, not our only task. You are women, and women are
more courageous than men. Be the saviours of humanity
С СО
mer


292
LAST PAGES
Be it your task to attack the monster that devours mankind
to make war on war, war to the death.
From this time forward, hate war with quenchless hatred.
Hate it as you contemplate its wrongs; hate it when you see
it adorned with the splendours of triumph, with the palms of
victory.
Let your hatred of it be a mortal hatred. Slay it!
Women! Mothers! Our grandchildren shall behold a United
States of Europe; they shall see a Universal Republic.
Great-hearted women, pass onward through the world with
these sentiments in your hearts. You will save Europe, and
bring happiness to all the earth.
d
When in Sweden, mistrusting an unstable peace, Anatole France wrote:
The most horrible of wars was followed by a treaty which was
not a treaty of peace but a prolongation of war. It will spell
the ruin of Europe unless, at long last, she finds a place for
reason in her deliberations.
Many of his last utterances were concluded with this prayer, "May we be
good Europeans.”
At the Trocadéro, celebrations were being held in honour of his eightieth
birthday. Upon this his last public appearing, four months before his death,
he made an effort to say a word in response to every speech. Pale but erect,
he stood at the edge of his box, and with all the force at his command,
said, “Let us make Peace. If not, we shall not be forgiven.”
In May 1924, having formed a plan of publishing what he had written
about the war, he proposed to set aside anything which did not accord with
his views of the moment. Some articles, for example, written at the beginning
of the war had been, he felt, set down not only in indignation but in
ignorance.
I had even suffered myself to make little speeches to the sol-
diers, living or dead, and I regret it as the outstanding mistake
of my life.
In the month of August, in the presence of his wife and grandson, when
he felt that the end was at hand, he once again carefully stipulated his wishes,
specified things to be suppressed, and indicated the entire order of arrange-
ment. With regard to the war, his emphatic last words were:
We must conclude by showing that the crowning wrong of
the war was its prolongation.


ANATOLE FRANCE
293
THE DIALOGUE ON ASTRONOMY
A Talk on Astronomy is the last piece of writing upon which Anatole
France was engaged. In connexion with his work upon it under the lime-
trees in his garden at La Béchellerie in July 1924, he was reading a book
by M Alphonse Berget, entitled Le Ciel.
Anatole France had set forth in notes, the characteristics of each planet
"which the genius of man has weighed and measured,” its dimensions com-
pared with the earth, the duration of its day and year, the number of its
satellites, the nature of its atmosphere, its distance from the sun, the heat
and light irradiated by it. Thus Mars, Venus, Neptune, Uranus, et cetera,
has each its fiche. The sun also is included, "aureoled by a crown of
hydrogen.” The stars he had classified in accordance with their brilliance,
their speed, and their distance from the earth. The nearest star, Alpha of
the Centaur, was eight trillion leagues away, eight thousand times farther
away than Neptune.
Although the heavenly phenomena were familiar to him, he was always
astonished “to behold the stars not as they are but as they were when the
luminous ray which we now contemplate began its journey.” The star
which appears to scintillate before our eyes may have ceased to exist a thou.
sand years ago, if light takes a thousand years to traverse the distance which
separates us from that star. And he grumbled at those “unkind inclina-
tions of the planetary axes which expose us to the successive changi's of
the seasons."
When he was studying the birth of the worlds, he noted that the spiral
nebula of the Canes Venatici was "the most ancient evidence of the existence
of matter." He once more put the old question to himself, the question
whether life on this earth of ours is not an accidental phenomenon, a
mouldiness, a lichen, and whether "we ourselves are not the product of
some unhealthy decomposition.” He tried to estimate the length of time
that might have elapsed between the formation of the earth and the appear-
ing upon it of organic matter—"in which we do not see life, but in which
perhaps life is.”
He considered also the hypothesis which would postpone the inevitable
cooling of the sun--which asserts that planets will fall into the sun and
restore its vigour, as in the fable of the Earth and Helios.
In addition to these notes, we find the log of one of those voyages upon
which he so loved to embark, “across the solitudes of frozen ether." He
described, as he passed on his way, the physiognomy of each planet. He
showed the whole of our solar system speeding on its way towards the con-
stellation of Hercules. Then crossing those frontiers “which our sight,
armed with glasses and directed by abstruse calculations is unable to pierce,"
he penetrated into those infinite depths within which stars are forever dying
and coming to birth. He said in conclusion:
The heavens, which human science explores, are not lapped in
tranquillity. They are the theatre of scenes of death, of unim-
aginable catastrophes, and they, too, bring forth in travail.


294
LAST PAGES
Geology, botany, and palaeontology, also had attraction for Anatole
France. Little given to reading periodicals, he subscribed for a certain
medical review till the end of his life, and new scientific theories never left
him indifferent. In a letter written in 1922, he says, “I am reading with
interest a book on Einstein, in which the ideas of that scientist are explained
without recourse to mathematics."
He observed one day that Sherlock Holmes knew nothing about motor-
cars, telephones, and wireless telegraphy; and that with these, he could
devise for his hero an entirely new set of adventures. One of those who first
ventured to make a flight in an aeroplane, he remarked in alluding to the
man whom he had had as pilot on that occasion:
He warned me that the landing would be sudden. But in this
he exhibited no less delicacy than virtuosity because, when he
spoke, we had already come to earth without my having so much
as noticed it.
He ever recognized the necessity for an alliance between Science and
Letters, and says in The Bloom of Life:
- Science divorced from Letters remains mechanical and dull,
and Letters divorced from Science are empty and hollow, for
Science is the substance of Letters.
THE CYCLOPS
Towards the end of 1919 Anatole France conceived the idea of writing
a novel to be entitled The Cyclops-a tragi-comic satire on humanity, after
the style of The Revolt of the Angels and Penguin Island.
The action takes place in the future. A yacht is wrecked on the coast
of Sicily. The passengers are saved. One of them thinks he sees “a giant
seated on one of the mountain-peaks." He is told that he imagines it. Then
another passenger exclaims, “I recognize the giant. It's a Cyclops."
How comes it that they find a Cyclops in Trinacria? The
Cyclops, who had disappeared before civilization, reappear now
that war has again plunged the world in barbarism.
The proposed plot is confirmed by a second note:
Cyclops anterior and posterior to civilization. Sicily had gone
back to its pre-Homeric state when the yacht was shipwrecked.
The following reply is addressed to the shipwrecked passenger who first
thought that he had seen a giant:


ANATOLE FRANCE
295
II
You have been taken in by a trick of Nature. It is a crag.
In the same way, people once thought they saw the head of
Napoleon on a mountainous island. It was close down on the
summit and was topped by the famous Napoleonic hat. Now
that twenty centuries have passed over the ashes of Napoleon,
his image has faded from men's minds and travellers no longer
see it above the island peaks.
The shipwreck, then, took place twenty centuries after Napoleon's death;
and in what way were the Cyclops occupied ? Alas, they made war, as is
evident from the following outline of the novel, the word "Act” being taken
to mean “Part.”
ACT I
The shipwrecked folk.
The Satyrs.
Philosophic Dialogue.
Polyphemus, son of Poseidon and the nymph Thoosa.
Polyphemus, who is blind, is at war with the other Cyclops.
ACT II
Mobilization.
Philosophic Dialogue.
The Satyrs, mobilized.
ACT III
Polyphemus deems himself victor.
ACT IV
Defeat of Polyphemus.
nated by odyssey relating the regard to the
Apart from these, we find still other notes concerning the regions desig-
nated by mythology as the home of the Cyclops; two or three passages
from the Odyssey relating to Ulysses' arrival in the Land of the Cyclops
and, finally, information with regard to the tonnage, dimensions, and fittings
of the yacht.
In June 1921, after having finished The Bloom of Life, Anatole France
writes:
I have finished the book about the memories of my young days.


296
LAST PAGES
I should like to commit myself to a more serious task, under the
guise and outward semblance of a piece of burlesque.
In November 1921, having that same year been awarded the Nobel
Prize for Literature, Anatole France made known his intention of writing a
book against war. He expatiated on the advantages of making use of
allegory for a work of that nature.
I wish to write this book in such a manner as will offend the
susceptibilities of the least possible number of people, the least
possible number of marshals, nay, of corporals. So I shall give
it an allegorical form, as I did Penguin Island. Fables have this
advantage: they enable a writer to present truth with a minimum
of harshness and a maximum of effectiveness. Rabelais would
have been burnt alive if he had not used allegory. Pierre Chaîne
was able to say all manner of things by putting them in the
mouth of an animal clad in blue. I should like to slaughter lies
without wounding men. . . . In fiction, it is true, blows are
likely to glance off a little, but you can, by reason of this fact,
hit the harder.
At my age, we either lose our memory, or else we remain in
ignorance of new customs, and so there are many advantages in
writing an allegorical story. In fiction you can do just as you
like. If I commit solecisms, if I make people dine at seven o'clock,
no one will be able to find fault, for the whole thing is fantasy.
INT
When he reluctantly admitted to a preference among his books, it was
evident that he preferred those in which he had set forth opinions, above
those “in which he had been able to express convictions—saying what he
thought.”
The Cyclops, then, which was to have been at once “a book of opinions”
and an allegory tempted him, but he delayed, saying in self-defence:
I'm too old. Look at Van Dongen's portrait of me.
He had also projected, as he expressed it, a "little novel" on Napoleon.
Napoleon has left Elba. He has gone ashore at Golfe Juan and is
making his way toward Paris. In the neighbourhood of Grenoble, he halts
at the château of one of his adherents, a rich Dauphiny landlord. The
owner of the château is out hunting and upon his return, Napoleon says
to him, in a bantering tone, “Well, you didn't expect to find me here ?"
Anxiety about another matter, the hostess forthwith communicates to her
husband: their little daughter is ill. For the father, the mother, and the
whole household, this attack of measles absorbs attention to the exclusion
of everything else, taking precedence of the Emperor's return, of his pres-


ANATOLE FRANCE
297
ence there, and of all the mighty events which were shortly to convulse
the world.
· Anatole France had visited the Golfe Juan and Grenoble and had, he
thought, at La Béchellerie two hundred volumes concerning the Emperor's
sojourn on the Isle of Elba and his return to France. After the war, how-
ever, he was no longer tempted to write the book on the escape from Elba.
PIEDAGNEL
Firmin Piédagnel is a character of minor importance in the first part of
The Elm Tree on the Mall. The son of an invalid shoemaker, whose
shop was under the shadow of the church of Saint-Exupére, he was the most
brilliant pupil at the Seminary. He was, however, without instinct for
theology or for the priesthood. From the instructors at the Seminary, he
had acquired merely the graces of classical scholarship and a kind of senti-
mental mysticism. The Abbé Lantaigne, the Superior of the Seminary,
feared lest in this child, he might be fostering a redoubtable enemy of the
Church—a Renan perhaps, and without so much as a word of explanation,
dismissed him. Firmin Piédagnel was at first amazed, then rebellious.
And suddenly a feeling was born and grew within him, a feel-
ing which sustained and fortified him, a hatred of priests, an
undying and fertile hatred, a hatred commensurate with a life-
time.
Anatole France would have liked to develop this character, writing a
novel around this delicate-souled and gentle person whom he, in some ways,
closely resembled.
He had already employed the not uncommon method, whereby an author
takes a passage in one of his own books as the starting point for another
book. A Mummer's Tale is an expansion of a short story called Chevalier
after the name of its hero. And Thaïs had an almost identical origin. He
had roughed out the story of Thais, Anatole France explained, in a Fantasy
on Lebiez and Barré, the murderers, who displayed, even when mounting the
guillotine, a demeanour of such moving piety that the priest, who was
there to assist them, was filled with wonder. Purified by the monk Paphnu-
tius, Thaïs would go straight to Paradise, while Paphnutius himself, who
had lost his soul for her sake, would groan in everlasting torment.
A sequel to The Revolt of the Angels is implied in a note which reads
as follows:
The Sequel to the Revolt of the Angels.
What befalls the Angels during the war.
Their reflections.
The lamentations of Satan.
The triumph of Michael.


298
LAST PAGES
MONSIEUR GAULARD
Though it seems to form no part of any projected work, the following
sketch belongs to the series of satirical portraits of learned professors which
enliven the pages of Pierre Nozière, Little Pierre, and The Bloom of Life.
eV
Monsieur Gaulard afforded me this spectacle for the thousand
and first time. He was an imbecile, but of a rare species. We
do not do justice to our imbeciles. They are always astonishing
us. Their diversity is amazing. Nature has created innumerable
varieties of them. Her resources, in this kind of task, are inex-
haustible, whereas she gets out of breath at once when she creates
a man of intelligence. Monsieur Gaulard, a patron of letters,
never understood a line of what he read.
"It's abstract," he would suddenly remark, breaking off in his
eading. His jaw would drop and he would cease to think. For
he thought only with mouth shut.
He was tall, thin, and booby-faced. His enormous mouth
housed an enormous tongue which filled it entirely. And when
his mouth opened, his tongue eased itself by emerging through
the open door. His visage, which inclined to sadness, took on
an expression of profound gloom, as often as in desperation, he
ejaculated, “It's abstract!”
He had read much, and chiefly admired Bossuet and Victor
Cousin. He would have been happy, if he had not finally come
to the conclusion regarding the teaching of those two great authors
that "it, too, was abstract.”
What significance was attached by him, to the term "abstract,”
this farthest confine of his thoughts? It is probable that for him
the word meant “difficult to grasp, impossible to understand.”
Anatole France was not content merely to deny and to demolish. In The
Red Lily, he set down as its crowning precept:
Let us give unto men for witnesses and judges, Irony and Pity.
Twenty years later he reaffirmed this sentiment in The Gods are Athirst:
Men are not sufficiently perfect to exercise justice in the name
of virtue: the rule of life should be indulgence and kindness of
heart.
The End


EVENING
BY CECIL GREY
MT HE cigarette drooped in his fingers in such a way that the
1 smoke flittered up occasionally into his eyes. He didn't
care; for the few moments of smarting he closed his eyes, indiffer-
ent. When the slight pain ceased he opened his eyes, slothfully,
heedlessly, and without conscious movement wiped away the tears
with one hand; then his hand fell, drooping too, back upon the arm
of the chair. He was hunched in the chair, very low down; his legs
looked freaky, fading in the blue dark of the room. He didn't
notice his legs; he was thinking. When his cigarette burned down
and another one was lighted, it was not he who lighted it; if he
had noticed it he would not have known that it was new. He
was protected.
Thoughts were queer things; you gathered one out of the dim-
ness, twirled it about in your brain-fingers, cauterized it, harrowed
it, ensnarled it, made it a crystal, murky yellow-grey; then you dis-
carded it. A space—and you reached out for another, and another,
until finally the crystal came clear water-white, and you smiled,
successful. If the crystal never quite escaped opaqueness, by how-
ever small a degree, then you were a failure to-night and your
sleep was a running-away.
Sometimes you couldn't think at all. You sat down, ready to
drop away, and you stayed right in the chair, and your crossed leg
got prickly; the smoke from your cigarette kept getting into your
eyes and making you angry; you smoked one cigarette after another
and it was tiring and annoying to have continually to be lighting
a new one. But when everything was right-you thought always
when you sat down that you were right—and you were slouched
down, your head rested finely on the soft leather back of the chair,
something lowered over you, a veil, a web, gossamer light, and you
were not in the room, were nowhere you were just a mind-
entity, undriven by volition and conscious will. You did not try
to capture thoughts; you just captured them, or failed to. You
realized how perfect it was only when you were brought back, and


300
POEM
sat on for a little while recalling yourself, re-establishing yourself,
readjusting yourself to undesirable action. Yet—and you couldn't
understand why; it really wasn't your fault-on the nights you
were a failure there was a hurt in you and you wanted to hide.
To-night, successful, he came back reluctantly. He always
had to come back, there was no escaping that; he hated it-hated
it. Life; the door, and then the staircase-Why couldn't one. ...
He walked slowly up the stairs.
POEM
BY E. E. CUMMINGS
supposing that i dreamed this)
only imagine, when day has thrilled
you are a house around which
i am a wind-
your walls will not reckon how
strangely my life is curved
since the best he can do
is to peer through windows, unobserved
-listen, for(out of all
things) dream is noone's fool;
if this wind who I am prowls
carefully around this house of you
love being such,or such,
the normal corners of your heart
will never guess how much
my wonderful jealousy is dark
if light should flower:
or laughing sparkle from
the shut house (around and around
which a poor wind will roam



TORSO.
BY ALEXANDER ARCHIPENKO






TORSO
BY ALEXANDER ARCHIPENKO





EMILY DICKINSON
BY CHARLES K. TRUEBLOOD
IN Emily Dickinson there seems to have been much of the vision-
I ary; if not in the general understanding of the word, then at
least in the meaning that her imagination inclined to the form of
inner vision rather than inner hearing, or other of the interior
analogues of sense. Her verse-world, so brilliant and so intense,
seems yet in a characteristic way, a world of soundless contempla-
tion, of "quietness distilled,” interrupted rarely, and perhaps only
on her own terms, by small low sounds, or those falling gently on
the ear, from far off. Not that she was without images of things
vividly heard or felt, but that such images were not so frequent in
comparison to images of things vividly seen, and when they did
occur their vividness was more apt to be achieved by visual than by
auditory or other figures; as for example, her “blue, uncertain, stum-
bling buzz" of the fly, or her wind as "tufts of tune," or as “cara-
vans of sound.” Again, she found, it seemed—for certainly she could
communicate-a particular pleasure in vivid stillness, such as the
silence of noon on certain summer days, or the soundless streak of
a falling star, or the noiseless brilliance expressed in her conceit of
butterflies “leaping off banks of noon, plashless as they swim.”
This distillation of temperament into vision, this brilliant quiet,
might perhaps be more apparent if one contrasted her poetry with,
for instance, the verse-world of Masefield, so thronged with the
rich torturous riot of every sense. Yet in such contrasts we should
be on guard; it is easy to make too much of a phrase. But if we
accept the phrase with enlarging qualifications, if we understand
it as only a hint of characteristics which may be more than the
words can denote, or as a tentative bearing taken in surroundings
where all is somewhat evanescent and transcending, then it may
be of value in pointing at the great delicacy and great force which
seemed to coexist in her individuality.
The combination of great delicacy and great force tends, no
doubt, to be self-destructive in a serious sense; and we are not


302
EMILY DICKINSON
without indications that it was so with her. In temperament par-
ticularly, delicacy and force might be considered to consist of the
same thing, namely, feeling; delicacy relating to the subtlety of
the incitement, and force to the depth of the resulting emotion.
And that she possessed both such force of heart and such exquisite-
ness, there is much evidence, subtle as well as obvious. . . . It
is evident in that pleasure in contemplation, un-invaded by the
disturbing messages of the inferior senses, that delight in brilliant
quiet, which has already been noted. It is evident in all that
one may suppose as to the explanation of such an attitude, and
deduce from the belief that her poetry, like other very original
poetry, is the image, not of random thoughts or idle observations,
but of fundamental wish, central to mental being. It is most of
all obvious in the shrinking and reluctance with which she met
the most usual and ordinary, even the most affectionate and tender,
of human contacts.
Her shrinking was no gesture. It became an avoidance and a
flight. Her involuntary reluctance grew with reiteration into de-
liberate escape. It passed into gossip, and from gossip into legend,
in which it became sufficiently fantastic, one gathers, to furnish
reason for an authoritative biography. Turning through this biog-
raphy, the Life and Letters, one has the impression that she fled
the world because she felt indeed that it was too much with her.
And taking at its face value, as in fact we should, the description
therein of her sensibility~from which it appears that the burning of
a neighbour's straw shed more played upon her than an earthquake
would upon the average person-we may indeed consider that she
escaped from circumstance because it too rollingly echoed in her
mind. Yet here again we might well be on guard. For while we
can accept this truth of her as far as it goes, we may find, if we
trace the growth of her inwardness both forward and back, that
the truth so stated is not quite all the truth. The ivory tower
aspect of her seclusion is perfectly intelligible as a refinement upon
the general world, as a preservation of treasures of feeling from an
excess of irrelevance, as a great factor, no doubt, in contribution
to the purity and flowering of her rare poetic instinct. Yet per-
haps this seclusiveness was but the outer appearance of an inward
1 Life and Letters of Emily Dickinson. Edited by M. D. Bianchi. Illus-
trated. 8vo. 386 pages. Houghton Mifflin Company. $4.


CHARLES K. TRUEBLOOD
303
bias which not only began much earlier and deeper, but also, in the
end, went much farther. Her solitude, one comes to feel, began
long before it became obvious, and went much deeper than was
ever apparent. And her rare subtle knowledge of the interiors
of the spirit, which we now so much remark upon, was perhaps
derived from the length, as well as the sadness and the intensity of
her dwelling there.
Her solitude must indeed have dated, in some part, from the
time she began temperamentally to be more than a child. It seems
reasonable to think it began in her relation to her family, that is,
really her relation to her father; for the family all dwelt, though
they seemed not to have been aware of it, in the shadow of his
personality. He was a man of gentle feeling, great intelligence,
but tremendous primness. The last, perhaps, was his marking trait,
for the public encomiums of him betray a general impression of
immense respectability. As a young man he had signed his kindly
frosty letters to his fiancée as her "most ob’t servant, Edward
Dickinson.” And his portrait rather confirms the tale. We see a
handsome man of eminent look, but with that perhaps unconscious
austerity in lips and brow and carriage of the head, which strikes
with awe, not alone the hearts of sinners, but how much more
those of the ingenuous and the timid. A culprit could, in imagina-
tion, feel himself slipping, slipping, hopelessly, down the smooth
cold sides of that austerity—unless help were vouchsafed from
above, as often it was, except in reprehensible cases; yet none would
have dared hope for it.
But on the one marked character at the Dickinson hearth, the
force of his respectability was imperfectly effective. In Emily
there had been early apparent the sparkle of more than ordinary
question. It was timid Emily, alone of three hundred girls in the
Mt Holyoke Seminary, who publicly and victoriously defied the
regimen of Mary Lyon on the question of whether Christmas-day
should be spent with fasting and prayer at the seminary, or in cele-
bration at home with one's family. It was Emily, in the seemly
Dickinson household, who enjoyed irreverence, and who grew off-
hand with accepted revelation, and saw in the austerities of the
public God, merely an infinitude of tedium. It was Emily, only,
who could write whimsically to herself, regarding the God of her
own solitude:


304
EMILY DICKINSON
"I hope the father in the skies
Will lift his little girl,
Old-fashioned, naughty, everything,—
Over the stile of pearl!"
With the growth in force of so much individuality, what of the
forbearing, but massive and immovable respectability that was
Edward Dickinson? Could he understand a mind so like his, in
some ways, and so different? And what if he could not? Would
there be submerged collision? and with what result? Or if there
were no collision, what became of the opposition? Force does
not evaporate; and as to the growing fact of her force and the
established fact of her father's force, or the family force, there
could be no doubt.
Adjustment to one's world is generally thought to consist either
of remaking oneself or of remaking the world. But it seemed that
she did neither: she moved to a brilliant and subtle solitude leagues
within. Without shrinkage, but rather with an increase of her
mental and temperamental powers—or perhaps one should say an
increase in their effectiveness—a process of withdrawal inward
began, which, it seemed, never quite ended.
Her interiorization gained impetus from what is usually under-
stood to have been its main cause; this was her encounter with love.
It took place in 1853, her twenty-third year. She was, during this
year, in Washington and Philadelphia with her father, who at the
time was a member of Congress. In Philadelphia she met the man,
whose name is not revealed, with whom she fell in love; he was
married. When she realized the state of her feeling, she fled back
to Amherst, where he followed her. The biography relates that
one day
"Sister Sue looked up from her sewing to see Lavinia, pallid
and breathless from running, who grasped her wrist with hurrying
hand, urging 'Sue come! That man is here!-Father and Mother
are away, and I am afraid Emily will go away with him.'”
But it does not appear that the contemplated moral succour was
required for Emily. The Dickinson generations, it seemed, had
already spoken in her blood. She went on with life in her father's


CHARLES K. TRUEBLOOD
305
house, showing no outward mark of this crisis except an "unex-
plained picture in a heavy oval frame of gold,” hanging on the
wall of her room, and an increase of turning from the world,
which soon, no doubt, became apparent enough. “To the faithful,”
she wrote, “absence is condensed presence. To the others—but
there are no others.”
Now, one would think, she sought the rare inner air of spirit;
and it was now, perhaps, as the turmoil of the actual died upon her
ear, as she found in some degree the distance, the silence, the light,
the "bright detachment” which she sought in anguish, it was now
that her poems began, as the private day-book of her heart; for
she intended most of them, it seemed, for no other eyes. They
mark rememberably the character of her solitude for force and
delicacy. Could such tumultuous precision have been achieved
otherwise than through her characteristic visionism, so powerful
and yet so far from gross? In it only, perhaps, was the full force
of a great temperament to find an expression utter and complete,
tremendous and yet delicate. Indeed such burning filigree may
mark out for us, as well as anything can, how much more dis-
criminated, how much more useful to the mind and heart, how much
greater the world of vision can be than the worlds of the other
senses; and how much more we should choose it, if a choice were
to be made.
Perhaps it is because this was the direction which her brilliant
sílent vehemence took; perhaps it is because her retreat inward was
to the bright observatories, and not the dark recesses of spirit, that
her utterance shows so little of the morbidness which often accom-
panies the growth inward of mental being. In the deepest mazes
of her solitude, it seemed, touch was brilliantly kept with the
exteriors of the actual, by the clearest, the finest, and, for her,
the most characteristic of the senses. Perhaps the great vitality
of that contact by vision is the essence, in part, of her poetic
originality. “The eye begins its avarice," she wrote, and the
words may have more than their immediate meaning. Her indi-
viduality, apparently, made its impress upon her world especially
through vision; through vision she exercised her abounding share
in that fine lyric tyranny, which makes the poet's whole world the
private possession of his personality.
It may have been a phase of this visionism, existing in her love


306
EMILY DICKINSON
of contrasts, and coupled with an arch humour, which was at the
core of her characteristic whimsical charm. It is best shown in a
species of inverse hyperbole, a favourite mode with her, in which
the lion and the lamb are made to lie down together, in which
things strange and vast are put in the same figurative company with
things homely and small. She likes to speak of “Vesuvius at
home,” of God as “a noted clergyman,” or as "Papa above," of
the storm winds as “dogs defeated of a bone," of Eden as "the
ancient homestead,” or that "old-fashioned house we dwell in
every day,” of her own being as a tiny craft among "stately sails”
oblivious alike of its presence and its absence. These things, pos-
sibly, were only whimsicalities, but perhaps they were more too.
Since the poet cannot but draw his own likeness, and project the
properties of his own feeling into what he describes, was there,
in this inverse hyperbole, not only whimsicality, but-what was
another phase of her delicacy and her shrinking an effort to make
the gross world less strange and painful by stamping it with the
character of her own vision, by figuring it in the terms of her
own experience ?
It was thus perhaps that she rebuilt her world, of treasured and
familiar things, deep within, and distant from fearful circumstance.
Built too, seemingly, of the substance of vision, it was as powerfully
yet lightly wrought as she could make it. But the more she built
its loveliness, the more she was contained within it. And since
with so vital a temperament, the creative substance must have been
almost continuously forming, in a sort of reverberation to the deli-
cate pronouncements of the senses, the progress of her imprison-
ment must indeed have been steady. How keenly she became
aware of those unseen bars is only too evident in her great lyric
longings for escape; and the escape in this instance is a far dif-
ferent thing from the old escape from circumstance. It is the
prison of herself from which she now wants extrication. One sees
it first, perhaps, in her whimsical longing for namelessness:
“How dreary to be somebody!
How public, like a frog,
To tell your name the livelong day
To an admiring bog!"


CHARLES K. TRUEBLOOD
307
Or perhaps it first appeared in the wish, implied more than a few
times in her poetry, to be absorbed in a sympathetic force greater
than herself, or as great in a different way. And as the inward
tendency progresses, one begins to discern its characteristic final
forms. That brilliant inner prison is becoming too confining.
From longing for namelessness, one observes the progress to long-
ing for greater freedom. “What,” she wrote,
“What if I file this mortal off,
See where it hurt me,—that's enough,
And wade in liberty ?”
For that indeed is finally the sole escape for those who are too
much caught in the prisons of themselves.
Strong as was this lyric prison, it was yet based in other things,
outside her personality. It was, in fact, only a slender mansion
in her father's house. And when, in June 1874, her father suddenly
died, a strange, unthought-of night fell indeed on her cherished
“bright detachment.” If he had not understood her tempera-
mentally, or perhaps in any way, he had yet never intruded, and
he had shown an immense if prim tenderness, in which she and
the others of his family had long dwelt. How much he must
have been in that household we can only imagine, except as we
have it vividly said in his daughter's poem:
“We learn in the retreating
How vast an one
Was recently among us.
A perished sun
Endears in the departure
How doubly more
Than all the golden presence
It was before!"
And from her manner of speaking in numerous poems of life, death,
the grave, and eternity, it seems evident that this loss tore a ghastly
breach in her inner citadel. In these poems there is not the old note


308
EMILY DICKINSON
of longing, which was yet so airy and so alive; there is not the
whim in the description of the wind as having "no bone to bind
him,” which was also her description of her own wish-to-be. This
quietism is not so brilliant or so poised for soaring; instead there
are deep painful looks at the exteriors of our mortality, in those
final moments when the frost is mantling in the clay. Instead,
as elsewhere in her poems, of looking forward to the beginning of
the bodiless, there is here rather an overmuch of the ending of the
body. Instead of the privacy of the breeze, here is the privacy of
the low dwelling. The idea of escape seems to have metamorphosed
into the idea of refuge, and one cannot be sure but that the note
of refuge—in the tomb_was the note on which she ended. It is
indeed a possible conclusion to inwardness.
That her exquisite vision should have dwelt so steadfastly, so
powerfully, and so often, on the conclusion of our poor clay is per-
haps one of the most formidable of the objections to calling her
a mystic, as has been donemloosely, one would think. Would the
dead flesh have looked so stricken, if she had not been of "that
religion which doubts as fervently as it believes”? Indeed, in
calling her a mystic are we not blurring the outlines of her char-
acteristic effect? Is not to call her a mystic to deny, in a way, her
unequalled general sensitivity? The mystic is but too often
polarized by his sustained and indiscriminate ecstasy. But not in
all her life was she so polarized. Does not the immense value of
her poetry lie in the fact that rather than mysticism it is the rarest
of lyric asceticism? Is not that the secret of the strange fine in-
telligence of the heart, and the comfort that so many have found
in her, so many of the stricken? When has stoic's metal been
struck to a more exquisite chiming?
Consistent with the delicacy and the force of heart which were
noticed as so characteristic of her individuality, there appears as
perhaps her principal literary quality a certain lyric incisiveness,
a bright passionate brevity, a sensitive immediacy of word to
thought. In poetry one grows accustomed to think of incisiveness
as often secured by discreet abrasure; of the brevity in question
as a studied brevity, for which the faculties required may be merely
intelligence and fine attention; and of immediacy as the product
ess


CHARLES K. TRUEBLOOD
309
of much choosing. Yet in her case the reverse seems true. For
her, apparently, to think and write pointedly, briefly, and with
the happiest immediacy of word to thought was as natural as to
feel powerfully.
There is, in her verse, an obvious absence of studio finish. ...
She was evidently inattentive to the more or less "artistic” arts of
metrical and phrasal music, and appears readily capable of letting
the verse-scheme of a poem, and even the syntax, stumble or
scramble, in a curious carelessness of everything but the flash of
vision and the gold of phrase. What she says seems always said
with the choicest originality, but not always with poetic Auency,
or even much attempt at it. And while it perhaps should be re-
membered in this connexion, that most of her poems were written
strictly for herself, often probably as the notes of her thoughts,
the marginalia in her private book of experience, which she had
no idea that others than herself would ever see, it still does not
seem certain that the result would have been widely different had
she been writing formally and for publication.
These oddities of structure and finish seem to betray the fact
that a poem of hers is almost wholly first thought and not after-
thought. Compare her work with that of A. E. Housman, who
dealt with many of the same themes, and some of the difference
due to after-thought should appear. The verse of Housman, direct
and piercing as it is, seems yet to reflect multiplied exclusions, and
a final simplicity that has been minutely wrought. The poems of
Emily Dickinson seem to reflect simply the direct feelings of a pro-
found heart. They seem less works of infinitely considered art, in
which the effort has been guided to achievement by a subtly
taught sense of poetic effect, than merely the spontaneous motions
of a rich sensibility phrased with natural immediacy in language,
which, if irregular, is of sparkling definition.
There was, of course, nothing merely wandering about her poetic
effort. However wholly from the heart her poems may seem to
come, no one who much reads them can escape the impression
that poetry, in her hands, becomes in good share a mental magic.
Her trenchant measures are as free from the dwelling unction of
the merely sensuous as they are free from the mere piecing out
of insight. The penetrating phrases into which her thought and
feeling are sharpened are set down with a close economy that some-
times has the effect of extreme fine dryness. And as significance
101.
easures


310
EMILY DICKINSON
is the substance of her force, so her verse follows the forms of wit
as much as the forms of sense. Her poems might indeed be called
epigrams. They might be called conceits, too, being often so
whimsical, and so edging on quaintness in their originality; they
might be called conceits that is, were they less fervently intended.
And whether conceits or epigrams, they seem always at the key of
the often intangible matter, and have not only general pointedness
but specific point.
To the service of her feeling she brought, perhaps as corollary
to her characteristic inner vision, a rare and singular sense of words.
Words, to her, were a festival; and she spent, as the biography
notes, hours with the dictionary. And since there are not many
of her single words that would not have been feasible and usual in
ordinary intercourse, we can reasonably imagine that she must
have been finding again the hidden, vivid textures in old meanings,
restoring for herself the lost edges of ordinary expression, search-
ing out the forgotten but astounding faces of customary words. It
strikes one, too, that she had very positively that tremendous com-
mand of “things used as words," which, to Emerson, so marked
the authentic poet. And to this command, one cannot forbear
thinking, her escape from circumstance added, curiously, much
strength and nourishing. Is it too much to suppose that when she
contracted her existence, she increased, in certain ways, its depth
and height? that when she then looked at the things of her lessened
life, it was more than before with the remarkable eyes of the
imagination that she then erected the familiar objects in her
round of deeper days, with powerful lyric conviction into symbols
of far things? In her verse noon does not always mean merely
noon; it seems sometimes to stand for the possibilities of a greater
glory. Nor are storms seen from covert merely storms seen from
covert; they call up thoughts of the refuge foreverlasting, even
if that refuge be only the grave. It is not to be contended, surely,
that symbolism achieved through so rich a temperament cannot
add a weight to words.
Not only by symbolism, which seems a thing so elemental and
so directly of the heart, but by her figures of speech, the products
of her sense of similarity, her acute visualizing mentality, did she
add strength to her verse. Her characteristic figure, perhaps, was
metaphor, and it is apparently in the quality of her metaphor, and
eems


CHARLES K. TRUEBLOOD
: 311
in the fact that not only her metaphor, which out-stands, but all
the smaller parts of her poetic utterance are made of the same
vivid, chiefly visual substance, that her extraordinary poetic dis-
tinctiveness lives. Filled with the clearest colours and the most
consummate lights, her poetic speech seems alive, to its smallest
parts, with its special sparkle. Where is to be found a figurative
note like hers in its combination of delicate brilliance and trenchant
quaintness, its piquancy and its sincere fervour? It sets a mode
in imagination that could found no fashions, for its secret is not
detachable. Here, indeed, we are as close as we shall get to the
language of her individuality; and here we must rest merely with
observing the force of spirit evident in its lightest terms. It recalls
again that her poetry was not professional; that it was but a means
by which she constructed her "bright detachment," and partly
lightened a weight of thinking.
It must also have been, in the same direction, a laying up of the
treasures of comprehension, of her deep knowledge of the in-
teriors of the spirit, gained, evidently, with so much anguish. In
her poems, said to have been found, for the most part copied on
note-paper, and laid away, tied with ribbon, in little bundles,
each of six or eight sheets, one can refresh his feeling and thinking,
secure that in what he thus comes back to, he will find no waning
of choiceness. This brilliant understanding of the heart and its
suffering, this great sensory delicacy, is rare essential wealth, proof
against tarnish. It is seldom that one finds surer gold.


PARIS LETTER
March, 1926
e
M HERE was a time when we were, so to speak, incapable of
I leaving Paris, not just because as Frenchmen we had a horror
of travelling, nor altogether because we hated nature and the coun-
try—a prejudice which, apart from modifying foreign influences
during the romantic period, has characterized ten centuries of
French literature. Paris was a jealous city, demanding of the
faithful all or nothing. In order to really understand the capital,
divided as it was into a hundred coteries, into ruelles, and later
into salons, cafés, and boulevards, it was necessary to keep in touch
with the happenings of each day, with the gossip, the tendencies,
and the tastes of a public at once suspicious, hard to please, and
all-powerful. No longer an exacting tyrant, Paris is to-day a
modern woman, nervous, avid for novelty, offering herself to the
latest comer, in love with inconstancy, faithful only upon condi-
tion that her lover is unfaithful. But if the main interest of the
human drama is often elsewhere, Paris remains none the less the
most highly sensitized magnetic needle in the world, and it is im-
possible to be long away without wishing to take one's bearings by
her compass. Returning after six months' absence, I find several
twilights, a new dawn or two, and one or more revolutions in the
world of talent and thought. Not to mention an infinitude of
books with which alone in my study I build mountains out of the
thoughts of my fellow-writers. I cannot speak of them here, since
I must submit to the tragedy of being brief.
The year 1926 is ushered in by three important books which I
shall discuss later: Albertine Disparue, by Marcel Proust (the next
to last book in A la Recherche du Temps Perdu); Bella, a signifi-
cant novel by Giraudoux; and Les Faux Monnayeurs, by André
Gide. But before commenting upon them, I must clear the ground
of what has accumulated so quickly.
As first incidents of the season 1925-1926, let me speak of the
Goncourt Prize awarded to Maurice Genevoix, the author of the
novel, Raboliot, and of the Fémina Prize awarded to Joseph


PAUL MORAND
313
Delteil, in recognition of his essay on Jeanne d'Arc. The prestige
of the Goncourt Prize which, immediately after the war, was
unquestioned by a certain portion of the French public, has
diminished year by year. Recently the award has been made to
books that were mediocre, outmoded, and without lustre. If this
continues for two or three years, the Académie Goncourt and the
old Naturalists who are its members will fall into oblivion. The
time has passed when the book crowned by the Goncourts was of
necessity “the best seller of the year.”
At this moment in France, two phenomena, I think, are to be
noted. The first is a great Neo-Catholic revival. I must confine
myself here to an examination of its literary aspect. Since the
Great War, as everyone knows, there has been in France and in
many other countries a religious renaissance. Sufferings of war,
disappointments of peace, Bolshevism, ruins; everywhere people
have begun to organize resistance of mind to matter. A re-
crudescence of magic, of mysticism, and of the need to believe, as
well as the recent tentative union of several branches of the
Christian faith are all symptomatic. (Shall we perhaps some day
have the spectacle of a kind of “trust” of the various religions?)
Literature, furthermore, shows the effect of the new spirit. A
great writer, Paul Claudel, whose glory was for a time unjustly ob-
scured, has, thanks to the religious spirit that pervades his work,
achieved a new celebrity. The Catholic theorist and philosopher
Maritain, who sees in Thomism and in St Thomas Aquinas the
breviary of modern faith and thought, is editor of the publica-
tions entitled Le Roseau d'Or, which, with the series Christianisme,
published by Rieder, is full of new names and of works imbued
with an intense spirituality; among them the writings of Max
Jacob and the first Catholic poems of Jean Cocteau—Cocteau
having yielded ardent obedience to the new current. His conver-
sion, or more accurately, his filial submission to the Catholic reli-
gion was much talked of last summer. Several other literary con-
versions are announced. Paul Claudel, before returning as Ambas-
sador to Japan, published his Morceaux Choisis, and Figures de
Saints, studies in hagiography unequalled since the great book of
Ernest Hello, Physionomies de Saints. André Gide has translated
and revealed William Blake to that discriminating public which
is his. Two books on Saint Theresa will appear at the same time.


314
PARIS LETTER
The second phenomenon to be noted, is that the Super-Realistic
writers, the one-time Dadas, have gone over to Bolshevism and
have given their allegiance to Moscow. First occasioned by a
literary dispute (a noisy protest against nationalism, insults to
Paul Claudel, encouragement to Abd-el-Krim) their attitude has
since become fixed, and their leaders, Breton and Aragon, are to-
day editors of the Bolshevist review, Clarté, which, abandoning
the vague and stagnant welter of Barbussist humanitarianism, has
been rejuvenated by the united talent of the young Super-Realists.
This turn of affairs should not surprise us. Heirs of Barrès,
their goal like his was inevitably politics. It is all quite logical;
the cult of the unconscious, the liking for Russian literature, the
lure of Asia, everything was conducive to this result. And now
their position has become identical with that of Anatole France,
whom they hate ... and not without reason. One may question
of course whether the determination to make a clean sweep of the
past is consistent with a blind acceptance of Marxianism. How-
ever that may be, the slight rôle accorded the intellectuals by
Bolshevism and the disdain in which they are held, are not calcu-
lated to enhearten our new revolutionists. Perhaps they hope to
change all this, remembering that revolution in western Europe
has been possible only when prepared for and sponsored by men of
letters. In any case, the entrance upon the political scene of the
two most interesting writers of the younger generation will, I
hope, raise the tone of the debate, and provide the opportunity for
some pretty verbal warfare. All things considered, I should rather,
if I may say so, live guillotined by Aragon than honoured by
Paul Bourget.
Returning to the calmer waters of pure literature, I must call
attention to three remarkable first books, all published by the
Nouvelle Revue Française. The first is La Ville Anomyne by a
young French writer, André Beucler. Beucler, whose mother was
Russian, brings to French literature a new note, a note of strange-
ness and fantasy not unfamiliar in English and in German, but
hitherto unknown in French. The second book, Paulina 1880, is
a remarkable study in psychology, and at the same time a re-
strained, exact, and charming picture of Italy since 1870. The
third is Jacob, by Bernard Lecache, depicting certain Jewish milieux
in Paris. For Paris has become a little New York, a veritable
"melting-pot,” whose novel aspect tempts our younger writers.


PAUL MORAND
315
The new book of Drieu la Rochelle, entitled L'Homme Couvert
de Femmes, is his best work, and was received as the best work of
an author usually is—with less favour than his former books.
It is the picture of a somewhat lax society—which must not be
considered typical of French lifepresented with the attractive
mingling of softness and egotism, of mental inelasticity and gen-
erous scorn, which constitutes the appealing quality of this writer;
we need not stress certain obscenities which are after all only
the protest of a mind tormented by ideals of purity. Aragon's
Libertinage and La Femme Française have had on this book an
obvious and salutary infiuence. Méditation sur un Amour Défunt
was received last summer with moderate enthusiasm. The author,
M Berl, a young disciple of Drieu, has written a book which bears
the mark of his own individuality—simple and cynical; and dis-
tinguished by the analytic penetration which is characteristic of
his race. I should like to note in passing Le Navire Aveugle, by
J. Barreyre, interesting as a first book; and Battling Malone, by
Louis Hémon, hitherto unpublished, which, in contrast to Le
Navire Aveugle, is a last book-one of the many posthumous works
of the author of Maria Chapdelaine.
Now that everybody—not excepting the French-travels, books
on foreign countries have become more interesting and better
documented. The new edition of Maspéro's China may be added
to those standard works on the subject by Reclus, Hovelacque, and
Père Huc. Albert Londres' lively sketches, La Chine en Folie,
make entertaining reading; notably one very amusing caricature of
Tchang-Tso-Lin. Madame Sylvain Lévi, who accompanied her
husband on the triumphal tour of the Orient which the great
French student of India made two years ago, has published a travel-
diary, entitled Dans l'Inde.
As literary criticism I can recommend Lamartine, by P. Hazard,
R. Benjamin's Balzac (of the Maurois-Strachey school of bio-
graphical fiction) and by Frédéric Lefèvre, Les Entretiens avec
Paul Valéry, in which the great poet (whom the French Academy
has just elected to fill the chair of Anatole France) sets forth his
doctrines, often esoteric; also his views upon art. By the same
author we have the third volume of those celebrated interviews,
called Une Heure Avec ..., in which Ossendowski, Thomas
Hardy, G. K. Chesterton, Claudel, Pierre Benoit, and others submit
to interrogation.


316
PARIS LETTER
Among the books on art, the Manet, by Rosenthal, the Dessins
d'Honoré Fragonard et d'Hubert Robert (published by Delteil)
and, of especial importance, La Comédie Italienne, by Duchâtre,
seem to me worthy of note. All lovers of the commedia dell'arte
will want to own this last-named work, authoritative, admirably
illustrated, replete with erudition, yet delightfully written and
within the comprehension of all.
Among books of scientific interest one can read with profit
Crime et Criminels, by Locard, the eminent criminologist; and Le
Crépuscule des Nations Blanches, by Muret. The success of the
latter in the United States is certain. Developing the thesis of
Lothrop Stoddard, M Muret insists particularly upon the political
aspect of the problem, and shows that Ghandism, Wilsonism,
Bolshevism, the Panturanian movement in Angora, and the
demagogy of the African colonies are so many insults to the white
race, which is everywhere (and I have noticed the same thing
recently in the Orient) losing "face," and is no longer either ad-
mired or even feared. However, M Muret, like Dr Legendre in
Tour d’Horizon Mondial, does not despair of the future of the
white race, provided that resistance is immediately organized. The
Americans who form with Germany the great natural rampart of
our race (the next Peloponnesian War will take place in the
Rockies or in Honolulu) and who alone attach to the study of
racial problems all the importance they deserve, will follow with
interest the beginning of a serious consideration of these questions
in France-a country which has until recently been blind to their
significance.
PAUL MORAND


BOOK REVIEWS
THE RHYTHM OF VERSE
What is Rhythm? By E. A. Sonnenschein. 12mo.
228 pages. Basil Blackwell. 10/6.
THAT is rhythm? is asked with the ulterior purpose of reach-
ing a better theory of English verse. Thus it becomes the
question that has notoriously parted friends and left "sweet bells
jangled out of tune and harsh.” No subject like metric to possess a
man with a new revelation, which he holds and imparts as a seer.
Well, therefore, that it should be discussed by a scholar to whom
years have brought ripeness. For he enters the old quarrel of time
and stress. The larger question of his title, What is rhythm? is
considered only in the brief first chapter, and only to open his in-
terpretation of the rhythm of verse. “Rhythm is that property of
a sequence of events in time which produces on the mind of the ob-
server the impression of proportion between the durations of the
several events or groups of events of which the sequence is com-
posed." The definition "speaks of durations; for time, in the sense
of the relative durations of events, is the fundamental feature of
rhythm.” Merely indicating the evidence for this general defini-
tion, the book proceeds to even shorter chapters on rhythm in music,
music and verse, rhythm in isosyllabic verse, gives more space to
Greek verse, still more to Latin verse, and the remaining four chap-
ters, about half the book, to English verse. Prose rhythm is ex-
cluded. The foot-notes and appendices show so wide a considera-
tion of both theory and laboratory experiment as to constitute a
serviceable bibliography. In two hundred twenty-eight pages Pro-
fessor Sonnenschein manages to be not only comprehensive, but
generous. In a field of criticism where differences have provoked
irritation and stiffened intolerance he holds an even tenor.
The opening definition of rhythm in general must be judged
finally by science, and, as the author rightly insists, by psychology
as well as by physics. Their evidence toward showing that re-


318
THE RHYTHM OF VERSE
currences known to be rhythmical are identical with other recur-
rences caught by the eye or felt in the muscles he merely indicates.
Without denying his right in so brief an essay to assume what he
himself accepts as to the scope of rhythm, we must be on our
guard against using this assumption as more than a provisional
hypothesis.
“There's not the smallest orb which thou behold'st
But in his motion as an angel sings,'
le-
may be truer than Shakespeare knew; it may coincide with the theory
that motor recurrences and time recurrences are one; or it may be as
misleading a notion as the rhythm of the money market. Brune-
tière's transference of the word evolution from biology to the
history of literature has hardly defined and furthered enquiry as
he hoped. In so tangled and disputed a matter as rhythm we
must be even more wary. On the other hand, if we find rhythm
in architecture, for instance, we must question the focus of Pro-
fessor Sonnenschein's definition on time.
Meanwhile, within the narrower scope of the so-called time
arts, music, dance, and verse, whose movement is rhythmical in-
dubitably and essentially, does this definition further enquiry? In
particular shall we read, and perhaps write, verse better by con-
ceiving its rhythm as always and singly "relative durations"? To
assume that in all these three arts rhythm is recurrence in time
means usually no more than to segregate them from the arts that
are conditioned by space; and certainly it is not equivalent to ad-
mitting that rhythm is necessarily recurrence of times. Rather
here has been repeatedly the very point of controversy. To ask
What is rhythm? is to ask what constitutes the recurrence, what
guides the artist and his audience, what is the control. To an-
swer that this is essentially time in the sense of “relative durations"
is to rule out stress rhythm by definition. Though stress is after-
ward discussed incidentally, the procedure is prejudicial.
For rhythm has long been felt and described not as single and
constant throughout music, dance, and verse, but as either of two
typical modes: one which guides us by time (i.e., by "relative dura-
tions”) as in music and in Greek verse; the other which guides
us by stress, as in dance and in German verse. That time and


CHARLES SEARS BALDWIN
319
CS
stress are not mutually exclusive, that they may coincide or vari-
ously combine, we know from songs and from dance music. But
in each case we feel one or the other as dominant, as controlling
as the rhythm. Where the verse control is time, stress becomes
subsidiary; where it is stress, time becomes subsidiary. In this
sense metrists speak of time rhythm and stress rhythm, of quantita-
tive verse and accentual verse. They mean not that any refined
verse ignores either time or stress, but that every verse has one
alone for its control. Horace's “Integer vitae," read aloud as it
was intended, is in time rhythm; sung, as frequently in colleges,
to the tune of a familiar hymn, it is still in time rhythm, though
in another time; but imitated in Latin poems of the middle age,
when its language was differently spoken, its “Sapphics” sometimes
are transformed into a stress rhythm. So the "hexameters” of
Goethe or of Longfellow have a different rhythm from those of
Vergil. So we say that Poe misread Horace when he tried to
render a famous ode in stress rhythm:
“Maécenas, átavis, édite, régibus.”
We can hardly conceive of rhythm as an equal and simultaneous
control by both time and stress. Verse, indeed, is composite, as
music is, or dance; it consists of more than its rhythm; but that
rhythm is single. Nor do Professor Sonnenschein's analyses to
show recognition of quantity in English verse suffice to show dual
rhythm. Rather his inference, though it is not always clear, must
be, according to his definition, that English verse after all is in
time rhythm, and more widely that stress in verse is always sub-
sidiary, not constituting the rhythm, but merely beating the time.
The distinction of two verse rhythms, then, must be an illusion.
There can be only one rhythm.
This theory, which Professor Sonnenschein is not alone in hold-
ing, runs counter to the experience of passing from one language
group to another. In the ordinary experience of learning to speak
French our main difficulty is with rhythm. Our English stress
habit is found to be incompatible. As for French verse, to read
it acceptably to a Frenchman is at first quite beyond us. One
great advantage of learning French is to enhance our awareness
of vowel length and of pitch. From this we rise to appreciation


320
THE RHYTHM OF VERSE
of the control of French verse by time. We learn another
rhythm. As the attempt to force stress rhythm upon French
verse at once violates the language and fails, so does the at-
tempt of a Frenchman to force time rhythm upon English verse.
In English, as in other Germanic languages, the rhythmical use of a
word is determined by the stress. So constant is this habit that it
holds even in the rare cases where the stress shifts. Fourteenth-
century English usage permitted in verse a variable stress for
foreign words. Thus the word country might be pronounced either
cóntree or contrée; and its fitting into the rhythm of a line depended
solely on the way which it was stressed. Thus the length of the
syllables composing the word oasis, which troubles Professor Son-
nenschein on page 127, does not determine its rhythmical use.
That is determined solely by whether the first syllable or the second
receives the stress. A definition of rhythm, therefore, which thwarts
the indisputable habit of Germanic speech, which makes the rhythm
of English verse identical with that of Greek verse, seems idle.
Its assumption that all rhythm is the same, instead of furthering
our interpretation of verse, ignores a difference that we are never-
theless compelled to recognize.
The testimony of our ears, our perception of two modes of
rhythm in speech, is confirmed by the histories of literature. These
have long described classical Greek verse as quantitative, mediaeval
Greek verse as accentual; the verse of Horace and Vergil as quan-
titative, popular Latin verse of the same period as probably ac-
centual; mediaeval Latin verse, the verse of the great Latin hymns,
as accentual. If this distinction of two historical rhythms depends
upon a theory of metric, we may revise or abandon it so soon as
we revise or explode the theory; but if on the contrary it records
a difference in speech itself, we cannot. Now both the Greek and
the Latin liturgies? of the earlier middle age show a shift to stress
rhythm, a change not in the way of explaining rhythm, but of the
rhythm itself. Latin stress rhythm, which seems to have been
latent in popular verse, was increasingly accepted in the early
1 Both the facts and the interpretation of them as a change in language
itself, independent of any theory of verse, are vouched for by Pierre Aubry
in Le rythme tonique dans le poésie liturgique et dans le chant des églises
chrétiennes au moyen âge, Paris, 1903. To this should be added, for the
high middle age, the admirable and equally conclusive introduction to
Misset and Aubry's Les proses d'Adam de St Victor, Paris, 1900.


CHARLES SEARS BALDWIN
321
Christian centuries, became familiar, finally predominated. The
archaistic quantitative verse of literary Gaul, and later of the
Carolingian literary revival, did not succeed in turning the clock
back. Latin verse shifted from time control to stress control. The
corresponding shift of the Greek word for rhythmical to signify
stress seems to Professor Sonnenschein deplorable. But why was
the word thus restricted? In order to distinguish the new rhythm
from the old. The answer is confirmed by the mediaeval Latin
use of rhythmus to distinguish the stress rhythm of the hymns from
the ancient time rhythm, which is called metrum. Language itself,
then, gives evidence for the record that one rhythmical habit gave
way to another, that time rhythm waned and stress rhythm came
into control. The two verse rhythms are facts of history.
But even those who find Professor Sonnenschein's attempt to re-
duce all verse rhythm to the single control of time unsatisfying
should not find it unfruitful. It enables a wider audience to
estimate the evidence of laboratory investigation; and it shows
abundantly that stress verse is varied and enriched by recognition
of time. For the appeal of verse is not limited to the pattern
of its directive rhythm. By moving in new rhythm the Latin
hymns did not renounce old harmonies. French verse, moving in
time rhythm, adds some of the effects of stress through pitch.
English verse recognizes the value of quantity for modulation and
variety. Even some metrists need to be reminded that the instru-
ment which they seek to describe has a wide capacity.
For to hear in verse only its rhythm, whether that be of time or
of stress, is to cheat oneself. It is like being content to hear only
popular music. Popular verse, in both English and mediaeval
Latin, by neglecting everything but its rhythm or by exaggerating
that, has sometimes lapsed into jolt and jar, has sometimes even
sunk into doggerel. Conversely, refined English verse both avoids
insistence of stress and uses time among its means of variety. The
great exemplar of this is the most learned of English poets, Milton,
whom Professor Sonnenschein rightly uses to show effects of time.
No less repaying to analysis would be Chaucer; for his awareness
of quantity adds harmony to his beautiful freedom.
Dryden's rewriting of Chaucer's verse proceeds partly, indeed,
from bad texts, partly from ignorance of Middle English, but
largely from what we now perceive to be too narrow a conception


322
THE RHYTHM OF VERSE
OTS
of English verse. Thus doubtless we should read Coleridge's
famous preface to Christabel. “Counting in each line the accents,
not the syllables," though far indeed from being a “new principle"
in English verse, was new as against the insufficient metric of the
preceding century. It is tantamount to a plea for variety and
range. Discerning that our native stress rhythm suffices by itself
for the guiding pattern, Coleridge actually opened a wider range
than seemed legitimate to Dryden and Pope. Professor Sonnen-
schein too seeks a wider metric. He has contributed to this less
by his procedure from a dubious definition of rhythm than by his
exhibition of English verse harmonies.
CHARLES SEARS BALDWIN


THE JESUIT RELATIONS
THE JESUIT RELATIONS AND ALLIED DOCUMENTS.
Travels and Explorations of the Jesuit Missionaries in
North America (1610-1791). Selected and edited by
Edna Kenton with an introduction by Reuben Gold
Thwaites. 8vo. 527 pages. Albert and Charles
Boni. $5.
AN important activity of our day is the construction of the
A American past. This past is, after all, our body. We are
exploring it, in order to be able to control it. When we are come
so far, we should be able to employ it for ends, let us believe,
not altogether of the flesh. Meantime, the “period” plays and
novels, and the biographies, which proceed from current presses
are a good omen: they are the fuel of so much conscious power
in our hand, according as they express the sincere attempt of dis-
covery of the American background. Unfortunately, the smart
mode mars a good deal of this matter. We have many “recon-
structions” whose aim is to adorn our present foibles with a new
fillip, rather than to enlarge our present power with more knowl-
edge. We have, however, a few noteworthy pioneers in this
wilderness of the American past as yet so slightly blazed by in-
telligent awareness. And to their company, among whom Mr
Brooks, Mr Beer, Mr Bradford, and Mr Werner come at once
to mind, we must add the name of Edna Kenton.
Miss Kenton's work, in making one organic volume out of the
seventy-tomed and inaccessible chaos of the French Jesuit Rela- .
tions, is of high importance. She has gone back of the too stressed
English beginnings of our world. We are prone, through the con-
stant suggestiveness of language, to forget that the English were
late-comers and at first sparse settlers in the American lands. The
Spaniard, the Portuguese, the Basque, the Frenchman, and the
Hollander shared at first in the magnificent adventure. Here,
then, is a book about the French and by the French: a book of their
opening of Canada, of their penetration of the Lakes and the


324
THE JESUIT RELATIONS
snes
Great Rivers, and of their joining north and south through the
vast ideal construction known as Louisiana. Still more are we
prone, in the immediate clutter of our industrial system and of
the break-down of our spiritual forms, to overlook the great rôle
played by religion in America's discovery and in its settling.
Columbus remains a shadow, beside the concrete greatness of his
deed. We do not know enough that he was a missile-a consciously
religious missile-aimed by a fanatically religious Queen. And
misconceptions, chiefly of the north (fathered by such formidable
men as Pascal') have blinded us so well that the work of Catholics
in general and of the Society of Jesus in particular, from Quebec
to Santa Fe, from Florida to Patagonia, remains quite unacknowl-
edged, not to be sure by the scholars, but in the consciousness of
the cultured American world.
Miss Kenton's work is original, because it is well done. She is
of course not responsible for the superb translation and printing
of the seventy-three volumes of the Relations, under the editorship
of Reuben Gold Thwaites, who had completed his task more than
twenty years ago. She will be, however, the true author of the
currency of this work, heretofore too unwieldy to be read or
popularized alone in a narration by Father John J. Wynne, S. J.,
whose pious particularity has barred his volume from the very
audience who needed to know what the Jesuits had given. Miss
Kenton, who is of Protestant Quaker birth, has performed a
miracle-although it be of the kind there is no church to canonize
her for. In one volume, she has succeeded in preserving the es-
sence and in formulating the body of the Jesuit writings. They
are a wilderness of letters, reports, entreaties, advices, monographs,
and disquisitions ranging for subject from botany to economics,
and from ritual to strategy. They were written by the Fathers for
the most part in smoky camps, to superiors in Quebec or Paris;
and they cover the field from the Mission's birth in 1611 to the
banishment of the Society of Jesus from all the realms of the
King, a century and a half later. But here, out of this jungle,
comes an organic book with prelude, climax, end. Here lives the
1 I refer, of course, to his Lettres d'un Provincial, a great literary work which
was as unjust in its philosophical interpretation of Jesuitism as it was
astute in the impulse to drive Jesuitism-an alien idea--from France.


WALDO FRANK
325
spirit of the Fathers in the flesh and colour of their stupendous
undertaking. Père Marquette, Père Jogues, and a dozen others
are no more empty names. They become living and they become
heroes of our story. The camps, the pow-wows, the diplomacies
and warfares, the corruptions, martyrdoms, romances of the ad-
vancing Conquest take on the plastic reality of art. This book, in
the heady language of the Fathers, captures the America in which
they roamed and plotted. The forests, the sourceless and mouth-
less rivers, the oceanic lakes, the clamorous, fuid nations of the
Red Man, the loom of distant France are here: above all the
transfiguring psyche of America itself, taking these Catholics as
in a mythic yesterday it took the natives, working upon the con-
secrated Fathers until all unknown, through the years, they were
French no longer, but Americans also.
The book as it stands has aesthetic being. Plastically, this
America lives for us. It is peopled by strange, turbulent races:
men of high tension and subtle character: men courteous, generous,
savage, cruel, brave: men, indeed, not in essence alien to us. And
the Jesuits, giving us these authentic Americans, give us as well
themselves! What a company they were! these "adventurous
scholars”—have we, perhaps, forgotten for an hour that scholars
must be adventurers ere they can grow to be scholars ?-practical
saints, wise children. They were forerunners of the old world
who, in an embrace arduous beyond measure and often unto death,
gave the spirit and the forms of Europe for an invisible con-
summation they did not live to see. Throughout these pages, we
watch them transact, so cannily, a mystery beyond them. They
are in submission to a power they call God or Christ; but to a
process they have no word for. Consciously they labour to baptize
the Indian, to increase New France. Actually, they and the Indian
and France go down, in a Rite whose outcome we ourselves are
now beholding.
So the book is not alone organic: it is an organic nexus, in our
cultural need, between ourselves and our past. The origins of
America were religious. The shallow geneticisms of psychologic
and materialistic doctrine have had their day. It is once more per-
missible to state that our land was discovered by a mystic mariner;
that our soil was baptized by men and women who came to perform


326
THE JESUIT RELATIONS
Crusades and to find Sainthood, as well as by indentured servants.
The world from Hudson Bay to Córdoba of the Argentine was,
for thousands of stammering pioneers, the Word of God. The
peculiar forms of their religious vision, being archaic, rotted soon
enough. "In God We Trust" found a symbolic haven on a silver
coin—the currency of a nation which had transplanted the old
world, rather than founded the new. But in this immediate hour,
the men and women of America are learning that the spirit of that
religious vision did not die: they are learning that the current
misery which, so fortunately, undermines our mechanical splendours
is precisely the survival of that religious spirit and its want of
valid, living forms.
This present religious spirit requires organic contact with the
forms of its own American past. Herein lies the significance
of the accessible publication of the Jesuit story.
WALDO FRANK


JOHN BURROUGHS VERBATIM
THE LIFE AND LETTERS OF John BURROUGHS. By
Clara Barrus. Illustrated. Two Volumes. 397 and
486 pages. Houghton Mifflin Company. $12.50.
THE effect of Dr Barrus' careful biography is rather as if she
I had wished to present the life of John Burroughs in his own
words, and even word for word, at least as far as possible. And
it seems to have been possible in no inconsiderable degree, for she
evidently possessed not only conscience equal to the occasion, but
nearly enough material. The tranquil, long, observant days of
John Burroughs, though they differed not greatly, one from another,
appear to have found liberal record in his journals. Then there
was his large correspondence; and, not least, the author's own
acquaintance with him, of nearly twenty years standing. Levying
generously from all these sources, the Life has the profusion, the
redundance even, which is characteristic of familiar biography; a
redundance, it is true, which is like life itself, creating in us the
strong sense of acquaintance with the man.
But one is obliged to consider whether the story of a man's life,
told, as much of this is, in his words of day to day, is so adequate an
account of him as it might appear; whether, indeed, we can be
satisfied with familiar biography. Familiar biography affords the
intimate view, the sense of acquaintance. But intimate views may
destroy perspective; and there may be intimate views that mean
nothing, or the wrong thing, or only a part of the right thing.
Again, a sense of acquaintance may contain the means of under-
standing, but it is not understanding. Something like this, perhaps,
is the case here. Dr Barrus spreads out in great abundance the
materials of understanding, but has not attempted any very syn-
thetic understanding, such as would inform the whole of her writ-
ing on Burroughs. This would have been well; the biography
would thus have gained relief, which it lacks; and correction might
have been secured for a slight, but evident and remediable distor-
tion which arises from the view of Burroughs which the quoted
journals afford.


328
JOHN BURROUGHS VERBATIM
He had himself stated an important fact when he had said that
his life was in his books. His books were, indeed, the literary
presence in which he embodied his emotions, and it was in his
emotions that he lived. A history of his personality, therefore,
might reasonably take considerable account of his emotions, and of
those native gifts, his senses and his temperament, which fed his
emotions. This cannot be done without considering his books. Not
only is the best evidence of his brilliant senses, his abundant and
subtle, if somewhat desultory observation, to be found in his books,
but the broad emotional contrast between his essays and his journals
furnishes perhaps the most entire view one can get of his hale, but
delicate and rather feminine temperament; for the essays, it seems
clear, were written at the top, and the journals at the bottom of
his daily range of feeling. In the essays we find him full of fresh
abounding enjoyment, pouring out his observations, intermingled
in tonic phrases with the spice of himself. In the journals we find
him after the spices have been shaken out, empty, weary, drooping
in a strange ebb of heart, dwelling with profound wistfulness on
his memories of the past. Indeed after his fortieth year the quoted
journals are so frequently the account of this brooding nostalgia
that one must guard against getting from them the impression of
a vitality lower and a melancholy greater than was the fact. All
they pointed to, really, was a mood frequent with him in the eve-
ning, which entirely passed off with the return of morning. Thus
neither this picture nor that afforded by the essays would alone
be adequate. Together, however, they show truly and fairly both
the delicacy of his temperament and its health and tone, for if it
was easily exhausted it was as easily replenished.
Because of his susceptibility to emotion and his limited capacity
for it, one would like a study of his education in higher relief than
is the case here, for it seems evident that his vital education was an
instruction of the emotions, in which his chief preceptors were
nature, Whitman, and Emerson. But the fact seems to be that
the materials of such a study, apparently so abundant, were, after
all, meagre. Indeed such questions are likely to be insufficiently
answered until the psychological methods of biography are con-
siderably improved.
Of the influence which nature had on him, almost any of his
pages seems sufficient testimony; of his debt to Whitman he never


CHARLES K. TRUEBLOOD
329
D
ceased to descant; but one wonders if Emerson, after all, was not
as profound an influence as any; was not, indeed, too immense a
stimulant. He had remarked that Emerson was his spiritual father;
and he has pages, even essays, in which he seems little more than
the son of his father. Perhaps it is fair to say that although he
learned a great deal from such rich and various masters—all, in
fact, that made him what he was—he did not learn (perhaps none
of them could teach him) to be in any strict sense a thinker. Not-
withstanding his excursions into science and philosophy, notwith-
standing his passion for truth, it does not appear that he was a
conspicuous master of inference. “I can write what I feel,” he had
said, "and only what I feel.” And in fact he seemed not to have
very definite notions of the organization of ideas, or the furtherance
of thought by logic. What he did learn apparently, was not how to
think, but rather how to feel with his mind, feel originally and
soundly.
If this was, as it seems to be, nearly the sum of his effective
culture, it yet had a rich reality. He was nothing if not genuine;
even his Emersonisms were his own in the sense that he was fully
possessed by the feeling which they stated. He wrote, in a way,
simply by description of true things, which he drew from inex-
haustible and explicit memories, memories he was always accumu-
lating in endlessly pleased observation of the creatures and events
of wood and field. Yet he did not write like a naturalist; his great
theme was the enjoyment of nature; and on that subject he was
something of an outdoor Addison. Even here, however, in his
own authentic demesne, he took unusual precautions to be exactly
himself; he was uneasy with subjects, even those well adapted to
him, which were not of his own choosing; he would attempt nothing
that was not visibly within his powers. And while, like so many
who depend much upon feeling, he did not perhaps succeed in
enlarging the area of his first originality—sometimes not escaping
vacuity when he made the attempt—it is also true that when he
repeated himself within the bounds of that first emotional mastery,
he could do it without redundance. There were always the qualities
of youth about such repetition; the airs of April rose unfailingly
from such pages.
The biography is at its best in certain passages dealing with his
maturity, when he had to some degree decided the limits of his
as
ma
On


330
JOHN BURROUGHS VERBATIM
originality, and had settled down within them to the husbandry
of his talents. These sections are livelier than other parts of the
book, and have much less the effect of verbatim chronicles. The
author drew to excellent purpose on her own impressions; and
while one cannot but think that modern biography should employ
a more succinct and synthetic method than she uses, yet these
familiar scenes of the characteristic Burroughs—in the bark study
at Riverby, or in the placid plebeian solitude of Slabsides, with
his dog, Nip, and his much too ornithological cat, Silly Sally, or
in the hay-barn study at Roxbury—such pictures are their own
warrant. They show him full of his true concerns, contented but
alert, occasionally peevish, occasionally elevated, occasionally wist-
ful; and though always realistic, always a much moved student
of the mother of everything.
CHARLES K. TRUEBLOOD


AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY
AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY. By Theodore Dreiser.
Two volumes. 12mo. 830 pages. Boni and
Liveright. $5.
ear
THE fact that Theodore Dreiser's new novel seems likely
I to leave many readers repulsed and many critics confounded
does not detract from its value. Its cold Acherontic flood pursues
its way, owing little, if anything, to the human qualities that
disarm, endear, or beguile, owing nothing to the specious in-
tellectual catchwords of the hour. The pleasure to be derived
from it is grim, stark, austere, a purely aesthetic pleasure, un-
propitious to such as require human cajolery in these high matters.
To use the expression “objective” with regard to it is only
illuminating if what one means is that the writer's energy is so
powerful that his vision of things is projected to a certain dis-
tance from himself; to such a distance, in fact, that there are no
trailing and bleeding fringes left to tug at his vitals or to hinder
him from taking up his load and going on his way. In this sense
the book is certainly a planetary projectile. It lives, if it lives at
all, by its own revolution on its own axis. Its creator has written
no apologia, no consolatory interpretation, on the sky of its orbit.
But what chasms and crevasses, what dark cavities worse than
lunar craters, have we to enter, in order to geologize and botanize
among the lava-cracks and the grey mosses of this scarcely con-
gealed metallic microcosm! One reads somewhere that certain
aboriginals of North America used to murmur of mysterious pres-
ences they named manitou, wakanda, orenda. The Bantu Africans
whisper too of an invisible essence called mulungu. These pri-
mordial emanations do not appear to have been exactly divine
or exactly diabolic. Rather do they present themselves as diffused
magnetic dispersions, thrown off by the motions of primal Matter,
as it stirs in its sleep, groping forward from the inanimate towards
the organic. Some such orenda, some such mulungu seems to be
the motive force and indeed the subject-matter of An American
Tragedy; only in this case the mysterious effluence is given off


332
AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY
rather by psychic than by physical forces. But to catch, out of
the "palpable obscure,” these secret stirrings and to follow them
in their furtive motions a writer has to break many rules of
language.
Perhaps the Introibo ad altare of any scrupulous initiation into
the Dreiserian cult is to put one's finger upon the “blind mouth”
of the historical method and wash one's hands clean of all rules,
standards, conformities, traditions.
An American Tragedy certainly justifies its title. It is not
merely American in its external stage-sets and the superficial
idiosyncrasies of its characters. Plenty of American novels offer
these allurements and yet remain as much afloat and deracinated
as drifting seaweed. This extraordinary creation is American in
its bones and blood and entrails. It is American in the heave
of its breath, in the swing of its stride, in the smoke of its
nostrils. Its Atlantean shoulders are American; so are its por-
tentous buttocks. Its solemn wink, its shameless yawn, its out-
stretched, nonchalant limbs, all betray the sardonic sentiment, the
naïve brutality, the adamantine stoicism of that organized chaos
whose event is in the hands of God.”
The greatness of this work lies in the fact, among other things,
that it covers so much ground. Some of the most arresting of
Mr Dreiser's contemporaries are vigorous and convincing enough
when on their own particular native soil. But where these "local-
ists" lose their plumage is when they leave home and like all
ill-advised migratory birds settle and chatter upon alien roof-
tops. No one except Dreiser seems strong enough to swallow the
whole chaotic spectacle and to disgorge it into some form of
digested brain-stuff. His alone is the sprawl and the clutch, his
alone the gullet and the stomach, competent to make away with
such a cantle! On their own immediate ground these other writers
can be suggestive enough. Off their ground they are nothing at
all. But to be off the American of Dreiser's saturation you
would have to take ship; and even then you would be miles out
at sea ere that voice of Polyphemus fell upon silence or that
Cyclopean eye, along with the light-ship of Sandy Hook and the
search-light of Alcatraz, sank below the horizon!
An American Tragedy begins in Kansas City, the geographical
navel of the land, moves thence to upper New York State, and
terminates with the execution of its hero in Sing-Sing; but the


JOHN COWPER POWYS
333
psychic chemistry, of which it captures the mulungu, has its body
and pressure in every portion of this country, and needs no map
nor chart. This would hardly have been the case had what in-
terested Dreiser most been those particular idiosyncrasies of our
common nature that require a local habitation for their richest
efflorescence. His Ygdrasil, his occult World-Ash-Tree, straddles
its roots from coast to coast; finds nourishment as easily from
the sands of Arizona, as from the red soil of the Carolinas; and
it can do this because its roots are not really in the earth at all but
in a vast diffused life-illusion, rising up like a thick mist out of a
multitude of defrauded souls. This accounts for the fact that
An American Tragedy is so lacking in what is soothing and heal-
ing to the mind, so sombrely naked of the kind of charm which
pastures upon old usages, grows sweet and mellow upon the milk
of ancient fields. Bell-hops, store-keepers, drummers, lawyers,
sheriffs, politicians, factory-owners, factory-managers, factory-
hands, stenographers, policemen, ministers, waiters, crooks, doctors,
newspaper-men; all these, together with their counterparts in the
residential sections, are perpetually throwing off, from Portland,
Oregon to Portland, Maine, from Duluth to Miami, a cloud of
invisible eidola, airy images of their grosser desires; and these
are the filmy bricks of which Dreiser builds his impregnable
dream-world.
It needs something thaumaturgic in a writer to enable him to
separate this mulungu of accumulated life-illusions from the rest
of the cosmic spectacle. But what Dreiser has done is nothing
less than this; and we are compelled to accept as reality the “grim
feature” thus starkly presented; although we cry to it in our dis-
may—"Hence, horrible shadow, unreal mockery, hence!" For it
is as if, in Dreiser's work, America itself—the "commensurate
antagonist” of the old civilizations—saw it self for the first time;
cast a sly, shrewd, exultant, inquisitive look at itself; and turned
away with a sardonic shrug.
Why is it that agriculturists and sea-faring people play so small
a part in Dreiser's books, though both Witla in The Genius and
Clyde in this story find their friendliest sweethearts in a farm-
house? Is it not because the doom is on him to recreate just that
particular life-dream which cannot co-exist with any close con-
tact with earth or sea? The traditions of earth-life and sea-life
surround the persons committed to them with all manner of magical
10.


334
AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY
encrustations such as have the power to reject and ward off that
garish hubbub, that crude hurly-burly, of an existence dominated
by "modern improvements.”
The very fatality of this spectacle, as Dreiser half discovers and
half creates it, is something that sets its rhinocerus-horn, rampantly
and blindly against all that is quaint, delicate, subtle in human
nature. And yet throughout those scenes in the Kansas City
hotel, throughout the coarse duplicities of the boy's first infatua-
tion, throughout the scatter-brained jovialities in brothel, wine-
shop, and automobile, throughout the rough-and-tumble on the
frozen river-so like a picture by Teniers or Jan Steen-through-
out these pathetic struggles of Clyde and Roberta to outwit the
vulgar respectability of Lycurgus, New York, one grows increas-
ingly conscious that, rank and raw as it all is, there is something
in the relentless and terrible gusto of the author's relish for what
he is about which rises to the height of a monstrous sublimity.
It seems a strange use of the word “realistic” to apply it to
this stupendous objectification of the phantasmal life-dreams of
so many tin-tack automatons of a bastard modernity; but when
one grows aware how Dreiser's own Deucalion-like mind murmurs,
weeps, laughs, and gropes among them, a queer oppression catches
at the throat and a kind of grim hypnosismas if a beast-tamer
were luring us into his cage of snouts and tails and hungry non-
human eyes—makes us almost ready to cry out, in kindred delu-
sion, "It's the truth! It's the truth!”
An American Tragedy is the other side of the shield of that
"plain democratic world” whereof Walt Whitman chanted his
dithyrambic acceptance. And we may note that just as Whitman
took ordinary human words and made them porous to his tran-
scendent exultations, so Dreiser has invented a style of his own,
for this monody over the misbegotten, which is like nothing else in
literature. I think it is a critical mistake to treat this Dreiserian
style as if it were a kind of unconscious blundering. If it is
unconscious it certainly could find a very sophisticated defence;
for who is not aware to-day of many recondite craftsmen who
make use of the non-grammatical, the non-rational, and even of
the nonsensical, to most refined aesthetic results ?
It is much easier to call Dreiser naïve than to sound the depths
of the sly, huge, subterranean impulses that shape his unpolished
OL
ven


JOHN COWPER POWYS
335
runes. The rough scales and horny excrescences of the style of
An American Tragedy may turn out to be quite as integral a part
of its author's spiritual skin as are the stripes and spots and
feathered crests of his more ingratiating contemporaries.
The subject of the book, this tragedy that gathers and mounts
and accumulates till it wrecks the lives involved, is the tragedy
of perverted self-realization, the mistaking of the worse shadow
for the better. All are shadows; but the art of life is still in its
infancy when we make the mistake that this poor Clyde Griffiths
made. But, after all, such in its own day and place was the
tragedy of Macbeth; such, with yet insaner convolutions, the
tragedy of Raskolnikoff. One has to take refuge in a different
world altogether, in a world that has vanished with the philosophy
of the ancients, to find an ignoble mistake of this kind un-
worthy of the ritual of Dionysus. Certain it is that with the excep-
tion of the unfortunate Roberta, not a character in this book wins
our deeper sympathy. Clyde is pitiable, if we renounce all crav-
ing for mental and moral subleties, but we pity him as we would
pity a helpless vicious animal driven to the slaughter-house, not
as we pity a fully conscious human intellect wrestling with an
untoward fate. And yet the book produces a sense of awe, of sad
humility, of troubled wonder. How has this been achieved ?
No one but Dreiser, as far as I know, could take a set of
ragamuffin bell-hops, scurvy editors, tatterdemalion lawyers,
greedy department-store wenches, feather-weight society chits,
"heads without name, no more remembered than summer flies,"
could thrust into the midst of these people an ill-starred, good-
looking weakling like Clyde; and then, out of such material-
surely more uninspiring than have ever been selected by the brain
of man or artist-set up a colossal brazen-ribbed image, which
the very wild geese, in their flight over the cities of men, must
suppose to be fathom-based upon reality!
To taste the full flavour, the terrible "organic chemical" flavour,
like the smell of a stock-yard, which emanates from this weird
book, it is necessary to feel, as Dreiser seems to feel—and, indeed,
as we are taught by the faith of our fathers—that the soul of the
most ill-conditioned and raw-sensed of our race, gendered by man,
born of woman, has a potentiality of suffering equal with the
noblest.


336
AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY
WO
Thus in place of the world we know there rises up before us
Something towering and toppling and ashen-grey, a very Balaena
Mysticetus of the abyss, riddled with devouring slime-worms.
And we ourselves, so great is this writer's power, become such
worms. It is a formidable achievement, the creation of this
"empathy," this more than sympathy, in the case of such unfor-
tunates; and to have brought it about is, say what you please, a
spiritual as well as an aesthetic triumph. To watch the death-
hunt of the faltering Clyde is to watch a fox-hunt in the company
of some primordial Fox-god, who knows as you cannot know, both
the ecstasy of stealing into the hen-roost and what it is to feel the
ath of the hounds following your flying tail!
Balzac used to throw his protean magnetism into the urge of
the most opposite obsessions, becoming sometimes an angel and
sometimes a demon; but Dreiser does something different from
this. He overshadows his herd of hypnotized cattle in the totality
of their most meagre and petering-out reactions, meditating upon
them in an ubiquitous contemplation that resembles the trance of
some “astral body” of iron and steel and paving-stone, some huge
impalpable soul of the inanimate, yearning in sombre tenderness
over its luckless children. And yet it is not really out of the ele-
ments of the earth that Dreiser-moving like some vast shepherd
of Jotunheim-flocks, among his rams and ewes-erects his sorrow-
ful sheep-fold, but rather out of the immaterial hurdles and straw
of their own turnip-tasting dreams.
The portion of the story that deals with the murder itself is
so imaginatively heightened as to cast a Janus-like shadow back-
wards and forwards over the rest of the book. What the boy
sees and hears as he sits in the train that is bearing him towards
his victim; the "supernatural soliciting" that calls to him out of
the air; the spasm of panic-stricken weakness that distorts his
purpose at the supreme moment; his convoluted doubts, after the
event, as to his actual guilt; these passages, like the dark waters
of the lake where the girl is drowned, possess so much poetic
porousness and transparency that they make the earlier and later
portions of the work seem like an opaque face, of which they are
the living and expressive eye.
Dreiser has always been a mystic. Only a mystic could capture
the peculiar terror of Matter become a ghost to the mind, as he
V-


JOHN COWPER POWYS
337
captures it, so as to be a veritable confederate with the Chthonian
divinities. Only a mystic could ponder so obstinately upon the
wretched pulse-beats of a scamp like Clyde, till they respond to
the rumble of Erebus, till they rise and sink in ghastly reciprocity
with the shadow-voices of Typhon, of Loki, of Azazel, of Ahriman!
We can protest—and here, as I pen these lines in the very hotel
where Clyde served his transients, I do most heartily protest-
that there are aspects of human nature entirely obliterated from
this gregarious shadow-dance. But such protests must conform
to aesthetic intelligence. An American Tragedy is the tragedy
of only such aspects of mortal consciousness as can get themselves
objectified in such a psychic panorama. An artist, a mystic, a
prophet if you will, must be allowed to isolate his phenomena.
Dreiser's phenomena are not lacking in their own inherent con-
trasts. Compare the letters of Roberta, for example, so poignant
as to be almost intolerable, with the baby-talk in the letters of
Sondra, so intolerable for the very opposite reason! Sondra
is one stage further removed from nature than Roberta; but the
genuineness of her infatuation for Clyde is not lost in her queer
jargon. Infatuated young persons, of both sexes, do babble in
this unpleasant way when they are devoid of all critical alter-
egoism. Like some gigantic naturalist studying the twitchings and
turnings of a crowd of shimmery-winged dung-beetles Dreiser has
been put to it to invent human sounds such as shall represent the
love-cries and the panic-cries of these husks of inane rapacity.
Had any of his rampaging bell-hops, his crafty lawyers, his sly
department-store ladies, his bouncing society-chits, shown too
marked a tendency to emerge into a more appealing stratum of
consciousness, a certain formidable unity of “timbre” would have
been lost to the book, a consistency of rhythm broken, a necessary
pressure removed. Composed of everything that prods, scrapes,
rakes, harrows, and outrages an intelligent organism the environ-
ment, to which these creatures of Dreiser's contemplation respond,
itself mingles with their lamentable response. It is out of this
appalling reciprocity of raw with raw, that the mass and weight
and volume of the book proceed. And this accumulated weight-
so terribly mortis'd and tenon’d by its creator's genius—has its own
unparalleled beauty, as pure an aesthetic beauty (almost mathe-
matical in the rigidity of its pattern) as the most purged and
ON


338
AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY
exacting taste could demand. Thus is brought about through the
mediumship of this omophagous intellect, the only escape from the
impact of a certain horrible dream-world which a lost soul can find;
the escape, namely, of giving to the Chimaera itself the lineaments
of a work of art. To the unhappy wretch by the wayside whom
Zarathustra found with a snake in his gullet was uttered the magic
formula—“Bite and spit!” This is what Theodore Dreiser has
done; and the result is An American Tragedy.
In Plays Natural and Supernatural this same author bestowed
an articulate voice upon that thundering ox-bellow of the Ameri-
can Locomotive (so different from the thin whistles of European
trains) which, reverberating across a continent, sounds the modern
tragic chorus to so many broken-hearted vigils. In this same book
there reaches the brain of a patient under laughing-gas a monstrous
voice, repeating the syllable Om! Om! Om!
Such, it seems to me that moan of the freight-train as you
hear it in the night and that other sound which few have the ears to
hear-is the only adequate commentary that can be made upon
the temptation and crime and punishment of Clyde Griffiths, bell-
hop of Kansas City: Not for nothing has this unique book
gathered itself about the mystery of evil.
Every imaginative writer is doomed sooner or later to become
a scape-goat; doomed to take upon himself, in a strange occult
fashion, "the Sins of the World.” And as one ponders upon the
figure of Dreiser, moving in sombre bonhomie, humming and
drumming, across the literary arena, one cannot fail to note that
he also has had to balance that pack upon his shoulders.
His vision of things blames no one, lets no one off, reduces all
“benevolence and righteousness” to sorrowful humility; pitiful,
patient, dumb. For at the back of the world, as he sees it, is
neither a Devil nor a Redeemer; only a featureless mulungu, that
murmurs forever “Om! Om! Om!”
John Cowper Powys
as
murmurs
ever


BRIEFER MENTION
JONAH, by Robert Nathan (12mo, 212 pages; McBride: $2) would—if the
heart had been kept out of it—be sparkling satire; would—if the head
had played less of a part—be delicate allegory. As it stands, it is better
than either, for it has, as one says of mergers, retained the best features of
both. Mr Nathan has done a great deal more than clothe the biblical
story in garments of modern prose; he has filled the legend with an
elusive irony, and retold it with a philosophic twinkle which is too suave
to be termed wit. Beneath the surface of his tranquil pages, one discerns
cool, dark depths of thought.
mes even might have blubs ands and th
THE SUTTON PAPERS, by Selwyn Jepson (12mo, 273 pages; Lincoln Mac-
Veagh, Dial Press: $2). The special accent that comes over from London
nowadays affects even the detective stories; and The Sutton Papers, if not
by Mr Huxley himself, might have been written by one of his friends. The
pleasant end of London, with its clubs and shops and good restaurants,
comes sharply into view as the tale unfolds; and the hero and heroine,
though as smart as possible and quite all right, do the oddest imaginable
things, and win out to a satisfactory marriage in spite of the machinations
of a titled villain.
CHRISTINA ALBERTA'S FATHER, by H. G. Wells (12mo, 401 pages; Mac-
millan: $2.50) begins by giving the reader the exhilarating assurance that
Wells can, at will, write another Mr Polly and ends by proving that he
does not want to. If the reader cares more for Polly-Wells than for the
Wells of The Outline, and of God, The Invisible King, he will be dis-
appointed; even so, he will feel the enormous gusto and fervour of Wells
in giving form to his ideas. There is a strange touch of melodrama in
the book and the expressing of ideas through and by the characteșs is
not perfect. The launching of Mr Preemby, both into the book and into his
adventure as Sargon the Magnificent, is done in the best of the old manner.
The rest is argument.
to overbid his hary, foursome. Younger generatity has been a
cerity w
PETER VACUUM, by Anthony Gibbs (12mo, 329 pages; Lincoln MacVeagh,
Dial Press : $2). The Gibbs writing fraternity has been augmented by a
confident recruit from the younger generation, making up the fourth
hand of a literary foursome. The son of Sir Philip is somewhat inclined
to overbid his hand, nor does he hesitate to trump the ace of sincerity with
the two-spot of flippancy. He has taken the stock novel of American
undergraduate life and given it an Oxford degree, rendering it perhaps
more sophisticated but certainly no more substantial. The self-con-
sciousness of his style is inescapable; its quality is sufficiently mirrored
in the following extract: “A complex is a nasty, new-fangled thing.
Neurotic novelists and nicotining neurasthenics have fed upon this
beastly brain-child of a diseased mentality, and, feeding on it, have waxed
insanitarily fat, like filthy fungoids on a rotting root.”
more sophisticated and given it an Caken the stock ne of sincerity
12. following style is intainly no atord degreeces novel


340
BRIEFER MENTION
CARAVAN, by Witter Bynner (12mo, 77 pages; Knopf: $1.50). Mr Bynner's
latest volume bears evidence of the diversity of his gifts without many
examples of their highest application. Of the longer poems, A Dance for
Rain is undoubtedly the finest. The imagery of this poem is beautifully
clear and is merely, as it should be, the visible sign of the more important
idea. Paul Thévenaz is also impressive, though the last stanza loses
power by a shift to the epigrammatic style. Yet merely as an epigram-
matist, Mr Bynner is often at his best. She Slept Like a Lady is a pleasant
and successful example of this form in the Cavalier mood. By far the
most memorable poem in the book, because the simplest, is A Good-bye
from Shipboard.
THE PRINCE OF WALES AND OTHER FAMOUS AMERICANS, by Miguel Covar-
rubias (8vo, 66 drawings; Knopf: $3) is a smart name for a book of
caricatures which do not possess and do not need smartness as a recom-
mendation. The exigencies of publication made Covarrubias do most
of his work in line, whereas most of his best work is done in wash and in
colour, as the scattered examples of these media in the present collection
amply prove. Certain of the caricatures have the quality of making you
reject them as libels which have nothing to do with the persons attacked;
remembering them, and meeting these persons, the penetration and justice
of Covarrubias are at once rendered beyond question. The sketches of
burlesque artists and of negro dancers recently shown at the Dudensing
Galleries are excellent; and occasionally when not drawing from life, as in
the Picasso, he shows a neat literary wit—a type he gets along without
entirely in his usual caricatures, avoiding comparisons with other masters
-comparisons which, as it happens, he could well afford to stand.
The merit of HOWARD PYLE, A Chronicle, by Charles D. Abbott with in-
troduction by N. C. Wyeth (illus., 8vo, 249 pages; Harper: $5) lies in
the revelation which is accomplished simply by selections from Howard
Pyle's lifelong and copious correspondence; for the self-effacing narrative
is but the required frame for these letters. Indeed, in the quotation alone
of his sincere, rational, and ardent words we have a series of portraits,
almost an autobiography, in which we can to some degree follow the growth
of his prolific talents. The numerous illustrations, including several in
colour, are, with the exception of his murals, representative of the whole
range of his work.
EXPERIMENTS, by Norman Douglas (10mo, 264 pages; McBride: $2.50).
The growing reputation of Mr Norman Douglas will not benefit from
Mr Norman Douglas' latest volume. The title is misleading. These
disjecta membra of old newspaper wars are not so much experiments as
they are reprinted magazine-fodder, done, needless to say, with a technique
which, though not novel, is superior and racy. One or two essays in the
art of fiction reveal once more the sad fact that the author of South
Wind is not at ease in this field, nor is the creative faculty among those
gifts bestowed upon him by the gods in whom he so ferociously
disbelieves.


BRIEFER MENTION
341
A LIFETIME WITH MARK Twain, by Mary Lawton (8vo, 362 pages;
Harcourt, Brace: $3.50). This is a garrulous account of a domestic
servant's adoring attendance upon the family of Mark Twain, faithfully
set down by a friend of the family who spares the reader none of Kate
Leary's repetitions. It is, in consequence, rather a treatise upon the servant
question than upon the literary life and the not-unfamiliar moral seems
to be that good masters get good servants.
JOAN OF Arc, MAID OF FRANCE, by Albert Bigelow Paine (illus., 2 vols.,
8vo, 746 pages; Macmillan: $10.50) is a biography strictly, and one
with character. While it is illuminated with the enthusiasm which the
author says had been kindled thirty years ago by Mark Twain's romance,
that enthusiasm has been confined to elucidation of the actual Joan, so
far as she is manifested in the record of her own words, and in the cor-
roborated testimony of contemporary witnesses. The author laboured four
years, he tells us, to secure the facts, and has endeavored to present them
"without bias, and without neglect.” The result, while not a manifest
triumph in point of style, produces the sense of an historic presence, which
is not so often achieved, and which usually vanishes with the slightest
attempt at bravura.
Madame RÉCAMIER, by Edouard Herriot (8vo, Vol. I, 320 pages; Vol. II,
460 pages; Boni & Liveright: $7.50) is a most valuable biography, the
story of a lovely woman, to whom it is meet and right that we should
pay homage. Mr Herriot's art is the art of Suetonius. Colour, mystery,
and adoration surround his heroine. Was the life of this beautiful
Juliette a happy one? Perhaps she was happy at the Abbaye-aux-Bois,
where her bedroom was ornamented with a bookcase, a harp, the portrait
of Mme de Staël, and a view of Coppet by moonlight! Through her
excessive loving-kindness had led her into several heresies, the good
Father Morcel whose manners were untainted by the world did not
hesitate to give her absolution.
REFLECTIONS ON THE DEATH OF A PORCUPINE, by D. H. Lawrence (10mo,
240 pages; Centaur Press : $4). The most important in this latest collec-
tion of Mr Lawrence's essays is entitled The Crown and was first written
in 1915. In it there are passages of a deep and penetrating beauty,
burning with intensity, rich in imagery, and fecund in philosophic sug-
gestion. It is only in certain instances where this cantankerous author
steps from prophecy to admonition that a vulgarity unprecedented and
phenomenal mars his pages. Indeed one searches all literature in vain
for another instance of a writer capable of combining such authentic
inspiration with such townsman's impertinences. However, at its best
Mr Lawrence's imagination is powerful and poetic enough to break through
the narrow confines of our walled-in days and to show us in a series of in-
candescent flashes life at its source intractable, quivering, luminous. The
Crown is of all Mr Lawrence's semi-mystical and philosophical writing
the most poetically sustained and restores one's faith in his singular and
eccentric genius.


342
BRIEFER MENTION
THE HOGARTH Essays: A SHORT View of Russia, by John Maynard
Keynes (10mo, 28 pages; The Hogarth Press : 2 /) is a keen bit of inter-
pretation, a revealing study of Russian revolutionism at home-of its
counterparts, and its influence upon modern thought at large. In dis-
cussing Leninism, here labelled a combination of religion and business,
Mr Keynes says the religion is a new variant, and the business highly
inefficient, the methods of both being terrible. Trotzky and his suc-
cessors proclaimed their working creed as material and anti-religious,
but this does not deflect Mr Keynes's vision from the Russian movement
as a persecuting, missionary faith combined with experimental economics.
Money-making as a profession is being done away with, says Mr Keynes,
and a new working for the community is being substituted. Old Russia
was, as new Russia is, stupid and cruel, he concludes; nothing could
emerge from the stupidity of the former, some minute particle of the
ideal may lie hidden in the new.
MURDER PIRACY AND TREASON, A Selection of Notable English Trials,
by Raymond Postgate (12mo, 254 pages; Houghton Mifflin : $2.50) is
an urbane account of sixteen criminal trials, selected partly in reference
to their social and historical background, partly for their interest in
themselves. The first is a trial by combat under Richard II; the last is
the strange history of Charles Peace, that elderly gentleman of refined
tastes who revered Queen Victoria and devoted his nights to robbery
and murder.
AMERICANA, 1925, edited by H. L. Mencken (12mo, 311 pages; Knopf:
$2.50) is an almost incredible collection of the follies, stupidities, crass-
nesses, malices, blunderings, and fatuities of the American people as they
find their way into the press of all the States. They are the pick of the
collections which appear each month in The American Mercury under the
same title; they are obviously genuine. They tell of the people who sit
at their windows and count the motor cars that pass and of those who
do Bible "marathons” and commit lynchings and otherwise declare the
glories of God. In an entertaining appendix (professedly compiled for
English readers) Mencken is at his best in summary analyses of the
character of each of the States, and is surprisingly unwitty in a lexicon
of the Americanisms used. Those with intelligence enough to know that
Americana is not America will find it an indispensable book; even the
others will know that it is vastly entertaining.
SCIENCE AND THE MODERN WORLD, by A. N. Whitehead (12mo, 296 pages ;
Macmillan: $3) is a study of the changing attitudes towards science
from the ancient world up to our own day, and of the effect of these
attitudes on the life and thought of the various epochs touched upon. Mr
Whitehead is a scholar, philosopher, and historian rather than a scientist
or psychologist in the very modern sense. But no matter how much one
may disagree with certain of his observations and concluding judgements,
one cannot read this interesting and stimulating book without experiencing
a heightening of sensibility and an enrichment of knowledge.


THE THEATRE
A MONG the minor amusements of a nation so wealthy that
nation so wealthy that
1. it can afford to ignore things priceless, a country so large
that it cannot become aware either of its greatest living painter,
Marin, or of its only living sculptor, Lachaise, we observe a highly
systematised smuggling-in of various brands of aesthetic “kick"
-some authentic, more diluted, most neither, but each and all
enticingly labeled. Whatever may be the cause of this dishonour-
able predicament, the fact remains that every American, whom
bootleg Art confronts, is at liberty to make one of precisely three
moves. First, he may refuse to partake of the proffered intoxicant,
on the ground that such indulgence were unconstitutional (not to
mention expensive); second, he may discerningly partake thereof,
scorning neither his own wits nor those of his stomach; third, he
may knowingly glance at the label, shut tightly both eyes, and
gulperdown. The inhabitants of New York City, U. S. A., who
are justly famous for their thirst, made the abovementioned choice
only recently, when Messrs Comstock & Gest (Art bootleggers
of the première water) let it be known that they had “the Great
Honor of Presenting For the First Time in America" a peculiarly
hyperfine brand of “Synthetic Theatre," which not only had ar-
rived direct from the former home of vodka, but wore the super-
alluring label: NEMIROVITCH-DANTCHENKO. Where-
upon the present writer, remembering that bootleg Art (like the
"little girl who had a little curl") is very very good when it's
good but when it's bad it's horrid, put wits, dollars, et cetera
suddenly together and sampled this latest miracle gradually. Hav-
ing done so, he takes great pleasure in announcing, not merely
that he is undead, but that he is considerably more alive than
before-a situation so perfectly remarkable as to merit analysis.
One might suppose (were one to believe what one hears) that
the technique of The Moscow Art Theatre Musical Studio re-
sembled the technique of some recently invented cocktail; that a
thorough, if not positively savage, shaking-up of various in them-
selves merely dangerous aesthetic ingredients produced a taste
suggestive of none, assuming the concoction to have been properly
ICO


344
THE THEATRE
gulped, plus a kick beyond dynamite. Actually, however, the
system of Nemirovitch-Dantchenko suggests that almost incredibly
skilful edifice, familiar to American preprohibition imbibers under
the salubrious pseudonym “pussy café,” which presents itself to
the eye as a number of colours or succession of layers, each con-
stituent layer or colour (obedient to the law of specific gravities)
keeping its particular level and refusing to blend or mix with the
others—whereof the gustatory pleasure results from an interaction,
on the tongue, of stories, as the edifice unrapidly is sipped. If
New York postprohibition audiences gulped the Synthetic Theatre,
if the whole thing looked like cocktail to them, if they approved
because the gin apparently had been killed since the ugly taste
of conventional Opera was absent, and if they disapproved because
they didn't get the kick which they expected to get out of a shak-
ing-up, by the gentleman with the hyphenated nomenclature, of
various arts—it luxuriously is true that there was no gin, and
that the aforesaid gentleman had not shaken up arts for the
exuberant reason that he had done something exactly different,
videlicet, he had made visible a law, he had demonstrated an
aesthetic relativity, he had “produced” an homogeneity of arts
precisely by not violating the discreteness of any one of them.
What happens on this gentleman's stage is a selfimposing next-
ness of arts, what happens in his audience (supposing the in-
habitants of Jolson's Theatre to constitute his audience) is an
overlapping or interpenetration of arts. The law governing each
specimen of his “Lyric Drama” is an aesthetic law, i.e., in each in-
stance, various arts, illustrating a certain order, cohere through
the differences of their common volition (so to speak)—the prin-
ciple at stake being not an agglomeration of ingredients but that
spontaneous sequence of elements which inevitably is the expres-
sion of their respective densities. This out-of-Spontaneous-by-
Inevitably idiom or audience-stage structure involves, before any-
thing else, the existence of a mobile theatre. More accurately:
it involves the elimination of a pennyintheslot peepshow parlour
and the substitution therefor of an aesthetic continent, through-
out whose roamable depth and height and breadth the tourist
pays his way in -ist currency (“constructivist” or “expressionist”
or what you will setting, lighting, costuming)—said currency
being amply protected against depreciation, thanks to the seizure
of that long-idle inexhaustible treasure: the chorus.
ire


E. E. CUMMINGS
345
We shall inflict upon our readers neither a diary nor a geog-
raphy of those portions of The Lyric Theatre (LYSISTRATA, LOVE
AND DEATH, CARMENCITA) which it already has been our privilege
to tour. Instead we shall remark that, as in the case of any
authentic experiment, there is here not much failure and much
invincibility. To be sure, The Moscow Art Theatre Musical Studio
has its anecdotal feebleness in ALEKO (with too many not thick
enough sounds attributed to Sergei Rachmaninoff), but it has its
found solidity in CLEOPATRA (with the unspeakingly supreme
protagonist “FLAVIUS-A Roman Warrior”), in CARMENCITA
(with an exquisitely orchestrated åváyxn of fans), and—best of
all-in the immaculate roughhouse happeningly enclosed by
LYSISTRATA. An exhibition of a different sort, of the cocktail
variety in fact—the Quinn collection of modern art-reveals a
total absence of Lachaise, many merely fifteenth-rate things, and
a fatuous sought negligible unthing by Augustus John, but also
a structurally sumptuous irrevocably itselfcoloured vibration by
John Marin. And of whatever failures in taste the late Mr Quinn
or the living Nemirovitch-Dantchenko may be accused, these
failures are honourable-unlike the failure which results when
Miss Eva Le Gallienne and an equally incompetent cast “do”
what, instead of being The Master BUILDER, becomes a rigid
mess vividly lighted by Emily Stevens' superbly réussi penetration
of Hedda Gabbler.
And now may we suggest some genuine home-brew?
Neither the presence of LYSISTRATA, nor the absence, from the
Musical Studio productions, of music by the greatest living
composer (whose Sacre and Noces, alone and as Nijinska-Gon-
charova ballets, are equal in intensity to anything for which
Nemirovitch-Dantchenko or Ibsen or any one else can possibly
be responsible), nor even the luminous existence of a Strindberg
DREAM Play at the Provincetown, chances to account for your
humble servant’s naïf idea that the NATIONAL WINTER GARDEN
BURLESK at the corner of East Houston Street and Second Avenue
is a singularly fundamental institution, whose Scratch is a noble
clown, whose first wink is worth the struttings of a hundred
thousand Barrymores, who are the unmitigated bunk: since the
direction of all spectacle lives in Aristophanes and the theatre"
has a great future behind it, said "future” being The Circus.
E. E. CUMMINGS


MODERN ART
THE European competition for New York favour is keener
1 this winter than at any time since the war. What are known
as “international” shows are thick. The Italians sent us—I believe
for the first time-a presumably representative collection of work
by their own favourites. The Tri-National, a travelling exhibition
sponsored by Mrs Harriman in the hope of aiding the British,
French, and American artists to know each other better, created a
genuine stir in New York after failing to create one in Paris. The
Carnegie International, of Pittsburgh, which has been the only
effort on a large scale at reciprocity during the recent lean years,
has now extended its scope, and intends to show its foreign contri-
butions at the Grand Central Galleries shortly. The Spaniards,
with true grandee indifference, have not attempted nationally a
contact with the acknowledged money centre of the world, but
two individual shows by the late Sorolla and the living Mezquita
clamoured for attention in the midst of the hubbub of the world
congress, so the would-be world students feel that they know most
of what is now going on and have saved the price of an ocean
passage this summer. Why go to the mountain when the mountain
is so willing to come to us?
International exhibitions, as those who have assisted in getting
them up know only too well, are farther from perfection than most
of man's inventions. The fates have piled up so many reasons why
first-rate pictures must never be sent abroad-reluctant owners,
the desire to sell nearer home, et cetera—that the faint-hearted
imagine that God objects to cosmopolitanism in art, though nothing
has as yet been found in Holy Writ that warrants the opinion.
The organizers of these affairs are not only not faint-hearted but
wholly incurious as to the propriety of having the Lion (Great
Britain) and the Lamb (Us) lie down together in this cosmo-
politan fashion. Lamb? What is our animal? Can we be
lambs? At any rate, lambs though we be, the danger to our
amours-propres does not appear to reside in that lion but in the
French rooster, who stalks about with such a superior air that
the rest of us feel cheap. It is not news to say that the French lead


HENRY MCBRIDE
347
the modern world in art. That fact was borne in upon all the un-
French long ago. But international exhibitions being what they
are, it is perhaps news to state that, in spite of the contrary winds
that fret these enterprises, French art has risen to its lawful state
in all of them this year. Even in the Carnegie International the
French at last take something like their rightful place at the head
of the list. This is not to say that officialdom has reformed. That
would indeed be too much like the millennium. Officials are as
slow-moving, as tied to their academies, as ever they were, but
they are continually being prodded by the dealers, and by such
things as this Tri-National already mentioned, and however reluc-
tantly they yield points, are, nevertheless, obliged to march.
The Tri-National really was a fine show. People came in
crowds, looked at every picture in every corner, and seemed dis-
tinctly impressed. It was an unmistakable triumph for the modern
men. The derisive outcries of ten years ago were no longer heard.
The very best members of the community, the sort who pride them-
selves upon having correct opinions upon art, went about in a
reverend manner. In fact the revering was overdone, and it is
apparent that modern art has now reached the stage when it must
be protected from its friends rather than from its enemies. In the
meantime it can be stated that Braque and Matisse, Picasso,
Maillol, and Juan Gris were never better represented in New
York than in the Tri-National. The collection, it seems, had
greatly improved upon what it showed in Paris by some discreet
New York borrowings. The splendid panel by Picasso, a master-
piece of abstract art, was lent by a New York owner, and though
I must have seen it before, I felt I was seeing its greatness for the
first time, so well was it shown. The Wildenstein Galleries, where
the pictures were hung, are admirably suited to contemporary pal-
ettes, and the only handicap was, occasionally, a lack of sufficient
space. The Juan Gris, for instance, a most handsome piece of
decoration, simply cried aloud for that commodity.
The English of the Tri-National provided many minor pleasures
but few great ones. The one Englishman who was talked of was
Augustus John, whose dashing portrait sketch of Mr Tom Mix,
of Movie fame, was much admired. It was considered fortunate
that in his disturbed and disturbing visit to our shores he had found
time to immortalize at least one of our reel celebrities. Mr Mix was


348
MODERN ART
quite worthy of Mr John's brush and he and the artist met in a
good moment. There are two other exceptionally good Augustus
John portraits in the Carnegie International, so Mr John, who has
his ups and downs in American favour, may here be considered in
the ascendant. There was also a quietly painted study of a young
man by Henry Lamb that astonished most because it was so differ-
ent from the same artist's Lytton Strachey. This last portrait,
all good Americans yearn to see, but I suppose we never will see it
until we go to London some day and find it in the National Portrait
Gallery.
The names I have been reciting, it will have been noticed, are
the familiar names. With all this to-do of internationalism, the
great artists do not arrive in hordes, and it is only with the truly
great that the record is much concerned. The Italians really made
a great effort to impress us but in the end it was only two of her
older painters who stood out-Boldini and Mancini—and not even
them can we consider monumental. There is apparently a great
deal of striving in Italy, just as there is in America, and much of
the striving has reached an intelligent plane, but intelligence is not
the whole of genius. The only moving talent among them was
that of the late Amedeo Modigliani, whose art, like Picasso's, so
depended upon Paris that I always think of him as French. Wildt,
the Italian sculptor, got into some of the newspapers with his gran-
diose bust of Mussolini whom he treated "in the grand style" with
a fillet round his head and a general air of being half Emperor
Hadrian, half Napoleon-but the discreet only smiled. Marinetti's
protégés, the futurists, were entirely negligible. The authorities
in charge of the exhibition quarantined them needlessly in a remote
room thinking thus to safeguard the Italian Republic in case
trouble should arise; but nobody bothered about them in the slight-
est degree.
Henry McBRIDE


MUSICAL CHRONICLE
mo1
TES NOCES by Strawinsky strikes the middle way of feeling
L in our time. Signori lust and sentimentality, eccentric halves
of disconnexion, may find the music respectively saccharine and
cold. The raucous strident note is out of it, and the ungirt facile
unrestrained one out of it as well. Direct relation: sensation, emo-
tion, and sentiment, will find the vibrance marvellously gratifying.
So justly does the work convey the proportion of robustness and
tenderness, impersonality and secret warmth shown by the clear
moments of the day that one can have the illusion “this is it.”
Strawinsky calls from the four pianos and the little battery a
quality of sound simultaneously metallic, frosty, and dense.
tones permeate the instrumental medium, flat Kremlin chimes,
clock-strokes, tzings of Chinese temple gongs: bell tones always
bright, sharp, high up in air, quickly muffled and cut off as certain
peals in Europe on special feasts. A scattering of cloudy pages
helps relieve the brilliant robustiousness; and the movingly spaced
series of clangorous chords and harmonic phrases struck at the end
seem merely to gather and decisively hold the firm rich quality of
white metals, nickel, silver, and steel, felt throughout the score.
Chorus and soli sound much as the voices in Renard, clamant,
severe, half impersonal, bare of nuances, and with satisfying litur-
gic monotony. In section four, the ribald wedding festival, shouted
tones of speech and falsetto singing thrust their dry and burlesque
timbres into the broad rigid flow. The drunken rhythmic stuff,
compulsive wild dance beats and cubic jerks and gestures are given
by band and voices with an elegance Strawinsky has not equalled.
Les Noces is powerful and transparently written, predominantly
linear in its polyphony, solid with the telling counterpoint of the
later Strawinsky, and cumulative in its effect. Dead spots do not
break the brisk never precipitous movement of the four conjoined
sections, each very slightly larger in volume than the last. The
varying moods of barbaric gaiety and sadness and tenderness remain
organic, and the vasty clock-strokes of the solemn conclusion round
and resolve the well-sustained initial impulse.
None of Strawinsky's pieces, not even the Symphonies for Wind
Instruments, is as classical and objective, or as radically placed out-


350
MUSICAL CHRONICLE
side the artist and alive in its own right. Here music exists, free
of all descriptive intention and visual idea, primarily the expressive
play of rigid lines and volumes. It is the action: whatever ballet
may be superimposed must depend from it. The conception is
human in scale, unlike the Sacre's, with its extraordinarily inhuman
proportions and fearful feeling of an alien, excessive, and tigerish
nature. Les Noces places us in a world relative and proportionate
to man, before a portal not too vast for him, and adjusted to his
size. These are the voices of the human being as the drive of
sexual selection gives them themes: voices of virginal fear and
painful manumission and majoration, ancestral promptings, orgi-
astic suggestions, tenderness from the untouched depths, and the
heart of decision in which blind transmitted instinct gathers itself
in a new thrust towa